We sat nightly in front of the television when we weren’t at the shrine in the hallway; praying that the photographs and images on TV would be made chaste; praying that the ‘heathens’ would heed our prayers… and while I was praying, or raking the leaves, or running fast so the chill air would intoxicate me, it might be alright. But if it was while I was sleeping, as Fran said it would probably be, then there would be no warning; it would all be over in not even a minute, the terrible rainbows and the glow before the storm, and all this at age eleven…
…the wheel of the Stingray moved slowly through the mud as I struggled to keep up, but they were outdistancing me, Barry and Marty were, moving south down the graded but unpaved roadbed of the new freeway that would be 99. It was my eleventh birthday, and the bike was a brand new one but too big for me to manage. Marty and Barry were far ahead and my frustration grew to anger, then panic, my feet struggling to keep on the pedals as I pushed unseated, riding the bar of my too very big bike, crying in frustration, finally but not finally, for finally I was propelled outward and upward from the muddy track.
Higher and higher I floated, as though in a fast-moving balloon, hearing my own cries from below me, fading, then vanishing altogether as I entered a dimension which was mostly incorporeal; no physical sensation or awareness of my body as the whatever it or I was, that was watched the world flick by in an onslaught of instants. I heard voices in different tongues as they ricocheted through my consciousness, understanding all of them and conversing with those who addressed me personally, and now, physically aware again, could feel and see and hear and smell them as they and we swirled about, guiding and inviting me in where I was welcome, where I was family, and where they had all always been there expecting me. English became German, then it was Slavic tongues and lives, Romance languages and Renaissance cities, and before that, Greece and Rome and Persia and China; then spinning backwards, the people became mountain dwellers, thatched hut village folk, native tribes…
…somewhere in the middle of it all, in the Mideast, in a gleaming white city overlooking a blue bay, a small boy is pulled from his sleep by one of his nurses, who bathe and scrub him until he shines ruby-brown. Then he is taken by a man, to watch a woman being beheaded, the sand gleaming white, then spattering red with blood from the heavy blade, the head rolling with green eyes opened as it passes in front of him… Then the melt and smear and moil and compression and it is the Eastern Seaboard in the mid-19th century; a residential street in a large city with a house marked in black crepe and a daguerreotype outside on the door of the woman who died there, while, inside, her husband mourns her, inconsolable and insensate from laudanum and brandy… Then a century or so later, a mountain cabin in Colorado or Utah where a couple live quietly in peace sometime around the Depression, getting dinner ready, all parts of all that he is or was or might be, accelerating outward in the black space, the tiny being below him mewling, barely audible but hearing it as though he were him who was still there…
…all is so tiny, so inconsequential from here, just one of a million spinning orbs. Then he is not above it but below it, grass towering over his head, a nonhuman being, a beetle or ant, hearing a grasshopper chewing through the weeds, and then somewhere in the middle distance, the sun circling and setting and rising again, rising and setting ever southward as the season marches toward summer, then back again, then reversing direction, spinning counterclockwise; peeling back the years, the eons, the ages to the Spaniards, the lemur-like natives, the mountains sinking, the valley filling with water, the whales frolicking in the inland sea, the sun spinning faster as day-night-day-night-day-night melds into a spectrum of grays. And seeing it all, and knowing what he is seeing but not understanding it, not even sure that what he sees is self-manufactured, or was, and is and always was and ever will be just peeled clear, a moment maybe ten minutes long that takes a millennium to occur as it reveals all millenniums. Then he was here again, Barry and Marty waiting as he reaches them and both of them yelling. “What is it Ram? What is it?” And him with no answer, for it is beyond the province of words, too fantastic for it to be believed, but too fully experienced for him to deny. “I thought I’d never catch up with you guys,” was what he said…
…I stood on the bright green lawn looking up at Six East, remembering when I was inside looking out. I saw nothing from here to attract my attention and walked inside past the security gate where I showed my I.D. The elevator doors opened and closed behind me. A voice came over the speaker. “Please check in at the nurse’s station, Mr. Le Doir. We’ll call Dr. Aragon and tell him you’re here.”
When I was shown into Paul’s office, I barely recognized him.
“What happened to the beard?”
“I got tired of the look. How are you? Sit down.”
I took the chair opposite my therapist and smiled.
“What brings you to town?”
“Tim O’Shaughnessy’s funeral.”
“I’m sorry to hear. Anyway, how are you?”
“I’m okay. I also had to come here for the parole thing.”
“I already sent the papers. You’ll be fine when you go before the board.”
“Remember, a while back when we talked about my quitting my job?”
“Yes.”
“I decided to take your advice, to just be patient and wait… in a way. What I actually decided to do was take a leave of absence. They said I could have six months.”
“What will you do, Ram?”
“I haven’t decided yet. I can’t go anywhere until September, when my parole actually expires.”
“Thinking of traveling?”
“I have some time before I have to make that decision.”
“Will you keep me informed?”
“Of course, I will. I’ll keep in touch.”
“Please do. You’re one of my few success stories?”
“Really?”
“No, Ram, I’m just saying that to be nice.”
I wasn’t sure which of the two I believed.
“Katz and Bardens still up to their old tricks?” I finally managed.
“Oh yeah, they’re still going strong.”
Aragon escorted me to the elevator. In the dayroom, I could see residents playing solitaire, watching talk shows on TV and working jigsaw puzzles. That was me five years ago, I thought.
“Take care, Ram,” said Aragon, giving me a short hug. “Write and let me know how you are and how I can reach you.”
“I’ll do that, Paul, but it might be awhile. I feel like disappearing for a bit, but I’ll follow all the rules.”
“You have to, Ram.”
“Believe me, Paul, I know.”
…from Fremont, I headed back downtown where I sat in Capitol Park for two hours, watching the squirrels play and chase one another, listening to them chuckle as they scratched on the branches of the redwoods and sycamores.
It was close to five on Friday when I walked into The Constitution. The old man was sitting at a table near the front while sunlight streamed through the porthole door. I stopped, said hello, and asked if he wanted anything.
“Larry knows what I want, he’ll bring me one.”
A minute later, the old man excused himself to get up. “Don’t go anywhere,” he said. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
He shuffled out the swinging doors. When he returned, it was with a canvas shopping bag stuffed with papers and photo albums. He pulled out his chair, sat down, and presented the bag to me.
“This is the stuff your dad was after. Here, let me show you.”
The old man pulled out one yellowed file and delicately removed some papers. “This here, this is the original Mexican land grant given to your dad’s mom’s side of the family, the Pierces, actually the Degnans. Here,” he pointed. “See that signature there under the gold mark? That’s Governor Micheltorena’s signature. And that one there is Joachim Degnan, he’s your first ancestor here in Sagrada.”
I was transfixed, and fo
r the next hour and a half, the old man took me through the papers. There was personal and business correspondence from Kit Carson, John Sutter, and William Tecumseh Sherman, from Leland Stanford and William Hartnell, from James Ben-Ali Hagen and John Bidwell. The letter from Sutter was one complaining about the price Joachim Degnan charged him for grinding corn. “You charge me two dollars fifty a fanega, but Bidwell only pays two dollars,” Sutter wrote. There were newspaper clippings—of the shoot-out on the Omochumnes between Joachim and the grubbers who stole his Rancho from him. There were clippings of the corruption trial of Charles Le Doir; birth certificates, death certificates, property deeds, and marriage licenses—all of it on ancient paper transcribed in pen and ink…
The old man pulled out a hand-sewn Moroccan photo album. In it, looking back into me, were all the dead Le Doirs.
“These were my mom’s, and I thought you’d like to see them. There are lots of photos of people in your family, and my mom told me a lot of stories about the Le Doirs, because, in a way, she was a part of your family, too. Here, let me show you,” he said, then began his narrative history.
“The first Le Doir here in Sagrada was Charles Le Doir, your great-great-grandfather. He was born on April 17, 1818 in Inch, Ireland as Charles Aloysius Lyall O’Dwyer, the son of a prosperous ship owner, and he arrived here in Sagrada in September, 1848. That was before Amador and Placer and Nevada counties were even known as the Mother Lode. It wasn’t until I was in my teens, when my mom felt I was mature enough, that I found out how he came by a French last name. Do you want to know how?”
I said I did, knowing what was coming.
“Charles O’Dwyer had been the tax collector in County Cork. He had a public-school education and a wonderful head for figures, my mom said. Not only that, he also had a great desire for what those figures represented. According to my mom, on a Monday morning in 1845, Charlie O’Dwyer failed to show up for work. The previous Friday, he’d boarded a steam packet for Brest with the county tax coffers stowed in his trunk.”
I nodded and shook my head. “My Aunt Hazel told me that story once, some of it anyway.”
“Your Aunt Hazel was a piece of work,” Bookman said, nodding. “She was a beauty all right, but she was mean as a snake toward my mother.”
“Your mom wasn’t alone,” I said. “She wasn’t too nice to mine either.”
“She was a real Le Doir, Hazel was,” Bookman said nodding. “What more do you know about them?”
“The Le Doirs? I heard stories when I was growing up, but they were more about the Pierces than the Le Doirs. Anyway, that’s ancient history.”
“Is it now?”
“Yeah, why do you ask?”
“Well, it might help you to understand some if you knew. For instance, did you ever wonder how Charles Le Doir became a millionaire by starting out as a butcher?”
“I tried to do a story in the Stinger on the Le Doirs once, but I never found an answer for that.”
Bookman raised his beer, sipped it, and said, “It’s all here in this file.”
He pulled out two letters from the file addressed to Hollis Byington, Sheriff of Yuba County. The letters were from John Sutter and concerned cattle rustling on his property. Bookman began reading.
“My Dear Sheriff Byington, I must tell you that my suspicions of my cattle being stolen by organized thieves are supported with facts. Last week, my lead vaquero, Edmundo Vallargas, saw a group of riders drive a herd of cattle across the Feather River. The thieves headed the cattle south. This group of armed riders was under the command of Mr. Charles Le Doir of Sagrada.” Bookman paused for my reaction. I didn’t have one, so he continued.
“There are two or three other letters in here from Sutter to Byington claiming the same thing. These letters were given to my mother by Ram Le Doir, your namesake. You know about him, don’t you?”
“A little,” I said, “but not much.”
“Do you want to know more?”
I felt familiarly uncomfortable, a feeling reminiscent of how I felt sometimes as a journalist when I had part of a big story but was unsure where the rest of it led.
“Go ahead,” I finally said.
“This one here,” he said, pointing to a handsome man of forty or so. “That’s your great-great-grandfather, the man the Mexicans called Joachim… He would be known to you as Jared, and he married Constance Pierce, the sister of Daniel and John, the ones who rescued the Donner party. Your grandfather Stanford Le Doir Sr. married their grand-daughter, Maudie, whom my aunt Dottie worked with as a nurse at the Sagrada City Jail during the 1920s, before your grandmother threw Old Fran out of the house on Capitol because he was such a drunk. Hell, they were all drunks, the Le Doirs were. No offense, Ram, but they were, pretty much.”
“You’re telling me nothing I don’t already know, other than that your aunt worked with my grandmother, and that doesn’t mean much to me because I never knew her.”
“Maybe this will make more sense then.”
He turned some pages ahead in the album—from the 1840s to the 1880s. The Le Doirs from that generation were standing by the same piano in the same pose as the one in the photo that Yick had on his wall. These Le Doirs were my great-grandfather and his brothers. There was my father’s grandfather, Thomas Le Doir, and all his other brothers, none of whom I ever saw or ever heard much about except my namesake Ram Le Doir. In this photo, just like the one on Yick’s wall, all the brothers were in their twenties, dressed formally in tuxedos, standing alongside the grand piano.
“I remember that piano and that old house,” the old man said, “and I remember watching them tear that house down in the 1920s when I was a boy. Your dad was there too… and this,” he said, pulling out a mid-sized portrait of a handsome man in his fifties, seated alongside a woman years younger than him, with a child of six or so. “This man is your namesake—the original Ram Le Doir.”
“And the woman and the kid, who are they?” I asked.
The old man smiled and nodded. “That’s my mother and I.”
He laughed softly, more to himself than with me, then reached inside his breast pocket and pulled out another portrait. It was of a young woman and she was absolutely stunning. It was the other half of the picture my dad had been given by the woman when I was with him at that house in the foothills.
“This is a whole other story… This woman who you see here was my mother. Her name was Paula Jane Leary. Does that mean anything to you?”
I told him that it didn’t and he continued.
“In 1915, Ram Le Doir disappeared from Sagrada. The Virginia City police found him in the St. Regis Hotel. The place was in tatters when they got there. Old Ram had demolished it single-handedly. After going upstairs with one of the whores, he accused her of being a Prussian spy and threw her from his window, which she somehow managed to survive. Then he took a ceremonial sword from above the mantelpiece and leveled the interior of his and the other state rooms in the St. Regis in thirty minutes. The proprietor of the hotel sent him an itemized bill for $5,000, which he refused to pay until a judgment was rendered against him.”
“Are you sure about this? This isn’t some story?”
“Oh, it’s a story all right, but I’m sure about it. Ram told me this when I was six. One thing my dad never did was lie to me, especially not about the Le Doirs. My dad was him, Ram Le Doir,” Bookman paused, draining the last of his beer and ordering another. “Now, where were we?”
“Virginia City and Ram Le Doir,” I said.
“Right,” he nodded, “then on to Sagrada… Ram moved back here but his brothers wouldn’t talk to him and the old man had already banned him from the house. When the old man died in July of 1895 and his wife followed him to the grave a month later, right to the day, the remaining heirs divided the old man’s fortune and did okay for a while. Then came the next generation, there were six sons and five of them survived. Of those five, every one of them lost every nickel they had. By then, the curse had taken effect.”<
br />
“What curse is that?”
“Sutter’s curse,” the old man said. “John Sutter put a curse on Charles Le Doir and his heirs for rustling his cattle and burning down Hock Farm… well, allegedly burning down Hock Farm, I should say. They never proved it, but it happened not long after Sutter wrote those letters to the sheriff that I showed you. My dad said Sutter put a curse on the family. That’s why so many Le Doirs are drunks. Maybe that’s why you were too. I saw that when I used to see you come in here walking like a king, like you were something special. He’ll fall, I told myself. And you did.”
Bookman excused himself to use the toilet. While he was gone, I considered what he said, not sure how much I believed of it or whether I doubted it given the documentation Bookman had shown me. A moment later, he returned and continued his story.
“My mother came out to Virginia City in 1895… The Comstock Lode was going great guns then and there was a lot of money floating around. She wanted to come west and try her hand at something different, I guess. She was a schoolteacher from a good home in Massachusetts… wanted to explore a new world, I guess.”
The old man paused and took a drink.
“She took the only work that was available to a single woman. My mother became a prostitute, a Virginia City whore, and your namesake and ancestor, Ram Le Doir, was one of her main clients—no more than that. He was her main lover… Anyway, one night, an incident similar to the one I told you about earlier occurred… Old Ram was drinking champagne and carrying on when the door burst in. It was Smiley Bookman, another of my mom’s clients… A row started. Smiley pulled out a derringer and shot your namesake to wound him, going for the leg. Shattered it so bad they had to cut it off just below the knee. He never recovered consciousness and died from the wound… You never heard anything about that?”
A burst of something like recognition suffused me. “That’s not the story I heard. I heard another story.” I remembered the story that Hazel and my dad told, of San Juan Hill and the Spanish sniper and the tale of honor. I shook my head.
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