Read The Roots of the Olive Tree Online
Authors: Courtney Miller Santo
I
am too old for bedtime stories, but each night when my mother sits on the edge of my sister’s bed and calls to me to come across the hall, I go. When it is cold I come wrapped in blankets and when the dry winds from the desert heat the valley, I lie on the wood floor, pressing my face into its coolness. We live in an old house on a hill, and from the windows of my bedroom, I can see the olive orchard planted by my great-great-great-great-grandfather.
The beginning of the stories is always the same. “There is a curious girl who lives in a curious place. She has as many friends as a girl her age can keep track of, but her closest companion is a tortoise who tells people he is as old as dirt, but really has only lived for a hundred and seventy-two years. The tortoise has no name and is simply called Tortoise by the girl, who has a name, but prefers to be called Girl.”
Often my little sister, who is four, demands that the Girl be given a proper name, usually Athena, which is also my sister’s name. My mother never indulges her and insists on calling the girl “Girl” and the tortoise “Tortoise.” All the women in our family are more stubborn than they need to be. “This is how the stories go,” she’ll tell my sister and lightly pat her leg through the covers. Tonight my sister refrains from trying to put her own stamp on the story. I think it is because Anna is in the room with us.
We all know that Anna, who is improbably my still living great-great-great-grandmother, is the little girl in the story. Tonight she is one hundred and twenty-two years and one hundred sixty-five days old. Normally nobody cares about how many days old a person is, but today is a record breaker for Anna. She has lived the longest of any other human being on Earth. At least that one can document. My friend Jim, who is faster than me in the forty-yard dash, says that Methuselah lived to be almost 969, but I told him it didn’t count because nobody can prove that he did. I could tell he wanted to hit me for saying that what he learned at Sunday school wasn’t true, but instead he challenged me to a race and took great satisfaction when he beat me by at least two full seconds.
Some of the stories are about adventure, others full of silliness, but the one tonight Mom tells is the sad story. I’ve only heard it once when I was younger than Athena, and all that I remember is that the Tortoise dies. I guess I’ve given away the ending now. But it doesn’t matter because, to me, all the other stories became better because I knew that eventually the magical world where there was just the Tortoise and the Girl ends. All the best animal companions die. Billy lost Old Dan and Little Ann, Travis had to shoot Yeller, and even though Wilbur managed not to become bacon, we still had to say good-bye to Charlotte.
My mother’s voice is like the sound of the ocean trapped inside a shell. People pay good money to listen to her sing in all those foreign languages, but her voice is best in English, and when she tells stories, the words seem to travel up to your ears from the inside of your body. The shells know that trick, too. My fourth grade teacher told us last year that the sound inside of a shell is nothing more than an amplification of all the noises our bodies make that we can’t hear—like the blood moving through our veins and our own heart beating. Anyway, that’s what my mother sounds like when she tells us the stories.
“The Tortoise is the only family the girl has ever known. He tells her that she’d been born in one of the great copper cauldrons that the women of the village use for washing. She crawled out one evening during twilight as the Tortoise moved from the tall grass to a wallow formed by the runoff from the washing cauldrons. It has become the habit of the great Tortoise to sleep in this mud pit during particularly cool nights.”
Grandma Anna reaches over and pats my mother’s arm. “That Tortoise doesn’t hear so well,” she says, interrupting. “That’s why he doesn’t notice the Girl until she is right in front of him and don’t forget to tell them about the hibiscus flowers.”
Earlier today, there were dozens of reporters at the house—all here to talk to Grandma Anna and to ask her what she thought of the world now. They kept calling her the grandmother of humanity. She told them that though the stuff around us had changed, we humans were the same as we’ve ever been, and then she told them that time was an illusion we’d dreamed up to keep our lives from happening all at once. “I’m just better at stretching my illusion out,” she’d said, and a smattering of applause rippled through the crowd.
Mom leans over and kisses Anna on the cheek. Because our parents travel so much, Grandma Anna helps look after us. Right now my dad is in Germany directing a production of Alcina for the Semper. They take turns leaving us, but lately Dad has been gone more often than Mom. I think it is because she is worried about how much longer she has with Grandma Anna. The other grandmothers worry, too. Grandma Callie and her husband, Grandpa Amrit, who isn’t really my grandfather, were here to celebrate Anna’s milestone. They had to get back to Pittsburgh though because of his research.
Mom starts up where she was interrupted and tells my sister about one particular day when, “the Girl feeds the Tortoise hibiscus flowers and talks about a man she’s seen in town. Because the Girl has no father or mother, while the Tortoise sleeps in the afternoons, she’s gotten into the habit of sitting near the fish market on the town’s eastern edge near the quay and looking up into the faces of the adults as they pass by.
“ ‘He had gold eyes,’ the Girl says.
“ ‘I only know one other person with gold eyes,’ the Tortoise says.
“The girl looks at him and blinks slowly.”
Athena stands up in bed and shouts, “The Girl. It’s the Girl. She has gold eyes.”
“I’m glad to see you remember,” Grandma Anna says, settling Athena back under the covers.
My mother looks at me, and it seems that she is asking if Athena is ready to hear the next part of the story. I get up off the cool floor and hug my knees to my chest. She takes this as a yes and continues the story.
“For many days, the Girl and the Tortoise watch the man. He seems to be making preparations to leave their town. He has men come to his house, which is nearly hidden inside the lush greenery in the bush outside of town, and carry all that he owns onto a ship. There is a woman bustling about inside the house who the Girl can never see clearly and a boy somewhat older than the Girl who looks down sadly at his father from the windows of the house. The more the Girl watches the man with the gold eyes, the more she comes to believe he is her father.
“ ‘He peels his bananas from the bottom up,’ she says to the Tortoise.
“ ‘He chews on bunya sticks,’ the Tortoise says to the Girl. He’s long disapproved of this habit, thinking that her teeth were falling out because of it. Because he is a Tortoise, he doesn’t know that humans have baby teeth.
“On the third day they watch him, the woman and the boy emerge from the house with him and together they walk down to the docks and onto the ship where all their possessions have been loaded.”
“Don’t forget about the twin girls,” Anna says as my mother takes a breath.
“Ah, yes. There are two little girls who look exactly the same except that one has red hair and one has blond hair. They were about the same age as the Girl, and seeing them in their matching blue dresses makes her sad. The Tortoise sees the tears in the Girl’s eyes and tells her that nothing is as beautiful as a dress made from eucalyptus leaves.
“ ‘If he leaves, I won’t know if he’s my father,’ the Girl says to the Tortoise.
“They continue to watch the boat and just as the Tortoise is getting very hungry and feeling like the Girl should at least offer to get him some hibiscus flowers, the large white sails of the ship go up, turning what had looked like spindly dead trees into majestic spires anchoring what appears to the Girl to be clouds.
“The Tortoise, who knows more than the Girl, realizes that the man and his family are never coming back. He doesn’t want to tell the Girl this because he is afraid of what she will do. He knows in his heart that a Tortoise isn’t a proper family for the girl, but he loves her and he likes the hibiscus flowers, which he’d never been able to reach on his own.
“ ‘Do you think he knows he has a daughter?’ the Girl asks.
“ ‘The boat is moving.’
“ ‘He can’t leave now.’
“The girl looks wildly about the dock and then her gaze settles on the Tortoise. She knows he can’t swim well, but she’s seen him float as easily as a cork in the wallow down by the laundry cauldrons. She doesn’t even have to ask. The Tortoise moves to the water’s edge, and then she blinks and he is in the water, motioning with his head for her to climb atop his great carapace.”
“Shell,” I say, knowing my sister looked as confused as I had hearing that word for the first time.
“Does she get there?” Athena asks me, because she knows better than to ask Mom to jump ahead in the story.
“Wait and see,” I say.
“Grandma Deb could never wait either,” Grandma Anna says from her corner of the room. “She always wanted to know the ending before the beginning. Used to read the last page of a book first, just so she could see where she was headed.”
I’ve only met Grandma Deb once. She lives in Florida and works in a place where you can swim with the dolphins. We went there when I was six, just after Mom and Dad finally got married. But we had to pretend we didn’t know who she was and her name tag said
LORNA
. She was in charge of handing out and collecting the wet suits we wore in the water.
“Shhhh,” my mom says. It is late, and although Athena’s eyes are wide open, the rest of her looks to be on the verge of sleep.
“What happens?” Athena asks.
“Using her hands, the Girl paddles the Tortoise near the boat. It takes them hours to catch up to it, but finally, they are near enough that the Girl stretches out and grabs on to a ladder that hangs down the side of the ship. She reaches into the water and tries to pull the Tortoise up with her, but she is too small to carry him and his legs are too short to climb the ladder.
“ ‘I’ll let the current carry me back to shore,’ the Tortoise says. His eyes are closed and his head is barely lifted out of the water.
“ ‘I can’t leave you,’ the Girl says. She does not think she’s ever seen her old friend look so tired.
“ ‘Kiss me on the nose. It’ll bring you luck and a life long enough so that we may meet again.’
“The Girl keeps one hand tight on the ladder and leans over to kiss the Tortoise on the nose. She’s never done it before and is surprised at how soft his skin feels. They bump noses and then he kisses her. She climbs the ladder and once she is safely atop the boat, she looks in all directions for some sign that the Tortoise is still in the water. In the darkening light, she thinks every wave cap is the Tortoise’s shell. She sees him everywhere and nowhere, and when the sun has finally set, she turns her back on the ocean and goes in search of her father.”
“The end?” Athena asks with her eyes closed.
“The end,” my mother says, rising and kissing the top of Athena’s head.
I take Grandma Anna’s arm, and as we walk out of the room together, she says, “You know, I’m still looking for that Tortoise.”
I
have a tattoo of a quill, which I got when I was eighteen and believed that it would always remind me that I was a writer. It did not, but my husband did. Not only did he believe that I could write this book, he took the kids to the movies, to the park, to ride bikes on Saturday afternoons so that I could write this book.
The year I turned thirty, chance and Richard Bausch put me in a group of writers who had nothing more in common than wanting to be better writers. We spent a winter sharing our work with one another and learning as Richard gently walked us through his lessons on writing (it is show-and-tell). I am still with those wonderful writers and they have shepherded me through many more winters with grace, humor, and honest critique of my writing. Thank you Beverly, David, Elizabeth, Jerry, Lisa, Marjorie, Patti, and Ray.
The students and faculty who are a part of the University of Memphis’ MFA program are incredibly talented and generous. If not for their help and guidance (and good old-fashioned competiveness) this book would still be a story about an old woman, a pregnant woman, and a turtle. Thank you to Tom Russell for helping me start this novel in his workshop and thank you to Cary Holladay for being the best thesis advisor. Cary is a brilliant writer who is generous with her time.
My agent, Alexandra Machinist, found me, fought for me, and in the process made me believe that dreams do come true. She, along with Stephanie Koven, have done more than their fair share of hand-holding to help me through all that I didn’t know about what happens after someone says yes to your book.
There is no better editor than Carrie Feron. She embraced my book and told me where it needed work. Without her valuable insights into my characters, this novel would be less than it is today. It is a dream to be working with the team at William Morrow: Tavia Kowalchuk, Shawn Nicholls, Ben Bruton, Lynn Grady, Liate Stehlik, Mike Brennan, Brian Grogan, and Andrea Molitor. A special thanks to Tessa Woodward for knowing what I needed before I could ask.
Finally, thank you to my own unbroken line of women. Especially my mother and my grandmothers. I am surrounded by strong, complicated, interesting women with more stories than I’ll ever be able to write.
COURTNEY MILLER SANTO grasped the importance of stories from listening to her great-grandmother, who lives in Northern California. She learned to write stories in the journalism program at Washington and Lee University, and then discovered the limits of true stories working as a reporter in Virginia. She teaches creative writing at the University of Memphis, where she earned her MFA. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in
The Los Angeles Review, Irreantum, Sunstone
, and
Segullah
. She lives in Tennessee with her husband, two children, and dog. Her most prized possession is a photo of five generations of women in her family.
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