The Roots of the Olive Tree

by Courtney Miller Santo

  “People will stop whenever they need forgiveness,” Dennis said. He bent down to see how the shelving was fastened to the floor. “Gotta get a good drill motor in here.”

  “The boys Callie hired, Pete and Robert. They’re good workers. They could help you with this,” Elizabeth said. She worried about them not having work.

  “I’ve already hired them,” Dennis said. “That daughter of yours had the same concern. Practically made hiring them part of the conditions for sale.”

  “That’s good of you,” she said. They walked to the back of the store.

  “Dennis here is a regular philanthropist,” said the Realtor. “He’s been spreading the money around. Even paid me commission on the deal I brokered for the billboard.”

  “I think you mean entrepreneur,” Elizabeth said. “What’s this about a commission?” asked Elizabeth.

  “He’s sold the rights to the sign to that business just up the street, across from the motel.”

  “You mean Eddie’s convenience store?” Elizabeth asked.

  “No. The other store, just next to Eddie’s,” said the Realtor, looking away from Elizabeth.

  She thought about the street and could picture only the pornography shop with its XXX above the door and metal shed “Annexxx,” which could be rented by the hour. “Surely not!”

  The Realtor looked at the floor, but Dennis smiled wide and Elizabeth saw that he had tobacco-yellow teeth. “The way I figure it, the best way to get men to church is let them sin a little and then feel bad enough to repent. I got Sean over at the emporium to put a little billboard up at the end of his property—one that the truckers will see on their way out. It says, ‘God Loves You Too’ with directions to our church.”

  “It’s not God they ought to be thinking about, but their wives back home. You can’t be with a hooker and do a little praying to make up for that,” Elizabeth said. She went to the front of the store and ripped down the wanted posters of Deb. “Forgiveness is a much harder process.”

  “God knows that,” Dennis said, following her. “He just wants me to get them to the door. And the best way I know how to do that is let them get an illicit poke in first.”

  The Realtor laughed. It was a high, thin sound that reminded Elizabeth of squealing pigs. She pushed the keys into Dennis’s hand and fled to her car.

  Anna sat on the back porch. She’d pulled her rocker into the one bit of sun that the branches of the maples were not able to obscure, and although her eyes were closed, Elizabeth knew she was resting, but not asleep. This was part of her secret; since turning one hundred, she’d started remaining as still as possible unless another person was around. She said that this conservation of energy, this hibernation, gave her extra time, that a minute spent in this suspended state was another minute on the earth.

  “Daughter,” Anna said as Elizabeth approached.

  Elizabeth said, “One of my grandsons was telling me that we need to stay out of the sun. That it somehow pokes tiny invisible holes in your skin and that’s what causes all of our wrinkles and our age spots.”

  “Those grandchildren of yours are know-it-alls,” Anna said. “Besides I’ve had wrinkles since I was thirty—what’s a few more going to hurt?”

  “Don’t tell him that. He’s one of those cancer doctors that will yell at you about your skin and cell mutations.”

  “No one, especially doctors, tells me what to do anymore,” Anna said. Elizabeth smiled at her mother.

  It was true. What could they say to a woman who’d lived to be a hundred and thirteen? Anna was confident that her body was perfect. It was old, but it worked well. Elizabeth wondered when the doctors would stop chiding her.

  “How’s Frank?” asked Anna.

  Her mother always had been able to do this. Sense the purpose of a visit, drill down to the reason for a person’s arrival on her doorstep. Elizabeth was surprised by the honesty of her answer. “I just couldn’t go see him today. After giving the keys to that Realtor, you know Lucy’s grandson. Well, I just couldn’t face Frank. He’s forgotten so much. He thinks he’s twenty-five.”

  “We all think we’re twenty-five. You know it’s only when I glance in the mirror or look at you and see how old you’ve gotten that I remember how much time has passed.”

  “It’s different,” Elizabeth said.

  “I know.” Her mother gestured for her to join her on the rocker on the porch.

  The sun warmed Elizabeth’s skin. The smell and the talk of Frank reminded her of the summer he proposed. It was 1927 and the valley was just coming out of a winter of heavy snows. Shasta, in the distance, seemed smaller, for all the snow that covered the mountain, and by June, when the rush of melting snow usually slowed, there was a second summer melting. The river was wide and it became a place where folks liked to go and watch. The farmers whose land touched its banks began backing up in May. Jerry Sims had even hired a team of horses to move his barn, and Barry James had emptied his grain silo—paid his neighbors to store it for him.

  In early June, after most of the work in the groves had been done, Frank showed up at the house and asked to take her down to watch the river. Elizabeth was not a pretty girl. She’d come to terms with this early. At nineteen, some generous people, who might have been farsighted, described her as handsome. She was taller than most of the men she met and had a hard angular face. She and Frank had grown up together. His family’s orchard, although not one of the original seven that made up Kidron, was purchased and planted shortly after Kidron’s historic move. His family had been Mormon—his mother married to a man with seventeen other wives until it had become illegal.

  Frank was courting another young woman at the time. A petite girl named Frances, who was friendly with his younger sisters. He took her to the movie theater that the Rodgerses had built in town and out for sodas at her family’s drugstore. Still, Frank would show up at Elizabeth’s house once a week, and they’d go for walks or ride the horses. His family had never had a stable, but he rode like a man born into the saddle.

  That summer that the riverbanks flooded, they rode out in the early afternoons and sat on the trunk of a sequoia that overlooked the river. Elizabeth’s mind didn’t hold all that they talked about, only words that suggested Frank’s thoughts on God or the best way to increase olive production. In August, when the river finally started to recede, revealing logs and boulders pulled down from Shasta itself, he proposed. Those words she remembered clearly. He grabbed her by the shoulders and said, “You’ve got to marry me. I couldn’t stand it being anyone else. Their perfume, their silliness, their petticoats.”

  “Do you love me?” Elizabeth asked him.

  “You are more than I deserve,” he said.

  In that moment, Elizabeth understood. There were no other suitors in her life, and the whole town talked to her like she’d be a spinster, the kind ones giving her Jane Austen to read or Emily Dickinson, and the less kind telling her that they were sure Anna was glad to have a child who would never leave home.

  “Will there be children?” she asked.

  “I’ll give you what I can,” Frank said. He’d picked up a water-soaked tree branch and poked at the carcass of a possum. It was bloated and much of its hair had floated away.

  “I’ll take what I can get,” Elizabeth said.

  He confided his secret to her on their wedding night. What he’d said exactly was, “My plumbing doesn’t work right. I might be able to get it turned on when you need it.”

  Elizabeth tracked her cycles methodically and let Frank know when she needed it. Still it took them four years to conceive, and watching his grim, determined face as he focused on getting his plumbing to work long enough, soured Elizabeth on sex.

  A cloud passed in front of the sun, and a chill swept across Elizabeth’s body. She turned toward her mother. “You should come see Frank with me today.”

  “I go on Sundays. Those nurses of his will yell at us for upsetting his routine. Why risk it?” Anna scooted her chair c
loser to the railing to be more fully in the sun.

  “I want you to tell me if I’m understanding something right. It’s about Frank and our boys and how he really is.” Elizabeth left her chair in the shade. She let her mind drift to the signs she’d been seeing between Frank and Guy at the retirement facility.

  The nurses at Golden Sunsets loved Frank. He’d been there longer than any other patient. They were mostly young and as such were progressive about Frank’s crush. “It’s nothing to be embarrassed about,” they tittered when she’d asked them. “Nothing works anymore for either of them and to see them holding hands and kissing, well it is just a sweet thing.” They told her of real problems between some of the younger patients. Confided that some of those in their seventies got their hands on Viagra a while back and then they’d had a real problem. “You wouldn’t believe the outbreak of the clap that went around.”

  Elizabeth would believe anything. She told the nurses this. “One advantage of living so long, no surprises left.” Her children would be surprised at Dr. Hashmi’s DNA evidence. And surprise wasn’t good for people; it led to hurt. Elizabeth had let go of expectations earlier than most. She didn’t expect much from the world around her, and it kept her from being disappointed.

  Anna pulled her from her thoughts. “You going to tell me?”

  Elizabeth opened her eyes and turned toward her mother. “They’re not Frank’s boys.”

  “Of course they’re not,” Anna said. “But you can’t tell them until he’s passed. It’ll be too hard on them, too much guilt.”

  “How could you know?” Elizabeth had been wrong. She’d not expected this, not from Anna. “Do you think they know?”

  “They know and they don’t know.” Anna was fully alert now, sitting up with her back straight and looking out over the orchards.

  “That’s what you said about your own secret.” Elizabeth searched her mother’s face. Anna’s eyes remained focused on the gnarled limbs of the trees just below the hill.

  “I always wondered if you knew about my mother. Wealthy was a wise man. People don’t give him enough credit, think he threw his life away chasing easy money.”

  “So I shouldn’t tell them?” Elizabeth still felt she needed someone to tell her what to do. Someone to tell her not to take Dr. Hashmi’s advice.

  “Are they happy?”

  Elizabeth wondered why Anna didn’t already know the answer to this question. The boys were happy. Their lives were ordinary and right—the only bits of heartache coming as a few of the grandchildren and now even great-grandchildren found the trouble they went looking for. She didn’t know about Callie. Happiness had eluded her for so long, but her voice was bright when she called from Pittsburgh, and Dr. Hashmi had told Elizabeth privately that he’d taken her to a counselor to talk about overusing her pain medication.

  “I could never tell Callie,” Elizabeth said.

  “Then let her and the boys have their joy for a bit. You tell them that Frank isn’t their daddy, it is going to bring a bit of unhappiness, like a rainstorm, but it will pass.”

  Anna settled back in her chair and began the rhythmic rocking. Elizabeth stood and kissed her mother on the top of her head. She thought that her mother’s joy had come from learning her true paternity. She’d expected Anna, who must have had some previous doubts about her own ancestry, to tell her to unburden herself, to give her boys that same gift. The world was full of unexpected answers.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Sin

  Elizabeth knew little about the fathers of her boys. She wished she’d had other choices. One of her grandsons had told her a few years ago at Christmas how he and his wife had ordered sperm through the mail. All they had to do was pick the attributes they were looking for and send two hundred dollars to a sperm bank. He’d pointed to his children, who were playing in the yard with their cousins—they were all as blond as he and his wife. Elizabeth picked the fathers of her boys from the men who were in the Red Horseshoe, a bar in Redding. It was a popular spot for cowboys and women of loose morals, which was what the newspaper had said a few years after she’d stopped visiting the bar. It had been closed in 1942, when the whole country got a little bit more uptight.

  She walked to the back of the house, where her bedroom had been as a girl, and where it was now. In the back of her closet, in a hatbox, was a yellowed piece of paper folded into quarters. There were four names on it, along with birth dates. These were the men who’d fathered her boys. She’d opened their wallets and copied the information from their drivers’ licenses and then crept out the doors of the motels or flophouses. Why had she done this? There were dozens of names she’d had to throw away—months when despite her careful timing she didn’t get pregnant. There’d been six men before her last son was conceived on one rainy Christmas eve. It had been too many; she’d started to enjoy herself, looking forward to putting on a dress and driving the hour north. Johnny’s father had been young, and although it made Elizabeth blush to think of it, she may have been the boy’s first. He took her three times and then talked to her about his father’s restaurant in Modesto before he fell asleep and she could sneak back home.

  Frank said nothing when she went out. Although he was as anxious as she when two weeks after her trips to Redding, she waited to see whether she’d bleed. He loved Elizabeth so deeply when she was pregnant—held the door open for her when she got out of the car and shooed her out of the orchard when the weather was anything but seventy degrees and sunny. He was wonderful with the babies when they came, cradling them in the crook of his elbow, and singing in Gaelic to them, as his grandmother had.

  Callie was suspicious about Elizabeth’s pregnancies. As a girl, she would poke her mother’s belly as it extended and pout. “No baby,” she’d say. “I’m enough.” Frank thought this was as funny as could be and taught her to say “I’m spectacular.” He also promised her that she’d be the only girl—Elizabeth prayed that this was true. She thinks now that a sister would have crushed Callie’s spirit.

  The names on the folded paper seemed unspectacular to Elizabeth. After so many years of reading them and wondering what they’d done with their lives, she was surprised to see how plain the names were: Joseph Appleton, Gary Chandler, Michael Adams, Elton Petrik. She wouldn’t be surprised if they were all dead now. And why did she have their names? So that someday her boys or their children or their grandchildren could find Elton’s great-grandson and tell them they were related? She crumpled the paper in her hand and then let it drop to the floor.

  “Grams?” Erin’s voice echoed down the hallway.

  Elizabeth quickly stepped back and shut the closet door. She tripped over the hatbox, which she’d left by the bed, and fell backward, banging her elbow on her maple dressing table. There was a loud crack, and then Erin rushed through the door, the baby attached to her in that primeval sling. The rapid movement woke Keller, and he started crying.

  “I’m fine. I’m fine,” Elizabeth said. She sat up, holding her left elbow with her right hand. She’d forgotten how small an infant’s cry was—more like mewing than wailing. The pain was sharp, like getting poked with a stick. To make it ebb, to take her mind from it, Elizabeth started to count backward from a hundred. She could hear Erin talking but couldn’t concentrate on what she was saying. By the time she finished counting, Erin had taken the baby out of its contraption and started nursing him. She was reading one of the pamphlets that had fallen out of the hatbox when she tripped. It was a brochure for the flight program with United. The one Callie had attended.

  “They sure had a different vision of women back then,” Erin said. She read a bit of the text aloud, which described the ideal candidate as being in good physical shape with a waist of no more than twenty inches and a bust of at least thirty-six inches. “It’s like they wanted Barbie.”

  Elizabeth held her arm out and straightened it. The pain was less intense. “Callie just wanted to fly. She’d been convinced since she was five that the world was b
igger than Kidron.”

  “Was she satisfied? Is that why she came back?”

  Elizabeth smiled. Her daughter had never been satisfied. “No. She came back to heal, and by the time she was fixed up, she had all those children and a restaurant to run.”

  “It’s not the same now. I feel her absence and I feel my mom’s absence.” Erin looked quickly at Elizabeth and then away again.

  “You’ve heard from her?”

  “She’s in Florida,” Erin said quietly.

  “Never would have put her there. I sent her to the Cascades,” Elizabeth said. She wanted to say more, but a lifetime of keeping and holding secrets had taught her patience. The story would come.

  Erin sank down onto the edge of the bed. Keller raised his head up and she moved him to the other breast. “I feel like we’re coming unhinged here.”

  “We’ve stayed in Kidron a long time,” Elizabeth said. “It’s natural we should start leaving.”

  “That’s what Mom said. She wants me to go back to Europe, to try to work some sort of arrangement out with Keller’s dad. She says it isn’t right to be away from one of your parents.”

  “Depends on the parent.” Elizabeth lay down on the bed.

  “She’s got a job. Cleans up for a bed-and-breakfast on the coast.” Erin lay down too and then rolled over on her side, so she was looking Elizabeth in the eyes. “Think they’ll catch her?”

  “Not in a million years,” Elizabeth said. “Not in a million years.”

  “I think all of Kidron feels her absence,” Erin said.

  They didn’t resume talking until Keller had finished. Erin held the boy out to Elizabeth and asked her to burp him. “You’ll just have to do a better job of avoiding the spit-up. I imagine you’ve got a few tricks, having raised all those boys.”

  Elizabeth laid the child facedown on her lap, with his head extended just slightly past the end of her knees, and began to rub his back. She didn’t want to risk getting spit-up all over her again. The boy let out a huge burp, and they laughed. “He’s so new.”