Tears of the Mountain
Tears of the Mountain
JOHN ADDIEGO
Unbridled Books
This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Unbridled Books
Copyright © 2010 by John Addiego
All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof,
may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Addiego, John.
Tears of the mountain / John Addiego.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-60953-006-8
I. Title.
PS3601.D46T43 2010
813′.6—dc22
2010013240
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
DESIGNED BY SH • CV
ENDPAPER MAP BY MEIGHAN CAVANAUGH
First Printing
For the Reader
Tears of the Mountain is the story of a single day in one man’s life—July 4, 1876—in which are imbedded a series of flashbacks. As such, the odd-numbered chapters take place on the Centennial Fourth of July in Sonoma County while the even-numbered chapters take place on earlier dates. Although the story refers to historical people and events and endeavors to reflect the record and spirit of the times, it is a work of fiction: all characters (with the exception of historical personages), dialogue and action are the products of the author’s imagination. There is a brief chronology of historical events important to the story placed at the end of the book.
Tears of the Mountain
• ONE •
July 4, 1876
5 AM
Near the western edge of the continent there is a country of hidden streams running under the earth and springing up through clefts of twisted shale. A rude structure of mud and redwood stands on a bench of land, the work of a self-proclaimed preacher named McKinley who had walked the breadth of North America, from the Virginia tidelands to the San Francisco Bay, and ended his days at the mouth of a Sonoma box canyon. This is the land he claimed by Mexican grant in 1845 and gave the name of Fin Hollow Glen. It was a notion among many that he refused to explain, an odd, aquatic image hewn from his mind onto a wood slab; nevertheless, the notion became place, the words became flesh, and the name remained musical and strange to McKinley’s children and grandchildren beyond his death.
Thirty-one years after the farm’s christening, at the beginning of this day, the nation’s one hundredth birthday, McKinley’s forty-six-year-old son, Jeremiah, lay in the cabin at Fin Hollow Glen, snuffling through the brush of a horseshoe mustache and dreaming. And in the dream Mr. Jeremiah McKinley stepped cautiously from brilliant California sunlight into the dark sanctuary of the Mission San Francisco Solano de Sonoma. He inhaled the dank, sepulchral lime and waited for his eyes to adjust. Beneath the life-sized statues of Joseph and Mary at the ornate altar there was an absurd hole in the floor, which in the logic of dreams became an open trapdoor and a stairway.
He descended a polished mahogany staircase to a green door that opened into the vestibule of a saloon, where voices and clinking glasses resounded behind a frosted window. Pushing aside a thick purple curtain redolent of tobacco smoke, he found himself in a perfumed closet with a seat or bed, little more than a shelf wedged into the recess of a cold adobe wall. Through a tiny window of metal grating he saw his first wife, Teresa, her oval face and dark eyes framed by a blue rebozo.
She let the head scarf drop and shook her long hair loose. Her shoulders were bare. “I want to confess,” she said in Spanish, breathlessly. “I want forgiveness.”
“I don’t have the authority of a father,” he said.
“I don’t want a priest.”
“I already forgave you, Teresa,” he said, “a long time ago.”
“Para Miguel, también?”
She spoke rapid Spanish now, in a whisper, and he could understand only a small part of it, something about giving light. Somehow she was beside him, kneeling on a small bed in a room that smelled of sex, fingering her rosary as she whispered, and as they knelt together to pray for their son, with her hip pressed against his, he felt a coarse rope against his throat. A crowd of men lifted him into the air, the noose tightened, and he awoke gasping and in a sweat, under his father’s redwood bark—slab roof, curled behind his second wife, Lucinda.
JEREMIAH STARED into utter darkness, feeling in two places and two lifetimes at once. He was naked and joined to his wife’s back by the effluence of their loving. Slowly, with the coming of dawn, the curve of her cheek came into focus, and the domed silhouette of the great live oak took shape in the warped window glass. The tree emerged from the dark in the manner of a photograph’s development, as he’d witnessed in the old newspaper office, a shadow caught on a plate of silver.
Had Ezekiel called? No, there was only the song of one owl to another from the cottonwoods near the river. Jeremiah extricated himself from bed, massaged old wounds and injuries, slipped into his overalls, and checked on his sleeping children. Then he took up his schoolmaster’s satchel and crept outside to the bench in the dooryard.
Ezekiel sidled up and placed his pointed snout on Jeremiah’s knee as the shadow of the tree became a solid tree. The subtlest idea of color came to the world: the coastal redwood’s furry terra-cotta, the corn’s hopeful green along the carriage lane, the fallow field brittle with the white gold of summer. Pacific Ocean mist moving slowly among the trees and cornstalks found its way through the folds of the round hills, through grapevine and vegetable plot and pasturage, here rising as steam from a kettle, there falling as water back down to the Sonoma Creek bottom.
Here was a land as much of water as of soil, of the sulfurous breath of the underworld making little geysers in hidden creek hollows. It was a place legendary among both Native and white people for the healing gifts of water rising up through the earth’s skin, and Jeremiah thought the passage of men on its surface as miraculous as walking on rivers of water.
He cleaned his reading spectacles and took a deep breath. This was a morning glorious in summer’s promise, and the promise of seeing old friends and heroes in the festivities of a nation’s birthday, and here was a moment to reflect upon it all before his loving wife and children rose. Yet there was that sensation of the hangman’s noose and a bittersweet fragrance from the presence of Teresa in the dream, a dolorous, warm darkness in her coming to him, as she often had in recent dreams, and saying something he couldn’t quite understand.
Jeremiah felt that he’d spent much of his life trying to understand things of light and dark, things of great beauty and awesome terror. The way a tree appears out of black nothing and slowly becomes real, a shadow captured by the heliographer’s art in silver nitrate. To the great trees his entire day might be the flicker of a rising and setting sun as they inhale and exhale one breath of life through their leaves.
The huge shade oak of the farm, round as a man’s brain, took depth and moved in the slightest breeze. Its toothed leaves trembled as the light grew. Jeremiah extracted pen and inkpot and deer-hide journal and placed them on the smooth plank that he customarily used as a portable desk. Then he remembered the special edition of the local news tucked into his satchel and reread the beginning by first