Divisadero (2 page)

What is not in the small
white book, therefore, is the strange act of our father during the chaos
surrounding her death, when he took on informally the adoption of a child from
the same hospital where his wife was giving birth—the daughter of another
mother, who had also died—bringing both children home and raising the other
child, who had been named Claire, as his own. So there would be two girls, Anna
and Claire, born the same week. People assumed that both were his daughters.
This was our father’s gesture that grew from Lydia Mendez’ passing. The dead mother
of the other child had no relatives, or was a solitary; perhaps that was how he
was able to do this. It was a
fi
eld hospital on the outskirts of Santa Rosa, and to put it brutally,
they owed him a wife, they owed him something.

Now and then our father
embraced us as any father would. This happened only if you were able to catch
him in that no-man’sland between tiredness and sleep, when he seemed wayward to
himself. I joined him on the old covered sofa, and I would
lie
like a slim dog in his arms, imitating his state of weariness—too much sun
perhaps, or too hard a day’s work.

Claire would also be there
sometimes, if she did not want to be left out, or if there was a storm. But I
simply wished to have my face against his checkered shirt and pretend to be
asleep. As if inhaling the
fl
esh of an adult was a sin and also a glory, a right in any case. To
do such a thing during daylight would have been unthinkable, he
’
d have pushed us aside. He was not a
modern parent, he had been raised with a few male rules, and he no longer had a
wife to qualify or compromise his beliefs. So you had to catch him in that
twilight state, when he had ceded control on the tartan sofa, his girls
enclosed,
one in each of his arms. I would watch the
fl
icker under his eyelid, the tremble
within that covering skin that signalled his tiredness, as if he were being
tugged in mid-river by a rope to some other place. And then I too would sleep,
descending into the layer that was closest to him. A father who allows you that
should protect you all of your days, I think.

More than a century before
us, in August 1849, a group of men set up camp in a valley more than a hundred
miles north of Petaluma. They built cabins at a place they called Badger Hill
and began to search for gold. There were twenty of them panning the streams,
standing knee-deep in the icy rivers, and they almost surrendered to the winter
storms that overtook them. But within six months gold-laced quartz was
unearthed in the place that would eventually be called Grass Valley. A hundred
ramshackle hotels went up, and bizarre names for mines began to speckle the
constantly reprinted maps
—Slumgullion, Delirium Tremens, Bogus Thunder,
Hell’s Delight, Graveyard, Lone Jack, Rich Hell, Ne Plus Ultra, Silver Fork,
Rocking Horse, Sultana.
Men would be stranded in the mountains with no
supplies and become hunters out of necessity, killing grouse, cattle, bears,
with shotguns and pistols. Butcher shops sprang up. Steamboats travelled inland
to the furthest point of navigation—as far as the Feather River. And a
many-headed civilization arrived. Gamblers, water entrepreneurs, professional
shootists, prostitutes, diarists, coffee drinkers, whisky merchants, poets,
heroic dogs, mail-order brides, women falling in love with boys who walked within
the realm of luck, old men swallowing gold to conceal it on their return
journeys to the coast, balloonists, mystics, Lola Montez, opera singers—good
ones, bad ones, those who fornicated their way across the territory. Dynamiters
blasted steep grades and the land under your feet. There were seventeen miles
of tunnels beneath the town of Iowa Hill. Sonora burned. Weaverville burned.
Shasta and Columbia burned. Were rebuilt and burned again and rebuilt again.
Sacramento flooded.

A hundred years later, at
the time of Coop
’
s obsession, there would still be
fi
ve thousand full-time gold miners along
the banks of the Yuba and Russian rivers. They scouted out the old towns in the
Sierras named after lovers and dogs and characters in novels
—
names that were a time capsule of hunger and desire for a new life.
Ne
Plus Ultra!
At each
fi
lament-like dot on the county maps, something had happened. On this
riverbank two brothers killed each other arguing about which direction to
travel. At this clearing a woman was traded for a site. It was as if there
were a novella
by Balzac round every bend.

Prospectors now drove up
in Airstreams, pulling gas-fuelled dredges to suck up whatever remained on the
river bottoms. A century of
fl
ooding and storms had knocked loose the gold from the prehistoric
beds, sluicing it down into the rivers. Miners in wetsuits were ‘
sniping
’ the streams, and swam in the underwater darkness
holding giant cauldrons of light.

Everything about gold was
in opposition to Coop’s life on our farm. It must still have felt to him that
he came from nowhere, the horror of his parents’ murder never spoken of by us.
He had been handed the habits and duties that came with farm life, so by now he
could ride up to our grandfather’s cabin on the ridge with his eyes closed, knowing
by the sound of the breeze in a tree exactly where he was and what direction he
faced, as if he was within safe architecture. Our land had been cleared of
stones and boulders, the wood planks on our kitchen table were wiped clean as a
page, the fence gates chained and unchained, chained and unchained. But gold
was euphoria and chance to Coop, an illogical discipline, a tall story that
included a murder or mistaken identity or a love affair. He hitchhiked two
hours northwest onto the Colfax–Iowa Hill road and watched the men with
crevassing tools working in the north fork of the Russian River. He was
seventeen years old when he impetuously hired himself out for a pittance and
the chance of a bonus to man the Anaconda suction hoses. He came home at the
end of the week with a twisted back. He remained wordless in front of us, these
two girls, his curious listeners, as to where he had been. Wherever he had
gone, we could see, he had been somehow altered, been part of a dangerous
thing.

He had jumped from the
fl
oating platform, the Anaconda hose in his
arms, and sunk to the bottom of the river. A second later the generator broke
awake and his body was
fl
ung from side to side as he tried to aim the live hose under
boulders for the possibility of trapped gold. Sometimes, when it got loose from
the suck of gravel, the jet hose leapt free of the water, into the air, Coop
still riding it until he fell back onto the river’s hard surface, submerging
once more with the glass and leather and iron of the diver’s helmet lolling
rough at his neck while within it the thin line of air led amateurish and
tentative and, he knew, unsafe into his mouth.

Coop sat in the small,
dark farmhouse kitchen with us and attempted to talk of this, but he could
barely take even one step into telling us of the absurdity and danger of what
he had allowed himself to do. So we did not know what had occurred. I remember
we sat there and chanted, ‘Coop’s lost week, Coop’s lost week. Where did he go?
Who was he with? Who was the woman who must have so exhausted him?’

The smooth rolling hills
of our farm were green in the constant rains of winter and parched brown during
summer and fall. Driving home, north out of Nicasio, we climbed to the peak of
the hills, then abruptly swerved right onto the farm’s narrow dirt road, which
went downhill a quarter-mile before it reached the barns, the car clobbering
over speed bumps made from the rubber of tractor tires that had been hammered
into the earth with spikes. When Claire and I were older, returning from
parties in Glen Ellen, half asleep and with full bladders, we cursed the
existence of the bumps. In the darkness, at the foot of the hill, we had to
halt the car.
My turn,
I said, getting out in my new cotton dress and
tight shoes to push the too-friendly and wide-awake mules off the path at the
foot of the hill, so we could drive on.

As sisters we re
fl
ected each other, competed with each
other, and our shared idol was Coop. By the time he was in his late teens we
discovered he had other lives, disappearing into the city, haunting pool halls,
dances, returning just in time to drive Claire into Nicasio for her piano
lessons. She’d watch his lean brown hands, how he handled the clutch, how he
took corners as if guiding them through water, swerving back to the straight
road in a single gesture. She loved Coop’s easy, minimal effort towards
whatever was around him. A year later, picking her up in Nicasio, he shifted
over to the passenger seat and threw her the keys, pulled a paperback out of
the glove compartment and began reading while she, frantic and uncertain about
everything, steered the suddenly massive car—she felt she was screaming— up the
winding road to its crest and then slid down the hill to the farm. He never
once looked up, never once said a word,
maybe
glanced
at the face of an almost sideswiped mule as it caught his eye in the side
mirror. From then on, Claire drove to and from piano lessons alone, missing
Coop. Coop, who with his con
fi
dence would sweep a hay bale over his shoulder and walk to the barn
lighting a cigarette with his free hand.

Sometimes Claire and I
would come down the hill with the car lights turned off in complete blackness.
Or we would climb from our bedroom window onto the skirt of the roof and lie
flat on our backs on the large table-rock, still warm from the day, and talk
and sing into the night. We counted out the seconds between meteor showers
slipping horizontal across the heavens. When thunder shook the house and horse
stalls, I’d see Claire in her bed, during the brief moments of lightning,
sitting upright like a nervous hound, hardly breathing, crossing
herself
. There were days when she disappeared on her horse
and I disappeared into a book. But we were still sharing everything then.
The Nicasio bar, the Druid Hall, the Sebastiani movie theatre in
Sonoma, whose screen was like the surface of the Petaluma reservoir, altering
with every shift of light, the hundred or more redwings that always sat on the
telephone wires and chirruped out loud before a storm.
There was a
purple flower in February called shooting star. There were the sticks of willow
that Coop cut down and strapped onto my broken wrist before he drove me to the
hospital. I was fourteen then. He was eighteen.
Everything is biographical,
Lucian
Freud says. What we make, why it is made, how we draw a dog, who it is we are
drawn to, why we cannot forget. Everything is collage, even genetics. There is
the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known brie
fl
y. We contain them for the rest of our
lives, at every border that we cross.

Who was Coop, really? We
never knew what his parents were like. We were never sure what he felt about
our family, which had harboured him and handed him another life. He was the
endangered heir of a murder. As a teenager he was hesitant, taking no more than
he was given. At dawn he’d come out from one of the sheds like a barn cat,
stretching as if he’d been sleeping for days, when in fact he had returned from
a pool hall in San Francisco three or four hours earlier, hitchhiking the forty
miles back in the darkness. I wondered even then how he would survive or live
in a future world. We watched as he muttered, thinking things out, while he
stripped down a tractor or welded a radiator from an abandoned car onto a ’58
Buick. Everything was collage.

Somewhere there is an
album made up of photographs our father took of Claire and me that provides a
time-lapse progression of our growing up, from our
fi
rst, unconcerned poses to feral or vain
glances, as the truer landscape of our faces began to be seen. Between
Christmas and New Year’s—the picture was always taken at that time—we’d be
herded into the pasture beside the outcrop of rock (where our mother was
buried) and captured in a black-and-white photograph on a late December
afternoon. He insisted on modest clothing, although as we grew older Claire
would arrive in chapped jeans or I would reveal a bare shoulder, causing a
twenty-minute argument. He found little humour in this. The yearly episode was
something he needed, like a carefully laid table that would clarify the past.

We would study ourselves
in this evolving portrait. It made us secretly competitive. One became more
beautiful, or reclusive, one became more self-conscious, or anarchic. We were
revealed and betrayed by our poses. There was the year, for instance, that
Claire lowered her face to hide a scar. In spite of having been almost
inseparable, we were diverging, pacing ourselves privately into our own version
of ourselves. And then there was the last photograph, when we were both
sixteen, where our faces gazed out nakedly.
A picture that I
would rip out of the album a short while later.