Divisadero

by Michael Ondaatje

  Sometimes Claire and I would come down the hill with the car lights turned off in complete blackness. Or we would climb from our bedroom window onto the skirt of the roof and lie flat on our backs on the large table-rock, still warm from the day, and talk and sing into the night. We counted out the seconds between meteor showers slipping horizontal across the heavens. When thunder shook the house and horse stalls, I’d see Claire in her bed, during the brief moments of lightning, sitting upright like a nervous hound, hardly breathing, crossing herself. There were days when she disappeared on her horse and I disappeared into a book. But we were still sharing everything then. The Nicasio bar, the Druid Hall, the Sebastiani movie theatre in Sonoma, whose screen was like the surface of the Petaluma reservoir, altering with every shift of light, the hundred or more redwings that always sat on the telephone wires and chirruped out loud before a storm. There was a purple flower in February called shooting star. There were the sticks of willow that Coop cut down and strapped onto my broken wrist before he drove me to the hospital. I was fourteen then. He was eighteen. Everything is biographical, Lucian Freud says. What we make, why it is made, how we draw a dog, who it is we are drawn to, why we cannot forget. Everything is collage, even genetics. There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross.

  Who was Coop, really? We never knew what his parents were like. We were never sure what he felt about our family, which had harboured him and handed him another life. He was the endangered heir of a murder. As a teenager he was hesitant, taking no more than he was given. At dawn he’d come out from one of the sheds like a barn cat, stretching as if he’d been sleeping for days, when in fact he had returned from a pool hall in San Francisco three or four hours earlier, hitchhiking the forty miles back in the darkness. I wondered even then how he would survive or live in a future world. We watched as he muttered, thinking things out, while he stripped down a tractor or welded a radiator from an abandoned car onto a ’58 Buick. Everything was collage.

  Somewhere there is an album made up of photographs our father took of Claire and me that provides a time-lapse progression of our growing up, from our first, unconcerned poses to feral or vain glances, as the truer landscape of our faces began to be seen. Between Christmas and New Year’s—the picture was always taken at that time—we’d be herded into the pasture beside the outcrop of rock (where our mother was buried) and captured in a black-and-white photograph on a late December afternoon. He insisted on modest clothing, although as we grew older Claire would arrive in chapped jeans or I would reveal a bare shoulder, causing a twenty-minute argument. He found little humour in this. The yearly episode was something he needed, like a carefully laid table that would clarify the past.

  We would study ourselves in this evolving portrait. It made us secretly competitive. One became more beautiful, or reclusive, one became more self-conscious, or anarchic. We were revealed and betrayed by our poses. There was the year, for instance, that Claire lowered her face to hide a scar. In spite of having been almost inseparable, we were diverging, pacing ourselves privately into our own version of ourselves. And then there was the last photograph, when we were both sixteen, where our faces gazed out nakedly. A picture that I would rip out of the album a short while later.

  Claire recalls whistling as she entered the horse barn, and reaching for a bridle when she heard a bucket kicked over somewhere in the darkness. A bucket would not be left loose in a stall, so it meant someone was there, or it meant a horse was loose. She stepped forward with her uneven walk, the bridle still in one hand. She didn’t call out. She reached the corner of the passageway, peered around it, and saw my body lying inert on the ground in the dark silence of the barn. Then, as she approached me, the horse came loud out of the blackness and smashed against her, throwing her down.

  There is a broken path in both our memories towards this incident, even now. We are aware only that something significant happened. Claire recalls herself whistling as she entered the barn, but in what follows, in what we have tried to piece together, she is still too close to the remembered evidence, as if she can see only grains of colour. For a moment Claire had been staring at me, who had already been knocked down by the attacking horse, and then the same horse had swerved out of the darkness and turned on her, and her senses closed down. Or maybe she remained like me, half awake on the concrete floor, unable to move, while everything around us was vivid and nightmarish, hooves smashing against the floor—I felt I could see sparks and flame to represent the loudness. The animal must have been crazed, claustrophobic, for it raced up and down the passageway, slipping on straw and concrete, banging into wood walls, charging the length of the barn, turning once more at the blocked exit, its eyes and heart frantic. Was she, was I, conscious during this, or unconscious? Or in a world of spirits, uncertain if we were dead or alive.

  When Claire opened her eyes, I was apparently sitting up six feet away and not moving, just looking at her lazily. I didn’t have the strength to rise, uncertain as to what exactly had happened. There were planks knocked loose all around us. No one had come for us. It was suppertime, I could tell by the light against the dusty windows.

  Territorial was Claire’s lovely name for that horse. I kept watching her. Later I told her it was because of all the blood on her cheek, though she said it was just her hands that hurt. We were both fifteen years old then, when Coop finally entered the barn and crouched down by me and called me ‘Claire.’ So that Claire herself became confused, uncertain for a moment as to who she was. But she was Claire, with what would become a thin scar like the path of an almost dried tear under her left eye, where all that blood had escaped.

  Something happened in the horse barn, that early evening, between the two of us, in the confusion. We had stepped suddenly into the large uncertain world of adults, and we would now need to be distinctly Anna and distinctly Claire. It became important not to be known as the sister of—or worse, mistaken for—the other. From then on we would try to bring Coop into our fold. In the next few months we often slipped back into this ‘incident,’ to talk about it. There was a border now between us, something we had never achieved in the series of photographs that kept the two of us arm in arm. The album, I suspect, is still with Claire, on one of her bookshelves. If she studies it, she could parse more clearly how the two of us evolved away from each other. The year Claire cut most of her hair and grew more distant, the year I stared out, wild-eyed, everything in me a secret.

  Why was Coop never in our father’s photographs? There were a few pictures taken of him, but these seemed preoccupied with texture and light. And there were some abstract reflections of him in a window, or of his shadow on the grass or on the flank of an animal. How many things could you throw your image against?

  In any case, it was Coop who had found us that evening in the barn and had mistaken our identities, who had eventually come over to me and lifted me into his embrace and said, ‘Claire, my god, Claire,’ and I had thought, Then I am not Anna, then that must be Anna over there.

  Coop began living in the grandfather’s cabin. From there, on the high ridge, he could look out onto black oaks and buckeye trees, where a glacier of mist appeared caught for an hour or so each morning in the roughness of the branches. He was nineteen now, in a desired solitude. He was rebuilding the cabin, working alone. He bathed in the cold water of a hill pond. In the evenings he slipped past the farmhouse and ended up in Nicasio or Glen Ellen, listening to music. Occasionally he ate with the others, abruptly rising from the table, bread still in his hands, and was gone—the exit and destination unannounced. The sisters knew that their days with Coop were finite. He was courteous and unruled, away most evenings. Returning, he’d cut the motor at the top of the hill and coast down so no one would hear him, then walk the half-mile to his cabin along with a shadow.

  He accompanied the girls into town only if they insisted on hearing music. At the Nicasio dances, C
laire and Anna wore their San Rafael dresses and graded the men in the bar, as if Coop, sitting beside them, were another species. He kept his distance, laughing silently to himself, barely speaking. Who is Coop, really? they asked themselves. Once, having decided to go to Rancho Nicasio an hour after he’d left, they saw him on that small dance floor, caught in its mayhem. Women were being swirled and then caught in his brown arms. He was not a good dancer, quite bad in fact, but girls buried their faces into his neck, their pretty heels next to his cow-shit boots. ‘Well, he’s a cowboy,’ Anna claimed. They didn’t want the spell broken, and melted away before he could catch sight of them in the crowd.

  Still, being older, he remained the emotional negotiator and translator between them and their father, handed the moderating role a mother would have had. It did not fit his temperament, and perhaps it was the desire to escape all this that made him move into the grandfather’s cabin. To rebuild it he needed money, and he earned it with extra work. His first job on the farm when he was a boy had been to help the father build the water tower that now was poised like a lookout over the fields. The grey structure had slowly risen on its skeletal struts, and even before it was completed, Coop would lounge on its sloped roof and gaze at the adjacent hills as though they were a road out. Now, a decade later, there was a leak somewhere within the tower’s dark interior.

  The minute Coop opened the trapdoor and looked down, panic hit him. There was in his mind the possibility of a snake or even a corpse in that unseen water. He stood for a last moment in the sunlight, pulled up the ladder he’d used to climb onto the apron roof, and dropped it down through the water. Then he removed his clothes, attached a slim hammer to the belt around his waist, and descended into the tank.

  Around his wrist were tight rubber bands, and tucked into them pencil-shaped pieces of redwood. He’d been sent to Abdon Lumber in Petaluma. The old men there with furls of wood shavings attached to their arms had politely told him, after he asked to speak with Mr. Abdon, that Abdon was the patron saint of barrel makers. Coop assumed that once he found the leak he could pound in dry shims from outside the water tower, but these men who built and mended wine barrels proposed sharpened sticks of redwood or cedar, and recommended he drive them into the holes from the inside so that dampened they would eventually swell up. Redwood, they told him, lasted over a hundred years, even if it had lain sunk at the bottom of a river.

  He let go of the ladder and swam into darkness until he reached a wall. The leak would not be under the water or above it, where the wood was dry, but somewhere around the surface line where the two met. Wood deteriorated at a boundary, it was where the weakness would occur. He was treading water, his fingers on the slippery edges. He had to feel for the leak, would not be able to identify it by sight. This could take hours, or days, in the numbing cold and in the windlessness of the tank. Even when his fingers discovered the initials he had cut into the wood years before, he was not appeased. It suggested a fate. How many times in his life would he or this family need to fix the tank? They had built a prison for themselves.

  He climbed out shivering, put on his pants and shirt, and stood in the bliss of the sun. He saw Anna and Claire waving from the second-storey window of the farmhouse. When he got warm he went down again.

  How we are almost nothing. We think, in our youth, we are the centre of the universe, but we simply respond, go this way or that by accident, survive or improve by the luck of the draw, with little choice or determination on our part. Years later, if he had been able to look back, Coop might have attempted to discern or reconsider aspects of his or Claire’s or Anna’s character, but when he had waved back to them, standing in the afternoon sunlight, Anna and Claire were interchangeable, one yellow shirt, one green, and he would not have been able to tell who wore this or that colour. And when he was back in the darkness of the water tank, there was just a retrospective image of the two girls, a tree branch partially concealing their identities and their waving arms.

  Once more, as he swam in the water, his fingers touched the wood for any clue of disintegration, some small tear. Coop preferred metal, the smell of it, oil in a crankcase, rust on a chain, all those varieties and moods of metal life. Reviving a car brought with it the possibility of another life, whereas this family rarely left the farm. The father had once ventured across the border into Nevada and spoke of it still as something foolish and unnecessary, perhaps dangerous. But Coop loved risk and could be passive around danger. He’d been gathered into this fold by a neighbour whose wife died a few months later in childbirth. He knew all things were held in the palm of chance.

  He had covered most of the circumference of the tank before he found the leak. He gave a false, theatrical laugh and luxuriated inside the echo, then hung in the water the way he’d seen frogs loll near the riverbank. He inserted the bullet of redwood and hammered it in through water. He found a second hole near the first and filled that too, then swam over to the ladder. Up there, on the roof of the tank, even the sun couldn’t warm him. He went into the farmhouse, undressed and wrapped himself in a blanket, then went back outside.

  Coop finished the cabin and inserted a large window that allowed him to look out on the trees. Then he began work on the deck. By seven each morning the others could hear the echo of his hammer ricochet down into the valley. He had insisted on working alone, and the only living thing to keep him company during those months of building was Alturas the cat, who roamed everywhere and never settled within anyone’s sight. Now and then the cat took a formal walk along the narrow man-made path that crested the hill but those were his only steps into their world. Though whenever Coop looked up from his carpentry, he’d see Alturas watching him, half hidden by the crest of the hill, and the cat would then lower his head and disappear from view. No one had ever seen the cat sleep, no one knew what the cat lived on. Yet when the great storm overtook the region the following winter, none of them assumed Alturas had perished.

  Coop used rippled sheets of corrugated iron for the exterior walls, saving wood for the eventual deck. He had poured concrete pilings, which allowed the deck to end in mid-air, ten feet above the slope of the earth. He took his time, hammering down the planks, letting himself be diverted easily by a hawk or its shadow, or by mist moving like that glacier through the slope of trees. He felt himself gregarious in this solitude, though what happened a short while later may have been the result of his seeing no one for weeks. There was a hunger in him for something as simple as the sharing of a laugh or a touch.

  Was what happened a sin or a natural act? You live within the crucible of a family long enough and you attach yourself to what you gaze on as a boy or a girl, some logic might say to explain what took place on that deck, in the silence where there was no hammering, a silence as if no other life was being lived.

  Neither one of them had made a move before the other. It felt as if one heartbeat was at work. Anna—who used to leap around like a boy or a dog; the one who’d broken her wrist, which Coop had splinted up with willow before he drove her to a sawbones in Petaluma, and who dared her sister to walk across the highway by the reservoir blindfolded (‘I’ll pay you, Claire’) and, when Claire didn’t, did so herself; the one who read so constantly and carefully she always had a frown, as if gazing at a fly on the end of her nose—one day began walking up the east ridge to his cabin in sunlight, along the curving path the cows, and sometimes Alturas, took. She passed the tree with the pesticide bag hanging from its low branches, under which cattle gathered to escape the swarms of flies and mosquitoes, then walked through the circular corral. Coop, she thought, must have finished lunch by now. It was almost two. She closed the second gate to the corral, and as she drew the chain around the post and snapped it, a sudden and heavy rain began, so whatever she wore was transformed. Everything felt heavy, was darker. And then, after a few minutes, the rain ceased.

  Coop was sitting, unaware of the brief shower, on the edge of the deck looking towards the thousand or so trees on the facing h
ill. There wasn’t a creak as she moved across the new wood. Wind swept across the deck. He turned and she stepped into his gaze. The rain light made his face a shadow.

  You’re wet, she began.

  Is that true …

  His casual voice saying nothing more, abandoning her.

  It would take a bird five minutes to swim through the air all the way back to the farmhouse, she thought. It would not, of course, move so formally, it would use sweeps and curves, preferring diversions, and be influenced by the surface of the earth. It had taken her twenty-five minutes to walk up here. A car could make it in four. An unhurried horse in ten. But now the farmhouse below seemed like a city one would spend days travelling towards. When she looked back into that distance, she felt there were a hundred valleys of mist and night travel that sheltered the two of them from the others.

  Build a fire, will you, Coop!

  It’s a warm rain, he said quietly to himself, and then louder, It’s a warm rain.

  But build a fire for me. My clothes. They’re wet.

  Here. I’ll do this.

  The cotton shirt like seaweed as he peeled it off, and he startled to see it come away in one piece. She looked down, her face burning, at her whiteness, in the grey light. The freckles of rain on her small frame. My turn, she said.

  There was silence, only water climbing down a chain from the spout. Everything else was still. Clouds, unseen tentative hills. She saw herself and Coop in this pause of weather, the sun coming out. A fox’s wedding, her father called it.