Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [52]
October 3. Old white trees. We take a brush light in one hand and ride into the aspens at night. There were horses in there, half asleep, walking like an ocean inland. I was there for two hours smelling their necks. I wanted to find one and sleep on her back.
December 5. Bobby has a girlfriend so thin she gets hammered on one beer. When Bobby’s father died, she crawled into Bobby’s bed and quietly embraced him. White-Jacket by Melville, that was Bobby’s favorite book. Men like him, it’s almost as if they are hiding behind depth.
In my work I sometimes borrow Claire’s nature, as well as her careful focus on the world. Though no general reader will recognize my sister, not even she, I suspect, if she would happen to pick up a book of mine. For I have changed my name. Perhaps, if she were reading my work, she might be impressed by my details about halter buckles and cinches in some medieval episode, or by the realism of the swivel of a walk caused by childhood polio. It was a swivel, not really a limp, and I have parsed that walk of hers carefully—how it would be different on a hill, on grass as opposed to pavement, how she could disguise it in a room of strangers.
And like Claire, I have become cautious of what I take in and nurture—the carefully chosen portion of experience. I once read an essay by a writer who was asked to imagine an ideal career, and he replied that he would like to be responsible for just a brief stretch, perhaps two hundred yards or so, of a river. I think this would have charmed Claire utterly, she would have safely put her life in that author’s hands. Perhaps it is because small things repeat their importance on a farm and make them indelible in our memory. She will remember Coop picking her up after a birthday party, and how they drove home along the coast road with the sky yellow and the hills purple-black. And the time he stood on the top of the water tower as the two of us watched him. And Alturas the cat. And probably the strange episode with the fox. I am sure Claire could draw a diagram of the cup of wine and the heel of bread and the deep gold of the cheese on the table at five a.m. in that dark kitchen of our childhood before milking began, and recall how even at that hour it felt raucous with the noise of the starting fire. But then, I remember that too.
I feel I can imagine most things about Claire accurately. I know her. But Coop I know only in one distinct way—as the twenty-year-old I fell in love with, who took one step beyond the intimacy that was handed to him. It is almost natural, is it not? He had grown up alongside these two sisters, an orphan, in our small desirous field. He had taught Claire and me how to build a rail fence, how to grind up a buckeye nut and sprinkle it on the surface of a river to tempt fish. All these rules and habits had created a bond between us. But when I reconstruct the arc of Coop’s life I can take it only as far as the knot of the moment when he, that shy alien one, became my secret lover, ironically at the very moment when he was exposing himself by this act of sharing.
The discovery of us in each other’s arms, under that green sky, a father attempting to murder a boy, a daughter trying to attack a father, is in retrospect something very small, something that might occur within just a square inch or two of a Brueghel. But it set fire to the rest of my life. I was witness to madness—fully mad myself—clawing his body and face with a piece of glass to be free of him, as he held my neck in that grasp. I have come to believe that no girl has had such an intimacy with a father, who was trying perhaps to strangle the devil out of her. Whatever anger existed, there must have been some grains of a fearful love for me. But I did not believe that then. All I thought was that I still had Coop’s heart in me as my father lifted my body out of that cabin, gripped my hand and took me down the hill. I was screaming when