Читать книгу Tears of the Mountain - John Addiego - Страница 18

• NINE •

8 AM

the voice of his father

as if from beyond the land of the dead, from the mouth of a child. Jeremiah sat astride his horse contemplating the phenomenon anew as the mare picked her way through the pine-and-oak forest to the willow-bordered river. At daybreak the encounter with the boy had seemed droll and vaguely mysterious, but now it sank like a heavy stone into the stream of his personal faith. Old Daniel McKinley was truly alive in the flesh of a little red-haired chap from San Francisco, sure as the sun shone and the river sparkled. He crossed the waters to the road and hurried back to Lucinda, wanting her warm embrace and empathetic ear, wanting the reality of his own children at Fin Hollow Glen, his father’s farm, and his heart lifted as he saw them rocking together on the porch, the mother reading to child and babe from the old volume of myths and tales from her own childhood and raising her arm to wave as he galloped up the lane.

“What was it?” she called out as he walked from the pasture gate. “You were gone an age. Ezekiel barked his head off two times. I took down the shotgun.”

“My Lord. Did you see what it was?”

“Whatever it was, Zeke scared it off. What took you?”

“I stopped at the hotel to see the boy, and Madison gave me a bathe.” He wiped his brow. “Yes. I believe I need a little water.”

“When do we go to the train, Pap?” Jacob yelled, squirming down from his mother’s lap.

“You had a bathe?” She moved Sarah from one knee to the other.

“Soon, boy. Lucy,” he began, and paused to consider the face of their baby girl, the intensity of her gaze. Did she regard him from the vantage of some previous lifetime, some fount of racial memory?

“Well, for pity’s sake, what did they want? What was the big mystery?”

“The boy,” he began. “I must tell you, that boy is... I mean to say, I feel convinced...”

“Who was Asi?”

“Asi?” He felt again something of the lightness of the hot pool and leaned against the porch rail.

“The telegram, for the love of Saint Joseph!”

“Oh, my, I nearly forgot!” He produced the envelope, and she snatched it quickly. “Wife, it’s only a bit of skulduggery, and my guess is it can only be the work of one man. Jake, would you fetch your pap a drink?”

The boy scooped the gourd into the water barrel under the eave, and Jeremiah drank rainwater slowly as he listened to his wife push through the door into the house and return before he finished gulping. She had his old family Bible on one knee and the baby on the other.

“Hold her,” she said, and he took little Sarah into his arms and gazed into those otherworldly eyes.

“It’s the professor, sure as you’re born,” he said.

“Ain’t we picking the perfesser up at the train?” Jake asked. His father watched his mother leaf through the fragile pages.

“That we are, boy, and soon. Are you ready?”

“I sure am!”

Lucinda scowled, and Jeremiah said, “Wife, this is just the kind of thing he’s done to me in the past. The man has a twisted mind, as you well know. He loves a good joke at the expense of scripture.”

“I love a good joke, too,” Jake shouted.

She leaned over the volume, frowning. “‘If a man is found lying with the wife of another man,’” she read, “‘both of them shall die, the man who lay with the woman, and the woman; so you shall purge the evil from Israel.’”

“Ha, ha!” Jake held his belly and forced a laugh. “That’s funny!”

Jeremiah leaned over Lucinda’s lap, and baby Sarah reached for the page. Her mother caught the tiny hand before it could tear the leaf. “You sure you got the right citation?”

“Twenty-two, twenty-two,” she said, tapping the heading. Sarah gripped her father’s bushy mustache and yanked his mouth down on one side. “Ouch! That’s one powerful child,” he said.

Lucinda studied the note again. Jeremiah settled beside her on the porch swing and bounced their baby on his knee. “Seems to be somebody’s idea of a joke,” she said finally, folding the missive back into its envelope, “and not a friendly one.” She turned a brooding look to him that made him think of Mother, that made him feel always the youngest, dearly loved and doted upon, yet suspect in some way, spoiled by so much attention and prone to go out on a limb. He thought of that dynamic in this second marriage, joining the big sister of one family with the baby brother of another, and how their slight year’s difference in age meant so little now, yet those family roles persisted. “Why would somebody make such mean accusations?”

He could feel her eyes studying his face as he struggled to keep Sarah from grabbing his glasses and lip whiskers. “I’m flabbergasted,” he said. “It’s a wild-goose chase, to be sure.”

“You think it’s Stiles?”

“Well...” He imagined the newspaper editor’s mean, close-set eyes. “No. I wouldn’t expect this of him, though he keeps a grudge. I really thought it was the professor. Speaking of which, we’d better get dressed and hitch the wagon.”

She fixed him with that dark gaze a moment longer, then took the baby from his arms and went into the house. Jake chased Ezekiel about the barn, and Jeremiah walked after them slowly and asked the boy to help with the wagon. The scythe hung from a support pole, and Jeremiah set it into the bed carefully.

THEY ROLLED SLOWLY on wheels fashioned long ago by his father, under the canopy of a live-oak savannah and the riverside willows, a family of four in their Sunday clothes heading into town but branching off near Vallejo’s Lachryma Montis and climbing above the Mexican estate to the Mountain Cemetery. Here on a clear golden rise the dead had their view of river and town and distant bay, of the gleaming rails snaking along the gravel bar and slipping atop the creosote-soaked bridge trestles, of the witch-hat Presbyterian steeple riding the meetinghouse roof to one side and the more rounded adobe mission bell tower to another.

Jeremiah gripped the green-flecked handle and swung the long, curved blade to clear the Queen Anne’s lace and wild anise from his mother’s grave, the thick grasses gone dry and brittle with midsummer. Lucinda, with Sarah on her shoulder, picked kitten ears and golden poppies with Jacob while Jeremiah labored. He shed coat and vest as the sun climbed the sky at his back and thought not so much of the dead here remembered by granite and redwood slabs as of the boy speaking his father’s words.

Five graves needed clearing, and when the work was done, and the blade returned to the wagon bed, and the waistcoat buttoned, he held the babe and watched his wife kneel in prayer. He noticed that color in her cheek that bespoke some disapproval and knew it had to do with the telegram and the letter of the morning. His eyes had sought hers a few times, but she had turned away at each entreaty to help the boy with flowers or coo to the babe, and now she addressed the tall erect stone inscribed

1824–1864 Beloved Husband and Father