The Roots of the Olive Tree (17 page)

They were laughing when Anna came into the kitchen, followed by her dog. “What’s all this?” she said, looking around at the papers that covered her table. Erin explained what she’d found, including the mysterious twin girls on the manifest.

Calliope watched her grandmother’s face change as Erin spoke. Anna’s eyes clouded, and the muscles in her jaw slackened. She eased into one of the kitchen chairs and fingered the yellowed papers. “I never thought that was real. They’d come to me in dreams and sometimes I’d wake with their laughter still in my ears.” She shook her head. “What a silly thing to say. I should tell you that I always knew that. But I’m not sure I did.”

“None of us ever had a sister,” Calliope said. She was shaken at the change in Anna, the way she’d seemed to age in front of them.

Anna said, “I would have liked to have them here in Kidron. I used to ask Mims about children, pester her, for siblings. She’d tell me that after Violet, she was like a chicken gone broody, she’s just interested in sitting around on the eggs she’s already got, not laying new ones.”

Keller’s small mewing cry came from the bedroom and Erin smiled. “I’ve gone broody,” she said and went to feed her son.

Bets entered the kitchen fully dressed. “Why are we talking about chickens?”

The dog barked and pawed at the back door.

Anna, who had been reading and rereading the passenger manifest, slid it over to her daughter. “I had sisters,” she said.

Bets let the dog outside. “Who wants oatmeal?” she asked and started gathering the pot and the milk.

“Do you think we’d be different if we had sisters?” Calliope asked. She remembered as a child that she’d desperately wanted a sister to even the odds against her brothers. For a while, she’d tried to make Lucy, who lived at the bottom of the hill, her best friend, and they became blood sisters, but it wasn’t the same as having another woman in the house.

“I don’t know how it would be much different than what we have,” Bets said. “There’s enough women in our family.”

It surprised Calliope that Anna disagreed with her. “The woman who’s your mother or your mother’s mother is different than a sister,” she said. “Look at your brothers, the way they bonded to each other, shared the same growing-up experience.”

“But they don’t have Daddy around, so they had to cling to each other, to that growing up,” Bets said, stirring the oatmeal.

Anna shook her head. “You’ll understand it better when I die. That despite how age has equaled us, we’re not equals, and that’s what you have in a sister, an equal.”

Bets thumped the wooden spoon against the side of the pan. Calliope looked up from the table and saw that her mother had her back turned to them. She pulled the spice cupboard open with a violent tug and shoved jars and bottles aside until she found the cinnamon. More to the wall, than to them, Bets said, “You’re never going to die. You’re going to live on and on and on and on.”

“I just might,” Anna said. Her mouth had tightened and her lips were turning white as she compressed them.

The cap came off the cinnamon and a splash of it fell into the oatmeal. Bets yelled and then turned sharply toward her mother. “You don’t even want to die. You’re too greedy for that. Can’t let go and let any of us have a life that you’re not a part of.”

“What’s wrong with wanting to live? That’s what God put us here for,” Anna said.

The oatmeal started to burn. Calliope moved to take it from the stove, but hesitated when her mother threw the wooden spoon against the wall. She walked right up to Anna’s face and said, “Then live! Just don’t expect me to follow along.”

Anna poked her daughter in the chest. “So go ahead. Die. Stop talking about it and give it up.”

Calliope gasped.

“What in the blazes is going on in here?” Erin asked, taking the burning pot of oatmeal off the stove. “The baby’s sleeping. You’re both being so morbid.”

“It’s just all so exhausting,” Bets said, taking a seat at the table. Calliope took up her mother’s hand and stroked the back of it.

“It’s going to be okay. We’ll all be okay,” Calliope said, not meeting anyone’s eyes.

Anna took out a kitchen towel, wiped the oatmeal off the wall, and then bent to pick the spoon off the linoleum, where it had landed. Calliope hadn’t seen them become angry with each other like this in years. Maybe even a decade. The year Anna had turned one hundred, they’d stopped talking to each other for several weeks. Bets didn’t like to be mothered. Calliope wondered if it had always been this way, even when Bets was too young to take care of herself. She knew that her mother hadn’t mothered her. She’d never felt clucked over, or smothered. Part of the urge she had to run away came because her mother never seemed to care what she was doing or how she’d been. Frank had cared; it was her father who had taught her the important lessons in life.

In many ways Frank had been like a mother and a father to her, and yet he’d ignored his sons. He let Bets mother them, and she had; she treated them like little princes all in need of being served, waited on them as if they had some disadvantage in life.

Calliope felt cold. She stood up and kissed Anna on the top of her head and then went to start another batch of oatmeal. She spoke quietly to her mother, not wanting Anna to overhear. “How did you know about the twins?”

“I didn’t,” Bets said. She took the cinnamon off the counter and stirred it into the new pot.

“You weren’t surprised,” Calliope said. “It was like you expected that we’d find something like this and you’re so angry about it. You’ve been angry about everything lately.”

“I’m angry about a century’s worth of small annoyances,” Bets said.

“They’re still small annoyances,” Calliope said. She took four bowls down from the cupboard. “You don’t get mad unless someone’s found out one of your secrets, so what is it this time? What do you know?”

“I don’t know anything,” her mother said, taking the oatmeal to the table.

They ate in silence, passing the slip of paper with the ship’s manifest around to one another and wondering aloud about Charlotte and Louisa. They gave them characteristics and family traits. Lottie, they called her, would have had Mims’s gray eyes and her dimples, and Louisa would have had red hair instead of gold. Calliope listened as Anna spoke about Mims and her father. Bets was quiet and Erin asked questions to fill the silences. Calliope wished she, like Erin, had known her great-great-grandparents. To hear Anna describe them, Mims and Percy Davison were as alive as any of them sitting at the table. Listening to Anna’s voice, she heard a slight Australian accent. She finally understood that if it weren’t for some genetic miracle, or health craze, that she wouldn’t know Anna, wouldn’t have had so much time with her own mother, and all the sisters in the world wouldn’t make up for that.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Independence

T
he night before Amrit returned to Kidron, Calliope asked Petey and Robert to hammer a
FOR SALE
sign into the small strip of grass that fronted the Pit Stop’s parking lot. Nancy, the cashier, hovered over them. She didn’t conceal her resentment.

“Did you tell your family about how serious the doctor is about you?” Nancy asked. She lit a cigarette and smoked it, standing in the open door of the store.

“Can’t smoke inside,” Calliope said.

Nancy shuffled her feet so that they were on the outside of the doorframe. “You didn’t tell them did you?”

“Nothing to tell,” Calliope said. “Got any plans for July Fourth?” She listened to Nancy’s yammering and wished she’d thought to bring a level. The boys had eyeballed the sign and called it straight, but to Calliope, it still had a slant.

One of her third cousins owned a real estate office in Kidron and had listed the property, promising not to charge a commission. Still, the property and business were worth less than she’d thought.

Petey wiped his face with a bandanna while Robert gathered up the tools.

“What if it never sells?” Nancy asked. “Will you just shut it up? What if someone wants the store, but not the business? This is prime real estate. I think they’d buy it for your sign alone.”

Calliope looked up at the metal billboard that stretched up out of the back lot of the Pit Stop. It rose nearly fifty-five feet, bringing it in perfect placement for drivers on I-5. Far enough from the exit that drivers had time to change lanes. “I’ll sell what I can. I got time enough to wait. Why you worrying? You don’t need this job.”

Nancy’s husband was on disability. “Everyone needs a job,” she said, tapping her ashes onto the cement stoop. “Even if you’ve got a man, you need a job.”

Calliope locked up the store and turned off the lights on the billboard. She waved good-bye to the boys and walked Nancy to her car. It had been a strange month. The
Guinness
people had accepted the census records and the ship’s manifest as proof enough of Anna’s age and had officially anointed her the oldest person in the world. Anna then spent a week receiving visitors from major news outlets—appearing on
Oprah,
via satellite, and talking on the phone with Regis. Anna told Oprah about the olive oil, and in a matter of two days, Calliope had sold out her entire stock and made enough money to cover all the missed mortgage payments on the store.

She’d confided in Amrit that she’d felt less excited than she thought she would. “I’ve found other things to worry about, like my mother, or that Deb will get caught.” She looked at her watch. He would already be on the plane from Pittsburgh to San Francisco, which meant it would be the first night in six months they hadn’t wished each other good night. She turned the car on and drove toward Hill House. It would be good to see him again. When they spoke, she had trouble picturing his face. He was a fleshy, robust man with a beard that did nothing to cover up the roundness of his cheeks, his voice with its slight accent was deep and powerful. She’d turned down the volume on her phone so that his voice didn’t alarm her. She had it so low now that when they talked, he sounded like he was whispering, something he did in the bedroom. It had been too long since she’d seen him.

The lights at Hill House were off and Calliope expected to find everyone on the porch watching the sunset. She walked up the gravel path that led to the back of the house and found it was only Anna in the rockers. “What’s the doctor going to tell us tomorrow?” Anna asked, holding out a wrinkled hand.

“He won’t tell me. Says it wouldn’t be fair to you.”

“That’s a smart man you’ve got,” Anna said. She motioned for Calliope to sit in the chair next to her. “Your leg always hurts after such a long day.”

“I should take another pill. Amrit’s coming in later tonight, and I told him I’d meet him for a late dinner.”

“Your mom thinks you take too many of those pills,” Anna said.

“Just ’cause they didn’t have medicine when the two of you were in pain, doesn’t mean I should suffer. I’ve had enough of suffering.”

“Your mom and I are of the mind-set that suffering is rewarded,” Anna said, compressing her lips.

“You know I don’t believe that anymore. How could I after what happened?” Calliope gestured to the sky, which had started to darken.

“Unbelief’s no reason to stop paying attention to God,” Anna said. They were both quiet a long while and Calliope heard the now familiar noises of her mother helping Erin give Keller a bath. A yellow and gray bird came to rest on the porch railing.

“It’s a Bullock’s oriole,” Anna said. “I haven’t seen one in years. Or maybe I just haven’t been looking.”

Calliope didn’t speak until the bird flew away. She saw in flight that the bird’s chest was a deeper shade of yellow, more like saffron and less like lemon and said as much to Anna.

“It’s a male. They have their own song,” Anna said.

“Wouldn’t the females have their own song, too?” Calliope asked.

Anna looked at her and laughed. “My daddy taught me about them and I guess I never thought about it. But what was special for him about birds was the way the males looked better, sang better, than the females. He didn’t care about the hens, unless he found their nests and could see their eggs, and then he appreciated all the tending as he said.”

There was so much that Calliope didn’t know about the men in her family. The stories passed around at holidays and funerals were about the women. Even her brothers talked about their mother—they didn’t have stories about Frank. A consequence of showing favoritism, she guessed. She had never felt like sharing the moments her father had given her. But now with Bets as silent as ever, and her father’s mind gone, she understood that it would be left to her to pass on her father’s stories.

In World War II, her father had served aboard one of the smaller vessels that had been stationed in the Pacific. She remembered being in the orchard with him while he talked about what the ocean looked like without any land around it. In the stories he told about himself, Frank was a joker, playing the other shipmen for laughs, setting traps that strung up the new mates by their ankles. He’d showed her one day how to set a snare that would tighten around a man’s ankles and swing him up into the sky. She’d tried for months to catch one of her brothers but ultimately only succeeded in pulling the family mutt up by his hind legs.

Calliope told this to Anna. “Was he like that?”

Anna nodded. “Frank had made everyone laugh, even your Grandpa Mike, and he was one helluva son of a bitch.”

“Grandma!” Calliope had rarely heard Anna swear.

“Used to say
bitch
all the time. Was a farm term. Somehow it got all mixed up with those other words, but it was what my husband was.”

“You’ve been alone a long time, know how to stand on your own two feet,” Calliope said. She wanted to ask Anna why it was so much easier for her to be alone, to be celibate.

“I hear you’re in love again. With that doctor fellow,” Anna said.

“I guess.” She would have agreed with Anna, but just then, hearing the way she said it made her feel foolish. They weren’t in love; they were lovers, and now it seemed ridiculous to Calliope to think of her and Amrit being in love. What they were was lonely.

“I never needed that foolishness after Mike died. But it was different then. It was different for a long time. Seems like it only stopped being different a few years ago.”

Calliope thought about how it’d been when she’d returned home from the accident. How most of the men who courted her wanted her because she had money and land. They wanted to be in charge of her, of her family. Greg Rodgers had been different—he’d been in love with her since he was the fat boy whose parents owned the theater. She used to giggle over him when she and her girlfriends went to the movies, took advantage of his crush to get free concessions. “I guess it’s only been different for Erin, and she had to go and fall in love with someone who’s old enough to be her father. So old he treats her the way men used to treat women. Just like her mother. There’s been too many bad men in our lives.”

“Don’t talk that way. You’ve got good brothers and good sons. Deb made her choices, Erin made hers. Your father wasn’t that way. Frank never treated Bets as anything but an equal, and he didn’t marry her for the land. You understand about him, don’t you?”

Calliope shrugged. She wasn’t ready to talk about her father. She didn’t want Anna to stop talking. “How’ve you done it, Grandma? How have you been celibate all these years?”

She expected Anna to blanch at the question, but instead she threw back her head and roared with laughter. The noise brought Bets and Erin to the porch, and Calliope, after resisting for several moments, joined Anna in her mirth.

“What’s so funny?” Bets demanded. She shook her head at them.

“Discretion,” Anna choked out and then chortled.

Erin sat down in another rocker. “I wish you’d tell me. I need a good laugh. All that baby makes me want to do is cry out of frustration or joy. I’m tired of crying.”