The Orchard Keepers

by Robert Pepper-Smith

  COPYRIGHT © Robert Pepper-Smith 2017

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication — reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system — without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law. In the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying of the material, a licence must be obtained from Access Copyright before proceeding.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Pepper-Smith, Robert, 1954–, author

  The orchard keepers / Robert Pepper-Smith.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-926455-90-7 (paperback). ISBN 978-1-926455-91-4 (epub).

  ISBN 978-1-926455-92-1 (mobi)

  I. Title.

  PS8581.E634O73 2017 C813’.6 C2016-905880-8 C2016-905881-6

  Editor: Thomas Wharton

  Book design: Natalie Olsen, Kisscut Design

  Author photo: Anna Atkinson

  NeWest Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Edmonton Arts Council for support of our publishing program. This project is funded in part by the Government of Canada.

  # 201, 8540 – 109 Street

  Edmonton, AB T6G 1E6

  780.432.9427

  www.newestpress.com

  No bison were harmed in the making of this book.

  Printed and bound in Canada 1 2 3 4 5 19 18 17

  This book is for Anna and Deane

  THE WHEEL KEEPER

  HOUSE OF SPELLS

  SANCTUARY

  THE WHEEL KEEPER

  From the late 1800s on, many left Roca D’Avola in southern Italy to work in the orchards and vineyards of the Argentine and of British Columbia. Every season they would go and many would return. They were called the golondrinas: the swallows. Often, with false papers or with an illegitimate child, they saw their way under the eyes of the authorities by cunning, disguise and quick flight. They learned the illusion of promises: a 1908 brochure advertising land grants and work on the Canadian railroad flaps on the mayoralty walls and on the door of Tommassini’s café in the Roca piazza. It shows a verdant valley, a river called the Illecillewaet. When you examine the brochure photo closely, you see a forest of black and grey spires, the green and blue fronds painted on.

  Often, survival for the golondrinas depended on a recognizable sign: boots made by Giacometti on the Via dei Mutaliti; a yellow accordion, a word or an accent carried under your tongue. We offer this signo to our children, to make it easy to see where we’re from.

  The Italian-Canadian Association of R.

  Driving over the rise of the new highway, I see below me the long grey reservoir that was once the K. valley. Wet flakes scatter from the cloud cover that has settled between the mountains, and a wind — leaping like a cat — raises a steely shimmer near the shore, then farther out. Except for the wind in the spruce and firs, and in the abandoned orchards above the takeline, there is no sound on the reservoir, and I recall with a shock that as a child of five I saw this grey mass long before the valley was flooded. I recognized it and I felt it recognized me.

  Below the surface of the lake is the village where I was born and lived till I was fifteen. I slow the car and turn off the highway onto a grassy track that leads through an overgrown orchard to the shore. There I climb out of the car with my young son. I try to tell him about the village of ninety houses that once stood below us on a riverbank, show him by the trace of mountain peaks and avalanche tracks where it once was. Yet all he can see is the grey water staring back at him and he looks up at me, his face blank.

  I can’t see any of that, Daddy, he tells me.

  Still he’s happy to be out of the car — we’ve been driving for over an hour — and he pulls a branch out of the high grass and goes to poke at some wind fallen apples under an old orchard tree.

  This I remember: in the village, the house my family shared with nostra nonna was called “the castle” because it was built of Italian stone to last. Now its hallways are currents, with the fish we call redfish in them. Before the dam chutes were closed for the first time, before the water crept into the felled orchards and torn-up vineyards, many of the village houses were burned and plowed into their cellars or moved to a new site above the takeline. That site was soon abandoned because of the dust storms that rose from the reservoir bed when vast amounts of water were let down during the summer to feed American dams. A railway bridge with a cedar catwalk under it crossed the river from the village to a far hillside. It too was dismantled. It crossed below me, and on the far shore stood the Pradolini house where my aunt Manice and my cousin Anna lived briefly.

  So many years have passed since that time. Now I have a child of my own, a boy who is seven. He has no memory here.

  I’m cold, Daddy, he says coming up to take my hand, the wind ruffling his hair. Let’s go!

  We climb back into the car. We are driving to my cousin Maren’s wedding in the Butucci orchards. She, too, lived in our village for a brief time, and we shared a love and the hardship of those days.

  I have a gift for her that is quite unusual, a gift that I hope will remind her of how much we once mattered to each other.

  1

  In our family a story is told of a child who went through the wheel of Roca D’Avola and was returned into the arms of her mother.

  Many infants who went through the wheels of southern Italy died within a year.

  So it was remarkable that Manice lived.

  And only because of the help of the wheel keeper — a Scottish slater of eighteen, my grandfather.

  Children vanish. They vanish through doors, under stairs, in the branches of apricot trees. They can be seen on the railroad bridge, on a catwalk of wooden planks, the river far below.

  In a dream I have my mother rises from her bed, floats away. I grip her by the ankle to pull her down. In another dream my father is absorbed into the alcove wall of our apartment on the street of the grandmothers. The wall takes him in like water.

  The night my cousin Anna — ill with appendicitis — was brought by ferry across the river, I was standing on nostra nonna’s porch roof. Anna was my aunt Manice’s daughter. I’d parted our kitchen curtains to climb out. I could smell smoke from across the river. Less used, the doors. You take a heap of stone and planks, you put it together and you have a house.

  What is a house that goes as far as a breath?

  It’s for human beings to live in, Anna.

  I had heard the village cars and trucks first in the street of the grandmothers and then farther away, quiet in the way they came together on the potholed road that led south of our village. Asleep, I was dreaming of the way Our Lady of Sorrows rings to announce an avalanche or a fire and when I awoke the bell’s ringing became the low idle of the village engines, first in our street then farther away. Cars and tractors were coming in from the vineyards onto the road to light up the runway on the southern flats.

  Wait, my uncle would say: that’s how he would announce a riddle for which he’d immediately supply the answer.

  Why is our road full of potholes?

  Nests for the fishes!

  I’d climbed through the kitchen window onto the porch roof to watch the long string of headlamps, the bright glare of the aircraft lights on the tractor my uncle used to hunt night deer in his vineyard on the Georgia Bench. I heard a rustling in the chestnut tree by the porch.

  The train station was lit up and behind it the shadow of the mountain, the glaciers above the treeline. Long gashes in the mountain forest, the tracks of avalanches. And in our garden by the cedar fence, the madonna’s cart in grape
leaves and ribbons, the odour of dill torches.

  This house had been built by Albert Murray, my grandfather, over forty years ago. In the village it was called “the castle” because it was the only house built of stone with two kitchens, the summer one downstairs, the winter one upstairs with its iron stove. The year Anna was born we moved into the castle’s upstairs apartment. After months of no work, my father had gotten the job as captain of the river ferry. He was also the deckhand and the ticket collector. To signal that you wanted to cross you rang a bell. There was room for three cars to be taken to the road on the other side of the river that went south into the valley orchards and vineyards. I remember his first uniform: the grey pants with the long black stripe, the blue jacket with provincial crests for shoulder patches, the grey cap with a peaked visor.

  Those who know the river, he said to my mother, those who know the river!

  He was standing in the doorway, wearing the same smile as when he brought home a redfish or, one fall, a pair of deer antlers and a bloody skullcap — food on the table.

  On the porch roof, I saw fires across the river near the railroad bridge: the Pradolini house and the Swede’s barn. The drone of an airplane shimmered above the fire, the house turned to breath. I felt like running to warn the grownups. I can still feel panic fluttering in my stomach at the memory of those fires, always at night, always on a warm night when the air was still.

  Wait, my uncle would say, how does the Hydro take the heart out of us?

  They burn our neighbour’s house. Their machines trample fences.

  A little grape syrup in their tanks, he suggested, to stop them.

  The night the call came for Anna, my father, getting out of bed to answer it, touched my ankle. I was asleep in the cot by the big stove we called the iron monster. As black as a locomotive, it darkened half the kitchen wall.

  Anna’s not well, my father said. I have to bring her across the river.

  In the foyer at the top of the stairs that led down to the first floor he was putting on his ferryman’s jacket and cloth cap.

  My mother who was with him said, We’ll be back soon.

  I felt then that they wouldn’t be back soon. How can you count on such hurried promises? When Anna was born ten years previous to that night she was not expected to live. I was told that, born prematurely, she was kept in a shoebox on my aunt Manice’s stove. I don’t remember the shoebox. I do remember my fear that she would vanish, though I felt responsible for protecting her. She lacked the bones that would weigh her to earth.

  I was also told, She will be like a sister to you. I understood that to mean: carry her like the madonna under your coat, a bird in your hands. And yet I who was to protect her had been left behind.

  2

  In our family the ruotaro, the wheel keeper, was used to threaten us. He was said to ride a horse with wicker saddle-baskets for l’innocenti. His infants came from the Roca D’Avola ospizio. In wicker baskets he took them to the ospizio in Napoli. Some died on the way. Innocenti, esposito: children of the wheel. In my dreams he’s a small, slight man with willowy ankles who rides a plowhorse. I was told that he always left for Napoli after dark; that you could hear the hollow clop of horse’s hooves in the Roca D’Avola streets and if you listened, cries muffled by the baskets.

  Once, climbing into an apricot tree in nostra nonna’s garden, I broke a main branch. She chased me with a cedar stake used to hold up a vine. From the swaying young tree I’d watched her walk among the high vines in her backyard garden to a barrow. She picked a few peas, shelled and chewed them to a paste. She uprooted a few of the dying stalks and laid them across the path. As she moved the barrow to the end of the row, the wheel shrieked. She opened the faucet near the coal chute and a plume of sprinkler water swept across the pea vines toward the apricot tree. To avoid the water I climbed out on a branch to lower myself to the ground. It snapped and she heard it.

  Beyond the backyard gate rose the stucco wall of the Community Centre. A blind wall on that side, with a rickety flight that climbed to the one fire door, high up.

  I hid there.

  She called for me and I hid behind the railing, laughing behind the wooden slats.

  Come down, she shouted. Or I’ll send the ruotaro for you.

  That was the summer of 195_. I was five years old.

  A week later, the St. Leon hospital called to say that my aunt Manice was about to have a baby. There are complications, the nurse said over the telephone. We — my father, nostra nonna and I — took the south road through the orchards on the other side of the river. The gravel road led through cherry and peach orchards and there were tall, grey-boned ladders in the peach trees. Though it was dusk, through the car window I could see the pickers on the ladders and at the roadside bins, emptying the fruit into them. The cloth sacks they carried were round and full. A strong odour of ripe peaches came through the backseat window that I’d opened. The pickers wore long-sleeved shirts and blouses to protect themselves from the peach skins; I could see them in the trees at dusk on the ladders, the white shirts and blouses among the masses of dusty leaves. Ten or twelve, but there always seemed to be many more. That came from their voices, from the languages I couldn’t understand welling through the leaves. Portuguese, Italian, high up in the trees on the grey-boned ladders. I remember the smells and how they carried the ladders slung on a shoulder, golondrinas flown in for the harvest. The white shirts were coming out of the orchards then toward the road, going to tables under lanterns hung in the trees. Women at the tables were canning the fruit too ripe to sell.

  The car was raising dust billows behind it, gravel rattling on the floor panels. We had taken the gravel road because of the call from the hospital and my father was driving the same way he piloted the river ferry — with the intent searching look of one who watches below surfaces.

  We went over the crest and below was the river, much wider here. Though it lay far away between the hills, it seemed to fill the windshield with its own soft light. The sudden smell of winds reminded me of melting snowfields above the village. We were going down the St. Leon road toward the river. The tug toward the mass of grey water was so strong that I knew we would not live. Because of my fear I no longer heard the gravel that was rattling against the floor panels. The hurry was Anna’s birth; nostra nonna, sitting by my father, urged him on. Watching the roadside for deer, he was not paying attention to the turn in the road.

  I had to put down an anchor. I slipped off a dress shoe that smelled of nostra nonna’s cellar where it had been stored on a shelf above the floodline, maybe for years. Nostra nonna had placed it in my hands for Anna’s birth. I balanced the shoe in the open car window, then pushed it out.

  By the time my father understood what had happened, we were a mile down the road.

  Without saying anything he pulled over, got out of the car and walked away alone. His bowed shoulders and stiff walk said, You can’t show up for your cousin’s birth in one shoe!

  Nostra nonna sat in the passenger seat without turning round. She wore a kerchief and beads of sweat had gathered on her neck. “Bambino piccolo, we won’t be there on time.”

  High branches over the trampled grass beneath the trees, three-legged ladders propped against the trunks. By then it was dark; nostra nonna had spread the dress she’d brought from the car in the grass, for me to lie down on.

  Go to sleep, she said.

  The canning fires lit up the pots hung over them and the trunks. I could see gleaming knives as the women worked. A woman with a long ponytail brought us some food from a table. Later I’d learn to call her the Calabrianne.

  Boy, she smiled. Where is your shoe?

  I dropped it out the window.

  Why did you drop your shoe out the window?

  Grandmother said we were going to drown.

  Nonna looked at me out of her astonished eyes.

  That we were going to drown, I nodded.

  She reached over to grip my shoulder, as if to silenc
e me.

  I remember that the first time I saw my aunt Manice was in late summer of the 195_ harvest, a few weeks before Anna was born. Because nostra nonna was ill that summer, she had crossed the river to help with the harvest.

  I was sent across the room to Manice.

  Head bowed, she sat alone at the end of the breakfast table.

  My father had placed something cold in my hand, folded over my fingers. “Take that to your aunt.” It was a two-year-old piece of her wedding cake wrapped in tinfoil. It was his way of saying, I know your marriage is finished. Without opening it, Manice slid the foil package into a patch pocket on her loose, ash-grey dress that had four wooden buttons up the front of it.

  Your aunt Manice. I stared at her, open-mouthed. Till then, I’d known nothing about her. Her dress was that of a poor fieldworker. Her black blouse was also very loose and had old-fashioned wooden buttons. She had a broad, gentle, almost shy face with clear brown eyes. Her hair was tied up in a kerchief, like a village grandmother’s.

  I went up to her. I pressed my hand on her belly.

  After her hip operation nostra nonna once said to us, I pinched myself to make sure I was awake. As the effects of the anesthetic wore off, she wasn’t sure whether she was dreaming or awake. Now I placed my five-year-old hand on Manice’s belly, to make sure she was real.

  You’re my sister’s son, she said. Your name is Michael Guzzo.

  Yes, I nodded.

  Do you know where I live?

  I shook my head.

  I live south of here on the St. Leon road. You should come to visit me. I have my own orchard where the dam is being built.

  Caught by her clear brown eyes, I’d forgotten my hand on her rounded belly.

  Kicks, I said, like a rabbit.

  Yes, she nodded, a rabbit. I’m going to have a baby who will be your cousin.

  She told me she was married to my uncle Paolo though I’d never seen them together. I had no idea that he was twice married and had two families, one at each end of the valley. To keep his secret he had forbidden Manice to visit us. Now everyone knew though nothing was said.