The room contained among other things a black leather couch which made me want to lie down, and a kneehole desk made of burnished cherrywood. There was a telephone on the desk, sitting on top of a worn leather folder.
I sat down at the desk, with my knees snug in the knee-holes, and dialed Willie Mackey’s office on Geary Street in San Francisco. The girl on duty switched me to his apartment on the top floor of his building.
Another girl answered in a less businesslike voice, and then Willie came to the phone.
“Call me back, Lew. You caught me in the midst of the act of love.”
“You call me.” I read off Mrs. Broadhurst’s phone number to him.
Then I lifted the phone and opened the leather folder under it. There were several sheets of foolscap in the folder, and a faded map drawn in ink on creased and yellowing paper. The map showed about half of the Santa Teresa coastal plain; roughly penned in at the back of it were foothills and mountains resembling thumb-prints and paw-prints.
In the upper righthand corner of the map, someone had written:
U.S. Land Commission
Robert Driscoll Falconer
Ex Mission Santa Teresa
Filed in office June 14, 1866
John Berry
The top sheet of foolscap was covered with Spencerian handwriting. Under the heading “ ‘Memories,’ by Elizabeth Falconer Broadhurst,” I read:
The Santa Teresa County Historical Society has asked me to set down some notes concerning my family. My paternal grandfather, Robert Driscoll Falconer, was the son of a Massachusetts scholar and businessman and a student and disciple of Louis Agassiz. Robert Driscoll Falconer fought in the Union Army and on May 3, 1863, was wounded, almost mortally, at the Battle of Chancellorsville. But he lived to tell me about it in his old age.
He came to the Pacific Coast to recuperate from his injuries and acquired, in part through purchase but chiefly through marriage, a holding of several thousand acres which became known as Falconer Ranch. Much of this ranch was originally part of the Mission Lands, secularized in 1834 and becoming part of a Mexican Land Grant which passed by way of my grandmother to my grandfather, and thence to my father, Robert Falconer, Jr.
It is difficult for me to write objectively about my late father. He was the third in the male line of Falconers to attend Harvard College. He was more of a naturalist and scholar than a rancher or businessman. My father has been criticized for dissipating some of the family holdings. His reply would be that he had more important things to do with his life. He became a noted amateur ornithologist, author of the first checklist of native species to be found in the Santa Teresa region. His rich collection of skins both local and exotic became the nucleus of the bird collection of the Santa Teresa Museum.
At this point the Spencerian writing began to deteriorate:
I have heard false rumors that my father was a wanton killer of songbirds and that he killed them because he loved to kill. Nothing could be further from the truth! He killed birds only for scientific reasons, in order to preserve the evanescent beauty of their markings. He loved the colorful little fliers which science compelled him to shoot.
I can attest to this from personal observation. I accompanied my father on many of his expeditions here and abroad, and many were the times I came upon him weeping openly over the perforated body of the warbler, or the thrush, which he held in his kind masculine hand. Sometimes we wept together, he and I, hid in some wooded recess of our home canyon. He was a good man and a crack shot, and when he bestowed the gift of death he did so instantly, painlessly, with no mistake about it. Robert Driscoll Falconer, Jr., was a god come down to earth in human guise.
Toward the end, the handwriting went to pieces. It straggled across the lined yellow page like a defeated army.
I started to go through the drawers of the desk. The top one on the righthand side was stuffed with bills. Some of them had been unpaid for months and had special little messages written across them: –“Immediate payment will be appreciated,” “In case of further delay, the matter will be placed in the hands of legal counsel.”
In the second drawer I found an old wooden gun case and opened it. Fitted into its shaped felt lining were a pair of German target pistols. They were old, but oiled and gleaming like strange blue jewels.
I lifted one of the pistols out of the case and hefted it in my hand. It was so light and so well balanced that it seemed to come up of its own accord to eye level and let me sight along it. I aimed it at the picture of the man with the whiskers, but that only made me feel foolish. I carried it to the window to find something better to aim at.
No birds. But there was a circular bird feeder on a metal pole set in cement. A rat was eating the few kernels of grain left in the feeder. I pointed the empty gun at him. He ran down the pole and disappeared in the black ravine.
chapter 20
“What in the world are you doing?” Jean said behind me.
“Playing games.”
“Put it away, please. Elizabeth wouldn’t like you to be handling her pistols.”
I returned the gun to its case. “They’re a pretty pair.”
“I don’t think so. I hate all guns.”
She fell silent, but her eyes were full of further things to say. The girl had changed her short bright dress for a black one that covered her knees but didn’t fit her. She reminded me of an actress again, this time a young woman playing the part of an older one.
“Do I look all right?” She sounded anxious, as if in the absence of her son, the death of her husband, she doubted who she was.
“You couldn’t look any other way.”
She pushed the compliment away as if it might contaminate her and backed onto the couch, pulling her legs up under her black skirt so that they were completely hidden.
I closed the gun case and put it away. “Were those her father’s guns?”
“Yes. They belonged to Elizabeth’s father.”
“Does she use them?”
“If you mean does she shoot birds now, the answer is no. The guns are precious relics of the great man. Everything in this house is some kind of a relic. I feel like one myself.”
“Is that Elizabeth’s dress?”
“Yes it is.”
“Are you thinking of living in this house?”
“I may. It suits my mood.”
She bowed her head and sat in a listening attitude as if the black dress was wired for sound like a space suit. “Elizabeth used to shoot a lot of birds. She taught Stanley to do it. It must have worried him, or he wouldn’t have told me about it. Apparently it worried his mother, too. She gave up shooting entirely long before I knew her.
“But my father never did,” she said surprisingly, “at least not as long as my mother stayed with him. My father loved to shoot at anything that moved. And mother and I had to pluck the quail he shot, and the pigeons. After my mother left my father, I never went back to see him.”
She had jumped from Stanley’s family to her own without any transition. Wondering why, I said:
“Are you thinking of going back to your family now?”
“I have no family. Mother’s remarried and living in New Jersey. The last I heard of my father he was running a sport-fishing boat in the Bahamas. Anyway, I couldn’t face either of them. They’d blame me for everything that’s happened.”
“Why?”