The Orchard Keepers

by Robert Pepper-Smith

  “I had a dream that she was drifting far way,” he said then. “I don’t know if I’ll get there in time.”

  “No,” Lacey said, her gaze steady on him. “You’re already there with her. All it takes is a change of heart.”

  14

  A few years after Bernabe and Helene saw the two young Canadians across the border, they, too, had to leave. Because the helicopters came at night, the village couldn’t organize itself or resist. One aldea after another was targeted. People were forced out of their homes that were then burned. Rosalina Tacam, who had spoken at a rally against the mine, and who had refused to sell her land, was shot in the face.

  The community leaders of Tisbaj, Lupina and El Tablon met in Bernabe’s school. No classes were held, and they met for two days. At the end of this, after weighing many options, they decided to leave. They gathered their families, their few remaining healthy stock and walked away on highland footpaths, crossed many arroyos and steep hills to the Mexican border. They left almost everything behind, only taking a few cooking utensils, some precious photographs or letters, some corn meal, eggs and salt and some beans, the few clothes they could carry, tarps for sleeping under. Whole aldeas were emptied in this manner, overnight.

  They saw the astonishment of the Mexican border guards who came to find them in the highlands of Chiapas: they had camped out for weeks before anyone official came to look for them. The captain didn’t order them back across the border, but he looked angry and perplexed at their number.

  They asked for asylum and for the help of the international community in protecting them from the mine’s and the army’s ‘security patrols.’ They asked that their right to the health of their land and drinking water be respected. They said they would not return till their safety and their way of life were guaranteed and secured.

  Soon international human rights groups and reporters were coming to visit them. To the embarrassment of their government, they were featured in a number of prominent news programs across the world.

  Friends and relatives in Canada and in Los Estados persisted in the work of letter-writing campaigns, educational events, media coverage and lobbying politicians. They built an adobe and thatched-roof school in the Chiapas highlands, a makeshift clinic. And they waited for word from the Capital.

  The Kootenays, British Columbia 198_

  After shift, he drives down to Burton to pick up his son. He’s still in uniform, the shoulder patches with the provincial crest on his jacket, the black pants, the polished boots. It’s late spring, a weekend, so the boy will still be asleep.

  There was only one call last night, to a rancher outside of New Slocan, the driveway under the ambulance headlights, he remembers, was paved in aggregate concrete, and there was a stand of tall firs that hid the road from the house, the porch light on, a woman standing in the doorway in a housecoat.

  “He’s having trouble breathing,” she’d said, and he’d followed her in carrying the jump kit, while his partner Anita Fuscaldo got the cot out of the back of the ambulance, brought it under the roof of the open carport that sheltered the doorway, the pots of geraniums that were just in bloom on the steps, their colours garish in the porch light.

  They went down a narrow hallway, all lit up, plastic tubing following the floorboard along the carpet, to an open bedroom door, a man inside sitting hunched over on the bed, breathing through an oxygen canula. His skin looked dark, as if burnt, and he shook off Michael’s hand when he went to take his pulse at the wrist.

  “He can’t stand to be touched,” the wife said.

  He was drawing in deep breaths, his mouth open, a gleam of fear in his gazing eyes.

  Michael asked for the husband’s meds, care card, and his partner Anita who had just come in wrote the number on the call sheet. They walked him down the hallway in his housecoat and slippers, the oxygen line curling behind him, and they got him to sit on the cot outside the doorway, put him on portable oxygen, loosely draped a blanket over him when he’d swung up his feet, the wife standing in the doorway, her face lined with worry and grief.

  When they’d loaded him into the back of the ambulance he struggled against the cot straps, tearing off the oxygen mask and snarling he couldn’t breathe.

  Michael spoke quietly to him, saying he’d only make it worse. “Here, this will help you,” slipping on a non-rebreather mask that gave him 100% oxygen, his lungs full of cancer.

  It was a sixty kilometre drive over the Perry range to the hospital in Nelson. He dimmed the lights, the patient closing his eyes and settling into the relief of pure oxygen, his breathing slowing, sleep coming on him now that he was no longer fighting for breath.

  Anita was new to the area, called him forward to ask for directions at a fork in the Perry mountains; they would soon be climbing through Grohman pass, through high cedar woods, and there they’d have to watch out for deer on the roadside, watch for a late spring frost that could lay down black ice on the asphalt.

  When Michael went back to sit on the bench, the patient’s breathing was easy, his eyes still closed, eyelids flickering, briefly dreaming then. He must be exhausted, who knows how long he’d waited before he got his wife to call, struggling for breath.

  He was dying and maybe he’d fought for a day or two against giving in, knowing this was probably his last trip. Michael drew the blanket to his chin, cool in the ambulance now that they were going over the pass.

  He wondered at this work he was doing. In the first year or two he took as many shifts as he could, for the experience he told himself, but it was more about the adrenaline and the glory, the self-satisfaction of walking into a house where there was pain and grief and knowing that he could do something about it, that the people there would be grateful. Was he at it, then, to win badges of recognition, to take pride in restoring life or offering comfort when nothing else could be done?

  Now he wondered whether it was possible to take care of people without a desire to please one’s self.

  What would that feel like, to forget yourself and your eye for glory while you went about your work?

  He could hear the low, throaty purr of the ambulance’s diesel engine as it climbed in the pass, the hiss of the oxygen mask, They must be going by Orange Creek where the cedars opened into a clearcut on the flank of Perry mountain, the wind buffeting the ambulance. They were following the Kootenay road from New Slocan through Syringa into the Nelson area.

  He could hear Anita talking on the radio, responding to a summons from Dispatch, location and expected time of arrival at the hospital. She had forgotten to call in, new at the job, and Michael could hear the anxiety in her voice as she gave their location, somewhere near Perry mountain, speaking in a hurried, clipped tone because she wasn’t used to speaking on the radio.

  She was a part-timer, just out of the IFA course. She was in her thirties, had taken the job to supplement her income. Her other work had something to do with raptors, using them to chase birds away from airports and garbage dumps.

  It was early in the morning when they got to Emergency, and the air would be colder, so he covered the patient with an extra blanket, tucking it in between the cot mattress and the side rails. He slid the portable oxygen cylinder under a strap by the patient’s leg, switched the line from the car port to the cylinder. He was saying that they were at the hospital now and that they’d be going in soon and Anita opened the back doors, letting in the sounds and the bright lights of the Emergency entrance, the chatter of an empty cot wheeled by, the cough of a woman in a hospital robe standing by the side entrance and smoking, an IV bag on a wheeled metal pole at her side, under a wall of plywood and scaffolding where the new wing was going in. He touched the patient’s shoulder lightly when he heard him try to say something, muffled words in the mask, bent down to listen, but he only shook his head, a tired, frightened look in his eyes, turned away.

  Michael got out to help wheel the cot to the Emergency doors. Inside, along a wall that divided the hallway from the ward, two p
atients in ambulance stretchers were waiting to be admitted. He knew one of the paramedics standing by them, Leah was her name, a friend of Rose’s who had just hired on and he nodded to her.

  Admitting was backed up: in the waiting room he could see a man with a bruised, bloodied face who looked like he’d come from a bar fight, a friend sitting with him, a young woman comforting a child that had a barking cough, the child turning restlessly in her lap, some chatty teenagers gathered around a pale, quiet young man, being careful not to look at him or at the wrist he was holding in his lap.

  They pulled the stretcher behind the other two, and he waited while Anita went back to the ambulance to clean up and restock the jump kit for the next call. He could hear the clatter of some bed rails being put up, the murmur of a doctor’s voice at the unit desk, the low wail of someone in pain.

  He asked Leah to keep an eye on his patient while he went into a treatment room to wheel out an oxygen tank, switched the patient’s line to the hospital tank and turned off the portable. He asked Leah how she was finding the work and she smiled and said she was enjoying it, but he could see by her anxious smile and the way she stared around that this was not what she’d expected and a little more than she could handle. Her patient was an elderly woman who was already in a hospital gown. She was dozing and smelled strongly of alcohol. Sometimes people only did a few shifts and then quit, not liking the confusion, the unpredictability of what you could walk into on a call, the ultimate lack of control. 95% of the time the work was routine; 5% of the time it was pure terror.

  “Is it always this crazy?” she asked.

  “Every Friday night,” he said.

  While he waited for the intake nurse, he thought of his son who was living with Rose in Burton, seven years old now. They saw each other on weekends and in the summer they’d go camping or drive down to Butucci’s to help out in the orchards.

  In a month or so he was flying down to a refugee camp in Chiapas, some people he knew from the Jacaltenango region were going home and he wanted to walk with them when they crossed the border.

  He would have to tell his son about this, let him know that he’d be gone for awhile. He wanted to boy to go with him, didn’t want to think of being away for so long, weeks, maybe a month or two, but he knew it was too dangerous.

  He was going as a witness, an accompanier. They’d walk for hours in the scorching mid-day heat to cross the border, and then they’d travel on crowded buses and sleep in schools, if the authorities could be trusted. Something told him that he had to go, though the military might turn on them at any point, calling his friends subversives and terrorists. Two weeks ago there’d been an incident: an army patrol had opened fire on some returned refugees, killing eleven and wounding over thirty, including several woman and children. He’d talked to Bernabe Mateas about it on the phone, the teacher’s voice hushed, frightened.

  “There’s a presidential election underway in my country,” his friend had gone on. “We’re being offered the choice between a war criminal and an idiot.”

  When the intake nurse came up to his patient, he fetched the rolled form from his back pocket, handed it to her and she quickly glanced at it, then took her own readings, blood pressure, pulse, sugar levels in the blood.

  “Busy,” Michael said, and she nodded impatiently, jotting down a reading from the blood pressure cuff.

  She pointed to a bed and she said, “Put him over there,” a hallway bed with a pull-around curtain. He rolled the stretcher over and his partner who had come in from cleaning and restocking the car let down the side rails. While he braced the stretcher the patient shifted over to the hospital bed, taking quick breaths and wincing.

  They drew a blanket over him and left him then, a nod and a quick goodbye, they’d been tied up in Emergency too long. When he pulled the curtain round Michael could see fear and appeal in the man’s eyes, defiance.

  But they were moving on, and he never felt he said goodbye in a way that mattered; there was always the next call, Dispatch at your back pushing you along, and sometimes anxiety at the thought that he wasn’t performing well enough, and he smiled at himself now, his anxious need to please and how he burdened others with it, even his patients, sometimes.

  They were driving now back through the New Slocan country to the station. Anita had the radio on low, rustling early morning announcer chatter and he wondered why she liked that station in particular, something about the music and the announcer’s voice; he’d have to ask her sometime. The dawn light was growing over Mt. Perry and turning it to shadow, and he also wondered whether he burdened his son.

  He and Rose were trying to figure things out, in those early weeks when he’d returned. Rose had this apartment above the Giacomo café and he had a trailer on the Palliser, maybe he should give it up and move in with her. Except for the anger and his inability to connect with her life.

  It had started with, “There’s no room for a crib in that trailer of yours!” and his refusal to have anything to do with Mr. Giacomo, that bastard who had been after his son. No way he was going to move into an apartment that man owned. And so it was about places and home. Where can we live together? But more than that, her trust had gone, that was it.

  “How do I know you won’t leave again?” she’d asked him once. They were sitting at her table in the upstairs apartment, first aid books and note cards and exercise books spread around her. He hadn’t yet found work, the Odin Mill wasn’t hiring, so he sat with her in the evening while she studied.

  “I won’t leave.”

  “Yes you will. There is nothing for you here, no work. You live in a trailer.”

  “I promise you,” he’d said then. “Things will work out.”

  She only shook her head, went back to her books. Their son awoke then, tossing fitfully in his crib and he got up to walk him, hold him in the crook of his arm and against his chest, the little one settling in, the weight of the baby’s head on his shoulder.

  When he turned back to the table she was looking at him. “I can’t wait. I have to get on with my life.”

  How could she trust him when he didn’t even know himself what he was going to do? It was a question that he ended up living in for months with no clear way out, and in that time any confidence she had in him, any hope for a real relationship in which she could let go of her determined need to get on alone, faded.

  So now they lived apart and shared the custody of their son, had for years. Anita was surprised to hear he had a son that was 7 years old.

  “You’re still young yourself,” she said, “a bit like a kid yourself. You must have been really young when he was born.”

  “Eighteen,” he said. Eighteen.

  At the station she parked on the tarmac and they washed the car down, spraying mud and gravel out of the wheel wells, scrubbing the sides with long-handled bristle brushes till they gleamed.

  And now he was driving to Rose’s to pick up their boy. She and Lacey shared a house in Burton. Rose would be off to work herself when he got there, was a paramedic in Station 19, down in Syringa.

  She’d gotten him into the Service, helped him practice for the first aid exam and then coached him through the application process and sometimes they got together over coffee to talk about calls and about their son.

  When he knocked at the door the boy flung it open and climbed into his arms, still in pyjamas. He smelled of warm bedclothes and of something sweet, like raspberries.

  “You’re late!” Sen said angrily and happily. “Where are we going?”

  Rose walked into the room then. “You’re late,” she repeated, “Why didn’t you call?

  I have things to do as well, you know?” He flinched but didn’t respond. Of course she was right — he should have called. Easy enough to say something cutting back to her, he could feel an angry response rising in his heart, but he had learned long ago now that that went nowhere.

  She was getting ready for work, tucking in the white shirt with the service crests on its
shoulders, the black belt hanging loosely at her side.

  She looked tired and worn, her forehead puckered in a frown.

  “What’s the matter?,” he asked.

  “I’m thinking of applying for a full-time position in Kamloops.”

  She explained that the position — if she got it — would give her a secure income and more money and that maybe she and Sen could afford to buy their own place. She had ambitions, too, of maybe eventually becoming a unit chief or a dispatcher.

  He understood all of this. It was a good move for her and her career, but it felt, unreasonably he knew, like abandonment. Maybe he would follow, find a job nearby so he could be close to her and their son. Maybe he would leave this place, too.

  Still, she had no time to talk right now.

  She was brushing out her hair to tie it up and he could see she’d put on a little makeup to hide her tiredness.

  She gave him a smile that asked, How are you with this?, but there was no time to talk.

  He set the boy down. He could see that she was afraid — of the decision, of what he might say.

  Kamloops was hundreds of kilometres away. That would mean that they would see less of each other, much less. It would be a journey to see her and his son, and when the boy stayed with him, they would have to travel back here, to his own home.

  Rose and his son were going to grow apart from him, through daily memories and routines that would be their own.

  Once again he felt that old fear of things he couldn’t control, of changes that he’d not foreseen and the effects of which he couldn’t say. Maybe he should try to get away from here, out of this country. The habits of his days went round the reservoir: ambulance calls, driving down to Burton to see his son, took him along its shores almost daily. Maybe, after all these years, he should just get over his grief and move on.

  When he’d helped Sen to dress for the day, they got into the car, the boy strapped in beside him. He started driving north on the Kootenay highway, along the Arrow shore. He was thinking of a place they could go for breakfast.