by Jim Harrison
My dad always regretted that he didn’t get to know his grandpa Clarence very well all because of his own stepfather’s prejudices against Indian people especially when it’s known that the Finnish people are a type of Indian themselves. Cynthia quotes this poet as saying we were all Indians once by which the poet means well back in history. In grade school we were taught that America was a “melting pot,” which was hard to understand when you were a kid because out in a shed we had a huge pot that was used for scalding pigs so that you could scrape off the hair.
My dad had a hard time with his emotions after Mother was gone off to Newberry. He took all of her clothes and stuff and gave it to her cousins over near Munising. He started living by the clock working for the Burketts and repairing boats in the evening and sometimes running a trapline in winter. He was saving for me to go to college, which never happened because we got married early though Cynthia later got her bachelor’s and master’s because she wanted to teach. I just liked to work hard but now I wish I had learned more about how the world works. There’s way too much I don’t understand.
One thing I can’t get my head around is that no one seems to be equipped to understand the passage of time. When my son Herald was home for Christmas we talked this over and he said, “No one understands that sort of thing, Dad.” Herald says that one thing he loves about mathematics is that there’s no emotional content. Herald’s girlfriend jilted him when he was a senior in high school and he never got over it. She wanted to get married after graduation and he wanted to go to college. Clare told Cynthia that in Los Angeles Herald sees this young woman who is Mexican and works as a stripper in a nightclub. This information knocked our socks off. Clare said that Herald even flew down to Hermosillo and met her parents. I loved hearing this because for a long time it seemed to me that my son actually liked being lonely. It seemed to me that Herald was similar to a bunch of drunks I have known who seemed to want to be lonely and misunderstood. They had a secret gripe against the world that could only be drowned out by alcohol. Herald’s grief over this girl Sonia could only be healed by mathematics.
Drunks seem to want to cut themselves off from others. I’m not an authority on this because I’ve never been a drunk. Cynthia says it’s partly because I’m large and it takes too much to get me cranked up. She’s real leery about alcohol because of her parents. Her mother, whom I learned to love, became okay when she left her husband, who was truly an awful man in so many ways that just thinking about him confuses you. He sold his son David’s cabin out from under him when David was down in Chicago with Polly studying religion.
I’m all over the place. Alcohol doesn’t run much in my family. My dad said he had trouble when he returned from the Korean War. He stopped drinking because he knew he would lose my mother if he didn’t. He had tried to drown himself but changed his mind when he got to the bottom of the lake off the pier. One thing that truly bothered him was cutting open an enemy soldier’s stomach to stick his feet in to keep them from freezing. You look at Korea on the map and you see it’s real far north and they experience a hard winter just like we do in the U.P. Men are always quick to go to war and if it doesn’t kill them it kicks the shit out of them. Some of them recover and some don’t and who knows why. I knew a fellow pretty well who had a hard time in Vietnam and one day he drove his motorcycle off the end of a half-built bridge at a hundred miles an hour. He told his friends he was going to do it and some of them watched. They built a fire and had hot dogs and beer for his last meal and off he went. After many years of not wanting to think about her father Cynthia checked out his war record, then went down to Mexico and talked to her father’s old buddy and employee Jesse, who was retired down there with his own people. Anyway, Cynthia found out that early in the war on some South Pacific island, I forget which, her dad was an officer and after a battle ninety-three of his hundred men came up dead. I knew Jesse’s daughter Vera, who was a real peach.
This was a real hard time and even now so many years later I know it’s hard for Cynthia to listen to but I want Clare and Herald to know my own feelings on the matter. One of the truest things I’ve ever heard is that the evil men do lives after them. David Sr. was always the talk of the town in the way that working folk can be amazed at the behavior of rich people. He had what some call a “drinking problem” but in fact was just a mean-minded drunk with a hankering for girls that were too young for sex. His right-hand man Jesse, who everyone in town liked, brought his twelve-year-old daughter Vera up from Mexico so she could learn English. She was beautiful and she and Cynthia’s brother got an instant crush on each other but he knew it was wrong to touch her unlike his father who raped poor Vera when he was drunk. That was the end of the family. Cynthia and I ran away together. Her mother Marjorie took off for Chicago. The father, who wasn’t even arrested, moved over to Duluth and no one laid eyes on him for years. David stayed home in this big house with Mrs. Plunkett looking after him. Jesse took Vera back to Mexico the day after the rape where she had a baby, a boy that was never quite right in the head though part of it might have been when he got hit by a car while he was riding his bicycle. Who knows what came first, the chicken or the egg? Anyway, years later, right after Cynthia’s mother died young David was stupid enough to go down to Mexico with his dad where a coffee farm was owned jointly by these two old men. Jesse and the dad had a drunken squabble and fight and Vera’s son steps in with a machete. David and his dad were pushed out in the Gulf of Mexico in a rowboat and since the old man was about dead anyway David shoved his father overboard. Strange to say I didn’t feel bad when at his ex-wife’s funeral this man wouldn’t recognize me or shake my hand. And here I was the father of his grandchildren. [This story isn’t hard in me. The story is as dead as my father. I’m just thankful to whatever gods there might be that my mother recovered after leaving him. C.]
So my own father’s solution for the hard knocks of life was to work too hard and that’s also been a downfall of my own. It used to drive Cynthia crazy in the summer when I’d have two crews working two shifts and I’d sometimes put in a sixteen-hour day. Cynthia did my bookkeeping. She was a soft touch and made sure my men were paid well and had health insurance. Maybe the worst point in our marriage is that I didn’t want us living on the money that was left to her from her mother’s family and, later on, money left from the sale of her dad’s land. Our compromise was all of our camping trips though sometimes on them I’d fish from dawn to dark, which often in the summer was sixteen hours. Once I took Clare a couple hundred miles west to fish the Middle Branch of the Ontonagon near Bruce Crossing. We dropped Herald off in Marquette, where he was going to stay with his uncle David and hear an important mathematician speak at the university. We got delayed over near Sidnaw when two old ladies in a Chrysler up ahead of us hit a doe and mangled it up pretty well. Clare was about seventeen at the time but she had a real calming influence on people just like her mother. While she settled down the ladies, I carved two backstraps, the loins, out of the deer and put them on ice to eat the following day. Just like beef or pork, venison is not at its best when it’s freshest. We made camp just before dark and because there was a big moon we fished at night knowing that the next day might be slow if the fish were able to feed all night. It was warm and buggy so Clare did better with her fly-fishing than I did with bait. I built a fire about three a.m. and when the coals were right I fried up a nice mess of brook trout in some bacon grease mixed with butter so I could get the iron skillet red hot. We ate our fish with just bread and salt and then had some blueberry cobbler Cynthia had sent along. We took a short swim and laid out our sleeping bags, both of us deciding to skip the tent in favor of the big moon. We were freshened up by our swim and started talking about this and that, including how to get Herald over his grief about losing his girlfriend Sonia. We took a couple of hits from a small bottle of schnapps and I asked Clare why she had had so many boyfriends. She said, “I like affection,” which meant she took after her mother, then she said that C
ynthia and I were lucky we had this great romantic love for each other to carry us through life, adding that most people aren’t so fortunate and that’s why there’s so much divorce. Love will carry you through the hard parts. We were made silent by our thoughts and watched the small rapids out in the river that caught the moon just right so the moon jiggled and wavered. We were being hypnotized by the moon in the water.
I told Clare a couple of stories about Night Flying Woman that she already knew and then a funny story about two friends of mine when I was thirteen who tried to hypnotize girls. These boys were both homely and small and the school principal called them urchins. One of them, Melvin by name, was a good fishing buddy and never seemed to eat anything but doughnuts. The other, Carl, was the son of a professor at college and snuck around after dark with Melvin in tow peeking in windows trying to see nude women or girls. Carl was goofy but smart and had a notebook of the best places to see “skin” as he called it. The police had caught them twice, once way up a fir tree outside this cheerleader’s second-story window. Anyway, they ordered a book on hypnotism from a men’s magazine. I wasn’t interested because I was an athlete, which meant I had no shortage of girlfriends. They practiced hypnotism out of the book and one cool October day down at the beach they practiced on me and I pretended I was hypnotized and walked right into icy Lake Superior up to my neck. They were pretty excited and started walking around at school in dark clothes pretending they had secret powers. Girls are often bigger than boys at that age and they were both aiming at this Finnish girl with monster breasts. She wasn’t very happy and was always slugging her schoolmates, often knocking them to the ground. Carl thought of her as a trial balloon for his real ambition, which was to see our really pretty history teacher naked. Carl and Melvin gave this Finnish girl five bucks to go out to a thicket on Presque Isle and take part in an experiment. She pretended she was hypnotized and Melvin, who was the most daring, reached out to touch her breast though it was a cold day and she was wearing a coat. She slapped the shit out of both of them, blackening one of Carl’s eyes.
Clare thought this was real funny but then talked about how sex drives young people crazy. The moon in the river current took over our thoughts again and then suddenly it was the first light of dawn, when a river begins to smell even sweeter for some reason. Clare always has her binoculars to check out birds and way downstream in the mist she discovered a bobcat hunting frogs in a slough. The bobcat caught a good-sized frog and carried it to a dry place, walking in a proud gait, flopped down, played with the frog a minute or so, and then ate it.
Now in the den talking these stories to Cynthia I’m thinking about this old nature documentary I saw on television. On television nature is most often presented as a threat to us. I suppose this is to keep our attention. On this old black-and-white documentary a jaguar and a huge snake called an anaconda were fighting on a riverbank somewhere in South America. I was sure it was going to be a fight to the death but they finally moved off very tired in different directions. I thought time would be over for one of them but it wasn’t, but then after at dinner I realized it was an old film and both of these creatures were likely dead as doornails. I thought of the day that two young men on my cement crew were arguing about our bowling league tournament the night before and started fist-fighting right in the middle of lunch hour. They were both good punchers but it was a cold March day and they had stiff hands and I knew they were likely to hurt themselves. I didn’t stop the fight right away because they had to work things out and I knew their hearts weren’t in the fight. It wasn’t like me and Floyd and the dead puppy. Sure enough they both broke bones in their hands. I sent them off to the doctor’s telling them to say it was work-related and not a fight or insurance wouldn’t pay up.
[Donald took a two-day break to ride around the countryside with K. I had ordered a new SUV with a special seat so Donald could be comfortable. He was upset about the expense and I had no alternative but to ignore him except to say that the money came from my mother and she would want him to be comfortable. How could he argue with a dead woman? The real problem is that he has come to the part of his story where he feels he has to admit some bad things about himself. Donald is a good person without being overwhelmed by daily ethical or moral concerns in any formal religious sense. I think that certain germinal, if peculiar, aspects of his character came from his two months with his father’s cousin Flower, who believed that people must be careful to live in complete harmony with their natural surroundings. There are also somewhat mystifying notions of people as totally interlocking and that to separate yourself is to be doomed. For instance Donald was always concerned by the way my brother David purposely isolated himself. I think that in Donald’s view the only people who legitimately isolate themselves, men or women, are medicine people like this shaman character he knows up in Canada. These people are said to set themselves apart in order to commune with spirits and that sort of thing. I’ve wondered if Donald’s tribal feelings might be genetic in nature because you don’t see these feelings in our culture. However, Donald has always insisted that he’s “just an American.” Way back when I started teaching grade school he suggested that maybe I shouldn’t teach the old melting pot notions as they might scare kids. I teased that not every kid had a pig scalding pot in the back shed and an out-of-control imagination to go with it. I think the main problem he saw in my brother David is that David always seemed to be at war with himself. An amusing part of our marriage is talking about our dreams at breakfast when we have dreams of any interest. I used to envy all of Donald’s animal dreams but then he’s quite familiar with wild animals. When he was upset with something at work he would walk it off and if you walk a long ways up here you’re bound to encounter animals because so much of the countryside is at least semiwild. For instance just before Donald got sick his favorite young worker got sent to prison for three years for selling marijuana that he had grown at the back of his parents’ farm over near Rudyard. Donald felt very bad about this partly, I think, because he’s claustrophobic and couldn’t imagine three years in a prison cell, and also because the young man was similar in character to K, that is, impetuous to the point of being a little crazy. Well, after the trial on Friday Donald took his canteen, some crackers, and sardines, and called the next afternoon saying his feet hurt. He had walked through the night over forty miles from Paradise to Muskallonge Lake down the empty shore of Lake Superior. That’s what I mean by his walking it off. C.]
I’m getting to the end of my story but there are a number of bad things I’ve done that puzzle me. Such things nag at you the way you can’t keep your tongue away from the hole left by a pulled tooth. My dad said that just because you’ve done a few bad things doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. And some things are right in the middle. For instance it bothered him that he knew Jesse embezzled money from Mr. Burkett after the rape of Jesse’s daughter. My dad couldn’t figure out what to do about the crime of stealing so he did nothing. He also said that in Korea he made love to hungry girls for candy bars, which most of the soldiers did, but then it wasn’t right to take advantage of hunger. But then it’s amazing what will be done for sex. I knew a guy from Iron River that made love to a cop’s wife even though he figured he’d probably get shot if the cop found out. Well the cop did find out and this guy got his kneecap blasted off all for sex.
The first bad thing I did was sort of in the middle. Melvin, Carl, and me were brook trout fishing a few miles south of town. We were trespassing on this rich guy’s place and we were sneaky and quiet because the guy had a German shepherd guard dog. Melvin was carrying his dad’s pistol but he didn’t have any bullets so I couldn’t figure out the point. Boys can be very dumb. Anyway, Carl let out a yelp when he caught a big brook trout about twelve inches and the guard dog came running. Nothing’s fair and the guard dog grabbed Melvin by the leg when he tried to climb a white pine. I went after the dog and faked it out with my left arm. The dog grabbed my coat but I reached over its head and go
t hold of its collar and swung it around hard and slammed it into a tree. Well, I went too far and the dog just lay there with fear in its eyes so I petted it and then its eyes went still though they remained open. Melvin had to have stitches in his ankle where the dog grabbed him but to this day I wonder if there wasn’t a better way to handle the matter than killing the dog. Carl wondered what the rich man was protecting if he had to have a dog that bit people. Melvin had to pay his own doctor bill out of his paper route. His parents were a strange couple in that the dad drank too much and the mother was real religious. She was fine at baked goods and if we wanted a piece of pie or peanut butter cookies we had to pray with her on our knees right there in the kitchen. It seemed like a fair trade though Carl always made crazy faces during prayer. Melvin’s mom told me I was a heathen headed for hell. This scared me at the time but when I told my dad he joked that since I was only half Indian heathen maybe only half of me would go to hell. He wasn’t too impressed by Christian people in that Catholics, Lutherans, and Baptists seemed to all act the same. It embarrassed him when Jesse was on vacation in old Mexico and he had to drive the Burketts to the Episcopal church in that big Packard. The question was why they couldn’t walk a couple of blocks. Mr. Burkett had so many drunken driving tickets the authorities wouldn’t allow him behind the wheel.
Dad said that people make terrible messes pretending they’re perfect. He knew the Bible preached against self-righteousness and people still went ahead and drowned in it. When Cynthia and I got caught making love on the Burketts’ living room floor and my dad got fired because of it I went crazy for twenty hours or so and then suddenly things returned to normal but not before I did some stupid things. First I drank too much beer down in Skandia during a poker game and lost the filly draft horse my dad gave me for my birthday. He had a mare he skidded logs with and had bred her to a stallion owned by a Mennonite over by Germfask. I had a full house but this guy from Trenary had a straight flush and there went my filly. This experience set me forever against gambling and is the main reason we left Sugar Island and the Soo area. I know the huge casino helped the tribe but gambling just set my nerves on edge. It’s the stupid hope of getting something for nothing that corrupts people, but then after we moved to Bay Mills a small casino was also started there though there were plans for a bigger one. Cynthia told me to get off my high horse because the casino had helped finance education projects and get Indians indoor plumbing. If you’re old and it’s thirty below zero with lots of snowdrifts it’s hard to walk outside to a privy.