Cambria
Terry Sanville
Ian McLeod was a tough dairyman. He had to be. He worked the family’s farm with his widower father and two older brothers on the Isle of Man and had survived twenty-three bitter winters. When the Kaiser made war in Europe, he found himself along with other Manx, on a boat steaming up the Kiel Canal in search of Jerry. He’d been lucky, lived through it, almost without a scratch. Only a bothersome wound to his right thigh slowed him down, took him off the front lines where they all seemed to die a muddy death in the rain-swollen trenches.
While Ian recuperated in an SOS hospital outside of Paris, the Yank in the next bed told him stories about the village he’d come from, how the rolling hills of the central California coast made for great dairy country, had plenty of grass and warm winters. After a few days, the soldier died from his gangrenous shoulder wound. It wasn’t long before Ian hobbled down the hospital’s rutted country road, heading toward the nearest rail station, on his way home.
But back on the island farm nothing much had changed. His brothers expected him to start right back in with mucking out and tending the cows and his father told him off to fix the meals for all of them. Ian had seen too much, had taken way too many orders, and felt restless. With ten pounds sterling sewn into his waistcoat, he bade his father and disgruntled brothers farewell, hopped the ferry to the mainland and from there a train to Liverpool.
Ian bought passage on an old three-masted schooner bound for New York City. Polish and Irish immigrants crowded the ship, all heading across the pond to find a new life in eastern American cities or the surrounding countryside. The few people he questioned about California thought it was still a wild frontier with cowboys and Indians. After a rough voyage, with Ian hanging seasick over the ship’s rail most of the time, the schooner sailed by the great Lady of the Harbor. He passed through immigration on Ellis Island without delay.
Ian found a job working as a day laborer in the warehouse district bordering New York’s docks. It took him six months to save enough money to buy a rail ticket to Los Angeles – a weeklong westward trek. He was glad to flee New York, where the Spanish flu seemed to kill people faster than the soldiers dying in the Great War.
From Los Angeles, he took the train north along the California coast and got off at San Luis Obispo. Farmers and shopkeepers crowded the town’s tiny rail station and platform. They’d come to get mail and supplies shipped from the east. Ian moved among them, asking each politely if they came from the village of Cambria. Most just chuckled and told him that there wasn’t much of a village there. But one young lad pointed out a middle-aged man with a milk wagon and a team of horses who looked ready to depart.
Ian quietly approached. “They tell me you’re from Cambria. Might I catch a ride with ya to that fine village?”
The dairy farmer smiled down from the jostling buckboard. “Aye, ya can, my friend. Tis a long time since I’ve heard a proper Manx voice in these parts. Me name’s Geoffrey McMillan.”
“Well, you best not have been here too long ’cause yer voice is still thick as the sea off our home shores. Ian McLeod, glad ta meet ya.” The men shook hands and Ian climbed aboard.
“I’ve just picked up me cow medicine and delivered fresh milk to the hotels. I could use some company on the ride home.”
“So what kind of cows do ya breed in these parts?”
“I’ve got 60 Holsteins and 30 Ayrshires on 200 acres. Best damn cows around. And the country’s ripe for it, to be sure.”
“Well, I’ve never seen hills quite like these.” Ian motioned to the gentle Kelly green slopes as the two headed northwest out of San Luis Obispo.
“Yes, they be that way all winter, with plenty of water – and best of all, no snow. You’ll see.”
It was mid-afternoon when they left San Luis Obispo. By sundown, they’d reached a beautiful stretch of white beach just north of a towering rock that stood offshore. The Pacific didn’t look anything like the Irish Sea Ian had grown up with. But it was big and green, and there was nothing on the western horizon except a thick fog bank coming on and flights of pelicans diving for their suppers.
That night they camped along the strand. After building a fire on the beach from driftwood, Geoffrey shared his meager supply of food.
“Didja ever hear of a fella named Jerry Folmer?” Ian asked.
“Sure. Nice young man, but sad about him being killed in the war. His folks own a small spread just down the road from mine.”
“Well, maybe you could drop me there when we reach Cambria. I’d like to pay my respects. I met Jerry in a hospital outside Paris. He was the one that told me about your country here.”
Geoffrey just nodded, neither were much for talking. The onshore breeze freshened and brought with it a cold blanket of fog. They retreated into the sand dunes and turned in early.
By noon the next day they passed through the small village of Cambria that straddled the coast road, then pushed eastward into a deep valley rimmed by green hills topped with pines. Barns filled with mounds of hay spotted the landscape and the lowing bawl of cows ready to be milked sounded from both sides of the road. At a nondescript dirt track, Geoffrey reined in the horses and Ian got down.
“You know it’s getting on calving time, so most farms along here can use some help with their cows. If you’re looking for work, come see me.” Geoffrey waved goodbye and continued his slow plodding way up the valley.
At the end of the track, Ian found a small clapboard house. He wasn’t used to wooden buildings since most of the farms back on the Isle of Man were constructed of fieldstone and were hundreds of years old. But the Folmer House looked cheerful enough, and he banged on the front door and the Missus answered. Ian introduced himself and said that he’d known her son in France for a short while, and was there to pay his respects.
Mrs. Folmer invited him to rest on the porch in the sun while she fetched her husband from the barn. The two of them listened as Ian recounted his short acquaintance with Jerry and how he’d died peacefully – although that part of the story strayed far from the truth, since the fever had driven the poor Yank crazy those last days. The Missus dabbed at her eyes with her apron and when Ian stood to leave, Mr. Folmer shook his hand and told him to come back any time and visit. They didn’t see many people now that their son was gone, and they wanted to hear more about the war in those faraway European countries where so many young men had died. Ian promised he’d return, but knew it would be a long time before talking about the war would come easy.
Back on the main farm road, Ian followed the ruts in the dirt left by Geoffrey’s wagon to his farm about a mile down – an impressive spread with three barns, a large main house built on a rise overlooking a creek, and black and white Holsteins and spotted Ayrshires speckling the hillsides. Geoffrey seemed glad to see him again so soon. They immediately struck a deal whereby Ian would work the dairy herd along with the McMillan children for the price of room and board and a small monthly allowance. It was work that he was used to and good at. It was a start.
In those days, dairymen took most of their product directly into the towns and villages to sell at the open markets. But a number of small dairies sprung up along the coast north of Estero Bay, and in the Harmony Valley. They produced cheese and even ice cream for hot summer afternoons. But one of the largest dairy processors occupied a complex on Higuera Street in San Luis Obispo. As the County seat, that city had grown to nearly six thousand people and ever since the railroad had come through, the town was a popular stopover for passengers between Los Angeles and San Francisco – and they all wanted milk and cream with breakfast. It became Ian’s job to leave Cambria in the middle of the night and ride the thirty plus miles until he reached San Luis to sell the McMillian’s milk. Geoffrey took care of the shorter runs, because he didn’t want to be away from the family if he could help it.
It was on one of his first solo trips, to deliver twenty cans to the Foremost Dairy, that Ian met Clarissa Thompson. She worked in the front office and paid the dairymen when they brought their loads in – but only after the Foremost’s official “sniffer” pried open the lid of each can and sniffed hard, trying to detect the odor of wild garlic – a weed that cows loved to eat and a major contaminant of fresh milk.
Clare lived in town with her parents and was just a year younger than Ian. When he made his deliveries every couple of weeks, he’d stay overnight and call at the Thompsons’ house – an ornate but dilapidated Victorian on Islay Street. Her parents welcomed him warmly, even though he was a farm hand, a profession generally considered lower class by most town folks. But the Thompsons had started as farmers themselves, and had only moved into San Luis when their cattle ranch failed and Mr. Thompson started work as a clerk in a grain shipper’s office. Clare’s job at Foremost helped support the family.
Ian only missed his bi-monthly meeting with Clare when winter rains turned parts of the coast road into a muddy bog, impassible for the wagon. During the summer and autumn months, they’d walk out to the old grove of lemon trees on the side of Mount San Luis, the volcano remnant that overlooked the town. They made for an odd-looking couple: Ian short and wiry with red hair, faded blue eyes, and almost invisible eyebrows that gave his face a look of perpetual surprise. Clare was tall, big-boned and dark, with hazel eyes and a quick smile. She wasn’t especially pretty. But she talked easily with the dairymen and was well liked.
Ian seldom said much of anything, even to Clare. But early on they had spoke of marriage.
“Ya must know how I feel about ya, Clare,” Ian blurted on one of their Sunday walks. “We should be married, don’t ya think?”
“Yes, we shall. But we’ll never make it on your laborer’s wages. We best save our money until we can find our own way. I will wait for you, Ian.”
So they both saved, and after three years Ian asked Geoffrey McMillan to co-sign a note at the First Bank of San Luis Obispo, and he bought a small dairy farm just north of the village on the coast road. Being closer to the ocean, it was colder there than on the McMillan spread, but had plentiful water and fields that sported a thick carpet of grass for the cows Ian planned to buy. The house wasn’t much to look at, raw board siding exposed to the harsh winter squalls. But the barn looked in good condition.
Ian had been embarrassed that Clare’s share of the down payment for the farm was bigger than his own. But he promised himself that he’d make it up by improving the property. The young dairyman was well known and liked throughout the valley – although no one could really call him a close friend. With what little money they had left, Ian bought six Holsteins, half of which were with calf, and set to mending broken-down fences, mucking out the barn, setting the watering troughs, cleaning the crap out of the well, and trying to salvage usable equipment from the pile of junk that the farm’s previous owners had left in the barn. It was from this junk heap that he retrieved some cans of mustard-yellow paint and used it to coat the house.
Ian and Clare barely had enough to start the farm. But within a month, Ian accompanied Geoffrey on his huge wagon to the local markets to sell his first cans of milk and barter for household goods produced by other farmers.
Clare planted a quarter-acre vegetable garden and laid in a clever irrigation system that diverted water from the nearby creek. Before her spring beans were out of the ground, she was pregnant. The children came rapidly then, two boys and a girl in three years and then it stopped, although their intimate relations continued as before. All the while Ian’s dairy herd continued to grow, and he dreamed about building a second barn and refurbishing the house. In San Luis Obispo, they had built a grand hotel, and the demand for milk was higher than ever and brought good prices to those willing to haul it into town.
By the time their daughter was born, the Country was well into the roaring ’20s. Memories of the war and economic hard times had been replaced by the prosperity of the day. Even rural areas like Cambria, felt the change. Traffic on the coast road had shifted from horse-drawn wagons and carriages to “Tin Lizzies” and motor-driven wagons built by the Mack Truck Company. Geoffrey McMillan was the first to buy a truck and Ian the next. He paid for it with the proceeds from Clare’s garden produce and the revenues from his ever-increasing milk runs. With the motor truck, he could now reach San Luis Obispo and return home in a single day and not have to pay for room and meals overnight. His trips increased, and pretty soon he was hauling his neighbors’ milk to market for a fee that covered the cost of gasoline and repairs plus a tidy profit.
By the end of the decade Ian’s sons had grown old enough to help after school with the milking and mucking out and with their mother’s garden. Tom and Richard inherited their mother’s stature, and by age ten were almost as tall as their father and experienced farm hands in their own right. They attended school in the village, except during calving season or when produce needed to be harvested for market. Clarissa had expanded the quarter-acre garden into more than two acres of irrigated truck crops, and during the summer months the trips into San Luis Obispo included selling fresh produce to the town’s grocers.
Their daughter Emily helped her mother in the garden pulling weeds, and at harvest time. But she didn’t attend school. Emily was what the village folk called “a bit slow.” She was pretty enough, had inherited her father’s sharply-defined facial features and shocking red hair. But Ian and Clarissa knew something was amiss when she took longer to learn how to speak and couldn’t seem to remember her letters.
But Emily was never sad and always had a twinkle in her eye, trailing after her father whenever he was on the farm or shadowing her mother in the fields, breaking up the dirt clods with her bare feet or carefully picking the just-ripe tomatoes off the vines without bruising them. Her brothers would make fun of her sometimes and tease her. One time, Tom, Richard, and some of their schoolmates had tied Emily up to a tree like an Indian captive and left her there sobbing, to be found by her mother. But they never tried any shenanigans when Ian was around. He had a cousin back on the Isle of Man that was just like Emily, and he knew he had to protect her from the cruelty of children. His older brothers had picked on Ian after his mother died and was not there to help. But Emily grew and prospered while her parents fretted about what would eventually become of her, with no prospects for marriage and farm life so hard.
Meanwhile, far away in New York City, stock market investors watched their fortunes turn to dust. Across the continent, the Cambrian farmers knew nothing about the stock market or how it related to their land. But in the decade to come they would find out.
The bad times started slowly for the farmers: some of the small dairies closed, leaving only the mainstays in San Luis Obispo open for processing. The large wooden hotel burned to the ground, which was just as well because it was only half full during the peak of the traveling season. To cut costs, people grew their own vegetables and the profits from Clarissa’s crops dropped. But it all happened so slowly that the farmers just kept scaling back their operations: cows sold, some small farms abandoned, and only the ones with good water and transportation to haul their products to market stayed afloat. One day Ian drove a load of milk to the Foremost Dairy, only to be told he’d have to sell it at a loss. He emptied most of the cans into a drainage ditch north of town and drove home.
Tom and Richard had finished high school and were now at loose ends. Ian put them to work rebuilding fences and cleaning out and repairing the milk sheds. It was especially hard on them, with no prospect for paid work in the valley, and San Luis Obispo full of unemployed men who ate at the soup kitchens and slept in hobo camps next to the creek. There were fights in these camps and even murders, all reported in the Telegram or Tribune newspapers that Ian read while making deliveries in town. There was no work for anybody, and Ian felt fortunate that he and his family at least wouldn’t starve – what with their productive garden and the generosity of neighbors.
In the spring of 1937, the newspapers reported that President Roosevelt had finally approved a major public works project for the San Luis Obispo County Coast. Laborers were needed to build a first-class highway from San Luis Obispo up the coast to the Hearst Ranch and the hilltop mansion of the millionaire newspaperman, William Randolph Hearst. Tom and Richard immediately signed up along with most of the men from the camps. Tom, the eldest, learned to operate a grader while Richard headed up the forming crew, building the wooden plank forms to hold the wet concrete for the road. They both lived in the construction camps situated on farms adjoining the highway. The camps would be relocated every few weeks as the improvements progressed northward. They were as rough-and-tumble as the hobo camps had been in San Luis, and Ian noticed the change in his sons when they sometimes visited over a weekend. They used foul language and always took too big a draft from the whiskey bottle.
For a time, it seemed like everyone had a job. Ian made special runs down the coast with his produce and milk to sell to the cooks at the construction sites. The road project pushed northward until it was directly adjoining Ian’s farm and the village of Cambria. He got paid for the use of one of his fields for the tent encampment and his sons slept in their old beds for the first time in over two years. It was a wild and noisy time for the quiet farmer and the village. Some of his neighbors complained to Ian about the road crew trespassing on their properties, stealing things and scaring their cows. His neighbors somehow held him accountable since the construction camp was on his land, and Ian did his best to keep order. But a few times the County Sheriff had to be summoned. He knew that they’d be rid of the camps soon enough and he worried about how to replace the income when the project was over.
It rained heavily that autumn day, so hard that the concrete pour had to be stopped and the crews dismissed. Most of the men had bedded down and waited out the storm in the depressingly gray twilight. Tom and Richard ate supper with their parents, but decided to join their buddies on the road crew for a night of poker and drinking. A thick coastal fog rolled in over the farm, muffling the loud laughter and arguments coming from the camp. But the crews seemed to settle in for a cold damp night. Around nine o’clock, Clarissa went in to check on Emily before turning in. She returned to the front room where Ian read the latest farm journal. He could tell from her stricken face that something was amiss.
“Ian, Emily is gone,” she blurted.
Ian stood, a smile pasted on his face. “Now don’t worry, I’ll find her.” His heart turned to ice.
Emily had grown into a beautiful woman, with a figure that rivaled her mother’s, clear delicate skin and a bright smile. But still a child inside, she doted on her parents. Ian had given Clarissa and Emily strict orders to be inside the house by sundown while the construction camp occupied their farm. That night Emily must have disobeyed and slipped away. Grabbing a lantern, Ian told Clarissa to stay inside while he ventured into the mist, scared of what he might find. He checked around the farmhouse first, at the old apple orchard in the rear yard, at the sycamore tree next to the creek where Emily liked to swing as a child from the rope draped over one of the tree’s massive limbs. He found nothing.
The soft glow of a lantern shown from the loft of one of Ian’s barns. He crept forward and slipped inside. Rows of black and white backs greeted him and he moved silently, whispering to the cows to quiet them. He climbed the ladder into the loft and froze. Tom and Richard slumped against one wall, passed out, a whiskey bottle clutched in Richard’s hand. Two others from the road crew lay in similar poses, flopped onto mounds of hay, snores coming from their snaggle-toothed mouths. He spied Emily, curled into a ball in the far corner of the loft. The light caught her eyes like those of a cat’s in the headlights of an automobile. She laid quivering, barefoot, dress torn, her bloomers flung next to her, bloodstained. She whimpered softly.
Ian couldn’t speak and struggled not to cry out. The white-hot rage inside him threatened to melt his sanity. He strode forward and grabbed one of the road gang by the shoulders, hauled him to the edge of the open loft, and threw him off. The body dropped like a sack of concrete onto the hard earthen floor, landing with a thud and the splintering of bones. A loud scream followed. But before the second man could rouse himself, Ian had him under the arms and threw him out of the loft, falling onto his partner in rape below. More screams tore the quiet night air. Ian stood at the edge of the loft and stared at the carnage that he’d created. Turning, he faced Tom and Richard who had scrambled up, their backs against the boards, trembling.
“You’d better leave now, and never come back. If I see you again, I’ll kill ya.”
“But Pop, we didn’t know–”
“Just go…and be gland you don’t have to face your poor mother.”
The brothers skittered along the wall, down the ladder, and slipped into the night.
Emily never recovered from the assault, her playful demeanor shattered. She withdrew into herself. By the following year Ian and Clarissa took the long drive south to Camarillo Mental Hospital where she was committed. Emily would live there until the hospital closed in 1997 and die shortly thereafter in a nursing home.
The sheriff who investigated the assault filed a report that said that the road gang members had gotten drunk and fallen out of the loft on their own accord. Since the crippled workmen were never charged with rape, there was no argument from them. Besides, Ian and Clarissa wanted to bury the incident, along with the memories of their sons. But that last task proved difficult.
Tom and Richard hitchhiked into San Luis Obispo and enlisted in the Army. They went through boot camp at Fort Benning, George, and were both assigned to an infantry unit, one of the first that hit Omaha Beach in Normandy. Tom was able to make it ashore and hole up in back of the sea wall, pinned down by machine gun fire from the Krauts. But Richard never made it through the surf, being shot while still trying to keep his head above water. Ian found out about his son’s death from the telegram he and Clarissa received from the War Department. They heard nothing from Tom.
With the booming wartime economy, the McLeods struggled to keep up with the demand for milk and garden products. But with their children gone, and no young men to hire on, much of the cropland went fallow, Ian sold off some cows, and all the buildings were in a state of disrepair. One hot summer’s morning, when Ian came in from the fields for lunch he found Clarissa hunched over in her garden plot, not moving. Only her left eye stayed open. Drool dripped down the side of her mouth onto her work dress. Two days later she died from the stroke.
“It could happen at any time without warning,” the doctor at County General Hospital said, trying to comfort Ian.
Ian hardened himself once against for another dose of sorrow. He lived on for years at the farm, selling most of his cows and keeping just a few favorites for his own milk and homemade cheese. He raised chickens, had never gardened much but learned and could keep himself in food. The McMillans and other old-time families in the valley made sure he didn’t go without. On a hot Indian summer day in 1959, Ian climbed into his stepside Ford pickup and drove south along the coast road. He was never seen in Cambria again, and nobody in San Luis Obispo knew of his whereabouts. Before he left, he nailed a “No Trespassing” sign to the front door of the house. Over the years, his neighbors replaced the sign when it needed replacing, until they too passed on. Ian’s prodigal son never did return.
In 1980, a wrecking crew pulled the rusted remains of a stepside Ford pickup with California plates from an overgrown creekbed alongside the Pennsylvania turnpike. The truck was pointed east toward the Atlantic and the Irish Sea beyond.
Terry Sanville lives in San Luis Obispo, California with his artist-poet wife (his in-house editor) and two plump cats (his in-house critics). He writes full time, producing stories, essays, and novels. His stories have been accepted more than 580 times by journals, magazines, and anthologies including The American Writers Review, Bryant Literary Review, and Shenandoah. He was nominated four times for Pushcart Prizes and once for inclusion in Best of the Net anthology. Terry is a retired urban planner and an accomplished jazz and blues guitarist – who once played with a symphony orchestra backing up jazz legend George Shearing.
