All the Little Live Things Read online

  “Joe,” Ruth says. “Not again. Not now.”

  But I am already in full cry, and with Marian Catlin’s amused and attentive face before me, I outdo myself. Early explorer, old settler, garrulous gaffer, I regale these green immigrants with the hyperbolical perils of the New World. I start far back, when our relations with Weld were friendly and even funny, when he was a skin-clad native and we were white strangers who had quenched their prow on his beach, and I give it all its philosophical applications and extensions. It would have gone something like this:

  2

  There are certain orthodoxies in the associations between natives and new settlers. The newcomers land, see that the country is fair, kneel and claim it in the king’s name, plant a flag and a cross, and advance making signs of peace, with muskets at the ready. Usually the local chief is friendly; if he isn’t, a volley teaches him instant manners. He swaps corn, fish, squash, daughters, and other native produce for beads, mirrors, and needles. He throws a feast of young dog, signs a treaty of friendship for as long as grass shall grow or water run, and accepts a plug hat, a coat with epaulets, and a lead medal. He is offered raw alcohol cut with branch water and spiced with cayenne and powdered tobacco, and when he comes to, groaning, next day, his new friends thank him kindly for the gift of Manhattan Island.

  Manhattan Island seems a small price for such enhancements of his life as the white men bring. He is employed as guide and hunter, there are new markets and job opportunities, the economy gets a boost. It even turns out that the newcomers value French and Iroquois scalps, will pay a dollar apiece and furnish the scalping knives.

  So far, fine. But little by little the Indian finds that the white men have burned off the woods where he hunted, and drained the bogs where he used to pick cranberries and trap muskrats. Places turn out to be out of bounds, things are forbidden. Helping themselves to the white man’s corn, Indians get slapped in the stocks. Shooting one of his spotted deer, they get thirty lashes. No longer red brother—now thieving redskin. Young bucks mutter threats, old chiefs counsel patience, winter comes, redskin cold and hungry, meat scarce, blanket ragged, tobacco and firewater impossible dreams. Appears at white man’s door begging a meal and a smoke: On your way, you gut-eating vagabond! And keep a hundred feet clear of the chicken house as you leave.

  That’s the usual pattern. Up to now my sympathies have been with the noble and ill-used redskin. I have applauded when he shoots burning arrows into the thatch and tomahawks the women and children who run out with their hair on fire, and I have sorrowed for him when he is cornered and done in by the Miles Standish types. But the clash of cultures between Tom Weld and me has taught me that the white newcomer sometimes has a case. When I think about this Mohican I signed a treaty with, I feel as if somebody has wrapped a blood-pressure band around my neck and is pumping it up.

  Ruth keeps saying we came out here to buy some quiet; we should accept the local culture for what it is. Weld’s family has ranched these hills for sixty years with no success whatever—Ruth says because they never had a decent water supply, I say because all of them must have been cretins. These unirrigated hill apricots are small, and don’t bring top prices from packers. In dry years the trees hardly bear at all. What would you do in those circumstances? Locate a decent water supply, or move to some land that could be farmed? But you’re not a cretin. Cretins go on trying to farm it. Every time they hit a bad streak they sign a new treaty with the palefaces and dispose of another chunk of land. For the last twenty years it’s taken a really splendid incompetence to lose money in California real estate, but there are the Welds with about thirty acres left out of two or three hundred, and nearly as strapped as ever. When Weld sold twenty acres to a developer, who resold our five to us, he needed money to pay for his father’s funeral and to buy a new caterpillar tractor so he could go on raising minicots for a reluctant packing industry.

  You can’t see the Weld place from here, but the day the carpenters finished boarding our roof we climbed up and waltzed over the whole place, all full of euphoria, and from up there, with the binoculars, we saw this white farmhouse with a warped ridge and faded blue doors and window frames, inside a sagging woven wire fence. Also inside the fence—you can see most of it now if you look—there was a galvanized butane tank, un-camouflaged, an old truck with mustard growing up through it, a horse trailer with two flat tires, a secondhand culvert, lots of tin cans, plenty of paper, and a pile of fence posts that looked as if somebody had scattered them to get at a rabbit.

  You think we were troubled then by that rural slum? Not a bit. Ruth even thought it was comforting to find that Weld lived a half mile off. A neighbor, that was nice. Not for fraternization, you understand, but just for emergencies. After all, we were after peace and quiet. So we waltzed around up there while a carpenter ran a machine saw along the edge of the roof, and down fell the ends of the roof boards like the ragged ends of our old life.

  Then over in the pasture south of us we saw this Labrador dog coming with something big in his mouth that when he got closer turned out to be a red chicken. He came through holding the chicken high against the drag of the weeds and grass, and disappeared into the poison oak at the head of our road, and came into sight again a long time later far down below, approaching Weld’s lane. The woven wire fence was in his way. He just left the ground and floated over it—a magnificent demonstration of what the dance people call ballon. Then he lay down and ate, and feathers blew around among the tin cans and old bones.

  We didn’t know LoPresti then, but we concluded he kept hens. Apparently, he kept them just for Weld’s dog, because without any particular watchfulness I saw two more of them come through the pasture in the dog’s mouth in the next ten days, and whenever I climbed high enough to see into Weld’s yard his spread of mustard and thistles was thicker with the feathers of Rhode Island Reds.

  Then one morning comes a short dark man to lean on a fence post and observe the building of our house. He wore faded suntans, and his hand that I shook was as callused as an oarsman’s. This was LoPresti, who sounds like Parma but is actually third-generation California. He said he was building his own house, making his own adobe bricks as he went along. He’d been building for three years and might make it last a lifetime. He had this pleasant way of mocking himself in his talk, as if what he did struck him as mildly insane. His wife wasn’t well—emphysema. They moved out here because it was smogless and because their daughter was horse crazy. He said there were a lot of deer, and at night they could shine flashlights out their windows and surprise raccoons and possums in the oak trees.

  “Hard on your chickens?” I said.

  “I don’t have any chickens,” said he.

  “Oh? I thought ...”

  “I had chickens,” LoPresti said. “Yesterday I chopped the heads off the five survivors and put them in the freezer. Though I’m not sure they’re safe even there.”

  “So you know about that dog,” I said. Oh, laughing—it struck me as very funny.

  He looked off across the pasture and plucked great gut-bucket sounds out of the barbed wire and gave me to understand he knew considerable about that dog.

  “Couldn’t fence him out?”

  “I did.”

  “Or keep the chickens inside a shed?”

  “Did.”

  “But he got in anyway.”

  “Under,” LoPresti said. “Over. Through. That’s no ordinary dog.”

  “How come you didn’t speak to Weld?”

  “I did.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “Said it was his brother’s dog, he was just keeping it for him.”

  “That’s a help. Did you talk to the brother?”

  “I sure did. He said it didn’t surprise him at all. He never knew a dog to beat this dog for hunting. Great rabbit dog, gopher dog, quail dog, mouse dog. It didn’t surprise Charlie Weld one bit that he got after chickens. Dog like that, brought up in the country where he learns to rustle his own grub,
it’s no expense at all to keep him. Charlie was willing to bet me Tom hadn’t bought a can of dog food since Charlie brought the dog out.”

  In my innocence, my inexperience, I cackled. “Did he offer to pay for the chickens?”

  “Oh, no,” LoPresti said. “Why would he do that? He didn’t take them. It was the dog.”

  “And it never occurred to either of them that a dog like that ought to be tied up.”

  “Well, I suggested it, and Charlie admitted he’d tried. But that kind of dog, how can you keep him in? He just naturally unties knots with his teeth, chews his rope, busts his chain. Can’t keep him in a pen either. Go over a ten-foot deer fence the way any other dog would go over a chair.”

  LoPresti pulled slivers from the fence post and flipped them humming into the weeds. “No,” he said, “Charlie convinced me there’s no way of looking at that dog except with regretful admiration. Which I do, indeed I do. He’s got style. Yesterday he came over for his daily pullet and found the henhouse empty. You’d think he’d be put out. Hell, he never let it get him down for a minute. I was filling the woodbox with fireplace chunks, and I had my wife’s cocker bitch tied to the clothesline for some exercise. She’s in season, been shut in. So I get around the house just in time to be assured this mutt of Weld’s won’t die without issue. We’ll have him in the God-damned family, multiplied by six.”

  LoPresti went home across the pasture, and Ruth and I had a big laugh. We had neither chickens nor cocker bitches.

  That night the first rain blew in. We hurried out from the motel where we were living to see what harm had come to our half-finished house, and right away got stuck in the mud of our half-finished road. So in the best tradition of the white settler asking native help, I walked back to Weld’s wickiup, and he climbed into his pickiup and came and pulled us out. When I watched him get down in the mud to hook on the tow cable, I felt my years, and I was grateful to him.

  When we got up the hill and parked by the lumber pile, there were these three horses looking out our unglazed window like Rosa Bonheur horses in a storm. From the evidence, which it took us a half hour to clean up, they’d been in our parlor all night.

  I couldn’t blame the horses. Weld had no shelter for them, and when he sold part of his land he hadn’t altered his fences. Who was to tell these nags, which weren’t even his, but boarders, that the south five acres were now out of bounds?

  Still, somebody had to tell them. I walked back a half mile down the valley to do it. When I knocked on the faded blue door, out popped Weld’s good-natured face. “Stuck again?”

  No, I said, I just wanted to see him a minute. My feet were so balled up with adobe mud that I took off my shoes and came in my socks across five or six colors of asphalt tile. Somebody had been loose in the old farmhouse, fixing it up. Mrs. Weld gave me a smile and a wet rubber-gloved hand. Either she had taken advice from conflicting authorities or she had a friend who gave her samples. The walls were variegated like the floors: one wall rosebud paper, one combed redwood plywood, one birch. The fourth I didn’t notice—window, maybe—but there was a large television in the living room with Weld’s teen-age son magnetized to it. Mrs. Weld swooped through picking up Sunday papers in her rubber hands, and swooped out again.

  Weld and I talked of the weather, and agreed it was wet. We agreed the road could stand a few more loads of base rock, which I planned to order. We said even if it was wet, the rain was welcome; out here it could sure get dry by November. We were mutually confident that it wouldn’t take but a week or so before the grass would begin to come green.

  After the preliminaries, I said, “Just now, when we got up to the house, we found your horses in it.”

  He was really pleased. “You did? They got in there, uh? It sure don’t take a horse long to learn. Let it start getting wet and cold, and they’re just like a person, if there’s anyplace they can get under cover, they will.”

  “I wouldn’t have mentioned it,” I. said, “only they do sort of mess up the house.”

  We laughed together, agreeing that a horse did, sort of.

  “It doesn’t matter much now,” I said, “but later on they could do some damage. I wonder if we could work out a way to keep them out.”

  “Why sure, I should think,” Weld said. “You probably want to put up a little fence around your place. I could give you a hand.”

  “That’s good of you,” I said, “but a fence means gates, and they’re a nuisance to be always opening and closing. Wouldn’t it be better if you fenced in the land you still own?”

  There was a definite moment when he began to take it in. You could call it a moment of cultural shock. He looked at me blinking. “That’d cut out a big chunk of pasture.”

  “Yes,” I said, “but you must have figured on losing it when you sold it.”

  He stood frowning and pinching his throat, looking at my stocking feet. “Well, yeah, I guess. But that’d be a big expense, that much fence.”

  I hadn’t thought it would come for nothing. In fact, I had come over prepared to share the cost, as a sort of neighborly gesture. But it struck me that he hadn’t yet admitted his responsibility to keep the horses on his own land. So instead of making any offer I remarked that the law was different in different states. Some places you were expected to fence loose stock out, but in California the law said the owner must fence them in.

  “Yeah, is that so?” he said. “I s’pose. I never looked into it.”

  His face had gone a little mulish. In the kitchen Mrs. Weld was drying a saucepan and listening. The television scored on a long pass and burst into a roar, but when I glanced over, the Weld boy was watching me, not it. They had a kind of solidarity that made me mad.

  “I don’t want to seem unreasonable,” I said. “But you can see that once the house is finished and the planting in, we can’t have horses clumping around.”

  Weld had a habit of swallowing air, and the habit had grown on him as we talked. He pulled his dewlap and rubbed his jaw and swallowed and bent to look out into the rain that was coming down hard on a stiff wind. He said, “I should think you’d want a nice little fence around your place—picket fence, grapestakes, something like that. Looks nice, and all your planting is inside and you don’t have to worry.”

  “That’d be fine,” I said, “except that the landscape plan doesn’t call for a fence, and I don’t need a fence. I haven’t got any horses.”

  I went to the kitchen door past Mrs. Weld, who managed a grimace about as near a smile as mine probably was. Weld watched my muddy shoes as I put them on. I suppose he was thinking that an hour ago he had done me the favor of pulling me out of the mud. So was I, for that matter.

  I left him looking mulish, saying he’d have to see. A little later we drove down the hill and got stuck in the same mudhole where we had bogged down coming out. I wouldn’t humiliate myself by asking another favor of Weld. I walked three quarters of a mile, clear past his place and on to the old horse ranch, and called a tow truck.

  For a while we kept the horses out with barricades, which are not so different from fences that it gave me any pleasure to put them up. By January we had doors, and the house was safe; but in February, when the painters came, there were buckets and jugs to kick over. One painter came to hate the horses so bad he brought an air pistol to the job and lurked (at five or six dollars an hour, on my time) behind comers and partitions, trying to sting one good. I never saw him succeed. Myself, I relied on stones. But neither stones nor air pistols nor barricades kept the horses from bursting into the kitchen patio the night after the concrete was poured. You can see their footprints out there now. That time, I went to the trouble of looking up the impounding laws, and if it hadn’t been for Ruth I’d have caged his wandering brutes and made him pay through the nose to get them back.

  In April, when we moved in, the horses were spectators. I had piles of rocks handy, and I really let them have it. In their dismay they ran right over my back fence, which was continuous with We
ld’s. That evening Tom came leading them home, and when he had turned them down the road he started toggling the fence back together.

  “That’s O.K.,” I said. “Don’t bother.”

  He was good-natured enough, but swallowing air. “Well, my horses bust it down.”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I’m planning to take that fence out.”

  Now for sure he swallowed air. “Then there’d be nothing keeping them in.”

  “Tom,” I said, and I assure you I smiled, “there’s nothing keeping them in now.”

  Victory. Within twenty-four hours we heard his pickup drilling postholes down along the road. I called the landscapers and placed an order. But a victory over old Massasoit is always partial or Pyrrhic. Instead of going on around and keeping road and bridge outside the pasture, he stops the fence at the bridge, and then he rips out alternate planks of the bridge and turns it into that fearful backwoods cattle guard we’ve got down there now. His horses can still come around the end of the fence and right up our road. I didn’t even bother to squawk. He owns the bridge.

  So there are still nights like the one when Ruth hears noises and wakes me up grabbing the front of my pajamas. I throw the switch on the burglar lights, and there is a horse looking in the bedroom window. He nods to us. I swear he swallows air. We can hear the others pacing the terrace like pickets. The one looking in the window has to be standing in the newly planted rose garden. I leap from bed, I ease open the door, I tiptoe to my nearest pile of rocks. They’re pitiful: I want stones the size of softballs. The horses hear me, and bolt over a pair of Japanese maples that had just cost me fifteen dollars apiece. They thunder on down the road out of reach while I spraddle and curse and hurl my pebbles in the dawn and bruise my feet on harsh adobe clods, a figure of impotence.

  We still had horses. Well, peace. Peace and rocks and eternal vigilance.