Returning to Earth

by Jim Harrison

  It was Donald’s teacher, or “medicine man.” I won’t use the other name vulgarized by the culture. I had met him a couple times with Donald over the years. We nodded and I introduced Herald. “So Donald is passing on?” he said. He walked over and began stripping cedar branches at the edge of the clearing for the bottom of the grave. He brought several armfuls to the grave’s edge and then said he would go out to the roadhead and make sure no one came through after Cynthia passed. When he left we drank from a bottle of water and Herald said, “He looks so ordinary,” and I explained that he was a surveyor for a timber company in addition to his tribal function though he lived separately from other tribal members.

  We were finished by noon and applying first-aid salve to Herald’s hands when we heard Cynthia’s car approaching in the distance. Herald put a sweaty handkerchief over the hypodermic, which I recalled was full of phenobarbital and also Dilantin to make the euthanasia run smoothly. I looked up the escarpment and imagined Donald sitting there for three days and nights and getting reassurance from the not so benign silence of the earth.

  We went over to help when Cynthia pulled up. Donald wanted to try to make the twenty yards or so of rumpled ground in his walker with Clare and David on each side of him. He was smiling and I had to look away to suppress a sob and then I gave up and sobbed. Cynthia and David helped him sit down at the edge of the hole and Cynthia sat down beside him with her arm around his shoulders. Donald nodded to Herald, who quickly plunged the hypodermic into Donald’s arm. Clare and I got down into the grave and helped Donald stretch out on the bed of cedar boughs. Cynthia slid down and lay beside Donald crooning softly. Within minutes Donald was dead and we helped each other out of the grave. Cynthia tossed a handful of dirt and whispered something I couldn’t hear. Cynthia and David sat down in the grass off to the side while Herald and I filled in the grave. Clare had been off picking wildflowers and sprinkled them on the fresh dirt mound. And then we all drove home.

  Part III

  David

  Carol left my cabin at first light after she threw her hairbrush across the cabin and into the kitchen counter. Her little dog Sammy retrieved the brush but then wouldn’t give it back to her. She’s angry because I won’t take her to Mexico with me next week. I explained that I’m working down there and don’t have time to be a tour guide but added that I’d give her a ticket to visit at Christmas. That wasn’t good enough. “Why would you work if you don’t have to?” she asks, which is a logical question from a woman who has been a waitress and barmaid for twenty years.

  It’s nearly four months since Donald’s passing to wherever. The cabin floor is truly cold after the warmest summer and early fall I can remember. I step on the abandoned hairbrush with a bare foot. Of course no one has a clue about an afterlife. I turn on the coffee and then light a kerosene lantern on my worktable not wanting to walk out to the shed in the cold rain to crank up the generator. Donald has been gone from the summer solstice through the autumn equinox. Cynthia’s been taking care of Flower, who hurt her foot in late August. Flower works in her garden barefoot and she cut her foot and got blood poisoning. By luck Cynthia stopped by to get a couple of blueberry pies and Flower was feverish with a swollen foot. Cynthia’s real motive for going over to Au Train was to get Clare out of the house. Clare has been severely depressed since her father’s death and it’s been nearly impossible to get her to move from her room. K told me that part of it is because Clare wanted to be pregnant but isn’t. She was supposed to be at Berkeley this fall and K back to Ann Arbor but now they’re going to stay at that house in Marquette for want of anything better to do. Cynthia is beside herself because she knows that Clare sleeps in her dad’s bib overalls. Herald left in midsummer to go back to Caltech and to be with his girlfriend. He came in September to help for a few days but gave up saying that perhaps his sister should be committed somewhere. I talked to Clare through the door of her room but all she would say is that she couldn’t understand life and death. This doesn’t put her in a unique position.

  Anyway, it helped Clare to go with Cynthia to Flower’s in late August. They got Flower over to emergency at the Munising Hospital, where she had to be put on intravenous. At the hospital Cynthia found out that Flower was seventy-eight rather than the sixty-eight she had claimed. After three days Flower escaped the hospital in the middle of the night and walked home overland on what she described to me later as the “old Indian path to town,” which she had known since childhood. She said it was easy because there was a big moon. She had to get home for the simple reason that she was obligated to make three dozen berry pies for various cottagers for the upcoming Labor Day weekend. So what helped Clare was having to help Cynthia make all of these pies while Flower sat back in her old leather chair giving instructions. I can’t say that a month and a half later Clare is completely out of the woods but she is emerging. I’m not suggesting that helping to make three dozen wild berry pies is a nostrum for depression. Something else is afoot here. The flavor of wild blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, thimbleberries. The smell of pie dough for which Flower renders her own lard from pigs a neighbor raises. The ordinary act of making pies but also the eerie serenity of Flower’s bare-bones little house, part tar paper and part Depression brick, but on the inside a couple of layers of pine boards with sheets of tar paper in between for insulation, and pieces of gunny sack stuffed around the windows. The woodstove is the center of the room, the cookstove also fired by wood over near the only door, her single bed in the corner. There are a number of worktables, one for carving canes and weaving porcupine quill baskets, and one that holds objects she’s found on her wanderings in the woods and on the shores of Grand Island: feathers, stones, a couple of bear skulls, beaver skulls with their peculiar teeth, a painted coyote skull, a rather frightening wolf skull, arrow- and spearheads, a soapstone peace pipe in the form of a loon, her favorite bird. It is hard to imagine a house so totally on the ground.

  Certain problems of late trying to force pieces of U.S. and world history into logical constructs. This is improbable with the history of Mexico but perhaps only because it’s fresher in mind. I mean I’m more accepting of the chaos of U.S. history merely because I’ve had it in mind for so long. Maybe the nature of historical chaos should have been taught in school? Anyway the pressure, the burden, the hubris of trying to force my puny logic on the sprawl of history has made me goofy again with the repetitive effort. My emotional life has squeezed out the edges of this effort so that when I wake up from my books and notes I’m disgusted. I walk out on the cabin porch and suddenly a mere mosquito, the last one of the fall, seems far more interesting than any of my thinking, and the presence of the river is so overwhelming that my senses leave my thoughts well behind, where I’m beginning to think they belong. No one appointed me a junior Toynbee.

  A flash of sunlight comes through the east window and I walk out on the porch and down the hill to my rickety little dock, where I put a bare foot in the swift, cold water. Heraclitus was wrong when he said you can’t step in the same river twice. You can’t even step in the same river once except for a microsecond. Life is like that Vernice would say about anything inscrutable. My errant mind turned to her lovely bare butt when Carol leaned over naked in the first light to try to get her hairbrush back from her dog, who didn’t know you weren’t supposed to play at dawn.

  I wonder why I keep returning to this dialectic of exhaustion. My social work in Mexico has nearly gotten me over this as a disease but when I come home for the summer, and after being okay for a couple of months in the lassitude of this northern season, the illness of history returns. Again, how do we manage to live with what we know? It’s so apparent that governments can’t learn from the previous generation let alone the distant past. Thinking of Donald I doubt whether I should have used the word disease but then the way his motor neurons began to die, thus destroying his musculature, my mind wanders back to my dithering obsession with the destructiveness of history.

 
Fifteen minutes along the river trail I remember that I’ve forgotten to eat breakfast and return to the cabin for a quick bite. This would never happen when I’m in Mexico and live close to the ground and like everyone else I get up at daylight and have tortillas or a roll and coffee and some fruit, a few tablespoons of loathsome yogurt. My beloved dog Carla used to remind me about breakfast because that’s what she wanted on waking, preferring a nasty combination of cheddar and oatmeal. My semiadopted dogs in Mexico come around at dinnertime for food, then a nap on the patio. They arrive when they hear my ancient Subaru rattling up the trail.

  As I head back on the river trail to the south I remember something about my wicked father that I hadn’t recalled in years. One summer morning at the club when I was nine or so and Cynthia was seven my father was taking care of us when my mother had a bridge breakfast. Our nanny had been fired the day before because she smoked and drank, both of which my parents did in great quantity but then some rich people don’t have much to do except to be exacting with their employees. Anyway, Cynthia wanted to go for a walk while my father would have preferred to play rummy and read the paper. Off we went toward a little lake perhaps a mile distant from our lodge. The trail was clearly marked but Cynthia was in her “secret Indian” mood and insisted on walking cross-country. I had to follow her because my father was in a linen suit and he would call out to us from the trail. Sometimes Cynthia would run and then purse her lips with “sshhh” and we wouldn’t answer my father’s yells, which were getting him angry. When we reached the lake we could see my father down the shore standing on the dock and bellowing out for us. I called back and Cynthia slapped at me wanting to further tease him, and then she took off her clothes and swam out in the lake. I gathered up her clothes and waded along the brushy shore toward my father, who hissed, “Your sister is impossible” for the thousandth time. Only Clarence the yardman received her total respect. Cynthia swam slowly toward us but then about thirty feet out from us she pretended to struggle and went under. I wasn’t worried by this trick because I knew she would swim underwater until she was beneath the dock, but my father jumped in after her. The water was full of swamp tannins and iron, had a muddy bottom, and was only waist-deep where my father jumped. He lost one of his loafers though a club employee later retrieved it. Cynthia came out of the water and ran naked and laughing up the trail. Totally out of character my father began laughing and lit a half-wet cigarette, then sent me after Cynthia to get her dressed. At lunch that day I heard him tell my mother, “Far in the future I have sympathy for her husband.”

  I almost take a wrong turn on the trail not because I’m thinking of my father but because my neurons summoned up the visual of my barmaid friend Carol bending over to grab her dog an hour or so ago. This happened a split second after tears formed over Donald. It’s a matter of how to accommodate our minds that never stop even in sleep. Of course it would have occurred to me that I had taken the wrong trail when I descended into the swamp and beaver pond where I fished with Donald for brook trout last summer when he could still walk however wobbly. Cynthia called me at the tavern last night to tell me that Clare had begun cooking dinner though she would return to her room when the meal was prepared. Cynthia and I talked over drinks with Polly about Clare’s depression and Polly looked at me with amusement. “Can’t you remember?” she asked because of course I’ve had a number of depressions, but then she went on rather brilliantly, Cynthia thought, to explain the quotient of time. There’s much talk about “healing” these days before the blood is dry on the pavement. Polly has been taking a vacation from having sex with me for nearly two months. I suspect she’s infatuated with a younger man, also a teacher, because twice I saw her blush in his presence at a school picnic. At one time I would have found this inconceivable because men love to think of themselves as the singular dog on the block despite the presence of others.

  I’m startled when I emerge into a clearing west of Barfield Lakes. In the distance about a quarter mile off a bear stares at me and then trundles away from my upwind scent. It occurs to me that since I’m so preoccupied with things that no longer exist it’s a specific tonic to see an actual bear. History always withers in the face of a raven squawking at me from the bare tamarack tree beside the pump house. Cynthia said on the phone that Clare has taken to driving into the Yellow Dog Plains wearing the camouflage suit I sent her when she was a senior in high school. She wanders around all day packing along a tin of sardines, crackers, and a canteen of water communing as she says with the ghost of her father, whom she will not let go despite his request that she do so. Since Cynthia has failed to get Clare involved in what is known euphemistically as “professional help” she is counting on a Ghost Supper over near Brimley in the first week of November (this is a somewhat ritualized dinner after which everyone throws tobacco on the bonfire to release their beloved dead with the ascending smoke). Cynthia has hopes that the presence of so many of Donald’s friends will help Clare’s inability to accept her father’s death. Cynthia said that the whole process was comprehensible to her because she was with Donald moment by moment from the inception of his illness and for two years until his life ended. I talked to Herald on the phone two weeks ago and he seemed fine until he said he was sure he saw his father at the crowded outdoor market in Hermosillo. For the first time in his life he had nearly fainted and his girlfriend had taken him to the bar for a couple of shots of tequila under her assumption that alcohol dispels ghosts. Herald told me not to tell Cynthia about this experience but he wanted to know what I as an “intellectual” (an antique word!) had to say about it. I wasn’t able to say anything and still can’t. I’m simply not equipped to talk about such things.

  Right now I’m looking for my armchair stump, a white pine stump that has decayed in such a way that it has formed a semblance of a living room easy chair. It is located in a sparse grove of chokecherry and dogwood trees but every year the collected flora grows and the landscape changes somewhat. Rather than actively finding the chair I stumble into it after giving up the idea. It was at least a quarter of a mile from where I searched the hardest. This was upsetting as if a cool breeze were blowing through my brain. I remembered a line of poetry Vernice liked: “The days are stacked against who we think we are.” My mind has lapsed backward to my return in early June when I read Donald’s story between three and four in the morning during an insomniac night. It was a jarring experience enclosed as it was by sleeping nightmares on both sides. I tried to look at the story again as recently as yesterday but have been unable to do so. I wondered at the idea that the dissonance of mood should so strongly affect what you read and that the contents would become part of your dream life without your having completely digested them. Consequently, I keep having this image of the first Clarence riding the draft horse Sally on a cold, smoky October morning, riding toward the east where the sun is red from the vast forest fires and the Chicago fire to the south. This is somehow mixed with a childhood story about orphans in a storm. And then the next image is of the horse falling to its death from the ore dock onto the ice far below. In my mind the horse takes ever so long to fall and sometimes stops a moment in midair. Because of the nature of when I read it Donald’s story has become more real to me than all but a few incidents in my own life. I see the grotesquely fat diabetic on his shabby porch drinking warm beer and feeding his dog sweet rolls. My own Carla’s eyes would roll with pleasure when I’d feed her fried whitefish or lake trout skin.

  I said to my uncle Fred on his brief visit this summer that we tend to live within a gray egg and rarely break through the shell to see life as it is, and he said, “No we don’t, we just think we’re within the egg but we’re outside of it. We feel safer in there.” I was irritated of course but came to no conclusions. There had been a rare heat wave and after a sweaty night we took a dip in the river at dawn. A group of noisy ravens watched us and there was distant thunder from the south. I stood in the river and said, “Right now I’m outside of the gray egg.” Fred
and a raven in a fir tree were staring at each other as if the bird had hypnotized the man. It took a number of cautious years for the ravens to determine if I was safe enough for them to hang out in the yard.

  I had been sitting in my stump chair for about an hour when I smelled something strong and rank. I thought at first that maybe the breeze had shifted bringing the scent of a dead deer, a coyote, or some other decaying animal. But there was no breeze and my skin began to prickle and crawl with the obvious thought that there was something behind me. I certainly hadn’t heard anything approach but then I had been lost in thought, a long-term habit that has gotten me into trouble a number of times. I was half encased in the stump and swiveled awkwardly until I could see behind me. The bear I had seen earlier was sitting in a sunlit glade not fifty feet away. I went from dry to sweaty in seconds, my breath shortening, while I thought of what to do. In all of my sightings and encounters in my twenty years locally I’ve never had a bear behave in this manner. With bears you always part company as soon as possible, usually with the animal leaving with all possible speed. No one can outrun a bear and I could see just a glint of my car parked about two hundred yards to the south off a log road. I gave up thinking, stood up and turned around and whispered a stupid “hello.” I began walking toward my car with a tight ass and quivering innards and it was naturally the longest two hundred yards of my life. It was only when I opened the relative safety of the car door that I thought, “Maybe it’s Donald.”