The Orchard Keepers

by Robert Pepper-Smith

  He’s dreaming of Lucia’s lips, said one of the sawmill workers in the drey. He spoke of the slater who had fallen asleep stretched out on the snow-covered poles, his head lolling against the sideboards. The street had taken a turn to follow the high bank, the river below frothing with ice. On the seat Gio stood with the reins in his hands. He was gazing with pursed lips at the silvery roof of Our Lady of Sorrows. He had supervised the building of the church and now he had doubts.

  Her lips touch you, said the worker to the sleeping figure and the others smiled.

  At a dug hole in the street, they awoke the Scottish slater to roll out a cedar wood pole for the street lights. Soon all the storefronts, lit up with kerosene lanterns, would have electric lights. It looked ready to spread the light in its newness, the tea-coloured pole stripped of bark.

  He was no longer able to uncurl the fingers of his left hand. And yet he must work to live. In their cabin on Second Street, Lucia drew up two chairs and they sat face to face. He looked frightened and defeated, his nostrils pinched white from the pain. Their daughter Manice was asleep in the only bed.

  What are our most beautiful birds here? she asked in a soothing voice. Two yellow finches came early in the spring, with bright yellow throats. Too early because the snow had not yet melted. Come outside they called, empty your pockets. They had shrill voices like two tin pipes played against a wall.

  I said to those birds, what do you want?

  Threads, they piped, threads for our nest. They were in the chestnut branches by the King Edward Hotel. High up, two yellow stains, I heard them piping against the wall. I said, What do you promise me? They had the voices of dripping icicles. Thaw pain, they said.

  From a high shelf she lifted down a cedar plank with the nest on it. Of woven threads and feathers it looked like a watch satchel and it weighed nothing.

  They worked hard those birds. She looped a thread through the nest mouth and carefully tied it to the fingers that Albert Murray was no longer able to uncurl by an effort of will.

  The nest of threads hung from your fingers. What is held in there? Let its weight thaw your hand.

  Already, an ice skin in the river shallows. He stood in the cabin doorway, a pair of antlers cradled in his arms. That must have been the autumn of 1922, their second in the village. She could smell the blood on the skullcap. The antlers looked like those dwarf oaks that, no taller than your waist, grow out of crevices and hollows near the treeline. The cabin was filled with the odour of her cooking. And through it all, like a bitter thread, the smell of the animal’s blood. It must have been huge to bear those antlers. She imagined its eyes and the mist of its breath in its nostrils. He talked in his pride of winter meat, more than enough for seven families. He’d already give some to Mrs. Canetti down the street.

  Those antlers, moss-covered, were heavy. He had them cradled like a stone in his arms; the points were spread by his face like splayed fingers. She had dreamt of this creature. In the dream the creature had come out of a forest of lodge pole pines in which the night slept out the day. It was very old. Two young deer walking alongside supported its head with the gigantic antlers. She remembered the two deer had milky blue eyes for they were blind. And now the creature’s antlers had appeared in her doorway, spread in her lover’s arms. She felt then he was unlucky. Something was going to happen to him. Maybe what he lacked was not luck but guile, the sly slipperiness some golondrinas have, those who smell trouble from a distance and who, when it arrives, have long disappeared.

  The burnt-out spires that surrounded the village disturbed him.

  “Where will we build our house?” Near the CPR tracks so that during the next fire they could run to the station, where a train just might happen to be waiting? Near the Western Canada Wholesale building, that, surrounded by its shipping yard, looked like a place of refuge?

  In the hills of Roca, she told him, there were often earthquakes, mudslides. You had to be careful where you built your house. To find a safe place, she said, you went into the church at night when the priest was asleep and cut from the hem of the alter cloth a little square this size, and she pointed to her thumbnail. This you put under your tongue. Then you walked your land. At the safe place to build the alter cloth would warm your tongue. It would signal: Build here!

  She went out into the snow hissing under the new street lamps. For the first time, the street that led past the storefronts to Our Lady of Sorrows was lit up after dusk. The after-dark light reminded her of a magic box that she’d seen in Montreal: you gazed through the peephole into a candlelit world, a street scene like this, with figures in windows and doorways, passersby. There is a man in an alley chopping wood; another is crossing the street to the movie theatre, with his lady. He wears a cloth cap and the woman has black gloves painted on her wooden hands.

  Mackenzie Avenue lit up at night reminded her of a magic box, only she was in it. Light quivered on the faces of a passing railroad crew and it gave their eyes a fevered glitter. Their foreheads shone like mirrors; their voices sounded tinny and hollow, as in the Illecillewaet canyon. Outside the dome of light loomed the mountain. A locomotive’s lights flickered way up in the high pass.

  She felt a terrible unease as she withdrew to stand in the doorway of the Modern Bakery. She remembered how the magic box owner had signaled her time was up. He’d brought his hand between the candle and the lens that illuminated the street, a suffocating blackness. How pale and waxen the passersby on Mackenzie Avenue looked as they strode arm in arm through the falling snow, now laughing now transfixed by the electric murmur of the street lights and the cascade of light that filled the street. She felt like running, to claw her way out of the glittering light that settled on her eyes and lips like flour.

  Albert Murray was at work on the church roof. He’d stripped the cedar shakes for kindling. Below, by the church doors that Lucia was painting green, were stacked slates from the Illecillewaet valley. He had not been satisfied with river slate. It was too soft, he’d told her, will only last for sixty years. So he’d taken trains into the mountains, jumping out here or there on a high grade to walk up a burnt-out valley, an avalanche track, till he found stone good for a hundred.

  A dark green streak on her hand, from painting the church doors ferried upriver from St. Leon. The St. Leon boat builders had made these nail studded fir doors a good ten feet high, to hang on steel hinges forged in the roundhouse at night, when the stewpot was bubbling. The doors were laid out in the churchyard on sawhorses. Three coats of paint for the summer heat and three for the knife-edged winter cold.

  The mountain billowed over Our Lady of Sorrows in a blue, milky haze. The snowcap, thawed and refrozen, flashed like a mirror. There was blasting going on above the village, to lay a second line of track. A puff of smoke, rattling windows, sometimes the aftershocks and salvos shook the churchyard. A section of new track near the village had already been laid. She had walked on it. To the side were slabs and blocks of blistered rock, with scored dynamite tunnels. The raw stone, covered in blasting dust, smelled like stagnant water.

  Now, many years later I imagine hearing that young woman say, How quick things are done here! The frenzied building was like her decision to leave Roca, to get away overnight. She sees the swagger of the laid track, but also its fear, the inner trouble. The fear of remaining among the burnt spires that surround the village, the unsure place.

  5

  At dusk, the three-car ferry tied up in its moorings, my father cast for the redfish long after they had settled into the deep currents.

  I was sent to find him.

  Supper! I called from the landing.

  I could hear the line hiss as he made a cast, the lure strike the surface. A warm, still night, the air clear, flicker of village lights on the river. I climbed under the padlocked barrier, walked up the ramp to the deck that smelled of oil and iron rust. Off the stern, the shadow tip of the rod flicked like the willow wand Anna used to knock chestnuts out of the crowns of the trees.
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  You’re going to have a sister.

  Is Anna here? I said. I thought she must be asleep in the wheelhouse. I remembered how, since she was born, it was said she would be like a sister to me. I was five or six years old then, now I was thirteen, and I hadn’t seen her often. Paolo didn’t like his two families to visit the village: he kept them away from us. The stillness that I felt came not from the sky nor the mountain nor the river, but from my father’s face under the peaked visor, his body a long shadow that goes rippling along the rod.

  Anna! I called.

  No, he smiled. Your cousin Maren is coming to live with us.

  Hands under my arms he pulled me to my feet.

  We walked up the road through the village orchards. My father had placed the fishing rod and the tackle box in the wheelhouse. Anna was not there.

  For a few steps he turned on the flashlight that he carried in his pocket.

  Better, he said, turning it off, his hand on my shoulder. He’d heard the Hydro was going to build a dam south of Burton. In a few years our village would be flooded. We would have to move, and he was talking of building a house in the orchard above the takeline. The village houses and buildings would either be trucked to a new site or burned.

  We could say we won’t go.

  We have to go, he said, resting his hand on my head. They take what they want in the end. And we will get what we can from the Hydro, he assured me.

  Still I remember something in his voice I’d never heard before — a far dark drifting like someone speaking out of a dream.

  How will you trick them? I was remembering nonna’s story of how the slater, dressed as a woman, had escaped under the eyes of the priest with the infant Manice.

  I won’t have to trick them, I’ll show you.

  The road went between slate banks then through orchards to the takeline. With his flashlight, my father pointed out orange ribbons hung from surveyors’ stakes, the heap of peach trees torn up to make room in the orchard for our new house.

  Nostra nonna will be angry!

  I remembered how she once chased me with a cedar stake when, climbing into a apricot tree, I’d broken a main branch. I tried to measure her anger from one branch to twenty or more trees and looked at my father in alarm.

  Nonna gave us this land, he said.

  For Anna’s birth I was given new shoes. For Maren we were given land. I sensed his happiness, yet all I could feel in myself was alarm. The wide gap in the trees was darker than the mountain, and the churned-up earth smelled of broken roots.

  I don’t like it here.

  You will, he smiled, When you have your own room.

  Those words seemed to float without meaning: takeline, reservoir at full pool, own room. All I could think of was the castle, the village, the railroad bridge and the Pradolini house across the river flooded. I imagined the reservoir foaming across the stump hills we used to call orchards, through the vineyards to touch the trees outside the promised bedroom window.

  What if we drown?

  This will be our orchard, he reassured me, above the takeline. Now that Maren is coming to live with us.

  That’s all I could do, ask questions, and I felt his grownup impatience; I was only trying to call him back. We asked a lot of questions in those days, questions for grownups who were off somewhere in some dark water, trying to think out where to go while our houses were trucked away or burned.

  It was two days before the village festa that was to last a week. My father read a letter from Maren’s mother. Before taking his early train to St. Leon, Uncle Paolo had slipped it under our door. I’d found the envelope, Don’t Show To Nonna written on it — the thick letters scrawled on the envelope with a carpenter’s grease pencil, in capital letters built out of lines that crossed, or leaned against each other like timbers.

  Don’t show to nonna. Yet she knew nothing and everything.

  Before I could open the letter, my mother took it: Not for your eyes, either.

  The letter lay tucked in its envelope on the kitchen table that my father pushed against the window as he said: Maren must come for the festa. My bed had been taken out of the laundry room, put by the big stove that we never used, the iron monster that clicked its teeth at night. She must have her own room, my mother said. A boy doesn’t need his own room; a girl does. By my bed my father had also made a shelf for the books I read in those days: adventure books, boyhood mysteries, stories of people who lived far away. One had a picture of a sacred lake in a volcanic crater, where the Maya said clouds were born, and I loved to imagine what that would look like, the birth of clouds off of water.

  The letter on the table pushed to the window to make room for Maren. Later I saw it among the copper-bottomed pots on the shelf above the stove. I wanted to read it, to see why the cousin was coming to live with us.

  But in a way I already knew. Three days before, my uncle had arrived to sleep downstairs. Through the laundry room window, I’d heard him talking.

  Good morning, Mother, he murmured.

  He spoke softly on the porch below. They’d brought out chairs for their coffee. Nonna’s would be half milk, warmed in a separate pot. I could hear the legs scrape as my uncle drew his chair in, to lean against the wall below my window. The porch, this house listened to you. No radio chatter, no ticking clock, the light and the smells listened to you.

  I heard nonna say, So she has left you too? And what about my granddaughter?

  Years later I found out for certain what my uncle was bargaining for that morning with a shy smile in his voice: a granddaughter in exchange for the Giacomo house in our village.

  I’ll have to take her away, he’d threatened. To the Aconcagua. You give me the Giacomo house and we’ll stay.

  It was then that it was decided: Paolo would get the house that Nonna owned across the street. Because he was often away on the trains, Maren would come to live with us.

  I didn’t know then he was losing his eyesight and he didn’t either. Macular degeneration, the doctors would later call it. I took the way he looked at you out of the corners of his eyes as a kind of slyness.

  My parents made Maren’s bed in the room off the kitchen we called the laundry room. It had a double washbasin in it, a washing machine, a big window that swung open, with the clothesline outside. It used to be an open porch, with wooden stairs that led up to it. The trainmen used to leave their overalls and jackets on the stairs for Nonna to wash. That’s how she made some of the money to buy the Giacomo house given to my uncle. Now the porch was glassed in, with a window in the kitchen wall that looked into it.

  In the laundry room my mother was standing behind my father.

  Maren is coming to live with us, she murmured. Who will work when the valley is flooded?

  He turned to her, a brief glare of anger in his eyes. We’ll have the peach orchard above the takeline.

  Who knows if you can ripen peaches on the side of a reservoir, she complained. She went into the kitchen, to pour a cup of wine. We should move to Westbank.

  Westbank, my father echoed. He spoke again of the Hydro’s unwillingness to pay anything but the “going rate” for our village land. It was worth much less than the orchards and vineyards of Westbank. I felt then that my parents’ voices were adrift, that they’d slipped away into the place of their leaving.

  We don’t have to move I told them, my voice uncertain.

  And we’ll end up paying taxes on lake bottom! my father shouted. His angry words rushed through by body as though I were transparent air. I crept behind my mother, a sound shadow.

  I drove with him to the bus depot. It smelled of floor cleaner and old newspapers. Though the waiting room was empty, I knew with a child’s logic that Maren was behind the photo booth curtain, by the twenty-four hour lockers that you paid to use. She waited for the whirr of the machine to produce the strip of photos before she drew aside the curtain. Maren’s bags were already by the glass doors: two suitcases with big metal locks. Because we were late, Maren w
as the only one left. Pushing aside the curtain she smiled when she saw us.

  Her hair was cropped short. “I asked my mom to cut it!”

  At the ticket counter, while my father carried the two suitcases outside, Maren asked the price of a return ticket to Field, wrote it on her palm.

  She held up the strip of photos. Who is that? she said, pointing not at the wet photos which she held pinched at a corner, but at herself. Maren, I said. I remembered the green eyes, slender chin, I had no trouble recognizing her.

  Once again she went to the counter, to verify the price of a return ticket to Field. When the dispatcher spoke, she looked first to his lips, then to her palm, like nonna checking an address on a letter, number by number, word by word.

  My father drove down an alley, through puddles from the heavy rains, by rain-stained cedar fences and metal garbage cans on stands to keep them away from the dogs and above the snowbanks in winter.

  Maren’s dim eyes; she reached for the door handle, lifted it. A twelve button accordion rode in her lap.

  You used to play in the Field bassa banda I said, remembering.

  We were riding in the back seat; my father had put the two suitcases on the seat beside his. Maren had been on the bus for most of the day.

  I had a long day to get here, she said. On the bus she had sat across from a boy and a girl. At a rest stop she had seen the two, the boy, the girl lean across a cafeteria table with their chins propped in their hands to kiss. They had leaned across the cafeteria table smiling and had kissed smiling with their eyes wide open and it wasn’t the kiss but what they exchanged with their open eyes that she remembered.