Landscape: Memory (20 page)

I dreamed about Uncle Maury. I saw his legs blown off in our pond, which was a bomb crater. I was trying to swim to him, to get him away from the shell, but I couldn't swim fast at all, like how you sometimes get bogged down in dreams just when you need to go fast. Duncan says I was all fitful and grabby.

Flora and Father were down by the wreckage early in the morning. We saw them, peering down the hill at first light. The storm had passed and they stood in the various mists down by the water, dawn light suffusing through it, all golden and orange and purple and white. I have much more trouble locating colors at dawn than at sunset. They seem to be everywhere and nowhere.

It was a launch not much bigger than Mr. McKennan's. This one had a cabin built upon it and various hooks and hoists that seemed to be related to fishing. It was a good fifty feet from the shore, but could certainly be reached at low tide, as Duncan pointed out enthusiastically. From up by the house it looked to be in good shape, save for the split across its middle.

Father says We're not to touch the wreck as the man whose boat it was came by and said someone'd sold him insurance on it. He's got to wait till this man can come look at the damage before he does anything and that won't be for some time, as the insurance man lives in Sacramento. So it rumbles and bobs out there on its little perch. Some big rock's stuck through its middle and even the highest tide doesn't raise enough to float it or sink it. Father warned Duncan about sharks that tend to congregate around lagoon wrecks.

The storm seems to have made quite a mess of the woods. In Bourne's Gulch one of the older cedars fell, taking down a whole line of younger trees with it, marking the woods with a sharp tear across the hillside so sunlight drifts in to places where it hadn't been before. It's hardly noticeable from up on the ridge, just a small line across the even trees, but it will change everything on that hillside, given time. The rain will run differently now, and some soil will go, eroded away from where it sat so safely. The sunlight on the forest floor and the changed run of the water will mean new plants in new places. Cedars will eventually grow again in the place cleared out by the fall, but that may be long after we're dead and gone.

We took the ropes off Duncan's boat, watching it steam in the hot sun. Two pelicans lifted off the wreck, circled up into the warm sky and dove straight down into the cold salt water. Sharp and clean.

 
* * * 

21 JULY 1915

Flora stayed out again last night. She and Father must've gone to talking very late. It's made it so lovely with Duncan, not having to be polite.

The pond is full up to its lip. Much of the meadow's turned to mush, all because of the storm. No more lying in the grass for the next few days. Cows frequent the pond now, curling up to nap on a knoll back by the oak trees.

We washed smelt under a cold-water tap in town with Grover. Buckets of smelt all cut open down their bellies.

22 JULY 1915

Duncan nailed down the last boards today. We brushed a whole bucket of pitch up and down, inside and out, sealing every last seam shut and touching up each other's bellies. He says we won't sail until he's done painting his design.

Another note from Father. I found it in my shoe. "John the Baptist had a little fit, some variety of epileptic seizure. So very much (the totality of those numberless stimuli that we mediate through our thoughts with ease every day) flooded his simple mind at once it was as a white flash. An intensity. An infinity of presence. An absence of distinction. An immediacy. Imagine, the totality without mediation, no things to stand for other things." I'd best save it for later.

Duncan gave me flowers. A bouquet of wildflowers from the mesa, all rough and rumpled in his sweaty hand. I was sitting with my dumb book when he sneaked up from behind and held them close by my ear, and out of view. Oh their fragrance, sneaking around me. We made garlands and set them on Father's and Flora's heads.

23 JULY 1915

Ruskin tells me nothing about colors. How can they ever be right, all bound up in oily goo? Around me there is simply light.

We don't see Flora at all after dinners. It's me and Duncan and the dark.

24 JULY 1915

All day at the pond today, the meadow finally dry and the grass so thick and lovely green from water and sun. I did flips from the rope swing, showing off. Duncan did a double flip.

Duncan's done the whole boat in a base of silver gray. He says that's just the beginning.

25 JULY 1915

I've arrived at a small handful of modest conclusions. All of this mulling over memory may have actually moved me, forward, or somewhere.

(1) My painting is glorious. The wet gobs of paint splotching unpredictably are glorious. The hundred different pictures it's been are blessed and divine. Its layers are wondrous, each and every one lying evident in the surface. That I may never actually finish it is staggering. It is a perfect picture of my memory.

(2) Cicero is glorious. His high ideal of finding a way to hold-fixed memories is inspiring, tragic and doomed to failure. His confidence that hard work will succeed in making such a system work is alluring and stupid. I too still wish to be given that impossible blessing and curse, a perfect memory.

(3) My memories form a glorious landscape. Weather washes over them all. Earthquakes burst through them from below. While always changing they are never gone. They shift and rearrange, rolling over and into each other like water that runs down the river to the sea arid returns again in rain clouds. They emerge like trees growing from the rotting wood of fallen giants. It is a rhythm that doesn't end.

(4) Duncan makes me delirious. He is an empty vessel. His body is miraculous, washed in the river of my attentions. When we're completely together we have both disappeared. Is there a word?

(5) It's as if I've found Father's notes inside me. Scary.

26 JULY 1915

Flora took us punting on the pond. She'd cajoled a canoe from Mr. Squashtoe and brought a long thin staff. She sat in the back to punt, rather than standing as the Venetians do, and she pushed and poked us round the pond a half dozen times. Then I punted and then Duncan, the passengers lounging about on pillows in the middle of the boat, eating fresh fruits and sipping lemonade.

Rippling waves tickled up my ankles, shuddering cold in the brisk evening breeze. I'd dropped my feet into the water, sitting on a drift log, watching Duncan paint ice-blue fish scales up the flank of his boat.

27 JULY 1915

Duncan's prow is a perfect spiral spear. Thick at one end and tapering off to a point at the other. He's painted it pearl gray.

We burned a bonfire on the beach, starting late after dinner, the cold sky black and clear. We burned driftwood down by the lagoon, upwind of Duncan's boat. The wood crackled and spit, burning bright as torches and high into the night. Even the wreck, a good fifty feet distant, glowed all orange and warm, reflecting the flames.

Grover, Tyrone and Falillia came, having seen the flames from across the water. They brought corn for roasting and marsh-mallows too. Flora took a photo and we all held stock-still for the long seconds she felt were needed to expose a plate by firelight.

28 JULY 1915

Duncan got me going in the afternoon, laying me out all lovely in the grass by the pond, naked and wet and my muscles all tired and tingling from swimming fast laps. He had me stretched out full, me reaching out above me and stretching my toes to their farthest possible points, all that feeling rushing from end to end and about to burst out of my middle and come when he stood away and let me lie there, almost bursting, looking at me and waiting. I said nothing, just stayed all stretched out, my heart still racing, catching my breath and the sunlight dappling through oak branches and over my brown skin. Then he lay down again by me and started over, very slow and soft, just touching and then his mouth over me again, and the blood just aching in me until I was dizzy and almost dying and up he got again, just standing over and watching me. It went on and on till I was so tired and dizzy I thought I'd passed out there in the grass, blind to the day and my body just raw and tingling, drawing deep breaths inside me. His mouth came over me then and I could feel the full length of me in him and my warm push against the back of his throat, and him working me all up and down. The whole afternoon came rushing through my spine, bursting out my middle and into his throat, like that white flash, that intensity, that infinity of presence.

I was completely gone. I lay there breathing, and sank into the wet green grass. Duncan's arm lay near my mouth and I felt that feeling in my throat. It felt so lovely, the groan and growl of that unconscious song rattling inside me each time I exhaled, buzzing the soft underside of his arm where my lips lay against him. It was nothing more than a sound.

29 JULY 1915

We four went up in the hills picking berries. Father made us wear sun hats and we dipped them in water whenever we could find water. Blackberries warm up hot like hot syrup sitting in the sun. They hang heavy on their stickered vines, and so soft they burst if you touch them too hard. You've got to unch them off with gentle fingers placed flush against their collars, right around the stem. Best of all, unch them off into your mouth. Hot bursting berry juice, boom! across your tongue.

The Seals are in first place, Grover says. But there's still a month and a half left in the season.

30 JULY 1915

Duncan worked on the rudder today, sawing it with the jigsaw so it looks like a tailfin. I painted it, following his instructions, all silver gray and black, very detailed, so it looks scaly like a fish and matches the design he's made up the sides.

Flora's sewing the sail from a white canvas tent Father junked because it tore. Duncan asked if she could cut it kind of fancy, making it look like an enormous dorsal fin.

We played Capture the Flag at dusk on the beach at Bolinas.

31 JULY 1915

Mother sent a note reminding us to go to Berkeley, among other things. Matriculation exams are in two weeks. Flora's excused because Mr. Morton put her on approval from Lowell. Classes in three weeks.

Flora and I climbed the middle canyon with her camera and set up on its north ridge. She took a series of shots across the whole panorama so we can post them up all in a row and see it "just like it is" here. I'm glad her photos don't have colors.

After, we had the loveliest time gossiping, just like we used to at school, but now about the various kids in Bolinas. She feels Falillia is far too intelligent for Tyrone, whose only appeal is physical. I asked innocently if she found Grover attractive, and she just laughed at the very idea, adding, however, that his body would be beautiful like Tyrone's and very soon.

Duncan says the boat is ready.

1 AUGUST 1915

Flora brought the camera down for the launch. It was after lunch and a swim and Father came too. What with setting the camera and attaching all the boat's various parts, it was quite late into the afternoon before we actually put it in the water and christened it with a Coca-Cola. Duncan simply poured the beverage over the prow, not wanting to foul the lagoon with broken glass.

When assembled, the boat is a beautiful silver fish. Its front slopes up to a fine proud snout, thick fish lips pouting in an aristocratic frown. The spiraled spear attaches right in the center of the prow and helps explain the ship's name,
Narwhal
 which Duncan had painted in sky-blue script across the back.

We climbed aboard and got a good shove off from Father, wading in up to his thighs and pushing away. Flora stood on shore and fixed her second plate in place, ready for an action shot.

We drifted out toward the middle and Duncan hoisted the sail. The rope pulled clean and easy through its pulleys and held on tight where Duncan wrapped it round the irons. The wind came in, filling the sail, and we were off, gliding across the choppy water, not even a drop leaking in. Duncan worked the rudder. I lay back on the smooth wooden gunwale and looked up past the taut white sail, up into the blue sky, watching the tip of the mast bend back slightly with the pull of the rope.

We sailed up and down the lagoon, Duncan tacking skillfully to recover ground against the wind, till the sun had sunk almost to the shore and Father and Flora were long gone, the camera packed in its heavy case and hauled back up the hill. We were swift and clean across that lovely clear water, racing on toward Bolinas, then making slow strategic progress back up the lagoon. It was all so pretty a sail. Just wind and water and Duncan and me, and Winky and Blinky the dog, which I remember from when I was little.

 
* * * 

Duncan let the sail down slack, the breeze blowing lightly now and warm, blowing over the hot inland hills. We lay low, back into the boat, watching the warm orange sun wash over clouds and shore and lagoon, turning the thin mast bronze and casting a long, pinpoint shadow across the water. It's another memory whose place I want to find, a moment I hope nestles in with all that matters to me, not slipping away. Duncan and I lying low in the evening, the soft wind washing over all of it and us, warm and close and touching, together in the same boat.