The Unforeseen

by Molly Gloss

  To my mind the message was just about worthlessly opaque, but it seemed to mean something to Johnny. His face colored up and he threw a wild look at his mother, who appeared flustered, her squinty eyes blinking and blinking.

  “Not dead!” Johnny said. “He’s some damn astrologer or horoscopist living over on the Carquinez Strait and I’m his bastard child!”

  Johnny, of course, had asked the planchette to put him in touch with his father’s ghost, and he sure as hell knew what the answering message meant: he was the bastard son of a living philanderer. I expected Flora to argue the planchette’s meaning, and she briefly did. “Now, do not mind this message, Johnny, such a strange message must not be meant for you, something from an abnormal imagination, a strange zodiacal voice to be sure, and not to be credited.” She babbled on, and all the while she caught up the paper from under the planchette and crumpled it.

  But as Johnny went on shouting—“You’re a damned liar! Quit playing tricks!”—she grew boiling mad, and gave up all pretense. Her defense became a lurid tale about a faked horoscope and a clever seduction, attempted suicides, a thwarted abortion. She stormed and raved, shouting down her son with the anthems of a sufferer: “Innocent! Abandoned! Destitute! Cast on the mercy of friends! You might never have been born!”

  Flora was famous for her temper, and Johnny was no match for her outrage, never had been. They wrangled back and forth a while and then he just took off from the house, cracking along so fast I had to jog-trot to catch up to him. We headed for the Heinold’s Saloon, a cracker box of a bar built on pilings over the water at the end of Webster Street, and open all night. Heinold knew our likes, and we were already half-drunk when we came in, so before long we were thoroughly plastered.

  Johnny railed against his mother a good long while and then began pouring scorn on the son of a bitch who had fathered him, and in the late middle of the night he asked me, “How many astrologers can there be in that damn town?” meaning Benicia on the Carquinez Strait. He didn’t have the man’s name, only that his trade was horoscopy.

  “We oughta go on over there and smoke the skunk out,” I told him.

  So we stumbled down to the wharf and put out in Johnny’s skiff. We were somewhere at the upper end of San Pablo Bay, where the current runs pretty fast out of Carquinez, when Johnny in a drunken stupor missed his footing and fell overboard. There was nothing but a fingernail moon; it was so dark I could only just make out his wan face bobbing on the water, receding from me as the boat sailed on. We shouted back and forth while I fumbled to get the boat turned around, but by the time I got back to where he’d gone over, there was nothing to see but a dark glimmer on the water. My shouts went unanswered.

  He wrote up the story afterward, the whole account; maybe you have read it yourself. He was thoroughly under alcohol’s sway, and when the current took him down the strait, the shore lights slipping farther and farther into the distance, he decided this drunken exploit was a perfect closure to his imperfect life. “A romantic rounding off of my short but daring career.”

  He was in the water a good four hours, alternately floating and swimming, thinking he might die or wishing to, and then falling into dreams, long disquiet dreams, he said, and when the effects of the liquor began to fade, it dawned on him that he didn’t in the least want to be drowned. But a stiff breeze had sprung up, choppy little waves were lapping into his mouth, and he was beginning to swallow salt water. He was cold and miserable and utterly done in. And then Plume came roaring into his head, into his whole body, and kept him alive.

  “The game is worth the candle”—that’s what he remembered Plume saying. “I was ready to cash in my chips, but I felt like those were the magic words that banished all the irks and riddles of existence. Those hours in the water, it was one of those agelong nights that embrace an eternity of happening.”

  A Greek fisherman running his boat into Vallejo pulled him out of the water sometime in the early morning hours, and right after that he signed on with the Sophia Sutherland, a schooner headed to Japan and the Bering Sea to hunt seals. He wrote me later that he had given up using the name Johnny and begun calling himself Jack. He said he liked the tougher sound of it.

  • • •

  In 1906, I was living in Santa Rosa, which, after the big earthquake, was a smoking ruin every bit as much as San Francisco. I hadn’t seen Johnny in a few years. He was famous by then and there were plenty of people asking for his time, but I would send a letter, and every so often he’d write back. After the quake he surprised me with a note, in some concern as to whether I had made it through or was burned out. He was living on a ranch up in Sonoma Valley by then, but he came down to Oakland, and I took the ferry over, and he met me at the landing. We spent the day at Heinold’s Saloon, knocking back more than a few. Heinold’s had always been the place for off-season seamen, and draymen hauling loads across the estuary bridge, as well as hoboes and other assorted down-and-outers. A few of them happened into the place while we were there, and I saw Johnny slip a dollar into more than one hand.

  I asked after his life, and he told a few stories, but he was modest about it, leaving out the perils and escapades. He’d been an able seaman in the Japan Sea, had been a hobo for a while, had gone up to the Klondike with the rest of the gold diggers, that was all he said. Well, he was a big celebrity by ’06, and in the stories I’d read, he’d saved a crewman who went overboard in a typhoon out of Yokohama. He’d been jailed and beaten up when he was marching to Washington with General Kelly’s hobo army. He’d climbed through the Chilkoot Pass under a heavy load and then hiked from Deep Lake to Lake Lindeman three or four times a day carrying 150 pounds of gear each time. Survived on scant rations through a bitter winter in the Klondike and canoed out through the roughest water any man had ever paddled.

  When he asked after my life, I told him, “I’m a taxidermist with a wife and five children, that’s the short story. The only adventure I ever had was palling around with you.” I guess he could see that my shoes and trousers had known better days.

  We went on drinking into the night, and then he walked me back to the ferry landing. We leaned on the railing along the harbor front, smoking stogies and looking out at the dark water, and after a while he said, “You remember that night we snuck the planchette into my room?”

  I remembered it. “The planchette told you the truth and you took it hard.”

  He gave me a look and shook his head. “Hell, Frank, it wasn’t the planchette. I was moving the pen so it’d write something close to what I wanted. My cousin had told me the truth, and I just couldn’t work up the nerve to front my mother. I figured I’d get the planchette to bring it up. I don’t know what the hell the pen would have written if I hadn’t been moving it around.

  “But I hadn’t figured on my mother blowing her stack like that. I thought she’d cry and beg me to forgive her.” He slid me a half smile. “I never planned it, but it sure gave her a good scare, me rising up from the dead like a drowned ghost, and when I said it was Plume who saved me, that did the job. She couldn’t quit wailing and asking pardon for lying to me all those years.”

  I wasn’t sure what to make of this. “You always said it was Plume who took over your body and kept you alive.”

  He looked at me sidelong. “She claimed the chief never conversed with anybody but her. That’s the whole reason I said it was Plume. To shake her.”

  I don’t know if he had started out that night planning to tell me the truth, but once he got started, he just went ahead. He said when he went overboard he wasn’t thinking he might die nor wishing to, he was too drunk out of his wits to hold that kind of a thought. He said he just drifted on the cold current, and after a short while washed up on the north shore. Nothing of strange dreams and never a word from Plume. When the sun came up, he swam out from the beach far enough to fake the need of rescue.

  I guess it should have burned me up, hearing all this about the planchette, and the night he went overboard in the b
ay. But I just felt myself becoming someone old and feeble, bent under a weight of years.

  Nobody in my own family had ever put much faith in spiritism. My mother was firm in her Methodist beliefs, firm in the knowledge that souls abided after death, but equally sure that spiritism might open a channel to the devil. I had come into Johnny’s house unacquainted with the spiritist world, and somewhat in fear of it. But after the planchette told us the story of Johnny’s parentage, and after Plume kept Johnny alive all those hours in the cold waters of the bay, well, I swung around to trust in mediums, and the spirit world, and in the years afterward I had more or less lived my life by their advice. The truth is, I hardly ever got counsel from them that did me any good. It would be something I already knew, or purely bad information, or else something so murky I couldn’t make sense of it. But once in a blue moon one of the spirits at a seance or a planchette reading would let loose with something shrewd, something bona fide, which kept me on the hook, and I would take another run at it, hoping the answer this time might improve my fortune. Hoping one of them might one day quit playing tricks and do me a modest good turn.

  • • •

  Before we split up for the night, I asked if he’d ever looked up the astrologer in Carquinez who might have been his father. He took a while to answer. “Dead men rise up never,” he said, in old Plume’s spectral voice, which was just the sort of murky answer I was accustomed to hearing from the spirits.

  Johnny had inherited a touch of the occult gift himself, being the son of a medium and a horoscopist—that’s what I used to think. I always figured his luck, his fortunate career, all the close calls and heroism he’d written about, and the daring escapes from calamity, had come about with help from the spirits.

  I never told him that while he’d been sleeping off his drunken stupor on a north shore beach, I’d been searching the dark water in a widening eddy of guilt and despair. The water in that bay was so damn cold nobody overboard ever lasted long; this was something we all knew. When I tacked back to the Oakland docks at sunrise, I was shaking so hard from grief and hopelessness I couldn’t get up the strength to walk over to Flora’s to bring her the news. I told Heinold the story and he sent someone off to the house, and I just sat down on the pier and wept. And it was hours before we got word that Johnny’d been pulled from the drink alive. Hours more before he told us all about Plume and “the game is worth the candle.”

  I took every word he said for truth. And believed all he wrote afterward. You might say my troubles are due to my own foolishness, and I might not disagree.

  Wenonah’s Gift

  IN THE SPRING OF THE year, in the days that are known as The Assuaging, the girl Dulce built her house beneath the limbs of a great cedar, climbing first, straddle-legged, to hang wind-bells in the lowest branches so when the air moved against the shards of glass the delicate unstructured music would speak to her while she worked. Two rills ran together near there, with the tree standing in the crotch between. The sound the waters made, sliding turning and rubbing against stones, and the wind stroking the glass bells and shaking the high boughs of the cedar, seemed to her to weave a complex song, a finely textured chorus, which was her reason for choosing that place where the house would stand.

  She had already thrown the pottery, all the bowls, pitchers, and jugs heavy and brown speckled bright berry color, before she began the laying of the foundation. She had pieced and tied a quilt, thick batted and nappy, had braided a sleeping mat from rags dyed hazelnut brown, all this before she began the building of a place where they would see use. And she had fashioned a narrow oaken trunk carved in bears and branches of spruce, made it specially for Guy, and soon as it was finished had traded it for one of Guy’s great curving windows made specially for her, a wide arch hung with pendulous glass ropes of wisteria. She had traded to Enid a long stool with knuckled feet so she might have a sun-saver to heat her house and impel her woodworking tools. All this first. And only then, with everything in readiness, did she begin the dwelling itself, setting the stones for the foundation, laying the notched and planed floorboards, raising the squared-log walls from trees she had felled and stacked to dry two seasons earlier.

  Often, she did not work alone. One or another of the people would come along the path between the rills and stay to talk and to work, asking, Shall I do it this way? or Is this the place to make the notch? so that the work and the house remained hers, though shared.

  Finally on the last day Wenonah came, pushing lean-legged through the pea vines that bloomed beside the water. The old woman did not put her hands to the work. She squatted on the grass in the stippled shade and from her seamed walnut face, from those deeply lidded eyes, simply watched while the girl built the house of her majority.

  When Wenonah had been there a long time and Dulce’s sweat had darkened her shirt at the neck, the old woman said, “I’ve brought a cheese,” and they sat together on the thin spiky grass and ate cheese and passed a jug of very cold cider. Dulce let the soles of her feet rest on stones in the creek. She looked sideways at her house. She was a little afraid to look at Wenonah.

  Finally, carefully, she said, “It’s small,” so the old woman might say, No, girl, no, it’s a house of good size.

  But Wenonah moved with faint impatience, pushing the palm of one hand through the air. “Yes, it’s small.” And then, puckering her mouth, shifting her buttocks against the ground, “Who needs more? It’s the right size.” And after a silence, lifting her chin as if there had been argument, “This is a good place. I like the sound the waters make.”

  Because it was the last day before the holy days, in the afternoon several people came to work on Dulce’s house. Guy’s window had not yet been set, the shingling was unfinished, the door had not been hung. So they drifted in one by one and set to work. Sometimes if there was a small stillness they could hear hammer blows rung from other places among the trees—Chloe’s house, and Thom’s, both unfinished as Dulce’s, with other groups of people lending hands there too.

  When the sunlight began to fail, someone came with a sodium torch and the house was finished in that false day-brightness, with Dulce, alone, straddling the roof peak to nail the last shingles. Then they extinguished the torch and stood together silently, studying the dark bulk of the house against the trees. Finally the old woman, Wenonah, made a sound that was nearly a sigh, a sound of weariness or of sadness, and patted the girl’s arm.

  “Good. Good.”

  In small knots of twos and threes they straggled back through the scattered houses and the trees, moving gently, with the sounds of their voices and the gestures of their hands muted like the dusk. Where the woodland opened out a little, someone had made a fire in a ring of stones, a high yellow blaze, and people gathered in the glare around it, standing or squatting together, and children in bunches too, spurting round and among the adults, sending their thin shouts rising with the firesmoke.

  The girl and the grandmother stood together, and while Wenonah spoke to this one or that, Dulce held her body self-consciously apart, and spoke only the few words that were necessary for courtesy. No child spoke to her, though she was often the focus of their furtive stares. There were already foods passing from hand to hand around the group, flat rounds of bread and bunches of bright red radishes, narrow-neck jugs of beer and steaming ribs of lamb, but Dulce, fasting, only handed them on.

  Afterward, there was tale-telling, with first one and then another Teller standing on the hewn stump of a tree with the children sprawled closest and then the others, the adults and the three who would be confirmed as adults, sitting in a wide fan, making audience. Wenonah, who was one of the Tellers, took her turn but did not bother to push through the crowd to take the stump. She only stood where she was among the people and sent her canorous voice out over their heads, with all the faces turned up and toward her as though she were the hub of a wheel. She chose a tale of the ancient Civilized tribes, the people who had called themselves The Mare Comes.

&
nbsp; Dulce sat beside the old woman’s sandaled feet and looked out past the shoulders and faces crowded there. In the jumping firelight she glimpsed Chloe once, and later, more clearly, Thom, sitting rigid and aloof. He might have felt her watching. His eyes came round and snagged her and then lurched away.

  Afterward, Dulce could not remember the tale Wenonah had told—only that it was a story of great passion and souls swollen with blood. The Civilized tales always ended in war.

  There was dancing and game playing, and the minstrels brought out their stringed instruments. Dulce stayed with Wenonah, or perhaps Wenonah with her. The old woman listened to this one and that, and sometimes laughed or spoke some light thing herself, and once she shared a pipe with two clansmen, another time gambled with sticks and lost and went off grumping and disgusted. All the while Dulce was near her, standing very stiff and silent with her eyes often turning out to the darknesses of the trees.

  In time there were people sleeping on the ground, fallen where they would, and the others stepping over them carefully to go on with their gaming or to find their own path home to bed, until finally more slept than celebrated. Then the old woman plucked Dulce’s sleeve.

  “I am too old to pillow my head on a stone.”

  In darkness and weariness and silence, the girl and the old woman climbed the ridge to Wenonah’s house. It sat on a high shelf so the window looked out on the tips of cedars and the far edge of sky, dark as metal against the serrated line of the trees. From there, they could see pillars of pale smoke rising from the valleys, marking other villages, other bonfires celebrating the Vernal Assuaging, where there were, as here, new houses, untrodden thresholds, unproven young adults.