Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Jean Hegland
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Into the Forest
Copyright
Windfalls
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Epub ISBN: 9781473537637
Version 1.0
Published by Arrow Books 2016
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Copyright © Jean Hegland, 1998
Jean Hegland has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in Great Britain in 1998 by Arrow Books
Arrow Books
The Random House Group Limited
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London, SW1V 2SA
www.randomhouse.co.uk
Arrow Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0 09 925672 X
For Douglas Fisher and Garth Leonard Fisher
and in memory of Leonard Hegland
Into the Forest is a work of fiction. Sally Bell’s story is the only material quoted directly from another source (‘Sinkyone Notes’ by Gladys Nomland, University of California Publications in American Archeology and Ethnology, Vol. 36 (2), 1935).
I would like to acknowledge the following sources for background information: The Way We Lived: California Indian Reminiscences, Stories, and Songs, edited by Malcolm Margolin (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1981), in which I first discovered the Sally Bell material, and Original Accounts of the Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island, edited by Robert F. Heizer and Albert B. Elasser (Ramona, CA: Ballena Press, 1973).
It’s strange, writing these first words, like leaning down into the musty stillness of a well and seeing my face peer up from the water – so small and from such an unfamiliar angle I’m startled to realize the reflection is my own. After all this time a pen feels stiff and awkward in my hand. And I have to admit that this notebook, with its wilderness of blank pages, seems almost more threat than gift – for what can I write here that it will not hurt to remember?
You could write about now, Eva said, about this time. This morning I was so certain I would use this notebook for studying that I had to work to keep from scoffing at her suggestion. But now I see she may be right. Every subject I think of – from economics to meteorology, from anatomy to geography to history – seems to circle around on itself, to lead me unavoidably back to now, to here, today.
Today is Christmas Day. I can’t avoid that. We’ve crossed the days off the calendar much too conscientiously to be wrong about the date, however much we might wish we were. Today is Christmas Day, and Christmas Day is one more day to live through, one more day to be endured so that someday soon this time will be behind us.
By next Christmas this will all be over, and my sister and I will have regained the lives we are meant to live. The electricity will be back, the phones will work. Planes will fly above our clearing once again. In town there will be food in the stores and gas at the service stations. Long before next Christmas we will have indulged in everything we now lack and crave – soap and shampoo, toilet paper and milk, fresh fruit and meat. My computer will be running, Eva’s CD player will be working. We’ll be listening to the radio, reading the newspaper, using the Internet. Banks and schools and libraries will have reopened, and Eva and I will have left this house where we now live like shipwrecked orphans. She will be dancing with the corps of the San Francisco Ballet, I’ll have finished my first semester at Harvard, and this wet, dark day the calendar has insisted we call Christmas will be long, long over.
‘Merry semi-pagan, slightly literary, and very commercial Christmas,’ our father would always announce on Christmas morning, when, long before the midwinter dawn, Eva and I would team up in the hall outside our parents’ bedroom. Jittery with excitement, we would plead with them to get up, to come downstairs, to hurry, while they yawned, insisted on donning bathrobes, on washing their faces and brushing their teeth, even – if our father was being particularly infuriating – on making coffee.
After the clutter and laughter of present-opening came the midday dinner we used to take for granted, phone calls from distant relatives, Handel’s Messiah issuing triumphantly from the CD player. At some point during the afternoon the four of us would take a walk down the dirt road that ends at our clearing. The brisk air and green forest would clear our senses and our palates, and by the time we reached the bridge and were ready to turn back, our father would have inevitably announced, ‘This is the real Christmas present, by god – peace and quiet and clean air. No neighbors for four miles, and no town for thirty-two. Thank Buddha, Shiva, Jehovah, and the California Department of Forestry we live at the end of the road!’
Later, after night had fallen and the house was dark except for the glow of bulbs on the Christmas tree, Mother would light the candles of the nativity carousel, and we would spend a quiet moment standing together before it, watching the shepherds, wise men, and angels circle around the little holy family.
‘Yep,’ our father would say, before we all wandered off to nibble at the turkey carcass and cut slivers off the cold plum pudding, ‘that’s the story. Could be better, could be worse. But at least there’s a baby at the center of it.’
This Christmas there’s none of that.
There are no strings of lights, no Christmas cards. There are no piles of presents, no long-distance phone calls from great-aunts and second cousins, no Christmas carols. There is no turkey, no plum pudding, no stroll to the bridge with our parents, no Messiah. This year Christmas is nothing but another white square on a calendar that is almost out of dates, an extra cup of tea, a few moments of candlelight, and, for each of us, a single gift.
Why do we bother?
Three years ago – when I was fourteen and Eva fifteen – I asked that same question one rainy night a week before Christmas. Father was grumbling over the number of cards he still had to write, and Mother was hidden in her workroom with her growling sewing machine, emerging periodically to take another batch of cookies from the oven and prod me into washing the mixing bowls.
‘Nell, I need those dishes done so I can start the pudding before I go to bed,’ she said as she closed the oven door on the final sheet of cookies.
‘Okay,’ I muttered, turning the next page of the book in which I was immersed.
‘Tonight, Nell,’ she said.
‘Why are we doing this?’ I demanded, looking up from my book in irritation.
‘Because they’re dirty,’ she answered, pausing to hand me a warm gingersnap before she swept back to the mysteries of her sewing.
‘Not the dishes,’ I grumbled.
‘Then what, Pumpkin?’ asked my father as he licked an envelope and emphatically crossed another name off his list.
‘Christmas. All this mess and fuss and we aren’t even really Christians.’
‘Goddamn right we aren’t,’ said our father, laying down his pen, bounding up from the table by the front window, already warming to the energy of his own talk.
‘We’re not Christians, we’re capitalists,’ he said. ‘Everybody in this whangdanged country is a capitalist, whether he likes it or not. Everyone in this country is one of the world’s most voracious consumers, using resources at a rate twenty times greater than that of anyone else on this poor earth. And Christmas is our golden opportunity to pick up the pace.’
When he saw I was turning back to my book, he added, ‘Why are we doing Christmas? Beats me. Tell you what – let’s quit. Throw in the towel. I’ll drive into town tomorrow and return the gifts. We’ll give the cookies to the chickens and write all our friends and relations and explain we’ve given up Christmas for Lent. It’s a shame to waste my vacation, though,’ he continued in mock sadness.
‘I know.’ He snapped his fingers and ducked as though an idea had just struck him on the back of the head. ‘We’ll replace the beams under the utility room. Forget those dishes, Nell, and find me the jack.’
I glared at him, hating him for half a second for the effortless way he deflected my barbs and bad temper. I huffed into the kitchen, grabbed a handful of cookies, and wandered upstairs to hide in my bedroom with my book.
Later I could hear him in the kitchen, washing the dishes I had ignored and singing at the top of his voice,
‘We three kings of oil and tar,
tried to smoke a rubber cigar.
It was loaded, and it exploded,
higher than yonder star.’
The next year even I wouldn’t have dared to question Christmas. Mother was sick, and we all clung to everything that was bright and sweet and warm, as though we thought if we ignored the shadows, they would vanish into the brilliance of hope. But the following spring the cancer took her anyway, and last Christmas my sister and I did our best to bake and wrap and sing in a frantic effort to convince our father – and ourselves – that we could be happy without her.
I thought we were miserable last Christmas. I thought we were miserable because our mother was dead and our father had grown distant and silent. But there were lights on the tree and a turkey in the oven. Eva was Clara in the Redwood Ballet’s performance of The Nutcracker, and I had just received the results of my Scholastic Aptitude Tests, which were good enough – if I did okay on the College Board Achievement Tests – to justify the letter I was composing to the Harvard Admissions Committee.
But this year all that is either gone or in abeyance. This year Eva and I celebrate only because it’s less painful to admit that today is Christmas than to pretend it isn’t.
It’s hard to come up with a present for someone when there is no store in which to buy it, when there is little privacy in which to make it, when everything you own, every bean and grain of rice, each spoon and pen and paper clip, is also owned by the person to whom you want to give a gift.
I gave Eva a pair of her own toe shoes. Two weeks ago I snuck the least battered pair from the closet in her studio and renovated them as best I could, working on them in secret while she was practicing. With the last drops of our mother’s spot remover, I cleaned the tattered satin. I restitched the leather soles with monofilament from our father’s tackle box. I soaked the mashed toe boxes in a mixture of water and wood glue, did my best to reshape them, hid them behind the stove to dry, and then soaked and shaped and dried them again and again. Finally I darned the worn satin at the tips of the toes so that she could get a few more hours of use from them by first dancing on the web of stitches I had sewn.
She gasped when she opened the box and saw them.
‘I don’t know if they’re any good,’ I said. ‘They’re probably way too soft. I had no idea what I was doing.’
But while I was still protesting, she flung her arms around me. We clung together for a long second and then we both leapt back. These days our bodies carry our sorrows as though they were bowls brimming with water. We must always be careful; the slightest jolt or unexpected shift and the water will spill and spill and spill.
Eva’s gift to me was this notebook.
‘It’s not a computer,’ she said, as I lifted it from its wrinkled wrapping paper, recycled from some birthday long ago and not yet sacrificed as fire-starter. ‘But it’s all blank, every page.’
‘Blank paper!’ I marveled. ‘Where on earth did you get it?’
‘I found it behind my dresser. It must have fallen back there years ago. I thought you could use it to write about this time. For our grandchildren or something.’
Right now, grandchildren seem less likely than aliens from Man, and when I first lifted the stained cardboard cover and flipped through these pages, slightly musty, and blank except for their scaffolding of lines, I have to admit I was thinking more about studying for the Achievement Tests than about chronicling this time. And yet it feels good to write. I miss the quick click of my computer keys and the glow of the screen, but tonight this pen feels like Plaza wine in my hand, and already the lines that lead these words down the page seem more like the warp of our mother’s loom and less like the bars I had first imagined them to be. Already I see how much there is to say.
What I really wanted to give Eva was gasoline. Just a little gas – enough to run the generator so she could play even a single CD, could let its music soak back into her bones; just a gallon or two of gasoline to give her a rest from having to dance to the harsh tick of the metronome.
But there is no more gas. When we got back from town that last time, the implacable needle on the truck’s gas gauge had sunk far below empty.
‘We drove those last three miles on fumes, girls,’ our father said. ‘Looks like we’ll be staying put for a while. But don’t worry we’ve got more than enough food, and when things get going again, I’ll take the gas can and hike to town.’
Now our father is buried in the forest, the empty can rusts somewhere in his cluttered workshop, and Eva will have to dance to the weakening strains of her memory for a while longer.
Here she comes from her studio, her ragged leotard dark with sweat, her ribs still heaving as she bends to open the woodstove door. The light from that boxed fire streams out, makes new shadows in the darkening room, and I pause from my writing to watch my sister stoke the fire.
I’m no good at fires. Eva says mine choke and smolder or fall apart because I’m always thinking – but never about what my hands are doing. She says I’m too impatient. Yet she can build a fire twice as fast as I can. She works with fire as though it were a living thing, coddling flame from dusty coals, coaxing it from damp sticks, knowing instinctively how to bank the embers so they will last till morning. Now that our father is dead, Eva is always our fire-tender.
She adds another length of wood to the coals, then sits on the floor in front of the stove to untie her shoes.
‘How’d it go?’ I ask.
‘It hurt,’ she answers cheerfully, as she examines her bleeding feet by firelight. And I know that after our awful autumn, she is finally dancing again, just as I am finally studying.
‘How do they work?’ I ask, pointing to the recycled shoes.
She looks at me, grins. ‘Fine,’ she says. ‘I wouldn’t have stopped, but it got so dark in there I couldn’t see a thing. How’s the notebook?’
‘Fine, too,’ I say.
She lits her arms above her head in third position and rises from the floor without touching the ground, as effortlessly as a cresting wave. ‘Time to light the carousel?’ she asks.
‘It’s dark enough,’ I answer. ‘But do you really think we should? I keep wondering if we shouldn’t save those candles for an emergency.’
She gives a little shrug. ‘It’s Christmas, isn’t it?’
Carved of pine and painted with bright enamel, the carousel is a round, three-tiered nativity set, the glowing centerpiece of my earliest and most enduring Christmas memories. It was made in China, and our father took a yearly pleasure in the fact that the shepherds all wear the dark suits of Chinese peasants, the angels have their black hair cut in the blunt-banged style of Chinese women, and everyone, baby Jesus included, has elegant Asian eyes.
‘I hope we’re sending them blond Buddhas in return,’ he’d say with ironic delight. ‘Nothing more likely to break down religious chauvinism than a free-market, worldwide economy.’
‘Ready?’ Eva asks, gesturing towards the table where the carousel waits.
I nod, trying to keep from calculating how many minutes of candlelight are left in those six candle stumps, trying not to imagine the time when we might need them more desperately than we need them tonight.
She pokes a piece of kindling among the coals, and when it ignites, she lifts it from the fire and bears it to the carousel. One by one, she touches her little brand to the candle stubs that ring the bottom tier. One by one, the fire leaps from wood to wick until there are six flames undulating in the still air.
It takes my breath away. We haven’t seen this much light at night since the kerosene lamp finally sputtered out last spring. It changes our voices, makes our words sound round and soft and full, a little awed. Pure and smokeless, the flames sway and leap like dancers around their stiff black wicks, and everything in the room seems warm and tender. My eyes fill with tears, and still I stare at those bright tongues, those petals of fire.
The wax softens, glistens, and as the heat of the candle flames rises, the wooden blades above the angels catch the warm updraft, and the whole carousel begins to move. Silently, sedately, the angels and shepherds and sheep, the wise men and their camel, all revolve around the stationary Mary and Joseph and infant Jesus.
We watch in silence, while all our Christmases come flooding over us in a feeling so sharp it’s awful to admit, impossible to refuse.
I ask Eva, ‘Do you remember when you asked if Jesus were a he or a she?’ It’s an old family joke, one that used to be brought out every Christmas like the ornaments for the tree.
She smiles, playing along. ‘Mom said Jesus was a he, but that it was just an accident. She said, “He might just as well have been a she.’”
‘And then Dad asked her if the Virgin Mary could just as well have been a he.’
Each of us nods, smiles. Each of us attempts the complicated business of remembering the pleasure of the past without allowing it any significance in the present.
One of the candles falters. The flame sputters, leaping up for oxygen and then collapsing into itself. The carousel slows. We watch in silence, mesmerized by the spinning shadows on the ceiling, by the pulse of the five remaining flames, by the slow burn and turn of memory.
‘I think she was wrong,’ says Eva after the second flame dims and finally disappears.
‘What?’
‘Jesus couldn’t have been a girl.’
‘Why not?’
‘Things would have turned out differently, a long time ago.’
‘How?’ I ask, eager to talk with my sister about an idea.
She shrugs, a little indifferent, a little impatient, the toss of her shoulders and the movement of her body her only eloquence.
I give up on analysis. ‘Jesetta? Jesusphina?’ I quip. But it sounds so much like one of our father’s jokes that it falls flat.
Another candle dies and the carousel stops. In the weakening light of the three remaining flames, the shepherds kneel patiently among their sheep. The wise men hold their gifts stiffly in their wooden arms, as far away as ever from their goal. Mary and Joseph stand rigidly on either side of the wooden infant. The candles dim and glare. The last wick topples. The final flame vanishes. Christmas is over.
Darkness reclaims us once again.
*
Another rainy day. Except for a dash outside this morning to get wood and open the chicken coop so Bathsheba, Lilith, and Pinkie can scratch in the sodden yard, we’ve spent the day indoors. Christmas was only yesterday, but if it weren’t for this notebook and the fact that Eva disappeared into her studio at dawn, no one would ever know it.
‘You’ll wear those shoes out again in a day,’ I said to her when she came out at noon.
‘I know.’
She tugged her sweat-soaked tee shirt away from her chest, took another deep drink of the water that collects, one drop at a time, in the kitchen sink. Then she lunged back into her studio without another word.
Even now Eva can use things up. I want to save everything, to dribble it out forever. I can make a dozen raisins or half an inch of a stale candy cane last an evening, eking out the pleasure as though it were a geriatric patient going for a ride in her wheelchair in the winter sun. But Eva can still gobble.
‘Might as well enjoy it while we’ve got it,’ she says, and she dances her shoes to tatters, swallows her share of the raisins in a single mouthful, lights candles and lets them burn, and never frets about what’s lost. ‘Why not?’ she asks with a toss of her head, a deft flip of her wrist. ‘Nothing lasts forever. And besides, it’s not like we’ll never see another raisin.’
Last week I read in the encyclopedia about an indigenous tribe in Baja for whom meat was such a rare delicacy that they would tie a string to a scrap of animal flesh so they could chew it, swallow it, and then haul it back up, to have the pleasure of chewing and swallowing again. I was embarrassed when I read that, because it reminded me of myself, unable to let go of anything more, unable to face even the smallest loss.
Eva’s not like that. ‘We have enough food,’ she scoffs when she sees me agonizing over a handful of stale peanuts or the last few drops of soy sauce. ‘We won’t starve.’
She’s right. The pantry shelves are still crowded with the supplies we bought on our last trip to town and with the quarts of tomatoes, beets, green beans, applesauce, apricots, peaches, plums, and pears we helped our father can last summer. We still have rice, flour, cornmeal, pinto beans, and lentils. We still have macaroni, tuna fish, and canned soup. We have a little sugar, a little salt, a sprinkle of baking powder. We have dried milk and powdered cheese. We still have half a can of shortening, a motley variety of spices, and an odd jumble of other edibles – the unlabeled cans we bought at Fastco, a box of orange Jell-O that must be at least six years old, a jar of stuffed olives.
We have more than enough to see us through. But even so I have to fight my urge to hang on to everything we have left, as though to lose another drop or scrap could cast us adrift for good. When I think of how we used to live, the casual way we used things, I’m both appalled and filled with longing. I remember emptying wastebaskets that would seem like fortunes now – baskets filled with the cardboard cores of toilet paper rolls, with used tissues, broken pencils, twisted paper clips, sheets of crumpled notebook paper, and empty plastic bags.
I remember throwing away clothes because they were ripped or stained or no longer in style. I remember tossing out food – scraping heaps of food from our dinner plates into the compost bucket – simply because it had sat untouched on someone’s plate for the duration of a meal. How I long for those brimming wastebaskets, those leftovers. I long to gulp down whole boxes of raisins, to burn a dozen candles at once. I long to indulge, to forget, to ignore. I want to live with abandon, with the careless grace of a consumer, instead of hanging on like an old peasant woman, fretting over bits and scraps.
In the encyclopedia the other day I read: Amnesia, a condition of memory loss caused by brain injury, shock, fatigue, or illness. When amnesia continues for an extended period of time, the amnesiac occasionally begins a new life entirely unrelated to his previous condition. This response is called a fugue state.’
I lifted my head from the page, looked out the window at the chickens scratching in the empty yard, and thought, This is our fugue state – the lost time between the two halves of our real lives.
Last winter when the electricity first began going off, it was so occasional and brief we didn’t pay much attention. ‘They’re probably working on the lines,’ we’d say, or ‘The rains must have brought a tree down. They’ll have the power back soon.’ And soon enough, the lights would blink on, the washing machine would resume its hum and churn in the utility room, the vacuum cleaner would roar back to life, and a second later we would be taking electricity for granted once again.
Looking back on it now, I’m sure the three of us were in shock. We were numb, still stunned by Mother’s death less than nine months earlier, so maybe we didn’t realize as soon as we might have that after decades of warnings and predictions things were actually starting to fail. Besides, living as far out as we do, we were used to having the electricity go off occasionally, to having to wait until the power in the more populated areas was restored before we got our power back. Perhaps it took longer than it should have for us to suspect that something different was happening. But even in town, I think the changes began so slowly – or were so much a part of the familiar fabric of trouble and inconvenience – that nobody really recognized them until later that spring.
For a long time the power quit only for a few minutes every day or so, just enough to be an irritation, a nuisance. The microwave would stop dead, the clothes would flop wetly to the bottom of the dryer, dinner would cool half-cooked in the oven. If one of us was taking a shower, the water would dribble to a gravity-fed trickle without the electric pump to give it pressure. If I was working at my computer, the screen would go blank and the machine would moan as it crashed. If Eva was practicing at home, the CD she had been dancing to would stop, and she would stumble out of her studio, looking as though she had just been slapped awake.
If it was night and our father was home from work, the sudden lack of light would sometimes propel him out of the grief in which he had lost himself, and he would entertain us by inventing absurd curses while he stomped and fussed in the darkness. ‘God whack a doughnut,’ he’d yell, or ‘Turds grow roses,’ as he bumped into the corners of tables and knocked things off counters, looking for the flashlight, the candles, matches. After ten or fifteen minutes when the lights would flick back on, Eva and I would be almost disappointed because we knew that all too soon his manic energy would drain away and he would once again slump back into despair.
For a long time it was a rare day when the power didn’t go off at least once. Finally it was a rare day when the power came on. At some point we realized we had lost the habit of groping for the light switch whenever we entered a room. We no longer automatically reached for the knob on the stove when we wanted to cook something or flung the refrigerator door open when we were hungry. We took the electric blankets off our beds, put the electric coffeemaker away, rolled up the carpets we could no longer vacuum. Our father taught us how to trim, fill, and light the kerosene lamps he had once refused to let our mother throw out, and for a time we lit those when darkness fell.
As winter faded and spring blossomed, we became accustomed to the unreliability of electricity, and we developed a routine to take advantage of it whenever it appeared. We left the kitchen light switched on all the time, and when it blinked into being, Eva would rush out to the utility room to start a load of laundry and then race into her studio, load a CD, and, skipping her barre work, begin to dance, while I flushed the murky toilet and turned on the faucets to fill the tub and the kitchen sink while the electric pump was operating. Then I would run to the computer, where I worked furiously until it all came crashing down again.
Father had long ago bought a gas generator to power the water pump in case there was a fire and our electricity failed, and sometimes we would turn it on so that Eva could dance and I could attempt to get on the Internet for news, or at least the propaganda – ranting or soothing depending on the site – that passed for news. But even when the phone lines happened to be working, it was all but impossible to connect. Usually I’d chafe so much at having to waste the time the power was on waiting for access, that I would give up, and instead work furiously on my studies while the generator chugged away outside. Eventually, as time passed and gas grew scarcer, Father convinced us to save the generator for emergencies.
At first when the power went off while we were fixing a meal, we would get out the Coleman stove and finish cooking over its hissing burners, until one day we didn’t bother putting the Coleman away. When we had used the last of the fuel and the hardware store had no more to sell, we figured out how to bake potatoes among the coals in the woodstove in the living room, learned to fry pancakes and boil beans and steam rice on its top.
We had long since used up the food in the freezer. Finally we had to give up on the refrigerator, too. Our father dug a hole in the creek, lined it with rocks and black plastic garbage sacks, covered it with a Yield sign he had once scavenged from the dump, and proudly called it a refrigerator. Eva and I complained about having to wrap everything so that the water wouldn’t soak it, about having to hike down to the creek every time we wanted milk or lettuce or margarine, until there was nothing left to keep cool.
The telephone faded in the same way the electricity did. For a while after the power had ceased to be reliable, we could sometimes make a call if we were persistent enough. It might take all morning, dialing the number until those seven digits jeered in our brains, only to hear the electronically polite voice of the phone company say, ‘We’re sorry. All lines are busy now. Please hang up and try your call again.’ But sooner or later we could get through, could still report to the power company’s answering machine that the electricity was out again.
One evening in early May, Father came home with a hunting rifle, and a little later a day came when he didn’t go to work at all.
‘Looks like summer vacation’s early this year,’ he had said the night before, as he fried eggs on the woodstove for our dinner.
‘That damn strep is keeping attendance down by half, and nobody can seem to find an antibiotic to touch it. Now there’s a rumor of meningitis. The board seems to think they’ll save everybody a lot of money if they close school a month early.’
He sighed and added, ‘Normally I’d fight that, but this year I guess I’m ready for a break. Besides, I’ve got to get the roof reshingled and replace those rotten supports under the utility room before things start up again next fall.’
During this time the mail delivery was becoming sporadic, and businesses were closed more often. For a few months state employees were paid with promissory notes, until the banks refused to honor the government IOU’s, and then they went unpaid altogether.
It’s amazing how quickly everyone adapted to those changes. I suppose it’s like the way people beyond our forest had already gotten used to having to drink bottled water, drive on overcrowded freeways, and deal with the automated voices that answered almost every telephone. Then, too, they cursed and complained, and soon adjusted, almost forgetting their lives had ever been any other way.
Maybe it’s true that the people who live through the times that become history’s pivotal points are those least likely to understand them. I wonder if Abraham Lincoln himself could have answered the inevitable test questions about the causes of the Civil War. Once the daily newspapers ceased to appear every morning and radio broadcasts grew more and more sporadic, what news we did get was so fragmentary and conflicting as to tell us almost nothing about what was really happening.
Of course, there was a war going on. We had moved our mother’s radio from her workroom into the kitchen, and before the batteries died last spring we used to coax it into muttering its litany of disaster while we were fixing dinner. Sometimes the news of the war would make Father stomp and swear, and sometimes it would send him upstairs to his bedroom long before our meal was cooked.
The fighting was taking place half a world away, taking place, the politicians promised, to protect our freedoms, to defend our way of life. It was a distant war, but it seemed to cling to our days, to permeate our awareness like a far-off, nasty smoke. It didn’t directly affect what we ate, how we worked and played, yet we couldn’t shake it – it wouldn’t go away. Some people said it was that war that caused the breakdown.
But I think there were other causes, too. Sometime in January we heard that a paramilitary group had bombed the Golden Gate Bridge, and less than a month later we read that the overseas currency market had failed. In March an earthquake caused one of California’s nuclear reactors to melt down, and the Mississippi River flooded more violently than had ever been imagined possible. All last winter the newspapers – when we could get them – were choked with news of ruin, and I wonder if the convergence of all those disasters brought us to this standstill.
Then, too, there were all the usual problems. The government’s deficit had been snowballing for over a quarter of a century. We had been in an oil crisis for at least two generations. There were holes in the ozone, our forests were vanishing, our farmlands were demanding more and more fertilizers and pesticides to yield increasingly less – and more poisonous – food. There was an appalling unemployment rate, an overloaded welfare system, and people in the inner cities were seething with frustration, rage, and despair. Schoolchildren were shooting each other at recess. Teenagers were gunning down motorists on the freeways. Grown-ups were opening fire on strangers in fast-food restaurants.
But all those things had been happening for so long they seemed almost normal, and as things got darker and more uncertain, people began to grasp at new explanations for what was going wrong. All last spring, every time the three of us went to town we were met by more and wilder versions of what was happening in the world beyond Redwood, until finally the ragged bits of gossip and rumor we gleaned seemed as reliable as the garbled nonsense we used to giggle at as children when we passed a whispered message around a circle of friends.
We heard the United States had a new president, that she was arranging for a loan from the Commonwealth to bail us out. We heard the White House was burning and the National Guard was fighting the Secret Service in the streets of D.C. We heard there was no water left in Los Angeles, that hordes of people were trying to walk north through the drought-ridden Central Valley. We heard that the county to the east of us still had electricity and that the Third World was rallying to send us support. And then we heard that China and Russia were at war and the U.S. had been forgotten.
Although the Fundamentalists’ predictions of Armageddon grew more intense, and everyone else complained with increasing bitterness about everything from the lack of chewing gum to the closure of Redwood General Hospital, still, among most people there was an odd sense of buoyancy, a sort of surreptitious relief, the same feeling Eva and I used to have every few years when the river that flows through Redwood flooded, washing out roads and closing businesses for a day or two. We knew a flood was inconvenient and destructive. At the same time we couldn’t help but feel a peculiar sort of delight that something beyond us was large enough to destroy the inexorability of our routines.
Along with all the worry and confusion there came a feeling of energy, of liberation. The old rules had been temporarily suspended, and it was exciting to imagine the changes that would inevitably grow out of all the upheaval, to contemplate what would have been learned – and corrected – when things began again. Even as everyone’s lives grew more unstable, most people seemed to experience a new optimism, to share the sense that we were weathering the worst of it, and that soon – when things got straightened out – the problems that had caused this mess would have been purged from the system, and America and the future would be in better shape than ever.
People looked to the past for reassurance and inspiration. At the library, the supermarket, the gas station, and even on the Plaza, we listened to talk about the sacrifices and hardships of the Pilgrims and the pioneers. Echoing the vanished newspaper columnists and talk show hosts, people reminisced about the Depression and World Wars, talked about how those hard times had built character and brought families and communities together, how they had strengthened our country and given it new energy and direction. This time, too, they claimed, a little patience and endurance were all that was required to further the causes of freedom and democracy. We each just needed to do our part and pull together and wait it out.
Of course Father scoffed at those platitudes, though even his contempt was halfhearted. If Mother had still been alive, I’m sure the patriotic rhetoric we culled along with the other tidings from town would have inspired some grand tirades on his part about humanity’s gullibility and politicians’ banality. As it was, he was mostly too sad to care.
Even so, he sent a voluntary donation along with his income tax payment that spring, and he, too, predicted that by fall the worst of our hardships would be over. In fact, the one conviction that all but the most wild-eyed extremists shared was that this situation is only temporary, that the world we belong to will soon begin again, and we will be able to look back on the way we are living now as a momentary interruption, a good story to tell the grandkids.
Once Father quit going to work we were so isolated from even Redwood that it was sometimes hard to remember anything unusual was happening in the world beyond our forest. Our isolation felt like a protection. Last June when the moon shone red from the fires of Oakland, it seemed like a warning to stay close to home, and the news we got on Saturday nights reinforced its message. So we settled in to wait for fall. As Father kept reminding me whenever I longed for town, at least out here we have a well-stocked pantry, a garden and orchard, fresh water, a forest full of firewood, and a house. At least here we have a buffer from the obsessions, greeds, and germs of other people. At least here some recognizable shape remains – even now – to our interrupted lives.
*
The B’s begin with fighter planes – B-17, B-24, B-29, B-52. Next is B Cassiopeia. Then comes Ba, the human-headed falcon believed by the ancient Egyptians to symbolize the immortality and divinity of the soul after death.
Fighter planes and supernovas and the falconlike divinity of the soul: death and flight, Heaven and the heavens. Even though it’s only an alphabetical accident, there is a serendipitous rightness to that juxtaposition, and for a moment I wish my father were here so I could prove him wrong.
My father always scorned encyclopedias.
‘There’s no poetry in them, no mystery, no magic. Studying the encyclopedia is like eating carob powder and calling it chocolate mousse. It’s like listening to lions roaring on a CD-Rom, and thinking you’ve been to Africa,’ he used to complain after an afternoon spent trying to convince the fifth-grade teacher to let her students learn about scientific research by raising tadpoles and growing molds instead of copying articles from the encyclopedia.
‘Education is about connections, about the relationships that exist between everything in the universe, about how every kid in Redwood Elementary has a few of Shakespeare’s atoms in his body.’
‘Along with Hitler’s,’ my mother added wryly, but my father ignored her, intent on his own idea.
‘The encyclopedia takes any subject in the world and dissects it, sucks the blood out of it, rips it from its matrix. What does that teach little Tommy? That research is dry and boring, that it’s much more fun to watch TV, steal candy, and destroy private property. And if your sole introduction to research has been an encyclopedia, it’s a fairly bright conclusion.’
‘Now, Robert,’ my mother would answer as she set the table for dinner, ‘encyclopedias have their place. Maybe Janice is just showing those kids how to use them before she turns them loose on their own projects.’
‘She’s not. She thinks research is dry and boring, too. And Janice’ll never turn them loose on anything – they might come up with questions she can’t answer.’
‘Dinner’s ready.’
‘First let’s burn all the encyclopedias!’
But our set had come to him as a gift from his faculty the year he walked with them up and down in front of the school with a picket sign, so it was never in much risk of being burnt, and sometimes one of us actually did heave out a volume to look up something.
Still, they probably hadn’t been used more than a dozen times before I got them out a few weeks ago. When the public library in Redwood closed last spring, the librarian let me take an extra armload of books. ‘You go ahead, honey,’ she said, because my mother was dead, because my father was on the Board of Directors of the library, because I had been checking out books from her since before I could talk, because I had gone to her for the address of the Office of Admissions at Harvard.
‘No one else will be reading these this summer if you don’t take them,’ she said, stamping the books with a date three months in the future. ‘This should be enough to keep you busy until we open up again in the fall.’
But I had worked my way through that stack by July, we buried our father in September, and it was the end of November by the time Eva and I were finally recovered enough for her to return to her dancing and me to my studies. Then for a full day I sat at the table, my letter from the Harvard Office of Admissions lying beside the Official Register of Harvard University while I looked back and forth between them, staring at the same few phrases over and over again.
Although we do not accept students more than a year before they are due to matriculate, we have reviewed your file and are very favorably impressed with both your outline of study and your intellectual and verbal abilities, as evidenced by your Scholastic Aptitude Test scores, said the letter. If your College Board Achievement Test scores are similarly high, we would encourage you to make a formal application to Harvard at the appropriate time next winter.
But in the Register I read, Although College Board Achievement Tests taken through the January series will satisfy our requirements, we urge you to complete your testing by December, since by applying early, you will ensure that the Committee has time to give your application the most thorough consideration.
It was like a calculus derivative I was unable to solve, a passage from Saint-Exupéry I couldn’t translate. ‘What will I do?’ I finally wailed to Eva when she emerged from her studio that afternoon.
‘About what?’ she asked, grabbing her extended leg and pulling it up so that it was almost vertical against her torso.
‘I’m supposed to have taken my Achievement Tests by now.’
‘Well, you aren’t the only one who hasn’t. I’m sure even Harvard is going to have to bend their rules this year.’
‘But what if things have already started up again back there?’
‘We’d know about it.’
‘How?’
‘There’d be a plane or something. Something.’
‘Even if the lights come on tomorrow, I won’t be ready to take the tests.’
She set her leg down and rose into an unwavering arabesque. ‘Why not?’
‘I can’t use my computer or my language tapes; the batteries are dead in my calculator. I don’t even have any paper left.’
‘Then read. Books don’t need batteries.’
‘I’ve already read everything in the house. Twice.’
‘Have you read the encyclopedias?’ she asked, sweeping down from her arabesque into a deep curtsey.
I wish I had started sooner. I can’t believe how much I’m learning. It’s all there – every date, every place, every artist and philosopher and scientist, every statesman and king, every star and mineral and species, every fact and theory, every bit of human knowledge. It’s all in one place, everything that matters, everything I’ll ever need, and all I have to do is turn the page. It may be a little dry, but it’s no drier than my calculus text or my French tapes. It’s no drier than what Eva does hour after hour alone in her studio.
Our parents never structured our studies. ‘Let ’em learn what they like,’ my father used to say. ‘A child will eat a well-balanced diet if she’s given a choice of wholesome foods and left alone. If a kid’s body knows what it needs to grow and stay healthy, why wouldn’t her mind, too?’
To his friends he explained, ‘My girls have free run of the forest and the public library. They have a mother who is around to fix them lunch and define any words they don’t know. School would only get in the way of that. Besides, if they went to school, they’d spend over two hours a day in the car. Lord knows I could use company on those drives, but it’s better for my kids to stay in the woods.’
So while other children were reciting their times tables and asking permission to get drinks of water, Eva and I were free to roam and learn as we pleased. Together we painted murals and made up plays, built forts, raised butterflies, and designed computer games. We made paper, concocted new recipes for cookies, edited newsletters, and caught minnows. We grew gourds and nursed fledglings and played with prisms, and our parents told the state that what we did was school.
For years I studied what I wanted to, when and how I wanted to study it. One book led to another in a random pattern, meandering from interest to interest like a good conversation, and the only thing that connected them was their juxtaposition on the bookshelves in Mother’s workroom.