The Orchard Keepers

by Robert Pepper-Smith

  Manice and Paolo sat at opposite ends of the table and did not look at each other. Or they looked through each other and spoke as if the other were not there. My uncle spoke loudly and cheerfully. He had seen my father return the wrapped piece of wedding cake to Manice and from that moment on his voice was loud.

  I knew several of the golondrinas at the breakfast table, but Manice I did not know and I kept my eyes on her. She didn’t say anything. She ate little and put down the knife and then the fork with its tines on the plate rim.

  In those days of light dew we began early and picked till midday. To lift the dew, my uncle Paolo who had raised a glass, said, We are people for this harvest; we are people for seven harvests from now! We all knew this Aconcagua saying of his that broke in during the meal. He was from the Aconcagua in the Argentine. His family had worked the vineyards there, and when he was twelve they emigrated to Canada. My uncle worked on the trains. He’d been a trainman most of his life, a fireman shovelling coal till he became an engineer. Paolo I’d see almost every day, and at night I’d hear his engine that we called the Sentinella. From every train came the long whistle followed by a short blast. But each was as individual as a voice, and from as early as I can remember I’d learned to identify the Sentinella’s whistle on the mountain, our sleep, the dark village. Now it was whispered that he had another family in Field and that the girl who sat beside him — the girl who had arrived in the cab of the Sentinella — was his daughter Maren from there.

  Maren is with me, he told me, leaning across the table. He didn’t say that she was his daughter, only that she was “with him.”

  I was hiding the fried egg I didn’t like under the rim of my plate. When I saw that Manice was watching me, I slid under the table to crawl away. The tablecloth hung down on both sides, making a kind of tent with legs and boots tucked under the walls. The new cousin had slid down beside me.

  What’s your name?

  Maren Pradolini, she said. She had green eyes and a slender chin.

  Long neck she called me then. Like a horse.

  My uncle caught me between his boots. He lifted me to touch the rosette of sculpted fruit and birds around the ceiling light. “Is it damp?” A damp rosette meant wasps in the vineyard.

  No, I said. I looked out of his strong hands at that girl who had crawled into the chair beside his. Slender chin, green eyes, a mocking smile.

  He was telling the girl about Bennello’s new plane. On the side my uncle sold dynamite to mines in the mountains, and he and Bennello flew it in.

  We’ll take you up tomorrow, he promised her. Then I heard him whisper, Go to your nonna, sit by her. She’s rich in vineyards and houses. She doesn’t know you well yet.

  Wait till the dew has lifted. After the breakfast, we stood at the vineyard gate by iron scales used to weigh grape bins. The pickers had brought the wooden bins on high-wheeled carts. The fence posts were already warm and the dew had gone from the wire fence. Some of the pickers had strings looped in their belts to tie the legs of netted birds for their soup.

  Smell the sugar! my uncle shouted.

  Empty bins scrubbed with sulphur water at the gate — the first morning of the harvest. Men and women from Italy and Portugal wore rubber gloves against the wasps.

  Do you hear?

  When I nodded, my uncle smiled.

  He opened the gate and to safeguard our luck I darted among the vines. As soon as they heard the clatter of stones under my feet, the birds struggled.

  Caught wing and neck, one tried to fly through the nets over the ripe grapes.

  The bird weighed nothing and it throbbed like a bell. I covered its eyes to pretend night. Yet it’s our smell that overpowers them. I was still young, without the odour of the soup makers. Freed wing, the gaping beak. I cupped it for a moment, the throbbing bell of damp feathers, then tossed it over the vines.

  A few weeks later, because of the call from the hospital we were going to Manice’s house. The car parked on the shoulder of the St. Leon road, I was unable to sleep on the dress that my grandmother had spread in the grass by the canning fires. I remember feeling that days had passed, though my father had hardly been gone an hour for the shoe. To avoid nonna’s anxious, impatient eyes I hid under a smokey blanket that the Calabrianne had brought.

  When my father had returned with the pushed-out shoe, he threatened, If you throw it out the window again you’ll walk for it!

  Nonna had fallen asleep in the front seat. Driving south along the river, I could hear her head knocking against the door window. I wanted to wake her up: such sleep was reckless, too trusting. I didn’t know what she was dreaming, why her head knocked against the window like a doll’s.

  We turned into a lane that led through Manice’s orchards to a house that was dark, silent. It was one of those small wooden houses built during the war, so strong that Manice had had it moved here from St. Leon and put on a stone foundation. Behind the bedroom curtain that my father drew aside stood a high brass bed with a carved headboard. Nostra nonna opened the window that looked out over the orchards and the road lined with canning fires. I watched the three or four wasps chewing on the sash outside the flyscreen while my father lifted my suitcase onto the bed.

  What have you brought, he joked. What have you got in there, bones? You plan to stay forever.

  Nostra nonna took my hand. I buried my face in her midriff that smelled of oranges placed to dry under the stove. Manice was in the St. Leon hospital.

  I slept in Manice’s bed with nostra nonna. Anna was born that night. I awoke to my father’s voice returned from the hospital, his words turning over in the darkened room. Through the still window curtains I could see the dark shapes of the trees. The warm night air smelled of dry grass and smoke. I heard a truck passing on the gravel road. The darkness weighed like a breath on my cheek. There was a dull gleam on the sash, where the wasps had fed.

  The murmuring of two voices. Yes they were speaking but I hardly heard anything: the words breathed in and out, distant and strong, voices that enter and leave and just before you fall asleep echo in a tin pot.

  While she and my father talked, nostra nonna gripped my ankle. I felt that without gripping my ankle she would have drifted from the bed, from the sheets, from the warmth of the canning fires that burned all night. Her hand was cold, she was warming her fingers where her skin touched mine. My blood fled to warm hers; and at the same time the soft murmur of the voices fell round me, to the sheets, on my lips and eyelashes.

  The heart has a peculiar past; everything that has affected it is present to it. My grandmother was telling my father how she had once climbed through the orchards of Roca D’Avola in Italy with her first child in her arms. Around the baby’s neck she had tied with a red silk string a picture of a saint torn from a calender, the segno di riconoscimento. Before she could marry the baby’s father, he had died on the road to Napoli. He was taking baskets of fruit and nuts to the Napoli markets and, drunk, he’d fallen from his horse. “Unmarried, I must make the gesture of giving up the child.”

  The ospizio she was climbing towards had a wooden box that rotated in the wall facing the village. She placed the infant in the box which was called the rouota: the wheel. To awaken the wheel keeper, she tugged on the bellcord. A clear night: above, a swath of stars, a high warm wind booming through the trees. She touched the rolled picture of the saint, the two closed eyelids. “Then I turned the box into the wall.”

  By signs of recognition we say, We’ll come back for you; we’ll bring you home soon. The shred of cloth, the piece of ribbon, a picture torn from a calendar — all catalogued, preserved. Images of saints, foreign coins, torn pieces of coloured cloth: segni di riconoscimento, signs of recognition. That night, the ruotaro takes the baby into the village. The mayor examines l’innocenti, checks her sex. She is healthy, well-fed. He opens the registry.

  He asks the wheel keeper if the mother has made the required payment.

  I never saw her, he replies.

&
nbsp; What name have you given her?

  Manice Esposito.

  The village mayor checks the registry, running his thumb down the entries.

  The next morning nostra nonna is at the ospizio gate posing as a wet nurse. “The mayor of Roca D’Avola has sent me to nurse l’innocenti.”

  The wheel keeper — a young boy of eighteen, our grandfather — looked at her, laughed.

  You’re the mother, he said.

  I am the wet nurse hired by the mayor.

  No, you are the mother who pretends to be a wet nurse.

  How do you know?

  By the smell of your milk, he says lightly.

  The blood trusts, I heard nonna say to my father, still I carried a knife. He led me to my child.

  Here is Manice Esposito, he said.

  Then it was my turn to laugh. Who says Manice Esposito, who gave her that name?

  I did, said the ruotaro.

  It was already written in the wheel keeper’s book:

  Manice Esposito, born August 11, 1920 with a picture of San Giovanni Neponani tied around her neck with a red silk string.

  The day nostra nonna brought Anna home, I was helping my father fork up potatoes in Manice’s garden.

  Who is getting born? I asked.

  Your cousin is getting born. My father laughed, straightening his back.

  Your cousin is born, he said, but you say she is getting born.

  How long does that take?

  He looked at me out of his amused eyes. His eyes were shaped like those of a sparrow and they had the same dark colour.

  You and she will be friends, he said.

  I was made to sit on the porch steps while nostra nonna got out of the car. She crossed the yard, to place the bundled baby in my lap. I remember feeling that they’d wrapped the cousin Anna to hold her together. Only the screwed up face showed through the swaddled cloth. A face with scratches on it, the pale blue eyes, the fringe of thick dark hair.

  You will be friends, nonna said. She will be like a sister to you.

  Anna weighed almost nothing in my lap and I felt like pushing her off. I was instructed not to free her arms, not to untie the mitts from her hands, “because she could scratch her face.”

  That fall I hunted in the orchards and in the outbuildings for bones. Something to hold you together, was the feeling I had. I didn’t want to see a lot of Anna, only I was afraid that out of sight she would be taken away somewhere. “You and she will be friends. She will be like a sister to you.” Then began my mistrust of words, of pronouncements. Even at that young age I felt that such relations couldn’t be made by what people said, by words. Anybody could see that she could easily drift away, that she lacked weight. To make the cousin whole I hunted for bones: pellets from an owl’s stomach, a heap of burst calf skulls by the roadside, the hawk skull on a shelf in the barn.

  That child slept in a shoebox. There was goat’s milk with her, an eyedropper. Her legs were no longer than a man’s finger. How those stories get told in families, with laughter. “No longer than your finger,” “in a shoebox kept on the stove,” “not expected to live,” “by the smell of your milk.”

  We called you “the baby” till Manice returned from the hospital with a name for you.

  I followed nostra nonna up the flight to Anna’s bedroom. Nostra nonna had found the path with the fewest creaks; I remember her milky, carefully placed ankles, the way her hand glided along the banister. With twigs and a wood chip my father had demonstrated how they rolled this house, lifted from its foundations, on logs across the tracks in St. Leon. It seemed strange that it could have been moved here, many miles away. When nostra nonna’s cellar flooded, I felt that her house would float away, that one morning I’d find only water lapping the cellar walls.

  Nostra nonna showed me Anna in her crib. Slept in a shoebox people say, not expected to live, but I remember that even then she was too big for a shoebox and that her eyes were open to look at us when we came in. Only her head and face peered out of the blanket that she was wrapped in. She sucked milk from an eyedropper while I held the dish with the goat’s milk in it. She never seemed to sleep. She was always wide awake with those wide eyes, now grey now slate blue, and I tried to get her to look at me: I rapped softly on the crib railing. Her hand like a wrinkled water flower: touch the palm and it closes, draw out your finger and it opens. To make her whole, to give her weight, I placed the sack of bones under the crib.

  Paolo called the next morning.

  How’s the bambina piccola? Does she have all her toes and fingers? What’s her name? I remember that the forced cheeriness of his rapid-fire questions astonished me. “You tell the grandmother I’ll be down soon. In the Sentinella!”

  For three or four nights in a row I listened for the Sentinella’s whistle on the tracks by the river. Once I heard the clatter of hooves in the gravel outside the house and I imagined that the ruotaro had climbed through the cousin’s window to place her in a wicker basket among others. In my fear I sat up in bed to listen for the cry of the basketed little ones. I realized the cousin had no name and nothing tied to her, nothing to say she was ours.

  A week after my aunt Manice had returned from the hospital, I was riding the bicycle that nostra nonna had bought for my cousin Anna. The lane climbed through Manice’s orchards, and I was on the crest. Below was the river, placid that morning, a glittering ribbon that reflected the hills on the far shore. The bike rocked as it went downhill. Nostra nonna had raised the training wheels with a wrench from her pocket. Soon I was going faster than I’d ever gone before. The wind rushed into my mouth, drying it. I crossed the river road at the foot of the orchard to fly over a stone embankment.

  Nostra nonna found me in a heap under the bicycle. She took me to the same hospital in St. Leon where Anna was born. She stood at the foot of my bed, cowling her head with her kerchief, so that only her eyes showed through.

  Nonna, what are you doing?

  I am the ruotaro, she said, changing her voice into a man’s that made me laugh. I’ve come to take all the little boys who are never home for supper.

  She made the sound of hoof beats on the painted radiator under the window, rapping it with her palms.

  No, I remember saying to her. It’s the cousin you want.

  3

  Birds feel the death in our hands. As a young girl nostra nonna was the bird-freer in the vineyards of Roca D’Avola. These vineyards were below the padrone’s pine forest with the rare stock dove and the skylark in them. Before the harvest could begin she would go among the netted vines to free entangled birds. Otherwise they’d make the pickers’ soup, which the padrone considered to be very, very bad luck for the harvest. Nostra nonna freed them without harm; she had delicate, patient fingers, yet there was no physical reason for her success. In her hands a bird stilled while she covered its eyes with her palm.

  She would cover our grandfather’s eyes with her hands to make him sleep. Her success, he said, had more to do with the smell of her calloused hands than with their warmth. Your hands smell like stone, he told her once, Anjou stone.

  The story begins in 1920. My grandfather is riding a bicycle from Dundee Scotland through France to Italy. His father was a master slater in Dundee, his mother a weaver. I see him pedalling south to Italy on a bicycle with low-slung handlebars. In the bag strapped over the rear fender he carries a slater’s hammer and a coil of copper wire. He is going south from the twenty-four hour jute factories of Dundee where there is no work for young men, to the village where his father had once cut and packed slate for the roof of the Lelands courthouse, a pale sea-green slate to set off the dull brick of the building. His father and mother — my great grandparents — had met in the village near the Italian quarry; she was a sharecropper who worked in the orchards and vineyards of Roca D’Avola. When he left for Scotland with the slate packed in straw in crates, she accompanied him.

  From his mother my grandfather had learned the dialect of the region; he was fluent in Itali
an. When he told her of his plans, she asked him to see to a debt that she’d left behind: a few lire owed to Tommassini, the owner of the trattoria in the piazza. After so many years that debt would have to be paid in a memorable fashion, perhaps with a goat.

  Wet snow was falling in the streets of Roca D’Avola, an event for the village. He rode under snow that fell out of the heavy low sky and when he looked up the flakes themselves turned grey. In France, he’d stopped at a hillside inn of Anjou to notice the town roofs, patterns of metallic slate for the sun’s reflection:

  Comme les cheveux d’une jeune fille, said the innkeeper.

  Where the albero— the festival pole — was usually planted outside the village church of Roca, a moon-tugged boulder had shouldered its way through the earth over winter, to lie hidden beneath the cobblestones. Men with pickaxes and shovels were digging a hole for l’albero. They’d uncovered a dun-coloured boulder that now wore a little cap of snow, impossible to go on.

  We dug here last year, one of them muttered. And it was good digging, too.

  Albert Murray heard the priest in the church doorway say Festa paesana in his little voice of disgust.

  One among them turned to a young woman, very pregnant:

  Lucia, bring us some water to drink from Tommassini’s, in a voice that had the authority of a father.

  Albert Murray leapt onto the back of the stone. He felt its back, a gentle brushing of the fingertips. He had such fine, strong hands at eighteen, grey stone dust under the fingernails. One nail, split, was bound with string tied in a knot.

  Lucia, he said to the pregnant girl, a glass of Tommassini water.

  This he poured into the fine cracks in the stone. He knelt down to listen, to feel for the exhaled air with his lips.

  He knew in accepting the glass the trace of her elbow, of her lips, the trace of her voice like stone dust on a sill. Where are you from, she’d asked. You speak like us.

  Dundee, he told her, All the way from Scotland. Hopped onto the back of the stone, he who had brought a goat to settle an old debt. The gentle tapping over the stone: here he said, here and here. Listen to how the voice changes. That kind of talking takes awhile, it goes behind and underneath. And with a few quick blows the boulder is broken up.