Winter Brothers Read Free

cat ear would twitch, give the air a tan flick just to be certain it still could. Then the self-hug into snooze again.
    The breakers,
now Swan the third day after his dream,
tore up the beach and rooted out immense numbers of clams which were thrown up by the surf. I gathered a few buckets full and soon the squaws and Indians came flocking up like so many gulls and gathered at least fifty bushels....
    Nine-nineteen. I see, by leaning to hear into the wind, that the night-black window which faces west off the end of my desk collects the half of me above the desktop and its spread sheaf of copied diary pages into quiet of my own.
    Nine-twenty.
Capt John told me,
this the morning following the beach bonanza,
that the cause of the great quantity of clams
on the beach yesterday was the dead people I dreamed about the other night and they put the clams there to show their friendship....
    Nine twenty-one. Last night at this time, winter began. I noticed the numbered throb of the moment—the arrival of season at precisely 21:21 hours of December 21—which took us through solstice as if we, too, the wind and I and the fencetop cat and yes, Swan and the restless memories of departed Makahs, were being delivered by a special surf. The lot of us, now auspiciously into the coastal time of beginnings. Perhaps I need a Captain John to pronounce full meaning from that.
    No, better. I am going to have Swan’s measuring sentences, winterlong.

Day Three
    A phrase recalled this morning from John McNulty when he wrote of having journeyed to his ancestors’ Ireland: that he had gone “back where I had never been.”
    Our perimeters are strange, unexpectedly full of flex when we touch against them just right. A winter such as this of mine—or any season, of a half-hour’s length or a year’s, spent in hearing some venturer whose lifespan began long before our own—I think must be a kind of border crossing allowed us by time: special temporary passage permitted us if we seek out the right company for it, guides such as Swan willing to lead us back where we have never been.
    Â 
    So Swan on one side of the century-line, myself on the other. Bearded watchful men both, edge-walkers of the continent, more interested in one another’s company than the rest of the world is interested in ours, but how deeply alike and different? That is one of the matters Swan is to tell me, these journal days when I stretch across to his footings of time.
    James G. Swan had hastened west in the same scurry as many thousands of other mid-nineteenth-century Americans. Their word isn’t much known today, but at the time they were called
Argonauts,
the seekers drawn to the finds of gold in California streambeds as if they had glimpsed wisps of the glittering fleece that lured Jason and his Greeks. Like Jason’s, the journey for many of them was by ship, the very impatience for wealth to come evidently weighting the sailing vessels to slowness. Swan stepped aboard the
Rob Roy
in Boston harbor in late January of 1850 and climbed off at San Francisco a half-year later.
    What exact cache of promises and excuses this man of New England left behind him can’t be known in detail, but they likely amounted to considerable. Something of the bulk and awkwardness of my own, I suppose, when I veered from Montana ranching to college and a typewriter. Swan was thirty-two years old when he set foot on the Pacific Coast. By the time of his birth in 1818—Turgenev’s year, Karl Marx’s year—in the north-of-Boston village of Medford, the Swan family name already had been transplanted from Yorkshire to Massachusetts for eighteen decades, evidently the devout achieving sort of New England clan which began to count itself gentry from the moment the Indians could be elbowed out of sight into the forest. (Swan himself was known to mention the family point of pride that his great-grandfather had been a landowner
on the N.W. side