The Orchard Keepers

by Robert Pepper-Smith

  “What will you girls do,” he said from the back seat, “now that the summer is over?”

  I could hear him sit up, pull at his coat, his voice thick and gravelly. And I wondered, how do you get to talk like that, deliberate or knowing, I’m hardly confident in anything I say. I heard him ask what kind of place Rose was staying in, and already in his asking there was some kind of promise.

  “You’re staying in a summer trailer?” he asked. “There’s no heat in Michael Guzzo’s trailer on the Palliser. There’s no phone for when that baby of yours is due, no way to call.” And the promise in his tone was, Oh now, we’ll find something else for you soon enough.

  I was surprised he knew Rose was pregnant and so was she; she looked at me with widened eyes then shrugged. The curiosity of our village was always on the alert, and now we knew that talk had been going around about her.

  I thought about Mr. Giacomo’s offering to help her find a place. Oh we’ll help you find something soon enough, I murmured, trying to feel the weight of his words, find the feeling behind them.

  Rose drove in a startled manner, pulling the wheel to the right or left as if she felt we were drifting to the gravel shoulder or the yellow centre line. It felt like she didn’t trust her sense of distance. I’d seen her knock glasses and café spoons to the floor, reaching for them. Oh, she would cry in frustration, looking at the shattered glass on the café floor, why won’t things stand! She walked like a dancer, all of her weight carried in the small of her back, but when she sat at the small linoleum table in her cramped trailer, she bumped the centre pole with her knee, spilling things.

  “This is way too far down in the valley,” she kept saying. “I can’t live this far down!”

  “You don’t want to live way down here all by yourself,” Mr. Giacomo agreed from the back seat. “You need to be close to the village and the hospital.”

  She was looking at the farmhouses and the orchards with increasing worry, as if the farther we drove the more the fields and the vineyards she didn’t know made her feel alone and vulnerable.

  I could have told her that Mrs. Hiraki’s was miles out of town, but I didn’t know that it would worry her so.

  In summer we often bought vegetables and eggs at Mrs. Hiraki’s farm. She would talk about the problems she was having, blighted tomatoes or rats in the pea crop. During our visits she talked just to keep us there a little longer, and she would show my father rows of withered leaves blackened with mould.

  She’s lonely by herself, my father told me once, driving back to the village. And she’s having trouble managing.

  Mrs. Hiraki was standing at the kitchen window when we drove into the yard, peering out. Rose parked under an old apple tree that had water wands rising out of its unpruned branches like the tines of a hayfork. Mr. Giacomo stayed behind in the taxi. “You girls go on in,” he said. “I’m comfortable here. I’ll just be in the way.”

  “They sell strong grappa in the village bar,” he went on. “If I get out of this taxi now, you’ll have to do my walking for me.”

  Mrs. Hiraki met us at the door. She took up Rose’s hands and patted them between hers. She led us upstairs, glancing at Rose with a wary look, a tremor in her lips.

  She showed Rose a room at the north end of the house under a sloped roof that made it feel small and cramped. She had washed the walls so that they gleamed and smelled of Lysol; under the single window there was an unpainted wooden table with a vase of dried flowers. The mattress creaked when Rose sat on it, on an iron frame that looked like it might have come from an internment shack outside of New Slocan. There was a porcelain basin where Rose could wash her hands and a tall wardrobe in one corner that just fit under the ceiling.

  “Thank you!” Rose said. “Thank you for showing me this room.” She gave me a quick, frightened look.

  “There’s more space here than in the trailer,” she admitted.

  Still, she couldn’t stay. Later she said a smell of cooking came through the floor grate, the kitchen was directly below. A lot of food smells made her sick in the morning. She hated the smell of miso soup and Mrs. Hiraki had been heating miso soup.

  We went downstairs, stood in the doorway to say goodbye. Rose couldn’t say no to the old woman’s staring, pleading look. You could tell that she hoped Rose would stay on, to help her with the farm, to keep her company. All Rose could say was, “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  The wind was picking up on Olebar Road when we drove home.

  “When I find a place, will you help me to move?” she asked me. I knew she was only talking about a few boxes of clothes and some kitchen utensils.

  “We will help you,” I heard Mr. Giacomo say from the back seat. “My wife and I will help you get settled.” I felt that he was testing her, to see what her reaction would be, to see how much help she would accept. Something in his voice worried me, something I couldn’t make out then.

  “Maybe you could move into Mrs. Camozzi’s on 2nd Street,” I said. Mrs. Camozzi’s house had been built for the Stagliano family and now there was a sign in the window that said EIGHT BEDROOMS, and some trainmen stayed there, but maybe she didn’t board girls. The hotel on Columbia Avenue was a two-storey brick building with a veranda that ran all the way around it. Road crews used to stay there, but now the rooms were rented out to old people mostly.

  Why don’t you come and live with us Rose, I wanted to ask her, to give her an alternative to the Giacomo’s offer. We had two bedrooms, a small kitchen, and a mudroom in the back, a tiny living room that we called the parlour in a place on 4th Street people called the miner’s cottage. Sometimes my father talked of building an addition but he never got around to it.

  In her fear of being alone that winter, Rose did most of the talking on the drive home and mostly about herself. Her hands on the wheel looked as delicate as a child’s, the skin under the nails a pale blue. Once, she leaned to peer through the windshield at apple bins at the side of the road, surprised to see them so late in the season.

  Mr. Giacomo said the apples in those bins wouldn’t ripen, that they were culls for the cider factory in Westbank and the jam factory in Sandon.

  “I’ll help you find a place,” I said, turning to her. “When I’m in town I’ll look after your baby for free when you get a job.”

  Mr. Giacomo said he could see the last of the fruit in the orchards, apples that the pickers had missed in filling their sacks to move on rather than climb for the one or two out of reach. His voice was gravelly, sleepy. It felt like he was talking just to stay awake.

  “Gleaners stay into October before going to Burton,” Rose said, “to cull what’s left. They stay in a drafty bunkhouse where you have to light a fire at night to keep warm, burn vine cuttings or peach wood.”

  I could tell that she was avoiding asking for his help and that he was waiting, quiet, letting his offer settle in with all this small talk about apples.

  “I don’t want to live downtown,” Rose said then. “I want a small place, with a sunny kitchen and a bath. I want a yard where I can plant a few flowers and grow some stuff. I want to make my own baby food and I want a porch where I can sit outside with him in the summer and nurse him without people looking. I want a plain wooden bed, not some old iron thing. And I want to be able to open the windows so the rooms smell fresh.”

  Her trailer had thin metal walls and an uninsulated floor. It had a propane heater under cupboards she’d painted red, but already that fall she could feel the chill of the floor through her slippers. The bed was the tabletop with the centre pole taken out and the top fixed between the bench seats so that it was like sleeping on a train bed, with your legs drawn in so that you could fit by the metal wall near your knees.

  The trailer she lived in was too small for a girl with a baby. Where would she put the crib?

  I couldn’t tell whether Mr. Giacomo in the back seat was asleep or listening.

  Now, driving back to town, I realized she was close to panic. I didn’t realize th
at not knowing where you’re going to live, that the prospect of a room like Mrs. Hiraki’s, could scare a person so. An early snow was falling through the street lights and the tires creaked down Columbia Avenue, making the sound of your hand in wet hair after a shampoo. Flakes swirled over the taxi. Rose’s hand darted out to snatch one from the air, to lick it from one of the wool mitts she’d put on because her hands were cold. She said that the mitt tasted of soap. There was hardly any traffic and all the store windows were dimmed. I could see tracks that horses had made and the fishtail track of a log that someone had towed to the Cowan St. Mill.

  Mr. Giacomo was asleep. That night it felt like we could take him anywhere or even leave him in the back seat and maybe he’d awake, startled or afraid of where he was. Nothing more I could do, not even a blanket to cover him with. He looked so small there, curled up and asleep, his hands pressed between his knees.

  “Where are we going to leave Mr. Giacomo?” Rose asked.

  She was driving cautiously down Columbia Avenue, turned up 4th Street, unsure of what to do. She left the car running in the street outside his house, hammered on the door, and when she heard approaching footsteps, ran laughing toward me, saying, “Let’s go!”

  9

  “You’re working too hard,” my father said. “Relax.”

  “Bend your knees and back. Get into a rhythm.”

  I was holding the two mould handles attached to the deckle; I scooped some milky water from the vat to send a wave across the mould that jumped off the far side.

  “Let me show you.” He was only using his fingertips to hold the handles. “Let the rigging carry the weight. If you lift it and force it, you’ll be exhausted in four sheets.”

  I gritted my teeth and tried and tried but I couldn’t make the even waves or splashes.

  I’d spent all morning watching him, the relaxed rolling of the stock across the bamboo mesh in the paper mould, arms, legs and back bent, body bouncing and nodding with the mould and splashing stock.

  “Be loose. Be gentle. You have to roll and work with the bounce. Stop forcing it.” I laughed. He was using the voice of Mr. Hiraki to instruct me, bits of paper fibre on his apron, in his black hair, on the window over the vat.

  When I watched him, there was never a pause or a dead moment in the forming of a sheet.

  Every fall my father drives about three hours from here to an abandoned goat farm in the Illecillewaet valley, to bring out truckloads of mulberry branches. Someone had tried to grow mulberries in there, to feed to goats. He steams the branches, to strip the white inner bark that he pins under large stones behind a weir in the Palliser River, strands as long as a girl’s hair. From a truckload he gets twenty pounds of bark that he makes into paper so precious that it’s sold in the art markets of New York and Montreal, to water colour artists and printmakers. His paper has almost no smell and it has the sheen of new snow.

  After the papermaking lesson, I went with him to help draw that bark out of the river.

  We took it into the Illecillewaet snowfields for snow bleaching. The snowfields were retreating. When I was younger, I could walk to them. Now we drove.

  We spread the bark in thin layers on the snow, covering it with snow. Every day for several days we’d drive up there to turn the bark over.

  He looked the fibre over carefully for flecks of black bark. Sound carried far up there and from way below I could hear the scree of a merlin hunting in the pines. Above us in the bright light the sky was almost black in the saddle between two peaks.

  I loved watching my father then. The fibre was new and held many possibilities. Who knew what kind of sheets it would make? It was healthy and strong and slowly bleaching in the snow and he handled the fibres carefully, spreading them over his palm as he turned them.

  “Why is your mother spending so much time with Rose?” he asked me.

  “She’s thinking about giving up her baby to the Giacomos.”

  “The fool,” he said. “She doesn’t know what she’s doing.”

  He gently stroked the fibres as if they were a cat’s fur, turning them in the brilliant light.

  “I want you to think about everything you’ve known. Has it ever been good to separate a family? Ever?”

  He laid the fibres out in light so strong that it hurt my eyes and covered them with a layer of powder snow that sparkled and glowed, scooping it with his bare hands.

  He refused to work with gloves.

  Once I asked him why and he said because the strands were like new skin — they needed to be touched, caressed, to make them receptive, sensitive. In this way, he said, the paper will acquire stability, coherence.

  “Do you like Mr. Giacomo?”

  He looked up at me, surprised.

  “Your mother and Mrs. Giacomo have been friends since they were girls. We get along okay.”

  “But do you like him?”

  “It’s not that I don’t like him, hon. I don’t trust him. He was a poor man when he left for the war, scratching up a living delivering mail and selling vegetables, just like me. Then after the war he came back rich. I don’t know how. It just doesn’t make sense to me. “

  “He says he made his money logging in the Nachako country after the war.”

  “That doesn’t feel right to me. I’ve worked with him, remember? He’s always dabbling in things, never quite making a go of it. A man like that doesn’t make a fortune overnight. And now he wants to dabble in being a father. What about your friend Rose?” he asked me then. “What are you going to do for her?”

  I felt a flash of anger. “Why is that up to me?”

  “You’re right,” he said. “Hon, it’s not up to you.”

  “We’re in a very bad place,” he murmured to himself, absently spreading handfuls of snow over the fibres. “Your mother thinks she can repair the damage done to the Giacomos, though that baby’s death wasn’t her fault! I don’t think anyone could have saved their child.”

  “We’ll help Rose,” he said, “when the time comes. I’m just not sure how yet.”

  Still, I felt angry. Maybe I was being selfish, but I wanted to ask, What about me? Who was I supposed to please? You can’t please everyone when you’re put in the middle between people you love. When they’re tugging at you from various directions.

  10

  When I was four, before the dam was built, we lived in a grey board and batten house on the Palliser River. The aquarium was in the back room, lit by a 100-watt bulb with a black lacquer shade over it. I remember lifting the lid and emptying a jar into it: crayfish, legs and pincers spread, drifted to the pea gravel. The water smelled of lichen. Here and there on the bottom were pot scrubbers of woven plastic where the young crayfish hid. It was a 20-gallon aquarium. The bottom was littered with potshard hideouts and in the middle a broken concrete block for the female with eggs on her belly. My father showed me the female’s eggs by lifting it and turning it over. The crayfish’s tail and legs were thrashing. Her young were used to catch winter trout.

  I went with my father to catch crayfish in the Palliser, an empty mason jar tucked under my arm. His fingernails, whitish, were very thick and domed. His hands, so long in the water, showed the pale colour of winter fish. Already ice laced the shallows. He was flipping over river stones and cowling his hand to trap crayfish that were as long as my thumb, almost transparent, with pepper grain eyes and trout-coloured pincers.

  “You’re too small to fish on your own!” he warned me. Even at that age I had a reputation for going off on my own to catch trout. He had never seen such a child for fishing, my father told me, quick, darting hands in the Palliser shallows, flipping stones. I used to trap minnows in a nylon stocking I’d taken from my mother’s drawer, laid out lines on the lake bottom. I walked out on the thin ice near the stream mouth, tapping my gum-boots and calling, “Fish, fish, I’m on your ice roof!”

  I had a lot of confidence then, when I was younger. Later, it would help me get in the way of Mr. Giacomo and his plans.


  Alberto Braz had told me that the fishing was best at night. You took out a flashlight and a jar of crayfish, the hand line wrapped on a yew wood reel and you shone a light into a hole chopped in ice. The rim ice, holding black, oily water, glows from the inside and the water at the side makes lace crystals the colour of ash.

  All this I was told and wanted to try.

  Calling from shore, my father got me to walk into the bay, then follow the point to the fishing huts where the ice was firm.

  He weighed too much to come out after me.

  Sometimes I’ve been afraid like that, too. One winter when I was eight or nine my mother was very sick. She’d worked herself to exhaustion and caught pneumonia, was so weak that she couldn’t get out of bed. Even when I went to change the sheets, she could hardly move. And when I sat there listening to her watery breath — she was asleep — I was afraid that I would discourage her, so I went to the bathroom mirror to stare the fear out of my eyes, to practice a look of composed silence and hope. When I returned, my face a cheerful mask, the sheets tangled around her legs and chest were soaked through and smelled like cold toast. She’d drawn her head back on the pillow to breathe, her throat a pale white, wet hair plastered to her ear.

  She opened her eyes then, and she must have seen the look on my face.

  “Don’t worry, hon, I’ll get better. I am getting better. You don’t have to pretend everything’s okay.”

  It was the strangest thing: I felt the mask that was my face crumple and I heard a sob in my throat.

  “I don’t know how to take care of you.”

  “But you are helping me, hon. You are.”

  11