Orchard

Neil Waxwing learns of his former bandmate’s second career as a high school teacher during the eulogy in a church in Halifax. The students in the pews, the girls particularly, appear irreparably wrecked by grief. Neil’s heard no mention of the real Matt Forge, the songwriter and musician. The goldenrod program in his hands is missing a crucial, half-fulfilled, paragraph.

Matt Forge (49) was the founder and benefactor of Orchard, an alternative folk/rock band active from 1996–2006. Based out of southwest Utah, the group consisted of Matt Forge on guitar and keyboards, Neil Waxwing on guitar, Sal Savadi on bass, and Leslie Collum-Bless on drums. All members contributed to vocals and to the songwriting on just over two-hundred polished original recordings. Not until all the band’s members turned fifty did they release their material, immediately cementing themselves as one of the finest bands of their generation, and the first to have intentionally and completely forgone the encumbrances of egos, agents, labels, gigs, promotions, marketing, and fans in order to fully realize their craft.

If Neil were delivering the eulogy, he’d begin with how he first met Matt, that night when Matt’s dad was arrested. New to the neighborhood, Neil discovered that every Wednesday night, for an hour, a band practiced down the street with drums, bass, and guitar solos audible during the commercial breaks of ABC’s “Perfect Strangers,” playing on the family TV.

One Wednesday night, a patrol car sped past the living room window, followed by an abrupt end to the music. Neil left the rerun to investigate, walking ten houses down the street through the sweltering night air to where he found Matt standing under the fluorescent light of an open garage. Matt was ten years old, hair shorn, a guitar on his back like a troubadour. His older twin sisters were glaring at a cop, one shaking her tambourine like a rattlesnake from behind her back. Matt’s dad, kneeling on the oil-stained concrete, wrists cuffed, was arguing with the officer. Sir, it’s a drumstick. Do you go around cuffing majorettes? You have? Well, I believe it. No. No, sir. You’re the one with a threatening demeanor. It went on like that for some minutes as Neil watched from the driveway. The officer, who said he’d come out on a noise complaint, kept telling Neil’s dad to make his daughter stop with the tambourine-rattling. He didn’t. She didn’t. Something broke in the cop. He lunged for the tambourine and looked surprised to find himself in a noisy tug-of-war with a girl and her jingle ring.

Leslie Collum-Bless stands between Neil and Sal in the church pew. Neil’s fingers are cold and twitch in her hand. Sal’s hand is colder and sways hers back and forth, like they’re two people in early love. The many mourners sing a hymn Leslie knows Matt would have found pleasing. It reminds her of the songs they recorded in The Narrows of Zion National Park, an hour west of The Farm. They’d gone in late fall, midweek, the water in the Virgin River running in gentle warbles, swifts darting overhead in unending haste. The four of them lugged guitars and recording gear over knee-high water kept cold by the deep and narrow canyon. At a spot where the water ran nearly silently and where there was an exposed bank on which to stand, they stopped and played for hours, the sunlight blooming off the cliff faces and making their bodies incandescent.

If Matt hadn’t convinced them to record their fourth album there, Leslie doubts she would have met Zell, a first-year park ranger who later told Leslie that Leslie’s voice, curving down the canyon to her ears, made her fall for her, sight unseen. She and Zell married on a farm in Vermont. And while the relationship didn’t last, the memory does: Matt surprising her with an original wedding march which the rest of the band played from their seats as Zell walked up the grassy aisle on her father’s arm.

There’s not one word about any of this in the eulogy.

Sal Savadi, jet-lagged from his hopscotch from Japan, is high for the first time in years. His stint in Utah for possession twenty years ago, the thing that led to Orchard’s disbanding, means he now diligently observes local laws, Japan’s especially. But it’s legal here in Nova Scotia, and he’s imbibing on the local Skosha like it might not be for long. He’s decided he’s not going to allow Matt’s death, or how old and foreign Neil and Leslie have become, or how awful this service is, to deprive him of celebrating the most generous son of a bitch he’s ever known, and the band Matt supported with pure love, despite the tragedies in his life.

Sal remembers their first effort as a band: an act of theft on the day the music college they attended shut down after losing its final accreditation appeal. Matt proposed they live off his recent inheritance and form a band. The four of them grabbed guitars and an acoustic bass from the tech room, as well as amps, new strings, a drum kit—even the school’s Wurly with the thunking upper register E. Their teachers, a now-unemployed and soused clump, nominally moved aside for them as they dollied gear past the main office. They were waylaid by sloppy pours into paper cups, slowed by hugs, kisses, phone numbers slipped into hands. Matt lifted the keys to the school’s Econoline from the secretary’s desk drawer and the new band drove west until, days later in Utah, they found a spot so quiet it was like music had never been played there before. Matt rented an old fruit orchard with part of his inheritance and they set about fixing up living quarters and turning the main house into a recording studio.

The band separated every year around the holidays, and then returned a month later, Matt waiting at SLC International with the defunct college’s worn-out van. In Sal’s memory, it’s always night as they journey back to The Farm, the four of them excitedly babbling about new record-store discoveries: Brazilian afrobeat and Guyanese pop, Faroese indie and vintage chansons, the music that would come to season their year of songwriting. For Sal, there was no happiness like knowing he had seasons of camaraderie ahead in which to write and play music conjured from dust and dreams—those kick-ass songs which made every day feel well-spent. He never imagined the feeling would stretch to fill a decade. There’s been nothing like it since, and it’s this fact, as much as Matt’s passing, that would make him weep if he let himself come down from his high.

The last time Neil talked to Matt was ten years ago, shortly after Matt’s move to Nova Scotia. Neil had called to wish him a happy fortieth birthday—a pretense. Tiptoeing to his question, Neil first asked what had become of The Farm. Were the scraggly apple and pear trees still standing? Were the bunkhouses still there? The farmhouse/recording studio, its walls paneled in sound-dampening foam? Were the empty album frames Matt had ordered from the company that made them for record executives—top-quality hardware with velvet backing—still there? And what about the barn where they held an annual fall concert for neighbors, inviting them to perform, to sing, to dance, to tell a good joke?

Matt said he had no idea. He’d bought the property five years into Orchard’s run, but sold it long ago.

Neil then asked Matt if he’d consider releasing their albums early. He lied and said Sal and Leslie agreed that it was time. What point was there in waiting until they were fifty? They were all older, wiser, and the music would forever be unaffected by fame. Matt laughed and said that all good things come to those who wait. And so what Neil wanted—a few motes of adoration and a record deal—had to wait another ten years. And now… Matt dead at forty-nine after a brief illness. Too much waiting.

At the service’s conclusion, the mourners are told that Matt donated his body to science—therefore there’ll be no cemetery-bound procession. In their shared rental car, Neil and Leslie and Sal pull up to the reception at Matt’s place, a tiny clapboard house with a roof covered with plates of moss. The low chain-link fence is thick with budding rose hips. Neil always saw their time together on The Farm as Matt’s way of surviving the loss of his parents and his sisters. It’s only now that he recognizes how much he’d been riding on Matt’s generosity for those ten years in Utah. That decade must have used up every penny from the life insurance payouts.

Inside, Neil introduces himself and the others to Matt’s surviving partner. Rita is short, younger, and doesn’t look like a person who would ordinarily wear black. She tells them that, of course, Matt mentioned them, his college friends. But music? No, Matt never played any songs he’d written with them. She asks if they’ve met the folk group Matt played with here in Halifax, pointing to the kitchen where a group of six older men, all gray, all bearded, stand around a cityscape of bottles. Doppelgängers. The name of their band.

Neil wants to tell Rita about the true Matt Forge, born of tragedy but immortally talented. Instead, he pours himself a drink in the kitchen without saying anything to the Doppelgängers, some of whom nod to him. He squeezes through the rooms of the packed house, looking at photographs on the walls. There: a bearded Matt in a suit, tie and, inexplicably, a toque. There: Matt and Rita on a canal boat, both waving. These are Matts he doesn’t know.

Leslie sees Neil stumble on the threshold as he steps from the back of the house, just as she had. She waves to him and he joins her where she sits on a lichen-blistered picnic table in the corner of the yard. Sal is draped bonelessly over half of it.

“It’s like crashing someone else’s funeral,” Neil says, not for the first time that day. “They know nothing about our time in Utah.”

“Did The Farm even exist?” Sal says, running the crowns of Queen Ann’s Lace between his outstretched fingers. “Who knows?”

“We swim through the tickling heat,” Leslie says.

“You even remember lyrics,” Neil says.

Behind the open windows, mourners stand in small groups, occasionally laughing. Leslie watches two kids clatter down the back steps and around to the front of the house, glass bottles of soda erupting under their thumbs.

“No one really passes away in their sleep. It’s usually from a stroke or a—”

“Shut up, Sal,” Leslie says.

Sal shuts up and takes his mind back to Utah. He’s swimming through the tickling heat. Grassy breeze rakes the orchard trees, scintillating with AOL CDs. Bye bye blackbird. He floats to the closest town, haunts the market’s familiar aisles, returns to the kitchen and cooks a meal for the four of them. He even remembers the goddamn silverware, thin and stamped to look fancy. Maybe it was. They have a drink after dinner, looking at the hills as the night paints it with muddy brushstrokes.

Sal drifts free of his reverie and sits up alone on the picnic table in Matt’s backyard, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Utah’s oppositeland. The sun has set early behind a bank of clouds too thick to get out from under with what time remains in the day.

Matt’s girlfriend, Rita, is sitting on the porch steps, a cigarette between her fingers. Matt never liked it when he smoked indoors at The Farm, either.

“Your friends are inside,” she says. “Everyone else has left.”

Sal walks around the house to the rental car. He pops the trunk and roots through his bag until he finds the worn, hard-shell storage case that’s followed him everywhere. He approaches Rita and presents her with the many CD-Rs they burned in Utah—the band’s complete oeuvre.

“We don’t have a CD player,” Rita says, looking up at him.

It’s the first time he’s ever seen anyone wince from a dead pronoun.

Neil takes the backseat with Leslie and watches Sal slide their recording from The Narrows into the car’s dashboard. The first strums echo and the song is effervescent, surprising, gorgeous. Neil can hear the water burbling in the silences.

Rita, in the passenger seat, exhales weakly at the sound of Matt’s voice. Neil finds it too heartbreaking and opens the door. The three of them leave Rita in the car, listening solo, and reenter the house where they continue to make themselves useful. They finish loading the dishwasher, emptying the garbage, draping sheets of foil over the many dishes people have brought, stacking them carefully in the fridge and the freezer so they won’t collapse onto each other.

Deep on a bookshelf, Neil finds a dusty photograph of the four of them at The Farm. There they are: the greatest band of all time. Not in albums sold, the size of their tours, the number of followers on MySpace—not based on any metric other than the quality of their songwriting, their singing, their playing, their arrangements, the exuberant rush of those never-ending codas that held enough music to dance your soul to heaven.

He checks on Rita through the kitchen window, wonders if they’ve only increased Rita’s sorrow by revealing that Matt was an even richer force than the man she’d known.

Sal joins Neil at the window. They watch Rita eject the CD and replace it with another. “She’s going to kill the car’s battery.”

“Shut up, Sal.”

They can’t leave, not with Rita still listening in the rental car.

Leslie sits down on the steps in back. She roots through the ashtray and lights the remains of a cigarette, then snuffs it out. She’s filled with questions. How long were Rita and Matt together? What was Matt like when he came home from a day of teaching? What did they do up here in Nova Scotia on an average weekend? Why had he never played for Rita the songs they recorded?

Neil pockets his phone and sits down beside her. “Okay. I’ve rebooked my flight.”

“Good. Now let’s get a hotel room and get high and raucous,” Sal says, leaning against the jamb. “Let’s pull some rock-star destruction.”

“We were never rock stars,” Leslie says. She knows she should come clean and tell the others how she once floated a few of their songs through a friend in the business, years ago. Just to get an idea, a number, a portrait of her future. Rather than disappoint them, she compromises with a fib. “I tried to get Matt to sell our songs.”

“Me, too,” Neil says.

“Same,” says Sal.

They start laughing.

“Whose idea was it, anyway, to wait until we were fifty?” Sal says. “We could have influenced a dozen bands, don’t you think? It was selfish, that withholding.”

“Matt’s. It was Matt’s idea,” Leslie says.

Neil, emptying the dishwasher, not minding the porcelain’s heat but leaving the metal to cool, hears the car door shut. Rita enters the house and puts down the case of CDs. She comes around to all three of them, hugging them tightly, as though trying to embrace Matt. It feels important to hug back as Matt would have: with compassion and full attention. Afterwards, they all sit in the living room in the light of the endless dusk.

“During the service today I was thinking about the first time I met Matt,” Neil tells Gina. “It was the night his parents and sisters were arrested. Did he tell you the story?”

Neil tells it again for Gina. “I’m there watching the cop and Matt’s sister tussle when Matt’s mom rides up on a bicycle, coming home from her weekly AA meeting. She pushes the bike at me and before I can even find the kickstand, she slaps the cop in the face. He swings her around and begins to cuff her. Then one of Matt’s sisters jumps on the cop’s back, and other beans him on the head with the tambourine over and over again. And there’s Matt, looking at me. He gives me a casual head nod and grins, like it’s an ordinary Wednesday night. I fell in love with the entire Forge family in that moment. They were what rock and roll was when it wasn’t a sound. I bought a used guitar the next weekend, spent every dime I had, plus a twenty I swiped from my mother’s purse. When things were normal again for them, when Matt’s mom was back at her AA meetings and the Wednesday jam was back, Matt and his sisters and his dad let me play with them. I worked my way up from tambourine.”

They talk and drink and share stories like this until, one by one, they fall asleep on the couch. Matt was always the night owl, the last one awake, the one to douse the embers so they could sleep in peace. This time it’s Neil who’s still awake. It almost feels like they’re back on The Farm, tired after a day of composing, practicing, recording, mixing, reading, apple-picking, cutting the grass with the scythe, crawling under the Econoline to attempt one or another repair, driving into town to do some grocery shopping—or back from a day out, like being in The Narrows, the body and mind simply exhausted in a delicious way, ankles still numb from the cold water, heads still burning from too much sun.

Neil steps outside and walks through the neighborhood, making larger and larger circuits down streets where nothing moves, not even the air. His phone says it’s nearly four in the morning. He deletes the emails from his new agent about Virgin’s reaction to the material he sent over from the Utah days, plus the forwarded emails with “heavy interest” and unguarded “holy crap” responses from Universal and BMG, respectively, as well as a half-dozen meeting invites waiting to spring into his calendar if he so much as touches them.

The charge these messages gave him a few days ago has been replaced with unease. Turning a corner, he hears trampling in the overgrown hedges and can sense the beast salivating in these last pools of night. Everything Matt convinced them to forestall—everything he wanted to protect them from until they were wiser—is waiting: The Business, ego, obligations, fame, endless questions, critics. It makes his insides churn.

He walks quickly back to the house, where he finds Rita, Sal, and Gina still asleep on the couch. He takes a pillow and curls up on a spot on the floor near the pellet stove and lies there, panting, waiting for the others to wake. He promises the memory of Matt Forge that he won’t tell the agent, or a label, or an interviewer, critic, or future fan—or anyone outside this room—a single story about their time out in Utah. The beast can have the two-hundred-some songs, but not how they came to be. What he will say, if asked, is this: Listen. Imagine. It was even better than that.