The Orchard Keepers

by Robert Pepper-Smith

  The yard engine was pushing box cars together: the clang of the warning bell as the engine backed down the track, the metallic echo as the box cars engaged. Hand in hand they walked down the alley. She wondered if she would see the slater again. Not all the cedar wood fences were as high as hers, and she compared gardens, looking for something new: today a child’s wading pool, the evening sky reflected on its surface. Passed the bowling alley, then boarded up, turned by the King Edward Hotel.

  She and Anna went to rest in a park by the tracks. A strong light was spreading across the snowfields, high on the mountain behind the train sheds. She watched Anna hop over the tracks, to a young boy who was sucking water from a squirt gun handle. That was the Butucci boy. He was five or six.

  Anna said to him, bent over, If you eat seeds and swallow lots of water, a garden will plant in your bones.

  The children had walked beyond the tracks to the station platform. And there he was again, a figure on the platform. She remembered when he’d got a job painting the station. That was the last day she saw him, over forty years ago. He’d come banging through the screen door with two paint tins hidden in burlap sacks the train crews used to wipe down the engines. Isn’t it a pretty yellow? He pried the lid from a tin of station paint. He went into their house. He started moving the little furniture they had in those days into the centre of the room. The walls were a dull whitewash they’d lived with for over a year. When they could no longer see how the paint was going on, they laid down the brushes and went to sit on the porch to drink wine, passing the cup back and forth. It was an unusually warm evening — like early summer. He cupped his hand on her belly, waiting for the kick of their second child. She heard the wail of the D. Street Mill calling the night shift to work. The alley gate had been left ajar. From the porch steps, they could see the Community Centre, all lit up. Women in groups of two or three were strolling by the gate, to follow a snow path to the Gioco De Lotto at the Centre. The air was still, and as they passed beneath chestnut trees, shadows streamed down their fine cotton coats. How elaborate their hair had been done up for the Lotto. There were no men. The men were in the bars or working.

  Some women had stopped at the gate.

  I’ve found work, Albert said.

  Give us your luck, they said arm in arm, laughing. Come and touch our cards with your luck.

  He had the fine nervous gestures of a small man trying to make room for himself and she was not used to them yet. She took his head in her hands, held him in her gaze, seeing him again for the first time. Such a fine lovely man she’d breathed then.

  From the park bench, she watched Anna and the Butucci boy pass below a lone figure on the station platform and disappear into a hollow near the train sheds. She stood to follow, to see where they were going. The fading light was turning the gravel between the tracks a deep blue. There were so many rails, narrowing and confusing her steps but the pleasing colour of the gravel and the figure on the platform drew her on. She heard the warning bell of a yard engine backing down the line, but paid no attention. The strong vibration at her feet told her something she was too tired to understand.

  Earlier that evening the Burton police had called to say her grandchildren had been found in a cattle car.

  Now there was a man crouched near the platform. When he looked up at her, she bent to touch the yellow streak on his lip.

  In the end, she tells the ruotaro, I’ve not been able to escape you.

  I’ve not been able to keep anything.

  10

  Two nights after we got back from Burton, I was standing on the castle’s porch roof. I was watching the procession led by my uncle’s tractor with its aircraft landing lights. All the village cars and trucks were lining the dirt runway south of the village. My cousin Anna, ill with appendicitis, had to be flown to the hospital in Naramata. The cars and trucks were shining their headlights on the dirt runway, so that Bennello could see where to land.

  I saw a fire across the river near the railroad bridge. First my aunt’s house, then the Giacomo house — and now the Pradolini house had been torched by the Hydro. Through my father’s binoculars, I could see Manice’s and Anna’s belongings heaped under the the orchard trees beyond the garden and the yard. In the yard stood one of the earthmoving machines. It would wait till the house collapsed and then push the remains into the cellar.

  Behind me I could hear Maren draw the curtains in the laundry room. Since we’d been brought home she stayed mostly in her room. Once she told me that she didn’t leave her room because she didn’t know what to do anymore, and that she was waiting for Paolo to take her away.

  Earlier that night, the night of the Pradolini fire, my father had come over to my bed. “Anna’s not feeling well.” I’d felt the grip of his hand on my ankle to awaken me. He was wearing his ferryman’s uniform: the grey pants with the black stripe, the blue jacket with the provincial crest on the shoulders, a cap with a peaked visor.

  Do you want to come?

  I shook my head.

  Better, he smiled.

  I had gotten out of bed to watch him polish his shoes in the foyer, a few nervous passes of the cloth. Nonna is downstairs my father reminded me — as he always did when he knew Maren and I would be alone. “If Paolo calls, you get him to speak to her.”

  My mother was going with him: “Anna has a high fever.”

  I could hear a shower drumming on the metal roof. I knew that Nonna was downstairs, but each time they went out at night my parents told me this.

  Now and then people called after hours from the other side of the river.

  If my father knew them he couldn’t refuse. “They wait for me. How can I sleep?”

  Usually he was in bed by ten o’clock. I could hear the radio, a reassuring murmur and no light from under their door.

  A call about Anna had come from the Pradolini house after midnight. It sent out a stillness into which we awoke, listening. My father got out of bed to answer.

  Never once did I see him angry at an after-hours call.

  Though once he refused to start up the ferry.

  Sleep in your government car, he shouted to the agents who, on the other side of the river, were sent to demand the Pradolini house.

  I was watching the cars and tractors on the flats south of the village. With their headlights on, all the cars and trucks from our village were driving onto the southern flats; the brightest were the aircraft landing lights on my uncle’s tractor that he used to hunt deer at night on the Georgia Bench. Overcast sky, no stars. From above the low drone of an airplane. Bennello dropped through the clouds, circled overhead, then skipped onto the lit-up runway.

  Anna was so ill that she needed to be flown out. And across the river I could see the Pradolini house on fire, flames lifting in the windows and in the eaves. Panic in my throat, I climbed through the window into the kitchen.

  I rapped on the curtained laundry room window. When Maren opened her door I said, We have to stop that machine across the river. Who is next?

  She helped me to find an old pair of work boots in the foyer, gardening gloves, a torn pair of my father’s pants bagged for the Salvation Army, a plaid shirt from the back of the closet, our grandfather’s cloth cap from the cellar.

  We have to disguise you, she said. In case you’re noticed.

  To make the boots fit, I stuffed newspaper in the toes.

  I won’t go with you. She knelt to roll the pant legs past my ankles. Two they’ll notice for sure.

  I looked down at her. No one in those days would have called my cousin Maren beautiful: she had Roca D’Avola features, the look of a peasant girl from southern Italy. and when Mrs. Canetti stopped her on the street of the grandmothers to comment on her looks, she’d say, From Roca, and laugh because Maren’s bushy eyebrows, her widespread eyes and the shape of her mouth made it easy to see where she was from.

  Last night Paolo had tried to come for her. Through the laundry room window, we could hear my uncle’s voice on the por
ch below. I no longer have the Giacomo house, he bargained with our grandmother. You give me money for the Aconcagua and maybe she can stay.

  Nothing more from me! our grandmother shouted at him. You want to take her away from me in my hour of prayer! She must have pushed him, because we heard his boot stumbling down the steps. Go away from here!

  In our kitchen I filled a sandwich bag with sugar. For the earthmoving machine outside the Pradolini house. Maren was waiting by the foyer door. When I went up to her she smiled, touched my cheek. I felt then such a deep sadness and anger, not only at the way I’d betrayed her at the doctor’s, but at the way our orchards had been felled, the way our houses had been strewn with diesel and torched or trucked away like toys, that I sank onto the foyer bench. I felt her warm breath on my lips then, the slightest brush of a kiss: You have to go.

  I wanted to ask for her forgiveness but I couldn’t find the words.

  They’ll be back soon, she said. You have to go now, and she pulled me to my feet.

  Walking down the street of the grandmothers to the railroad bridge, I pretend that everything I see is already gone.

  Pretend that everything is lost, nostra nonna urges us.

  Only then will you see the true face of things.

  I take off my boots to feel my way along the cedar catwalk on the bridge. For luck, I touch the sugar bag in my pocket. Up here the river’s breath feels cool; the bridge smells of creosote and old steel.

  What was that sound?

  A nighthawk, I imagine Maren telling me. So close, a sudden whir in my ear.

  I hear my grandmother murmuring:

  Not egg the lemon

  The lemon is not an egg

  There are those who uproot and those who plant

  There are those who plant and those who uproot

  Below me, the river shimmers like a dragonfly wing; its own breath a mist that hovers over the sandbar and on the village flats where all the trucks and cars are lined up.

  In the foyer, Maren had led me to the door, her warm breath heavy on my lips.

  Hurry, she’d said. Some things needed the two of us to find them; we two are the reason they’re felt.

  Above me, the creosoted ties, steel rails. On the catwalk I was halfway across the river. Already I could feel the heat of the Pradolini fire as I walked toward it. One by one I saw the village houses, shimmering like breath. I heard popping windows, the fire’s roar in the Pradolini eaves. I saw the gleaming blade of the earthmoving machine raised high in the trees. It had to be stopped before it pushed in the house of someone else that I knew or loved. Behind me in the shadows on the castle’s porch, the scarred chin, gentle green eyes: Sometimes I feel I shouldn’t be alive.

  Not that many years ago there was an unusually dry winter in this valley. Hardly any snow dusted the mountain forests, and in summer the reservoir retreated to the clear river channels. To prevent dust storms, the Hydro seeded the valley bottom with fall rye, and I walked out in the green fields between the river channels to find the village foundations. Here you can see the foundations of the Giacomo café, there the crumbling, silted walls of “the castle.” It’s all there and in memory I trace the streets, the gravel river road, lines in my palm. I only see Anna or Maren now and then, at weddings or funerals.

  This summer I saw Maren at her own wedding feast. She’d married one of the Fuscaldo brothers. I remember the boys of the Fuscaldo family, they were so polite and wanting to please. By the end of the wedding feast the father had tucked his chin to his chest, asleep, almost drunk. But it was the sons, the three of them who kept up the chatter at the wedding table for the girl who had married the youngest. And you could see where she was from, in the shape of her face and lips. Maren stood tall above her seated husband though she was no taller than a girl, her slender arms covered with freckles, and on her wrist she wore the bracelet her young husband had given her, a thick band of gold. She wore it as though it were a leaf that had fallen on her wrist and that she’d tied there with a strand of her own hair, some girlish game she’d forgotten, so that the leafy wrist went up and down in the conversation, knocking wine glasses on the table as she reached in her laughing for some plate to pass among the boisterous brothers.

  The girls the two older brothers had with them were as polite as they were. They didn’t laugh boldly with their mouth open. If they laughed at your teasing or your jokes it wasn’t laughter at all and they weren’t going to lean half over the table to pass you some plate you wanted, not at all the kind to get out of their chairs and display themselves like that, with that gold bracelet negligently banging around things.

  Then she calmed the Fuscaldo boys with a Roca D’Avola song. She sang a few words at the end of the wedding table and they sat listening, quiet in their chairs, astonished looks on their faces: where did that come from, that song, and they felt the thrill of it growing on them in their chests.

  My son and I were sitting at the far end of the table. His mother and I no longer live together, though in writing this I imagine I’m trying to keep her near.

  What we don’t forget is like distant music. It stays with us, a song in the air to thaw pain. The valley bottom is no longer the place of certain words that have abandoned us. I offer this signo to our children; may it guide them under the tongue.

  HOUSE OF SPELLS

  I get paid to watch mountains and forests. From the fire lookout on Palliser Mountain I’ve memorized the peaks, the avalanche tracks, the bends in the river below, the logging roads and cut lines. When anything looks different I see it.

  The tower cabin is a standard one-room with a seven-foot ceiling and four walls of four-foot-tall windows, no curtains, the chrome-legged kitchen table and chairs under the east window. My bed is under the south window and my books line the north sill. In the west corner, a sink and a small counter with a bar fridge under it, run on propane. Only the fire finder, a circular table with a topographical map and two sighting apertures, stands above the sills.

  I go outside to place my pots of basil on the catwalk banister, watch clouds build over the eastern ridge, beyond the outhouse and the patch of grass the Forest Service calls a garden. Below I can see three horses at the foot of the mountain, a grey and two buckskins, the ones Mr. Giacomo lost earlier this summer.

  Sometimes in that morning light an avalanche track can look like a column of smoke. Golden conifer pollen drifts over the Slocan gorge, wisps of river fog rise off the hidden bend of the Palliser. Low clouds blow up over the eastern ridge like water flowing uphill.

  Now that I’m alone, memories float in and out of my mind. I’ve assisted my mother at two births, one in the spring of 1969, the other this year. Mrs. Giacomo’s was the first birth. Her son was born blue, couldn’t be made to breathe. While my mother tried for a long time, her mouth over the baby’s nose and mouth, I held Mrs. Giacomo’s cold hand and she turned to the wall.

  I remember the baby’s puckered, bruised eyes, glued shut with a sticky film and its limp, tiny hands. Finally Mrs. Giacomo reached for her child, to take it out of my mother’s arms. She could see there was no hope. She took it under the blankets next to her chest and then she drew the blanket over her head.

  Even though I was only sixteen years old, I couldn’t leave her there alone. I crawled under the blanket to rest my head against her shoulder, and my arms around her felt so weak and useless. She felt like she was covered in ashes. Over her shoulder I could see the face of the still one in her arms. His tiny brow looked puzzled at not entering the living world. His limp hands were delicate, hollow-boned and the skin at his temples pale blue.

  Later Mrs. Giacomo would blame my mother for the child’s death. She would say that my mother had not done enough. That was the end of a long friendship.

  Then this year Rose’s child was born; I was there too.

  My name is Lacey Wells and I’ve got a lot to tell you. I know who the father of Rose’s baby is. His name is Michael Guzzo. He left last winter before Rose knew she was pr
egnant, when the Odin Mill shut down because of the snows. He left to travel in Central America.

  I know why Mr. Giacomo wants Rose’s baby and why he can’t have him. And I want to make sure none of this is forgotten.

  1

  One night in the winter of ’68, over a year before Mrs. Giacomo lost her baby, Rose wanted to see if there was ice on Olebar Lake. She liked to skate and she was waiting for the lake to skin over. She knocked at my window, and we rode bikes in the dark through falling snow to a beach that was packed with fishing huts.

  We’d met the summer before, picking fruit in the Butucci orchards. The Portuguese Alberto Braz would get us up at 5 AM, hammering at the bunkhouse door. He would drive us into the orchards in the back of his truck, the bed bumping and jarring on the potholed road with a grassy hump up the middle of it and Rose curled up and still trying to sleep, head in her arms on one side of the truck bed. He would really yell at us when we left ripe fruit in the branches that we missed or that was too hard to reach. Sometimes when he wasn’t around, we played soccer on the river road, using a hard green peach for a ball.

  Now we rode bikes in the dark to Olebar Lake. Onshore, Rose knelt to put her hand in the ripplets that were washing through the beach gravel. Surprised, she said the water was warm. I’d heard that there were hot springs in the lake bottom, and that sometimes, on nights like this, warm water was pushed ashore by the wind.

  She went out wading, trailing her hands, the snow driving in around her.

  I took off my boots and rolled up my pants to follow, the lap-lap of water that smelled of fish around my knees, groping over stones with my toes. Skin ice was splintering way out, but near the shore the lake was quivering like a mirror that had nothing to reflect. Hissing snow was drawing over it in wide curtains.

  “Let’s go out as far as we can,” I heard Rose say, laughing. “This water is as warm as a bath. I want to dive in!”