No mushrooms yesterday. The mold and matted leaves under the bushes stuck to the tarry adobe on tools and shoes. One after another I basined the flowering peaches, still in tight bud, and raked the rubbish into a pile. I would not put that on the compost heap, because the trees had peach-leaf curl that I could not seem to get rid of. Burn their litter and leaves, therefore ; cauterize, imperfectly and hopelessly, another pest.
Along the fence the acacias, now ten or twelve feet high, hummed with bees. Under them too the winter had left trash. I had to reach far in to get it, and in the soft sun, in a temperature climbing into the sixties, I shed my jacket.
The wind was fresh and soft among the feathery leaves and the yellow balls of blossom. It was the sort of day that Marian would have buried herself in, powdering herself with all the pollens of life. I liked it myself, I liked the smells in my nostrils and the sounds in my ears and the feel of the sun on my bent back. But I did not forget that the peach trees behind me would shortly come out into bloom as rampant as these acacias, only to show with their very first leaves the swellings, the warpings, the obscene elephantiasis of their chronic disease. Burrowing among sunny flowers, I never lost the sense of the presence of evil.
Off in the pure blue above the hills I caught sight of the redtail soaring, a neighbor well known, but as ambiguous and unconfronted as any. He floated until he was barely a speck, and then he turned and came back toward me over the school land. Sweetly, purely, a serenity with talons, he rode the air, and his shadow dipped and raced across violet deciduous oaks and the dark mounds of live oaks and buckeyes tipped with green candles and down green slopes moiréed by the wind. Little animals, feeling that shadow, would shrink into their holes, or flatten themselves fearfully in the sweet grass.
Walk openly, Marian used to say. Love even the threat and the pain, feel yourself fully alive, cast a bold shadow, accept, accept. What we call evil is only a groping toward good, part of the trial and error by which we move toward the perfected consciousness.
Allah kareem, an Arab leper said to me once—nose-less, almost lipless, loathsome, scaled like a fish—Allah kareem, God is kind. I dropped coins and fled from his appalling visage and his appalling faith. My impulse is to do the same when I think of Marian.
God is kind? Life is good? Nature never did betray the heart that loved her? Then why the parting that she had? Why the reward she received for living intensely and generously and trying to die with dignity? Why that horror at the bridge for her last clear sight of earth? Why the drugs that she repudiated but couldn’t refuse, that killed her intelligence and will without killing her pain? Why that crucifixion death, with John hanging to one of her hands and a nurse to another and the room full of her mindless screaming?
I do not accept, I am not reconciled. But one thing she did. She taught me the stupidity of the attempt to withdraw and be free of trouble and harm. That was as foolish as Peck’s version of ahimsa and the states of instant nirvana he thought he reached by sugar cube or noise or the exercise of the anal sphincters. One is not made pure by blowing water through the nose or by retiring from the treadmill. These are the ways we deceive ourselves. I disliked Peck because of his addiction to the irrational, and I still do; but what made him hard for me to bear was my own foolishness made manifest in him.
There is no way to step off the treadmill. It is all treadmill.
I was leaning on my rake thinking thoughts like this, not by any means for the first time, but with a kind of renewed bitter passion because of the brightness and purity of the afternoon, when I saw Lucio, Fran, and Julie LoPresti, followed by the mongrel dog, walking in the pasture. Once or twice they looked my way, but if they saw me behind the acacias they made no sign. I believe they didn’t see me, for they seemed much preoccupied with one another, strolling slowly, watching the ground, lifting their faces to look at one another as they said something.
I had not seen any of them in a long time, and it was a shock to see Julie big-bellied, careful on her feet, leaning backward against the weight of her six-or-seven-month pregnancy. But something else struck me more. The three people walking in the spring field talking of something serious—plans to take Julie somewhere? what to do about the baby when it came? what to do about Julie’s further schooling?—were a family, an intimate threesome. They were talking together in a way I had never seen them doing. And when they turned at Weld’s orchard fence and started back I saw that Julie’s once lank and stringy hair was in a single braid such as her mother used to wear.
So maybe Julie had got something she obscurely wanted. I did not think that the child would be put out for adoption, as Fran in her first rage had said it would be. I expected to see mother and grandmother sharing its care. But behind the acacias, spying on their family colloquy, I could not forgive any of them for the fact that Julie’s spite child would be born and that Marian’s love child had been a blob of blue flesh that moved a little, and bleated weakly, and died.
Desolately I went back to raking litter out from under the yellow hedge. New growth caught in the teeth, and when I bent to look I saw that it was poison oak. Though I had sprayed every resurgent clump and bush for two years and more, and had cleaned the hill, now some bird or wind had dropped a berry and started me a new crop where it would be the devil itself to spray without killing what I wanted to preserve.
You wondered what was in whale’s milk. Now you know. Think of the force down there, just telling things to get born, just to be!
I had had no answer for her then. Now I might have one. Yes, think of it, I might say. And think of how random and indiscriminate it is, think how helplessly we must submit, think how impossible it is to control or direct it. Think how often beauty and delicacy and grace are choked out by weeds. Think how endless and dubious is the progress from weed to flower.
Even alive, she never convinced me with her advocacy of biological perfectionism. She never persuaded me to ignore, or to look upon as merely hard pleasures, the evil that I felt in every blight and smut and pest in my garden-that I felt, for that matter, squatting like a toad on my own heart. Think of the force of life, yes, but think of the component of darkness in it. One of the things that’s in whale’s milk is the promise of pain and death.
And so? Admitting what is so obvious, what then? Would I wipe Marian Catlin out of my unperfected consciousness if I could? Would I forgo the pleasure of her company to escape the bleakness of her loss? Would I go back to my own formula, which was twilight sleep, to evade the pain she brought with her?
Not for a moment. And so even in the gnashing of my teeth I acknowledge my conversion. It turns out to be for me as I once told her it would be for her daughter. I shall be richer all my life for this sorrow.
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