Valley Oaks Blues

A Fireside Chats excerpt

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

The Valley Oaks Mobile Home Park was an oasis in a stereotypical wasteland of trailer trash. Whether transformed by the magical grace of its live oaks, its meandering stream or the simple good fortune of stable, crime-averse tenants, Valley Oaks had always managed to skate clear of toilet-bowl lawn ornaments, refrigerator and car-hood fencing and the dizzyingly sweet and sulfurous fumes of methamphetamine labs. The park’s diverse tenants communed under a lush canopy of gray-green leaves and gentility more commonly ascribed to the explicitly affluent landowners who locked themselves in their towers up in Brook Hills or Morro Hills or Rolling Hills.

Not far from sea level, Valley Oaks’ residents were more akin to the salt of the earth. Artists captured the park’s pastoral landscape from the decks attached to their doublewides. Elderly couples walked the winding streets at dusk, their matching oxygen tanks in tow. Immigrants shared the earthy bounty of their verdant, well-measured gardens, and their respectful children always waved hello. Retired widows and widowers had ready and willing partners for their serial games of bridge and whist and the occasional roll in the graying hay. Eccentrics found accommodating neighbors who laughed at their antics or agreeably ignored them. People escaping raucous, chaotic lives found sweet solace in the pacific lanes and sage-scented breath of the community.

Indeed, the friendly tranquillity of the park was, Dorrie Cupa felt certain, the perfect — no, the only — place fit for nestling into her final days. And she had known plenty of less-qualified nests and nesters over the wide-ranging course of her life.

She awoke late-morning, as was her norm, to a chorus of birds — wrens, towhees, sparrows, scrub-jays — all vying for tasty morsels revealed as the morning shifted toward noon. After decades of rising with the sun in obligation to others, Dorrie was enjoying her natural nocturnal rhythms. She came alive in the dark; she loved the skies, the songs of the night, the cover of shadows. She would have howled with every moon, had she no neighbors. But she was content with crooning the tunes she used to belt in her youth. She would serenade the stars and the beasts who shared them with her, dancing through the night with her collection of seventy-eights and forty-fives, the albums and sheet music — music once devoured and then dedicated to a decade of audiences, until a consensus of disapproval of her burgeoning belly hooked her from the stage.

Rising slowly now, to avoid the vertigo of her eighty-eight years, Dorrie noted a different pitch to the birds’ songs as she hummed the Eames Brothers’ “Indian Summer Blues,” whispering a line or two: “Too bad you’re leaving, but I know you got to go.” She stretched her crinkled body, naked but for the turquoise and silver coiling every limb and the tattoo on her left breast, once bold and brash, now elongated and faded with the reach of age. “Live and love well,” it said, two things she had practiced avidly and with varying results until she got them both just about as good as she figured she could.

She took her old Kodak Brownie to the window and snapped the view, as she did every day, not wanting to forget one moment of her life and hoping her eyes wouldn’t go before she did, so her photographs would always serve as ready reminders. She donned the blue jeans and shirt she had tossed earlier that morning on the armchair by her bed, slipped her feet into ancient moccasins, and walked just a little gingerly toward the caffeine awaiting her in the kitchen. She touched the turquoise necklace that lay heavy on her chest and said “Good day” to her multitude of elders and cousins and siblings and friends and enemies, as she passed each along the hallway. She paused at the end by her Antonio, her dear husband of inadequate years.

“Beat you by ten thousand, three hundred and twenty-five days, Dear One. Ha!” And she kissed the glass that kept her husband’s lips, flung to the winds some twenty years before, from her own.

She put coffee on the stove to perk, rolled her cigarette and dropped some loose tobacco into her breast pocket, then headed for the yard to give thanks to Mother Earth for her many gifts, including allowing her to awaken yet another day more alive than dead.

As she stepped outside, she understood with one deep and smoky breath of the Santa Ana wind why the birds had altered their tunes, and then she heard a muffled, incomprehensible voice booming through the trees and someone banging on her front door. She tucked the cigarette in her pocket and walked back through the house, picked up her Brownie and opened the door to two young men breathing heavily and blinking fast, windborne ash caught by their ruffled hair.

“You gotta get out!” one of them blurted. “The fire’s coming!”

“Yeah,” said the other. “You have to be out in ten minutes, Ma’am. Do you need help packing up?”

Dorrie looked into their faces, not yet bearing the marks of much experience, and she took their picture. She could see they were as scared as they were eager to be part of the biggest thing that had ever happened in their short Fallbrook existence. But their image dimmed as she was struck by the vision, oddly out of context given her relative good health, of her life replaying on an ethereal screen only she could see.

•     •     •

The greasy smoke of a cook fire beside her father’s truck seemed to Dorrie a welcome alternative to the dust that had driven them westward, filling their nostrils and ears, their creases, even the folds of her most private part. She did miss little Wilma, her younger sister. The pretty one, she was married off to anyone but a farmer before they packed for California, the meager remnants of their life leaving plenty of room in the truck for people, flesh-and-blood and remembered. She never knew the three boys lost to the flu in 1918, the year she was born, but she missed them anyway.

She watched the next one, Joshua, caught up in the thresher and, although she missed him, too, she didn’t like to think about what the pieces of him had looked like. She missed most her older sister, Liza, who had been like a second mother. But when Liza learned the hopeless news she was going to become one, she kissed Dorrie and hanged herself from the last rickety cottonwood tree on the land that was no longer theirs.

“Surprising, that tree held up,” Dorrie’s Pops said, shaking his head lower than ever and kicking the ground but loosing nothing but dust. “Too bad.”

Dorrie knew Liza would have rathered the privacy of a barn, as she knew her father couldn’t afford the lumber to build one. They cut her down and laid her right into the grave they had dug in the clay and rock for her Gram, who was sure to go any moment. So, after she sang her Mama’s favorite hymn, “Softly and Tenderly,” like she had never sung it before, Dorrie and Sam, her last remaining brother, had to grab the pick and shovel and start right over digging.

Liza made it a hard kind of sadness to use that last tree for fuel, but eventually they had to. Dorrie saved a piece of it, though, carved Liza’s name in it, and she put it in her keepsake box with Joshua’s one pack of baseball cards and bone-handled whittling knife, the small family portrait Grams had always favored, and the doll crafted of sticks and rags her Mama had made Wilma give up the day of her wedding.

Yes, the past year they had seen their worst luck and sorrow enough to fill a dozen barley bins, maybe a hundred. It didn’t seem right, what God had done, and Dorrie figured her life so far had been mostly one great sadness. Of the eight kids her Mama had birthed, only two were along for the ride to California, Dorrie and Sam, and at eighteen, Dorrie was nearly beyond the hope of marriage, approaching the bitter role of burden to her near-to dried-up and starving parents. They reminded her of the mummy king article she’d saved from an old newspaper, lollygagging one cool day when the outhouse didn’t smell so bad. She wanted no part of any of it — the sunken cheeks, the desiccating sadness or the spinster life awaiting her in California — any more than she wanted another meal of the pone and fatback crackling on the small fire, struggling to become a meal.

That’s why, when they made it to Uncle Mearl and Auntie June’s in Livingston, her Pops’ brother’s farm, she knew she would pick their grapes for one season and no more. The day she left to pick farther south, with her satchel and her box of keepsakes, her Mama gone to bed in a coma of sorrow, she didn’t listen to what any of the others said, because she knew she would do anything, anything but what Liza did, to escape the life laid out before her like the thick painted line on one of those big highways, heading straight to misery.

“You’re dressed like a darn man,” her Pops mumbled, kicking dirt. Dorrie watched his boot and figured at least he had moist earth to cushion his toe. At least he had that.

“After all we done for you, don’t you come back here, girl,” Uncle Mearl said.

“I thank you for everything you’ve done,” Dorrie lied, thinking of how her Mama and she had worked hard, doing everything they could find to do for their keep, while her cousins and Auntie June went to the picture shows and dances in new dresses and Dorrie mended the old ones, stained brown under the arms, and wore them while she wiped the pee those brats had dribbled on the doubleholer, knowing she’d come along behind them. “I am full of all the gratitude you deserve. And Pops, I love you and I love Mama and I’ll be seeing you all.”

Dorrie didn’t go back for two years. Not until she had swapped the overalls and satchel for a smart day dress with a proper flounce and a beau with a respectable car so he could drive her back up from Los Angeles and take her Mama and Pops and Sam for a ride and an ice cream, her treat. And she sang all the way, songs she learned from the Negro folk in her tarpaper neighborhood off Central and performed for the white folk uptown. But when Dorrie and her beau got to the farm, it turned out Sam had disappeared, no one knew where, her Mama had passed, and her Pops kept calling her Liza. All she could do was hold onto her heart and ignore Uncle Mearl and Auntie June telling her how her worthless soul was going to burn in eternal, fiery damnation for abandoning her parents. She had her beau take a picture of her and her Pops with the Brownie another beau had given her, and she stuffed some money in her Pops’ shirt pocket, even though she guessed someone else would be spending it. They found her Mama’s grave in the family plot and she took a picture of that, too, although the name and dates, so poorly carved into the wood, like an afterthought almost, were already badly weathered and the cross was barely holding together.

“Goodbye, Mama. I am sorry if I broke your heart, but I hope I only broke one-eighth of it. Still, I am sorry one hundred percent, I truly am. I love you. I love you, Mama.” And she kissed her Mama goodbye, leaving bright red lips and salt on the marker. “Sugar, please take me back to L.A. as fast as your spiffy car will get us there — and driving all night is no problem.” Except, at the end of the lane, she made him turn around and speed back past Uncle Mearl, who shook his wobbly fist at them, and on to Mama’s grave, where Dorrie pulled the cross bar off the marker. She clutched it to her heart, embracing her second great sadness all the way to their first stop, at the Hotel Tulare, where she had a bowl of peach ice cream and a Coke with a shot of the gin she poured from a silver flask that said “To My Dearest Dorrie with Love From Alvin,” a different beau. And two nights after that, back in L.A., having bought a larger keepsake box at a pawnshop on Pico big enough to hold her Mama’s grave marker, and surrounded by her regular Saturday night audience, she bled out the blues like they were pumping from her heart. And they were.

Which is why the man visiting from the new Hollywood club she had been hearing about sidled up after her first set to woo her away, even though she wasn’t ever going to be as pretty as Wilma, but the man didn’t even seem to notice.

“How long have you been singing, young lady?”

“Since Mama made us stand around the table Sundays and learn her favorite hymns — because the church was too far and gasoline was too dear.”

“You don’t sing like any choir member I ever heard.”

“Not Mama’s kind of choir, but I guess you’ve never been to a Negro church?”

“Hmm, no. Are you one of those light-skinned Negroes?”

“No. And if I was?”

“It could have been a plus, sort of a West Coast Lena Horne, but it’s neither here nor there, because you have talent and style, and I’d like you to come sing at a nightclub, up in Hollywood.”

“They treat me real well, here. I get wages and tips, and they just gave me time off so I could visit my family.”

“That’s not nearly enough with your voice, gal. We have a better clientele, a better band and a better venue. I know what you make here, and we’ll pay you half again as much as that, and you don’t have to drink with the customers unless you want to.”

Dorrie looked at the man, at his clear eyes and nice suit, kind of like the men seeking skilled office assistants, and nothing more, who visited the business school where she studied secretarial arts during the day and made sure to talk with every teacher after class. Thanks to them she knew to say, “Put the offer in writing, with a twelve month commitment, firm, and thirty-day notice of termination requirement, and it’s a deal.”

The man looked at Dorrie with one eyebrow cocked, gave her an admiring grin and put out his hand. “Let’s shake on that. My handshake lasts a lot longer than a piece of paper.” Dorrie hesitated. “But you’ll get that, too.” And they shook.

The next day, Dorrie put her contract in one of her keepsake boxes, and that’s when she realized there was more to making her way in life besides working hard and honoring her mother and father and finding a man to compensate for not being the pretty one. So she gave up the beaus, snuck into an after-hours tattoo parlor to have her new doctrine emblazoned on her chest, and started trying other ways not to miss her family. And this is what, in 1947, brought Dorrie to San Diego County, more specifically, to the grand seaside resort of the Hotel del Coronado. There, MGM was pleased to pay her to work long hours booking and managing the live entertainment intended to occupy the cast of the studio’s High Barbaree production when they were not filming — or to at least keep the more lively members’ less seemly escapades, along with their irrepressible hands, in the controlled enclave of the hotel, limp with booze and out of the pages of the San Diego Union and the Evening-Tribune. The studio’s gratitude included a deftly negotiated, cherry-red Studebaker Skyway Champion convertible, in which Dorrie spent her sparse free time exploring the far reaches of San Diego’s North County, open land beautifully neglected by publicity hacks and developers.

It was there she discovered her next life on a dirt road snaking off Highway 395, where, amid spinning wheels and swirling dust, she managed to hit a scrawny sycamore tree instead of the Marine trudging eastward. She sat sideways in the car with her feet on the ground and assessed his face as he wiped the little bit of blood from her lip and she determined that he was like no other man she’d known before, and she pocketed some of the gravel through which she had skidded, to remember the moment.

“Doesn’t look as though I’ll be singing the mourning song over your grave.”

“I’m happy to hear that. Did you get lost on the way home from the war?”

“I took a little detour through Okinawa, but I’m home for good now.”

“Well, if I haven’t stopped the car for good, I’ll drive you the rest of the way.”

“I’ll take that ride, thank you, and not just because you are the prettiest woman I have ever seen.”

Dorrie’s heart sang as together they rode through the valley to his family’s adobe on the Pala Reservation and a meal his sisters made of beans and fry bread. And on, to a ceremony where there was dancing and singing and from which she departed as Mrs. Antonio Cupa with his first gift of silver and turquoise on her finger. And on through some years of Dorrie’s performing and Antonio’s schooling, until he was ready to teach and she was ready to drop their firstborn. And on into a nice little rancho in Fallbrook, where they had their second son. And Antonio taught high-schoolers the eviction of his people from their homes and ancestral graves in Warner Springs and coached the boys to wrestle like warriors. And Dorrie made coffee and thanked Mother Earth with the tobacco offering Antonio taught her to make. And she milked the goats and shot her family’s life with her Brownie and tried to talk their boys out of Vietnam, to no avail.

And this failure was what gave Dorrie her third great sadness, lying prostrate outside their door, her heart dripping into the earth, as Antonio sent the casualty notification officer away and held her through the afternoon and as the moon crossed over them and the coyotes howled their sorrow and as the sun pushed the moon away and the dew settled on them. And then Dorrie left her anguish, sowed and watered, and rose to make coffee and smoke her thanks to Mother Earth and frame the short lives she had captured with her Brownie. And Antonio sang the mourning song over their boys’ graves that held only parts of them. And the Secretary of Defense letters yellowed in one of Dorrie’s many keepsake boxes as her anguish grew into a bottlebrush tree that graced their home with cool and comforting shadows.

It was there, on the bench her Antonio built so they could sit under their sons’ tree, the bench into which he carved his love for her, that he said to Dorrie, “You are still the prettiest woman I have ever seen,” and she poked him as her heart sang. And then Dorrie’s fourth and final great sadness filled her womb and she roared the mourning song over Antonio’s still body, collapsed at her feet. Her sorrow rose into the tree and twined around it as she wove a basket of green bottlebrush twigs to hold their love, she thanked Mother Earth for waiting with Antonio for her to join him, she sold their home and gave away their goats to a nice old Fallbrook family who made cheese, and she pried the arm carved with her Antonio’s love from the bench and moved her keepsakes to Valley Oaks, where she did her own waiting for twenty some years. Until now.

•     •     •

A deputy sheriff’s cruiser screeched around the bend and for a moment they were, all three, Dorrie and the two young men, mesmerized by the amplified words delivered in the controlled monotone of an unhappy messenger. “Valley Oaks is under a mandatory evacuation order. The Rice fire is approaching. For your safety, you must be out of the park within ten minutes. Valley Oaks is under a mandatory evacuation order. The Rice fire is approaching. For your safety, you must be out of the park within ten minutes. Valley Oaks is under a mandatory evacuation order…”

“Thanks, boys, but I don’t have much to take. The family next door could sure use your help, though. They have a child.”

The young men ran to the next home, and Dorrie rolled another cigarette and put it in her pocket, knowing she wouldn’t be there the next morning to do so. She turned the light off under the coffee, poured a mug and took it out to the yard. She dropped her offering of loose tobacco under the trees and lighted a cigarette, inhaled and gathered the smoke to her, cleansing herself in its swirls and imagining the larger fire heading her way.

“Hell of a bath, Fallbrook’s taking, Antonio.”

She thanked Mother Earth for the songs of birds and the stars of night, for eager young men and the passions of her life. Four lives, in fact, she had lived in unequal parts, twenty years as a sorrow-bound daughter, ten as woman unto herself, thirty years as a wife and mother, and twenty-eight years as a lone woman she knew had lived and loved as well as she had been able. And all this, the memories of it all, were contained in the eight hundred square feet of her home, papering the walls in black and white, shelved in celluloid and vinyl and bindings, stacked in countless boxes often opened and caressed with love, scattered throughout in sheets of paper, pieces of wood and rock, bone and steel, bits of string and threadbare fabric, and in woven bottlebrush twigs.

She went back into the house, to her Antonio, and kissed him once more. “You are still the prettiest woman I have ever seen,” he said, and she walked away taking only her Brownie and the keys to her Studebaker.

©2009 Kit-Bacon Gressitt