Malaga, Washington

Malaga, Washington, is rendered through the orchards that organize its working life and Ben Givens’s memories. Its rows of fruit trees, seasonal labor, and migrant-worker camps make it more than a rural backdrop: the place joins Ben’s childhood and family history to his late journey, when he tries to find apple-picking work for Emilio and comes to the orchard of William Harden.

Orchard Country and Family Work

Ben’s family orchard stands on the east bank of the Columbia River, among rows sheltered by Lombardy poplars and irrigated by ditches. Its crop is carefully apportioned: thirteen acres of Golden Delicious, two of Winesaps, two of Rome Beauties, and eight acres of cherries and apricots. A weathered packing shed, picker shanties, barns, a stable, and other farm buildings make the landscape a place of production as well as home. The farmhouse occupies a knoll among elms and willows; sage scents the rooms, and the wind moves through the trees throughout the year.

The work follows the seasons. Ben makes apple boxes, tends the kitchen garden, splits wood, and milks cows; with Wright Givens and Aidan Givens, he helps place pollinating hives and clear weeds from irrigation ditches. The annual cycle continues through planting, disking between rows, tying back branches, thinning fruit, propping limbs, picking, and winter pruning. This detailed agricultural calendar gives Malaga’s orchard country a lived order: each harvest depends on repeated, skilled labor long before fruit reaches a crate.

Harvest and Migrant Labor

The harvest also brings workers from elsewhere. On June 11, when cherries ripen early, the pickers gather at first light: Ben, Wright, nine migrant workers, the Emery family and its four young children, and Rachel Lake, the Emerys’ niece, who has come from Waterville, Maine. Rachel arrives without suitable work clothes and borrows oversized denim pants and a flannel shirt. The workers are assigned ladders, buckets, and rows; Ben picks carefully, removing leaves and gathering cherries with their stems intact.

The harvest is measured both in fruit and in time. Ten thousand trees await picking, and the days ahead stretch into weeks and months; the labor becomes so continuous that Ben imagines fruit and moving hands even in sleep. When the afternoon heat softens the cherries and loosens them from their stems, Wright calls off picking. The crew loads the day’s fruit and sends the boxes for pickup. Later, the busier apple harvest fills the rows with workers, children, resting dogs, ladders, coats, hats, and canteens. Pickers ease full bags into bins to avoid bruising the apples, while tractors and forklifts move the crop toward the sidings. The abundance of the orchard is inseparable from the people who gather it.

A Destination for Emilio

Years later, Malaga becomes a practical destination in Ben’s effort to help Emilio. Speaking by telephone with a job contact, Ben gives a false name and invents personal details, then recalls having worked at Wolfhound Orchard near Malaga. When he asks whether he can get there again, he is told that positions are available and that a referral can be arranged. Ben carries the news to Emilio in Spanish, explaining that there is apple work in Malaga and tracing the route on a county map down the west side of the Columbia on the Malaga-Alcoa Highway.

The referral turns remembered orchard country into a concrete next step. Ben and Emilio walk through Wenatchee, where Ben’s pain and nausea slow him, and Emilio helps carry their bags. They rent a truck and set out toward the work. Ben’s act of arranging the job is modest but consequential: the orchards that shaped his own life become a means of offering Emilio a chance to work.

The Orchard and Ben’s Return to Life

On Joe Miller Road, Ben slows to take in the apple harvest: bins and ladders among the trees, workers reaching into the canopy, and the voices of pickers overtaking the orchards’ usual quiet. The scene recalls the labor-filled landscape of his youth. Elsewhere in the orchard country, the sight and smell of a cherry orchard in midautumn sharpen his awareness of his breathing and steady heartbeat; despite his illness, he recognizes that he wants to live in this world.

His arrival at the Hardens’ mailbox gives the setting a more dangerous edge. Ben has come looking for the person who took his shotgun, though he has never seen the thief’s face, and suspects that William Harden may be the night rider who runs wolfhounds after coyotes. As workers continue loading fruit nearby, Ben hesitates over whether one of them might be Harden. Malaga’s orchards thus hold together opposed possibilities: work offered to Emilio, a landscape that renews Ben’s attachment to life, and the unresolved confrontation that has drawn him to Harden’s property.