It was a good plan. Even now, fourth grade teachers in Kidron during their sections on local history tell their students that Percy saw the future—he was a man who sensed the growth of the West would come by bringing in the people who were neither rich nor poor, but wanted more space than the congested East could give them. Then there were the children of farmers who knew enough to want more than to raise livestock or depend on the volatility of wheat prices at harvest. Olives were a steady crop with predictable payouts. Her father lived long enough to read a few of these history passages about the colonies, and it delighted him.
Before it could be a triumph—and the Maywood Colony was hugely successful—Percy had to appease George Kidron, who felt anyone’s success but his own as if it were sand in his underwear. As the town’s founder, George held opinions that people respected. When asked about the colony, he predicted failure and called Percy a foreign con man come to fleece California. His blustering made Percy’s investment partners nervous, and they asked him to make peace. Percy could read men like he could the earth, and he knew that the failure of Kidron to find success as a railroad town had left a great, gaping pit in George’s heart—so instead of offering him money, Percy told him that he knew how to move the town.
For this part of her father’s story, Anna didn’t need to rely on the town’s history books, or what Mims and Percy had told her. Her first clear memory—one that moved beyond emotions and senses—was of this move. She thought of that fall day in 1900 as the day she was born. There existed in her mind still images from Brisbane—a woman she didn’t recognize in a flour sack apron, a tortoise as big as a table, and her father lifting a basket of sun-blackened olives. She sometimes wished she could find the key to start these images rolling into a movie, felt that they would give her insight into herself, but they remained still and slightly out of focus. The day the town hauled itself a mile toward the railroad was a moving picture, but unlike the story of her father and how he brought the olives, it lived and breathed in her cells.
There was no school on moving day. All the children were released and told to stay out of the way. Some of the older boys, like Anna’s brother, Wealthy, assisted their fathers by tying ropes and holding harnesses. Anna volunteered to take care of her mother, who was five months pregnant. There was optimism that Mims would be able to carry this child to term, but the midwife, after hearing her history, had confined her to bed. Anna had no talent for ministrations and her mother soon sent her to town, telling her to watch over her father and brother. “If we lose them, we’re lost,” Mims had said.
As it happened, Mims blossomed when all the men in her life had left her. With her petite, round figure and her small-featured face, Mims had, when she was thin, resembled a mouse. As she aged and put on weight, her face filled out and looked like a child’s illustration of the sun. This was how Anna’s children remembered Mims, but on that day in 1900, her skin was drawn tight over her skeleton—all the worry about the baby, the orchard, and the colony had eaten up every last reserve of fat she had.
The hot air pushed up the valley from the desert to the east of Kidron and brought with it the fine grit of sand. After two years of living in the valley, Anna still felt out of place. It was a sentiment shared by most of the other residents of Kidron. She overheard her father tell the men at the general store that most mornings he felt like he’d put on another man’s pants. There was less permanence back then, when the people who lived in the valley had only called it home for one or two generations. Now, everywhere she looked, Kidron was filled with the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those men standing around the store, agreeing that the hot wind just didn’t feel like home.
The general store was an imposing rectangle with annexes stuck off the sides like stacked boxes. To Anna, the buildings hadn’t seemed old, but now that she was six, she’d only recently decided that the world hadn’t started at her birth. She considered the things that had been there before her as she fed the horses bits of carrots on moving day.
It had been decided that the saloon no longer fit with the character of the town and it would remain, along with what her father called the “ladies” house on old Main Street. When her daughter Bets first married Frank, she lived on old Main Street, and visiting them Anna was surprised to find that both buildings had survived. The ladies house, which she now understood had been a whorehouse, was home to an eccentric pair of brothers who rented rooms to vagrants during the winter. The saloon had become a restaurant that capitalized on the building’s history. Although the owners had installed swinging doors, like those one would find in a John Wayne picture, they had not been present when she was a girl. Anna told Bets that the saloon had never had swinging doors. “Such an impracticality. Good only for gunfights, and we never had those,” she’d said.
Those two buildings had large black Xs painted on their sides on moving day. Anna walked among the teams of horses waiting to pull the buildings, and stopped to listen to the butcher tell her father and a few of the other men who’d come into town from Maywood Colony about seeing an outpost in Iowa attempt a move. “Damn fools killed half the horses in town and had to put the other half down from injuries. I saw a man flattened when a house rolled over him,” said the butcher as he spit tobacco juice into the street. “It wasn’t like you’d think. No popping or bursting right when it happened. Naw, that came later.”
The men went on to discuss death and how the bodies they’d seen never looked like one expected. The butcher said the flattened man’s body had started to swell, and the skin on his legs split like a peach left too long on the tree. “He was dead before the sun set,” the butcher finally said. Some men standing around him edged away and found a way to busy their hands with horses or uncoiling rope. Her father, though, stepped closer and put a hand on the man’s shoulder. She frowned and remembered her mother telling her father that morning that the easiest solutions are often impossible. Although Anna was only six, the image of that man’s skin splitting open like overripe fruit stayed in her mind as if she had actually been in that small Iowa town to watch the man suffer.
She watched her father as he threaded his way through the town taking notes on who was ready to move. Anna kept a few paces behind him, stepping into a doorway when he turned around, or reaching to stroke the neck of one of the hitched horses. The town smelled different then; there was always straw thrown down over some low spot in the road, and a man’s sweat mixed with that of the animals. The horses were damp with perspiration that day and the smell of their sweet, heavy sweat overpowered Anna. She watched him write numbers on buildings to indicate the order that they would be moved. At last he came to the general store, and he drew a chalk line up one side of the store and then handed off the chalk to the men on the roof, who completed the line. He took his chalk back and marked the store’s halves each with a different number.
Anna felt no compunction to watch over her brother. He’d been so sickly in Brisbane that her parents let him roam all hours of the day and night around Kidron. Anna complained about how Wealthy never had to help, and her parents said that God was likely to take his miracle back if they stopped him from exercising his good health now that he had it. It made her wish him ill. She watched him shimmy up the side of the general store to help the Lindsey boys dismantle the chimney one brick at a time and hoped that he’d fall and break his leg.
Logs had been stripped of their bark and made smooth, and they sat like the legs of giants in the middle of the road. Each of the two dozen buildings in town was surrounded by piles of furniture and goods, and Anna left her father and his chalk numbers and amused herself by wandering among the stacks to examine the insides of houses she’d never set foot in. All around her the noise of steel teeth cutting through planks and men swearing as horses pulled unevenly filled her ears. The breeze pushed back at her as she walked, and although there was no salt in the air, there was the sweetness of newly cut lumber. She felt proud of Kidron, emboldened by a town that refused to
die because the Southern Pacific Railroad had plotted a route out of its reach.
The town worked together to move the butcher shop first. Two dozen men slid planks under the foundation and forty others circled the structure. On the count of three, men pushed down on the planks and those circling the building moved in to take their place along the front or sides and hold up their section until the logs could be rolled underneath. It took no more than three minutes for the butcher shop to be placed on rollers. Anna watched as it was secured with ropes and then as six teams of horses were hitched to the logs. At that point every man put a hand on the building and walked with the horses to where lines had been burned into the prairie grass to mark the place for the shops. Anna returned to where the butcher shop had sat and poked her toe at the bone and dried blood that had dropped through the cracks in the floor.
Wealthy and the Lindsey boys began scavenging for bits they could use in their cowboy games and pushed Anna aside. “This is no place for girls.” Anna pocketed a palm-size bone fragment the color of weak tea and settled herself on a stack of flour sacks. It took nearly ten hours to move the remaining eighteen structures. For the last two—the pharmacy and the blacksmith—the children were given lanterns to set atop their heads and told to walk the path between old Main and new Main. After the last had been settled into its new foundation, Anna watched her father set his foot on the path toward Hill House and then scurried back with her lantern to find what had fallen through the floor cracks of each of the buildings. That night was the only one she ever remembered staying out later than Wealthy.
Anna kept that pile of treasures tied up in a blue handkerchief far into adulthood. It wasn’t until one long summer day when her children were small and in need of a distraction that she dug the pile from her hope chest. She doled out the buttons, shoe buckles, nails, and even the bone to each with a made-up story of the item’s owner and the special powers it held.
From the orchard, Anna heard the grind of tires on the gravel and knew that the geneticist had finally arrived. She quickly ran her hands up several more branches, trying to pull as much fruit as she could. The basket at her feet was nearly two-thirds full. It would be enough.
CHAPTER FOUR
Supercentenarian
Anna watched the good doctor fill his plate with olives, green beans, and potatoes. He passed on the meat but took three of Callie’s dinner rolls. His muddy brown eyes flicked around the table, and he nodded each time he made eye contact with any of the women. He looked to be in his midfifties. Callie was probably too old for him. In Anna’s experience, men his age wanted a wife young enough to take care of them as they aged. Still, he had kind eyes, and they glanced most often at her granddaughter.
Bets, who’d overseen the cooking of the ham, picked up the platter and tried to urge it on him. “It isn’t beef, if that’s what you’re worried about. Fresh meat, we only got the hog butchered last week.”
Dr. Hashmi’s gaze dropped to his plate. “I’d not expected such a large lunch.”
“Most of the Hindus I know are vegetarians,” Erin said. She’d come out of the bedroom during the introductions. They’d told him right away about her unexpected return, and he’d clapped his hands, offering that he was delighted that he’d get to meet the fifth generation in person.
“Ah, yes. American food is quite complicated,” he said, bringing an olive to his mouth. “But quite good.”
“Well I don’t eat the meat either,” Erin said and turned toward the doctor. “Philosophical grounds. Humane treatment and all that.”
Anna stiffened. “Your second cousin Charley Spooner raised this pig up from when it was small. Bought it at the 4H auction, and it followed him around like a sheep. How much more humanity do you want?”
Bobo growled and then Erin surprised them all by reaching for the platter and moving a slice onto her plate. She tore a bit off, tossed it to the dog, and then licked her fingers. “Oh God that’s good,” she said. Anna wasn’t sure if she were speaking to the dog or to those seated around her.
Erin blinked rapidly. “I’ve been away too long. I forget that you don’t see the world the way everyone else does. I forget it’s still possible to get a pig that someone took on daily walks.” She cut the meat into small squares and then put a bite no bigger than a pea on her fork. “I’d also forgotten that Bets can make a ham so tender it melts in your mouth.”
Anna didn’t know what to say. Erin’s strange behavior wasn’t an issue they could raise in the presence of a stranger. Bets put another slice on Erin’s plate. “You’re so thin, maybe a little ham will put some meat back on your bones,” she said.
In the end, Erin was the only one of them to have an appetite. Anna watched Bets clear half-full plates with food pushed around the edges. In the corner, Callie and Dr. Hashmi stood, holding their plates as if on their way to the sink, but instead they talked to each other in low voices.
“Should we start?” Anna asked.
Dr. Hashmi ended up sandwiched between Erin and Callie on the low living room couch. Erin, who appeared revitalized by lunch, asked question after question, with hardly enough space between her words for the doctor to answer. “Your accent is slight,” she said to him. “Where are you from?”
“Tennessee. It was my father who immigrated to America in the 1940s to be part of the nuclear experiments.”
He’d shared this information as if they wouldn’t know what he was speaking of, but Anna corrected that notion. “At Oak Ridge, right? One of the Lindsey boys was out there at that time working security. Of course we all thought he was a peanut farmer. Maybe your parents knew him?”
Dr. Hashmi raised his shoulders as if to answer her, but Bets cut him off. “One of the faults of being so old is that you tend to think everyone ought to know everyone else.” She changed the subject, asking if he’d been born in Tennessee.
Dr. Hashmi shook his head. “I’m afraid now that you know I wasn’t it gives away my age.”
“Age is nothing to be ashamed about in this room,” Callie said. “You don’t get to be the head of a department if you’re under fifty.” She leaned forward, exposing a bit of her ample cleavage. “I just couldn’t get over that his assistant put me right through to him.”
Anna watched the doctor closely. He dipped his head slightly in Callie’s direction, but she couldn’t tell what he was looking at. It had become apparent to Anna that Callie had developed feelings for Dr. Hashmi. She wondered if he felt the same.
“I’ve been searching for a family such as yours nearly my whole career.” His hand briefly touched Callie’s knee.
“And here we are in the middle of nowhere California,” Erin said. There was an edge to her voice that set off alarm bells in Anna’s head. She brushed her concerns aside to concentrate on the doctor, who opened his briefcase and passed around a thick packet of papers.
“The questionnaires are first, but I want you to do this over the next few weeks. The oral interviews are why I’m here and of course, your DNA. I vant your blood.” His attempt at humor was greeted with silence. Callie’s laugh came a beat late.
Anna pitied him and despite herself, she felt her suspicions melting away. She’d been strongly against the idea of having a geneticist study their family. Lab rats, she’d said to Callie when she brought them the idea. Her granddaughter explained how well his research suited their family. He was specifically interested in studying supercentenarians, both living and dead, and the resulting longevity of their offspring. He, along with several financial backers, believed in the existence of a longevity gene.
Callie’s fascination with their family’s age sometimes exhausted Anna. That girl was always trying to find the why behind the Keller women’s ability to age gracefully. Anna, although she would never vocalize this, felt that if there were something special about the family that it would somehow lessen the feat of living to be the oldest person in the world. Like when those baseball players got into trouble for taking drugs. Anna just wanted Calli
e to leave well enough alone, and yet here she was again. All it took this time was reading some of an article in Newsweek about Dr. Hashmi and his research.
Callie immediately contacted his office at the University of Pittsburgh earlier that year, and in the spring, he’d sent a brief questionnaire and arranged telephone interviews with all the firstborns. Getting permission to speak with Deb, who was incarcerated, had been difficult. Fortunately, there was money attached to the project, and the warden at Chowchilla, where she was housed, accepted a substantial donation from several backers of the study the week before she approved the interview request. During the phone interview, Anna had been grumpy—providing only one-word answers and muttering about the presumptions of this man who thought he could divine the secrets of longevity by asking about the diseases of long-dead family members.
Now, Anna paid close attention as Dr. Hashmi took them through the lengthy questionnaire. She didn’t want to give him any opportunity to think she was addled. She did notice that Erin ignored his guided tour and leafed through the pages, stopping when she came to section six, which was headed “Dietary Considerations.”
“Glad to see you’re interested in what we’re eating this time around,” Erin said over the top of his explanation about section two, which discussed environmental toxins.
“Yes, food is an important consideration, although I’ve no training in—” Dr. Hashmi inclined his head and let Erin speak.
The Roots of the Olive Tree Page 3