The Roots of the Olive Tree

by Courtney Miller Santo

  It was near the end of rodeo season in 1986 and Carl had been gone twelve days. He’d spent more money on travel than he’d earned in prizes and had cracked two ribs and his ankle after a bad fall in Pocatello. The night before Carl was to return to Kidron Deb had been at the Green Door Tavern, telling one of the regulars there, Bobby, that her marriage was over, that she was sure he was never coming back. It was nearly 3:00 A.M. when Carl called collect, shouting over the operator that his bus from Pocatello would arrive at 10:55. Deb was drunk when she answered the phone in her mother’s house and started crying, telling the operator long after Carl had hung up how much she loved him and what it felt like to know he was on his way home.

  The next morning her mother, Callie, found her asleep with the phone still cradled next to her ear. Callie nudged her daughter with her foot until she woke up enough to stumble to bed and then, knowing that she wouldn’t see her granddaughter for a few days, dressed Erin and took her to the Pit Stop with her. No matter what was true, at the trial, Callie testified that Deb expressed happiness at Carl’s impending return. Erin imagined her mother took a long time to prepare for Carl’s homecoming, that she packed her clothing into the matching set of luggage she’d been given on her wedding day by Uncle Lester, took a steamy bath, and painted her toenails bubble gum pink.

  Near dinnertime, she picked up Erin from the Pit Stop and drove to the boardinghouse, where Deb and Carl had moved after they were married. Mrs. Castello, who had inherited the place from her own mother and still ran it as if it were the 1930s—including meals in the common dining room for an extra fee. Because Deb had never learned how to cook, they took dinner at the boardinghouse. Mrs. Castello presided over dinner and offered a blessing before passing around the warmed-over dishes. It was said that night that Erin had her first bite of shepherd’s pie, and then asked for seconds.

  Mrs. Castello treated Carl like a son. She told the prosecutor that she didn’t think Deb was planning to kill him—how could any woman plan the death of a fun-loving, high-spirited man like Carl? As much as she thought Deb took Carl for granted, she still believed that shooting him had been an accident. Like kicking a dog, she’d said. You know the old cuss don’t understand, but at the same time you got to stop him from pissin’ on your geraniums.

  The night of the murder, as it neared time for Carl’s bus to arrive, Mrs. Castello volunteered to watch four-year-old Erin, who was asleep on the floor of the closet, which her mother made into a room when they stayed at the boardinghouse. This had been their routine the last four years. When she read the trial transcript, Erin had been surprised about how much Mrs. Castello knew about her parents. No. She’d never seen Deb with any bruises, no she didn’t seem particularly afraid of her husband. The child? They adored the child. It made her wish the house hadn’t been torn down and replaced by a pharmacy, that the old woman’s mind wasn’t as addled as her great-grandfather’s, and that she wasn’t sitting in Golden Sunsets talking gibberish. Mrs. Castello could have given her real truths about her parents.

  In the police report, Deb said she’d gotten the time wrong, or the bus was late. Erin imagined that her mother sat on an aluminum bench next to the Greyhound sign on Antelope Drive and waited. The heat from the day dissipated quickly and left her shivering in her lightweight cotton dress. As she waited, the adrenaline that had pushed her through the day evaporated, leaving her drowsy, with aching muscles. She began to dream about the type of life she could have had, away from Kidron, away from Carl. The squeal of the brakes from the large silver bus woke her, and she leaped up from the bench. She couldn’t be caught like this, unaware, inattentive. Carl was the only passenger to disembark.

  He was limping. One of the steers that Carl had wrestled to the ground at one of the small towns in eastern Idaho stomped on his foot, and although he’d not had it checked out by a physician, he was sure at least three of his toes were broken and maybe a rib.

  Seeing him wince, she pressed herself against him and whispered in his ear. He pushed her away and grabbed his duffel bag from the driver who’d found it among the jumbled luggage in the outside compartments of the bus. The driver waited for a tip. Carl brushed him off and headed for the truck, which was parked across the street. Deb pressed a dollar into the man’s hand.

  It was not the reunion either of them had imagined.

  In the Chronicle’s account of the murder, Carl’s sister said that her brother was a willful man. “Frankly, I was surprised he married her. Mama told him he didn’t have to. She knew Carl best, and that boy didn’t want to have anything to do with a family. He was running away from us when he started bulldogging.”

  The night he was shot, Carl was preparing to return to Idaho for another stretch of rodeos that crisscrossed that frying pan of a state. He would have made small talk with Deb. Told her how ugly he thought Idaho was, said that looking out the bus window all he saw was brown grass, dirt, hills, and buildings the color of mud. They would have been whispering, trying not to wake Erin, who was always asleep by 7:00 P.M.

  Deb saw that he was packing more than the usual road items. That in addition to spare jeans and underwear, he put in his lucky belt buckle and the flask his father had given him. She knew his secret before he was ready to tell her, and it made her consider her own secrets. At some point in the preceding weeks, she’d taken her grandfather’s gun from Hill House. Erin, when piecing together this part of the story, tried to consider all the reasons her mother could have had for taking the gun. Maybe she was afraid her grandfather with his increasing dementia would use it, or maybe she took it for protection when she stayed at the boardinghouse. She wondered if her mother was depressed and had considered suicide. What she never allowed herself to think was that the taking of the gun was premeditated.

  Erin imagined the airlessness of the room at Mrs. Castello’s house. It wouldn’t smell like lemons and Murphy’s oil soap, like Anna’s house on the hill in Kidron. It would smell of other people, of misery, of liver and onions taken in rooms, and of industrial soap purchased by mail order from a generic supplies company.

  When he finally admitted the truth, that he was leaving her, Deb would have felt like she was being bulldogged. A steer set loose to run and then out of nowhere grabbed by the horns and pulled down. How long would it have taken him to say those words? A second? Deb would have thought of Monkey Lip. Of the three and a half seconds it took for Carl to leap from the back of his horse and lean with all his weight on the horns of that half-ton steer. And just when the bovine thought it had a fighting chance, reared its head up and sideways, Carl’s hand would have come around and clamped tight on its nose. Maybe dug a finger up in the nostril to give the steer a little pain as they stumbled to a stop and rolled over each other.

  She wouldn’t have had enough life, not with having that baby right away and not with growing up with the grandmothers, to know that a steer could get up and shake off the weight of a two-hundred-pound man, bringing it down. Trot off like it’d just tripped on its own feet.

  But there was the trouble with the gun. She’d taken it. Taken it long before he told her he was leaving. Told her that for a long time he’d been sleeping with women like her, who saw him wrestle that beast to the ground and wanted nothing more than to be wrestled to the ground themselves.

  “She took it for protection.” That was Bets telling the reporter that she’d given it to Deb. Pressed it into her hands as she left for the boardinghouse that week. Because Carl had become unpredictable, she said. His drinking had increased and his anger was like a thunderstorm—just as likely to fill up the sky on a clear blue day as not. She also mentioned the quality of characters at Mrs. Castello’s and that there were rumors of drugs and whores and that she wanted her granddaughter and great-granddaughter to be safe, to feel safe.

  Loraine, Carl’s sister, saw it differently. As the lawyer reminded the probation officer of the trial testimony, Erin heard clearly Loraine’s sour voice whisper, “That’s just a story they come up with
. And I’m surprised the jury believed her. You know the judge didn’t or he wouldn’t have given her fifteen to life. Would have let her just sit for seven or so years. That’s what they give the accidental murderers. She wasn’t part of any accident.”

  Erin tried to tell herself that the whole situation was an accident, but it only made her feel worse, because her conception was the accident that triggered all the other missteps, mistakes, miscues. Her presence in her mother’s womb was the first change from girlish scrawl to tightly compressed scripted lines.

  Six shots.

  “I need you to stay,” Deb would have said. Maybe she grabbed his collar or emptied his bag as he packed it.

  Each time Erin thought about it, the details were different. There was information in the trial that she never envisioned. Her father never hit her mother. No one ever hit her. There were no bad guys, just accidents and anger. She shook her head, brought her hands to her ears, and tried to obliterate Ms. Rivera’s talk about the quarts of blood that were found at the scene, the six shell casings. She closed her eyes and again remembered that day in her mind, even though she’d been asleep holding fast to Rainbow Brite.

  She thought of another scenario, one with more detail, one where both her parents shared the blame. They’d run out of beer. Carl left to walk to the 7-Eleven at the end of the street, and while he was gone, Deb had unpacked his duffel bag and found a pair of women’s panties, or lipstick on one of the buttons of his Wranglers, and that was when Carl walked in, keys jangling, whistling. Erin remembered that her father always whistled. Usually “Buffalo Girl” or the theme to one of the old westerns. Shane. She hadn’t known then that the tune she associated with her father was from a movie until she watched it with the first boy she’d ever kissed. When she realized, she cried so hard she couldn’t talk and had to wipe her face with her shirt. After that, she could never bring herself to return the boy’s phone calls.

  “Why do you have to sleep with them? Why can’t you just take their kisses and their winks and come home to us?” Deb would have yelled this. Erin knew her mother well enough, knew that the women she’d lived with didn’t have rational logical discussions, but were full of anger and accusation.

  “Leave it alone. We’ve got enough going on without you bringing what I do when I’m away from you into it.” Erin had started to think of Carl as one of the interchangeable leading men from the westerns, and so in her mind he spoke in the clipped way that all men from those movies talked, as if syllables were rationed.

  “I’m not sleeping with you. Not going to have you stick me with something that’s been up and down the bars of Idaho.”

  “You know there aren’t many bars in Idaho. To get good whiskey a man’s got to duck into the barn of a fellow he just met. It isn’t my fault those barns sometimes have women.”

  “I think it’s time you stayed. Gave up steer wrestling.”

  “You make me stay and I’m going to leave for good. Not much holding me here now.” Erin liked to think that her father spoke of her during this fight, but no matter how she tried, she couldn’t make it fit the narrative. Couldn’t make it seem natural that her father would speak of his daughter, their daughter, and that her mother would respond by shooting him. Sometimes she pretended her father deserved to be shot.

  “I’m not sure that little bastard is even mine.”

  Sometimes he spoke like Shane did to Joey. “You make sure she grows up strong and straight, even if I’m not around. You can explain things to her.”

  The fight would have escalated. Mrs. Castello’s pictures had been knocked off the walls, and the photos the police took of Deb when they put her in jail showed a woman with a busted lip and a slightly swollen cheek.

  The first shot had hit Carl in the back of the left shoulder, passed clean through, and lodged itself in the solid wood door. He would have turned around and tried to wrestle the gun away from her.

  The second shot passed through his right hand and into his upper thigh. He fell to the floor and screamed like the sound a calf makes the first time it’s hog-tied. He pleaded with Deb, who stood above him, but she fired again. The third, fourth, and fifth shots hit him in the groin. He would have been unconscious. One shot to his thigh hit his femoral artery. The police were already on their way. They’d been called when the downstairs neighbor heard the first shot.

  The sixth shot was through Carl’s heart. Deb lay on top of him to deliver this final bullet. There were powder burns on his shirt and her blouse as if she had laid her head one last time on her husband’s chest and pulled the trigger.

  The police didn’t find her on top of Carl. She stood when she heard the sirens, tucked the gun into a pocket in her skirt. She then went to the closet where Erin slept and curled around her daughter. Sometimes Erin knew that she was wide awake after the first shot and that her mother came into the small closet and lulled her back to sleep, but she didn’t always remember it that way. In any event, this was how they slept at Grammy Callie’s house—mother curled tightly around daughter, and now whenever her mother was close, Erin smelled gunpowder.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Erin’s Performance

  I’m so sorry. So very sorry,” murmured Deb as Ms. Rivera finished her account of Carl’s murder. At first it was a low mumble, more of a catch in her throat than words, but as the bullet count increased so did Deb’s sniffles and apologies. She looked at Carl’s mother and his sister as she groveled. Her lawyer put a hand on her arm and pushed Bets’s handkerchief toward her. This was not a good scene. Erin felt the commissioners begin to turn against her mother, and she willed Deb to pull it together before Ms. Rivera introduced the psychiatrist’s report. The younger commissioner appeared annoyed by the tears and shook his head slightly from side to side. He set his pencil down and stopped following Ms. Rivera through the report. The older man with the scarred forearm leaned over and whispered to him, and they both glanced at Carl’s mother. She’d set her mouth in a deep frown and turned her body away from the proceedings. Erin hoped that the older woman didn’t remind either of the men of their own mothers, she held on to the faith that they were born to kind-hearted women who didn’t look as if they sucked on lemons. Carl’s mother felt their gaze, and instead of softening her face, which would have made her seem frail, she leaned across the space that separated her from Deb. “Nobody cares about your apologies, my dear. Nobody cares.”

  Their assigned guard moved from the back of the door to stand in the aisle between the two families. Deb pulled herself together and used the handkerchief to wipe her face—taking with it much of the makeup she’d been wearing. Erin felt the mood in the room shift, and knowing that the commissioners were still on her side relaxed her, allowed her to leave the horrors of her memories behind and start to prepare for her performance. Ms. Rivera asked the commissioners to turn to the psychiatrist’s report, and Erin focused her energy on her upcoming speech. She trusted that the lawyer had already painted a picture of Deb as a near-perfect prisoner, and in the rebuttals he would counter the report, which claimed that Deb suffered from borderline personality disorder. He had two evaluations by private psychiatrists that showed while Deb had poor impulse control, she wasn’t crazy. Crazy might be a good television defense, but it was the kiss of death in a parole board hearing. The objections and clarifications portion of the proceeding passed quickly.

  “You ready?” Bets picked at her pale peach nail polish. Her great-grandmother had asked Erin countless times if the speech she was about to give in defense of Deb was legal and wouldn’t agree to come to the hearing until the lawyer sent her a copy of the rules, which specifically stated that next of kin were allowed to speak with no restraints placed on content.

  “I just wish they’d let me get in the last word. Giving it to Carl’s mother doesn’t seem right,” Erin said.

  “I’m sure they’re saying the same thing about you speaking,” said Anna, who spoke louder than a whisper and drew a shush from the guard. A few moments lat
er the older commissioner asked for the next-of-kin statements.

  Erin struggled to rise from her chair. She arched her back, pushing her stomach as far out as it would go, and then placed her hands on the arms of the chair to steady herself. At that moment she knew she looked like she was twice as far along as she actually was.

  “You can sit if you’d like,” said the blond man, and Erin felt a quiver of attraction toward him.

  She shook her head. “What I need to say needs to be said standing up. It’s not a casual request, asking a couple of men to give my mother the chance to come home. Just doesn’t feel like something I can say unless I can stand eye to eye with you.” She spoke clearly but softened the vowels so that her words floated over the room and sort of settled into the commissioners’ ears. She’d been trained to do this, to speak, to sing, in a way that changed how a person felt. Her voice coach said that before television and movies, folks were used to feeling moved by a person’s voice. Creating shared consciousness was a gift that especially great preachers had, or dictators and all actors of Shakespeare. But now no one understood live performance, and when those transformative performers took the stage in a Puccini opera or a Beckett play, audiences couldn’t put the experience into words.