That was Sunday morning, though. The rest of the week the tension made folks irritable. Mando lost sleep, and took the short end of Doc’s temper; he didn’t much care what books I read from, or even whether we read at all. “Armando!” I said. “You of all people have got to want to read.” “Just leave me be,” he said blearily. Around the ovens the women talked in quiet voices. No boisterous tattling, no shrieks of laughter tearing the air. No old man jokes on the boats. I went out to help the Mendezes gather wood, and Gabby and I nearly got in a fight trying to decide how to carry a fallen eucalyptus tree to the two-man saw. Later that day I passed Mrs. Mariani and Mrs. Nicolin, arguing heatedly at the latrine door. No one would have believed me if I had told them about that. I hurried down the path unhappily.
* * *
One day at the rivermouth it got worse. They were pulling the boats onto the flat when I arrived—I was spending a week helping the Mendezes, and only came down to help clean up. I joined those moving fish from the boats to the cleaning tables. Steve was over with Marvin, pulling the nets out of the boats and washing them in the shallows, then rolling them up. Usually Marvin did this by himself; John saw Steve and called, “Steve, get over and help Henry!”
Steve didn’t even look up. On his knees on the hard sand of the flat, he tugged at the stiff wire rope at the top of the net. Answer him! I thought. John walked over and looked down at him.
“Go over and help get the fish out,” he ordered.
“I’m folding this net,” Steve said without looking up.
“Stop it, and get over to the fish.”
“And just leave the net here, eh?” Steve said sarcastically. “Just let me be.”
John grabbed him just under the armpit and yanked him to his feet. With a stifled cry Steve twisted and jerked out of John’s grasp, staggering back into the shallows. He pulled up and charged John, who walked straight at him and shoved him back into the shallows again. Steve stood and pulled back a fist, and was about to swing when Marvin jumped between them. “For God’s sake!” Marvin cried, shouldering John back a step. “Stop this, will you?”
Steve didn’t appear to hear him. He was rounding Marvin when I seized his right wrist in both hands and dragged him away, falling in the shallows to duck a left cross. If Rafael hadn’t wrapped Steve in a bearhug he would have pounded me and gone after John again; his eyes were wild, they didn’t recognize any of us. Rafael carried him down the beach a few steps and let him loose with a shove.
Every man and woman on the beach had stopped what they were doing. They watched now with faces grim, or expressionless, or secretly pleased, or openly amused. Slowly I stood up.
“You two are making it hard to work in peace around here,” Rafael scolded. “Why don’t you keep your family matters to yourself.”
“Shut up,” John snapped. He surveyed us and with a chopping motion of his hand said, “Get back to work.”
“Come on,” I said to Steve, pulling him up the flat and away from the boats. He shrugged free of me impatiently. We stumbled over the net where it had all started. “Come on, Steve, let’s get out of here.” He allowed me to pull him away. John didn’t look at us. I decided against the cliff path, worrying that Steve might throw rocks down on his pa, and led him up the riverbank. I was shaken, and glad that Marvin had had the wit to jump between them. If he hadn’t been so quick … well, it didn’t bear thinking about.
Steve was still breathing heavily, as if he had just bodysurfed every wave of a big set. Between his clenched teeth he was cursing, repeating the words in an incoherent string. We took the river path to the broken end of the freeway, and sat under a torrey pine that hung over the whitish boulders and the river below. Going for cover, like coyotes after a scrap with a badger.
For a while we just sat. I swept pine needles into stacks, and then scraped through the dirt to concrete. Steve’s breathing slowed to normal.
“He’s trying to make me fight him,” he said in a voice straining for calmness. “I know he is.”
I doubted it, but I said, “I don’t know. If he is, you shouldn’t rise to it.”
“How am I supposed to do that?” he demanded.
“Well, I don’t know. Just avoid him, and do what he says—”
“Oh sure,” he cried, twisting to his feet. He leaned over and bawled at me, “Just keep on crawling around on my belly eating shit! That’s a real help! Don’t you try to tell me what to do with my life, Mister Henry Big Man. You’re just like all the rest! And don’t you get in my way again when I go after him, or I’ll bust your face instead of his!” He stalked down the freeway, cut into the potato patch and disappeared.
I let out a deep breath, relieved that he hadn’t hit me right then and there. That was my best feeling; other than that I was pretty low.
Kathryn had said that Steve listened to me more than to anybody else. Maybe that meant he didn’t listen to anybody anymore. Or maybe Kathryn was wrong. Or maybe I had said the wrong thing—or said it in the wrong way. I didn’t know.
It took me a long time to get up the spirit to stand and walk away from that place.
* * *
One day I took off up the river path, past the gardens and the ovens and the women washing clothes at the bridge bend, on up to where the hills closed together and the forest grew right down into the water on both banks. Here the path disappeared and everyone had to make their own way. I moved back into the trees and sat down, leaned back against the trunk of a big pine.
Wandering into the forest, to sit and be with it, was something I had done for a long time. I started when my mother died, and I imagined I could hear her voice in the trees outside our house. That was dumb, and soon I stopped. But now it was a habit again. With Tom sick there was no one I could talk to, no one who didn’t want something from me. It made me lonely. So when I felt that way I went out into the woods and sat. Nothing could touch me there, and eventually the knot would leave my stomach.
This was a particularly good spot. Around me trees clustered, big torrey pines surrounded by littler daughter trees. The ground was padded with needles, the trunk bowed at just the right angle for a backrest, and the curly branches above blocked most of the sun, but not all of it. Patches of light swam over my patched blue jeans, and shadow needles fenced with the brown needles under me. A pinecone jabbed me. I scrunched against the flaky bark of my backrest. Rolling on it, I turned and picked some of the dried crumbly gum out of a deep crack. Pressed it between my fingers until the still-liquid center burst out of the crust. Pine sap. Now my fingers would be sticky and pick up all sorts of dirt, so that dark marks would appear on my hands and fingers. But the smell of it was so piney. That smell and the smells of sea salt, and dirt, and wood smoke, and fish, made up the odor of the valley. Wind raked through the needles and a few of them dropped on me, each fivesome of needles wrapped together by a little bark nub at their bottoms. They pulled apart with a click.
Ants crawled over me and I brushed them away. I closed my eyes and the wind touched my cheek, it breathed through all the needles on all the branches of all the trees, and said oh, mmmmmmm. Have you heard the sound of wind in pine trees—I mean really listened to it, as to the voice of a friend? There’s nothing so soothing. It put me in a trance more like sleep than anything else, though I still heard. Each buffet or slacking shifted the hum or whoosh or roar of it; sometimes it was like the sound of a big waterfall around the bend, other times like the waves on the beach—still again, like a thousand folk in the far distance, singing oh as deep and wild as they could. Occasional bird calls tweeted through the sound, but mostly it was all that could be heard. The wind, the wind, oh. It was enough to fill the ear forever. I didn’t want to hear any other voice.
But voices I heard—human voices, coming through the trees by the river. Annoyed, I rolled on my side to see if I could see who was talking. They weren’t visible. I considered calling out, but I didn’t feel obliged to them; they were invading my spot, after all. I couldn’t blame th
em too much, it was a small valley and there weren’t that many places to go if you wanted to get away from folks. But it was my bad luck that they’d come to this one. I laid back against my tree and hoped they would go away. They didn’t. Branches snapped off to my left, and then the voices took up again, close enough so that I could make out the words—just a few trees over, in fact. That was Steve talking, and then Kathryn answered him. I sat up frowning.
Steve said, “Everybody in this valley is telling me what to do.”
“Everybody?”
“Yes!… you know what I mean. Jesus, you’re getting to be just like everybody else.”
“Everybody?”
Just that one word and I knew Kathryn was mad.
“Everybody,” Steve repeated, more sad than angry. “Steve, get down there and catch fish. Steve, don’t go into Orange County. Don’t go north, don’t go south, don’t go east, don’t row too far out to sea. Don’t leave Onofre, and don’t do anything.”
“I was just saying you shouldn’t deal with those San Diegans behind the backs of the people here. Who knows what those folks really want.” After a pause she added, “Henry’s trying to tell you the same thing.”
“Henry, shit. He gets to go south, and when he comes back he’s Henry Big Man, telling me what to do like everyone else.”
“He is not telling you what to do. He’s telling you what he thinks. Since when can’t he do that?”
“Oh, I don’t know.… It ain’t Henry.”
I scrunched down behind my tree uncomfortably. It was a bad sign, them talking of me; they’d sense me by the way my name sounded to them, and search around and see me, and I’d look like I was spying when I had only been trying to get some peace. I didn’t want to hear all this, I didn’t want to know about it. Well … that wasn’t strictly true. Anyway I didn’t move away.
“What is it, then?” Kathryn asked, resigned and a little fearful.
“It’s … it’s living this little life in this little valley. Under Pa’s thumb, stuck forever. I can’t abide it.”
“I didn’t know life here was that bad for you.”
“Ah come on, Kath. It isn’t you.”
“No?”
“No! You’re the best part of my life here, I keep telling you that. But don’t you see, I can’t be trapped here all my life, working for my dad. That wouldn’t be a life at all. The whole world is out there! And who’s keeping me from it? The Japanese are. And here we have folks who want to fight the Japanese, and we’re not helping them. It makes me sick. So I’ve got to do it, I’ve got to help them, can’t you see that? Maybe it’ll take all my life to make us free again, maybe it’ll take longer, but at least I’ll be doing something more with my life than gathering the food for my face.”
A scrub jay flashed blue as it landed in the branch above me, and informed Steve and Kathryn of my presence. They weren’t listening.
“Is that all the life here is to you?” Kathryn asked.
“No, shit, aren’t you listening?” Annoyance laced his voice.
“Yes. I’m listening. And I hear that life in this valley doesn’t satisfy you. That includes me.”
“I told you that isn’t true.”
“You can’t tell something away, Steve Nicolin. You can’t act one way for months and months and then say, no it isn’t that way, and make the months and what you did in them go away. It doesn’t work like that.”
I’d never heard her voice sound like it did. Mad—I’d heard it mad more times than I’d care to count. Now that angry tone was all beaten down flat. I hated to hear her voice sound that way. I didn’t want to hear it—any of it—and suddenly that overcame my curiosity, and my feeling that it was my place. I started crawling away through the trees, feeling like a fool. What if they saw me now, lifting over a fallen branch to avoid making a sound? I swore in my thoughts over and over. When I got out of the sound of their voices (still arguing) I stood and walked away, discouragement dogging every step. Steve and Kathryn fighting—what else could go wrong?
Beyond the neck at the end of the valley, the river widens and meanders a bit, knocking through meadows in big loops. It’s easier to travel in this back canyon by canoe, and after walking a ways I sat down again and watched the river pour into a pool and then out again. Fish tucked under the overhanging bank. The wind still soughed in the trees, but I couldn’t get back my peace no matter how hard I listened. The knot in my stomach was back. Sometimes the harder you try the less it will go away. After a while I decided to check the snares that the Simpsons had set up on the edge of the one oxbow meadow, to give me something to do.
One of the snares had a weasel caught in it. It had been going after a rabbit, dead in the same snare, and now its long wiry body was all tangled in the laces. It tugged at them one last time as I approached; squeaked, and baring its teeth in a fierce grin, glared at me murderously, hatefully—even after I broke its neck with a quick step. Or so it seemed. I freed the two little beasts and set the snare again, and set off home with them both in one hand, held by the tails. I couldn’t shake that weasel’s last look.
Back in the neck I walked along the river, remembering a time when the old man had tried to detach a wild beehive from a short eucalyptus tree up against the south hillside. He had gotten stung and dropped the shirt wrapping the hive, and the furious bees had chased us right into the river. “It’s all your fault,” he had sputtered as we swam to the other side.
Sun going down. Another day passed, nothing changed. I followed a bend to the narrows where the river breaks over a couple knee-high falls, and came upon Kathryn sitting alone on the bank, tossing twigs on the water and watching them swirl downstream.
“Kath!” I called.
She looked up. “Hank,” she said. “What are you doing here?” She glanced downstream, perhaps looking for Steve.
“I was just hiking up canyon,” I said. I held up the two dead animals. “Checking a couple of the Simpsons’ snares for them. What about you?”
“Nothing. Just sitting.”
I approached her. “You look kind of down.”
She looked surprised. “Do I?”
I felt disgusted with myself for pretending I could read her that well. “A little.”
“Well. I guess that’s right.” She tossed another stick in.
I sat down beside her. “You’re sitting in a wet spot,” I said indignantly.
“Yeah.”
“No big deal, I guess.”
She was looking down, or out at the river, but I saw that her eyes were red. “So what’s wrong?” I asked. Once again I felt sick at my duplicity. Where had I learned this sort of thing, what book of Tom’s had taught me?
A few sticks rode over the falls and out of sight before she answered. “Same old thing,” she said. “Me and Steve, Steve and me.” Suddenly she faced me. “Oh,” she said, her voice wild, “you’ve got to get Steve to stop with that plan to help the San Diegans. He’s doing it to cross John, and the way they’re getting along, when John finds out about it there’ll be hell to pay. He’ll never forgive him.… I don’t know what will happen.”
“All right,” I said, my hand on her shoulder. “I’ll try. I’ll do my best. Don’t cry.” It scared me to see her cry. Like an idiot I had thought it impossible. Desperately I said, “Look, Kathryn. You know there isn’t much I can do, the way he is these days. He almost hit me for grabbing him when he went after his dad the other day.”
“I know.” She shifted onto her hands and knees, leaned out over the water and ducked her head in it. The wet spot on the wide seat of her pants stuck into the air. After a good long time she came up blowing and huffing, and shook her head like a dog, spraying water over me and the river.
“Hey!” I cried. While she was under I had wanted to say, look, I can’t help you, I’m with Steve on this one … but looking at her face to face, I didn’t. I couldn’t. The truth was, I couldn’t do anything: no matter what I chose to do, I would be betraying someone.
/> “Let’s go to my house,” she said. “I’m hungry, and Mom made a berry pie.”
“Okay,” said I, wiping my face off. “You don’t have to ask me twice when it comes to berry pie.”
“I never noticed,” she said, and ducked the scoop of water I sent her way.
We stood. Walked down the riverbank until the trail appeared—first as a trampled-down line in the weeds and shrubs, then as scuffed dirt and displaced rocks, then as trenches through the loam that became little creeks after a rain. New paths appeared beside these as they became too wet or deep or rocky. It reminded me of something Tom had said before we went to San Diego, about how we were all wedges stuck in cracks. But it wasn’t like that, I saw; we weren’t that tightly bound. It was more like being on trails, on a network of trails like the one crossing the bog beside the river here.… “Choosing your way is easy when you’re on established trails,” I said, more to myself than to Kathryn.
She cocked her head. “Doing what people have done before, you mean.”
“Yes, exactly. A lot of people have gone that way, and they establish the best route. But out in the woods…”
She nodded. “We’re all in the woods now.” A kingfisher flashed over a snag. “I don’t know why.” Shadows from the trees across the river stretched over the rippled water and striped our bank. In the still of a side pool a trout broke the surface, and ripples grew away in perfect circles from the spot—why couldn’t the heart grow as fast? I wanted to know … I wanted to know what I was doing.
The more I feel the more I see. That evening I saw everything with a crispness that startled me; leaves all had knife edges, colors were as rich as a scavenger’s swap meet outfit.… But I only felt fuzzy things, oceans of clouds in my chest, the knot in my stomach. Too mixed to sort out and name. The river at dusk; the long stride of this woman my friend; the prospect of berry pie, making my mouth water; against these, the idea of a free land. Nicolin’s plots. The old man, across the shadowed stream in a bed. I couldn’t find the words to name all that, and I walked beside Kathryn without saying a thing, all the way downriver to her family’s home.