Returning to Earth

by Jim Harrison

  I turned west for a few blocks then walked through a piss-smelling pedestrian underpass, and then farther west along the beach. I sat on a park bench needing to collect my thoughts but was distracted by the story of one of my mother’s friends, whose corgi named Ralph had found a shoe on the beach with a foot still in it. Chicago detectives call these partials. Finally I was calmed by glistening Lake Michigan, which, though it lacked the clarity of Lake Superior, was overwhelming enough to remove the thought of a severed foot.

  Five months after Donald’s death I still sense strongly the continuing vacuum that once was his body. Sometimes the vacuum struggles to resume his bodily shape but what is most real is the presence of the voice, and the occasional scent of raw lumber and cement, and occasionally the scent of sun on his skin. Now I can hear him say as he did farther up the beach on a park bench near Mother’s house in Evanston, “I wonder if there are any fish out there in front of us?” And then he turned to the vast skyline of Chicago and said, “There must be a mile of bedrock or they couldn’t raise buildings like that. They must have had a bunch of people who knew what they were doing.” On our infrequent trips Donald, Herald, and Clare would eat three or four of those crappy-style Chicago hot dogs teasing me for squeamishness.

  Uncle Fred wrote me a fine letter from Hawaii last week. There was a fascinating paragraph on all of the delusions the death of a loved one can bring upon those left behind. He quoted a Japanese philosopher whose name has slipped my mind: “No changing reality to suit the self.” I showed the letter to Clare, who became angry and walked away. She finally admitted to me that she thinks her departed father has become a bear. I view this as insane though I know it exists in Chippewa lore. I think she spent so much time up on the Yellow Dog Plains because she was looking for Donald as a bear. The two of them used to fish the Yellow Dog when we visited Clarence in Marquette. I didn’t say so to Clare but I was certainly pleased when the season for bear hibernation had arrived.

  Sitting there on the park bench I abruptly thought that “No changing reality to suit the self” is too austere for the actual human condition. My dreams have to be part of reality and they aren’t susceptible to rules. I’m a fairly clearheaded human and understand that despite all the diversions our culture offers us there’s no escaping the pain of his death. There are no palliatives, or at least none that work for me. Way back in college I remember an anthropology professor saying, “Primitive people think that when they talk to God He’s listening and that some sort of answer can be expected.” As Herald likes to say, “I can’t get my head around this.”

  By absurd coincidence I can see Vera and David approaching in the distance. Actually it’s logical because the hotel is close and he’s deeply claustrophobic. When we were in Zihuatanejo we took a little panga south and walked his favorite beach, which is fifty miles long. We saw the coxcomb-shaped dorsal fins of passing schools of fish that he said are called roosterfish. I keep stupidly thinking that he could have done all of his logging and mining research in a couple of years instead of twenty but then his head was full of knots that no human hands would untie. Father had to die first and then the knots apparently began to loosen. You wonder how life can be so errantly determined but it is. For instance, in my earliest teens I had seen Donald around school but only as a leading member of the athletic clique. At the time I was busy behaving poorly and reading English novels, which were able to divert me from my life. And then there was that hot summer morning when Clarence and his son Donald were digging behind the garage to shore up the tilting foundation. Laurie and I made them lemonade. I said to Donald, “Why won’t you look at me?” and then he did. I was immediately conscious that he was the man on earth least like my father. They’re still a hundred yards away but Vera waves. The idea of them together is so appalling that it’s acceptable, somewhat in the way ancient peoples would have accepted Greek or Roman mythology. I laugh at this idea. Your father Zeus rapes the girl you love but keep yourself from. You wander thirty years but after killing your father you return to her. Something like that. How does this story end? Who knows. I only know how my own story ended. I’m trying to have the heart to begin again.

  Vera approaches with David far behind, doubtless thinking about the theory and practice of Lake Michigan.

  “I saw you hiding in the shoe store. I didn’t tell David. You weren’t ready for the carnival?” she laughed.

  “Not quite yet.” We embraced and turned to David, who picked up half a dog-chewed Frisbee and put it in a trash can. My thoughts returned to appalling love. “You know that I told him that he should go see you. I didn’t think you’d end up in the same bed.”

  “Why not? I always thought of him as my first boyfriend. That book you sent me said that it’s hard to live with the unlived life.” She was properly grave.

  “Yes, our Episcopal priest who was mostly a nitwit used to talk about the sins of omission and the sins of commission as if life were a bundle of meat tied up with a butcher’s string.” She took my hand brushing a finger across my wedding ring. I was errantly thinking about Thomas Hardy and wondered if those dozens of English novels I read so early had done my mind harm. I would confuse the fictional vicars with the local Episcopalian priest, whose first priority was dinner. My father would send him prime beef roasts from Pfaelzer’s in Chicago. When I took Herald and Clare to England in their teens I was daily amazed at how well the novels had prepared me. Donald wouldn’t fly. He’d always say, “I’ll hold down the fort and feed the dogs.”

  “That was a beautiful way for your husband to die,” Vera said, clenching my hand.

  “Yes, it was.” To avoid the lump rising in my throat I got up and walked down to the water to where David stooped like a child with a hand swishing through the waves.

  “It must be ten degrees warmer than Lake Superior.”

  “Ten?” I teased. He always ascribes pointlessly exact numbers. The weather is never in the seventies but “seventy-four” or “seventy-seven.” The time is always “8:47” or “8:33,” or “the first dawn light came at 6:08.”

  “How was Clare when you left this morning?”

  “She drove me to the airport then was headed to Snowbound Books to pick up her fresh shipment of bear books. She must have a hundred different titles. K is humoring her but is upset because she has decided not to go to the Ghost Supper. She’s refusing to say good-bye to her father.”

  “Maybe she’ll talk to Coughlin. She liked him.”

  “Nothing doing. She’ll talk to me a little. She’ll talk to K, but mostly she drives over to Au Train to see Flower and hear bear stories. I spoke with Coughlin and he said there’s really nowhere to go but to let her work it out over time.”

  We walked up to the bench and sat down on each side of Vera. Her eyes were moist but she was smiling. She had had our father’s baby and I supposed or wondered if that made her our stepmother? She leaned against David’s shoulder. We sat there in silence and I began to half doze in the weak sunlight. I’m not sure what sleep is anymore. It’s intermittent at best with a dozen novels always on the night table. There’s an incalculable rudeness to death. How much am I meant to understand? A dark-complected young man in running clothes quickly passed us, nearly as large as Donald had been, and I felt the slightest twinge of desire, the first in a very long time.

  I stayed in Chicago for three mostly pleasant days despite the weather, which became wet and blustery but not as cold as it would have been in Marquette, where, the television had said, there had been a major snowstorm that had stranded thousands of deer hunters in their tents and camps. Vera spent much of the days at the wholesale clothing convention showing lines for the coming spring. David and I bundled up and walked a great deal and had one mildly awkward conversation about being the sons and daughters of privilege. The explicit question was “What are you going to do now?” and I said “Continue teaching, I guess” though I didn’t enjoy Marquette as I had the Soo or Brimley or Bay Mills, where I taught Indians, mixed
breeds, and poor white kids. Prosperity rarely brings out the best in children. David was looking into an international version of the Peace Corps that had headquarters in Switzerland but had an opening in the Veracruz area for someone who could afford to work for very low pay or had the predilection to do so. Much of the work would be directed toward ensuring pure drinking water in villages since so many diseases were waterborne. This seemed oddly limited but David said with conclusiveness, “I always liked the idea of water,” as if it were an idea. This conversation took place in front of the Newberry Library, where he was showing me the exact spot on the sidewalk where he had met Vernice. I looked gravely downward at this historical place and couldn’t help myself and laughed at the ordinary ways lovers first meet. Donald was digging down a hole. David met Polly at a hamburger stand in Iron Mountain. And David meeting Vernice the Matchgirl, who had helped him more than anyone else but Coughlin. When Vernice was terribly ill with tropical parasites I had sent her a check and in return she had given me a double-volume set of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. I admit I rarely read poetry but somehow no writer had helped me as much with Donald’s fatal illness as Akhmatova, who had one of the most spacious minds in human history. I had kept in touch with Vernice since meeting her in Chicago so long ago partly to have her insight into David’s precarious mental condition, which Donald described succinctly: “David doesn’t seem to have both oars in the water.” There is a specific visual of a man rowing with one oar, or a crow trying to fly with a single wing. The psychologism in the term depression scarcely covers the thousands of varieties but it is always a circular infirmity.

  Each of my three evenings we had dinner with Coughlin. The first one was a little iffy because we went downstairs in the Drake to the Cape Cod Room and halfway through the meal David abruptly left for the ground-floor bar, where we found him eating a cheeseburger. He explained that the Cape Cod Room was where he’d had dinner with Father the evening before the fatal trip to Mexico. Things got even rougher in the bar when the subject of war came up and I carelessly described a little research I had done on the World War II battles in the Philippines in which both my father and Vera’s father, Jesse, had taken part. A martini had made me half daft as I rambled on about the Battle of Cape Engano and also gruesome land battles where my father lost most of the men he commanded. Coughlin said he had met an ex-Green Beret medic while fishing in Montana who had tried to duct-tape together several dozen children who were in pieces when our personnel had called in mortar fire in the wrong place. I wasn’t hearing Coughlin clearly when he quoted some poet saying, “There’s a point at which the exposed heart can’t recover.” I was looking at the increasingly pale face of my brother, who got up abruptly and walked out. Vera also looked stricken and followed. Naturally I was upset but at the same time amused that Coughlin continued drinking with relish. I raised an eyebrow.

  “In thirty-five years of practice I’ve heard everything. There are no true monsters, only some people like your father who with regularity acted like a monster. It’s still episodic.”

  “Meaning?” I quickly drank a full glass of wine.

  “Well, David managed to spend half his life researching the wrongs his family visited on everyone. Long ago I told him he should be looking into what happened to his father during the war. You managed to do so. It never works when you leave out even a small part of the picture. It’s a little like the doctor who failed to diagnose the reason for a woman’s stomachache but then she failed to tell him that her husband punched her there. War can do horrible things to men. Most recover well enough to behave well and some can’t. And some don’t seem to want to as if the horrors are encysted in their brains to be examined over and over almost as if they deserved affection or at least loving attention because what would be there if the horrors were taken away? In crude farmland lingo, pigs love their own shit.”

  “Even as a boy David never seemed to have enough skin. I mean his skin wasn’t thick enough while mine was.”

  “Precisely. Once on the way to fish we stopped to look at a big snapping turtle crawling along the road and I said to David that it would be bright of him to take this creature as a model, you know, develop a carapace.”

  He paused because David returned sheepishly but with Vera looking as if she had told him an important secret. The old waiter stopped by, shaking his head at the cold hamburger, and David said he’d settle for a dozen oysters. Vera ordered a cold lobster “just in case” she had to leave again. She laughed and tickled him somewhere critical under the table.

  “To close the conversation and get on to something more interesting like a beauty queen’s perineum, true, I never gave my father the slightest break. Mother told me that she remembered him before the war and that’s why she held on with the help of booze and pills. Let’s give the dead a break today.”

  David raised his glass and we all followed. I felt slightly choked and Coughlin gave me a peculiar look that I get from K and used to receive from the young men on Donald’s work crew. I admit I felt pleased.

  Through an old friend of my mother’s who is on the board of the Art Institute of Chicago I wangled two passes to visit the big Gauguin show at seven a.m., two hours before the museum officially opened. David and I were quite dumbfounded and when we left the museum in a cold, windy rain I thought of how undemocratic art was in that so few do so much while the rest of the world looks on. I recalled that when I took Herald and Clare to the Tate in London when we were on our English trip in their teens Clare had been transfixed by the Turners and asked, “How can one artist be so much better than others?” Gauguin didn’t bring you happiness but consciousness.

  I had a rare insomniac night that was pleasant, drifting in and out of sleep, but awoke trying to determine what was reality and what was dreaming. I called Clare at three a.m. thinking she had called me. “Mom, I’m asleep!” she hissed, but it was precipitated by a dream of a call she had made from college when distraught over a crush she had on a professor (eventually consummated). Most of the thoughts and dreams were about Donald and dealt with what he had said again only a week before he died: “You’re going to have to find yourself a boyfriend.” Before dinner last evening I had taken a walk with Coughlin and he had taken my hand when we crossed Wabash. I told him his hand felt strong and he laughed and said it was because he had been rowing and fly-fishing at least ten hours a day for months and now that he was back therapizing his hands would become weak again. He then spoke of a man he had been counseling for thirty years whose father had died in a building fire in Chicago. The man had been ten years old at the time, a single child, and had basically spent his bachelor life with his mother maintaining their West Side apartment as a shrine to the dead father. “We just do things we need to do without consciously thinking about them. But then we can become trapped if we don’t finally think them over. There’s something to be said for the old European model of wearing black for a single year. Of course you lived with Donald’s death sentence for quite some time. We’ve been so inept and careless about death in America and have paid big for the consequences. Surprise! We die. That sort of thing.”

  “I think we’re a little better than that up in the north. I don’t mean the cities of the north but the villages. Over at the reservation death was an open book we all at least glanced at every day.”

  “Well, yes, because life was slower and more ruminative. Farm kids eat the animals, the pigs and cows that they loved. Once in Italy I entered a basilica by a side door and in the lintel above me skulls were embedded as a reminder, a memento mori, and then there are all of those paintings and murals clearly illustrating the end of the life process. I must have counseled a thousand patients on this matter and there is always a nearly mute craving for reassurance that there’s something more in the offing for their loved ones.”

  “And what do you say?” He had paused overlong and we were standing there looking at wind-tossed and rumpled Lake Michigan, a view shorn of anything comforting.


  “I say I don’t know.” He laughed at himself. “I say that I have no idea. I say that no one knows. Back in college in Dublin we wise young cynics used to tease devout Catholics with the question of just where in the human body is this soul located? We were witty smart-asses, children of the Enlightenment, and in the postwar gloom barely past the century’s halfway mark we had noted that ninety million had died under God’s supposed tent in two wars. Last year I was talking to this kindly old biologist from the University of Chicago who was dying of a kidney tumor. He was nominally an Episcopalian but mostly because he loved their church music. He was neither plus nor minus about the prospects of life after death feeling it was unscientific to assert anything either way. He did point out that in terms of DNA each of our cells contains thirty-two thousand indicators of what we are, so that there’s plenty of room for a soul. ‘It needn’t be very large. What’s wrong with a nanosoul?’ That’s what he said to me.”

  I was instantly transfixed by what he said. I remembered a walk along a river over near Au Train with Flower, who told me that our departing spirits enter the bodies of our favorite animals. That meant that Donald was a bear, but then I was absurdly troubled that my own preferred animal had been the very ordinary dog. Did that mean I had no chance for a reunion with Donald? Standing there looking out at the troubled water with the cold north wind burning against my face I felt a palpable heartache. Dogs and bears don’t like each other. Somehow I managed to laugh at the blatant silliness of it all. Coughlin looked at me, his face a question mark, and I couldn’t explain myself so said nothing.