by Tom Murphy
By three o’clock in the afternoon the ranch compound was completely encircled by fire. Fred’s firebreak held. One chicken coop went up, victim of a flying ember, but all of the other buildings were miraculously intact. Ranch hands were posted on every roof now, armed with buckets and wet blankets to beat out flames. The noise was less now, as the fire advanced beyond them.
Lily and Fred and Mary Baker stood together in the central courtyard, silent, exhausted, breathing deeply yet flushed with a kind of triumph.
For they had survived, and that in itself was a victory. They had stayed and fought the monster, and sent the monster on its way.
Lily looked around her, at the buildings black with smoke but still intact. She looked up at her beloved hills and saw them bare and blackened. And in that moment, beyond logic, Lily knew that she loved the ranch more, right now in its ruin, than she had ever done. The hills would be green again, trees could be planted again. She had fought for this sweet land and thus made it her own—more than by just paying for the place, indeed; and hadn’t she killed for it, killed Tiberio Velasquez himself? And wouldn’t she do the same again? Lily touched a finger to her cheek. It came away black with soot. She looked at it and burst out laughing. She put her arms around Mary Baker and gave that calm, quiet woman a great squeeze.
“We’ve done it! We’ve done it!”
Then she went upstairs and had a long hot bath and went to sleep immediately. When Lily woke, late that night, it was to a strange and unfamiliar sound.
Raindrops were spattering on the tile roof! She leaped out of bed and ran downstairs and out into the courtyard and stood there, barefoot, in her nightgown, until she was drenched. Lily threw back her head and raised her arms and laughed.
It might be too late for the fire, but wasn’t it rain all the same, and delicious sweet rain, too, rain to soak into the parched earth, rain to make the seeds sprout, rain to build a new life on, for all of them, and starting tomorrow.
Then she realized where she was and how foolish she must look, and ran quickly back into the ranch house, laughing all the way.
37
Brooks Chaffee sat in his father’s great tufted-leather wing chair in the front parlor of the Washington Square house and looked out at the vividly blue August day. And he hated himself for a coward.
Just as the battle at Antietam creek had forced Brooks to face up to horrors whose existence he hadn’t even suspected, the discovery of Caroline’s unfaithfulness had come as a shock that unsettled the very foundations of his soul.
It was a revelation deeper than shame, a hurt that blasted all of his feelings into a kind of moral numbness beyond pain, for if Caroline could be false to him, who, ever, could be true?
For months he had cowered in the big house, going out only rarely, using his game leg as an excuse and hating himself for needing excuses, hoping that this bitterness would fade, mellow, praying that time would help him to forgive Caroline, to understand her, or to forget.
Of Caroline herself, he saw nothing, and heard no word, nor wanted to. With his parents Brooks carried on a pale, polite imitation of their old life, smiling at mealtime over food he could barely force down, delicious as it was, laughing at his father’s dry jokes, and all the time wondering what kind of life was left for him, wounded as he was in body, shattered as he was in spirit. For Brooks Chaffee could not forgive Caroline, and no more could he forget the careless ease with which she had tossed away his love and broken that love into a thousand sharp, irreparable fragments.
Friends came to visit, once the word seeped out that he was back. Their careful silence on the subject of Caroline told him more than he cared to know of their pity, of their disgust at the situation. And with the older generation, with his parents’ friends, it was worse.
For now all the casual arrogance with which Caroline had treated these people came home to roost, dripping venom. In all justice, he had to admit they were a stuffy lot; maybe it had been a healthy thing for Caroline not to kowtow to these waddling old dowagers, these penguin-suited old gentlemen.
But these same people were an inescapable part of the Chaffees’ world: Brooks had known them since infancy, and rather liked them for all their formality, for all their impossible social standards.
They had always suspected the worst of Caroline Ledoux, and now she had confirmed their fears to a degree that not even the most spiteful among them would have dared dream.
At twenty-nine Brooks Chaffee was the most famous cuckold in New York.
There were streets he could not walk, houses he could not visit, tunes he could not hear because they were haunted for him by the terrible undead ghosts of a love turned to poison. The very sunshine mocked him because it also shone on her.
One advantage of being a Chaffee was that there were regiments of lawyers at hand, and good financial advice. He’d need it all for the divorce.
When his parents realized Brooks was serious about divorcing Caroline, they took it in surprisingly good part. For divorce was simply not done. In all his acquaintance, Brooks knew no one who had ever been divorced, or seriously considered it. Yet such a thing was possible, it existed upon the lawbooks, and he was bound and determined he’d do it.
What a blessing there were no children!
Brooks sat in the sunlit room, sipping tea that had grown cold, as the morning dragged on. He hated himself for a weakling, but neither could he stop feeling what he felt. To have gone through the horrors of Antietam, of Neddy’s death, and be faced with this! The world he had always taken so much for granted was entirely spoiled for him now, broken beyond repairing. He reached for his cane—the crutches were gone now, he was getting much stronger—stood up, and walked to the window.
Five small boys were flying kites in the park just across the street. The Old Gent was at the office. His mother had gone calling. He watched the boys laughing, shouting, running, tumbling in the warm sunshine, and wondered if he’d ever laugh like that again. Twice she had written to him, and twice he had forwarded the letters to his lawyers, unopened. He watched a big red kite soaring up and up into the unclouded blue sky over Washington Square. What a grand, free thing it was! How he and Neddy had loved to fly kites in that very park a thousand years ago! And how the memory of it stabbed him now. The red kite flew impossibly high; the little boy ran with it, and his small clear voice rose too, a crescendo of glee. Up and up went the kite, glorious, the tension on the string increasing as the wind took it ever higher.
Then the string broke.
Higher it went, and higher still, until the kite seemed to be nearly scraping the roof of the sky. Brooks watched it out of sight, then lowered his eyes to the earth again, to the lush green grass of the park. The kite-flying boy was being led away by his friends, sobbing bitterly. And that’s the way of it, lad, you must beware of the thing too fine and too free, too alluring, for the higher you soar, the harder you’ll come crashing down.
Brooks thought of that kite, soaring and dancing in the breeze, but out of control now, a little crazy. Soon the vagrant wind would tire of its sport and dash the fragile bright plaything down, and all its fine brave red paper would lie in tatters, the sticks of its frame shattered, string ends tangled, forlorn.
In that moment Brooks Chaffee made a decision that would change his life.
The morning after the rain, Lily woke with a child’s bubbling energy, ran to her window, and looked out at a world turned black by the fire. Well, sure and ’tis not a beautiful sight, but there is a kind of beauty in our victory, for the drought did not defeat us, nor the damned fire either, and if we can come through all that, we can come through anything.
Then Lily smiled, thinking about the replanting.
The next few weeks passed in a frenzy of planning, plowing, seeding, sweat, and dreams. The long drought was over for sure: a week after the first rain, it rained hard again. Slowly the water-storage tanks filled up again, and now the creeks ran clear and bright. Lily sat long into the night with Fred Baker,
planning, sketching where the reservoir would sit, for they were determined to have a reservoir, scooped out of the earth and lined with stones, cemented to keep the water in, fed by the two creeks, with pipes to the major fields and cattle troughs. Never again would they be so completely at the weather’s mercy.
“Barring,” said Fred, “an earthquake.”
“Oh, I’ve lived through two of them since 1857, Fred, and the first time they had to tell me what it was, just a bit of a bumping. The next one, in sixty-one, was a little rougher, but nothing to speak of.”
“They can get rough, though, and when they do, there’s little enough can be done about it.”
“Then I guess we can’t worry too much, can we?”
The land seemed as eager as Lily and Fred were to heal its wounds. New grass sprouted out of the blackened hills almost as they watched, and where the stumps of great old trees stuck charred and tragic out of the earth, new shoots poked up. These were small signs, but heartening, for dead as it looked, the land was not dead. The loss was enormous in both time and in money: half of their sheep were gone, and there would be no real harvest this year. Yet there were some advantages in it too: hundreds of acres marked for clearing had been cleared all too completely by the roaring flames. The rattlesnake population, never large, seemed to have vanished along with the trees and the grass.
And for the first time, Lily found herself thinking about landscape plantings.
In those first hectic years, Lily had been far too busy to do more than get the house and outbuildings into good working order. What flowers had survived the generations of neglect, she cultivated tenderly. But no new gardens had been laid out, nor ornamental shrubs set in. Only when Fred ordered the stand of eucalyptus cut down did Lily realize how much she loved those tall fragrant trees with their dancing silver-green leaves. The great house looked naked without them, and Lily determined that this would not go unamended for long. Just as she had learned about turnips and carrots and oats, Lily now turned to studying nature’s more frivolous inventions. She looked at her long curving driveway with eyes newly educated to the tempting possibilities of rhododendrons clumped en masse, and underplantings of perennial lilies, of rare peonies and great shade trees. For here in this golden climate, almost everything could grow, given love and enough water, and Lily was determined there would be an abundance of both. For what was she to love, now, if not this good land?
Brooks steeled himself as though he were going into battle rather than merely down the hall to the Old Gentleman’s library. He had been summoned, and from earliest boyhood that had meant only one thing: he was going to be put on the carpet, for sure! How he and Neddy had dreaded those gentle, implacable interviews! How he dreaded this one tonight. Leaning on the cane as lightly as comfort would allow, he made his way down the hall. The library was a small room, completely his father’s, lined with bookshelves floor to ceiling, dark, with dark woods and dark leather bookbindings touched with gilt. The chairs were green leather and the brass kerosene lamp had a green shade; the bright brasswork of the lamp’s stem was the only vivid note in the room. The Old Gentleman was sitting where he always sat, in the swiveling desk chair, his back to the bookshelves.
Brooks sat. There was a moment of quiet. He’s as nervous as I am, thought Brooks as his father cleared his throat and groped for the words that soon followed.
“You’re determined to go on with it, then?”
“The divorce? Absolutely. And if I can prevent her from using my name, I will do that too. The disgrace she’s brought all of us is sufficient as it is, and I’ve no intention of letting her go on with it, dragging the name Chaffee through whatever gutters her fate may lead her to.”
“I’d scarcely dare say it in public, son, but I feel you are right. That wasn’t what I meant. I meant the…other.”
“My going West? It’s that or Europe, and I’ve never been out West. It may not be permanent, in fact it almost surely won’t be. But these last few months, when I’ve stayed inside like a hunted man, licking my wounds, it is very hard for me to say just what I feel, sir, but I know this: I must get away, at least for a while. She has ruined New York for me, as well as my marriage. There’s no place I can go, and few things I can do, but that I’m reminded of her, and how happy we were—fool’s paradise that I might have been inventing for myself—and it all seems lost and useless to me. I’d be no good here now. People would either pity me, which is death, or feel that they must avoid me, that I am somehow responsible for it. Neither situation is acceptable to me. What’s more, after the war—I mean, after what happened to Neddy and me—I feel the need of a change. To sail around the Horn, now, that’s a fine adventure. And there is such opportunity out there, in California. Maybe it is time Chaffee, Hudner opened a branch there. And there are other opportunities too, things we Easterners haven’t even thought of yet. Soon after the war, they’ll build a railroad. That’s a certainty. Then it’ll be only a matter of days—a couple of weeks at the most—from here to there. Why, you and Mother could—”
“You have always been very dear to us, son, as was Neddy. Now the war has taken him, and this…new mood of yours threatens to take you. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”
“You want me not to go?”
“I’d never ask that, if you are truly determined. I ask only that you think of all the consequences.”
“I could come back regularly, and you surely could come out there, assuming I decided to stay. And what about the idea of opening up a branch of Chaffee, Hudner?”
The Old Gentleman stood up then, and walked to an old globe that stood yellowing on its own handsomely turned pedestal. It was far from up-to-date, this globe; Brooks could remember it from his childhood, and it had been an ancient curiosity then. Mr. Chaffee spun the globe to California, which was inscribed as being part of Mexico.
“Half a world away.”
“No one knows me there. There I can make my own future, with no extra burden of the world’s pity or scorn.”
“You’re a well-set-up young man, Brooks. With your grandfather’s trust, and what you inherited from your brother, and what you will inherit—”
“Please, don’t speak of it. I need very little for myself. It may be that a settlement of some sort will be necessary for Caroline.”
Brooks found himself shuddering, and it dawned on him that this was the first time since he’d come home that he had actually said her name out loud. It hung there between him and his father like a cloud of noxious smoke.
“We will do whatever must be done on that score, never fear it.”
The Old Gentleman, as always, spoke quietly, but gathered into his words was enough venom to wipe out regiments of Carolines.
“Even now,” said Brooks in a whisper, “just saying her name makes me quake like some weed in the wind.”
His father turned from the globe and walked to Brooks’s chair. He put his hand on his son’s shoulder and looked him in the eye, clear blue to clear blue. “I had never thought,” he said softly, “that I could hate a human being so very deeply. For what she has done to you, and to all of us, I can never forgive her.”
Brooks dropped his eyes first. He had known for weeks that he was beyond questions as superficial as forgiving: he would settle, gladly, for even a small dose of forgetting.
His father squeezed Brooks’s shoulder a little and went on: “Go to your California, son, if you think it will help. And our blessings will go with you.”
Then, overcome by what he had said, the Old Gentleman turned quickly and walked from the library.
Brooks sat where he was for several minutes. Well he knew what his father’s words had cost. Well he knew that if he did go West he might never see his parents again, or at any rate, not for years. It was not a journey anyone undertook lightly. But he wasn’t undertaking it lightly. He was doing it to save his sanity, to see if there was any chance at all for happiness, for a productive life in this world for a young man who had been
brutally wounded both in his body and in his spirit.
Then he smiled, a quick and bitter smile, but a smile nonetheless. Tomorrow I’ll book passage on the best and quickest clipper in New York! And, who knew? Maybe by this time next week he’d be off, bound for California, where the streets were paved with gold and everyone was happy, and no one cared about where—or what—you’d come from.
38
Lily stood in her driveway surveying the new-planted stand of sapling eucalyptus, and tried unsuccessfully to think about the war raging in the East.
By the time a newspaper reached the ranch, the news in it was weeks old. The new telegraph wires, wonder of the age, now spanned the country all the way from New York to St. Louis to Salt Lake City to San Francisco. The telegraph wires quivered and hummed with tantalizing flashes of news, but detailed reports still must come overland, and there was no way of telling what had been amplified or diminished in the passage.
The war was a distant rumble, like some remembered earthquake, unsettling but too easy to ignore or gloss over. Even the bustle and flash of San Francisco, not twenty-five miles away, seemed remote as some distant twinkling planet. Lily was so entirely absorbed in building her own small world here in San Rafael that had San Francisco vanished in a puff of smoke, she would hardly have noticed it but for Fergy. She worried about Fergy but saw him almost never: this was his choice, Lily painfully forced herself to admit, for Fergy had nothing but leisure, whereas Lily lived for Katie and for the farm, and what time the one didn’t fill, the other was sure to.
Not that Lily regretted an instant of it. The hours with Kate were a joy, the more so for all the endless years of deprivation, that now, magically, had ended. Lily would ride with her daughter—and a fine little rider she was, too, on her gentle Shetland pony—all afternoon and into the evening, chattering gaily or in easy silence. Lily looked at the child, going onto seven years old now, and already felt the pangs of parting, and wondered if it would be possible, when the inevitable moment came, to let her go, to school, or to a husband. Well, it would be years, and in the meanwhile Lily intended to savor every second of every minute with the girl.
