Body Surfing

assumed control of the farm in ’81 after a completely forgettable three-year stint in the Navy, he’d taken an axe to the worst of them all, the Red Delicious, which in his opinion looked like a bell pepper and tasted like a potato. Three hundred trees his father had planted in 1947: John was pretty sure he made more off the firewood than they’d ever earned from those mealy apples. His idea was to replace the mass-market trees with more rarefied varietals, Mutsus and Macouns, Braeburns and Winesaps, each delicious in its own way, but all difficult to grow, and requiring economies of scale that a small farm like his just couldn’t produce. In the end he’d been forced to sell off the land a parcel at a time. There was an estate to the Van Arsdales’ south now, some internet millionaire who’d built a Rubik’s cube of a mansion that glowed like a lighthouse at night, while Apple Acres, a small condominium development, (Grannysmith Lane, Idared Avenue, blah blah blah) stood to the north. On the rare occasions the elder and younger Van Arsdale were in the same vehicle, the father wouldpoint out the bland, vinyl-sided apartments to his son: “See that, Jasper? That’s your college fund right there.”
    Aside from the narrow strip of land between the house and the river, John kept just one four-acre field immediately north of the house, on which he grew daylilies.
    “Why daylilies?” was a question he heard often enough (from his smart-aleck son especially) to which he usually answered “Why not?” There were a lot of good answers to that question, chief among them the fact that flowers brought in less than apples, and were more work besides. But even before Jasper died and his father found himself in possession of his son’s college fund, John Van Arsdale didn’t give a rat’s ass about money. He’d started growing the flowers after his wife and daughter died. He always said it that way, “wife and daughter,” even though his daughter had never seen the light of day. Never taken a breath of air or a drink of milk, never even had a name. There’s something profoundly disturbing about a six-months-pregnant woman in a casket, unholy even, and when it’s your wife, well, John Van Arsdale was pretty much done after that. No bottle on earth was deep enough to drown that sight. But on the drunken nights immediately following her death, when he’d searched his heart for some trace of Amelia, it was their nameless daughter who came to him. She was a warm weight on his chest, like a kitten curled up to sleep, or a gentle touch at the back of his head. John liked to think she’d been spared the horrors of this world—the farms that went bust and the spouses who died and the sons who were as strange to you as people you passed on the highway. His daughter’s comforting presence seemed to tell him that life would go on, that it should go on, and he should be a part of it. It was this feeling that had led him to the Beech Blossom only a week after he’d buried Amelia, and from there to the bed of a woman whose name he never could remember (he called her Blossom in his head, after the bar, although sometimes he just called her a Beech). Sleeping with her had been close to a compulsion. It had seemed to him that he was honoring Amelia’s memory—she’d been so full of life, she’d want him to be happy—but after it was over he just felt dirty. Guilty. Empty . Even the comfort of his daughter’spresence had vanished, as if she’d been ashamed of what he’d done in her name. So he’d gone from bar Blossoms to garden-variety ones.
    I.e., daylilies.
    It was right after Amelia died that he sold the big north parcel to the real estate developers, banked enough money for Jasper to go to any school in the country and set up what was left over to dole out enough to get by on, then started with his flowers. What initially drew him was the fact that each bloom only lasted a day, but, since there were six or eight buds on every stalk and three or four stalks to every plant, you had flowers for weeks at a time. Life’s brevity, symbolically speaking, coupled with the endurance of generations, all in one beautiful package. Then, too, there was the fact that daylilies were easy to care for, pest resistant, good in sun or shade, which made them easier to sell than roses or orchids or some extra-fancy flower like that. Only later did he discover that the daylily was a relatively simple plant to hybridize. All you