The Roots of the Olive Tree Read Online Free PDF Page A

that capitalized on the building’s history. Although the owners had installed swinging doors, like those one would find in a John Wayne picture, they had not been present when she was a girl. Anna told Bets that the saloon had never had swinging doors. “Such an impracticality. Good only for gunfights, and we never had those,” she’d said.
    Those two buildings had large black X s painted on their sides on moving day. Anna walked among the teams of horses waiting to pull the buildings, and stopped to listen to the butcher tell her father and a few of the other men who’d come into town from Maywood Colony about seeing an outpost in Iowa attempt a move. “Damn fools killed half the horses in town and had to put the other half down from injuries. I saw a man flattened when a house rolled over him,” said the butcher as he spit tobacco juice into the street. “It wasn’t like you’d think. No popping or bursting right when it happened. Naw, that came later.”
    The men went on to discuss death and how the bodies they’d seen never looked like one expected. The butcher said the flattened man’s body had started to swell, and the skin on his legs split like a peach left too long on the tree. “He was dead before the sun set,” the butcher finally said. Some men standing around him edged away and found a way to busy their hands with horses or uncoiling rope. Her father, though, stepped closer and put a hand on the man’s shoulder. She frowned and remembered her mother telling her father that morning that the easiest solutions are often impossible. Although Anna was only six, the image of that man’s skin splitting open like overripe fruit stayed in her mind as if she had actually been in that small Iowa town to watch the man suffer.
    She watched her father as he threaded his way through the town taking notes on who was ready to move. Anna kept a few paces behind him, stepping into a doorway when he turned around, or reaching to stroke the neck of one of the hitched horses. The town smelled different then; there was always straw thrown down over some low spot in the road, and a man’s sweat mixed with that of the animals. The horses were damp with perspiration that day and the smell of their sweet, heavy sweat overpowered Anna. She watched him write numbers on buildings to indicate the order that they would be moved. At last he came to the general store, and he drew a chalk line up one side of the store and then handed off the chalk to the men on the roof, who completed the line. He took his chalk back and marked the store’s halves each with a different number.
    Anna felt no compunction to watch over her brother. He’d been so sickly in Brisbane that her parents let him roam all hours of the day and night around Kidron. Anna complained about how Wealthy never had to help, and her parents said that God was likely to take his miracle back if they stopped him from exercising his good health now that he had it. It made her wish him ill. She watched him shimmy up the side of the general store to help the Lindsey boys dismantle the chimney one brick at a time and hoped that he’d fall and break his leg.
    Logs had been stripped of their bark and made smooth, and they sat like the legs of giants in the middle of the road. Each of the two dozen buildings in town was surrounded by piles of furniture and goods, and Anna left her father and his chalk numbers and amused herself by wandering among the stacks to examine the insides of houses she’d never set foot in. All around her the noise of steel teeth cutting through planks and men swearing as horses pulled unevenly filled her ears. The breeze pushed back at her as she walked, and although there was no salt in the air, there was the sweetness of newly cut lumber. She felt proud of Kidron, emboldened by a town that refused to die because the Southern Pacific Railroad had plotted a route out of its reach.
    The town worked together to move the butcher shop first. Two dozen