Now, climbing over a bedframe, she asked me, What are we going to do to help Maren?
She’s not going anywhere, I insisted, though I was surprised at the hollow feeling in my chest that now, many years later, I recognize as a love I would not admit to myself.
Do you trust Paolo?
No, I said. He only says what he thinks you want to hear.
And in my confusion over what felt like a sudden breath of fire in my chest, I could not think of what to do.
That afternoon the golondrinas moved into the Pradolini house. For the harvest they crossed the river at dawn, on a catwalk under the railroad bridge. After the last ferry run, they’d use the same catwalk to return to this house. Because she was worried that one of them might fall in the river, my mother gave them watered wine at supper — late supper at dusk at tables of planks and sawhorses under the trees outside the vineyard gate. They ate, drank, carried hurricane lanterns over the river. The Calabrianne was among them. I remember her vigorous strong face, the tight braid of grey hair at her nape, the way she laughed when, under the peach trees where nonna had spread a black dress for me to lie down on, she’d heard of the shoe I’d pushed out the car window.
Sometimes my father offered a ride on the ferry which, out of politeness and deference, the golondrinas refused. Sometimes ten or twelve lived in the old Pradolini house, workers nonna had hired for the harvest. While they ate supper at the plank tables I would listen to their Québécois French, their Italian and Portuguese. Once I heard the Calabrianne sing in her high plaintive voice:
Blessed virgin
I met a man and a woman
bound in a ball of yarn
water flow thaw pain
Later at night from my bed I saw lanterns on the railroad bridge.
The river brought their voices that I heard clearly without understanding, voices brought close with a ringing and an echo in them like the sound of a bell way down the valley or up the mountain.
That autumn, the autumn of 196_, the Hydro took Manice’s orchard at the south end of the valley and bulldozed the house into its cellar. Beneath her orchard the hillside was gouged into levees for the new reservoir. The earthmoving machines had cut terraces to her fences. Though she was paid valley prices for her land, the word we used was “taken.”
After a rainstorm, I remember watching her peach trees sway and tremble as though trying to walk. At first I thought they were wading through the earth till I saw that the earth was moving with them, yawing in deep cracks to the pit below.
My uncle had brought out the madonna to stop this, a little blue doll with chipped fingers. He carried her among the half-buried trees. I remember the silence — all the birds, terrified, had fled. He placed her in the branches of a young apricot tree, reasoning that at least to save herself, she would not let any more trees go over. Among the apricot leaves her eyes were the colour of fir pitch. When you tapped her side she sounded hollow. We could feel the low murmur of the earth and how Manice’s house had begun to tremble; you could hear stones falling from the cellar walls.
Terrified, Anna climbed into a chestnut tree near the house. High in the branches, she clung to the swaying trunk. My uncle had to climb after her to bring her down.
Why did you sign? Why didn’t you make up an excuse? Why didn’t you say you couldn’t write or that you hurt your wrist! screamed my uncle.
Manice held out the court order the land buyer had brought: my uncle snatched it from her to read that she had to be out within a week.
The day Manice moved to the Pradolini house, we crossed the river to help. Ears white with calamine lotion, Anna took my father by the wrist to show him her garden, a small fenced garden with a magnolia tree in it that smelled of warmed olive oil. She said she didn’t want to move to the Pradolini house, the house of the golondrinas.
Where will we go from there? she wanted to know.
When my father had nothing to say, he wore a kindly expression to mask his worry and lack of knowledge. A wind was flowing down the banks among Manice’s orchards, carrying the smell of the warmed land at dusk. All the lights in Manice’s house were off, and a lot of the furniture was heaped on the porch. Nighthawks, diving over the river, made a hissing sound with their wings.
Nighthawks he said, to take Anna’s mind off the house of the golondrinas, the house she was going to move into. They hunt by sound!
Anna went to bicycle around the house that was to be burned down, and she sang:
I don’t want to go.
Me and my sister don’t want to go!
Anna’s words touched a worry that I’d been living with for months: that it was only a matter of time before Maren, too — like this house — would vanish. That what she or I wanted, even if it was not yet clear to us, didn’t matter.
Stones falling from the cellar walls made the hollow clop of a horse’s hooves. Anna rode swinging a rope through the dangling clouds of mosquitoes till she came into the porch-light flushed, licking the salt on her arms. Sand crusted under her nose as she drank water from a baby food jar — all the glasses were packed.
Let’s run away together, she said to me, then went to sit on the porch to pulp some berries, a lavender hand trail dotted with seeds. “We used to make money from these.”
Anna what are you doing?
Turning on the lights.
No, not in the middle of the evening, Manice said softly from the porch table. Anna don’t interrupt us. Go play now.
I remember my Aunt’s pale, anxious expression, the way my father knelt on the steps to listen.
Go play now.
One light off and one light on, Anna said in the kitchen, turning on the light over the stove, the alcove light.
I’m the ruotaro, she said brightly, watching her mother. I’ve come to take all the people who are never home for supper.
As long as we’re here, I said, the machines stay away.
Today, many years later, I remember how things would go. First the drivers of the earthmoving machines would splash the house walls with diesel fuel to set them on fire. Then they would use their machines to push the smoldering wood and stone into the cellar and blade it over with earth. They were powerful, those Hydro people. They had machines that tremored the earth under your feet, a schedule of things to do that took all the light of recognition out of their eyes.
I remember the land buyer at the kitchen table, tugging at his cuff-linked sleeves to straighten them, the flash of the tiny gold links over the court order. He talked of land values in the valley, of what land like Manice’s had gone for in St. Leon and in Renata. And when Manice asked where she’d find orchard land elsewhere for his price, he smiled, spread his hands to say, That’s for you to decide. We’ve bought from others you know: Beruski’s store, the Giacomo house. He walked through the house, measuring rooms; he counted the trees in her orchard; he saw money in all that, underwater.
That autumn, after she moved into the Pradolini house, Anna started school in late September. Lost in the hallway, she wandered into our class.
I pretended I didn’t know her. I was afraid she would shame me.
Isn’t that your cousin?
I shook my head, bent over my desk, gazing at the wood grain till I became absorbed in it, all forehead. Dimly I could hear their laughter. Others had turned in their seats to say, Don’t look at us!
Anna stared at people. Lost in looking, my father called it, or gathering wool.
What is your name? asked the teacher Mogliani.
Mumbled words.
Speak up child, what is your name!
An-na es-pisi-to!
General laughter; to hide her face in her hair, she lowered her head. Our teacher took her by the hand to the office.
When he returned, he wrote on the board:
figlia della madonna
He told us of the famous wheel of Naples, through which many, many children were passed. I remember his words: And what were these children named?
Inn
ocenti. Esposito.
Our teacher Mogliani was from Naples. He told us how lucky we were, that almost all of the infants who went through the wheels of Italy died in the first year, many thousands of them.
You are as rich as kings, he said.
Rich because alive? When people say things like that to you, you don’t know where you are. Many laughed. We knew most of what we had was to be taken by the Hydro.
I never knew when one of the cousins would show up in a way unconnected with my life. By appearing in our class doorway, Anna had singled me out for ridicule. I can still hear the mocking laughter of my classmates who saw my unwillingness to acknowledge her. She was four years younger and I didn’t want to see her in school. I felt she was from a different life, that she didn’t belong there.
That day after school I saw her crouched in the alley behind the Community Centre. With a stick in her hand, she was prodding thoughtfully at a grey cat under the Centre’s fire stairs. In shadow, the cat glared at her, its tail twitching. She didn’t look at me even when I crouched beside her.
You can come with me to nonna’s I said.
They all laugh at me!
Not if I’m with you, I promised.
7
I awoke before dawn for the festa campestra.
My mother was making coffee at the gas stove under the narrow alley window. From my bed by the stove we called “the iron monster,” I watched my mother make coffee before she left to deliver the bread by cart horse in the street of the grandmothers.
Uncle Paolo is ashamed, I said.
Yes, she nodded.
In our village, when a man for some unknown reason didn’t show up for work, we would say he was “ashamed.” Now that he’d lost his job on the railroad, Paolo delivered bread by carthorse in the village alleys. She’d seen his dogs outside the King Edward Hotel, where he drank at night. She delivered the bread when Paolo was ashamed, in order to make money to buy land in Westbank.
I must have slept through the baker’s call. I stayed in bed, half-awake and through the open window I could hear the whistle of the yard engine as it put together cattle cars for St. Leon.
The Sentinella was in the roundhouse. My uncle used to take the Sentinella to St. Leon, for the zucca melons.
From the river I also heard the whistle of my father’s ferry that announced the first morning trip from the far shore.
There was a ringing in my ears, like a voice in a tin pot when someone dies. I sensed that my cousin Maren was still in her room. I had awakened from a dream, the print of her kiss on my lips. And the music: the distant wail of an accordion in the orchards under the mountain, a ribbon of her tone that, lifted from the vineyards and the orchard floors, brings the odour of dusty leaves and ripe fruit. With the imprint of her kiss on my mouth and the taste of cinnamon, I draw the sheet over my head.
I struggle against the odours of wax and bread, of violets and horse dung.
I feel my mother’s hand burrow under the sheet to find my shoulder, my cheek that she touches with her fingers that smell of coffee.
Paolo is ashamed.
I see his two dogs outside the doors of the King Edward Hotel where he drinks at night.
The warm fingers that touch my cheek make the kiss vanish.
I heard my mother leave through the backdoor in the laundry room to pick violets in the garden, to tie to the horse’s halter before she harnessed it to the bread wagon.
The last time Paolo was ashamed, I’d helped my mother package the bread in wax paper that you folded around the loaves and then there was a machine in the bakery to seal the ends with heat. It left wax on my hands so that they gleamed as though polished as we loaded the bread crates into the wagon. We went down the alleys early in the morning, when the air was heavy with the smell of dew from the mountain, heavy and still.
My mother wore a broad-rimmed hat of plaited straw.
She would bring the horse to a halt by drawing her hands together, or turn it up the alley by drawing the rein gently along the neck. Once she said, Would you like to learn music?
In exchange for our looking after Maren, my uncle had offered accordion lessons.
I’d heard him play during the first night of the festa. Outside the Giacomo house, I’d heard him play “The Rooster.”
To save our condemned village, the St. Leon fishermen had brought a fishing scow upriver, their papier mâché San Calogero with its great almond eyes at the bow. At the head of the procession walked the Calabrianne. As she walked by the Giacomo house, Paolo struck up “The Rooster.” He was sitting in his second-storey window, lit up by a lamp at the far wall.
For her, he played “The Rooster.”
The paper San Calogero followed behind on its bed of grape leaves, a mantle flung over its stiff, outstretched arms.
The Calabrianne smiled as she passed under the music, and she made a dance step. Then she returned to her solemn posture, and the coil of knotted hair at her nape no longer trembled.
I went out to decorate the Butucci orchards. A withered apricot struck between my shoulder blades, and I knew that Maren and Anna were in the trees. A warm breath stirred around the trunks, with its odour of leather and rope. Now and then, far off in the alleys, I could hear the voice of my uncle’s accordion. I heard Maren’s laughter in the crown of the trees, a track of gleaming prints that vanished. Nonna was at the trestle tables, where women were spreading the gnocchi, the braided bread. She came over to touch my forehead:
You’ve a fever!
Once again I felt the press of Maren’s dream kiss on my lips. My worry that she would vanish had turned to an icy feeling that flowed through my veins and made my legs tremble.
Nonna made me sit in the grass beneath an apricot tree. From another table came the Calabrianne. She opened a blanket that smelled of smoke from the barbecue pits for me to sit on. Her breath tasted of the young wine they were pouring at the trestle tables.
Are you staying for the dance?
In the long hours before the dance the Calabrianne wore a Calabrian dress embroidered at the chest. She spoke to Nonna in Italian I couldn’t understand. She said she was one of the golondrinas.
That bird, the insect eater that you often saw on the river at dusk, skimmed the water and dipped to drink. I had never touched one and now I touched her inner elbow. I had often caught the finches we called the grapeaters, to toss them high over the nets. How could she be one of those birds?
Will your mother dance?
Paolo is ashamed, I said. My mother would have to deliver the bread and help the baker later in the day. Maybe she’ll be too tired to dance.
Even now I’m not sure of her name but we called her the Calabrianne.
I’d climbed into an apricot tree to tie festa streamers in the crown. In branches and leaves that were coated with dust from the new reservoir, I’d fallen asleep and dreamt of the wail of the Sentinella on the mountain, of Maren leaving on that train, her hand slipping out of mine.
You come down out of that tree, our grandmother called. You forgot to drink, she said, touching my forehead. Why do you look so worried? Go home to bed. Fell asleep! What if you’d fallen? Nonna stood at the trunk. She pressed a wet cloth to my lips.
Go to bed.
On the street of the grandmothers I kept under the chestnut boughs, by surveyors’ ribbons that marked trunks to be cut down for the new dam. Were it not for the weight of my hands and eyelids, and that of the strange buzzing in my ears threaded by the voice of my uncle’s zerocetti, I felt I’d float away, vanish over the high-beaked snowplows by the roundhouse. While I climbed the steps in the castle to our apartment, the voice of my uncle’s yellow zerocetti grew stronger.
I’ll teach you to play.
I didn’t like the accordion’s harsh unpleasant voice, tuned sharp for the sake of brilliance. He left it on the kitchen table, to lead me outside by the wrist. We sat on the wellhead. He smelled of the cement he’d mixed to cap the village graves. Now that he no longer work
ed for the railroad, he’d also taken the job of cementing over the village graves. He’d made a plank keyboard, with whittled hollows for the bass buttons. The plank between knee and chin, this one up and this one down he said, tapping his fingers on the wood.
You try.
I could tell that he didn’t want to teach me. He spoke in a low voice about the vineyards of his childhood, the ox skulls that were used for chairs in the workers’ huts, of ox carts whose wheels were solid wooden discs as tall as a man.
Do you think Maren will come to the Aconcagua? The worry in his slumped shoulders and the fear in his glance made me draw away from him.
She wants to stay here, uncle.
With his thumb, he was rubbing the dried concrete from his palm.
Is the zerocetti grey or is it yellow?
Everyone knows it’s yellow.
One of my eyes says grey, he said. The other yellow. You tell my daughter that.
Why?
I need her to go to the Aconcagua with me. To see the place where I was born.
You tell her, I said.
Anna danced before me like a cat. For the festa she was wearing one of Nonna’s dresses from the cellar that smelled of coal dust and cedar. She had a dark green streak of church door paint on her hand.
Who’s behind me? Anna asked.
In Maren’s room the yellow zerocetti cleared its throat. I could smell its bellows of strong manila cardboard and its soft leather gussets. It was dusk. My parents were still in the orchards.
Go on, Anna said, look through me.
In the laundry room doorway, she danced before me like a cat. I felt the low bass chords in my chest and in my fingertips, and I could smell Maren’s odour of cinnamon.
Try to go through me, she said.
Anna wore my mother’s lipstick on her bright, fixed smile and mascara smudged under her eyes. When I went to touch her she was not there and then she was. “He wants to take her to the Aconcagua.” When I pushed through, I heard her whisper, She doesn’t want to go.
The Orchard Keepers Page 7