Read The Roots of the Olive Tree Online
Authors: Courtney Miller Santo
Dr. Hashmi is a dynamic speaker and passionate about his research. Some other researchers have been put off by his zeal for his subject matter. In his spare time, he volunteers with a youth organization in the Pittsburgh area that teaches underprivileged children to fly kites. One of the members of that organization said that a few years ago Dr. Hashmi designed a curriculum for their afterschool program that taught the basics of geometry and spatial recognition through building kites.
Personally, I find his research not only compelling but boundary-pushing. His area of expertise is young in relation to many of the more established disciplines, but it may be that because it has been previously overlooked, the study of aging will yield tremendous society-altering results. So far the field, without even knowing the exact and varied mechanisms of aging, has managed to find ways to extend life in the laboratory. It is admirable that Dr. Hashmi seeks to bring that same approach to humans themselves.
R
ECOMMENDATION
Dr. Hashmi should be awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in the next three years.
E
lizabeth had never enjoyed being called Bets, but nicknames had a way of sticking when you least expected them to. It’d been her Grandpa Percy who called her Bets. Bitty Bets because until she became a teenager, she was a foot shorter than all the other children her age. Elizabeth thought about this as she ducked her head under one of the branches in the orchard on her way back up to Hill House. In all of her ninety years, she’d never lived anywhere else, and unlike the others, she’d never wanted to leave. She watched the dry summer breeze blow across the orchard and stir the glaucous leaves. Her hands were still shaking from her fight with Callie. The girl must know Elizabeth’s secret. She was sure her boyfriend had told her, had betrayed what she’d confessed to him in confidence. She should never have trusted Dr. Hashmi.
She steadied herself on the porch railing. Inside Anna plunked out a series of commercial jingles on the piano while Erin hummed along. The baby let out a gurgle of excitement each time the music swelled, and his laughter made the dog bark. They were oblivious to all the confidences Elizabeth held, not just her own, but others’. There had been small secrets disclosed by her siblings and her playmates, admirations, petty thefts, but her first big secret had come the summer she turned fourteen, when Grandma Mims told Elizabeth the truth about Anna. It was Mims who’d marked her as a secret-keeper, pointed out that Elizabeth looked trustworthy—with eyes set evenly and so roundly that the corners melted into high cheekbones and a voice that was soft and at such a decibel that there were those around her who couldn’t hear her speak.
She slid her hands along the railing, and a small sliver of wood embedded her palm. She sat in the rocking chair and pinched at it with her fingernails, thinking about her grandmother. It seemed like two lifetimes since the old woman had died, but Elizabeth felt her presence now, had felt it in the grove arguing with Callie. She knew that when Dr. Hashmi arrived, there would be revelations, and then there would be change. Elizabeth wasn’t ready for either. She dug at the splinter until her palm bled.
When it became clear that Mims was dying, father asked Elizabeth to come in from the olive fields and take care of her grandmother. That had been the summer he’d dropped Bitty from her nickname. Calling her Bets, she saw now, was an attempt to delay the obvious—that she was growing up. That July she’d been taken to the department store in Red Bluff for what Anna called womanly wears.
Mims had been a large woman, but that summer she lost fifty pounds and her skin hung on her like sheets on the line. She’d seemed so old then to Bets, as wrinkled and gray as Anna was now, although at the time Mims couldn’t have been much more than sixty. When Elizabeth lifted Mims’s arms to bathe her, she had to push aside folds of skin to clean between them. It reminded her of patting dry the chickens after they’d been plucked. They both averted their eyes during these moments. At other times, when Elizabeth read to Mims from the book of Tobit or Esther, a conspiratorial feeling emerged between them. Mims had grown up Catholic but became a Lutheran to please her husband. The first night Elizabeth had sat with her, she’d asked her to go next door to the Lindseys’ and borrow their mother’s Bible. “I need a little of my girlhood faith,” she’d said by way of explanation to Elizabeth.
One night after Mims’s eyes closed and Elizabeth got up to go to her own room, her grandmother let out a whimper. Elizabeth tried to soothe her, but she became more distraught and finally she said, “Your mother is not my daughter.”
The entire story unspooled from Mims. The time spent in Australia and how on the night they were forced to leave, that her husband had told her about his infidelity with the girl who came into town to help with the laundry. That bush woman’s child, the little four-year-old girl who had freckles, was also his child. “He wouldn’t leave Brisbane without her,” Mims said. “I watched, stood by as he took Anna from her mother’s arms. I grabbed tight to my own children as he did this, as if I were protecting them from being taken.”
Elizabeth wondered that her mother didn’t know. Days after learning the story, she studied her mother and saw that she looked nothing like Mims. Anna had skin that was the same color as the bark of the olive trees. Her hair was dark with a hard wave that resisted all attempts to pin it back. She had mannerisms of her father, but where he had the high, chubby cheeks of the Irish, Anna’s cheeks stretched from her eyes to her chin, and her heavy mouth gave her face the appearance of a bulldog when she was angry. She had her father’s eyes, in shape, but they were yellow-brown instead of blue. Elizabeth knew she looked like her mother, her own skin was lighter and the wave in her hair more manageable, but side by side they were the same—especially now that she’d started to take on a woman’s shape.
The story came out in bits as Mims’s illness lingered. Elizabeth didn’t know what to do with her secret. She was afraid of her grandfather, who she’d always thought of as a hard man. Now that she knew he’d taken Anna from her real mother, she stopped talking to him. He didn’t seem to notice that she answered in nods instead of yes, sirs. One afternoon as she helped her mother knead biscuits, she asked Anna about her childhood, about Australia.
Anna was brisk and efficient in the kitchen. “What I remember most is wanting to leave. If you want to learn about kangaroos and wallabies, you should ask your Uncle Wealthy.”
She pushed her mother, asked her about her earliest memory of Mims. Anna pursed her lips and folded a biscuit in half. “She didn’t cry. The day Violet was burned up in the school fire, I remember her slapping Daddy when he cried, but not Mims. She said God gave them either what they deserved or what they could handle.”
“But Mims cries all the time,” Elizabeth said. She was alarmed that when her mother had said this, there was a hint of satisfaction to the story.
“She’s gotten old,” her mother said with a wave of her hand. “You get near the end of your life and you start regretting. But when you’re young you can’t waste time on tears.”
At that moment, Elizabeth’s father had come into the room. “That’s the Scot-Irish in you,” he said and grabbed his wife around the waist. Anna stiffened and then rested her shoulder briefly against his shoulder. “You aren’t telling my baby girl to toughen up, are you? You save that talk for the boys. I’m pretty sure one of your sons was wailing about a splinter this morning.”
“Oh hush,” said Anna, tossing a bit of flour at him.
Mims died in July. It was at her funeral that Elizabeth thought to talk with Uncle Wealthy about the secret. He had been nearly eleven when they came over on the ship—old enough to remember the sudden addition of a four-year-old to his family just before they left for the United States. Wealthy was a speculator. “Trying to live up to my name,” he’d said if someone asked him about his current project. He bought and sold land, originally trying to second-guess the railroads and then spent most of his time in Texas buying and selling leases in search of a well plentiful enough that he could retire.
At the funeral, he arrived wearing the largest hat Elizabeth had ever seen. He had a mustache, and his red hair had started to turn white. He entertained the children by making shadow puppets on the walls outside the home in Kidron. Elizabeth didn’t know how to start a serious conversation with an adult. She felt that if she asked him outright, she’d be betraying a secret, so she asked him sideways questions like she had of her mother.
Tell me about Australia. What’s your earliest memory of my mom? What did you do when you were on the boat?
On his second day there, he asked her if she wanted to go for a ride. Her father kept a few horses for when the roads became too muddy to drive in, and they saddled up two old mares and headed down to the river. They talked a little as they rode, mostly about how different the land was in west Texas, and he tried to teach her a few words in Spanish. When they could see the river, they stopped their horses. He didn’t look at her as he spoke.
“What did Mims tell you?”
“She isn’t Anna’s mother.”
“She’s wrong about that. Mims was every bit a mother to Anna.”
Elizabeth stumbled over her words. “I mean she told me that Grandpa stole my mother from her real mother.”
Wealthy sighed. “I’m not sure he stole her, but what he did was wrong. He should have brought the laundress with us, paid for her passage to America, too.”
“I don’t know what to do,” Elizabeth said. The water was muddy. It always was back then. There weren’t any dams and reservoirs to keep the silt from flowing down from Mount Shasta.
“Forget it. Knowing that Mims isn’t your grandmother changes nothing.”
“Does my mother know?”
“She knows and she doesn’t know.” Wealthy dismounted from his horse and led it to the river to drink.
It took Elizabeth many years to understand what her uncle was telling her. Wealthy never did live up to his name, but every time he hit big, before he poured it into another speculation, he bought a few acres of land around the family orchard in Kidron, so that by the time Elizabeth married and her brothers went off to seek their fortunes, there was enough land for everyone to feel safe. Wealthy died in 1943 mining a claim in Kiwalik Flats. Two of Elizabeth’s brothers and a score of nephews and cousins had made the trek to western Alaska to mine the claim. It was there, like Wealthy himself on the verge of paying off. A month after his death, Elizabeth received a nugget in the mail that he’d fashioned into a necklace. It was five ounces of gold and looked like a hardened lump of oatmeal.
Elizabeth’s palm had stopped bleeding, but a bit of the splinter remained. She unhooked the necklace she’d worn most of her life and weighed the gold nugget in her hand. There had been no note with Wealthy’s gift, and as she turned it over in her hand, she understood that it was payment for keeping secrets.
T
he hard crunch of tires on the gravel drive brought Elizabeth from her memories. She saw the geneticist with his unkempt black hair and round face peering at her through his windshield. In her periphery, she saw Callie step out of the orchard and move toward the car. The piano had stopped playing. A wave of panic rushed over Elizabeth. For the last few months, she’d avoided considering what Dr. Hashmi would find when he looked at her blood, at her children’s blood, but seeing him again the fear rushed at her, and she felt submerged. She had to talk to Dr. Hashmi before he spoke to them all. She stepped quickly down the stairs and waved at him to stop.
He rolled down the window. “You are excited,” he said.
“No. We have to talk before you tell the others what you know. Can we go someplace? Or maybe just talk in the car?” Elizabeth opened the passenger door and got in. Callie arrived at the car at that moment.
“Mom, what are you doing?” she asked.
“The good doctor forgot one of his papers at the motel, and I need the fresh air. Told him to take me for a drive.” Elizabeth gestured to Dr. Hashmi to back the car up and waved to her daughter and her mother, who’d come onto the porch.
“We’ll be right back,” Dr. Hashmi said and gave a sort of a nod to Callie.
They didn’t speak until he’d turned onto the main road from Hill House.
“Where to?” he asked.
“No place, anyplace. There’s a field about two miles down with an access point that only a few of us know about. I’ll tell you when to turn,” Elizabeth said. Her palm had started to bleed again, and she wiped it on her gray trousers.
She directed him to park under one of the oak trees that dotted the field. “This used to be an orchard, but some fool got the idea that it would be cheaper to lop off the trees every year rather than prune them. Called it coppicing,” she said.
“Didn’t work?” asked Dr. Hashmi.
“Broke him. The trees didn’t regenerate as fast as he thought.”
She rolled down her window and put her seat back far enough that she could stretch out. These compact cars always felt like she’d stuffed herself into a box. Dr. Hashmi pulled some papers from a folder he had in the back of the car and shuffled them.
“I’m guessing this is about the blood work,” he began.
She cut him off. “You ever hear of a bunyip?”
He shook his head. Elizabeth stretched out her legs and rested her feet on the dashboard. “When we were younger, Mom used to warn us about a creature that had the skin of a seal and the mouth of a crocodile. Said it hid in water. We liked to come down here before I had breasts and swim in the mud holes. They were cold as hell.” She looked out the window and pointed to a small clearing past two oak trees and several other stumps. “There’s one that pops up there. Vernal pools they called them back then.”
“Yes. I know about these. They come in the spring when the water channels get overloaded with melting snow,” said Dr. Hashmi. He did not appear to want to hurry Elizabeth’s story up, just nodded at her to continue.
“I never went in the water. I’d come down here with my brothers and watch them strip to their skivvies and jump in with yelps and hollers. But I couldn’t do it because I just knew that that bunyip was waiting for me to put my toe in the water.”
“Surely there’s no such thing as a bunyip,” said the doctor quietly.
“No. No. It’s just a made-up monster, some beast held over from my mother’s childhood. It’s just that when you get older, get to be as old as I am, that you wish there were bunyips. What can hurt me now are the monsters I made myself.”
“It’s not as bad as all that,” he said.
Elizabeth wanted it to be over. She turned to him and said the line she’d been practicing since the day he came to draw her blood. “You’ve found me out.” The words weren’t lighthearted and funny as she intended. Instead, she blinked away tears and the words fell like stones into a pond. Each one making its own ripple.
He handed her a sheet of paper, and she saw that Callie’s name was typed at the top of it. “The lab, as part of my research, analyzed the DNA your family provided, not just for longevity but also to group them by similarity in profiles. I wanted to see how being directly related to Anna affected the results. Basically, these tests also revealed paternity. There are fifteen DNA markers we use to determine paternity.” He pointed to numbers on Callie’s sheet and read off numbers he called
alleles
and discussed
locus
. Elizabeth wasn’t listening.
She knew what he was saying. Callie was her daughter and Frank’s daughter. It had taken them four years to conceive. Four years of Elizabeth lying in bed and praying for her husband to touch her. She’d wanted a large family, like she’d grown up in. But Frank didn’t want her.
The geneticist pulled out the sheets of paper with her boys’ names on them. Matthew, John, Mark, Luke. The four gospels. The names were an apology to God. Her boys had all sent samples of their blood to Dr. Hashmi. This collection of samples from all the direct descendants was what had taken the doctor so long, he explained. He paused before continuing. “These results exclude Frank as the father and, I was surprised at this, they show that it is highly probable that each of your sons has a different father.”
What must he think? Elizabeth looked at Dr. Hashmi, who was intently focused on his pen—clicking the top of it repeatedly. “Can we keep this from them?”
He cleared his throat. “In my experience.” He stopped and then reached out to take her hand. “Ms. Bets. This happens more often than you’d expect. I can keep your secret, and unless one of your sons or their children is particularly knowledgeable about genetics, you won’t be found out. I wonder that some of them don’t already know. I mean, if you look at the odds of you and Frank having a blue-eyed child, and you have three sons with blue eyes.”
She interrupted him. “You’ll keep this from them then?”
He nodded. “But if it were me, I’d want to know about the bunyip.”
“Wouldn’t you hate her though?”
“Who?”
“Your mother.”
He shrugged. “Hate’s a thing you can get over.”
“I don’t have enough time left for them to get over it.”
“You have more time left than I do.” Dr. Hashmi hugged her then, and whispered “Tell them” into her ear.
She opened the car door and stepped out into the field. The grass was dry, and as she walked, grasshoppers leaped ahead of her steps. “I need a minute,” she called to Dr. Hashmi. He waved her off, reclined his seat, and closed his eyes.
She wished she could be with Frank. She needed him to have a lucid moment to talk with him honestly about what she’d done, about what she’d asked him for permission to do. She thought about her boys and knew that if she dared tell them, they would forgive her.
T
he drive back to Hill House was far too short. She saw Callie sitting on the front stoop drawing letters in the gravel with the tip of her shoe. Elizabeth let Dr. Hashmi get out first. He leaned down and offered a hand to Callie. When he pulled Callie to her feet, she stumbled into him and they embraced for several seconds, exchanging low whispers. Her daughter wouldn’t forgive her. Allegiance was more important to Callie than water, and no matter what her reason, she’d blame Elizabeth for the disloyalty.
“Feel better?” Callie asked, holding her hand out. Elizabeth had expected her daughter to be holding on to some of the anger from their earlier fight in the groves, but Dr. Hashmi’s presence seemed to have erased the tension that had been between them. Her daughter had not been this temperamental since she was a child. Elizabeth, for the thousandth time, wondered what her daughter would have been like if that damn pilot hadn’t committed suicide by flying his plane into that mountain. She embraced her and breathed in the scent of her hair, which smelled like lavender and the dirt around Hill House.
“Too tight. Oomph,” Callie said and pulled away, but for just a moment, Elizabeth had felt her daughter return her embrace.
She’d been the wrong kind of mother to Callie. Even before the crash, she’d not mothered her in the way she needed. She felt that she owed it to Frank to let him have her, raise her the way he wanted. They both knew the others wouldn’t be his and that he’d feel this. Her husband had been superstitious and taught Callie all his rituals. Frank had always been in awe of Elizabeth’s family. He watched as their vineyards prospered in years when his family’s withered. He’d been there to see Anna appear to stop aging as his own mother lost her mind. Her mother-in-law had died not because she’d gotten old, but because she’d wandered away in the middle of the night and fallen into an irrigation ditch. The old woman never recovered from the pneumonia she caught that night.
Callie was as much Frank’s daughter as the boys were Elizabeth’s. Without the imprint of their father, they became what Elizabeth wanted them to be. She fostered them with her uncle Wealthy in the summers—sending them to work wherever his next big find landed him—Sedona, Walla Walla, and finally western Alaska.
“You look funny,” Callie said.
“I was just thinking about your brothers.”
“They’re just in a different stage of their life. Remember when they were all having their babies. That one year, when was it? In 1968, when between the three of them they had three babies. They couldn’t stop calling you then—asking for advice and reassurance that they were doing what was right. You’ll see them soon.”
“It was hard to talk with them after Deb disappeared again. I hated making those calls because I never know how to talk to them about you or their niece and it always leaves us with such sadness and distance.” Elizabeth, without realizing it, had brought up the sore spot between them.
Callie furrowed her forehead. “It’s nobody’s business where Deb is. Or why she left—especially my brothers. They were never kind to her—to us.”
How could the happiness her daughter had felt just a moment earlier be so easily obliterated? “No, that’s not true, they just want what is best for—”
“Nobody wants what’s best for me. You all blame me for the way she turned out. I know they think it is my fault. Do you realize that neither Mark nor Matt has sent me a thank-you card for any of the presents I sent for birthdays, graduations? Their photocopied Christmas letters are full of how well their children are doing. Who graduated from college, who was elected mayor, how many times they’ve sailed around Africa. And they’re just like you, they think the smartest thing Deb did was leave again. Run away from her problems and leave us with our own.”
“There was no choice. If they find her, she’ll go back to prison until she dies.”
Dr. Hashmi cleared his throat.
“That’s what she deserves.” Callie was absolute in this statement.
“Should we go inside?” he asked.
“Not even Erin believes that. And out of all of us, your granddaughter should have the last say,” Elizabeth said.
It was because of Erin that Elizabeth and Callie kept peace. Invoking her now brought the argument to a close. They both knew there was nowhere for them to go with their anger and that it would be best to move on to another subject.
Callie slid her arm around Dr. Hashmi’s waist and walked up the steps. Leaning on him, her limp was less pronounced, and Elizabeth watched her daughter’s shoulders relax as they walked in the house together.