The Path

The path appeared on the night of the first frost. That year the frost came early, on the seventh of October, while the late yellow apples called Shinano Gold were still on the branches and it was too soon to pick them. Kyoko went out onto the veranda at half past five, the way she had every morning for twenty years, with a thermos of barley tea and her husband's old jacket over her nightgown. The orchard she had inherited from her father ran down from the house in three terraces to the farm road, and past the road to the Chikuma River, where the mist lay. All the grass between the rows was white with frost, even and furred, and through it, from the bottom gate to the seventh row, ran one dark stripe.

Kyoko set the thermos on the railing, where the paint had worn off in a ring the exact size of its base, and stood looking. Anyone who has walked on frosted grass in the morning knows the track it leaves: dark green, wet, and it stays until the sun melts the frost. The stripe began at the bottom gate, the one that opens onto the road. It ran along the seventh row, narrow, a single footprint wide, and ended at the last tree before the fence. That was an old Fuji apple tree. Her father had planted it the year Kyoko was born. She and her husband, Yasuhiro, had kept it only because it still gave the sweetest apples on the slope.

Kyoko put on the rubber boots that always stood by the door with their toes to the wall and went down into the orchard. By the trunk the footprints went round and round in a tight circle, on one spot. The grass there was trodden down to the dirt, the way it gets where a person stands and waits for a long time. Then the path went back the same way to the gate. Kyoko walked it, setting her feet in the stranger's prints, and counted a hundred and forty steps to the tree and a hundred and forty back. She decided that one of the neighbor's seasonal workers had cut through to the bus. But no bus had run on that road for five years. And the gate was closed with a wire loop that Kyoko twisted shut herself every evening, and in the morning the loop was twisted the way she always did it, three turns.

Yasuhiro got up at seven, after the frost had melted, and saw nothing. The dark stripe by the seventh row lasted longest, because the fence throws its shadow there, but by seven it was gone too. Over breakfast Yasuhiro talked about apple prices and said he had to call the co-op about crates, and Kyoko didn't tell him a thing.

That evening she twisted the loop on the gate as usual, three turns, and clipped a red clothespin over it. In the morning the path lay across the white grass again, and the clothespin hung exactly where Kyoko had left it. That was when Kyoko decided she would find out for herself who was walking in her orchard, and she would find out before her husband did.

The path came every morning there was frost. One night it rained, and in the morning the grass was just wet, with no tracks on it. Kyoko stood on the veranda with her tea going cold and couldn't understand why she felt so let down. The next night it froze again, and the stripe lay across the white once more, the same one, with the same trodden circle under the old Fuji. Every morning while Yasuhiro slept, Kyoko walked it in her own boots. By the time he got up the frost was going, and her tracks and the stranger's turned into the same wet grass.

In the evenings Yasuhiro watched baseball with the sound off, because he didn't like the announcers. Kyoko sat next to him with her sewing and looked at the dark window, where the lamp was reflected, and the two of them on the couch. She started going to bed earlier so the morning would come sooner. When she stepped out onto the veranda, the first thing she looked for was the seventh row, and on the days the stripe was there, her work went well and she hummed. Once Yasuhiro asked her what she was smiling about, and Kyoko said the apples were good this year.

She asked the neighbor, old Hattori, over the fence whether he had seen anyone on the road at night. Hattori was a little deaf. He cupped a hand to his ear and made her repeat the question twice. Then he said that at night he slept, at five in the morning he turned on his radio, and before five nobody in the world existed for him. Kyoko walked the bottom of the orchard along the fence and found no gap and no flattened grass on the outside. The stranger's tracks began at the gate, on the inside.

Around the twentieth of October they started picking the Shinano Gold. Kyoko and her husband worked with three students the co-op had sent for two weeks. Kyoko stood on a ladder in the seventh row with a woven basket on a strap at her hip. She looked down at the crooked trunk of the old Fuji and at the trodden circle around its roots. Long ago she had forbidden herself to remember, and she remembered anyway. At sixteen she used to come to this tree in the evenings through the bottom gate, while her father watched television in the house. A boy from her class, Seiji Kinoshita, would be waiting for her under the tree. He stood by the trunk shifting from foot to foot and smoked cigarettes he stole from his older brother.

One day Seiji said that after school he was leaving for Tokyo and she was coming with him. Kyoko didn't go. Her father was sick, and there was no one else to look after the orchard. She went to the agricultural college in nearby Ueda, and six years later she married Yasuhiro, who worked for the co-op back then and came out to count her father's harvest. It turned out to be a good life. Kyoko never told anyone she regretted anything, and she never told herself either.

The students went home, and only the Fuji apples were left in the orchard, red and heavy; those are picked later. The path came every morning.

On Saturday Kyoko drove to the supermarket out by the highway. Natsuko was at the register, an old classmate of hers, round and loud, with her reading glasses on a cord. Ringing up the tofu and the laundry detergent, Natsuko said in passing:

"Seiji Kinoshita's back, you know. Remember him?"

Kyoko nodded. Natsuko kept talking without looking up from the scanner. Seiji was divorced, his wife and kids had stayed in Tokyo, and he had come to Saku, the next town over, to look after his father. Old Kinoshita had lost the use of one arm after a stroke.

"He's not staying long, though," Natsuko said. "On Saturday the thirty-first he's taking his father to a nursing home in Nagano, and then he's going back to Tokyo. They're selling the house. I saw him at the pharmacy. All gray now, but you'd know him." She looked at Kyoko over her glasses. "You two used to be friends, didn't you?"

Kyoko said it was a long time ago and left without her change. In the car she sat for a long while without starting the engine. Saturday was a week away, the radio promised frost nearly every morning, and from Saku to their road was a twenty-minute drive.

She drove home through Saku, though it was out of her way, and went past the Kinoshita house by the railroad tracks. She knew that house from school, when she and Seiji used to ride their bikes there. The roof had been redone in blue sheet metal, and a small gray car was parked by the gate. Kyoko didn't slow down. She watched the house only in the mirror until it was gone around the bend.

That evening Kyoko stood at the window, looking out at the dark orchard and the gate, until it was late. She should tell Yasuhiro someone was walking in the orchard, call the police, put a padlock on the gate. Kyoko did none of it. In the night she woke a little after three with her heart pounding and lay listening to her husband breathe beside her. She didn't go to the window, because she was afraid of scaring off whoever was walking there. In the morning the path was fresh and dark, all the way across the orchard.

The next night Kyoko set her alarm for four. Without turning on the light she went to the bathroom and put on the red lipstick she had bought once for a friend's daughter's wedding and never worn again. A forty-seven-year-old woman looked back at her from the mirror, with red lips and a gray streak over one ear, and Kyoko's face went hot. She wiped the lipstick off with a towel, went back to bed and lay awake until dawn.

In the morning, under the old Fuji, in the trodden grass, she found a tube of lipstick, gold-colored, cheap, the letters half rubbed off. The lipstick inside was a dark plum, a color Kyoko had never worn. That evening, while Yasuhiro was in the bath, Kyoko opened the tube. She stared at the plum stick, worn down at a slant by someone else's lips. Then she capped it and hid it in her sewing box.

On the thirtieth of October the morning radio said it was First Love Day. A hundred and thirty years ago to the day, the poet Toson had published his poem "First Love," about a girl under an apple tree. Down in the town below the mountain, where Toson once taught school, they were holding a reading for the occasion. Kyoko heard the radio from the house next door: old Hattori turned his on at five in the morning at full volume. By then Kyoko was already standing under the old Fuji.

She had come out at half past four, in the dark, in her husband's jacket and her boots, and had left her own path on the white grass next to the stranger's. The evening before, she had twisted the gate loop only once, so it would be easy to open from the road. She hadn't put on lipstick. Kyoko stood by the trunk, in the trodden circle, and waited. After a while she noticed she was shifting from foot to foot, in a tight circle, on one spot, and she stopped. Then she started again, because her toes were cold.

The frost was heavy that morning. The grass crunched under her boots, the branches had grown white needles of frost, and in all that white the red apples hung heavy, frost on their sides. The mist over the Chikuma was turning pink. On Hattori's radio a woman's voice was reading the poem. In it a young man sees a girl under an apple tree. Her hair is put up for the first time, the way grown women wear it, with a comb in it, and she holds out an apple to him. Kyoko knew the lines from school; they had all learned them by heart. In the third stanza the radio went silent, cut off mid-word. Kyoko stood in the quiet and thought about the last stanza, where a path has worn itself under the apple tree, and the girl asks who walked it first.

A car stopped on the road by the bottom gate at a quarter to six. It was a small gray car, the same one that had been parked by the gate in Saku. The headlights went off, a door slammed. A man in a dark jacket got out, gray-haired and stooped, and stopped at the gate. He looked at the orchard, at the white grass, at the dark path that started at his feet and ran along the seventh row. Kyoko recognized Seiji by the way he stood, shifting from foot to foot. Seiji untwisted the wire loop and came into the orchard.

He walked the path slowly, looking at his feet, and after thirty steps or so he raised his head and saw her. Seiji stopped. Kyoko took a step toward him, away from the trunk, and meant to say his name, but she kept quiet, because she saw his face. It was gray and all at once old, the mouth half open, and Seiji stared at her without blinking, even when he nearly stumbled off the edge of the path.

"You're still here," he said quietly, under his breath. He was looking at her the way she had looked at this path for three weeks.

Then Seiji backed away. He retreated without turning his back on her, all the way to the gate, and only there did he turn and run for the car. He ran clumsily, an old man's run, slipping on the frost. The car started on the second try and drove off toward Saku. Kyoko stood under the apple tree until the sound of the engine had died away completely, and only then did she notice she was holding an apple. She had picked it from a low branch and didn't remember when.

Yasuhiro was in the kitchen when Kyoko came back. He stood at the stove in his undershirt pouring tea into two cups, though he usually got up at seven and she was the one who poured the tea. He set a cup in front of her, sat down across the table and for a while watched her warm her hands on it. Kyoko put the apple on the table between the cups, and it lay there thawing, the frost on one side darkening and running off.

"Why do you go out at night?" Yasuhiro asked calmly, the same way he asked whether she had called the co-op about the crates. "It's been two weeks. You get up at three, get dressed, go out the front way onto the road and walk down to the bottom gate. An hour later you come back and lie down. I thought you couldn't sleep, it's your age, my mother was the same. I didn't want to ask."

Kyoko looked at her boots by the door. They stood there wet, with blades of grass stuck to them. Every morning she had found them wet, and every morning she had thought she got them wet on her early walk along the path. She remembered the wire loop on the gate, twisted in three turns, the way only she twisted it, and the red clothespin that nobody but her had touched. She wanted to tell her husband she remembered none of it. That the path had been in the orchard on the seventh, the very first night, a week before the two weeks he was talking about. She wanted to tell him about Seiji, about the lipstick, about the hundred and forty steps. Kyoko drank some tea and said it was true, she couldn't sleep, it must be her age.

In the afternoon they picked the Fuji on the top terrace. Kyoko handed her husband empty baskets and laughed at his jokes. They left the old Fuji in the seventh row alone; it was always picked last. Around four, when the sun went behind the mountain and the orchard turned blue all at once, a small gray car drove slowly along the road below and didn't stop. Kyoko stood holding a basket and watched it go until Yasuhiro called her a second time.

That evening Kyoko went down to the bottom gate, took hold of the wire and didn't twist it, only dropped the loop over the post. She set her boots by the door with the toes pointing out the door, the way you set them when you mean to go out to the orchard early. Then she lay down and fell asleep at once, the way she hadn't in years.

In the morning she went out onto the veranda with her thermos. There were two paths in the frost, one from the porch, one from the bottom gate, and both led to the seventh row. On the road by the gate, tire tracks showed dark. The boots stood by the door, dry, their toes to the wall.