Light Action in the Caribbean Read online

  ACCLAIM FOR BARRY LOPEZ’S

  Light Action in the Caribbean

  “Lopez displays his skill for description in writing that’s precise, gorgeous [and] arresting.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  “Reveals our comfort with work, our imperfections in love, our capacity for violence, and our longing for grace.”

  —Austin Chronicle

  “Has the precision of a well-oiled rifle—and the kick.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “The stories carry the reader through explorations of place, of time, of tradition, of memory and of self.”

  —The Plain Dealer

  “A tautly rich, rewarding read.”

  —The Denver Post

  “These are characters we know, or wish to have known. We dream to share their fortitude, their attempt at equilibrium, the magic launched from their each and every conundrum.”

  —The Bloomsbury Review

  BARRY LOPEZ

  Light Action in the Caribbean

  Barry Lopez is the author of six works of nonfiction and eight works of fiction. His writing appears regularly in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Double Take, and The Georgia Review. He is the recipient of a National Book Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and other honors. He lives in western Oregon.

  BOOKS BY BARRY LOPEZ

  NONFICTION

  Arctic Dreams

  Of Wolves and Men

  FICTION

  Light Action in the Caribbean

  Lessons from the Wolverine

  Field Notes

  Crow and Weasel

  Winter Count

  River Notes

  Giving Birth to Thunder

  Desert Notes

  ESSAYS

  Apologia

  About This Life

  The Rediscovery of North America

  Crossing Open Ground

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, OCTOBER 2001

  Copyright © 2000 by Barry Holstun Lopez

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2000.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  The author would like to thank the editors of the following publications, in which some of these stories originally appeared: American Short Fiction (“Remembering Orchards” and “Thomas Lowdermilk’s Generosity”); The Georgia Review (“The Letters of Heaven” and “The Mappist”); The Gettysburg Review (“Mornings in Quarain”); Manoa (“In the Garden of the Lords of War,” “Rubén Mendoza Vega,” and “In the Great Bend of the Souris River”); San Francisco Magazine (“Emory Bear Hands’ Birds”); and Story (“The Deaf Girl”). “Stolen Horses” first appeared in Writers Harvest 3, edited by Tobias Wolff and William Spruill.

  The author also would like to express his gratitude to the Lannan Foundation for a residency fellowship that allowed him to complete work on this book.

  Excerpt from “Apology for Bad Dreams” from Selected Poems by Robinson Jeffers, copyright © 1925 and renewed 1953 by Robinson Jeffers, is reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Lopez, Barry Holstun, [date]

  Light action in the Caribbean : stories / Barry Lopez.

  p. cm.

  I. Title.

  PS3562.067 L5 2000

  813’.54—dc21 00-020310

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80651-2

  Author photograph © Nancy Crampton

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1

  For

  Debra

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Remembering Orchards

  Stolen Horses

  Thomas Lowdermilk’s Generosity

  In the Garden of the Lords of War

  Emory Bear Hands’ Birds

  In the Great Bend of the Souris River

  The Deaf Girl

  Rubén Mendoza Vega, Suzuki Professor of Early Caribbean History, University of Florida at Gainesville, Offers a History of the United States Based on Personal Experience

  The Letters of Heaven

  Mornings in Quarain

  The Construction of the Rachel

  Light Action in the Caribbean

  The Mappist

  Light Action

  in the

  Caribbean

  Remembering Orchards

  In the years I lived with my stepfather I didn’t understand his life at all. He and my mother married when I was twelve, and by the time I was seventeen I had gone away to college. I had little contact with him after that until, oddly, just before he died, when I was twenty-six. Now, years later, my heart grows silent thinking of what I gave up by maintaining my differences with him.

  He was a farmer and an orchardist and in these skills a man of the first rank. By the time we met, my head was full of a desire to travel, to find work like my friends in a place far from the farming country where I was raised. My father and mother had divorced violently; this second marriage, I now realize, was not just calm but serene. Rich. Another part of my shame is that I forfeited this knowledge too. Conceivably, it was something I could have spoken to him about in my early twenties, during my first marriage.

  It is filbert orchards that have brought him back to me. I am a printer. I live in a valley in western Oregon, along a river where there are filbert orchards. Just on the other side of the mountains, not so far away, are apple and pear orchards of great renown. I have taken from these trees, from their arrangement over the ground and from my curiosity about them in the different seasons, a peace I cannot readily understand. It has, I know, to do with him, with the way his hands went fearlessly to the bark of the trees as he pruned late in the fall. Even I, who held him vaguely in contempt, could not miss the kindness, the sensuousness of these gestures.

  Our home was in Granada Hills in California, a little more than forty acres of trees and gardens which my stepfather tended with the help of a man from Ensenada I regarded as more sophisticated at the time. Alejandro Castillo was in his twenties, always with a new girlfriend clinging passionately to him, and able to make anything grow voluptuously in the garden, working with an aplomb that bordered on disdain.

  The orchards—perhaps this is too strong an image, but it is nevertheless exactly how I felt—represented in my mind primitive creatures in servitude. The orchards were like penal colonies to me. I saw nothing but the rigid order of the plat, the harvesting, the pruning, the mechanics of it ultimately. I missed my stepfather’s affection, understood it only as pride or gratification, missed entirely his humility.

  Where I live now I have been observing orchards along the river, and over these months, or perhaps years, of watching, it has occurred to me that my stepfather responded most deeply not to the orchard’s neat and systematic regimentation, to the tasks of maintenance associated with that, but to a chaos beneath. What I saw as productive order he saw as a vivid surface of exquisite tension. The trees were like sparrows frozen in flight, their single identities overshadowed by the insistent precision of the whole. Internal heresy—errant limbs, minor inconsistencies in spacing or height—was masked by stillness.

  I have, within my boyhood memories, many images of these orchards, and of neighboring groves and orchards on other farms at the foot of the Santa Sus
anas. But I had a point of view that was common, uninspired. I could imagine the trees as prisoners, but I could not imagine them as transcendent, living in a time and on a plane inaccessible to me.

  When I left the farm I missed the trees no more than my chores.

  The insipid dimension of my thoughts became apparent years later, on two successive days after two very mundane observations. The first day, a still winter afternoon—I remember I had just finished setting type for an installment of Olson’s Maximus Poems, an arduous task, and was driving to town—I looked beneath the hanging shower of light green catkins, just a glance under the roof-crown of a thousand filbert trees, to see one branch broken from a jet-black trunk resting on fresh snow. It was just a moment, as the road swooped away and I with it.

  The second day I drove more slowly past the same spot and saw a large flock of black crows walking over the snow, all spread out, their graceless strides. I thought not of death, the usual flat images in that cold silence, but of Alejandro Castillo. One night I saw him twenty rows deep in the almond orchard, my eye drawn in by moonlight brilliant on his white shorts. He stood gazing at the stars. A woman lay on her side at his feet, turned away, perhaps asleep. The trees in that moment seemed not to exist, to be a field of indifferent posts. As the crows strode diagonally through the orchard rows I thought of the single broken branch hanging down, and of Alejandro’s ineffable solitude, and I saw the trees like all life—incandescent, pervasive.

  In that moment I felt like an animal suddenly given its head.

  My stepfather seemed to me, when I was young, too polite a man to admire. There was nothing forceful about him at a time when I admired obsession. He was lithe, his movement very physical but gentle, distinct, and hard to forget. The Chinese say, of the contrast between such strength and fluidity, “movement like silk that hits like iron”; his was a spring-steel movement that arrived like a rose and braced like iron. He was a pilot in the Pacific in World War II. Afterward he stayed on with Claire Chennault, setting up the Flying Tigers in western China. He was inclined toward Chinese culture, respectful of it, but this did not show in our home beyond a dozen or so books, a few paintings in his office, and two guardian dogs at the entrance to the farm. In later years, when I went to China and when I began printing the work of Laotzu and Li Po, I began to understand in a painful way that I had never really known him.

  And, of course, my sorrow was, too, that he had never insisted that I should. My brothers, who died in the same accident with him, were younger, more disposed toward his ways, not as ambitious as I. He shared with them what I had been too proud to ask for.

  What drew me to reflect on the orchards where I now live was the stupendous play of light in them, which I began to notice after a while. In winter the trunks and limbs are often wet with rain, and their color blends with the dark earth; but blue or pewter skies overhead remain visible through wild, ramulose branches. Sometimes after a snow the light in the orchards at dusk is amethyst. In spring a gauze of buds and catkins, a toile of pale greens, closes off the sky. By summer the dark ground is laid with shadow, haunted by odd shafts of light. With fall an elision of browns—the branches now hobbled with nuts—gives way to yellowing leaves. And light again fills the understory.

  The colors are not the colors of flowers but of stones. The filtered light underneath the limbs, spilling onto a surface of earth as immaculate as a swept floor beneath the greens, and the winter tracery of blacks, under a long expanse of gray or milk or Tyrian sky, gave me, finally, an inkling of what I had seen but never marked at home.

  I do not know where this unhurried reconciliation will lead. I recognize the error I made in trying to separate myself from my stepfather, but I am not in anguish over what I did. I do not live with remorse. I feel the error only with a little tenderness now, in these months when I find myself staring at these orchards I imagine are identical to the orchards that held my stepfather—and this is the word. They held the work of his hands, his desire and aspiration, just above the surface of the earth, in the light embayed in their branches. It was an elevation of his effort, which followed on his courtesies toward them.

  An image as yet unresolved for me—it uncoils slowly, as if no longer afraid—is how easily as boys we ran away from adults who chased us into orchards. They were too tall to follow us through that understory. If we stole rides bareback on a neighbor’s horses and then tried to run away across plowed fields, our short legs would founder in the furrows, and we were caught.

  Beneath the first branching, in that grotto of light, was our sanctuary.

  When my stepfather died he had been preparing to spray the filbert orchard. He would not, I think, have treated the trees in this manner on his own; but a type of nut-boring larvae had become epidemic in southern California that year, and my brother argued convincingly for the treatment. Together they made a gross mistake in mixing the chemicals. They wore no protective masks or clothing. In a single day they poisoned themselves fatally. My younger brother and a half brother died in convulsions in the hospital. My stepfather returned home and died three days later, contorted in his bed like a root mass.

  My mother sued the manufacturer of the chemical and the supplier, but legal maneuvers prolonged the case and in the end my mother settled, degraded by the legal process and unwilling to sacrifice more years of her life to it. The money she received was sufficient to support her for the remainder of her life and to keep the farm intact and working.

  We buried my brothers in a cemetery alongside my mother’s parents, who had come to California in 1923. My stepfather had not expressed his wishes about burial, and I left my mother to do as she wished, which was to work it through carefully in her mind until she felt she understood him in that moment. She buried him, wrapped in bright blue linen, a row into the filbert orchard, at a spot where he habitually entered the plot of trees. By his grave she put a stone upended with these lines of Jeffers:

  It is not good to forget over what gulfs the spirit

  Of the beauty of humanity, the petal of a lost flower

  blown seaward by the night-wind, floats to its quietness.

  I have asked permission of the owners of several orchards along the river to allow me to walk down the rows of these plots, which I do but rarely and harmlessly. I recall, as if recovering clothing from a backwater after a flood, how my stepfather walked in our orchards, how he pruned, raked, and mulched, how his hands ran the contours of his face as he harvested, the steadiness of his passion.

  I have these memories now. I know when I set type, space line to follow line, that he sleeps in my hands.

  Stolen Horses

  What we did was wrong, of course, and then it got out of hand, as I suppose such things often do. I knew Ed Hemas from grade school, years ago, before all this. It was his idea. He made it work a few times, and then him and Brett Stallings and Andy Pinticton thought it would work again, and that’s how I got into it.

  Actually, I don’t remember what I thought at the time, twelve years ago. Easy money, and I didn’t have any, I guess. I was drifting between high school and whatever when Ed asked and I said, Sure, I’m in.

  He and Brett and Andy had done this twice already, stealing horses and hauling them across the high desert to Burns in the middle of the night, where some guy gave Ed four hundred bucks a head and loaded them on another truck. Thirty head one time, thirty-eight another. Split three ways, cash of course. You can figure it out.

  Andy brought the stock truck down from the Victor Ellen place north of Madras where he worked, tractor-trailer rig. Ed and Brett, they drove Ed’s pickup with a two-horse trailer. Ed scouted places around Sisters and down toward Bend where he thought he could get the horses bunched up quiet, away from the house, and then load them in the dark, where all he needed was a little plastic fencing set up, like wings on a chute into the truck. He and Brett wrangled, Andy pushed ’em up the ramp into the trailer.

  It took no more than an hour, either time. They did it under a
new moon, two in the morning, no one even around maybe on these 300-acre, new-money showplaces. By sunrise, they had the truck idling in a stockyard 150 miles away in Burns, and Andy had the rig back at the ranch by noon. I don’t know what he told his boss about where he’d been with the truck.

  The job they asked me about was a place between Sisters and Redmond, sixty head of horses. I knew there were some registered quarters in there, I’d driven by and seen them. Andy wanted a hand with loading. Ed had gotten a deal for five hundred bucks each, so that would be $30,000 four ways. I should have said no, of course, but it looked good and I didn’t care at all about the people who owned the horses.

  Here’s where my thoughts on this start to run deep. Ed was selling the horses to a guy who trucked them back to Michigan, back to Ohio. This guy, Ramirez or Sanchez, sold them to people who’d pay a premium for horses that came, as they say, from out west, people just getting into stock market money or lottery money, lawyering or something. Inheritances. Ed thought this Ramirez guy was getting $2,000 a head. We were stealing them from the same kind of people in Oregon, people who just got them for show. I know it’s not right, but justice is a strange thing, looking at it from my end. My family ranched that central Oregon country for four generations. We took the land from the Indians to start with, but then these people, they took it from us. They came in from Seattle, California, wherever, waving big money around, desperate to get some horses in and look the part. We had to sell. None of us had ever seen money like that.

  I know, there’s no excuse for theft, not stealing like this, just to get a little extra money and maybe smack some of these people in the face. But anger was a strong feeling, and we all had it. We wanted to fool and rile these people. They could just buy a place they knew nothing about, none of its history or even literally which way the wind blew. And they surely didn’t want to be caught around any of us, no more, I guess, than my great grandparents wanted to hang around with the Molala.