The Marrow of the Orchard

People often ask me what it’s like to grow up in a haunted house, and I can only shrug and say it’s like growing up anywhere else, except the walls remember things better than you do. My family moved into the old Perkins place when I was nine, a rambling Victorian in the high desert of Nevada, miles from the nearest town, surrounded by sagebrush and a dying orchard of gnarled apricot trees. The previous owner, a woman named Agnes, had lived there for sixty years, and every window in the house faced her bedroom. She would sit there, knitting, and watch the trees bear fruit and shed their leaves, until one winter she stopped coming to the window, and they found her cold in her bed, a single sock on her needle.

Our house was a maze of creaking floors and drafts that moved the cobwebs even when no wind blew. The cellar was the worst, a black pit of a place with a dirt floor and shelves lined with dusty canning jars, each one labeled with a year and a few words in Agnes’s shaky cursive: ‘1971 – peach jam,’ ‘1984 – pear butter,’ but some were just ‘1998 – what was left.’ I hated going down there, but my mother sent me for a jar of tomatoes one August afternoon, and as my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I saw a dark stain in the corner that looked like a dried puddle, and the jars nearest it were covered in a fine layer of dust that formed a pattern like fingerprints.

That night, I dreamed of the orchard. In the dream, the trees were bare, and the ground was cracked, and from each crack, thin white filaments rose like hairs, pulsing with a sickly glow. Agnes stood in the middle, her back to me, and she was digging with her bare hands, pulling up a root that writhed like a snake. She turned, and her face was smooth, without features, but she spoke in a voice that came from the soil itself: ‘It’s thirsty, child. You’ll feed it soon.’ I woke with my hands caked in dry dirt and the taste of copper in my mouth.

The next day, my little sister, June, wandered off into the orchard, and we found her under the biggest tree, a twisted monster of a thing with bark like scar tissue. She was humming a tune I didn’t recognize, and when I asked her what it was, she said Agnes taught her. I looked at the tree, and there, carved into the bark, was a shape: a crude face, with eyesockets hollowed deep enough to hide secrets. I tried to pull June away, but she resisted, her small fingers digging into the soil, and she said, ‘Don’t be rude. She’s still growing.’

That’s when the house started to change. The walls began to sweat a sticky amber liquid in the heat of the day, and the smell was sweet, cloying, like rotting fruit. The floorboards in the hallway warped into gentle curves, as if they were breathing. At night, I’d hear a thrumming, a low pulse that vibrated through the floor and into my bones, and I’d find June standing at her window, staring at the orchard, her hand pressed flat against the glass, leaving a smudge that looked like a tiny root. My parents didn’t notice; they were too busy arguing about money, about moving, about the trees that were inexplicably dying despite the irrigation.

One evening, I decided to confront the source. I took a shovel and went to the oldest tree, the one with the face, and I started to dig. The soil was loose, too loose, and it gave way easily, and I felt a tremor run up the handle. I dug deeper, and deeper, and then my shovel clinked against something hard. I knelt down, brushing away the dirt, and found a rectangular slab of concrete, like a small grave. Carved into it was a name: ‘Agnes Marrow, 1921-1999.’ Beneath it, a line: ‘She gave the earth her marrow.’

I threw the shovel and ran back to the house, but the door wouldn’t open. I turned the knob, pushed, pulled, but it was stuck, as if something on the other side was pressed against it. I peered through the keyhole, and I saw a single eye, milky and unfocused, staring back. A voice, dry as a dead leaf, whispered through the gap: ‘You opened the door, child. You let me in.’

I broke the window and climbed in, and the house was full of roots. They were crawling up the walls, across the ceiling, weaving through the banisters, and at the center of the living room, June sat on a throne of tangled branches, her eyes closed, her mouth moving in silent speech. I shook her, and she didn’t wake. I heard my parents screaming from upstairs, but their voices sounded far away, muffled, like they were calling from under water. The roots tightened around my ankles, and I felt the cold, greedy pull of the earth, the same pull that had taken Agnes, and that had been waiting for a new family to feed on.

I don’t remember how I got out. I only remember waking up on the highway, miles from the house, with a piece of root in my pocket. June was beside me, pale but alive, and we hitched a ride into town. The townsfolk gave us odd looks when we said where we were from; they said the Perkins place had been empty for years, that the old woman who lived there had died, and no one had ever moved in after. They said the trees were cursed, that the soil was sour, that nothing would ever grow there again.

But they were wrong. Last spring, I went back, and the orchard was blooming, but the fruit was not apricots. They were small, hard, and black, and when I picked one, it burst, releasing a fine dust that smelled like my mother’s perfume. And in the center of the orchard, the tree with the face had grown, its bark now forming a perfect mirror of my own features, its mouth open just enough to show a hollow, endless throat. I dug into my pocket and felt the root, still warm, and I knew it was only a matter of time before I returned, because the earth was patient, and it always gets what it’s given.