Janet Moodie--Next of Kin

by L. F. Robertson

  Dodger wouldn’t set foot in the house, so I left food and water for him on the deck, hoping it wouldn’t have the paradoxical effect of bringing more rats. If it did, Dodger must have nailed them, because I didn’t see any sign that anyone else but he and the other cats were eating his kibble. When I fed him he would sometimes let me scratch his ears for a few seconds. But at the sight of Charlie, Lizzie, or one of the other cats, or any random sound he didn’t recognize, he would turn, quickly and silently, and disappear into the brush.

  Dead voles, and an occasional young rat, began appearing on the stoop outside my kitchen door in the early mornings, possibly as thank-yous for the cat kibble. Sometimes in my walks into the garden and orchard, I’d see the head—nothing more—of a vole or mouse, lying in the path. Dodger was doing what he’d been hired for, and I was grateful. Nevertheless, I felt a little uneasy because of all the rodent death suddenly occurring around me. Not that I didn’t realize, on an intellectual level, that it had been there all along. “Nature, red in tooth and claw” was always around, in the form of hawks, barn owls, foxes, and other feral cats; and I hadn’t been above hiring a gopher trapper, who discreetly emptied his traps while I stayed in the house. But I didn’t like it when it was made visible to me, and it made me a little depressed when I saw a young rat or mouse dead or dying on my doorstep and realized that this was the trade-off for my living comfortably in my home and harvesting unmolested fruit and vegetables. For all that, I grew fond of Dodger and the fact that he left what he felt were gifts for me, and I tried to cultivate his friendship, partly out of an egotistical desire to win him over, and partly because I wasn’t sure how I’d be able to feed and shelter him once the winter rains started. But by the time they began, it no longer mattered.

  25

  Anyone who lives in the forest in California, unless they are in serious denial, must consider the fires that scorch parts of the state every summer and fall and realize that the odds are against them—that someday it will be their turn, and those giant sheets of flame they watch on the news will be sweeping across their ridges, through their wooded canyons, and up their roads.

  Our turn came that fall, with a heat wave in the middle of October, just when we thought the dangerous season was almost over. The arid winds that sighed over our heads and around us and shook the branches of summer-dried trees swirled around an abandoned campfire in a state park and transformed it, like a horrific genie rising out of its bottle, into a column and then a wall of flames that ran before the wind too quickly for any fire crew to stop.

  Most of my legal files were in storage in Santa Rosa, and as the fire became worrisomely close I made a trip there one morning with a carload of most of the rest. When I didn’t hear from Ed, I called him, to see what was up. When he called back, he explained that he and Molly’s husband were out fighting the fires. He had taken Pogo to a friend’s house out of the danger zone. I’m not religious, but I said a prayer for their well-being.

  Back home I loaded one irreplaceable item after another into my car—personal records, the last few boxes of files from the cases I was working on—and I strapped a carrier with some camping equipment onto the top. I piled cat carriers next to my kitchen door. With a hose I watered the roof of my house and a perimeter around it as thoroughly as I had time for, without much hope that it would help much in the bone-dry air, now filling up with smoke and the harsh smell of burning brush and logs. I kept the dogs and the two house cats indoors, in case we had to leave, but Dodger evaded all my blandishments and kept melting into the brush when I tried to catch him. When a sheriff’s car came up my driveway, and two kind but firm men said it was time to get out, I packed my computer and pets and made one last run into the back yard calling frantically for Dodger. We had to go now, if ever. I couldn’t see the fire from the house, but the air was brown and hot and the smoke so thick it made me cough, while carried on it was an occasional ominous cinder.

  We fled north, up the coast highway, toward Sea Ranch and the town of Gualala. As I made the turn onto it, I could see flames from burning trees on the ridge, and on the way I pulled over several times to let fire trucks through. Harriet and Bill had left a couple of weeks earlier to stay with Bill’s son in Reno, because Bill’s damaged lungs couldn’t handle the smoke from another set of fires burning to the north of us.

  I camped out for three days on a beach in a county park near Gualala, where the dogs and cats could be with me, the dogs tied up on leashes near my tent and the cats in an old wire dog crate I’d brought along. I texted Ed a couple of times and then figured he’d answer when he had time. When I heard, finally, that we were allowed to go back to check on our houses and land, I packed up and drove back home to see what was left.

  The fire wasn’t that big, as wildfires go. The land it burned was sparsely settled, mostly forest and pasture and parks. Nobody died, and the number of houses lost to it numbered in the dozens, not the hundreds or, as in the great fires of those years, the thousands. It made the local TV news and papers, but got barely a mention outside northern California. But for us in the middle of it, it took away irreplaceable things—not just possessions, but the beauty around us and our various ways of life.

  The road to my house and the driveway were passable, and my house had been saved, along with its old detached garage. Both were dark with soot, and the house stank of stale smoke and damp, but they were still standing, with no serious damage that I could see. My orchard had burned, though, and the apple and pear trees, some of which still had ripening fruit when I left, were now a tangle of bare black branches and blackened trunks. When I saw them, I began to cry. But I was lucky. Ed’s house was burned beyond repair, a blackened skeleton cluttered with twisted remains of furniture and appliances, all too visible across the rubble-strewn waste that had once been a forested lot between our properties.

  There was no power, and therefore no water, since I couldn’t run the pump in my well. With the weather still warm, I spent some time pulling furniture, books, bedding, curtains, and so forth, damp from the water that had saved the house, onto the deck and driveway, in the hope that they would dry out. I drove to Gualala and bought big black garbage bags, dry ice, gasoline for the generator I’d bought after a winter storm and power outage, groceries, and drinking water. Back home, I put the dry ice in my refrigerator and freezer and started up the generator to give them some power, so my food wouldn’t spoil and I could charge my phone. Power company trucks were already working out on the highway, so with luck all this wouldn’t be necessary for long.

  Inside the house, I opened all the windows and started a fire in my stove with the wood in the rack next to it. My wood pile outside had been hosed down by the firefighters, but I scavenged until I found some wood that wasn’t too wet and laid it out to dry outside and on the stove.

  Every time I went outdoors I called for Dodger, but he never appeared.

  When night fell I cooked some frozen thing for dinner and ate it on a paper plate, hardly tasting it. I had no Internet connection, so I spent the evening reading by the light of a camping lamp. Since my sofa, mattress and box spring were out on the deck, I set out a sleeping bag and inflatable mat on the floor and slept there. Before going to bed I put a bowl of kibble and one of water on the deck.

  The next morning I took the dogs, my computer, and some files, and drove up to Gualala to find someplace with wifi. Before leaving, I checked the bowl of kibble; it was still full.

  I spent the day in the public library, writing notices to several courts that I’d need more time to prepare briefs in appeals before them because I’d be dealing with the damage and disruption from the fire. While I was there, Ed called. Under the watchful eye of the librarian, I raced into the lobby to talk to him. “Ed, how are you?”

  “Okay,” he said. “Not bad, all things considered.” His voice was hoarse.

  “Where are you?”

  “In Gualala. Staying at a friend’s house.”

  “You don’t sound so
good,” I said. “Are you really all right?”

  “Yeah. Sprained my ankle, some smoke inhalation.”

  “Jeez, what happened? I’m in Gualala today. Would your friend mind if I came over?”

  “Laurie’s at work, but I’m sure she wouldn’t mind.”

  So Ed had a lady friend, I thought. Good for him.

  He gave me the address, and I cleared my things from the library and drove over.

  Laurie lived in a neighborhood of little houses and cabins in the redwood forest above town. Her house was shaded by an enormous redwood in her front yard. Under it were an old wooden bench, several arrangements of plants in pots, and curious bits of sculpture and ceramic. A Talavera pottery sun, in bright colors, had been fastened to the tree trunk, and on the ground below it was a half-size statue of St. Francis of Assisi, a stone bird resting on his raised arm. Windchimes, hanging from the eaves, jingled softly in the breeze.

  Ed opened the door a minute after I knocked. He was leaning on a cane, and his eyes were bloodshot. His face was tired and pale under its tan. The interior of the house was open plan, with one big room spanning the breadth of its front half. Ed hobbled ahead of me, lowered himself into an armchair and used his hands to raise his ankle onto a straight chair in front of it. “Have a seat,” he said. “I can’t get you water or anything, I’m afraid; I have to stay off my ankle as much as possible.” He coughed, a deep grumble, cleared his throat, and then sat silent for a minute, catching his breath.

  “Jeez, what happened to you?” I asked.

  “Stupidity,” he said. “Bunch of us almost got overtaken by the fire, and I twisted my ankle on a log running away.”

  “Shit!” I said, unable to help myself.

  “Everybody made it,” he said. “I was the worst hurt of the group.”

  “Well, that’s good, I guess.”

  “I heard my house burned down. How’s yours? Have you been back?”

  “I was there yesterday. It’s still standing, not much damage; they saved it.” I didn’t mention the orchard just then; it was nothing to lose compared to Ed’s home. “I owe someone a huge debt of gratitude.”

  “Glad to hear it,” Ed said. “Someone told me a tree fell onto my driveway, and they couldn’t get up to the house in time.”

  “Damn.”

  “Yeah. I didn’t get much stuff out beforehand. Lost most of my record collection.”

  “Oh, shit, I’m sorry.” I looked around. “Where’s Pogo?” I asked.

  “At work,” Ed said, with a laugh and a cough. “I left him with Laurie because I was afraid you might have your hands full if you had to evacuate.”

  I nodded; he was probably right.

  “Laurie takes him and her dog with her to work. She works at a plant nursery, and they’re cool with it. She can give them a walk at lunchtime.”

  “Nice.”

  An idea had been slowly forming in my mind as I drove from the library. I hadn’t been sure of it, but as we talked my intention suddenly clarified itself, surprising me.

  “Are you planning to rebuild?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Yeah. I’ve lived there forty years. Figure I’ll have enough from the insurance to build a little place big enough for me.”

  “I’m not sure I want to stay,” I said.

  Ed looked a question at me, but didn’t ask why.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” I went on, “but if you’re going to rebuild your house, maybe you can stay in mine—when you’re on your feet again, of course. There’s some water damage and a bunch of cleaning up needed on the property—all covered by insurance, I hope. I wondered if you could maybe hire some people to take care of it—I’ll pay you for it—and watch over them for me.”

  Ed nodded. “Sounds like a good idea; we can talk details when we know more. I hope you’ll be back. I’d be sorry to lose you; you’ve been a good neighbor and friend.”

  “You, too. I don’t know exactly why I feel like I do—it just hit me when I saw the place. My orchard burned.”

  “They come back a lot of the time,” Ed said.

  “Maybe. But I don’t know that I have the will to wait for it.”

  I asked Ed how it had been fighting the fire, and he told me stories, some funny and others scary or sad. “There was a crew from the county jail,” he said. “Young guys. Good men, absolutely fearless. One of them was from up the ridge; his parents’ house burned. He was all broken up when he heard about it. Bob Cordero’s place came out okay, but half the houses on the way up there burned; the road was so bad the trucks had a hard time reaching them. Bob said his wife was saying it served them right, for not paying to have the road fixed.”

  I had to smile. “Molly was right,” I said.

  “All in all,” he said, “it was quite an adventure. Wouldn’t ever want to do it again—I’m probably too old, anyway.”

  Before I left I made him some lunch, a sandwich from cheese and cold cuts in the fridge and a cup of filter coffee. “You want to stay off that foot as much as possible,” I told him. “Keep it elevated.”

  “I know,” he said. “You sound like my doctor.”

  When I left, he said, “I’ll get back to you about your house. Think I’ll take the offer. I have some thoughts about a crew I could get to help. Have to wait till I can walk again, though.”

  “Whenever you’re ready,” I said.

  I let myself out the door and drove back to the library. I still wasn’t sure I was making the right decision, or how I was going to be able to afford it, but amid the uncertainty, I felt light, as though I’d been released from a tether holding me to the ground. Now I just needed to figure out what I was going to do next.

  It was late afternoon when I got back to my house. There was still no electricity, and the weather had finally turned cool; the house, its walls and floors still damp, felt cold inside and clammy. I built a fire in the stove, loaded more dry ice into the freezer, topped up the gas tank of the generator, and headed down to Vlad’s, which had power, food, and a good dark ale.

  Back at the cabin, with only the glow of the stove and the light from my camping lamp and a couple of candles, I felt apprehensive. The rooms were full of shadows, and the night outside my windows was pitch dark. I was painfully conscious of the burned land around me and the charred frame of Ed’s empty house, looming invisibly a few hundred feet away. I felt very alone, and I found myself listening intently for any sounds other than the crackle of the stove, the stirrings of the dogs and cats, and the noise of the generator. The house, which had once seemed so secure and welcoming, felt fragile as a half-burned sheet of paper, a thin and brittle shell between me and the dark shapes hunting blindly in the night.

  After Terry died and Gavin moved away, I noticed that I’d stopped feeling that I even had a home. I stopped getting homesick on trips out of town, the way I used to when I had to be away from my family. For a long time, it didn’t much matter to me where I lived or stayed. Eventually I’d developed an affection for the house in Corbin’s Landing and had made friends there, but the fire had revealed how shallow all that was. In a half-dozen years there I’d learned little about even the people I was closest to—Ed, Bill, and Harriet. Maybe, with the scars of experience on our souls, we defend ourselves from the kinds of all-absorbing friendships we had when we were young. Whatever it was, I was feeling that Corbin’s Landing wasn’t where I was going to settle, but a way station on a road to somewhere—another destination as yet unknown, or maybe just dusty death.

  In September, Harriet and I had gone to Santa Rosa to see a performance of Brahms’s German Requiem, and I remembered a passage that had spoken to me at the time: Denn wir haben hier keine bleibende Stadt. “We have here no permanent place.” Even the melody and the rhythm had suggested the wandering journey of someone who knows he has no real home on this earth. This latest loss—the burned woods around me, Dodger’s disappearance and my guilt about it—hardly compared with what I’d experienced when Terry died, but
it was enough of an echo to bring back some of that pain and grief and that sense of belonging nowhere anymore. Corbin’s Landing had been a refuge, a place that allowed me to heal, but like everything else, it was impermanent, provisional. Something was saying to me that now it was time to move on.

  26

  I try not to engage in magical thinking, but sometimes events move you so decisively in a particular direction that it’s hard not to think you were meant to go there.

  The day after I decided I had to move away from Corbin’s Landing, Carey called. “We were in Vancouver,” she said, “and I didn’t hear about the fire up there until we got back. Are you all right?”

  I told her. “Yes, basically. My house didn’t burn, but my neighbor’s did. I think I need someplace to move to, for at least a while. My house has a good deal of water and smoke damage—and I just don’t feel like staying up there right now.”

  “I understand the feeling,” she said. “Are you going to stay in the area?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “It’s hard to find a place. Lot of displaced people, not enough housing, since the big fires last year.”

  “I don’t know if you’d be interested,” she said, “but as it happens, we have a friend who has a little house on the central coast. He’s been keeping it as a vacation rental, but he told us the other day he was getting tired of managing it and considering finding a long-term tenant.”

  The central coast was a long way from where I was—but perhaps that wasn’t such a bad thing. “You know I have two dogs and two cats. Will he accept pets?”

  “I’ll vouch for you,” she said. “I’m sure you’re very responsible.”

  Carey put me in touch with her friend, an easy-going mortgage broker in Ojai. He sent me photos of the house, and we worked out the details of rent and deposit. Ed and I, in our turn, talked arrangements for the house in Corbin’s Landing, and we agreed he’d move in once his ankle was healed enough that he could drive. I spent the next couple of weeks packing what I wanted to take with me, mostly books and mementos and enough bedding, dishes, and kitchen stuff to get me started in the new place. From the house and shed I took loads of damp and smoke-damaged possessions—mostly boxes of papers, books, and tchotchkes I’d brought with me when I moved there from Berkeley, and never opened—and hauled them to the dump. I left whatever else was useful for Ed. Between that, work, and calls and visits from insurance adjusters, I had plenty to do to keep my thoughts at bay, at least during the day.