Peaches with Bonus Material Page 8

  “Oh, crap.” Leeda ducked behind Murphy as Rex cut a diagonal across the row. He looked their way, rolled his eyes and shook his head, and kept walking.

  When Leeda stood up to her full height again, Murphy looked at her quizzically.

  Leeda shrugged. “I don’t want him to see my pus bumps.”

  Murphy’s lips twisted into an amused grin. “You’re not letting your boyfriend see you until your pus bumps go away?”

  “No.” Leeda knew it sounded stupid, but suddenly it sounded really stupid with Murphy looking at her like she was. “I’m just particular,” she offered airily.

  Murphy was shaking her head and swatted at the peaches, though Leeda knew she knew they weren’t supposed to swat.

  “Nah. That’s anal,” Murphy said matter-of-factly.

  Leeda was too tongue-tied to retort. Murphy blinked at her frankly, twirling the bottom of her T-shirt around her fists until two workers walked by and they both turned to watch them. Some of the men and women came to the farm in couples, and these two were holding hands as they walked and talked. They snuck a kiss before separating to their different trees.

  “They were talking about the frost,” Murphy said. “Sounds like it’s definitely coming.”

  “I know.”

  “Are they talking about it?” Murphy asked, nodding back toward the main house.

  “Kind of.” Leeda considered telling Murphy about the long silent dinners. She wished she could explain to someone how Uncle Walter had looked smiling up at her from his desk with his office falling apart all around him. The orchard had broken up his marriage, it had turned him gray, and now it was making him broke. “Maybe it’s better for him to get out of farming,” Leeda added finally.

  Murphy eyed her critically. “It’s never better to be forced out of something that’s your whole life,” she said in a superior, knowing tone that got under Leeda’s skin.

  “Well, people get what they deserve,” she retorted. “If Uncle Walter wasn’t so stubborn about selling…”

  Murphy laughed. “Of course you can say that when your family’s loaded.”

  Leeda opened and closed her mouth, feeling stupid. Then she sucked her bottom lip into her mouth and bit it irritably. Murphy shook her head, annoyed, and walked down the row, leaving Leeda standing there feeling like an idiot.

  Leeda scanned the rows for Rex and then walked out onto the grass. She found him kneeling beside one of the tractors with a rag spread out, his old tools laid out on top of it.

  She crouched beside him. His skin smelled like tractor grease, which made her scrunch up her nose, but she put his hands on her bumpy calves, and, when he turned his face toward her, she kissed him on the corner of his lips. She was well aware it wasn’t like the other couple’s kiss at all. Their kiss had been secret, stolen, special. The kiss she gave to Rex was sweet but flat—like a Coke without the bubbles.

  Murphy usually knew why she was miserable. She could enumerate the reasons proudly, like a kid counting out birthdays on his fingers, and she liked to enumerate them often. But Friday afternoon she had to search herself for why she felt so dark, and it didn’t come easy. With two nights left on the orchard, she blamed it on the fact that her spring break had just about ended and she could never redeem it. Coming to the closing point was a fresh reminder that two weeks had been stolen from her. That was what she told herself, but it didn’t ring quite true. It kept nagging at her that since the weeks of hard labor were over, she should feel like a jailbird spreading its wings. And she didn’t. She felt like she was about to fly into a window.

  She thinned trees that afternoon, hardly noticing she was doing it at all. After her run-in with Leeda she steered clear of everyone altogether, feeling like a menace to society. Before she knew it, the workers were straggling in ahead of her instead of behind her like they usually did. She lingered in her row, watching them disappear, and continued to thin the trees here and there, feeling the emptiness of the rows around her. She finally walked out to the edge of the trees and stood there, looking toward the dorms. She couldn’t deal with the sad, worried faces of the workers as they listened to the radio, like they had at breakfast and lunch. They shook their heads at the radio as if they were trying to will the frost away, and it just made Murphy darker. So instead of walking up the stairs of Camp A, she turned right and walked alongside it. There was low brush behind here, Murphy knew, but now that she got close, she noticed a tiny overgrown footpath. She followed it.

  The air smelled like invisible flowers. Murphy breathed it in as the trail lost itself a few times, becoming tall grass and brambles, and then sorted itself out again into a little dirt line that wound toward the side of the Darlingtons’ farmhouse, ending at an odd little open patch with a trellis in the middle.

  Murphy peered around, then touched a few of the bushes, letting her fingers run along the ridges of the leaves while she looked at the different shapes and structures of them and the plants they belonged to. There were rosebushes, azaleas, peonies—none of them blooming yet, all being strangled by kudzu and grapevines. It was like a nightmare garden—the kind a creepy old lady with a bunch of cats would have, Murphy decided. A creepy old lady in an old wedding dress she’d been wearing since being jilted at the altar fifty years ago.

  Murphy pulled a cigarette out of the pack in her pocket and lit up, taking a deep inhale and looking at the disrepair of the garden. It only blackened her mood. She was thinking it was typical. People didn’t know how to finish what they started.

  A rustle came from behind her, and Birdie emerged from the trail that went toward the house. Birdie stopped, startled, and blushed.

  “Oh. Hey, Murphy.”

  “Hey.” Murphy was at a loss for words with Birdie. She looked stricken. Murphy shoved her left hand in her pocket. “This your garden?”

  Birdie looked around as if trying to orient herself. “Oh. My mom’s.” Silence. “I tried to revive it a couple of years ago. But there’s too much other work.”

  Murphy nodded, as if she knew what Birdie was talking about. But she’d never had too much work. She’d almost made a full-time job out of avoiding work of any kind.

  “Poopie planted that nectarine tree, but the fruit is always filled with bugs.” Birdie looked up at the tree. “She said it’d be a miracle if it ever made a healthy fruit,” Birdie added quietly. Again, silence.

  “I bet it gets boring.”

  Birdie looked confused. “Farm work?”

  “I mean, living on an orchard in general.” Murphy only half believed this. She said it more out of trying to be helpful about the frost thing. Like, Look on the bright side—your life really sucks anyway.

  “Oh God, it’s not boring.” Birdie smiled gently and sadly. That was all.

  Murphy took a long drag on her cigarette. “So your mom ditched the garden, huh?”

  Birdie lost her smile. “She ditched…it, yeah.” She looked worried, shy, nervous, lost—each expression passing over her face like a cloud. Murphy tried to imagine the layers of crap she’d have to peel away to let people see her feelings cross her face that way. It was too many to count.

  “Well…” Birdie said. “I’m going to get the field heaters ready. We have a few that work.” She gave a little half wave. “I’ll see you.”

  “See you.” Murphy watched her disappear down the trail.

  When Birdie was out of sight, Murphy turned and eyed the garden, focusing on a tiny rosebush that was being devoured by a gang of grapevine weeds. It suddenly offended her deeply. Murphy crouched and started yanking out the weeds one by one.

  She lost track of time. When she looked up, it was dusk, and her skin was cloaked in a slight chill. She sank back onto her haunches, her hands covered in dirt and stained in green stripes of chlorophyll. The lights of the Darlington house had come on, spotlighting the inside for the outside. In one of the upstairs windows Murphy could see Birdie’s figure clearly. She was on the telephone, sitting in her window. She hadn’t noticed Murp
hy. She was turned toward the fields beyond the dorms, her body looking curved and defeated.

  Murphy looked around the garden, feeling like she’d been in a trance, noticing that she’d cleared a large circle of weeds. She let the handful of weeds her fingers were clutching fall to the ground, stood up, and headed back down the trail.

  Chapter Nine

  All the next day the orchard felt like a ghost town inhabited by predominantly Mexican ghosts. The workers drifted from tree to tree, frowning, talking to one another in whispers, and rubbing their hands together. The air was noticeably cooling as the day went on. It sent a chill into even Murphy’s heart, which was usually cold enough.

  Ghostiest of all was Walter, who lingered on the porch, watching over the orchard with slumped shoulders, looking still and solitary. He stood out as a gray figure, much like the lord of the underworld probably would.

  By dinner the static flying through the workers’ talk was matched only by the energy with which the thermometer beside the Camp A door dropped, and by nightfall the static had become a steady buzz.

  Murphy was thinking about tomorrow, and whether her mom and Richard would still be an item, and how much he’d be around if they were, but she could also feel the frost buzz through her closed door, and it was hard to ignore. Late in the afternoon Walter had had them drag out the few field heaters to the farthest trees, which were the lowest, and where the frost was most likely to settle. They had started their way in the back and worked their way up, so now when Murphy looked out her window, she could see the place where the heaters had run out and there were only solitary trees for the last stretch toward the dorms.

  Tap tap tap. Sniff sniff sniff. Murphy stood up and opened her door. One of the dogs, Honey Butt or Majestic, she didn’t know which, stared up at her pitifully.

  “Where’s Mama?” Murphy asked. The papillon tilted its head at her.

  “You are an ugly dog. But come in.”

  Murphy plopped back down on the bed and let the dog hop up beside her. Birdie had been running around like a madwoman all day, which was probably why Honey Butt felt deserted.

  Murphy stared at her toes. Maybe she had foot fungus. She’d had that once, back at Camp Bright Horizon, which was a camp outside Macon for supersmart broke kids. She’d been able to pick her toenails off then; they’d just painlessly shed in her fingertips. She tried that now, but the toenails stayed. She was interrupted by a knock at the open door. Leeda stood there, her gray eyes unsure and her slate gray silk pajamas shining silkily.

  “C’min.”

  She plopped down on Murphy’s bed, making Murphy move her feet.

  “What’re you doing?”

  “Trying to figure out if I have toenail fungus.”

  She thrust her feet out toward Leeda, who surveyed them casually, trying to impress Murphy with how unsqueamish she could be. Murphy stretched farther to touch her toe against Leeda’s thigh. At the last minute Leeda bailed, shoving at her calf. “Ew.”

  “It’s too nerve-racking being in my room. Everybody’s so tense.”

  Murphy nodded. “Yeah.”

  Leeda reached out and stroked Honey Butt’s back, which made Honey Butt let out a whimper for sympathy.

  “The dogs are obsessed with Birdie, aren’t they?”

  Murphy shrugged. There was a long silence while Leeda seemed to try to think of some other topic of conversation. Murphy, in a rare act of generosity, provided one.

  “I can’t wait to get back to my life.”

  Leeda blinked a few times. “Me too.”

  Murphy tried not to feel jealous of anyone, but sometimes she still did. She was jealous, right now, that Leeda had a mom who neither dated high schoolers nor very married men. That Leeda could go home and not have to wonder if Richard from Pep Boys was going to be parked on her couch. That Leeda had friends to go home to, where Murphy only had guys who would leave her lying on train tracks for Walter Darlington. And that Leeda actually did look forward to going home, while Murphy was only lying.

  “Poor Birdie,” Leeda offered.

  “Yeah.” Leeda looked so thoughtful, her eyelashes doing the fluttery thing again, and it made Murphy regret how snotty she’d acted the day before. She shifted on her bed awkwardly.

  “Well, I wonder if they’ll make us do much work tomorrow,” Leeda said, standing up.

  “Probably not if all the trees are dead,” Murphy joked.

  Leeda half-laughed obligingly. “Rex says it’ll be a while before they know if the frost has done any damage.”

  “I guess he knows everything.”

  Leeda’s mouth tightened. “He’s a great guy.”

  “I’m sure he is,” Murphy said. She didn’t know why she’d said what she’d said. She couldn’t stop herself sometimes.

  Leeda stretched her long, pale arms over her head. “I’m gonna try to get some sleep. See you.”

  “See you.”

  The whole thing had the air of a final good-bye to it, though they would see each other Monday in AP Bio. Leeda disappeared through the doorway.

  Murphy listened to her radio for another hour, doodling in a book she’d brought by Nietzsche. When she moved across the room to turn off the light, she froze. Her breath drifted out in front of her in a tiny white cloud.

  Murphy’s heart sank. She turned out the light and crawled under the covers thinking of poor Birdie and how life just kicked people when they were down.

  A few minutes later she was staring at the ceiling that she couldn’t see in the dark when an orange flicker sped its way across the wall. Murphy thought she was imagining it until it happened two more times. The third time she sat up and looked out the window, and her heart stood still.

  There was Birdie Darlington, dragging something huge and heavy out of the supply barn and down between the trees, where she heaved her whole body forward, plunging whatever it was on top of an enormous fire. Lit by the firelight, Murphy could see that Birdie’s face was tear streaked and red. Murphy watched, entranced. Birdie had lost it and she was burning down all the trees.

  Birdie stared at the flames for a minute, then launched into a run again toward the barn, emerging a few seconds later with a broken wooden chair. She dragged it to the next row of trees, looking back and forth, trying to gauge the distance.

  Murphy realized she was wrong. Birdie wasn’t trying to burn the trees down. She was trying to keep them warm.

  Murphy was paralyzed. It was perhaps the saddest thing she’d ever seen in her life. Birdie’s body was graceless as she hauled and dragged whatever she could carry into the rows of trees. It was pure survival and clearly a losing battle. From Murphy’s high window Birdie looked small and foolish and awkward, and Murphy knew there was no use searching herself for the cynicism that would make it seem distant and dark instead of raw and terrible. Birdie was trying to save her home single-handedly, and there was no way she could.

  Murphy sank against the window, her forehead pressing against the glass, and tried to let it go, the way she let it go when she drove past an abandoned dog or saw a news spot about something she couldn’t do anything about. She imagined everyone else in the dorms was doing the same thing.

  And then a figure appeared beside Birdie—taller, leaner, and more muscular. When he got close to one of the fires, Murphy saw that he was one of the guys from the men’s camp. He said something to Birdie and then raced into the barn, and then Murphy could hear feet pounding down the hall outside her door.

  Murphy opened the door and watched the women rush past and disappear down the stairs. The screen door below slammed. Leeda stood in the doorway opposite her, looking confused.

  “They’re trying to save the orchard,” Murphy said, at a loss. Leeda didn’t say anything back.

  Murphy walked into her room and to her window. The workers had poured out into the trees, and several small fires had popped up now, all randomly spaced apart, like stars on the ground. It was beautiful. It was like fireflies.

  Murphy stood f
or several minutes, having a heated argument with herself, her heart in her throat. She wanted to help. And she wanted to keep driving. She wanted to belong with people who helped one another. But it was so foreign that she needed to convince herself that she could.

  Finally she decided it would hinge on Leeda. If Leeda had the nerve to go down there with all those people, who had worked through the two weeks while she and Murphy had slacked, then Murphy would too. Murphy’s ears perked, listening for her to come out of her room.

  After a few more minutes Leeda’s door creaked open, and Murphy heard her walk down to the bathroom. A minute later she came back down the hall, and her door creaked again behind her, closed. There was the faint sound of bedsprings creaking as she crawled into bed.

  Maybe Leeda couldn’t see herself down there either.

  Murphy closed her door. In her bed, she watched the fire lights dancing across the ceiling until she fell asleep.

  Chapter Ten

  Birdie tugged up the waist of her jeans, which were threatening to slide off her sweat-slicked hips, and landed on her knees on the grass. She shifted around onto her butt, slumping back against the nearest tree, and peered around at the damage they’d done.

  It was almost morning. It wasn’t a shade lighter than night, but the animals had started moving around, the birds had started chirping, and it smelled like day.

  A few of the workers were still shadows straggling up and down the rows of trees, tossing this and that dead limb, or piece of farm debris, onto the fires scattered at intervals down the white sand trails. A few branches were smoldering. And the fires themselves were beginning to burn out. But the night was over. And they were out of fuel. There wasn’t much more they could do.

  Birdie’s dad had come out to supervise only briefly, looking so depressed that Birdie thought they should set a fire at his feet so he wouldn’t freeze too. And then he had gone back inside. The workers, on the other hand, who had no ownership in the orchard and had a million other places they could work, had stayed all night. Over the past half hour the majority of them had begun to straggle inside to bed, many stopping to hug Birdie and kiss her on the cheek before disappearing across the grass. Birdie just couldn’t believe how good people could be.