Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [8]
Coop finished the cabin and inserted a large window that allowed him to look out on the trees. Then he began work on the deck. By seven each morning the others could hear the echo of his hammer ricochet down into the valley. He had insisted on working alone, and the only living thing to keep him company during those months of building was Alturas the cat, who roamed everywhere and never settled within anyone’s sight. Now and then the cat took a formal walk along the narrow man-made path that crested the hill but those were his only steps into their world. Though whenever Coop looked up from his carpentry, he’d see Alturas watching him, half hidden by the crest of the hill, and the cat would then lower his head and disappear from view. No one had ever seen the cat sleep, no one knew what the cat lived on. Yet when the great storm overtook the region the following winter, none of them assumed Alturas had perished.
Coop used rippled sheets of corrugated iron for the exterior walls, saving wood for the eventual deck. He had poured concrete pilings, which allowed the deck to end in mid-air, ten feet above the slope of the earth. He took his time, hammering down the planks, letting himself be diverted easily by a hawk or its shadow, or by mist moving like that glacier through the slope of trees. He felt himself gregarious in this solitude, though what happened a short while later may have been the result of his seeing no one for weeks. There was a hunger in him for something as simple as the sharing of a laugh or a touch.
Was what happened a sin or a natural act? You live within the crucible of a family long enough and you attach yourself to what you gaze on as a boy or a girl, some logic might say to explain what took place on that deck, in the silence where there was no hammering, a silence as if no other life was being lived.
Neither one of them had made a move before the other. It felt as if one heartbeat was at work. Anna—who used to leap around like a boy or a dog; the one who’d broken her wrist, which Coop had splinted up with willow before he drove her to a sawbones in Petaluma, and who dared her sister to walk across the highway by the reservoir blindfolded (‘I’ll pay you, Claire’) and, when Claire didn’t, did so herself; the one who read so constantly and carefully she always had a frown, as if gazing at a fly on the end of her nose—one day began walking up the east ridge to his cabin in sunlight, along the curving path the cows, and sometimes Alturas, took. She passed the tree with the pesticide bag hanging from its low branches, under which cattle gathered to escape the swarms of flies and mosquitoes, then walked through the circular corral. Coop, she thought, must have finished lunch by now. It was almost two. She closed the second gate to the corral, and as she drew the chain around the post and snapped it, a sudden and heavy rain began, so whatever she wore was transformed. Everything felt heavy, was darker. And then, after a few minutes, the rain ceased.
Coop was sitting, unaware of the brief shower, on the edge of the deck looking towards the thousand or so trees on the facing hill. There wasn’t a creak as she moved across the new wood. Wind swept across the deck. He turned and she stepped into his gaze. The rain light made his face a shadow.
You’re wet, she began.
Is that true …
His casual voice saying nothing more, abandoning her.
It would take a bird five minutes to swim through the air all the way back to the farmhouse, she thought. It would not, of course, move so formally, it would use sweeps and curves, preferring diversions, and be influenced by the surface of