The Wild Shore: Three Californias (Wild Shore Triptych) Read online

  “I’ll go on up and tell the old man you’re coming later.”

  “All right,” Steve said, not looking at me. “I’ll be there when I can.”

  Old Nicolin gave me three rock bass and I hauled them up the cliff in a net bag. A gang of kids splashed clothes in the water, and farther upstream several women stood around the ovens at the Marianis’.

  I took the fish to Pa, who jumped up from his sewing machine hungrily. “Oh good, good. I’ll get to work on these, one for tonight, dry the others.” I told him I was going to the old man’s and he nodded, pulling rapidly at his long moustache. “Eat this right after dark, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, and was off.

  The old man’s home is on the steep ridge marking the southern end of our valley, on a flat spot just bigger than his house, about halfway to the peak of the tallest hill around. There isn’t a better view from any home in Onofre. When I got up there the house, a four-roomed wooden box with a fine front window, was empty. I made my way carefully through the junk surrounding the house. Among the honey flats, the telephone wire cutters, the sundials, the rubber tires, the rain barrels with their canvas collecting funnels, the generator parts, the broken engines, the grandfather clocks and gas stoves and crates full of who knows what, there were big pieces of broken glass, and several varmint traps that he was constantly moving about, so that it was smart to watch out. Over at Rafael’s house, machines like those scattered across Tom’s little yard would be fixed and in working order, or stripped for their parts, but here they were just conversation pieces. Why have an automobile engine propped on sawhorses, and how had he gotten it up the ridge, anyway? That was just what Tom wanted you to wonder.

  I kept going up the eroded path that ran the edge of the ridge. Near the peak of the spine the path turned and dropped into the crease south of it, a narrow canyon too small to hold a permanent stream, but there was a spring. The eucalyptus trees kept the ground clear of underbrush, and on a gentle slope of the crease the old man kept his beehives, a score of small white wooden domes. I spotted him standing among them, draped in his beekeeping clothes and hat. He moved pretty spryly—for a man over a hundred years old, I mean. He was ambling from dome to dome, pulling out trays and fingering them with a gloved hand, talking all the while, I could tell, despite the hat that hid most of his face. Tom talked to everything: people, himself, dogs, trees, the sky, fish on his plate, rocks he stubbed a toe on … naturally he talked to his bees. He shoved a flat back into a hive and looked around, suddenly wary; then he caught sight of me and waved.

  “Get away from the hives, boy, you’ll get stung.”

  “They aren’t stinging you.”

  He took off his hat and waved a bee back toward its hive. “They don’t have a lot of me to pick at, now do they. Besides they won’t sting me; they know who’s taking care of them.” The long white hair over his ears streamed back in the wind, mixing in my sight with the clouds; his beard was tucked into his shirt, “so I don’t eat any of the little sweeties.” The fog was rising, forming quick cloud streams. Tom rubbed his freckled pate. “Let’s get out of the wind, Henry my boy. It’s so cold the bees are acting like idiots. Perhaps you’d have some tea with me.”

  “Sure.” Tom’s tea was so strong it was almost like having a meal.

  “Have you got your lesson ready?”

  “You bet. Say, did you hear about the dead man washed up?”

  “I went down to look at him. Washed up just north of the rivermouth. A Japanese, I’d venture. We buried him at the back of the graveyard with the rest of them.”

  “What do you think happened to him?”

  “Well…” We turned onto the path to his house. “Someone shot him!” He cackled at my expression. “I guess he was trying to visit the United States of America. But the United States of America is out of bounds.” He navigated his yard without paying the least bit of attention to it, and I followed him closely. We went into the house. “Obviously someone has declared us out of bounds, we are beyond the pale, boy, only in this case the pale is rather dark, those ships steaming back and forth out there are so black you can see them even on a moonless night, rather stupid of them if they wanted them truly invisible. I haven’t seen a foreigner—a live foreigner, that is—those dead ones make mighty poor informants, hee hee—since the day. That’s too long for coincidence, not that there aren’t contributing indications. But that’s the main fact; where are they?—since they are out there.” He filled the teapot. “It’s my hypothesis that declaring us off limits was the only way to avoid fighting over us, and destroying … but I’ve outlined this particular guess to you before, eh?”

  I nodded.

  “And yet I don’t even know who we’re talking about, when you get right down to it.”

  “The Chinese, right?”

  “Or the Japanese.”

  “So you think they really are out there on Catalina just to keep folks away?”

  “Well I know someone’s on Catalina, someone not like us. That’s one thing I know. I’ve seen the lights from up here at night, blinking all over the island. You’ve seen them.”

  “I sure have,” I said. “It’s beautiful.”

  “Yeah, that Avalon must be a bustling little port these days. No doubt something bigger on the backside, some Alexandrian causeway harbor, you know. It’s a blessing to know something for sure, Henry. Surprisingly few things you can say that about. Knowledge is like quicksilver.” He walked over to the fireplace. “But someone is on Catalina.”

  “We should go over and see who.”

  He shook his head, looking out his big window at the fast onshore streamers. “We wouldn’t come back.”

  Subdued, he threw some twigs on the coals of the banked fire, and we sat before the window in two of his armchairs, waiting for the water to heat. The sea was a patchcloth, dark grays and light grays, with silver buttons scattered in a crooked line between us and the sun. It looked like it was going to rain rather than fog up; old Nicolin would be mighty annoyed, because you can fish in the rain. Tom pulled at his face, making a new pattern in the ten thousand wrinkles lining it. “Whatever happened to summertime,” he sang, “yes when the living was eee-sy.” I threw some more twigs on the fire, not bothering to respond to the little tune I had heard so often. Tom had told a lot of stories about the old time, and he was insistent that in those days our coastline had been a treeless, waterless desert. But looking out the window at the forest and the billowing clouds, feeling the fire warm the chill air of the room, remembering our adventure of the night before, I wondered if I could believe him. Half of his stories I could not confirm in his many books—and besides, couldn’t he have taught me to read wrong, so that what I read would back up what he said?

  It would be pretty difficult to make up a consistent system, I decided as he threw one of his packets of tea—made of plants he picked in the back country—into the pot. And I remembered once at a swap meet, when he came running up to Steve and Kathryn and me, drunk and excited, blabbing, “Look what I bought, look what I got!”—pulling us under a torch to show us a tatty old half an encyclopedia, opened to a picture of a black sky over white ground, on which stood two completely white figures and an American flag. “That’s the moon, see? I told you we went there, and you wouldn’t believe me.” “I still don’t believe you,” Steve said, and nearly busted laughing at the fit the old man threw. “I bought this picture for four jars of honey to prove it to you skeptics, and you still won’t believe me?” “No!” Kathryn and I were in hysterics at the two of them—we were pretty drunk too. But he kept the picture (though he threw away the encyclopedia), and later I saw the blue ball of the Earth in the black sky, as small as the moon is in our sky. I must have stared at that picture for an hour. So one of the least likely of his claims was apparently true; and I was inclined to believe the rest of them, usually.

  “All right,” Tom said, handing me my cup full of the pungent tea. “Let’s hear it.”

  I cle
ared my mind to imagine the page of the book Tom had assigned me to learn. The regular lines of the poetry made them easy to memorize, and I spoke them out as my mind’s eye read them:

  “‘Is this the region, this the soil, the clime,’

  Said then the lost Archangel, ‘this the seat

  That we must change for Heaven?

  —this mournful gloom

  For that celestial light?’”

  I went on easily, having a good time playing the part of defiant Satan. Some of the lines were especially good for thundering out:

  “‘Farewell, happy fields,

  Where joy forever dwells! Hail, horrors! Hail,

  Infernal world! and thou, profoundest Hell,

  Receive thy new possessor—one who brings

  A mind not to be changed by place or time.

  The mind is its own place, and in itself

  Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.

  What matter where, if I be still the same,

  And what I should be, all but less than he

  Whom thunder hath made greater? Here at least

  We shall be free—’”

  “All right, that’s enough of that one,” Tom said, looking satisfied as he stared out to sea. “Best lines he ever wrote, and half of them stolen from Virgil. What about the other piece?”

  “I do that one even better,” I said confidently. “Here you go:

  “Methinks I am a prophet new inspired,

  And thus expiring do foretell of him:

  His rash fierce blaze of riot cannot last,

  For violent fires soon burn out themselves.

  Small showers last long, but sudden storms are short;

  He tires betimes that spurs too fast betimes;

  With eager feeding, food doth choke the feeder—”

  “That was us all right,” Tom interrupted. “He’s writing about America, there. We tried to eat the world and choked on it. I’m sorry, go on.”

  I struggled to remember my place, and started again:

  “This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle,

  This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,

  This other Eden, demi-paradise,

  This fortress built by Nature for herself

  Against infection and the hand of war,

  This happy breed of men, this little world,

  This precious stone set in a silver sea

  Which serves it in the office of a wall,

  Or as a moat defensive to a house,

  Against the envy of less happier lands,

  This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England—”

  “Enough!” Tom cried, chuckling and shaking his head. “Or too much. I don’t know what I think. But I sure give you good stuff to memorize.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You can see why Shakespeare thought England was the best state.”

  “Yes, he was a great American. Maybe the greatest.”

  “But what does moat mean?”

  “Moat? Why, it means a channel of water surrounding a place to make it hard to get to. Couldn’t you figure it out by context?”

  “If I could’ve, would I have asked you?”

  He cackled. “Why, I heard that one out at one of the little back country swap meets, just last year. Some farmer. ‘We’re going to put a moat around the granary,’ he said. Made me a bit surprised. But you hear odd words like that all the time. I heard someone at the swap meet say they were going to cozen up to someone, and someone else told me my sales pitch was a filibuster. Insatiate, simular—it’s amazing, the infusion of words into the spoken language. Bad news for the stomach is good news for the tongue, know what I mean?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I’m surprised at you.” He stood up, stiff and slow, and refilled the teapot. After he got it set on the rack over the fire he went to one of his bookshelves. The inside of his house was a bit like the yard: more clocks, cracked china plates, a collection of lanterns and lamps, a machine for playing music (once in a while he’d put a record on it and turn it with one bony finger, commanding us to put our ears next to it, to hear scratchy songs whispering up and down, while he said “That’s the Eroica! Listen to that!”); but most of two walls were taken up by bookshelves, overflowing with stacks of mangy books. A lot of them he wouldn’t let me read. But now he brought one over and tossed it in my lap. “Time for some sight reading. Start where I have the marker, there.”

  I opened the slim, mildewed book and began to read—an act that still gave me great trouble, great pleasure. “‘Justice is in itself powerless: what rules by nature is force. To draw this over to the side of justice, so that by means of force justice rules—that is the problem of statecraft, and it is certainly a hard one; how hard you will realize if you consider what boundless egoism reposes in almost every human breast; and that it is many millions of individuals so constituted who have to be kept within the bounds of peace, order and legality. This being so, it is a wonder the world is on the whole as peaceful and law-abiding as we see it to be’”—this caused the old man to laugh for a while—“‘which situation, however, is brought about only by the machinery of the state. For the only thing that can produce an immediate effect is physical force, since this is the only thing which men as they generally are understand and respect—’”

  “Hey!”

  It was Nicolin, busting into the house like Satan into God’s bedroom. “I’m going to kill you right here and now!” he cried, advancing on the old man.

  Tom jumped up with a whoop: “Let’s see you try!” he shouted. “You don’t stand a chance!”—and the two of them grappled a bit in the middle of the room, Steve holding the old man by the shoulders at just enough distance so that Tom’s fierce blows missed him.

  “Just what do you mean filling our heads with lies, you old son of a bitch?” Nicolin demanded, shaking Tom back and forth with genuine anger.

  “And what do you mean busting into my house like that. Besides”—losing his pleasure in their usual sport—“when did I ever lie to you?”

  Steve snorted. “When didn’t you? Telling us they used to bury their dead in silver-lined caskets. Well now we know that one’s a lie, because we went up to San Clemente last night and dug one up, and the only thing it had on it was plastic.”

  “What’s this?” Tom looked at me. “You did what?”

  So I told him about the gang’s expedition into San Clemente. When I got to the part about the coffin handles he began to laugh; he sat down in his chair and laughed, heee, heeee, hee hee heeee, all through the rest of it, including the part about the scavengers’ siren attack.

  Nicolin stood over him, glowering. “So now we know you’re lying, see?”

  “Heeeeeee, hee hee hee hee hee hee.” A cough or two. “No lies at all, boys. Only the truth from Tom Barnard. Listen here—why do you think that plastic on that coffin was silver-colored?” Steve gave me a significant look. “Because it usually was silver, of course. You just dug up some poor guy who died broke. Now, what were you doing digging up graves for, anyway?”

  “We wanted the silver,” Steve said.

  “Bad luck.” He got up to get another cup, poured it full. “I tell you, most of them were buried wrapped in the stuff. Sit down here, Stephen, and have some tea.” Steve pulled up a little wooden chair, sat down and commenced sucking on his tea. Tom curled in his chair and wrapped his knobby hands around his cup. “The really rich ones were buried in gold,” he said slowly, looking down at the steam rising from his cup. “One of them had a gold mask, carved to look just like him, put over his dead face. In his burial chamber were gold statues of his wife, and dogs, and kids—he had on gold shoes, too, and little mosaic pictures of the important events of his life, made of precious stones, surrounding him on each wall of the chamber.…”

  “Ah, come on,” Nicolin protested.

  “I’m serious! That’s what it was like. You’ve been up there, now, and seen the ruins—are you going to tell me they didn’t
throw silver in the ground with their dead?”

  “But why?” I asked. “Why that gold mask and all?”

  “Because they were Americans.” He sipped his tea. “That was the least of it, let me tell you.” He stared out the window for a while. “Rain coming.” After another minute’s silent sipping: “What do you want silver so bad for, anyway?”

  I let Nicolin answer that one, because it was his idea.

  “To trade for things,” Steve said. “To get what we want at the swap meets. To be able to go somewhere, down the coast maybe, and have something to trade for food.” He glanced at the old man, who was watching him closely. “To be able to travel like you used to.”

  Tom ignored that. “You can get everything you want by trading what you make. Fish, in your case.”

  “But you can’t go anywhere! You can’t travel with fish on your back.”

  “You can’t travel anyway. They blasted every important bridge in the country, from the looks of it. And if you did manage to get somewhere, the locals would take your silver and kill you, like as not. Or if they were just, you’d still run out of silver eventually, and you’d have to go to work where you were. Digging shit ditches or something.”

  The fire crackled as we sat there and watched it. Nicolin let out a long sigh, looking stubborn. The old man sipped his tea and went on. “We travel to the swap meet in three days, if the weather allows. That’s farther than we used to travel, let me tell you. And we’re meeting more new people than ever.”

  “Including scavengers,” I said.