Stan lay down on the grass. He rolled over a couple of times, then stood up and brushed himself off. My father was wearing a suit as he almost always did. He had his hands in his pants pockets, his jacket hooked back behind his wrists.
“What do you think, boys?”
Stan looked perplexed, trying to figure out what answer my father wanted. “It’s not any good for rolling.”
“What about you, Johnny.”
“Nice spot. Are you marketing it?”
“I own it.”
“Really?”
“Closed the deal today.”
“The whole field?”
“Most of the meadow and on down through those trees at the bottom. The Swallow River runs on the other side of them and that’s where the property ends. That log cabin comes with it too, but the house over there is on a separate title.”
Stan ran his hands nervously through his hair. “Oh boy, Dad. Oh boy.”
“What’s the matter, Stan?”
“Are we moving here?”
“No, we’re not moving.”
“But you bought a place with a cabin.”
“We’re not moving, Stanley. Don’t worry.”
Although I didn’t share Stan’s nervousness about moving to a new house I could understand his confusion. The piece of land my father had bought appeared to have no other use than as a place to relocate to. It had nothing going for it as an investment. It was too far from town and too isolated to subdivide and sell off in property lots. And as something to do with the tourist trade it was also a washout. Pretty and peaceful as it was, it had nothing that anyone would spend time traveling to see.
My father strode off across the deep grass. He swung his arms as he went and there was a jauntiness to his step that seemed put on, as though this man who had so much difficulty with his feelings was making a deliberate attempt to communicate his happiness to us.
We entered the trees that lined the bottom of the meadow. They grew thickly at first and there was grass underfoot, but after about ten yards the ground became dusty and the trees weaker and thinner and more widely spaced. My father stopped here and looked around as though he had no interest in continuing to the river. He scuffed at the dry earth with the toe of his shoe then walked a few yards to his left to a small hole someone had dug in the ground. Stan and I waited for him to start moving again but he seemed lost in a daydream, looking at the hole and nodding to himself. Stan cupped his hands and raised them to his mouth. He made a noise like static on a radio.
“Earth to Dad. Come in.”
My father lifted his head and chuckled and started walking again. Twenty yards further on the trees ended and we stepped out onto the bank of the Swallow River.
After the Swallow passed under the bridge at the southern end of Oakridge it ran through ranks of quartz-bearing hills until it joined the middle fork of the Yuba. It was nowhere near the size of famous Gold Rush rivers like the American or the Feather, but it had been well known as a river that was consistently rich along its length. We stood now on the inner curve of a bend in its path where the water ran shallow and wide. To our right, looking upstream, I could see the ragged end of the meadow’s rock wall sloping down through the trees to the edge of the riverbank.
Stan looked knowingly back and forth along the river. “I know where we are, Dad. This is your photo, isn’t it? This is the river in that photo.”
“Correct, Stan.”
“I thought so! Cool.”
I knew my father didn’t have the kind of money to go around buying land for the heck of it and it crossed my mind that after a lifetime of financial failure, of looking after Stan single-handedly, he might finally have succumbed to some sort of mental illness.
“What are you going to do with this place, raise crops?”
My father tapped the side of his nose. “You’ll see, John. You’ll see.” He took a deep breath and clapped his hands. “Remember this day, boys.”
We followed him back through the trees and up the meadow to where we’d left the car. As we came level with the wooden house I heard Stan draw his breath in sharply. Two people were sitting on the stoop in the afternoon sun. One of them was the girl from his dance class. He tugged my sleeve and whispered, “It’s Rosie!”
The girl saw Stan and lifted her hand in a weak wave.
“You better go over, dude.”
“But what am I going to say?”
“You talk to her at dance lessons, don’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“Well?”
“Will you come with me?”
My father was a little way ahead of us. He turned when he heard our conversation. “You two go over for a few minutes, if you want. I’ll wait in the car.”
The boards that made the steps up to the stoop were bare and worn soft with age. In the sun they gave out a faint papery fragrance that dried the back of the throat. Rosie was standing now. Beside her in a bent-wood chair was a thin woman of about seventy. Her gray hair was long and held by a pencil in a slowly collapsing bun and though her skin was sun-singed and deeply wrinkled, her eyes still held a sharp brightness and it was not hard to see that she had been good-looking in her youth. A light crocheted shawl lay across her knees and her fingers pushed a small collection of crystals absently back and forth across it.
Rosie rocked gently from side to side and watched Stan. She was barefoot and there was dirt between her toes. She wore the same faded pink shift as she had when I saw her last.
The woman smiled at us and said hello. Stan coughed uncertainly.
“Um, I’m Stan. I go to dance lessons with Rosie.”
The woman nodded. “Yes, Rosie told me about you. I’m Millicent Jeffries, Rosie’s grandmother.”
Stan raised his hand quickly at Rosie. “Hiya, Rosie.”
Rosie shifted on her feet as though she was tired and said, “Did you come specially?”
“I didn’t know you lived here.”
Millicent squinted across the meadow. “Is that your father over there?”
Stan nodded. “Yeah, he just bought the land.”
“Oh, I know him. He should have come and said hello.”
Rosie held her hand out to Stan. “You can come inside if you want.”
“Is it okay, Johnny?
“Sure, not too long, though.”
Stan and Rosie went into the house and Millicent gestured for me to sit on the chair next to her.
She picked a small glass ball from her lap. Its surface had been cut with triangular facets and as it rested on the flat of her palm small rainbows quivered against the dry skin of her wrist and across the woollen shawl that covered her knees. She moved her hand a little and smiled as the rainbows danced.
“Look at that. You’d never think there was all that color just waiting inside light, would you? And all you have to do is look at it a certain way. Beautiful, don’t you think? My Rosie mentioned your brother. She likes dancing with him. Is he a little slow?”
“He had an accident when he was young, but he isn’t slow.”
“A little… different? Rosie is a little different too. Only it wasn’t any accident that did it to her. Life just knocked her around until she couldn’t see any joy in it anymore. She’s lived with me since she was nine. She supports herself now cleaning people’s houses.”
“What happened to her parents?”
“Her mother was a heroin addict. In the evenings, after she’d had her fix, she liked to sit on the windowsill to catch the breeze. They lived in an apartment building and one night she just fell out. Rosie saw it happen. Her father wasn’t the sort of man who could see through to the other side of things so he started drinking and about six months later got in his car and never came back.”
She set her crystals and her shawl on a small table beside her chair and stood up.
“Some folks might have reservations about someone like Stan and someone like Rosie starting up a friendship. They might say it’s bound to end unhappily. But you get to my age and it seems like happiness is only ever temporary anyhow. So if they can pretend for a little while that they aren’t so different from everyone else, I’m just going to be happy for them.”