Andrew Valencia: Lord of California

Nothing’s happened, he said. Season’s over. Job’s finished. It’s time to move on.

You’re a foreman, I said. Mom should’ve talked to you about staying on through the winter. She should’ve asked for your help in seeing us through the cold months.

She did. She invited me to stay on straight through to next year’s harvest. But I turned her down. I got enough saved up now to start the next leg of my journey. No sense sticking around here longer than I have to and making things complicated.

I looked at him with the beginnings of tears in my eyes. What did it mean to be complicated if our time in the orchards had been simple?

You’ve got no reason to be like this, I said. How can you just wander from one place to the next, changing the lives of the people you touch, and then leave without a second thought? How can you live like that?

That’s how it is on the road, he said. You stay in a place for a while and make friends while you’re there. Then you pick up and leave and maybe you see them again and maybe you don’t. It’s nothing personal. It’s just the way it is. You get used to it. Trust me, you’ll remember me more fondly after I’m gone. The heart appreciates distance. It’s a forgetful little muscle.

He kicked the lid on the cooler shut and picked the cooler up by its handle. Suddenly it hit me that the hunt was over, that he was packing up to leave, and that this would be the last hunt we ever went on together.

You told me to stay at home, I said. You told me I had it good here, and I should think twice before leaving. Did you believe that? Did you ever mean any of the things you said?

You’re my boss’s son, he said. You really think I’m going to encourage you to run off?

No, I said. But you did other things with me you weren’t supposed to do.

He set his hands at his sides and looked at me. Yeah, he said, and you did things you weren’t supposed to do either.

I could tell on you. I could tell Mom about it.

Yeah. And I could tell her about the rifle.

I can’t go back. Not now. How can I go back to the way things were? How I used to be?

You’ll find a way, he said. You think it wasn’t hard for me after the war? You think I never looked inside myself and felt completely alone? At least you have faith. I lost any faith I had a long time ago. And you’ve got your own rifle now. I won’t deprive you of that. So buck up. It’s not the end of the world.

He turned and started walking with the cooler swinging at his side. I followed after him, but didn’t try to close the gap between us. Not the end of the world. Spoken only like someone of that generation could, the ones who awoke one morning to find the world they knew gone and still had to decide what to do about breakfast. I kept the rifle in the closet and told Mom he took it with him when he left. What he really took from me, I never told a soul.

How do we begin to build? How do we start over again when the blood inside our veins is tainted with betrayal? Poisoned by tragedy. Pain of trauma inherited through cellular memory. Indians knew it, heathens though they were. Cain and Abel never saw the garden, but they felt the sting of disobedience in their hearts, and knew it from their parents’ stories. Probably why Cain couldn’t work the soil worth a damn. Too much to live up too, too many expectations. Only the free can find favor in the fruits of their labor, and there’s no freedom for a child burdened by a parent’s broken dream. What must it have been like to grow up in that house, to hear of a world without pain where no one ever died and nakedness was a thing without a word and so it wasn’t a thing at all? Father Ramsey used to talk about lost tribes in South America, about heathens in Africa who’ve never been blessed to hear the Word of God. Anecdotes of a world we’d never see filtered through the American accent of a middle-aged virgin. Some clueless boy would ask, Wouldn’t it be better if they never heard the Word at all? At least then they’d be more likely to end up in Purgatory instead of receiving eternal damnation. And the old priest would bat his weary eyes and reply, Everyone deserves the opportunity to receive salvation. What good would it do sparing them the Word if it wound up costing them the chance to enter paradise? That was his answer to Adam’s children. That was what we had to content ourselves with when our parents told us old stories about life in the garden.

I try to imagine what life was like back then. I tend to see it as full of contradictions, as a world where everyone was rich and happy and also addicted to crack. Tom Hanks and Eddie Murphy fighting terrorists in space while obese children starved to death. Dad never talked about that world. It was old and sad and complicated, and so it didn’t concern me whatsoever. Mom talked about the mistakes they made back then, that whole generation living it up like the party would never end, dumb sluts popping champagne corks on the deck of a sinking ship.

Should’ve seen the sort of things we wore in public in those days, she’d say, shaking her head. You’d be ashamed of your mother if you could’ve seen her then.

Ashamed? Is that what you wanted? Is that what all this was for? Why do I have to learn from your mistakes, when I may have been one myself? Your pain and your shame are in my blood, they are my pain and my shame, too, but that’s not all I feel. Here’s what I’ve seen and what I know and what I remember. I was eight years old and it was January. Worst frost on record. Dad was gone, off wherever it was that he went. For three days the power was out and there was no butane left in the gas tank and the foremen were under emergency lockdown at the state camp. You’d dress me in sweaters each night at bedtime and pile me with extra blankets to keep the cold of morning from creeping in. You’d wake at dawn with the electric alarm broken and walk out into the vineyard with a hatchet stuck through the pocket of your mended winter coat. And by the time I awoke you’d have already hacked and gathered the grapewood and built a fire in the living room hearth and boiled water over the range to make the oatmeal and hot cocoa for my breakfast. That was you. That was your love. And on the fourth day, after the fuel truck came, I opened my eyes in the morning and missed the smell of woodsmoke in the house.

Was it blood that made you stay by me when all others went away? Was blood the only thing? Child, born of blood and agony, proof of maternity laid bare for all to see as soon as the head begins to crown. No swabs needed, no tests required. Is that why I was dear to you? Is that why he never had faith? I’ve tried… I’ve tried to be better than I am. That world you lost, the one that took my brother… I’ve tried to live up to all the good things you’ve told me about it, and shut out the wicked things as you shut out your past. But I’m not a fresh start for anyone. I was never such pure clean clay. My name was written somewhere before I was born, and blood won’t help me with the task ahead. If I build, I build on a foundation of tears.

For two days and two fitful nights I stayed by the prisoner’s side. For two days I tried reading to him from Scripture, alternating between various passages but coming back time and again to the part about Lazarus rising from the dead. The longer I delayed, the more unreachable he became. Unreachable and incoherent. I tried my best to keep his wound clean. Each morning I rinsed the area with warm water and iodine and applied fresh bandages to the cut. But still the wound began to fester. By the third morning he was running a fever so high he couldn’t even sit up to take soup. From then on all he could do was lie on his back and suck ice cubes and empty his stomach irregularly into a tin bucket on the floor by his bed. The chain had already been pointless for some time, but now it just seemed absurd. The only way he was going anywhere was if someone carried him off. And if God wasn’t going to step in and do it, then I knew exactly who the responsibility would fall to. Chris was right. The clean kill is best. A dying animal is nothing you want to have on your hands.