by Dick Croy
“You see,” said Ram calmly, his arm tensed and playing the rope to keep the horse in firm but not rigid control, “as the mountain changes, so must you. Each day now the snow will be less. By August there will be none on the southern face at all. The strong can always change without losing spirit.”
Douglas was quiet now as these two felt each other out. He could feel things more readily than he could construct and verbalize thoughts, and the tension, the communication here between man and horse was as palpable to him as the taut rope which bound one to the other. This is what he loved most about the Indian: this voice that his ears had never heard. How deep was the love and even respect expressed for him in this silent voice, as if he were not Douglas at all—at least not the awkward boy he perceived himself to be—but the man he would become.
Now this silent stream of thoughts and images, words and feelings was being directed to the stallion. And though he couldn’t make out what was being said in return, Douglas felt Jebel Druze reply. Suddenly the horse relaxed. The invisible thread of conversation ceased so abruptly that Douglas, bent forward in fascination following it, damn near fell off the fence.
Ram laughed uproariously. “Come on, winter mustang,” he commanded. “We need to brush that coat of yours. Catherine will want a shine to it that she can see her face in.”
Leaving the mares and foals together in the corral, he led the stallion to his newly cleaned stall in the barn. Douglas again opened and closed the gate for them, then stayed behind to play with the foals, though he knew he should be beginning his chores. They clustered about him, competing for the attention of his gentle hands.
In his stall next to the tack room, Jebel Druze was beginning to recall the compensations of surrendered freedom. His muzzle was buried deep in a feed box half full of the blend of oats, barley, and corn laced with vitamins which, together with alfalfa, made up his summer and stud diet. Ram was almost as absorbed in the sounds of his eating as the horse was in the act itself. There was in fact as much contentment on the Indian’s face as in the snorts and grunts from the interior of the feed box.
Ram wasn’t the man working the currycomb through the stallion’s thick winter coat. He was the attentive, rhythmic combing. And his free hand exploring the coat and the skin beneath it for scars or lumps or other signs of distress to the animal was indistinguishable from the flesh with which it was in contact. Ram made his examination not only with hands and eyes and the discriminating part of his brain, which analyzed the animal’s physical condition; he sent his consciousness out through his horse-feeling, horse-loving hands until he found himself becoming aware of the stallion’s body from the inside.
When the comb tickled Jebel’s belly, sending ripples across the smooth surface of his flank, Ram experienced the sensation as if his hands were stroking his own abdomen. And when the horse suddenly sighed, flapping his big loose lips, the Indian’s serene face momentarily broke into a broad grin. It tickled.
This flowing into and filling the body of another was to embrace that being’s very soul. Ram could do it whether or not the other was actually present, using only his mind and the power of his imagination; for purposes of this regular physical, however, it was best to have a physical body to work with, and this one was in superb condition. A slight tenderness he felt in the left foreleg was probably the result of galloping off balance to the ranch while being led with the halter. He would check it again in a day or two to see if it had disappeared. In the meantime Ram put his hand on the sore muscle and sent energy into the foreleg he was temporarily sharing with the animal.
Combing and examination complete, he began to smooth the stallion’s smoke-gray coat to a deep luster with a bristle brush. The combing had removed a lot of loose hair and under the brush the coat gradually became as sleek as smoked glass. The stallion had spoken to him last night in urgency. Even the weather and landscape in his dream had been a warning of impending crisis. Ram sensed it was for this crisis that he had come to the ranch in the first place, almost 20 years before, when Catherine’s mother carried her in her womb. It was the mountain that had sent him then and it was the mountain that had spoken to him last night through the stallion. A great wind, howling under a sky yellow with smoke from a vast and distant fire: destruction. That was the first message of the dream. Destruction of his own life? He knew that was imminent. Destruction of the land? Destruction of the girl? Destruction of the old to make way for the new?
At the end of his dream the saddleless and bridleless horse had acquired a rider: a raven-haired Indian princess—Catherine’s dark sister, her shadow, to whom Ram had introduced her years ago in an initiation ceremony that had seemed a wonderful game of make-believe to the child. This would be Catherine’s summer of change; he must speak to her soon after her arrival. The dark sister had spoken mutely to Ram and she would have her way. How that would affect the young woman in his charge would ultimately be up to Catherine. But his preparation could make all the difference.
“When you spose Cathrun’ll be here, Ram?”
He hadn’t seen the boy this excited since the last time she was here. Douglas walked into the barn and up to the stall with that pronounced farm boy sway of his while Ram continued to give the stallion’s scruffy range land coat a gloss that was nearly translucent. The Indian smiled, more in the eyes than on his lips, which scarcely moved. His serene almost Buddha-like expression was in marked contrast to the innocent unreined excitement on Douglas’s face.
“I don’t know who is more anxious for her arrival, Douglas: you or Jebel Druze. To look at him, he thinks only of eating. But I have seen all morning that he senses her coming. You see, to him, this brush and the comb belong to her. My handling them tells him she comes.”
“You know how I’d know, Ram, even if nobody’d told me? Because summer’s a-comin’ and Catherine’s been here every summer I can remember.” His youthful face was full of pleasure from the clever deduction.
“That’s right, Douglas. Our Catherine is a summer mustang.” The boy didn’t get this; his eyes revealed a brief struggle to make sense of the remark and so did his jaw, which fell open as it customarily did when he was concentrating. Usually he caught himself. Ever since his Aunt Lucille had said it made him look like he was trying to trap flies, he’d been self-conscious of the habit.
He noticed that no one else on the ranch ever had their mouths open long enough for anyone to think they could possibly be trying to trap flies with them—except maybe for Uncle Normund in the evening, when he’d start to yawn. So when he’d catch himself at it, Douglas often snapped his mouth shut so fast he could almost have bitten a fly foolish enough to be there in two. He didn’t like that thought either. Sometimes he did bite his tongue, making him angry with himself and Aunt Lucille as well.
“Do you spose Cathrun’ll ever come up here and not go back? Do you think she might ever live here?”
Ram kept brushing. He’d heard this question several summers in a row. “She might. But she might be unhappy living here all the time. She’s a city girl more than she realizes.”
The boy held on to that a moment. “What do you mean, Ram?”
“Catherine’s place is with people, Douglas. Where ideas become things. Where young minds are pulled, to make the world. Cities are the beehives.”
“I wouldn’t want to live in no city,” the boy said disgustedly. “They look too dangerous, an’ there’s too many people. I hate to think of Cathrun living in a city like Sam Fra’cisco.”
“No, the city’s no place for us, Douglas. But it is part of our world. It concerns us. If the bees lost interest in our orange trees, do you suppose we could learn to drink lemon juice?”
Douglas didn’t need to answer. So powerful was the Indian’s command of his imagination it was as if Ram had just given him a drink. He grimaced and his eyes registered a fleeting look of betrayal.
“And if they stopped visiting our orchard altogether, we would have no more honey. The hive and the orchard need
each other.”
“I know you’re not talking about bees’ honey,” said Douglas. He was getting restless.
“I know you do. What do you think human honey is?”
The boy thought. And though his mind pretended to be tired and even to swell slightly so that it hurt his head, he did not give in to the feeling. Ram had taught him how to relax when this tension became unbearable. Douglas knew the term “developmentally disabled.” It was ugly to him: a cold gray lump he sometimes felt in his chest when he heard it. At other times the feeling it conjured up seemed to hang over him like a clammy dark cloud or a kind of fog. He could never quite grasp it but he knew what it meant: that he was slow. Aunt Lucille had even implied that there were things he could never do, though she had hastened to reassure him that what he liked best—working outside with Ram and Uncle Normund and the horses, learning to do more all the time by himself—these things would always be there for him.
But Ram, who knew more even than Aunt Lucille, never acted as if there was anything he couldn’t do. Ram never made allowances for any “slowness”. In fact at times like this he seemed to Douglas to be challenging him; he had shown him how, instead of struggling to make his mind work, to trust it to come up with answers on its own. So Douglas told himself to relax, feeling himself in Ram’s hands now.
A picture in his mind revealed the hives in the small citrus grove down by the creek. He saw bees flying out to the orange and lemon trees, with others returning in the same loopy flight patterns, bobbing and circling in what Ram had told him was a dance that told the rest of the hive where the sweetest blossoms could be found: not only the direction but how far as well. Inside the hives, as he had observed many times when Ram and Uncle Normund gathered the honey, worker bees were clustered over the face of the honeycombs, making cubicles for the brood and storage space for the honey out of the waxy substance they took from their own bodies somehow. And there was the golden dripping honey itself, making his mouth water even now just seeing it in his mind, tasting it even.
But what did this vivid picture have to do with what Ram was trying to tell him about the city? Douglas had a different feeling now about the place Catherine chose to live, how it affected her and why she always returned there even though he knew how much she loved it here at the ranch—but his mind had no idea what to make of this vague sense of being there himself.
The Indian saw that Douglas had come this far—that he was experiencing the human swarm in the city, with no more thought of how to relate to it than bees themselves give to their communal activity. “Just feel it, Douglas. All those bodies around you have nothing to do with it, do they. It’s the work. The cooperation. Working together.
“You see, here we do the same thing, but it is with the forces of nature that we cooperate. We are more open here. In the city,”—and here Ram stopped brushing to bring his hands together so that the fingers reached out to one another a few inches apart—“in the city the forces are more concentrated. Catherine is needed there, to work with other people, and we must help prepare her.”
Douglas liked this idea, if finding it difficult to understand what Catherine was being prepared for, or why it should take place here instead of in the city, where Ram had said she was needed. The main thing was that he had said, “We must help prepare her.” Douglas too. It suddenly looked as if this summer was going to be even more special than he had been anticipating for so long.
The boy’s face virtually exploded and he would have let out a great whoop of delight had he not learned to be more restrained around the horses—especially the stallion. He caught himself at the last moment and threw a big adolescent hand over his grinning mouth, hunching his shoulders up around his head to hide his embarrassment. Then he turned and, walking swiftly until he reached the open end of the barn, broke into a joyous, headlong gallop toward the corral. “I’m gonna feed the A-rabs, Ram!” he yelled back over his shoulder.
In the kitchen of the rambling frame house beneath the shade-giving live oaks, Lucille looked up in amusement from her baking. She understood Douglas’s exuberance; she shared it. Life needed periodic celebrations like this anticipation of Catherine’s arrival. She sneaked a look at her creation in the oven, then returned to the potatoes she was peeling in the sink.
She’d had Catherine’s room ready for a couple of days now. It was all aired out and there were wildflowers in two big vases, one on the bureau and the other on the night stand beside her bed: California poppies, thistle, lupine, pink and lavender fireweed from a burned hillside that had been struck by lightning last fall; clover, field daisies, wild lilies and, from Shasta itself, brought down by Ram at Lucille’s request, tall tubular red, lavender and blue penstomen, called “beard tongue” from the fuzzy stamens that curled up from the deep belled throats of these mountain flowers.
Between the sheets on the brass bed, Lucille had even put a sachet of dried rose petals from her garden. When Catherine pulled the covers back, the marvelous fragrance would not only welcome her to the ranch all over again but would take her back in a flood of memories through all the summers she had spent here since she was five years old. Lucille smiled at the thought.
Yes, celebration was so good for the soul. This girl was like kin to her and more. There’d never been any of the competition between them that existed between Catherine and her mother, none of the constant testing a child subjects its parents to. Just a firm friendship begun in love and nurtured these many summers in the wonderful life they shared here at the foot of the mountain.
Lucille had been careful not to usurp Elizabeth Conrad’s place in her daughter’s heart, nor to conflict with her ways of rearing the child, then adolescent, now finally the young woman Catherine had become. It was this restraint—coupled with a deep rapport which Lucille had long believed was neither coincidental nor simply the result of their influence on each other over the years, but was obviously part of Providence’s plan for bringing their lives together for their mutual instruction and reward…it was these features of their relationship that kept it spiraling into further and further reaches of understanding and sensitivity. Loving and learning from each other, they withheld nothing but the demands that a mother and daughter so often unconsciously make on each other.
She picked up the yellowed, brittle recipe for the banana-nut bread baking in honor of Catherine’s return and slipped it inside the cookbook she had pulled down from the shelf for the occasion. The years had been far kinder to Lucille than to the crumbling piece of paper. Mellowing her body while taking little of its inner fire, they had given her the quality of Indian Summer, accentuated by the crow’s-feet at the corner of her eyes and the fine mesh of lines which gave her whole face the burnished texture of a leaf beginning to glow with the warm colors of autumn.
As she stood on tiptoe to replace the recipe book, her husband of more than 40 years, sweaty and grimy from work, slipped up behind her and pushed the heavy book into place.
“Why thank you, Normund,” she said, genuinely pleased by both his thoughtfulness and his timing. She had heard him come in through the back door, but it hadn’t really registered. Lucille turned to him, the smell of his work heavy and stale in the damp fabric of the cotton shirt next to her face. Though it made an odd contrast with the fresh aromas of her kitchen, it wasn’t unpleasant to her. Their eyes met but Normund seldom gave any outward sign of emotion, and his wife had long ago adapted to this with an “all-business” attitude herself when they were around each other during the day. They had their moments. Normund was like the earth he husbanded, with all manner of secrets beneath the surface.
He pulled a pitcher of ice tea from the refrigerator and took down from the cupboard a glass that at one time had contained jam. He poured the tea and took a couple of big satisfying gulps before addressing his wife. His question had a gentle edge of mockery in it.
“That Catherine’s nut bread?”
Lucille snorted good-naturedly. “Catherine’s and yours. You’ll eat as m
uch of it as she will.”
Grunting, not quite smiling, into his refilled glass, Normund drained it and set it down heavily, then strode from the kitchen with the air of a man with work to do. Lucille looked after him affectionately. God knows, he’d always taken care of that.
Chapter 8
Eugene rode the Custom Harley like a working part of the machine, his weight thrust forward so the shock of the road was absorbed by the flex in the angle between his upper body and thighs. He had an agreement with gravity: he respected her and she made no impossible demands of him. It was a good relationship, very physical: at this speed, an embrace as passionate as it was tender.
He was coming into Santa Rosalia, where, he’d leave the ocean and turn west into the Baja interior. It would be almost 400 miles before he’d have the coast for company again. Then, like a new ocean, the Pacific would be on his left all the way to L.A. From there it was a day’s ride to Mt. Shasta.
He entered the city. It seemed full of a secret joy. The sound of his motorcycle boomed back at him from its sun-struck adobe walls. People watched him and he sensed that they were content to see him go; he did not stir in them the hunger that he felt. And why should he? Life was about to unfold here. Any moment could be the…no, that was bullshit; life was happening all around him. What he felt as “imminence,” the promise of something quietly majestic about to be born in these sunny streets, was simply the present, from which he was excluded by a state of mind. He chose to be moving through; he could stop anywhere—right here. (He imagined pulling the bike into the shady side-street which seemed suddenly almost to beckon, to speak to him: Here I am; you thought to seek me far from here and for years yet. But, see, I am the way—quickly! But already he was past the quiet dusty street, its voice less than a whisper remembered.)
Couldn’t he choose to experience these people as his companions, his compadrés? So what if their way of life matched neither his own nor the vision that drew him. Mind-fucking on a Mexican street, that’s what you’re doin’, boy. He laughed inside and felt a sharp warm release in his chest, an orgasm in the heart chakra. He forced all this buzzing energy out into the universe and when it got to his hand on the throttle it lifted his front wheel off the street. Bam! He was outa town and back in his trip tunnel. Somewhere at the other end a patient and undemanding but oh-so-persistent voice was calling.