Later, Paolo would take me aside to ask, What did nonna say?
Nothing, I said then, turning quickly away.
Now that he’d bargained for the Giacomo house, he always wanted to know what the grandmother had to say outside of his hearing.
The metal railings shook as the ferry slowed to turn ashore. Once landed, Anna strode away and stood on a high sandbank.
I’m going to see the new village, she said, turning to look over her shoulder.
It was hot where we had landed. There were some cottonwood fibres caught in Maren’s hair from trees over the sandbar. A path led up to the new graveyard. I remember trying to search for mocking laughter in Anna’s eyes, a reaction to our grandmother’s words. She said to no one in particular: Me and my sister are going to see the new village.
Maren hoisted her shirt to show me a bottle of wine she’d taken from the crates under the middeck tables and in her knapsack a carton of ice cream from the icebox.
Me and my sister aren’t going with the others to the new graveyard.
In the new village I saw Maren sprawled on the curb outside Beruski’s store, which was on the blocks used to move it there. Over the past days the Hydro had moved buildings and houses from our village to this site. Soon many would live here.
Got to get up, Maren said, but she didn’t.
Anna was propped against a chestnut sapling. The street was empty, the windows of Beruski’s store sheeted in cardboard. As she went to pass Maren the carton of ice cream, she scraped her knuckles on the bark.
I saw then she was drunk. Because of the wine, she didn’t seem to feel the pain of the scrape nor did she notice the blood welling on her knuckles.
Why don’t you get down from your bicycle, she said with a wave of her hand, and help us.
Maren, who was on the other side of the trunk, roared with laughter.
Jumping bean, she cried, wiping the tears from her eyes. Jumping bean get a grip. She was no longer wearing her loose-fitting blouse; she was wearing Anna’s cowgirl’s shirt braided up the front, with studded cuffs. Maren had gone over the fence to Beruski’s, to take a wild rhubarb leaf that looked like a star cut from wet tissue paper spread in her lap.
First off your bicycle, Maren repeated as a kind of joke. I had walked here as the cousins had from the ferry. Why are you staring? Did you follow us?
The ferry is loading, I answered. Time to go back to R.
Those places are from R, pointing to Beruski’s store, the Fuscaldo house, the Swede’s house. But this isn’t R.
Not R, Anna echoed, the corners of her mouth trembling with mirth.
And then she imitated our grandmother’s voice: You two look after each other.
He can look after himself said Maren, turning red.
A clear mid-afternoon light had settled on the pavement, clean as a pressed sheet. When I knelt to lift her, Maren shut her mouth and tried to compose her look, yet her lower jaw trembled. She smelled of wine. She dragged a wisp of hair across her lips and bit it, to keep calm. Only, her eyes had begun to water.
I have to pee, she said.
Crouching, Anna lifted her. We went down the street, past houses from our condemned village that were still on blocks in the air. There was a high flush in Maren’s cheeks and a brightness to her eyes. Anna was almost as tall as Maren. When she laughed there was a certain gladness in her voice. Walking back to the ferry made her stop laughing, made her wipe the tears from her cheeks. My sister, she said.
I saw Maren didn’t like being called sister: she gave Anna the look of someone slapped, as if she, too, felt the distance between sister and what we really had; between new village and a site strewn with uprooted houses and stores, blind windows sheeted in cardboard. It gave me a giddy feeling in the chest, the sense that we could float away anytime.
Early the next morning, all the laundry room curtains were drawn. To call Maren, I rapped softly on the laundry room glass. I carried a chair across the floorboards to the iron stove, to reach down the letter hidden among the copper-bottomed pots.
On the cellar stairs I crouched above the water stirring against the walls.
The letter said:
For one thing she is too lonely.
I felt her breath.
Maren had come down behind me.
Why do you want to push me in? Turning to look over my shoulder, I shoved the letter into my pocket.
I felt her breath. I don’t want to push you in. I can’t sleep here; it’s not like I remember. What were you reading?
A salamander had surfaced at the foot of the stairs, its head a dark aspen leaf. I reached for the net tucked by the stairs, made out of a nylon stocking strung on hanger wire.
Nothing for you.
The cellar light held it to the surface, wide black eyes. I turned the net inside out to free the struggling body with its flame-coloured belly. It thrust its snout into the little hollow between the curved thumbs of Maren’s cupped hands.
From the cellar stairs, we could hear my uncle’s accordion in the street of the grandmothers. He was the bassa banda. He played “The Dolphin,” “Grass,” “The Black-headed Saint.”
That’s your father, I reminded her. It was the third or fourth morning of the festa campestra and he was waking everybody up.
She told me what she remembered from six years ago. She remembered the albero hung with prizes: salami, mortabella; money and toys disguised as bunches of leaves; and at the top of the pole the grand prize, a young lamb that had been slaughtered and dressed for cooking.
I haven’t seen that in a long time, I said.
We took the salamander to the river. We went down the alleys to avoid my uncle’s cheerful accordion. She had opened the gap between her thumbs to look into its glittering black eyes.
Listen.
Cranes were flying over the village to the southern flats; their wings made the sound of slowly revolving helicopter blades.
Maren had stopped in her tracks.
Cranes, she said.
There were hardly any songbirds, although crows flew restlessly from chestnut tree to chestnut tree. We went down the river road patched with gravel. The cranes were dropping into the river like an uncoiling braid of hair. On the Illecillewaet sandbar, while she slipped her hands into the river,
I stood back to read:
She ran away to Nakusp last week. If she had had enough money, she would have gone on to Vancouver. We believe there is no point in forcing her to stay with us any longer; it will only make her more miserable.
To prepare for the last days of the festa, we children were gathered in the church basement. A nun in a black and grey habit described all the toys in heaven. She was directing her remarks to the younger ones — ages five or six — who, wide-eyed, heard about the dazzling, irresistible toys of heaven. Maren shook her head in disbelief. She bit her lip, glanced from side to side. Later, when it was discovered that money collected in the madonna’s plate had been stolen, the nuns put us in a line, palms up.
Hold out your hands.
When the ruler struck, Maren made a fist, more in panic than in anger; she refused to let go. The nun tried to shake the ruler from her fist. Maren’s eyes were full of wild panic. Turning to flee she tripped over a chair and split open her chin. I remember her look of helplessness as she examined her bloody hands. She ran to a door that opened onto a staircase leading outdoors. The nuns rushed after her. I saw that, expecting me to follow her, she’d stopped at the door. I edged behind the rushing nuns and the taller children who were staring in disbelief at the blood pouring from her chin.
I climbed around her in the high branches.
Hi! Fine!
She told me she was fine before I asked her.
You have to go to the St. Leon clinic, I said.
Crouching below me, shirt pressed to her chin, she said, Sometimes I have this feeling I shouldn’t be alive.
My father’s shouts guided her down. Call the doctor!, he shouted, though he knew it w
asn’t the doctor’s day in our village.
I slept on the way down and woke up in the streets of St. Leon. I don’t remember the doctor who arrived to unlock the clinic door, turn on the lights. In the operating room there were pads of blood-stained gauze in the sink, implements scattered across a metal tray on the counter.
Climb up then, his voice full of sleep. He spread a clean sheet on the table. He quickly draped a sheet over Maren’s chest. He wrapped her arms in the sheet, then tucked the ends under her back. When he sponged her chin she began to cry, staring at the ceiling.
I’m ordered to hold down her knees.
The doctor, impatient to return to bed, doesn’t wait for the injected anesthetic to work. For the first two stitches she winces, lips clamped between her teeth, her face bathed in tears. Her knees, trembling under my hands, feel like wood.
I didn’t question what the doctor demanded of me; I held down her knees. There was nothing else I could do. By her amazed, staring eyes and her reproachful look, I felt my stomach hollow to the shame of that betrayal. Now, many years later I understand these things: to hold down her knees, to jump to that order, was to make myself less than I was. When he missed a stitch the doctor swore, pushed through the sickle-shaped needle. He wiped away the disinfectant, dabbed on antibiotic cream, then taped on a dressing that had to be replaced every day. As he gave his instructions, Maren, free of the wrapped sheet and sitting on the table, continued to stare at me with astonished, reproachful eyes, the look of someone who sees you as you’ve never been seen before.
She doesn’t do her chores because she’s unhappy. She lies about it so she won’t get into trouble. Then we bawl her out; for that she builds a wall around herself so it won’t penetrate, and so she won’t get hurt. After it’s over we all hate each other, and the work still isn’t done properly.
Under an open window through which I could hear the trains, my father reworked his house plans. He was sitting at the kitchen table, drawing by lamplight. I was in bed: a fold-up cot that my mother brought out at night, made up. I watched her step over the low sill, to sit with her bare feet outside on the warm porch roof shingles.
My father got up to rap on the laundry room window. Through the drawn curtains you could see the light from Maren’s reading lamp.
He rapped again softly: I’ve something to show you. His finger traced across the house plans.
This will be your room, he said, on the first floor.
She was wearing my mother’s flannel pyjamas and her feet were bare. Her hair that had grown longer was tied at the nape, and she had a gauze dressing taped to her narrow chin, under the wide, green eyes. She smelt of cinnamon and disinfectant.
She had her new look: cheerless, resigned. From my bed I heard her say, I can’t stay here. Of course you can stay with us, my father said with surprise. You’re tired after the shock of your fall. You need to rest.
Through the window over the sink I could see that across the tracks the train station was lit up: the passenger train was arriving. It would stop for an hour then go on to the coast. My father called it the Vlanmore train. Italian immigrants once took that train from the transatlantic docks of Montreal. Where are you going they asked each other. Some were going to Vlanmore, others to Sanmore, others to Windamore. But they all got off here at the same village, my grandfather among them.
Sometime in the last days of the festa campestra Paolo came into our upstairs apartment from the roundhouse, with the yellow zerocetti on his shoulder. That accordion was made in Castelfidardo in 1910. It was tuned slightly sharp for the sake of brilliance. In his arms he carried a copper brazier from St. Leon. It’s cold in the Giacomo house! To warm his room at night he’d burn almond shells in the brazier. There was a little metal shovel to stir the coals.
He asked for nothing, though now and then he gazed at Maren. He touched the dressing on her chin — a caress that was also a reproach.
Maren had never heard of the Aconcagua.
“It’s a mountain in the Argentine.” He described the vineyards of his childhood watered by the melting snows, the vast grasslands. He spoke of peach trees that grew so quickly they were used for firewood, of the Barletta wheat and how you had to plow not three but six inches deep so that the rockless soil would retain sufficient moisture. I saw Maren’s eyes squint, as in a glare.
He carefully unfolded a map before her, tracing a railroad from Rojas to Mendoza.
You take the Rio Cuarto from Mercedes.
Maren refused to play “The Red Rooster” on his accordion. A pale light shone through the window onto the table where my uncle had placed the copper brazier.
Play Carpani’s “Moonlight.” Once again she shook her head, eyes lowered.
She won’t play for her father!
And why so often then did he say “she”?
Look at her, how she is eating!
Look who she is asking.
He pointed in her science book and laughed: How do you know —?
Well because … and Maren explained. She held the book open before his hands.
You can do all kinds of things, leafing the pages to show him.
I can’t see those blurry lines.
Maren hated math but she knew more chemistry than any of us and this made her proud; she spoke hurriedly.
Paolo said she was “showing off.”
He touched the side of her plate: Your mind is elsewhere.
“Thank you!” In the midst of his words, her mind was elsewhere. She was wearing a light blouse that my mother had given her, full at the wrists.
I could tell by Paolo’s composed expression that he had something to tell us and now he spoke: Today I lost my job on the railroad. My eyesight is going.
Do you hear me, he repeated, Do you hear me? He had the yellow accordion on his lap, still buttoned, and at his elbow on the table the copper brazier that glowed dully in the late afternoon light.
My parents rose from their chairs. My father placed the science book before him: Show us.
I turn my head to the side, he said, I can read fine. I look straight at the page, all I see are blurred lines.
I didn’t believe the shy, faraway smile in his voice. I was sure it was another trick of some kind, something to do with money.
Anna Esposito. When I think of that name, my mind wanders. Nine years old, she was the only girl left on the school field. A late afternoon under a cloudy sky, long shadows on the field. In order to keep her attention, but to show that she would not be let in our game, we made up names for ourselves.
Vince Berutchi called himself Ochi.
Peter Alfi; Scusso.
I was called Tulip.
The game went faster and faster; we played without looking at her. That was on the school playground, under a cloudy sky in 196_.
Anna called out, Who is looking at you?
You’re looking at us, I said.
I’m not looking at you.
Then who is?
Tulip is looking at you.
What’s your name, Vince asked.
Tulip! she said, and I felt singled out by the laughter of my two friends.
While her influence over us grew, she remained quiet. Even our words sounded blurred; we talked too fast. I remember her standing at the edge of the school field, always with that mocking flicker that never left the corners of her mouth. Her wide, quiet eyes reminded me of a salamander’s. Now she had a worried look as she twisted a finger in a lock of hair behind her ear.
Come with me. Tulip wants to talk to you, she said. I followed her off the field, to stand by the playground swings.
I went over to the Giacomo house today, she said, to look for Maren. Paolo was in the kitchen talking to the land buyers and I was on the porch. I heard him say he’d sell the house, that he’s going back to the Aconcagua with his daughter.
The swing chains were creaking in the wind that came up from the river. The seats cut from truck tires turned and weaved like driftwood under the bridge.
Yes, she said. But Paolo told her he’s not going anywhere. You gave me the Giacomo house, he says, and we’re staying.
6
A few months passed and though I watched Paolo carefully nothing seemed to change. Maren continued to live with us, and once I asked her about my uncle’s intentions. She shrugged, said that he was looking for work in town, which meant they were staying. Still she looked confused and uncertain, as if not sure of what he’d do next.
Then that fall Manice lost her house. It was around the day my father took the ferry across the river for winter firewood. He carried his two axes, his chainsaw and gasoline can to the landing, early enough so that the Cancelled Sailing sign hung on the padlocked gate wouldn’t bother anyone. We were going for cedar on the other side, burnt-out spires from the 1930 fire that had leapt the river, burned lower town.
I don’t see how it could have happened. I look at the river, wide with the colour of a sky massed with snow — and I say, How did the fire cross?
There used to be a shake mill in the cedar grove on that side, I remember my father saying. In the summer of 1930 a fire started in the slash near the mill. It was so small no one paid any attention. The village was more worried about the forest fires to the south, which had filled the valley with a haze that turned the sun blood-red. One afternoon the wind picked up. Within minutes the fire had spread from the slash into the mill yard. Wind-driven, it roared from the storage sheds to the mill, and it flung burning shakes like handfuls of leaves across the river into lower town.
Anna and I left my father in the pilothouse. We ran from bow to stern, coats flapping in the unusually warm wind. Anna high-stepped as she ran, to make the clop of a horse’s hooves on the deck.
The ferry landed, my father walked into the cedar hollow. Anna and I climbed through nostra nonna’s orchards to clean out the Pradolini house for the golondrinas who would arrive later in the day. I found a broom to sweep the leaves from the porch; we carried out a kitchen table that had collapsed on its legs and boxes of newspaper and wine bottles from the cellar. In the yard by a chestnut tree was a bathtub of tea-coloured water, streaks of rust on the chipped enamel rim. We played that game Anna liked, travelling from room to room on the counters, abandoned bedframes, and furniture without touching the floor. Anna loved to climb. She was sent into the crowns of the old chestnut trees, to knock down clusters with her willow wand. My uncle would guide her down with his shouts.
The Orchard Keepers Page 6