Orchard by Larry Watson

sea.”
    He was unaccustomed to her starting a conversation, and her willingness to speak, even though her voice traveled out toward the water, almost made him rush the moment and reach out to touch her. He remembered, however, the vow of patience he had taken months before; he could screw himself into the sand and wait a little longer.
    “You confused the words?” he asked. “Or was the confusion in your eye? I remember the first time I visited the ocean. I couldn’t get used to what seemed to be the sight of the sand rushing out to sea.”
    “No, no. I thought—I knew the sea was salt. I tasted it. And when my father came home from his day out on his fishing boat, in his—what do you call them? In his face? Folds? Wrinkles? In the wrinkles on his face and in his hair would be lines and grains of white—salt from the sea and the wind. So then when I walked on the beach I thought the sand was salt, tossed up by the ocean. This was when I was very young, but I still get them a little mixed up in my mind. Like when I hear the expression ‘salt of the earth’—I think ‘sea of the earth’? That makes no sense.”
    “The sand of your beaches must have been very white.”
    “I think maybe our salt was not so white.”
    Weaver laughed and then realized she may not have been joking. “Where did you grow up?”
    “Takla. A small fishing village on the northwest coast of Norway. When fishing was poor, life there was very hard.”
    “And life here?” Weaver asked. “With the lake all around—does it remind you of your childhood home?”
    She said nothing for a long time, and Weaver wondered if she had fallen asleep. A gull hovered then landed on a flat rock nearby. It picked up its feet a few times, as if it had to adjust to the stone’s hot surface. When it swiveled its head in Sonja’s direction, she began to speak again.
    “In our village there was a man whose son begged to fish with his father’s fleet. The father finally gave in, though everyone knew this boy was too young to do a man’s work. On his first day on the ocean, a great storm rose and the boy—who was not on his father’s boat because the father did not want to favor his child—was washed overboard.
    “The father never fished again, but he kept going out to sea. He rowed out alone in a small boat, and then pulled in the oars and sat there, drifting and bouncing on the waves. From the shore we watched him. Everyone said he was looking for his son, and each day he searched farther and farther out. Soon he was beyond the rocks, and people whispered that someday he would not return in the evening with the other boats. When that day came, my mother, who wanted every story to end happily, said to my brothers and me so we would not be frightened by too much death in our little village, ‘Einar has found his boy. . . .’ ”
    Sonja fell silent, and the gull, as if it knew there was nothing more to the story, blinked its black oily eye and then jumped into flight. The lake made small sipping sounds among the rocks, and under the heat of the sun Weaver felt the skin along his backside tighten like a drumhead. He was burning, he knew, but he did not change his position or speak. He wondered if there was anything he could do but wait with this woman.
    Since she began posing for him, Weaver felt as though he had produced some of his finest work, yet his frustration had also increased, as if he were incapable of reaching a new, higher standard that this model set for him.
    Sonja raised up on her elbows and turned to look at Weaver. Sand stuck to her breast, and while he watched, the grains began to drop away, but slowly, as if she and nature had concocted a little striptease. “Have you lay here long enough?” she asked. “Do you know now what it feels like to be me?”
    The following day,
Weaver returned to the beach alone, and he brought with him the necessary materials for working on either an oil or a watercolor. His idea was this: He would take