The Orchard Keepers

by Robert Pepper-Smith

  13

  This morning I weeded the herb beds, painted the outhouse. I got a call from a lookout in the Asher Valley and went out on the catwalk to watch a narrow, boiling mass of clouds send bolts, some of them visible for seconds, into the ridge at my feet. I could hear the electricity zinging around the aluminum eavestroughs, crackling and sparking. Curtains of virga swept across Leon Creek.

  Because maybe the cabin would be hit by lightning I knelt trembling on a stool with glass insulators in the bottom of the legs. Helicopters were in the air to the south, tracking three fires that I’d spotted. Every time I finished taking a bearing from the fire finder I’d look up to see another tree explode into flames before I could finish filling out the last message.

  Later this evening, the unmistakable smell of wood smoke. I sat up in bed to look north and made out in moonlight a column rising straight up, thick with burning fir or pine pitch.

  Because it was night, no one could be flown in to that fire in the Bremmer Valley. The road in was switchbacks through canyons, so it would take three or four hours to drive to the scene. High, strong winds, I write in the log book.

  In the Bremmer Valley there’s a wet hollow of alder saplings. I don’t know how they got in there. The valley is narrow and dark and only gets a couple of afternoon hours of light. A raw wind must have carried in alder seeds, all at once, so that a field of them grew young and springy, their trunks no thicker than my thumb. Someone had tried to farm in there once, leaving only a fence line of rotten cedar posts grassed over, a scattering of lichen-covered apple trees that looked crouched and huddled in themselves, like cats moved into a new house, and a hollow for a root cellar.

  A few weeks before Sen was born, I walked from the fire tower to the Bremmer Valley, to lay out an armful of alder saplings to dry in the field among the apple trees, shaking the soppy earth that was full of shale from their roots. A week later I took in a saw to cut off the root balls and I stripped the canes of withered leaves, carried them back to the cabin to weave into a crib. I wasn’t sure it would ever be used but I wanted it just in case Rose needed me to take him. I’d offered to help her and I wanted to be sure I could. I laid in towels for bedding in a frilled pillowcase and tied to the side a mobile of painted pine cones that I knew would make her laugh, so that he’d have something to look at. I even made rockers out of bent saplings tied with fishing line and I placed it under the north window and moved my little collection of books to the east sill. Those were warm days, maybe the last of the season, and the fireweed was in second bloom along the Palliser Ridge. When I sat out on the catwalk for hours, it felt like midsummer and I could smell the heat in the cedar siding, waiting.

  Whole days and nights went by, billowed in time, and I didn’t know what was happening to her.

  Now I see headlights on the dust roads, crews driving in to take out weekend campers and river runners. By now the fire is in the pine and fir, trees torching off like matchsticks on the slopes of Bremmer Mountain. Burning debris tumbles and ignites more fires across the Palliser Ridge.

  Later this morning a cold front is supposed to move in, bringing sleet and rain.

  14

  When I had a few days off, a month or so after we returned on the train, I went down from the fire tower to see Rose in her new apartment and to serve at the parish supper. It was hard to see her, after her decision to return. She always looked tired, as if she wasn’t sleeping well, worn and quiet.

  Though she had her own place now, though she was still in our village, every day she grew more distant, more unreachable.

  Yet when I asked her how she was, she’d say, Fine! and look at me defiantly.

  It grieved me to be around her. All the lightheartedness had gone out of her step; she no longer laughed in that quick, bright way that made you feel good. Another time when I was in town I didn’t even go see her. I told myself I was too busy.

  On the first morning of preparations for the parish supper, I got up early because my mother was up: I could hear her in the kitchen. She was making toast and coffee though it was still dark outside and the birds were asleep. She was dressed as I’ve never seen her before, in loose, light blue cotton slacks and a plain blue blouse. She looked younger.

  “Where are you going?” I asked, wondering at the brightness in her eyes. All the worry had gone from her face. Though she was no longer dressed as a midwife, I asked, half-asleep, confused, “Is someone having a baby?”

  I looked around for her midwife’s bag that she usually put on the kitchen table to check through before leaving.

  “I’ve given that up,” she said. “I’ve another job.”

  And in my astonished silence, she added:

  “Cleaning rooms in the Mackenzie Hotel.”

  I’d never seen her smile like that. She looked wide-awake, as if she’d just come from a swim in the lake. She was making herself a bag lunch, slicing bread and laying lettuce and sliced tomatoes and shredded ham on it, her hands light and quick. She took a couple of apples out of the refrigerator and a handful of raisins. These she put in a paper bag and she took a thermos of tea.

  In her old job, she never had time to make food to take with her. When the call came, she would just get up, check the contents of her bag and go. Usually the family would feed her. Now she had time to sit and drink coffee before she went to work. She got up early, to sit at the kitchen table and listen to the awakening birds. Sometimes, she told me, she even read a newspaper or listened to the radio. There was no hurry, no emergency.

  She called her new job — cleaning toilets, she said: “I clean toilets in the Mackenzie Hotel” — the work of nonemergencies. She had no disasters to anticipate. No one was turning to her, full of pain, with a look that said, You’re the only one here who knows what to do. Do something.

  Lunch bag in hand, she said Mr. Giacomo had called to ask me to meet him by the river.

  “He wants you to show him where to fish,” she said. “For the parish supper.”

  On the Palliser banks, he asked me, “Do you think we’ll have any luck?”

  I said I didn’t know.

  We left the shore in his boat. I knew the deep pools under the bridge, where the sturgeon sleep like old dogs.

  I remembered how he’d tried to touch my knee on the train and how my body had drawn away from him without even thinking. I didn’t feel that I was myself around him anymore. It slowly settled in me that I was growing even more afraid of him. His smile was calm and inviting, the friendliest thing about him, but it made me afraid.

  The metal line he let out had thread woven over it the colour of the shadows that flowed along the river bottom. The tip of his fishing rod was as thick as his thumb. The river was littered with alder leaves, so many coloured with a blue bloom, like ripe plums.

  I counted eight boats on the sturgeon pool under the bridge. Every year at this time the village fished the river. By agreement only one sturgeon was taken, and it was offered to the priest.

  “Since the death of our boy,” he said, “my wife and me are like old people.” He laughed. “We must look like we’re cut out of cardboard! I believe people here see us that way,” touching the corners of his eyes. When he looked at me his eyes were full of shame.

  “Mrs. Giacomo hasn’t left her room for weeks. Do you think Rose is going to keep her child? It must be so hard for her.”

  His face showed the same quiet patience that I’d seen on the train.

  The sky had settled over the river and already a few flakes were falling; almost like night the way the light had faded, the snow beginning to cling to the sandbar. The jacket he handed me smelled of wood smoke, of the campfires the village had lit on the sandbar while we fished for the new priest and of the gasoline he’d poured into the outboard motor tank. He draped the jacket over my knees with raw hands touched by the cold, his knuckles swollen. He was massaging his knuckles and I wanted to give him my mitts but he said no, he was fine.

  “Of course she’s going to k
eep the baby,” I said then. I’d put on a look of complete confidence. “Your helping her isn’t going to make any difference.”

  For awhile he looked at me quietly. “Well that’s it, then,” he said. “I guess there’s nothing more I can do.”

  He looked at me again and in his eyes there were still flashes of hope. “Rose has changed her mind before,” he said. “Maybe she’ll change it again.”

  In the stern at his feet there were paper lanterns with cut-outs pasted to them: horses and stars, half-moons, birds. Those were lanterns for the parish supper. Mr. Giacomo had brought them along for me to repair. I reglued the curled arms of foil stars, horses’ heads, crumpled birds’ wings that the Grade Twos had made from construction paper, fingertips numb in the river wind that came up in the morning.

  He asked me if we should pull up our lines to try another pool, but I didn’t know for sure, and briefly his face looked sad. He couldn’t fish in one place for fear the fish might be caught in another. I really don’t know the river that well: a lot of easy and broken water, light and dark places.

  He touched the corners of his eyes. I wondered then why he did that so often, then I felt it was the nervous gesture of a man who was no longer confident in himself. His face was almost grey in the cold mist rising from the river.

  I thought about what he’d said: about how he thought people in the village saw him and his wife in their grief. Like old, used-up people, he’d said, like cardboard cut-outs.

  He wanted a place of honour in our village. He’d always wanted to be among the best people, to fit in that way. Yet his wealth had not been enough to guarantee the health of his family, the respect of our village. You could see he felt he’d come so close, with his son and then with Rose, and now, in his confusion, he didn’t know what to do. Maybe it’s okay to have goals in life. But maybe you’d better accept they’re unattainable, so that all you can hope to do is get a little closer.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to him then. “It can’t be helped.”

  It was not Mr. Giacomo’s boat that caught the priest’s fish. Mr. Beruski caught it. Early afternoon, by way of a gaff-hook in its jaw, Mr. Beruski pulled the sturgeon onto the sandbar. It was lying on its side, gasping, and I covered its black eye with my hand.

  “Over one hundred pounds,” said Mr. Giacomo. He walked its length, prodding its belly full of roe, a disappointed look on his face.

  Sometimes I look for a change in my luck too. The morning before I came down from the fire tower to serve at the parish supper, I saw three crows fly by the north window, each making the point of a triangle and I said to myself that’s a sign things are going to get better for my friend Rose. I was that desperate for encouragement.

  Later that afternoon, pulling handfuls of soppy rotten leaves from the rain gutters on our house, I saw my mother hurry across the street. She’d been working at the hotel, lost track of time, and wanted to be home waiting for my father who was down at his one-vat mill. On the ladder I saw what she hadn’t noticed — that he, too, was in the street. He had stepped behind a transport truck so that she wouldn’t see him under the street light that had just come on. This was a new game that they played, the waiting for each other. For the pleasure of seeing you. If she had slipped and fallen in the icy street he would have run to her. Her new life of nonemergencies was making her happy again, and so he was happy.

  15

  Four men carried the fish to the priest. With the sturgeon wrapped in a black tarp, they stood at the church doors. They had brought it up a river path, then along 3rd Street to the church. Although Mr. Giacomo was at the head walking with Rose in her waitress outfit, the others did not allow him to carry any of the weight. He might as well have been carrying air. He pretended for the onlookers, but his arms were slack. I saw this, standing on the corner of 3rd Street and Columbia Avenue.

  In our village, when people make up their mind that you’re generally more trouble than you’re worth, the hints at first are often subtle. There was this drifter who took a job on the green chain at the Odin Mill. Things started to go missing: gloves, work boots, a sandwich from a lunch pail. One day he sat down at the lunch table to pour tea from his thermos. What spilled out into his cup was bunker oil. No one said anything, the whole crew was there at the lunch table, watching. He quit within the week, took his pay and left.

  People could see what was happening with Rose, I wasn’t the only one. People could see how worn and tired she’d become, that a wall had been put up around her. I sensed this in the way others looked at her in the café when she was serving.

  Earlier in her room above the café I’d brought Rose the rust-coloured paper raincoat I’d found in the Grizzly Bookstore. I told her that the procession was about to start and that Mr. Giacomo was waiting for her by the river. I said she could wear the paper raincoat in the procession. On an unpainted wooden table there were roadside cornflowers in a slender vase, their leaves curled and withered. She had changed into her waitress clothes to go to work in the Giacomo café and was combing out her hair that clung to the brush with static.

  Along the sill, light played on small pieces of driftwood she’d collected. On one she’d painted, bright blue, the eye of a fish because it looked like a fish and on another she’d painted a horse’s mane. She’d sanded the pieces and polished them with beeswax. Light spilled over them as the shine spilled on her combed hair. After I picked one up, my hand smelled faintly of honey.

  She said, “Early in the morning before shift we go along the river to find new pieces he can play with. I like to make my own things for him.”

  “I couldn’t see myself in Field,” she said. “I felt scared thinking about it. Still, I’ve got to figure out a way to get my life back.”

  She had no dresser, so her clothes were carefully folded in the two open suitcases she had taken on the train to Field. The baby’s clothes were stored in bins under the secondhand crib my mother had bought for her, and he was asleep in there. Because the apartment was above the café, she only had to walk downstairs to work, and she would call the bar telephone and leave hers off the hook so that she could hear his cries should he awake while she was working. She hadn’t put up curtains because she didn’t know how long she would be there. After her shift she’d carry up a plate of leftovers to make baby food — whirred squash or peas and pabulum — in a blender that she’d take apart and leave to clean in the sink. There was no music or radio and all you could hear was the traffic in Columbia Avenue or the crackle of the frost melting on the east windows when the sun came up over the alley at midmorning; she had a towel bunched there to collect the dripping water.

  The place filled me with silence, the silence of waiting and of being unsure of yourself. It made me feel quiet and expectant and I didn’t know what I was waiting for. Even the creak of the floorboards sounded loud and edgy, maybe because there was hardly any furniture and the echoing ceiling sloped on two sides to join the walls at shoulder height.

  I’d bought the paper raincoat for her, thinking she’d like to wear it, but she laughed and said no, turning down my gift.

  She held the raincoat up to herself to check the fit; it had the luminescence of corn snow. It had been waterproofed with persimmon tannin.

  “No,” she said again, stroking out a sleeve to flatten it along her arm, “Honey I don’t think so. Mr. Giacomo won’t like it. He wants me to show up in my waitress things, to represent the café.”

  “Why don’t you wear it?” she asked.

  I thought that she would have been bold enough to wear it in the procession, to stand up to him, but I was wrong. Her laughter had sounded sharp and false.

  “Do you like this place?” I asked her.

  Now she looked at me thoughtfully. She picked up her brush and wrinkled her brow.

  “You’re my friend, right?”

  “Yes, Rose,” I nodded.

  “No, I don’t like this place. It doesn’t feel right.”

  “Why not?”

&n
bsp; “It doesn’t feel like my home. I always feel we’re being watched. I can’t go anywhere without Mr. Giacomo asking, Where are you going? When will you be back? I try to pretend that we’re okay but we’re not.”

  At that moment she had lost her defiant, determined look. It no longer felt like she was pushing me away, and I could see how lonely and vulnerable she had become. I felt then that I could help her, and a memory came to me.

  “Do you remember the night we went wading in the lake in the snow, when that house came out of the mist?”

  She nodded, smiling.

  “And Mr. Giacomo in the window?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you remember how anxious and worried he sounded when he called out to us, Who’s there? Can’t you hear Mr. Giacomo saying to your boy, Where are you going?, When will you be back?, while he grows up in that Burnham house? And where will you be?”

  “Why is he that way?”

  “I don’t know,” I said then. “I feel he’s always trying to hide something.”

  She was sitting at the table by the window, the hairbrush in her hand. I bent down and gave her a kiss.

  16

  Each year I have to climb farther, a little farther, a few hundred yards or so, to bury my father’s paper in the snowfields. Everywhere there is reflected light.

  The morning of the parish supper, before I loaded the truck to drive up to the snowfields, my father laid out a two-by-three-foot sheet on his work table. You could see the impression of the grain of the yew wood drying board on it, under a powder snow luster. It smelled like straw.

  Lacey, he said to me, running his hand over it, not one flaw, not one impurity. It’s like a new human soul.

  I drove up to the snowfields to lay out the paper and cover it with snow. Those sheets were translucent and they had a fine satiny sheen. Because of their purity, they’d last maybe hundreds of years. They were so strong you could pass them through a finger ring and they wouldn’t shred.