The Roots of the Olive Tree (4 page)

“I wish I knew,” she’d said.

A
nna told no one about her conversation with Wealthy. She was afraid to believe him, and so over the years, she pushed that memory deep into her mind until she’d convinced herself that she’d forgotten it. She blinked at the paper in front of her—filled with questions about her family, what she ate, how much time she’d spent in the sun as a child, and a chill ran through her. None of her children suspected there was any complication to their genealogy. It was as straight as it could be—a line from Erin back to Mims. Anna shook her head. There was nothing special about her family. No matter what Callie was looking for, the Kellers were ordinary women with ordinary stories. Over the years, she’d found little to lend weight to Wealthy’s claims—a yellowed ticket that the immigration officers had pinned to her coat and her parents’ sworn statement that although they could produce no birth certificate she was born January 18, 1894, in Brisbane. And that was enough for Anna.

CHAPTER SIX

One in Seven Million

A
nna’s interview with Dr. Hashmi began the next morning. They had the house to themselves. Bets had taken Bobo with her to the assisted living facility for her weekly visit with her husband, Frank, and Callie had dragged Erin to the Pit Stop to help with inventory. The last time Anna had been alone with a man was when the cable guy had to come over to string new lines after a late-March thunderstorm. The boy caught her watching him climb up his ladder, and when he brought the bill in for her to sign, she had trouble meeting his eyes and felt the urge to giggle.

Men had stopped appraising Anna around the time her youngest child, Timothy, had gotten married. His wedding had been a lavish affair held in the ballroom of the Fairmont in San Francisco. Her husband, Michael, had been dead nearly two years then, and when people asked her why she never remarried, she liked to tell them that by the time she was ready to get over her husband, the country didn’t have enough men to go around. The war had taken so many. Girls no older than eighteen were throwing themselves at the feet of widowers, and youth with its dewy edges triumphed over age.

Anna finished putting together a tray of olives and crackers. It worried her that Callie had a crush on the doctor. He was the sort of man young women went after, and she didn’t see how her granddaughter could compete. The doorbell rang. Anna knocked over the jar of olives. She cursed her clumsiness, threw a kitchen towel over the mess, and hurried to the door.

Dr. Hashmi looked much as he had the day before. He extended his hand to her with the palm down and she grasped it in more of a grip than a shake. It was small and soft like a woman’s.

“Have I come at the right time?”

“Yes, of course. I just spilled a jar in the kitchen and it took me a moment to make it—”

He held up his hand. “You have near perfect mobility. I am just making sure that the others have gone.”

As Anna told him about the inventory at the store and Bets’s weekly visit with Frank, he unpacked his briefcase onto the coffee table. He laid out a syringe and other tools for drawing blood. Then he ate several olives and asked her about the orchard.

“We used to have several hundred acres, but with all the offspring it’s been divided and quartered and sliced up so much that all we’re left with is fifty acres,” Anna said. She gestured toward the windows that lined the back of the house. The curtains were open, giving them a clear view of the trees at the bottom of the hill.

“Everything’s still so green,” Dr. Hashmi said.

“Those there,” she said, pointing to the center of the grove, “are the original acres, the trees Daddy planted.” Anna took an olive and began to suck on it. The brine coated her tongue. There was a lull in the small talk. They sat in silence for several moments, watching the branches rustle in the wind, their green leaves turning over to reveal their soft, silver undersides.

Dr. Hashmi picked up a length of rubber cord. “You must be used to this. I had to learn it a few years back after the university cut my travel budget. Used to bring a nurse along with me.”

Anna shook her head and rolled up her sleeve. She’d worn the purple caftan she bought for Erin’s graduation and all her best jewelry. The bracelets clanked as she slid the bell sleeves of the dress up onto her shoulder. “No. I haven’t been to see the doctor in about a decade. The last time I went was for a hearing aid, but I don’t use it anymore. Can’t get the batteries in.”

“But you can still strip a tree of its olives in less than twenty minutes. Remarkable.” He found the vein and slid the angled point of the needle into her arm.

It took nearly half an hour to fill the six vials he’d brought with him. When they were finally finished, he held her hand and apologized, telling her she had thick blood. The doctor insisted Anna remain seated while he brought her a glass of lemonade to drink.

“What are you going to do with all that blood?” she asked after emptying her cup.

“See what it is made of.” Dr. Hashmi smiled. “Before we’re through we’ll know all your secrets, and if we look hard enough I might be able to find that gene I’ve been looking for.”

“Secrets. What makes you think I’ve got any secrets?” Anna had never considered that the doctor would be looking for more than a reason why she’d lived so long and how she’d maintained her good health.

“Everybody has secrets. There are so many clues hidden in DNA and we’re just beginning to understand what they mean.” He packed up the vials and the equipment and took a small silver device from his coat pocket. “That’s why the interview is so important. It helps us figure out those secrets.”

Inexplicably, Anna felt the need to protect her family from Dr. Hashmi. He’d done nothing threatening and his manner the entire time had been jovial and kind, but seeing him lock her blood up in his cooler made her wary. “We try not to keep secrets anymore,” she said.

He fiddled with the device and then stated the day and time and Anna’s full name. “Is that because of what happened with Callie’s daughter?”

“That’s part of it,” Anna said.

“I’m not after those sorts of secrets. I just want your blood to tell me about your family. Can you tell me about your parents? What do you know about their backgrounds—where they came from and how old they were when they died?”

She didn’t tell him about her vague memories of another mother, or about Wealthy’s confession. He was a scientist, and she knew he’d want facts. Anna also knew that she wasn’t ready to face the possibility that she was anyone other than the daughter of Percy and Mims. They talked about her childhood and then about her husband and his family. She speculated on why her brother, Wealthy, had never married. To keep the genealogy straight, they drew it out on a paper together, and seeing all the branches made Anna dizzy. They ate their way through a second platter of olives and crackers. As the doctor finished his prepared questions, they began to talk about his work.

“Do you know how rare you are?” he asked.

Anna shrugged. “There aren’t too many of us, but I’m telling you I’m not only going to outlive that man from China, I’m going to outlive that French woman who died at a hundred twenty-two. I got at least a decade left in me.”

Dr. Hashmi turned over the paper with her family tree on it. He drew a bell curve and then circled the far right corner of the graph, where the line nearly touched the bottom of the paper. “You’re here. One in seven million people live to be older than a hundred ten. So right now on Earth there are probably only eight hundred and fifty people alive right now as old as you, and none of them, at least the ones I’ve met, can remember their name, let alone have enough teeth to eat crackers. So I’m giving you at least fifteen more years to live.”

At this assurance, Anna forgot all her reservations about Dr. Hashmi and his tests. She grabbed his hand and held it tight. “I knew I liked you,” she said.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Ovuli

A
nna’s obsession with staying alive longer than any other human being didn’t begin until she celebrated her hundredth birthday. Prior to that milestone, she’d had no real interest in age and felt little of the nostalgia that infected her peers. She’d focused on what was right in front of her; however, that year the local newspaper sent a young man to Hill House during her birthday celebration to interview her about her legacy. The reporter was a small, plump adolescent with a smattering of large freckles across his cheeks. He sucked on the inside of his cheeks when he wasn’t talking. “Just pretend I’m another party guest,” he’d told them, following Anna around like Bobo did if he wanted to be fed. He was silent for long periods and then would corner someone from the family and let loose with two dozen questions. He didn’t take notes, a fact that Anna returned to time and again when the article was published.

Near the end of the afternoon, he sat down and ate a piece of cake with Anna. “You don’t look that old,” he’d said. “I thought you’d be half blind and deaf and there’d be someone here, a nurse or an orderly, wheeling you about.”

She did not start to lose her eyesight until ten years later, just before her hundred and tenth birthday. That day she had two pieces of cake and ignored all the boy’s questions about longevity. Instead, she told the story of when they moved the town and took a few of the treasures she’d found underneath the stores—a bit of bone from the butcher’s shop, three pearl buttons from the seamstress’s shop, and a watch fob from underneath the bank—and laid them on the table. They were trinkets her children and grandchildren had loved playing with. Erin, who was twelve years old at the time and beginning to be interested in adult stories, was more entranced than the reporter. Still, that boy had the nerve to hug her as he left (the younger generations had no proper sense of formality any longer) and told her he felt blessed to have been able to get her stories from her before—. She cut him off.

“Before what? I die?” Anna was four inches taller than the reporter, and she’d glared down at him.

He stammered and blushed and then apologized before turning and rushing out the front door. Her confrontation had made little impact on him. He wrote about none of that but penned an article that painted Anna as he’d expected her to be—a senile, wrinkled woman who was the town’s last remaining link to its past. “Reading this,” Anna said to Bets, “you’d think I’ll be dead before the year is out.” The article had a tone of near tragedy, and although the reporter acknowledged that Anna was in good health, he quoted a nurse as saying that the elderly often deteriorate rapidly.

The nurse worked at Golden Sunsets, where Frank lived, and Anna made a point of ignoring the woman when she visited the home with Bets. The reporter left to work at a larger paper in Fresno, and every Christmas, Anna sent him a card that she signed, “still here.” As awful as the story had been, it awakened her to the realization that everyone expected her to die, and soon.

Those around Anna had died because of illness or war. She didn’t know of anyone who’d died of old age—just diseases and infections related to aging. What a load of crap that phrase was—“related to.” She read the obituaries and kept a tally of the causes of death. By her hundred and first birthday, she had categorized nearly one hundred and fifty deaths from heart attacks, cancer, strokes, falls, drowning, suicide, and snake bites. Not one mention of old age. That year she went skydiving and was given a ten-year renewal on her driver’s license. Neither event merited another story in the
Kidron Observer
.

She asked Louise Bells, who had gone to school with Bets and now volunteered at the library three days a week, to find the person who’d lived the longest. “You mean besides Methuselah?” Louise asked. The woman Louise found was French and was one hundred and twenty. Jeanne Louise Calment lived on her own until she was one hundred and sixteen and claimed her longevity could be traced to chocolate, Bordeaux, and olive oil, which she poured over all her food and rubbed into her face every night. Anna felt that this was a quip designed to put off reporters and other intrusives, but Callie took it as gospel truth and photocopied the news accounts of Mme. Calment to hang in the Pit Stop. She wrote to the French woman to request an autographed photo, which was framed and hung next to the tin cartons of imported olive oil. Callie liked to have visitors guess the woman’s age—they always picked a number between eighty-five and ninety-eight.

Callie took this as proof that olive oil was a cure for old age, but Anna thought the more likely story was that people couldn’t conceive of anyone living longer than a century. She kept this thought to herself and let her granddaughter believe in the miracle of the oil, although she couldn’t help but point out that she herself had far fewer wrinkles than Mme. Calment and had never once put olive oil on her face.

“You should start,” Callie had said one night at dinner. “Then in twenty years we can put your picture up and claim it works wonders.”

They’d laughed, and Erin, who’d grown up around wrinkled women, took to stealing olives from the refrigerator and rubbing them across her cheeks. There’d been an argument about the child’s behavior. Anna and Bets thought the act was frivolous and wasteful. Callie, who’d been overruled about the tooth fairy and Santa Claus, threatened to move out and take the child with her. The courts had made her the legal guardian of Erin, and although they’d all agreed to raise her together, if she decided to leave, Anna and Bets couldn’t stop her.

“The child has nothing to believe in,” Callie had said. “What’s wrong with letting her believe in the olives? Neither of you can say that the olives had nothing to do with your remarkable health. You don’t believe that they’ve kept you younger than your years, but that’s not to say that they haven’t.”

It disappointed Anna when Bets took Callie’s side. “Let her believe in this,” she said.

Anna understood how Callie might see the orchard, the olives, as having magical properties, but Bets knew better. There had been so much work when Anna was a child helping her father and even more during the years Anna raised Bets. Children were let out of school during harvest, and they worked as hard as the adults picking olives from the trees. The cheap labor came not from Mexico, but from the households of Kidron. When Anna thought of the orchard, she recalled blisters, splinters, arms that ached during harvest. Her memories of the trees were of sweat. Bets had the same childhood, and then they’d had to work together to keep the business alive during the years when the men had been gone for war. She wanted to shake Callie and Erin and explain that the olives were nothing more than the fruits of their labor. But Callie and Erin had never worked in the orchard, and that allowed them to find mysticism in the fruit.

By the time Callie was born, the orchard was picked by immigrants who moved up the valley with the ripening of crops every fall. They still owned the land, but they paid a neighbor to manage the orchard and split the profits with him every year. The groves became a playground for Callie—row upon row of places to hide or climb or sit in the shade and watch the leaves rustle with the wind. Frank had indulged his daughter; he’d indulged all of Bets’s children but especially Callie, because she was the first and there had been such a long time between her and the others. Deb, Callie’s daughter and Erin’s mother, had never spent much time in the orchards. Callie and her first husband had bought the Pit Stop when Deb was first born, and her experience had been one of canned olives and fluorescent lights.

Deb would have brought up Erin in the store, too, giving her a sterile view of the olives, if she’d gotten the chance, but she’d screwed everything up. When the three of them finally got Erin, Callie had just lost her husband and was working eighty hours a week trying to keep the store afloat. In the end, Erin was raised by Bets and Anna, who were overwhelmed by the preschooler. For the first time in their lives, they felt truly old. To keep the house tidy, Anna kept Erin out of it as much as possible. Before she was old enough for school, they spent most afternoons walking through the orchard, showing Erin how to climb trees and during harvest the best way to pick olives.

Bets surprised Anna by telling stories. This respite from the constant motion of the small child was a blessing, and Anna found she enjoyed hearing her daughter talk about how the goddess Athena showed up her brother by creating the olive tree, which was of much more use than a spring of salt water. Erin had gray eyes like the goddess, and the legend held that the leaves of the olive tree were patterned after Athena’s eyes because although they were green, the undersides were a soft gray. It would be these stories that gave Anna the courage to tell her own, disguising them as being about about the Tortoise and the Girl.

The day after Anna caught eight-year-old Erin rubbing olives across her face, she took the girl into the orchard and began to teach her about the trees. This was what Anna knew. She couldn’t give her Greek myth, but she could give her truth disguised as myth, which held more mysteries than a thousand fairy tales. It was February and the weather had finally turned cold enough to ensure budbreak in the spring. They were buttoned up against the cold, and Erin’s green scarf kept getting caught on branches as they walked among the trees. Anna wanted to show her great-great-granddaughter the first trees, the ones that her father had planted when the family first moved to Kidron.

The older trees were easy to find; they had much thicker branches, and the leaves held the same shape as a hawk’s flight feathers—oblong and tapered at the ends. The high wood-to-foliage ratio meant the trees produced fewer olives than their offspring, but in Anna’s experience the older trees produced larger fruit heavy with oil. Her father had started with a hundred trees, but over the years, they’d lost several to frost, disease, and pests. There were two dozen that remained, and they’d become Anna’s trees. The foreman knew that she would take care of the trees and they were not touched except to harvest. If a younger tree was struggling, Anna often took cuttings from these old trees and grafted them to the immature trees.

As spring came, she would show Erin how to slice off a stem the size of a pencil and grow a tree of her own, but on that winter’s day, Anna just wanted to sit her great-great-granddaughter in the tree and tell her how the trees were brought from Australia and before that from Spain. She helped the girl climb up into the crown of the tree and then leaned in so that the branches surrounded them. It was warmer inside the tree’s canopy and their breath no longer came out in white puffs.

In the tree Erin showed Anna the underside of a leaf. “See,” she said. “The same color as my eyes, but nobody else’s. I guess I get that from my dad.”

“You’ve got his fingers, too,” Anna said. “I always thought his hands were too feminine, with such long fingers that had the look of a refined man. Those fingers are what made us start you on the piano.” They didn’t often talk about Carl, her father.

The child was quiet for a long bit, and then she reached up and ran her fingers across Anna’s high, wide cheekbones. “You and I match here,” she said. “Maybe I’ll be like you and live forever.”

Anna laughed. “How old do you think I am?”

Erin shrugged. “As old as the trees?”

“Smart girl. You know what’s amazing about olive trees? They have a real sense of survival.” Anna wasn’t sure if at eight, Erin knew what
survival
meant, but the little girl nodded. “If we cut down this tree today, in the spring, it would have about a hundred shoots growing up out of the side and top of the stump.”

Erin looked skeptical. “You just told me the tree was older than you. How do you know it’ll be all right if you cut it down?”

“These shoots, they’re sometimes called suckers.” Anna made a noise like she was sucking on a straw. “They suck up all the energy they need to grow from the roots that the original tree left behind. It’s the roots that are important.”

“Where do the suckers come from?” Erin asked.

Anna was surprised at the question. She’d thought the girl would want to talk about the miracle of a dead tree coming to life. She held out her hand and helped Erin out of the tree. Then she took off her gloves and dug around in the soil around the trunk. The ground rarely froze in Kidron, although the red dirt had just enough clay in it that it clumped together. She dug down about two knuckles deep and exposed the gnarled bumps on the bark. “Burr knots. They’re sacks of nutrients and energy, and that’s where the suckers come from.”

Erin ran her fingers over several of the ovuli and smiled. “It’s like someone put olives underneath the bark.”