Suppose, for instance, he ran amock and ate the neighbors’ sheep. In farm country, sheep-killing is a major crime, and a thing that kills sheep is always shot on sight. Once a farm boy had gone around breaking the necks of all the new calves for miles around… .no one had been able to figure out why, but no doubt it was the rural equivalent for the city child’s breaking windows on knifing auto tires. Vandalism in the country, though, so often involves killing, because farm property is expressed in terms of flocks of ducks and chickens, herds of dairy cows, lambs and sheep, even goats. To the right of us the Landners, an old couple, raised goats, and every so often they killed and ate a goat, having such things as goat stew and goat soup. To people in the country, a prize sheep or cow is to be guarded against any menace; they are used to poisoning rats and shooting foxes and coons and dogs and cats who infringe, and I could just see Jack being shot, some night, while crawling under a barbed wire fence with a bloody lamb in his jaws.
So now, driving back to Drake’s Landing, I was beginning to pick up morbid anxiety fantasies… having them for Jack, possibly, as he seemed to be rather calm and undisturbea.
But that is one aspect of country life. I have sat in the living room, listening to Bach on the hi-fi, and looked through the windows and across the field to the ranch on the hillside beyond, and seen some ghastly act taking place: some old rancher in his manure-impregnated blue jeans, his boots and hat, out with an ax knocking in the skull of a dog found nosing around his chicken coop. Nothing to do but keep on listening to Bach and trying to read “By Love Possessed.” And of course we killed our own ducks when it came time to eat them, and the dog killed gophers and squirrels daily. And at least once a week we found a half-eaten deer head by the front door, carried there by the dog from a garbage can somewhere in the neighborhood.
Of course there was simply the problem of having a horse’s ass like Jack undenfoot all the time. It was easy for Charley; he spent all day down at the plant, and in the evenings he shut himself up in his study and did paper work, and on weekends he usually went outdoors and used the noto-tiller or the chain saw. Contemplating my brother lounging around the house all day made me realize how neally coopedup you are in the country; there’s no place to go and nobody to visit — you just sit home all day reading or doing housework or taking care of the kids. When did I get out of the house? On Tuesday and Thursday nights I had my sculpture class down in San Rafael. On Wednesday afternoon I had the Bluebirds over, to bake bread on weave mats. On Monday morning I drove down to San Francisco to see Doctor Andrews, my analyst. On Friday morning I drove over to Petaluma to the Purity Market to shop. And on Tuesday afternoon I had my modern dance at the hall. And that was it, except for occasionally having dinner with the Finebungs or the Meritans on driving out on weekends to the beach. The most exciting thing that had happened in years was the hay truck losing its load on the Petaluma road and smashing in Alise Hatfield’s station wagon with her and her three kids inside. And the four teenagers who got beaten up at Olema by the twenty loggers. This is the country. This isn’t the city.
You’re lucky, up where we live, to be able to get the daily San Francisco Chronicle; they don’t deliver it — you have to drive over to the Mayfair Market and buy it off the stands.
As we drove through San Francisco, Jack perked up and began to comment on the buildings and traffic. The city obviously stimulated him, no doubt unwholesomely. He caught sight of the tiny, scrunchedtogether shops along Mission and he wanted to stop. Luckily we got out of the South of Market district and onto Van Ness. Charley gazed at the various imported cans in the dealers’ display windows, but Jack did not seem interested. When we got onto the Golden Gate Bridge neither of them paid attention to the incredible view of the City and the Bay and the Marin hills; both of them had no capacity to enjoy anything esthetically — for Charley things had to be financially valuable, and for Jack they had to be — what? God knows. Weird facts, like the rain of frogs. Miracles and the like. This spectacular sight was wasted on both of them, but I kept my eyes on the view as long as possible, until finally we were out of the hills, past the forts, and back among the rubbishy little suburban towns, Mill Valley, San Rafael — the pit, as far as I’m concerned. The really all-time low, with the dirt and smog, and always the County machinery tearing up the roads for a new freeway.
At a slow nate we drove through Ross and San Anselmo, fighting the commute traffic. And then, past Fairfax, we left the stores and apartments and got out on that stretch in the first pasture land, the first canyons. All at once there were cows instead of gas stations.
“How does it look to you?” Charley asked my brother.
Jack said, “It’s deserted.”
With bitterness, I said, “Well, who’d want to live out here with the cows.”
“A cow has four stomachs,” Jack said.
White’s Hill impressed him, with its terribly steep and winding grade, and then, on the far side, the San Geronimo Valley made the three of us feel pleased. Charley got the Buick up to eighty-five on the straightaway, and the warm mid-day wind, the fresh-smelling country wind, blew in around us and cleaned the can of the smell of moldy paper and old laundry. The fields on both sides of us had turned brown from the sun and lack of water, but around the clusters of live oak trees, mixed in with the granite boulders, we saw grass and wild flowers.
We would have liked to have lived down here, closer to San Francisco, but land cost too much and the traffic, in summer, had a depressing element to it, the resort people heading for Lagunitas and the cabins there and the campers on their way to Samuel Taylor Park. Now we passed through Lagunitas with its one general stone, and then the road curved, suddenly as always, forcing Charley to slow so radically that the nose of the Buick sank down and all four tires squealed. The warm dry sunlight disappeared and we were down deep in the redwoods, sniffing the stream, the wet needles, the cold, dark places where ferns grew in July.
Rousing himself, Jack said, “Hey, didn’t we go picnicking here once?” He craned his neck at the sight of the tables and barbecue pits.
“No,” I said. “That was Muir Woods. You were nine.”
After we had reached the hills overlooking Olema and Tomales Bay, Jack began to recognize that he had passed entirely out of the town area and had entered the country. He noticed the shabby, peeling old wooden windmills, the boarded-up abandoned buildings, the chickens scratching in driveways, and that indubitable sign of the country: the butane tanks mounted one behind each house. There, too, was the sign to the right of the road just before reaching the Inverness Wye: so-and-so well driller.
As we drove by Paper Mill Creek he saw the fishermen down in the water and he saw, for the first time in his life, a flashing white egret out on the marshes, fishing.
“You see blue heron up here,” I said. “And once we saw a flock of wild swan. Eighteen of them, on an inlet near Drake’s Esteno.”
After we had passed thnough Drake’s Landing and had started up the narrow blacktop road, Saw Mill Road, to our place, Jack said, “It’s sure quiet up here.”
“Yes,” Charley said. “At night you’ll hear the cows bellowing.”
“They sound like dinosaurs stuck in the swamp,” I said.
Perched on the telephone wires, at the last bend of the road, was a falcon. I told Jack how that particular falcon spent his time standing on the wire, year in year out, catching frogs and grasshoppers. Sometimes he looked sleek, but other times his feathers had a molting, disreputable look. And not far from us the Hallinans lost goldfish from their outdoor pond to a kingfisher who stationed himself in the cypress tree nearby.
Not so many years ago elk and bear had roamed around the hills overlooking Tomales Bay, and the winter before, Charley claimed to have spotted a huge black leg at the edge of his headlights; something had gone off into the woods, and if it wasn’t a bean it was a man in a bean suit. But I did not discuss this with Jack. There was no point in providing him with the local myths, because he would soon enough concoct myths of his own; and it would not be beans or elk that meandered down into the vegetable garden after dark and ate the rhubarb — it would be Martians whose flying saucers had landed in the Inverness canyons. Now it occurred to me to remember the feverish flying saucer activity at Inverness Park; a rabid group already existed, that would no doubt draw Jack into their midst and give him the benefit of their twice-weekly explorations into hypnosis, reincarnation, Zen Buddhism, ESP, and of course UFOs.