Joan Didion - Run River

He had explained repeatedly that Christmas was out of the question; he had only a seventy-two-hour pass and transportation was at best uncertain. He would go instead to Mexico, although he did not tell her that. You don’t know how I need you , she had repeated over the telephone two nights ago, and he had answered in a blaze of righteousness: You don’t seem to realize there’s a war going on . Immediately he had laughed, trying to cover not only his pomposity but his deception. It must be clear even to Lily that El Paso was not exactly Leyte Gulf, and that getting to the ranch for Christmas would not be impossible.

Now when the orderly told him that he had a call from California he felt the resentment return: they were forcing the issue, making him feel guilty. Annoyed with them all and with himself, he picked up the telephone ready to tell Lily once again that there was a war going on.

“Is that Everett?”

He was abruptly charmed by her small voice. For a moment it was as if he had never gone away from her, never discovered the siren lure of celibacy.

“Who does it sound like?”

There was a silence. “This is Lily.”

“Not Lily McClellan, surely.”

“Yes,” she said, and paused again. “Now listen to me.”

“What is it?”

She did not answer. He had stiffened, preparing himself for the last-ditch appeal, and now she did not make it, did not answer, said nothing.

“What is it?” he repeated, remembering suddenly what she had said about Martha.

She said nothing.

“Operator,” he said. Then, with some relief, he heard Martha’s voice, controlled and distant.

“We’re at the hospital,” she said rapidly. “Sutter Hospital. Daddy had a stroke and you’d better come home.”

“Is he all right?” He realized the idiocy of the question as he asked it.

“Of course he isn’t all right. He’s dead. Or we wouldn’t have bothered you.”

All that night he sat in the washroom of a Pullman car, smoking cigarettes and watching the green-shaded lights flicker on and off as the train crawled across the desert to Los Angeles. He probably could have gotten a seat on a plane, but had not, even though Martha’s sharp, precarious voice had finally broken: I said he’s dead, Everett, come home now oh Christ Daddy’s dead and let’s not have any more of that crap about how the lights are going out all over the world, Everett, please, come home fast . The train would be at least two days, longer should he miss the Los Angeles connection. He had wired his father’s lawyer to make arrangements for the funeral. He knew with certainty that although he might see Bliss again, he was as good as discharged now; although he had in 1942 given up his farm deferment in order to enlist, there was no one now to run the ranch. He would ask for and certainly get a hardship discharge.

That he would not see his father again did not really occur to him until he reached the ranch, six hours too late for the funeral (he had missed the connection in Los Angeles, and by then could not get a flight at all), and found that Sarah had flown home from Philadelphia. “It was sudden,” she kept repeating to Everett, “it was terribly sudden.” “Yes,” he agreed each time, dimly reassuring her as he reassured himself; they seemed to share some burden, the guilt of the children out playing when the trouble happened.

It was all they shared. He had not seen Sarah since the day of her wedding, in August of 1936. She had been married in the garden, in their mother’s wedding dress, to a boy named Peter. Although she had met Peter at Stanford he turned out to be from Philadelphia, a circumstance which seemed insurmountable to all the McClellans except Sarah. Seventeen years old, Everett had been an usher. He had gotten a little drunk on champagne (Peter had not approved of the champagne, which was California; it had been Peter’s conviction, expressed in company which included two Napa Valley grape growers, that if you could not afford a decent French champagne you did better by sticking to Scotch) and toward the end of the afternoon, when Sarah was cutting the bride’s cake, he had told her and Peter a not very funny but very dirty joke. Peter had looked faintly annoyed. He never looked more than faintly anything. “I guess we’ve had enough of the local vino,” he said, slapping Everett’s shoulder in what he seemed to consider an appropriately fraternal manner. “You ass,” Everett had said, and Sarah had thrown her arms around Everett, laughing and kissing him with white frosting on her mouth. She had been home twice since then, once before and once after the six weeks on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe which legalized the end of Peter, but Everett had been away that summer, working in a lumber camp out of Tacoma.

Her presence now, even the trace of her perfume that was all through the house (the same perfume: it smelled again like the summer she was married, when the house was full of silver and tissue paper and girls), indicated that this was indeed an event, a crisis, a death in the family. Sad and nervous, she walked aimlessly through the house straightening pictures, picking up plates and putting them back, opening and closing the shutters; through her alien’s eyes Everett saw that what Lily had said was true: everything was falling apart.

It would be a difficult spring. Lily had not exaggerated; he had simply not wanted to believe her. Apparently his father had not been well for months before his stroke, and had lost interest in growing anything on the land he held so tenaciously. Everett could understand that; he never blamed his father. When it came down to it, beyond making enough to live on, he had little interest himself in using the land. Like his father, he wanted only to have it. The Braden place was a case in point. It was two hundred acres, near Auburn, virtually untillable, deserted for years. It had been in Everett’s mother’s estate. Although Joe Templeton had wanted to buy it, Everett had refused to sell, ostensibly because he planned to develop it himself. He knew now why he had not sold the Braden place. He had thought about it in that Pullman washroom crossing the desert. He wanted, all of his life, to be able to go up to the Braden place and stand on the hill and look up the Valley to the Marysville buttes, and he wanted to be standing on his own land. It had nothing to do with crops, development, profit. He understood, all right, how his father, sick, could have let the river ranch run down. He had just dropped his guard temporarily, and there it went.

Moved by this example, Everett was on guard, now, armed with the brisk decision, the semblance of efficient appraisal. Their Japanese foreman had been evacuated in 1942, and his replacement, to whom Everett’s father had increasingly left the day-to-day operation, had proved incompetent. Everett had said, when they hired him, that the man was not responsible; “never mind,” his father had muttered, disturbed more than he saw fit to admit by the relocation of the Japanese. “Those bastards asked for it.” It was typical of him to have thought that the loss incurred by an irresponsible foreman would be the government’s; he had apparently never at any point seen that it was his own. On acre after acre, the redwood poles and wire trellises had been knocked down and left to rot with dead vines, unpicked the summer before. Part of last summer’s crop, the foreman told Everett, had mildewed; in the shed Everett found, unopened, the copper sulfate which would have prevented it. Machinery, unreplaceable until after the war, had been left out to rust in the autumn rains; the kiln was in no condition to use, the main road rutted. Even the levee was eroded, neglected all one year. The Army Engineers, as far as that went, were supposed to watch the levees, but Everett did not suppose that the Engineers had been deeply concerned during 1943 and 1944 with the levee at McClellan’s Landing.