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" Heave 'er up," said Pippy, whose back was never right, and Jasper threw his own back into the lift, grunting with the effort, but successfully dragging the base of the cider press up the ramp they'd made of one-by-eights and onto the bed of Pippy's truck.

"Mind that rust hole!"

Pippy was protective of his truck, a thing so ancient its decrepitude approached his own. Jasper kicked the press so it moved an inch, paused a moment for a rest, then kicked the rust hole, climbed down, removed the boards, banged the tailgate home, and hauled up into the cab of the truck alongside Pippy. This was last fall, during the late-season harvest, when only a few tenacious Blue Pearmains and Lady apples still hung from the trees. Jasper thinks about that harvest as he knocks his boots against his stone doorstep and enters his airless damp back porch. Pippy had whined about the mix of apples available for cider, and Jasper had been angry, but refused to argue.

It is late winter now, the sky a wet and mousey canvas tarp with blue rips in it. Jasper wears a wool-lined cotton jacket, and over this a leather satchel. He removes the satchel and hears inside the dull jangle of his tools: his rosewood-handled folding knife, once his father's; a stick of grafting wax in a twist of paper; wrapping tape; a small ball of cotton twine; woven tags for labeling scions, the applewood twigs used to create grafts; his pruners; and a pen with which to mark the scion tags. Every day he carries all these tools, though he never uses any but the pruners anymore.

He leans to hang the satchel by its long strap from the coat hook on the wall. He hesitates, hand on hook (thin-skinned, creased hand; cast-iron hook), then surveys the small familiar room, this moment of reluctance the chance to change his mind.

Decisively, he slips the satchel strap across the hook, sits to unlace his boots, stands to unzip his jacket, and hangs his jacket up. In his kitchen, Jasper listens to the nothing sounds and draws a breath of the nothing-smelling air. Even now her absence from the house exasperates him. At one time - for thirty years or more - she was always home. He goes into the kitchen and opens a drawer and looks at and touches the baking tools she gave up using: rolling pin, pastry cutter, small flat brush with butter-coloured bristles. Could he bake? He spins a wooden spoon in his hand and wonders what he'd do with it. He wants something he can do. Not a hobby, like poetry: a skill he could perfect. And not something complicated, either. He has no time for complicated.

You can graft, that's your skill. She believed her words were reassuring to him. Every time, he turned away, so she wouldn't see his face. Grafting might be a mystery to her, but there wasn't any skill required. You stuck one bit of tree into another, bound them so that they would join - what choice did they have, if they wanted life? - and they were one. It was nothing.

He takes up one of her recipe books. The words stream across the page, a dark streaked moving stain, not a script he ought to recognize. Several words jump out at him: blanch, dice, dredge. Tea, he thinks. Tea he can make. Outside, it is too cool and damp for apple work. He will read the paper.

He makes his tea and sits to read the paper in his rocking chair and falls asleep. That day Annie - her name was Anna Lisa, but he didn't like Lisa, so that part of her name had fallen away - had driven to town in their ten-year old Buick for volunteer work at the library. She read books to the blind four afternoons a month.

The secret to slowing down to enrich your life is simple: do something for which you have a proven, genetic lack of ability,* she read, and thought of Jasper. Her mind often wandered during readings. She took her time with the words. Since her clients couldn't see the marks on paper, she believed the rhythm of the words was important. The precise visual imagery and careful cadences of William Carlos Williams' poems were a particular favourite of Eddie Harms, who had lost his sight in a shop accident at twenty-two. But today Eddie'd asked for this collection of aphorisms from a little book called Hanging Out the Laundry. "Lack of ability!" he said. "If that were true, I should read or look at pictures. Horsecakes! My life is slow enough already."

Annie preferred William Carlos Williams to the junk philosophy of the laundry book, but she enjoyed the way Eddie guffawed at his own pronouncements, and she liked that his reading request suggested a solution to Jasper's trouble. Today she would bring home a book on a new subject, something Jasper seemed unfitted for.

Normally, Annie borrowed books on apples and trees and hardwood grafting for her husband, books she searched for in bibliographies and requested through inter-library loan. He didn't understand the work of this, thought she just plucked them off the shelves. That didn't matter. The books kept him interested. On his own, he might not remain interested, might lose his taste for life. She could no longer remember when this had begun to seem a possibility; it had worried her for so long. Nearly rocking out of his chair, Jasper starts awake from a dream of cutting himself - and bleeding without her there to help. He had been lying on the frozen grass of the orchard, bleeding and thinking of his disgust at seeing the poems she wrote: like greeting cards, cool and heartless, devoid of a moral centre. He had been lying there wondering how she could think those poems worth the time she spent on them.

Once he asked Pippy to drive her to the library and get a look at this man, Harms, she talked about.

Pippy had not understood the errand. "Well I seen him and he doesn't look any different than anybody else," was all he said on his return.

For help with important matters Jasper would prefer to ask Perry or Willard, his neighbours. It had been more than thirty-five years since the three had met. Not that they did things together anymore. In early days they got up card games and played shinny on the low spot in Perry's back field when it froze. But now their relationship depended on the memory of those shared activities.

In contrast to Perry and Willard, Pippy was unreliable - but Pippy was around. "Give 'er, b'y!" Pippy had said, when the truck's belly caught on the grassy hump at the back of the orchard. Jasper was driving while Pippy laid old bed sheets under the trees to catch windfalls. They planned to shake the trees - this was easier than climbing, and fine to do, so long as they made sure to grind the fruit immediately. Fruit that wasn't dead ripe they would have to climb to get, then store in Pippy's barn in bushel baskets until it barely yielded to a firm touch. Neither Jasper nor Pippy liked ladders, so that day, windfall day, they had been in giddy humour. Perhaps that was the reason Jasper gunned the truck too hard and - startled - jerked the steering wheel around so that Pippy's balky junker rammed a fine young Golden Russet. "Awww, jeez ..." Pippy had said, saddened on behalf of the truck (which was only dented) and not the tree (which wouldn't last the winter).

When they tasted the apple juice from that final harvest - Pippy called it "must" - Pippy complained it was too uniformly sweet. "It needs some bitter in it." Pippy had pointed out an old crabapple gone wild in Willard's hedgerow, a little tree with no more than a dozen fruits hanging from its branches. What they needed was to grow some crabs like that, Pippy had said.

Pippy was a collector of illogical rules: Apple trees grow more if you cut them back hard; a cat will rub up against any person who ignores it. Jasper's fondness for Pippy was related to this fascination with events or situations that seemed, at first glance, suspect. But Jasper wasn't sure about the rules themselves. How could bitterness improve a thing?

Pippy tasted a crab from Willard's tree and made an awful face. "That's what we need! That'd add what they call 'sprightliness' to the cider." Looking at his boots, he bobbed his head as if in agreement with himself, then looked up - apologetically, it seemed.

Jasper's mouth was open.

"Your Annie brought me a book once. Making Cider, Sweet and Hard," Pippy said, and shrugged his shoulders. He raised his eyes to Jasper's. "Some people calls it 'roughness,' what them little wild apples add."

Jasper could say nothing to any of this. Pippy was a nag, but Pippy was in charge of the cider making. He let the process take over his entire kitchen, and shared the bottles with Jasper, whose orchard it was. Jasper nodded to indicate he'd heard what Pippy had to say. He bent to collect a crab that had fallen down. He didn't look at Pippy. He had absolutely no intention of adding to the orchard. Soon he would be seventy-two years old. What were the odds he'd be around to reap the harvest from any trees he grafted now?

Gathering windfalls off the sheets that morning, Cam Pippy thought of the times he'd seen Jasper Laird accost his U-pick customers with terrible false jollity: "How d'ya like them apples, eh?"

Conversation never was Jasper's strength, and he makes the same mistakes now as he made then, Cam thought, biting into a sweet and pretty Lady apple.

Also, Jasper was pigheaded. Like his father before him, he wouldn't change his ways. Pippy was reminded of a biting dog Jasper once had, called Lonnie in remembrance of Jasper's father. Lonnie was not a local favourite, and that dog was not great either.

Jasper shifted in his chair and peered into his teacup: from the look of the scummy surface he could tell the tea was cold.

That spring Willard couldn't do his volunteer owl survey for the Fish and Wildlife Department because his wife got it in her head for them to go to Florida. Since Perry was away, Willard asked Pippy to count his owls, but Pippy said, "Nah, Jasper'll do it."

Willard appealed to Jasper by saying Pippy wasn't reliable, and Jasper immediately agreed to help. It was only when Willard arrived with the clipboard and forms and tape-recorded owl calls that Jasper learned surveying was a complicated job. Naturally, Willard had assumed that Annie would be Jasper's partner.

So yet again Jasper, who briefly thought the owl thing might be the skill he could perfect, was forced to depend upon his wife.

This seemed to be the signal rule of their relationship: Jasper flailed around; Annie saved the day.

Jasper empties his teacup down the drain and looks around his tiny, tidy kitchen, all its surfaces covered in patterned oilskin or tile or paper. He sees Annie in the kitchen, years and years ago, suspicious then of what she called "this obsession with the trees." We never talk, she had accused. This was before the poetry and blind-reading and coffees with women friends. Perhaps it was a justification for the poetry and blind-reading and coffees with women friends. But it was untrue: he could remember conversations. They had talked. Now, the life they led seems broken into eras, hers and his. He sees that life was held together by compromise, and he remembers how at the end neither one could make a change without discomfiting the other.

Willard liked to gesture as he drove, so Jasper stomped on an imaginary brake pedal as Willard explained himself, arthritic hands describing the smooth, abrupt and startling flight pattern of an owl. The truck fell into a pothole and Jasper tore his eyes from Willard's hands. By some miracle the truck was still upright.

"I seen him three times," said Willard, hands soaring free again. He popped a tape into the dashboard player and the hoots and barks and spine-tingling shrieks of owls filled the cab.

"That there's a Great Horned. I heard him up by Harry Jamieson's place."

Willard was watching where he drove now, so Jasper relaxed his grip on the door handle. But with his heart still pounding in his ears, he couldn't hear the owl.

"And listen. That one's a Northern Saw-whet. Them is sweet, tame little birds."

They pulled off onto the muddy edge of the road just before Harry Jamieson's place. Dark piney woods rose all around.

"See that surveyor's tape?" said Willard. "That's how you'll know where to begin."

Jasper looked. A ragged bit of orange ribbon fluttered from a spruce branch.

"Okay! Let's go over the methodology." Willard pulled a clipboard jammed with paper from behind the seat, and Jasper looked at his retired farmer neighbour. Method what?

"You better go over these data sheets before you leave. And listen to the owl tape." Willard said. "You can use my tape machine."

Willard liked to look at birds. He knew the name of every duck. But surely knowing birds hadn't made Willard into an egghead. Jasper felt a little sick.

Willard produced a second tape. "This other tape has Barred owl calls on it," he said. "Your owls will respond to it, just like a dog that hears another dog come into its yard. You mark down the calls you hear and the weather and temperature and like that. Okay?"

Jasper bobbed his head at Willard. Damn, if Willard could do all this, so could he.

"Get Annie to mark the data sheet," said Willard. "That's what I'd do. It's a tedious job."

Tedious. Jasper thought of Annie sitting in his truck, in the dark, for half an evening. It'd never work. She'd argue and they'd have to quit. Why had Willard not mentioned this part of it before? Jasper shook his head.

"All right!" said Willard. "Great! I owe you, b'y!"

Annie loved the data sheets. "I don't mind filling out these forms," she said. She wrapped both hands reverently around the clipboard and studied the dozens of empty rows and columns as if they were secret doors that might open to reveal a treasure of some kind.

Jasper slid a tape into Willard's machine. "You'll have to listen, see if you can tell these three owls apart." He passed the heavy tape machine to Annie and she set it on her lap. Jasper started up the truck and as he drove owls filled the cab. Annie listened, repeating the calls quietly to herself.

"Okay. I've got it," she said as Jasper pulled the truck toward Willard's beribboned tree.

"Good," said Jasper. "Let's go then." He opened his door. The sun was almost set.

But Annie hadn't yet written on the data sheet. Jasper waited while she set things down, squinting at the paper and mumbling as she went along: "Temperature? Hmmm . . . four . . . direction? North . . . wind speed? What would you say, Jasp?"

Smiling, she showed him her work when she was done. Neat as a ledger.

They got out of the cab together, pressed a button on Willard's tape machine, and set the machine on the hood of the truck. Then they paced off forty yards. After a moment, an unmistakable sound broke the silence.

"Oh, Jasper!" Annie said.

"That's the owl on the tape, Annie."

"Oh."

But right away a massive figure swooped across the road beyond the truck. "Annie!" Jasper hissed. It was a big owl, the first either of them had ever seen so close.

"Great Horned?" said Annie.

"Or Barred," said Jasper.

This indecision would make a mess of her data sheet. Jasper felt badly for her.

"Oh-" she said softly as another owl called.

"Tape again, Annie."

Then a real owl began to call in response. "Ha!" said Jasper. "That's another Great Horned."

On the walk back to the truck the same doubt occurred to both of them at once. Were the flying owl and the calling owl one? Jasper found a flashlight in the dash and held it as Annie filled in her data sheet. "It doesn't matter, Jasp," she said. "It says here we just put an X if we hear an owl and an S if we see one. We don't have to know."

Two hours and ten kilometres later they'd played the owl tape seven times. Jasper said he'd be happy if he never heard another owl in his life. "I know," said Annie. She reached underneath the seat for the thermos of tea she'd made and poured a cup for each of them. In the middle of the road, in the dark woods, they sipped their tea. "I know," she said again.

Annie's eyes were shining liquid in the moonlight, exactly like the eyes of that old, girlish Annie who'd giggled when Jasper took her driving in the dark so many years ago.

"Why did you ever start to write those poems, Annie," Jasper asked, and held his breath.

She didn't answer right away. Jasper thought she must be listening for an owl.

"I don't know, dear," she finally said. "I just needed to."

This was not the answer he was hoping for.

Jasper drained his tea. He felt bereft. Why had they grown so far apart? When? Forty years of ups and downs of marriage, he thought - and all I do not know.

She died just a few weeks after that. A sudden heart attack, driving home from town.

The following year, Willard asked again (this time out of kindness - Jasper wasn't getting out) and Jasper agreed to count the owls. "Alone, though," he said. "I have to go alone."

Jasper listened to the training tape in Willard's tape machine while he ate his meals. Anyone calling would have thought there were owls roosting in his house.

"I'm ready," he had said to Willard on the day he dropped by for the survey forms.

"Sure," said Willard. "Good for you."

Jasper thought that Willard looked a little constipated. He snatched the forms and left. Whatever is wrong with Willard has nothing to do with me, he thought. Hmmph. Methodology.

This had been the second year, the year he said, one day, I am entirely alone.

All that summer, Jasper walked. He liked the way, in the evenings, the sky loomed grey and violet behind the great oak at the end of Perry's road. Sometimes, going out, he could hear Annie calling faintly after him. Out of doors, he'd hear, a phrase of hers. Annie'd always emphasized the last word, doors, when she said this, as if the doors themselves were the significant thing, not the outside world, nor the inside.

In winter, he took up his mill file and oil and cleaned and sharpened all his garden tools. The tools were already clean and sharp, but there were only so many things to do in winter.

When the weather was warm enough, he snowshoed in woods Willard's father sold years ago to a summer visitor, avoiding a stand of pin cherries scarred by black knot. It pained him to see those trees diseased so badly. He gave the stand a wide berth. He had to be careful not to carry the virus home to his own few plums and cherries.

One day towards spring he noticed movement in the sky, and a cloud of white birds set down in his orchard like so many flakes of snow. He wanted to call them snow larks, or winter finches, but he knew this wouldn't be right.

He looked the birds up in the library book he found in Annie's bag after she died, and which he never returned because it was the last thing she ever brought him, and different from the other books before it.

Snow bunting, Plectrophenax nivalis

- Sings only on Arctic wintering grounds

- Call a whistled teu

- Bathes in snow

- Forages on the ground for seeds, insects and caterpillars

This information seemed to answer some need he felt, but it did nothing to solve the mystery of the visitation, as he thought of it.

Weeks go by. Then one day, putting away his tea things in the cupboard, Jasper happens to glance outside. Something has changed: all the snow has disappeared. Thinking Spring! Jasper searches his cupboards for cider and finds an unopened pint bottle labeled in Pippy's wavery script: Test Bache 10. "Twelve percent proof," Pippy had boasted when he brought the bottle over. "I put Willard's crabs in this one." Taking care not to disturb the sediment, Jasper pours an inch of cider into a glass and takes a sip. The liquor sparkles on his tongue and spills a gentle fire down his throat. Jasper thinks of Pippy's word. Spritely, was it? There is more to this cider than the taste of apple, and yet it is more intensely apple than any apple he's ever eaten. It isn't just that test batch ten is stronger than Pippy's others, nor only that Jasper tastes a pleasant bitter note. He thinks spritely and a little winged girl with Annie's face alights behind his eyes.

Jasper pours another tot of cider. Pippy was right about the crabs. He feels a twinge of guilt over his meanness toward Pippy - but it's nothing compared to the stinging Annie-guilt that pains him every day.

Now that she is gone, Jasper can see clearly why they didn't get along, and what he might have done about it. When she was alive, he hadn't been able to see a thing. He'd been baffled, as if her presence blinded him. Their life together had been like one of Pippy's nonsense rules: resistant to the very thing they'd needed. How much easier it would be if you could count up signs of love like owls in the dark.

Forty years of ups and downs of marriage. Jasper throws back what remains of the seductive cider - fragrant, bitter, complicated - and rinses out his glass.

In the porch he dons his boots and jacket and opens up his satchel. He selects his rosewood grafting knife. Then he marches out the door and strides toward the road. He's going to cut some scions from Willard's wild hedgerow apple. What the hell. Willard won't miss the twigs, and Pippy'll be glad to have those bitter little apples for his cider.

The fire of the liquor inside him. And the feel of the tree's skin.

Note:

* Lara, Adair. Hanging Out the Wash. Berkeley, CA: Conari Press, 2002, p. 13.