The orchard, the family affair, was a compound with three houses, three barns, four hundred acres of forest and arable fields and marsh, the sheep pastures, and the apple trees. The woods were wild and dense, no hiker’s path of shavings, no sign at the start announcing points of interest, the lady’s slippers hidden in the broad ginger leaves, the morels—we weren’t going to tell anyone where they were. There was no warning about future dangers, such as the cougar maybe making a comeback in our state. By the far west fence there was an Indian burial mound that we took for the shape of an owl, and in a thicket nearby the remains of a settler’s cabin. Once, digging around, we found a tin cup, dented and packed with dirt. William picked it up, he sniffed it, sniffed the rim, where lips would have touched. I asked should we take it with us? He held it in both hands, looking off into the distance, seeing, I guessed, the fairy-tale children of long ago. An ogre of course and a father with an ax. Without deciding exactly we buried the cup as if it were a little pet we’d cared for.
Home we went over the wooded hills. The last glacier coming down into Wisconsin had stopped just south of us, dumping its remaining load of gravel, ideal country for an apple orchard, the soil rich enough, the drainage superb. In truth, though, we were more interested in what was to come than in what had already happened in the time of weather and pioneers. William and I were the fourth generation born unto the operation, heirs to a historical property and a noble business, far more than our friends could say about their fathers’ jobs and their houses on quarter-acre lots.
What worried us was a possible hitch, a potentially tricky web. Because we were not the only heirs. The major candidates in our minds were our good playmates and cousins, Adam, the oldest of us four, the boy for William, and Amanda, the youngest, the girl for me. They lived across the road in the manor house, a house far enough away and shrouded by trees so that it was not visible from our side. Amanda and Adam lived in Volta. William and Mary Frances lived in Velta. Our divided kingdom, William inventing the names, Velta and Volta, for what was true. Our cousins in Volta on the whole hated to work, disliked the out-of-doors, and never went into the woods unless their father coaxed them. Adam had cause to protest because he had the bee sting allergy, a cruel joke for a boy living in the middle of an orchard. But aside from their natural disinclination, their mother, Dolly, was always describing to them their college lives, way off, already excited about their adulthood in the city. So Amanda and Adam usually didn’t trouble us too much, but what about the cousins who lived elsewhere, in Alaska or California, children whose parents had grown up on the farm, those strangers who might arrive and seize the road? Children we had never met. For the most part after our trip to Minnesota we forgot that our father might someday give the farm to his partner, to Sherwood, or maybe we heard our parents not long after discussing their will in reasonable and generous terms. With that fear out of the way we had to make ourselves afraid on our own steam, pretending we were royal orphans, our right to rule threatened by the thugs at the palace door. Then we put on our capes and crowns and we climbed on top of the old chicken shed for our rapture: Bring me my bow of burning gold! Bring me my arrows of desire! Bring me my spear!