polished quartz. His hands were wide and tough as paws, the skin flecked black on the fingers and wrists, tiny flakes of coal spotting the knuckles. Coal followed the sweat furrows in his brow too, streaking beneath the skin in faint lines like letter paper. Beside mother he cut the figure of an unlikely mate. She was a thin woman, but big-boned and hardy. She wore by habit a vague scowl which spread clear in the most luminous smile when he spoke kindly to her.
My parents had come from Monmouthshire, Wales, to the Diablo hills with all the high ideals of people in exodus. Jolting in the westbound stage from Stockton, they watched the mountain swell upon the horizon—the sun cresting the peaks like a burning bush. In the Carbondale valley they found a ragtag township. A new railroad snaked through high grasses, the tracks trestling up to a humpbacked bunker house. A few wood-and-nail structures leaned along the main street amongst a few fine brick ones. Noah Norton’s house towered on a hillside beyond the smokestack, and a number of miners’ cottages dotted the edges of the valley.
Mr. Norton himself secured my parents a room in George Scammon’s lodging house, and the next morning father went to work as a haulier on the Mount Hope Slope. Within the year, as the mines proved stalwart and Nortonville’s population flourished, hammers set to ringing on the skeleton of the new Exchange Hotel. Father moved to the Black Diamond shaft to work laborer on the Clark Vein. Six months later he made miner there. This was his job when I was born. By that time he and mother had befriended a number of other Welsh. They attended weekly Bible readings in a neighbor’s house and father frequented the small saloon, to the protests of his wife.
They secured a wooden company house, a sturdy place with a broad front stoop and six narrow windows. It stood at the northern end of the valley, at the head of Main Street and below School House Hill. Fifty feet east of the front door, the Black Diamond Railroad ran north through the cleavage of two camelback hills to slither six miles down to New York Slough. Otherwise, the house was surrounded by a clutch of company homes, which all stood mutely amid lisping grasses. A wide fur of chaparral spread up the hills on the west, and down among the shops and meeting houses stood a few eucalyptus trees.
MEMORY IS A NIGHT LANDSCAPE. SHADOWS OF HILLS AGAINST SHAdow of sky. I walk into myself when I travel back through my memory, and I find a dark world, streaked with intermittent lamplight. Yet some deep place within me, some smooth-worn reservoir, contains all the unbroken images of my past—people and moments long gone. Somewhere in the body we carry even the humblest moment we’ve lived. So maybe I can behold the intuitions that were already flitting through that valley eighty years ago, but I can’t blame any of us for failing to notice them. I was a little boy, not the wizened and brittle-boned thing I am now, sitting here enjoying the privilege of remembrance and poised to damn myself for all I couldn’t have known. The price of memory is a certain profound impotence. One can do nothing but observe, collect, revise this impression and then that one, and enjoy the pure futility of illumination.
Slinking into focus now is the Diablo of my youth. You could see it from the ridge just above Nortonville. As a boy I went up there to find a great canyon gashed between the peaks, as though some blast had cored the mountain. The twin summits gazed across the hollowness at each other, awaiting a massive earth-lunge that might one day unite them again.
In those days I was a mess of legend, and that Diablo was like my Sinai. I dreamt of William Israel, gangly farmer who hunched at a wound of earth on a day in ’59, a stained hat pushed back on his head, his fingers poking at the black ground. Israel’s pastures six miles south, where coal first showed itself, seemed to me as distant and wondrous as the Egyptian desert. I thought Mr. Israel the heroic figure from the Book of Exodus which mother read to me: “And there Israel camped before the mount.” I dreamt of Francis Somers and Cruikshank unearthing the great Black Diamond Vein. I saw the black deposit worked with sack and shovel, the paltry yield packed out load by load on the backs of mules. These early men labored away at something momentous, like the minions who hauled those great stones to the pyramids. And Noah Norton was the new pharaoh in these daydreams of mine. Not long after his arrival he had linked the meager operation to shareholders in Martinez fifteen miles west. In ’61 he raised his hands and decreed that railroad tracks be laid to the docks on the slough, a move that roused the works to a monumental standing, so that by the time I was born our company steamers had sewn the waters countless times to Stockton, San Francisco, and Sacramento.
In my boyhood the Welsh folk were entranced by all sorts of quasi-historic and fairy tale beliefs. And so in addition to Bible stories and the ancient yarns of the old country, mother and father taught me all about the Welsh Prince Madoc and his heroic escapades. Most impressive was his discovery of America in the twelfth century. I learned of our fierce brethren, the Welsh-speaking Padouca Indians, natives of our region whom we’d surely encounter one day. I learned of the adventurer John Evans, the Welsh Methodist minister who prefigured Lewis and Clark in his exploration of the northern Missouri while searching for the ancestors of Madoc.
Though fictitious, all these legends were harmless—especially harmless when compared with that larger fiction by which I was nursed for my first twenty years: that our town was an empire in its own and would thrive till time ran off its spool.
{1}
BEING AS OLD AS I AM NOW AND SITTING AT THIS DESK ON THIS spring morning, thinking back through all the trouble and the mystery—it’s a bit like trying to find something precious in a cluttered drawer, something I would give to my kin when I am gone. It would be simple to stop the search. But somehow, someplace, all the debris from the earliest years has accreted and begun to make a kind of sense. If I’m now powerless to change or correct, at least I’m able to comprehend. True, I’m walking in the dark, but beneath my blind feet there’s a clear path, and often enough paths go places—even when it’s late and hard to see.
Before me on the desk, in a hot glint of window light, is the dancing Hindu figure of Shiva, god of destruction and death. Fashioned of heavy bronze, he is ringed in flame, with wild hair fanned out, a bare skull ensconced upon his brow, his four spidery arms akimbo. He holds in this hand a drum, in that hand a ball of fire, one foot lifted in his apocalyptic dance. He is worshipped, even for all his wrath. Maybe I ought to start here, because this I can understand: the adulation of death, the plain reckoning with impermanence. For on a frosted morning when I was five years old, watching a small coffin slide roughly into its raw grave, a number of blue flowers at my feet opened their blossoms in silence.
Nortonville’s Protestant cemetery stood on Rose Hill, a mile over the eastern rise, on that tilting shelf of earth above Somersville. The folks of the town went up there to crowd about open graves and feed the hungry earth her lot of bodies. It was a frequent ritual. We climbed the steep Somersville Road with a casket borne before us on the shoulders of our men. From the high windy graveyard, the neighboring town was just a smatter of slant-roofed buildings squatting below. On a frigid January morning in 1869 we buried Edward Leam—nine years old.
Mother gripped my right hand and father my left as we trudged through seething mud toward the crest of the hill.
“Where’s Edward gone to?” I asked, squinting at the sting of my sinuses. Edward walked to the works every day with father and the men. He’d once given me a thumb’s worth from his tobacco pouch.
“He’s gone away, Ash,” said father.
Looking up, I saw the underside of his beard, the white throat afuzz with dark whiskers. “But where’s he gone, father?”
Mother squeezed my hand. “To heaven, Asher.”
“How’s a boy get to heaven?”
“He
