‘It takes a lot of pesticide to create a beautiful, perfect apple.”
Theresa Weir is an American writer who has produced 13 novels under her own name and at least a dozen under the name Anne Frasier. I confess I had never heard of her, but it seems not to matter, for The Orchard is a memoir and so, presumably, unlike anything else she's written. It's a small, unquiet book that reverberates queerly, like a slow-release bomb.
The (apple) orchard in question belongs to the Curtis family of Champaign County, Ill., two hours south of Chicago; The Orchard is Weir's plainspoken and chilling, even haunting, account of her marriage to a Curtis son and, by extension, to the family farm that was in his blood.
An inveterate packer-up and mover-on, Weir made an unlikely farmer's wife. Her parents divorced when she was 6 and the remaindered family – Weir, her mother, and two brothers – moved from place to place as her mother attempted one disastrous hookup after another. Weir's dream was art school, but in 1975 she landed in her uncle's backcountry watering hole – “a cornfield bar along a sad, lonely stretch of highway not far from the Mississippi River” – settling there as a bird settles on a branch, effortlessly, but with much less sense of direction.
There she met and fell in love with Adrian Curtis, first-born son of a fifth-generation farmer whose land had been in the family for 100 years (and was considered by the locals to be cursed). He was young – 23 to her 21; beautiful; like her of an artistic bent and, unlike her, utterly in thrall to his family, particularly to his mother, and to the myth of the Family Farm.
They met and married within months and settled into a barebones cabin on the family property in a setting that ought to have been idyllic: down a grass-and-gravel lane, past a grove of apple trees and a pond. That it wasn't idyllic became rapidly apparent. The rosy-cheeked, curly-haired, Keds-wearing demeanour of her mother-in-law belied a being utterly hostile not just to the idea of her son's marriage, but to the fact of the woman he married. Though rarely seen or heard from directly, she is a force of such malevolence as to seem almost crazed; Weir's father-in-law is little better. Even the neighbours, who aren't shy about offering their opinions, regard the marriage as a mere stunt or act in some weird oedipal drama being enacted between Curtis fils and his mother.
The growing sense of ominousness, however, does not spring from these warped family dynamics, nor from any histrionics in Weir's presentation of them. On the contrary, she is … not unemotional, but almost unnervingly unsentimental. The indications that the poison in the atmosphere extends beyond family relations literally into the air, soil and water are simply there, from the beginning: in the nightly sound of the sprayer, “hypnotic, methodic, repetitious”; in the chemical drift of the air, carried on the wind; in the fine dust on the clothes that most farmers carry with them as a second skin, and which covers anyone after 15 minutes in a field; they are in the multiple miscarriages of farming wives; in the fish that bob up in the farm pond, covered in tumours; in the nitrate-laden water the local children are forbidden to drink; and, perhaps, in the cancer that kills Curtis's father and grandfather and Weir's uncle, among others, and that strikes numerous neighbouring farmers.
The indications are, perhaps, always there; it's we who decide how much weight is accorded them. Myself, when Weir recreates a conversation about stockpiling banned chemicals, I believe her. More frighteningly, when her husband, goaded beyond his normal taciturnity, explodes: “Everybody does it. Everybody. We couldn't survive otherwise. … There's a misconception that new products are safer. It’s all bad. It's all dangerous” – I believe him.
The Orchard is being hailed, perhaps inevitably, as on par with Rachel Carson's 1962 classic Silent Spring. It isn't. Silent Spring is a scientific examination of our Earth and our systematic killing of it, with 55 pages of end notes citing works with titles such as No More Arsenic and Effect [cct] of Fish Poisons on Water Supply. But you might think of this as a complement to it; the personal story that drives home the truth behind the numbing mass of statistics that Carson so awfully wields.
Weir eventually got off the farm, with her two children, but not before having her eyes opened to more than she could have ever wanted to see. “The chemicals were all around us,” she writes. “In the clothes and sheets and towels I removed from the line. In the air we breathed and the water we drank.”
Something to think about, when you next bite into your beautiful, perfect apple.
Toronto writer and editor Kathleen Byrne frequently reviews for Globe Books.
