Paradise Orchard

Chapter 1

THE BARN

What irritated Phillip Vanderkamp most about the barn that stood on his farm was not that it was rickety and old and in need of a paint job which he had neither the time nor money to give it. Its lines were fairly acceptable, and the weathered boards that covered its sides and corrugated metal sheets that covered its roof were in fairly good shape. It was the largest building on the whole 300 acres, and centrally located, and he used it to house the hundreds of odds and ends that his uncle had out in the fields and woods: rusted plowshares, haying rakes, mule harness, and wagon parts, seed boxes, broken orchard equipment, two old cars, truck parts – the great numbers of things that would otherwise have lain about, exposed to the rain. All were gathered in the barn as if awaiting his attention.

Over the years he had carried out repairs on practically every part of the building. He did so with increasing reluctance, though, for the building did, after all, irritate him. It was simply built wrong.

It rested on the ground in such a way as to facilitate the rotting of its sills and main posts. The system of rafters, joists, and studding was ill-conceived and the floor plan was awkward and inefficient.

The materials in it were good, but they were just put together wrong.

Phillip could have built a better one himself. He had built or rebuilt a number of other structures on the place during the nine years: tool sheds for his new orchard equipment and Deutz tractor, a house for his wife and three sons, a welding shop, a pump and irrigation shed, a fruit stand beside the paved road, and his newly completed and beautifully sited packing shed which overlooked the orchards and which was almost as big as the barn. He had done an excellent job on each project. He had not cut corners on any of them and he had designed and built each from the ground up.

But the old barn still dominated the view of Paradise Orchard from the public road.

It swayed in strong winds. With annoying frequency various rusted roof panels would partially detach and be twisted skyward to flap loudly in the breeze until Phillip set aside the time to haul out the heavy wooden ladders and take on the dangerous task of renailing the sheets to the brittle purlins beneath.

When trying to hammer home the neoprene-washered roofing nails at places where the purlins were not backed by rafters, the roofing and nails sprang back in frustrating refusal to cooperate with his hammer. He would always remember what Guthrie Bains had told him: You oughta sell that old barn to the damn Yankees, he had said one day after Phillip had mashed his thumb with the hammer twice in ten minutes.

Bains had meant, of course, that Phillip could just burn the thing down for the insurance proceeds. Bains had been kidding, but every time Phillip had ascended to the roof to wrestle with the unwieldy sheets he remembered the suggestion. It had become a frequent thought of his not only because he had grown to despise the barn but also because he himself was a Yankee and his father was president of a large insurance company in Cincinnati. Phillip could only wonder what his father would have thought had he been there hearing his son cussing while Bains smoked a joint, petted his coon dog, and suggested arson.

Money had grown short, though, and the barn did fulfill a great many storage functions, and so Phillip let it alone and worked on it only when he absolutely had to. Over the years the barn had seemed to take on a sort of adverse personality of its own. It seemed to loom up just over the crown of a low rise and look down disapprovingly on everything Phillip was attempting to do in the ten acres of the main orchards. Its two upstairs shuttered openings and its broken main door gave it the look of a big somber gray face which the rusted sheeting of the roof framed with what one could envision to be a tattered hairline.

My granddad said that barn even looks like C.Q. Huber, Bains had said one day as they viewed the barn from a distance. And of course he – old Huber – really was a first-class son of a bitch. His son ain’t worth a shit, either, he concluded, referring to the current owner of the Bank of Buchanan County. It was C.Q. Huber who had built the barn in the late 1920s. It was a monument of him that wouldn’t die.

The barn, of course, was not the most notable aspect of the farm by a long shot. Phillip’s own accomplishments were. In the nine years he had owned it he had transformed the place from a neglected bit of scrub land to an agricultural showplace. It was his tribute to the virtues of Yankee industriousness and capital investment, and it was on the verge of being able to turn a respectable profit.

As with any farming operation, though, there had been many problems throughout the years, but they had been met and either mastered or deferred. Farming is a brawny, basic endeavor, but it has its delicacies and its vulnerabilities, too. The external vagaries such as weather, commodity prices, interest rates, and the health of the farmers and their families are not the only considerations which must be considered in the building of a successful farm. The knowledge and judgment of the farmer and his wife are more important than those externals. And their spirit is more important still.

In the beginning, the farm had been nothing more than three-hundred acres of cut-over scrub in the southern part of Buchanan County, forty acres of which were thin-soiled, weed-rich meadows dotted with stunted pines and sweet gum. It had been – like so much of the land in that part of the state – ground exhausted by the farming practices of generations of poor, ignorant farmers. It had been a pathetic place. If the soil had been able to speak for itself, it might have expressed a yearning for its lost fecundity, and for a return of the primeval forests that had covered it before the white man came. With its cheap house and its gray, weathered barn and sheds, the farm had been the sort of place that his friends from Yale might have held in deepest contempt had they seen it as it had been during Phillip’s childhood and when he took it over in the late ’seventies.

It was his, though. Although the trustees of his grandfather’s estate held the legal title – for they had advanced the money to invest in the place – it was nevertheless Phillip’s own and for it he was beholden to no one except his dead uncle. He thought of himself as typifying the Jeffersonian ideal of the yeoman farmer: justifiably proud and fiercely independent of both the government and of his Cincinnati family.

His mother had always despised her brother-in-law’s farm when Phillip was a boy, and she had always refused to stay there whenever they had gone by it on her way to his paternal grandfather’s Thomasville plantation. Broom sage and hicks, she would snort. She did not run the family; she only tried to.

I have outgrown juvenile rebellion against my mother, he had once told his lawyer friend, Wilson Lambert. It is a mature emotion now.

His mother’s dislike alone was reason enough to incline him to love the place, but coupled with his own rebelliousness was the fact that he had loved that poorest of his six uncles. He had respected the man for having chosen to disregard the family positions available in Ohio in favor of a much simpler life. That Uncle William, the family maverick, had joined the Marines in 1937 and had gone up through the ranks to become an officer. Transferred at his own request from Quantico to the Pacific in 1943, he had lost a leg on Iwo Jima. Within a year he married the Buchanan County girl who had been his nurse in California, and they moved to Georgia. When she died he had inherited the family farm she left to him. They had been a happy couple.

Unable to care for the place in his declining years, Uncle William had watched the place falling down and lying fallow about him, but he had a plan, and that plan was to give it to Phillip. More than all of the other nephews and nieces, Phillip seemed to deserve the place and be the only one in the family who might actually keep it and come to Georgia to live on it. It was Phillip who most regularly visited William and his wife. The boy enjoyed watching people farm and took an interest in the broom sage and the hicks. He loved the land and the uncle loved the boy. When he inherited the place, Phillip did not feel as though he had earned it. He just thought that he was meant to have it. Run down as it was, the place seemed to be waiting for his hands and the money it would take to multiply those hands’ work and bring forth orderliness and fruit from the exhausted fields.

The money he had had – at least during the first six years. His family was wealthy, and he had some funds in a trust his grandfather had left to him. He was able to borrow more from the trustees by putting the land into their hands. He plowed it in to the soil surely as if it – this cash – was fertilizer, seed, and nursery stock. He had plans and purpose and was happy. As a part of that plan, from England, out of all the women he had known, he had chosen a wife to fit all of his needs – or so he had thought. He had worked and planted, rebuilt and plowed. He had sown orchard grasses and planted thousands of trees. The land gave forth its bounty and the wife hers. All in good time, the orchard sang with bees and the house resounded with the shouts and cries of three sons.

Alicia, his English wife, gave his home not only children but also music, style, and beauty. As his farm and his family came along (as the local farmers were fond of saying), he surveyed his domain with justifiably increasing pride, self-assurance, and contentment. He knew that he had done the right thing by resisting his mother’s ceaseless importuning that he enter medical school after Yale. It was as if his life had been one of choosing between various grand views and lofty prospects – all of which were equally delightful and equally rewarding to the staunch, albeit favored, followers of the oiled, sure rails of the rich. He had pride in his tall, handsome appearance that had always opened doors for him and made women interested in him. He had pride in his possessions, his background, his land, his handiwork, his children, and his wife – in short, he had pride in himself.

He was a religious man in a deep-seated, Catholic way that did not unduly interfere with his daily life and his daily desires. His life had gone so well for so long that his pride in his accomplishments had long suppressed most of his thoughts about spiritual matters. He had forgotten during the years prior to the advent of his sister-in-law that simple, warning precept which, if not in the Bible, was quite thoroughly a part of the religion of his race. He was proud, and he had forgotten that old saying: pride goeth before a fall.

Chapter 2

SYBIL

April, and the noontime sun was so bright that it hurt Phillip’s eyes when he lifted them toward the higher branches upon which he worked. Large drops of sweat formed along the center of his spine and on his chest, accumulated, and took their ways, first slowly, then with a plunge, down his body beneath his shirt in cool trickles that ended in his waistband. They were distracting; the sun was distracting; the bees that droned from flower to flower among the orchard trees were distracting.

He could not think about his work and about the five thousand trees of the orchard he had planted and their five thousand demands for his constant, unremitting attention. His undistracted attendance upon each tree in its turn, followed by the next and the next and the next was a thing of the past. Not since his sister-in-law Sybil had arrived in Georgia to help work with him in the orchards, that is: not since she moved into the house and into the orchard and into that tormented place in his mind and his loins’ desire, edging into every moment’s thought.

There were respite of sorts in thinking about other women he had known, his wife included, but since the subject was the same it came back always to his sister-in-law and stirred around in him. He thought of himself as a sort of silly, agrarian Hamlet. To have her was the thesis. Not to have her was the antithesis. He longed for simpler times.

Although the birds sang loudly among the apple trees, the day was quiet except for the snap-snap-snapping of his clippers and the more distant, faint snapping of Sybil’s well-wielded clippers. Occasionally he heard her singing what he took to be a siren’s air while she worked the next row over slightly ahead of his own station.

Unlike him, she was working without distraction, giving the trees her full, professional attention. Phillip thought of his wife and children down at the house in the woods, but his thought was an artificial construction and it faded quickly – just as too little water thrown on a fire is quickly gone and the fire remains unquenched.

Hating himself for his weakness, he put down the tool he carried and went to where she worked as if to offer help. Any excuse would do, he told himself. Just to be near her and to catch those inevitable glimpses of her large smooth breasts beneath the soft, blue, partially unbuttoned shirt she wore, or simply to look in her eyes for that wayward, magnetic gleam he always found there, he thought would be enough. Naturally, it was never enough – it could not be enough, for she was neither statue nor image. She was a woman in her prime who fit his idea of perfection exactly. All of their being near each other in the perfumed privacy of the close rows of trees, all the looking into her eyes and glimpsing the curved, living expanses of her flesh could not possibly be enough. All that such glimpses could do was make him want her more, and he knew it. He also knew he was powerless to stop himself from going to her.

I pant after her like a dog, he said to himself with disgust again and again. And yet he went.

As there was never anything he could really say to her, he always said something pathetic and lame, such as Lord, isn’t it hot? – half thinking and half hoping she might unfasten another button, half afraid he might suggest a swim in the tank by the barn and be repulsed.

Or he might say, I guess I just feel lazy today, to which she always replied with her lovely English-accented voice something on the order of Don’t be silly! You’re the most industrious chap around, as she would reach forth a long, cool hand and stroke the line of his jaw, her blue eyes boring into his. They were alone. They were always alone amid the undulating rows of fair, pink-white flowers, gray-brown branches, and green orchard grass. He approached her as he always approached her, with an unmistakable, affected air of nonchalance which every schoolgirl knows and at which they laugh—the adolescent’s failure to be cool.

But Phillip was no adolescent, regardless of how awkwardly he acted. He was tall and lank and burned by the sun into a fine, even tan along those part of his arms and face and neck he left exposed to the sun during the milder seasons of the year. Even when he was naked, the tan lines caused by the wearing of shirts were not too pronounced, because his skin was of that dark hue sometimes found among those of North German descent. He had been doing agricultural work for twelve years, but the skin of his neck had not yet gotten the leathery, wrinkled look which among fair people clashes so brutally with the white skin of the chest below.

At thirty-six, he was beginning to think in terms of a few more good years. But years of what? Years of ardent sex? Years of athletic good health and good looks? Years of being attractive to young, desirable women not because he was a good provider or a good catch but simply because he was a handsome animal and an experienced lover? Daily he wondered about those few good years.

He hated being so awkward with Sybil; it was as if she canceled out by her presence all of the calm assurance with which he had been so successful with women in the past. Since her coming, he thought almost constantly about such things, continuously reviewing his memories of the many lovers he had had during the years prior to his marriage. He had known girls of every hue and shape. He had known older women and younger ones, and was familiar with their needs and their tactics, and knew – or presumed he knew – every style of thrust and whinny one might make when he mounted her. By the time he was twenty-eight, he felt not only satisfied with the breadth of his experiences, but also safe from the more dangerous aspects of female charms, which is to say, safe from the possibilities of a passion-induced destruction of the neat existence he wanted to formulate for himself. He felt himself to be, in short, a man of the world, ready to marry and get on with his life’s ambitions.

Now that Sybil was there, though, he perceived himself bound, beaten, and common – a laborer lusting for a wench. He stood on no plateaus or summits. He had no visions other than one of her smiling – smiling with eager, mouth-open longing, eye-flashing wanting of him – of her squirming out of her shorts, pulling aside the soft blue of shirt to let her breasts swing about in the moment before they cushioned his pulling of her up against himself as she lifted her hands, long and cool, to the sides of his head and pulled his mouth eagerly down to hers. He could easily imagine her nipples grow tight with excitement against his smooth chest, as his hands and his strong arms wrapped around her finely muscled back in that physical and emotional melting into her for which he longed. Then his hands slide down at last as the hot kisses remind them both of their rampant natures and of the obvious differences between the sexes. His hands slide across the smooth hips as hers search out holding places upon his back. Finally, but not without surprise and joy, he finds her sex wet and ready in its eagerness to provide, and she searches and finds his – not with surprise but with joy, hard and stiff and ready in its eagerness to provide. As he reaches her, she shudders as if chilled, but she is melting to new and deeper levels of animal lusting. Her moans become whimpers. Her whimpers become urgings as they lie down in the soft grasses, and her urgings become desperate pleas as she cries for him to come into her, as she increases their tempo as he rolls into position, her hands frantically reaching for the hard promise of her satisfaction – pulling at him to bring him to the mark as she bites her lip to stifle the growing animal cries that come from some deep and untapped reservoir within her. Urgently, when he begins the long descent into her, she pulls at the cheeks of his butt to hurry its progress so that, finally she moans with an "unghnnnn" from some primordial race memory unrecognizably apart from her normal self that all the world has seen. Then comes the masculine push of the last part of him which he had saved back – the unexpected surfeit, the cervix-touching, mind-shocking, stomach-warming last plunge of him into her depths which finally obliterates any distinction between them that either might have discerned. He runs up against her pulled and distended clitoris and flaps his scrotum in its own surprising way up against the sensitive area near her bottom, such that all being at once done and beyond even the satisfaction she had felt when he entered, her lip is released, the animal is released, and everything about her is released, and without buildup or premeditation of affection or even a thought, a full-throated HAAAAAA! comes from her. Loud and resonant it continues on and on as he pulls out and returns in the age-old give and take which ends in his shouts mingled with the fluids of his body mingled with the fluids of hers and their minds and bodies suffused into other’s as they lie at last beside each other in the hot April sun under the canopy of pink blossoms, gradually re-emerging into a perfect world where birds sing and bees hum against a backdrop of blue sky and motionless white clouds.

Sure is hot, isn’t it? he said lamely as he walked up to her.

Sybil stood on her tiptoes clipping a higher branch, her breasts pushing fully out against the taut shirt. She looked quickly into his eyes before she bent over at the waist to put together a bundle of trimmings. As she did, her shirt came open and afforded him yet another long gaze into the place where sweat formed in little beads in the center of her chest between the smooth curves of flesh leading off to the edges of her nipples which he saw, though fleetingly, where they touched now lightly against the blue cloth. It is by such visions that men are dominated – bits of feasts being more compelling than feast itself.

Having been facing Phillip directly before she bent over, she was directly before him and her hair – long and full and red like her sister’s – hung down damply like a frame around the vision her open shirt offered. Phillip resisted, as he had before several times, the almost overpowering urge to step forward so that as her head came up and forward in the act of rising, it would come within inches of his sex which was quickly beginning, unwilled, its own act of rising. She, understanding with sudden clarity, and with love and even perhaps humor, would then stop, smile up mischievously at him, and kneel to address his member with her liberating hands working gently with the buttons of his pants and his belt, then with her lovely mouth, first kissing, then sucking ardent manhood …

It’s not so very hot, darling, she said (she called everyone darling, he thought irritably), as she straightened up. Now come on and get back to work, for we must get this section done by supper.

The whole event – his arriving, her stopping, his look, his fantasy, her standing back up – had lasted but ten seconds and now here he was standing dumbly in the field with her – feeling ashamed at his awkwardness and what he took to be the impossibility – or at least the unforeseeable dangers of his situation.

Sybil had never given him even a hint that any advance he might make would be treated with the scorn and revulsion one might expect, but neither did she urge him on or entice him – not overtly, at least, not that he could tell for sure. Her very presence was enticing, he thought, as he stood beside her fumbling with words, gazing with longing just a yard or two from her.

Normally, of course, he avoided looking into her eyes directly for fear of offending her, but with constant – though surreptitious – stares when they were in the orchards together, he drank in the sight of her long legs and arms as they picked up the afternoon colors while she worked. In the moments when she was not looking, he stared at the erotic hump of her firm but prominent mons venus with its clothen covering framing it in the vee of her tight pants. Occasionally he would catch glimpses of the tight folds of the bottom of her shorts running longitudinally in strict adherence and conformity to the construction of her nearby covered entrance.

Occasionally, too, he saw a bit of her panties, or even what seemed, in the fleeting glimpses, like the bush of her, damp and quiet, waiting beneath the thin cloth.

Her face was almost identical to his wife’s face, but somewhat younger. It was not the youth of it, though, that held him: There was something in it that attracted him more. He knew what that element was, and he was tormented by his knowledge of it, because the thing he perceived in it was nothing less than a barely repressed sexual explosiveness which experience had taught him lay close beneath the surface of at least some women.

She had a thin, aquiline nose which was – to his mind’s tastes – perfectly proportioned. Her eyes were a shade lighter blue than the sky’s, but they shared in their depths the sky’s background of slight pink. Not pink, but rose madder, in the lightest of washes, his artist friend, Sheila, might say as she worked upon landscapes, he thought as he contemplated with self-derision the madness in himself that his twenty-nine-year-old sister-in-law evoked. Her cheekbones were high and prominent in a way that gave force to her face without robbing it of femininity, and her dark, red brows were thick enough to lend her face that slight touch of masculinity which is always needed to perfect truly astonishing beauty.

Her hair was a curly mass of multi-hued reds and blondes which in profusion fell to the mid-point of her back. She was, if anything, slightly more hirsute than average, and – untrimmed around her neck, forehead, and temples – her blonde, downy underhair grew and strayed into an inviting thicket in which a man might nuzzle contentedly before and after his consummations into her.

Her lips held the real heart-twisting revelation of the inner woman, though. It was they more than any other of her features which attracted him to her, for in the knowing of many women he had discovered something about such lips as she had, for they seemed to adorn women of the very highest degrees of sexual ardor. Having known many women and kissed many lips, hers reminded him of the sweetest of the tastes of love he had known.

In London with quiet little Margaret who lived in a small flat in Chelsea, and whose every other feature was not particularly compelling, he had known it. The taste of her lived on and on in him. Whenever he looked through the album which held pictures of his traveling days and saw the lone picture of the thin, frail girl caught at a bad angle on a dreary street, he suppressed the urge to tell the viewer about his passions for such an ordinary girl. Even in front of his wife, Alicia, he had said, Oh, that’s a girl I knew in London.

Alicia, of course, knew better, knew that Margaret had been his lover, knew that he had lived with her for five weeks in the distant past. But even Alicia, with all her unerring intuition, did not suspect how frequently the thought of Margaret’s mounting on top of him in the hot surge of her own heat came to Phillip as he lay in his morning’s bath or even when she, Alicia, mounted him in ways that simply could never quite equal Margaret’s ways. And distant Margaret had those lips – those giveaway lips – that he saw now every day on nearby Sybil.

Chapter 3

BECKY

When he was single, Phillip always found it easy to sleep with the girls he wanted. Where his looks would not carry him, his charm would. And there was always his wealth to fall back on. He had never used a prostitute, but sometimes he felt afterward that he had purchased an embrace or two along the way, particularly on the day following an evening’s expensive dinner, a show, an after-the-show drink and some predictable, theatrical sex. By the time he was twenty-four, he had grown to despise what he called dinner whores. He had come to think that – at least in theory – outright prostitutes probably constituted a better class of women.

He had reluctantly concluded, though, that even the good, desirable women always wanted something beyond love, romance, or passion. They wanted marriage even if a man couldn’t offer it, or they wanted money even if he didn’t have it, or they wanted revenge on their husbands or on the man’s wife. Sometimes – but only rarely – they did just want love – usually with a man who couldn’t give it to them.

Naturally, to keep from scaring him off, most of the girls he had been with either said or implied that all they wanted out of him was good companionship and good sex. He had known better, but they made it easy for him. All he needed to offer a girl