All the Little Live Things (14 page)

I was getting impatient with the afternoon, and was glad when they came tottering and reeling, one after the other, across the bridge. I handed Julie back her horse, which had slobbered green spit on the sleeve of my jacket.

Marian had me by the other arm, shaking me and scolding. “You should have come over. It’s just terribly cute, everything is so ingenious and Rube Goldbergy.”

“Maybe a little too Goldbergy,” I said.

“I’m coming back to see you every day,” said Debby from up on John’s shoulders.

“You do that,” Peck said. “Only when I’m home, though, all right?” To Julie, sitting her horse and watching, he directed his gappy Dionysian grin. “You too, Mrs. Johnson. When you’re out riding, stop in for a dish of tea.”

The dull red swept up through her neck and face, she gave him an uncertain look, jerked her head around and saw us watching her, and angrily kicked the horse into an instant canter. At the open trail gate she slowed only to a trot, then leaned the horse to the right, sitting him solid and easy and loose like a bag of flour. We saw the dark streak through the trees and heard the clatter of galloping, and then the pick pick pick as he took the hill at a fast walk. Our group let loose a flurry of thanks at Jim Peck, standing by his castle gate, and he lifted an indulgent hand. As we turned away he was already hoisting the bridge.

“Well!” Marian said as we walked across the bottom. “Quite an afternoon.” Her eyes touched me, gave me a look of amusement and understanding and commiseration, and went on to rest on Debby, riding John’s shoulders. “We saw the treehouse, and we found somebody who might take you riding and stay with you when we have to go out, and we had a little party.”

To us, when we stopped by the car, she turned with a smile that literally blazed, excessive, intense, and troubling. “I love this kind of day,” she said. “I love getting to know the new place, and new people. I like to feel us living our way right into it.”

“You’re doing that, all right,” I said, depressed, and opened the car door. She was a very unsteady young woman. The light she shed was like the magneto headlights of an old Model-T Ford—it dimmed and flared again as the motor was accelerated or retarded. Now she went on blazing as if her machinery was going full speed, just when all my machinery had died down to a three-cylinder limp—cold hands, cold feet, a sodden irritability of spirit. Then all at once she stood on tiptoe and kissed me on the cheek. “We love it most that you’re our nearest neighbors,” she said. “I was telling John, it’s as if we’d known, you all our lives.”

“Our unanimous family feeling,” John said, and bending top-heavy with Debby he kissed Ruth and gave her a hand into the car. They stood watching while I backed out. During the minute or two while I maneuvered to turn around in the lane, Marian’s smile was brilliant and strained. I had the feeling that it was maintained with an effort, and that it was directed at me to assure me that
she
didn’t think I had been acting badly, even if Ruth did. She seemed thin and frail; it seemed that her friends should look after her and make sure she didn’t overdo. The cobweb of her kiss clung to my cheek, saving the whole afternoon.

The first time I found myself down below when neither the Catlins nor Jim Peck seemed to be at home, I went down to Peck’s pad and made a little reconnaissance of his less visible improvements. As I had expected, I found an insulated electric cable crawling out of the cutbank and drooping into the brush of the creek bed. On the far side it went underground, undoubtedly to emerge through the floor of the tent and from there to climb up the back of the oak to the treehouse. On my side it also disappeared underground. Short of ripping it up, which I was tempted for a moment to do, I had no way of following it, but I knew perfectly well where it led, and after snooping around the pole that held my meter box, over by the pump, I found the cable coming up the grooved inside of an old innocent-looking weathered board nailed to the power pole. Somebody more scientific-minded than Peck, I assumed, had tapped into the power line for him above my meter. A plus for the twentieth century. Even saintly tree-sitters may have friends with engineering skill, and thus put the callous capitalist world under contribution.

Undoubtedly, Walden was pleasanter with electricity. Our thanks to the Pacific Gas and Electric. The music for which I had given Peck and his friends total credit might not have been picked out on their own guitars at all, but could have come from a hi-fi; for all I knew, he might have stereo, with his speakers distributed between treehouse and tent. The girl who sounded like Joan Baez might well have been Joan Baez, recorded. And how cozy to chase away the winter damps with an electric heater, and lie in the treehouse bunk under a good bed lamp. fixed up a flashlight rig, yes.

And power was not all he had brought to Walden. Under the bridge, drooping almost invisibly into the leafing poison-oak and blackberry vines, I discovered a black plastic pipe. This too disappeared underground on both sides of the bridge, but one inescapable intuition and a three-minute search showed it to be attached just below the surface to the pipe line from my well.

Plumbing too, then, this courtesy the Joseph Allstons. If I had felt like risking my neck I could have crossed the bridge, I felt sure, and found a complete bathroom-washbowl, shower, water closet, tub, tiled walls, chrome fixtures, the works. And perhaps a bidet for his lady guests.

A week earlier, I would have told him to dig up his improvements and tear down his bird’s-nest and tent and get the hell off the place. But now I was caught. What, destroy the treehouse that was Debby’s delight, and thus destroy Marian’s pleasure in seeing her child happy, and her satisfaction at living her way into the new place? Put myself in the position of autocrat and policeman, appear petty and mean not only to Peck—whose reaction would not distress me in the slightest, considering the way he had chiseled on my bounty—but to the Catlins? It would certainly not break me to provide his water, and I was not under any special obligation to protect the P.G.&E. I was only infuriated at being made into a mark, and being helpless to do anything about it.

I followed my usual course: I went home and blew off to Ruth, who asked me why I cared, what did it matter, really? If I had not taken a hostile attitude in the beginning, he probably wouldn’t have tried to put things over on me. I did not accept her analysis, but I did nothing. I was pretty sure all the time that I would not, for it is part of the script that Peck’s Bad Boy should deceive his Pa, and that Molière misers like me should be tricked by the ingenious and irreverent young.

D
ECEMBER 12, the calendar tells me. Two months since the Catlin cottage went dark.

All through the past weeks the storms have come spinning in off the Pacific,, and the microclimates of the foothills have been swept together and obliterated in rain, like petty differences of opinion in a crisis. Each new storm arrives with a pounce, and our house anchored on its hilltop shakes to the padded blows of the wind, and the trees heave and creak, and our terrace is littered with twigs and berries. We fear for our windows, pounded and streaming, and look out across the terrace to see horizontal bursts of rain combing the treetops below us, blurring the ugliness of Weld’s interrupted excavations across the gully.

Even the lichened oak outside my study window, with limbs larger around than my body, is uneasy in the wind. There is a stiff arthritic movement in it as if the 6600 volts of turmoil tearing through its upper branches have been stepped down, here in the underleaf cave, to a housebroken 110. The soggy duff on the ground is constantly kicked around by juncos and Oregon towhees and golden-crowned sparrows, and the presence of these birds, which we watch with pleasure and for which I have built a feeding tray out of Catarrh’s reach, communicates a certain uneasiness to our minds, for they ought to mean spring and actually mean winter, and the winter they mean is so confused with spring that one used to the standard seasons is bewildered.

Much of what the eye sees is Novemberish. The apricot orchards are bare, and blown downwind and plastered against walls and fences are those leaves of pistachio, liquidambar, and Japanese maple that gave us a brief New England color. Like other immigrants, we brought the familiar to an unfamiliar place, our planting impulse no different from that of pioneer women hoarding in their baggage seeds of lobelia and bittersweet, or Johnny Appleseed scattering civilization along a thousand miles of frontier tracks. Call it the Law of Dispersion and Uniformity. Marian, who valued the indigenous over the exotic, was almost the only person I ever knew who didn’t submit to it, and even she would sometimes take pleasure in the results.

A false autumn, then, imported but half persuasive. Now in December the earth smells Labradorean. If we had not lived through two California winters we would expect snow. And indeed we do get something wintry enough, for on clear mornings we may look out our windows and see the redwood screeds of the patio wearing a pelt of frost. Sometimes the bricks are lacquered with ice, and when we drive out on early errands the lonely untracked bottoms are white, and so are the rails and post tops of Debby’s corral, and so are the treads of Weld’s miserable bridge, still unrepaired.

And yet under ice and frost the sand between our patio bricks has sprouted in intersecting lines of bright-green moss. Within ten days of the first rain the bedraggled stubble of the hills could be parted with a toe and show tiny, cotyledons of filaree and burr clover and tiny spears of oat grass. All during the weeks when the year has been darkening toward its end, the green has forced itself upward through the brown, until now at close to Christmas the hills are voluptuous lawns, and the lavender branches of the deciduous oaks spread against a background like April. The coyote brush, hardy and forehanded, has been blooming white since November.

Unsystematic, contradictory, unlike anything that habit and literature have led us to expect, the rainy season is a season, profoundly different from the summer it succeeds. It is green, not golden; wet, not dry; chilly, not warm; clear, not milky. It, has real clouds, not the high fog that obscures the summer sky. It produces real sunsets, not tame quenchings of daylight. It attracts whole populations of wintering birds. It smells different.

Watching the still unfamiliar changes come on, I can’t help realizing that nearly our entire acquaintance with Marian was on the other cycle. She smells in the memory of sun, sage, dust, the faint dry tannic odor of sun-beaten redwood, above all of tarweed. Her light is hot and yellow or warm and brown, never the damp green of this season. She moves from high spring to summer, and stops. In the chilly, fishy smell of wet mold or the freshness of a rain-cleaned wind off the skyline, there is no trace of her. She does not go on. One must go back for her, and that means re-creating not only herself but the season she inhabited.

 

It was a season so fresh that, even remembered, it has all the feel of a beginning. That was Marian’s doing. We thought of ourselves as old settlers, but she made us newcomers again. Until the Catlins came we hardly had a social life, only a set of comfortable habits, a finicky separation from our own and all other history, and a disinclination to all acquaintance except the least demanding. In her passion to live her way into the new place, Marian pulled us after her; or rather, she set us to thinking what the Catlins must see, whom they must meet. Who would respond with the proper enthusiasm to this girl’s vividness? What persons, houses, views, would excite her? Who ought to hear John, in his dry down-Maine voice, tell stories of expeditions he had been on, or expound the sonar system of porpoises, or prove that whales were once land animals by demonstrating their modified limbs and residual hair?

A Californian who is just long enough settled to be able to mispronounce Spanish names correctly is a spider, he lies in wait to initiate others into the land of his temperate exile. Not quite anything, he has to show off everything. Somewhat to our surprise, we turned out to be that kind of Californian. The Catlins, who had spent the winter in a furnished apartment downtown, with only one car and John away part of the time, had had little time to look around. They were predestined victims.

How about our favorite walk, an easy three miles, delightful in this season? Lovely views, hillsides of lupine and poppies and blue-eyed grass.

Fine. The first available Sunday morning they walked with us through the opulent hills. Every three minutes Marian discovered a new plant which John identified with the infallibility of a botany book. We made the whole loop onto the hogback and across the school land and through the woods home, and saw riders strung out through the pasture, and put up a doe and fawn in a thicket. But it was a little too long. Marian was looking drawn by the time we crossed the creek below Peck’s roost, and Debby had been complaining and hanging back for half an hour, and finished on John’s shoulders. Next day she was broken out with poison oak.

By mutual consent we did not repeat that walk, but several times we came past at the end of our therapeutic miles and lured them up the hill for a drink or a meal, bringing Debby so she could wade in our lily pond. One of those times, as we were sitting on the terrace with our feet on the rail discussing, with indignation the couple who slaughtered pigeons for their dogs’ education (and also trapped the foxes who raided the pigeon house, Marian had discovered), the red-tailed hawk from Shields’s pasture labored over us heavy and slow, and squinting up into. the blinding purity of sky, we saw he had a gopher snake in his talons. The snake was by no means whipped. He was wound all around the hawk’s legs, pulling them down. We could see his body work, only sixty or seventy feet above us, and sense how the hawk gripped and shifted, hunting a killing hold or trying to let loose. They struggled around the terrace twice, looking about to crash, before they took their unfinished drama elsewhere. Marian accused me of staging the whole business, just to demonstrate my tooth-and-claw thesis, and I was as proud as if I had. Ah, California!