The Orchard Keepers

by Robert Pepper-Smith

  Papermaking required my father’s total attention: he’d settle the wave of pulp on the bamboo screen with a slight shift of his fingertips on the mould handles. I felt shy around my father when he was at work, yet I wanted to ask how he knew Rose was pregnant.

  He said she swayed on her hips as though wading in a strong current, gripping her way over stones with her toes. Besides, he’d noticed her thick wrists and the loose clothes she wore.

  Did I know who the father was, he asked me.

  I was surprised at his curiosity. It wasn’t like him to ask about other people’s secrets, though in some ways our house was the clearing house for village secrets and stories. My mother was often away in other people’s homes, there for grief or joy, birth or death. People often dropped by my father’s mill to review their problems. His work was seen to be either odd or useless and therefore worthy of interruption. Sometimes, when he heard a truck or a car drive up, he’d go out the back door to sit among the river poplars and wait till the driver left so he could get on with his work, fretting over the thought that the paper in the press was spoiling.

  Did I know who the father was, he asked me again. I shook my head, though Rose had told me his name.

  I wasn’t sure how much Rose wanted me to tell others then. I felt like I should protect her secret. On the raft she’d told me the father’s name, Michael Guzzo. On the walk home from Mr. Giacomo’s, she told me how she’d met him and that he’d gone travelling in Central America.

  I was watching my father make washi paper. He was sprinkling hibiscus petals into the pulp, a pale mauve that was my favourite colour and that reminded me of the shadows under Mr. Giacomo’s eyes and at the corners of his lips.

  “What?” he was saying, he thought he’d heard me say something, but I’d said nothing, my mouth pressed into my rough sleeve and my gaze following him. I kept still because I was remembering a story I’d heard from several different people. Around here it’s hard for an interesting secret to stay secret, and I’ve thought of it many times.

  One summer in the ’40s my father and Mr. Giacomo worked together. In those days, a young man starting out on his own, Mr. Giacomo delivered mail in the valley. He took rice, letters and packages to the Japanese internment camp near New Slocan. My father went with him, to buy vegetables and eggs in the camp that he sold to the railroad cooks.

  Mr. Hiraki was interned down there. He was my father’s friend from before the war. They’d worked on a section crew together, repairing track in the Odin pass, and when Mr. Hiraki had earned enough he’d bought a small farm in the valley south of our village. My father used to drive down to his farm in summer to buy vegetables.

  Mr. Hiraki grows the best vegetables in the valley, he used to say, and soon he was taking orders from the village wives and the railroad cooks.

  After the Pearl Harbor attack in December 1941, all Japanese-Canadians were identified as enemy aliens. Mr. Hiraki spoke out against the forced evacuation of Japanese-Canadians from the coast. Many times he said to anyone in our village streets who would listen that the war was against Japan, not Japanese-Canadians. “And what about you Italians,” he’d ask the Pradolinis, the Staglianos, “Why are you not being arrested? It’s because of the colour of your skin!”

  He and his family were sent to the New Slocan camp. Before the RCMP came for them, the Hirakis asked their Canadian friends to store household goods. They thought they’d be back on their vegetable farm within a few months, that the forced internment was only brief. My father was a young man then and he was building his first house on 4th Street. They didn’t ask one Canadian family to take all their belongings, they asked three or four. My father hadn’t finished the second floor, so they asked him to take the piano and a big record player.

  One day my father went to look for his friend in the camp. He found Mr. Hiraki doing what he always did, hoeing soil to receive rain and to trouble the roots of young weeds that he pulled by hand. The garden earth smelled musty, like an empty chocolate box and it had flecks of eggshell in it. Under dark, shiny leaves my father could see the bulge of beetroots and under feathery leaves carrot tops the colour of the lichen you sometimes see on the north side of cedar trees. He saw that Mr. Hiraki loved every plant, every little tree, and he gave them tender care. Still, something was wrong, something in the way his friend moved from row to row said he was afraid of being singled out and attacked.

  Mr. Hiraki gathered sacks of beets and potatoes, carrots and lettuce for my father. Then he raised a trout on a barb-less hook from his well. It was as black as charred wood and its eyes had skinned over from a lack of light. It struggled on the hook.

  “The fish tells me the water is still pure,” the farmer said. Then he let it down on a rope tied to a bucket, the trout circling and nosing the sides. It lived on insects that fell into the well and it was healthy and strong.

  Mr. Hiraki said that he expected the well would be poisoned by people who attacked at night; he stayed awake at night, listening.

  When they went into the shack for tea, Mr, Hiraki spoke of ripped-up camp gardens, of young fruit trees snapped at the trunk or torn up and laid on the ground with their roots exposed as if by a windstorm.

  “Do you know who is doing this?” my father asked.

  “People from the village,” he replied. “They drive away before we can get to them, teenagers mostly. I’ve recognized a few.”

  “But it doesn’t stop there,” he went on. “The government sends us moth-infested rice. The shipment of seed potatoes that arrived last week was full of rot.”

  The shack that his family shared with the Kitagawas was divided into living sections without walls: a kitchen, two sleeping areas, a small altar in the main room. Lumber was expensive in the war years, so there were no inner walls.

  He wouldn’t accept money for the vegetables.

  “What do you want, then?”

  “Mulberry bark,” he said. “So that we can make strong paper.”

  He explained that the paper would be used to make screens to divide the shack into smaller rooms for privacy; here the two bedrooms, he said, there the kitchen.

  “Paper walls,” my father said, intrigued.

  “If you’re interested,” Mr. Hiraki said, “I’ll show you how.” On the drive back to the village Mr. Giacomo left the camp mail sack in the back of the truck. They went through a rainstorm and when my father insisted they pull over to bring in the sack, Mr. Giacomo drove on. He said there was no room in the cab for the sack. “Besides, everything they write is censored, torn up, misplaced, forgotten.”

  My father shouted at him to pull over. Mr. Giacomo looked at him, surprised, and drove on. “No one deserves to hear from them,” he said.

  When they got to the village, the mail was a sodden mess, a pulp of cheap tissue paper and glue.

  Later that summer, Mr. Giacomo went off to a war that the Japanese were about to lose. Because his mother was Japanese-Canadian and he knew the language, he was taken to Shido Island off Korea. High-ranking prisoners of war were kept there. He interrogated officers of the Imperial Fleet, a captured prince of the imperial family. He was told to ask about artifacts and bullion that the Japanese had stolen during their occupation of Asia and their retreat.

  Mr. Giacomo was proud of what he had done on Shido Island for the war effort, and he often spoke about it.

  My father stayed behind. He was too young to go to war.

  Instead, he learned to make paper from Mr. Hiraki almost by chance.

  He delivered a truckload of mulberry branches to the New Slocan camp and stayed on to help Mr. Hiraki cut the branches to length, steam them in a steamer made out of an old dairy tank. He was ashamed of how his friend was being treated, forced off his farm to live in a shack.

  My father learned to peel the green and black bark from the white bark, as if he were peeling a stick-on label off a bottle.

  He scraped away bits of clinging bark with a knife.

  He washed the white bark in t
he Lemon River, to free loose specks of black bark, and in the New Slocan camp he hung the strands to dry.

  By then, the Custodian of Enemy Alien Property was selling off the inmates’ belongings for a song.

  The inmates made records of their possessions. They wrote on the new paper called washi that Mr. Hiraki made. It was so tough you could hide it in the well. They wrote letters to Canadian friends, instructing them to sell a fishing boat or a house on paper that could not be pulped in the rain. These letters had to be delivered by hand; any mail sent through the post office was censored, and the sale of unconfiscated property was illegal.

  Now, after asking about Rose, my father was making paper that he knew I loved. With no decoration, it could be cut and folded into greeting cards. The hibiscus petals, stuck in the fibres, were an attraction, and the cards I made from the paper sold well in the Giacomo café. I was watching the petals fall from his sifting hand onto the deckle, pale rose colour of the Illecillewaet snowfields last evening, light that I’d seen torn into a spreading grey that vanished.

  To concentrate, he kept his back to me as the sheet formed in the deckle over the vat.

  He was watching the pulp settle on the bamboo screen and now I could see what the petals had made, a leaning girl with her arms out. He could feel my stillness, my gaze, and he heard me stir and get to my feet and say, “I’ll bring the lanterns in for you.” He didn’t turn to see me go, waiting for the fibres to bind. One slight tremble of his hand would send out a wave that would thicken the fibres at one end and ruin the sheet.

  When I returned with the lanterns, I could tell he liked this one; he was smiling over the sheet.

  The swirl of petals made me think of Rose, one arm a gentle curve for balance as if she were leaning to place a glass on the floor. I remembered how she used to walk her family’s Clydesdales down our main street, the reins draped loosely over her arm, a lightness in her step.

  All of a sudden I felt that the figure in the paper showed me who she was.

  That’s you, Rose, I would have said to her, if she’d been there with us.

  Some thin flicker of light to touch down, a lightness of spirit, tentative and apologetic. Later on, when events began to wear her away, to bear her down and push her to earth, when I’d need the courage to help her, I’d remember that figure in the paper.

  Now my father was lifting the bamboo screen from the sheet draped on the post. I could smell snow in the air that had drifted in when I went outside, not that it was much warmer in the mill, too warm and the paper would spoil. He rubbed his hands in warm water on the stove; his fingers, thin and arthritic, ached so at night that sometimes he drank grappa to sleep.

  “Why doesn’t Rose go back to the Big Bend,” he asked me then, “to stay with her parents?”

  “She has no friends up there,” I said. “And her mom’s mad at her for getting pregnant.”

  He shook the water off his hands, dried them on a towel by the sink.

  “We’ll have to help her, then,” he said.

  7

  Today I got out the homemade ladder and caulked the eavestroughs in a few places, hammered a few nails in the frost-heaved catwalk. A storm was building over the eastern ridge, and I tracked a harrier working its way above the pines. Harriers are pale grey long-tailed hawks with black-tipped wings. Usually they keep to the valley grasslands. They hunt rats and mice by quartering the ground, buoyant and tilting to clear the Palliser valley fences.

  Warm southwest winds climbing the ridge met colder winds from the glacier and I watched as clouds were born. Out of clear air, mare’s tails appeared and rose into the mass above them. When it began to rain and sleet, I went inside to build a fire in the wood-stove with chunks of subalpine fir and pine that lit like paper.

  Outside, the trees bent over, the rain came in torrents, sheets that swept through the trees like hundreds of ghosts marching north.

  What happens when you begin to lie to yourself?, I say to my ghosts. My mother remembers helping the young one to breathe. Yet I saw her paralyzed by grief and indecision. So it is not events themselves that make us, or what we remember of them. It’s what we choose to forget, what we just can’t stand to remember, that leads us by the hand down a road we can’t recognize.

  It would be so easy just to give up, to not try to fathom what I was beginning to feel. Last night I dreamt of the old judge’s house. I felt that someone unseen had taken my hand, to lead me through its many rooms. In the dining room, a meal had been laid out on a big table lined with chairs. In another room men and women were dancing, all the furniture pushed to the walls. There was an aliveness to the house that came from the fullness of its memories. It felt cared for, and its memories reached out to hold up those dancing men and women, to give them the space of their laughter and desire.

  When I awoke, I remembered how good I’d felt in that dream house, so welcomed. That feeling seemed to promise so much: that Mr. Giacomo would really help my friend Rose; that the Giacomos would overcome their grief and find the acceptance they wanted in our village.

  And then I remembered how the house now stood, grey with neglect, in a bladed clearing with scarred fir roots sticking out of the earth. I remembered how it smelled of mildew and squirrels’ nests. I felt then that Mr. Giacomo’s kindness would have a terrible cost.

  7 AM, the sawmill whistle blows. They are cutting yew, you can smell it. It smells like wet cinnamon. Through the fire tower binoculars I watch geese rise through the heavy mist on the river, lifting off the sandbar. The clouds above the village are heavy with rain.

  I don’t eat much. I don’t like to cook and there’s nowhere to go out. You could make a pie or jam out of the huckleberries on the east slope of the Slocan Gorge, and sometimes I walk down to eat a handful for something to do. Huckleberries taste bitter and sweet at the same time and they have tough skins. This morning a flock of bushtits flitted in the bushes, eating them; cheeky, they scolded me when I got close and made me laugh.

  Some days there doesn’t seem to be a clear distinction between myself and the cabin and the cedars, especially the birds. I feel well when this place is in bloom and they are chattering in the bushes. Because there is never any hurry, because I can take my time, even the raggy towel I use to dry the dishes has become something like a living thing.

  Sometimes I feel people are like those dappled shadows you find under a summer peach or apricot tree, growing steadily and then fading as the light fades, say when a cloud passes over the sky. Then they grow bright again and they fade, not all at once, in their own time and when they show strong light they share their warmth and when they dim they’re afraid and often alone and there is no pattern to it and no ultimate reason.

  8

  At the end of the summer, Rose and I went into the village bar to phone about a room; she needed a place to stay for the winter when her baby would be born. Mr. Giacomo was sitting alone in one of the booths and he turned to watch us come in.

  Rose led him into the talk of his loss, her eyes shining and serene.

  “The baby was a tiny thing,” he said, weighed almost nothing in his hands. He had made the coffin, spent an afternoon in his workshop finishing something that was no bigger than a wooden shoebox, with a cross that he’d carved in the ash wood lid. He worked the lid with some fine chisels he’d found on Shido island, tempered and old, wanting the afternoon alone in his grief and in his fear of what might come next. “A blow close to home — to the heart — ” he said, “for us to lose a child like that.” He was wearing fingerless gloves and he was gazing at his hands wrapped around a coffee cup that smelled strongly of grappa, his face worn and drawn.

  For the first time, Rose really looked at him. I had never seen her look so caring before. She’d overcome her shyness, which she usually expressed through laughter. It was unusual for her to be so quiet, and you never knew when she might turn what she heard into a joke, even a man’s grief. Maybe because she was going to be a mother herself, she looked touch
ed by his story.

  She led him on in her quietness; he could have been talking to a mirror the way she looked at him, composed and quiet and touched his hand to listen. I wasn’t sure of her friendship then; sometimes when she talked with Ian Beruski or Danny Moyer, older boys, there was a sparkling brightness in her voice, and she laughed quickly and eagerly at their jokes, when she wanted them to like her.

  She brought Mr. Giacomo a plate of almonds from the bar. He hadn’t eaten since morning, up in the vineyards pulling leaves to expose the fruit to the weak sun, and he was drinking grappa and coffee to warm up, he said. In his café there would be food all day but here the kitchen didn’t open till five. When he looked at me his eyes were full of grief. He drained the cup, placed the taxi keys on the table. Rose helped him to his feet.

  “Where do you want to go?” she asked him.

  He said, “You girls drive anywhere you want.” He walked like he was wading in thigh-deep water and Rose supported his arm.

  “We’ll go down to Mrs. Hiraki’s, then, to look at a room she has for me.”

  She looked at me and smiled.

  I wouldn’t touch him. He smelled of coffee and grappa, and I was afraid that if I touched him he would fall over or crumple. Rose had trouble guiding his steps. She warned him about the raised threshold, worn oak. She had the patient voice of a nurse. When we were outside, he couldn’t button his sheepskin coat. She buttoned it for him.

  “This is a marvelous day,” he said, sniffing at the air, eyes shining. “You girls drive anywhere you want,” and he stretched out in the back seat. He rolled down a window. To clear his head, he said.

  Rose drove down main street, past the Giacomo café and the swept granite steps of the town hall. “I don’t have a license,” she announced and we looked at each other and laughed. We left town, went under some roadside willows in a hollow by a cattle pond, trees that were always the last to put out their leaves in spring and the last to lose them in the fall, and I could smell sap where an early frost had pried into the bark. Some Charlois were standing at a pasture fence, their dark eyes turned to the taxi and behind them a field of meadow grass that reached to the foothills.