The Sand Hill Review               http://www.sandhillreview.org 2011

Letting Spring

Christopher Wachlin

In a tree-shaded market in Menlo Park, California, Wade bagged a couple heads of butter lettuce for a customer while his daughter Isabelle counted out change on a purchase of shallots, green garlic, and red and yellow beets. In the stall next to them, Harold, an egg farmer, watched her. Harold made a low noise.

Up and down the market, tables were piled high with potatoes red, purple, and beige, with cherries, strawberries, carrots, and oranges, with cut flowers, mushrooms, chards, and basils. At one end, the end with the mossy stone wall and thick border of trees, the air was heavy with aroma—waffles, crepes, and just-pressed masa harina tortillas that held anything from American bacon to deeply seasoned beans.

A couple greeted Wade and Isabelle by name as they started to select their produce. Wade was tall and lean, clean-shaven, not yet in his forties but with a touch of silver in the brown hair at his temples. Isabelle had hair that tumbled beyond her mid-back, as thick and rich as the soil they worked. Like Wade, Isabelle was also lean, but she had an attendant voluptuousness, in the way that a tree, with taut, tough branches, gives fruit soft and full.

Harold’s noises coalesced into hum-singing. He had hummed-sung one song through three decades of working markets, dating back to when he was fifteen and his parents quit the Silicon Valley rat race and bought a hen farm. Even back then the song was old. In word and melody, Harold continuously announced that he was the egg man. He was the egg man. He was the walrus! “Coo-coo, ca-choo! Coo-coo, coo-ca-choo!”

Replenishing a mound of favas, Wade glanced at Harold. Harold’s appearance could still be jarring even after all these years, his face as wide as a feed shovel, his close-set eyes, his tubby hands, half moon belly, pinned-back ears, and protruding chin. Twelve years before, when Harold was thirty-five, the farm went into trust after his parents died in a car accident. Since then, Harold did the labor and a lawyer handled the paperwork.

A customer approached Harold’s stall. Harold switched to hum-only, and did it quieter except at the end. “Hmm-hmm, hmm-hmm! Hmm-hmm, hmm-hmm-HMM!”

“Hey, Wade, can I buy some singles?” That was Wade’s other neighbor, Willow At The Banks, a weaver and jeweler who lived in a forest up in the fog of the Santa Cruz Mountains. She was in her sixties and had black and gray hair down to her waist.

“I’m so disorganized,” she said. “But disorganization allows the universe to create.”

Wade counted dollar bills between a pile of skirts and a spindle with necklaces made from twigs, metal, and leather.

One of Harold’s customers switched his purchase a few times, and Wade could hear confusion mounting. He listened a bit and stepped in. Wade asked Harold to hand the customer his money back, and start everything at the beginning. As Harold almost imperceptibly hummed, Wade helped figure out what the guy needed.

“Alright Harold,” Wade said, “there you go—two dozen larges and a dozen and a half of the jumbos. What’s that going to come to again?”

Harold announced the total, and then took the money and made the change. The customer said he was sorry for causing confusion, but he said this to Wade, not to Harold. Wade told him not to worry.

The first of the market’s rushes was over. As usual, Isabelle asked Wade if she could go find her friend Gretchen, except that being fifteen now, Isabelle told him as much as she asked his permission. He said sure, and thought that along with finding Gretchen, whose parents farmed up in Point Reyes, his daughter would also find that boy whose folks had cattle all up and down the San Mateo County coast. Isabelle sauntered off toward the distant end of the market.

In his peripheral vision, Wade saw Harold start to lean his way. The slow, extended stretch had a reptilian air about it. Wade glanced over.

“Isabelle is so fuckable,” Harold said.

Wade was behind Harold’s stall in a flash. He grabbed Harold by the throat. Harold’s tongue stuck out and he made a gurgled sound. Then just as quickly Wade let go. He put his hands on top of his own head. After a few seconds he let them down to his sides. He looked at Harold and spoke.

“You can’t say that. You can’t ever say that, Harold.”

“S-s-orry.”

“Do you understand?” Wade spoke very slowly. “Do you understand—you can never, ever say that again, Harold.”

“I—yes. I’m sorry.”

“But do you understand? Never.”

“I understand.”

After a pause, Wade let out a long breath. “Okay,” he said. He returned to his own stand.

And that was it. But Willow walked right up behind Wade’s stand. She said he should not have choked Harold.

Wade asked her if she noticed the choking had ended as soon as it started. She said it didn’t matter. Wade asked if she had heard what Harold initially said. She said no, but this, too, did not matter.

“Violence is never the answer,” Willow said. “To anything. And that goes double for Harold. My God, Wade, he’s developmentally disabled.”

Wade stared at her some long seconds, shook his head, and got back to his work. Willow eventually turned and went back to her stand.

When Harold’s parents first set up at market in the early 1980s, Wade’s mom and dad forbade him, and he quickly forbade himself, from saying any but kind words to the not-right boy. Wade was eight and Harold was fifteen, although at first Wade thought he was in his twenties.

Wade felt a sudden need to check on Denise, his wife. She and their son worked the Los Altos market. He called her. She said she was fine. She said Max was fine. Then, no doubt intrigued by the call, Denise asked if he was okay. Wade said he was. And Isabelle? Wade said she was doing just fine, at least as far as she was concerned. Laughing a little bit, he asked, “When has she not thought that for her everything was perfectly okay?”

Denise laughed with him. “I swear,” she said, “that girl. Do you know that the other day she…” Wade lost himself in the warm candle glow of his wife’s voice. When she was done he told her he loved her and ended the call.

He heard a silence. The thrum of the market continued, it wasn’t that. It was within the thrum itself. There hung one particular silence, one particular absence. An absence of song.

Wade’s whole body tensed. He looked to Harold’s stand. It was empty.

“Willow, watch my stall,” he said.

He strode toward the other end of the market. Isabelle and Gretchen hung around the market a lot, but just as often they hopped the wall and went to the coffee shop, to the diner, to the art supplies store. Or she could be somewhere with that ranch boy. Wade’s head swung from side to side as he scanned the market. There was no sign of Isabelle. He walked faster.

He and Denise were always secretly proud of how headstrong Isabelle was, and sometimes openly proud. She was a beautiful girl, with big eyes like Denise. She was hard-working, independent, and a little nuts—a farm kid.

He reached the market’s end. Still no Isabelle. He looked past the wall and through the trees. He scanned the street, down one sidewalk and up the other. Where was she? But he heard her before he saw her.

“Get off me!”

Wade turned and started running. He saw Isabelle. Harold held her and was rubbing his body against her. He started announcing that he was the Egg Man. Then he was doubled over, holding his crotch and wailing. Isabelle began hitting and kicking. Harold, still bent over, started turning circles to avoid the blows. Then Willow entered the picture. Wade’s legs pumped as hard as they ever had in high school track, but slow motion was how he saw what happened next.

Willow kept moving in, but toward Isabelle, who still hit and kicked. Willow caught one of Isabelle’s arms, and yanked it. Isabelle swung round to face her and freed herself. She yelled, “Get your hands off me,” and punched her. Willow staggered backward, lost her balance, and fell.

In another few seconds Wade was there, hugging Isabelle tight and asking her if she was okay. She started to sob in his arms.

Police came. They handcuffed Harold and sat him in the back of a patrol car. He kept saying “I’m sorry!” between song lyrics, shouting it from behind the sealed windows. The police got Isabelle’s statement, and everyone else’s. Willow leaned toward pressing charges against Isabelle for striking her. Wade heard her say, “I have every right to try to halt violence wherever I encounter it.” She and the police talked. She ended up not pressing charges.

Wade pulled up the phone number for Harold’s trustee, the lawyer. He told the lawyer what happened. He told him that he would rather not, but if the lawyer absolutely needed him to, he could pack up Harold’s van, and either lock the keys in it, or, wait. The lawyer said no, someone would be there in twenty minutes.

The police car drove off. Harold was looking out from the rear window. Wade was pretty sure that, had his hands not been cuffed, Harold would have been waving.

Wade and Isabelle loaded the truck. Wade strapped the load, jumped out, and pulled the sliding door down and locked it. Isabelle stood next to him. He put an arm around her. He gave her a single-limbed death-grip bear hug.

“Daaaaad, Jeez,” she said, and he eased his hold. She sounded fine. A-Okay. He looked at her and told her he would be right back. He walked over behind the coffee shop and stood in the lot. Alone, he stood there, his eyes open, but looking at nothing, seeing nothing. Then he looked down at the ground. Some unnaturally white shipping crate peanuts were on the pavement. He picked them up and threw them in a dumpster.

He strode back to the truck. When he looked at Isabelle, he felt the corners of his lips lift into a smile. He told her to jump in, and then started it up. Before he engaged the transmission he looked at her. “Hey,” he said. “Are you okay?”

Isabelle smiled. “Dad, I’m totally fine.”

He maneuvered out of the market and they headed down the tree-lined streets, then out into the country and the tall California sunlight, singing an old radio song with the windows wide open.◊