ONCE UPON A TIME IN SAN BERNARDINO:
Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream (Joan Didion, 1967)
Like so much of this country, Banyan suggests something curious and unnatural. The lemon groves are sunken, down a three- or four-foot retaining wall, so that one looks directly into their dense foliage, too lush, unsettlingly glossy, the greenery of nightmare; the fallen eucalyptus bark is too dusty, a place for snakes to breed. The stones look not like natural stones but like the rubble of some unmentioned upheaval. There are smudge pots, and a closed cistern. To one side of Banyan there the flat valley, and to the other the San Bernardino Mountains, a dark mass looming too high, too fist, nine, ten, eleven thousand feet, right there above the lemon groves. At midnight on Banyan Street there is no light at all, and no sound except the wind in the eucalyptus and a muffled barking of dogs. There may be a kennel somewhere, or the dogs may be coyotes.
Banyan Street was the route Lucille Miller took home from the twenty-four hour Mayfair Market on the night of October 7, 1969, a night when the moon was dark and the wind was blowing and she was out of milk, and Banyan Street was where, at about 12:30 A.M., her 1964 Volkswagen came to a sudden stop, caught fire, and began to burn. For an hour and fifteen minutes Lucille Miller ran up and down Banyan calling for help, but no cars passed and no help came. At three o’clock that morning, when the fire had been put out and the California Highway Patrol officers were completing their report, Lucille Miller was still sobbing and incoherent, for her husband had been asleep in the Volkswagen. “What will I tell the children, when there’s nothing left, nothing left in the casket:’ she cried to the friend called to comfort her. “How can I tell them there’s nothing left?”
In fact there was something left, and a week later it lay in the Draper Mortuary Chapel in a closed bronze coffin blanketed with pink carnations. Some 200 mourners heard Elder Robert E. Denton of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church of Ontario speak of “the temper of fury that has broken out among us.” For Gordon Miller, he said, there would be “no more death, no more heartache, and no more misunderstandings.” Elder Ansel Bristol mentioned the “peculiar” grief of the hour. Elder Fred Jensen asked “what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” A light rain fell, a blessing in a dry season, and a female vocalist sang “Safe in the Arms of Jesus.” A tape recording of the service was made for the widow, who was being held without bail in the San Bernardino County jail on a charge of first-degree murder.