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

“I’d like that.” I had been wondering what I would do all day on a farm full of busy people. “I could help, if there’s something I’d be able to do.”

Hadley smiles at me. “Hey Sam, we’ve got some cheap labor. Rebecca is going to work for free.”

Sam, who has been talking to my mother on and off, twists around so he can see me. “Okay. You can shear the sheep next time they need it.” He grins. “Unless your mom wants to do it.”

At this point, my mother starts to run across the field. “It’s Joley,” she shouts. “Joley!”

Uncle Joley is standing on a ladder, wrapping green tape around a branch of a tree. He sees my mother but makes no motion to stop wrapping the tape. He winds it slowly and carefully, and I watch Sam smile as he does this. Then he holds his hands to the branch for a moment, and closes his eyes. Finally he climbs down the ladder to where my mother is waiting, and hugs her.

“Looks like you survived the trip, Rebecca,” Uncle Joley says to me when he walks closer. He kisses me on the forehead. He has not changed a bit. He turns to Sam and Hadley. “I assume you’ve all met.”

“Unfortunately,” my mother mutters, looking at Sam, and I’m positive he can hear her.

Joley looks from Sam to my mother, but neither one says anything else. “Well, it’s great that you’re here. We’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”

Sam says, “Why don’t you take the rest of the afternoon, Joley. On account of you never see your sister.”

Joley thanks him and takes my mother’s hand. “Are you all right?” he says, looking deep at her, as if the rest of us have disappeared. It makes us uncomfortable, though, and Sam starts to head back to the sheep pen. Hadley watches Sam leave and asks if I want to stay with Joley or learn abut pruning. I consider staying-I haven’t seen my uncle in a long time, after all-but on second thought I tell Hadley I’d like to go with him.

Hadley takes me through the retail orchard, pointing out various types of apples by tree. Some of the names I recognize: Golden Delicious, McIntosh, Cortlands. Most are foreign: Gravensteins, Miltons. “They sound like the names of mailboxes on a very rich street,” I tell Hadley, and he laughs. He stands very tall when he walks, and from my position it looks like he touches the sun.

He takes a deep breath as we come to the corner where the lake hits the orchard. “Smell it?” he asks, and there is mint all around. “It grows wild here.”

“Did you grow up in Stow? You know so much.”

Hadley smiles. “I grew up on a farm in Massachusetts. Hudson.-But my mom sold the place when my dad died. She lives in New Hampshire now. In the mountains.” He turns to me. “You grew up in San Diego?”

I glance up at him. “Do I look it?”

He picks a reed from the water’s edge and clamps it between his front teeth. “I don’t know. What do people from San Diego look like?”

“Well, they’re usually blond and skinny and real airheads.”

I mean it as a joke, but Hadley stares at me so intently that I think he will burn a hole through my shirt. He starts at my feet and winds up looking at my eyes. “Two out of three,” Hadley says. “I won’t tell you which two.”

We walk for a while along the shore of Lake Boon, letting the cattails whip around our knees. At one point Hadley reaches down and very casually plucks a tick from my thigh. He tells me about Uncle Joley, and about Sam. “Joley just came in here one day, and I have to tell you I was a little jealous-I’d been working with Sam for seven years and here this city boy struts into the place and can work miracles. But it’s true, no doubt about it. Your uncle-God that sounds funny-can heal things. He’s saved more dying trees single-handedly than I don’t know what.”

I am impressed. I want to try to touch a tree myself, to see if this skill might be inherited. Hadley keeps talking. His voice had a strange twang to it-a Boston accent, I guess it’s called-with weird A sounds and missing R s. “Sam took over the orchard when his dad had the heart attack. Parents live in Fort Lauderdale now, in Florida. He’d had ideas though, for a while. His dad walked out the front door of the Big House, and that very day Sam had tractors uprooting and moving trees.” He surveys the land up the hill. “I mean, it looks good now, and it turned out all right, but that’s not something I would have done. Sam’s like that.”

“Like what?”

“A kind of gambler, I guess. It’s a real risk to move around well-rooted trees, and he knew that-he’s smarter than me when it comes to agriculture. But the way it was here, well, it just wasn’t the way he saw it in his mind. And he had to make all the pieces fit together.”

Hadley sits down on a cluster of rocks on the edge of the lake and points to the tree overhead. “You hear that cardinal?”

There is a noise like a squeaky toy-high and low and high and low and high and low. Then out of the branches flies a bright red bird. The things this guy knows, I think.

“It’s really nice of Sam to let us stay here,” I say, making conversation.

“No insult to you and your mom, but he’s doing it for Joley. Sam isn’t really big on visitors, especially women from California. He’s been griping about it all week, actually.” He stops and looks at me. “I guess I shouldn’t be telling you this.”

“Well, that’s all right. He seems to have it out for my mother. She fell into a pile of manure before and he didn’t do anything to help her.”

Hadley laughs. “Not much you can do if someone falls in a pile of shit,” he says. “Didn’t your mom grow up around here?”

“Newton. Is it close by?”

Hadley whistles through his teeth. “Close in miles but a world away. Sam’s got this chip on his shoulder about the suburbs in Boston. They’re the ones with all the power who always vote down local aid to farms, but they haven’t got any idea what kind of work we do here. Newton girls, when we were in school, were the ones who used to giggle when we walked by, you know, come on to us but not let us near them. Like we were always dirty, because we worked with our hands instead of pushing a pencil. Some of them were really hot, too. Drove Sam nuts.”

Hadley turns to face me. He is smiling and about to say something but when he looks at me his smile falls away and he is just left staring. “You have really pretty eyes.”

“Oh, they’re a mutation,” I say. “In biology we had to go around class and tell our genetic combinations-you know, big B, little b, et cetera. So all the blue-eyed kids said little b, little b, and all the browneyed kids said big B, little b, or big B, big B, and when the teacher came to me I said ‘I have green eyes,’ and the teacher said that green eyes are a mutation of blue. Like a radioactive monster.”

“Well, they’re a really nice mutation, then.” Hadley grins at me and I think I have never seen anyone with such an open smile. It’s like he’s saying, Come with me, come along, we have all the time in the world.

We walk for a little while along the edge of the lake (Hadley says it’s stocked with freshwater bass, thanks to him and Sam when they were kids), and then we cut up the north side of the orchard. Finally, far away from the house, I begin to see apple trees that really have apples hanging on them. Hadley tells me these are the Puritans and Quintes-a little tart for eating but great for cooking. As we come closer, I see Sam and Uncle Joley and my mother.

“Where have you guys been?” Uncle Joley says. “We were getting-ready to have lunch.”

Hadley pushes me gently between the shoulder blades so that I take a step forward. “We’ve been down by the lake. Rebecca was telling me all the stupid things you did at family Christmas parties,” Hadley says, and everyone laughs.