by Molly Gloss
Crossing the bridge again, facing into the morning sun, she could see in glimpses through the railing blue spruce draped with lichen, and candle-spire firs, and a fringe of red-twig willow ranging up and down both sides of the river. Above the east bank an osprey worked the shore, looking for spawning salmon. The man, as he crouched washing his muddy hands in the water at the river’s edge, lifted his head and watched the bird for a moment.
She spent the rest of the morning reading how to notch the low side of a tree before sawing through from the high side, and how to lever up the logs of a cabin single-handedly with long poles and a rock fulcrum. Some of the books had copyright dates from the sixties and early seventies, when everybody she knew had been thinking about homesteading, or joining a farming commune. She had spent one summer living in a tent on Whidbey Island, picking strawberries and raspberries and Blue Lake green beans, one crop after the other. Her boyfriend back then was an architecture student at the University of Oregon, and in the fall when he went back to school she followed him. She had thought briefly about staying behind on the island—she had liked living in a tent, doing farm work, being dirty a lot of the time, the smell of her own body so much like the smell of earth in a strawberry field. Now she thought: My life might have been entirely different.
Late in the afternoon she was in the bathtub when a great noise sprang suddenly high up like a fountain and then down and then up again in a new shape, booming and wordless—Mel was playing around with the wiring on the stereo. She had been almost asleep. In her dream, the world had folded in on itself and she was on another page: The tub was tin and she had carried water to it in kettles heated on a cast-iron stove. She sank her body in the green water until her ears flooded.
Years earlier she had bought a denim tote bag, a shapeless cheap thing with two looping handles, to carry books back and forth from the library, a swimsuit when she went to the Y. There was an unopened can of racquetballs in the bottom of the bag. She took that out and put in the library books and her own barely read gardening books—not all of them, not the ones about patio gardens and landscape design, but one about organic methods of pest control and another about vegetables and fruits. She looked through her clothes and put a flannel nightgown and a wool shirt and two pairs of insulated ski socks in the sack with the books. Then she dressed in jeans and a cotton shirt and her old leather-and-shearling lace-up boots and stood in front of the bathroom medicine cabinet, staring at the little boxes and jars and tubes on the glass shelves. Finally she took toothpaste and moleskin and aspirin and a leftover prescription bottle of antibiotic and the old-fashioned red Merthiolate that Mel sometimes used to paint a wart, and put them in the tote bag with the other things. In the basement on a shelf above the electric dryer there were several little packets of seeds—broccoli and peas, snap beans, zucchini, little flat packages with the corners torn out and crumbs of dirt stuck to the colored photos on the fronts. Tokens of earlier seasons of brief optimism. She put them in the bag, inside one of the socks, and carried the bag out to the car. She left the unused sacks of manure and compost piled up by the garage, but she dug the strawberry starts out of the clay pot, put them in a cardboard box, and put the box in the trunk of the car. When she drove away from the house, Mel was still playing with the fine tuner on the stereo.
The sun was low by then, just above the brim of the hills, shining flat in her eyes when she crossed the Ross Island Bridge. It would have been perilous to look away from the lanes. She could just see from the edge of her eye the clearing behind the screen of old trees, and a wisp of smoke rising from the stone chimney of the cabin.
She drove off the bridge onto Macadam and parked the car on the graveled shoulder, took out the tote bag and the box of strawberry starts and walked downhill across a dry weedy ditch and into the shade of three-hundred-year-old firs and cedars and hemlocks. Through the manzanita and huckleberry a narrow trail trodden by animals wound downhill toward the river’s edge. In low places where the ground was still damp, unshod horses had left their tracks. Anne shifted the weight of the cardboard box to her other hip. He would be interested in bartering for the strawberries, she felt—strawberries, a rare and fine thing in his valley, while horses were easy to get and cheap. Although she didn’t think she needed the man, she had a plan that included a horse.
Dead Men Rise Up Never
THESE DAYS, HE’S FAMOUS. YOU pick up a magazine and there’s a story he’s written, you open a newspaper and he’s covering the Russo-Jap war or sailing around the world, escaping cannibals in the South Seas. But when I first knew him he was just a kid, a “work beast” he liked to call himself, on account of he was up every morning at three o’clock delivering newspapers, out again with the late papers after school, working Saturdays on an ice wagon, and Sundays setting up pins in a bowling alley. Then a couple of years later—this would have been ’90 or maybe ’91—he was an oyster pirate, hanging around the Oakland waterfront and pretty often drunk. But I was there too, stealing oysters and becoming pretty thoroughly alcohol soaked, so don’t take any of this as judgment.
We were school chums, Johnny and me, which you wouldn’t have thought. You’d have thought he was a sissy and a bookworm, owing to the fact he’d plant himself on a bench in the schoolyard every recess and stick his nose in a book, which was a long mile from my own practice, shooting squirrels with a pellet gun and collecting cigarette coupons, trading them for picture cards of racehorses, prizefighters, stage actors and such. But one time this big kid Mike Pinella ground his boot into my best set of Indian Chieftain cards, and Johnny just popped off the bench, lit into the kid, and bloodied his nose, which redeemed him in my mind. Then it turned out he collected cards too, so after that we started hanging around together. When his afternoon papers were finished, we’d go after mud hens on the Oakland Estuary with homemade slingshots, or rent a rowboat, pull out onto the bay and fish for rock cod, or just stroll along the waterfront watching ships sail through the Golden Gate. And I visited him at home a few times, which was how I first got acquainted with Plume and the rest of that spiritist realm.
His mother’s name was Flora, though she wasn’t any pretty flower. She was dwarfish with a skimpy head of dark hair, black squinty eyes, a thin mouth always set in a hard straight line. I wouldn’t say she was ugly, although she came near to it, and she had a savage glare verging on madness. But she advertised herself as a medium holding séances and planchette readings, and in that field of work, odd looks were the wonted thing, an inkling of her profession.
I had the idea that the furnishings in Johnny’s house might be tattooed with mystical configurations and puzzles cabalistic, but they were living in a dingy little cottage on Pine Street near the estuary in West Oakland, and the front room had just a coal stove, some plain chairs and bare floors, and a drop-leaf table covered with newspaper in lieu of a tablecloth—the only time I saw a good linen cloth on that table was when Flora was holding a seance. You wouldn’t know you were in an uncanny house except for the half-dozen Mason jars lined up on a shelf in the kitchen. Johnny said the dark shapes in each one, small as wrens and slowly turning in milky plasma, were the corpses of dybbuks and poltergeists his mother had taken captive. He said this offhanded, with a sidelong glance at me, so I didn’t know whether to take it for truth or mockery. Looking back, I think maybe he hadn’t made up his mind himself.
Flora had been born to luxury—she’d had an education in music and elocution and social graces, all of which she’d lost when her mother died and she couldn’t get along with her stepmother. She was always looking for ways to get back to that fancy life, but when I knew the family, she was married to a man who wasn’t Johnny’s daddy, a part-time carpenter and farmer without prospects for improving their situation. Her knack for the occult brought in, at most, a middling income, so she was always hectoring her husband into unsupportable ventures and money-losing schemes one after the other, while betting the household budget on Chinese lottery games. The Work Beast turned o
ver nearly every cent he made to his mother, who had always to be bailed out of some financial hole or other.
Flora communicated with several kinds of spirits—ghosts, wraiths, sprites, even jinn. She’d walk around the house talking with one or another of them, asking their advice, listening to their secrets, whispering hers, and it was those pneumae that she called on for the seances and planchette readings that made up most of her business.
Plume, in particular, occupied Flora’s body whenever she conducted a seance. All the clients in those days were set on Indians, and Plume, so Flora said, had been a Blackfoot war chief in his temporal life. Plume spoke English in a growly low voice, and he punctuated every seance with wild war whoops. He could get the people holding hands around the table to moan and chant and whoop as if they, too, were Indians gathering for a war dance, and more than anything else this was what brought Flora her trade.
Johnny liked to put on an air of disdain for his mother’s ghosts, but not from misbelief. It was his opinion that none of the spirits she talked to, even Plume, were better than third-rate. They might tell a woman that her uncle had a goiter—information of no particular use to her—or that a man’s peach crop would come down with canker, which anybody could guess from the wet winter, but none of the spirits who hung around Flora’s house could tell a man where he might nail a job or find a gold mine. When any of them gave advice to Flora herself, what numbers to bet in the Chinese lottery, for instance, the numbers would always be off by one or two. And if the messages they sent to her clients weren’t outright worthless, they were usually cryptic, damn near impossible to make sense of, which Flora promoted as mysterious, but Johnny thought was their canny way of hiding ignorance.
“I don’t know why she listens to any of them,” he told me. “They never come across with any goods.” But it galled him that Flora kept the planchette and her whispered correspondence to herself. In spite of his low regard for Plume and the others, he couldn’t help thinking if he ever had the chance to slip a question into their world, he might learn the truth of his parentage.
His father had died before Johnny was born, or so Flora had always said, but in one telling it was a tragic accident in a lumber mill, another time a heroic death, saving his pregnant wife from desperadoes. Yet again, he’d been run over by a wagon in the street. Her vague and shifting accounts left Johnny plenty of room for his own lively notions. He liked to imagine he was the natural-born child of a famous man—it was Muir or Roosevelt, usually—stolen from his rightful family as an infant, while his true parents (Flora not his actual mother) were even now searching the world for him. But I suppose he knew this was fanciful; what he really wanted from his mother’s spirits was to be put in touch with his father’s ghost.
• • •
My folks moved us up to Auburn right after Johnny and I graduated Grammar School. In the letters we passed back and forth after that, he said he was working for Hickmott’s Cannery, stuffing pickles into jars for ten cents an hour, which was long hours and filthy work. But he was squirreling away the small change, finding the gumption finally to keep some of his wages out of the hands of his mother, and when he had enough saved up, he planned to buy a boat.
He could sail, Johnny could, having taught himself by the time he was twelve, navigating in rented boats across those forty miles of open water thronged with commercial traffic, and up the northern end of the bay through all those estuaries and inlets, swift-current narrows and treacherous shallows. He was a natural sailor, and it was his idea to quit the cannery and be an oyster pirate.
The oyster beds all up and down the bay were owned by the railroad. Armed guards protected the beds, and pirating was a felony, so the California Fish Patrol was also on the lookout. But a daring pirate could earn a month’s factory wages from one good night’s haul, and the way Johnny thought of it, oyster pirates were folk heroes fighting the Octopus. The railroad monopoly kept the prices high, and when pirates undersold to saloons and stores along the waterfront, everybody but the railroad came out the winner. It was dangerous business—every nighttime raid was an invitation to get shot or arrested—but that wasn’t any discouragement to Johnny, just the opposite. He was a bookish kid who had learned to hide that side of his nature behind a front of nerve and daring. He wrote to me that prison would be an easier life than working at the cannery.
Well, every pirate needed a crew, a fellow or two to drop from the boat and fan out across the mud flats, gathering up the plunder; so after he bought his boat, a decked-over fourteen-footer with a centerboard, he wrote and offered me a one-third split. I left the factory job I had in Auburn, came down to Oakland, and moved in with Johnny, into his little slant-roofed bedroom tacked onto the side of the kitchen. I told my parents I was taking taxidermy lessons in San Francisco.
We went out only on the darkest nights when the tide was low. Some nights were so dark I couldn’t see the boat a couple of yards away, and more than once, reaching down into the black water to grab slippery oysters off the seabed, I’d feel something greasy, something cold as ice, brush through my hands. I guess it was Flora’s influence that led me to think this wasn’t any fish or eel. She had never said there were wraiths or ghosts in the drink, but I knew there were drowned men aplenty, and the hardest part of pirating, for me, was reaching down into that oily wet darkness, not knowing what I might touch, and imagining the worst. I never admitted a bit of this to Johnny; I guess I was working up a front of nerve and daring myself, when it came to ghosts and suchlike.
We ran oysters for a couple of years without getting shot. We had some close calls, but Johnny had a thoroughgoing knowledge of the water’s depth everywhere along that shoreline, and his boat had a shallower draft, was frailer but faster than the patrol boats, plus he had a gift for sailing in absolute silence over still water, where any knock or bump could make a shocking loud noise.
Whenever the moon was too bright or the tide too high for pirating, we hung around the Oakland waterfront with the rest of the hoodlums and drunkards and became fairly much drunks ourselves, which I have already mentioned. And we might have gone on like that until we finally got ourselves killed or thrown in the pen—that was the path we were on. But one night after a couple of hours of blind drinking, Johnny had the idea we ought to steal the planchette from his mother’s cupboard and try to get in touch with his dead father. I was too drunk to put up an argument, so we stumbled back to his house and he snuck the planchette into the little bedroom we slept in. And the way his life unfolded after that, the whole adventure path he followed—and my life too, as far as that goes, the unhappy, insolvent path I’ve followed—was more or less on account of that night.
• • •
I don’t know if you’ve seen a planchette—in modern times it’s gone out of use in favor of Ouija boards. The one Flora used was a heart-shaped piece of African blackwood supported by two wheeled casters carved of bone, with an aperture at the apex to hold a pen, the needle-sharp tip of the pen being the heart’s third support. Flora always pretended to poke the nib into the palm of her hand so the planchette’s words would be written in blood, but the truth was, her palm hid a tiny vial of red ink. Johnny didn’t want to fake it; he wanted the answers to be real, written in his own real blood. So we spread a sheet of newsprint flat on the floor and set the planchette in the middle of it, and Johnny pierced his hand with the nib of the pen. He could be quiet as death when we were out pirating, but he was pretty drunk that night and not seeming to care how much noise he made, which I suppose was why Flora came into the room in her nightdress just as the pen had pulled his blood up into its tip. A few drops fell on the newspaper as she fixed her mad, glittering black eyes on each of us in turn, and I don’t know when I’ve felt such a cold fear. But I’ll say this for Johnny, he put on a solemn face and made up a lie on the spot.
“One of the fellows at the docks got killed dead tonight, killed by the Fish Patrol. We weren’t with him when he died. We were just hoping the planchette
will have some last words for us, something from our pal, to guide us in the earth-life.”
This went well with her. She knew his low opinion of Plume and the others, and it must have surprised her that he would wish to ask the planchette a question. She may have taken it as a sign that her son had finally come around to respecting her occult gift. In any case, she pulled her brows together over her nose, considering, and then just gathered up her gown and sat right down on the floor with us and placed her fingertips on the wooden heart.
“You should touch the board very lightly but firmly, and do nothing of your own volition,” she said, in a hoarse whisper.
I had spied on her readings a few times, but I’d never touched a planchette myself. There was a little electrical shiver when I touched the board, which maybe was my own nerves, but when Johnny placed his hands on the board, the whole thing trembled. And after a long moment, the wooden heart went skating across the paper. We all leaned in, watching the pen trace a line of red words. Then Johnny straightened up and threw me a look. “Oh, that’s Herbert’s hand,” he said. “Isn’t it, Frank? I would know his fist anywhere. It’s Herbert’s, I’m sure of it. Isn’t it?”
Well, there wasn’t anybody down at the docks named Herbert, dead or alive, but I said, “That’s his hand, all right,” and Flora nodded solemnly.
“You may ask the board a Question Unspoken,” she said, in a spectral voice. “That is, with your mind only. Your friend or his kindred spirit will bring word from him.”
So we kept our hands lightly on the board and closed our eyes, and I guess Johnny asked his Question Unspoken. For myself, I asked the planchette for a bit of information about the Fish Patrol, and what haul we could expect from the next low tide. The planchette twitched under our fingers and began to write. When the heart ceased moving, Flora pulled her arms into her lap with a sigh, and seemed to wake from half sleep, and then Johnny and I leaned in to read what was written on the paper: for the youthful inquirer after truth dead men rise up never seducer astrologer Carquinez and then a scratchy line unreadable as the blood-ink ran dry.
