EATING
BAMBI, OR GROWING UP REDNECK
for Bill Dinsmore, 1933-1994,
Maureen Reilly,
1932-1994,
& Joseph Hurley,
1926-1993.
Several
ranchers drop in to pay their respects,
discuss
boundaries: dairy vs. beef cattle, wild & domestic hogs,
the
last buffalo, the growing herds of deer,
and
who’s able to hold onto the last of the open range.
It’s
a dry wake; we’re all second- or third-degree Celts—
the
displaced white indians of Europe who still can’t hold our liquor.
Someone
asks how my uncle died. Closing familial ranks,
my
cousin Sinead and I echo, “Alcohol.” We don’t add
how
her father drowned in his own bed.
The
Gallagher brothers take turns slaking their terrible thirst
at
the Rancho Nicasio bar across the town square—if you can call it that—
drinking
in the geographic isolation and psychic distance
of
several lifelines with measured precision.
Here,
we’re all related to someone or another by blood or marriage.
When
winter grass circles the outcroppings, it could be Ireland.
We
hold onto our “R”s, aspirate “S” into sh. Hold our liquor by the ears.
One
rancher wears a “Native Sons of Nicasio” emblem on his jacket.
No
one can explain why we locals pronounce it “Nicashio.”
To
tell the natives from the newcomers, Mrs.
Farley volunteers.
I’m
not satisfied with dialectic explanations.
What
did Chief Marin and Nicasius call
this place?
When
newcomers arrive in the country of death,
what
do they speak? Irish? Miwok? Slainte Gael macushla mo chroidhe.
A
toast to my Gaelic heart’s blood. I
keep a Joycean rendezvous
with
the dead in Nicasio, the geographic epicenter of Marin.
Last
month, during my mother’s wake, a forest fire broke out,
helicopters
dragged tarps of reservoir water for the parched trees.
Last
week my uncle’s roomate’s heart failed him.
Last
night Alan McIsaac’s mother died; they gather knee-deep at the bar
after
mass. His father invites me over, but I’ve another death to attend to.
(Once
I was 16, kissing Alan, cattle tongued the steep hillsides.)
Sinead
asks what happened to the last buffalo at the church pasture.
Shot, someone volunteers. A neighbor bought another
buffalo
named
it “Nickel” who mouthed french bread cigars like Churchill.
Lonesome,
he took off overland, looking for ghost kin.
The
venial abstraction of fences didn’t stop him.
Someone
talks about goin’ huntin’, dropping his “G”s.
The
speculum of potential opens us up, pushes us back to root origins,
we
revert to generational patterns—the good old boys
who
paid regards to Bambi on the plate and in the pasture.
I
remember my uncle bringing home haunches of roadkill venison.
The
newcomers close ranks, carving our land into prime estates.
We’ve
killed off all the predators, and the herds suffer.
Somewhere
on the plains a white buffalo calf is born.
This
is the seventh and final generation before the millennium.
The
wooden Indian at the Ranch House, silent as smoke.
Last
full moon before the solstice:
The
DUI brothers hitch home alone at dusk.
A
slow driver cramps my style, the spiral of Petaluma hill
unwinds
in low gear like a yellow ribbon, taking no prisoners.
I
dreamed of a fork in the road, my truck leaked hydraulic fluid,
and
of the final cry of a wild goose who died in my arms
as
I wailed in sorrow—for he was my father come to warn me.
An
owl banks its wings against the velocity of my car.
Doesn’t
quite cross my path. I shudder, dismissing superstition.
Sinead
says, All things come in threes.
Prime numbers offer little solace.
Her
father chose the week after his friend’s passing,
my
mother, the seventh year after our grandmother’s burial,
my
father chose the day after his own birth.
At
least today isn’t Thursday; they died on a Thursday
like
the exiled poet, the Paris rain quenching his bones.
Backbone
of the drought broken after a half-life of thirsty skies.
The
dream decodes itself: the brakes fail after I arrive home.
It’s
been that kind of day, that kind of winter, keeping score, the river rising.
Maybe
we could abolish Thursdays, but not the rain.
We’re
the last ones, displaced by those who’ve come,
and
those who’ve died; the gap closing in on each of us,
a
double helix of owl feathers fluxing the laden wind.
12/19/94
