Read The Roots of the Olive Tree Online
Authors: Courtney Miller Santo
While waiting for her laptop to start, she flipped idly through the front section of the
San Francisco
Examiner
. She sold copies at the store, and the out-of-date ones were always laid on her desk. The news was no different than it had been before Deb’s escape. It was like betting on all the horses at the track; the paper had no idea what would retain its importance, and so it reported on elections that would be forgotten and businesses that would close. The story, the one that would change Calliope’s history, was tiny—just the briefest mention in the columns of a section entitled “News Around the World.” Hong Wu, the oldest living person in the world, had died two days earlier at home in the Shinxing province. His daughter, the article stated, was inconsolable.
“Anna’s the oldest,” she shouted. The boys, who were elbow deep in soapy water cleaning the shelves, looked up at her. Nancy shook her head and said, “I’ll be.”
D
o you believe in miracles?” Calliope asked Anna the next morning.
“What’s not to believe,” Anna said. She stood up, twisted side to side at the waist and then bent down and touched her toes. “Used to be I could do the splits, but my bladder isn’t what it was when I was a hundred.”
Erin laughed, and at the sound of his mother’s voice, the baby tried to mimic what he’d heard. Bobo responded with short high yelps.
“It’s like a circus in here,” Calliope said, shifting uncomfortably in the deep couch. Next to her, Bets, in an uncommon gesture, put her arm around Calliope’s shoulder and pulled her close. They slid together, pushed by the couch, and for a moment, she felt like a girl curled up on her mother’s lap.
“Makes it feel like a home again,” Bets said.
Calliope let herself be enveloped by the warmth of her mother’s love. Their relationship had borne too many strains over the years, and such intimacy was rare between them. The truth was, for the first time in Calliope’s life, Hill House was beginning to feel like home. Over the last few weeks, she had started to believe in miracles. The news about Anna not only had the potential to save the store, but it was also sure to bring Amrit back to Kidron. It had been many years since so much had gone so right for Calliope.
“I’ve got something to show you,” she said, pushing herself off the couch.
“Don’t tell me you can do the splits,” groaned Erin. “I’m still recovering from childbirth and shouldn’t be subjected to old ladies running circles around me.”
“We’re not all old,” Bets said. “Just Anna.”
Laughter echoed around the living room and followed Calliope down the hall. She couldn’t remember the last time her mother had been in a joking mood. The bottle of oil, which she’d lovingly wrapped the night before, stood on her nightstand. She couldn’t wait to share her plan with Anna and with the others. She closed her bedroom door, and out of habit, knocked twice on the frame for good luck.
Don’t want it too much,
she thought. The women were still giggling when Calliope walked back into the room, and she felt like joining in their revelry. She called out to Erin and then slid into a near perfect center split.
“Once a cheerleader, always a cheerleader,” she said.
“What is that?” Anna asked, pointing to the bottle. “Champagne?”
“No. It’s your oil.” Calliope placed the bottle in Anna’s hand.
“Mine, huh?” Anna said, struggling to untie the delicately curled ribbon that held the paper in place.
Calliope was as obsessed as Anna with longevity, but unlike her grandmother, she needed explanations. How was it possible that Anna could still hear so well, or that she was able to walk unaided? Her yellow-brown eyes were rimmed in red, but her sight was strong enough to scan the headlines in the newspaper. “For years I’ve watched how carefully you strip the trees of the last of their fruit and press the oil. I know there’s something to it, something you may not even know yourself.”
“So much of what I do is just out of habit,” Anna said.
“But those habits, those are what keep you so youthful,” Calliope said.
“There’s nothing special about me,” Anna said, sliding the bottle from its bag.
“There is. There’s something special about all of us.” Everyone turned their eyes toward her, and their expectation made Calliope backtrack. “I mean, I just feel like there has to be or why else would Amrit have come so far to study us?”
“I don’t think we should make too much of this,” Bets said. Erin disagreed with her, and the two argued back and forth for several minutes.
Calliope took some satisfaction in knowing her mother would soon be proved wrong. Finding out why the Keller women were special had brought Amrit, and now it might even be able to bring much more. Her instincts told her that Hong Wu’s death was just the beginning. Once the press met Anna and discovered their family’s beautiful unbroken line of firstborns that stretched over six generations, people would be clamoring to find out their secrets. That was the way the world worked—people wanted explanations for the oddities in the world. They wanted to know what made supercentenarians able to live so long.
Before Hong Wu, the title had changed hands every few months and during one brutally hot summer in 2002 the title of world’s oldest person had been held by fourteen different people. And then she discovered Jeanne Calment, the
doyenne de l’humanité,
as her French countrymen called her. She’d held the title for nearly a decade and when she finally died at age one hundred and twenty-two, she also held the title of oldest person ever. This “elder of humanity” had lived an extraordinary life. When Jeanne was thirteen, she sold Vincent van Gogh a fistful of colored pencils when he came to her father’s fabric shop. She remembered the painter as a dirty, smelly, disagreeable man and found his work to be of a similar nature. By the time she was in her eighties, she’d outlived all of her family, including her grandson, who died in a motorcycle accident, and her husband, who ate a dessert topped with canned cherries that were later found to contain botulism. Jeanne had eaten the same dessert herself but was only mildly sick from the canned fruit. In reading about this extraordinary woman, Calliope was fascinated by two items. The first was the way in which the press celebrated her. Once she became the oldest living person, reporters from as far away as China showed up in the small French town. She entertained them with witticisms, like “I’ve only got one wrinkle and I’m sitting on it.” She gave advice. “He who hugs too much, hugs badly.” She philosophized. “I’ve been forgotten by a good God.” She was their darling, and what she said delighted them. Her accounts of history were given more weight than any text, and it was said that the press would take her version of the construction of the Eiffel Tower over Mr. Eiffel’s own written words if it came to that. Calliope, who’d had her own brush with celebrity in the aftermath of the plane crash, envied the decade-long thrall Jeanne held over the press.
The second item that Calliope paid particularly close attention to was Jeanne’s prescription for longevity. It included the usual tropes about enjoying life, living for the future and not the past, but in addition, Jeanne gleefully told reporters that she enjoyed three vices every day—one unfiltered cigarette, one glass of port, and a piece of chocolate—and that she was able to wash all these evils out of her body with a big dose of olive oil. She not only cooked with it, but she also used it as a moisturizer for her face, and every night before bed, she swallowed a tablespoon of it.
Taken together, these two facts made Calliope realize her family was sitting on a potential gold mine. For the last thirty years, the Keller women had sold their olives to a neighboring orchard that processed them for canning. In exchange for the olives, the neighbor took care of the orchard and gave them 60 percent of what he made after his labor costs. It was enough money for Anna and Bets to take care of themselves and the house, including the cost of Frank’s care. However, there were always olives left behind, and in a good year a grower, especially one wanting to use the olives for oil, could leave the fruit on the trees through January. Most years, after the harvest was finished in November, Anna would wander into the orchard and glean what she could—using those olives and her father’s handpress to make her own oil. This
olio nuovo,
as the Italians called it, was revered for its bright, peppery taste and health properties. This year, while everyone else had been preoccupied with Deb’s parole hearing, Calliope had hired a few locals to strip the orchard bare of the leftover olives.
Olive oil is notoriously tricky and
olio nuovo
is even more volatile. She’d arranged to have the oil pressed at one of the facilities on the outskirts of Kidron the day after the harvest, which coincidentally had been the day Deb was up for parole. If she’d not had them pressed immediately, there was a danger of fermentation. Once the oil was pressed, it was filtered into large steel drums and left in a cool dark cellar to settle. No matter how fine the sieve, there were always bits of olives that slipped through during the pressing, and fresh olive oil, like the sort Anna pressed, had to be consumed quickly. Fresh-pressed oil was more green than gold, with an aftertaste of pepper. The oil took on a gold hue after it settled. In late March she tasted the settled oil to make sure nothing had gone wrong in the process. There was always a chance of an oil turning during settling, a chance that the bright bite of fresh oil would turn to a fustiness as it settled, or worse that the room would not have stayed cool enough and she’d have gallons and gallons of rancid oil.
Her oil, which she’d been calling Sixth Generation, was beautiful, with an assertive olive flavor with a hint of pepper and a buttery finish with a bright, almost citrus note. She hired the stock boys, Robert and Petey, to help her bottle the oil and attach the labels advertising the oil as a special family blend from the Keller Orchards. By the time the baby was due, Calliope had more than five hundred bottles at the ready. Her plan was to present the oil as a gift to everyone when Erin had her baby. But then Deb pulled her disappearing act, and Calliope’s plans for the oil had gone with her daughter.
Like all fats, olive oil has a tendency to turn rancid. She had, at most, until the beginning of fall before the oil would go bitter and be good for nothing more than fire-starter. Before they had electricity at Hill House, Anna and her mother, Mims, used rancid oil for light. Anna said they gave off light that was almost as bright as what you got from whale oil, but that the edges of the light were blue and afterward the air tasted like olives.
In the living room, the women had turned their attention back to the bottle. Anna moved the bottle around in her hand and ran her fingers over the embossing on the gold label.
Bets got off the couch and moved to where she could peer over Anna’s shoulder. “So, you’ve actually done it.”
“It’s already on display at the store, and I’ve brought you over a dozen bottles to pass around when the media come calling,” Calliope said.
“Media?” asked Erin.
“Of course.”
“—Now we don’t need to start that already,” Bets said.
Calliope ignored her mother and kept speaking, turning so that she faced Anna.
“It’s your oil,” Calliope said. “I mean, not exactly, but I had it pressed from the olives in our orchard, and I can tell you there was nothing left to glean this year.”
“How extraordinary,” Anna said. “It looks so expensive. I’m used to just pouring it out of that old wine bottle I keep in the back of the cupboard. This is too much.”
“No.” Calliope worked hard to restrain her excitement. “The oil is what’s going to save the store. You’ll see. We can put it out when the reporters come and then you can talk about how you have the oil every day. I think—”
“What exactly is your plan?” Bets asked, talking over Calliope.
“People are going to want to buy this, and where there’s demand and limited supply, there’s money to be made.” Calliope turned to face her mother. “I know you don’t—”
“I don’t want to hear about this foolishness. I’ve been worrying about you and that store for months. You are living in some other world.”
“Grandma Bets,” Erin said. The baby started to squirm in her arms.
Bets closed her mouth and compressed her lips until they were a thin line of disapproval.
“I can’t believe they’d actually send anyone out to interview me,” Anna said. “Maybe they would have years ago before there was the Internet and phones that you can see the person you are talking to, but I’m afraid the world has moved past people like me. Poor Hong Wu got no more than a paragraph.”
“They’ll come,” Calliope said. She was sure of it. What Anna said was true, but she also knew that their family had more story than Hong Wu. They were more than a flash in the pan. Amrit had told her as much the last time they spoke about his research.
“How much are you going to charge?” Bets asked. She’d taken the baby from Erin and returned to her seat on the couch. Erin stood in front of the bay window and stretched, arching her back and leaning from side to side.
“Fifty dollars an ounce.”
“That’s insane,” Erin said, almost laughing.
Anna laughed, too, but she seemed to understand what Calliope was driving at. “You underestimate the fear of dying. People will give all they got to buy a few extra years. That’s what Callie’s selling. Years, not oil.”
T
wice a week Calliope visited her father at the facility. In the beginning she’d accompanied her mother on her daily trips to see him, but that had been too difficult for everyone. He was easily frustrated, and trying to figure out who two people were and why they’d come to visit was enough agitation to send him into restraints for the rest of the day. Also, when she and her mother were alone together, they had nothing to say to each other. The coldness had intensified since their disagreement about the oil, and what Calliope wanted most was to be able to talk to her father about her mother. He used to know all the secrets to thawing out Bets, but now he didn’t even remember who his wife was.
Driving from Hill House through Kidron, she began to think of a way that she could unlock her father’s memory—if not of her mother, then of the orchard. Anna’s father had shown Frank most of his secrets, and it was only the two of them who knew the species and crossbreeds that made up the varieties of fruit in the orchard. It would be greedy of her to expect another miracle, and yet it didn’t keep her from hoping that her father would have a moment of lucidity. She wanted more knowledge about the olives, some bit of information to feed to the reporters. No matter what Bets said, they were coming. Calliope believed it.
She tried to see Kidron as outsiders would. There existed a haze of ruin over many of the buildings. Lots of the stucco houses were missing bits of plaster, leaving the chicken wire framing to show through. Others were covered with splotches of yellowing water stains. The hitching posts along the main sidewalks had all been painted primary colors as part of the town’s centennial celebration seven years earlier. Their garish brightness drew attention to the colorlessness of the rest of the city. Her home was a dry, dusty town with too many people on the other side of fifty.
They’d lost the hospital about fifteen years earlier, but Golden Sunsets kept building additions and annexing property until it stood alone on a block near the edge of town, which had once been considered Kidron’s medical district. The facility’s sole architectural feature was that each wing had been painted a different tone of yellow. She guessed the intended effect had been to evoke a sunset, but in reality it looked like a day care, which she supposed in a way it was. Her father had been a resident for two decades.
He managed to look old and young at the same time. His white hair was exactly as it had been his whole life, thick and bold, and his facial expressions were those of a young man in his prime. His body seemed strong and he moved more easily than most of the other patients, but his skin was leathery and covered in age spots. It hung off his arms and chin and cheeks, where the fat deposits had just melted away.
“Frank,” she said and held her hand out to him with her palm down. She’d learned from earlier visits that calling him Daddy, as she longed to do, only upset him.
“Ma chérie,”
he said, his lips grazing the backs of her knuckles. These were the sorts of affectations he’d acquired since moving to the home. Such changes made Calliope suspect that he had wanted a different life.
It was early and he’d not fully dressed for the day. Around his neck he wore a dark purple scarf as if it were an ascot. “You look well,” she said.
“What news have you come with today?” Frank asked, leaning forward in his recliner.
His ears were long and the lobes wobbled when he talked. “Plenty of gossip around Hill House,” Calliope said, pulling her chair closer.
“Ahhh, the Keller women. They’re always getting into trouble.” His eyes brightened at the mention of the house; he never failed to remember it.
She told him about Anna being the oldest and about the oil—changing enough of the details that he wouldn’t connect it to himself. Time had stopped for her father and she’d learned it was dangerous to remind him of his current age. Still, she wanted so badly to make him understand about the Sixth Generation oil. She needed someone to take her side, and her father even when she was little took her side.
The year she turned twelve, she clung to him like a burr on a dog’s coat—desperately afraid that she wouldn’t be allowed to roam the groves once she became a woman. Her mother had been on the lookout for the change in Calliope that summer, prompting her to stay out of Bets’s reach. A few weeks into June, to keep the peace, her father put her to work grafting branches of a new species of olive that could be used to produce oil onto an acre of Anna’s trees. The habit of taking her into the groves carried over into August, and by the end of the summer at the end of a long day, they would emerge from the groves together, with Calliope riding piggyback. Her brothers were either working for pay on the Lindseys’ orchard or too little to be of any use.
“I worked in that orchard,” Frank said when she described the trees that she’d taken her olives from to make the oil. “I used to carry my little girl around with me and feed her bits of jerky I kept in my overall pockets.”
“Yes,” Calliope said, drawing in her breath.
“You were my daughter’s teacher, right? Or maybe the boys’? Did you have the boys in your class? They’re all away at school now and my little girl flies airplanes.”
The boys had never come back from college. They moved to the towns where their wives grew up and put down roots deep enough to keep them out of Kidron. They were in their sixties now. The youngest, Johnny, had been killed in Vietnam. Every few Christmases, Bets and Calliope visited them, but they were always ready with excuses to keep them from coming home to Kidron. Calliope thought it was because they didn’t love their father—Frank was harsh with them.
“Your daughter? She’s a flight attendant?” She tried to keep her voice even. It was greedy of her to ask, but she was desperate for a connection to her father.
“Flight attendant? I think they just call it a stewardess. But I’ll tell you she’s smart enough to fly that whole plane. The only thing she loves more than flying is the orchard.”
“Tell me about the orchard,” she said. The time she spent at her father’s elbow gave her the ability to lose herself in the vineyard. She often felt as if she were treading on holy ground when she was in the grove, stepping into the shaded spots among the trees. Calliope left Kidron behind when she walked the orchard—felt that she was translated to some higher plane where the world was as expansive as space and the fruit of the trees was as innumerable as the stars in the sky.
Listening to her father speak, she heard him describe the same feeling. Gratitude overwhelmed her—this gift of his had kept her sane the last forty years she’d been confined to Kidron. She was sure her mother married Frank because he knew how to make their family’s olive orchard better. Before his family arrived in Kidron, they’d worked the trees in Italy. The summer before she went to flight school, he had finished grafting the farthest corner of the orchard with Bouteillans. No one believed that olive oil was worth producing. That had been the idea early on in Kidron, to produce olive oil, but the first settlers soon discovered that the olives that grew well there didn’t produce enough oil to make their investment pay off, and no matter how effectively they worked, how many efficiencies they adopted, they couldn’t price their oil lower than it could be imported.
He stopped talking and looked at her closely. “I’m a terrible host. You’ve come to me for advice. I’ve just talked on and on and never once asked you what your problem was.”
Calliope told him about how people wanted California oil now. How table olives were out of fashion and many of the orchard owners were playing catch-up and just now grafting oil-producing varieties onto their stock. Calliope described this new breed of American who cared about buying local, pesticide-free products. He reached over and picked up her hand. He held it like they were both children. The intimate gesture was devoid of intent. Calliope stopped talking and looked closely at her father, hoping for a glimmer of recognition in his eyes. Occasionally this happened, but he was never in the present. If he recognized her, it would be from a time before he started to forget. There was no familiarity.
“There’s money in oil,” he said.
“No one’s ever found oil in this part of California,” Calliope said.
He laughed, and it was like rain after a dry, dusty summer.
“That’s a good one. You’re a sharp lady. Sharp enough that I’ll tell you my secret.” He put his head close to hers. “Bouteillans. I’ve got acres of them over on my wife’s land. Best cultivar for oil. Thirty-five percent yield, and they’re big enough for table production if you don’t want to wait for the oil. Of course, no one believes me because even for Bouteillans, that’s too high. I used to think I’d invented a new breed, but I had some young guy from the agriculture college come out and test ’em. They were just what I said they were. I guess it’s the land or the trees that makes them special. I never could tell. I’ll cut you some if you want to graft some of your acreage.”
“Liquid gold,” she said.
Her father smiled. His shock of white hair, which he kept swept back and was quite vain about, fell over his eyes. “There’s a trick to it though. You can’t harvest in October; you have to wait sometimes until Christmas or maybe even as late as New Year’s. And if you get an especially cold snap in October, then the oil production will be through the roof.”
This much she knew from watching him work in the orchard all those years. One of her favorite memories was tied to this late harvest. She tried to get him to speak of it. “I remember one of your kids telling me about your oil. They found bottles of it in their stockings?”
Frank narrowed his eyes. She didn’t know if it was because he was suspicious of her or because he couldn’t remember. “Wasn’t us. Oil spoils too quickly. Sounds like a fool thing to do. We put oranges in the kids’ stockings, filled out the toe better than anything else.”
She remembered the oranges. She’d hoped he’d tell her about that first Christmas when the Bouteillans were ripe enough to harvest. He’d had to glean what was left after the harvest in the fall because Anna had refused to let him keep a full crop on the trees. Christmas eve, she’d watch as her father, as prideful as he’d been when one of his sons was born, set up an elaborate tasting of his oil for their mother.
She tried again. “Can you tell where the oil came from by tasting it?”
Frank’s eyes darted around the room. “Why are you asking me about oil? I thought you were here to see if I’m fit to go on outings.”
She’d lost him. This happened quickly with her father—a look out the window or a question that made his brain work too hard could reset him. She was someone new to him now. She knew enough, had been in the situation often enough, to recognize the best option was to leave as quickly as possible.
“You’re fine, Mr. Wallace. I’ll tell Dolores that you are healthy enough to leave for the occasional day trip.” She extended her hand to him, and he rose to shake it.
“Guy will be so pleased. He’s wanted for ages to go to the casino.”
Frank followed Calliope out of his room and called loudly for Guy. She stopped and talked with Dolores at the front desk and watched her father greet his friend with a kiss on either cheek. Guy, who’d had a stroke, was in a wheelchair, and he reached up to Frank for a hug. “They’re getting close,” she said to Dolores.
“It’s nice that they’ve found each other. They’re so much alike and I gotta say Guy was pretty depressed until he met your father. He’s good with him, calms him down.”
“Dad said he wanted permission to go on a trip. Do I need to sign anything?”
“Naw. Your mom took care of it when she was in here earlier.”
“So, she knows about Guy?” Calliope asked.
The nurse shrugged. “Who knows anything these days?”
What Calliope remembered about that particular Christmas eve was that her mother had never come home. Before Johnny was born, Bets disappeared a couple of nights a month. Frank called it running out. She remembered that year her father had laid out finger-size bowls of different olive oils and pieces of bread. “Got a treat for your momma,” he’d said after he finished reciting
’Twas the Night Before Christmas
from memory and tucking the children into bed. Calliope told him she was worried, and he leaned close and whispered for her to say a prayer. “Your momma always comes back, but we can’t give her everything she needs. That’s why she runs out.”
Calliope came down the stairs at midnight, but instead of sending her back up, he called her down and asked her if she was ready for an adventure. There were five bowls of oil on the table. He had her taste each one, talking about the different qualities of the olives. Some were fruity and others bitter, like the rind of an orange. When they were done tasting, he asked her which one was his. She tapped one of the bowls on the table. Her father roared his disapproval. “Look at the color,” he’d shouted. “That one’s crap—the color of a muddy pond. Look at this one.” He held up the bowl in the middle. “It looks like liquid gold.”
Calliope thought the color was more like a beam of light coming through a cloud. She’d always wished she’d taken more time picking, remembered that the middle one had fruity undertones, while the rest of the samples tasted greasy or soapy and had the aftertaste of rot. But at that moment, she’d been so tired and all she wanted was to finish her father’s test and go to sleep so she could wake up the next day and see her mother cooking pancakes.
Instead of sending her back to bed, he opened the hall closet and pulled the rope of a trapdoor that was hidden underneath the shoe rack. He handed her one present after another and told her to put them under the tree. Up until that moment, Calliope had still believed in Santa Claus.