Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [2]
‘There was a man further down the Petaluma Road who had a hundred goats, a gentle man. Sometimes he came and camped with his goats in our fields—a special small goat that ate thistles, and its digestion killed the seed, somehow it chewed the seed up properly. A cow doesn’t do that. A cow eats thistles and the seed goes right through. If you hate thistles, you could have loved this man… . There was a terrible violence on the farm next to ours. The Cooper family was killed by a hired hand who beat them to death with a wooden board. At first no one knew who had committed such an act, but their son had hidden in the crawl space under the floorboards of the house for several days. He was four years old and he came out eventually and told who had done it. We took the boy in, to stay and work on the farm.’
This is all of the portrait we own of our mother. Whatever else she might have considered and thought remains in an unquestioned distance. She had spoken mostly of events that stumbled against her, so we had only her affection for the goat man, her brief joy in dancing, the details of the murder on the neighbouring farm that brought Coop into our household. There is nothing revealed here about her pleasures or her intelligence or her compassion. Things that must have been a guiding star for our father. Just two pages about this ‘Californio’ who would die in childbirth when she was twenty-three.
What is not in the small white book, therefore, is the strange act of our father during the chaos surrounding her death, when he took on informally the adoption of a child from the same hospital where his wife was giving birth—the daughter of another mother, who had also died—bringing both children home and raising the other child, who had been named Claire, as his own. So there would be two girls, Anna and Claire, born the same week. People assumed that both were his daughters. This was our father’s gesture that grew from Lydia Mendez’ passing. The dead mother of the other child had no relatives, or was a solitary; perhaps that was how he was able to do this. It was a field hospital on the outskirts of Santa Rosa, and to put it brutally, they owed him a wife, they owed him something.
Now and then our father embraced us as any father would. This happened only if you were able to catch him in that no-man’s-land between tiredness and sleep, when he seemed wayward to himself. I joined him on the old covered sofa, and I would lie like a slim dog in his arms, imitating his state of weariness—too much sun perhaps, or too hard a day’s work.
Claire would also be there sometimes, if she did not want to be left out, or if there was a storm. But I simply wished to have my face against his checkered shirt and pretend to be asleep. As if inhaling the flesh of an adult was a sin and also a glory, a right in any case. To do such a thing during daylight would have been unthinkable, he’d have pushed us aside. He was not a modern parent, he had been raised with a few male rules, and he no longer had a wife to qualify or compromise his beliefs. So you had to catch him in that twilight state, when he had ceded control on the tartan sofa, his girls enclosed, one in each of his arms. I would watch the flicker under his eyelid, the tremble within that covering skin that signalled his tiredness, as if he were being tugged in mid-river by a rope to some other place. And then I too would sleep, descending into the layer that was closest to him. A father who allows you that should protect you all of your days, I think.
More than a century before us, in August 1849, a group of men set up camp in a valley more than a hundred miles north of Petaluma. They built cabins at a place they called Badger Hill and began to search for gold. There were twenty of them panning the streams, standing knee-deep in the icy rivers, and they almost surrendered to the winter storms that overtook them. But within six months gold-laced quartz was unearthed in the place that would eventually be called Grass Valley. A hundred ramshackle hotels went up, and bizarre names for mines