After Alice by Karen Hofmann

be propped under them to prevent their cracking off at the joints.
    The texture of tree trunks asserts itself, remotely, in her fingertips. Slubbed satin of the younger cherry; sketchpad-sheets of the curled apple bark. A body memory. Her fingers recognize the texture as if it is their cradle tongue, not heard for half a century.
    Along the driveway, deeper into the orchard. Now, a clearing, an acre or two of outbuildings and yard. They pass the old house, her old house. She does not look at it closely, only sideways, out of the corner of her eye, registers the boxy mass of it, its honey-hued stucco, tile roof, boarded-up windows. The house she grew up in, the house built to her father’s specifications, the house containing all of her childhood, and Alice’s. It’s an odd house: built not to take advantage of the view of the lake, but to repel the southern sun, to create a refuge, a well of cool shadow. The windows are high, small; the walls thick. It’s larger than most houses of its vintage in this village — larger and more European-looking. It tells, she thinks now, the story of her father’s youth: part Bavarian castle, part Alpine chalet, part Italian villa.
    And now a wreck, a smashed box, though the outside, of course, betrays little of the havoc. She does not think about what’s inside; her mind skulks around the edge of it.
    â€œDo you want to go inside, have a look around?” Walt asks. “I brought the keys down in case.”
    No. No, she does not. She does not want to go into the house. She had been in on her last visit, twenty years ago. She does not want to see it now.
    Though she will have to deal with it, some day.
    She strides on.
    Past the old wash house, past the chicken shed, past the Quonset where the tractors and other equipment live. The sweet-sharp smell of pesticide. The landscape of her very early childhood, when she had not ventured beyond her mother’s garden. All in good repair. The dry climate preserves. That and, she supposes, Walt’s assiduous stewardship. What decay, what wreckage has infiltrated, must have arisen in the years when Walt was absent, when the house and orchard stood unattended.
    Then past the yard, and a turning of the double track of the driveway, this rough road used by the tractors and pick-up trucks. Now they’re in a sheltered rise, a section always planted with the tender fruit, the peaches and the less hardy cultivars of the cherries. The cherry trees with their delicate, narrow, translucent leaves, their pink blossoms like Japanese watercolours. The peach trees with their deep forks, their narrower limbs: some are damaged, torn nearly in two, and bearing great scars, and there are spaces where trees have been removed. The peaches have not fared well during their decades of neglect. An unpruned peach tree, or one too heavily laden, is a vulnerable being.
    â€œA battle zone, eh?” Walt says. “This section should be replanted in two, three years.”
    They walk the rows of Golden and Red Delicious, the Spartans (how she misses Spartans, which are really only grown in this province!), Macs (cheap, not good keepers, but popular, Walt half-sneers: the orchardman’s bias), the gnarled, finicky Red Havens, the tall Bings, purple in the spring light.
    They cut north and eastward, through the trees, as the tractor path swings wide here to avoid a rock outcropping, a steep-sloped gully of pine. Here a section of very old trees, gnarled and blackened.
    â€œStill producing,” Walt says. “But they’ll have to go in a year or two.”
    They talk prices: Granny Smiths, Grannys , Walt says can be relied on to bring in about eight-and- a- half grand an acre; Spartans, only around seven. Cherries are holding at ninety-five cents a pound, but with a shelf life of about two days, they’re volatile. Peaches, freestones, will gross four grand an acre — hardly worth the trouble, and they ripen in