Orchard by Larry Watson Page B

overhung by an apple orchard.
    The cabin, built by one of the county’s first white settlers, was the only building on the property when Ned and Harriet bought it, and for two summers that was where they lived while the main house was being built. Then they sold their town house in Chicago and moved to Wisconsin to live year-round. Harriet had a sentimental impulse that made her want to say she and her family were never happier than when they lived in the cabin’s small rooms, but she knew it wasn’t true. A hundred years of dust clung to the splinters of the open beams and unfinished timbers. Insects found their way in through every open crevice. The plumbing and cookstove were primitive, and the stone fireplace did not draw properly. The girls lamented the lack of privacy in the cabin, and they liked even less that they had to leave for hours if Ned decided to work indoors. They were all happier when the big house was ready for them, though in that brief period when they lived in the cabin’s cramped quarters, both Ned’s life and work were open to Harriet in a way they had not been before or since.
    Ned converted the cabin to a studio. He knocked down an interior wall. He increased the size and number of the windows. He put a padlock on the door. After Harriet found the key, hidden in a mustache cup that belonged to Ned’s father, she still waited almost a year before going into the studio. Even then, she might have continued to obey his command to stay out if she had not been certain that Ned took to England with him the woman who wrote the catalog for his show at the Sand Gallery in St. Louis.
    Now Harriet stepped inside, feeling as always a mixture of both fear and anticipation. She never knew what she might find. Last year she walked in and gasped, sure she had stepped into a booby trap. A rifle, its barrel pointing at the door, lay on a table. But there were no trip wires attached to the trigger; the rifle was simply another of Ned’s props. Six months later it appeared in a painting. She could as easily discover that Ned had begun an exciting new phase—the watercolor series of weather over the lake, for example, each painting representing the storm of a different season. Or she might happen upon the evidence that Ned had found a new model, as when Harriet saw the painting of a familiar-looking woman seated naked on Ned’s footlocker. Harriet finally placed her as Dr. Van Voort’s nurse. Ned had cut his ankle scrambling around the rocks below the Egg Island lighthouse, and his leg became infected, necessitating frequent visits to Dr. Van Voort’s office. Obviously those trips had also provided Ned the opportunity to persuade the dark-haired nurse to pose, not that women usually needed much persuading. Either they knew of his stature as an artist or they succumbed to his charm, which he knew how to wield almost as well as a drawing pencil. Harriet had long ago reconciled herself to the fact that when Ned’s models were females and attractive, the chances were excellent that he fucked them. How did she know this? She knew her husband, and how his art—the act of making it rather than the made object—stimulated him almost beyond release. She remembered well the demonstration he had once given. He picked up a red sable brush, spread its hairs, then wet them between his lips so they came together in a stiletto point. He held up his forearm, and while she and others watched, he somehow made the hairs on his arm stand up, though there was no chill in the room. “See,” Ned said to those assembled around the Weavers’ dining room table—Harriet, the novelist Jake Bram and his wife, Caroline, along with the writer from
Art and Artists
there to do the article on Ned—“that’s what painting does to me. It’s as if my whole body is trying to turn into a brush, and if I could figure out a way to paint with
these
hairs, I’d do it.” The entire episode (none of which made it into the printed article unless