What do you mean?, she asked.
I’ve been trying to figure out what I feel, where I really belong. Have you ever felt this, how eager your heart is when it suddenly, dimly, hears a real voice, how deep the longing?
Say when you read something or someone says something to you that you know is true, so true, and so beyond what you usually feel that you feel a shiver go up your spine? It’s not even a choice, he said then, it’s who I am. I’m tired of things being taken from me. I’m tired of loss so that other people can get what they want. I’m tired of their greed and thoughtlessness.
She smiled then, nodded.
Night was drawing in, the diffuse blue light under the tarp fading to darkness. He told her then of something that had just come to mind, a story his grandmother had told him in her last days, maybe just to keep talking, maybe so they could stay awake in that truck:
This took place in the spring of 1967, the spring before she died. At that time the Hydro was buying the village and the valley where she lived, to turn it into a reservoir.
In those days his grandmother didn’t answer her door. Often the agents came by, not always the same one, and when she heard the knock, unfamiliar, urgent, she went out through the back screen door into her garden, unlatched the gate and walked away down the alley, walked and wandered, sometimes across the tracks up onto the mountain they call Palliser Mountain, and she asked herself, Am I a coward?
One morning an agent caught her by surprise. She was out back hanging laundry when he came around the house. She was running out sheets and dishcloths that billowed and flapped in the early morning breeze that came off the mountain, smelling of snow and rain-slick rock. He must have heard the shrill of the wheel.
“Good morning Mrs. Murray,” he said, and she looked down at him from the porch, a clothes peg between her teeth as she sailed out another sheet, a flash of anger in her eyes.
“You’re taking more time than anyone else,” he said to her, apologetically smiling.
She would have dismissed him then, except for the voice and the smile in his eyes. His face was all crinkled and closed like a turtle’s and his hooded eyes were dark with humour.
She wouldn’t let him in the house. She pegged the last sheet and walked down to him.
He was in her garden then, looking at her young plants. “What are you growing here?” There was a soft courtesy in his voice that reminded her of her young husband who had died many years ago.
“Salad greens,” she said, “martock peas.”
He bent to pluck a feathered, burgundy-streaked leaf. “Tastes like a radish,” he said, “hot!”
“Arugula,” she said. She’d brought the seeds with her from Italy over fifty years ago.
He didn’t talk about deals or land purchases, he talked about visiting. “I’ve visited the Pradolinis this morning,” he said. “The Beruskis.”
And suddenly the fear rose in her throat that there would be no spring here again.
She could feel the warm spring sun on the back of her hands that smelled of bleach. She watched a young red-tail soar over the Community Centre across the alley, turn south to the valley truck farms with a flick of its wing, riding the high winds and the clear air.
“Let’s walk,” she says, and she led him away from her place into the alley.
He had some papers to show her, some numbers, but she didn’t appear to be listening. She could hear the hawk’s shrill cry from somewhere near the roundhouse, hunting along the tracks to bring mice or rats to its young. There was a flash on the mountain, like that of an opening window, and the ground trembled as a freight train made its way down the tracks on the far side of the Community Centre.
He wanted her signature on an appraisal sheet that listed her property: orchards, house, lot.
“Fair market value,” he said, and in his eyes there was that old humour.
“I won’t sign this,” she told him then sharply. “I won’t sign away my life.”
He shook his head. “Others are troubled, too,” he said. “This is not an easy time for anyone.”
He mentioned that he’d be back again, in a week or two — he had others to visit — to see if she had changed her mind, and in his voice there was a shadow of impatience, not much, because he was also kind, but he was really saying that soon there would come a date when this would have to end. Not firm yet, but not indefinite, either, some horizon that she felt coming towards her.
“I won’t sign,” she said again. “Ever.”
“You’ll end up in court, and the Authority never loses. They can’t appear to lose; it wouldn’t look good. And you’ll get less than they’re offering you now. They’ll spend millions to save thousands.”
“It’s surprising how many of my friends and neighbours who have been forced to leave have died: John Camozzi, Margaret Pradolini, Mary Beruski.”
For the first time the humour in his eyes was gone, and for a moment there was a kind of wonder.
When he didn’t reply, she said, “I feel like I’m disappointing you.”
She’d said too much for his courtesy to bear.
It had never occurred to him that the loss of your home, your land could wear you out utterly, put you in an early grave.
He handed her the papers and turned to go. He had others to visit.
“It’s been a pleasure to see you,” she said. “Come again.”
She went and sat on a bench by the tracks. The freight train that she’d heard was a coal train from Alberta, hamper after hamper rumbling by, the coal piled high and smelling of oil, the metal wheels shrieking. She looked at the papers he has given her. The figures weren’t generous, they never were.
Still, was strange to see a price put on everything you are and ever will be.
What are they buying then, these assessors that come from the Hydro Authority? They never send the same one all the time. In two weeks she’d be dealing with another one. What were they getting with their dam? They were getting her young husband furrowing in the grass for wild potatoes, one hand crippled from a fall. That was just a few weeks after he’d arrived on the train from Montreal over fifty years ago, and he hadn’t yet found work. They were getting her trees and her garden, the Palliser forest, the river, the mountain and the sky, all of it.
She was trying to understand what was happening to her. She couldn’t go anywhere in the village without a memory flaring up, maybe for the last time. It was as though the village and the trees and the mountain were trying to speak through her memory, as if the earth itself were speaking through her before its final submission. It made her feel that her memories were not her own, that they belonged to this land that soon would be underwater, that the final expression of its pain and sorrow was in the voice of her memory. For the earth did suffer, she knew that then, and she often walked barefoot to feel its apprehension and pain.
Though she is sitting on the bench, she was far away from the tracks, the mountain, the receding train. That’s all the Authority knows how to do, with its numbers and figures, assessors and engineers: shape dust. She admitted to herself that she was deeply wounded, that something inside her was dying, and that the flare of her memories, so vivid and real, was the final gift of her life to this land. She slapped the bench once, hard, as if to give notice to hard reality: I am still here!, stood and walked home.
This is what his grandmother wanted to say to the assessor, he told the girl, the one who walked away after handing her the papers, walked quickly down the alley to some other deal or court ordered purchase:
Come with me. There is no life where you’re going.
Look at my pea vines. Vibrant, green, already in flower! And the soil around the roots, two feet deep. It’s taken me forty years to build that soil, rich and dark and full of life. Run your hands into it, smell it, feel how warm it is, how it invites life.
These are my trees, my vines. I know each of them individually. These my husband planted thirty-five years ago. They’re Galloway Pippins from Sc
otland. He had the scion wood smuggled in by a friend. Sometimes I walk among these trees clapping my hands because they make me feel like I’m four years old. How? I don’t know. Something from them goes through me. I’m pruning the branches, yes, or up on a ladder looking over them, and I feel a sturdy kindness and a grace in them that surprises me and that makes me want to clap my hands.
Now all I can do is wait and see what will happen: listen to the rain, feel the sun and wind on my skin. A handful of trees and I have enough cash to live on when I sell fruit at the end of the season. What I don’t need to buy I trade for: a little wine, a secondhand sweater.
Once an orchard worker from southern France called me a fainéante.
That’s true, I said to her, my joys here are free.
That’s our mountain, Palliser Mountain we call it. It watches over us with the eyes of an old cat. I walk into its forests maybe three, four times a week just to feel its breath. At this time of the year if you brush by a young pine its scent will turn you around in your tracks.
And the river. The final thing you want to kill in order to live. So many memories there: the slate in its banks that my husband found, the booming grounds where my husband walked across the logs to find work, the seasons of its currents in full flood now and tearing at the bridge ramparts. You go down there, you can smell mountain snow in the water, oily, impatient water as green as grass.
There is no life where you’re going because you’re careless.
There is something violent in the way you hurry along, visiting as you call it. Always at the bidding of the Authority, always anxious because of their impatience. Don’t you see this is carelessness? Don’t you have any feeling for what you are doing? There’s a kind of treason against life in those machines you bring to us, to push down our houses and cut down our orchards, our forests. There is no life there in that commotion of iron and fire, and that’s what you serve.
Early in the morning, curled up beside each other on blankets, the boy and girl awoke when the truck geared down, pulled over to the side of the road. Through the tarp they heard angry shouts, the slam of a door.
A hand rapped the metal side of the truck box, listening for an echo. Two members of the security patrol stood outside, Luis Miralles and Pedro Real. Miralles was carrying a rifle. The two in the back could hear fear in the teacher’s voice as he got out of the cab, they were arguing over something. Then they heard the slap of untied ropes as the tarp was unlashed, starting at the tailgate.
And once again Michael felt terror go through him, the terror of a menace that you don’t understand that is whipping you up against the edges of your life. He heard the anger of the two patrolers and what sounded like a placating offer in the teacher’s voice, but he didn’t understand the words. The girl’s hands were trembling in his.
Get ready to run, she whispered.
Then they heard the scrape of cinder blocks and a concrete plancha being pulled from the truck bed, the tinny echo of stove pipe, the clatter of bricks stacked on the roadside. They heard the tarp being relashed, the air once again settling into the musty smell of ripe oranges. They heard the teacher whisper in English through the tarp as he climbed back into the cab, a glint of grim amusement in his voice, “They took the stove.”
And in the back they drove on, for an hour or more, not knowing what had happened. Somehow the search was halted, it had something to do with a stove but what that meant they didn’t know. The plastic smell of the tarp and the musty smell of the crated oranges in the back grew strong in that morning heat. The truck swayed as they climbed switchbacks high into the hills. For a moment there was an odour of concrete dust as they went by a cinder-block works.
They came to the base of Cerro de Fuego.
Here Bernabe let them out, and his wife began to climb with them.
“I have to take the truck back to El Tablon,” he said. “It belongs to my cousin and he needs it to get to market. My wife will explain everything.”
While they climbed through the streets and through the cornfields of El Pajal, Helene said, “Two from the Jacaltenango security patrol were looking for you, but they saw the stove and were satisfied with it. My husband is a clever man,” she smiled. “He made sure the most tempting thing was right there for them to see when they opened the tarp.”
They climbed in a path of volcanic grit. The boy had to turn his shoes out, scuffing the edges of the soles into the dust so as not to slip. It was like he was climbing in ice-crusted snow. Though it was early morning, the sun was warm on the slopes and on the pines. Below a valley of small farms and in the east the blue haze of Huehue. They went by pine logs stacked for trucking. The girl knelt to count the rings on a stump. “These weren’t very old,” she said, “maybe thirty years.” Michael reached for her hand to draw her away. They had to keep moving so as to avoid attention.
Ahead, a young child was sitting by the path, her nose and upper lip smeared with mucous, dark eyes and dusty black hair. When they came near the child, a farmer with a hoe in the field above shouted and Helene Mateas called back.
“He was telling us to go away,” my wife said, “to stay away from his child.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I gave him the blessing of a curandera.” They watched as he descended the slope to put a coin in her hand.
Five hours into the forest they came to the rim of the volcano. They’d walked through pines to the crest; through the trees they could see sparkling water below. They went down wooden steps, hundreds of them, staked into the side of the crater, sometimes stepping sideways to keep their balance.
They came to a beach of white pumice stones. The one Lacey picked up was as light as hollow bone. Sunlight rimmed the crater and the wind-rippled water darkened.
He recognized the stick tripods arranged on the beach in some kind of sacred pattern, ribbons fluttering in the breeze. This was the lake in the photograph. And he saw exactly what the caption said he would see: mists racing across the water as clouds were born.
They set down their packs. They had brought in food, blankets, a tarp that they strung up between bushes for shelter.
Helene stayed with them into the evening, talking about the altars made of fluttering ribbons and stake tripods placed on shore.
“This is a sacred place,” she told them. “No one would dare touch you here. And anyway,” she smiled, “hardly anyone knows the way in.”
Late in the afternoon, she lit a fire and they waited for the sun to go down. At dusk she went to catch fish. The wind had picked up, darkening the lake, and high on the slopes they could hear the pines singing.
“As soon as it’s safe we’ll take you to the border.”
“Why are you looking at me?” the girl asked.
“I don’t know, “Helene said. “But there are many, many things these days I don’t understand.”
She left the boy and the girl by the fire, went to sleep on blankets under the tarp. “Don’t be up late!” she called out, “We may have to leave as early as tomorrow morning.”
The girl turned to him then, and for the first time he saw a new worry and anger in her eyes. “Maybe this is all for nothing,” she said then.
“Maybe Rose won’t have anything to do with you, or maybe the Giacomos have convinced her to give up your son.”
He felt a familiar sense of drifting then, of not being held in place, but it was beginning to fade. The offer of his return was like a song that drifts in the wind, maybe not understood, maybe not even heard. But the offer didn’t depend on some secret want to curb or manipulate or destroy. He wanted to hold the boy, to feel his weight, that was a deep ache in his hands. And maybe Rose would accept him because the offer of his love would last in the grace of his hands and lips. That was how he was changed, he felt then, a change that had begun around the campfires that disturbed the peace of Garden View suburb. There are those who uproot and those who plant, a line from one of his grandmother’s songs. But these times were, in a way, di
fferent: there are those who learn to sleep out in the open and those who remain and stare from behind curtained glass, afraid to go out, afraid to make an offer of trust and tending care.
Early the next morning the girl drew back a blanket to step out from under the tarp. The boy, the young father, had huddled in beside her, and she drew the blanket over him.
Helena was on the beach, crouched before a tripod of sticks tied with ribbons. The ribbons were fluttering in the breeze. The girl looked across the lake. Clouds born out of thin air rode off the water.
The dawn sky rimmed the crater. To the west she could still see the triad of bright stars in Orion, the three hearth stones.
She crouched beside Helene, whose face was grim and drawn, staring over the water.
“Often back home,” the girl said, “I could feel an electric charge in the air before a storm blew over Palliser Ridge. The sky could be perfectly blue and I could feel it bristling on my forearms, like static electricity.”
“Yes,” the wife said. “Something is coming, I can feel it too. The helicopters that come at night, the civil patrols, the unexplained sicknesses in our children, burnt crops, it’s going to get worse, much worse. A darkness is falling,” the wife said, turning to the girl. “A darkness that will last a long time.”
Michael had come out from under the tarp. He went by them to touch the water, old, archival.
The Orchard Keepers Page 26
