Free Orchard by Larry Watson Page A

he stopped. Did he know that this was where John collapsed? No, Sonja was sure she had told him no more than that John fell in the yard.
    “I can’t,” Henry said. “Not tonight.”
    “But you’ve already been in there. Feeding Buck. The chores.”
    “That was different. I wasn’t . . . Look, we have people here. We can do this another time.”
    “Go back, then. They are your family anyway.” Sonja knew she angered him with this remark, but when he turned and wordlessly walked back toward the house, she felt no inclination to go after him.
    Although Henry and his friend Reuben Rosicky had brought electricity out to the barn two years earlier, Sonja did not turn on any lights. John had no doubt come there to touch, and only by denying herself the use of her eyes could Sonja take in through her hands, her fingertips, as much as her son did every day of his brief life.
    She walked slowly forward, her hands held out in front of her. A barn cat, or one of its prey, made a scurrying sound in the straw. The pigeons that Sonja would have thought fell asleep hours before burbled high in the rafters. The heat had swirled all the barn’s smells into the single overpowering odor of rot, and breathing it in brought unbidden to Sonja’s mind the image of her son in his child-size coffin, her son at the mercy of decay’s inexorable powers. She rushed forward to frighten away such thoughts, and when she stopped she was standing next to Buck’s stall. She felt his warmth and heard his deep-lunged breathing. He snorted softly.
    Perhaps if you stood in the barn next to Sonja House that night, perhaps if you stood so close to her that her lips were almost touching your ear, perhaps if you were that close and you also understood the Norwegian tongue, then you might have heard her whisper, “Horse, did you kill my baby boy?”
    Sonja did not
want to go back in the house, not right away. The lights there were too bright, and after three days of tears her eyes felt like open wounds. The barn was too dark—its blackness seemed to have substance—but standing out in the yard was a comfort. The warm night asked nothing of her, neither sorrow nor soothing, and the crickets’ scraping made no attempt to question or console.
    She began to count silently to herself, though she had no idea what number she would have to reach before reentering the house. Twentyfive, twenty-six . . . Just as this afternoon, seated in the hard pew, she had counted—one hundred, two hundred. . . . How high she had to go before the hymns and prayers and the young minister’s words words words would stop she couldn’t know. Three hundred twenty-five, twenty-six. He spoke about the impossibility of knowing God’s unknowable reasons and of the futility of even approaching God by way of reason: “God’s ways are mysterious and many.” How many, Sonja echoed, and counted higher. By then, she had stopped believing in God and instead believed in what she desired—silence, since it was silence that surrounded her son now and forever five hundred forty-one . . .
    From the house came the sound of laughter, bass notes sung by Henry’s uncle Alvin, a man who could not remain somber any longer than a child. Sonja liked to hear him laugh, but she did not want to come too close for fear his joviality might be contagious.
    She counted the squares and rectangles, the house’s windows and doors, three, four, five blank portals of light . . . and while she watched, one of the spaces filled. In an upstairs window a figure appeared, a child-size body in the exact place where John used to stand and watch for his father’s truck winding up the hill toward home.
    That was June silhouetted in the upstairs window, and while Sonja stared up at her daughter another figure joined June. Henry had searched the house and found his daughter alone looking out at the night. He put his arm around her, and their separate bodies became one shadow.
    They didn’t know Sonja was out