The Roots of the Olive Tree

by Courtney Miller Santo

  “She knows,” Bets said. Her daughter didn’t like disagreements. Anna wasn’t surprised when she changed the subject. “How long until the good doctor gets here?”

  “Before lunchtime,” Callie said. She pulled on the neckline of her shirt until it fully covered her bosom.

  “Help me with these olives then,” Anna said. “If we get them in the press now we’ll have fresh oil for lunch.”

  “The pickers did a good job this year. The Lindseys said their crew pulled down a ton an acre and we got at least that,” Bets said.

  Anna didn’t agree. “There’s a lot of picking left to do.”

  Bets sighed and took the bait. “Didn’t they strip it clean enough for you? I know Benny hired that new foreman, but he’s Diego’s son, and you know he’d been out with his daddy in the Lindseys’ fields since he could walk.”

  Anna looked at the funnel that fed the small handpress they kept on the porch. She needed another basket of olives to fill it. “Pickers didn’t do any worse than any other year. Definitely no better than the year all our men were at war and the harvest was left to the women and children.”

  “Daddy always said women made the best pickers. What’s that old proverb?” Bets asked.

  Anna grinned as she spoke. “ ‘In the olive grove you’ve got to be wise in the feet and wild in the head.’ ” She smiled thinking about her own father and how he’d always claimed that women were the only souls wild enough in the head to pick a tree clean. He never meant it as a compliment, but Anna took it as such.

  Callie shook her head. “I never did understand that. I think you ought to let the pickers use those machines. We could probably get a ton and a quarter an acre.” With this statement, her granddaughter had started an old argument, and Anna understood Callie raised it mostly for the conversation.

  “The noise would kill me and the pounding is likely to kill the trees.” Anna smiled as she said this. She knew her granddaughter was just finding a way to argue, since Bets had cut off their conversation about the doctor. This was better. Callie liked to tell people that the day her grandmother wasn’t outraged, they’d start planning the funeral. It made folks laugh, especially young people, who couldn’t imagine that Anna, as old as she was, hadn’t already planned her interment twice over.

  They stood on the porch, hashing out old complaints until the dry November wind drove them inside. Just as Anna moved to pick up the basket and head to the orchard for a second time, she heard the crunch of a car coming down the gravel drive out front.

  “He’s early,” Callie said, rising and moving with her awkward gait quickly through the house to the front door. The dog, who was too old to hear the car, trotted after Callie as she thumped past him.

  Bets held the door open for Anna and then glanced at the ormolu clock on the piano in the corner of the front room. “I don’t see how he made such good time from the airport. Oakland traffic is never easy to get through.”

  There was no porch off the front door. Three concrete stairs stepped down to the gravel driveway, a carved semicircle in the front yard. Anna remained standing on the top step, shading her eyes against the sun as a dark blue sedan made its way down the drive.

  “Why doesn’t he hurry up already?” Callie asked.

  “Probably didn’t get the rental insurance,” Bets said. “They’ll get you for the tiniest ding.”

  Anna squinted and saw that there was a woman behind the wheel. Bobo surprised them all by rising up on his hind legs and pawing at the sky before turning a flip. It was a trick he hadn’t done in years. Anna was just realizing it was not who they expected when the car stopped and Erin, her great-great-granddaughter, stepped out of the car.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Erin

  Erin left Kidron two years earlier, after graduating from college, and hadn’t been home since. She talked too fast for Anna to catch most of what was said, but it was clear that her great-great-granddaughter was in trouble. Erin’s voice was thin, her skin sallow, and her gestures moved in opposition to her words. Anna heard her say, “I just needed a break, the stress—” and watched her hands make a circle, as if to indicate that there was some larger problem, an issue so big it couldn’t be spoken about. Callie settled next to her on the couch and the dog climbed into Erin’s lap and curled into a ball.

  “You need to eat,” Bets said, bringing in a plate of olives and saltines. “You’re too thin and your cheeks are all sunken in. What do they feed you on tour? I’d think in Italy it would be all pasta and bread.”

  Callie picked up where her mother left off. “Did you lay over in New York? Why didn’t you call to tell us you were coming? You didn’t have to rent a car, I would’ve picked you up.”

  Erin leaned her head on Callie’s shoulder and closed her eyes.

  “We should send her to bed.” Anna wanted to talk to the others without Erin present. They needed to piece together an explanation of the child’s behavior.

  “I’m old enough to send myself to bed,” Erin said. Her eyes were still closed, and Anna suspected she was crying. “I didn’t know I was coming home until I got here and by then it was too late to tell you.”

  Bets stroked the girl’s hair and murmured soothing words. The scene wasn’t much different from the one that unfolded when Erin had been a child, one who lost her parents and had come, quite unexpectedly, to live with them at Hill House. Anna listened to Bets’s hypnotic voice—there was some lilt, pattern to her speech that soothed the instinct to run and then watched as her daughter—old enough to need help herself—walked Erin down to the bedroom that had been hers when she was four. Bobo went after them.

  Anna pulled open the secretary in the living room and took out all the papers she had about Erin’s time in Italy. There were a handful of airmail letters written on tissue-thin paper full of vague descriptions of the other opera members, anecdotes of day trips they’d taken, and one particularly long missive when Erin thought she’d left her sheet music on a city bus. She also had the initial packet of information that Erin had received when she signed her contract to sing mezzo-soprano for the Academy of Santa Cecilia.

  Callie and Bets came down the hall and settled back into the couch. The exchange with Erin seemed to have restored some of their youth. They talked quietly, and Anna didn’t even try to listen. She’d never admit it, but she couldn’t hear as well as she used to. Instead, she searched for the copy of the contract that Erin had given her when Anna demanded to know how she was going to pay for her living expenses. There was money that Erin didn’t know about—money from an insurance policy that had paid out when her father died—but Anna was holding back, waiting for the right time to give it to Erin. At last Anna found what she’d been searching for at the bottom of the pile of letters. When she unfolded it, she realized every word was in Italian. It would be of no use to them.

  “She’s in trouble,” Bets said, at last bringing Anna into the conversation.

  “I’ve never seen her look so much like her mother,” Callie said. “Should we look in the car for clues? There has to be some indication of why she’s here.”

  Bets took the paperwork from Anna and scanned it. “You can read some of this,” she said to her daughter. “Spanish and Italian aren’t that much different. Both romance languages, right?”

  “They’re nothing alike,” Callie said, not even glancing at the papers. “I’m not sure we should pry. Chances are she’ll tell us when she’s ready.”

  “Her mother never told us anything,” Bets said, pulling at a silver strand of hair that escaped the low bun she always wore.

  Anna knew she should step between them, knew that the blame and the guilt for what had happened with Erin’s mother was deep enough to threaten the bond between the two of them. It had been ugly for so many years after it happened.

  “A woman is entitled to her secrets,” Anna said. She thought of all that she’d kept from her own mother, her daughter—suspicions that none of them were who they thought they were.
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  Bets stood, quickly gathering the papers up off the couch. She had her father’s height and his chin—pointed and heavily angled, although he’d always worn a beard, which softened his face. Bets didn’t have that option and as a result, people often felt accused when she spoke to them. “We could have stopped it if we’d known. I’m not going to let this become another festering secret we keep because it’s easier to tell ourselves that privacy is important. To hell with privacy.”

  Anna listened to the front door slam and the heavy crunch of Bets’s feet on the gravel. “She’s not going to find anything,” she said to Callie. “I got a good look when our girl jumped out of the car crying and I didn’t see a bit of luggage and not so much as a burger wrapper.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Mom thinks you took my side again.” Callie glanced down the hall at the closed door to Erin’s room.

  “There aren’t any sides,” Anna said, reaching for her granddaughter’s hand. “There’ve never been any sides. It’s all just one big endless circle.”

  “I don’t want to be sitting here when she comes back in,” Callie said.

  She sounded petulant, like she had at fourteen when her hair was a tangled mess and her feet were summer-browned. As a girl and then as a teenager, she’d been a blur running from Bets, running from Hill House, never wanting to be contained. Every spoken wish tied inextricably to leaving Kidron. Callie had thought the big wide world was holding its arms open for her. “Come down to the orchard with me. I need another basket of olives to get enough oil pressed,” Anna said. The orchard had a way of calming people.

  Callie rubbed her leg through the stiff denim. “In too much pain to do any serious walking. I’ll start lunch, I need to figure out another vegetable, since Erin won’t eat any of that ham we’ve got baking.”

  Anna rose and thanked God that her body functioned well enough for her to move around. She’d never been one to be idle. Not that her granddaughter’s leg kept her idle, but it allowed her to hide in kitchens and storerooms doing only the work she wanted to. Anna pulled a sweater from the front closet, grabbed her basket, and headed out the back door to the orchard. With Erin’s arrival, the day seemed cooler to Anna.

  The house would be in disarray when the geneticist arrived. Anna wondered what sort of man Dr. Hashmi was and whether he’d notice the chaos around him. Men weren’t blessed with the same intuition as women. At the bottom of the hill, she turned to look back at her house. It was a home built in stages, with rooms added as their family grew in size and in wealth. Like many of the homes in the Sacramento Valley, it had been patterned after the missions that the Spanish abandoned when they lost the war. It was one story with an adobe roof and stucco walls. From the back you could see the two wings that ran perpendicular to each other off the main structure. The kitchen, which for many years had served as a place to process the family’s olives, took up most of the north wing. The south, comprised of three bedrooms and a bathroom, was slightly longer than its counterpart. The main building held a master bedroom, renovated most recently, a sitting room, a dining room, and a library.

  This home, which had always been called Hill House, had been built by Anna’s father, Percy Davison. Over the years, she’d often wondered how a man had constructed such a perfect home for the women who’d come to inhabit it. When they moved from the canvas tent where they’d lived waiting on the fledgling orchard to sprout, providing enough collateral for the bank, her father told them their temple awaited them. Hill House was not the oldest home in Kidron, but because it was one of the few plots of elevated land in this part of the valley and the orchard was still family owned, it was one of the stops on the tourism route drawn up by the town. The brochure, which Anna had hanging on her refrigerator, called it Kidron’s own San Simeon. It was, of course, not even a third of the size of that mansion, but Anna privately agreed with this assessment. She never said as much, afraid that what the world perceived about her town, about her house, was not her reality.

  The closer she came to the orchard, the younger she felt. She stepped into the grove of trees, which were not even a foot taller than she, and breathed in the musk of decomposition. Fall was coming fast, but there, among the olive trees, summer was still suspended in the gray-green of the leaves. The fruit had just started to turn from lime green to purple. She reached up and cupped her palm around one of the nearest branches. The noise the leaves made as she moved her hand quickly upward, the friction sending the fruit falling into the waiting basket, sounded like the voice of her father, who held as many stories as there were stars and each one always began and ended with the trees.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Kidron

  Anna had loved her father, but she never liked him all that much. She suspected most people felt this way about one parent, or at the very least, a sibling. It wasn’t God’s way to stick you with people who were easy to like—life was all a big test. Can you love your sniveling, sickly brother? Can you love your dumb but well-intentioned mother? Can you love your hard-as-steel father? Anna used to tell her children that God never gave one commandment about liking a person and she’d learned over the years that it was possible to love without having a lot of like in your heart.

  Under her father’s inscrutable gaze, Anna always felt disappointed in herself. This feeling of not measuring up is what made her older brother, Wealthy, leave home, and it is what made Anna stay in Kidron. Funny how two people raised in the same home could have such opposite reactions. Of course, you are born who you are. In Anna’s experience, raising children was less like molding clay and more like chipping away at granite with a butter knife. Her father had never tried to change who his children were, he just remained disappointed that they couldn’t become what he expected of them. A week or so after he died, Anna found a slip of paper in his Bible that confirmed this for her. On the top of the paper in his deeply slanted writing, he’d written “The Accomplished Life of Percival Keenan Davison.” Following that was a numbered list:

  1. First man to cultivate olives in California

  2. Two-time collar-and-elbow champion of Meath

  3. Discovered the world’s fifth largest alluvial gold nugget in Australia

  4. Moved Kidron to present-day location

  5. Father to Wealthy Davison and Anna Davison Keller Flew on a plane

  Anna didn’t know whether he’d crossed his children off the list because those weren’t the type of accomplishments he’d intended to document or whether in the end who his children had grown up to be was less of an achievement than riding in a biplane at the state fair.

  She did know that his list wasn’t entirely accurate. The Spanish were the first to bring olives to the New World. When they conquered California, they planted groves wherever they planted their missions—using the oil for the church’s anointing and consecrating. The olive tree, like most religions, required civilization to survive, and when the Spanish were conquered, left-behind trees became feral, barren bushes. Percy arrived half a century after the Spanish ceded California, meaning that Anna’s father could truly only claim to have resurrected the crop.

  Veda, Anna’s mother, who was called Mims, claimed the gold nugget was as large as two clasped hands. Percy’s mining partners cheated him, and in the end, Anna’s parents left Australia with just enough money to start over in California. Because Anna was only four when they left Brisbane, she never fully understood why they needed to start over—only that the move was connected in some way to Wealthy’s asthma and Mims’s grief over the babies she’d lost between the births of Anna and her brother.

  The people in Kidron held a dozen stories about Percy that differed in a dozen different ways from the truth that Anna knew about her father. If he’d talked more, maybe the history books would agree on a few facts, but the only story anyone had right was what happened once he arrived in the Sacramento Valley. The Davison family arrived in San Francisco in 1898. After weeks on a cramped ship, Percy couldn’t take even the smallest crowds. He wrinkl
ed his nose at the stench of the city and went in search of arid land with mild seasons.

  Anna, Wealthy, and their mother stayed in a rooming house guarding the family’s most precious possession—six wooden boxes filled with rootstock. As Anna understood it, there had been more trees when the family had left Brisbane, but they’d not all survived the voyage. For many years, her parents used these boxes as nightstands, and it was only when they both died that Anna tossed them into the woodpile and put in their place a matching set from the Penney’s catalog. She sometimes wished she hadn’t done this, but for many years, she didn’t appreciate that objects could have a history.

  Ultimately her father was only able to untangle half his trees. He spent the money he’d planned to use to build the family a house on buying year-old trees from Spain and then he grafted bits of his trees onto the new rootstock. The earliest written account of Percy’s contribution to Kidron notes that he went in search of the feral trees at the back of abandoned missions—snipping branches from the heartier specimens. After seeing how quickly his rootstock with the feral cuttings took to the soil, Percy allowed himself to feel hopeful. In a year’s time the trees were as big as those that were three years old in Brisbane. He calculated that instead of ten years, it would only take six for his trees to bear enough fruit to pay back his outlay and start putting money in his pocket.

  Money remained an obstacle to easy success—her father didn’t have enough cash to wait six years for a crop. He needed to find people with money who would believe in him and understand his vision of small ten- and twenty-acre lots producing just enough for a family to make a living. Two of the largest landowners in Tehama County, James Mayfield and John Woodburn, quickly signed on to make Percy’s vision a reality. They waited until the location of the railroad became public knowledge and then they announced the creation of the Maywood Colony. They divided up the acreage of Mayfield and Woodburn into ten-acre plots and planted them ninety trees to an acre, then they took out advertisements in major magazines offering more than 100 percent profit on the land. It was nearly true, too. The trees provided enough income for purchasers to make their installment plan payments on the houses and land and earn enough money for a family to buy house goods. They hired Percy to manage the olive and fruit trees and paid him a small percentage of each sale.