The Orchard Keepers

by Robert Pepper-Smith

  She began to climb quickly now, up a different and more direct path. They went by a half-finished cinder-block house, rebar sticking out of the bricks. Shredded plastic bags, broken concrete blocks, rotting oranges and melon rinds were scattered across the earthen floor. Passersby were using it as a dump and he felt the sadness of the place, its disuse. He followed her as a child might, chastened and wondering, with the vague sense that he’d done something wrong — was doing something wrong. Not understanding what she was trying to say and her impatience made him feel that he’d become an unwanted burden, someone who was just getting in the way at a time when something needed to be done. But what it was he couldn’t tell.

  “Celedonia says someone is looking for you,” Alana translated from bed. “A young Canadian. Who is she?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Celedonia can stay with me. You go and find her. She’s in El Tablon, staying with a teacher. “

  He couldn’t think of who she’d be. He’d had no news from home, and no one he knew would come this far to find him. He had made no arrangements to meet anyone and had told only a handful of people about his plans, which were uncertain. He had sent only two letters to Rose, both from Mexico.

  “Celedonia can look after me,” she said. “You go.”

  When she coughed, he could hear a soppy rattle in her chest, probably pneumonia. If the Cipro didn’t work she’d have to go to hospital in San Marcos. In the weeks that he’d been with her, he’d seen how hard she worked, how little she slept or ate.

  She would go out of her way to help almost anyone. He’d seen how she couldn’t walk down the street without someone stopping to talk with her, a hand on her wrist, sometimes to give her a bag of avocados or a handful of stoney little peaches, or to ask for a favour, a street consultation. He could see that she felt needed then and was of help. He would stand to the side, watching, and sometimes he was introduced as her new friend.

  Still, there were things you couldn’t say to her. She was always seeing patients, visiting with those who had become friends and who always seemed to want something from her, organizing a playtime for neighbourhood children, trips to the city to buy medical supplies or to arrange for a patient to see a specialist.

  She always kept going, hardly taking time to eat or sleep. Once they were walking through a market when he told her this and she’d walked ahead then, ducking under the strung blue tarps over the market stalls and weaving through the close-packed stream of people coming toward them, at a quickened, irritated pace.

  When he touched her she’d pull away, get angry. Now that he was leaving, he could see the disappointment in her eyes, the loneliness.

  “I’ll come back,” he promised.

  “You don’t have to come back. Celedonia will take care of me. I’ll be on my feet in no time!”

  He could hear her voice waver.

  “You can’t go on by yourself,” he said.

  She drew the sheet to her chest. “I have and I will,” glaring at him.

  “You’re always sick,” he said.

  “Get out,” she said.

  11

  The patrol leader Bernadino Garcia made one, decisive mistake. To find the gringa, he went to the wrong house.

  Garcia wasn’t from the village and he should have remembered that he would be lied to, had relied on one set of directions. The abuella who opened the door was stirring a pot over a fire ringed by stones on an earthen floor. Smoke was rising through the eaves and through holes in the roof thatch. An open umbrella protected the bed from an afternoon’s rain that had just let up. Bent over, hardly taller than a girl, she looked at him out of wizened eyes that shone like wet stones, her face a leathery mass of wrinkles, her hair bound under a pale green bath towel. She smelled of wood smoke and urine.

  When he asked where the teacher Bernabe Mateas lived, she seemed to look through him, blind. Then he saw the milky rings around her pupils. She offered her hand for the traditional greeting and show of respect. She pointed down the road the way they’d come and shut the door.

  He and another carried a rifle. The others carried sticks.

  They were a new authority in the highlands, unwelcomed.

  To try to find the teacher’s house was like a dream in which every step feels like you’re wading through thick syrup. He would not forget this: in a scattering of huts on two hillsides it took an hour to find the teacher’s house. In full view, they had wandered like dogs sniffing for market scraps.

  By then the teacher and the gringa were gone. Bernadino Garcia insisted on inspecting the compound. An old woman led them into a warm, smokeless kitchen, a small stove of new bricks burning in the corner. It gave off a steady heat, the fire banked low. Two of his men went over to warm their hands.

  They watched the old woman feed sticks into the firebox under a concrete plancha dusted with lime.

  They looked over the wood at its side: small branches cut to lengths of maybe thirty centimetres, and kindling of the same length.

  It looked like a child’s stack of wood for a play stove.

  “Does it use much wood?”

  “Maybe a third of what I used to use.”

  They looked at each other. The younger one Luis Miralles had to borrow a pack mule to bring in firewood. All the pine forests around his village were young, privately owned. Occasionally he’d get pruned branches, that was all. For firewood he had to go to the San Antonio forest, two kilometres away.

  “Where did you get it?”

  “From my son. He’s giving them away.”

  They glanced at each other again.

  12

  Word travels quickly on the highland buses: a boy was on his way to El Tablon, to see how cortes typicas were made and to ask the way into a volcanic lake called Tikru Lake.

  Lacey was waiting for him in a street called calle de los Tejedores, street of the weavers. Here cortes typicas were woven, yards of cloth wrapped around the waist and tied with an embroidered belt. One door to the street was open and from inside Michael could hear the clack of the warp lifted and lowered, the hiss of the shuttle skimming over the shed. Standing in the doorway, he couldn’t see into the shadows, could barely make out the figure of a man tossing the shuttle back and forth, the curve of his arm. The air felt cool and there was a faint smell of dried oranges and dill and ground water. When he stepped across the threshold into the room, she came up behind to put her arms around him. He felt a shock of fear go through him, so bright and clear that he froze, just like those birds he used to free from the vineyard nets back home, cupped still in his hands till he lifted them into the air.

  At first he couldn’t make out who she was, didn’t recognize the freckled forearms, but relaxed into an embrace that was gentle and kind.

  “It’s you!”

  He turned in the sound of her voice.

  She looked as young as he remembered, on the days when he saw her in the bookstore. She was dressed in jeans and in an embroidered blouse. Something was new in her. She seemed to see him and yet look through him.

  She took him by the hand to stand at the weaver’s side, “Just watch.”

  The shuttle flew across the shed, building the cloth thread by thread, mild colours of orange, purple and brown. The weaver’s hands had the grace of a temple dancer. The bolts of cloth stacked on shelves behind him smelled of dry straw.

  “I’ve been watching for hours,” she said. “I’m beginning to see how it’s done. This is for you,” fetching out a letter from the back pocket of her jeans.

  He unfolded the letter but the writing was too small to read in the dimly lit shop.

  He pulled her outside to sit on the raised flagstone sidewalk, his heart pounding.

  “You wrote this?”

  “Because I couldn’t trust myself to say it.”

  In the long hours when she wrote reports, noted sightings, she had no one to talk to except the radio dispatcher who spoke in code and who avoided chitchat ‘to keep the channel open.’ />
  For days on end, she wrote and rewrote, so that he might choose from a place of knowing.

  When he bent over the letter, she walked away.

  She felt angry, exhilarated and afraid.

  Let there be a moment of stillness, let all the silence that she’d gathered come into the words to catch him unawares, open his heart.

  This morning I got up in the dark to turn on the light, sweep the cobwebs from the cabin ceiling. I was remembering a dream. In the dream you were floating above me, weightless like a balloon, and I reached to pull you down by the leg.

  At dawn I went out on the catwalk. Tendrils of cold air went by, like breath off the glacier. I could see the sky was clear, just a few stars showing, and I knew it was going to be one of those sunny fall days that smell of snow and make you feel you could walk for miles.

  Odin Mountain just a shadow, I decided to go see the place you always talked about, where your village used to be. I wanted to see the foundations of the houses and stores you used to talk about: Beruskis and Alfis and the remains of the stone house, all out on the reservoir flats that are planted with fall rye to keep down the dust that sometimes blows through our village in late summer, the stone and concrete foundations scattered in the tall grass.

  No one talks about your village anymore, as if we’ve agreed to forget about it. I think we’re all ashamed of what happened, and I feel like we’ve disappointed you in some way.

  Sometimes I feel that if I could just describe for you what is here, you could really feel what you’ve left behind. I’m dreaming of wandering, too, and yet I feel so unconfident, useless. Sometimes I don’t even know what I feel.

  This morning I went down to Rose’s. She’s rented the apartment above the Giacomo café. In the alley I called out to her open bedroom window, and when she didn’t answer I went up the outside fire stairs that go past her kitchen window all the way to the flat part of the roof. She was on the dewy roof, hanging out bedsheets and diapers to dry on a line. She’s had a baby by you. There’s a one-armed rocking chair up there, curved, laminate wood, the varnish worn off, mustard yellow cushions. She sometimes sits in it to read or study or to nurse her baby. She’s planted some late summer kale in raised beds up there, the dew jewelled on the leaves and some gangly sunflowers in big pots. A voluntary tomato was growing out of one of those pots in a bloom of little yellow flowers that would never produce any fruit.

  Let’s go, I said to her. Let’s go for a ride somewhere.

  The sun was already up and it was already getting warm, you could see from her roof the green glacier water sparkling in the river bed, the sway of the poplar leaves in the morning breeze along the bank, main street swept clean with a few cars in it, people going to work in the sawmill or going to open a store.

  I knew it was her day off and I wanted to get her away early because I knew that sometimes Mr. Giacomo would ask her to work anyways, and she often does because she needs the money — she’s saving up for her own place.

  I’ve got to study, she told me, draping a sheet over the line, clothes pegs between her teeth that turned her smile into a laughing grimace. I could tell she wanted to go because she was hesitating and thinking about it.

  Maybe just for the morning, she said then.

  We went down the fire stairs to the apartment, climbing in through the kitchen window.

  Hurry! I said because I could hear Mr. Giacomo unlocking the café below.

  She made some sandwiches and sliced some apples to take with us, pushing aside the textbooks and work papers on the table. She was taking a first aid course to get a better job, maybe in a logging camp. I got the baby out of his crib and into a jumper that I’d spread on her unmade bed. She showed me her account book, how much she’d saved for her own place, “It’s going to take years!”

  We went back out through the window onto the fire stairs, because we didn’t want to go through the café. I was carrying the baby — Sen is your son’s name. She handed me him through the window. In the alley she put him in this bike seat, a grey plastic one with blue padding bolted over the back tire of her bike. The seat was tilted so he could sleep in it and she strapped him in. Then she unchained the bike from the stair railing.

  We rode down the alley where Mr. Giacomo couldn’t see us to 1st St., crossed the river on the one lane bridge in lower town, the one with planks that rattle under your wheels, and we went by the Cowan St. Mill. I could smell the yew wood they were cutting, drying boards that my father had ordered, the ones he props in the yard outside his mill to dry his paper on, and I saw Mr. Beruski wave at us from the mill yard and I waved back.

  We rode south along the river. The air had that cool, damp feel of early fall. The light laid a dusty haze across the peak of Odin Mountain and you could see that fresh snow had fallen up there. Wide gravel bars stretched to the middle of the river, the water was that low, and you could see the deeper channels in the gravel, the water darker and riffled.

  The farther we got out of town, the more Rose smiled.

  This is wonderful, she said, I haven’t felt like this in months!

  And she went on weaving down the paved shoulder till she remembered she had a baby behind her. Then she straightened out, and when I pulled up beside her she said, Thank you, Thank you for suggesting this.

  Where the river widened out, the reservoir flats were covered in grass.

  We parked our bikes under some poplars, and we walked down to the flats. Rose carried your son. Summer grasses were growing through the foundations of your village. We found the graveyard with all the graves covered in concrete, we found the stone foundations of the house you used to call ‘the castle,’ we found the cellar of Beruski’s store silted in. It’s all still there: you can walk where the streets were, and find these things. A cold wind was blowing over the grasses and there weren’t any birds.

  I told Rose then that I was going away.

  Where?, she asked.

  I don’t know yet, I lied. I haven’t made up my mind.

  I didn’t want to tell her where I was going because I didn’t know how I’d feel when I saw you again. Maybe I’d just walk away and not say anything, I didn’t know. Maybe I wouldn’t like you when I saw you. Maybe you’d have changed.

  Michael’s put the idea into your head! she said angrily. How long will you be gone for?

  I don’t know. A couple of months, maybe.

  She was fighting back tears. She wiped her eyes with her sleeve, looked away. I was the second person to leave her like this.

  God, this is a sad place she said, looking around. I could tell that she was angry, even hated me then. She had that determined look she gets when she sits down to study, like she’s facing a difficult climb. She was hugging that baby to her chest.

  Maybe you’re looking for a home in the wrong place. Sometimes I feel my home is just in a longing for faithfulness, and then for a little while the way I touch things, look on them, the way I see and talk to people becomes a little more kind. Have you ever felt that way? Maybe you should come home and meet him. If you could just take him sometimes, so that she doesn’t have to feel it’s all up to her.

  13

  They were heading north towards Cero de Fuego, Lacey and Michael sitting on folded blankets in the back of a transport truck, under a lashed tarp. Bernabe was driving, his wife beside him.

  He was taking the boy and the girl to a place where he knew they would be safe. He had heard that a civil patrol was looking for the girl, to use her in their efforts to find Jose Cabral. The patrol leader Bernadino Garcia had accused Cabral of dynamiting towers that carried electricity to the mine.

  Bernabe had heard that Garcia suspected that he knew where Jose Cabral was, or could find out: they were from the same region of aldeas northwest of Jacaltenango, all within walking distance of each other. Bernabe knew that Garcia wouldn’t dare touch him — he was well-respected and still had connections from his days as a carrier. Garcia’s plan was to hold the girl, till Bernabe agre
ed to say something.

  You have to leave this country, Bernabe had told the boy, the girl. We have to hurry. No one knows what these civil patrols are capable of. No one can guarantee your safety. These people can do whatever they want because the army is behind them.

  While they were walking in the streets of El Tablon, Bernabe had come to find them.

  So you have received your news, he said to Michael. Is it good or bad?

  He could see a kind of wonder in the boy’s eyes then, and a glint of fear.

  But there was no time then to talk. The civil patrol was in the village and they had to leave immediately.

  Now the boy and the girl were in the back of a transport hidden behind crates of watermelon and oranges, the truck gearing down as they climbed into the Huehue highlands.

  What are you going to do, Lacey asked him then. It was late afternoon, and in the diffuse light under the flapping tarp she was hugging her knees, her face in shadow, not looking at him.

  He asked what his son was like and she told him about the birth of the child, the mewling cry, how his wrinkled, cupped hand had curled around her finger like a pale water flower, his grip firm and surprisingly strong and gentle. He’s getting close to one now, she said, maybe learning to walk, tottering around on his fat little legs.

  And Rose is keeping him?

  You don’t know how difficult that is, she said, and for the first time there was the sharp touch of anger in her voice, and impatience and maybe a sense of irreparable loss.

  She told him of how the Giacomos had set up to take the child, having lost a baby of their own, and of how in the end Rose had refused, fleeing on a train to Field, but she never got there because Mr. Giacomo had gotten onto the same train, sat with her and talked, took her courage away with his words of loneliness, a hard life, when he had such a fine, rich life to offer the boy. An easy decision, he’d said then, a necessary one. You can’t do this on your own.

  There are so many people I’ve met, the boy said then, who are running from loss. He spoke of the painter and of the woman he’d met north of Encenida who cleaned hospital rooms, how they lived out in the hills above El Camino Real, waiting for the day when they would be forced to move on. Their only protection is to not be seen, to not be singled out by a word or a look, to not be there when the Migra comes looking for them, to have already vanished, and yet they carried the touch of where they were from in their eyes and in their look, not often shown, but a real human vulnerability in the quiet reach of their trust and their willingness to help: Yes, you can stay here, too. No guard dogs, no electrified fences, no barred windows, no patrol cars, no one prodding you in the back in your sleeping bag with a baton in some park in the middle of the night saying, Move on.