…They stood at the tall windows of Hazel’s apartment watching the black Electra pull up to the curb.
“Uncle Yick! Uncle Yick’s here,” shouted Ram to the others.
“Honey, you and the other boys go down to the car and give your Uncle Yick a hand bringing up the presents. You kids do that, unh-huh,” Hazel said cheerily, gesturing with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
The boys tore down the two flights of stairs emerging into the cold air and ran to the car where Yick emerged with a stogie between his teeth while he greeted them.
“Alright, alright now,” he said. “Let me open up the goddamn trunk.”
Yick loaded each one of them with as many presents as they could carry. They followed him back up the stairs to the apartment where a Christmas record was playing.
Music played all afternoon and early evening—Bing Crosby and Perry Como, Dean Martin and Judy Garland—and liquor flowed in the adults’ room until the maid Hazel hired for the occasion would announce that dinner was ready. Then the double doors from the living room to the dining room would open. The adults would meander in and join Ram and his brothers and cousins who’d been sequestered there during the cocktail hour. There would be ham and potatoes and cabbage and beets and hot biscuits and butter and gravy and turkey and dumplings, and after Father Brooke said grace, they would all raise a toast with crystal glasses celebrating their good fortune and saluting the holidays…
…The phone was ringing, Ram realized. He turned off the water, grabbed a towel, wrapped himself in it, and picked up the receiver. “I’m here,” he said.
“It’s Phil.”
“Phil who?” asked Ram, momentarily confused.
“Phil Le Gris, you idiot.”
“I’m sorry, man… I was in the shower, sort of lost in the shower as it were.”
“Uh-huh. You okay, Ram?”
“I’m fine.”
“Okay, listen, I spoke to Jill about your visit. She’s cool with three nights, but after that, you’re on your own, bub.”
“I can stay at a hotel if I need to. Tell her thanks and I owe you guys a dinner somewhere.”
“I know a place called Port’s.”
“I was thinking Musso’s.”
“Sure, whichever you want. Listen, when are you getting here?”
“Tuesday. The lunch meeting with BB is on Wednesday, I think.”
“Give me a call when you hit town and we can coordinate where we’ll meet up, maybe The China Club. You can buy cocktails.”
“Fine, I will do that. I’ll call you later, when I get back from dinner with my Aunt.”
“I want a full report. Happy St. Paddy’s Day.”
“The same to you. I gotta go. I’m running late.”
It was pitch black with no moon and there were puddles in the parking lot. Ram was dressed in a sports coat, turtleneck, and black trousers. Hazel insisted on men being properly attired for dinner and Ram didn’t risk disappointing her. It was 8:15 when Ram pulled into the Crystal. He found a space in the back, circled around to the padded double doors, and entered.
It had been so long since he’d been here that Ram wouldn’t have recognized the place for what it was—Yick’s St. Patrick’s Day’s shrine—until he saw the green goat standing under a table. In Yick’s time, it would have been a pig.
“Something else ain’t it?”
“That’s not what I was thinking, but yeah, it is,” Ram said.
Ram looked at the man who started the conversation. He said he was a welder from San Pedro who was passing through.
Something else all right, Ram agreed silently, thumbing through the catalog of memories he had of Yick and St. Patrick’s Day… The bar owner took Ram aside and explained the change in livestock. “Goats are cleaner,” he said.
Ram remembered His Honor and the green pigs, Yick’s St. Patrick’s Day pranks, like dyeing the city’s water supply green. He remembered Yick and his friends singing Irish songs, the dusted-off brogue, the green derby His Honor reserved for ‘the glorious day’ as he called it. Ram swallowed hard as the memories came up, including that of Yick’s wake. Then he recovered and was back in the moment. “Excuse me,” he said. “I have to find someone.”
Ram walked to the back of the room, then into the hallway. At the end of it was a small desk in front of the dining area. A young woman in her early twenties was there, dressed in jeans and a white, buttoned-down, long-sleeved shirt. She had a green ribbon in her hair and looked up as Ram approached her.
“Is there something I can do for you? Maybe dinner?” she offered blandly.
“I’m supposed to be meeting someone, my aunt—”
“—I guess you’re Ram, right? I’ll take you to her table.”
Ram followed the hostess as she wound deep into the dining room, stopping at a banquette in the back where Hazel was seated. She had on a white printed pants suit, matching her white hair that hadn’t been done recently. She was wearing pearls and dark glasses and a screwdriver sat in front of her. She raised it to Ram as he approached. An empty glass stood nearby.
“Ram, honey, come here and give your old Aunt Hazel a kiss.”
Ram did as he was directed; the scent of alcohol mildly strong.
“You look wonderful,” Ram smiled.
“I’m okay, honey. I do what I can. Happy St. Patrick’s Day. Let’s have a drink and we’ll toast Uncle Yick.” Hazel said. “Honey, do you have a light?” she asked, producing a pack of Virginia Slims and pulling one out.
“Somewhere I do.”
Ram fumbled about in his jacket and found a Bic. He spun the wheel and held the flame to his aunt’s cigarette, following her movements as she bobbed toward it, trembling, the same kind of tremor that Ram’s dad had.
“Your Uncle Yick, wasn’t he just a kick?”
Ram agreed that he was and they spent the next half-hour trading reminiscences, which Ram sometimes noted in his notebook whenever a colorful episode of Yick Le Doir’s life was recalled.
John Pierce “Yick” Le Doir was the last of his generation, just as Ram was in his, just as Ram the First was in his, the first-generation of native-born Sagrada Le Doir’s. Ram remembered the time that summer of his undefined malaise in Red Bluff, when he finally got Hazel to open up on her family.
They were sitting in the den by the picture of the young men, when Ram turned to his Aunt and said, “This one here. That was Uncle Ike, right?” His Aunt nodded in assent. “My dad said he had an ice factory,” Ram said.
Hazel took a long sip from the drink and looked at her nephew, a strange expression on her face. She shook her head and laughed softly. “Well, he did once. He owned an ice factory, yes, but he lost it. Lost it and everything else he owned—just like all his brothers did except for your Uncle Paul.” Ram asked Hazel how he lost it. How do you lose something as big as an ice factory? Ram wondered. His aunt sighed, took another drink, and stubbed her cigarette out. “Honey, what I’m about to tell you is between you and me. You’re not to tell Yick about it and you mustn’t tell your father. God, he’d have a fit! Your dad thinks of himself as our family’s historian, and so he is in his own way, but your dad only tells part of the story, about the Pierce side of the family and the land grant and the Gold Rush and the Donner Party and all such like. Your dad wants you to know the good things about his family and they did many good things, but there’s another part of the story that he doesn’t tell. Oh, what the hell,” Hazel said, draining her glass and holding it out for Ram to refill. “You’re gonna learn it sooner or later, and you’ve been pestering me all summer long, so I’ll tell you some of what you don’t know.”
…Like his dad’s version, Hazel’s also began in Ireland, in Kerry, on the Dingle Peninsula near Inch. But where Fran’s version had Charles Le Doir arriving directly in New York after leaving Cork, Hazel’s had an interval between the two: Charles O’Dwyer transformed himself into Charles Le Doir and it happened in Paris between 1844 and 1846. In Hazel’s
version, Charles O’Dwyer bought a new identity in France and lingered in Paris awhile before arriving in New York City in the late autumn of 1846.
Hazel told Ram that the money Charles had was nearly exhausted when he got to New York. He used the last of his funds to rent a third-floor apartment in Chelsea and buy a new suit. In a week, he had a job working for Horace Greeley’s New York Herald as an assistant copy editor. A month later, he was promoted to reporter. When news of the Gold Rush struck New York City in the summer of 1848 with the story of James Marshall’s discovery of gold in the Sutter Mill tailrace, Greeley sent Charles to Sagrada, California to report it.
Over the next three months, until December of 1848, Charles Le Doir filed stories on the Gold Rush. His last story was one reporting the exorbitant costs of goods in Sagrada. In this dispatch was also a personal letter to Greeley, submitting his resignation. Then Charles went into business with a man named Isaiah St. Claire, operating a butcher shop called the Paragon Meat Company.
“Within ten years, your great-great-grandfather had a fortune,” said Hazel, nodding. “The Gold Rush made him rich selling meat to the miners.”
The stories came out in a torrent that afternoon. She told Ram how Charles had married well and had seven sons, six of whom survived, and that the one who didn’t—the second son—had fallen to cholera in 1864, a year after the last son in that generation of Le Doir’s—Reynolds Aloysius Muir Le Doir—was born.
She told Ram of the succeeding generation descended from the sixth son, Thomas, the banker, her great-grandfather, and how he married well into the St. Claire family and how Thomas’ s third-born son, Stanford Francis, also married well, into the Pierce family, the pioneers who had the land grant and rescued the Donners; that Thomas and his wife Hazel had six sons, five of whom survived, and that her father—Hazel’s and Fran’s and Charles’ and John Pierce “Yick” Le Doir’s father—Stanford Francis Le Doir Sr.—was the third-born son in his generation, and that when she and Ram’s father were young, they would go to the old mansion and slide down the banisters of the staircase between the second and third floors. “We still had plenty of money thenan, Ram, the Le Doir’s did… Then it was gone, just like that, pfft.”
Hazel told Ram more about the Le Doir’s then he had ever heard from his Dad. She told Ram how Charles Le Doir went from reporter’s rags to land baron’s riches in less than a decade, moving up the social scale in Sagrada, acquiring new lands in Sagrada and Royo and Salisal counties and the big ranch in Arizona near Wikiup just before he died, and how the rumors that followed Charles’ accumulation of wealth and prestige and political power all seemed to wind back to the meat he supplied to miners…
“…What brings you up to Red Bluff other than St. Patrick’s Day at the Crystal? Did you see that green goat they have in the bar?”
“I did. Not quite a pig like Yick used to have.”
“He used to take that damn pig with him to all the bars in town on St. Patrick’s Day. It sat on a stool next to Yick, wearing that silly hat of his. Wasn’t he something?”
“He sure was something special.”
“And he just adored you, Ram, even though I sometimes used to shake my head in wonder because sometimes you were not a nice little boy.”
“Thanks, Aunt Hazel,” said Ram, uneasily.
“Well, it’s true. You were a spoiled brat. Too much your Mom’s little boy, and she was never a Le Doir.”
“I’m not so sure she regarded that as a liability, Aunt Hazel.”
“Yeah, she was too good for us.”
“She felt it was the other way around. That you felt you were too good for her.”
“Well, we were the Le Doir’s for Christ’s sake, and in this family, you’ve got to measure up. Your mom didn’t measure up to your dad, at least that’s what I felt.”
“I know, Aunt Hazel, I know.”
“And you were always more her son than you were your Dad’s.”
“I know you feel that too.”
His aunt went silent, rooted for a moment in her recollections of Ram’s mother and was about to say something, then reconsidered: “Why are you here anyway?”
Ram said he was researching a story on his family and he had some questions that he wanted to ask her.
“How many times do I have to keep telling you those stories? Besides, your father had all that family stuff. All I have are a couple of old pictures.”
“I picked up a bunch of stuff from the State Library on the Le Doirs and I wanted to check some facts and dates with you. It won’t take long.”
“How long?”
“Maybe an hour or two—an afternoon at most.”
Hazel considered the request.
“Okay, honey. You come by the house tomorrow afternoon around one. I’ll have lunch ready and then you can ask me. Right now, I don’t feel like talking about that. Come on and have a drink. We’ll toast the pig.”
Ram thought of telling his Aunt that he didn’t drink anymore, but concluded it was useless; she’d ignore what he said and dismiss it. Ram found the waitress and told her to doctor the drink order Ram’s aunt was about to place for him. “I’ll be ordering whiskey and ginger ale, but I only want the ginger ale,” Ram said. “Is that clear?” The waitress said it was and came to the table and took the order. When the drinks arrived, Ram and his Aunt ordered Yick’s standby, corned beef and cabbage, and ate their St. Patrick’s Day meal in silence, interrupted only by the arrival of additional drinks. At the end of the meal, Hazel was sloshed but insisted on going into the bar to watch the goat. Ram called a cab and instructed the driver to take his aunt directly home, slipping him a $20 and telling him another twenty was waiting for him when he completed his mission. “Don’t stop at any bars. I don’t care how insistent she becomes,” he said. “Just take her home, then come back here and tell me that you did. Then I’ll give you the other twenty.”
“You’re the boss,” said the taxi driver.
In the barroom, Ram watched the action for a while. It was getting louder, more boisterous. The goat was getting drunk. But it didn’t have the appeal that it had when Yick was alive. Ram grew bored with the scene and retreated to his motel, arriving a little after 8:30. He turned on the television and surfed with the remote until he found a movie channel. He pulled out the clippings again and looked the material over.
He was reading The Stinger obituary of Charles Le Doir when the phone rang. It was Phil Le Gris.
“So how was the party, Ram?”
“Low-key, at least it was on my end. I went to dinner with my aunt at the Crystal. They had a green goat there.”
“No pig?”
“No, goats are cleaner, the owner says.”
“Gotcha. How was dinner?”
“It was okay.”
“Are you okay, man?”
“Just tired, and I still have some reading to do before I call it a night.”
“There’s a party coming up when you’re down here. It’s at Duncan Miller’s house in the canyon on Saturday after you arrive. Should I put you down?”
“Sure.”
“What about Vera?”
“I don’t know what her schedule is. I’ll call her and tell her she’s invited.”
“Do that. Jill and I would love to see her. It’ll be like old times.”
“Yeah,” Ram laughed.
…Those times were well over a decade past, when Phil and Jill still lived in Sagrada and Vera would come to town when she wasn’t doing theater in Refugio, before she’d made her mark in movies. They’d go nightclubbing at the Sagrada clubs and spend the hot summer afternoons boating on the Delta on Jill’s father’s cabin cruiser. Although Vera wasn’t taken with Sagrada at first, she warmed to Jill, then Phil, and was welcomed into the circle of friends that Phil and Jill and now Ram were a part of. One day, Ram took Vera on a tour of Sagrada, showing her the old Le Doir family houses and taking her up the Omochumnes, where the land grant was, showing her pictures of the Pierces and Degnan
s that hung in the old station house that was now a restaurant and bed-and-breakfast, taking her afterward to the graveyard down the road where the Pierces and Degnans were buried. Vera listened to Ram’s history recitation that day—a bright spring day with daffodils blooming and poppies blowing in the soft breeze—but when it was over and they were driving back to town to meet Jill and Phil for dinner, Vera put her hand on Ram’s shoulder and said, “You know, really, so what? So what with all this old history? That’s over a hundred years ago, Ram. What does it have to do with you now?”
Ram waited a long time before answering. “I’m not sure, but I know it does. I can’t put my finger on it, but there’s something I’m supposed to do with it.”
“What? What are you supposed to do?”
Ram turned to look at her. She was lovely in a printed cotton dress, although the wildflower behind her ear had wilted. She had a look of uncertainty that seemed to seek a resolution she wanted Ram to provide.
“I wish I could say. But I don’t know…”
…Vera picked up on the third ring.
“How’s my baby werewolf?” she cooed.
“Not running amok in Kent.”
“Good. Then he’s being a good boy in Red Bluff?”
“Sober as a judge.”
“Sometimes, I think you could use a drink, Ram.”
“Sometimes, I think so too. Like tonight.”
“Why tonight?”
Windwhistle Bone Page 41