The Orchard Keepers

by Robert Pepper-Smith

  He was on a bus from La Trinitaria, Mexico, where he’d been to buy notebooks and pencils and coloured markers for his new school, and it was also an excuse to visit his friend Tomas Ortega who, like his brother, had had to leave their country because of his association with people who opposed the mine in their district.

  A violent storm that passed through his region cut short Bernabe’s visit. He was worried about the safety of his family, his students and his school. The bus he was on crossed the border at night. He was sleeping when he felt the bus gear down. They were on tarmac under a long string of glare lights. Ahead he could see idling trucks, some tarped and some with what looked like stacked fruit or vegetables in open baskets.

  As soon as the bus stopped, two soldiers came aboard. One stood by the driver, a rifle cradled in his arms. The other began to herd people out, starting at the rear. Bernabe watched a young girl lift her packsack from the metal overhead rack; she couldn’t have been more than seventeen or eighteen, a pale complexion, her eyes wide and anxious. She kept looking at the soldier behind her who was not as tall as she, and not much older. He had the broad forehead and narrow, dark eyes of a campesino from the San Miguel Acatan highlands. Carrying the rifle in one hand, he was rubbing sleep from his eyes as if to stay awake.

  Outside, they were directed to unpack their bags on the tarmac.

  Bernabe was directly behind the young woman, and he asked her, “Do you know what they are looking for?”

  She turned to watch him repack his duffle bag with school notebooks and small boxes of coloured markers and pencils.

  “Weapons,” Bernabe said.

  “You speak English,” she said, and he could tell she hadn’t heard anyone speak in her own language in days. “Your accent sounds like home!”

  She helped him to replace the coloured markers that a soldier had spilled out of their boxes. His wrists had flared up in La Trinitaria. He had no trouble with the notebooks, but the numbness in his fingers and the ache in his wrists prevented him from picking up markers.

  “Thank you,” he said. “My name is Bernabe Mateas.”

  “Mine’s Lacey.”

  Back on the bus, he sat with her. “Do you mind?”

  They didn’t speak for several minutes. She was so quiet Bernabe thought she’d fallen asleep, her arms wrapped around the pack in her lap; then in the light of a passing transport he saw the glint of her eyes staring straight ahead.

  She had a look he’d seen many times, from this border to Mexico, to Indiantown and North Carolina. It’s the look of someone who has arrived and is looking for someone.

  He was hoping that Lacey would talk with him. He hadn’t been able to sleep for two days.

  He explained that during a particularly difficult financial time in his last year of teacher training, he’d gone to work on the Vancouver construction sites. “I have a good ear for pronunciation,” he told her. “To fit in, I’d picked up the accent there.”

  He thought, those who do not trust enough will not be trusted. He told her about a dream he’d had in Tomas Ortega’s house in La Trinitaria. He’d dreamt of a spring bubbling through sand. In the dream he’d stirred the white sand with a finger, just where the cold, bright water was burling in a pocket the size of your fingernail. From such a little spring abundant water flowed in two directions, into a wide gravel and rock bed. He realized then that he had to protect the source from a menace he could feel but not see.

  It was this dream that had kept him awake for two nights, and he was talking out of a fear of being alone.

  Still, a listener wants something to hope for. He could see the burden in Lacey’s strained smile when he glanced at her, and he wanted to ask, What do I need to carry for you?

  “Where are you going? Huehuetenango?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Do you have a map? Can you show me where you’re going? In these times it’s best to have destination and know when you’ll arrive.”

  “I don’t have a map.

  I’m looking for someone, a boy.”

  “In love?”

  “No,” she smiled.

  “Sometimes,” he said, “to find someone in these highlands, you have to take paths known only to goat-herders.

  Why do you want to find him?”

  “To give him a message.” She had a fine clear voice, without assurance.

  The light was just growing over the hills, and they could begin to see steep hillsides planted over to corn, a dim light in an adobe farm house, the dark shadow of a copse of trees planted in a hollow.

  “Do you know where your boy was going?”

  “Some place called Tikru Lake.”

  Most in these highlands had heard of that sacred lake, though few actually knew the way there. His wife Helene knew the way in because she was a practitioner of the costumbre. He and his family had visited it many times. They would go there during the time of the sacred ceremonies, to remember and honour the soul of his father, of his brother, and to ask for the blessing of their corn. Strangers were not permitted there.

  She pointed at a passing bus that was going in the opposite direction: “Yet he could be on that!”

  They had come into perhaps the steepest farmland in that country; the fields rose sheer above them and were wreathed in mists.

  “Here,” he said to her, “they grow mostly corn. Sometimes the volcanic slopes are so steep a farmer has to tie himself to his house before he goes to work, otherwise he’ll fall off!”

  It was an old joke, but he liked her laugh.

  “Is your message for the boy good news or bad news?”

  “I’ve a letter for him,” and she touched her shirt pocket. “It says he’s a father.”

  Lacey told him about the mother of the boy’s child then, her best friend, and how another wanted to take the child from her.

  “It may already be too late. She has no one left to help her.”

  “She has herself,” he said. “And how does this other one plan to take the child?”

  “By taking up her time.”

  He told her then about his brother who was in a car accident in Indiantown. “When I heard, I left to be with him. Distance has no measure. Love draws you on in times of danger. You must try.”

  “But what if I’m too late?”

  “I don’t understand time or how we approach each other, but when I heard of my brother’s accident, I was with him immediately.”

  “You had thousands of miles to travel!”

  “No, I was already there. And you, the nearer you get to him, the nearer you are to her. You are going to her now, your best friend. Nearer and nearer you approach.

  Give up trying to find him. Search for him every day but give up trying to find him. That’s the only way to go forward.”

  Climbing on switchbacks into the hills, the wide sky opening in the early light, they entered a wooded area, and she asked him the names of the trees. Pine and eucalyptus, he pointed out, ceiba and oak, and farther on an avocado orchard on the hillside below.

  She settled in, her arms hugging her pack, her eyelids drooping and soon she was asleep.

  The bus came to a halt on a cobblestone road among four or five adobe houses.

  “Come with me,” Bernabe said. “If your boy is around here, we’ll help you find him.”

  “What is this place called?”

  “The Department of El Tablon,” he said. “In this Department there is also a village called El Tablon.”

  He pulled a duffle bag off the overhead rack and she stood to follow.

  In a yard across the road by a tethered goat, a girl was washing her long hair in a plastic basin, wringing it in her hands. At her feet a four-or five-year-old boy, squatting on his haunches, was chopping corn stalks into kindling. Smoke drifted from under the eaves of their hut.

  They went along a path along a ravine. They could smell the remnants of rain in the air and mud in the path from the recent storm clung to their boots. Soon it felt like they we
re walking with weights strapped to their ankles. Here and there were small apple trees with withered leaves, the beginning of an orchard or the end of a failed one, he couldn’t tell which. The girl was tired, and he had taken a shortcut that he didn’t often use. A stone’s throw below, they saw a man leading a mule, a saddle loaded with firewood on its back.

  On a path of crushed pumice, they scraped the mud off their boots with a stick.

  Before them was a new valley and a new sky. Small tilled fields bordered by raised grass paths quilted the hillsides. The patter of a one-piston motor echoed through the valley.

  Ahead a boy palmed a bicycle wheel down the path, jogging beside it. Below there was an adobe hut with a thatched roof that she touched as they went by, the thatch damp with rain. She looked like a child walking in a dream. Everything here was new to her, and though she was very tired, she had that wide-awake look of someone for whom every impression is not a matter of habit.

  She asked about the grove of trees on a far hillside.

  “Those are pines,” he said. “We grow them for lumber and firewood.”

  Beyond, to the west, a chalk-white scar in the landscape that was kilometres long, the rim of the open-pit mine.

  “A lot of people have been driven off their land to make room for that mine,” he said. He tried to control the anger and sorrow in his voice when he spoke of the displacement, but not successfully, because she looked at him more carefully.

  On the other side of this valley, he led her into a compound. His mother was washing clothes in a pila, an outdoor sink. She came toward them across the open courtyard, wiping her hands on a length of polythene that she’d tied around her blouse and that reached to her ankles. She touched the girl’s outstretched hand, brushing her fingers, then raised her hand to her forehead. She lowered her head, like someone bowing.

  “My mother says welcome.”

  She had a gentle manner, but she was suspicious of anything new that came from outside their Department. Her eyes narrowed, and when she glanced at her son her expression said, So you’ve brought us home another stray?

  Her health was not good: bronchitis from the daily smoke of cooking fires, arthritic fingers and wrists from working the fields and from shelling corn at dawn on cold mornings.

  Lately she said little and didn’t often smile; sometimes when he saw her in the distance, tilling a field, she looked like someone who sensed that someday — perhaps soon — they would have to leave. She would work the hoe then stand and look around as if she felt something in the air, look across the fields and the valley to the distant hills. She would stand there gazing for a long time, immobile as a startled Kej, a white-tailed deer, and he could sense in her darkening a gathering stubbornness.

  At night a week before a helicopter had passed low over their land, and she’d asked him in the morning, ‘What do they want?’ He shrugged, said I didn’t know, but he could still hear the whap whap of the blades, a sound that is meant to stay in your ears and heart, to keep you awake. That sound sours in your chest and creates a hollow of fear. It was their first attempt to uncouple his family from their fields.

  Now she was putting the two together, the helicopter and the girl. Momentarily, the shadow of fear in her eyes said she felt a menace she couldn’t locate.

  Still, they were a friendly, gracious people.

  She offered the girl food, drink.

  But he could see that the girl’s eyelids were drooping. He remembered then that she had crossed the length of Mexico in two days.

  “Would you rather sleep first?”

  Yes, she nodded.

  “I’ll show you your room.”

  She watched the mother return to the outdoor sink. She had felt the old woman’s fear and she looked puzzled.

  They went over to a small adobe building by some rabbit hutches.

  “This is my old room. I share a larger one with my wife and child.”

  He pushed open the wooden door that had a bird with long tail feathers carved in it. The door smelled of pine and the beams in the room were new pine, the colour of fresh straw.

  “The roof was torn off in a storm. We replaced it this spring.”

  She told him that she used to work as a lookout in a fire tower and that she had seen many powerful storms go by, lightning crashing into the trees.

  She unlaced her muddy boots and went in.

  Inside there was a double bed with a faded coverlet on it, a small wooden table and a wooden bench. The only light in the room came in through the eaves and the open door. The air in the room felt cool and the light coming in through the eaves spread over the new beams.

  “You must be tired,” he said. “I’ll close the door to give you some peace.”

  She thanked him for his hospitality, a shy smile in her eyes then.

  He said that she was welcome to stay as long as she liked and that his wife would have some breakfast ready for her later, after she had slept.

  Later, when Lacey’s room was quiet, he slipped a note under the door saying that he was going to visit a student who was sick, perhaps from ground water poisoning, and that he’d make enquiries about the boy Michael Guzzo.

  2

  She slept for two or three hours stretched out on the faded coverlet. When she awoke, flies were turning in the warm shafts of light that had climbed down the straw and clay walls.

  Her mouth felt dry and she had a headache. What was she doing here? She remembered the walk along the crest of the ravine, touched the letter she carried in her pocket.

  When she got out of bed, she saw a note tucked under the door. It reassured her that she was welcome. “My wife has breakfast ready for you.”

  As soon as she opened the door, the light heavy and blinding, children crowded around her. They touched her pale arms, her loose blouse. Off in the distance she could see a volcano ringed by clouds. While she stared around, a young girl took her by the hand to lead her across the courtyard to a doorway.

  “Welcome,” said a woman at the stove. She was dusting the plancha with lime dust and placed two tortillas on it, moving them around with her fingers. There was a boy at her side who looked to be three or four years old.

  “Please sit down.”

  At the plank table she watched the young woman at the stove pour a drink from a jug into a plastic cup.

  “You must be thirsty.”

  She nodded. The dyed drink was sweet and clear. Children perched on the bench on the other side of the trestle table watched her quietly. She could see there were two sets of twin boys and the young girl who had taken her hand.

  “Did you sleep?”

  Again she nodded, as if not quite awake.

  “I’m Helene, Bernabe Mateas’ wife.”

  She brought over a plate of tortillas, kale and beans, sat down beside her.

  “My name’s Lacey,” the girl said.

  The boy had followed Helene from the stove and was standing at her side, clutching her dress. He stared up at Lacey wide-eyed.

  “Manuel Mateas,” she said. “Our son.”

  She pointed across the table to the girl who was kneeling on a bench. “My niece Petrona Raymundo, daughter of my sister Virginia. The twins,” she said indicating the two sets that sat beside the girl and across from Lacey and who were staring at her, “belong to my sister Rosario Lopez: Juan and Sebastian, Martin and Escobar.”

  The kale and beans tasted salty and the tortillas slightly bitter with lime dust.

  “You look worried.”

  She explained that she was in a hurry to find a friend, that she had something important to tell him.

  “You Canadians come a long way to tell people things,” she said. “A Canadian bishop was here a month ago, to talk to people about the mine. It’s poisoning our water. And now you.”

  The young woman poured out more of the sweet drink. “You’ve had a susto,” she said, “in your heart. I’ll make a special drink for you.”

  “Did you learn English in Vancouver?” />
  “No,” the young mother smiled. “My husband taught me. I’ve hardly been out of these hills, only been to the city once.”

  After breakfast, Lacey and Helene walked through a field of maize to the grass and scrub beyond. Along the footpath they gathered apazote leaves and in a forest they found cypress and oak leaves, Helene reaching with her son at her side to fill woven sacks.

  “This is for fever,” she said, “Aching bones. This is for machete wounds.”

  On a hill covered in blue tradescantia they came to a large mound of stones. Helene swept the sacred area clean with a sprig of escoba. She spread pine needles and placed pine branches decorated with sprigs of hydrangea in the four corners of the quadrilateral world. Then she gathered cuttings from a small tree with yellow flowers called chilia.

  Lacey had never done this kind of work at home. Her mother used to be a midwife who was trained in the use of anesthetics and she would sometimes brew a special tea or massage a woman’s belly with almond oil to help with the contractions, to help her relax. But her mother had quit that work soon after the Giacomo baby died, she had lost confidence in herself attending that birth. Now she cleaned rooms in the Mackenzie Hotel.

  Her parents had not wanted her to leave. They said she was too young to travel in such an unsettled country, that if anything happened it would be very hard to get her out.

  On the day her plane ticket arrived, on the day she was packing to leave, her father, a papermaker who sold his paper to artists and printmakers, took her down to his one-vat mill.

  “You can’t repair what’s been done,” he said, stirring a vat of pulp with a wooden paddle, waiting for it to reach the right temperature and consistency, pulp flecks drying on his hands. “It’s not up to you.”

  “I can’t just stay and watch what’s going on with Rose.”

  “This is a small town, Lacey,” he’d said then, going to the sink to wash the pulp from his hands. “Everyone knows what Mr. Giacomo is up to. Something will happen.”

  “No,” she’d said then and there was real anger in her seventeen-year-old voice, “I can’t wait. You don’t know how he looks at her and I see it every day.”