Dieter, only fourteen but telling the world he was twenty, mistakenly believed he’d better get busy with his mallet or else he and his hinny, Caroline, would find themselves freezing beneath the cruel veil of the first snow-fall. That was how little he knew about where he had landed. The first cottage rose from the pounding of Dieter’s mallet in twelve days. This was the same tool that had hammered a war’s worth of tin cups, and somehow Dieter knew that this mallet would determine more than a few things in his life. At the eastern edge of his new land—which the Baden-Badeners had dismissed as too windblown to be worth anything—tilted a eucalyptus grove, their trunks pink and buckling like the skin on elbows. The grove had been planted by Donna Marròn, who had possessed ill-conceived dreams of a rancho lumberyard. Those trees, gone wild over the years, provided Dieter with his first plank. The cottage’s floors were green and weepy from the freshly cut wood, and the chimney leaned with stream stones. A coal stove, potbellied, coil-handled, disassembled and shipped to California in a crate on the
Elephant Seal
, sat portly on a large flat beach rock. In the alcove, beneath a shuttered window, Dieter first unrolled his horsehair blanket and slept, so tired that he dreamed of no one at all. This sensation would carry him through the years: nightly dreamless exhaustion from the hours in the field, clearing and tilling and planting and harvesting and separating and packing—all that work and only getting by. The hinny and the nitrogen-rich soil and the months of relentless sun brought Dieter no riches at all, only a steady hard life of rising with the bantams and retiring with the silvery moon peeking through the gaps in the tar paper. Each October, before anyone could guess whether the winter would be wet or dry, Dieter would twist himself with worry, wondering if this would be the year he’d be unable to feed his hinny and his hens and himself. His agrarian skills earned him enough of a reputation for the gimpy horsemen who hung around Margarita Sprengkraft’s front porch to tip their hats and call him by the friendly nickname Cebollero, “Onion-seller,” which he translated in his head as “Herr Zwiebel.” The other villagers, some German but many more of Spanish and Mexican blood, trusted him enough to grant him the rightto work the scale at the gutting house or borrow a double-barrel to shoot a bold coyote or kneel at their pews in the adobe cathedral where the waxy hands of Padre Vallejo caressed their chins as he offered the chalice. They asked Dieter to play his fiddle at the harvest dances and join the crew in burning the sumac creeping alongside El Camino Real, and not once did anyone claim he had succumbed to what was called “Californio fever,” something Dieter eventually understood as old-fashioned laziness. The villagers of Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea accepted Dieter in every way but one: they refused to let him marry one of their own. And when he asked why, Margarita, at her counter, arranging bolts of calico, told him how Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea perceived him. “You’re a funny little man. You’re smaller than most ten-year-old boys. Your face is wrinkled and fat like a baby’s. You make us think of a tiny creature stepping out of an enchanted forest. We’ve read about you in fairy tales. You own the worst piece of farmland around, right there at the ocean’s edge. You weren’t meant to marry.” Did she say the word
Erdgeist
? Dieter wasn’t sure, but afterward he would recount it as if she had:
Who would let his daughter marry a gnome? a stranger? he who is not one of us?
Many years later, after Dieter married the girl from Mazatlán with the heart-shaped face, he built a second cottage. By then he was familiar with every pebble in the arroyo and every golden chinquapin and cinnamon tree cresting the hillocks and the intertidal marshes abutting Condor’s Nest. Out by the eucalyptus stand,
Elephant Seal
, sat portly on a large flat beach rock. In the alcove, beneath a shuttered window, Dieter first unrolled his horsehair blanket and slept, so tired that he dreamed of no one at all. This sensation would carry him through the years: nightly dreamless exhaustion from the hours in the field, clearing and tilling and planting and harvesting and separating and packing—all that work and only getting by. The hinny and the nitrogen-rich soil and the months of relentless sun brought Dieter no riches at all, only a steady hard life of rising with the bantams and retiring with the silvery moon peeking through the gaps in the tar paper. Each October, before anyone could guess whether the winter would be wet or dry, Dieter would twist himself with worry, wondering if this would be the year he’d be unable to feed his hinny and his hens and himself. His agrarian skills earned him enough of a reputation for the gimpy horsemen who hung around Margarita Sprengkraft’s front porch to tip their hats and call him by the friendly nickname Cebollero, “Onion-seller,” which he translated in his head as “Herr Zwiebel.” The other villagers, some German but many more of Spanish and Mexican blood, trusted him enough to grant him the rightto work the scale at the gutting house or borrow a double-barrel to shoot a bold coyote or kneel at their pews in the adobe cathedral where the waxy hands of Padre Vallejo caressed their chins as he offered the chalice. They asked Dieter to play his fiddle at the harvest dances and join the crew in burning the sumac creeping alongside El Camino Real, and not once did anyone claim he had succumbed to what was called “Californio fever,” something Dieter eventually understood as old-fashioned laziness. The villagers of Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea accepted Dieter in every way but one: they refused to let him marry one of their own. And when he asked why, Margarita, at her counter, arranging bolts of calico, told him how Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea perceived him. “You’re a funny little man. You’re smaller than most ten-year-old boys. Your face is wrinkled and fat like a baby’s. You make us think of a tiny creature stepping out of an enchanted forest. We’ve read about you in fairy tales. You own the worst piece of farmland around, right there at the ocean’s edge. You weren’t meant to marry.” Did she say the word
Erdgeist
? Dieter wasn’t sure, but afterward he would recount it as if she had:
Who would let his daughter marry a gnome? a stranger? he who is not one of us?
Many years later, after Dieter married the girl from Mazatlán with the heart-shaped face, he built a second cottage. By then he was familiar with every pebble in the arroyo and every golden chinquapin and cinnamon tree cresting the hillocks and the intertidal marshes abutting Condor’s Nest. Out by the eucalyptus stand,
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