a letter to a friend:
I was building fences, when I lived in the Napa valley, working for a half-mad Dust Bowl hillbilly California Scotsman, scraping by, trying hard - he got us a job up on a ridge west of C_, people wanted a deer fence around twenty acres they had up there, a kind of summer cabin and a guy that lived there year round whose name was A_ E_.
A_ was going to be a helper, thrown into the bargain, they gave him a place to live up there and part of that was he was going to help us.
They were Adventists, he was an orphan their parents had adopted sort of but not exactly, taken custody of or whatever it's called when you take someone in as a child but don't make them part of the family.
I didn't like the owners right away. Before anything happened, just talking to them. Two sons, about my age then, which was 32.
A day or two after we started A_ asked me at lunch if I wanted to see his place, so I went down there. His rooms were like a dream, not a hearts and flowers dream, but other-worldly real/not-real, clean as could be, and trig, neat and tidy swept and dusted, colors mostly dark green as I remember them, cool and dark against the heat and glare of 100 degree weather outside, nothing in there even near gaudy or cheap, some old used furniture and a tv, but the floors were spotless and there was a dignity to everything, the way it sat, the way it was placed in the rooms. Out in back, out the kitchen door there was a garden, with its own high wooden fence, he never said but it felt like the owners had never even seen it. It was like Eden. Every single plant was heroic and strong, big and healthy and ready to get on with life right now. It was a knockout of a garden, something people pay big money to get someone else to make for them, and it was just there in back of his little cabin-y house where he made it, tended it, and ate from its produce.
One of the owners had mentioned that A_ and his sister had been "rescued" by their parents as a charitable act of Christian kindness, that they were congenital syphilitics, their mom had had it, and therefore they were not right in the head, they were slow and uneducable. And they were Indians, maybe local, he didn't know what kind.
Around the owners A_ acted just like they expected, but I noticed when he talked to me every word was accurate, poetically fit the meaning and the moment, not as singing but in that athletic grace where nothing is extra, nothing put on for secondary reasons - when he spoke there was that kind of strength you need to know suffering to be able to recognize, how firm it is, how much weight is behind it. Which doesn't describe it too well, because we were just talking about the things you do when someone shows you their house who you don't know real well.
What I'm trying to describe is what came through above and below and around the words and gestures, telepathy maybe a little, and whatever it is that goes between people outside and alongside the bits and units of language.
Something behind this world's surface things that's more real, and some people that know that and aren't afraid of it, and haven't sold out to whoever's buying - it's there in their voices and faces, but you need to want to see it.
One time there was a problem on the job, and things were getting tense, going too slow, and there were hang-ups and breakdowns, and unexpected difficulties, a solid granite section of the ridge ten inches under the grass and thin topsoil on a hillside the fenceline had to run; they called a licensed blaster down from P_, with dynamite to blow holes we could cement the posts into - somewhere during that we were in the shade, me and K_ my boss, the blasting guy, one of the owners and his wife, and A_. And the owner just offhand said something to A_ that was so loaded with racist evil and confident disdain I couldn't let it pass, and I called him on it, and he dismissed me - or he tried to, not fired me but you know, blew me off, or tried to - and I went toward him a little and said what you need to say when it's like that, and he faced me more directly and started to do his personal Adventist power ritual whatever it was, and I went toward him a little more, and K_ being an outlaw as much as not and a decent human being besides, though his family's welfare depended on us getting paid, he didn't say much of anything, just watching and listening.
I guess if you could imagine the way I looked that time you first came down to L_C_ from S_, in that shiny red car with your long hair and symmetrical features and I met you at the gate - you know, dark tan and muscled up, only a me twenty years younger than that - so you could see maybe his wife was casting glances a little, the owner being a vegetarian Adventist with some kind of bizarre Christian sex trip and everything; so there was that. And then there I was up in his shit about the way he was talking to A_, who he'd been treating that way since he was a boy, younger than A_, bossing him around, insulting him whenever he felt like it - it was a foundation in his world and it was being attacked, so his world was in need of defending. It heated up a little. After a few rounds of back and forth moves on his part and no moves at all on mine he squawked out something about going up and getting his gun, and I liked that part. I'm a total pussy about heights, and fist-violence makes me almost crippled to even think about, but I'm not afraid of a man with a gun and I never have been - not the way they want you to be when they pull it on you, or talk about pulling it on you.
So I went up a little closer to him and made it clear where I was at with that.
He had room to the side to get his wife and him on back up to their cabin without exactly turning his back on me or losing too much face, and at one point someone suggested we all just leave it alone, that we'd leave now, no more work that day anyway; and he left, with huffy words and his dignity relatively intact; so it didn't get resolved exactly, no permanent violence was done, just tension and hold and then room to move and it's over, and of course when you leave you leave wondering if it's all going to come back down on A_, who had no other place to go to live, he'd been there all his life just about.
I like to think there was a little weight attached to that man's heart when he went to throw his shit around on A_ later, something that held him back. Of course he insisted that I not go back up there to finish out the job, though to somebody's credit he didn't fire K_ and the rest of the crew, which was I think consisting at that time of K_'s wife and another guy besides me.
A long time later I saw A_ on a bus in S_ R_. He represents something for me, it's why I'm trying to tell you this. Not just him but a whole class of people that I think of when I think of failing, of letting people down, of not getting the job done, of selling out, of taking the easy way, now, at the expense of a whole long time later on, forever.
I guess what it is I'm trying to say - it's possible to champion people you don't even know, or try to, want to, feel like you have to, even people you don't have names or a name for, to want to champion them to want to be someone that holds something back for them or moves things in another, better direction - not for A_ and all the ones now so much as for longer than now, deeper in, even all the way.
Right and wrong isn't rules or laws - that's a lie, and it's an ugly lie at that.
Right and wrong is about beauty and ugliness. That's what it comes down to, and the faith of it, the believing, is that beauty isn't personal, subjective, relative. It's real all by itself, you can see it; but it's there even when you can't.
