The next morning I was fishing drowned greens out of our garden when I caught sight of Kathryn walking down the path, muddy once again, holding a bunch of scraggly young corn stalks in her hand. She’d been rolling up the tarps, and if they were up already, then she and her farm crew must have been at it since before first light, because they could never get as many people to help roll the tarps up as they could to put them down. Getting them back up was more or less their problem. And so of course Kathryn had just had a look at the damages. I could tell she was mad by the way she walked. The Mendezes’ dog ran out barking playfully at her and she swung a foot at it with a curse. The dog slipped avoiding her boot and yelped, then ran back to its garden. Kathryn stood in the path cursing, and then kicked the base of the big eucalyptus with her heavy boot, thump. I decided to pass on saying good morning to her.
Tom appeared from the other direction. “Henry!” he called. I waved to him as he approached.
He stood looking down at me with a twinkle in his eye. “Henry, what would you say to a trip to San Diego?”
“What?” I cried. “Sure, you bet! What?”
He laughed and sat down on the barrel half in our yard. “I was talking with John and Rafe and Carmen and the San Diegans last night, and we decided I’d go down there and talk with this Mayor of theirs. I want to take someone along, and the older men will all be working. So I thought you might not mind.”
“Wouldn’t mind!” I stalked around him. “Wouldn’t mind!”
“I figured not. And we can make some sort of deal with your pa.”
“Oh yeah?” Pa said, looking around the corner of the house. He grinned, came around the corner carrying two buckets of water. “What’s this all about?”
“Well, Sky,” Tom said, “I want to hire out your boy for a trip.”
Pa put down the buckets and pulled his moustache while Tom told him about it. They wrangled over the value of a week of my work, both agreeing it wasn’t much, but differing over just how little it was, until they’d worked out an agreement whereby Tom rented my services for whatever it took him to get a sewing machine that Pa had seen at the swap meet. “Even if the machine doesn’t work, right?”
“Right,” Pa said. “I want Rafe to strip it for parts, mostly.”
And Tom was to deal with John Nicolin concerning my absence from the fishing.
“Hey!” I said. “You got to ask Steve to come too.”
Tom looked at me. Fingering his beard, he said, “Yes… I suppose I do, really.”
“Ha,” said Pa.
“Aye. I don’t know what John will say, but you’re right, if I ask you I have to ask Steve. We’ll see what happens. When you’re done fishing, ask John when I can come by to talk about the San Diegans. And don’t say anything about this to Steve yet, else it will be him asking John and not me. And that might not be so good.”
I agreed, and soon I was off running to the cliffs, singing San Diego, Sandy Dandy-ay-go. On the beach I shut up, and spent the afternoon fishing as usual. When we were back ashore I said to John, “Tom would like to talk with you about the train men, sir. He was wondering when it would be convenient for us to drop by and talk.”
“Any time I’m not down here,” John said in his abrupt way. “Tell him to come by tonight,” he added. “Come eat a meal with us. You come too.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said. With a mysterious wink at Steve I was off up the cliff. I ran the river path home, splashing every puddle. To San Diego! To San Diego by train!
5
Late that afternoon the old man and I walked down the river path to the Nicolins’. The valley cupped us like a green bowl, tilted to spill us into the sea. The air smelled of wet earth and wet trees. Overhead crows cawed and dipped and lazily flapped their ways home. Above them there wasn’t a cloud in the sky; nothing but that pure dome of early evening blue. Naturally we were in high spirits. We skipped over puddles, cracked jokes, and described to each other the dinner we were headed for. “I’m starved,” the old man declared. “Starved! I haven’t eaten a thing since you told me we were invited.”
“But that was only a couple hours ago!”
“Sure, but I passed on tea.”
We turned off the river path and climbed the trail leading to the Nicolins’ house. Once over the freeway we could see it through the trees.
It was the biggest house in the valley, set on a fine patch of cleared land just behind the highest part of the beach cliff. The yard around the house had been planted with canyon grass, and the two-story, tile-roofed building stood on its green lawn like something left over from the old time. There were shutters bracketing glass windows, big eaves over the doors, and a brick chimney. Smoke lofted from this chimney into the river-blue sky, and lamps glowed in the windows. Tom and I gave each other a look, and went to the door.
Before we got there Mrs. Nicolin threw it open, crying, “It’s a mess in here but you’ll just have to ignore it, come in, come in.”
“Thanks, Christy,” Tom said. “The house may be a mess, but you’re looking fine as always.”
“Oh you liar,” Mrs. Nicolin said, pulling back a loose strand of her thick black hair. But Tom was telling the truth; Christy Nicolin had a beautiful face, strong and kind, and she was tall and rangy, even after bearing seven kids. Steve took a lot of his features from her rather than from John: his height, his sharp-edged nose and jaw, his mouth. Now she waved us in the door past her, shaking her head at the ceiling to show us, as she always did, that her day had been too harried to be described or imagined. “They’re cleaning up, they say. They’ve been building a butterchurn all afternoon, and right in my dining room.”
Their house had a dozen or more rooms, but only the dining room had a giant set of windows facing west, so despite Mrs. Nicolin’s protests it got used for everything that needed good light, especially when the yard was wet. All of the rooms we passed had fine furniture in them, beds and tables and chairs that John and Teddy, Steve’s twelve-year-old brother, had built in imitation of old time stuff. To me the whole house looked like something right out of books, and when I had said that to Tom he had agreed, saying it was more like houses used to be than any he’d ever seen: “Except they didn’t have fireplaces in the kitchen, nor rain barrels in the halls, nor wooden walls and floors and ceilings in every single room.”
When we got to the dining room the kids ran out of it yelling. Mrs. Nicolin sighed and led us in. John and Teddy were sweeping up splinters and chunks of wood. Tom and John shook hands, something they wouldn’t do unless one was visiting the other in his home. Through the big west windows we had a good view out to sea. Sunlight slanted in and lit the bottom of the east wall, and the wood dust in the air. “Get this room clean,” Mrs. Nicolin ordered. She pulled a hand through her hair, as if just standing in the room was making her dirty. John lifted his eyebrows in mock surprise, and tossed a scrap of wood in her direction. I left and went through the kitchen, which was stuffy with good smells, to find Steve. He was out back, cleaning the inside of the new churn.
“What’s up?” he asked.