Tears of the Mountain

• ONE •

July 4, 1876

5 AM

Near the western edge of the continent there is a country of hidden streams running under the earth and springing up through clefts of twisted shale. A rude structure of mud and redwood stands on a bench of land, the work of a self-proclaimed preacher named McKinley who had walked the breadth of North America, from the Virginia tidelands to the San Francisco Bay, and ended his days at the mouth of a Sonoma box canyon. This is the land he claimed by Mexican grant in 1845 and gave the name of Fin Hollow Glen. It was a notion among many that he refused to explain, an odd, aquatic image hewn from his mind onto a wood slab; nevertheless, the notion became place, the words became flesh, and the name remained musical and strange to McKinley’s children and grandchildren beyond his death.

Thirty-one years after the farm’s christening, at the beginning of this day, the nation’s one hundredth birthday, McKinley’s forty-six-year-old son, Jeremiah, lay in the cabin at Fin Hollow Glen, snuffling through the brush of a horseshoe mustache and dreaming. And in the dream Mr. Jeremiah McKinley stepped cautiously from brilliant California sunlight into the dark sanctuary of the Mission San Francisco Solano de Sonoma. He inhaled the dank, sepulchral lime and waited for his eyes to adjust. Beneath the life-sized statues of Joseph and Mary at the ornate altar there was an absurd hole in the floor, which in the logic of dreams became an open trapdoor and a stairway.

He descended a polished mahogany staircase to a green door that opened into the vestibule of a saloon, where voices and clinking glasses resounded behind a frosted window. Pushing aside a thick purple curtain redolent of tobacco smoke, he found himself in a perfumed closet with a seat or bed, little more than a shelf wedged into the recess of a cold adobe wall. Through a tiny window of metal grating he saw his first wife, Teresa, her oval face and dark eyes framed by a blue rebozo.

She let the head scarf drop and shook her long hair loose. Her shoulders were bare. I want to confess, she said in Spanish, breathlessly. I want forgiveness.

I don’t have the authority of a father, he said.

I don’t want a priest.

I already forgave you, Teresa, he said, a long time ago.

Para Miguel, también?

She spoke rapid Spanish now, in a whisper, and he could understand only a small part of it, something about giving light. Somehow she was beside him, kneeling on a small bed in a room that smelled of sex, fingering her rosary as she whispered, and as they knelt together to pray for their son, with her hip pressed against his, he felt a coarse rope against his throat. A crowd of men lifted him into the air, the noose tightened, and he awoke gasping and in a sweat, under his father’s redwood bark—slab roof, curled behind his second wife, Lucinda.

JEREMIAH STARED into utter darkness, feeling in two places and two lifetimes at once. He was naked and joined to his wife’s back by the effluence of their loving. Slowly, with the coming of dawn, the curve of her cheek came into focus, and the domed silhouette of the great live oak took shape in the warped window glass. The tree emerged from the dark in the manner of a photograph’s development, as he’d witnessed in the old newspaper office, a shadow caught on a plate of silver.

Had Ezekiel called? No, there was only the song of one owl to another from the cottonwoods near the river. Jeremiah extricated himself from bed, massaged old wounds and injuries, slipped into his overalls, and checked on his sleeping children. Then he took up his schoolmaster’s satchel and crept outside to the bench in the dooryard.

Ezekiel sidled up and placed his pointed snout on Jeremiah’s knee as the shadow of the tree became a solid tree. The subtlest idea of color came to the world: the coastal redwood’s furry terra-cotta, the corn’s hopeful green along the carriage lane, the fallow field brittle with the white gold of summer. Pacific Ocean mist moving slowly among the trees and cornstalks found its way through the folds of the round hills, through grapevine and vegetable plot and pasturage, here rising as steam from a kettle, there falling as water back down to the Sonoma Creek bottom.

Here was a land as much of water as of soil, of the sulfurous breath of the underworld making little geysers in hidden creek hollows. It was a place legendary among both Native and white people for the healing gifts of water rising up through the earth’s skin, and Jeremiah thought the passage of men on its surface as miraculous as walking on rivers of water.

He cleaned his reading spectacles and took a deep breath. This was a morning glorious in summer’s promise, and the promise of seeing old friends and heroes in the festivities of a nation’s birthday, and here was a moment to reflect upon it all before his loving wife and children rose. Yet there was that sensation of the hangman’s noose and a bittersweet fragrance from the presence of Teresa in the dream, a dolorous, warm darkness in her coming to him, as she often had in recent dreams, and saying something he couldn’t quite understand.

Jeremiah felt that he’d spent much of his life trying to understand things of light and dark, things of great beauty and awesome terror. The way a tree appears out of black nothing and slowly becomes real, a shadow captured by the heliographer’s art in silver nitrate. To the great trees his entire day might be the flicker of a rising and setting sun as they inhale and exhale one breath of life through their leaves.

The huge shade oak of the farm, round as a man’s brain, took depth and moved in the slightest breeze. Its toothed leaves trembled as the light grew. Jeremiah extracted pen and inkpot and deer-hide journal and placed them on the smooth plank that he customarily used as a portable desk. Then he remembered the special edition of the local news tucked into his satchel and reread the beginning by first light:

A GREAT DAY FOR SONOMA COUNTY

By Abner Stiles, Ed.

July 4, 1876

Folks, this is it! This is the glorious Centennial Fourth of July Edition of your own Sonoma Democrat, and this is the day we have been all anxiously awaiting! For California it’s been thirty years since the Papist Monarchial Yoke was lifted, right smack here in the heart of our county, and for American Freedom it’s been fivescore since King George’s shameful shackles were shed and the Liberty Bell boldly bellowed, Independence! The Bald Eagle spread his wings at Concord, and our fathers fostered Freedom ever Westward, culminating here where the mighty California Bear growled and raised his namesake flag in Sonoma’s courthouse square!

To-day is a Great Day to commemorate the selfless acts of Heroism that created this nation and this state, and there may be no better place in the entire U.S. of A. than right here, in Sonoma County, to celebrate our triumphs! Here in your own Sonoma Democrat you will find listed the many events and speakers slated for our glorious celebration. Take for example...

He chuckled and sighed with a little envy. Abner Stiles was the local poet laureate, read by scores of people each year and lauded for his prowess as a wordsmith. While Jeremiah contributed a few articles and editorials and tinkered with an epic poem of the West that never reached further than his porch, his old rival Abner, with all his alliterations and exclamations, spoke for the people of Sonoma.

Well, he knew this literary avocation was likely just some form of foolishness. When he tried to set his own thoughts down before farm and school work, before rousting his little boy for his dubious help in milking and feeding, before his wife made the stove clank, even before the cock’s crow, it was a fool’s errand, to be sure.

And yet the act of trying to write what had happened with clarity, or what a dream might mean to him, and the occasional turn of good words, was such a secret delight. He dipped the pen and made note of the dream of Teresa and the lynch mob and the way Lucinda’s cheek and the tree had looked in the darkness before dawn, and the way the geography of Lucinda’s body under the blanket seemed to blend with the world at first light. Then he set about listing the chores and events of the day on the margin of the newspaper and checked again on the speakers and events:

Take for example the exploits of one Mister John C. Fremont! World-renowned explorer, War Hero, Presidential Candidate, John Charles Fremont has made a special detour to join his old comrades in arms in our home town! Captain Fremont will be joined on the podium by celebrated statesmen, such as Senator Morris, local representatives of Old California, such as General Mariano Vallejo and Padre Ignacio, Various Heroes of the Bear War and the Civil War, as well as historians, scholars, soldiers and statesmen from across the nation as well as from our own Valley of the Moon.

Fellow free Americans, what a century for the Progress of Mankind this has been! We have mapped the mighty rivers, settled the wondrous wilderness, mined the majestic mountains, and crossed the colossal continent with the plenipotentiary locomotive! We have tamed the Savage and freed the Mexican and the Negro from bondage! We have brought light to the redwood forest and made cities of enterprise from dark backwater bogs! Our great nation has survived a War Between Its States, and whether your heart hails from South or North, we here in the West proudly proclaim Progress! Progress as we fulfill our destiny and survey this Pacific domain that the Good Lord has given us to have dominion over! From Sea to Shining Sea, from...

HEY, BOY, what is it?

Ezekiel growled, his half-bitten-off ears erect, his brow furrowed, and Jeremiah silenced him as he stepped into the house, snatched the shotgun from its rack, and pocketed the box of shells from its perch above the door. A dark shape emerged from the creek’s mist and entered the lane.

It looked to be one of those carriages hired out by the San Francisco line to take the dandies, arthritics, and drunks to the Springs Hotel, except that the team had been cut from six to two and the long wagon was empty save a driver and two passengers on the bench directly behind him. They wound their way among the new corn and stopped beside the barn, and Jeremiah noticed a third passenger now, a small redheaded child clinging to the mother. He leaned the shotgun against the door frame.

A young couple, perhaps half his own age, the gent in top hat and tails, the lady in a high-buttoned dress underpinched by a corset, stepped down from the bench. Peeking from behind the heavy folds of the woman’s dress was the freckled little boy, no more than five years old.

The teamster, a burly fellow in slouched hat and suspenders, set to unhitching the horses and leading them to the trough at a nod from Jeremiah, who recognized the wagon hand as the progeny of Badger Smith, an odious companion from his youth. It was always a little difficult to keep the Smith boys straight.

Sir, hello, and I beg your pardon, sir, the young man called out. His hand stretched out from his shoulder like the tip of a sword, the arm long and thin. By his dress and formality the fellow might have been a snake-oil salesman, but Jeremiah had never seen the lot travel with family and driver before. He could hear his own family now, the baby crying, the little boy calling out, and the footfalls of his wife on the puncheon floor, gathering the children up. Ezekiel gave the stranger a cursory sniff and sauntered over to the teamster at the trough.

Beautiful place you have here, sir!

Jeremiah felt a sudden flush of shame. His father, a pious man beset by misfortune, had taken a modest view of man’s dominion over the earth, and the earth had generally decomposed the works of his hands in quick fashion. He’d erected a series of simple, jerry-built structures based on notions of the land and people about him, the Californy cabin being his ultimate effort: here some lumpy adobe brick, there some logs and planks from a giant tree he and his son had felled; here a few curved sleeves of bark from that same redwood for a roof thatch, there two mismatched windows bartered from the local Spanish alcalde for a buggy wheel. It’s a miracle that it’s still standing.

Well, the land itself. It’s a beautiful place!

They shook hands. Kind of you to say.

That old sign by the creek said, ‘Fin Hollow Glen’?

My father’s invention. One of many things he would never explain.

Fascinating. The man had the rheumy eyes and florid complexion of a drinker, and in fact his breath exuded the bouquet of strong spirits. The woman’s eyes were large and frightened, and an auburn ringlet of her hair escaped from the bonnet and swept across her mouth. I’m very sorry to intrude upon your privacy today, sir.

The heavy redwood door opened, and Lucinda came to his side, holding the infant girl. Little Jake fairly climbed his father’s leg and landed in the crook of his arm. How can we help you, sir? Jeremiah asked.

The slender gentleman tipped his stovepipe to Lucinda and bowed deeply. He chuckled. Sir, I hardly know where to begin. This is quite a lark.

Lucinda, who had been trying to arrange a few loose strands of hair behind an ear while holding a hungry babe, managed to step down from the porch and introduce herself to the young mother, whose face softened at this gesture of bonhomie. As the two women spoke in rapid tones, Jeremiah caught the fellow’s name and occupation—Nathaniel Burns, attorney on Montgomery and Seventh in San Francisco—and was given a discreet intimation of the purpose of the lawyer’s visit to the Sonoma country and its healing mineral waters as a palliative against the scourge of whiskey.

Husband, Lucinda called up to him, it’s the most remarkable story, don’t you think?

I don’t believe I’ve received it as yet, he replied, and as the attorney cleared his throat as if about to launch into a closing argument before a judge, the young wife, no doubt emboldened by the kind attention and warmth that Lucinda bestowed upon any stranger, broke in.

Our little boy, she declared, says this is his farm!

Jeremiah watched the lad peek at him from behind the woman’s dress. And it appears that he has brought legal counsel to defend his claim.

Nathaniel Burns bent double with laughter. No, sir, he sputtered, wiping his eyes with a handkerchief, I assure you that I am not here to represent a claim or a grievance. Oh, what a lark!

The baby squalled. Husband, let me go inside and feed Sarah, Lucinda said. You bring chairs out to the dooryard here, and I’ll make coffee.

My son has an active imagination. From the very start...

The young woman cut in, His first words, very near, at least, were about his having a farm....

We live in the very heart of San Francisco, and there is nobody in our acquaintance who runs a farm or even speaks of...

Of course we thought this was his private, make-believe world, the woman said.

Lucinda, unwilling to miss a word, plopped onto the porch step and discreetly opened her blouse enough to nurse the baby.

Of course you would, she said. And you’re very obliging parents to entertain his fancy.

We’re indulgent parents, the young woman replied. Walter’s our only child, and we spoil him dreadfully. She stroked the boy’s head. You have two lovely babes.

I have another grown, old as yourselves, Lucinda said, from my previous marriage.

How wonderful for you!

It would be wonderful if he didn’t denigrate everything his mother stands for. Jeremiah had one before these two as well, a boy who passed on at a tender age. Jeremiah was amazed at the ease with which his wife related these unusual, some might say scandalous, facts of their lives. Husband, would you get chairs for our visitors?

He stepped inside the dark house and was reminded of the dream of coming into the dark mission and speaking with Teresa. It felt so real and present to him. Jacob clung to his neck right where the old scar was and asked about the little boy as Jeremiah took the rough-hewn chairs out to the grape-trellised dooryard. The young lawyer was holding court:

... and then, yestereve, he went on, "as we came into the valley on the company wagon, en route to the mineral springs, Walter started screaming about his farm."

And he pointed up in this direction, the young mother leaned down and held her son’s chin in her hand, and wouldn’t stop until we decided to ask that driver to take us here before he sets out for the ferry landing this morning.

I declare! Lucinda said. The two women sat in the kitchen chairs, and little Walter climbed onto his mother’s lap and whispered into her ear.

He says the adobe was added onto the original redwood cabin a year later. He says there’s four more of these chairs, the woman said, made from a yew tree that stood behind the house. Lucinda gasped and looked up at Jeremiah. Before we came to your lane he told us right where everything would be—the creek, the stable and toolshed, the wellspring, which he says is off to that side of the house. She pointed north. And he says he knows your husband.

The boy buried his face in his mother’s shoulder. Jeremiah squatted before him with Jacob still on his neck. The two lads were near the same age, between four and five. You know my pap? Jake asked. The other boy nodded against his mother’s throat.

Jeremiah had read about Hindus back when the professor had come to the valley. He and the old pedagogue had spent many long afternoons by the river, talking in sacrilegious terms about any number of beliefs and rituals, including the transmigration of souls. It didn’t really make sense to him, and yet this child, and the dream of Teresa an hour before, gave him an unsettling sensation of walking in a land between life and death, as he had lain that morning between waking and sleep. He set Jacob down and asked his guests to wait a moment.

The tintype of his father, Daniel, was near the bed. The still dark bedroom with its feathered dawn-light brushing the log wall made him think of his very first recollections. That shadowy place of early memory in the small cabin in Missouri and

how the light had come

• TWO •

Missouri, 1831

through the chinks between logs

and danced about him, and how his mother and oldest sister leaned over him in that dimly lit room, their faces like moons in a night sky, and then were gone. His earliest memory was of those fingers of light penetrating the log chamber and a wishing for their faces to return, and a wishing for the pressure on his chest to lift, but he knew that the recollections of various days had mixed together in some fluidity of time. When he tried to recall his very first memory the images would appear and dissolve like reflections on a pond’s surface, and he was somehow in the center of that pond of flickering light and longing.

He was a sickly child and not expected to live through the first winter. Jeremiah remembered much of his early years spent with fever raging in his skull and a weight like some evil incubus crouched on his chest, strangling his lungs and sinus like a creeping vine round a tree’s branches. He remembered the sense of somehow being unfit for life and a kind of fevered rage against letting go, against giving in to that little night monster on his chest. He remembered time spent in dark rooms, and vaguely, ever so impalpable and undefined in memory, his brother lifting him from a moment of deep abandonment and carrying him to his mother.

A face of such hale and handsome ease, a young man with blond curls and blue eyes, leaned over him and took him on a sturdy shoulder to the mother sitting by the fire. There was a smell of wood smoke and deer leather, and a hearty laugh, and that was all he could recall of the oldest brother, the one who left for the West with Father when Jeremiah was not yet three.

Father went west with his fifteen-year-old son and abandoned them all when the brother drowned in the Columbia River. A messenger, a stout, squint-eyed mountain man in deer leather, came to the cabin with the story and something of the boy’s outfit, the felt hat and powder horn, and that was all Jeremiah knew of it. His brother drowned, and his father wandered off without explanation—so the story went. Jeremiah had that one picture in his mind of the brother carrying him but nary a one of their father besides a vague, bearded shadow presence near Mother at the fireplace. The old man was remote as God throughout the boy’s childhood, his absence a bitter reminder of Jeremiah’s cursed health and lineage.

Out of the loss of husband and her favorite child, out of the months and hardwood seasons of stoical darkness and snow and silences, came a new bond with Mother and her ancient Bible. While she had the girls dig, plant, milk, and toil in their clearing in the woods, Mother and the son who should have died, youngest of a brood of five, began the Old Testament. Jeremiah placed verse to memory, then discovered the sense of deciphering sound from letters on the frail pages. The book was large and leather-bound with a Latin missal as appendix, and Jeremiah spent hours tracing its tiny letters with his fingers and giving them voice, even the ancient Romantic tongue. By his seventh birthday he was the best reader between two rivers of Eastern Missouri. The words floated up from the tender pages with a musty scent as of sorrel mushrooms hidden beneath a cover of dried leaves, and the boy devoured them quickly.

Mother was Pennsylvania Dutch and had been given to Father, a long-bearded, frightening, melancholy stranger from Virginia, when she was little more than a child. He was an apprentice to a local smith her father traded with and was thought to be a man of great faith who’d suffered a great loss. She wept nightly the month before and after the marriage, but her heart warmed to the new life as mother to a darling boy in a cabin the couple built by hand in the Missouri Territory. In conversation with Jeremiah, she likened Daniel to Job, a man who had been tested to the limits of his faith with a previous wife and three children killed by Indians in Kentucky and tested further, when given a second family with her later in his life, when God took his first and favorite son in a wilderness flood.

He’s testing him even to this day, she said, and Jeremiah pictured a wild-bearded man covered with boils and scabs, wandering the wilderness, shrieking at the heavens.

But God give him another family, the little boy said after some thought. Four of us and you.

Yet snatched away the favorite.

Mayhap, the six-year-old Jeremiah said, recalling that one clear vision of the golden-haired brother lifting him, but it don’t make sense to me. As a test, I mean.

The Lord works in mysterious ways. Mother swept the hair from his forehead and kissed him there.

I just wonder sometimes if He gets too much on His griddle or something and kills the wrong feller.

She yanked his earlobe. Lands! Don’t you ever question the works of the Lord, Jeremiah! Nor say anything disrespectful to the memory of your brother!

I didn’t mean no disrespect, he replied, I was only thinking, Mother. I mean, a feller can make a mistake if he’s got too much on the fire, is what I meant. And it didn’t make no sense killing Dan’l Junior, did it?

His mother’s tears served as a reminder to tread softly around certain subjects, especially those dealing with God and his brother. And when the boy was near the same age as the brother had been upon his death, a man with a flowing white beard rode up the trail from the forest. Late-October drizzle and its mist in the trees made the figure appear spectral. The boy watched from the manger as the horseman walked the stallion to within a yard of the cabin and stood it, towering above the porch.

Mother and Ruth stepped out of the cabin. The old whitebeard had a weathered and resigned aspect under the large-brimmed hat. He scowled down at the two of them and seemed to scrutinize each momentarily before making pronouncement: We must be off for Oregon this spring. I come to get you, as the drought is upon us and this country no longer provides.

The two women stared up at him, openmouthed. Where are the other three? the man asked.

The older girls have married and gone downriver, Mother responded in a small voice. The boy is abed with the ague.

The old horseman scratched behind an ear. We’ll make the Missourah jump at Independence. Jeremiah, watching in secret, realized that this old stranger was his father. He closed the manger door silently and listened in darkness.

There is no easy turning back on such a journey, the old man said, and the boy in the darkness imagined himself and his brother camped in a tepee among savage Indians out on the frontier beyond the Missouri. Mother called for him, and yet he hid a while and stifled his rasping gasps for air. The last light of day came through a hole in the door and projected a coin-sized white circle on the wall opposite it, which seemed a tiny, precise, upside-down vision of the tree line and their little cabin. And years hence Jeremiah would observe the photographer’s craft and think of that projection as the image

from the camera obscura, or

• THREE •

6 AM

the dark room

where he and his wife had lain an hour earlier had a shelf of photographs, and here was the one of the old patriarch in his only suit and the ubiquitous sweat-and-smoke-stained frontiersman’s round-brimmed hat. The man’s beard shot out from the sober mouth like a round spray of white water over a boulder. The eyes were so light as to appear washed out by the wonders, or terrors, they’d seen. His father’s image had been cut to fit a heavy necklace favored by his mother on Sundays. Jeremiah took the tintype to share with the gathering before the family house.

And if it were true, if somehow this little redheaded boy had been born with the soul of the old man inside him, what would it be like to see this grizzled image of your previous self? Not wishing to frighten the lad, Jeremiah pocketed the picture with the shotgun shells and carried it a few yards off to the lawyer, who had just finished helping his wife and child into the hotel carriage. Our driver assures us that we can tarry no longer, the young man said. What’s this?

The man whose farm this was. He watched the attorney study the tintype. He passed five years hence.

We got to keep schedule, Smith said in a gravel voice. He flicked a whip across the hindquarters of one horse, and the wagon started up without the lawyer. Jeremiah boosted the young dandy onto the buckboard and trotted alongside.

Mind if I pay a visit? You’re in the hotel?

Please, please do! From under the man’s arm the boy’s head peeked, and as the wagon rolled down the lane the child and Jeremiah stared into each other’s eyes and slowly, simultaneously, lifted arms to wave.

THEY SAT a while in the dooryard, this family of four, the parents aged almost half a century while the children were at the very beginning of life. After some time of sitting and listening to birdsong, lost in their private thoughts, the little boy ran to the chicken coop and the mother placed the baby girl in the father’s lap and went into the house. Sarah pulled on her father’s gray brush of mustache and gurgled excitedly. Jeremiah, staring into her dark eyes, wondered if the babe had memories beyond the six months since her emergence from Lucinda’s womb and thought again of the gaze of the redheaded boy and the way the great live oak had come out of the darkness before dawn as he himself had come out of a conversation with Teresa in his sleep. The dead seemed intent on speaking to him today, he mused. And he wondered what the professor would say to all of this, beyond calling it mystical claptrap.

As he thought of the imminent arrival of Elijah Applewood, a man known to Lucinda and a dozen others of their generation as nothing more or less than the professor, his son cried in jubilation at having found seven eggs. The little fellow ran across the field with his treasure held precariously in shirttails, Ezekiel barking at his heels, and Jeremiah started to warn the boy against dropping their breakfast when he realized that the dog’s call had another aim.

Jake, you hold those close, he said, scooping the boy into his other arm and carrying both children to the doorway at a trot. One egg fell and splattered, but Ezekiel was so intent on invasion that he didn’t tarry to lick it up. A little dust came up from among the willows where the lane met the road. He could see it