The Roots of the Olive Tree (16 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Selling

B
ets found Calliope alone in the kitchen cleaning the stove.

“Nobody sees those crumbs but you,” Bets said.

It was the first time she’d spoken directly to Calliope in weeks. “The ants will find them and then we’ll have to call that horrible pest company again,” Calliope said.

“I’m not trying to start a fight. Why do you always do this?”

“Do what?”

“Think that every word out of my mouth, out of Deb’s mouth, is somehow an attack on you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Calliope said, wiping the last of the crumbs into her hand and then leaning against the stove, taking the weight off her bad leg. Cleaning was like meditation to her. The smell of lemons and vinegar and the sight of a bare expanse of countertop unlocked her mind, allowed her to be open to ideas. Just now she’d decided to add olive oil to the tasting bar at the store. She glanced at her mother and saw that when she relaxed her face and thought no one was watching her, she looked to be on the verge of tears. This vulnerability was new to Bets. As a child, Calliope remembered Bets being strong and distant, like granite. Her eyes had the same black flecks.

“You okay?”

“It’s been a long week. Knowing my mother’s the oldest person alive makes me feel older.”

Calliope raised her eyebrows at her mother. She’d felt invigorated by the news, it made her feel younger, and her life seemed to stretch out in front of her. If Anna were alive and well at one hundred and thirteen, then Calliope hadn’t lived half her life yet. For the first time since she’d returned to Kidron after the accident, she felt like she had time to leave. It wasn’t a jail, and the fear that had kept her there, held her back, was evaporating, like rubbing alcohol. “You don’t look older,” she said and joined her mother at the table.

“What about this oil?”

“Don’t start this again.”

“I’m not. It’s just that sometimes you remind me too much of Frank and of Uncle Wealthy, and it worries me.” Bets blinked slowly and then breathed out her question. “Is it the real thing? Does it do what you say it does?”

Calliope knew she could tell her mother the truth. People had been telling Bets secrets as long as she could remember, but Calliope didn’t want to burden her.

“It’s not fraud,” she said.

“Those are your daddy’s olives, right? I remember when Frank told me about them. I could never see what was so special about them, but I didn’t have the touch you did in the groves.”

“Why do you think Anna’s lived so long?”

Her mother looked like she was about to tell her one of her long-kept secrets. “Your grandmother’s a unique woman. What does that boyfriend of yours say?”

Calliope felt her cheeks get hot and it angered her that she could blush at her age. “He thinks a sequence of our genes doesn’t turn off properly.”

“That’s a reason I’d buy. But what makes our genes special?” Her mother said this as if she already knew the answer.

“Mutation,” Calliope said.

Bets shook her head. “You’ve got to give this oil up. It’s quackery. It is one thing to market it to those idiots who are willing to pay so much more because we sprayed the trees with lemon juice and garlic instead of dimethoate kill, but you know the oil has about as much to do with Anna’s longevity as the prayers she says at night.”

“I need the money,” Calliope said. She wanted her mother to understand this, to feel the practicality of her decision. After all, she hadn’t claimed the oil would add years to people’s lives, only asked that Anna mention that she has a bit of it with bread every night for dinner.

“Sell the store,” her mother said. “You might make a little money.”

“What would I do?” asked Calliope. She was stunned by her mother’s suggestion. She’d always thought of the store as her nest egg, as her retirement plan. She was still paying off the loan, and she wasn’t able to save much of the salary she paid herself. If she could just have a good enough year to pay the loan off, she could turn the management of the store over to Nancy and live off what she would have paid on her mortgage. She’d need at least ten more years to have enough money to live on, and that didn’t take into account her extended life expectancy.

“It wouldn’t be enough,” she said.

“It’s holding you back,” her mother said.

“What’s holding you back?” Erin asked. She’d appeared in the doorway without either one of them realizing she’d been listening. They stared at her and she added, “The baby’s finally asleep, just finished feeding him. Anna’s out like a light.”

“Don’t let Anna know you’ve accused her of sleeping,” Bets said.

“You know Grandma, she just rests, and when her eyes are closed, she’s just replaying some part of her past,” Calliope added.

Erin pulled up a chair. The girl was tired. Calliope remembered her first months of motherhood when she was bone weary and that the lack of sleep had set her nerves on edge so that the littlest slight would send her crying and screaming. She blamed it on her leg. One of the reasons she married Greg was because he let her scream at him for hours and never reacted, just kept doing what he’d been doing whether it was watching television or whittling his pieces of wood until she wore herself out and started crying. And here it was forty years later and a habit she couldn’t break.

“Mom thinks I should sell the store,” Calliope said. She thought that Erin would take her side, would immediately see the legacy of the store, but instead she nodded in agreement.

“That place is killing you,” she said.

“Gives you too many excuses,” added Bets. “You should have been there for Deb’s hearing.”

Erin started to talk in bits and pieces that were hard to follow. Half-finished remembrances about her time at the store when she was younger and a funny story about olives and mice poop that she never finished telling. Across the table Bets smiled at Calliope, and she knew that they were both remembering how hard the early months of motherhood were.

“I always thought you’d leave someday. The whole time I was here doing my growing up I knew that you had that one good leg of yours out the door and that one day I was sure to wake up and find that I was left to just Anna and Bets to raise me.” Erin yawned and then before she put her head on the table, she said. “Why didn’t you leave?”

Looking at her granddaughter, Calliope felt as worn-out as she ever had. She didn’t know what to say and had never known that the girl knew that she felt trapped in Kidron. This past summer had been the first that she hadn’t planned to leave. That was how she’d kept sane over the years, by planning her escape, but this year, her own daughter had beaten her to it. Walked away from another lifetime in prison, and that had taken away Calliope’s desire to run, but it hadn’t made Kidron feel any less like a cage than it had when she arrived at age twenty-two in a half-body cast wheeled up to Anna’s house and set in the front living room on a bed that Frank had moved down so that she could look over the olives as she convalesced.

Her mother leaned across the table and said, “It’s time to close up shop. I’m going to bed.” She shook Erin awake and whispered that she’d better be in bed soon, because little Keller was likely to be up and hungry in just a few hours.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Proof

T
he next day, a research assistant working for the company that published the book of world records requested Anna’s birth certificate. In the midst of promising to fax a copy, Calliope looked up to see Bets shaking her head and mouthing what looked like, “We don’t have it.”

“Just a minute,” Calliope said to the assistant and covered the mouthpiece of the portable phone.

“There’s no birth certificate,” Bets said.

“Then we’ll get it from the courthouse,” Calliope said, waving her hand, as if erasing the problem.

Bets opened her mouth and then closed it. “It doesn’t exist.”

Calliope had the sense that her mother had wanted to say more, that behind that short sentence was a hoard of secrets.

The researcher grew impatient. “Ma’am? Ma’am? I’ve got half a dozen other claims to sort through. Can you just call me back at this number when you have the proof?”

“Of course,” Calliope said, placing the phone back on the wall. Her leg throbbed with pain. She called out to Anna, who was sitting on the back porch with Erin and the baby. Some of the anger and the urgency she felt must have come through because in a moment all the women of the house were settled around the kitchen table.

“I thought you knew this already,” Bets said.

Erin moved the baby to her shoulder and rubbed his back. “This is the problem with this family. You think whatever you know everyone knows.”

“But I’ve told all of you this before,” Anna said.

“Your stories are about Kidron, not Australia,” Calliope said. “I just assumed that Mims and Grandpa Percy came over as newlyweds.”

“I don’t understand why it makes a difference if Anna was born in Brisbane or Kidron. It doesn’t change her age,” Bets said.

“It does matter.” Calliope pushed her chair back from the table. “It’ll take months to get any records out of Australia, and who even knows if they kept this sort of information?”

“You’ve always been such a pessimist,” Bets said. “Even as a little girl, you couldn’t unwrap a present without pointing out potential flaws. The doll’s hands were too fragile. White sweaters never stay white. So-and-so broke his leg trying to learn to ride a bike. It’s no wonder that plane crashed on you. You’ve been asking for it your whole God damn life.”

Calliope wished her mother were wrong. She wished that someone else in the room would disagree with her, but the long silence told her how right Bets was.

“I just can’t get him to burp,” Erin said, switching her son to her other shoulder.

“Let me,” Anna said.

Erin handed over Keller. “There are other ways, you know.”

When no one responded, she continued. “We could look at the census records or figure out how Anna ever got a Social Security card. We’ve got boxes of old papers in the attic. There’s got to be proof lying around here.”

By lunchtime, the women were surrounded by boxes. Bobo yipped and tried to pee on every bit of cardboard, but Calliope had three potential pieces of paper to prove Anna’s age. Right off, Anna had produced a yellowed slip of paper, which had been fastened to her dress the day they arrived at the immigration facility near Los Angeles. The paper, with its loopy handwriting, stated that a girl, age four, had arrived with her parents, Veda, or Mims, as she had always been called, and Percy Davison, to the United States on March 1898. They also had Anna’s Social Security card and her driver’s license, which had expired.

With shaky hands, Calliope called the researcher back. He listened patiently to the descriptions of the proof, and then sighed heavily.

“Ever heard of Carrie White? Or Shigechivo Izumi?”

“No,” Calliope said, sitting down heavily at the table.

“If you ask Carrie’s relatives, she lived to be a hundred seventeen, but their only proof was the age listed on the intake form at the sanatorium her husband dropped her off at when she was in her thirties. Izumi was thought to have died at a hundred and twenty, but it turns out that his family submitted his older brother’s birth certificate as proof for his age. The two siblings had the same name.”

“But we have more than enough. I’m sure Hong Wu didn’t have a birth certificate. His whole family was washed away in a flood.”

“True enough. The immigration paper is good, but the other two are just fruit from a poisonous tree. That is, they could be legitimate, or they could be based on incorrect information. If I were making this decision, I’d want more. Tell me your grandmother’s story again,” the man said.

Calliope recounted what she knew of Anna’s history and then motioned for a pen and paper as the researcher gave her a rapid-fire list of documents that could supplement the ones they’d found.

Calliope looked down at the scrawled list. “We need more proof.”

Erin made everyone lunch, and then they started looking for further evidence that Anna Davison Keller had been born on January 18 in 1894. Erin called a second cousin who was working Wealthy’s land in Alaska to ask if there were any journals or letters from her great-great-uncle stored away up there. Bets visited the courthouse and the library, looking up what public records of Anna did exist. She’d seemed the least interested in learning what Anna remembered of her time in Australia. Erin peppered Anna with questions, and Calliope, too, found herself caught up in the stories Anna told. For the first time in years she listened close as Anna reminisced.

“They grow olives in Australia?” Erin asked. She had Keller on her knees and was playing peek-a-boo with him. “That’s why Grandpa Davison came here, because he knew how to grow olives?”

Anna laughed when Keller laughed. She seemed as amused by the game as the infant. She started to tell a story about a giant tortoise, as if she were reading a picture book to the baby. “There once was a curious girl who liked nothing more than exploring.”

As she continued, Calliope felt as if she’d heard the story before. She thought it might be the cadence, but when Anna held up her hands to show the size of the tortoise, Calliope realized she’d heard this story and a dozen more like it the summer she was recovering from her accident. Every night that year had ended with Anna telling her a fairy tale about a curious little girl in a curious land. There was a story about the tortoise, one about a sick little boy, a girl who lived in a tree, a kind washerwoman, and others that she could only recall emotions about. The stories seemed lost in her memory.

“Why that curious girl is you,” Calliope said, interrupting the big finish. “I’ve just now figured it out.”

Anna shrugged. “I guess they are me. I doubt there’s much truth left in them. I’ve added to them over the years in telling them to all the children, grandchildren, and . . .” She faltered, and Calliope saw she was trying to figure out how many
greats
to add to get to Keller’s generation.

“Great-great-great-grandchildren,” Erin said. “Now that sounds like a fairy tale.”

There were more stories as the afternoon wore on. In Brisbane, the family had lived around the corner from the Botanical Gardens, and for a nickel, any child could ride on the giant tortoise that was said to have been one of the specimens Darwin collected during his voyage to the Galapagos Islands. Wealthy told Anna the tortoise was king of all the reptiles.

Erin interrupted her. “Did you ride it?”

Anna nodded. “I don’t know where I got the nickel, but I climbed on its back and the creature walked me around the paths of the gardens. I kissed its nose before I got off.”

Calliope turned to Erin. “She’s told me this before, only it started with once upon a time in a land far, far away and that kiss gave the child the gift of a long life—to live as long as the tortoise, who was already a century old when the girl kissed it.”

Bobo tilted his head, as if to weigh in on the conversation. Anna scratched his ears and grinned at them. “Every tale has a bit of truth in it, or it wouldn’t be worth telling.”

“You can’t possibly remember that,” Calliope said. “You couldn’t have been more than two, unless your parents lied and you are older than you’re supposed to be.”

Erin opened one of the boxes and as she pulled out leather binders that smelled of decay, she begged for another story.

“I don’t remember much more about Australia,” Anna said. She took the book Erin was holding and turned it right side up. “Daddy’s ledger. Kept track of crop yields.”

“Tell us something about Kidron then, what it was like when you first got here.”

“Dusty,” Anna said, coughing as she fanned the pages of her father’s ledger. She passed the book to Calliope. The pages were brittle, and bits of them broke as she thumbed through them. “Useless.”

“We need something of my mother’s,” Anna said. “Daddy liked numbers and details. He could tell you how big an olive was going to be just by looking at its flower, but he wasn’t good with people. He always said he married Mims to take care of the people in his life.”

Erin, who’d left to put the baby down for his afternoon nap, sat down on the floor in front of a box marked
MIMS
. She hummed to herself as she unpacked a wooden doll and a small wreath under a glass dome.

“That’s made out of human hair,” Anna said, extending her finger toward the wreath.

There were two shades of hair in the finely wrought flowers and knots that formed the wreath, one a copper-gold color and the other a yellow so light it appeared white when Calliope held it up to the light. While Erin questioned Anna about how such a decoration was made, Calliope tried not to think about it. She pictured the long strands of hair greasy with dirt and oil that she pulled out of the drain of the tub, and the thought that Mims had spent hours tying it into knots and winding it around wire made her sick.

A date was carved at the back of the dome, which was mounted on a piece of walnut
. L AND C 1893 TO 1895
.

“I wonder who they were,” Erin said. “Do you know, Anna?”

Anna shook her head. She reached for the wreath, which Erin held, and ran her fingers over the letters. “I remember Mims had this in her bedroom. It hung by the portraits she kept of us and later of our children.” She closed her eyes, and Calliope thought she looked like she might be remembering something, but when she opened them, she just said that no one had the time to work at such intricacies anymore.

Erin adjusted her nursing bra. “I can see why you’d do such a thing. We have so much to hold on to now. I’ve probably taken a thousand pictures of Keller already. I can’t imagine not having that to go to, to remember what he was like as a baby. Why, when Mims was a girl they didn’t even have cameras.”

“I have all my children’s booties,” Anna said. “Knitted them myself. Of course your mother only wore hers that first night. She kept kicking them off. Liked to go barefoot, and I didn’t have the patience to put them back on again. Mims kept telling me she’d get a cold and I’d lose her. That was a real possibility back then you know. We lost babies who got sick.”

Calliope had a difficult time thinking of her mother with bare feet.

“Proof,” Erin shouted. She held a sheaf of paper that had at one time been folded into thirds. “I’ve got her name here, her age, and the year and month they set sail for America.”

“I wonder why we have that,” Anna said, turning the ship’s manifest over in her hands. There was a list of more than 250 people who’d sailed on the
Una.

“It meets the requirements,” Calliope said, looking at her list.

Erin had taken up a piece of paper and was making her own calculations. She looked up at Calliope and shook her head. “This is all so confusing. Wanna order a pizza for dinner?”

Bets came home from the library just before their dinner arrived. She had photocopies of the town’s census records, which first listed Anna as a resident at age six during the 1900 census and in every survey after that. She also had a photocopy of the immigration papers the Davison family had filed when they arrived in San Francisco. “You won’t believe what you can get on the Internet these days,” she said, pulling all the toppings, including the cheese, off her pizza.

Calliope looked at her mother and laughed, forgetting about their fight that had been going on for weeks now. She pictured Bets as a baby, kicking her shoes off, and the image made her squeeze her mother’s arm and whisper that she loved her.

E
arly the next morning, Calliope found Erin in the kitchen. The sun was just beginning its rise but hadn’t yet climbed high enough for them to see its light. Instead, the sky around the hill was blush-colored. “I think I’m doing something wrong,” Erin said. “I’ve been up half the night trying to figure this out. You’re good with numbers.”

Erin slid the pieces of paper she’d been working with over to Calliope. The ship’s manifest listed four children with the Davison family. In addition to Anna and Wealthy, there were two other names: Louisa and Charlotte. They were listed as being three years old. Calliope tried to understand what her granddaughter had been figuring. She had Anna’s birthday of January 18, 1894, the date the ship left Australia June 13, 1898, and three other dates on various sheets of paper.

“Do you see?” Erin asked. “If Mims were pregnant with Anna in May of 1893, then she still would be pregnant with Anna when these twins were born.”

Calliope worked out her math on the scraps of paper. She wanted to talk about these girls Charlotte and Louisa and what had happened to them. Erin’s math was right, but she didn’t take into account any variables. “Not all pregnancies go nine months,” Calliope said. “Twins are almost always early, there’s not a lot of room for two.”

“But at two months? It seems like back then they wouldn’t have survived.”

“Without the exact birthdays, we can’t tell. Anna could’ve been born two weeks early and the twins conceived at the end of March.”

Erin put her head down on the table. “I guess you’re right, there’s just something about it that doesn’t make sense. I wanted to prove that Anna was born in January.”

“You did,” Calliope said. “She’s at least as old as she says she is, and heck, maybe older.”