The slender gentleman tipped his stovepipe to Lucinda and bowed deeply. He chuckled. “Sir, I hardly know where to begin. This is quite a lark.”
Lucinda, who had been trying to arrange a few loose strands of hair behind an ear while holding a hungry babe, managed to step down from the porch and introduce herself to the young mother, whose face softened at this gesture of bonhomie. As the two women spoke in rapid tones, Jeremiah caught the fellow’s name and occupation—Nathaniel Burns, attorney on Montgomery and Seventh in San Francisco—and was given a discreet intimation of the purpose of the lawyer’s visit to the Sonoma country and its healing mineral waters as a palliative against the scourge of whiskey.
“Husband,” Lucinda called up to him, “it’s the most remarkable story, don’t you think?”
“I don’t believe I’ve received it as yet,” he replied, and as the attorney cleared his throat as if about to launch into a closing argument before a judge, the young wife, no doubt emboldened by the kind attention and warmth that Lucinda bestowed upon any stranger, broke in.
“Our little boy,” she declared, “says this is his farm!”
Jeremiah watched the lad peek at him from behind the woman’s dress. “And it appears that he has brought legal counsel to defend his claim.”
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
