Nathaniel Burns bent double with laughter. “No, sir,” he sputtered, wiping his eyes with a handkerchief, “I assure you that I am not here to represent a claim or a grievance. Oh, what a lark!”
The baby squalled. “Husband, let me go inside and feed Sarah,” Lucinda said. “You bring chairs out to the dooryard here, and I’ll make coffee.”
“My son has an active imagination. From the very start...”
The young woman cut in, “His first words, very near, at least, were about his having a farm....”
“We live in the very heart of San Francisco, and there is nobody in our acquaintance who runs a farm or even speaks of...”
“Of course we thought this was his private, make-believe world,” the woman said.
Lucinda, unwilling to miss a word, plopped onto the porch step and discreetly opened her blouse enough to nurse the baby.
“Of course you would,” she said. “And you’re very obliging parents to entertain his fancy.”
“We’re indulgent parents,” the young woman replied. “Walter’s our only child, and we spoil him dreadfully.” She stroked the boy’s head. “You have two lovely babes.”
“I have another grown, old as yourselves,” Lucinda said, “from my previous marriage.”
“How wonderful for you!”
“It would be wonderful if he didn’t denigrate everything his mother stands for. Jeremiah had one before these two as well, a boy who passed on at a tender age.” Jeremiah was amazed at the ease with which his wife related these unusual, some might say scandalous, facts of their lives. “Husband, would you get chairs for our visitors?”
He stepped inside the dark house and was reminded of the dream of coming into the dark mission and speaking with Teresa. It felt so real and present to him. Jacob clung to his neck right where the old scar was and asked about the little boy as Jeremiah took the rough-hewn chairs out to the grape-trellised dooryard. The young lawyer was holding court:
“... and then, yestereve,” he went on, “as we came into the valley on the company wagon, en route to the mineral springs, Walter started screaming about his farm.”
“And he pointed up in this direction,” the young mother leaned down and held her son’s chin in her hand, “and wouldn’t stop until we decided to ask that driver to take us here before he sets out for the ferry landing this morning.”
“I declare!” Lucinda said. The two women sat in the kitchen chairs, and little Walter climbed onto his mother’s lap and whispered into her ear.
“He says the adobe was added onto the original redwood cabin a year later. He says there’s four more of these chairs,” the woman said, “made from a yew tree that stood behind the house.” Lucinda gasped and looked up at Jeremiah. “Before we came to your lane he told us right where everything would be—the creek, the stable and toolshed, the wellspring, which he says is off to that side of the house.” She pointed north. “And he says he knows your husband.”
The boy buried his face in his mother’s shoulder. Jeremiah squatted before him with Jacob still on his neck. The two lads were near the same age, between four and five. “You know my pap?” Jake asked. The other boy nodded against his mother’s throat.
Jeremiah had read about Hindus back when the professor had come to the valley. He and the old pedagogue had spent many long afternoons by the river, talking in sacrilegious terms about any number of beliefs and rituals, including the transmigration of souls. It didn’t really make sense to him, and yet this child, and the dream of Teresa an hour before, gave him an unsettling sensation of walking in a land between life and death, as he had lain that morning between waking and sleep. He set Jacob down and asked his guests to wait a moment.
The tintype of his father, Daniel, was near the bed. The still dark bedroom with its feathered dawn-light brushing the log wall made him think of his very first recollections. That shadowy place of early memory in the small cabin in Missouri and
how the light had come
• TWO •
Missouri, 1831
through the chinks between logs
and danced about him, and how his mother and oldest sister leaned over him in that dimly lit room, their faces like moons in a night sky, and then were gone. His earliest memory was of those fingers of light penetrating the log chamber and a wishing for their faces to return, and a wishing for the pressure on his chest to lift, but he knew that the recollections of various days had mixed together in some fluidity of time. When he tried to recall his very first memory the images would appear and dissolve like reflections on a pond’s surface, and he was somehow in the center of that pond of flickering light and longing.
He was a sickly child and not expected to live through the first winter. Jeremiah remembered much of his early years spent with fever raging in his skull and a weight like some evil incubus crouched on his chest, strangling his lungs and sinus like a creeping vine round a tree’s branches. He remembered the sense of somehow being unfit for life and a kind of fevered rage against letting go, against giving in to that little night monster on his chest. He remembered time spent in dark rooms, and vaguely, ever so impalpable and undefined in memory, his brother lifting him from a moment of deep abandonment and carrying him to his mother.
A face of such hale and handsome ease, a young man with blond curls and blue eyes, leaned over him and took him on a sturdy shoulder to the mother sitting by the fire. There was a smell of wood smoke and deer leather, and a hearty laugh, and that was all he could recall of the oldest brother, the one who left for the West with Father when Jeremiah was not yet three.
Father went west with his fifteen-year-old son and abandoned them all when the brother drowned in the Columbia River. A messenger, a stout, squint-eyed mountain man in deer leather, came to the cabin with the story and something of the boy’s outfit, the felt hat and powder horn, and that was all Jeremiah knew of it. His brother drowned, and his father wandered off without explanation—so the story went. Jeremiah had that one picture in his mind of the brother carrying him but nary a one of their father besides a vague, bearded shadow presence near Mother at the fireplace. The old man was remote as God throughout the boy’s childhood, his absence a bitter reminder of Jeremiah’s cursed health and lineage.
Out of the loss of husband and her favorite child, out of the months and hardwood seasons of stoical darkness and snow and silences, came a new bond with Mother and her ancient Bible. While she had the girls dig, plant, milk, and toil in their clearing in the woods, Mother and the son who should have died, youngest of a brood of five, began the Old Testament. Jeremiah placed verse to memory, then discovered the sense of deciphering sound from letters on the frail pages. The book was large and leather-bound with a Latin missal as appendix, and Jeremiah spent hours tracing its tiny letters with his fingers and giving them voice, even the ancient Romantic tongue. By his seventh birthday he was the best reader between two rivers of Eastern Missouri. The words floated up from the tender pages with a musty scent as of sorrel mushrooms hidden beneath a cover of dried leaves, and the boy devoured them quickly.
Mother was Pennsylvania Dutch and had been given to Father, a long-bearded, frightening, melancholy stranger from Virginia, when she was little more than a child. He was an apprentice to a local smith her father traded with and was thought to be a man of great faith who’d suffered a great loss. She wept nightly the month before and after the marriage, but her heart warmed to the new life as mother to a darling boy in a cabin the couple built by hand in the Missouri Territory. In conversation with Jeremiah, she likened Daniel to Job, a man who had been tested to the limits of his faith with a previous wife and three children killed by Indians in Kentucky and tested further, when given a second family