The Roots of the Olive Tree

by Courtney Miller Santo

  Bets got off the couch and moved to where she could peer over Anna’s shoulder. “So, you’ve actually done it.”

  “It’s already on display at the store, and I’ve brought you over a dozen bottles to pass around when the media come calling,” Calliope said.

  “Media?” asked Erin.

  “Of course.”

  “—Now we don’t need to start that already,” Bets said.

  Calliope ignored her mother and kept speaking, turning so that she faced Anna.

  “It’s your oil,” Calliope said. “I mean, not exactly, but I had it pressed from the olives in our orchard, and I can tell you there was nothing left to glean this year.”

  “How extraordinary,” Anna said. “It looks so expensive. I’m used to just pouring it out of that old wine bottle I keep in the back of the cupboard. This is too much.”

  “No.” Calliope worked hard to restrain her excitement. “The oil is what’s going to save the store. You’ll see. We can put it out when the reporters come and then you can talk about how you have the oil every day. I think—”

  “What exactly is your plan?” Bets asked, talking over Calliope.

  “People are going to want to buy this, and where there’s demand and limited supply, there’s money to be made.” Calliope turned to face her mother. “I know you don’t—”

  “I don’t want to hear about this foolishness. I’ve been worrying about you and that store for months. You are living in some other world.”

  “Grandma Bets,” Erin said. The baby started to squirm in her arms.

  Bets closed her mouth and compressed her lips until they were a thin line of disapproval.

  “I can’t believe they’d actually send anyone out to interview me,” Anna said. “Maybe they would have years ago before there was the Internet and phones that you can see the person you are talking to, but I’m afraid the world has moved past people like me. Poor Hong Wu got no more than a paragraph.”

  “They’ll come,” Calliope said. She was sure of it. What Anna said was true, but she also knew that their family had more story than Hong Wu. They were more than a flash in the pan. Amrit had told her as much the last time they spoke about his research.

  “How much are you going to charge?” Bets asked. She’d taken the baby from Erin and returned to her seat on the couch. Erin stood in front of the bay window and stretched, arching her back and leaning from side to side.

  “Fifty dollars an ounce.”

  “That’s insane,” Erin said, almost laughing.

  Anna laughed, too, but she seemed to understand what Calliope was driving at. “You underestimate the fear of dying. People will give all they got to buy a few extra years. That’s what Callie’s selling. Years, not oil.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Frank

  Twice a week Calliope visited her father at the facility. In the beginning she’d accompanied her mother on her daily trips to see him, but that had been too difficult for everyone. He was easily frustrated, and trying to figure out who two people were and why they’d come to visit was enough agitation to send him into restraints for the rest of the day. Also, when she and her mother were alone together, they had nothing to say to each other. The coldness had intensified since their disagreement about the oil, and what Calliope wanted most was to be able to talk to her father about her mother. He used to know all the secrets to thawing out Bets, but now he didn’t even remember who his wife was.

  Driving from Hill House through Kidron, she began to think of a way that she could unlock her father’s memory—if not of her mother, then of the orchard. Anna’s father had shown Frank most of his secrets, and it was only the two of them who knew the species and crossbreeds that made up the varieties of fruit in the orchard. It would be greedy of her to expect another miracle, and yet it didn’t keep her from hoping that her father would have a moment of lucidity. She wanted more knowledge about the olives, some bit of information to feed to the reporters. No matter what Bets said, they were coming. Calliope believed it.

  She tried to see Kidron as outsiders would. There existed a haze of ruin over many of the buildings. Lots of the stucco houses were missing bits of plaster, leaving the chicken wire framing to show through. Others were covered with splotches of yellowing water stains. The hitching posts along the main sidewalks had all been painted primary colors as part of the town’s centennial celebration seven years earlier. Their garish brightness drew attention to the colorlessness of the rest of the city. Her home was a dry, dusty town with too many people on the other side of fifty.

  They’d lost the hospital about fifteen years earlier, but Golden Sunsets kept building additions and annexing property until it stood alone on a block near the edge of town, which had once been considered Kidron’s medical district. The facility’s sole architectural feature was that each wing had been painted a different tone of yellow. She guessed the intended effect had been to evoke a sunset, but in reality it looked like a day care, which she supposed in a way it was. Her father had been a resident for two decades.

  He managed to look old and young at the same time. His white hair was exactly as it had been his whole life, thick and bold, and his facial expressions were those of a young man in his prime. His body seemed strong and he moved more easily than most of the other patients, but his skin was leathery and covered in age spots. It hung off his arms and chin and cheeks, where the fat deposits had just melted away.

  “Frank,” she said and held her hand out to him with her palm down. She’d learned from earlier visits that calling him Daddy, as she longed to do, only upset him.

  “Ma chérie,” he said, his lips grazing the backs of her knuckles. These were the sorts of affectations he’d acquired since moving to the home. Such changes made Calliope suspect that he had wanted a different life.

  It was early and he’d not fully dressed for the day. Around his neck he wore a dark purple scarf as if it were an ascot. “You look well,” she said.

  “What news have you come with today?” Frank asked, leaning forward in his recliner.

  His ears were long and the lobes wobbled when he talked. “Plenty of gossip around Hill House,” Calliope said, pulling her chair closer.

  “Ahhh, the Keller women. They’re always getting into trouble.” His eyes brightened at the mention of the house; he never failed to remember it.

  She told him about Anna being the oldest and about the oil—changing enough of the details that he wouldn’t connect it to himself. Time had stopped for her father and she’d learned it was dangerous to remind him of his current age. Still, she wanted so badly to make him understand about the Sixth Generation oil. She needed someone to take her side, and her father even when she was little took her side.

  The year she turned twelve, she clung to him like a burr on a dog’s coat—desperately afraid that she wouldn’t be allowed to roam the groves once she became a woman. Her mother had been on the lookout for the change in Calliope that summer, prompting her to stay out of Bets’s reach. A few weeks into June, to keep the peace, her father put her to work grafting branches of a new species of olive that could be used to produce oil onto an acre of Anna’s trees. The habit of taking her into the groves carried over into August, and by the end of the summer at the end of a long day, they would emerge from the groves together, with Calliope riding piggyback. Her brothers were either working for pay on the Lindseys’ orchard or too little to be of any use.

  “I worked in that orchard,” Frank said when she described the trees that she’d taken her olives from to make the oil. “I used to carry my little girl around with me and feed her bits of jerky I kept in my overall pockets.”

  “Yes,” Calliope said, drawing in her breath.

  “You were my daughter’s teacher, right? Or maybe the boys’? Did you have the boys in your class? They’re all away at school now and my little girl flies airplanes.”

  The boys had never come back from college. They moved to the towns where their wives grew up and pu
t down roots deep enough to keep them out of Kidron. They were in their sixties now. The youngest, Johnny, had been killed in Vietnam. Every few Christmases, Bets and Calliope visited them, but they were always ready with excuses to keep them from coming home to Kidron. Calliope thought it was because they didn’t love their father—Frank was harsh with them.

  “Your daughter? She’s a flight attendant?” She tried to keep her voice even. It was greedy of her to ask, but she was desperate for a connection to her father.

  “Flight attendant? I think they just call it a stewardess. But I’ll tell you she’s smart enough to fly that whole plane. The only thing she loves more than flying is the orchard.”

  “Tell me about the orchard,” she said. The time she spent at her father’s elbow gave her the ability to lose herself in the vineyard. She often felt as if she were treading on holy ground when she was in the grove, stepping into the shaded spots among the trees. Calliope left Kidron behind when she walked the orchard—felt that she was translated to some higher plane where the world was as expansive as space and the fruit of the trees was as innumerable as the stars in the sky.

  Listening to her father speak, she heard him describe the same feeling. Gratitude overwhelmed her—this gift of his had kept her sane the last forty years she’d been confined to Kidron. She was sure her mother married Frank because he knew how to make their family’s olive orchard better. Before his family arrived in Kidron, they’d worked the trees in Italy. The summer before she went to flight school, he had finished grafting the farthest corner of the orchard with Bouteillans. No one believed that olive oil was worth producing. That had been the idea early on in Kidron, to produce olive oil, but the first settlers soon discovered that the olives that grew well there didn’t produce enough oil to make their investment pay off, and no matter how effectively they worked, how many efficiencies they adopted, they couldn’t price their oil lower than it could be imported.

  He stopped talking and looked at her closely. “I’m a terrible host. You’ve come to me for advice. I’ve just talked on and on and never once asked you what your problem was.”

  Calliope told him about how people wanted California oil now. How table olives were out of fashion and many of the orchard owners were playing catch-up and just now grafting oil-producing varieties onto their stock. Calliope described this new breed of American who cared about buying local, pesticide-free products. He reached over and picked up her hand. He held it like they were both children. The intimate gesture was devoid of intent. Calliope stopped talking and looked closely at her father, hoping for a glimmer of recognition in his eyes. Occasionally this happened, but he was never in the present. If he recognized her, it would be from a time before he started to forget. There was no familiarity.

  “There’s money in oil,” he said.

  “No one’s ever found oil in this part of California,” Calliope said.

  He laughed, and it was like rain after a dry, dusty summer.

  “That’s a good one. You’re a sharp lady. Sharp enough that I’ll tell you my secret.” He put his head close to hers. “Bouteillans. I’ve got acres of them over on my wife’s land. Best cultivar for oil. Thirty-five percent yield, and they’re big enough for table production if you don’t want to wait for the oil. Of course, no one believes me because even for Bouteillans, that’s too high. I used to think I’d invented a new breed, but I had some young guy from the agriculture college come out and test ’em. They were just what I said they were. I guess it’s the land or the trees that makes them special. I never could tell. I’ll cut you some if you want to graft some of your acreage.”

  “Liquid gold,” she said.

  Her father smiled. His shock of white hair, which he kept swept back and was quite vain about, fell over his eyes. “There’s a trick to it though. You can’t harvest in October; you have to wait sometimes until Christmas or maybe even as late as New Year’s. And if you get an especially cold snap in October, then the oil production will be through the roof.”

  This much she knew from watching him work in the orchard all those years. One of her favorite memories was tied to this late harvest. She tried to get him to speak of it. “I remember one of your kids telling me about your oil. They found bottles of it in their stockings?”

  Frank narrowed his eyes. She didn’t know if it was because he was suspicious of her or because he couldn’t remember. “Wasn’t us. Oil spoils too quickly. Sounds like a fool thing to do. We put oranges in the kids’ stockings, filled out the toe better than anything else.”

  She remembered the oranges. She’d hoped he’d tell her about that first Christmas when the Bouteillans were ripe enough to harvest. He’d had to glean what was left after the harvest in the fall because Anna had refused to let him keep a full crop on the trees. Christmas eve, she’d watch as her father, as prideful as he’d been when one of his sons was born, set up an elaborate tasting of his oil for their mother.

  She tried again. “Can you tell where the oil came from by tasting it?”

  Frank’s eyes darted around the room. “Why are you asking me about oil? I thought you were here to see if I’m fit to go on outings.”

  She’d lost him. This happened quickly with her father—a look out the window or a question that made his brain work too hard could reset him. She was someone new to him now. She knew enough, had been in the situation often enough, to recognize the best option was to leave as quickly as possible.

  “You’re fine, Mr. Wallace. I’ll tell Dolores that you are healthy enough to leave for the occasional day trip.” She extended her hand to him, and he rose to shake it.

  “Guy will be so pleased. He’s wanted for ages to go to the casino.”

  Frank followed Calliope out of his room and called loudly for Guy. She stopped and talked with Dolores at the front desk and watched her father greet his friend with a kiss on either cheek. Guy, who’d had a stroke, was in a wheelchair, and he reached up to Frank for a hug. “They’re getting close,” she said to Dolores.

  “It’s nice that they’ve found each other. They’re so much alike and I gotta say Guy was pretty depressed until he met your father. He’s good with him, calms him down.”

  “Dad said he wanted permission to go on a trip. Do I need to sign anything?”

  “Naw. Your mom took care of it when she was in here earlier.”

  “So, she knows about Guy?” Calliope asked.

  The nurse shrugged. “Who knows anything these days?”

  What Calliope remembered about that particular Christmas eve was that her mother had never come home. Before Johnny was born, Bets disappeared a couple of nights a month. Frank called it running out. She remembered that year her father had laid out finger-size bowls of different olive oils and pieces of bread. “Got a treat for your momma,” he’d said after he finished reciting ’Twas the Night Before Christmas from memory and tucking the children into bed. Calliope told him she was worried, and he leaned close and whispered for her to say a prayer. “Your momma always comes back, but we can’t give her everything she needs. That’s why she runs out.”

  Calliope came down the stairs at midnight, but instead of sending her back up, he called her down and asked her if she was ready for an adventure. There were five bowls of oil on the table. He had her taste each one, talking about the different qualities of the olives. Some were fruity and others bitter, like the rind of an orange. When they were done tasting, he asked her which one was his. She tapped one of the bowls on the table. Her father roared his disapproval. “Look at the color,” he’d shouted. “That one’s crap—the color of a muddy pond. Look at this one.” He held up the bowl in the middle. “It looks like liquid gold.”

  Calliope thought the color was more like a beam of light coming through a cloud. She’d always wished she’d taken more time picking, remembered that the middle one had fruity undertones, while the rest of the samples tasted greasy or soapy and had the aftertaste of rot. But at that moment, she’d been so tired and all she wanted was
to finish her father’s test and go to sleep so she could wake up the next day and see her mother cooking pancakes.

  Instead of sending her back to bed, he opened the hall closet and pulled the rope of a trapdoor that was hidden underneath the shoe rack. He handed her one present after another and told her to put them under the tree. Up until that moment, Calliope had still believed in Santa Claus.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Selling

  Bets found Calliope alone in the kitchen cleaning the stove.

  “Nobody sees those crumbs but you,” Bets said.

  It was the first time she’d spoken directly to Calliope in weeks. “The ants will find them and then we’ll have to call that horrible pest company again,” Calliope said.

  “I’m not trying to start a fight. Why do you always do this?”

  “Do what?”

  “Think that every word out of my mouth, out of Deb’s mouth, is somehow an attack on you?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Calliope said, wiping the last of the crumbs into her hand and then leaning against the stove, taking the weight off her bad leg. Cleaning was like meditation to her. The smell of lemons and vinegar and the sight of a bare expanse of countertop unlocked her mind, allowed her to be open to ideas. Just now she’d decided to add olive oil to the tasting bar at the store. She glanced at her mother and saw that when she relaxed her face and thought no one was watching her, she looked to be on the verge of tears. This vulnerability was new to Bets. As a child, Calliope remembered Bets being strong and distant, like granite. Her eyes had the same black flecks.

  “You okay?”

  “It’s been a long week. Knowing my mother’s the oldest person alive makes me feel older.”

  Calliope raised her eyebrows at her mother. She’d felt invigorated by the news, it made her feel younger, and her life seemed to stretch out in front of her. If Anna were alive and well at one hundred and thirteen, then Calliope hadn’t lived half her life yet. For the first time since she’d returned to Kidron after the accident, she felt like she had time to leave. It wasn’t a jail, and the fear that had kept her there, held her back, was evaporating, like rubbing alcohol. “You don’t look older,” she said and joined her mother at the table.