Rainsinger (4 page)

From the other room, she heard sounds of him moving, and she dumped water in the coffeemaker. As she pushed the button to start it, the phone rang. He answered it in the other room, and Winona took the opportunity to flee out the back door.

* * *

The phone call annoyed him. It was from a woman in Denver who’d been hired to run one of the gallery outlets he’d helped organize last year. The galleries were designed to increase the profits of Indian craftspeople—weavers, silversmiths, potters and others who created handmade goods for the public. Native American products had been generating huge profits the past few years; the project removed the middlemen and put the bulk of the profits into the pockets of the artists.

As projects went, it was a rousing success, but the Denver woman was needy and nervous, and called at least twice a week with some problem or concern. He was beginning to think he’d made a mistake in hiring her. This morning he didn’t bother to hide his annoyance, and rushed her off the phone with a promise to look into her worry.

But to his disappointment, Winona Snow was nowhere to be found when he entered the kitchen, though he smelled the brewing coffee she’d thoughtfully made. He poured a cup, brushing absently at a few grounds she’d spilled on the counter, and put the can of coffee back in the fridge. He had noticed her efforts in the bathroom—and he’d thought she might be as orderly as Joleen, who showed evidence of the same compulsive neatness as Daniel himself.

A peek into Winona’s room—he had knocked and the door had swung open—had shown him Winona and Joleen were quite different. Dirty clothes were heaped on the suitcase flung open on the floor, and the damp towel was thrown over the back of a chair. She had tossed up the covers on the bed, rather than making it.

Oddly, it pleased him. She was a slob who tried to be careful, which confirmed the original impression he’d received from the rattletrap Volkswagen she drove. He prided himself on being an astute judge of character and didn’t like to be proved wrong.

Daniel carried his mug of steaming black coffee—nice and strong, he noticed—to the back door. It was a little past noon, and the sun shone almost white in a cobalt bowl of sky. The high desert was greening after the long, harsh winter, and the brief, dazzling season of blossoms had begun. Papery fuchsia blossoms of cactus lit the dun-and-sage-colored landscape like Christmas lights. The tall, graceful white flowers of yuccas opened discreetly, as if lighting candles in celebration of the awakening of the Mother. Later there would be other flowers, but this was his favorite time, when the shy cactus and yucca broke their conservative facades to celebrate the season of awakening. On the distant horizon were the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, blue and hazy in the bright day.

A deep sense of satisfaction filled him. He loved the high desert, with its secrets and dangers and moments of almost drunken beauty. And nowhere was the magic as intense for Daniel as at El Durazno, a small ranch on the western edge of the Navajo reservation.

Here, on this forgotten pocket of land, was a piece of history—his own and that of his ancestors. Here, Daniel had found the answer to a long-mysterious secret.

Between the small vegetable garden and the distant mountains stood the orchard he’d yearned to find since he was ten years old. The fabled Lost Orchard, the only orchard to survive the methodical, brutal burnings led by Kit Carson in 1863 to drive the Navajo from their land onto a reservation.

They were peach trees. While many other Indian nations had fought against the notion of agriculture, the adaptable Navajo developed a flair for it, and nowhere was that flair more evident than with their peaches. Their orchards had been productive and well suited to the climate along the high river valleys of northern New Mexico and Arizona.

From the time of the Spaniards, his people had embraced their beloved peach trees, nurturing them with special care. For two hundred years or more, the orchards had thrived.

Daniel’s ancestors had forgiven the war with the U.S. government and their subsequent long walk to Bosque Redondo. They had forgiven the burnings of their pumpkin and corn, even the destruction of their sheep.

But they had never forgiven the burning of the orchards.

As a ten-year-old boy, sitting with his mother’s brother by the fire of a winter night, Daniel had heard the story of the peach trees and wept. It seemed to him a crime of epic proportions to kill trees that might have given food for generations, and only to break the hearts of those who’d loved them. In his young mind, already hardened by the things he’d seen, the peach trees became a symbol of all that had been lost to his nation. For weeks he’d been haunted by the tale.

To ease his sorrow, his uncle had told him the story of the Lost Orchard. It had belonged to his great-great-grandmother, who had protected the hidden orchard at great cost to herself, for she had died defending it.

But according to the story, the orchard had survived.

When Luke and Jessie’s marriage had ended Daniel’s hope that Jessie might come to love him, Daniel had become obsessed with the story of the Lost Orchard. For months, he’d pored through every scrap of historical material he could find on the Navajo wars and the Long Walk and Kit Carson.

At last his patience had been rewarded. In a tiny article in a Santa Fe newspaper, he’d found a clue to make him believe the orchard might really have existed. After several more months of research, he’d come upon an advertisement dated 1902, for peaches from El Durazno. The owner of the orchards was listed as Manuel Lynch. Daniel knew the orchards more likely belonged to Manuel’s wife, but the times were such that women were not respected as business owners.

In 1908, El Durazno passed by sale to one Horace Snow. Daniel had been unable to uncover a reason, but he could guess. Those had been bad times for Indian nations. Prejudice and suspicion must have driven the Lynches out of business and back to the reservation, where Daniel was born almost fifty years later.

As a young man, he’d believed the legend to be only a pleasant story, told to ease the sorrow of a people. Now, in the white noon of a late-spring desert day, Daniel felt a swell of pride as he gazed upon the peach trees. The trees were not the same ones, of course. Like him, they were descendants of the participants in that great drama.

But at long last, after over a hundred years, the Lost Orchard was found. His discovery had given him a reason to again take up the reins of full living. To keep his place here, he would fight as fiercely as his great-great-grandmother had done. For her, and for his ancestors, he would tend the Lost Orchard. He would tend the trees to honor the tenacity of the Navajo spirit.

In time, perhaps these trees, this land, might let him know where he fit in the world.

Fortified with these thoughts, Daniel stepped off the porch to go meet his opponent.

Winona saw him coming, wearing jeans loose enough for a man to work in and a simple chambray shirt. His dark hair gleamed in the sunlight, but was not as dark as she’d first believed. Lighter streaks at the front spoke of a mixed heritage and a lot of time in the sun. A thick rope of twisted silver shone on one dark wrist.

He gave her a polite nod. “Are you feeling better?”

“Yes. Thank you for taking care of us so well. It was an invasion, and I apologize.” Ruefully she lifted a corner of her mouth. “We didn’t know anyone lived here, and by the time I realized it, I was too sick to go anywhere else.”

“Malaria, huh?” He gestured with one hand to a path under the trees. “I thought they could prevent that nowadays.”

“They can. Unfortunately, my protection lapsed before I realized it. It was a couple of years ago, but I still get attacks from time to time. Quinine ends them. They’re more of an annoyance than a danger.”

He looked at her in a peculiarly intense way, and she realized again that he was just a little taller than she was—a rare, delicious luxury.

“You seem okay,” he said.

“I’m fine.”

They walked below the branches of the trees on a carpet of shed blossoms. The air was sweet with the perfume of crushed petals, and bees droned lazily, as if made drunk by the nectar still lingering in the last flowers.

The orchard had obviously been neglected for many years, but here and there, she could see the careful work Daniel must have tendered. “The trees are in good condition,” she said. “Do you have a horticultural background?”

“Nope. Computers. I’ve been learning, though.”

“I can see that.”

“What do you know about it?” He scowled. “Sorry, that sounds confrontational. I just mean—do you know? How do you know?”

She looked at him, then at the canopy of leaves and branches shading their path. “I practically lived in these trees as a child. I spent my summers here from the time I was two until I went to college.” Pausing at the foot of a tall, spreading tree, she touched a split, blackened place on the trunk. “Must have been a harsh winter. This needs to be watched for fungus or insect invasion.”

His mouth turned down at the corners. “What causes it?”

“Extreme cold. It’s more common elsewhere, but it happens here sometimes, too, when you get those subzero temps.”

“There was a stretch of about a week in January when it never got above five degrees. Nights were a lot colder.” He touched the edge of the wound gently, a small frown creasing the warm brown skin of his brow. “What can you do?”

She shook her head. “Not much. Examine the other trees for similar splits and keep a watch on them.”

He pursed his lips. “Isn’t there a paint to put on the tree to protect it?”

“There is, but I’m of the school that believes the less human intervention, the healthier the trees will be.” She walked a little farther and pointed to some chewed leaves. “Looks like there might be a few leafhoppers around, too, but other than that, these trees are amazingly healthy for the amount of time they were neglected.”

“I’ve been working with them for almost a year. I couldn’t do all the pruning last summer, but I got a lot of it.”

Winona smiled. It was textbook-perfect pruning. She had a hunch he had carried the book outside with him and trimmed the trees exactly according to instructions. “You did a great job. There should be a good crop this year, barring natural disasters.”

“What disasters?”

She shrugged. “Dozens of things. Drought. Hail. Windstorms when the fruit is heavy enough to be blown off. Insect invasions.” She looked up. “Shall I continue?”

“That’s enough.” He sipped coffee. “You obviously know more than I do.”

Tenderly Winona stroked a graceful limb. “It’s a magical place, this orchard.”

“Why didn’t you come when old man Snow died?” It was a long and tangled story, too tangled to explain in a sentence or two. “There were family problems, and I was out of the country.”

“I see.”

In a semi-cleared meadow at the center of the orchard, he stopped at the foot of a huge, ancient tree. Winona stopped, too, and put her hand against the bark of the tree.

“She’s still alive,” she said, rubbing her palm over the rough skin. “I used to call her the mother tree.”

His face grew as still as a mirror. “She’s one of the original trees, I think. A man from the extension office said she might be as much as 130 years old, which is an outrageous age for a fruit tree.”

“Yes, it is,” Winona agreed. “But whoever planted her knew what they were doing. See the open crotch here?” She pointed to the middle of the tree. “That lets light come in, to nourish the heart of her.”

“It was my great-great-grandmother who planted this tree,” he said.

Winona looked up, and all the pieces fell into place. “Of course,” she said, more to herself than to Daniel.

“Of course?”

“Last night when you told me your name, I thought it sounded familiar, but I couldn’t remember why.”

“Now you know.”

She nodded, a sinking feeling in her gut. This was going to be much harder than she had originally imagined. In preparation for the battle about to be waged, she crossed her arms. “So what do we do now?”

He took another drink of coffee from a blue glass mug painted with moons and stars, and she thought briefly the cup was a frivolous possession for a man who appeared so serious.

“We have a problem,” he said.

“So it would seem.”

He lowered his head, as if to study something in the grass below the tip of his tennis shoes. Then he looked at her full on. “No point in beating around the bush. I put every penny I have into this ranch. I paid the back taxes, started shaping up the house and the orchard. I rewired the whole place last summer.”

Winona couldn’t bear the full weight of those infinitely expressive brown eyes. She glanced toward the blue horizon and concentrated for a moment on the sound of the bees. “And I’ll tell you just as honestly, I don’t have a dime to my name. We put it into the current taxes.”

“If that’s the only problem, I’ll give you the money back. I went down there to pay them yesterday.”

“At which point, the place would have belonged to you.” It was almost a question, but not quite.

He lifted a shoulder.

“It was a pretty big risk to take, considering you might lose it all in the blink of an eye.” She inclined her head. “Legally you haven’t a leg to stand on if I can come up with those taxes you paid.”

“I thought it was a good gamble.” His posture shifted. He crossed his arms over his chest, and his legs were slightly spread, as if to ward off a running tackle. “Do you know the story of this place?”

Winona moved, ambling toward a tree stump as broad as her rear end. Fondly she touched it. “Yes,” she said with a sigh. “My uncle told me about it. It is the only Navajo peach orchard to survive the army’s burnings.”

“By that measure, the land is mine by birthright.” Unruffled, Winona lifted her head. “That may be true. However, legally it’s mine.”

“Legally it’s ours.” He tossed the dregs of his coffee on the ground. “My work and the back taxes I paid, your deed and the current taxes.”

Neither spoke for a moment. Winona looked at the trees and reached up a hand to brush the leaves. “I used to sit for hours out here, examining the way the leaves grew, or making rubbings of the bark, or trying to figure out why some trees branched in one place and others did it another way.” She plucked a leaf and held it to the sunlight, remembering the girl who had been so enamored of the cell structure of living plants.