Returning to Earth

by Jim Harrison

  “I was sorry to hear about Donald. There was a man who could put in a day’s work.” I shook his hand as he offered this ultimate compliment of the north. His hand felt like a semipetrified baseball mitt. “You might not remember me. Donny and me played football way back when, then worked together. The name’s Teddy.” He bowed, his face reddening, and walked away.

  “You were the left tackle,” I called out and he turned and grinned.

  When I made the turn near Au Train I wasn’t a hundred yards down the small road toward Flower’s when I saw a man lying on his back in an orange suit with a rifle across his chest. I got out of the car and I called out to him but he didn’t answer. I walked over and could see his footprints deep in the snow coming out of a swamp to where he lay. I said, “Hello” loudly thinking he was ill. I remembered Donald saying that about the same number of hunters die by heart attack as do of errant gunshots. He opened his eyes as if I were a dream. “I had a hangover and this fucking snow is too deep so I took a nap.” The whiskey fumes rose toward my nose and I hurried away.

  There was no one at Flower’s but I could see a trail out the back door through the snow and from perhaps a few hundred yards in the woods I could hear a chain saw, which would be Clare and Flower working on the shelter. The house was overwarm and water dripped from the eaves. The temperature outside was rising above freezing and the midmorning sun glinted off the snow. I lay down on a small corner bed in the room where I had lain with Donald so long ago when I was fourteen and he sixteen. How we loved each other. There were five bearskins tacked to the wall from the time of Flower’s dad, whom she said was so hard he broke like a stick. Flower had become angry when she discovered Donald had put a bearskin on the floor for our lovemaking. It evidently broke a taboo of some sort. Then as now I was decidedly a white woman and didn’t want to know. This thought made me wonder how much Clare had absorbed from her father but then it’s impossible to be quantitative about such matters. In my essentially white Episcopalian mind-set I could somewhat understand Uncle Fred’s Zen Buddhism but when I tried to read a piece in Harper’s about Tibetan Buddhism it seemed an alien country. I recalled in high school when the local Finns were angry because an anthropologist at the college had said that Finns were essentially northern European Indians. Clarence and Donald thought the whole fuss quite funny with Donald being half and half. Clarence would say, “I’m just an American whatever the hell that is.” When Clare was a junior in college she brought her Sicilian roommate home on Easter vacation and this girl had thick, black kinky hair that was beautiful. At dinner Donald asked if he could touch her hair and when he did so we all laughed. She said that over a period of thousands of years Sicily was vulnerable and everyone invaded it, Muslim countries, Africans, and Greeks. Donald said, “I agree with the results” and blushed.

  Now there were ravens surrounding Flower’s house and I swear a large, bearded male looked in the window which cast a yellow square of light across my chest. I sniffled a bit over daughters missing their fathers. I never missed mine.

  I slept until late afternoon when the cold November light began to fail. I don’t think I ever slept more deeply and there was the pleasant illusion that I had become part of the bed. I turned to see Clare and Flower folding up the five bearskins and wrapping them in a large canvas tarpaulin.

  “Mom, are you okay?” Clare said with a windburned smile. In the few days I had been in Chicago she had become ruddy, her skin coarsened by weather.

  “I’m not the one in question,” I whispered, which she ignored.

  Clare and Flower dragged their heavy bundle out the door and left the door open. I got up and watched from the window as they skidded off their freight on a toboggan down toward a low area in the darkening woods where I once found a wild orchard. What a pair of women, I thought. The only thing my mother had in common with Flower was a fascination with wildflowers. Once when Flower drove her old Plymouth into the alley behind the garage to talk to Clarence my mother and I were in the yard and she acted frightened of Flower.

  I went to the wood-burning kitchen stove and lifted the top of a Dutch oven smelling a venison soup made with dried corn and dried wild leeks. Herald was always leery of Flower but sent her packages of food from the Southwest that included chiles and a variety of dried corn and beans. When Herald was still a little boy Flower had sent him a hunting knife she had made with a deer-horn handle. He never used the knife but it was a prized possession.

  I sat down at the table and tasted a chile sauce that burned my tongue pleasantly. Suddenly it was dark and I heard their feet crunching through the snow on the path back to the house. I tried to think of something to say to Clare, which made me want a drink. There was a jealous notion that Flower had become Clare’s mother during this dark time. What did I have to offer? Should I say to Clare that your father is forever dead to you and you should resume your life? In my mind’s eye I could see Donald and Clare packing for one of their countless fishing trips with Clare at age seven in pigtails sitting at the kitchen table going over her list of needed supplies saying, “Dad eats so much bacon I can’t believe it.”

  While Flower dished up the soup Clare sat down beside me and gave me a hug as if I were the one with problems. “Don’t worry about me, Mother, I have to do this.”

  What could I say? Nothing whatsoever, not even “Dress warmly.” We ate our delicious meal and ended up laughing at a naughty joke about an old woman with one leg who made love to a bear. Despite my laughter it was slightly unnerving that Flower told the joke as if the story were absolutely true. When I got up to leave I had decided not to tell Clare about the problem with Polly’s daughter in New York. Though Rachel was younger Clare had patiently taught her dance steps and how to swim. The thought of this girl in prison made me think of Dickens’s phrase “bleak consternation.”

  When I got home I found my asshole father’s martini shaker in the pantry and made myself an overlarge drink. At this stage, why not? There were two phone messages and I chose David in Jalapa to come first over K in New York.

  “How are you?”

  “I don’t know. How are you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  An exact transcription. We started over with me delaying the bad news about his ex-wife Polly and him telling me about his first interesting day driving around to villages taking samples from wells and water systems. The threat of cholera made me think of the novel I was rereading. Bears and cholera. I was a long way from Chicago. I took a big gulp of my drink and told him why Polly was in New York and he questioned whether he should fly up and help. I asked, “How?” and he was offended. I said that I’d call tomorrow when I knew more. I left a message at the hotel where Polly and K were staying and K called back in an hour when I was half bombed and dwelling on a passage in the García Márquez novel: “Only God knows how much I loved you.” I nearly didn’t answer the phone. K said he had given Polly a sedative and she was asleep. The arraignment had been perfunctory. The only things working in their favor were the fact that there were hundreds of similar cases on the docket and that the amount of heroin sold to the undercover agent wasn’t in the major category. The lawyer had covered the bail with my wired money and they would need more to pay him. I said I’d wire more in the morning and then heard a noise from his end. K said his sister was sobbing in the bathroom because he wouldn’t let her see her boyfriend or call him. After he hung up he was taking her to a detox center even though she claimed to be only an occasional user. He asked about Clare and I was noncommittal, then a little frightened because the night had been still up until fifteen minutes ago and now a strong wind from the north had begun.

  “I think she means to hibernate to get close to the spirit of her father,” I said, my voice quavering.

  “Jesus Christ I knew it was something like that. I just have no idea what we can do.”

  “Me neither,” I said, hanging up the phone because I could no longer talk.

  I went into the kitchen and made anoth
er drink and then went out onto the open back porch and sipped it in the blowing cold. I looked up and watched the clouds of the oncoming front cover up the stars. Just like that, they’re gone.

  At some point in the night the furnace went off so that when I awoke at first light just before seven the house was frightfully cold. I put on a full-length sheepskin coat Donald had given me for Christmas, made coffee, and waited for the furnace man I had called to arrive. He turned out to be from the class behind me in high school though I didn’t remember him. After he had replaced what he called the igniter I poured him a cup of coffee and he showed me what was wrong with the defective part with his oily hands. Heat was flooding the kitchen and I parted my coat. For an instant my left breast peeked out of my nightgown and we both blushed as I covered it. He left moments later and it occurred to me as I watched him walk out to his van that if he had made a move I doubt if I would have resisted. What could be erotic about oily hands and the scent of fuel oil? I had felt so naked beneath my robe and nightgown.

  I dressed as warmly as possible then went out to Clarence’s workshed and got my cross-country skis and poles. I still tasted last night’s vodka in my mouth and my mind was unclear. I wanted to go to a wild area near Champion but remembered it was deer season and didn’t want to be mistaken for a doe. Presque Isle would be too windy so I chose Trowbridge Park and skied for nearly two hours until I was soaked with sweat but hadn’t quite dispelled the image of the repairman’s large oily hands. My heart jumped at the idea that I had forgotten the wire transfer to K and Polly so I stopped at the bank, and then picked up a steak at the IGA remembering how easily Donald could eat a two-pound porterhouse or a whole chicken, for that matter.

  When I got home there was a call from Coughlin on the answering machine saying that he had got some interesting information from both the anthropology professor and a researcher at the Newberry. He was assembling it and would FedEx it north. He sensed the inquietude in my voice and we ended up talking for an hour. I covered the steak with salt and pepper with my spare hand and at the same time kept glancing at the stack of high school textbooks at the end of the counter with extreme distaste. He said that on all levels the main reason to live is because you’re already alive. I tried to make a joke about my early morning nonexperience with oily hands and he laughed and said, “Real desire often takes us by surprise.” He reminded me that my own husband had told me to find a boyfriend and that though some people are able to transcend their biology I probably wasn’t one of them. I admitted that I had thought over the matter of whether I needed another man but hadn’t come to any conclusions. He was quick to remind me of the limits of thought. I asked if he wanted to come up for the weekend and go cross-country skiing and he was startled saying that it was already noon on Friday but that he could come up the following week for Thanksgiving weekend if I wished. The hardest part of the conversation was about Clare. He told me that it would be helpful to everyone directly involved if I stopped saying “my child” and “my daughter.” Clare was twenty-three and past ownership, and I couldn’t help her by pursuing her.

  Despite this I panicked when I ate the steak and listened to the noon news. The weather said the front out of Alberta (a clipper, they called it) was passing quickly but that it would become still and very cold, perhaps drop well below zero. I was drowsy but immediately put on a coat and drove out to Au Train. My daughter simply couldn’t be allowed to sleep in a fucking hut when it was that cold.

  Flower wasn’t impressed. She was making three venison mincemeat pies and said that Clare had driven over to the Canadian Soo (Sault Ste. Marie) to see her father’s spiritual teacher for a few days. This was so totally unexpected that I sat there like a lump but close to tears of relief. I told Flower that I wanted to see Clare’s shelter but she said absolutely not. She sat down and poured us each a glass of her homemade wine, for which she used wild strawberries and rhubarb. She looked at me overlong and I was reminded again how native people don’t fill up all available space with chatter. They don’t believe that talking is thinking. This unnerved me and I absurdly remembered a college term paper I wrote on the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. I had read a book by his widow, Caitlin, called Leftover Life to Kill, which shocked me. How could these people have a good marriage when they appeared to be drunk every day? The professor told me that I was more than a trifle too bourgeois. Sitting there with Flower staring into my eyes made me feel like a hysterical PTA mother, the kind who used to crowd me as a teacher for ignoring her son whose sole activity was picking his nose and staring out the window as if it were a television screen.

  “How could you help her get over her grief?” Flower finally asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said, a perennial answer.

  “What are you doing to get over your own?”

  “Getting up in the morning, reading, eating, going to bed at night. That’s about all except going out in the snow on skis.”

  “The snow is a good thing. I’m not sure there are any books for this. Just don’t take up with a wet man.”

  “I don’t know what you mean?” I had waited for a full minute for her to explain “wet man.”

  “A wet man is like a frog way back in the swamp that thinks he is the whole world, that the world starts and ends with him. I notice that most men are like that now. Donald wasn’t like that.”

  “I just worry that Clare will freeze to death,” I said lamely.

  “Smart people have always known how to keep as warm as their bodies want to be.” Now she began laughing so hard tears formed in the corners of her eyes. “I didn’t know that was what you were worried about,” she choked out. “I thought you were worried that your daughter would become a bear and be lost to you.” She came around the table. “In the old days a few men became bears while they were living but it was real rare for women unless they made love to a bear.”

  Flower sent me home with a venison mincemeat pie and I ate it for lunch with a salad. It was better than any I had made for my family because she used lard for the crust and her own deeply flavored dried fruit including wild crab apples. A flash of sunlight came through the kitchen window and I felt happy with the only sour note being the stack of textbooks on the counter over by the toaster. I gathered the textbooks in my arms, opened the door to the basement, and threw the books down into the darkness. There was still a faint scent of fuel oil and I had a memory that was dimmed by the wine we drank when it happened. It was June and my parents had moved up to the Club. Mrs. Plunkett, our housekeeper, had the day off and David was off fishing with Glenn, who always smelled like beer. I was fourteen and Donald sixteen and we were dancing in the living room to the Rolling Stones. Laurie was over with her boyfriend and after we searched my father’s den for a while we found the key to the wine cellar. We sat at the table in the wine cellar, smoked a joint, and drank two bottles of French wine. Laurie went off in the corner behind a rack with her boyfriend but we could hear her giving him a blow job. I had never done that before but Laurie said that you avoid getting pregnant by keeping boys soft. Donald was laughing and we left the wine cellar and went into a room full of stacked furniture and luggage and necked against the wall and I got grease marks on my pale blue blouse leaning against the wall on a greasy copper fuel line that led from the furnace to the buried outside tank. Donald would rub his prick through my underpants against my pussy until I wilted and his stuff came all over my thighs.

  I was amazed that I had thrown the books down the basement stairs but it made the rest of my piece of pie and salad taste that much better. I opened Love in the Time of Cholera to my bookmark on page 47. “It had not been easy for her to regain her self-control after she heard Digna Pardo’s shriek in the patio and found the old man of her life dying in the mud.” It happens everywhere all of the time, I thought, but it never quite registers until it happens close to us.

  It had become quite evident that I didn’t want to teach in Marquette. All I had to do to rediscover this was to flick on the basem
ent light and look down the stairs at the textbooks sprawled there like book corpses that had lost their lives in my private war. Literature textbooks resemble anthologies where all the finest material is left out to arrive at a harmless product. I no longer wanted to be part of a system whose actual intent was to produce reliable employees. You could add on babysitting and the expectation of parents for you to instill a sense of discipline totally absent in the home. The smallest possible light bulb went off in my head when I remembered that in late September a young man who taught human geography at the college had suggested I might tutor some native students who tended to get lost out of shyness. This seemed like a better idea than wandering hither and yon in the Marquette school system. The professor had said that half the native students were new politicized Indians and in your face while the other half were withdrawn. He had introduced me to a brother and sister from Baraga who were bright enough but barely spoke above whispers and suffered from terminal homesickness in addition to being too poor to eat decently. A few were quite traditional and there was fatalism in their early return home from the alien cities of Sault Ste. Marie and Marquette to areas where unemployment was fifty percent and the rate of alcoholism very high.

  It had begun snowing hard outside and I slouched forward on the kitchen table in a semidoze watching the snow gather in the barberry bushes outside the window. I hadn’t noticed the green of summer enough and now the colors were gray and white and black. David and Vera were in green Veracruz abutting the blue Caribbean but I had to tend Clare. Coughlin said on the phone that I can’t guide her unless I accept her. If I stridently oppose what she’s doing she’ll oppose me. How can the daughter be more like the father and the son more like me seemingly in full control of all of life’s vagaries? I finished my master’s degree tending the house with two little kids. Mother said on the phone, “You should have some help.” No thank you. I’d rather be exhausted. Nearly prone I set García Márquez up on the table, skipping ahead. “For the next two weeks he did not sleep a single night.” I’ve read so much fiction that I used to think my perceptions of life were merely a fiction I was writing, especially after the kids left for college and there was so little noise in the evening. Once Donald was watching Monday Night Football when a call came from the state police for help in finding two hunters from downstate in Flint who were lost. Donald was part of the search-and-rescue group for Luce and Chippewa counties and the lost people were usually hunters but sometimes summer campers with cheap compasses or no compasses at all, or children who had wandered away from campsites with mothers weeping that the lost child would be eaten by wolves and bears though this only happened once, near Brimley, when a bear killed a young girl or so I’m told. The Flint hunters were lost nearby in the Hiawatha National Forest (silly poem). The swamp where the Flint hunters were lost was too thick for snowmobiles so Donald and a friend who was a commercial fisherman and large took off on snowshoes. I worried all night and the state police were parked in our yard at dawn when Donald and his friend returned with the two men over their shoulders. The two lost men weren’t very big but they still must have been a burden. I cooked the biggest breakfast possible with the men smelling like pine smoke and snow. Donald had built a huge fire of tamarack and pine in the swamp so that they were fairly cozy. One of the men was of Italian descent and shipped us fifty pounds of Italian sausage, cheese, and salami by FedEx, which we loved. I fell asleep at the table, my eyes opening now and then to see the snow on the barberry bushes forming thick, fluffy white hats. I had seen in a sporting catalog of K’s a sleeping bag used by mountaineers in the Himalayas that was good for weather down to fifty below zero. I would order one for Clare. One winter she and Donald camped by a remote lake for ice fishing and said they were never cold one bit.