The Roots of the Olive Tree

by Courtney Miller Santo

  “It’s the oil,” she said.

  “The oil?” Dr. Hashmi, who was flustered at being interrupted, didn’t understand what Erin was trying to say. Anna knew, as did Bets, who was shaking her head to warn Erin not to speak.

  “Olives. You had some earlier with lunch. Didn’t you notice driving through the grove how beautiful the trees were? I arrived just before you, and with the slight breeze blowing in from the west I saw not only the greens of our leaves, but also the silver underbellies. They call that Athena’s eye. I don’t know if they’ve told you all their secrets, but here’s one for you. That stock of trees traces its roots back to a time before Christ ever walked the earth. You ask Anna, she’ll tell you how her father smuggled his special stock over from Brisbane.” Erin sat back in the recliner and smiled, satisfied that she’d made her point.

  “The groves.” He paused before continuing and glanced at Callie, who shrugged slightly. “They are quite striking. And you process the oil yourselves?”

  “Process it, sell it, cook with it, and if you listen to Erin long enough, she’ll have you believe that we sleep in it,” said Bets, tightening her grip on her own questionnaire until the paper started to crumple. “The good doctor is looking for answers, not hocus-pocus.”

  Erin frowned at her great-grandmother. Bets had never believed in the power of the groves, and every time Erin or Callie, who was the true believer, talked about it, her voice took on a dismissive tone, as if she were explaining how the magician pulls a rabbit out of a hat.

  Anna closed her eyes. Bobo came to her and began to paw at her knees.

  “Perhaps I’ve stayed too long,” said Dr. Hashmi, rising from the couch. Callie had been sitting so close to him that when he stood, she fell over into the space he left behind.

  “No,” Erin said. “We just need a snack. That’s something else you should know about the Keller women, we’re all a little hypoglycemic. You don’t feed us every four hours and we’re likely to start a fight over a feather.”

  “I didn’t realize you called yourselves that,” he said. “It is your married name? Am I right?”

  Anna failed to answer him. She had been trying to catch Bets’s eye. She knew what was wrong with Erin and wanted to see if Bets knew as well. The hunger was the giveaway. Erin had just eaten. When she was small and had first come to live with them, her eating patterns had been erratic. She’d gorge on a meal and then, like a snake, not eat for two or three days afterward.

  “It’s of no consequence,” he said when no one answered him. He moved into Erin’s seat across from Anna and squeezed her hand. “You’re amazing. Most of the supercentenarians I interview fall asleep before we’ve even turned the first page.”

  His praise made Anna less stoic, and she admitted that she was tired. “I don’t nap. I know that’s what everyone thinks, but I close my eyes to conserve my energy. I’m still aware of what’s happening around me. There’s too little life left for me to miss out.”

  “Like bears. Hibernation is a myth. It isn’t a long sleep, it is a long rest.” He continued to hold her hand. “I’ll let you hibernate for the rest of the day if you schedule a time for our interview. I’ve actually got to meet with everyone here and then, of course, Deb.”

  Erin came back into the room, cradling Mims’s yellow cookie jar. Anna’s gaze settled on the girl’s midriff. Seeing Erin in the hallway with the fading afternoon light turning her black hair purple, Anna was reminded how much the girl looked like Violet, or what Anna’s sister would have looked like had she ever become a woman. Her great-great-granddaughter finished chewing the half of peanut butter cookie she’d crammed into her mouth and then smiled at Dr. Hashmi. “You can come down to Chowchilla with me. Mama is up for parole again, and I thought I’d try to see if I can help her get out.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Violet

  Anna’s little sister Violet was born in October 1900. After her father had overseen the town’s move, his investors had given him enough money to build a house for his family. The stucco had not yet dried and the floors had not been laid, but Mims was moved indoors when her contractions started, and Violet Philomena Davison was the first child born at Hill House.

  Her presence marked the beginning of good fortunes for the Davisons, and in those early years the trees prospered and the plots of land for the acreage sold quickly. By Violet’s third birthday, Maywood Colony had bought out three more ranchers and two alfalfa farms, bringing the total acreage of the colony to forty thousand. The Lindseys, who were one of the first families to buy into the colony, purchased land near Kidron’s old Main Street and built a processing plant that was run as a cooperative.

  Until Anna was thirteen, the only sour note in her childhood was when her brother, Wealthy, rejected their father’s offer to buy him his own plot in the colony. Instead, he bought a train ticket to Texas to search out his fortune. Her father refused to see him off and then he forbade any of them from so much as waving good-bye to the train. Anna, who liked that she and Wealthy called the mailman postie and asked for snags instead of sausages with their eggs, skipped school and walked the four blocks to the station on the day that he left. She found him quickly; he was the only man besides her father in town who had red hair. His head was leaning against the window, and Anna threw pebbles at the train car until he turned and saw her. He nodded, and it was the first time her brother looked like a man to her. She hummed to herself as she left the station, planning to make good use of her day out of school by heading to the swimming hole. She heard a low whistle and turned to see her father in the shadows of the station. He winked at her. It was one of the only times she liked her father.

  Two months later in early May, the schoolhouse on West Street in the oldest section of Kidron caught fire. It was unusually hot and windy that Spring, and before the fire all that the town talked about was the weather and how it would affect the fruit set of the olives. Anna’s father was especially concerned about fruit set because his trees would be six years old that season. His reputation had been built on the promise that in 1907 all the trees that had been planted the first year they sold plots would bear a full harvest—they would be as mature with as much fruit as trees that were a decade old elsewhere.

  Anna and Violet had little supervision. The wind made Anna itchy and she often ducked out of school after lunch to go to the swimming hole she and the Lindsey boys had discovered their second year in Kidron. The creek forked at the edge of Anna’s land and cut through the property that the Lindseys had purchased. Just after it forked, there was a sinkhole that in the Spring, as the snow from Shasta melted, filled with water.

  When her father found out about playing hooky he sent her to bed without her supper, but that year, her parents barely registered the notes the teacher, Miss Dupont, sent home. Violet liked to be praised and enjoyed having her sister punished. Anna knew it bothered her little sister when she was told to mind her own business when she complained about Anna not being where she should be.

  They attended Kidron Public No. 1, a wood clapboard structure with an old-fashioned bell tower at the top of its three stories. In the West, where no one family had more than a generation’s claim on the land, the social pecking order was determined by proximity to downtown. Those who got in early were seen as forward thinkers and admired, while those who went to school No. 5 were deemed to have unimaginative parents who’d followed the pack. Those with real money boarded their children in schools in the East.

  By May it became apparent that the crop yield for 1907 would be far lower than expected. The wind had been too strong to pollinate the trees. Instead of gently blowing the bits of yellow dust from one blossom to another, it swept all the pollen north and into the foothills of Mount Lassen. Families who’d taken out large loans based on the previous year’s yield prepared for bankruptcy. The town itself was still flush with revenue under the direction of George Kidron, who was the mayor. He moved to bring the town into the twentieth century. The week before the f
ire they began replacing the Kidron’s electric arc lamps with incandescent ones, and they purchased thirty gallons of a new red paint that the distributor promised would last for thirty years because of the addition of thermite to the mix.

  The schoolhouse was half-painted when it caught fire. Twenty-six of the forty-two children died, including Violet. Years later, when Anna was in her eighties, a researcher interviewed her about the fire; although she’d not seen it herself, she related the accounts of those survivors, yet long dead, of a strange quality the fire had, almost chemical in the way it popped and flamed, with geysers of fire igniting. He sent her a copy of his paper, which blamed the fire on the paint and the thermite, which had later been used in World War II to help bombs ignite.

  The schoolteacher, Miss Dupont, who had been brought in from the teachers’ college in Illinois, survived the fire, although her left arm and neck were badly burned. She left Kidron after the funerals but remained a presence in the lives of those whose children died. Every year on the anniversary of the fire, she wrote letters to those who’d lost children. These letters were hopeful and imagined what each child would have accomplished that year had he or she lived.

  On the second anniversary she wrote to tell Louisa Farris’s parents that their daughter had won the school-wide spelling bee and Miss Dupont expected her to place at the state level. On the tenth anniversary, she wrote to George Lee’s parents to tell them she was quite sorry to find out that his eyesight had not allowed him to join the army but was proud to know that he had raised so much money for war bonds. On the fourteenth anniversary, she wrote to Emily Rose Burnam’s parents to tell them how proud she was that their daughter was so skilled as a nurse that she’d saved fourteen others from the influenza epidemic. On the thirty-fifth anniversary, John Pickerling’s sisters discovered that their brother had narrowly lost the election for governor. On and on went her letters, every anniversary these children who’d perished in the fire escaped wars and epidemics and had lives of prosperity and notoriety. When parents died, siblings began receiving these letters, and in the case of George Lee, who’d been an only child, the letters went to a distant cousin in Arkansas who’d never met the family. This continued until Miss Dupont’s death in 1972. The month after she died, each family received an obituary of their child that Miss Dupont had written out. Some relatives refused to open them—this would have been the case with Anna’s parents, but by the time that Violet’s obituary arrived in the mailbox, she’d been opening Miss Dupont’s letters for decades.

  Ten years before the woman’s death, Anna had the occasion to visit Miss Dupont in Illinois. That year Callie was selected to attend the United Airlines’ stewardess school at O’Hare in Chicago. Bets and her husband, Frank, were overloaded with the orchard, which had grown to three hundred acres, and asked Anna to accompany their only daughter on the train. It was an uncomfortable trip, not only because the train was stalled in Nebraska for two extra days, but also because Callie had wanted to travel unchaperoned. They didn’t speak much during the trip, although when she dropped Callie off at the dormitories the girl held her tight and whispered, “Thank you.”

  She took a cab to the southern suburbs of Chicago and met Miss Dupont for coffee in her brownstone. The scar tissue had not softened over time, and it reached from Miss Dupont’s neck, like tendrils, and wrapped around her jaw, stretching toward her left eye. Once she stopped looking at the deformity, Anna, who was in her sixties at the time, was surprised to find that time had compressed the difference in age between them. All around the scar tissue, Miss Dupont’s skin was as wrinkled as Anna’s, and her eyes had a similar red-rimmed wateriness to them. They ate the pimento-stuffed olives that Anna had brought and talked about how small the world seemed now that man had been in space.

  They talked about their lives, the good years, the lean years, and complained that age had sneaked up on them. They circled around their families, each unsure how to talk about children and grandchildren without thinking about Violet. When Anna relaxed into the camelback sofa, Miss Dupont finally brought up her children. Miss Dupont had outlived three husbands and birthed nine children; she counted off her grandchildren, occasionally pointing at a photo set on her brick mantel. “That’s thirty-seven altogether. It’s more than I lost, but I know it’s a big debt to pay and I’m not sure God’ll take mine in exchange for them.” They sat quietly, two gray-haired women gazing at photos of children. Then she patted Anna’s hand. “Your sister was beautiful. Like a Botticelli angel.”

  “Violet looked like Mom. I used to watch them play mirror—they’d sit face-to-face and mimic each other’s every move. I’d watch, hoping to see a trace of myself in either of them, but there was never a gesture, a freckle that I could lay claim to. After she died I realized that the one thing she never had was Mom’s accent.”

  “I kept wondering when you’d start to sound like you were from Kidron. Wealthy dropped his accent and picked up the Lindseys’ Italian.”

  “My brother was a chameleon. You thought he was related to whoever he was standing by. Had a way of parroting folks. When he was sick, before we came here, Mom said he used to lie in bed and practice bird calls. It got so he could summon any bird in Brisbane to the tree outside his window.”

  “He was in my class the first year I taught at Kidron. Him and Michael Keller tormented me—”

  “You know I married Michael? He’s been dead more than twenty years now.”

  They traded stories for a while and then in a lull Anna reached up and smoothed her iron gray hair, which as far as she could tell didn’t belong to anyone in her family.

  “You must look like your people,” said the teacher.

  “My mother said one of her grandmothers married an Italian, which is where—”

  “Your father told me about you being a half-caste. So you don’t have to—”

  Anna looked away from Miss Dupont and then at her watch. She’d not known that her father ever spoke those words aloud. Wealthy used to whisper it to her at night when she’d showed him up at spelling or tree climbing, but she refused to give weight to his taunts.

  Miss Dupont rubbed her scars, which took on a purple-red hue when she blushed. “It was in the hospital when we couldn’t find you and thought you dead along with Violet.” She went on to talk about that day, and as she got closer to the climax of the story, when Anna appeared with the Lindsey boys, wet and muddy from spending the afternoon in the creek, her voice dropped to a whisper.

  Anna surprised herself by giving away the ending. “My mother slapped me and then told whoever would listen that I was to play hooky whenever I wanted.”

  Miss Dupont was crying. “But you never came back to school. None of us did.”

  Half-caste. She’d forgotten the sound of those words until Miss Dupont said them. They stayed with her, pulling up memories she thought she’d forgotten. She remembered being eight or nine and beating Wealthy in a foot race on the playground. He’d said it then, spit on the ground and told her she was just a half-caste anyway. Anna was not a woman who liked change. Violet would have grown up to become the type of woman who would have confronted Wealthy—demanded to know the truth. Anna waited nearly thirty-five more years to ask.

  In 1941, two years before Wealthy died in a mining accident, he came home to Kidron for Christmas. His red hair had turned white and his mustache yellow. The skin around his eyes was deeply wrinkled from spending so much time hatless out in the sun. He was lucid, but there were moments when he confused Bets with Anna or asked when Michael, Anna’s husband, was expected home. A night in between Christmas and the new year when the wind was still, but the air chilled, they walked through the orchard, each of them reaching out to brush their fingertips against the gray-green leaves of the olive trees.

  She’d not wanted to ask him about her past because she was afraid that what she believed about herself would be changed. But that night as they swapped stories about Kidron, their father, their mother, and even Violet, Anna fe
lt time collapse on itself and she sensed that whatever her brother said it only confirmed what she’d always known—the story of her life was not the same as the truth of her life. She didn’t have her mother’s Irish complexion nor did she ever get sick. She was four inches taller than her father, stronger than her brother, had curly black hair, and skin the color of polished olive wood. She thought maybe she was nobody’s child, but what Wealthy told her was that she was their father’s child and that although Mims loved her as if she were her own, she’d not given birth to Anna.

  “I wish I remembered more,” Wealthy had said. They were sitting in the two rocking chairs on the front porch, huddled under heavy wool blankets. “It seemed important when I was younger, when I knew there was a difference between us. But once I was grown and you were grown, it all seemed quite unimportant.”

  Anna pressed him for any details, and he told her that before she came with them on the boat that he remembered seeing her riding a tortoise and hanging around the fire where the women boiled the wash.

  “I used to know more,” he said, again lamenting his age and the loss of memories. He looked so pained that Anna shushed him. They were quiet for a long while and then he asked her where Michael was.

  “He’s dead. Been that way a few years now,” Anna said.

  Wealthy laughed and then asked her what her secret was. “You’re aging so well. The rest of us move slower, can’t see as well, and have enough aches and pains to keep a doctor in Cadillacs. But you, you are just a little more wrinkly and only slightly slower than you used to be.”

  “I wish I knew,” she’d said.

  Anna told no one about her conversation with Wealthy. She was afraid to believe him, and so over the years, she pushed that memory deep into her mind until she’d convinced herself that she’d forgotten it. She blinked at the paper in front of her—filled with questions about her family, what she ate, how much time she’d spent in the sun as a child, and a chill ran through her. None of her children suspected there was any complication to their genealogy. It was as straight as it could be—a line from Erin back to Mims. Anna shook her head. There was nothing special about her family. No matter what Callie was looking for, the Kellers were ordinary women with ordinary stories. Over the years, she’d found little to lend weight to Wealthy’s claims—a yellowed ticket that the immigration officers had pinned to her coat and her parents’ sworn statement that although they could produce no birth certificate she was born January 18, 1894, in Brisbane. And that was enough for Anna.