The Orchard Keepers

by Robert Pepper-Smith

  My mother has a room for you, I said, my voice full of resentment: she was to have my room, the laundry room. Now I remember the oiled floor boards, with cracks between them. If you put your ear to one, you could hear what was going on below. I used to listen to my uncle’s voice. I had learned to predict when he would ask our grandmother for money.

  Her hand was on the lifted door handle. My father, who had heard the click of the latch, drove as if a load of firewood had shifted on the car roof. He explained that at the last minute the station dispatcher had ordered uncle Paolo to take a train to St. Leon. He drove past the Giacomo house that nostra nonna had given Paolo; she twisted in her seat to gaze over her shoulder at the darkened windows.

  A low murmur, Maren was singing to herself.

  She had lifted the door latch. She could have leapt into the alley, the price of a return ticket written on her palm. Instead, Maren told me she’d never had her hair cut so short, that the cut had given her a different face. I remembered the last time I’d seen her, under the table during the grape harvest. She was four years old then. Between those tablecloth walls, I’d felt I was in my kingdom. A pale light shone through the cloth. On the roof, rain was the clatter of knives and forks. Voices the voices of people in the street. She had slid out of her chair under the table. You have a long neck, she’d told me. Like a horse’s. She smelt of cinnamon and diesel oil. She’d arrived in the cab of the Sentinella, perched on the sacks of cinnamon that my uncle used to dust his vines against mildew. I remember that her mocking smile made me feel trapped, no longer left to myself.

  At fourteen Maren wasn’t tall for a girl. She had angular features and a downcast look under bushy eyebrows; she looked as though she felt singled out. She had the waist and hips of a young girl and so with her wrists. But she had a woman’s hands and she hid her breasts under my mother’s loose-fitting blouse. She’d begun to walk as though others had a reason for noticing her. That evening when I saw her coming out of the laundry room, turning to close the door, I thought she was a stranger, a thief maybe, for she closed the door like a stranger’s door.

  So that she wouldn’t sit alone in her curtained room, she was made to do her homework at the table cleared after dinner. Papers spread on the table, textbook open, my father explaining a math problem, writing quickly as he spoke.

  I’m one of those people that are no good at math, she said. The night before the festa, she wanted to talk about the albero: prizes hung at various lengths from the top of the pole; you kept what you reached and carried down.

  My father looked astonished at what she was talking about. “We stopped that years ago.” He turned away as though trying to recall something.

  Well, you’re from Field.

  The next day, to announce the beginning of the festa campestra it was custom to visit others in disguise. My uncle dressed up Maren as a man, with a tape-on moustache. She wore a plaid shirt open at the collar, baggy sleeves with rolled-up cuffs. Pant legs tucked into the big work boots she had on, so they wouldn’t get caught in the bicycle chain as she rode beside my uncle, pressing the moustache to her lip. Her hair piled up in my grandfather’s hat from the cellar, with yellow tobacco stains on the rim.

  This is my brother Antonio from the Aconcagua, announced Uncle Paolo. He had put a cap gun in Maren’s pocket (“You’re a dangerous character!”). They were visiting Mrs. Canetti, Maren’s godmother.

  Your brother, so young and handsome. And from the Aconcagua!

  He’s a tough customer, my brother; he’s going to take over my business.

  The commare was setting out plates of gnocchi, two bottles of beer.

  Your business, what business?

  I sell blasting supplies on the side, commare; and Antonio here is telling me to be on my way. He wants to fly Bennello’s plane, too!

  Maren laid the cap gun on the table. Under the moustache, she burst out laughing. That day in the village she was the dangerous brother from the Aconcagua. For once Maren seemed free, in her element. Now and then she pressed the moustache to keep it stuck on, over her eager laugh and wild gestures with the cap gun.

  Once, to calm her, my uncle placed his hands on her shoulders: You behave yourself here. Stay by your nonna, who is rich. And then, with a puzzled look: When I look at you straight on, you seem blurry. When I turn my head to the side I see you better.

  That night — the night before the madonna was brought out for the parade of decorated fruit carts — there was a fire and music on the Illecillewaet sandbar. Maren and I went out there. We were tolerated by the older teenagers who were making plans of mischief for the evening.

  Who would you like to go out with, one of the older boys asked me. His girlfriend was toying with his idle fingers in her lap. Others laughed: He’s too young.

  Maren, I said.

  All of a sudden the stillness in their looks, the cedar crackle in the fire throwing off blue flames.

  A joke I blurted out.

  The next morning, my uncle pulled Maren by the arm down the alley.

  Don’t you shame me, he said, and he lifted her hand to see if any of the painted hand prints on the fences matched hers. You behave yourself here!

  Once after school Maren and I happened to walk home down an alley of high fences of weathered board. It was as though we were walking in the Illecillewaet gully with the strong sunlight reflected from the wind polished boards and the smells of rotting garbage from the cans on wooden stands by gates that, taller than a man, were always closed. Maren tried to remember the houses on the street-side, to figure out whose we were walking by. In those days she was a liar. She told me she had a knife her father had taken after she’d buried it in the head of a dead raven. Or that her father, who had moved to a different town, was going to send a picture of this woman he lived with. At the pink stucco wall of the Community Centre, I pushed her down: My uncle is your father. Everyone knows.

  Okay, she said. And this, too.

  She would go into my parents’ bedroom, to look through the dresser drawers. She took out my mother’s jewellery box, the folded bills hidden under it, the old razors, the railroad watch that no longer worked, the folded ferryman’s shirts, the panties, the one crumpled tie. And replaced them as they were.

  Once my mother watched from the doorway.

  Later I heard her say to my father, when she thought I was asleep: She wants to belong here.

  Dressed as a clown Maren wore my grandfather’s slouch hat, a taped on moustache.

  On that bicycle, she pedaled past looks that said: The daughter from Field.

  They made her eager to play the fool. Once she sang in a hurried, breathless voice:

  Girl guide dressed in yellow

  This is the way you treat your fellow

  The next morning — the third or forth of the festa — nostra nonna said to me, Bring the dill for the madonna’s cart.

  All winter the dill was kept in the cellar. On the cellar stairs I saw that water, glittering with coal dust, had welled over the first three steps to meet me. After the heavy rains of the day Maren arrived by bus, nostra nonna’s cellar had flooded. Now as in previous years, when the water vanished I’d find salamanders in the mud and shrimp that lived in underground streams, translucent with pepper grain eyes. Crouching, I made glittering trails in the coal dust on the surface of the water. A raft of grape lugs and cedar bolts had floated from under the stairs where I’d built it in the winter.

  The echo of wine bottles under the light by the furnace. I pulled the raft in, untied it, poled with a broom handle along the wall. Ripples slapped the stone walls, water came up between the slats as I poled the raft over to the shelves. Reach down the dill fronds from rough cedar shelves above the high water mark.

  The house is dying, I imagined saying to Maren. Already it refuses us.

  At night I hear waterfalls in the cellar. I see smoke stains on the windows.

  The house had settled during the night, creaking like the ferry in its slip. That morning
my father’s shirtsleeves and hands were covered in shavings that had the odour of cinnamon and old oak. He was planing the doors stuck in their frames.

  My father called from the top of the cellar stairs: Anna is here.

  She came down to the step above water in a dress with patch pockets, a sunhat. Don’t worry I won’t kiss you she said and then she did — a cousin’s kiss. Under the plaited brim of the sunhat, I saw dark eyes, flashing teeth, someone over winter who had grown almost as tall as I.

  Maren’s living here. Where is she?

  I said she was with the priest, to get ready for the parade of the madonna and the trip to bless the new graveyard above the takeline.

  I haven’t seen her in a long time! Do you think she’ll recognize me?

  Yes, I nodded, uncertain.

  What if she doesn’t remember me?

  Just say your name, I said. Just say, Anna Esposito.

  We climbed the stairs into the kitchen. I laid the dill on the table. My father was sitting by nostra nonna, brushing wood shavings from his hands. They were discussing the land buyers sent by the Hydro.

  Try always to have a friendly witness around, my father recommended. Offer wine, our braided bread.

  My uncle, his voice full of anger, was talking about the Hydro machines in the vineyards last evening: Their drivers say, Sorry. We weren’t sure about the fence line. They trample fences!

  A little grape sugar in their tanks, he suggested with a sly look.

  Talk about everything under the sun except the business at hand, my father countered. Never allow two of them to discuss business with you alone.

  He passed to Nonna a Hydro brochure that showed holiday cabins on the shore of the future reservoir, which was advertised as a recreation area.

  They lie like the priests, she said.

  That day of the madonna, of the trip upriver to bless the new graveyard, we stripped the window frames to paint them for the festa. My father was on a ladder scraping the blistered paint with a tool shaped like a claw; a snow of heavy flakes fell into my hair, my eyelashes. The different clothes I put on, the various colours of my hands: green of the church doors, pale violet of our windows. The dust, the paint flecks in my hair like flakes of many-coloured slate, chalky dust smeared across my forehead as I wipe away the sweat, holding the ladder for my father. He was two storeys above me, and I couldn’t look at him.

  They say not to paint, he says, hooking the clawtool on a rung. That painting our houses for the madonna won’t bring us more Hydro money. This isn’t for money; this is for honour.

  All these years later I can still smell the burning dill. It had a sweet smell, the grey smoke that drifts on the river while my uncle plays his yellow zerocetti. The dill torches hiss as they strike the river among the flowers sent out for the festa.

  My grandmother said, You come with me. I had never seen her look so determined; her cheek was white, as if she’d received a slap. She’d slipped a pair of kitchen shears into the pocket of her black dress. This was after I’d brought the dill from the cellar and after she’d slid the Hydro brochure across the table.

  At the foot of my uncle’s house across the street I knelt to peer into the madonna’s shrine, the size of a birdhouse made of slate. My uncle had found her in the 1923 avalanche. Twelve years old, he’d brought the madonna down the mountain under his coat: She’s the only one I saved. Orchards south of the village were being cut down for the new dam and a pall of smoke rose there. The madonna wore a blue robe that draped her arms above the upturned palms. Her high, rounded forehead. I tried to imagine the eyes under the lids, once pressed in snow like flour. A pale plaster showed through her chipped fingers.

  While nostra nonna knelt to clip a square of silk from the hem of the madonna’s blue robe, she muttered under her breath:

  And the sickle is not a hoe

  Not a hoe the sickle

  There are those who uproot and those who plant

  Those who plant and those who uproot

  For you mother, she said. A song from Roca. My gift for your gift. It was the song she used to sing in the ospizio to the infant Manice. She would sing it at night to calm the baby against the priest’s footsteps, full of whispered hope to get away. Now she struggled to her feet, the square in her fist. I wanted to know what it was for. For you, she said, raising a finger to her lips to say quiet, no more questions. From down the street we could hear the creak of the picker’s cart, many voices.

  A red silk thread tied around her wrist, Anna carried long dill fronds that quivered as she walked. In the street of the grandmothers my uncle wheeled a picker’s cart with the madonna on a bed of straw and grape flowers. Others joined from behind their gates as he walked to the ferry landing. He’d slung his yellow accordion with its buttoned bellows on one shoulder. The Canetti family waited behind a gate and by custom it was the grandmother who opened it.

  Come place a gift: a handful of grape flowers, a ribbon in the cart, a loaf that smells of saffron. My father was waiting at the landing, the low rumble of the ferry’s engine. Six girls of the village, Maren among them, carried dill fronds and lit candles along the gravel river road. The gravel clattered in the heat. The fronds above them, like pale sputtering flames. Maren had powdered her eyebrows and fingers with grey ash. In her open shirt she smelled of sweat. Green eyes and slender chin — she walked at the side of the priest. I saw her eager smile. With the five at the side of the priest she was far from Paolo’s silencing glance. She wouldn’t look at me. She wanted to be left in her element, the ceremony itself. She looked like she belonged. Anna with her lit candle was behind; she was talking excitedly to the candle bearer at her side in a loud, cheerful voice that I could tell was meant for Maren who wouldn’t turn around. I could tell each was aware of the other, though nothing was said between them.

  Out on the river, we passed below the railroad bridge. I remember that we were going to the new graveyard that the Hydro had made above the takeline. We were going to hold a ceremony over a plaque for the seventy-six who had died in the 1923 avalanche.

  Wait, my uncle said: Once their mouths were full of snow, soon they will be full of water!

  My father’s ferry had turned upriver into the strong currents, among whirlpools capable of drawing a log to the bottom to release it. At middeck, tables from the firehall were laid out with salads and gnocchi, roasted ham and braided bread. The accordion music went out like smoke, awake and dreaming, travelling low across the water. To have a feel for the currents, to feel your way along as a blind hand glides up a bannister.

  We passed beneath the railroad bridge, and Paolo brought nonna a plate of salad and gnocchi.

  I won’t be eating with you, our grandmother said very brusquely. I’ve burnt my throat with tea.

  Anna looked at her, sensing there was more to it, and said nothing.

  Go see a doctor, my uncle advised, if you’ve burnt your throat like that. He placed his accordion on the table, offered to drive her to the clinic when we returned to the village.

  She pushed away the plate he’d brought her. I’m fine.

  She stood to walk to the stern.

  You come with me, she said, biting her lip.

  Off the stern we could see the churning prop water, the railroad bridge with its catwalk of cedar planks, the green haze of the Pradolini orchard on the far shore.

  You are my only grandson.

  Yes, I nodded. I bought the Giacomo house for you. It was meant to be yours.

  She had bought it from Mr. Giacomo, a logging contractor who had recently moved to our valley. It was a narrow two storey house that he’d lived in temporarily with his wife, while he looked for land north of our village. He wanted to plant vineyards beyond the takeline. Nonna had wanted it for me as a promise and as a symbol of success — the house of a rich man!

  Much later I would learn that he had sold it to nonna to buy a judge’s house in Burnham, to float on a barge across Olebar lake for his wife. His wife had dreamt of the ju
dge’s house and he’d wanted to make it hers. In those days I wondered at the way we move towards dreams and the deft way we handle them, as though light and memory could be manipulated in our desire.

  Now nonna pressed the blue square from the madonna’s hem in my hand. When you go to look for your new home, put this under your tongue. It will protect you. I could see shame and bewilderment in her eyes-she had meant that house for me when I was older and now she’d been forced to give it to Paolo, and she didn’t know where I’d end up. I didn’t know then of the secret negotiations between nonna and my parents, to keep Maren near. Yes, Paolo would get the Giacomo house, a home to share with his daughter. To my parents nonna would give an orchard above the takeline, in compensation for my loss.

  Where would I end up? The ferry was advancing upriver, against the current. Under my feet I could feel the reassuring iron deck, I could smell the cottonwoods onshore and I could see the inviting, wide, slow pace of the river ahead. The water behind us frothed white then spread in widening ripples to the far banks. Yes, all was well. And yet, I sensed in the solid weight of the iron beneath my feet a lie: we were going and yet we are already gone.

  Maren had joined us. Nonna wet her kerchief with spittle, to quickly rub the priest’s ash from Maren’s nostrils and from under her eyes, those round peering eyes that smiled at the old woman. You two look after each other, nonna said.

  I saw Maren draw back then, flushed to her hair. She gave me a quick, bewildered look. She took Anna’s hand and the two walked away to the middeck tables where Paolo was uncorking wine bottles.

  Now I see our grandmother’s words had named a distance between us we were unable to cover. Our automatic reaction was to fly from each other. The cousins at the middeck tables were laughing and whispering, and I had the impression they were making fun of the way I stood rooted at the stern, embarrassed and exposed by the old woman who loved us. I had no idea of how to look after either of those cousins and yet I was drawn to them both. From where I stood, rooted by our grandmother’s words, I could see that they were watching me, mocking and distant.