The Orchard Keepers

by Robert Pepper-Smith

  My father called this taxi “the boat.”

  “I’m taking you to the train in a boat!” he said. He didn’t want to say, I’m taking you to the train in Johnny’s taxi. I could feel he didn’t want to acknowledge a debt to Mr. Giacomo, however small.

  That 1964 Chevrolet convertible felt like a river scow, solid and slow. Now my father was turning up 2nd Street towards the tracks, taking the hill in a wide arc, hands climbing on the wheel as he leaned to the left to make the car more stable.

  We passed by high-peaked houses with darkened verandas. I knew who lived in those 2nd Street houses, in every one. The Camozzis and the Sandezs, the Staglianos and the one-armed yard worker Danny Ote. I knew their lives, their memories; I’d known them for as long as I could remember. I felt held by those memories, held where I belonged. In our village, I knew I’d be cared for when the time came for me to be cared for. That’s what Rose didn’t have, and that’s what she was looking for, I felt, starting with that baby in her arms.

  I’d always felt that Mr. Giacomo didn’t have the sense of being welcome in our village either, though he and his wife have lived here for many years. It’s hard to say how I knew this. Then I realized many people in the village shared my feeling: there was a wary deference in the way people chatted with him in the street or in his café. Everyone called him Mr. Giacomo.

  While Rose went into the lit-up station to buy tickets, my father carried her suitcases to the platform. I saw her under the yellow light of the station’s tall windows, walking to the double doors that let out a vapour when they opened. I could hear the squeak of her suede boots in the new snow while she tried to walk in a normal, unaffected way. Carrying the newborn wrapped in a blanket, she stumbled once, tripped over her own feet.

  My father gave me a twenty dollar bill. “Sweetheart, you look after her,” he said. “Help her get settled.” He wrote our phone number under the chin of the queen as if he thought that, once out of town, I’d never be able to remember it, then folded the bill twice before my eyes and drew my sleepy, half-frozen fingers out of my coat sleeve to close them over the folded bill.

  All the anger and fear that I’d seen in his eyes when he’d found Mr. Giacomo in our house had faded. “You’re right to get away,” he’d told Rose in the car. “Mr. Giacomo isn’t one to give up. Stubborn as a mule in the beginning, but he spoils everything he touches.” Then he asked me to go with her, to help her get settled.

  Now he said, “Call me from Field.” He was such a quiet man; usually he hardly said anything.

  Soon after the Giacomo baby’s death, my mother told me that she didn’t know what to do with herself. All the joy had gone out of her work. Standing there on the platform, I felt her entire desolation. I understood then that trying to replace that lost baby with Rose’s wouldn’t heal my mother. I was torn between going with Rose or going home to her. You can never tell how much you really matter. The kind of difference you make.

  My father, watching Rose return from the station, said, “You have to go with her.” He must have sensed my hesitation.

  Carrying that baby, she was hurrying, and she looked at the same time vulnerable and alone, determined and scared. She took me by the hand down the train corridor. We climbed into a narrow bed behind heavy curtains. I raised the blind to the lit-up platform that was rolling past at a walk, the clacking of the wheels and she on her side. Rose combed her hair while the newborn nursed at her breast. She had a nightshirt for me in a marbled green suitcase, warm from the stove where it had hung drying. Lying beside her I touched the little hollows in the small of her back that were the colour of pips left on raspberry canes after you pick the fruit.

  The bed was narrow, and I felt pushed against the metal wall. The heavy curtain smelled of rug cleaner. Rose’s feet were icy cold on my ankles. She said, “We’re going,” and I could sense her smile in the dark. She was going away to her new life, eighteen years old. People talk about responsibility, being mature, but they don’t know what they’re talking about. Mostly they mean, Do what I tell you. Outside I could see the dawn over the mountains through the flickering snow and when we went over the Palliser Bridge I saw my father’s mill upriver on the bank, snow-covered ice in the shallows.

  Rose handed me her sleeping baby and said, “Walk him a bit for me, won’t you? I need to sleep.”

  I climbed through the curtains with the little one in my arms.

  He hardly weighed more than the winter blanket I’d wrapped him in, and I felt his toes wriggling. I was worried that he might wake up and that I wouldn’t know what to do. So I kept walking in the corridor, afraid that he would cry.

  We were standing on the metal plates between cars and I was watching the mountains through a window opening that had no glass in it. Snow hissed over the face of the mountain. We were slowly climbing out of the valley and I drew the blanket loosely over Sen’s face to keep him warm.

  In the train bed she’d told me she’d decided to call him Sen.

  I felt afraid without knowing why. In the village museum there are school photos from the 1920s: dirty-haired boys with wide, still eyes and girls with prim smiles, all out there in their faces — they had gone on to work in the sawmill or drugstore, marriage, the house on 4th Street, the kids, a trip to Scotland or Italy, piling up experiences like money deposited in a bank. Then a car accident or a heart attack, a funeral and a mossy stone, mostly the usual thing. It all made me feel so tired.

  But maybe a class photo, a bit of a second, was more than enough in any life, if you just paid attention to what you already have in your arms.

  In the winter of 1964, when I was eleven, I sneaked out at night to go ice fishing on Olebar Lake. I took a flashlight and a yew wood reel. I had a mason jar of crayfish in my coat pocket. It was so cold that the ice hummed like a violin string and stars glittered like a thousand miles of mica. Alberto Braz had marked the hole he’d chopped in the ice with a bundle of sticks tied with a ribbon that shimmered in the starlight. It was a long way out there and quiet and once I heard the huff of a moose in the dark firs along the far point. No one else on the lake that night, all the fishing huts closed up. I cleared ice out of the hole with my bare hands; I ran around in circles to attract fish by underwater vibrations. I laid the flashlight down, set my line, and soon I was hauling in trout after trout, little things with a blue and green speckle on their sides and the smell of archival water on them. Soon I had a heaped pile at my side with the ones on the outside beginning to freeze. Hungry, they just kept taking the bait.

  There was no one else out there to see how lucky I was that night.

  I kept looking around for someone to see what was happening.

  And then, all of a sudden, I saw myself and what I had at my feet: way too many, too quickly and without much effort. Looking at the poor little things, I felt my stomach turn. I cleared away the frozen ones, the light had already gone out of their eyes. Five or six in the middle of the stack were still alive. Heartsick, I let them go.

  Now I heard the car door slide open and Rose was standing beside me. To stay awake, I’d rested my forehead against the metal wall. The wind in the window opening was numbing my ears. The forest ran by and clefts in the rock peaks above were just beginning to show. After a while she said, “Give me him, I can’t sleep.”

  When she returned to the sleeping car, I felt the train slow between high, sooty banks. We were climbing into the mountains. I walked through the dining car past linen-covered tables with flower vases bracketed to the wall and on each a peach in a silver bowl. An unripe peach is hard and sounds like an empty wooden box. The skin of a ripe one bunches under your thumb. I was hungry and tucked one under my shirt.

  Then, thinking of Rose, I felt she was in trouble.

  I hurried, almost ran back to our sleeping car.

  I was remembering how in the fall of ’68 Mr. Giacomo had paid us to find his horses that had come down from the alpage. I remembered that in the Slocan Gorge we could smell their grassy br
eath: his two buckskin horses were on the path. I could hear the clop of iron shoes and the suck of heavy shoes in the mud. They were coming down slowly, unsure, because the Palliser Range was buried in snow. In those days Mr. Giacomo was a trail guide, and he often took them into the mountains. They were coming down to their winter stables in the first snow.

  “Lacey,” Rose said then,” it’s Mr. Giacomo’s horses.”

  To let them approach we stood by the path under the pines. I felt a warm muzzle brush my shoulder and arm. On their breath I could smell the sweet range grass that crackled when you walked through it. I could hear snow melting in the bearded moss that hung from the pines. The air had turned warm and it smelled of rain. Suddenly the horses tore away.

  The clouds we’d seen south of there had gathered overhead. Hailstones raked through the pines. Shadows rolled over the mountainside and the air, suddenly cold, smelled like breath out of a well. We heard splintering wood in the trees across the ridge, then thunder heaved the forest floor.

  I ran into the forest to press my forehead against a pine trunk. Whimpering, I locked my arms around the tree. Rose unlaced my fingers one by one.

  “Look at me,” she said, backing down the path, gazing into my wild eyes and holding me steady in her gaze. My hands clutched hers like old roots.

  And now on the train I felt the same way, and I went looking for her.

  When I got to the observation car, I heard Rose talking. She was sitting on the carpeted platform under the glass dome at the rear. Until I was beside them, I couldn’t see that it was Mr. Giacomo she was talking with. He was wearing his sheepskin coat and riding boots. He was in one of those tall, cloth-covered observation chairs, his hands clasped between his knees. He must have walked to the station to get on the train before we did.

  “You belong at home,” he told Rose, adding, “Honey, you’re leaving a good place behind.”

  “You really don’t care about us,” Rose said.

  “What will you do away, in Field?”

  “I’m going to work in a hotel.” Rose looked at him defiantly.

  “But who will look after your baby?”

  Rose handed me the baby and unwrapped the cold omelet that she’d brought. She hurriedly and silently tore it to pieces to give me some. I could see her wrinkled brow and I saw her begin to hesitate.

  So little warmth came through the blanket, it was almost like the baby wasn’t there; a hand floated up to touch my cheek. He reminded me of an owl I’d found on the Palliser road, stunned by a car. I’d covered it with a beach towel to carry it to the gravel shoulder, wings tucked under my arm next to my rib cage so that it couldn’t push them out. Though it was bigger than a cat, it weighed hardly anything, all feathers and hollow bones.

  “We have to keep going,” I told her. “It’s what you wanted, remember?”

  I could see that all her excitement at leaving for a new life was fading, worn away by her fear of being alone. There was a sudden desolation in her eyes. She was wrapping up the pieces of omelet that she’d left untouched, wrapping and unwrapping them as if not sure what to do with the food.

  “Field is too far away,” Mr. Giacomo nodded, watching her fumbling hands and mocking her gently. “Farther than Mrs. Hiraki’s.”

  I hated his know-it-all patience then. He was trying to turn her around, turn her around with his mild confidence, his answers for every problem that she might have.

  He was telling her that she could have the apartment above the Giacomo café and that she could work for him there. “Just a few afternoons a week to get you settled, then we’ll see from there. You can stay with us as long as you like. Lacey here can visit when she wants.”

  “But he can’t have two mothers,” Mr. Giacomo advised her. “Don’t take away his good fortune.”

  He smiled and leaned in to touch my knee, as if to tell me that he was right or maybe to show that I agreed with him. I pulled away, shrank back in my seat.

  “All right,” I heard Rose say. “All right then. I can’t do this on my own. I’m too scared.”

  “Thank you for helping me,” she said to me. “Thank you! We’re going back.”

  When I crawled under the blanket to hold Mrs. Giacomo after her baby died, I felt how icy cold she was, shivering, and now that cold grief flared through me.

  Now, when anyone touches me, I pull away without thinking. Have you ever felt that way? It comes to me like a spark of static electricity, as when you barefoot it across a carpet on a dry morning and touch a door handle.

  In the winter of ’69, a few months after Rose met Michael Guzzo, I saw him in the Starlight Theatre.

  In those days, my mother bought theatre tickets so she could sleep in the theatre. We’d go up the side aisle to where there was hardly anyone and wrap ourselves in blankets. She said she slept best in places where sleep surprised her, in the depot waiting for the bus to Naramata, on trains or in farm trucks returning home after a birth, jarring down the valley roads with a towel bunched on the rocker panel for a pillow, sleeping while the sun climbed over Odin Mountain, a dusty, rosy light flaring over the windshield. She slept a dreamless sleep and she awoke reluctantly, touching her dry lips and rubbing her eyes, looking around in all innocence or startled by where she was. Till all the worries rushed in, she briefly looked young and she had all the mussy-haired sleepiness of a little girl. Then she’d remember the Giacomo baby’s death, but there was a moment or two when she didn’t remember and I imagine the world was as it was, the flare of light on the Illecillewaet snowfields through the truck window, the long face of Cary Grant on the screen, the Palliser Valley orchards spreading by the bus window, and she was momentarily okay.

  One night we were sitting below the prow, a little raised platform in the theatre where the sawmill crew usually sat. Michael Guzzo had come in. My mother was asleep and I watched him take short steps down the aisle, feeling his way in the blinding screen light, turning to look over us. He smelled of cedar sawdust, and the sawmill crew called out as he went past,

  Keep your head down, Guzzo, we can’t see!

  Where’s Rose? someone in the crew called out.

  Is she here?

  He raised an embarrassed hand to brush away their laughter and to shield his eyes.

  Yes, she was here somewhere.

  They were showing North by Northwest and in the light of Mount Rushmore’s face and Cary Grant’s frantic running, I saw Rose reach up to take his hand and I heard her whisper:

  It’s you!

  She took his hand to draw him down, and he put an arm around her to muss her hair.

  I felt jealous then, watching how they sat so close together, and I wondered whether a boy would ever hold me like that.

  How did he go from her life?

  That winter he was only in town to earn money to travel. His uncle Paolo Pradolini, almost blind and no longer able to work, had bought an interest in the Odin Mill. He said he could get Michael a job there. I’d seen Paolo Pradolini now and then in town. He walked the sidewalks peering at you as if he thought he should recognize you in a smile of greeting, but you could tell that he wasn’t sure, that faces were difficult for him. Finally, tired of the effort of recognition, he’d sit at a table outside the Giacomo café and play songs from the Aconcagua in the Argentine on a yellow accordion. Then he would smile.

  He had a daughter my age — Maren was her name. I’d met her the summer I’d first met Rose, working in the Butucci orchards. We worked on a different crew and Maren and I never really became friends, though from a distance I liked her ability to climb and the way she teased the boss Alberto Braz. She tossed green peaches behind him as he walked the orchard floor, then climbed high in a tree before he could turn in his anger and locate the one who had thrown the unripe fruit. Later I heard that she’d run away, and I heard a rumour that she’d burned down the Giacomo house to stop her father from taking her to the Argentine. I never saw her again that summer.

  The mill hired Michael as a family
obligation, though he turned out to be a good worker, reliable, and even when they were cutting edge grain cedar for the Vancouver boatyards, he showed up for work, forearms bandaged because the oil in the dust raised welts on his skin.

  Rose told me that he’d left to travel in Central America before she even knew she was pregnant.

  The mill was going to shut down because of the coming snows, and he couldn’t see sitting out the winter idle. He promised her that he’d be back in the spring, when the boss said they’d be rehiring.

  Why are you going, Rose had asked him. They were sitting together on the narrow, cushioned seat by the linoleum table in his trailer on the Palliser, and she’d drawn away to look at him carefully.

  She could see that this wasn’t the whole truth. There was a sadness in him that she couldn’t touch or hold or lessen, and it confused her.

  He told her that he’d been drifting since his family had lost their land, their village, that he couldn’t find a place to settle down in.

  But you are coming back?

  Yes, he reassured her.

  There was a lake in Central America he wanted to see, in a volcanic crater where the Maya said clouds were born. Once in the Grizzly Bookstore he’d shown me a photo of it: there was a lone fisherman on a shore of pumice stones; bundles of sticks with ribbons tied to them showed against the water, and the sides of the crater, covered in pines, rose steeply all around. He had found this photo in a book at the back of the store, among the secondhand volumes he called train books.

  What’s so special about a lake? I asked him.

  He closed the book then, touched its cover, a childlike, fragile look in his eyes that I felt drawn to.

  Who knows what I’ll find there? he said with a smile.

  A sacred lake that he wanted to see. Have you ever felt that, amazed at what people do? That the wanting was enough for him to go? What are “wants”? And do they really matter that much, “I want this” and “I want that,” and therefore I shall go. Doesn’t it get a bit tiring after a while, wanting things? Don’t you get worn out? What if you didn’t want anything at all, what would happen to you then?