"All set!" she said, reaching for the next person's books.
He couldn't walk away.
"Want to get a beer later?" he said, cringing, dammit. Those cheekbones, her deep-set eyes so direct.
She looked at him for a long moment, then shrugged. "Why not?"
Months later, sitting on the boardwalk in April, they watched surfers and kids playing beach volleyball. She laughed at a man wearing a hot dog costume. There was a small hole in the knee of her jeans, a chip in her front tooth from when she'd been thrown from a horse as a girl. Molly the girl. He wished he had known her then, had known her at every age.
"Not any horse," she said. "My own horse. It was mutiny!"
Her face lit up when she talked. Inside he was moving in slow circles, captivated, counting the number of times they caught each other's eyes without meaning to. This was different, this was mystical. A disobedient piece of hair, sticking up at the back of her head where she couldn't see it, could move him to tears, anything could. Her raised eyebrow, the neat pile she made with her food before sticking her fork in it. He felt love like a fist in the gut.
She turned to him, shimmying toward him on the wall. Their legs were dangling. He could smell her shampoo and her skin, clean sweat.
"Have you ever been a gardener?" she asked.
"No, never." He reached out and touched her face with the backs of his fingers.
"Then you couldn't know," she said. She took a sip of tea from the thermos cup she held in her hands. It was early in the morning, the sun on the water was the only swathe of diamonds he'd likely ever see.
"Couldn't know what?"
"We have these bean plants, back home." Her ranch. Home to her in all of her stories. There was the ranch, and there was now. Nothing else. She was a child on her first trip away.
"They reach these small tendrils of themselves out—those things that are made for grasping other things. Sometimes they do what they're supposed to; they climb up their stakes and flower and grow bean pods. But sometimes they find each other. They curl around and around each other, until two of them practically become one plant." She looked at him and the upsweep of her eyes was like a wave crashing over his head. "You and I, together, remind me of that."
It was the sexiest thing he'd ever heard. He couldn't help himself, he had to kiss her.
Now he thought of the part she'd forgotten. How the plants became too heavy for each other, how they pulled from the stake and dragged one another into the muddy ground.
In the dark forest Molly's eyes opened slowly, fluttering. She stared at him for a moment, then pulled herself up and wiped the corner of her mouth with the back of her hand. There was a detail of pine needles imprinted on the side of her face. Some still clung to her. He brushed them away. He leaned against the trunk and watched her gather herself.
"I was sleeping?" she asked.
He nodded. "You were tired."
"How did you find me?"
He tilted his head in the direction of the road.
"Your faithful donkey. And your dog."
She smiled a little at that, ruffling the fur on Sam's neck.
"Oh Jack, the Eve tree." She stopped. Silence deepened around them, then that one damn cicada took up again.
"Look how dark it is! I should be serving dinner."
"Don't worry. Your mother's making a salad."
Her mouth trembled and he could see how she would berate herself now, would gather anger as arsenal against the comfort of a nap under a tree. He leaned forward suddenly, put his hand on her wrist.
"Don't do that."
"What?"
"It's fine. She came to help." She looked back at him, a wall behind the deceptively delicate bones of her face. She stood and brushed her legs free of needles, shaking one foot to let a stone out of her sandal. He watched the purpling sky behind her head.
"Let's go," she said and he placed his hands under himself to push to his feet. They walked softly to where Jefé was and Molly put a slender hand on the donkey's head. He blew softly at her, happy now that she was out of those thick trees where he couldn't see her. Jack smiled at the moonstruck donkey. They were like brothers, where Molly was concerned.
The hills were indigo, now, a crushing softness. They walked down the road to their house. His breaths felt restricted, old. Molly's muscles seized under his arm and he looked up, startled.
"What's that?" She pointed to a spot above the ridge, a place in the sky where he saw an elongated orange glow that they hadn't seen before, like the glow that surrounds a well-lit town when you pass through a hilly country at night. The fire was illuminating the sky, those smoky molecules.
"Must be—" Jack started to say, wanting to soothe her, but it was only the beginning that he got out because there was an explosion, loud and angry. A blast of orange like a volcano shot straight into the air where they were watching. Molly's shriek tore at his heart, and Jack gasped. He watched in horror as millions of sparks settled on the forest, on the hill. Sam whined and barked in its direction.
They began to run, toward the ranch, toward the phone, toward someone who could fix something, anything at all.
TWELVE
Jack and Molly clattered into the kitchen as big as dinosaurs. Catherine clutched at her heart, they startled her so. She had dropped the salad, she saw, the bowl neatly sliced in two on the floor. Molly stood with her hand over her face. Jack was on the phone. Catherine was somehow in a chair, Amber beside her, young hand smoothing her old, old arm.
"I'm so sorry, Mama," Molly said. "We didn't mean to scare you."
Her daughter's voice sounded as though it was coming from far away. Catherine's hands shook as she gripped the sides of the wooden chair she had sunk into, pushing herself up. She started forward, pausing when her legs wouldn't go and then giving an extra heave so she stuttered ahead. She knew how she looked from the outside. You didn't need to hold a mirror up, she'd been there, after all, when it happened to her dear mother. Oh, Ma. Your trees.
"I'm going to lie down again," she said, trying to make her voice something steady.
On the floor Todd picked up the pieces of the big bowl and swept leaves of lettuce and spinach into them. She paused for a minute while he threw them into the compost bucket, then continued down the hallway. It seemed a long way, the glowing portraits on either side mocking her. She reached Molly's bedroom and lay down on the coolness of the bed for the second time that day. She thought of her painting and regretted that it was so far off. Somehow she was not herself here, at the ranch, anymore. She would just lie here for a moment now.
Snippets of conversation. "A tree's torched…" They're not all that worried." "Good thing we got those goats moved." "Gerard?"
"Where are the bucks?" she called, but no one heard her, and she didn't call again.
Oh, it was a long story. More days than she could account for had gone into the strip of land that was in danger of burning. Of course there was the logging. Everybody did it. She'd been so young, after all. And fatherless.
She was seventeen when he died. Dan had tried to intervene in a fight between neighbors over property lines. One man pulled a gun out to shoot the other one. He had terrible aim, and Catherine's father was shot and killed. Their family died then, the three of them who had owned the land together. For a time, it was all she and her mother could do to feed themselves and keep the two rockers on the front porch going. But one morning about a month after the noisy, harsh day of his death, they looked at each other for a long moment. Bertha's eyes were wounded. They were smudged underneath, marked with dark half-circles.
Catherine was pushing the rocker hard, tapping her feet, listening to her father's voice in her head.
"You'll work hard, girl. But the land will be here for you. It'll sit right here with you. It'll be home to you, but it needs all of you." Catherine could see that there were sparks way back in her mother's sad eyes, and knew that she still had the fight in her. The two of them still wanted the land, and they
wanted to live, but the year was moving along without them and they could only get the garden planted if they hurried. The grace time of mourning was falling to the side. It was time to sow.
Later that month, kneeling beside the dirt hill that she was shoving potatoes into, Catherine thought about money. Her father had been more concerned with seasons and soil mixtures than money, a fact that was confirmed by the state of his bank balance after he'd gone into the ground. There wasn't a lot to keep Catherine and her mother rolling into the future.
She remembered his salty hair standing on end as he gestured with a shovel or a pitchfork or a fistful of a horse's reins.
"Money, sure. Money we need. But can a dollar buy you the assurance of the rain in the right season? Can it help you tame a wild piece of land?" His hat off, one hand on the back of his brown neck with its pale lines where the sun couldn't reach.
Catherine loved the land more than any promise of money. She couldn't imagine loving anything more than she did the shape of the hills outside her window first thing in the morning, when the color gradually crept into the world. But it would take more than a few dollars to re-shingle their roof. The previous winter had been a wild dance of moving buckets and cooking pots around the house to catch all the water the sky had to toss them, everything the roof couldn't keep out. Poverty weighed more than they wanted to admit, and Catherine's mother was from a basket-weaving people. She had trusted her husband with all questions of money. She wouldn't be the one to get them a new roof now.
Catherine herself didn't have much of a mind for business, but she thought for a long time as she squatted among the potatoes, putting one piece after another into the warm, damp earth. She scratched around in her mind like a chicken in the yard, started unearthing ideas like seeds. Her mother was winding twine around stakes to make a trellis for the beans. She was bareheaded, with her long hair loose and twisting behind her in the wind, and she was wearing one of Catherine's dad's old shirts with a shapeless sack-like skirt that couldn't quite hide how small she was underneath. Catherine thought she was heartbreakingly lovely.
She waited until the next morning at breakfast to say something about her idea. They were both tired from the rush of getting the garden in. Bertha was toasting bread in the pan with a covered bowl of scrambled eggs beside her. She wore an ancient blue robe that had belonged to Dan. His warm smell still lingered in and around it. Catherine wandered into the kitchen and walked to her mother, who fit neatly beneath her jawbone. She bent her head so she could put her nose to the collar of the robe. Some memory of sun-soaked skin and safety wafted up to her.
"You made that coffee yet?"
Her mother knew perfectly well that she hadn't made any coffee. Catherine crossed the kitchen to retrieve a pot and fill it with water, walking quickly back to the stove while the water sloshed up and over the sides. She felt itchy with her idea.
"Something on your mind?" her mother asked. The scent of toasted bread started to fill the kitchen as Bertha flipped the slices of bread over in the iron pan.
"What about trying to raise goats?" Catherine asked, leaping right in.
She measured the coffee out in big spoonfuls, tossing them into the boiling water and watching it turn a deep brown.
"Goats?" Her mother was spreading butter on the toast, bare feet and legs planted like trunks into the worn floor.
"I hear there's money in the milk," Catherine said. "Some people prefer it to cow milk."
Bertha was laying two plates on the table. She frowned.
"Why're you so keen on making money all of a sudden?"
"We need it, Ma. We need to build a new house, sometime."
"What's wrong with this one?"
"It leaks, is what's wrong! It smells of mold. When I get to bed my sheets are wet, except in the summer and you know how hot this house gets in the summer."
"But goats? Why this all of a sudden?"
"People have been talking about them. Say they're the next thing after sheep, and you know these hills all around are covered with sheep."
"Goats smell."
"I don't mind the smell."
"You've never spent all your live long days with that smell."
"Neither have you."
They faced each other.
"Nobody really drinks goat milk, do they?"
"They do. It's different from cow milk, but good, I hear." Catherine wasn't too clear on this point.
The coffee was done and she filtered the grounds out, poured a mug for each of them and set them on the table with the plates. They gave thanks to the Lord, the way they always did, though ever since Catherine's dad died, they had trouble lifting their heads afterward.
Bertha chewed her first bite of toast and swallowed.
"Dairy animals are a hard living. Have to be with them night and day."
"You know we never leave. We're like those trees out there, stuck to the land just as sure as they are."
Bertha looked where Catherine pointed, watching the trees through the window for a while before turning back. Catherine realized in that moment that her mother was still very young, not old enough to be a widow with a nearly grown daughter.
"Dan's cattle are no doubt turning wild out there somewhere."
"Oh, I'll get the cattle eventually, you know they're no trouble, Ma."
"I really don't want to take care of no goats, Catherine."
"You won't have to. I'll do it. I'll take care of everything."
Catherine kept her eyes on her mother, who waved a hand over her food to sweep a fly away.
"I have no earthly idea about raising goats…" Bertha said. Catherine started to interrupt, but her mother held her toast up and she fell silent. "But I know that if there's anyone who can do it, it's you. Go on, do what you want."
The window wasn't as clean as a window could be, but the sun was radiant, really, through it. Catherine looked down toward the garden, with all those plants that were weaving their way into the sun. These were the moments when people decided they'd change the world and then they went ahead and did it.
And then the world veered and slid off course. Late in the summer, she went to buy some goats and came back with almost nothing to show for it.
The air had been clean and sweet while she waited on her ride to Santa Rosa for the livestock fair. She was puffed wide with possibility, standing on the porch with one of her dad's old felt hats jammed on her head for luck.
Her mother slammed pots around in the kitchen. Glen, the only neighbor Catherine had found who was going to the fair, was mean and unreliable. Bertha didn't want Catherine to ride with him.
Catherine half turned to the door behind her.
"I can take care of Glen Miller, Ma!" she called. "Trust me."
Seventeen years old and she figured she could do anything. Her hair stuck out an inch or two below the hat. She fingered the ends of it. She had cut it one day after a long hard afternoon in the garden, an afternoon that she had spent wiping tears out of her eyes because of worry and grief and longing for her father.
Her mother spoke angrily in Pomo, viciously cracking an egg onto the spitting hot skillet. She switched to English, knowing half the Pomo was lost on Catherine.
"It's not you I don't trust!"
Catherine smiled at the sky, unafraid.
It was a quick goodbye as she hopped into the truck with the sacks of food her mother had made for her, Glen unfriendly in the driver's seat. Sneering at her Indian mother. He wouldn't have dared when her father was alive. When he put his hand on her leg, she slapped it away, not gently.
It was warm enough to have the truck window all the way down. The trailer behind them clanged like a sack of tin pots and pans, and Catherine was dreaming! She would come floating back up the dirt road with a half dozen goats in the trailer behind her, following her to their new home.
As they drove through the trees, the sun broadsided them for moments at a time before disappearing behind the immense forest. Catherine turned her face to
the sun and let it dazzle her again and again as it flashed through the clearings, scrubbing the parts of her that were always coarse with sadness since her father had died. The forest itself disappeared and they were on the bright open road, hillsides covered in flowers that bracketed the brown ribbon of earth winding through. This was the farthest from home she'd ever been. Purple lupine carpeting the curves of the hills, oaks fresh with leaves, the air rushing past the truck as sweet as on Creation morning. At home the tomato plants were reaching for the tops of the trellises and her mother would be washing the laundry. She felt a wave of longing and laughed at herself.
After the first sixty miles, she was exhausted. She had slapped Glen's hand away two more times. The rushing countryside was tiring her. She wasn't used to motor vehicles and the bumps and curves were making her feel sick. Glen laughed at her pale face and Catherine wished she could give him a lesson with her fists, then dump him in a heap somewhere, but she didn't know how to drive his truck. The road went on and on.
Finally, after another long spool of road and a late lunch of meat pie from the brown paper bag, they roared into the town of Santa Rosa. Catherine stared. It was the first town of its size she'd seen. She tumbled out of the truck door and couldn't leave Glen fast enough.
But then she was overwhelmed by the livestock fair. She strode from barn to barn, trying to get her bearings, surrounded by the smells of fresh hay and manure, long legs somehow not moving fast enough to keep the other types of animals in pens from distracting her. There were cattle, sheep, pigs and chickens before she finally got to goats and walked into the cave-like darkness of the barn.
Thin light streamed through dusty holes in the ceiling. All over the barn, goats called and griped at one another. The sound was deafening to Catherine, who stood feeling like a lost child. She'd thought she would arrive, some money would change hands, and she'd be on her way with her herd. Used to being on her own on her ranch, she was a speck of dust in this crowd. Were there really this many goats in the world? And people?
The Eve Tree: A Novel Page 14
