Jodie Picoult - Songs of the Humpback Whale - A Novel in Five Voices

I find myself humming along. To think like Jane. To think like Jane.

I prop my head up on my elbows. Whales don’t have vocal cords. We don’t know how it is that they make these sounds. It is not through the expulsion of air; there are no bubbles surrounding whales when they sing. And still there are these clicks, these whistles, these cello groans.

Jane’s door faces me. Without warning, immersed in the sounds of the sea, I can clearly see her devil.

The apple, I tell them, came before Adam and Eve in the story of Creation. It had to have been there at least three years because that’s how long it takes for a new tree to bear fruit, much less carnal knowledge.

That’s the first line of the talk I give every year at my old alma mater, the voc-tech high school in Lexington. I’m a big draw at the school. I’m the head of one of the only profitable apple orchards left in Massachusetts, I have a staff of fifty, one hundred thriving acres, a good rapport with the buyers for Sudbury Farms and Purity Foodstores, and U-Pick-Em fields that attract the public on weekends from as far away as New York. I kind of fell into the position when my father retired after his heart surgery, but I leave that part out of my speech.

The kids seem to get younger every year, although I suppose you could make a case that I am getting older. This time, there aren’t as many of them as there used to be because of the economy; they all want to go into steel production or microchip processing-farming doesn’t pay. I watch them filter into the auditorium and they are still ninety-nine percent male, which I understand. It’s not that I have anything against women’s lib, but working at an orchard requires grit and muscle that few ladies have. My mother, maybe, but she was an exception.

I don’t plan to talk about running an orchard, or profitability margins, or scabs or even textbook examples of management. I’ll tell them what they are least expecting to hear, and I try to draw them into my life. The stories my father told me when I was growing up, when we would sit on the porch and all around us the scent of cider would make us dizzy; these are the very things that bred pomology into my mind. I never made it past high school and I may not have the smarts of a high-style manager; I admit there are many things I do not understand, and I will not waste their time. Instead, I tell them what I know best.

In reality the apple mentioned in the Bible probably wasn’t an apple. Apples didn’t grow in Palestine, but the first translations of the Bible were done in some northern country, and the apple comes from England, so there you go. I have heard that there are shells fossilized in the peaks of the Rocky Mountains, left from a time when the water reached that high on the earth. Well, apples have been fossilized too. Archaeologists have found remains of apples, charred in the mud in prehistoric excavations sites near Switzerland. Imagine.

The apple spread west, and it spread fast. It grows from a seed. Toss an apple core into the ground and in a couple of years you’ll have a sapling. When I was a kid, apple trees sprung up on the farms of my parents’ friends, in just about every place where there wasn’t something growing. The trees would fight against the cows that grazed on their leaves, and after a few years they’d get above the cows’ necks and drop the fruit at their bases. Then the cows would cluster at the bottom and eat the sweet apples, inadvertently planting new seeds. In our own cow pasture we had a tree that grew apples as red as fire, that made pies almost as good as Macouns. Never did figure out that variety, or market it . . . if I had I probably would be a lot richer than I am today.

You can find apples in Norse mythology, Greek mythology and fairy tales. My father told me all the stories. There’s Snow White’s poisoned apple and Eve’s fall from grace. In Scandinavia, a character called Iduna kept a box of apples that, when tasted by the gods, gave them new youth. As late as the 1800s in England, fertility salutes were dedicated to apple trees to ensure a bountiful harvest. And here in New England, when little girls peeled apples, they tossed a long curl over their shoulders to see what letter it would make when it fell-the initial of their future lover.

At this point I ask Hadley-who graduated from Minuteman Tech with me and has been working at the orchard since-to pass out the apples I’ve brought. When these kids taste for themselves what the work and patience of human hands can do, well, they understand a lot more than I could ever tell them. I open the floor up for questions, and then I have no problem giving information. Lectures I have trouble with. But questions are a different story. I have always found myself to be a much better listener than talker.

“Are you hiring?” kids ask. “Do you break even?” One industrious boy asks something about the merits of scion grafting versus bud grafting, the official names of which I didn’t learn until about two years ago. But the question I will like best will come from the kid in the back, way in the last row, who hasn’t said a word. I jump off the podium and walk down the aisle and lean over towards him, and he turns red. “What do you want to ask?” I say softly so no one else can hear. “I know there’s something.”

There is, it’s in his eyes. “What is your favorite?” he asks, and I know what he means. Spitzenburgs, I say, but they’ve about died out now. So suppose I have to say Jonathans. It’s the question I never got to ask when my own father gave this speech, when I was still a student.

Afterwards, I send Hadley back with the truck. Me and Joellen, a math teacher at the school and my first girlfriend, go out on the town. There’s a Chinese place we like; I don’t get to eat too much of that in Stow. I order her a Mai Tai, which comes in a porcelain coconut with two pink umbrellas, and I get a Suffering Bastard myself. When Joellen gets a little drunk, she forgets that she hates me for some reason or another, and like last year we will probably wind up in the back seat of her Ford Escort, on top of textbooks and abacuses, clawing at each other and bringing back the past.

I do not love Joellen. I never have, I think, which may be the reason she thinks she hates me.

“So what you been up to, Sam?” she says, leaning across the Peking fried chicken wings. She is a year younger than me but she’s looked thirty for as long as I can remember.

“Pruning, pretty much. Getting ready for the troops in the fall.” In late September we open the orchard up to the public. Sometimes I can gross over a thousand dollars in one Sunday, between bushels of apples and fresh-pressed cider and retail-pricing wholesale Vermont cheddar cheese.

Joellen grew up in Concord, one of three or four fairly poor families living in a trailer park, and she came to Minuteman Tech to be a beauty stylist. She has a reputation for doing nails. “Find your own variety yet?”

For years I have been working in a greenhouse, grafting and splitting buds in hopes of coming up with something really incredible, some apple that will set the world on edge. My own form of genetic engineering, I’m trying to bring back a Spitzenburg, or something like it that is easier to grow and more adaptable to our climate, so that this time it won’t die out quite so fast. I can’t tell if Joellen is interested, or mocking me. I have always been a lousy judge of character.

Joellen dips her finger into the duck sauce and deliberately sucks it clean between her lips. She holds her hands out to me. “Notice anything?”

Her nails, which are what I have been trained to look at first, are covered-with tiny caricatures of Sesame Street characters. Big Bird, Ernie, Snuffelupagus, Oscar the Grouch. “That’s good. Where’d you learn that?”