I parked in the city lot and walked over to the Capitol across the street. Session was going on, and the halls were filled with young staffers, none of whom I knew or recognized, and none of whom recognized me. I walked the halls of the old wing, past committee rooms in session, and walked through the bullpen where lobbyists were still encamped, lurking in wait for legislators carrying water for them. Again, there was no recognition either way.
I left The Capitol and walked two blocks to the cathedral, lit a candle, and said a prayer for Shaughn. Sitting there, I remembered when Fran and Peter and I served mass together that single time many Easter’s past.
When I woke up the next day, I drove to the house on Santa Monica Avenue where Tim Shaughnessy was raised and where he died, and I recalled the days when we were teenagers here and then when Shaughn lived here briefly after returning from Europe. He was a force then, whip-smart and ambitious and full of life, and was the inspiration for Jonas Allen and I. What we wanted to do, Shaughn had already done. I remembered the time in Deerville when we all did acid together and went to a park, watching Shaughn as he faced north into a biting wind and telling us he thought our planned exile to Vancouver was a smart move. “You can live on your feet or on your knees, guys. It’s your choice.”
For the rest of the day, I drove around Sagrada without seeming purpose, guided by instinct, and strictly for my own amusement. I took unknown roads purely by inspiration, seeking nothing, and finding nothing in return… the River Road spun me down the Delta and I watched the Sagrada lumbering by, flat and brown with spring runoff. In a shallow bog near Steamboat Slough, a great blue heron stood on one leg, and the surrounding fields shot by the afternoon light were russet, milk-gray, and heather, the standing rainwater lightening from forest green to jade. On the horizon, the sun was racing down a patch of clear sky smudged with smoke from a slash fire. I looked at my watch and saw it was time to head back upriver for the rosary.
It was at St. Theresa’s, my old elementary school on Jefferson near the tomato cannery. It didn’t look much different now than it did forty years before when Fran and Peter and I attended it. It was a brick, two-story, double-winged affair with St. Ambrose’s Church in the middle of it, all of it behind a brick wall and a partial screen of sycamores, redwoods, and pomegranate trees that fronted onto Jefferson. I drove into the parking lot behind the school, walked to where the baseball diamond once stood and circled back the opposite direction to the swing set…
…the organ played the opening chords of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, reminding me that the rosary had begun, reminding me, too, somehow of the birthday present I bought for Shaughn when he turned twelve, a recording of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture with a big cannon on the album cover, remembering how Shaughn loved it and loved telling strangers that story…
…Monsignor O’Malley was leading the rosary, the same priest from Fran’s and Peter’s and my time at St. Theresa’s forty years before. He looked older now, but not really different, his stringy hair still black, his voice thick with Belfast accent, his face still stern and unsmiling, his eyes cold and piercing as he led us in prayer. I remembered O’Malley chasing the boarders at our school with a rolled up Catholic Herald when he caught them trysting in the dugout on the baseball field… The memories flitted through the lens and fell away. I made my way into the church and sat at a pew near the back. A moment later, Earl McHugh came up, touching me on the shoulder. “Hey, Ram,” he said. I nodded and smiled.
After the rosary, O’Malley said a few words about the life and legacy of Tim O’Shaughnessy. He spoke of how Tim Shaughnessy was a good and decent and law-abiding son of the church. Earl and I rolled our eyes. He spoke of how Tim Shaughnessy was a respected businessman in San Francisco, and a supporter of local Little League teams, and I’m sure he probably was… Then he spoke of how Tim O’Shaughnessy had suffered the debilitating effects of a long and painful illness, and how his suffering was now ended because God had summoned him home. Earl looked at me and raised his eyebrow. All I did was nod back. O’Malley was the authority of the moment now, and if this was the version of Shaughn that he wanted to portray, I wasn’t going to be the one to dispute it. ‘Let Shaughn go in peace,’ I thought to myself, because he sure didn’t find any here on this mortal coil. And if, as the Buddhists believe, Shaughn’s karma would ricochet back on him and he would have to come back here to try and work it out again, then he could sure use all the strength and love and support that our prayers and hopes could give him… The harlequin grin flashed through the projector and I smiled, closed my eyes, and held it a moment.
Afterwards, Earl and I went for coffee and talked for a while about nothing in particular. He looked good, relatively unchanged, fit and clean-shaven with short hair, lined a bit around the eyes but otherwise unmarked by time from all appearances. He said he was working as a manager of a shipping company. He said that he was happy and clean and had been so for the past fifteen years. I said I was happy for him.
…short blips of memory of Earl came into view from the unhappy days of heroin with Jaime; the Vancouver episode at Customs wafted through and blew quickly, happily away…
“What are you doing now?” he asked me.
“You mean, at this minute?”
“No, in general.”
“Not much, about the same as you. I have a job as an electronics assembler in a little town above Santa Rosa. I guess I’m wondering what comes next… You know what happened—” I started, but he interrupted me.
“I read about it, but let’s not go there.”
I said sure, what’s the point, and left it at that. We sat in silence for a while before Earl asked me if I saw anybody from back then.
“Not until you tonight. How do you spend your free time?” I asked him.
“I have a girlfriend who works with me and we like to travel.”
“Where do you go?”
“We like to go to San Francisco to see plays and stay in nice hotels.”
“I didn’t know you were a theater buff, Earl.”
“I wasn’t until I met her,” he said, omitting to tell me her name.
“Where else do you go?”
“We like to go the races, NASCAR mostly. We do the Daytona 500 every year, been there for the last ten.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” he said, not offering to expand on it.
“…you know, Earl, I don’t think I’ve ever had a friend more reticent to open up and talk than you are.”
He shrugged. “It’s my nature, Ram. I don’t talk about personal stuff.”
“Yeah, I know… but now that I think about it, there is one other friend who was even more guarded.”
“Who?”
“Shaughn,” I said. “For all his blather and boasting he was never really straight with me. I never knew whether or not to believe what he said was real was real… That thing about him being a stepchild for instance and having another father. Do you think that was true?”
“I don’t know, Ram. We never talked about it. All I know is that we were all friends once, good friends, and we all survived it until Shaughn.”
“Do you ever see Jonas?”
“Haven’t heard from him in twenty years. Don’t expect to either.”
“Why?”
“I’d rather not talk about it, Ram. Listen, I gotta go. See you at the funeral then?”
“Yeah, Earl. Good to see you again.”
“We should try to keep in touch. We’re the only ones left.”
I told Earl that might be a good thing, that I’d let him know where I was and would stay in touch. But it was just something I said. I knew it wasn’t going to happen. We parted with a handshake and said we’d see one another at the funeral and burial on Friday. The funeral was scheduled for three, the burial at four, with a wake at Shaughn’s Uncle Mike’s house to follow.
…that night in my hotel room, I heard the whistle again like I first heard it more than forty years ago. The same whistle, t
hough closer now. I remembered when it would come moaning across the fields of tulé and mustard grass filled with mourning doves and ring-necked pheasants along Morrison Creek, and where in a grove of eucalyptus, stood a small clapboard farmhouse, which my brothers and I said was haunted because a man had axed his wife to death there sometime in the 1930s.
From the southwest, it’d come. Hua, hua, it’d be moaning. the sound echoing in the wet tulé, doing a ghost waltz up the dead end of our block, the fog rising up and stealing in from the creeks and fields, tiptoeing across Jefferson Boulevard and spidering up Goya Parkway like a gray daddy longlegs, before turning up our scrawny-treed, crab-grassed lawn and through my window where hua, hua, it’d moan softly again in the hollow of the hollow wound of the windwhistle bone that hung above my bed.
Then the clatter, like a marching army shaking the earth, and the onrushing halo of the moist, spot-lit eye that I saw for that brief moment before its passing. The cows would low in the pasture of the farm and in the slaughterhouse a quarter mile away at the corner of Boulware and Jefferson, and the dogs would join in, baying at the spook and wonder of it, that ghostly whistle, that I later learned railroad men called a quill.
Every late night, unable to sleep in our new home in what was then Sagrada’s newest and southernmost subdivision, I’d listen to that concerto, that primeval dirge of machine and beast. But the silence following in its wake was somehow louder still and brought the sleeping house to life in a way more real than it was during the day. Rising from my bed, I’d begin walking the rooms of the still house, one by one, long past when the moon rose and filled the hollow wound of the windwhistle bone with its bone-white light, and then, and only then, could I finally fall asleep.
But that wouldn’t come for hours yet, not until Peter’s radio station had gone off the air and my mother’s dream muttering stopped. “No, no, not in this house,” she’d gurgle to herself or to my father’s not-dead ghost, for his spirit was still haunting those rooms then, along with the fear and the guilt and the shame that befell us as the sole broken-home pariahs of our parochial school, until the sap of the new-sawn boards was sucked dry by our sorrow, as dry as the windwhistle bone, though the bone, ancient as it was, had long since had its sap sucked dry, although not its power.
It was early in the year for it to be so wet and foggy. That’s what everybody said, although we were still too new in this part of the world to have such knowledge. Usually, the tulé fog didn’t come until mid-November, though it was nearly that now. Rising from my bed quietly so as not to awaken Peter, my brother—now father now that my dad was gone—I watched the wisps of the tulé’s gray spider legs as it tried hanging in the plum tree too small to hold it, and, finding no place to rest there, came to lick at my window instead. And all the while, snoring Peter, sleeping to Jackie Wilson or the Tokens, didn’t feel it, nor did my mom, muttering behind the door that we no longer let her keep closed all the way. And neither did Fran, my middle brother in the middle room, feel it scampering over the ridge beam as it spun its woolly vanishing web over the sleeping house. Only I, long awake past the time I was tired, saw how the tulé was wrapping us and how it sneaked into the window cracks to fill the air in our house with its wetness and chill full of creekfield smell, until it seemed the muskrat and carp and beaver and pheasant were all there in the house too, swimming and flying and burrowing among us while we slept.
Rising from my bed, I’d tiptoe to the hall where the hollowed-out cross with the dried palms behind it hung, and take it down softly from the wall so as not to make a sound that light-sleeping Fran would hear. I would open it and take the candles from their places and pretend to light them and pray, sprinkling the holy water on my forehead, and praying a God Bless us and save us full rosary as we, all of us, had been doing every night and morning for the past week. Then, when I felt myself securely clean with God again, I’d wander into the lanai and slip out the sliding door to stand under the peach trees too young to bear fruit yet, standing barefoot in the cold wet grass while the spidering tulé delicately licked my toes, and then, after a long while, I’d look up, although I knew what I would find there. The sky would be low and gray and thick, and to me, it was all too all of these to think that God could somehow see me through it, although the Fathers and my brothers and my mother and the Sisters all said it was otherwise.
How long? Longer than an hour I’d stand there, turning away from the sky and looking down to the ground as we all did during those days. I remember that nobody looked up much then, except only every so often when they’d steal a glance to make sure that up was still there. And then my toes would begin going numb, a lovely feeling I thought, that tingling just before the dead had set in. Then the pain and soreness would come when I resisted the fullness of the deadness of its embrace by pulling away from it. That was delicious, too, because it meant you were still here to feel it, and nothing much during those days really brought it home to you that we were still here, wherever here was nothing other than the fear and the prayers.
If I am so quiet that I become like the tulé, I’d think, and slip back through the door as it does, making no sound, then I can turn on the TV and see the pictures and how they’ve maybe changed in the past few hours. Fran said it wouldn’t make any difference though, even if we had warning, that all we’d hear was a whoosh and see a flash of red. I’ll have to be lucky to catch it right and then from God’s height, see whether the ships have turned and whether the tubes are now on them, which was what all the praying and the not looking up was about. I remember him, the knight of our faith, pointing with a pointer and talking about them that first night, and how father-brother Peter started sobbing and prayed harder than he usually did, which was plenty hard anyway.
But I’ll probably be caught if I do this, I’d think, and then Peter will punish me like he feels Dad would do if he were here. So instead, I’d wander into the living room and look at the family pictures for a while. Pictures of my mom and dad and all of us way back when, and Grandpa and Grandma, him just dead and her just having gone back east after coming out to terrorize us again for the second summer in a row with her Ukrainian blood curses and old country ghost stories which, too, are part of the sorrow sucking the sap of the new-sawn boards dry. And best of them all, the old photo that Dad got up the Omochumnes on one of our research trips that time at the house of the old lady with skin as white and dry as parchment, the lady with the graves out her backdoor beyond the wild poppies. She fetched it from an old metal bread box and tore herself, young and beaded and full-bodied, out of the picture, giving us the half with old Ram on it. Then she laughed, so hard and wide that I could see the gold in her teeth.
There he is, old Ram, my namesake. Old Ram, with his black frock coat, string tie, brocade vest, and gold watch chain strung across his belly, fingers crooked in his vest pocket and with a mustache that mostly covers his full sad mouth. There is a sign on the bottom of the frame saying, Virginia, missing the City that was on the torn-out half of the picture that the paper-skinned lady kept. He has what my Aunt Hazel called “those limpid Le Doir eyes,” limpid but burning and haunting, the same as those of Fran the First, and Fran my dad, but not Fran my brother, who somehow managed to avoid them. Maybe if the picture had gone down far enough, it’d have shown the nickel-plated peg below the pant leg, cause that’s where the windwhistle bone used to be before it was shot off at San Juan Hill and passed down through generations of Le Doirs, until, eventually, my dad passed it along to me.
Even then, I never could look at old Ram for longer than two minutes at a time. It was the eyes, sure, but it was also who he was which came through the photo, even though the story first told me about San Juan Hill wasn’t true. I concluded that it was both who he was and what he did. Somehow that picture told all of that. My dad didn’t like it hanging there amongst all the rest, and once, I caught him trying to throw it out. My brother Fran took my side then or else my dad probably would have. Even still, when my dad was still with
us, plenty of times I’d come in and find the photo face down on the mantle.
When I was finished looking at the pictures, I would go and stand outside my mother’s room and listen to her breathing and murmuring through the door that a neighbor man had swelled up so it wouldn’t close all the way shut. Sometimes I would put my face up close and look through the crack and see her sprawled sideways across the bed and tossing every few minutes. Sometimes, a phrase or two—nothing that really meant anything that you could understand—would tumble out of her. And sometimes, after she’d said something, I’d ask her a question, and half the time she’d respond, even in context although she was still asleep. I would laugh under my breath and then go quiet again. Then I’d stand there a while until I was sure she was breathing all right. I had to do that because, otherwise, I couldn’t sleep.
It’d been two years now since the day I came in and found her lying crosswise on the bed. It was the early evening of a hot day and my brothers and friends and I were playing down the street in a neighbor’s backyard Doughboy pool. Why I came back home long before we were due, I really didn’t remember. What I did recall was how still the house was, so still you could hear the lamplight and the flies buzzing against the screen. There was a clicking sound of a record at the end of its play coming from her room, and I called to her as I got outside her door. All I could hear was the clicking. The door was locked and wouldn’t give at first and I called her again. She didn’t answer me. I put my weight behind the door and pushed it in. When the door gave, it made a shattering twang. She had pictures of her wedding scattered on the sides of her bed and a wad of paper in her hand. Mom, I called, but still, she didn’t answer. Mom, I called, again and again, but it was the same thing. I rolled her over to look at her face. It was grayish green. There were dots of dried foam at the corners of her mouth. I must’ve stood there calling to her. “Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom,” for five minutes or so I called. My head was racing and my heart was pounding, and then for a minute, all was clear and silent and I just stood there watching this and sizing up what I knew to be true. I ran next door to the house of the neighbor lady nurse and brought her back over to my Mom. I must’ve been screaming because in a couple of minutes, my brothers and a bunch of neighbors arrived. The nurse lady was slapping my mother hard, and the rest of the women were yelling. One of them got on the phone. When I looked at her face, it was stretched tight. My brothers stood there, mute and ashamed, while I begged Mom to wake up. Then somebody, one of the neighbor ladies, told Peter to quick, get me out of there. As he dragged me away, I turned and saw the nurse neighbor grab something small, off the night stand and look at it. She told Fran to hurry next door and get her bag from the front closet. They took me down the street to the neighbor lady’s house, who gave me cookies and milk, as much as I wanted. They told me my mom was sick, her and another neighbor lady who soon arrived there. It was nothing serious, they said, just a spell. Fran and Peter arrived and they looked at me in a way that I could never remember them doing; like it was me who had the spell or something. I remembered all that like it was the yesterday it is, and most of what I remember was how badly everybody wanted me to believe that it was just a spell, and how little I didn’t.
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