The Orchard Keepers

by Robert Pepper-Smith

  The priest who had watched from the church doorway hired him to repair the ospizio’s northern wall that had been damaged by a mudslide. He could tell this boy who spoke with the accent of the region knew how to work stone. Presently the ospizio housed no innocenti. They had been sent into the hills to wet nurses, their names in a book. And it was not a thick registry for a village.

  Lucia was not used to it, thick about the shoulders, to bind the hair under the scarf, how to twist and curl the mass. She felt its weight as though it were not her own as she carried her child, only a few days old, through the orchards behind the village, to place her in the rouota: because she was unmarried, it was the demand of the priest. Her hair had grown long since her brother had left for Canada, and she’d left it uncut. Sky bright with stars; a booming wind in the trees. I’ll cut it when I see you again, she’d told him.

  That night Albert Murray was the ruotaro. Usually this task was given to the wet nurses of the ospizio, closed down now because of the damaged northern wall. He drove sheep out of the ospizio orchard with handfuls of snow. When the snow pelted one of the sheep, staining its coat, the animal would trot for a few feet and then stand gazing straight ahead with darkened eyes as if listening. He remembered the priest’s instructions: Now that you’re repairing the ospizio wall, he’d said, it is possible that a mother will use the wheel. Try to get a payment from her before she vanishes. If there is a signo attached to the baby, carefully record its details in the book of the wheel keeper. Preserve the signo, no matter how tattered and worthless.

  Before entering the ospizio the slater rolled his long trousers above the bird-thin ankles, rolled the trousers so as to make no sound as he went down the corridor with its plaster walls, by rooms open to the hills. Much later that night, while he was reading by lamplight, he heard the creak of the turning wheel, then an infant’s cry.

  A week later she lay beside him to listen, as when you strain every nerve to hear a cry baffled by the wind. I describe him precisely as she described him to me: he disappeared into his hands. Asleep, he wrapped himself in his hands as in wood; the milk from her breasts wet his shoulders.

  In the morning he sat at the empty table and he said, conjuring an imaginary breakfast with his fluttering hands, I myself generally have some porridge and milk, a little tea, a slice of bread and ham, and, as far as I can afford it, a little steak. For dinner I generally have broth; sometimes potatoes and milk; and I generally take tea at night, with bread and cheese, or bread and butter, with a slice of toast.

  She smiled, shaking his conjuring hands that placed the imaginary porridge and milk at the empty table as if to awaken him.

  What is toast? She blew gently in his eyes, Full of smoke she said, we have no toast here.

  Where are you going? He had felt in the way she looked at him and in her smile her plans to leave.

  Vlanmore in Canada, she told him. Or I’ll lose my child to the priests.

  Another time: Sanmore, the word a blur in her mouth, dream smudge. All the months of letters from her brother, then the invitation: the money order for passage. The extravagance of paper, printed land brochures with coloured reproductions of a painting that showed the Illecillewaet river with a boat on it, a mountain forest.

  What does it say?

  He looked at her.

  I can’t read, she said.

  He traced out the words, blotting them: the cracked nail. “What’s the stone like on this river the Canadians call the Illecillewaet?”

  The stone?

  Yes, he whispers in her ear. The slate.

  For the infant Manice he gouged the skin of a North African plum, the pit a lump of yellow ice. He licked the juice from her belly and tossed her in the air, Manice Tomorrow he said, Manice Tomorrow, see what tomorrow may bring and he laughed flashing his bright little teeth while he tottered around the room on his bird ankles, tossing the laughing child into the air with her plum-sticky belly. He tossed her up and up with her fat little arms spread and the fingers spread to grip the air. To you he said. To your mother who is going to Sanmore, Vlanmore. And I am yours, yours in the big light of this place, with its big booming orchard winds.

  See my teeth, he smiled. You have no teeth all you have is a dirty chin, wiping her face with his shirttail.

  We will play emigrants now.

  The bed is our boat, or hide under the bed till your momma comes home.

  The whole village smelled of oregano. She was out cutting oregano on the hills, to be brought to Napoli in sacks on horses. She spread it to dry under the eucalyptus trees. The money her brother had sent wasn’t enough to cover passage to Montreal and a train ticket to the village beyond the Rockies called Sanmore or Vlanmore, where her brother had set up a bootmaker’s shop. While Albert Murray repaired the ospizio wall and tended the child he’d named Manice, the child who was not his own, she cut oregano on the hills to make up the difference.

  Her fingertips, glistening with oil, made tracks on the wall by the bed. The ospizio wall of rough plaster, in the hillside orchards.

  Vine stalks blackened with philloxera among the trees.

  From each room with its windows flung wide open came a wind carrying the earth odour of oregano. He walked with her down a long corridor booming with wind by old plaster walls. She carried a sack of her clothes under her arm.

  His breath was between a sigh and a whistle as he followed her down the corridor, and she always stayed with him till he slept.

  Or sometimes till she slept.

  Touch my lips she says to him and his touch is the air.

  Touch me she says and his touch on her cheek is like breeze. All of a sudden she is asleep, head on his chest. He takes in the track of fingerprints on the wall, and through the window the tall trees that border the ospizio, the various shadows that have laid open the orchard. He takes in the fluttering, the wild fluttering of ribbons tied to the tree marked for the albero and the wind that rushes to them is a good dry wind from the hillside: it smells of winter stones the size of oranges.

  There is honour in local stone.

  It honours the soil and the light and the moderating effects of the valley. It allows you to distinguish between what is foreign and what is kin to you. It makes you feel that you are growing from the inside outwards.

  It’s time, she said, rising to dress him.

  Once a terrified bird flew through the window into her hair.

  He was looking at her, laughing, he had seen it before she had. The laughter on his lips like a light froth; who knows how long he had lain there, watching her sleep.

  She shook her lifted head, flaring her nostrils, remembering the smell of his hands on her face.

  The baby, too, had touched her and she held its face near hers. She swaddled Manice and stroked her forehead till she slept, humming whatever came to mind, words that drifted in and out of meaning and sometimes she would laugh low at what she heard herself sing:

  There are those who uproot and those who plant

  There are those who plant and those who uproot

  On the priests lightning and thunder

  Lightning and thunder upon the priests

  Not a hoe the sickle

  And the sickle is not a hoe

  Not egg the lemon

  The lemon is not an egg

  How strange their night laughter sounds! The soft laughter of the lowlying ice mist that has crept into the orchards.

  They remember: the cut-up olive and amandier branches, firewood stacked by the door.

  I did that for you, she reminds him.

  And their faces in the winter, so warm.

  The shadows of her arms fall across the window slats as she measures with her fists the size of the moon, one atop the other. They can smell the lowlying mist that climbs on its knees into the lower orchard like a planting drunk, late at night, so late at night under such a moon that the earth lows and drifts, dark and dank. The three-fisted moon throws slats of light across her shoulders, her hair and she li
stens for the priest’s footsteps as she does every night, hardly able to sleep. She says, If he hears about us, he’ll come for my child. To take her to the ospizio in Napoli.

  I will dress you, I said to him. If I leave now I’ll be noticed and caught.

  No, I will do it.

  No, I said. Don’t you see? To fool the priest’s eyes, you must be dressed in a woman’s clothes with a woman’s hands.

  The next morning, in an oregano cart, Albert Murray leaves for Napoli with my child.

  Segni di riconoscimento: in the ospizio the slater led me by the hand into a room of cluttered wooden shelves. It was like a shop, but of the strangest things: foreign coins, a shoe with a missing heel, a strip of cloth torn from the hem of a dress, rolled up pictures of saints, all tied to infants that had passed through the wheel.

  Where are they, I asked.

  Figlia della Madonna, the ruotaro said, in the hills with wet nurses.

  4

  Albert Murray arrived in R. on a train from Montreal. It was early autumn, that’s to say the autumn of 1921 or 1922. In the Rockies he saw mountainside after mountainside of black and grey spires: fires had climbed through the trees in the railroad’s right of way. He arrived to find a river village surrounded by burnt forests.

  He went to stand in the village fountain, to play the chanter he’d learned to play while working on the Montreal docks. He’d saved enough for his train ticket and a little more. Then his haversack had been stolen on the train. A young woman he recognized was kicking up road dust as she pushed by a barrow full of rags for the midwife. It was one of the last hot days of that year, dry, and the sun bowed her shoulders. She held her proud, shy head to one side listening to the reedy chanter.

  Do you see this? It’s not mine.

  He had stepped into the fountain, chanter in hand, motioning to the water. An orange floated there.

  Do you think I’ve forgotten your name?

  Lucia, she reminded him. The shy, curious glances between them said they had not seen each other for months. While he had remained in Montreal to work, she’d travelled to R. with the child Manice, to join her brother.

  No Lucia, you can’t have the orange to eat. Who knows how it got there, and she, walking toward him said, So what? As if how it got there mattered now that she, Lucia, was about to climb into the fountain to press into him.

  He stood in the water, pants rolled to the knees, and played on a single reed that made the frantic sound of birds she’d never heard of. It was his way of saying he’d lost everything, that he had no savings with which to begin their life here. Even his boots had been stolen on the train, and now he was cooling his feet.

  I put the orange there, he confessed. It was all he had after the months of absence: something quickly pocketed in the dining car.

  Where did that come from?

  From the train.

  You bought it? her eyes wide at the extravagance.

  I stole it for you.

  On the riverbank below the village, he was tapping a slate face with a hammer, spread his hand on the grey face of the bank. He tapped once between thumb and forefinger, then pressed an ear to the stone. A keen smell of snow in the air seemed to come from the stone itself. In its song, the way healthy stone sings when you strike it, was a kind of soft laughter.

  A muted light played on this stone that already smelled of winter; it shimmered in indistinct colours with grey edges. He tapped along the riverbank, listening and humming.

  The slate face that went for a hundred yards in both directions hummed back.

  High on the bank above stood Our Lady of Sorrows with its cedar shake roof. At his feet, a wide river. The slate he’d stacked on the sandbar was so sharp that it had split the rotten calf gloves he’d found in an alleyway.

  The river frothed ice crystals. His fingers were going numb.

  And there, the wide grey sky between the mountains, lean with snow, any day now. How the hammer’s small voice rang against the cloud mass.

  In his hunger, he rested against the slate face. A few grains of snow fell on his sleeve. The coat he’d borrowed from Lucia’s brother was tight at the shoulders, his left hand numb.

  What does rain sound like on the wooden roof of Our Lady of Sorrows?

  On a wooden roof rain does a tap dance. On a slate roof it sings.

  Here now, the booming grounds. Taunt ropes, three fingers thick and lashed to iron rings driven into the bank, shivered like violin strings. On the far side of the log boom he could see the D. Street sawmill at the mouth of the Illecillewaet. Through the clapboards, the gleam of the sawblade. A storm was blowing down the valley, and the grey-backed logs began to rock at his feet.

  By the mill, three men and two horses were dragging cedar logs ashore. Now the men began to strip the logs. They raised their arms high and the bark came off with the sound of tearing paper.

  Lucia had taken him to her brother the village bootmaker. She walked ahead, eating the orange while he wheeled the rag barrow. She crushed the peel in her hands to perfume her hair, a childish gesture of happiness.

  When they caught the extravagant fragrance, people in the street turned to her. She chewed on the crushed peel. A bell rang as she opened the shop door.

  In the narrow shop with its odours of leather and beeswax, more like a darkened corridor than a room, boot moulds lined the sidewall shelves. They were waiting on the shelves unmoving. A pair were taken down. They rested in the bootmaker’s hands like fat pigeons the colour of milk. They were asleep.

  The bootmaker ran his hands that glistened with beeswax over their wings. They were like birds that slept in wells. At the bench he covered the boot moulds with a leather sheet. The leather was soft, subtle, indistinct in colour: it had been worked to exhaustion, and it shed the pale colour of buried asparagus shoots.

  For the field inspector’s wife, he said.

  From a shelf behind the workbench he took down two or three pairs of boots. Try these, he said. The men who paid for them died in last winter’s avalanches.

  When does it rain here? the slater asked.

  In the fall.

  And how long are the roof icicles?

  Long, long, said Lucia. From the eaves to the snowbanks! Though he had only arrived that day, she could tell by his questions he was already thinking about work, about the pitch that a slate roof would require in this new village under the mountains.

  He walked across the logboom to the mill. The mill was silent. Rather than follow the shore, he walked straight across the two acre booming grounds. Hungry, he touched some wild potatoes in his jacket pocket. A light snow was falling. Before setting out across the logs, he’d strung his new boots around his neck on copper wire.

  Where the bark had been worn off the log felt slick underfoot. He used his toes to grip it.

  You put the only food you had at your feet and you pointed to it. He hadn’t kept the orange for himself. When he saw Lucia with the barrow he immediately took it out of his shirt and placed it in the fountain.

  There it was, floating, a poor joke for you.

  And then he took out the chanter.

  He made the sounds of strange birds, I tell you. Though he was very hungry he did not eat. It’s there, he said of his only gift now that his haversack had been stolen. Help yourself.

  He went across the logs toward the mill. Sometimes only shadows were visible in the slanting snow, a short coat that flapped at his waist. In the mill the giant circular saw, choked with sawdust, gave off a soft grey light between the clapboards. When he fell on his hand, pain stabbed into his left elbow. How could he have fallen — hunger dizzy? He gave a cry, more of vexation than hurt. The three near a slab fire on shore stood up. He could see their gloves drying on stakes tapped into the ground.

  You see he’s fallen in, he heard one say. That was the boss Gio who the day before had refused him work.

  The three left the fire to come to the shore, good. Now they would see what he could do: walk hunger-faint acros
s the sleek backs of the logs as though they were the perlins of Our Lady of Sorrows. Yes, they would see that in his agility and confidence he was the one to replace the church’s wooden roof with slate.

  Asleep out there, the boss Gio shouted.

  Now he was going toward the workers on shore, the short coat flapping at his waist, the slant snow blurring his eyes and lips.

  They were stripping cedar logs for street light poles. While they rolled the poles onto the drey, he carried the bark to the fire in his one good hand, his left hand curling in pain and going numb from the fall.

  Who will pray in your church? he asked slyly. Under a wooden roof? Who will do that for you?

  He reminded the boss Gio of the dangers of a wooden roof in a valley where sparks from the locomotives regularly set off forest fires.

  On a wooden roof rain does a tap dance, he observed. On a slate roof it sings.

  On the veranda steps she was dealing out cards she had collected by the tracks. Men played cards on the station platform waiting for a train, in the roundhouse at night, and she’d gathered those dropped on the tracks or flung by the wind.

  Yours is the king of hearts, she said, watching him swing an axe in his good hand to split firewood. It has one torn corner like a dog that’s got its ear chewed in a fight.

  And who is this? she said wide-eyed, mocking, taking another card from the deck, A lady? And look how she stands, proud! Why don’t you offer her your arm? But no, the king of hearts with his chewed ear, what does he do? He slips back into the pack and there he hides, too proud to ask for food.

  She had said this while watching Albert Murray go into the cabin he’d rented from her brother, promising to pay later. To have been robbed of everything he’d saved angered him, and he wanted no help.

  Crows flapped overhead while he gathered chestnuts. Lucia had shown him the abandoned field with the two trees in it. The chestnuts were wet in the dark grass and he had to feel for them with his fingers among the long tufts that were stiff with frost. This field, too, had gone a little way and then been abandoned. The potatoes he gathered were wild potatoes, bleaching along a ditch that had not grown over. Take that spade, she had said, her words ringing against the flinty ground as obstinate as he. Someone had planted the two trees, the field, and then gone on, who knows where.