All the Little Live Things (38 page)

Now here came Dave Weld on the bulldozer. Frozen spectator up to now, he knew what power he commanded and saw the job clearly. But John stood up a second, estimating the pulpy bridge, and waved him back, and ultimately it was up to him and me, with Peck and Miles belatedly and inadequately helping. We struggled, slipping in thick blood, dragging at legs, mane, tail, prying at broken legs with broken pieces of plank. We got the legs free, rolled it over, pried the loose heavy shoulders and haunches nearer the edge, got its legs over, pried it closer. Resistant, sagging, sliding inside its skin, it moved reluctantly. Beside me, rank as a goat in the heat, Jim Peck grunted and shoved. His left eye was black and purple from the blow Tom Weld had dealt him at the booking. Miles was green in the face, and snorted and moaned as he worked. We pried, tugged, lifted. With a slow fleshy caving, with a tremendous loose dead weight, it toppled, gave, crashed down into the creek-bed brush.

Pouring sweat, smeared with blood, John threw the two-by-four after the splitting hammer. He said to Peck, “Get Julie home. Ask her father to have somebody with a winch get the carcass out of the creek.” Dragging an arm across his face, he started for the car.

Peck turned on me a face that seemed to have shrunk inside his beard. He looked like a boy in false whiskers, which is probably more or less what he had always been. “What is it?” he said. “What’s happening?”

I might have felt sympathetic to him, seeing him as scared boy. And I had been working at his side in an emergency, the only time in all our acquaintance when we had had anything in common. Though I blamed him for all this blood and anguish-why in God’s name did he have to stop in the middle of the road?—I saw by his face that he hadn’t the slightest idea why John was so raging mad to get the dead horse off the bridge, why a tragedy to Julie must be turned into an emergency as furious as a pit stop in an auto race.

I started to answer. The bus and the station wagon whited out, Peck’s face faded, I was glaring blindly into a sheet of oatmeal paper. Then it came back, the hill steadied and deepened to its usual gold, the blood was dark on the pulpy planks, the body of the horse was shining black, laced with bright blood, among the crushed brush below me. I said to Peck, “We’re taking Mrs. Catlin to the hospital to die.”

It was a cruel thing to say, and if I had it to do again I would not say it. For I saw at once that he hadn’t the slightest notion of Marian’s condition. He thought she was pregnant. And in that moment I had a kind of rush, a revelation, an understanding of how it is with the Pecks. They think it is simpler and less serious than it is. They don’t know. They fool around. They haven’t discovered how terrible is the thing that thuds in their chests and pulses in their arteries, they never see ahead to the intersection where the crazy drunk will meet them.

I turned from him, ran to the station wagon, slid in, and from the glimpse I had of Marian’s white face I knew she had watched it all. John took her in his arms again, where she had been when all our complicated relationships erupted into one of their consequences. In the mirror I saw her bowed, pigtailed head, his bloody shirt. Then I was easing the station wagon over the bridge while Peck and Miles stood back—staring, staring, shocked, without a word to their tongues. I felt the tires go sticky and then dry again. At the stop sign fronting the county road I stopped. Another look in the mirror.

Marian had lifted her face from John’s shoulder and laid her head back against the seat. It rolled there with a strained, floundering motion like the threshing of the broken horse. Blood from John’s arm or shirt had smeared her cheek. The cords were tense in her neck, her teeth were clenched, her body squirmed, her face was wet. If any of us had spoken to her she would not have heard.

Epilogue

Y
ESTERDAY WAS FEBRUARY first. After lunch, when I went out into the yard, I found the almond trees, as dependable as the swallows of Capistrano, announcing another spring. It was a day as fresh as spring itself, the air washed, the hills green, acacias yellow down the valley, mustard yellow in the fields. And all it said to me was that a few more like it would dry the ground so that Tom Weld could put his bulldozer back to work tearing the heart out of his hill, and that on just such a day as this Marian and John had first made their way up our road, and that the last blossoms I had seen in our orchard had been those put out by the cherry tree with death at its roots.

Peace was not in anything I saw or smelled or felt. The bell jar that had protected our retirement was smashed, the dark hole that had guaranteed quiet was dug up. And no exhilaration in any of it, none of the pleasure in pain that Marian, professed. Only somber thoughts and a sense of exposure and grievance. Despite her urgings, I do not accept the universe.

Knowing no other way to deal with unpeace than the way that used to work for both me and Lou LoPresti, I busied my hands. I got hoe and rake and began to basin trees and shrubs on the bank where, not quite a year before, Marian had preached me her sermon on the indomitable mushroom.

No mushrooms yesterday. The mold and matted leaves under the bushes stuck to the tarry adobe on tools and shoes. One after another I basined the flowering peaches, still in tight bud, and raked the rubbish into a pile. I would not put that on the compost heap, because the trees had peach-leaf curl that I could not seem to get rid of. Burn their litter and leaves, therefore ; cauterize, imperfectly and hopelessly, another pest.

Along the fence the acacias, now ten or twelve feet high, hummed with bees. Under them too the winter had left trash. I had to reach far in to get it, and in the soft sun, in a temperature climbing into the sixties, I shed my jacket.

The wind was fresh and soft among the feathery leaves and the yellow balls of blossom. It was the sort of day that Marian would have buried herself in, powdering herself with all the pollens of life. I liked it myself, I liked the smells in my nostrils and the sounds in my ears and the feel of the sun on my bent back. But I did not forget that the peach trees behind me would shortly come out into bloom as rampant as these acacias, only to show with their very first leaves the swellings, the warpings, the obscene elephantiasis of their chronic disease. Burrowing among sunny flowers, I never lost the sense of the presence of evil.

Off in the pure blue above the hills I caught sight of the redtail soaring, a neighbor well known, but as ambiguous and unconfronted as any. He floated until he was barely a speck, and then he turned and came back toward me over the school land. Sweetly, purely, a serenity with talons, he rode the air, and his shadow dipped and raced across violet deciduous oaks and the dark mounds of live oaks and buckeyes tipped with green candles and down green slopes moiréed by the wind. Little animals, feeling that shadow, would shrink into their holes, or flatten themselves fearfully in the sweet grass.

Walk openly, Marian used to say. Love even the threat and the pain, feel yourself fully alive, cast a bold shadow, accept, accept. What we call evil is only a groping toward good, part of the trial and error by which we move toward the perfected consciousness.

Allah kareem,
an Arab leper said to me once—nose-less, almost lipless, loathsome, scaled like a fish—
Allah kareem
, God is kind. I dropped coins and fled from his appalling visage and his appalling faith. My impulse is to do the same when I think of Marian.

God is kind? Life is good? Nature never did betray the heart that loved her? Then why the parting that she had? Why the reward she received for living intensely and generously and trying to die with dignity? Why that horror at the bridge for her last clear sight of earth? Why the drugs that she repudiated but couldn’t refuse, that killed her intelligence and will without killing her pain? Why that crucifixion death, with John hanging to one of her hands and a nurse to another and the room full of her mindless screaming?

I do not accept, I am not reconciled. But one thing she did. She taught me the stupidity of the attempt to withdraw and be free of trouble and harm. That was as foolish as Peck’s version of ahimsa and the states of instant nirvana he thought he reached by sugar cube or noise or the exercise of the anal sphincters. One is not made pure by blowing water through the nose or by retiring from the treadmill. These are the ways we deceive ourselves. I disliked Peck because of his addiction to the irrational, and I still do; but what made him hard for me to bear was my own foolishness made manifest in him.

There is no way to step off the treadmill. It is all treadmill.

I was leaning on my rake thinking thoughts like this, not by any means for the first time, but with a kind of renewed bitter passion because of the brightness and purity of the afternoon, when I saw Lucio, Fran, and Julie LoPresti, followed by the mongrel dog, walking in the pasture. Once or twice they looked my way, but if they saw me behind the acacias they made no sign. I believe they didn’t see me, for they seemed much preoccupied with one another, strolling slowly, watching the ground, lifting their faces to look at one another as they said something.

I had not seen any of them in a long time, and it was a shock to see Julie big-bellied, careful on her feet, leaning backward against the weight of her six-or-seven-month pregnancy. But something else struck me more. The three people walking in the spring field talking of something serious—plans to take Julie somewhere? what to do about the baby when it came? what to do about Julie’s further schooling?—were a family, an intimate threesome. They were talking together in a way I had never seen them doing. And when they turned at Weld’s orchard fence and started back I saw that Julie’s once lank and stringy hair was in a single braid such as her mother used to wear.

So maybe Julie had got something she obscurely wanted. I did not think that the child would be put out for adoption, as Fran in her first rage had said it would be. I expected to see mother and grandmother sharing its care. But behind the acacias, spying on their family colloquy, I could not forgive any of them for the fact that Julie’s spite child would be born and that Marian’s love child had been a blob of blue flesh that moved a little, and bleated weakly, and died.

Desolately I went back to raking litter out from under the yellow hedge. New growth caught in the teeth, and when I bent to look I saw that it was poison oak. Though I had sprayed every resurgent clump and bush for two years and more, and had cleaned the hill, now some bird or wind had dropped a berry and started me a new crop where it would be the devil itself to spray without killing what I wanted to preserve.

I had had no answer for her then. Now I might have one. Yes, think of it, I might say. And think of how random and indiscriminate it is, think how helplessly we must submit, think how impossible it is to control or direct it. Think how often beauty and delicacy and grace are choked out by weeds. Think how endless and dubious is the progress from weed to flower.

Even alive, she never convinced me with her advocacy of biological perfectionism. She never persuaded me to ignore, or to look upon as merely hard pleasures, the evil that I felt in every blight and smut and pest in my garden-that I felt, for that matter, squatting like a toad on my own heart. Think of the force of life, yes, but think of the component of darkness in it. One of the things that’s in whale’s milk is the promise of pain and death.

And so? Admitting what is so obvious, what then? Would I wipe Marian Catlin out of my unperfected consciousness if I could? Would I forgo the pleasure of her company to escape the bleakness of her loss? Would I go back to my own formula, which was twilight sleep, to evade the pain she brought with her?

Not for a moment. And so even in the gnashing of my teeth I acknowledge my conversion. It turns out to be for me as I once told her it would be for her daughter. I shall be richer all my life for this sorrow.

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