The Orchard Keepers

by Robert Pepper-Smith

  They could have breakfast in Nakusp. Lacey was going to meet them there. He asked Sen if he was hungry and he said yes, looking out the window with that dreamy expression of his that reminded him of Rose. Pleased he was and settled and unsure of where they were going, sleepy still, rubbing his eyes.

  He tried to put aside last night’s call, the pain in the man’s eyes, his look of hopelessness. “I don’t want to go,” he had said, sitting on the bed and his wife’s eyes had started with tears then and she had turned quickly away, gone to fumble among the pill bottles on the dresser, packing up his medications in a plastic bag. They didn’t even try to pretend, none of that false cheeriness in her voice — Oh, you’ll be back soon! — the silence of grief between them, in the look they exchanged at the door, the husband on the cot and the wife standing in the doorway, love and goodbye was in that look, tenderness and grief.

  North of New Slocan, the hills rose steeply dark with stands of fir and cedar, a morning mist coming off them and dimpling the windshield. As they rounded a curve, he caught a glimpse of the grey expanse of the reservoir through the trees. About fifty kilometres north they came to an overgrown side road that used to lead down to a farm on the flats, the grass rustling against the underside of the car as they drove down, and the boy looked around.

  “Where are we going, daddy?”

  He could feel a choking sensation in his throat as they came into an orchard. He parked by some trees with branches twisted or snapped by bears that had climbed after apples.

  He went over to touch the stone foundation in the tall orchard grass — his aunt Manice used to live here. Now she lived in a rest home in Naramata. There were two cousins from that time that he often thought about, though now he saw little of them. He remembered when his cousin Anna, a newborn, Manice’s child, was first brought to this house. She will be like a sister to you, he was told, and he was made to hold her on the porch steps as if to seal the relationship, he a boy of five and the cousin swaddled in a blanket so that she wouldn’t scratch her face with her tiny fingernails. He was astonished at how little she weighed then and to protect her, to make sure that she wouldn’t just float away, to keep her to earth, with a five-year-old’s logic he figured he’d need to gather a sack of bones to put under her crib. Later, he’d often not wanted to have anything to do with her, especially in school. Once, lost, she’d appeared unannounced in his classroom doorway and the teacher had asked,

  What is your name, little girl?

  An-na es-pisi-to!

  Some classmate asked if he knew her and he’d denied that she was his cousin. Mocking laughter. Now he felt a burning shame at that denial. Somehow as a boy he’d made the decision that Anna was from a different life unconnected with his, that she didn’t belong. He felt the distance between sister and what they really had, between the new village that the Hydro had promised and what they’d delivered: uprooted houses and stores set on blocks in a dust-strewn site.

  Despite the claim that she was to be like a sister, they had drifted apart. They had watched the village vanish before their eyes and it had not held them together, it had not given them the streets to walk down together, the orchards to climb in, the river in which to toss the burning dill torches of the festa. Between them, they could not make those places stay. So in the end, ungrounded, not kept to earth, they’d drifted apart. Now she sold real estate in Naramata to be close to her mother.

  And the other cousin, Maren.

  After she’d set the Giacomo house on fire, they’d tried to run away together. She’d set that house on fire because her father Paolo was going to take her away, back to the Aconcagua in the Argentine, the place of his birth. To pay for the plane tickets he was going to sell the Giacomo house, so she burnt it down. And then he and Maren had gone to hide in a cattle car, to run away to Burton. She had kissed him then, in that cattle car, her lips trembling on his.

  Later, as the train climbed through orchards, she fell asleep on burlap sacks, her head resting in his lap. A child of twelve, he felt then a death in his hands and he was no longer able to touch her. He felt then that it was not only houses and orchards that were vanishing, but a tenderness that could no longer be held in a place of its own.

  He hadn’t seen her in over a year. He’d heard that she was to marry one of the Fuscaldo boys.

  And now he remembered one of his uncle Paolo’s riddles that Paolo immediately answered himself:

  Wait, his uncle once said to him: What does a man have for himself when he has lost himself?

  A fist in the mirror!

  Now his son was standing in the tall grass, bundled up in a shiny, nylon coat that Rose had bought in a secondhand store, the sleeves too long for his arms. The boy was watching him, uncertain.

  “What’s that smell daddy?”

  It was the odour of windblown, rotten apples and of mouldering leaves on the reservoir shore.

  He parted the grass under a tree to show the boy the wrinkled apples and he bit into one to show its white, winter flesh and for the sweet, acrid scent of it.

  He said he used to pick these when he was a boy, that the unpruned trees were going back to the wild.

  “I’m going away for awhile,” he said then, “to Chiapas to help some friends.”

  “Can I go with you?”

  He spoke of Bernabe Mateas who had a child a little older than Sen. A teacher he’d met in El Tablon and who had got him and Lacey out of the country at the start of la violencia. “Maybe you’ll meet him someday. His son doesn’t speak English. You’ll have to learn some Spanish.”

  He started naming things around them in the language, the words strange on his tongue and in this place and the boy looked at him.

  “Stop saying those sounds, daddy,” he said. “Stop it. You’re just trying to trick me!”

  There was anger and bewilderment in the boy’s look.

  “I’m not trying to trick you,” he said, crouching down and pressing his knee into the grass by his son.

  “Yes you are!”

  And then he said, “Can I go with you?”

  “Where?”

  “To that place you said.”

  How is it that words, especially in a language we don’t understand, can make us feel angry, displaced or even afraid, unweighed to the earth? He remembered then a story he’d heard of his grandfather pedalling south from Dundee, Scotland to Roca D’Avola, Italy in 1920, a bag of slater’s tools strapped to the carriage over the bicycle’s rear wheel and of his using his slater’s hammer to break up a boulder uncovered in front of the Roca church to impress a young pregnant woman who would later become his wife. He knew then, so the story goes, that he would follow her anywhere, even to Canada.

  You speak like us, she’d said.

  You have our accent, because his own mother was from that village and had taught him the language in Dundee.

  Wasn’t it true, he thought then, that only one language, the language of your birth and childhood, could connect you to your heart, that when you speak that language, even after years of its having gone silent, you are back home?

  In another world, in another life, he could have brought his son here and his aunt Manice — the baby that his grandfather once helped to rescue in southern Italy, now an old woman who live in a rest home in Naramata — would have come to the door to greet them, take the boy in her arms. She would have led the boy by the hand through her orchard, shown him her trees, always well-pruned in a way that was like an easily identifiable signature.

  Let’s go, he imagines her saying. I know others who want to meet you, and they take the gravel river road by a grey expanse that was once the river. In the village, in a late, slant autumn light, on a café terrace, the two are waiting, Maren with her bushy eyebrows, narrow chin, green eyes of a girl from Roca, Anna with her wide smile and a dancing light in her eyes. They are sitting at a table drinking lemonade, both in dresses that look almost identical and when Manice and his son approach, they stoop down to say,

&
nbsp; What a wonderful little boy! We’re your aunts!

  “It’s cold here, daddy,” the boy said then, looking over the reservoir. “Let’s go!” His cheeks looked pinched raw from the wind, his nose running.

  “Here, take this,” and he fished in his jacket pocket for some tissue the boy could use. His son had no connection here, no memory. All he saw was dead grey water and all he could feel was the chill of that shrill wind.

  Somewhere on the drive to Nakusp, he made a decision. He was too connected to loss here; this is where he’d stand. But not only loss. Just as with the undocumented migrants who camped out in the hills north of Encinitas, he could reach back and be held, at every turn here there were memories that held him and made him who he was, offered him the possibility of making the choices of a good man, of a real human light in his eyes and touch.

  At a café in the town he spread a few photos across the table to show the boy his friends in Chiapas, Bernabe Mateas and his son Manuel, Helene and Andreas Tomas, but the boy was not interested in those faces: the plate of waffles had arrived and he was too hungry to pay attention.

  Then he looked up from his plate and smiled.

  Lacey had come in to sit with them. She worked in a hardware store across the street, had come to sit with them on her break.

  “These are for you,” Michael said, gathering up the photos and handing them to her. “Bernabe sent them.”

  “Look at Manuel,” she said then, a bright light in her eyes, “he’s become a big boy!

  Just like you, Sen,” she said to his son and the boy, cutting the waffles, nodded thoughtfully.

  “Are you coming with me?” Michael asked her then.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t think Rose would like it. We’ve already left her once, and I don’t think I could do that again, even for our friends. It’s dangerous, Michael. And she needs one of us to stay.”

  “You go,” she said then, touching his hand. “One of us has to,” and he nodded.

  “Better get back. We’re always busy on a Saturday morning! People in to buy lumber for some shed they’re building, paint, plumbing supplies, you know: weekend jobs. It’s always good to see the two of you together,” she said then, standing and smiling. “Always.”

  After breakfast, Michael and his son drove to his trailer on the Palliser where he changed into street clothes, and there, at the table he wrote out a cheque for two thousand dollars. It was a deposit on a property he’d walked a few times and was thinking about buying, part of a farm in the Bearpaw Valley.

  The road to Pinnacle Creek followed the base of Mt. Odin. The mountain was one of the tallest in the region, over 2,100 metres, its steep flanks covered in fir and pine. This used to be a logging road that was made public when Timber-lands sold its concessions in the Bearpaw Valley to farmers who moved in to tear out the stumps to plant hay and grain fields and orchards and Christmas trees. He wouldn’t know much about the valley except for a call that had taken him there, a farmer who was pinned by a tree he was felling. By the time they got there the farmer was dead, volunteer firefighters standing around waiting to cut away the tree so that the body could be removed to the RCMP station in New Slocan, where the coroner would examine it.

  Now there was a homemade For Sale sign at the foot of the driveway.

  He knew the widow: she used to be a train dispatcher in R. Years ago when he was ten or eleven he’d see her on 5th street, sometimes early in the morning or late at night coming back from shift work; he’d see her from his bedroom window, and sometimes she’d look up, smile and wave as she walked by, but he never got to know her, she wasn’t part of his family’s circle of friends.

  She was Mrs. Palladino from Enderby, who had gotten a job as a train dispatcher, that’s all he knew. And he’d heard that she often walked alone, didn’t have many friends in town.

  She was waiting for them on the porch when they drove into the yard; he’d phoned ahead to make sure that she was at home and to ensure that they would be welcome. The spring sun had broken through, and she was warming herself on the steps, a cane at her side.

  He’d been by a few times to walk the property, and now he wanted to show it to his son.

  “You go on ahead,” she smiled, “That’s a fine boy you’ve got there!” and his son looked at her shyly then, taking his father’s hand.

  They walked up the fence along the property line to a gate that led to a mined out gravel pit. On the north face of the pit a grove of alders had rooted, dense light, milky air, alder pollen sifting through the branches. In the hollow a pond, dark, sifting water, otherwise mounds of sand and gravel, tufts of bracken.

  This is what he was proposing to buy, all he could afford, really. It would take years to build soil here. Already, though, the alders had started. He and the boy walked to the grove and he knelt to scrape away last year’s leaves: under them, handfuls of dark humus.

  Years of work, that’s what he was proposing: build soil, plant trees and vines, a vegetable garden, let that grove go back to the wild.

  “I’m going to buy this,” he said to his son.

  “What for?”

  “So we can have a home here.”

  “There‘s no place to sleep, daddy!”

  He felt the boy’s hand tighten in his, and he was looking up at him, wide-eyed.

  How strange must be the ways of grownups to him. What they propose must often seem ludicrous and without sense. They must seem like wild dreamers in need of much correction. The boy had Rose’s practical sense of purpose and he wanted to know how, really, this was supposed to work.

  “We’ll move the trailer here,” he said then, “and we’ll build a house when we can afford it.”

  “This will be your room.” They gathered stones to mark out the lay of the foundation, the division of rooms, the entrances and where the windows would be, and the boy stood in his room and looked south toward the water.

  “Can you see it?”

  “Yes,” he nodded. “But there will have to be real walls.”

  “Yes,” he laughed, “there will have to be walls.”

  Later that evening, he returned. He and the widow sat at the kitchen table, more formally now that he has laid out the cheque between them. He saw that she was reluctant to accept it, that it would mean so much change in her life. He was not buying the whole farm, just the gravel pit, but it was already a step in a direction that she was reluctant to take. The two thousand dollars was a deposit, and the price he was offering was generous. The pit was practically worthless. Subdividing it from the rest of the property would make her farm more saleable. She knew this, and yet she was quiet, withdrawn.

  You were one of the paramedics who came when my husband was killed by a tree he’d felled, she said.

  Yes, he nodded.

  I’ll tell you how we ended up here and how he died, she said. I’m telling you this because I want to warn you about something.

  My husband’s name was Hector Palladino, He used to be a fireman on the railroad and I was a dispatcher. I met him in Field.

  He was walking along the platform when I stepped off the train for some fresh air. I’d been in Banff for a weekend holiday.

  “Don’t wander away,” he warned me. “We’re only here for five minutes!”

  I explained that I knew the precise time the train would leave, that I was familiar with this route as I was a train dispatcher in this division.

  He swept off his striped trainman’s cap and bowed low, saying, “I didn’t know I was in the presence of royalty!”

  His ears stuck out from under his short-cropped hair and he had a thin, nasally voice, like that of a tin whistle. I’d sworn I’d have nothing to do with a railroad man.

  Soon he was calling me at work from the station in Field. Once in the fall, without a word, he held the phone to an open window: I could hear snow falling.

  We bought a two-bedroom bungalow on 2nd street and tried to save for a few years, to buy land to get away from the rai
lroad. He only worked within our division. Sometimes he’d get work in town, sometimes as far away as Enderby. He could be gone for weeks at a time, at a moment’s notice. He hated shift work, always being at the beck and call of the telephone, the weeks that sometimes went by without a call and the bills piling up, his hands idle.

  We put off having children because he didn’t want to be away or asleep for most of their home life.

  Then one day he came banging in through the door, saying that he’d got a job on one of the tugs the Hydro had hired to help clear the forests north of Burton. He’d be gone for ten days in camp, home for four. The pay was good and meant that we could start to save for the farm we always talked about buying.

  So that fall, the fall of 1968, he was gone most of the time.

  Finally, after a few years of this we had enough saved to make a down payment on land we hoped to own. I don’t know what was in us. As we got close to our dream, something in us began to change. Maybe it was because of the money we were using, the way it had been made; grief money, I called it to myself, cutting down all those forests. It made us impetuous and even a little giddy, so that we didn’t see the things we should. We saw the pretty little house, the gardens, the well-tended orchard and didn’t see that the mountain would cast a long shadow in winter and early spring, making it a cold dark place. The soil was mostly grey clay that had no odour and every February a spring welled up under the basement floor, flooding it. I wondered why the orchard was planted to the northeast till I realized it was a windbreak for the winter winds that come through here, funneled by Mt. Odin and the flank of Mt. Burnham.

  Because we heated with wood, every winter we needed five cords to keep this place warm. At first wood was cheap or even free for the taking because of the clearing of the reservoir, then the price began to climb after the Hydro crews left and the reservoir was flooded.

  We have a grove of second growth fir in the northwest corner of the property, and one morning last spring Hector said to me that he was going to cut down a few for firewood, just thin the grove out a little, “to get ahead of the game.”