There were reasons for the rush, mostly on Nessie’s father’s end. In Ennis’s posting, he had written that should the match result in marriage, he would send a flat sum back to the bride’s family as a token of his gratitude. He named the sum in his handbill, and it was quite healthy. The daughter of a butcher who had far too many children to provide a decent dowry for any of the girls in his large brood, Nessie was promptly packed up and shipped out the very next morning, and word was sent by Pony Express that Nessie was already on her way. Ennis waited with apprehension, for he rather thought Nessie’s father had jumped the gun and that this did not bode well. He’d expected some preliminary exchange of correspondence—and a photograph, of course.
But when the train came chugging into the Rocklin station and Nessie climbed down, the match was acceptable to Ennis, and Nessie stayed. She was a hard worker and a woman of few words. No one could have said whether or not she enjoyed the change of scenery when she made the move from Boston to California, for no one ever bothered to ask Nessie her feelings on the matter, and she hardly revealed such sentiments in idle prattle. She was a good deal younger than Ennis Thorn—a mere eighteen to his forty—but she behaved like an elderly matron. In a strange way, Ennis took to heeding her as though she were a kind of mother figure, and their relationship was curiously enriched by this arrangement.
Back in Ireland, Ennis’s first wife, Liza, had been temperamental and a dreamer, leaving Ennis to play the part of the responsible provider. It was a role he’d chafed against, a role that had left him feeling suffocated—until, of course, he abandoned it altogether. For years, he assumed he was not cut from the kind of cloth that gave married life its appropriate shape. But married to Nessie, Ennis was the impulsive, impractical one by a mile, and he found he liked the contrast very much. As far as he was concerned, a thing wasn’t worth doing if it wasn’t worth hiding from Nessie. Surprisingly enough, the dynamic between them—a dynamic best described as that of disapproving schoolmarm and naughty pupil—nurtured an unexpected feeling in Ennis, and he found that despite his high jinks and regular philandering, he loved his wife with a strangely fierce, protective passion.
John Ennis Thorn was born on April twentieth, in the year 1877. It was a breech birth, and Nessie suffered terribly, almost to the point of death. The doctor wound up cutting her open and stitching her up—a last-ditch effort to save her life, but a rather haphazard, hastily enacted procedure even the doctor did not believe she would survive. She did survive, but only just barely.
Hearing his wife’s screams and seeing her already frail form grow weaker sobered up a very drunk Ennis almost instantly. After John’s birth, Ennis watched the small infant suckling at her pale breast with amazement, and never again touched his wife with carnal desire. Instead, he loved her just as fiercely, but from afar. It was an unspoken agreement between the two of them: From now on, Ennis would take his passion down to the ladies’ boardinghouse in town, and there only. For her part, Nessie seemed to appreciate being left in peace. Her husband’s “loyalty”—the portions of it she prized, anyhow—was still hers, and hers alone. He revered her as his schoolmarm wife, and if he ever disobeyed her, he continued to take the trouble to do so behind her back. She was happy to rule the roost with her intense silence and let him entertain his mischief elsewhere. And entertain his mischief elsewhere he did, often gambling and spending hours and even entire nights in town while Nessie stayed home nursing the baby. She didn’t mind. She enjoyed the quiet.
* * *
One night, Ennis surprised his wife and child by coming home earlier than usual—earlier than midnight, in any case—and burst through the front door in a swaying tangle of drunken legs and expletives. A huff of warm night air wafted in with him, carrying the scent of wet hay. Nessie and John looked up, stupefied. By then, John had grown into a toddler, chubby and sedate (“sedate” was a very fitting descriptor for the child—much more so than “happy,” for, after all, it could be said he was a stoic baby). The pair of them sat before the fire, she with her knitting, he sluggishly toppling the towers of blocks his mother had laid out for him.
Right away, Nessie noticed that Ennis was drunker than usual and angry as a hornet. Ennis was always garrulous but rarely so angry. He was a man of mirth and merriment, a man with a special talent for avoiding the seriousness of life. And yet, when he wanted to, he could spew pure vitriol. Nessie said nothing; she simply put down her knitting and waited for him to speak, as was her habit.
“Goddamn cheats and thieves, all of ’em,” Ennis growled, swinging his fists through the air with deadly heft and all-inclusive aim. “That lousy Silas Northrup ain’t got no morals . . . no morals at all, dammit . . .” He continued grumbling as he hit his head on a hat rack and caught his ankle against a bench that stood in the entryway. “Dammit! Who put this here? I ain’t given no one permission to rearrange the entire goddamn house!”
Nessie never asked a single question. Eventually, between hiccups, belches, and slurred curses, it came out that Ennis had been playing poker and lost big in a very unlucky hand. He often came home thoroughly drunk—Nessie was accustomed to this—but ordinarily he didn’t turn up until one or two o’clock in the morning. Ennis had set a record for speed that evening. Here he was, and it was barely eight.
“Sonofabitch kept refilling my glass and raising the stakes,” Ennis grunted, “the goddamn thief.”
Whether out of tolerance or indifference, Nessie let her husband rage and helped him off with his boots. After putting John to sleep, she helped her husband into the bed they shared.
“What did you bet?” Nessie broke her long silence to ask. There was no accusation in her voice, only a flat, affectless curiosity. She lay next to him, staring up vacantly at the ceiling, her hands folded neatly and pressed to her chest, over the quilt. There was a long pause.
“The western parcel,” Ennis finally answered. His words were frank, but his voice was deep and pained.
Ennis had originally purchased two adjacent plots of land, combining them to form his orchard and ranch, and so had two deeds that accounted for the whole of his property. He favored the western parcel—it was twice the size of the eastern parcel, the drainage was better, and the soil was richer—but he was smart enough to know he was a novice farmer, so Ennis had begun cultivating the eastern parcel first. He figured he could make all his mistakes on the eastern parcel, and as he expanded with more orchard trees and grazed more horses, he could turn that western parcel into a real prize piece of property. He even built his farmhouse on the eastern parcel, so as not to use up any of the land that contained the best soil.
Nessie took the loss with complacence, for she knew Ennis was possessive of any injury done to him, and this would fall into that category, even if it affected the household. A thing was only ever happening to him; she was not entitled to regard it as happening to her, too. She did not say, At least we haven’t lost the parcel that contains our home, even if she might have thought it. She was wise enough to know her husband didn’t care one bit about keeping the farmhouse—not at that moment, not in comparison to losing the western parcel. While with every passing year it grew more and more doubtful Ennis would ever get around to cultivating it, his plans for the plot of land nonetheless grew increasingly grandiose, and the western parcel possessed a certain abstract significance he’d come to depend upon. It represented his belief in the future, the idea that he’d staked his claim in California, that he was a great man who would leave his son a great legacy and that a region would be named after him—or, at the very least, a vital road.
Nessie braced herself for the days and weeks to come, for she knew Ennis would sleep fitfully that night, eventually waking with the sweats, a pounding head, and a ferocious, renewed temper. He was not likely to let this new grievance go anytime soon.
* * *
As fate would have it, Ennis Thorn lost his prized piece of land in a hand of poker that was almost
an exact reversal of the hand that had won him the money to buy it in the first place. The man who’d won the deed to Ennis’s land, Silas Northrup, had kept a careful tally of the glasses of whiskey Ennis had put down that evening. Moreover, Silas was reputed for keeping an ace up his sleeve. Whether or not Ennis’s loss had been entirely fair, only Silas could say, but either way, Silas knew better than to keep the land for himself; Ennis—once sober—would be furious.
Sure enough, the whole town got a good show once Ennis’s hangover wore off the next day, when Ennis took to chasing Silas around in front of the general store, cursing up a storm and firing off his six-shooter. Deadly serious as Ennis was, it was nonetheless a comical sight, with skinny, lazy Silas even shimmying up a drainpipe, moving quicker than anyone had ever known Silas could move.
Ennis didn’t catch Silas that day, or the day after, and the spectacle repeated itself several times—amusing and horrifying townspeople alike—until finally Silas was able to shout back his only defense: He’d sold the property to the first buyer he could find. Silas slipped away again, and this time, when Ennis tired, he got blind drunk again and staggered home. He prayed Silas had lied.
Less than a week after the poker game, Ennis spotted what appeared to be a Chinaman making camp on the western parcel, and knew immediately what had happened. His heart sank, becoming a leaded ball that dropped deep into some terrible recess in his intestines. But he also knew this was now his cross to bear alone. Ennis’s appeals for justice had been turned away by the only judge in town, and then by every lawyer and civil court clerk for miles and miles around. No one wanted to get involved with a dispute that centered on a drunkard’s foolish poker habits.
Ennis learned the name of his new neighbor—Kenichi Yamada—but nothing more. He didn’t care to know more. In those early days, the neighbor, Yamada, called on the Thorn household exactly twice, hoping to introduce himself. But both times the young, smooth-faced Japanese man stepped gingerly onto the rickety wooden porch and rapped on the screen door, his knock went unanswered; Ennis refused to acknowledge him. He ordered Nessie to do the same and bade her to keep the baby quiet. It was bad enough Silas had stolen his land; now Ennis was forced to watch some young foreigner live on it and attempt to cultivate it.
In future years the foreigner, Kenichi Yamada, was not difficult to avoid. He proved himself a quiet man intent on leading a curiously lonely life, slowly and meticulously cultivating the land as his youth trickled away, harvest by harvest and year by year. To Ennis’s irritation, Yamada did not plant apples, the sole crop Ennis had envisioned for his estate. He planted a then-unorthodox mixture of almonds, citrus, and plums.
By the time Yamada had fully planted and coaxed a complete yield out of Ennis’s prized western parcel, Ennis’s son, John Thorn, was a grown lad of ten or so. The two sat together on the porch of the Thorn ranch house in the evenings, and Ennis began to tell his son the great tales of his adventures. These entertaining yarns, inclusive of both fact and fiction, ranged from stories about Ennis’s childhood back in Ireland, to his days following the wagon trail west, to his gambling and whoring in Nevada. (Ennis saw no reason to shield his boy from the rougher facts of life, much less the birds and the bees.)
Ennis’s tales also included the infamous story of how he’d been betrayed by his friends and fellow gamblers, and more specifically how he’d been tricked by one enemy in particular—the immoral Silas Northrup—and ultimately been cheated out of the glorious western parcel. In Ennis’s telling, certain details were altered. In his version, for instance, Silas Northrup had been in cahoots all along with the Jap who eventually stole the Thorns’ land, and together Silas and the Jap had laced his whiskey with opium—he was sure of it.
Ennis’s version of the story was certainly more colorful and entertaining than the factual account. He was Irish, after all, and knew how to instill sympathy in his listener.
* * *
In 1906, at the age of seventy, Ennis Thorn went to bed with a case of drunkard’s pneumonia, and thereafter, never got out of bed again. He spent a month or so gasping and hacking away, day and night, at the terrible cough that would not leave his chest. Nessie dutifully propped every pillow in the house around her husband so that he might sleep in an upright position, but it was no use. Decades of hard living had left Ennis tired and run-down, and even as the pneumonia worsened, he demanded his flask be replenished and kept by his side at all times.
“It’s medicinal,” he grunted, and winked, responding to the reproach that Nessie—consummately silent in her ways—never actually voiced.
Full of “medicine,” he dosed off one afternoon while Nessie was outside pulling weeds in the little kitchen garden, and sighed his last rattling breath.
At that instant, and from that moment forward, the house fell silent: devoid of Ennis Thorn’s terrible barking cough, devoid of his jolly banshee’s laugh, devoid of his angry rants. Nessie and John—the latter, by then a twenty-nine-year-old man—were utterly alone in the world, left to run the ranch together in a mutually stoic silence.
John was an odd study in character. Neighbors and townspeople who were acquainted with the Thorns had come to think of him as Nessie Thorn’s “man-child.” Without Ennis as a catalyst to stimulate constant change, Nessie and John stagnated for a number of years and fell further into a state of arrested development. John ran the ranch and oversaw the orchard with a serious, competent air but had little interest in leaving the ranch or in pursuing adventures of his own, and Nessie was quite content to have it so. John’s youthful years ticked by without much celebration or ceremony. He was thirty-six, a bachelor still living alone with his mother, when he finally got it in his head that maybe he ought to be married.
“It’s time we had some help around here,” he stated simply on the day of his birthday. “I’m thinking of taking a wife.”
Most mothers would assume this meant her son had a specific bride in mind, but Nessie Thorn knew better. She rocked calmly in her usual chair in the sitting room, working on a rather splendid example of the Ten Commandments in needlepoint.
“That Edith Sommerset is a nice young girl” was all she said in reply.
Conveniently forgetting the fact that she had once been one herself, Nessie harbored a secret fear of outsiders. She was afraid John would send away for a picture bride she wouldn’t like, or that he would get sweet on some half squaw or worse. She’d been eyeing the local stock of pretty, docile, conventional girls and silently making her own selection for quite some time. Nessie’s pick, Edith Sommerset, was seventeen to John’s thirty-six. But she was also Irish, pale-haired, and freckle-faced. As far as Nessie was concerned, the girl had belonged on the ranch all along and only needed someone to teach her how to milk the cows and bake Nessie’s signature shortbread in order to fulfill her role as a Thorn and as John’s wife.
“Well . . . all right, then,” John replied to his mother in a matter-of-fact tone, and left the room. Nessie understood this meant she ought to ready the house for Edith. This had always been their way together—Nessie’s and John’s. John announced his intentions, and Nessie pointed him in the direction she preferred. They were a businesslike, taciturn pair, and had been ever since the two of them survived John’s birth together.
Two weeks later, John Thorn and Edith Sommerset were married in a quiet ceremony in the little white-clapboard bungalow of a Catholic church up in Coloma. The priest, a man accustomed to a congregation full of unkempt miners who picked their noses and nodded off during services, was clearly delighted to marry the young couple. Before giving his blessing, he had only one question: Would they baptize their children according to the Catholic faith? John gave his word they would, and the priest was appeased. Moments later, he pronounced the couple man and wife—married forever in the eyes of the Catholic Church.
* * *
Once home, Nessie diplomatically moved out of the master bedroom without a word,
and John and Edith went about the business of starting a family.
To say they were successful in this pursuit is putting it mildly. Every year brought a new Thorn child for the better space of eleven years. A son came first; they named him Guy. He was followed by Marion, then Louis, then Otis . . . Gilbert, Lester, Carl, Ernest, Clyde, Rudolph, Franklin, and finally, little Ruth. John Thorn built onto the house accordingly, adding bedroom after bedroom with the scanty materials available to him on the ranch.
There was, of course, eventually an exchange for all this life.
The stock market crashed sometime just after Carl joined the family but before Ernest was born. John Thorn didn’t think very much of this development at first: How could something that happened in New York make much difference to a simple farmer in California? Then, in the spring of 1930, Nessie was working on a piece of needlepoint when she suffered a sudden embolism, clenched her teeth, and died.
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