by Tatjana Soli
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For Gaylord with love
How much land does a man need?
—Tolstoy
That odd capacity for destitution, as if by nature we ought to have so much more than nature gives us. As if we are shockingly unclothed when we lack the complacencies of ordinary life. In destitution, even of feeling or purpose, a human being is more hauntingly human and vulnerable to kindnesses because there is the sense that things should be otherwise, and then the thought of what is wanting and what alleviation would be, and how the soul could be put at ease, restored. At home. But the soul finds its own home if it ever has a home at all.
—Marilynne Robinson, Home
Contents
Copyright Notice
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraphs
Prologue
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Part Two
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Part Three
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Part Four
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Acknowledgments
Also by Tatjana Soli
About the Author
Copyright
Prologue
He was a respectable and loyal man, Octavio Mejia, the father of six children, and he had been late to leave that day, treating an infestation of whitefly on the newly planted Valencia trees. It was a Friday evening, his daughter’s quinceañera, and he hurried the stick shift into reverse and stepped hard on the gas with his heavy, rubber-soled workboot even as the car bounced over a small mound under the lemon tree where he had parked for shade.
Forster and Claire had insisted he go on with the family celebration even though they would not attend. But he also was in mourning for the missing boy. Did they not see? Octavio had worked hard his whole life and mainly had a mountain of bills to show for it. The quinceañera had cost his whole paycheck for two months, Forster chipping in a hefty bonus, and even then, his wife, Sofia, and his teenaged girls were not quite satisfied that it would outshine the neighbors’ recent parties.
It was late, the week so merciless it was one only the devil could be responsible for. He, Octavio, the only one cleared to do basic maintenance on the ranch to keep things alive. The police had finally allowed the irrigation stations to be turned on again, the rusting wheels screeching in protest, the hollow thunder of water tumbling down dusty tunnels after two weeks lying dry during record heat. Lizards, believing they had found homes in new cool caves, now dropped and rolled through the deluge of water like judgment, either saved out the end of a pipe or drowned against the wall of a sprinkler head, stunned by the sudden, unfathomable change to their world. As slowly as the police covered the land, it would take them a year to pore over all 580 acres. The immediate perimeter of fifty acres around the house and sheds yielded nothing. The ranch turned a parched, closed face to them. Water meant that the fruit would be saved, the harvest sold, and the bills paid, but it also meant that whatever marks might be left from that night would now be washed away forever.
No, he did not notice the mound, the freshly turned earth, thinking only of gophers, eternal bane of farmers, as he prepared to drive home. But he stopped the pickup truck a few yards away, the engine idling, and tried to recall something that buzzed, teased, at the edge of his memory. He snatched an orange on the dashboard, wedged against the windshield to keep it from rolling back and forth or dropping to the floor to be crushed beneath his boots. It was impossible to tell if the lack of water during the hot weather had done damage. Orange trees died from the inside out, the hurt not visible until long after the crime.
Absentmindedly, not hungry in the least, he peeled the orange, gnawing at the spongy pith beneath the rind before dropping the peel outside his window. The taste was bitter. He had worked the ranch his whole life, eaten its fruit, breathed its air, sheltered under its shade, worn its dirt like a second skin. He was as much a product of the land as the fruit, and yet it had turned strange against him. The roundness of an orange. He remembered what was nagging him. The night of Claire’s birthday an odd thing had happened—a small silver globe went missing. But what did that have to do with anything later? The sorry sight of Claire, found when she did not want to be found, weighed heavily on his tongue. That it had been his pickup driving up the driveway. Easier if it had been a stranger. Try as he might, he did not think that they could pretend, go backward in time to the friendship they had had these many years. The bond they had formed over the land. It was as if the boy had vanished into thin air. As if the land were cooperating in letting him hide.
The sun was in Octavio’s eyes, and he had to shield his face to look up at the towering tree as he ate the wedges of succulent fruit. He was in the oldest section of the ranch, where the ancient lake grew smaller each year because of drought. He seldom came as far, the unmaintained roads making the passage slow and rough, but one of his newly enforced duties each night would be to padlock the back gate leading to the lake. He had forgotten the night before, rushing home for a final dance instruction.
When there were fires, the lake was used to fill fire trucks, or, more recently, water-bomber planes. Before that week, kids from the high school would sneak down there to talk or drink, and the Baumsargs had turned a blind eye to their goings-on. In his time, even Octavio had made the pilgrimage with Sofia when they were courting. The Baumsargs’ lake had been a rite of passage for the young people who grew up in the area. Another thing that would now end.
The neglected lemon tree had grown to a monstrous height, almost even to the pitch of a barn roof, and the unpicked fruit had grown obscene—globular, swollen lemons the shape of footballs, hydrocephalic tennis balls, or further deformed into bizarre shapes resembling gourds, or small, ghoulish animals. Unlike the prim, tended rows of Valencias, Washington navels, and newly planted Eurekas, this was original rootstock left to its own devices. His grandfather had brought the original seeds to the ranch, named the tree Agua Tibia. Octavio thought of it as the patriarch of the orchard, its vigor too crude for the more delicate, cultivated, grafted generations. A section of fruit caught in his throat, and he coughed till it went down.
Much past its prime, the tree was woody, its fruit inedible. Its only purpose now shade. No one tended it. The fruit fell to the ground, rotting and enriching the soil till a fecund, gentle hill rolled away from the trunk. Around it formed a scrabbled, lush garden straight out of the Bible, composed of overgrown coyote bush, Russian thistle, goldenbush, sagebrush and curly dock, needlegrass and wild morning glory and Indian paintbrush. Stray seed of California poppy and nasturtiums. Horseweed grew so wild and untamed that the cottontail rabbits ran in and out unafraid of human contact, while quail worried their way b
ack and forth across the seed-strewn path. One glimpsed near-sightings of roadrunners, coyotes, red-tailed hawks, all lusting after such abundance.
The tree reminded Octavio of the Mexico of his father’s time, reminded him even of the California of his own youth, the way it would never be again. Cutting it down would be like cutting off an arm, sundering oneself from one’s history. A way of life disappearing, and now this. A stray trail of juice trickled down his chin, and he roughly wiped all evidence away. He was late. The gate could wait one more night. He was heartbroken. He must pull himself together.
The boy’s disappearance made him sick. Everyone had always commented that he was wild over Joshua, spoiled him, defended his misdeeds, and the boy loved him back like an uncle. He had taught the boy to drive in that very pickup, its floor usually littered with his chocolate-bar wrappers and comics. But did that necessarily make him above suspicion? The ground itself had turned poisonous, had swallowed him up, and wouldn’t show Octavio where he had gone.
The low sun poured bands of dusty gold down the dirt alleyways of trees. The farm had been worked by his grandfather, his father, and now Octavio, and in the important ways that mattered, the ways that had nothing to do with money or paper titles, he felt it belonged to him, or he to it. Something devastating had been done to them all, but he could only probe the extent of the damage like a toothache.
Part One
Chapter 1
Claire did not believe in the evil of the world, and so when it touched her, at first she did not recognize it for what it was. No pointing red tails and pitchforks as in the movies, not even malice in the heart. Evil as simple as an accident, as boring as the aftermath it brings. Forster saying death would have been easier than enduring what followed. A small, domestic evil as random as lightning, as devastating to those touched by it.
* * *
She had longed for home—a place of connection and belonging and family—for so long it was hard to believe that her struggle to attain it was about to be consummated. Eighteen years since she first came to the ranch. Her only regret that Hanni, her mother-in-law, wasn’t there to share the moment she finally got it back for the family, because what was the worth of something unless it lasted through one’s desire for it, a whole lifetime if need be, or beyond it, into one’s children’s lives also? She couldn’t imagine anything better than Josh or one of the girls taking over when the time came. She looked around at all that was hers: the blush of sunset on her blossoming citrus trees; Forster, coming down the steps from the porch two at a time, wrapping his arms around her. Hers—his love—also.
“Hurry, the girls have a surprise for you. Pretend you don’t know.”
Forster was throwing a party, a Claire-will-live-forever party, since she hated birthdays and their reminder of time passing. Yes, about to have everything, but time itself had escaped her, moved on, made her a little more leathery, a little more tired than she wanted to be. At last she had time to spend with the children, just as they were growing up and going away.
Everyone had been invited, everyone came, barbecue for over two hundred, pushing at the seams of the farmhouse, spilling over onto the lawn, eddying around the rose gardens, the shadowy edges of the stalwart orchards. Her mother and father had driven down from Santa Monica—witnesses to her hard-won good fortune. She took a long look around as if she were about to depart on a journey and would need this memory: the citrus fruit hanging heavy with juice; the leaves on the trees turned ever so slightly toward the last rays of sunshine, showing their faintly silvered backsides.
* * *
In the kitchen, the caterer was scolding a newly hired waiter who’d come in late and ungroomed. In her room, Gwen, sixteen, put on lipstick and mascara for the first time. The guests walked along admiring the healthy rows of trees, the food-laden tables, as Lucy led the younger children in a game of hide-and-seek. People ate as much as they could bear and drank more. Unnoticed, Joshua snuck out from the bar with a bottle of vodka hidden away in a newspaper. Everyone was giddy with the rare sense of work put aside in favor of pleasure.
* * *
As Claire stood admiring the paper lanterns strung across the lawn, her lawn, rocking in the faint breeze, the banker Relicer sidled up to her with a plate stacked high with ribs. Even under the magic golden pink of sunset, time had not been kind during the last ten years she had been in business with him. He looked as severe and expiring as in his mahogany-lined office—aged, pale skin and caved-in cheeks that spoke of a life of frugality.
“It’s a beauty,” he said. “What you’ve accomplished with our money.”
“Money didn’t accomplish this,” Claire said, feeling smug with the last check to him in her pocket. She would put it in the mail after he left. “It just kept developers away long enough for it to provide.” Impossible to explain that the land was alive and fertile. It just needed coaxing along.
Relicer gnawed at the rib beyond simply getting the meat off, intending to suck the very marrow out. A tardy waiter came by and in offering a napkin almost flipped the paper plate on the banker’s shirt. Claire frowned, noticed the waiter’s greasy blond hair, his unkempt nails. She would complain to the caterer. The young man apologized, but the expression on his face, small eyes and large nose crowded together, wasn’t the least sorry.
“The money wasn’t exactly a gift.” Claire looked down at her feet. The moment of sweetest revenge. They would no longer be needing his services; the trees were bowing under the weight of their record harvest; prices were up and the loan would be paid off and the Baumsarg ranch would never be beholden again. A happy birthday indeed. Forster had been right that the place never felt as much theirs since the debt, but Claire knew that sometimes necessity made one temporarily do the wrong thing.
The most devastating revenge: the thin envelope with its single stamp, a check for the full amount, and a simple note requesting the closing of the credit line. Gwen made her way over to the rescue. “Come on, Mom. Cake time.”
Claire looked back at Relicer, happy to be abandoning him. “It’s a hard job living here, not a vacation.”
As she walked with her daughter, she noticed the girl’s first attempt at makeup. “I wish you’d wash that off. It makes you look too old.” When Gwen frowned, Claire relented, putting her arms around her shoulders. “And too beautiful. What happened to my little girl?”
A mountainous tower of frosting masquerading as a cake was wheeled out on a cart, and by it stood Lucy and Gwen, unhappy that Josh was as usual nowhere in sight to sing his part. Raisi, Claire’s mother, offered to go looking for him, but Octavio took charge. The girls sang “How Sweet It Is” in harmony, one part missing, and it sounded strangely romantic and dreamy coming from their mouths instead of the usual James Taylor version that Forster loved to play. Did the girls mistakenly think that Forster’s favorite song was hers also? The girls didn’t know differently because Claire had no time to listen to music, much less have favorites, so on Saturday nights, exhausted from a long day doing errands that had been put off during the week, she deferred to Forster’s taste.
“Where’s Josh for the picture?” Claire asked. He had hit a new stage of rebelliousness that was unfathomable after the docile joys of raising daughters.
After a half hour’s search, Octavio found him drinking vodka with older boys in an irrigation ditch.
“There are going to be consequences to this,” Claire said when she found out. “This is not acceptable. Those are teenagers. Not ten-year-olds.”
Josh looked at Octavio, betrayed. “But they said—”
“You missed cutting my cake. Singing the song your sisters prepared. You weren’t in the family picture. Things are going to change.”
A charmer, Josh held out an orange as a peace offering. It used to be a joke between them when he got in trouble. The most precious thing for the family and the most common.
“Not going to get you off the hook this time, mister.”
“We can always take ano
ther picture.” Forster held the camera, not paying mind to his son’s ruffled hair, his crooked smile, his fingers making rabbit ears behind Lucy’s head, and at the time Claire was angry that the pictures were too silly to use for the Christmas card. “Behave!” she said. Forster was distracted after overhearing Claire’s conversation with the banker, a double impotence—the farm’s loan and this man’s presence lording the fact over them. Forster remained sullen until she reminded him that this would be the last time they would have to entertain the man. “You can give him the check yourself.”
Claire handed him the envelope, then gave him a thumbs-up. “We need you in the picture—”
“Let me take it,” Raisi said, stepping out of the line.
“You have to stand by Dad,” Claire said.
“Allow me.” Relicer had appeared from nowhere and offered to take the family snapshot. A bad omen. Forster reluctantly handed over the camera. But the old man fumbled with the buttons until the dirty-haired waiter reappeared. He put his hand on the banker’s shoulder. “I’ll take over, Pops.”
Claire again noticed the dirty fingernails, and Raisi noticed, too, her eyes clouding. Octavio started toward the waiter, sensing the women’s discomfort, but Sofia called him. “Go,” Claire said. She would handle this herself. The caterer would get an earful soon. Forster escorted Relicer to the car, handed him the envelope, and watched him drive away.
* * *
The night after her birthday party, Forster was late coming home from a machinery exposition out in Pomona. Her parents had left that morning to return home. A night of hot moonlight and citrus perfuming the air. Claire had worked late in the fields with Octavio. Listless from the heat, the kids begged to eat a dinner of party leftovers out on a blanket on the lawn.
After the meal, they played cards while she went to the barn to recover a wrap she had left from dancing the night before. Late into the night, Forster and she had danced in celebration of ending the Relicer part of their life. The caterer had bawled a waiter out, demanding to look in his bag before he left. When the silver globe was found in it, she came to the barn to inform them she was calling the police. Never seeing the man in question, Claire had stopped her, telling her to escort the man off their property with a warning not to show up again. A blemish on an otherwise perfect night. They kept dancing. Now ribbon and confetti lodged in the gravel like stars, flashed through the grass like comets, turning the world topsy-turvy.