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BLAKE: Mum’s got an orchard, back home. Only a few trees. This time of year it looks like it’s been snowing, blossom everywhere. And then in May, we have to pick them. Me and Joe. Takes the whole day.
SCHOFIELD: So, these ones all gonners?
BLAKE: Oh no, they’ll grow again when the stones rot. You’ll end up with more trees than before.
After the war, Will goes to see Mrs. Blake’s orchard.
It is the tail end of spring when he goes, May just twisting into June, and the blossoms are mostly fallen, blanketing the yard in a carpet of white. They remind Will of ashes, a town after it’s been shelled, all the beds and kitchen tables burned, white from a distance but when you walk through it, your boots crunch through gray, gray, gray.
The petals don’t crunch under Will’s feet. They’re delicate things, tinted with gold and pink at the center, as though they’d been designed especially for a spring wedding. Will feels like he should apologize, almost, for stepping on them. He tries to skirt the edge of the grove, his back to the wind.
“What’re you doin’ out there?” she calls.
She—Martha Blake. Tom’s mother. She looks like her photograph, stern nose and round cheeks, hair twisted up in a bun, wearing a high-collared blouse and long skirt billowing out behind her. She’s got a basket in hand, collecting the fruit.
She looks like her photograph. She looks like him, fuck, and Will is flayed open, Will is the wind and the wide blue sky and the petals falling fast.
“Hello?” she asks. “You all right?”
Will stands for a moment, closes his eyes against it, against everything, then opens and moves forward.
“Lance Corporal Schofield, ma’am,” he says. “Will, I mean. Will Schofield. I knew your son.”
He goes for a handshake, but she pulls him into a hug. She’s strong—of course she is, she’s a farmer, managed this land just her and her boys after their dad died of cholera. Tom used to tell stories about her, how she would lift him up so that he could reach the top branches of the apple trees or sit astride their horse, then scold him when he inevitably lost his balance. My ma’s like a barmaid in an old novel, he’d say. Her arms are enormous and she can’t keep her hair up, and her face’s always red from the sun.
It’s funny, now, to embrace her—Will’s arms going up around her shoulders as she, or he, or both of them start to shake. It’s like holding a ghost, like a woman stepped out of Tom’s stories and grew bones and flesh. She’s not quite real.
Or if she’s real, nothing else is. The world, the sky and the rolling hills and the city in the distance all fold into this. The wind in the cherry trees, the sweet scent of their blossoms. The woman, her arms hot around his neck.
Will steps back, finally, and clears his throat. There’s something in his eye, too, and he tries to blink fast so that he doesn’t have to swipe at it.
“Will Schofield,” Mrs. Blake says. She’s smiling, but there’s an edge to it—something shimmering in her eyes. “He wrote about you, you know. In his letters. Said you were the smartest man he’d ever met.”
Will smiles. “That’s because he’s a complete idiot in comparison.” And then, when he remembers where he is and who he’s talking to—“I mean, your son was very brave, ma’am, but he—”
“He had a tendency to rush into things without thinking,” Mrs. Blake says. “Yes. I know. Once, when he was seven or eight, Joe dared him to ride the family cow like a horse, and he got as far as the pasture gate, out there—” (she points) “—before she bucked him off. Broke his arms, wouldn’t stop whining about it for weeks.”
Will can almost picture it—tiny Tom Blake, short and loud, perpetually-scraped knees and tousled curls. Running around the farm like he owned it, diving into mud and manure because he could. If Will had known him then, he thinks, they would’ve hated each other. Screamed at each other until their throats went hoarse, or otherwise dared each other to do increasingly stupid shit until they both got hurt.
“Will,” Mrs. Blake says.
And it takes Will a moment to process that this is maybe the second or third time she’s said his name, that she’s looking at him expectantly.
“Yes?” he asks.
“Would you like to help me collect the last of the cherries?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he says. And he knows it’s unnecessary but he gives her a little bow, just a dip of his head, because something about it feels ancient and right. “Yes, I would be honored.”
Mum’s got an orchard, back home, Tom said, in the middle of the mission, crossing to the abandoned farmhouse. Only a few trees. This time of year it looks like it’s been snowing, blossom everywhere.
Tom was like that: he could look at a botanical graveyard, trunks chopped off and scattered, and see a whole orchard. He could see sunrises, beautiful women, the end of the war. He would lie down on his back sometimes and try to talk the clouds into taking different shapes—an elephant, maybe, or a giant turtle, or a battleship, or a flower. He’d poke Will, rouse him from his nap and get him to join.
Tom could be sweet, always when you least expected it and always with as much bravado as he was brave. The stories were part of it, the way he’d whisper half a joke into Will’s ear while they were crouched in a trench, motion for Will to pass it on, and wait for the words to get mangled ten men down the line before shouting the punchline. Or the way he’d stop, halfway through his dinner, to look around the circle and ask if anyone else needed it more. Or he way he’d hum to himself, on long marches—couldn’t keep a tune, really, but he’d get pieces of melody stuck in everyone’s heads anyway, get their minds off everything else.
Will wanted to punch him, sometimes. No, that’s not right—Will wanted to be near him. To rub the dirt off his stupid face, to squeeze at his stupid-round cheeks until they sharpened. To touch—his hands, delicate across the map or his lips, red even through the dust, like he was always licking them, always readying to say something stupid.
There was a cold night, February 1917, hadn’t snowed in a week but the ground was frozen ten meters down and the wind was howling, and Will had dropped his stupid sleeping pack crossing a river and sat there shivering for nearly an hour before Tom said, hey, we can share mine. Tom was warm, always warm, took his coat off in the middle of training sessions just for the hell of it warm, and he lit up like campfire embers there in beneath the blanket. Don’t be a pussy, we can touch, he said, and Will pressed his shivering limbs up against Tom’s warm ones—and it was like holding the campfire, or holding the fucking sun, really it was, and Will lay there watching Tom’s silhouette in the moonlight just thinking please, please, don’t let this war touch him, let him keep smiling, let him keep smiling.
Tom shifted in his sleep, sometime before dawn, when Will woke up to piss. He mumbled something—a syllable, slurred—might’ve been a name.
Don’t be a pussy, Tom said. But Will always played it safe, played it smart, played it safe. Until he couldn’t anymore.
Harvesting the cherries is hard work.
It’s deceptive, sneaks up on you like an infection in a fucking foxhole—easy at first to just reach up and pull down, but then you get an hour into it and your arm’s on fire.
Still, there’s a rhythm to it. Reach, pinch, pull down, place in basket. Reach, pinch, pull down, place in basket. Like a drumbeat on a long march, or Will imagines so anyway, they never really got drums. Other battalions couldn’t spare ‘em. Like Tom humming, maybe, if he wasn’t always out of tune.
The trees smell sweet, like that decapitated orchard at the farmhouse, only that was too sweet, almost rotting, and this is still fresh. Will looks over his shoulder sometimes, startled by a bird calling or a gust of wind, and almost sees Tom running. Tom age seven or eight, arm in a sling, red-faced and hair tousled, mouth open in a yell. Tom age twelve, short pants over skinned knees, climbing to the top of a tree and dangling off the highest branch, holding one hand out to flip off his friends jeering below. Tom age sixteen, lanky and bowlegged, curls blowing in his face, uncomfortable in a tight-collared shirt and leading a girl, maybe, maybe a girl with hair shining golden in the afternoon sun, maybe a boy with freckles and a wide smile, maybe pushing each other into the mud at the edge of the orchard just to touch—
He sees Tom at nineteen. Marching in his uniform. Cheeks still ruddy, caked in dust. That stupid rounded helmet, that brown jacket loaded with weapons. Tom at nineteen, marching and humming, maybe running up next to Will to whisper a dirty joke or the start of a story. Maybe marching into an abandoned orchard, all the cherry trees cut down—and Will wants to march back through the memory and raise his arms and shout, DON’T STOP, DON’T STOP, DON’T HELP HIM, KEEP GOING, JUST KEEP GOING, JUST HOLD ON—
The trees smell sweet, like something rotting. Will lifts his boots and for a moment, his heels are caked in blood.
“Mrs. Blake,” he says at supper later, the sun glowing faintly past the ridge and the air hazy with fireflies, “do you think your orchard is haunted?”
He regrets it immediately but she doesn’t flinch—looks at him as coolly as if he’d asked her to pass the potatoes. There’s something about her face, the upturned nose maybe, that suggests there could’ve been a lady under that sunburn.
“Do you think so?” Mrs. Blake asks.
Will leans back in his chair a little, chews his stew slowly.
Mrs. Blake leans forward. And she looks like him, she does, stern nose and round cheeks and eyes, eyes glittering in the candlelight, twin constellations shrunk down and made human.
“I think so,” Will says. “Or, at least—it is for me.”
She stays quiet and the words rush out of him after that, like water breaking free of a dam, like a body in that fucking river, nearly two years and he still can’t get the taste of mud out of his mouth.
“We were near an orchard when he died,” he says. “Cherry trees, like here, only the Germans’d cut ‘em down for—for no reason, I guess, only to destroy the crop, only Blake—Tom—said they’d all grow back. He talked about you. And he said all the fallen branches were like seeds. It’s a nice image, I think, if this were a novel and everything had to mean something, but it’s not, it’s not, the plane came and the pilot—the fucking pilot—and it didn’t mean anything. None of it means anything.”
Will runs his arm over his eyes, tries to stop himself from shaking, and sees that Mrs. Blake isn’t at her place on the other side of the table. She’s crossed to the bench beside him, and she’s pulled him close—just an arm around his shoulders, but it’s something heavy. Something real.
“Can you start from the beginning,” she says, her voice quiet and close. “They didn’t tell me any of this, and I. I would like to know.”
Will’s never told anyone about this. Not his friends, not his wife. It doesn’t do to dwell on it, Captain Smith said. But this table, this candlelight, this house still-sweetened by the berries that will be their dessert—it is another world, a heavier one. Mrs. Blake wants to know.
And so he starts at the beginning, and he tells her. He tells her about sixteen restless hours and sixteen hundred men, about the trenches and the farmhouse and the river, about the baby and the pilot and the trees. The fucking trees. About how he was always running, even when he was lying on the floor in Ecoust-Saint-Mein, even when he was carrying Tom’s body. Running and breathing and shouting because if he stopped he would die, they would all die, the world would die and the flames would come and nobody would ever sit under the sun and close their eyes against the warmth ever again.
He tells her everything. She doesn’t speak, just looks at him. Keeps her arm around his shoulders. And that’s a good thing, too, because without her he might just float up, buoyed by this voice that no longer quite belongs to him, up out of his body and over the house to join the ghosts in the orchard.
She stays, and so he stays. When he is finished finally, his voice hoarse and strange, she offers him a cup of water. It stings his throat, cool and sharp, like dropping to the earth after a long march.
“Thank you, Will Schofield,” Mrs. Blake says. The words are a medal, or they’re more than a medal, they’re flesh and blood and memory.
She looks at him, and she goes on. “My sons are gone, but my orchard still grows. Would you come here, next spring, and help me harvest it? I promise, if you see any ghosts, I will help you face them.”
“Yes,” Will says. He clears his throat and takes another drink of water, says it again. “Yes, I will.”