The Roots of the Olive Tree

by Courtney Miller Santo

  “Are you all right? Do you have cancer? Are you dying?” Frank’s voice was high, and he sounded like a child.

  “No. Quite the opposite. The doctor gave Anna another thirty years and me fifty if I want them,” Elizabeth said.

  “That’s another lifetime,” he said.

  “He knows about the boys. Knows what I did to get them.”

  Frank’s eyes narrowed, and he straightened up, pulling his shoulder blades close together. This was the posture they’d taught boys in high school, when they were readying everyone for war. “Why would he have checked them? Everyone knows it isn’t the men who live so long, not at least when compared to you Keller women.”

  “They have daughters, you know. Your sons have become grandfathers.” She didn’t think Frank was slipping back into dementia. It was difficult for her to remember that her rough and tumble boys had grown into men and then lost their hair and had hips replaced.

  “If they’re so old as that, I guess they’re old enough to know that I’m not their father.”

  Elizabeth had wanted a more definitive answer from him. “You’re their dad, though.”

  “I’m not anything,” Frank said.

  They stared at the water for a time. Elizabeth fiddled with her necklace and wondered how aware Frank was about his memory loss. He bent down and picked up a few stones and bits of concrete that were strewn around the ground and then began throwing them into the river. Elizabeth felt her opportunity slipping away with each plunk of stone hitting water. She put her hand on his arm, stopping him from throwing his last few rocks into the river.

  In one breath, Elizabeth asked him, “Should I tell the boys you’re not their father?”

  He hurled his handful of rocks at the water, and they hit like a spray of buckshot. She felt the impact of those stones in her heart, and she wished that he’d been born fifty years later so that he never would have had to choose between a family and love. No, that wasn’t right. Frank loved her; it just wasn’t the same sort of love that other married people had; there was no desperation, no attraction, just resignation.

  “Can Callie handle it?” he asked. “If they know, she needs to know. I worry that she’s not strong enough to live with it, to understand. But maybe she’s learning to be stronger at that flight school.”

  Elizabeth smiled. She’d forgotten how protective Frank had been before Callie left for school. How he didn’t see that his influence, his parenting, had given his daughter the wings she needed to leave Kidron. If Callie hadn’t been in that plane crash, then Elizabeth would have told them all years ago about their fathers. Frank would have told them himself and explained their actions.

  “It’s hot out here,” Frank said.

  She was lost in her thoughts about Callie and the boys, so she didn’t react quickly enough when Frank reached down and rolled his pant legs up. He kicked off his shoes, slippers really. How had she not noticed his footwear when they left Golden Sunsets? He waded into the water.

  “Don’t,” Elizabeth said, reaching for him, but he stepped away from her farther into the water. He turned, waving her off, and then a branch fallen from a large spruce tree hit the back of his knees causing them to buckle. He fell backward into the water and his head submerged for just long enough for him to swallow water. She saw his throat constricting at the sudden influx of water.

  “Frank!” she screamed.

  He made an effort to stand. What had seemed like placid water had a brisk current and somehow in his flailing, Frank was pulled from the backwater into the current and struggled to stay afloat.

  From behind her, she heard Guy scream. “Go after him. Go after him. Oh God. You’ve got to reach him.”

  “Stand up!” she shouted to her husband. She trotted along the sidewalk, watching his stumbling, desperate attempts to gain footing on the river bottom. She saw a tree ahead of him, one that at one point had been a shady spot for the Frisbee players to lounge under. “Grab the tree!”

  Elizabeth was not a strong swimmer. She hesitated, looking around her for something to extend to Frank. She heard him call her name, and looking up she realized that he’d managed to use the tree to stop himself. He had his back against the trunk and was half sitting, half standing in the water. It was too deep for him to sit, but shallow enough that he was able to keep his upper torso above the water.

  She heard Guy yelling again. He sounded closer, and when she looked back at the car, she saw that he’d opened the door and managed to crawl out onto the pavement. A woman who’d been sitting in a blue sedan was walking toward them with a phone in her hand.

  “Mama. Please. Mama!” Frank was crying. He’d fully returned to his dementia. Elizabeth could only wonder what he thought as he looked around him. She did look like his mother, it was one of the reasons he’d married her, and now that she was old and wrinkled, she looked like everyone’s mother or grandmother.

  She stepped into the water and felt it course across her ankles and into her sneakers. She felt safer with them on, thought that stepping onto the soggy grass beneath the water would be less slippery. He wasn’t far from the sidewalk, but she could see that he’d exhausted himself. He’d lost his hat, and she saw the age spots on the crown of his head, along with the jagged scar he’d gotten when his brother had hit him with a stick they had used to play ball. The scar ran from just over his left ear down his neck and looked like a crack in glass just before it broke.

  “Help,” he called again.

  Elizabeth was within an arm’s reach of him and the water was above her knees. She felt the current pulling at her slacks, and as she stepped, the water splashed up into her face. It was not clean, and now that she was in it, she began to worry about sewage and dead animals and snakes. “You’ve got to stand up, Frank,” she said.

  He grabbed onto her shoulder and pulled hard enough that she stumbled into the tree. He clawed at her, and she felt herself begin to lose her balance. The water flowed much more quickly around the tree; it pushed against her. Frank fell backward and his head again slipped under the water. She leaned over, grabbing desperately at his shirt, trying to pull him up toward her. She stepped backward to give herself more leverage and the current took her legs out from under her. The last image she had was of Frank’s brown eyes opened wide in terror under the water. His mouth gaped, and she knew that he wasn’t going to make it.

  The water was cold. Elizabeth thought she should panic, flail her arms and yell for help, but she couldn’t find the energy. She realized that she wanted to sink, to join Frank on the bottom of the river. She was tired of her secrets, tired of living. Hadn’t she done enough? Wasn’t ninety years more than enough? The water slammed her arm into a boulder, and for a moment a blinding pain ripped through her body. She screamed and a bit of water, which tasted like day-old fish, rushed into her mouth. She felt her shirt catch on a limb that was trapped between rocks on the bottom of the bank, and it held her in place.

  The air was smoky in this section of the river. She realized she’d floated miles downriver of Woodson Bridge to where the rice farmers were ending their season by burning the stubble of their harvested crops. The smoke hung low in places around the edges of the bank, making it impossible to see if anyone had come after Elizabeth. She wondered if Guy had seen her be carried away, or whether the woman on the phone had reached help. The water was loud, like standing next to a waterfall, and she thought she heard voices drifting from the bank or a pleasure boat. There were murmurs of the constantly changing river channel. A man talking about snags and shoal, and maybe a woman crying, and the memory of Mims talking about how land never belonged to a family until they had laid their dead in it.

  She looked up at the sky as the branch held her in place and water rushed around her. The river was running faster than its normal four miles per hour, and she could tell by the trees and the gravel that she was just a few hundred yards from Foster Island. Above her an osprey flew with a stick in his talons. His brown-and-white-striped feathers outs
tretched as he rode the air currents, the white cross of his belly and the edges of his wings spread like fingertips. She closed her eyes against the sun and relaxed her body. The water, which had been pushing against her rigidity, rolled her body over. With her face pressed against the river water, she tried to raise up her neck to get a breath of air, but the water was moving too quickly and the angle at which she was twisted made it too awkward for her to move. She stopped fighting and opened her eyes, but the water was too murky, too filled with sediment for her to see the bottom of the river.

  KELLER, AUGUST 1, 2017

  I am too old for bedtime stories, but each night when my mother sits on the edge of my sister’s bed and calls to me to come across the hall, I go. When it is cold I come wrapped in blankets and when the dry winds from the desert heat the valley, I lie on the wood floor, pressing my face into its coolness. We live in an old house on a hill, and from the windows of my bedroom, I can see the olive orchard planted by my great-great-great-great-grandfather.

  The beginning of the stories is always the same. “There is a curious girl who lives in a curious place. She has as many friends as a girl her age can keep track of, but her closest companion is a tortoise who tells people he is as old as dirt, but really has only lived for a hundred and seventy-two years. The tortoise has no name and is simply called Tortoise by the girl, who has a name, but prefers to be called Girl.”

  Often my little sister, who is four, demands that the Girl be given a proper name, usually Athena, which is also my sister’s name. My mother never indulges her and insists on calling the girl “Girl” and the tortoise “Tortoise.” All the women in our family are more stubborn than they need to be. “This is how the stories go,” she’ll tell my sister and lightly pat her leg through the covers. Tonight my sister refrains from trying to put her own stamp on the story. I think it is because Anna is in the room with us.

  We all know that Anna, who is improbably my still living great-great-great-grandmother, is the little girl in the story. Tonight she is one hundred and twenty-two years and one hundred sixty-five days old. Normally nobody cares about how many days old a person is, but today is a record breaker for Anna. She has lived the longest of any other human being on Earth. At least that one can document. My friend Jim, who is faster than me in the forty-yard dash, says that Methuselah lived to be almost 969, but I told him it didn’t count because nobody can prove that he did. I could tell he wanted to hit me for saying that what he learned at Sunday school wasn’t true, but instead he challenged me to a race and took great satisfaction when he beat me by at least two full seconds.

  Some of the stories are about adventure, others full of silliness, but the one tonight Mom tells is the sad story. I’ve only heard it once when I was younger than Athena, and all that I remember is that the Tortoise dies. I guess I’ve given away the ending now. But it doesn’t matter because, to me, all the other stories became better because I knew that eventually the magical world where there was just the Tortoise and the Girl ends. All the best animal companions die. Billy lost Old Dan and Little Ann, Travis had to shoot Yeller, and even though Wilbur managed not to become bacon, we still had to say good-bye to Charlotte.

  My mother’s voice is like the sound of the ocean trapped inside a shell. People pay good money to listen to her sing in all those foreign languages, but her voice is best in English, and when she tells stories, the words seem to travel up to your ears from the inside of your body. The shells know that trick, too. My fourth grade teacher told us last year that the sound inside of a shell is nothing more than an amplification of all the noises our bodies make that we can’t hear—like the blood moving through our veins and our own heart beating. Anyway, that’s what my mother sounds like when she tells us the stories.

  “The Tortoise is the only family the girl has ever known. He tells her that she’d been born in one of the great copper cauldrons that the women of the village use for washing. She crawled out one evening during twilight as the Tortoise moved from the tall grass to a wallow formed by the runoff from the washing cauldrons. It has become the habit of the great Tortoise to sleep in this mud pit during particularly cool nights.”

  Grandma Anna reaches over and pats my mother’s arm. “That Tortoise doesn’t hear so well,” she says, interrupting. “That’s why he doesn’t notice the Girl until she is right in front of him and don’t forget to tell them about the hibiscus flowers.”

  Earlier today, there were dozens of reporters at the house—all here to talk to Grandma Anna and to ask her what she thought of the world now. They kept calling her the grandmother of humanity. She told them that though the stuff around us had changed, we humans were the same as we’ve ever been, and then she told them that time was an illusion we’d dreamed up to keep our lives from happening all at once. “I’m just better at stretching my illusion out,” she’d said, and a smattering of applause rippled through the crowd.

  Mom leans over and kisses Anna on the cheek. Because our parents travel so much, Grandma Anna helps look after us. Right now my dad is in Germany directing a production of Alcina for the Semper. They take turns leaving us, but lately Dad has been gone more often than Mom. I think it is because she is worried about how much longer she has with Grandma Anna. The other grandmothers worry, too. Grandma Callie and her husband, Grandpa Amrit, who isn’t really my grandfather, were here to celebrate Anna’s milestone. They had to get back to Pittsburgh though because of his research.

  Mom starts up where she was interrupted and tells my sister about one particular day when, “the Girl feeds the Tortoise hibiscus flowers and talks about a man she’s seen in town. Because the Girl has no father or mother, while the Tortoise sleeps in the afternoons, she’s gotten into the habit of sitting near the fish market on the town’s eastern edge near the quay and looking up into the faces of the adults as they pass by.

  “ ‘He had gold eyes,’ the Girl says.

  “ ‘I only know one other person with gold eyes,’ the Tortoise says.

  “The girl looks at him and blinks slowly.”

  Athena stands up in bed and shouts, “The Girl. It’s the Girl. She has gold eyes.”

  “I’m glad to see you remember,” Grandma Anna says, settling Athena back under the covers.

  My mother looks at me, and it seems that she is asking if Athena is ready to hear the next part of the story. I get up off the cool floor and hug my knees to my chest. She takes this as a yes and continues the story.

  “For many days, the Girl and the Tortoise watch the man. He seems to be making preparations to leave their town. He has men come to his house, which is nearly hidden inside the lush greenery in the bush outside of town, and carry all that he owns onto a ship. There is a woman bustling about inside the house who the Girl can never see clearly and a boy somewhat older than the Girl who looks down sadly at his father from the windows of the house. The more the Girl watches the man with the gold eyes, the more she comes to believe he is her father.

  “ ‘He peels his bananas from the bottom up,’ she says to the Tortoise.

  “ ‘He chews on bunya sticks,’ the Tortoise says to the Girl. He’s long disapproved of this habit, thinking that her teeth were falling out because of it. Because he is a Tortoise, he doesn’t know that humans have baby teeth.

  “On the third day they watch him, the woman and the boy emerge from the house with him and together they walk down to the docks and onto the ship where all their possessions have been loaded.”

  “Don’t forget about the twin girls,” Anna says as my mother takes a breath.

  “Ah, yes. There are two little girls who look exactly the same except that one has red hair and one has blond hair. They were about the same age as the Girl, and seeing them in their matching blue dresses makes her sad. The Tortoise sees the tears in the Girl’s eyes and tells her that nothing is as beautiful as a dress made from eucalyptus leaves.

  “ ‘If he leaves, I won’t know if he’s my father,’ the Girl says to the Tortoise.

&
nbsp; “They continue to watch the boat and just as the Tortoise is getting very hungry and feeling like the Girl should at least offer to get him some hibiscus flowers, the large white sails of the ship go up, turning what had looked like spindly dead trees into majestic spires anchoring what appears to the Girl to be clouds.

  “The Tortoise, who knows more than the Girl, realizes that the man and his family are never coming back. He doesn’t want to tell the Girl this because he is afraid of what she will do. He knows in his heart that a Tortoise isn’t a proper family for the girl, but he loves her and he likes the hibiscus flowers, which he’d never been able to reach on his own.

  “ ‘Do you think he knows he has a daughter?’ the Girl asks.

  “ ‘The boat is moving.’

  “ ‘He can’t leave now.’

  “The girl looks wildly about the dock and then her gaze settles on the Tortoise. She knows he can’t swim well, but she’s seen him float as easily as a cork in the wallow down by the laundry cauldrons. She doesn’t even have to ask. The Tortoise moves to the water’s edge, and then she blinks and he is in the water, motioning with his head for her to climb atop his great carapace.”

  “Shell,” I say, knowing my sister looked as confused as I had hearing that word for the first time.

  “Does she get there?” Athena asks me, because she knows better than to ask Mom to jump ahead in the story.

  “Wait and see,” I say.

  “Grandma Deb could never wait either,” Grandma Anna says from her corner of the room. “She always wanted to know the ending before the beginning. Used to read the last page of a book first, just so she could see where she was headed.”

  I’ve only met Grandma Deb once. She lives in Florida and works in a place where you can swim with the dolphins. We went there when I was six, just after Mom and Dad finally got married. But we had to pretend we didn’t know who she was and her name tag said LORNA. She was in charge of handing out and collecting the wet suits we wore in the water.