Authors: David Ebershoff
But when drought blanched the year, the mineral spring ran dry and the tourists stopped coming and the speculators turned brittle, and no one could make a living at all.
A regular morning fog shrouded the bluffs and the fields of Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea, the heavy dew bending the brittle bush and the monkey flowers. On some winter days the fog never lifted, and the villagers—Spaniards and Mexicans and Germans twisted together into a wild Californian vine—padded through their work in damp ponchos while the greedy lips of the few remaining longhorn cattle worked the succulence from the cholla and the live-forevers pushing up from the crags. Yet for much of the year the fog would ascend early to reveal the hills and the scrub, the farms and the sea—an unknown paradise emerald in January and February and March, gold and gilded the rest of the year—through which the Santa Fe passed but didn’t stop. The village had once been a marine outpost on the Rancho Marròn, a parcel of cattle land that stretched a half-day’s ride between the Pacific and the first wandlike creosote bushes of the desert. But that was long ago, when the rancho’s allegiance ran to the Spanish king—for whom the highway, still running north and south, was named. But the world of missions and padres, Mexican governors and suede-legged rancheros, fields littered with the sun-bleached debris of steer—horned skulls and carrion and carcasses skinned for hide and tallow—had disappeared by the time Dieter Stumpf beat the odds of side-wheel oceanic voyage and arrived in California in 1866.
The Stumpfs—faithful family of Schwarzwald—owned, through land grant, the sea cliff known as Condor’s Nest, two score acres two miles outside Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea. The sandstone-and-blueschist bluff rose seventy feet above the Pacific, crowned by a trapezoid of field and an arroyo where a lonely puma prowled. The property had come as compensation for the tin cups Dieter and his brothers had produced for the Union Army in the Stumpfs’ tiny hammer-tapping shop. The shop sat deep in the misty Black Forest on the outskirts of Baden-Baden, where waters heavy with minerals had long before earned a reputation for therapy, both hygienic and Providential. For more than two years,
young Dieter had worked late at night tapping his small-headed mallet against the circular sheets of tin,
tap-tap-tapping
cup after cup into shape, curling over the lip with pliers. He produced his cups for the Yankees and the Confederates and didn’t care who won; all he cared about was staying busy and receiving an eventual, if currently unspecified, reward. Dieter was smaller than most boys, with a head almost pointy at the crown, and his face and hands were pruned like an old man’s. Nothing made him happier than working alone, tapping and bending tin, out of teasing’s range. When the Civil War—which from Schwarzwald seemed more like an opera raging on a prince’s distant stage than anything with actual bloodspill—came to a halt, the federal government of the United States offered Dieter and his brothers a piece of land to pay for the tens of thousands of tin cups. But Dieter’s older brothers weren’t interested in land on the other side of the world. In exchange for his share in the Stumpf tinnery, they gave Dieter all rights to the land grant, and happily sent their odd little brother on his way. Yet to Dieter the reward was so great that his immediate hope was for another war. Some might say that Dieter had been duplicitous in supplying both sides, but Dieter himself realized more than others that he had been wise. For he believed that a boy could pave his own path, and that was what he had done, with a mallet and thousands of dull, circular sheets of tin.
The official papers were slow to reach the thatched shop deep in the fir wood, but when they did, and after the pale-faced sister at the moss-walled nunnery downstream translated them, Dieter learned that his offer for compensation was for one of three pieces of genuine American land: a wooded parcel described as prettily situated at the tip of Illinois; a cottonwood plain at the foot of a mountain range he’d never heard of, “the Stonies,” as Sister Anke translated it; or a plot of California soil, up on a bluff, that stretched from an ocean-thrashed precipice inland to a hill rolling with soil the color of caramel. This oceanside land lay situated in a newly formed settlement called Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea, named for its own mineral-heavy spring in which the old and the infirm and the barren and the lovelorn and the Christ-scared washed their feet and hands. One of young Dieter’s repeating nightmares was about meeting a girl—dark-eyed, hair wild round her face—in the dawn but not knowing how to speak, how to shout “Wait! It’s you!” In the nightmare, language failed him, and so he chose the piece
of land, forty acres, where it seemed most likely people would shout and sing in his German tongue.
He arrived in California in September 1866 on a side-wheel steamer called the
Elephant Seal
. Upon taking deed to his land, Dieter, only fourteen but telling the world he was twenty, mistakenly believed he’d better get busy with his mallet or else he and his hinny, Caroline, would find themselves freezing beneath the cruel veil of the first snow-fall. That was how little he knew about where he had landed. The first cottage rose from the pounding of Dieter’s mallet in twelve days. This was the same tool that had hammered a war’s worth of tin cups, and somehow Dieter knew that this mallet would determine more than a few things in his life. At the eastern edge of his new land—which the Baden-Badeners had dismissed as too windblown to be worth anything—tilted a eucalyptus grove, their trunks pink and buckling like the skin on elbows. The grove had been planted by Donna Marròn, who had possessed ill-conceived dreams of a rancho lumberyard. Those trees, gone wild over the years, provided Dieter with his first plank. The cottage’s floors were green and weepy from the freshly cut wood, and the chimney leaned with stream stones. A coal stove, potbellied, coil-handled, disassembled and shipped to California in a crate on the
Elephant Seal
, sat portly on a large flat beach rock. In the alcove, beneath a shuttered window, Dieter first unrolled his horsehair blanket and slept, so tired that he dreamed of no one at all. This sensation would carry him through the years: nightly dreamless exhaustion from the hours in the field, clearing and tilling and planting and harvesting and separating and packing—all that work and only getting by. The hinny and the nitrogen-rich soil and the months of relentless sun brought Dieter no riches at all, only a steady hard life of rising with the bantams and retiring with the silvery moon peeking through the gaps in the tar paper. Each October, before anyone could guess whether the winter would be wet or dry, Dieter would twist himself with worry, wondering if this would be the year he’d be unable to feed his hinny and his hens and himself. His agrarian skills earned him enough of a reputation for the gimpy horsemen who hung around Margarita Sprengkraft’s front porch to tip their hats and call him by the friendly nickname Cebollero, “Onion-seller,” which he translated in his head as “Herr Zwiebel.” The other villagers, some German but many more of Spanish and Mexican blood, trusted him enough to grant him the right
to work the scale at the gutting house or borrow a double-barrel to shoot a bold coyote or kneel at their pews in the adobe cathedral where the waxy hands of Padre Vallejo caressed their chins as he offered the chalice. They asked Dieter to play his fiddle at the harvest dances and join the crew in burning the sumac creeping alongside El Camino Real, and not once did anyone claim he had succumbed to what was called “Californio fever,” something Dieter eventually understood as old-fashioned laziness. The villagers of Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea accepted Dieter in every way but one: they refused to let him marry one of their own. And when he asked why, Margarita, at her counter, arranging bolts of calico, told him how Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea perceived him. “You’re a funny little man. You’re smaller than most ten-year-old boys. Your face is wrinkled and fat like a baby’s. You make us think of a tiny creature stepping out of an enchanted forest. We’ve read about you in fairy tales. You own the worst piece of farmland around, right there at the ocean’s edge. You weren’t meant to marry.” Did she say the word
Erdgeist
? Dieter wasn’t sure, but afterward he would recount it as if she had:
Who would let his daughter marry a gnome? a stranger? he who is not one of us?
Many years later, after Dieter married the girl from Mazatlán with the heart-shaped face, he built a second cottage. By then he was familiar with every pebble in the arroyo and every golden chinquapin and cinnamon tree cresting the hillocks and the intertidal marshes abutting Condor’s Nest. Out by the eucalyptus stand, a great blue oak grew in yellow grass. Lore claimed that a Spanish settler had married an Arcadian princess beneath the oak’s canopy, but Dieter was Teutonically suspicious of any myth that didn’t involve Norns and Valkyrior. Regretting nothing, he axed the blue oak to a stump; and just as easily as the myth had billowed over the years, so it disappeared with the felled tree. But Dieter wasn’t one to consider preservation, nor was anyone else those days in Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea. His handsaw, won in a poker game on the deck of the
Elephant Seal
, drove wide kerfs into the logs, splitting them into planks later smoothed with a file. The second cottage was no bigger than the first. There were three windows facing the Pacific, which for years Dieter had done his best to ignore. But the new cottage was more refined, with a bookshelf and plastered walls and a mantel carved with blue whales. Dieter strung his old horsehair blanket along a wire, securing privacy for the bedroom, and hung, in a gesture
he believed would be inviting to a female presence, a string of washed-up baleen over the door. This cottage, lullabyed with the night ocean, warm from the chimney, cocooned old Dieter and his young bride in their conjugal bed, where they would retire stunned by fate and fatigue. Dieter would smell of the chives and the leeks and the white globes of onions, and Valencia would be perfumed by the owl limpets and the hairy hermit crabs she’d learned to collect during an ebbing tide. The shrouded bed, a mattress stuffed with mule hair, served as the nativity pallet for Siegmund, in 1897, a runt of a baby, bright and dark as a ruby grapefruit, eyes squinty and struggling, and then, six years later, on New Year’s Day, Sieglinde, a mass of black hair marking her from the beginning.
Years later, Dieter would tell her about her infant gray eyes. “Gray as gull,” he’d say, in his accent that Sieglinde thought of as iron and rust. “And we couldn’t tell what color they would end up. One day they looked like they’d fire up and turn permanently blue, and the next day they seemed as if they’d turn as black and slick as a moray. Back and forth, blue and black, black and blue, your eyes changing like a witch’s, as if there were a fire smoldering in you. Blue, like the belly of one of your lobsters, black as that old tooth of mine that one of these days I’m going to ask you to yank out.” Eventually baby Sieglinde’s eyes simmered permanently black, and Dieter, who was well past fifty now and somehow at last suited for his small, wrinkled
Erdgeist
body, attached the plow to his burro Beatrice and cleared the land for the third cottage of Condor’s Nest.
He built it for the children with his mallet, a one-roomer with diamond-paned windows and a tin-and-tar-paper roof and a porch where chilies and laundry dried in the sun. Sieglinde’s bed sat beneath the window that faced the ocean; Siegmund’s pitted-iron bedstead pushed beneath the window that surveyed the fields. Before she was six, Sieglinde had caught a puma pup in her claw-mouthed trap. She spread the cat-skin cozily between their beds, ignoring Siegmund’s complaints that it was like sleeping with a feline ghost. Electricity had yet to reach the farms surrounding the village. The lone kerosene lamp was nailed to the wall above his bed, its circle of light failing to reach Sieglinde’s pillow. At night Siegmund would stay up reading, the lamp reflecting off his spectacles, while Sieglinde would roll into her nightly heaving slumber. She didn’t understand where her brother’s reading
appetite came from, but there it was—a longing that was foreign to her. Dieter made Siegmund read certain books:
A Guide to the Soils of the West; The Gentleman and His Ranch; The Benevolent and Proper Thinking of Today’s Young Farmer
. But whenever he could, Siegmund would open a volume of history or literature. “You’ll die with a book in your face,” Sieglinde would declare, yawning, pushing her hair into her sleeping cap. Siegmund wouldn’t respond, his body and his books huddled together. And Sieglinde—who even at age six had visions of the world beyond Condor’s Nest and Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea—would pull the quilt to her chin and shut her eyes.
Her brother didn’t see well, and she’d always say he had damaged his eyes reading in the weak light. Though his wire spectacles were expensive, he was careless with them—or so it seemed to Sieglinde—the arms snapping or the lenses popping out in the ocean or Siegmund simply forgetting where he’d left them, even if they were propped atop his head. “You’ll go blind from reading,” she’d say, unaware of her maternal tone. His lips would move as he read, and sometimes a whole word would emerge from his throat, as if he were testing out its meaning and how it might apply to the Stumpfs of Condor’s Nest. Sieglinde could see that it was a struggle for him to comprehend the books—it would take him many months to finish one, sometimes even a year—and she wondered what made Siegmund try. “I want to learn for myself. I want to become an educated man,” Siegmund would say shyly, as if such an utterance would expose his soul too rawly. And maybe it did: for already people said things like
Sieglinde’s the bright one
or
I don’t know why he even bothers
or
What on earth can he learn from a little History?
Sieglinde too possessed a vague notion that Siegmund was fighting his destiny, a battle that inevitably he would lose. Even at a young age, she had enough sense of the way things worked in the world to understand that he was meant to be an onion farmer, nothing more and nothing less, and that any attempt to climb out of the hole of his fate would prove futile—and, perhaps, even dangerous.