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never forgotten. But you live and learn, and the garlic-and-salt treatment for the marriage bed was something else again. My Papa was probablyright: I wasn’t so smart, after all. Still I had strong doubts about Joyce’s pregnancy beginning that night last November on Mama’s studio couch.
    Lunch was over. Papa pushed back his chair.
    “Get your hat.”
    I never wore a hat. He meant that I should follow him. We went down the porch steps to the street. He poked inside the mailbox, drew out a dry cigar butt, and lit up. The smoke hung so motionless in the quiet air that he had to brush it with his hand. Heat filled the mighty sky, blue and vast and endless. To the east the Sierra Nevadas raised proud heads, the snows of last winter still upon them.
    The street before the house was deserted. Ten years ago San Juan had been a hustling town with packing sheds and importance as a grape center. The state highway used to run right through the business center, but the war came and the highway was rerouted, so that it skirted the town now, and the town was slowly dying. The highway was beyond the peach and hop fields now, and tourists swept past and never knew that beyond the orchards lay a community of six thousand.
    “Where we going?”
    Without answering he started up the street. We passed three small homes and then there were no more houses, only the broken asphalt with weeds forcing their way through the cracks, and vineyards on both sides of the road, fanning off to the north and south, thousands of acres of muscats and Tokays, a sea of green silence.
    “Where we going?”
    He walked a little faster, until we came to a place where the road turned and went downhill. This was Joe Muto’s land. I recognized the white-topped markings of his fence posts. It was the edge of the Muto vineyard—uncultivated, shrouded in a disordered growth of scrub oak, manzanita, and the last of what had once been a lemon grove. Everything grew wild here, three or four acres which, for one reason or another, Joe Muto had not planted to grapes. My Papa stood before this mass of green confusion and swept it with a gesture of his cigar.
    “There she is.”
    He went plowing through the weeds and I followed. In the very middle of the plot, on a promontory overlooking the whole area, he stopped to open out his arms.
    “Here she is. What I’m dreaming about.”
    He bent down to pull up a clump of wild poppies. They came, roots and all, the black tenacious soil hugging the roots. He crushed the roots in his fist, and the warm wet soil was molded to the shape of his hand.
    “Everything grows here. Plant a broomstick, she’ll grow.”
    I saw the meaning of it all.
    “You’d like to own this, Papa? You want to buy it?”
    “Not for me.” He grinned and kicked the ground. “It’s for the baby. This is where he’s gonna live. Right here.” He kicked at the earth again. “It’s what I’m dreaming about. You and Miss Joyce and the little boy. Me and Mama down the road. Big place. Four acres. For you. For your children.”
    “But Papa…”
    “No buts. I’m your Papa. All that junk you write. You got money?”
    “I got a few dollars, Papa.”
    “You got two thousand dollars?”
    “Yes.”
    “Buy it. I talked to Joe Muto. He’s my paisano. He won’t sell to nobody but me.”
    What could I say to this man—my Papa? What could I say to this work-wracked face, hardened by the years, softened now by his dream, moving about with his feet on his dream? There was the blue sky and the old lemon trees, and the tall weeds purring like an old love at his legs; and they were there already, his grandchildren, breathing that air, tossing in the grass, their bones fed by this soil that was his dream.
    What could I say to this man? Could I tell him that I had bought a house in that jumbled perversity called Los Angeles, right off Wilshire Boulevard, a plot of ground fifty by a hundred fifty, and teeming with termites? Had I told him, the earth would