Read The Roots of the Olive Tree Online
Authors: Courtney Miller Santo
“They might have been able-bodied, but they certainly weren’t able-brained,” Bets said. She had never been able to resist a dig at her brothers, even if they were dead.
“I think it’s romantic,” Callie said.
Anna took a good look at her granddaughter. She’d put on her Sunday makeup, even though it was a Saturday, and she was wearing hundred-dollar jeans the saleswoman in Nordstrom had insisted made her look merely fifty, instead of the sixty-five she actually was. Anna thought dungarees were ridiculous no matter who was wearing them. She smoothed the fabric of her own skirt and pulled a stray string from the seam.
“This is science, not romance,” Anna said. She wanted to warn Callie, to keep her from getting her hopes up. This had happened before. One of the suppliers for her store would strike up a relationship with Callie on the phone and she would think she’d found true love.
“She knows,” Bets said. Her daughter didn’t like disagreements. Anna wasn’t surprised when she changed the subject. “How long until the good doctor gets here?”
“Before lunchtime,” Callie said. She pulled on the neckline of her shirt until it fully covered her bosom.
“Help me with these olives then,” Anna said. “If we get them in the press now we’ll have fresh oil for lunch.”
“The pickers did a good job this year. The Lindseys said their crew pulled down a ton an acre and we got at least that,” Bets said.
Anna didn’t agree. “There’s a lot of picking left to do.”
Bets sighed and took the bait. “Didn’t they strip it clean enough for you? I know Benny hired that new foreman, but he’s Diego’s son, and you know he’d been out with his daddy in the Lindseys’ fields since he could walk.”
Anna looked at the funnel that fed the small handpress they kept on the porch. She needed another basket of olives to fill it. “Pickers didn’t do any worse than any other year. Definitely no better than the year all our men were at war and the harvest was left to the women and children.”
“Daddy always said women made the best pickers. What’s that old proverb?” Bets asked.
Anna grinned as she spoke. “ ‘In the olive grove you’ve got to be wise in the feet and wild in the head.’ ” She smiled thinking about her own father and how he’d always claimed that women were the only souls wild enough in the head to pick a tree clean. He never meant it as a compliment, but Anna took it as such.
Callie shook her head. “I never did understand that. I think you ought to let the pickers use those machines. We could probably get a ton and a quarter an acre.” With this statement, her granddaughter had started an old argument, and Anna understood Callie raised it mostly for the conversation.
“The noise would kill me and the pounding is likely to kill the trees.” Anna smiled as she said this. She knew her granddaughter was just finding a way to argue, since Bets had cut off their conversation about the doctor. This was better. Callie liked to tell people that the day her grandmother wasn’t outraged, they’d start planning the funeral. It made folks laugh, especially young people, who couldn’t imagine that Anna, as old as she was, hadn’t already planned her interment twice over.
They stood on the porch, hashing out old complaints until the dry November wind drove them inside. Just as Anna moved to pick up the basket and head to the orchard for a second time, she heard the crunch of a car coming down the gravel drive out front.
“He’s early,” Callie said, rising and moving with her awkward gait quickly through the house to the front door. The dog, who was too old to hear the car, trotted after Callie as she thumped past him.
Bets held the door open for Anna and then glanced at the ormolu clock on the piano in the corner of the front room. “I don’t see how he made such good time from the airport. Oakland traffic is never easy to get through.”
There was no porch off the front door. Three concrete stairs stepped down to the gravel driveway, a carved semicircle in the front yard. Anna remained standing on the top step, shading her eyes against the sun as a dark blue sedan made its way down the drive.
“Why doesn’t he hurry up already?” Callie asked.
“Probably didn’t get the rental insurance,” Bets said. “They’ll get you for the tiniest ding.”
Anna squinted and saw that there was a woman behind the wheel. Bobo surprised them all by rising up on his hind legs and pawing at the sky before turning a flip. It was a trick he hadn’t done in years. Anna was just realizing it was not who they expected when the car stopped and Erin, her great-great-granddaughter, stepped out of the car.
E
rin left Kidron two years earlier, after graduating from college, and hadn’t been home since. She talked too fast for Anna to catch most of what was said, but it was clear that her great-great-granddaughter was in trouble. Erin’s voice was thin, her skin sallow, and her gestures moved in opposition to her words. Anna heard her say, “I just needed a break, the stress—” and watched her hands make a circle, as if to indicate that there was some larger problem, an issue so big it couldn’t be spoken about. Callie settled next to her on the couch and the dog climbed into Erin’s lap and curled into a ball.
“You need to eat,” Bets said, bringing in a plate of olives and saltines. “You’re too thin and your cheeks are all sunken in. What do they feed you on tour? I’d think in Italy it would be all pasta and bread.”
Callie picked up where her mother left off. “Did you lay over in New York? Why didn’t you call to tell us you were coming? You didn’t have to rent a car, I would’ve picked you up.”
Erin leaned her head on Callie’s shoulder and closed her eyes.
“We should send her to bed.” Anna wanted to talk to the others without Erin present. They needed to piece together an explanation of the child’s behavior.
“I’m old enough to send myself to bed,” Erin said. Her eyes were still closed, and Anna suspected she was crying. “I didn’t know I was coming home until I got here and by then it was too late to tell you.”
Bets stroked the girl’s hair and murmured soothing words. The scene wasn’t much different from the one that unfolded when Erin had been a child, one who lost her parents and had come, quite unexpectedly, to live with them at Hill House. Anna listened to Bets’s hypnotic voice—there was some lilt, pattern to her speech that soothed the instinct to run and then watched as her daughter—old enough to need help herself—walked Erin down to the bedroom that had been hers when she was four. Bobo went after them.
Anna pulled open the secretary in the living room and took out all the papers she had about Erin’s time in Italy. There were a handful of airmail letters written on tissue-thin paper full of vague descriptions of the other opera members, anecdotes of day trips they’d taken, and one particularly long missive when Erin thought she’d left her sheet music on a city bus. She also had the initial packet of information that Erin had received when she signed her contract to sing mezzo-soprano for the Academy of Santa Cecilia.
Callie and Bets came down the hall and settled back into the couch. The exchange with Erin seemed to have restored some of their youth. They talked quietly, and Anna didn’t even try to listen. She’d never admit it, but she couldn’t hear as well as she used to. Instead, she searched for the copy of the contract that Erin had given her when Anna demanded to know how she was going to pay for her living expenses. There was money that Erin didn’t know about—money from an insurance policy that had paid out when her father died—but Anna was holding back, waiting for the right time to give it to Erin. At last Anna found what she’d been searching for at the bottom of the pile of letters. When she unfolded it, she realized every word was in Italian. It would be of no use to them.
“She’s in trouble,” Bets said, at last bringing Anna into the conversation.
“I’ve never seen her look so much like her mother,” Callie said. “Should we look in the car for clues? There has to be some indication of why she’s here.”
Bets took the paperwork from Anna and scanned it. “You can read some of this,” she said to her daughter. “Spanish and Italian aren’t that much different. Both romance languages, right?”
“They’re nothing alike,” Callie said, not even glancing at the papers. “I’m not sure we should pry. Chances are she’ll tell us when she’s ready.”
“Her mother never told us anything,” Bets said, pulling at a silver strand of hair that escaped the low bun she always wore.
Anna knew she should step between them, knew that the blame and the guilt for what had happened with Erin’s mother was deep enough to threaten the bond between the two of them. It had been ugly for so many years after it happened.
“A woman is entitled to her secrets,” Anna said. She thought of all that she’d kept from her own mother, her daughter—suspicions that none of them were who they thought they were.
Bets stood, quickly gathering the papers up off the couch. She had her father’s height and his chin—pointed and heavily angled, although he’d always worn a beard, which softened his face. Bets didn’t have that option and as a result, people often felt accused when she spoke to them. “We could have stopped it if we’d known. I’m not going to let this become another festering secret we keep because it’s easier to tell ourselves that privacy is important. To hell with privacy.”
Anna listened to the front door slam and the heavy crunch of Bets’s feet on the gravel. “She’s not going to find anything,” she said to Callie. “I got a good look when our girl jumped out of the car crying and I didn’t see a bit of luggage and not so much as a burger wrapper.”
“Doesn’t matter. Mom thinks you took my side again.” Callie glanced down the hall at the closed door to Erin’s room.
“There aren’t any sides,” Anna said, reaching for her granddaughter’s hand. “There’ve never been any sides. It’s all just one big endless circle.”
“I don’t want to be sitting here when she comes back in,” Callie said.
She sounded petulant, like she had at fourteen when her hair was a tangled mess and her feet were summer-browned. As a girl and then as a teenager, she’d been a blur running from Bets, running from Hill House, never wanting to be contained. Every spoken wish tied inextricably to leaving Kidron. Callie had thought the big wide world was holding its arms open for her. “Come down to the orchard with me. I need another basket of olives to get enough oil pressed,” Anna said. The orchard had a way of calming people.
Callie rubbed her leg through the stiff denim. “In too much pain to do any serious walking. I’ll start lunch, I need to figure out another vegetable, since Erin won’t eat any of that ham we’ve got baking.”
Anna rose and thanked God that her body functioned well enough for her to move around. She’d never been one to be idle. Not that her granddaughter’s leg kept her idle, but it allowed her to hide in kitchens and storerooms doing only the work she wanted to. Anna pulled a sweater from the front closet, grabbed her basket, and headed out the back door to the orchard. With Erin’s arrival, the day seemed cooler to Anna.
The house would be in disarray when the geneticist arrived. Anna wondered what sort of man Dr. Hashmi was and whether he’d notice the chaos around him. Men weren’t blessed with the same intuition as women. At the bottom of the hill, she turned to look back at her house. It was a home built in stages, with rooms added as their family grew in size and in wealth. Like many of the homes in the Sacramento Valley, it had been patterned after the missions that the Spanish abandoned when they lost the war. It was one story with an adobe roof and stucco walls. From the back you could see the two wings that ran perpendicular to each other off the main structure. The kitchen, which for many years had served as a place to process the family’s olives, took up most of the north wing. The south, comprised of three bedrooms and a bathroom, was slightly longer than its counterpart. The main building held a master bedroom, renovated most recently, a sitting room, a dining room, and a library.
This home, which had always been called Hill House, had been built by Anna’s father, Percy Davison. Over the years, she’d often wondered how a man had constructed such a perfect home for the women who’d come to inhabit it. When they moved from the canvas tent where they’d lived waiting on the fledgling orchard to sprout, providing enough collateral for the bank, her father told them their temple awaited them. Hill House was not the oldest home in Kidron, but because it was one of the few plots of elevated land in this part of the valley and the orchard was still family owned, it was one of the stops on the tourism route drawn up by the town. The brochure, which Anna had hanging on her refrigerator, called it Kidron’s own San Simeon. It was, of course, not even a third of the size of that mansion, but Anna privately agreed with this assessment. She never said as much, afraid that what the world perceived about her town, about her house, was not her reality.
The closer she came to the orchard, the younger she felt. She stepped into the grove of trees, which were not even a foot taller than she, and breathed in the musk of decomposition. Fall was coming fast, but there, among the olive trees, summer was still suspended in the gray-green of the leaves. The fruit had just started to turn from lime green to purple. She reached up and cupped her palm around one of the nearest branches. The noise the leaves made as she moved her hand quickly upward, the friction sending the fruit falling into the waiting basket, sounded like the voice of her father, who held as many stories as there were stars and each one always began and ended with the trees.
A
nna had loved her father, but she never liked him all that much. She suspected most people felt this way about one parent, or at the very least, a sibling. It wasn’t God’s way to stick you with people who were easy to like—life was all a big test. Can you love your sniveling, sickly brother? Can you love your dumb but well-intentioned mother? Can you love your hard-as-steel father? Anna used to tell her children that God never gave one commandment about liking a person and she’d learned over the years that it was possible to love without having a lot of like in your heart.
Under her father’s inscrutable gaze, Anna always felt disappointed in herself. This feeling of not measuring up is what made her older brother, Wealthy, leave home, and it is what made Anna stay in Kidron. Funny how two people raised in the same home could have such opposite reactions. Of course, you are born who you are. In Anna’s experience, raising children was less like molding clay and more like chipping away at granite with a butter knife. Her father had never tried to change who his children were, he just remained disappointed that they couldn’t become what he expected of them. A week or so after he died, Anna found a slip of paper in his Bible that confirmed this for her. On the top of the paper in his deeply slanted writing, he’d written “The Accomplished Life of Percival Keenan Davison.” Following that was a numbered list:
1. First man to cultivate olives in California
2. Two-time collar-and-elbow champion of Meath
3. Discovered the world’s fifth largest alluvial gold nugget in Australia
4. Moved Kidron to present-day location
5.Father to Wealthy Davison and Anna Davison KellerFlew on a plane
Anna didn’t know whether he’d crossed his children off the list because those weren’t the type of accomplishments he’d intended to document or whether in the end who his children had grown up to be was less of an achievement than riding in a biplane at the state fair.
She did know that his list wasn’t entirely accurate. The Spanish were the first to bring olives to the New World. When they conquered California, they planted groves wherever they planted their missions—using the oil for the church’s anointing and consecrating. The olive tree, like most religions, required civilization to survive, and when the Spanish were conquered, left-behind trees became feral, barren bushes. Percy arrived half a century after the Spanish ceded California, meaning that Anna’s father could truly only claim to have resurrected the crop.
Veda, Anna’s mother, who was called Mims, claimed the gold nugget was as large as two clasped hands. Percy’s mining partners cheated him, and in the end, Anna’s parents left Australia with just enough money to start over in California. Because Anna was only four when they left Brisbane, she never fully understood why they needed to start over—only that the move was connected in some way to Wealthy’s asthma and Mims’s grief over the babies she’d lost between the births of Anna and her brother.
The people in Kidron held a dozen stories about Percy that differed in a dozen different ways from the truth that Anna knew about her father. If he’d talked more, maybe the history books would agree on a few facts, but the only story anyone had right was what happened once he arrived in the Sacramento Valley. The Davison family arrived in San Francisco in 1898. After weeks on a cramped ship, Percy couldn’t take even the smallest crowds. He wrinkled his nose at the stench of the city and went in search of arid land with mild seasons.
Anna, Wealthy, and their mother stayed in a rooming house guarding the family’s most precious possession—six wooden boxes filled with rootstock. As Anna understood it, there had been more trees when the family had left Brisbane, but they’d not all survived the voyage. For many years, her parents used these boxes as nightstands, and it was only when they both died that Anna tossed them into the woodpile and put in their place a matching set from the Penney’s catalog. She sometimes wished she hadn’t done this, but for many years, she didn’t appreciate that objects could have a history.
Ultimately her father was only able to untangle half his trees. He spent the money he’d planned to use to build the family a house on buying year-old trees from Spain and then he grafted bits of his trees onto the new rootstock. The earliest written account of Percy’s contribution to Kidron notes that he went in search of the feral trees at the back of abandoned missions—snipping branches from the heartier specimens. After seeing how quickly his rootstock with the feral cuttings took to the soil, Percy allowed himself to feel hopeful. In a year’s time the trees were as big as those that were three years old in Brisbane. He calculated that instead of ten years, it would only take six for his trees to bear enough fruit to pay back his outlay and start putting money in his pocket.
Money remained an obstacle to easy success—her father didn’t have enough cash to wait six years for a crop. He needed to find people with money who would believe in him and understand his vision of small ten- and twenty-acre lots producing just enough for a family to make a living. Two of the largest landowners in Tehama County, James Mayfield and John Woodburn, quickly signed on to make Percy’s vision a reality. They waited until the location of the railroad became public knowledge and then they announced the creation of the Maywood Colony. They divided up the acreage of Mayfield and Woodburn into ten-acre plots and planted them ninety trees to an acre, then they took out advertisements in major magazines offering more than 100 percent profit on the land. It was nearly true, too. The trees provided enough income for purchasers to make their installment plan payments on the houses and land and earn enough money for a family to buy house goods. They hired Percy to manage the olive and fruit trees and paid him a small percentage of each sale.
It was a good plan. Even now, fourth grade teachers in Kidron during their sections on local history tell their students that Percy saw the future—he was a man who sensed the growth of the West would come by bringing in the people who were neither rich nor poor, but wanted more space than the congested East could give them. Then there were the children of farmers who knew enough to want more than to raise livestock or depend on the volatility of wheat prices at harvest. Olives were a steady crop with predictable payouts. Her father lived long enough to read a few of these history passages about the colonies, and it delighted him.
Before it could be a triumph—and the Maywood Colony was hugely successful—Percy had to appease George Kidron, who felt anyone’s success but his own as if it were sand in his underwear. As the town’s founder, George held opinions that people respected. When asked about the colony, he predicted failure and called Percy a foreign con man come to fleece California. His blustering made Percy’s investment partners nervous, and they asked him to make peace. Percy could read men like he could the earth, and he knew that the failure of Kidron to find success as a railroad town had left a great, gaping pit in George’s heart—so instead of offering him money, Percy told him that he knew how to move the town.
For this part of her father’s story, Anna didn’t need to rely on the town’s history books, or what Mims and Percy had told her. Her first clear memory—one that moved beyond emotions and senses—was of this move. She thought of that fall day in 1900 as the day she was born. There existed in her mind still images from Brisbane—a woman she didn’t recognize in a flour sack apron, a tortoise as big as a table, and her father lifting a basket of sun-blackened olives. She sometimes wished she could find the key to start these images rolling into a movie, felt that they would give her insight into herself, but they remained still and slightly out of focus. The day the town hauled itself a mile toward the railroad was a moving picture, but unlike the story of her father and how he brought the olives, it lived and breathed in her cells.
There was no school on moving day. All the children were released and told to stay out of the way. Some of the older boys, like Anna’s brother, Wealthy, assisted their fathers by tying ropes and holding harnesses. Anna volunteered to take care of her mother, who was five months pregnant. There was optimism that Mims would be able to carry this child to term, but the midwife, after hearing her history, had confined her to bed. Anna had no talent for ministrations and her mother soon sent her to town, telling her to watch over her father and brother. “If we lose them, we’re lost,” Mims had said.
As it happened, Mims blossomed when all the men in her life had left her. With her petite, round figure and her small-featured face, Mims had, when she was thin, resembled a mouse. As she aged and put on weight, her face filled out and looked like a child’s illustration of the sun. This was how Anna’s children remembered Mims, but on that day in 1900, her skin was drawn tight over her skeleton—all the worry about the baby, the orchard, and the colony had eaten up every last reserve of fat she had.
The hot air pushed up the valley from the desert to the east of Kidron and brought with it the fine grit of sand. After two years of living in the valley, Anna still felt out of place. It was a sentiment shared by most of the other residents of Kidron. She overheard her father tell the men at the general store that most mornings he felt like he’d put on another man’s pants. There was less permanence back then, when the people who lived in the valley had only called it home for one or two generations. Now, everywhere she looked, Kidron was filled with the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those men standing around the store, agreeing that the hot wind just didn’t feel like home.
The general store was an imposing rectangle with annexes stuck off the sides like stacked boxes. To Anna, the buildings hadn’t seemed old, but now that she was six, she’d only recently decided that the world hadn’t started at her birth. She considered the things that had been there before her as she fed the horses bits of carrots on moving day.
It had been decided that the saloon no longer fit with the character of the town and it would remain, along with what her father called the “ladies” house on old Main Street. When her daughter Bets first married Frank, she lived on old Main Street, and visiting them Anna was surprised to find that both buildings had survived. The ladies house, which she now understood had been a whorehouse, was home to an eccentric pair of brothers who rented rooms to vagrants during the winter. The saloon had become a restaurant that capitalized on the building’s history. Although the owners had installed swinging doors, like those one would find in a John Wayne picture, they had not been present when she was a girl. Anna told Bets that the saloon had never had swinging doors. “Such an impracticality. Good only for gunfights, and we never had those,” she’d said.
Those two buildings had large black
X
s painted on their sides on moving day. Anna walked among the teams of horses waiting to pull the buildings, and stopped to listen to the butcher tell her father and a few of the other men who’d come into town from Maywood Colony about seeing an outpost in Iowa attempt a move. “Damn fools killed half the horses in town and had to put the other half down from injuries. I saw a man flattened when a house rolled over him,” said the butcher as he spit tobacco juice into the street. “It wasn’t like you’d think. No popping or bursting right when it happened. Naw, that came later.”
The men went on to discuss death and how the bodies they’d seen never looked like one expected. The butcher said the flattened man’s body had started to swell, and the skin on his legs split like a peach left too long on the tree. “He was dead before the sun set,” the butcher finally said. Some men standing around him edged away and found a way to busy their hands with horses or uncoiling rope. Her father, though, stepped closer and put a hand on the man’s shoulder. She frowned and remembered her mother telling her father that morning that the easiest solutions are often impossible. Although Anna was only six, the image of that man’s skin splitting open like overripe fruit stayed in her mind as if she had actually been in that small Iowa town to watch the man suffer.
She watched her father as he threaded his way through the town taking notes on who was ready to move. Anna kept a few paces behind him, stepping into a doorway when he turned around, or reaching to stroke the neck of one of the hitched horses. The town smelled different then; there was always straw thrown down over some low spot in the road, and a man’s sweat mixed with that of the animals. The horses were damp with perspiration that day and the smell of their sweet, heavy sweat overpowered Anna. She watched him write numbers on buildings to indicate the order that they would be moved. At last he came to the general store, and he drew a chalk line up one side of the store and then handed off the chalk to the men on the roof, who completed the line. He took his chalk back and marked the store’s halves each with a different number.
Anna felt no compunction to watch over her brother. He’d been so sickly in Brisbane that her parents let him roam all hours of the day and night around Kidron. Anna complained about how Wealthy never had to help, and her parents said that God was likely to take his miracle back if they stopped him from exercising his good health now that he had it. It made her wish him ill. She watched him shimmy up the side of the general store to help the Lindsey boys dismantle the chimney one brick at a time and hoped that he’d fall and break his leg.
Logs had been stripped of their bark and made smooth, and they sat like the legs of giants in the middle of the road. Each of the two dozen buildings in town was surrounded by piles of furniture and goods, and Anna left her father and his chalk numbers and amused herself by wandering among the stacks to examine the insides of houses she’d never set foot in. All around her the noise of steel teeth cutting through planks and men swearing as horses pulled unevenly filled her ears. The breeze pushed back at her as she walked, and although there was no salt in the air, there was the sweetness of newly cut lumber. She felt proud of Kidron, emboldened by a town that refused to die because the Southern Pacific Railroad had plotted a route out of its reach.