Windwhistle Bone

by Richard Trainor

“It was just the environment; and the company. My aunt was starting to work me over a bit.”

  “Fuck her. That’s an old scab. You’ve got to stop picking at it.”

  “Easier said than done.”

  “When are you coming to Los Angeles?”

  “I’ll be there Tuesday, around seven.”

  “I’ll have a car sent for you.”

  “I don’t want you to send a car. I’ll take a cab.”

  “Suit yourself then, but come directly to me. I’ll be at the Marquis.”

  “Are you still looping?”

  “Yes, we have another week to go.”

  “We’re invited to a party on Saturday night. Can you make it?”

  “I think so. How are Jill and Phil? I’d like to see them. How are they now? It’s been such a long while.”

  Vera’s reply lacked a certain subtlety. She now saw Phil and Jill as beneath her. Now they were Ram’s friends.

  “They say they miss you and would like to see you.”

  “How sweet.”

  “Well, anyway, the invitation has been made. I intend to go. I’ll be staying with them while I’m in LA.”

  “You’re not staying with me at the Marquis? Your own wife?”

  “Not when you’re in the middle of a picture. I always wind up getting sucked into something that swallows me and takes all my time. I have two stories due in a couple of weeks. But I’ll stay with you Tuesday night. I miss you, baby.”

  “I miss you too,” said Vera, hurt that Ram wouldn’t be by her side when he was in town. Ram could feel her anger rising over the phone line, and knew she was about to start in on him and spoke before she began.

  “There’s somebody at the door. I’ll call you from the airport.”

  “Ram!” she shouted as he was hanging the phone onto the receiver. It rang again as Ram was going out the door to the front desk. “Don’t let the phone ring through again,” Ram said when he got there. “Take messages.”

  He went back to his room and looked at the disassembled pieces lying on the bed, spending the rest of the evening trying to assemble them into something fixed and coherent that could be narrated as a story.

  …Some said The Crash caused the Le Doir’s to lose their fortune, and while it was true that the downward spiral in their individual failures was concurrent with the stock market crash and the Depression that followed it, there seemed something more to it than that, thought Ram. Fran Sr.’s title insurance company was entirely cashed out by 1931, forcing him to sell his big house on Capitol Avenue and move ten blocks south, near the state printing plant whose chemicals leached into nearby Burns’ Slough and made it stink like a slaughterhouse. Ike lost the ice factory by gambling it away, losing all the Sagrada property he had and retiring to the small ranch where he kept his collection of animals, including giraffes, impalas, zebras, and two lions that he kept in a corral. When he lost the poker hand that cost him the ice factory, Ike left Sagrada the next day and didn’t return until he died. He was buried there in 1938, succumbing to cirrhosis at age 48. Charles fought his embezzlement indictment until his money ran out in 1930, leaving him to settle the case with a plea bargain struck with District Attorney Blumenthal, the terms of which were kept sealed. He was dead seven years later at age 40. The cause was a self-inflicted shotgun blast to the head, leaving Paul as the last Le Doir in his generation. Ram remembered his great-uncle Paul, quiet and dignified and soft-spoken, always in a blue suit, bow tie and hat. Even then, remembered Ram, Paul looked like something out of a different time, another century, another world from the one Ram found himself and his family occupying. Paul was of the 19th century, early 20th at best, and Sagrada in the 1950s and the Le Doir family’s place in it, then bordering on a lack of place in it, was something that made Paul uncomfortable, although not as much as it did his nephew Fran.

  …They were seated in a fussily decorated front room of a mansion down the Delta on one of their research trips. Fran told Ram to keep still and behave himself. The woman whose house it was had given him cookies to help keep him quiet while she tried as best she could to answer Fran’s questions.

  “You have to remember that I was just a child, Mr. Le Doir, and that’s over 70 years ago.”

  “I appreciate that, Ma’am, but whatever you can remember would be useful.”

  Fran was attending UC Berkeley then, researching the book he said he was going to write about his family, collecting stories wherever he could, often at old homes like these, Ram remembered—ornate Edwardian, Victorian, and sometimes antebellum mansions surrounded by fruit orchards or foul-smelling beet fields, houses filled with heavy brass and marble furniture and old framed family photographs with lace curtains blowing in the Delta breeze. The old man sat in the overstuffed chairs with the old lady while Ram drained lemonade after lemonade, sitting on a chair by the parlor window, watching the Big Green lumber by. The woman was telling Fran about the one time she had met John Pierce, when she was a little girl and he delivered a prize bull to her father.

  “What I remember most was his presence. He was quiet and shy, but there was a fierceness in his eyes and behind that a sorrow.”

  “He was liquidating everything he could then, getting ready to divide up the Rancho between his sons and heirs,” said Fran, recalling the period of history that the old woman was remembering for him.

  “My father said he was one of the few great men he knew whom the Gold Rush actually ruined.”

  Fran smiled ruefully. “Yes,” he said.

  “Well, that was a tragedy then.”

  “Yes, yes it was,” Fran agreed, an expression of loss on his liquid features.

  On their way back to Sagrada, Fran was feeling no pain. He’d drank four glasses of sherry with the old woman, who still seemed perfectly sober, but the liquor combined with the stories and the profound summer heat had a powerful effect on Fran and made him garrulous. He started the history monologue almost as soon as they left the house.

  “Who knows where we’d be now had he managed to preserve the old Rancho, Ram? Who knows where we’d have been if the Gold Rush hadn’t happened?”

  “I thought we came here during the Gold Rush, Dad.”

  “The Le Doirs did, Ram. But not the Pierces or the Degnans, they were here from before the Gold Rush.”

  “But we’re the Le Doir’s, Dad. We’re not the Pierces or Degnans.”

  “We’re both, Ram. But I’m looking into the Pierces and Degnans now, not the Le Doir’s. My book is on the Pierce side of the family.”

  “Why not the Le Doir’s, Dad?”

  The old man shook a cigarette out of his pack and fumbled to light it. When he did, he inhaled deeply and exhaled through his nose, looking like a dragon, thought Ram.

  “I’m too tired to go into that right now…”

  …As he drove to Hazel’s house the next morning, having reread all the clippings again, he jotted questions in his notebook. At a stoplight, he looked at the questions: there were about ten. Most of them had to do with Ram’s father, Fran Jr. and Ram’s namesake, Ram the First, the seventh-born son of Charles Aloysius Le Doir, nee O’Dwyer, formerly of Inch, then of Cork, then Paris, then New York, sire of all the later Le Doirs, and all of them natives of Sagrada, California.

  Before he got to her house, Ram stopped at the graveyard directly in back where Yick was buried. He hadn’t been there since the funeral and it took him awhile to find the gravesite. It was under the canopy of a valley oak, Ram remembered. When he finally found the grave, he saw the rose marble headstone had gone gray, two decades of valley fog, heat, and rain having rendered it so. Yick’s rodeo belt buckle was still on the headstone, as were the dates of his birth and death and a small legend that read, “Time will march to a different beat without him.” Ram remembered the backwards-running clock of Yick’s and smiled. He placed a bouquet he’d brought with him and recalled that day in 1968 when the funeral and wake were held…

  …The service was led by Monsignor Brooke at
St. Mary’s. There was a long motorcade to the graveyard, Ram and his brothers riding together, not with their father or Aunt Hazel or Uncle Charles who rode in the hearse with Yick’s casket. The younger Le Doirs were the pallbearers, and after the graveside blessings, the boys dropped their green carnations into the open grave atop the silver casket, then all drifted back to Yick’s house fifty yards away. The wake was heavy with liquor and light on food, just as it was at Fran’s wake in Los Angeles that day some years later. Ram remembered the stories at the wake by his sister and brothers and friends, the telegrams from the White House and the state capitol that honored John Pierce Le Doir and were read aloud by his brothers and sister, followed by family recollections of when life was green for the Le Doir’s before the blight and mildew descended, and then, when everybody was good and drunk, the reminiscences of Yick and St. Patrick’s Day. Ram remembered, too, how perfectly apropos and synchronous that it was 1968 when Yick died in that helicopter ride from Disneyland to LAX, that year when the entire fabric of America was in flux and transformation. Nineteen Sixty-Eight, that year that seemed almost a decade long and took almost a decade for its transformative shock waves to be fully felt…

  … Ram came back to the moment, said a prayer, and walked to his aunt’s front door. It was one o’clock when he rang the bell and he felt she’d appreciate his punctuality. It was expected. He was, after all, a Le Doir, at least in part.

  Hazel answered the door in a printed housecoat she wore over white capris and a pink sweater. Her hair was swept back from her face and her pale eyes were clouded and hard, brightening briefly when she said hello. A lunch of cold meats, pickled vegetables, and hard-boiled eggs was set on the dining room table, alongside a pitcher of milk, a pot of coffee, and another pitcher of screwdrivers. “Help yourself to whatever you want, honey,” she said. “I’ve already eaten.” Ram filled a plate, poured himself a coffee, then followed her into the library and sat on the couch while Hazel sat in the burgundy leather easy chair that was once Yick’s throne. Ram waited until his aunt was comfortable, lighting a cigarette for her and refilling her tumbler with a new screwdriver. She inhaled, exhaled, and then sighed. “Go ahead and ask your questions. I’ll see what I remember.”

  “What do you remember most about your father when you were a child?”

  She smiled ruefully, took another drag, and smiled back at Ram.

  “I think I most remember the good times when we were kids and lived in the big house on Capitol. We had money then and my mom and dad loved to entertain. We had big get-togethers at Christmas and the Fourth of July and the house was filled with interesting people from politics or ranching or business.”

  “What about the arts? Were people from the arts at these parties?”

  “God, no. These were society parties. There weren’t any artists in Sagrada society,” she said dismissively. “Maybe Miss Mabel McCready, she might have been at one or two,” said Hazel, referring to the woman whose family owned The Stinger. “I think she had something to do with the arts, but that wasn’t how she got an invitation to the Le Doir’s. These were social affairs, not hootenannies or happenings or whatever those kinds of affairs are called. These were people my parents wanted to cultivate, not writers or painters or actors, for God’s sake,” she said with a shudder. “It’d been bad for maybe three years then,” recalled Hazel, skipping ahead. “When the crash hit, nobody could keep up their mortgages and had to default on them, leaving Dad’s title business to cover the notes on the properties. That wiped him out, and at the same time that he was being wiped out, so were Ike and so was Charles. The party was over, we sold the cabin in Strawberry and we had to move to the south side of the city, which was a different world than the one we were used to. It was a tiny house compared to the one we had on Capitol. We knew we’d gone from being rich to being poor, especially your father, Ram. It wasn’t a happy time, and then it got worse.”

  “How?”

  “Your grandfather had, I guess, what they might call a nervous breakdown. He couldn’t face what happened. He stopped going to the office in the morning and started spending all his time going to the old Gold Rush saloons that were still there. He’d sit all day listening to old-timers telling stories of the Gold Rush and asking them if they remembered the Le Doir’s and Paragon Meats and if they knew his father and his father’s father. Eventually, my mother got sick of it and threw him out of the house.”

  “Where did he go then?”

  “He went to the Elks. He lived in one of their rooms there, lived there until he died in 1947. When I was a young girl, I used to go there for tea dances in the Starlight Room and I’d stop by Dad’s room and have a drink with him. By then, he was a wreck. Your dad would go there and get him to talk about his family, but Charles and Yick were forbidden to see him by Mom. She said they were too young and he was too irresponsible to be trusted. He died there in his early fifties. Your grandfather was a great man, Ram, but he was very fragile, very sensitive, and very proud. He had a hard time accepting what happened to him and his family. God, what a ruin we had become, and just like that,” Hazel half-whispered, snapping her fingers. “All of a sudden, pfft, it was gone.”

  Yick never talked about his family. “What do you want to know all that old shit for anyway?” asked Yick as they sat in the Crystal one afternoon when Ram was ten or so. “Your father is the authority on all that, and you should ask him, not me. As far as I’m concerned, that’s just shit from the past. I don’t have any use for it, never did. As soon as I had the money to buy the plant, I left that Goddamn town. Sagrada has too many sad memories for me. It’s long ago, an old story, and maybe your Dad can make a book out of, and if he can, then good, but I wouldn’t think about it too much, Ace. Your life is in front of you and I’d hate to see you get swallowed up in all that horseshit. Leave it to your Dad. Ask him about all that crap, because I don’t remember much of it and I don’t spend my time thinking about the past and the years when I was young in Sagrada, although your Aunt Hazel does. What matters is now, that’s all that counts,” said Yick, shuddering. “Leave the past alone.”

  …And Ram had, for more than twenty years, until the opportunity presented itself through his profession to unearth the bones and reassemble them into the whole he was now striving to construct, coming back into the moment with Hazel, now holding forth on Ram’s namesake: Reynolds Aloysius Muir Le Doir, the seventh and final son born to Charles Aloysius Le Doir and his wife Marie. Ram the First, born on the Fourth of July in 1863, when the local newspapers were filled with the first accounts of a great battle, being fought in a farming village in Pennsylvania called Gettysburg.

  “He certainly was a handsome devil, your namesake was. I remember the picture your dad has of him, taken when he was 21 or so. That big shock of hair, the watery eyes that both you and your dad and my dad have”dreamer’s eyes," my mom used to say. We never met him—your dad and Yick and Charles and I—he died just a few years after your dad was born, but he was quite a character as I understand it," said Hazel, musingly at first. Then she started laughing.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s that story about the stagecoach. Did your father ever tell you the story about Ram and the stagecoach?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Hazel shook her tumbler, the ice cubes rattling, and Ram brought the pitcher in, refilling the glass and lighting a new cigarette for her. Hazel laughed lightly and shook her head smiling.”Not a word of this goes back to your mom, Ram."

  …Hazel told Ram the story of the stagecoach, told him how the first Ram took the linchpins out of the eastbound stage to Hangtown, causing the wheels to fall off as soon as the stage turned east from Front onto J Street. He was picked up by the constables and taken into custody for malicious mischief. When the judge read the charges, young Ram, then sixteen, was unable to control his laughter. The judge read how the stage overturned and sent the driver and shotgun rider cartwheeling in opposite directions, as Ram and his cohorts
raised their flasks in a cheer from their vantage point atop the assay office roof above the Wells Fargo Station. The reason that Judge Eli S. Philpot gave for dismissing the charges against Ram after first clearing the courtroom, had to do with Ram’s tender age and the rambunctiousness of hot-blooded youth, which Judge Philpot confessed to still remember and would consent to forgive, providing Ram refrain from any further mayhem. Later that day, Charles Le Doir and Judge Philpot met for drinks and dinner at the Orleans House. After agreeing that the upcoming election would be hotly contested, the men exchanged compliments and made small talk. When Charles got up to leave, he neglected to pick up the envelope placed alongside the judge’s cognac while dessert was being served…

  “Isn’t that just a hoot, Ram? Your ancestor was quite the character, as I understand, and quite the ladies’ man.”

  “How did he die?”

  “You said you knew how he died.”

  “Just what the newspapers said.”

  “I don’t know anything more than that, Ram. Maybe your father could’ve told you.”

  “Every time I asked him, he said he didn’t know.”

  “Well, maybe he didn’t know. Your father was a bright man, but he didn’t know everything. If he couldn’t tell you, then I don’t know who could.”

  “Maybe I have to keep digging.”

  “Maybe you do. That is what you do isn’t it? Dig things up on people.”

  “Sometimes, but it’s not all that.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard. I read a couple of your stories. I can’t say I’m very impressed,” she said, draining her glass and shaking it so the ice cubes rattled, prompting Ram to refill it. After he did, Ram walked over to the wall and stood by the large oval portrait of Charles the First taken at the height of his power in 1886, nine years before his death.

  “How did your grandpa get so rich?”

  “It was the meat market. He did very well as a butcher.”

  “The butcher business brought those ranches and all that cattle and sheep?”

  “Sure, why not?”