The Orchard Keepers

by Robert Pepper-Smith

  Maren made the accordion say I had a long day to get here; I walked from the Butucci orchards. She was playing the accordion on her cot.

  Did Paolo give this accordion to you? she asked me. She made it wail like the Sentinella and laughed.

  For as long as I could remember I’d heard that whistle on the mountain, usually at night, when Paolo used to take a train to St. Leon for the zucca melons.

  It woke me up; it was like a familiar footfall in the stairwell and a voice I knew.

  We’re going to the Argentine, she said. Do you want to go with us?

  Yes, I nodded.

  Thank you, she said. Thank you for saying that.

  She talked of the Aconcagua till her eyes shone. Her laughter was like a track of wet footprints on warm floorboards.

  They don’t have a real San Calogero in St. Leon, she said. Just a papier mache one. Do you want to come to the Aconcagua?

  I want to go with you.

  There isn’t enough rain there.

  How do you know?

  Paolo told me. Why won’t you look at me?

  In truth I couldn’t look at her. In the presence of her quiet stare, her excited patter, I felt my throat tighten at the thought of her leaving.

  Through the window I could see girls peeling zucca melons on the platform of the canning factory across the tracks. She made the whirr of many wasps, then a bird’s flapping in the vineyard nets. She played and the Sentinella was in our room — I felt its whistle vibrating in my chest. Last night the Sentinella had whistled on the mountain and I’d heard the clatter of my uncle’s boots in the street of the grandmothers as he went to meet his favourite engine. Even today I think of how she was playing at going to the Aconcagua, playing a child’s tune on the accordion. Anna’s saying she wants to stay here was echoed in the song Maren played, and in the mascara smudged under Anna’s eyes, the worried, tight smile.

  That night in 196_ was the last night of the festa campestra. In the Butucci orchards, my uncle had come into the firelight. “Where’s Maren?” To turn a trussed lamb over the barbecue pit he wore a leather apron and a bright red handkerchief tightly bound about his head. You could smell the grease burning on the coals.

  On the street of the grandmothers, walking to the Butucci orchards, I’d heard her tone that filled my head with the scent of her skin. Soon, I was no longer sure it was Maren; maybe it was the wind in the river alders, under the bridge, the chattering catwalk, the streamers in the crowns of the apricot trees. As he stood in his greasy apron, staring around, Paolo did not seem to see me there. In the firelight he had the wide-eyed look of someone peering underwater.

  I climbed through the branches near the barbecue pits. I sensed that Maren was in that tree. Her hair smelled of cinnamon. She had tied streamers to the crowns of the trees. From there, under the street lights I could see buildings that used to be in town had vanished: Beruski’s store on Mackenzie Ave, Mallone’s café. This place that was ours was rapidly vanishing. The streets, the lights, the orchards with their odour of ripe peaches and the smell of the canning fires — all that expressed what I now recognize as the temper of our life was being removed, before my very eyes.

  I heard her voice in the leaf shadows: I don’t want to go to the Aconcagua. Her voice among the leaves was plaintive and wide awake.

  Are you going to St. Leon tomorrow? I asked her. On the Sentinella?

  I edged along the branch, to kiss her on the mouth. I felt the softening of her lips, their acceptance, then she pushed me away. In her anger-filled eyes there was a memory. Her look reminded me of how, while the doctor sewed her chin, I’d held down her knees.

  I don’t want to see you anymore, she said.

  I don’t want to see you again! she screamed at me, then dropped from the branch to the ground.

  When you’re in a room I’ll leave, I shouted down at her. And when I’m in a room you leave. With both hands I gripped the branch. I could have fallen when she pushed me. I hadn’t chosen to help the doctor I reminded myself. Yet my shouts rose from the hollow feeling of being seen as less than I wanted to be.

  She went off to stand among three girls near the canning fires, Anna among them. They had some kind of game going, kicking a hard green peach like a ball, and soon they were running among the trestle tables in the fire light, kicking the peach back and forth till the women who were canning fruit at the tables told them to stop or go elsewhere. The others, Rose and Lacey, were girls from north of our village, and I really didn’t know them then, although they came into my life later in a way that took me far from this valley.

  Sitting on the branch, I wondered whether Maren was telling them about the kiss and my betrayal, and I felt a burning sense of shame.

  I’d seen Rose and Lacey picking fruit in the Butucci orchards. They were on Alberto Braz’s crew and slept in the same shack and worked together. Once, Rose had asked me if Maren was my girlfriend and I’d only laughed. She had clear brown eyes and the strong wrists of someone who worked with horses — she’d told me that her parents were horse loggers on the Big Bend. She’d smiled after asking about Maren and then looked at me in a measured, intent way that years later I would learn to love.

  Later that evening I found Maren standing in our garden by the house. She was carrying the twelve-button accordion slung on her shoulder and a small cloth knapsack. I’m running away, she said. I don’t want to go to the Aconcagua.

  Why don’t you just stay here?

  I don’t belong here.

  Across the street, I could see a light flickering in the second-storey window of the Giacomo house. That room faced the mountain and was cold even in midsummer, with its walls stuffed with newspapers and sawdust. To warm his room, my uncle had lit a heap of almond shells in the brazier he kept there.

  I’m going away now. Do you want to come with me?

  Yes, I nodded. I’ll go with you. I felt that I would do anything to regain her trust, and I took her hand briefly before she backed away.

  Standing under the chestnut tree near the porch, she gave me a tired smile. On the accordion, she made the low wail of the Sentinella on the mountain.

  Soon we heard the clatter of my uncle’s boots in the street of the grandmothers, on the way to the roundhouse.

  You wait here, she said, and watch for Paolo.

  She went into the Giacomo house, climbed the stairs to the room with the flickering light in it. I remembered Anna saying in the school playground, He’s going to sell the Giacomo house to by tickets for the Argentine. And I also remembered his promise to our grandmother: You give me the Giacomo house and we’ll stay. In Paolo’s bedroom Maren found a trestle bed of faded green deal boards, the rolled-up mattress at one end. On the floor a copper brazier was burning. It gave off the bitter fragrance of almond shells.

  Do you think he’ll try to take me with him soon? I imagined her asking while I stood outside under the tree near our porch.

  I don’t know, Maren.

  She fingered the carved headboard. She wasn’t often in that house. Now I see her draw the brazier to the bed by one of its looped handles wrapped in cord, to tip out the burning almond shells. At first nothing happens, the heap glows dully on the wooden floor. Impatient, worried that Paolo might return at any moment, she searches the room for something to add. There’s a stack of music sheets on a sideboard that she crumples onto the fire and soon the green deal boards are catching, the mattress begins to smoulder.

  When she returns to me, I see dull orange flames and long shadows climbing in the window.

  I’m going now, she said. I’m going to hide on a train that will take me away from here.

  I’ll come with you, I said then. I will.

  Hi Anna!

  In her anxiety she called me Anna as I climbed into the cattle car. Frost gleamed on the rails in the shadow of the canning factory. Last night we’d found this place for her to hide and I’d gone home to bring her a blanket. Maren sat on a mattress of burlap sacks. Light streamed in
through the cattle car slats.

  Where is my father, she asked. Is he looking for me?

  Paolo says when he finds you, you’re going to the Aconcagua. Are you running away to Vancouver?

  Yes, she nodded. Nearby, girls were peeling zucca melons on the cannery platform. Inside the cattle car I could hear drawknives make the melon skins hiss like split stone. The tasteless juice glittered on the knives and on the fingers and elbows. There was ash on the tracks from the Giacomo fire.

  Everybody’s looking for you.

  You’re going to tell them where I am, aren’t you.

  Once again I felt my throat tighten at the thought that I had not regained her trust.

  Though I had brought a blanket to the cattle car, she had not slept under it; all night through the cattle car slats she’d watched the red glow of the Giacomo fire.

  We slipped by the factory platform heaped with melon rinds where the drawknives flashed. Crossing the tracks I saw Lombardy poplars glittering behind the train sheds and the wide beaks of the snowplows.

  Through a side door we crept into the roundhouse. Maren went in and I followed. A pot of stew was bubbling on the stove by the door. High above the wooden beams were covered in dust; light streamed in from banks of encircling windows. A worker was pressing a flat metal bar to the grinder at the far bench. Sparks flew under his goggles. The Sentinella stood by another engine that we called “the Tall Musician” because its whistle sounded like a deer bone flute.

  That morning I felt I was seeing everything for the last time. Dawn streamed through chinks in the roundhouse walls, through the banks of dirty windows. Arc lamps blazed over the tracks, lighting up the empty cattle cars.

  The roundhouse windows had turned the colour of river stones. To let out the Sentinella, the doors would swing open and the big engine would creep into the yard. Through the windows, you could see the shadows of empty cattle cars that smelled of sulphur water.

  In the cab of the Sentinella, Maren explained the many levers. I didn’t really listen to what she was saying. For the first time, I felt what it would be like to leave that vanishing place of my bones, my hands and touch.

  “I’ve been in here lots,” I heard her say. Between us there was a strained smile. She talked in a low solemn voice of the Aconcagua till her eyes shone. She spoke of how in one year twelve sets of twins were born, of the wide river Plate, of the Mendoza earthquake that the French geologist Bravard had predicted.

  That’s not you, I told her. That’s Paolo.

  You’re going to tell them where I am, she said with her resigned look. Aren’t you?

  In her eyes I was still the doctor’s boy.

  8

  Rattling and swaying, the train crossed the railroad bridge and climbed into the Pradolini orchard. Through the cattle car floor I heard the voice of the wheels that asked for nothing, a reassuring clack. On the ridge track that led south through the valley orchards, I smelt canning fires and wind-fallen, rotting fruit. Through the slats I could see across the river the glittering tin roofs of our village and the D. Street Mill at the mouth of the Illecillewaet.

  I had never been south of Burton. Yet I could smell the Kootenay lake, the packing crates on the St. Leon wharf, the rail car barge that brought in Renata fruit, all things that my aunt Manice had told me about.

  I can walk all the way around Paolo, Maren was saying. She wore a pleated, cream-coloured blouse that had no warmth in it. I can walk all the way around him like this, tracing a circle in the cattle car straw with her toe to show the limits of his sight.

  In our apartment, she’d pocketed a handful of peppermints that my mother liked to keep in a blue bowl on the kitchen table. I’d filled my pockets with ciambelle.

  Now she gave me a mint: Put it under your tongue to make it last. We hadn’t had anything to eat since the afternoon before the Giacomo fire, and she hadn’t slept all night. Peppermint on her breath; I felt her lips tremble under mine. She’d drawn near to kiss me and in the softness of her lips I felt a welcome but also a lingering doubt. All around us, the smell of dry straw and urine. She’d made a mattress of burlap sacks among the straw bales that were used to pack the zucca melons.

  Under my tongue, at the root, I could still taste the burnt house. I’d watched the flames climb out the second-storey window to curl into the eaves. I’d waited till the roof shingles began to smoke and then ran. Too breathless to yell, I went up to my mother who danced in the Butucci orchards and pointed to the red glow above the village roofs.

  The clang of Our Lady of Sorrows’ bell and then the fire truck’s siren. My father drew the hose from the fire truck bed as though he were casting wildly for trout. I could hear the shouts of men over the fire’s roar. At the yellow and red-painted hydrant on the street of the grandmothers my uncle spun the brass hose coupling. I heard the cough and purr of the fire truck generator as arc lamps lit up running figures in front of the Giacomo house.

  Paolo knelt to connect an attack hose to the main line, dragged it to wet the smoking walls of the adjacent houses. I heard windows popping, glass shivering into the Giacomo yard. Now my uncle and my father carried the attack hose through the front door, only to be driven back by the smoke and heated air. I saw my father, head ducked, raise his hands to cover his singed ears.

  I can still smell that house. It stank of charred wood and sawdust, a bloated mattress dragged into the street, burnt plastic and linoleum.

  I’d taken a bottle of drinking water from the fire truck, filled my pockets with ciambelle at our kitchen table.

  You haven’t slept all night, I said to Maren. You rest then.

  I sat cross-legged, to cradle her head in my lap. The gleam and dim of her fingerprints on the water bottle. Through the cattle car slats I could see the river.

  I listened for her slowing breath, felt the heartbeat in her fingertips. I stroked her hair, her minnow features. To breathe, our grandfather had cupped his hands before his face as the avalanche snow flowed like flour around him. Clawing to break the suffocating ice that his breath made in the little cavern around his nostrils and mouth, he wore his fingers to the first knuckle.

  I wondered what death I might bring her. It’s not only birds that feel the death in our hands.

  Wait, my uncle once said to me: What does a man have for himself when he has lost himself?

  A fist in the mirror!

  At five, Anna had drawn a picture of the ruotaro, a gap between the black hat and head and between his body and the horse. My hands repeated that gap above Maren’s closed eyelids, her throat hollow with the locket in it; now I dared not touch her. I felt then that we were unlucky somehow, that it was not only houses and orchards that were vanishing, but a tenderness that needed a place of its own. My head resting against the slats, I heard the thrumming of the train wheels. On a high grade they slowed to a clack. Through the slats I saw familiar trees: peaches and apricots pruned by her hand, the light between the branches as distinctive as a signature: that was Manice’s orchard above the tracks. She let no one touch her trees and did all the pruning on her own. There were the trees I’d known since the age of four and they were always pruned that way. Where Manice’s house used to be, smoke trailed from the bladed earth. A ground-moving machine stood in the clearing; its raised blade, dirt-crusted and as long as a wall, gleamed like a weapon. I heard my uncle’s low voice: A little grape syrup in their tanks.

  I felt then a flash of anger. Yes, I said to myself, a little grape syrup in their tanks. I thought then with a child’s logic that if the machines could be stopped the destruction would stop.

  9

  Many years later Anna told me how she heard the story of our grandfather’s death. She heard this story two days after the Giacomo fire, when Maren and I had disappeared. She and Nonna were in the castle’s backyard garden. Our grandmother was telling her how the slater had gone to help dig out the seventy-six buried in the snow. While he and the other rescuers were in a trench they’d dug to open the tracks,
an avalanche began on the mountain opposite. It could have been started by a shout when another body was discovered, that of a Chinese cook. The face of the mountain fractured. The slide quickly turned from white to black as it ripped up soil and flung timber spears, filling the rescue trench.

  The village heard its roar from thirty miles away.

  Nonna had crept into the street of the grandmothers, into a stillness that said they already knew.

  Now, a plume of sprinkler water travelled across the back yard porch at her feet. She cranked down the faucet handle. The hose vibrated shrilly, stopped. She told Anna she wanted to see who was out on the downtown sidewalk that evening. A familiar dip of the head, the right sort of cloth, a step that vanished in a crowd. It was strange how the slater was beginning to return to her in this way: the glimpse of memory in the way a hand rested lightly on a child’s head.

  That morning she’d been to the doctor about the burning in her throat, the dull old coin in her cheek. Folded in her pocket a medical report that talked of the surgical removal of bone and muscle, at her age.

  At her age!

  Returning from the clinic, she’d seen someone who looked like Albert Murray standing in front of the theatre, cap pulled low over his eyes and one hand resting on the head of a young girl. The child was wearing a sundress with patch pockets. The man’s clothes were not Albert’s, she would tell me later. He was Albert in build, in the set of his shoulders. He reminded her of how young Albert Murray must have been when she knew him. He must have been very young.

  The gate unlatched, she and Anna stepped into the alley.

  She touched Anna’s forehead with the back of her hand. You seem hot! Head bent, with dull glazed eyes, the cousin was listening to something inside herself. She had not left our grandmother’s side since the Giacomo fire.

  Where are my cousins?

  The police called, our grandmother told her. They’re down in Burton. They were hiding in a cattle car, they’ll be back tonight.