Century of November, A (1 of 2 free samples)

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COPYRIGHT
Century of November, A by W. D. Wetherell. Copyright by W. D. Wetherell 2004
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Dedication: For Phil and Mary


A CENTURY OF NOVEMBER

by W. D. Wetherell

I
HE JUDGED MEN AND HE GREW APPLES and it was a perilous autumn for both. A surprise autumn--the apples had promised so much. They blossomed early, luxuriously, with a rich pink-white color that went beyond anything he had ever seen. For once there was no late snow, no storm whipping in from the Pacific, no frost. In June, he was already ordering extra crates from a dealer in Vancouver, carving crutches to support the fruit-heavy limbs. In July, smoke blew across the strait from fires on the mainland, acrid and sticky, not like wood burning at all, but something more malignant. With no young men to fight them, the fires continued all summer, until each apple tree in the orchard was doubled by a spiky silhouette of gray. From Flanders, local people said, shaking their heads. They were convinced it wasn't forest fires at all, but mustard gas blown all the way from France.
By September, the apples were scabbed with yellow and orange rust, and now, here in late October, there was nothing hanging on the branches but pitted little sacks of empty brown flesh.

As for men, there wasn't much to say. His job as magistrate had never been easier. For three years now there had hardly been a crime worth mentioning, even though the town was only a few years removed from being frontier. There were drunken Indians, there were the bastards who sold it to them, the fishermen down on their luck who smuggled hooch in from the States, but except for those, the entire island had been well-behaved right through the duration. It was as if the evil in the world had turned liquid, spun sideways in a whirlpool, spewed all its fury toward France as part of the same desperate cycle that returned the smoke to them.

He was magistrate because he was the only person on that part of the coast who could be magistrate--a stipendiary magistrate devoted to, in the words of his oath, insuring the equal rights of the poor and the rich, after his cunning, wit and power. In normal times, this was no easy task. He had been shot at once. Shot at from ambush doing what he was doing now, strolling up the long rows of the orchard appraising how things stood. It had been spring then. The shot clipped a branch directly above him, covering him in a shower of white petals. "Missed," he remembered thinking, as the report echoed across the headlands and the petals tickled his face. He had been blind that way, stupid. Missed.

The tree, the fractured branch, became a shrine for him, a place he went to whenever he took the judging too seriously or not seriously enough. And now it was something more than that, his lucky spot, a sanctuary, the one place in the world he could stand and be safe. The bullet wound seemed to release something vital in the tree, since it was the only one in that row that managed a fully formed apple. A joke of course--he knew when fate waxed sardonic, having seen it so often from the bench. He reached to touch it now. Its skin was wet and slippery from the early rain, but the old familiar heft of it, the oval fullness, felt good against his palm.

He was standing there, his hands plunged again in his jacket pockets, his collar turned against the wind, when he saw something move across and briefly darken the narrow view of the water the orchard commanded. Someone walking up from the beach, which meant someone who had come by boat. He felt a premonition seeing that. He felt a premonition because at no time in the last two years had anyone approached him across any separation of any size without his feeling a premonition. But perhaps this wasn't the right word. It went deeper than that. It was certainty, one that hardened as the shape grew closer and he recognized who it was.

Ira Cooper. Short, stubby, solid, walking in the peculiarly clumsy way he favored, as if there were a sack of bricks looped over his shoulders. He picked his way up the grassy hill, his black sea boots like huge blunt plows gouging out the steps. He came, Marden noticed, precisely along the path the bullet had traveled years ago. Up the hill, through the orchard gate, along the longest row toward the wounded branch.

It was Cooper who had brought the news of Laura's death three weeks earlier. She had been visiting her sister in Vancouver. A long visit, all of August and deep into autumn, for reasons Marden didn't fully understand. The strain of worrying about Billy. The isolation of the island, the fact she needed more life, more urgency, than what could be found there. The difference in their ages. Something new and dark in him. There were reasons, lots of reasons, but none that solved the mystery. The important thing was that she planned on coming back. He had a long, loving letter from her giving the boat she was crossing on, the time of her arrival.

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