The thing to know about a man called Fisher, is that he is not a man to damn the soil of his neighbors. He is not a man to damn the soil of his countrymen.
Citrus is his business, and cultivars with names like Ruby Star, Seville, Lisbon, and Ponderosa are planted in his groves. How beautiful these names have always been to him, sounding like the places Fisher has never been to, like the gemstones he will never buy. More than once, Fisher has walked through the alleyways of his orchard, whispering the names of his trees. Ponderosa, ponderosa, ponderosa, he will say to himself, a pruner in his hand. Or Seville, Seville, with the upturned -ya like he hears his pickers do.
And without children to dote on, without a wife to adore, it is a grove of cara cara navel oranges that are the farmer’s lifeblood. All species of navel are planted in the wing of his orchard called Aberdeen, for the way they slump and curve like barbed hooks on a line. But it is only the cara cara navels that stand up straight amongst the rest. In the good years, they will live up to their coupled name, producing two fruit for every one that the mandarins do, or even the eager breed of palm-sized jaffas.
Fisher had once believed that he could smell blight the way a dog could smell fear. Ever attentive, he could root out whatever canker, whatever pockmark there was in his otherwise perfect groves before it could even reach the size of an olive pit. And however much it hurt him – with those navel oranges of his, especially – he would chop down the guilty tree to spare the rest.
But this was no blight – no canker, no pockmark, no single tree or blemish to blame.Whatever it was, it had spread through all of low San Joaquin – to the Kundert brothers’ fields next door, and the Harris family’s almond orchard a few acres after that.
Fisher was told that he had been lucky. On the whole, citrus was faring well when you considered the wipeout of nectarines, or the scourge upon garlic bulbs. Fisher was asked what he could have expected, after all, with a fruit so sweet and thin-fleshed as his navels.
Of course, Fisher had thought about lying. At any sign of sickness, all farmers in the valley were made to report infected trees to the county. From there, the commissioner would send a harem of hounds (who apparently could smell disease as well as fear) and a plant pathologist who would recommend which trees would be extracted, and which could remain. Fisher couldn’t help but feeling that, if given enough time, or maybe a different fertilizer, the sick trees would right themselves. But Fisher thought of the Kunderts, he thought of the Harrises, and in thinking so, thought better.
So weekly, Fisher watched as his navel trees, ashen and splintering from the exhaustion of illness, were hauled away. At first, he couldn’t decide what to do with the oranges left behind, not suitable for market, but piled deep and high within his orchard’s alleys. Compost had seemed too rugged a burial for Fisher, and leaving the oranges to rot in their place completely, though presenting the same utility as a cremation, also seemed to be lacking the same amount of ceremony.
And so, Fisher drives north through Fresno the way the rest of us do – past the rainbow parasols of the street side vendors, past the cherry farms whose pits fallen wayside embroider the road in a long red stitch. As he drives, Fisher plays his music in the cabin, loudly. Or else, it is the sound of his navel oranges he will hear, rolling and thudding against the wooden slats of his truck bed like a thousand heads concussed, again and again. On that long stretch of otherwise quiet highway, he avoids looking back in his mirrors when he can. To hear his oranges dying is one thing. To see it is quite another.
When he reaches Firebaugh, on the county line, Fisher turns onto the town’s main thoroughfare. It is a place called O Street by those who know it well. O Street is something of an oddity – an interruption of the natural order that grows in California. Beyond it rolls the country’s cornucopia – the great American cultivars, swept into windrows, running up to the building faces along the avenue in such a fevered pitch, Fisher worries the whole township might collapse at any moment, like a buckled seawall.
O Street is lined on either side by a dozen yards of chicken wire, and swaths of canvas stretch upward from it before they are tampered down by two large stakes at the head of the road. Beneath the canvas are the wives and daughters of the pickers who stand in the great piazza of the San Joaquin farmer’s market and sell all types of wonderful things in jars and pretty parchment paper. There are honeys and pickles and beeswax soaps cut into odd shapes. Slender bottles filled with vinegars, whose colored urns of emerald and umber, become stained glass in the sunshine seeping through the weave of the canvas.
At the mouth of the tent is a girl selling marmalade. She stands behind stacks of silver-lid jars, piled high and carefully like a parapet. She bends slightly backward at the weight of her expectant stomach, on which she rests an olive palm. There is already another baby on her hip – a facecloth plastered over him, soaked with Manzanillo tea leaves to keep the sun out. Elena is her name, she says.
Fisher introduces himself as such, and accepts a spoonful of Elena’s marmalade to taste. He tells her of his business – that some of his trees are sick, and some of them are not, but the fruit is good to eat all the same. And how would she like, he asks, to buy these oranges for her marmalade at half any market price she could find in Fresno?
Elena smiles, and her baby offers a clumsy wave – his mother’s hair a black coil wrapped around a tiny fist. Fisher spends the remainder of that afternoon in June stacking the crates of his oranges behind the canvas of Elena’s tent, enjoying very much a supper of her marmalade, spread in amber knifefuls on thick slabs of bread.
Back in his crook of the valley, and in the weeks that follow, Fisher watches as his orchard thins. With his cara cara navel trees becoming fewer and fewer, Aberdeen is almost empty. But going to the market as often as he does, and seeing Elena’s stomach grow, Fisher is not without hope. On these trips to Firebaugh, he is reminded how everything works in a circle, which a farmer who stares out at rows and quadrangles for the large part of his life is apt to forget.
Fisher likes the routine of the market. There are familiar faces with familiar baskets of bundled herbs and things wrapped in cellophane. The stalls of the market are always in the same place, and a great many seem blessed with abundance – no matter how many bouquets of asparagus are bought, or how many loaves leave the piazza in cradled arms, the vendors’ shelves seem always full, and at this, Fisher feels both wonder and envy. Elena, he has watched, often becomes flustered in keeping pace with the traffic of the market.
A few of the other vendors are pregnant, like Elena, and they return, after a time, with babies on their hips. Or else, they are replaced with a sibling or husband who fumble for price sheets in the absence of their sisters and wives. Fisher thinks about what it will be like when Elena has her new baby – how she will manage stacking marmalade jars with a child on each arm. Fisher wonders if Elena’s husband will come in her place. But on the subject of babies and husbands, Fisher has never asked. When Fisher goes to the market, and unstacks his crates of oranges for Elena, they talk about the lack of rain, or the milling of the highway up toward Sacramento. Before Fisher leaves, and his visit ends, Elena sends him off with a few jars of her marmalade, and the baby waves goodbye.
In late summer, Fisher’s last cara cara navel tree dies, and the pathologist orders it be taken away. In its wake, the tree leaves a litter of half-rotted fruits and untangling pulp. If one didn’t know any better, if one didn’t know the slaughter of it all, the scene might resemble the day after Christmas – something like the way tinsel and ornaments fall, in their reflective golds and crimsons, and remain splayed on an empty tree skirt.
Fisher loads a truckful of his proudest looking fruits, and drives toward the market in Firebaugh. Everything beneath the canvas is the same as it ever was, though beneath Elena’s dress, as white and delicate as cheesecloth, her waist is small. Smaller than Fisher has ever seen it. As for Elena’s face, her cheeks are dusty, and cut into fine fracture lines by the rolling tracks of sweat. She looks like porcelain, broken and then hurriedly glued.
This time, they don’t speak of rain or the work on the highway, now nearly done in anticipation of the trucks that will drive Fresno’s harvest out to the rest of the country in the coming fall. Elena decides to return Fisher home without a jar of her marmalade, or maybe she just forgets. Even the baby doesn’t wave to Fisher, nestling instead into his mother’s shoulder.
Fisher imagines that exhaustion and forgetfulness are what come with having a new baby. Of course, he can’t be sure. But in the weeks that follow, Fisher waits for the new baby on Elena’s hip or a sister at the counter in her place. Neither come. Always, it is Elena, alone, and the baby Fisher already knows playing nervously with the black locks of her hair.
Fisher’s trips to Firebaugh become less frequent, even as the season stretches its long arms into the end of August. It is not until then that Fisher can bring himself to rake the last of his navel oranges into a pile – barely enough, now, to fill a quarter of the truck. On that same afternoon, Fisher brings his final bedful to the market, and he tells Elena as much.
If it is the last, Elena says, she might go with him to his orchard, and see where his oranges grow. Fisher likes the idea very much. They bring a few jars of marmalade from Elena’s counter, and some other things from the stalls of the piazza. A bottle of cider from the table next to hers. A loaf of bread.
At the farm, Fisher shows Elena and the baby the things he doesn’t care for, first. His patch of mangy meyer lemons. The tumble of perennials – a thicket of alyssums and lavender – that help his oranges grow with the bees they foster.
After, they walk through the groves that Fisher adores, all but Aberdeen, and he loves to listen as Elena says the names of the trees, so much lovelier than he ever could. Seville, Seville, she says, and the baby giggles at his mother’s voice.
By the time they have walked through the last wing of the orchard, it is nearing dark. And if you have looked at the flesh of an orange, cut down the middle, and seen its vascular white lines of pith running jagged all the way through, you have seen the way heat lightning sprawls itself across the sky at sundown, on the last of August in Fresno, California.
The two of them sit high on Fisher’s roofwalk, drinking their cider, spreading their marmalade on ends of toast, and watching lightning strike the valley.
For a moment, Fisher thinks he might turn to Elena and say how his chest feels like a steel drum, so big it holds all the emptiness below them in his orchard, and how his is a constant worry that the lightning will hit the pan of the drum, and strike him down, hot and hollow.
But the other thing to know about this man called Fisher, is that he is not a man to say anything of the sort.
And so Fisher is quiet at the wonder of it all. He is quiet in his grief. Elena, too, is quiet in her own wonders.