Steve Erickson - Rubicon Beach

Actually her name was not Catherine. She would be given the name of Catherine later, in America, when the speechless beauty of her face so resisted naming that the relative banality of Catherine was the best anyone could give it. Her actual name was an impossible sound, a mutation of Spanish, Portuguese and an Indian dialect, just as her people were an impossible social configuration for which the name Village suggested too much communal fabric and the name Tribe too much common blood. The closest translation for what they were would be Crowd. When Catherine was five, a couple of years after the night of the shipwreck, the rains washed away their cliff and the Crowd moved into the South American forests. For miles it was difficuIt to separate the forests from the sea. The Crowd traveled north to a place where the edges of a monstrous river slipped in and out of the trees and the air was constant clouds of water lit by the green light of afternoon. The people of the Crowd lived in nests. Overhead they constructed canopies of black wood. They did not consider themselves wild people. They didn’t live naked, and they did not love ritual. In the dim ambitions of Catherine’s father Colombia might be a place of uItimate migration; he’d lived there a little as a younger man. He remembered the bars. What wildness was in him was of a man-made strain.

The boats didn’t stop crashing into their lives. Rather than floundering on the beaches they caught themselves in the weird wicked roots of the forest. Sailors who survived spoke of spotting these roots slithering off the coast of England, licking the hulls of their ships with pink vulvalike mouths. If this seemed improbable even to a girl as small as Catherine, it nevertheless imparted to her a sense of the world’s smallness, which she never got over. She would think to herself, If I were the forests of my home, my face would be a cloud of water lit by the light of green afternoons, and my legs would cross the sea to England; she hadn’t the slightest idea what or where was England. The mornings of her childhood were of wreckage in the trees and the lies of sailors, and the dusks of her womanhood never forgot them.

When Catherine’s father was a young man of twenty-five he fell in love with women who made his heart stop. When he was an older man of thirty-five he fell in love with women who made his heart meIt. When he looked into the face of his small daughter she made him feel the older love that was characterized less by desire than the beauty of sorrow. In this way he might have been of the Orient. In the evening, after he’d hunted the family’s food or chopped it from trees, he took Catherine in a small canoe on the river where she sat between his knees with her back to his belly and he pointed out to her the visions of the forest. They paddled among a hundred green clouds hanging from the branches that crossed the water; these clouds were like the snow walls of northern countries which formed long spiraling mazes. Corridors of the river, framed by the green wet walls, hurtled off in wrong directions. Her father knew no wrong directions. Her father knew the mazes of the river as he knew the mazes of the trees. At dusk he knew the mazes of the sky as he knew the mazes of the river. His breath in her hair was as calm and steady as the current and left a small bright trail in the twilight, so clear that when they turned back Catherine could navigate the way, following her father’s breath fauItlessly and certainly home.

One day out on the water, right before the sun fainted into dark, her father picked her up to gaze over the side of the boat. There, for the first time, she saw her own face. She thought that it was a strange and marvelous watercreature, like the roots of trees with pink mouths off the coast of England or the fish that dead men watched in the dirt. Had her father looked over the side of the boat with her, she might have understood it was her face. Rather she grew up believing that this creature accompanied her wherever she went, that she could call to it in her mind and see it by her side when she walked along beaches. She claimed it for her pet. She threw it food it never ate, and when she tried to catch it, it swam from her so fast it seemed to vanish at her touch.

Their part of the forest, sitting as it did at the mouth of the sea, became a burial ground for ships, the Crowd waking each dawn to another skeleton caught among the trees. Usually no crew, or only the remnants of one, was to be found. The Crowd picked their way among each disaster with hard-headed consideration for what was of use. If there was food it was eaten and if there were clothes they were worn. The Crowd would not have objected to the honor of being deemed scavengers. They did, however, become impatient with the clutter of the boats themselves: only so much rubble of so many decks and cabins and cavernous husks could be absorbed into the thicket of the wilderness. They pushed the boats out to sea only to watch the water bring them back. Soon each tree in the village became a boat unto itself, draped in the cloth of sails and terraced with the plains of thirty bows. Sometimes on the high branch of a tall tree Catherine thought she might sail the whole forest somewhere east and north, where the mazes had walls that dwarfed the trees, and separate rooms for day and night.

By the time Catherine was twelve her father had come to believe she would never stop the hearts of men. She would in time, he believed, meIt the hearts of men as she meIted his, but by then he’d be gone. He laughed in relief at this, since it meant he wouldn’t lose her, and then he cried at his own selfishness, because it meant she would never be happy. That she was so composed and resolute as to survive unhappiness would not make the unhappiness any less. At any rate, as it happened her father was wrong, though he would never know it. He reached his conclusion and confirmed it to himself over the next five years of her adolescence, because her body, while strong and self-sufficient, was without the voluptuous gifts young men valued. So the boys of the Crowd pursued other girls while Catherine with her straight solid form watched alone. She was too proud, even at sixteen, to rage at the betrayal of her breasts.

They did not see her face.

They took her eyes to be the large fiery insects that buzzed among the reeds of the river. They took her mouth to be the red wound left by hunted animals or perhaps their own women each month. They took her chin to be the bend of a bough and her hair to be the night when there was no moon. Her father saw her face for the first time the winter she was eighteen; for eighteen years he’d loved her face because it belonged to her. But he’d never seen it as something separate from her.

A terrible rain came lashing the forest and he took refuge after a wild night with the Crowd of setting floating bonfires to sea. In the distance a huge black ship battled through the deluge. A huge black ship battles through the deluge, he told his wife under sheIter, a ship huger and blacker than we can know. One overpowering wave and the ship will come overpowering us like our own shadow gone monstrous: one ship too many for a forest of ships. He turned to look out at the bonfires sent floating out to sea to ward off the ship and now saw only sizzling embers doused in the rain. The ship loomed larger. Do we move? his wife said. Not in this rain, he said; we wait: and then he turned to look at his children and saw his favorite sitting and watching, and saw her face. Her eyes were the brightest lights he’d ever seen. For a moment they were something separate from her; for a moment her mouth, her chin, her hair were all something separate from her. He made a horrible sound. He was beset by the disassembling of his life: the upheaval of home, the visions of a deathship crashing down on them in revenge for all the other ships that had caught themselves in his forest, and now his favorite child with a face that had a life of its own. Panicked, he began to sob. His head buried in one hand, he reached over, groping in the dark, to lay his fingers gently on Catherine’s forehead and bring them down over her eyelids, in the manner of one who closes the eyes of the expired so as to keep the soul inside a little longer.