to guide me,
The rooms downstairs were musty and stingily
furnished, the walls devoid of paintings or photographs.’
An oval hooked rug covored the living room
floor. Bordering it were a thrift shop sofa and two
aluminum folding chairs. The dining room was storage
space for cardboard cartons full of old newspapers
and bound cords of firewood. Bedsheets had
been used for curtains.
.Upstairs were three bedrooms, each containing
BLOOD TF. T 275
crude, rickety furniture and
one that had been Woodv’s bore a semblance of
· cheer–a toybox nex.t to tte bed, superhero posters
on the walls, a Padres banner over the headboard.
Nona’s dresser was blanketed with cut-glass perfume
atomizers and bottles of lotion. The clothes in
her closet were mostly jeans and skimpy tops. The
exceptions were a short rabbit jacket of the type
Hollywood streetwalkers used to favor and two frilly
party dresses, one red, one white. Her drawers were
crammed with nylons and lingerie and scented with
a homemade sachet. But like the rooms below, her
private space was emotionally blank, unmarked by
personal touches. No yearbooks, diaries, love letters,
or souvenirs. I found a crumpled scrap of
lined notebook paper in the bottom drawer of the
dresser, It was brown with age and covered, like
some classroom punishment, with hundreds of repetitions.of
the same single sentence: FUCI MADRONAS.
Garland and Emma’s bedroom had a view of the
greenhouse. I wondered ff they’d woken in the morn-lng,
peered down at the chamber of mutations and
been warmed by a self-congratulatory glow. There
were two single beds with a nightstand between
them. All available fioorspaee was given over to
cardboard boxes. Some were filled with shoes, others
with .towels and linens. Still others held no.thing
but other cardboard boxes. I opened the’ closet.
The parents’ wardrobes were meager, shapeless,
decades out of style and biased toward grays and
browns.
There wasa small hinged trapdoor cut into the
ceiling of the closet. I found a stepstool hidden
behind a mildewed winter coat, pulled it out,. and
stretched high enough to give the door a strong
276
Jonathan Kelleniian
push. It opened with a slow pneumatic hiss, and a
ship’s ladder slid down automatically through the
aperture. I tested it, found it steady, and ascended.
The attic covered the full area of the house, easily
two thousand square feet. It had been transformed
into a library, though not an elegant one.
Plywood bookcases were propped against all four
walls. A desk had been constructed of the same
cheap wood. A metal folding chair sat before .it.
The floor was speckled with sawdust. I looked for
another entry to the room and found none. The
windows were small and slatted. Only one mode. of
construction was possible: planks had been slipped
through the trapdoor and nailed together up here.
I ran the flashlight over the volumes that lined
the shelves. With the exception of thirty years’
worth of Reader’s Digest condensed books, and a
case full of National Geographics, all were on biology,
horticulture, and related topics. There were
hundreds of pamphlets from the U.C. Riverside
Agricultural Station and the Federal Government
Printing Office. Stacks of mail-order seed catalogues.
A sat of oversized leather-bound Encyclopaedia of
Fruit printed in England, dated 1879/ and illustrated
with hand-tipped color lithographs. Scores
of college texts on plant pathology, soil biology,
forestry management, genetic engineering. A hiker’s
guide to the trees of California. Complete collections
of Horticulture and Audtcbon. Copies of
patents awarded to inventors of farm equipment.
Four shelves of the case closest to the desk were
crowded with blue-Cloth looseleaf binders hbeled
with Roman numerals. I pulled out Volume I.
The cover was dated’ 1965. Inside were eighty-three
pages of handwritten text. The writer’s pen-
BLOOD TEST- 277
p was hard to decipher–cramped, back-and
of uneven darkness. I held the flashlight
with one hand, turned pages with the other,
ad finally got a perceptual fix on it.
Chapter One was a summary of Garland Swope’s
plan to be the Cherimoya King He actually used
that term, even doodling miniature crowns in the
margins of the book. There was an outline of the
fruit’s attributes and a reminder to check out its
nutritional value. The section ended with a list of