All the Little Live Things (2 page)

Nevertheless, Marian has invaded me, and though my mind may not have changed I will not be the same. There is a sense in which we are all each other’s consequences, but I am more her consequence than she knew. She turned over my rock.

Looking at my ruined cherry tree, I could do nothing to repair what had happened. I could only act out a pantomime of impotence. Like a dwarf in a tantrum, some Grumpy out of a witch-haunted comedy, I dug in the basin of the tree until I found the run by which evil had entered and by which it had gone away. I set a trap facing each direction, knowing that even if I caught this gopher I would gain nothing but an empty revenge. If I ringed the hill with traps, others would still get through. If I put poisoned carrots in every burrow in Shields’s pasture, some fertile pair would still survive.

I can see Marian smiling.

Riddled with ambiguous evil, that is how I think of it. All of us tainted and responsible—Weld, Peck, the LoPrestis and their sullen daughter, myself, John, even Marian. And yet until a few months ago this place was Prospero’s island. It never occurred to us to doubt its goodness; we wouldn’t have dreamed of trading it for our old groove in Manhattan’s overburdened bedrock, or for one of those Sunshine Cities where tranquilized senior citizens (people our age) move to Muzak up and down an eternal shuffleboard court. Coming here, we kept at least the illusion of making our own choices, and we found that this sanctuary kept us physically alive, more alive than I at least have felt since those springs a millennium ago in Maquoketa, Iowa, when I used to go skinny-dipping in the creek with other boys and crawl out into an icy wind, shaking and blue, to pull on the bliss of a cotton union suit over my goose pimples.

For more than two years, physical well-being has been enough to make a life of. The expanding economy has had no boost from us. We have gone on no credit-card vacations to Oahu or Palm Springs, we never set off for the mountains towing a trailer or a boat, we belong to no country club, seldom dine out, possess no blue blue pool with lily-pad cocktail tables and expensive guests afloat in it. It will hardly do to confess aloud, in this century, how little it took to content us. We walked, gardened, read; Ruth cooked, I built things. We simplified feeling, as we had already anesthetized memory. The days dripped away like honey off a spoon. Once in a while we went for drinks or dinner to the house of someone like the LoPrestis, with whom our relationship was easy and friendly because it was shallow. Once in a while we were tempted out to San Francisco for a concert or show. That was all. Enough.

Yet if I had really been so fierce for withdrawal, wouldn’t I have fenced Tom Weld away when I had the chance? Wouldn’t we have kept Fran LoPresti at wary arm’s length? Wouldn’t I have sprayed for Jim Peck and his crowd before they got like weevils into everything?

I am as responsible as anyone. When we first met Peck in the bottoms I should have come away cackling and clutching my brows, crying, “A fool! A fool! I met a fool i’ the forest, a motley fool!” Instead I came away implicated, entangled, and oppressed, and I knew exactly why. He was like a visitation—beard, motorcycle, and all, and his head rattled with all the familiar loose marbles. He angered me in a remembered way, he made me doubt myself all afresh. And there was a threat in him, a demand that he and his bughouse faiths be somehow dealt with or they would undermine peace forever.

But the Welds and the LoPrestis, who merely involved us in neighborhood complications, and even Jim Peck, who challenged every faith I hold, threatened our serenity far less than did Marian Catlin, who only offered us love.

These ironies are circular, without resolution. I drift from grief to anger, and from anger to a sense of personal failure that blackens whole days and nights; and from that all too familiar agenbit of inwyt I circle back to the bitter aftertaste of loss. All anew, I am assailed by ultimate questions.

The other night, standing in the patio watching the stars and the lights lost among the hills, I had a flash as if my veins had been shot full of menthol, a cold convulsion of panicked awareness that I was I, that for sixty-four years I have inhabited this skull which from the inside seems comfortably habitual, but which I might not even recognize if I could stand six feet away and see its hairless shine in the starlight. That old bald-pate I? Good God. Is that what Ruth sees? What Marian regarded with affection and amusement? What Curtis rejected and was rejected by? And if I am so strange from the outside, am I so sure I know myself any better from within?

How do I know what I think till I see what I say, somebody asks, kidding the Philistines. But I can’t think the question so stupid. How do I know what I think unless I have seen what I say? For two years I cultivated the condition that Marian called twilight sleep. Now my eyelids flutter open, and I am still on the table, the gown is pulled away to reveal the incision, the clamps, the sponges, and the blood, the masks are still bent over me with an attention at once impersonal and profound.

Escape was a dream I dreamed, and waking I am confused and a little sick. Sitting here sorting out the feelings and beliefs of Joseph Allston, while the rain sweeps in on gusts of soft Pacific air, I am sure of hardly anything, least of all of the code I thought I lived by. Some of it, yes; maybe more of it than I now think, for certainly I don’t believe in conversions and character changes any more than I believe you can transform a radio into a radar by rewiring one or two of its circuits. But I do believe you can replace a blown tube or solder a broken wire. I have always said that the way to deal with the pain of others is by sympathy, which in first-year Greek they taught me meant “suffering with,” and that the way to deal with one’s own pain is to put one foot after the other. Yet I was never willing to suffer with others, and when my own pain hit me I crawled into a hole.

Sympathy I have failed in, stoicism I have barely passed. But I have made straight A in irony—that curse, that evasion, that armor, that way of staying safe while seeming wise. One thing I have learned hard, if indeed I have learned it now: it is a reduction of our humanity to hide from pain, our own or others’. To hide from anything. That was Marian’s text. Be open, be available, be exposed, be skinless. Skinless? Dance around in your bones.

So I will have to see what I say about this sanctuary, these entanglements, these unsought amputations and wounds, this loss. In the saying, I suppose there will be danger of both self-pity and masochism. That Roman who drove a dagger into his thigh and broke it off at the hilt for a reminder, who would dare say he didn’t enjoy the stoical spectacle he made? But I will have Marian at my elbow to mend me with laughter.

 

The rain has come on harder. I should go up to the house and bring in wood and light a grate fire and prepare such comforts as the first night of winter prescribes. Ruth has been by herself long enough. But I know I must come back down here to my study shack, regularly and often, until I have either turned light into these corners or satisfied myself that there is no light to be switched on. If every particle in the universe has both consciousness and choice, as Marian believed, then it also has responsibility, including the responsibility to try to understand. I am not exempt, no matter how I may yearn for the old undemanding darkness under the stone.

O
UR SIAMESE CAT, called Catarrh for the congested rumble of his purr, has a habit of bringing us little gifts, which he composes on the door mat with an imagination that transcends his homely materials. One morning there will be the long grooved yellow upper teeth of a gopher, a sort of disembodied Bugs Bunny smile, gleaming up at me when I open the door. Once there was the simple plume of a gray squirrel, quite effective; once the front half of a cottontail rabbit, a failure; once a pair of little paws with their naked palms upturned as if attached to an invisible cosmic shrug. Many times there have been compositions of feathers, especially in March when the cedar waxwings sweep in on their way north and have a blast on fermented pyracantha berries. They overwhelm the mockingbird who thinks he owns those bushes. No sooner does he chase off one batch than another whirls in behind him and starts gobbling. He turns on these, and here come the first ones, reinforced. In a single day they can pick him bare. They sit in clouds in the plane tree and spit seeds on the bricks, and when they get really illuminated they try to fly through the plate-glass windows. Then Catarrh carries the casualties to the mat and makes jackstraw patterns of their yellow-tipped tail feathers.

This morning when I looked out into rain-washed sunshine, Catarrh had prepared a beauty: a gray nose, bristling on both sides with long whiskers, gleaming with four long teeth. Below and to the left, an intact paunch like a purple plum, enclosed within a coil of iridescent intestines. And along the top and down the right side, tying grin and guts together with a sweeping S curve that was pure dynamic symmetry, the nine-inch tail of a wood rat. Undoubtedly it was Catarrh’s best to date—
Neotoma fuscipes
was his masterpiece. He sat in the entry in the sun, washing himself and waiting for compliments, and he made no objection when I lifted the mat at arm’s length and hurried around the house with it. He understands that his art, like a Navaho sand painting, should not survive the hour of its creation.

I was so intent on getting the mat around without spilling its contents that I forgot we have been avoiding that side of the house as accursed. Now as I threw the wood rat’s remains down the hill into the brush and straightened up with the mat dangling from my hand, I got the whole view of what Tom Weld had done to the opposite hill in little more than a week.

The eyesore dog pen and pigeon house were gone, but so was the great oak that once crowned the hill. Below the summit Weld had gouged a harsh bench terrace thirty feet deep, and from that led off a deep road shelf with a bulldozer asleep in it like a hog in a wallow. Beyond the bulldozer a bench of gray dirt ended in a long cone that spilled down the hill. The rain had cut gullies in it; I knew that our road at the bottom would be a foot deep in mud.

I looked Weld’s work over with bitterness. The hill that once swelled into view across the ravine like an opulent woman lazily turning was mutilated and ruined, and Weld was obviously not through yet. Only an amateur planning commission unable to read a contour map could ever have approved that site plan; only a land butcher could have proposed it and carried it out. And though I had every hope that the people backing Weld would swallow him before the operation was completed, there would be no restoring what he had ruined. It reminded me too painfully; it made me sick to look.

I turned my back on it and went around the house. Too many miserable events in our recent life seemed to me in some way consequences of some ignorant act of Weld’s. Perhaps he is where I should begin. Am
Anfang,
God created Weld, and Weld was without form, and void. And yet I know that Weld, however irritating, began nothing. From before the beginning he was, after all ends he will be. He is only the raw material of mankind, the aboriginal owner of the undeveloped tract called Paradise.

Neither was Lucio LoPresti a beginning. He too existed here, a prefabricated example, a dry run, a model and a warning, though I did not read him that way at once, and have never lost my sympathy with him.

Begin where, then? With Curtis’s life and death, that uprooted us from habitual life and set us wandering? Not that either. My son is not what I want to examine now; I have examined him before, endlessly and without spiritual gain, and I can’t undertake all that again. Nothing that I really want to examine begins until after we settled in this place. Once we found it and made it our refuge, we were as if in hibernation; exasperations, troubles with the neighbors, demands from outside, were no more than the fly-buzzings that persuaded us our sleep was sweet. It took something more to wake us—first a long, loud ringing of the alarm, and then something softer: a touch.

The alarm went off a year ago. The touch on the lips that brought us fully awake did not happen until last March.

Ordinarily this is not good walking country. In wet weather the adobe is like tar, and through the summer and early fall the open country is unpleasant with barbed and prickly seeds. In those seasons our walking is confined to roads and lanes. But when a rain or two has flattened the weeds and started the new grass without soaking the ground, then cross-country walking can be marvelous.

Last year, as this, the rains came early, and in October you would have seen us any afternoon, bald head following white head, country corduroy behind country tweed, me brandishing a blackthorn stick that an Irish poet once left at the apartment, starting through the Shieldses’ pasture fence. We followed the path made by Julie LoPresti’s black gelding, a path so uniformly double-grooved that it might have been made with skis. This ran into a trampled space under an oak where he used to sleep on his feet and switch flies, and then out again along the fence separating the pasture from Weld’s apricot orchard.

Somewhere along there we always stopped to admire the view, with our backs to the orchard and our faces toward the pasture and woodland rolling steeply down and then more steeply up, ravine and ridge, to the dark forested mountainside and the crest. Across the mountain the pale air swept in from remote places—Hawaii, Midway, illimitable Japans. I have never anywhere else had so strong a feeling of the vast continuity of air in which we live. On a walk, we flew up into that gusty envelope like climbing kites.

The Shieldses, who own the pasture, have been abroad for a year. We pass their lane, turn left, turn right again past the LoPresti entrance. Almost any afternoon we could look down and see Julie working her horse in the ring or currying the dust out of his hide, and at the house, Lucio laying up adobes for another wing. (Ruth suggested that he unraveled each night what he had laid up during the day.) Fran would be chiseling or sanding languidly at one of her driftwood sculptures, sometimes crowding under the shade of the patio umbrella, sometimes quenched under a straw hat a yard across. She has had a couple of moles removed by needle, and fears actinic cancer.