Do you want to drive to the coast, Rose was saying, in this one? She was calling down to me through the open window of the car she was in.
Not really to go to the west coast. She was already pregnant then and she needed a friend. I wasn’t sure of her, maybe because I felt her need for a home where she’d feel safe, a need that I didn’t know how to answer. Still, I liked her laughter that was an invitation to cross the distance between us.
Sure, I’ll go to the west coast with you, I said then. You drive, I’m coming up there.
Well, come on then! and I heard her voice settle and grow more assured. Maybe it was then that she began to trust our friendship.
5
Later in the summer, Rose and I were lying on our bellies on Michael Guzzo’s raft off Olebar Beach. Michael Guzzo wasn’t with us then, he’d left to go travelling months ago.
He was Rose’s boyfriend. She’d got to know him in New Slocan. When she described him, his unkempt sandy hair, the green logger’s vest that he always wore, his mild, chestnut-coloured eyes, I knew who he was. I’d seen him one summer in the Butucci orchards. He’d climbed into an apricot tree after his cousin Maren and when she came down out of that tree I heard her shouting at him that she didn’t want to see him again.
And I’d seen him in the Grizzly Bookstore from time to time, going through the secondhand books. Before he left for Central America in the winter of ’69, he gave me a carton of books for safekeeping. There’s some interesting ones in there, he said, you can read them if you like. He took out one to show me: A Catalogue of Unrecovered Items, Volume Four: Pottery and Clay Figurines. He’d said that it was from the end of the Second World War. It showed photographs of items that were stolen by the Japanese army and navy during their retreat and that were never recovered during the occupation of Japan.
Rose and I were kicking the raft through the still water at dusk. I heard voices from the picnic tables under the bone dead oaks near the point. I heard two voices — a man’s and a woman’s — arguing and hushing each other. Rose said, That sounds like your mother.
When Mr. Giacomo shouted, You girls must be cold out there!, I recognized his voice, and he went to the barbecue pit to build us a fire. Whoever was with him had left.
I wondered what he was doing there. It was the first time that he seemed really interested in us. I thought then that the woman he was arguing with could have been my mother, but I couldn’t tell. She had stayed away from the Giacomos since their baby’s death and I didn’t understand what she could be doing talking with him on Olebar beach.
Later in the fall, I’d find out why. At our kitchen table, my mother would spread adoption papers before Rose, and then I’d understand that she and Mr. Giacomo had been planning this all summer, that they’d met on the beach to talk about the adoption of Rose’s child.
Rose was at the mast and I was in the water, kicking along the raft. By then it was almost dark, though I could see the oaks on shore that had died in the winter of 1968. I told her that I’d got a summer job working relief in a fire tower and that I’d be gone maybe weeks at a time. She looked at me then, and I saw sadness draw into her eyes, as if she’d miss me. I was surprised at how she felt; we’d only been friends for a few months. She turned on a flashlight secured to the mast with duct tape. The beam swept the beach, picking out Mr. Giacomo sitting on a drift log.
Rose, don’t shine people, I said, embarrassed.
Well, at least I’m not flashing him, she replied.
We dragged the raft onto the gravel and went to sit by the fire, shivering in towels. We had stayed out on the water too long, and because the lake was rimmed by mountains on the western side, darkness had fallen suddenly.
Girls, it’s too dark to bike home, Mr. Giacomo said. I’ll give you a ride.
He owned the only taxi in our village, and he’d driven to the beach in that car. We loaded our bikes into the trunk. The whole time Rose was laughing, because to fit two bikes into the taxi was like trying to cram nine feet of trellis wire into a tin can: jumble of handlebars, pedals in spokes, hands blackened with grease and road dust, a smear on Rose’s cheek.
She had never actually met Mr. Giacomo before.
She was laughing out of shyness and not wanting to look at him.
Amused, he stood watching us. When the bikes were in the trunk he cinched down the lid with rope. The pouches under his eyes looked bruised and his strong hands that worked the rope were as small as Rose’s.
I’d known the Giacomos for years, though Mr. Giacomo had never really talked to me till now. He had never really seemed to see children.
His wife and my mother had been friends since high school. My father had worked with Mr. Giacomo when he was a young man, delivering mail to the internment camp near New Slocan during the Second World War. He and my father bought vegetables grown in the camp to sell in our village.
At his feet were a small grey satchel and a sketch pad. He took some papers out of the satchel to show to Rose. Then he looked at her, seemed to change his mind, and put them away.
The car that he drove us home in, this “Johnny’s Taxi,” a 1964 Chevrolet, used to belong to my mother. One summer she’d worked in the canning factories of Westbank to make the money to buy it, and then she went for her driver’s license.
It turned out that she was afraid to drive that old boat of a car: the pedals confused her and sometimes she stepped on the gas when she meant to brake, the car surging, and she’d pull over to the shoulder gravel in a sweat.
And then there weren’t a lot of births in the valley, so she couldn’t afford gas or repairs. She got the Italian truck farmers to pick her up when their wives were in labour. In the spring of 1967 she sold that black Chevrolet to Mr. Giacomo, and he made it into “Johnny’s Taxi,” the letters stenciled in white paint on the front door panels. This was just one of his money-making ideas. He owned vineyards and orchards south of our village; for a while, he was even a trail guide with horses.
Rose, shivering in the back seat, her shirttails wet and stuck to her swimsuit, a striped terrycloth towel draped over her knees and bunched under her so that she wouldn’t wet the vinyl seat, asked who Johnny was.
“Johnny” he told her, was his first name: John Giacomo.
We looked at each other and laughed: he was no Johnny. Just as the village called the priest “Father,” so they called Mr. Giacomo “Mr. Giacomo.” It was just the way people talked about him. He did all kinds of jobs and dressed like any working man. Looking at him you’d think he was poor, but we all knew he was rich.
We drove through the Palliser valley past the Italian truck farms, past Mr. Pradolini’s house and Mrs. Hiraki’s house, both two-storey clapboard WWII houses that had been moved up from Renata after the dam was built.
Down there, nobody bothered with curtains, so you could see deep into kitchens and living rooms and the barns were wide open, lit up, with someone bedding down the cows, and I saw Mrs. Hiraki look up from her kitchen table at the car on the gravel road; she came to the window to watch us go by.
She looked out in a peering, alarmed way, as if our lights meant an accident or a death. I saw her raise a hand to shield the kitchen glare so she could see through. Now on her own, she came from a valley family that had been here since before the war. Her husband had died of a heart attack, after he retired from the Odin Mill, and her son Bruce Hiraki had recently died in a logging accident south of the Big Bend. He was felling a cedar when a root-rotted fir on the edge of the clearcut tumbled and caught him on the side of the head. I remembered my mother telling me about the accident. News travelled quickly in our village. I remembered seeing him toss water at girls at the village fountain, the way he looked at Amy Mallone with a merry glint in his eye. And I felt a stillness settle in me then, a deep ache in my chest.
I was there when the tree hit him, Mr. Giacomo told us. I helped lay him out in the truck bed and we took him to the hospital in Naramata, but it was already too late. He was bleeding f
rom the ears and he’d already stopped breathing. We had to drive for miles along the reservoir before we could turn west below the dam, towards the hospital.
Mr. Giacomo was quiet for a while. Then he said, That dam was built ten years ago. Before it was built, in winter we’d get a week of twenty or thirty below. Six feet of snow fell. Now the weather has changed, he said, because of the reservoir behind the dam. You can even plant grape vines here.
I thought to myself then, I’ve never seen that dam. My parents had told me that it had flooded the entire Renata valley, that many people had lost their land, that whole forests had drowned. Though I have never seen it, I dream of that water sometimes, pressing down on a forest and I’m swimming over stripped trees that have lost their needles and that peer up at you like miles of ghosts.
These were all dirt farms we were going by, and the car lit up corn or sweet potatoes, or a tororo field, a quarter-acre vineyard, the nets furled and bunched on an overhead wire. You could smell manured soil and the sweet, heavy scent of grape flowers that, early for that time of year, spread through the valley on still evenings.
He told us he was the one to start winegrowing in our valley and where once there had been alder copses, scrubland, and apple orchards there were now vineyards. He had even gone to Italy to buy Veneto vines that would grow on the village slopes and produce grapes that would ripen here in autumn. Over the years he’d bought up over fifty acres south of our village.
Whenever he’d come by our 4th Street house or my father’s paper mill, not often over the past years, he never said hello to me. Once when I was standing right in front of him — was I eleven then? — holding out a roll of paper that he’d just bought from my father, he took it out of my hands and gazed right through me.
Now he was looking at me in the rear-view mirror, studying me, and for the first time in my life I felt a little afraid of him. I sensed he wanted something from Rose, and maybe he had already begun to suspect I might get in the way.
As we drove along, he explained that he was redecorating the downtown café he’d just bought from Mr. Mallone with things he’d picked up on Shido Island during the war and that he was bringing in ash wood tables and chairs that would need to be varnished. Afterwards there would be regular work, serving.
You girls have finished high school, he said. Do you want to work for me?
What will you call it, Rose asked, Johnny’s Café?, and in her high spirits, in her not having to pedal home in the dark, she burst out laughing.
He didn’t turn round to look at her. He kept himself still, maybe listening to her laughter. Rose, wiping the tears from her eyes, was suddenly quiet. She looked at me and shrugged, though I was sure she felt the change in him, too, and it confused her, made her unsure.
After his stories and his offer, he was quiet. Maybe he was hurt by her laughter or maybe he was just amused; I couldn’t tell by the expression in his eyes when he glanced at me in the mirror.
We drove into the village past the roundhouse, the doors flung open and spilling out light. We stopped in front of Mr. Giacomo’s house on 4th Street. On his porch, he showed us a 30 power telescope and a drawing board lit up by a battery-powered reading lamp. He told us that he was sketching the basaltic areas south of Vieta and the Imbrium Sea on the moon, difficult because of the way the light passed quickly over the Crisium plains.
He had to sketch quickly, he said, because the moon kept slipping out of the telescope’s viewing area.
Ten degrees of brightness for the peak of Aristarchus, he said, the highest degree of brightness on the moon. It could only be expressed by the purest white paper. Five degrees for the walls of Argo, expressed by slight shading. He drew on paper my father made; it got whiter as it aged.
Rose smiled at the drawing he showed us, her teeth chattering.
You girls are cold, Mr. Giacomo said then. You’d better go home and change.
When we had closed his gate behind us, Rose turned and said, Thank you for the ride!
He called out to her, Pioneer E is going to pass by the moon on its way to the sun tonight, and take photos of the face of the moon we never see!
Who cares, Rose said under her breath, and she glanced at me in a way that made me laugh.
I turned round to see if Mr. Giacomo had heard. He’d given us a ride home, offered us work in his café. He had been kind to us. Yet I also felt that what Rose had said was her way of keeping to herself. Maybe even then she sensed that his kindness had a cost.
On the walk home, pushing her bike and shivering in her wet towel, Rose told me how she got to know Michael Guzzo. He was working in the Odin Mill in the fall of ’69, and she used to bring lunches to the scaler Mr. Beruski on night shift, when she was living at Mrs. Beruski’s. It was one of her duties for reduced room and board, to take those lunches to Mr. Beruski who measured the logs as they came into the mill, calculating board feet. The scaler would thank her as he unpacked his hot meal, gnocchi sometimes, or a chicken wing pasta with a flask of diluted wine.
Michael Guzzo was a sandy-haired eighteen-year-old boy who drew lumber on the chain and he wore doeskin gloves that were too big and loose on his hands. The cedar they were cutting raised welts on his arms, so the scaler had called to say bring some salve along with my lunch. It was a night shift in early October and the snow she walked through had changed to fine powder, heaped on the stacks of logs that reached to the river and collected in the chain-link fence that surrounded the mill. The crew was gathered around the wood stove in the scaler’s shack, under a forty-watt bulb, and this boy was at the table, his sleeves rolled back. The scaler took his flask and the metal canister of warm pasta. The others in the green chain crew smiled at Rose, standing around the stove. Their wool jackets steamed and smelled of cedar, machine oil, and the winter cold.
And when she brought out the salve from her pocket they said, From your hands, Rose, challenging her, a smile in their eyes, gentle or mocking.
She sat across from the boy, poured some salve into her hand to warm and spread on his enflamed forearms, but her hands were cold! So, elbows propped on the table, he cupped her hands in his and gently blew on them, eyes laughing at her. His eyes reminded her of her father’s, so mild and chestnut-coloured. Two shy people who couldn’t talk to each other. He wasn’t even a year older. He wasn’t particularly cute: his hair was long, sticking out from under a toque, his eyes reddened by the cold, and when he stood to rebutton his sleeves to go back to work, she saw that he was thin and a little taller than she.
He had built the raft that we’d kicked along off Olebar Beach. On weekends he used it to fish for landlocked salmon with a hand net.
I knew who he was. I often saw him in the Grizzly Bookstore, rummaging through boxes of books that people had left or forgotten on the trains. Once he said to me there is no other bookstore like it in the valley, because of those train books that came from so far away and from lives so unlike our own: Anna Karenina, Cannery Row and Spinoza.
Sometimes he’d hold a book just for the weight of it, for the feel of it, as though, if he were sufficiently still and watchful, it could communicate to him its own life. And sometimes he sat there for a long time in a disused chair in the back, an unopened book in his hands. He seemed sad then and little inclined to talk. Once he held out to me the collected dialogues of Plato; the paper in that book was like a Bible’s, tissue-thin and almost transparent.
There, too, you could find treasures, clothing abandoned or left on the trains. He showed me a rack of such castoffs in the back.
Who owned these things, he asked me then, smiling. Doesn’t it make you wonder?
He asked me if I wanted to try on any of those clothes — a pair of jeans that looked like they would fit me, a paper raincoat from Japan, a plaid scarf, a siwash vest that was almost in style — but I shook my head. I could see a sadness in his eyes that I didn’t understand.
I asked where he was from because he wasn’t from our village.
He said
he was from south of here.
South? I asked. Where?
Nowhere in particular, he said. My family’s land is under the Hydro reservoir.
I touched his arm, shocked.
Jesus! I said.
He laughed. What can you do about it? he said. They took our houses, our land, gave us some money and told us to move on, go live somewhere else. And there’s nothing we could do about it.
I felt sick, the colour draining from my face. I didn’t know what to say.
Maybe that’s what I feared most: to have the place where I was cared for and loved taken from me. It made me feel dizzy to think about it. If our village were wiped out, who would I even be?
It’s not your worry he said, smiling and gazing at me.
All I could do was look at him.
Then he said, The dreams are the worst. Sometimes I wake up at night with a crushing weight on my chest, I can hardly breathe. It feels like the weight of all that water.
6
A few weeks later, I went to my father’s one-vat paper mill. I didn’t often go there because he didn’t like to be disturbed when he was working. That day he wanted to show me a windsock made for a newborn. I touched the painted eyes of the trout on it. It was made to swim in the wind on a long pole and he said it was for Rose’s child. He had learned to make windsocks at the internment camp near New Slocan. That was during the war, when Mr. Hiraki taught him to make paper. Mr. Hiraki and others had raised flying fish and paper horses over the camp on long poles.
“They remind us this won’t last forever,” Mr. Hiraki had told my father, watching the figures in the wind over the rows and rows of wooden shacks. “They give us courage.”
The Orchard Keepers Page 11
