The Orchard Keepers

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The Orchard Keepers Page 23

by Robert Pepper-Smith


  A flash flood from the storm that had brought him back from La Trinitaria had torn at the road and at a hillside farm house. Below three or four workers were digging the remains of a house out of a mud slide. Broken adobe bricks, scattered as if by a blow, were strewn across the hill. Men were digging out of the dried mud and rocks pine beams, doors, and metal roofing, pieces of it folded like paper, stacking the wood and metal to the side.

  The bus went over a crest and came to a stop by a wood shop.

  Under the roof of an open shed a pinewood coffin was laid out on sawhorses. He said it was for a grandmother who had died in the slide. “When the family felt the hill turning to mud they couldn’t get her out in time.”

  That torn and shattered house that they’d seen lay across a steep hill in a scar of dried mud. He spoke of the pounding, driving rain, the winds, it must have happened at night, with rivulets of water running off the road and foaming by the house, cutting channels that became streams that no one could hear because of the rain lashing the metal roof, and when the mud poured in at the door, pushed in the walls, the old woman must not have had the strength to get out.

  He saw a shiver go through her at the thought of the woman’s terror and hopelessness.

  Climbing off the bus Lacey was drawn to the ready-made coffin, her hand brushing over carved figures, lithe cats and intricate flowers on its sides. “Cats and flowers to honour the old woman’s life,” he said. That were meant to keep her near. The grain was smooth and warm to the touch; it smelled of pine and light oil, maybe linseed.

  The sun was clearing the side of Fuego volcano, rising over the slopes and warm light flooded the road and crossed her neck and arms, the hair on her forearms bristling. Here the morning light threw long shadows across the river valley far below. There weren’t many forests left — just clumps of pines dotted here and there in the ravines and on the hillsides but on the slopes of the volcano there was a forest and on some nearby hillsides, too, that were too steep to plant.

  It looked like she was getting over a long time of worry and indecision, that she was beginning to see and feel again.

  Still, Bernabe could tell travelling didn’t sit well with her. The landscape went by too quickly for her to feel she belonged here.

  There wasn’t time to experience her thoughts or emotions in any particular place, and so recently she’d just travelled through scenery. For the first time since she’d left the Kootenays, she wasn’t on a plane or bus: with him, she was actually walking somewhere.

  Yet there was so much she was missing.

  What did she really see and feel here?

  Hurried along by the fear of not finding the boy she was looking for, she hardly remembered what had happened the day before yesterday.

  They turned off the road to follow a path through trees bearing green peaches, the leaves spotted and rusted. They went along a ravine, the hillside rising at their right hand, to the left the valley dropping below.

  “Here,” he said, “People eat a simple breakfast: tortillas and salt. The land is — what do you say — depleted?”

  In this dusty, pale land, corn was planted everywhere a human hand could reach. They passed a family hauling soil from the bottom of a slope to the top of the slope in fertilizer sacks. A young boy was carrying a sack on his back supported by a head strap: he couldn’t have been more than four or five in that tired, vexed look he gave them. Behind him the mother and father gave the traditional greeting as they crossed the footpath; then the mother reset the sack on her back, her mouth a thin bitter line, her neck deeply furrowed as she went straight up the slope.

  They watched the father lift the sack from the child’s back, place his own at his feet and spread the soil as though it were flour on a baker’s table, raking it between the plants with a hoe.

  “It’s too quiet here,” Bernabe said, glancing at his watch.

  “I don’t hear children on the paths.”

  “Sometimes,” he said, “children who go to the fincas on the coast to pick coffee return with open sores on their skin, from sleeping on concrete or dirt floors. But the sores I saw on the student I went to visit yesterday were new. I suspect groundwater poisoning from the mine.”

  “All around this region people are getting sick. Nothing foreign came to us,” he said,“till the mine came.”

  She spoke of the worry she used to feel when she’d worked as a fire watcher in a forestry tower. First, she’d spot a tendril of smoke rising from a lightning strike: at first disbelief, thinking that she might be seeing things, not trusting herself, wanting to be sure before making the call. Then the disbelief would change to certainty when the column thickened and grew.

  At the school, he unlocked the padlocked door. Children of every age crowded around her, the teenagers hanging back, the boys in castoff American jeans and shirts, the girls in traditional corte.

  Toddlers were staring up at her; one was trailing a length of rope tied around her ankle, as if she’d been tethered somewhere.

  The children looked and did not look at her: they had this way of gazing around her; they didn’t focus on anything in particular, as if looking for a place where she made sense.

  “You teach two-year-olds?”

  He smiled. “Sometimes the mothers leave them here with their older brothers or sisters. It gives them a break and the little ones like it.”

  He opened the door and she followed inside. The school children didn’t follow and he closed the door behind them. It was cold in the school. There was no stove and the early light had not yet warmed the room.

  He laid out exercise books, scissors, rolls of paper and crayons along a table under a cinder-block wall. Charts were taped to the wall with English and Spanish and Mam words on them.

  He went to the window and looked out. “Mateo Garcia is missing,” he said. “Juan Pascal from Lupine. And seven kids from Chehb’al, a long walk from here. Petrona Raymundo isn’t here, I’ve heard she’s ill.” He counted slowly. “That makes twenty,” he said, “twenty missing.”

  “Is that unusual?”

  “Half the school is missing,” he said.

  He went down a row of plywood tables, and in front of each chair he laid down a few crayons, a sheet of coloured paper and a pair of scissors.

  Before the older students’ chairs he carefully placed an exercise book with a sharpened pencil aligned on it, an eraser at its side.

  His heart was racing and he could hardly keep himself still. He felt there was something terribly wrong with all this eerie silence and absence, and he didn’t know what to do. Later he would learn that, the night before, security patrols had descended on the land, driving many families from their homes and burning their crops.

  7

  She saw her last patient in the evening. Then she locked the clinic, and they walked to Celedonia’s.

  She brought along a jump kit to clean and re-bandage the father’s foot. They followed a path through a pine copse under a sky of glittering stars. He could see the constellation the village called the scorpion and there, in the western sky, the three hearth stones. At the foot of the hill, he could hear the river that rustled at night like corn leaves. She played the flashlight beam along an adobe wall, looking for the dogs.

  Celedonia was standing in the portal when the beam passed that way, her hands at her sides.

  She said in an apologetic voice that her father was gone.

  “Gone where?”

  “My husband took him to San Marcos. He’s going to stay with my aunt. He says there are powerful curanderas in San Marcos.”

  The nurse sat on the stool outside the kitchen door.

  “He’s not going to make it,” rubbing her forehead. “I should have come earlier. I could have convinced him to stay.” Angry, she clutched the jump kit in her lap.

  Celedonia went into the kitchen.

  She called them in, stirring atol on the stove.

  “Where are the girls?”

  “At my sister’s,” s
he said.

  The kitchen felt empty, cold. When Celedonia added pine branches to the stove fire, the flames lifting, he saw her crouch inside herself, unsteady on her feet.

  “Why are your girls at your sister’s? Are you going to the coast?”

  She sat across from them, and in the candlelight he could see the anger and worry in her eyes.

  “My husband helped my father onto the bus,” she said. “I went with them to San Marcos. My father was in a fever. I gave him water and I kept his forehead cool with a wet cloth, just like you showed me.

  He asked me what was wrong between me and my husband. I said nothing was wrong. We helped him into my aunt’s house and my husband stayed with him.

  Then I went to a market, to buy some panela to bring home. A man came up to me.

  ‘Are you Jose Cabral’s wife?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Jose Cabral has made my daughter pregnant,’ he told me. ‘Do you know who I am? My name is Bernadino Garcia. I served in the presidential battalion under Arbenz. I’ve been appointed head of the new civil patrol in our district. I want you to remember my name, you can ask about me. Your husband is Cabral, yes? Word is he’s become a subversive. I can bring him in at any time. And I cannot guarantee his safety. Do remember this. If you don’t sleep with me,’ he said then, ‘I’ll kill him.’ Then he turned and walked away.”

  “You should tell the police,” Alana said.

  “The police will laugh at me.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Alana went around the table to sit beside her. She took her hand and held it in her lap, gazing quietly at the wife.

  “Come and have dinner with us. Don’t sit here alone.”

  “Jose Cabral is coming back tonight,” she said. “I want to talk to him alone.”

  “Are you afraid?”

  “No,” she smiled bitterly. “I’m not afraid of him. I could kill him myself.”

  Outside the clinic door, neighborhood children stood in the street.

  She reached in through the iron grate in the door to unlock it.

  “I’d forgotten,” she said. “It’s Thursday night.”

  When he looked at her she explained that every Thursday night she had these children over for crafts, a snack and a kind of play time.

  From under the reception desk, she took out a box of scissors and construction paper, glue, crayons and plastic vials of spangles, while neighbourhood girls and boys stood in the doorway. One he was sure he’d seen in a field when he first arrived in the village, the dark-haired one. Now she was watching him, wary and distrustful as if she wished him away, not wanting him to interfere with what was to happen next.

  She smelled of wood smoke and looked wan and hungry.

  Upstairs, Alana flicked on the terrace light, a single bulb on the wall by the stairs. She spread crayons and construction paper on the open terrace floor. Across the valley he could see the last light dimming behind the hill, a lone avocado tree on the crest, the shadow of a volcano in the distance, bulked above the surrounding hills.

  “You can keep them occupied while I cook supper,” she said.

  The two girls drew on the construction paper. The boys ran through clothing and clinic towels hung on lines to dry, the younger one imitating the older who swung a broom handle like a machete.

  One of the girls, the older one, asked, “Como se dise eso en ingles?”

  She had drawn a mule or a horse, a dog to its side.

  She was salting spangles in the glue-spread face of the mule and in the dog’s eyes.

  Under each he wrote an English word. And under those he wrote a phonetic approximation in Spanish.

  He watched her young mouth pucker as she tried to pronounce the English words.

  “Como te llamas?” he asked the girl.

  “Maria Sanchez,” she said. “This is my sister Ena.”

  Little Ena looked up from the drawing she was making between her splayed knees. With her palm, she spread glue over the lines she’d drawn.

  She brought her hands together, watching the skin of her palms tent when she pulled them apart.

  Maria led her sister by the wrist to the terrace sink. She washed Ena’s hands, daubed at a glue smear on her blouse.

  The boys were charging through the hung laundry.

  Watching from the doorway, Alana said,“Time to dance.”

  Inside he could see that she’d made a skillet of rice flavoured with tomato sauce, chopped peppers and canned tuna.

  “You can dance on the bed,” she said, “one at a time.”

  She put on music and the first up was the boy with the broomstick, kicking out his legs in a way that made the others who were sitting on the floor clap and laugh. “One at a time,” she’d said, and they’d sat on the floor, used to the ritual.

  It was the way she ended the evening.

  After the last dancer, after little Ena’s hopping with her eyes closed and her arms stiff at her sides, her eyes startling open when she approached the mattress’ edge, they filed out the door, carrying their art and small packages of salted crackers.

  “See you next Thursday!” she called out.

  She set the table with plates and cutlery from market bins kept under the sink. From the skillet she heaped rice on his plate, less on her own. She poured out water for them to drink, her hand trembling when she picked up her fork.

  “I’m too tired to talk about anything that’s happened today.”

  So he talked about his family back home. They’d worked half to death trying to shore up their land in terraces. Why had they stayed when many had sold out and gone to Westbank or moved to the new town the Hydro had built at the far end of the reservoir? “We won’t abandon this place,” his father had said, while the reservoir water seeped into the hills, loosening them, and the trees they’d planted began to tilt toward shore.

  When they realized there was nothing they could do about the walking hills, when the terrace walls, some of them made of logs and some of them made of stone, began to split and founder, the heart went out of their work.

  He would listen at night to the complaining trees, and he could feel the house strain against the pull of the hill. In the fall, in the down time before the pruning and replanting began, he left.

  “Go up to New Slocan,” his father suggested, “There’s work for you there,” laying a cheque on the table to help his son get settled.

  “Go and see what’s out there.”

  On shore, they listened to the hiss of a fall rain on the reservoir and watched the grey mist rise from it.

  “You can’t stay here. There’s nothing here for you.”

  And he wanted to say, There’s nothing here for you, either.

  But his father had to find out for himself: that in his grief he was just trying to replant on this hillside the orchards that had been taken from him. As if trying to repeat what you once had was enough of a life.

  When you work with no hope, he’d learned, there is no richness to the days that blur together, and you push yourself to keep going, sick at heart.

  They climbed into the skiff, to pole their way through a mat of wood debris that opened at the bow, thumping the aluminum sides.

  “There’s no life for you here,” his father said, “and I’m sorry to see you go.”

  Yet already he could feel that his own going would lead to a put-off decision. That his parents would soon board up the windows, lock the doors and walk away.

  Soon alders would overtake the orchards, then cedars and firs. Rain and snows would wear away at the house, the outbuildings, or maybe the whole hillside would calve into the lake, leaving a raw scar for salal to grow over.

  It was amazing how quiet the reservoir was.

  He told her how it concussed the landscape. You looked out over fretful water to the lip of the dam on the far horizon. Not even the sound of a fish jumping, just the thud of the debris on the bow and a shivering wind. Soo
n they were skimming through riplets that hissed against the bow like glacier water thick with rock flour, over a drowned forest.

  He knew that he was being sent away so that he would be spared the day when his parents moved on. His father was watching the water ahead for drift logs and deadheads, his face lined with habitual worry and grief.

  They moored the skiff at the Ames’ Landing dock, a wooden float lashed to a couple of tin-capped pilings, and walked up through the mist on the asphalt to the Burton store, its windows still dark. There they waited for the bus. They shared a thermos of coffee, his poured into a tin mug that was kept in the skiff locker. It bore the name of the river ferry his father used to captain and he ran his thumb over the embossed image of the ferry, over and over, as if trying to take the feel of it with him.

  He was going up to New Slocan to work in the Odin Mill. Near blind, his uncle had bought into the mill for a retirement income.

  He’d set his suitcase down by the unlit gas pumps, ashamed at his eagerness to leave.

  His father reached out his hand to take his as the bus came up the road, saying “Thank you for your help,” and in his eyes there was a mute appeal that the boy couldn’t answer and he flinched away from his father’s gaze.

  Then he talked of Tikru Lake, of the photograph that he’d found in a secondhand book in the Grizzly Bookstore. He’d dreamt of that lake.

  Maybe there was nothing there for him, but he had to go see.

  “I’ll show you where it is,” Alana said. “It’s not far,” gathering the plates and setting them in a tub to wash later in the sink.

  She spread out a map, her forearm brushing his as she traced the route with a finger. “Here it is, you start here,” she said.

  “You take the bus to El Tablon,” she said, “You can go tomorrow if you want. You’ll need a guide to show you the way in. A few hours on a bus then a day’s walk.”

  He felt her warm breath when he leaned in to follow the route.

  She folded her arms on the map, laid her head down on it, an inward stare of loneliness.

 

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