Page 8 of Under Story

This was how she spoke: sideways, through omission. Even her praise was restrained. A good father, she’d said—not superb. Not faultless, as Laurel thought of him.)

On weekends, Clare walked to Memorial Union, a student center on the shore of Lake Mendota. The second floor contained an old ballroom that never seemed to be in use, or locked. Inside was a Steinway grand piano. Her mother, a music teacher, had taught her how to play. Clare performed Bach’s “Zion hört die Wächter singen” from Sleepers Awake—her mother’s favorite cantata—for Pete alone. By graduation, they were married.

Pete and Clare were not only drawn to the romance of Edner’s ramshackle farmhouse. They also had plans for the orchard. Edner had rented the west side of the farm to an aging apple-grower who ran a traditional orchard, Macs and Red Delicious to which he applied synthetic nitrogen and 2,4-D on a calendar schedule. But Clare and Pete had seen what radiation did in Hiroshima and Agent Orange did in Vietnam. They were teenagers in 1968, when Black sanitation workers went on strike in Memphis, and one year later, as three million gallons of crude oil flooded into the ocean from a drilling rig off Santa Barbara. During the spring of their first year of college, twenty million people joined Wisconsin senator Gaylord Nelson in the first Earth Day teach-in.

Pete signed up for a fruit-growers course at Michigan State. He learned to use pheromone traps to assess insect maturity and to scout an orchard, monitoring it for issues before planning an intervention. The previous farmer had only grown commercial trees, which were strategic for a wholesale model—they produced high yields, which ripened all at once and barely bruised—but what they gained in homogeneity, they sacrificed in taste. Pete and Clare planted heirloom varieties: great old giants that could live for a century, particular as any elder whose character had steeped over decades. Northwestern Greenings had tough chartreuse skin that ceded to a tart and cheeky sweetness. Wolf River grew so large that you needed just two for a pie. Ashmead’s Kernel was shy bearing—it matured late, in October, and the yield was always unpredictable—but its richness was unmatched. Those apples ripened to a hammered-looking bronze.

One night, when Laurel was in kindergarten, her parents let her stay up late with only “You’ll see” for a reason. At ten o’clock, a caravan of trucks, fronted by two blinding eyes of light, made their way toward Upper Orchard. Laurel smelled the cargo before she saw it. Out they flooded: twelve sheep, half of them stolid brown Romneys, the other half white, jaunty Finns.

Pete’s family claimed that real farmers didn’t name their animals, but Pete countered that “real farmers” still used ear tags. The only difference between a name and a number, he said, was dignity. There was noble Nora, who charged a coyote when the guard dog froze; Lemon, who assumed a one-eyed glare before she butted something; and Hank, who was frostbitten one winter and spoiled thereafter, his debrided ear small as the petal of an artichoke. It was Laurel’s job to make sure they had water and hay. Grain went to the lambs and pregnant sheep. When the female Finns were in heat, they gathered around Oberon, the Romney ram, like fans to a rock star. One year, an ancient ewe named Ileana knocked over a gate to reach him. The Finn ram was sweetest: he nuzzled a ewe, walked and ate with her, until he knew she was ready to stand for him.

Spring was lambing season, and Pete was there for every birth. In late pregnancy, the ewes made a point of coming over to him, as if to remind him they might need his help. Most delivered on their own, but when they couldn’t, a shepherd had to move quickly. Once, two days before Christmas, Laurel entered the barn and heard pawing. This was a sign of labor: a ewe made a nest and lay down, over and over, to find the right position for her trial. The sound led to Agnes, who fed and warmed any lamb who needed it, often at her own expense.

Pete and Clare were visiting a friend; they’d never had such an early birth. Laurel, thirteen, dropped her grain and ran for gloves. Agnes’s birth canal was small. Laurel inserted a hand and eased a large lamb caught in the channel. She was afraid that it would suffocate, but the baby emerged in a brine of fluid unscathed, and mellow for all the trouble he’d given his mother. A second lamb followed without assistance. By the time Pete and Clare came home, Laurel was drying the twins with towels while the other ewes helped themselves to the grain she had spilled at the door.

A shearing took place every spring, conducted by an expert who traveled across the state. The shearer sat on a bucket. His stage was a piece of wood beneath a single light bulb. He knew that this was a performance: Laurel and her parents, along with the farmhands, stood in the barn, watching. It was often a cold morning, the spectators in hats and gloves; space heaters were brought in for the sheep, who would have to adjust to losing pounds of wool.

Only the shearer wore a light shirt. Arm hooked through the horns, he danced with the rams, daring and efficient. The females waited in a huddle. Alert were their soft faces, the marble eyes on each side of the head. He chiseled, like a sculptor, until a shape emerged: a lean little sheep or a full one, her teats already straining—not until the shearing, weeks before lambing season, could they be sure which ewes were pregnant. Brave Agnes always went first. The shearer pulled her toward him and propped her across his lap, where she lay like Jesus in the Pietà. Her fleece, grown over the course of one year, fell in velvet pools. Afterward, she stood on wobbling legs, eyes glazed over in the light of the bulb like some beleaguered muse.

Between subjects, Laurel darted forward for the coats. There was a stark contrast between the haggard outer wool—pierced by hay, matted by mud or droppings—and that which had been next to the skin, which was clean, with an airy, spongelike structure. She humped them in the pickup truck, where they looked like whole sheep sleeping. Her rough hands drank up the oily lanolin.

They fed the animals apples in reward. And hay, a faded sage, carried to the barn in bales. The rams tussled in their pen. For two days, Pete kept them inside to reacclimate. Then he opened the gates, and they streamed into the pasture, lightened.

A nearby mill turned the coats into yarn, which the Salters sold. The wool of the Finns was springy and soft; the Romney was less supple, which made it warm and strong. The Salters’ skeins never sold as well as machine-washable yarns, stripped of scales and coated in plastic, so highly processed that it was hard to believe they had come from an animal. Some customers held the Finn and Romney wool to their bare skin and frowned. But those who loved farm yarns knew they kept you warm like nothing else. Clare liked to knit socks, and Laurel made vests, or long, trailing scarves. Her greatest achievement was a cabled cardigan, which she lived in throughout college. It kept her warm in the drafty campus library, and it made her think of the animals.

Clare left her teaching job to manage the finances of the orchard. They turned the big barn into a farm store that sold bagged apples and yarn, as well as all manner of autumnal things: honey, beeswax candles, cider, spice packets for pie. As a teenager, Laurel worked the register. Weekends were madness, but on weekdays, she read her parents’ dog-eared copy of Silent Spring between customers. She was agog at the world’s interconnections: insecticides found in lake fish and birds’ eggs; arsenic that poisoned livestock and bees, then farmers; radioactive material that cooled into dust and reappeared in crops. If life was a circle, soil was the circle’s join, the place it all began and ended: cause and effect, birth and death.

“The orchard is a system,” her father said, “more complex than we can understand. When we change one thing, we change everything.”

They walked from tree to tree, hanging the little baggies of human hair—a natural deer repellant—that Pete procured from the local barbershop. Laurel’s mortal fear was that a crush would witness this exchange.

“As for you and me, chickadee?” said Pete. He tied a bag to a branch with string. “We’re no more important than anything else.”

They understood why other farmers sprayed. Wholesale growers had to produce unblemished fruit to survive. At Clare’s suggestion, the Salters used a pick-your-own model. Still, each year was a tense economic dance. Aside from the yarn, their only income came in fall. As spring waned and the harvest took shape, the energy at home became taut and watchful. They stretched meals, darned socks, wasted nothing. In winter, they traded goods with other farmers. If the orchard was a system, so, too, were the Salters: her father’s optimism, her mother’s vigilance, Laurel absorbing both.

The sheep lived in synergy with the orchard. They grazed rotationally, managing weeds, and in November, after the harvest, they ate leftover fruit from the ground. During rare lucrative years, the Salters could afford to keep the male lambs and older ewes. But the best wool came from young sheep, and the flock grew every spring. Clare tried to sell the male lambs as breeding stock, but sometimes she was forced to turn to the butcher. For Laurel, those were bad mornings, cry-your-eyes-out mornings, at least in the beginning. When she saw that her outbursts upset the sheep, she learned to be stoic.

“This is part of our purpose in the world,” Pete said, as a throaty bleating sounded from the trailer. The Salters thanked the sheep when they pulled them from the flock—gave them a good scratch, a good rub. “The person who buys their meat helps us to keep the orchard running.”

Every year, Laurel felt wretchedly tender. In the long run, though, something hardened. She became adamant in her belief that humans were no different from the rest of the animal kingdom. She had seen sheep mourn for babies. Once, a lamb named Willie broke his foreleg in the crook of a tree; when the vet came to set it, there were tears in his eyes. By ten, Laurel was a vegetarian in a state known for bratwurst. Those who questioned her underestimated her determination.

In Antarctica, the presidential election takes place one calendar day later than it does in the United States. The polls close as the galley preps for dinner. Some of the cooks sneak wine into the kitchen, certain the win will be Hillary’s, but Louis and Charlie look morose from the beginning. Stewards run to and from the computer in the dorm lounge, where a crowd is tracking the returns. The reports are increasingly grim—Trump wins Ohio, then Florida—but Jules keeps their spirits up, blasting Beyoncé, saying it isn’t over until the Midwest sings. Laurel and Louis are washing pots when Diego, the pastry chef, bursts into the dish pit. At his pronouncement (“He took Wisconsin”), Jules sways a little, staring. Moments later, Charlie returns from the cafeteria, pushing a cart laden with other people’s leftovers and wiping quick, silent tears.

Laurel brings Louis and Charlie back to her room. When they enter, leaden, Nita is holding a stapled article. Finish Your Ugly-Cry, it reads. Here’s What to Do Next.

“Okay,” she says. “Tonya in IT is organizing a donation to the NAACP. When it comes to undocumented immigrants, we can petition our local governments to offer sanctuary. You can contribute to Planned Parenthood directly, but it might be best to wait a few days, because the site keeps crashing. Needless to say, we should all contact our congresspeople. And obviously, we need to abolish the electoral college, but that’s a long-term goal.” At the sight of their faces, she stops. “What?”

“Nita,” says Louis, “I can’t afford a fancy key chain at the General Store.”

Laurel takes the article from Nita. “I feel like such an idiot. I really thought she’d win.”

“No offense, Laurel,” Nita says, “but that’s because you’re white.”

Charlie looks at Laurel sympathetically. “It feels dystopian. I think a lot of us are in shock.”

“No, Nita’s right,” says Laurel. “I should have seen it coming.”

“I did,” says Louis, “but that’s just because I always expect the worst. I recommend it. No nasty surprises.”