Ben Givens and Lenora Givens's Mother-Son Relationship

Ben Givens’s relationship with his mother, Lenora Givens, joins intimate family life to a demanding shared world of orchard labor. She teaches him to see work not merely as the family’s livelihood but as a way to discover and give one’s particular gifts. When Lenora dies of pancreatic cancer in 1938, that relationship becomes an early, enduring loss; its legacy can be seen in Ben’s later readiness to care for others through concrete action.

Identity and Shared Home

Lenora raises Ben and his brother, Aidan Givens, in a household organized around the family’s orchards on the east bank of the Columbia River. The farm is both home and workplace: its extensive rows of apples and stone fruit are crossed by irrigation ditches, supported by props, and surrounded by the buildings and equipment that sustain a working orchard. Their farmhouse stands on a knoll above the river, within a landscape marked by shade trees, wind, and the fragrance of sage. This setting matters to the relationship because Ben’s childhood with Lenora is not separate from labor; the work of the land structures family time and gives her daily example its force.

Lenora is not only a mother within that household but an active manager and skilled worker. She keeps the orchard books, advises her husband, Wright Givens, about when to plow and plant, and spends evenings entering figures in her ledger. In the packing shed she works alongside Ben and Aidan, making boxes from pine shook and nailing them together. Her speed exceeds her husband’s: where he can make sixty boxes in an hour, she can make sixty-five. During the harvest she wraps apples in oiled tissue and packs them carefully. The details establish her authority through expertise and effort, rather than through affection alone.

Work, Faith, and Independence

Ben’s childhood work ranges across the seasons: he makes boxes, tends the kitchen garden, splits wood, milks cows, helps place pollinating hives, clears weeds from irrigation ditches, plants trees, and supports fruit-laden branches. Lenora’s own example places her within this same cycle. Their bond therefore develops through repeated participation in tasks with practical consequences for the family and orchard.

She also imagines a future for Ben beyond the work he knows. When he protests that he will never leave and cannot picture doing anything except growing apples, Lenora tells him that he will grow up, be ready to go, and find work of his own. She does not treat leaving as a rejection of home; she presents it as a natural step toward discovering what he can contribute. Her faith gives that advice a moral framework. A committed Presbyterian, she understands work as service to God and as a path to self-knowledge: each person has worthy tasks suited to a particular design. She urges Ben to read and to find the work that fits who he is, linking education and independence to a larger sense of purpose.

That teaching does not diminish her attachment to him. Rather, it shows her expressing care through preparation: she wants him to be able to build a life beyond the orchard, even when he cannot yet imagine doing so. Her counsel holds together two forms of belonging—the inherited responsibilities of family work and the future work he must discover for himself.

Illness and Death

Lenora’s illness brings the limits of work and expertise into sharp focus. Dr. Williams explains to Ben and Aidan that she has pancreatic cancer and cannot be cured. Ben answers from the assumptions of a child who has seen adults solve practical problems: the doctor, he points out, is a doctor. The physician has to tell him that medicine cannot always provide a cure. The exchange marks a painful break in the secure world built around his mother’s competence and the family’s labor. This is a need that neither skill nor effort can meet.

Before she dies, Lenora tells Ben to do something fine, grand, and wonderful—whatever his heart desires. Her words continue the earlier lesson about finding work fitted to one’s nature, but the moment gives it a sharper emotional weight: she is speaking to her son near the end of her life. Ben says he will try. Later that week, on June 28, 1938, she dies at 6:35 in the morning, with Ben, Aidan, and Wright beside her. Her husband leans close to her, then rests his cheek against her heart and repeats her name. The family buries her on a knoll above the river. That summer, the orchard work continues, but the family experiences it with a hollow feeling, and the orchard declines. Loss alters both the household and the place where mother and son had shared so much of their lives.

Inheritance and Later Acts of Care

Ben’s later conduct gives the relationship a reach beyond his childhood without proving that every act is a direct consequence of Lenora’s teaching. In the desert, he uses his medical kit to tend Rex, his injured dog, and later insists on staying while the dog receives veterinary care. When Angel collapses at a bus station, Ben calls for emergency help, identifies himself as a doctor, and remains available to assist. When Doris is in labor and it becomes clear that she cannot reach a hospital in time, he turns to the immediate practical demands of the birth. In each case, care takes the form of attention followed by work: assessing a need, accepting responsibility, and doing what the circumstances require.

Those scenes resonate with Lenora’s insistence that a life is shaped through the work a person is meant to do. Her own care for Ben was likewise expressed in practice—in shared labor, instruction, and the effort to prepare him for a future beyond home. The resemblance is not a simple inheritance of a profession or a stated doctrine; it is a pattern of treating useful action as an expression of responsibility.

Narrative Significance

The mother-son relationship provides an early source of both loss and moral orientation in Ben’s life. Lenora’s confidence in his future contrasts with his childhood certainty that he will remain on the farm, while her final wish gathers that earlier confidence into a parting charge. Her death cannot be repaired by the kind of labor that maintains an orchard; the family’s hollow work afterward makes that limit visible. Yet her belief that people come to know themselves through what they do persists as a meaningful frame for Ben’s later care of vulnerable beings. The relationship thus connects the intimate scale of a mother teaching her son to the wider question of how he will spend his life.