All the Little Live Things (15 page)

They indulged our guidebook fervor, and they forgave us that our time was always free, as theirs was not. We made expeditions to Monterey and Pacific Grove, where John showed us the marine laboratory in which he expected to spend a good deal of his time. We did Carmel and the Big Sur coast, we visited the flowering orchards, remnants of what had once stretched the length of the Santa Clara Valley. We took in San Juan Bautista and ate tamale pie with a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon. We had a picnic on the skyline ranch that Lou LoPresti owned with six or seven other people, and, from a ridge cropped as smooth as a Vermont meadow by cattle, we looked down through big wind-broken Douglas firs to the surf lacing the blue bulge of the Pacific. When school was out we planned to go together to one of the Music in the Vineyards concerts, and hear Pergolesi operettas in the winery yard and sip champagne at intermission, looking down over the vineyards and woods that plunge toward the smogged valley and the strident city of San Jose.

Come see, let us show you. It was all the California we knew, and we liked it better for the chance to share it. This is how the New World looks, this is what is happening in the vital madhouse of Eden, the vanishing Lotus Land. See it quickly before it is paved under and smogged out.

And the neighbors? A few. The Casements, Bill and Sue, rich, openhanded, openhearted, givers of great
fêtes champêtres
and barbecues. When the weather gets hot Debby might want to swim over there, all the young ones do. And the LoPrestis-Julie’s word on them isn’t sound, they’re pleasant intelligent people; and if he is a little humorously housebroke and she takes herself a little seriously, only those of us who are without sin should throw stones. Because of her illnesses, real or imagined, they do not go out much, but when they do throw one of their Fourth of July or Christmas parties, they make history. She is artistic, sort of—creates mosaics and driftwood sculptures and things I can’t help thinking of as button-box art because it is like the things I used to make at six or seven by sticking things from my mother’s button box onto modeling clay. Lucio is an omnicompetent, knows how to build or do anything. Try his ranch olives.

Others? We come up suddenly against the true poverty of our acquaintance. There are the Canadays, admirable people who annually turn their ranch into a camp for blind and crippled children. We would gladly know them, but have got no closer than a hello when we meet on a walk. Over the ridge west is an even bigger ranch owned by some real-estate people jealous of their seigneurship and lavish with NO TRESPASSING signs that have kept us from knowing them, or wanting to. For though Ruth will trespass at the drop of a wire, she depends on me to talk us out of situations we may get into, and I do not like standing guiltily before hard-eyed people with hard questions in their mouths.

Next to the real-estate folks lives a former All-American center who married the daughter of an Italian chocolate maker from San Francisco. They are horsy and hunt-clubby, friendly when encountered but definitely Society. In the guest cottage on their place, living in astonishing simplicity, is the ousted dictator of a banana republic. Once as we were walking across country on a hot fall afternoon, we saw him on the lawn in shorts, being squirted with the garden hose by his tall and striking wife. But they didn’t invite us in and make intimates of us.

That was about it. East of us the pressing suburbs and tracts, with a few stubborn ranchers clinging to residual orchards and vineyards. Down the road, Tom Weld, busy figuring how he could subdivide and make a million: nobody we wanted to show off to the Catlins. Yet shortly we saw that the Welds and Catlins were on friendly terms. The women stood chatting at the mailboxes, Weld’s daughter played sometimes with Debby, though she was a dull little girl, somewhat retarded. Weld’s son worked around the Catlin place cleaning and burning trash and making firewood. He was a willowy, sinewy boy, burned black with sun above the waist. He liked to wear a .22 target pistol in a loaded cartridge belt when he worked. His hair was skinned off and the top flattened so close that a bald spot showed on the crown. On his wrists he wore leather-strap supports that I imagine were more ornamental than orthopedic, designed not to support weak joints but to call attention to muscles. He drove a molded, raked 1957 Mercury so hiked up behind that its front wheels looked smaller than the rear ones. It went down the road like a ground hog just about to disappear in a hole.

Even these natives, illuminated by Marian’s friendly interest, came to have a look of rightness. Like harmless weeds, they served to complete the local flora. What if they did give me hay fever? Marian and John, accepting them, persuaded me that even these had some place in nature’s beneficent plan.

Once he got his spring disking done in the orchard, Tom Weld seemed to have a lot of business downtown. If I had known what he was working on, I would have watched less complacently from the terrace when, in bathrobe and slippers, I came out to consult the spring mornings and see what Catarrh had created on the mat. I would not have assumed so casually that the people who on several occasions walked around Weld’s hill with him, setting the beagles crazy, were merely friends or potential renters of pasture.

Nearly every afternoon Julie LoPresti rode past, uphill or down, with her frizzle-chinned mongrel padding so close to the horse’s heels that it was a wonder he didn’t get his nose split by a calk. I remarked to Ruth that this misbegotten mutt was a rather apt symbol of the ties that bind family to family, and men to other men, and the living to the unborn, whether they elect to be bound or not. I thought I sounded rather like Joseph Conrad in an elevated mood, but Ruth only looked at me with her sharp raccoon face and said that it was clear whom I had been talking to. All right, I accepted the soft imputation. I talked to Marian every chance I got, and so far as I could see, so did everybody else around here.

And actually Ruth and I had more reason to see her frequently than anybody else did. We had a commission to keep an eye on her. One evening in April, before going down to Guadalupe Island off Baja California to study sea elephants, John came up our hill and asked us seriously, as a great favor, if we would sort of look out for her while he was gone.

He did not have any trouble persuading us. It was like being a small boy asked to hold somebody’s thorough-bred. But his request gave me a fresh respect for John. Until then, I suppose I had looked upon him as a genial and attractive boy, fond of his wife but not really in her class. That afternoon, while he stood talking to us in the drive, I saw lines in his face that I hadn’t noticed before, and they seemed to me lines of sobriety, responsibility, masculine resolution. It struck me that his life had been adventurous and daring, and that if he was overshadowed by his vivacious wife, he was so because he wanted to be. If I had been a father with a daughter I was anxious about I couldn’t have found a son-in-law to whom I would have been more willing to entrust her.

“You know how it is with her,” he said. “There’s been absolutely no recurrence, and she goes in to the clinic every few weeks for a check. She seems stronger to me —it’s been good for her out here. But pregnancy sometimes speeds these things up, female hormones seem to act like carcinogens. So I’d feel a lot better if I knew you were here for her to come to.”

It would be pure pleasure, we assured him. And shouldn’t she be kept from doing too much, shouldn’t she rest more than she did?

That made him smile. “If you can keep her from doing too much you’re better than I am. She’ll do all she can do, and a little more. As long as I know you’re here, and ready to help if anything should go wrong, I won’t worry about her. If anything does go wrong, I wish you’d call this number in San Diego, Bill Barger. If you can’t get him, try the Oceanographic Institute in La Jolla. Well be in touch with both of them every day by radio.”

He handed me a three-by-five card with the two addresses and telephone numbers typed on it. He shook my hand, he kissed Ruth’s cheek, he said he would see us in about a month, he backed up a step or two, turning to go.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Does Marian know we’re her keepers?”

John laughed. “Do you think I want to break up a fine friendship? No, keep it dark. She’d come to you anyway. I just wanted to ask you for that little extra watchfulness. She needs to be looked after, but she hasn’t found that out yet.”

Off he went, hand in air. Before he got to the turn he was running. We heard him thudding down the steep road, vigorous as a young hart upon the mountains. It was reassuring to think that Marian had all that health supporting her, and exhilarating to think that now we temporarily replaced it.

You would have thought, and you would have been right, that the principal lack in our life up to then was a little responsibility. Ruth never went by without stopping to see if she could take anybody anywhere or pick up anything at the market. I developed the habit of stopping every day when I walked down for the mail. There was rarely anything we could do for Marian, but we tried to do things for Debby. I spent a day building her a playhouse in the grove, but I never observed that she used it. Marian admitted a little apologetically that it suffered by contrast with Peck’s treehouse, to which Debby and Julie went whenever they found Peck home. Marian was less inclined to object because she was troubled by the lack of children Debby’s age in the area. The Weld girl was three years older, and her bus got her home late from school. Marian yearned for more playmates for her child. She believed in something called “block play,” and she sometimes wondered if they should have brought Debby out into the country. She and John loved it so much they hadn’t thought of Debby. This miserable only-child business. She knew all about it from her own childhood. Later on, with a little brother or sister, she’d be better off. Or if she had a pony. Julie LoPresti seemed to require nothing else in life.

Well, why not? I said. They could put up a ring, and a tack shed if they wanted, down there in the bottoms between their cottage and Peck.

Oh, she said, delighted, could they? Would I rent them that land?

Rent nothing, I told her. If I could afford to let Peck live in my tree, I could let them make use of a piece of unused pasture.

I was all the more willing because it appeared to me that Marian needed a pony more than Debby did. She spent half her time taxiing the child to piano lessons, to friends’ houses, to parties, to the park, to the Junior Museum. When she wasn’t taking Debby somewhere to be intellectually stimulated and emotionally refreshed, she was working with her to build birdbaths, feeding trays, frog-and-turtle pools, fern and flower collections. The introduction of a horse into that family would probably add twenty hours of rest time to Marian’s week.

So we drove them around looking at stables and ranches until we found a fifteen-year-old piebald gelding, marbled like a cake even to the eyes. He was, the man said, as gentle as a kitten. As if to demonstrate, a pair of achromatic white kittens that had been chasing one another around the corral flew with their tails up along the fence and one of them raced up a fence post and the other, seeing a little darkly with its miscolored eyes, ran up the piebald’s leg and hung there above the knee with its claws sunk in. The piebald only quivered. Marian bought him on the spot, to be delivered as soon as we could prepare quarters for him.

That was the week in May when the wind blew hard and dry from the north, and the hills under it went green-bronze and then gold, the whole landscape changing within three days, emerging into another set of colors like a drying color print. Against the gold hills the oaks were round, dense, almost black. The fields overnight were impossible to walk through, horrible with barbed seeds. I did not fail to point out the change to Marian, but I took some pleasure in it: it was another thing to show her about California. That seasonal change is as remarkable, in its way, as the stealthy spring that begins with the coming of winter. You go to bed on a May night with flowery smells on the air and the peepers singing, and awake to dusty summer, cracking adobe, and the first of the season’s gnats.

Some sort of prologue ended with the finding of the horse and the swift coming of summer. Another act began when we drove down the hill one Saturday morning and found a horse trailer backed up to the trail gate and John, Dave Weld, and the stable man unloading the piebald.

We stopped, we shook hands, asked about the sea elephants, that sort of thing. John was as black as a pirate, blacker even than young Weld. With his shirt off he showed himself to be muscled like a prize fighter. “Sea elephants!” he said. “I hadn’t been home ten minutes till Debby had me turned into a horse wrangler. Dave and I are taking his dad’s pickup in for some fencing right now, to put in a ring. You’re the indulgent owner, you can supervise. ”

“Supervise hell, I’ll drive a nail,” I said.

I sent Ruth into town alone, and I was waiting with posthole auger and shovel and hammer when the pickup came back with posts and redwood two-by-fours. By spontaneous combustion we found ourselves in a neighborhood work party. Julie was there, leading Debby around on the piebald and giving all sorts of trouble to her mutt dog, who insisted on staying at the heels of Julie’s horse and kept getting stepped on by Debby’s. Dave Weld, peeled to his walnut hide, with his target pistol strapped down to his leg and his transistor radio blasting out a Pirates-Giants game, was augering out postholes in the cementlike adobe. Gunslinger, strong and silent, he strained and twisted, gleaming with sweat and ropy with young muscle, his wrists strapped in leather, his face still and stern. Marian, catching me looking at him, half closed her eyes and made swooning motions with her head. She and Ruth, having fed us sandwiches and salad, were sitting in the back patio in the shade of a little walnut tree watching us swarm like ants around the bottom land.