Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [1]
Most mornings we used to come into the dark kitchen and silently cut thick slices of cheese for ourselves. My father drinks a cup of red wine. Then we walk to the barn. Coop is already there, raking the soiled straw, and soon we are milking the cows, our heads resting against their flanks. A father, his two eleven-year-old daughters, and Coop the hired hand, a few years older than us. No one has talked yet, there’s just been the noise of pails or gates swinging open.
Coop in those days spoke sparingly, in a low-pitched monologue to himself, as if language was uncertain. Essentially he was clarifying what he saw—the light in the barn, where to climb the approaching fence, which chicken to cordon off, capture, and tuck under his arm. Claire and I listened whenever we could. Coop was an open soul in those days. We realized his taciturn manner was not a wish for separateness but a tentativeness about words. He was adept in the physical world where he protected us. But in the world of language he was our student.
At that time, as sisters, we were mostly on our own. Our father had brought us up single-handed and was too busy to be conscious of intricacies. He was satisfied when we worked at our chores and easily belligerent when it became difficult to find us. Since the death of our mother it was Coop who listened to us complain and worry, and he allowed us the stage when he thought we wished for it. Our father gazed right through Coop. He was training him as a farmer and nothing else. What Coop read, however, were books about gold camps and gold mines in the California northeast, about those who had risked everything at a river bend on a left turn and so discovered a fortune. By the second half of the twentieth century he was, of course, a hundred years too late, but he knew there were still outcrops of gold, in rivers, under the bunch grass, or in the pine sierras.
There was a book, not much more than a pamphlet with a white spine, I found high on a shelf in the mudroom of the farm. Interviews with Californios: Women from Early Times to the Present. As most of those women did not write, archivists from Berkeley had travelled with tape recorders to capture these lives and the ambience of the past. The monograph included accounts dating from the early 1800s to the present, from ‘The Dictation of Doña Eulalia’ to ‘The Dictation of Lydia Mendez.’ Lydia Mendez was our mother. It was here in this book that we discovered the woman who had died the week Claire and I were born. Only Coop, among the three of us, who’d worked on the farm since he was a boy, had known her as someone alive. For Claire and me she was a rumour, a ghost rarely mentioned by our father, someone interviewed for a few paragraphs in this book, and shown in a washed-out black-and-white photograph.
All the people in the book had a humility, a sense that history was around them, not within them. ‘We grew up in the Central Plain, north-east of Los Angeles, where my father worked the asphaltum pits. I married when I was eighteen, and that night we danced so many times to “La Voquilla,” and “El Grullo”—the violin players and guitarists, my husband said, were the best in the region. The trestle table with food was set up by the great rock in the pasture. My husband’s father landed thirty years earlier in San Francisco, and the same day, I am told, he caught the steamer to Petaluma, and built this house. By the time I arrived here there were a thousand laying hens. But my husband did not want others working on the farm so we kept only dairy cattle and grew corn—foxes were killing the hens and it took too much trouble to protect them. There were other animals in the hills— bobcats and coyotes, rattlesnakes in the redwoods, I saw a mountain lion once. But the devil’s curse was thistles. We fought to cut them back. The neighbours never did it right, and their thistle seeds flew onto our property.