Run River (10 page)

She drove into town alone, a silk robe pulled over her nightgown, to identify the bodies. Because the accident had been discovered so quickly, identification was only a formality. Walter Knight’s face, unmarked, bore only the featureless look of the recently drowned. Rita had been cut, across her left cheek and down that long Blanchard throat; she had been thrown, they said, against the dashboard before the car hit the water. Her long hair was still wet, and Edith Knight wondered, irrelevantly but obsessively, if it would dry before they buried her. She did not see how it could dry in the grave. Although she asked the coroner’s emergency attendant if it could, he did not seem to know. A small man possessed of a large curiosity about people under stress (an interest which relieved the general tedium of his work), the attendant took advantage, however, of this opening: he wondered, probing delicately, if the lady with the beautiful hair had been visiting Mrs. Knight and the late Senator. The late State Senator.

“Miss Rita Blanchard has lived all her life on Thirty-eighth Street,” Edith Knight said sharply. “She is from an old, old family in the Valley. A family,” she added magnanimously, “which crossed the Great Plains a year before my own.”

“A great tragedy, Mrs. Knight,” the coroner’s assistant said, abandoning the opportunity to pursue Sacramento Valley genealogy further and reaching instead for her hand. “A tragic loss.’ ”

“The Lord gives it and takes it, Mr. Paley,” she said, turning away from his outstretched hand.

By the time she left the morgue the sun was completely up, and the heat rising. She drove directly to the McClellan place and found Lily in the kitchen. “Oh Christ,” Lily whispered. “He’ll never have the marmalade.” She had gotten up at dawn to make pear marmalade for her father before the heat came up. The marmalade was a kind he especially liked, from a recipe of his mother’s, and she had planned it as a surprise. She had gone to the ranch the day before to get the pears from Gomez. “The marmalade would have shown him,” she whispered. “Shown him what?” Edith Knight asked, but Lily did not answer because she had put her knuckles against her teeth to keep from screaming and had slipped down beside the sink to the linoleum floor. Shaking but not moving in any other way, she stayed there until Edith Knight pulled her to her feet, untied the apron she was wearing over her nightgown, and led her upstairs to Everett, who was shaving. Later the doctor gave Everett enough pills to keep her quiet for two days and Edith Knight said she had never, never in her entire life, seen anybody react the way that child reacted to a death in the family, she had always been morbidly sensitive and frankly it would have been better if they had gotten the pills before they told her, they might have known it would happen and she of all people should have known Lily was not strong enough to cope with the things other people had to cope with, but when do you think at a time like that.

On the morning of the funeral, Edith Knight and Martha, together, managed to get Lily dressed. She sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the floor while Martha went through her closet. She had nothing which approximated mourning except a black silk suit she had bought in Berkeley; now, six months pregnant, she could not fasten the skirt. “Everett said it didn’t matter what I wore,” she said again and again, and finally, after her mother and Martha had conceded that it did not, she put on a maternity skirt, a pink and white flowered blouse that her father had once admired, and, an afterthought, a black lace mantilla. She looked, Martha whispered to Everett, like a stray from
The Grapes of Wrath
.

It was another bad day, close to 108° at eleven o’clock. Lily sat between her mother and Everett in the car, her composure so precarious that she could look at neither of them.

“I feel stronger every minute,” Edith Knight announced, trying to work her long gloves onto her fingers. “Here,” she added, pulling off one of the gloves and twisting a large ring from her finger. “I meant for you to have this some day anyway.”

Lily slipped the ring over her wedding ring and closed her eyes again. It was a diamond her father had given her mother the day she was born.

“Thank you,” she said.

“I don’t know.” Edith Knight lifted Lily’s left hand and appraised the effect. “You’re really too young.”

“She’s really too skinny,” Everett said. “She’ll lose it.”

“I
want
it,” Lily said, opening her eyes; it was the first unequivocal statement she had made in two days.

They did not have a Catholic funeral. Because only a handful of the Knights were Catholics in the first place and because even their Catholicism was more an accident of birth or marriage than an act of faith, the family was not troubled by the Episcopal service, the unconsecrated ground: the family graveyard, near the ranch, where no one had been buried since 1892. “I don’t care if he was brought up Catholic or brought up Hindu,” Edith Knight had declared. “I guess I know where he’d want to lie. I guess I know that much.”

From all over the Valley and from the Sierra foothills the family came; everyone from the river came and everyone from town came. Gomez and Crystal came, the Governor came, and the bartender from the Senator Hotel came. As if she were immune to grief, love, all the transient passions, Edith Knight stood throughout the funeral without moving. Lily stood behind her, looking away from the grave toward the distant line of cottonwoods which marked the river. She had thrown the mantilla back from her hair because it seemed to draw the heat; now it lay, fallen from her shoulders, on the ground behind her. She could not stoop to pick it up.

There was a certain comfort in the unkempt graveyard. Dried grass obscured the markers, and the wings had been broken years before from the stone angels guarding the rusted wire gate; there was about the place none of the respect for death implicit in a well-tended plot. Once, a long time before, Walter Knight had brought Lily to see this graveyard. He had made her trace out with her finger the letters on the stones, the names and their dates, until she found the small, rough stone which marked the oldest grave.
Matthew Broderick Knight, January 2, 1847, until December 6, 1848
. The baby had been the first of them to die in California. It was a favorite story, passed on from Knight to Knight and documented periodically in the historical supplements to the
Sacramento Union
. Born in Kentucky, the child had begun to burn with infant fever on the way west. Another child in the party had died of it, and that mother had carried the dead child in her arms for three days, telling no one, afraid they would bury her baby before they came to a station. But Matthew Knight had lived out the crossing; he died instead in a room in Sacramento that first winter, while his father, Lily’s great-great-grandfather, was building the first house on the ranch. His mother, twenty years old that winter, was deranged for months, believing herself at home in Bourbon County even as she hauled buckets of Sacramento River silt to cover the hardpan around her raw house. She wanted to grow a garden of forget-me-nots and love-lies-bleeding and the dogwood she remembered from her mother’s kitchen stoop, but as summer broke and she began to feel herself again she planted those same alien poppies and lupine that grew on the child’s grave.
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down
, she had ordered cut into the gravestone, but that had been when she was ill. The symbolic nature of Amanda Broderick Knight’s first garden on the ranch was, for the Knights, this story’s
raison-d’être
. “I think nobody owns land until their dead are in it,” Walter Knight had said to Lily, playing a familiar variation on a familiar motif. Even as she recognized that all he was giving her was the official family line, Lily could not help but be disarmed. She answered in the same rich vein: “Sometimes I think this whole valley belongs to me.” “It does, you hear me?” Walter Knight said sharply. “We made it.” She had never doubted that.

The grave was covered by noon. Her arm through Everett’s, Lily sat in the car, twisting the diamond on her finger and watching her mother. Edith Knight stood in the dry grass by the wire gate and received: accepted as her due the certified recollections, the ritual testimonials which serve as visas into that comfortable territory where no dead man is less than noble.
You remember when Walter came up that summer, ’thirty-three, we were in the middle of a crop and there was all the trouble and Walter sent in his own men and cleaned up the crop. You remember how Walter held the note on the Hawkes place all those years after it was due until the son could pay it off. Remember now. Remember
. The litany of Walter Knight’s shining hours continued until one o’clock, long after most of the mourners, including Mr. McClellan and Martha, had left for Rita Blanchard’s funeral in town; Edith Knight stood impassive and triumphant throughout. Were they not attesting, after all, that he now belonged to God alone and that she, Edith, had sole rights to his relics in this world?

Two weeks later, the lawyers notarized her victory. In 1933, Rita Blanchard, needing cash, had sold to Walter Knight 120 frontage feet of a downtown block which had been in her family for eighty years. Although his will provided that this parcel be returned to Rita, their simultaneous deaths meant that it now belonged to Edith. To the lawyers, the family, and to the reporter who was writing up the disposition of the estate, she announced that she wanted the sizable income from that property placed annually in a University of California scholarship fund to be administered by the Department of English and to bear Rita’s name. “If there is one thing I will remember about poor Rita to my dying day,” Edith Knight explained, “it’s that Rita was a
reader.”
Because the entire estate went to Edith (passing to Lily at her death and held throughout both their lifetimes in a loose trust which would vest in Knight at some point after his twenty-first birthday), she could now afford, in every sense, to dispose of Rita with that grand gesture. (The impact of the Rita Blanchard Scholarships was somewhat weakened, however, when it became apparent a month later that Rita had left half the Blanchard estate to Lily, the other half to be divided among sixteen cousins, including Everett, Martha, and Sarah McClellan. As Martha said to Everett in the Blanchard lawyer’s office, you really had to grant that round to Rita.)

9

There were roses (so many for September) and late poppies: the room was full of them. Everett must have brought them in from the ranch. No matter what way Lily turned her head on the pillow she saw roses, dropping their petals in the closed gray room which looked exactly like the room they had given her when Knight was born. Somewhere among the roses were jasmine gardenias, sweet and heavy as the drugs. The nuns would not open the windows in the storm. The rain had begun the night before she started labor and was still falling; she watched it washing down the narrow windows all that morning. When she closed her eyes she saw rain beating the leaves from the camellias around the house. It must be raining in every part of the world, flooding all the valleys: she was certain that her baby had died in the night, that the nuns were concealing the death from her, and she knew as well that before long she would begin to hemorrhage and die herself. She had recently read
A Farewell to Arms
and now she cried to think of Everett walking out of the hospital into the rain like Lieutenant Henry.

Everett had come yesterday. When she woke from the drugs he had been sitting by the window, and she had watched him for several minutes without speaking. The San Francisco papers were spread on the floor around his chair. He had been reading three or four papers all that year, since before Pearl Harbor. Although she tried every few days to read a paper through, she seemed always to have come in too late on any given action to understand that day’s plays. After a while she had tried concentrating only on the war in the Pacific, which as far as she could gather America seemed to be losing. Although this did not seem entirely credible, it seemed, winning or losing, more credible than anything about the war in Europe; what the war in Europe so notably lacked, for Lily, was a Pearl Harbor. As Mr. McClellan had said the morning of Pearl Harbor, when Martha ran downstairs wrapped in a towel to tell them, “That tears it.” (That was all he said, and he did not say that until he had shouted at Martha “You keep on listening to the radio in the bathtub, Missy, you’re going to fry yourself,” but he spent the rest of the day pacing up and down in front of the house, scanning the sky and muttering to himself.) Until Everett had explained to her that the Germans and the Japanese were pledged to defend one another, a point which had eluded her for the first two weeks of the war, Lily had been at a loss to understand what the United States was doing in Europe at all. The Pacific, of course, was another case. It did not please her to think, as she had thought, that this baby might have been conceived the morning of Pearl Harbor. It was not propitious.

Everett, yesterday, had been looking out the hospital window into the rain. The lights seemed to be just coming on outside. It would be about five o’clock, she supposed, and there would be lights in all the windows down Thirty-eighth Street. Only Rita Blanchard’s house would be dark; the house had been empty since the accident. She could never remember that the house now belonged to her, to her and Everett and Martha and Sarah and thirteen other people, but mostly to her. Everett had talked a few weeks ago to a man who wanted to buy the place and have it rezoned for a day nursery. That would be the day. Painted wooden rabbits on Rita Blanchard’s lawn.

“Tell me what’s in the newspaper,” she said finally. Everett was always trying to tell his father what was in the newspaper. Because Mr. McClellan neither read the papers (none of them, he said, carried anything but pictures of that crew in Washington) nor listened to the radio, his many ideas about how the war should be conducted were based almost entirely upon information given him by Everett. Once he had absorbed two or three facts, usually tangential, he would cut Everett off by saying that it was no news to him, he knew those yellowbellies and all their tricks like the back of his hand.