Run River Read online

  He had explained repeatedly that Christmas was out of the question; he had only a seventy-two-hour pass and transportation was at best uncertain. He would go instead to Mexico, although he did not tell her that. You don’t know how I need you, she had repeated over the telephone two nights ago, and he had answered in a blaze of righteousness: You don’t seem to realize there’s a war going on. Immediately he had laughed, trying to cover not only his pomposity but his deception. It must be clear even to Lily that El Paso was not exactly Leyte Gulf, and that getting to the ranch for Christmas would not be impossible.

  Now when the orderly told him that he had a call from California he felt the resentment return: they were forcing the issue, making him feel guilty. Annoyed with them all and with himself, he picked up the telephone ready to tell Lily once again that there was a war going on.

  “Is that Everett?”

  He was abruptly charmed by her small voice. For a moment it was as if he had never gone away from her, never discovered the siren lure of celibacy.

  “Who does it sound like?”

  There was a silence. “This is Lily.”

  “Not Lily McClellan, surely.”

  “Yes,” she said, and paused again. “Now listen to me.”

  “What is it?”

  She did not answer. He had stiffened, preparing himself for the last-ditch appeal, and now she did not make it, did not answer, said nothing.

  “What is it?” he repeated, remembering suddenly what she had said about Martha.

  She said nothing.

  “Operator,” he said. Then, with some relief, he heard Martha’s voice, controlled and distant.

  “We’re at the hospital,” she said rapidly. “Sutter Hospital. Daddy had a stroke and you’d better come home.”

  “Is he all right?” He realized the idiocy of the question as he asked it.

  “Of course he isn’t all right. He’s dead. Or we wouldn’t have bothered you.”

  All that night he sat in the washroom of a Pullman car, smoking cigarettes and watching the green-shaded lights flicker on and off as the train crawled across the desert to Los Angeles. He probably could have gotten a seat on a plane, but had not, even though Martha’s sharp, precarious voice had finally broken: I said he’s dead, Everett, come home now oh Christ Daddy’s dead and let’s not have any more of that crap about how the lights are going out all over the world, Everett, please, come home fast. The train would be at least two days, longer should he miss the Los Angeles connection. He had wired his father’s lawyer to make arrangements for the funeral. He knew with certainty that although he might see Bliss again, he was as good as discharged now; although he had in 1942 given up his farm deferment in order to enlist, there was no one now to run the ranch. He would ask for and certainly get a hardship discharge.

  That he would not see his father again did not really occur to him until he reached the ranch, six hours too late for the funeral (he had missed the connection in Los Angeles, and by then could not get a flight at all), and found that Sarah had flown home from Philadelphia. “It was sudden,” she kept repeating to Everett, “it was terribly sudden.” “Yes,” he agreed each time, dimly reassuring her as he reassured himself; they seemed to share some burden, the guilt of the children out playing when the trouble happened.

  It was all they shared. He had not seen Sarah since the day of her wedding, in August of 1936. She had been married in the garden, in their mother’s wedding dress, to a boy named Peter. Although she had met Peter at Stanford he turned out to be from Philadelphia, a circumstance which seemed insurmountable to all the McClellans except Sarah. Seventeen years old, Everett had been an usher. He had gotten a little drunk on champagne (Peter had not approved of the champagne, which was California; it had been Peter’s conviction, expressed in company which included two Napa Valley grape growers, that if you could not afford a decent French champagne you did better by sticking to Scotch) and toward the end of the afternoon, when Sarah was cutting the bride’s cake, he had told her and Peter a not very funny but very dirty joke. Peter had looked faintly annoyed. He never looked more than faintly anything. “I guess we’ve had enough of the local vino,” he said, slapping Everett’s shoulder in what he seemed to consider an appropriately fraternal manner. “You ass,” Everett had said, and Sarah had thrown her arms around Everett, laughing and kissing him with white frosting on her mouth. She had been home twice since then, once before and once after the six weeks on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe which legalized the end of Peter, but Everett had been away that summer, working in a lumber camp out of Tacoma.

  Her presence now, even the trace of her perfume that was all through the house (the same perfume: it smelled again like the summer she was married, when the house was full of silver and tissue paper and girls), indicated that this was indeed an event, a crisis, a death in the family. Sad and nervous, she walked aimlessly through the house straightening pictures, picking up plates and putting them back, opening and closing the shutters; through her alien’s eyes Everett saw that what Lily had said was true: everything was falling apart.

  It would be a difficult spring. Lily had not exaggerated; he had simply not wanted to believe her. Apparently his father had not been well for months before his stroke, and had lost interest in growing anything on the land he held so tenaciously. Everett could understand that; he never blamed his father. When it came down to it, beyond making enough to live on, he had little interest himself in using the land. Like his father, he wanted only to have it. The Braden place was a case in point. It was two hundred acres, near Auburn, virtually untillable, deserted for years. It had been in Everett’s mother’s estate. Although Joe Templeton had wanted to buy it, Everett had refused to sell, ostensibly because he planned to develop it himself. He knew now why he had not sold the Braden place. He had thought about it in that Pullman washroom crossing the desert. He wanted, all of his life, to be able to go up to the Braden place and stand on the hill and look up the Valley to the Marysville buttes, and he wanted to be standing on his own land. It had nothing to do with crops, development, profit. He understood, all right, how his father, sick, could have let the river ranch run down. He had just dropped his guard temporarily, and there it went.

  Moved by this example, Everett was on guard, now, armed with the brisk decision, the semblance of efficient appraisal. Their Japanese foreman had been evacuated in 1942, and his replacement, to whom Everett’s father had increasingly left the day-to-day operation, had proved incompetent. Everett had said, when they hired him, that the man was not responsible; “never mind,” his father had muttered, disturbed more than he saw fit to admit by the relocation of the Japanese. “Those bastards asked for it.” It was typical of him to have thought that the loss incurred by an irresponsible foreman would be the government’s; he had apparently never at any point seen that it was his own. On acre after acre, the redwood poles and wire trellises had been knocked down and left to rot with dead vines, unpicked the summer before. Part of last summer’s crop, the foreman told Everett, had mildewed; in the shed Everett found, unopened, the copper sulfate which would have prevented it. Machinery, unreplaceable until after the war, had been left out to rust in the autumn rains; the kiln was in no condition to use, the main road rutted. Even the levee was eroded, neglected all one year. The Army Engineers, as far as that went, were supposed to watch the levees, but Everett did not suppose that the Engineers had been deeply concerned during 1943 and 1944 with the levee at McClellan’s Landing.

  “I kept writing you,” Lily reminded him, never looking up from her knitting. It seemed to him that she had been knitting steadily since his arrival. Whenever she caught him looking at her she would bite her lip, ostentatiously readjust her needles, and knit faster.

  He turned, wordless, to Martha.

  “I never noticed anybody letting me run this ranch,” she said. “I can’t even write a check around here.”

  “We did everything we could,” Lily said. “Your father wasn’t asking for a
ny advice from us.”

  “If only someone had let Everett know.” Sarah closed the box of old dance programs and pressed orchids which had claimed her attention since dinner. “If only someone had let me know.”

  “If only someone had thought.” Martha leaned to touch Lily’s arm. “Sarah could have forwarded us some pamphlets from the United States Department of Agriculture. Or maybe she could have talked it over with Peter.”

  “I haven’t seen Peter since 1939.”

  “This new one then,” Martha said. “I can’t ever think of his name.”

  “It’s on all my note paper,” Sarah said with an attempt at serenity. “Robert Carr Warfield, Jr.” She paused. “Bud,” she added doubtfully.

  “Bud. That’s it. Maybe you and Bud could have put your heads together and gotten this place in shape by air mail.”

  Lily put down her knitting and looked up at Everett.

  He understood: he had never meant to cast doubts upon their intentions. Nonetheless, he would be away another few months until his discharge was processed, and someone would have to take hold. Could they do that, could they get the poles up and the fields cleared and above all could they get the Engineers to do something about the levee before they found themselves floating around the Delta?

  “You tell the men I’m running it and I will,” Martha said.

  “Joe Templeton will help us,” Lily said.

  “Joe Templeton will help us,” Martha repeated. “Oh my yes. Old Joe Templeton will absolutely leap at the opportunity to help us. Yes indeed. Joe Templeton can be depended upon, Everett, count on that.” She had been playing nervously with one of Lily’s knitting needles; now she jammed it into a ball of yarn and walked to the window.

  Three days after the funeral Everett put Sarah on a plane back to Philadelphia (“back home,” she said, apparently oblivious to the pain she could cause her brother simply by shifting the locus of her belonging), carrying a paper bag full of dried hops to show to her children and to the stranger who was now her husband. The hops had been Martha’s idea. “They’ll think I’m bringing candy,” Sarah laughed, nervous as they stood in the rain at the gate. “I should have bought something, they won’t realize I came for a funeral.” Her voice trailed off as she watched the propellers catching. Tentatively, Everett put his arm around her shoulders, thick in her black fleece coat, too heavy for California. She turned, smiling brilliantly and blowing him a kiss. “You come visit us,” she called as she ran to the plane, “come visit whenever you can.”

  After the plane had left the runway Everett sat in the empty parking lot, bent over the steering wheel of the station wagon with the rain blowing in through the open window and the strings of Christmas tinsel stars clinking in the wind between the low buildings, and cried for the first time that he could remember, not so much for his father as for Sarah’s defection, because she had lost all memory of the family they had been on that day when he got a little drunk on champagne.

  14

  “Everett,” she said. “Everett.”

  He turned toward her, fumbling blindly through the wrinkled sheets for her body, meaning to draw her to him in the hot bed and drop back into sleep, wanting only to quiet her.

  “Everett. Please. Everett.”

  He opened his eyes. Lily lay on her back smoking a cigarette. He had been home from Bliss six months now, ever since his discharge in February, and through those two seasons of 1945 he had not slept one night without the dim troubled sense that Lily was awake, shifting in bed, walking around the room or sitting by the window in the dark. (She could not remember, she told him, a summer so hot: she had not been able to breathe for months.) Not until he woke in the morning would she be asleep, sometimes in the chair by the window, her legs stretched out across the low sill and her nightgown fallen from her shoulders; sometimes on the far edge of the bed, one hand flat on the floor, the other flung toward him but not touching him. She would lie for hours then without waking; one morning he had sat on the bed and held her hand for twenty minutes while she lay as if drugged, neither clenching nor withdrawing her fingers.

  “Go to sleep,” he said now. “Go to sleep, baby.”

  “I have to talk to you.”

  He ran his fingers over the moist ends of her hair and across her face. Her eyes were wet. Jesus Christ. How many nights had he heard Lily crying. As some parents sleep through fire, thunderstorms, and voices at the back door only to wake at a child’s whisper, so Everett heard Lily crying at night. Her muffled sobs seemed to have broken his dreams for years. He had heard her even at Fort Lewis, even in Georgia, finally at Bliss. That was Lily crying in the wings whenever the priests came to tear up his mother’s grave. Lily cried in the twilight field where he picked wild poppies with Martha; Lily’s was the cry he heard those nights the kiln burned, the levee broke, the ranch went to nothing.

  “What is it, Lily.”

  She crushed out her cigarette. “I have to tell you.”

  He brushed the damp hair back from her forehead and kissed her closed eyelids, tasting the salt on his tongue.

  “I didn’t want to tell you but I have to.”

  “What is it,” he said. “What do you have to tell me, baby.”

  He did not want her to say it. He had known for maybe three weeks, since that morning (it was the morning the pump broke, the Monday after they had gone to Lake Tahoe with Marth and Channing) when he had gotten up and found Lily sitting on the edge of the bathtub, her head down, her arms crossed as if she were having a chill. Her nightgown was down around her waist and a glass of orange juice was spilled on the pink tile floor. Her hands were shaking, her eyes glazed; he knew she had been sick. As he helped her back to bed it occurred to him that she was overdue that month. He was not sure. She had not taken her eyes from his face as he pulled the sheet over her, and while he tried to clean up the orange juice with toilet paper (for some reason he had not wanted to leave it for China Mary to see) he recalled that she had been sick on orange juice the first few months both times before. He had hoped (so fiercely that it was a constant prayer, now after three weeks as automatic as breathing) that he was mistaken, about the one thing if not the other, hoped that she would not say the words. But he had known she would. He had known all along she would wake him some night. I didn’t want to tell you but I have to.

  He moved his arm beneath her shoulders. Her body was rigid. He would have to let her say it. He was the goddamn priest who would have to hear it.

  “I’m pregnant.” Her eyes were shut tight, as if she expected him to hit her. “I’m pregnant and I don’t think by you.”

  Her voice was as smooth and anonymous as a recording. She must have rehearsed the words so often that all inflection had been erased. He threw off the sheet and sat up on the edge of the bed, reaching toward the table for a cigarette, stalling less from shock than from a sense of anticlimax. Spoken, the words had lost their power.

  Lily had not moved. Well let her sweat it out.

  “You don’t think by me,” he repeated finally.

  She was sobbing convulsively now.

  “Any Mexican would know better.” He could hear the flatness in his voice. “Any West End whore.”

  “Leave me alone.” She was choking. “Just leave me be.”

  “Crystal on your mother’s place would know better. Crystal Gomez. Or whatever her name is.”

  He persisted only because he did not know what else to do, and thought she expected it of him.

  “What do you want,” she whispered, her head turned away from him. “What do you want me to say.”

  “Nothing.” His voice was gentler now. “I don’t want you to say anything at all.”

  She sat up suddenly, as if anticipating a trick, suspecting some incipient violence.

  “You want to know who it was,” she sobbed, almost screaming.

  You want to know who it was. He did not know whether she meant it as question or accusation. Without looking at her, he reached for the shirt and the p
air of khaki pants thrown on the chair the night before. He supposed he knew who it was, if it mattered. He would rather it had been a stranger, someone who came and left. For it to have been someone he knew made the fault more subtly Lily’s: she had at once violated several contracts. That kind of thinking, however, did not apply. No kind of thinking that led to the word “contract” could possibly apply to whatever it was between him and Lily. He would prefer that it had been a stranger but it did not matter that it had not been. It might as well have been.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to hear anything more about it.”

  He pulled on the khaki pants and left the room, carrying the shirt and a pair of sneakers. When he dropped one of the sneakers on the stairs he did not bother to pick it up.

  Mostly because a light had been left burning on the sun porch, he sat down there on the edge of the rattan couch, one sneaker still in his hand, and wondered how long he had been asleep and how long it would be until dawn.

  He sat there the rest of the night, occasionally taking a swallow of bourbon from a bottle left on the table, staring blankly at an album of snapshots Martha had left out. She had been showing their pictures to Channing the night before. (Channing, of course, had missed the point about Martha’s showing him the pictures, had studied a snapshot of Martha on a horse at eleven years old and remarked only upon the resemblance in pose to Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet; had examined the pictures of Martha on the beach at Carmel and been struck not by Martha but by the cypress formations. “They just blow that way, Ryder,” Martha explained again and again with more patience than Everett thought either characteristic or necessary. “They just get blown that way and stick.” It had so irritated and saddened Everett to see Martha spreading out their vacations at Carmel before Channing’s disregard that he had gone upstairs at ten o’clock. “Now, Everett, baby,” Lily had said, that deceptive mildness in her voice, “Martha’s baby pictures do not exactly constitute Mount Rushmore.”)