All the Little Live Things Read online

  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.

  I

  OUR 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.

  2

  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.

  From Lucio and Fran, a wave, perhaps a minute of shouted conversation. From their daughter, nothing. She was not nearsighted, she was just a girl who didn’t know how to smile, and was not inclined to acknowledge the flappings and hoo-hooings of neighbors who meant no more to her than her horse’s droppings. She had a certain cold ferocity of antagonism to her mother, a contemptuous toleration of her father, and a passion of attachment to her gelding. Those, I believe, constituted her total emotional life last October. By now, a year later, her capacity for feeling should be enlarged.

  Ruth believes that boys are not found around stables because what they like is taking things apart and putting them together again, and for this purpose horses are not so satisfactory as cars, motorcycles, and even bicycles, while girls adore horses because they are biological and have functions—just pat them and feel how warm! I wonder, on the contrary, if Julie didn’t spend all her time with her horse because she had no other friends and because riding let her indulge her fantasies of having a bit in her father’s mouth and a Mexican spur in her mother’s side. She was a dark-browed girl, fifteen or sixteen, somewhat flat-chested, big in the behind. Off the horse she was rawboned and awkward; mounted, she was almost beautiful. She always rode bareback.

  So there we went one day last fall. A wave from Lucio, a flutter of Fran’s uplifted glove across some sort of mosaic panel laid out on sawhorses. No Julie—apparently not yet home from school—but the horse was hanging his chin on the corral rail waiting. We turned into Ladera Lane under big gum trees whose bark was starting to peel to reveal the delicate pastels underneath and whose fallen buttons, crushed by passing cars, filled the air with the smell I could never dissociate from the 1918 flu epidemic, during which we went around in gauze masks soaked in that pungent oil. Past the riding stable—more girls, no boys—and down a sudden gully smelling of bay and sage, around the comer of a walnut orchard to Roble Road and along it up a long hogback, the first crest visible from our house, until we came out on a windy plateau with puckers of woods below us and hills between us and the mountain.

  It is a view that has the quality of bigness without actual size, and it used to comfort me to know that these little mountains, like everything else around, are very lively, very Californian. The range grows, they say, a half inch or so a year, and in the same time moves about that distance northward. It is a parable for the retired. Sit still and let the world do the moving.

  The ridge was as far as we let our string out. Reeling in, we turned to the right across the clods of a plowed orchard, climbed through a fence beside a locked trail gate, and found ourselves in the pasture bought from Tom Weld’s father a long time ago by a school district looking to the future. A wall-eyed white horse with a hanging lip and the black nose and black feet he had got from wading around in tarweed watched us; he had a decrepit Hooverville look like an old man dirty from picking through the dump. Angus steers, three-dimensionally black against the dun hill, chewed the cud under a dying grotesque of an oak.

  Ahead and to the right the hills flowed into the valley. Roofs and trees and streets receded toward the bay, and in the unsmogged breezy clarity we could see the bridges—Dumbarton, San Mateo, even the Bay bridge—and far off on misty contracostal hillsides the white of continuous city.

  Below or above the snuffling of the steers and the lazy rushes of wind through the oak I could hear the sough of traffic in the thousand streets of the valley, and I felt at once elated and besieged. A little more population pressure, that bigger water main that Tom Weld wanted, and our desert island would be quarter-acre lots and beatitude a memory.

  A long slope led us down into the wood that thickened along the dry creek bed. There were dusty asters under the brush, an occasional scarlet gilia. Some trodden weed sent up a sudden minty smell. In the path I saw the scat of an animal, fox probably, all knotted up with fur and feathers, and I turned it over with the tip of the blackthorn. “Boy,” I said, “that looks painful. How come a nice wild natural fox suffers from strangulated hemorrhoids?”

  Holding her mouth as if she had been interrupted when just about to whistle, Ruth said in her mildest whisper, “I’ve got a Kleenex, if you want to take it home for your collection.”

  I made some suitably scatological remark and golfed the thing into the bushes. But there it was. I admire the natural, and I hate the miscalled improvements that spread like impetigo into the hills. But who can pretend that the natural and the idyllic are the same? The natural is often imperfect, and Homo fabricans, of whom I am one, is eager to perfect it. So I clean it up and grub out its poison oak and spray for its insect pests and plant things that bear blossoms instead of burrs, and make it all Arcadian and delightful, and all I do is help jar loose a tax increase, bring on roads and power lines, stir up the real-estate sharpies with their unearned increment, and get the hills cut up with roads and building lots. All our woe, with loss of Eden.

  If I had three wishes—one would do—I would stop all development in its tracks and put the real-estate people to growing apricots again. Better a country fox with a hemorrhoid than a city fox with a pile. Aesop must have said it.

  Through the brushy bottoms trail-riders had cut a ten-foot swath, but the summer’s growth had half closed it in. Fronds of poison oak hung into the trail, dry cucumber vines and bindweed wove the walls of brush together. The ground, trodden by horses when wet, had dried again rough and hard as concrete. Passing under an oak, we got our faces full of late oak-moth caterpillars hanging on their threads, and Ruth was still pawing her face and shuddering when we came to the broken-down place in the bank where the riding trail crossed the creek between the Thomas cottage, then vacant and up for sale, and our south line. We slid down and clambered up, pulling ourselves by exposed roots.

  And had a cold, visceral shock, a stoppage of the heart followed by a pounding pulse. For there, down in that quiet creek bottom where nobody but an occasional horseman ever passed, and where the only wheeled tracks were those of the man who periodically serviced our well pump, was this motorcycle sitting quietly, and on its seat this person in orange helicopter coveralls bulging all over with zippered pockets. The suit was unzipped clear to his navel, and his hairy chest rose out of it and merged with a dark, dense beard.

  Caliban.

  He was not surprised by us as we were by him; I had the feeling he had deliberately sat there soundless and let us startle ourselves. Teetering, tiptoeing his padded boots to balance the cycle (surely the feet inside those boots were cloven), he sat and looked at us. He was young, no more than twenty-two or -three. His hair was long and tousled, even matted where the helmet, now hung on a handlebar, had crushed it down. It crawled over his collar, and was pushed forward on his forehead, hiding his horns. His brown eyes, extraordinarily large and bright, gleamed out of that excess of hair, and his teeth, badly spaced, the eyeteeth long and pointed, were bared in a hanging, watchful, half-crazy grin. His coveralls and his shaggy head were splashed with green and gold as the leaves of the bay tree above him moved in the wind. He creaked like a saddle when he shifted, and he gave off an odor like a neglected gym locker.

  The breeze was going in the top of the tree, but down in our hot pocket it was still. The wild mixture of things I smelled—this boy’s rank body odor, bay leaves, crushed weeds, hot oil, gasoline—seemed to me the things I would smell in a camp of bacchants if bacchants rode motorcycles; and I was irresistibly reminded that the maenads were supposed to have intoxicated themselves by chewing bay leaves. In spite of the stillness of his face and body, in spite of his watchful grin, I was not in doubt about this fellow for a second. If I ever saw the incarnated essence of disorder, this was it. He emanated a spirit as erratic, reckless, and Dionysian as his smell, and I had not seen eyes like his since one day in the suq in Beirut, when a Bedu boy whom I knew for a pickpocket watched me buy Ruth a gold chain.

  “Lost?” I said.

  �
��Oh no.” He had a soft, pliant voice. His hand went inside the open zipper and scratched comfortably at his ribs.

  “I didn’t hear your motor.”

  “I’ve been here a while.”

  Since he had to know he was trespassing, and since he might have guessed that I was the trespassee, I waited for him to explain. When he didn’t, I said, a little sharply, “Doing what?”

  The gappy smile widened, I became aware of very red lips among the red-brown beard. His eyes rolled upward eloquently, he seemed ready to laugh. “Meditating,” he said. “Under your bo tree.”

  That was as fantastic as the helicopter suit. What is more, he spoke in a tolerantly amused way that said of course I wouldn’t know what he was talking about, and who gave a damn? I said, “Bay tree, bo tree, that shouldn’t make any difference. But I never heard of anybody meditating on a motorcycle.”

  I suppose there was some coloration of contempt in my voice. More than once, since that afternoon, I have wondered if, supposing I had responded to him heartily or good-naturedly, we might have begun and ended in good feeling rather than in suspicion and dislike. Marian suggested as much, so did Ruth. But I was jumpy from encountering him down there where I thought everything peaceful and safe; everything about him, from his repudiation of personal cleanliness to his mode of transportation, was a threat aimed straight at me, and I was bound to show it. He flicked his brilliant eyes at me—oh, he was alert, he was as sharp as a pin, he missed nothing in fact or by implication—and said in the tone I remembered too well, the tone of the son not quite keeping his temper before a censorious father, “Look close, and you’ll see this is a Honda, not a Harley. Not everybody that rides a motor is a Hell’s Angel.”