by Jim Harrison
THIS IS ONE OF
SIX HUNDRED SIGNED COPIES
OF THE FIRST EDITION OF
The Road Home
THE ROAD HOME
BOOKS BY JIM HARRISON
Fiction
Wolf
A Good Day to Die
Farmer
Legends of the Fall
Warlock
Sundog
Dalva
The Woman Lit by Fireflies
Julip
The Road Home
Poetry
Plain Song
Locations
Outlyer
Letters to Yesenin
Returning to Earth
Selected & New Poems
The Theory and Practice of Rivers & Other Poems
After Ikkyu & Other Poems
Essays
Just Before Dark
THE ROAD HOME
Jim Harrison
Copyright © 1998 by Jim Harrison
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
Endpaper map of Nebraska from the Official State Atlas of Nebraska, 1885,
used by permission of the Nebraska State Historical Society.
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Harrison, Jim, 1937–
The road home / Jim Harrison.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-87113-724-0
ISBN 0-87113-729-1 (Limited Edition)
I. Title.
PS3558.A67R63 1998 98–8391
813’.54—dc21 CIP
Design by Laura Hammond Hough
Atlantic Monthly Press
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
98 99 00 01 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Peter and Molly Phinny
THE ROAD HOME
I
1
JOHN WESLEY NORTHRIDGE II
October 21st, 1952
It is easy to forget that in the main we die only seven times more slowly than our dogs. The simplicity of this law of proportion came to me early in life, growing up as I did so remotely that dogs were my closest childhood friends. It is for this reason I’ve always been a slow talker, though if my vocal cords had been otherwise constructed I may have done well at a growl or bark or howl at scented but unseen dangers beyond the light we think surrounds us, but more often enshrouds us. My mother was an Oglala Sioux (they call themselves Lakota), my father was an orphan from the East, grayish white like March snow, under which you don’t count on spring, intermittently mad as he was over a life largely spent on helping the Natives accommodate themselves to their conquerors. After his release from the Civil War (sic!) until December of 1890 he burned up body and soul in these efforts, fixing on botany as the tool of liberation and this is in an area, the Great Plains, that is ill disposed to the cultivation of fruit-bearing trees, or berry-bearing bushes of an Eastern nature. The fact that he failed utterly in his life’s mission only increases my reverence for him, though he was much easier to live with dead than alive, so powerful were the spates of irrationality that came upon him in the last twenty years of his life.
I have always collected my thoughts on Sunday, a habit enforced in my childhood when my father gave up on the church and turned to my own education with an energy that must be called unpleasant. He had gradually come over to the Native religious view that every day should be Sunday in terms of piety, and the lack of an immediate target for religious impulses made me the likeliest of prey. What young boy would truly wish to have Emerson on “Self-Reliance” read to him on long winter evenings before the fire, or in summer when the last light comes late, to sit there listening when one could still be in the hills on the far side of the Niobrara River looking for arrowheads with the dogs? One female Airedale, Kate, even supposed she could find them herself, when not looking for something to kill and eat, barking insistently at any peculiar, small sharp-edged stone. And each Sunday evening I was seated at the kitchen table to make sense of the preceding week, the very first slate-blue-covered notebook reading, in infantile scrawl, “I dont wan be hear.”
Yesterday morning when I began this I had been startled from sleep thinking I heard my son John Wesley’s car coming up the long two-track to the house, but then he’s been dead two years and it was only the milk truck rattling on the section road a mile to the east. Nonetheless, I had rolled from my bed, my heart thumping with hope, before his face in the photo on the dresser spoke more loudly than he had ever in life. Panmunjom. But his daughter, my granddaughter, had asked me the day before why my parents had died within three days of each other back in February in 1910. Dalva is a scant eleven years of age and was curious I suppose because an October storm had threshed off the leaves of the lilac grove wherein we had our family cemetery, and she became mindful again of those buried including her father though there is no body there, the remains of which still rest on a snowy mountain hillside in South Korea. In any event, when I thrust myself out of bed so violently, my heart became tremulous, literally shaking in its sac, and I had the direst sense of mortality I have ever experienced, short of my youthful scrapes with physical violence in Arizona, Mexico and France, not to speak of two drunken louts I pitched into the East River in New York back in 1913 after a nasty struggle. Brushes with death are so memorable you can still see the pores in the face of the immediate enemy decades later.
Now, no one asks a more serious question than an eleven-year-old, and they deserve to be answered in kind, inasmuch as they are attentive to a painful degree, waiting for an answer rather than mentally concocting their next question. Usually she asked the same or similar questions about the horses of the past, liking familiar stories: how in 1934 did Lundquist and I feed up a Belgian stallion until he weighed twenty-eight hundred pounds, purportedly the largest in the country, if not the world at that time. But why my parents died within three days of each other could not be answered with, “Because they were sick and heartbroken with age and illness.” The event had to be encapsulated in a story and not a simple one at that; at eleven she was already reading Dickens and the Brontë sisters and a reality painted in careless pastels would not be sufficient.
Another event, albeit strange, had occurred the week before and deeply unsettled me. Lundquist and I had made a three-hour drive to the west and north to hunt my remaining English setter, Tess, very likely the last bird hunt for both of us, she being twelve, and my knowing for a year that when Tess was gone this game would be over in this life. We had left before dawn and reached our first spot near Parmelee across the border in South Dakota, from whence we intended to travel onward to Gordon to visit some coverts where the dog had had her best day many years before. Bird dogs are fond of revisiting scenes of early happiness just as we are. Lundquist grumbled about the Parmelee area as expected; three members of his family, or so he maintained, had lost their lives in the New Ulm Massacre in Minnesota nearly a hundred years before and he was fearful of the Lakota. Tess pointed a sharp-tailed grouse that I flushed, shot but only crippled, and then we floundered in sedge and spike rush for a half hour, damning Lundquist who had wandered off as if following a distant star at midmorning. Tess repointed the wounded bird, unwilling to dispose of it, so gentle was her disposition. I grasped it by the neck and broke it, feeling the fragile vertebrae crush beneath my thumb. For some reason I kissed the bird, then dizzied and stooped to my haunches long enough to concern the dog. An old man half-kneeling in a bog
saying good-bye to the hunt after a half century is a melancholy portrait indeed. Bringing the bird back to life was a casual and sentimental impulse, not the less absurd for being so heartfelt. In this grim world there is more sentimentality about killing than motherhood.
When I stood up and headed back to the car the day that had begun sunny and warmish for mid-October had turned gray and cool with the wind beginning to bluster out of the northwest. My heart that had been so eager for this last hunt now labored to get me back to the car which seemed to grow more distant, and the legs that had carried me as far as thirty miles in a single day now stumbled over blades of short-stemmed grama, tripped over dead flowers. I reminded myself that I had made love with a specific vigor only a week before, but that was thin fuel to get me to the car which had become a shiny dot on a far hillock. In this sea of grass you always park on a hillock for visibility so that you don’t lose your way in the sere and undulating landscape, a color painters used to call “burnt sienna.”
I had two stiff gulps from the whiskey bottle to the disapproval of Lundquist who had the heater running and was eating a peanut butter, onion and mustard sandwich, an enthusiasm, I daresay, he shared only with himself. He had worked for me since 1919, and his life was organized into peculiar rites. He always drank his water before the whiskey. We never quarreled but, as is usual of old friends, commented on each other’s beliefs and habits in the most sidelong manner. “You’re drinking the whiskey first?” No matter that I had done so hundreds of times in his company.
I dozed while Lundquist drove off for home, abandoning our plan for a full day’s hunt. I awoke when the car stopped and Lundquist got out, sensing that we hadn’t gone all that far. The engine was still running, the windshield wipers were on, my shins too hot from the heater. He was fumbling in the trunk and my eyes opened to watch him walk off with a gunny sack, perhaps fifty yards, where perhaps two dozen or so men, women and children were picking potatoes in a mixture of light rain and sleet. Most of them were Lakota, both pure and mixed breed. Three little boys, impervious to the weather, were having a fine potato fight. In my youth I had picked a lot of potatoes in nasty weather and checked myself short of sympathy: it was work and in this case, it was what one did to keep alive. Neihardt, the scholar and poet, had told me that even the legendary Lakota medicine man Black Elk picked potatoes in the fall, though with a great deal more humor than anyone else but the children.
It was then that my attention was caught by an old man in especially ragged clothing who had a stiff left arm that made him pick more slowly than the others. Even at a distance I caught the peculiar and pronounced hook in the bridge of his nose, the sag in a cheekbone, that had been caused by a cow’s kick when we were scarcely ten years old. There was no doubt that it was Smith, a name adopted in humor because so many white men were named Smith and the name offered the ultimate in gentle concealment. He was from the family of Samuel American Horse and though I knew his real name I could not bring myself to utter his secret over fifty years later. I had bid him good-bye in 1906 when we were both about eighteen and he was off to Europe as a trick rider with a troupe of cowboys and warriors, one of the last of the touring Wild West shows.
I fairly bolted from the car, stumbling in the ditch, but my legs regained their strength as I made my way toward him. When I was only halfway there and still thirty yards away he turned and recognized me, then looked away blankly which gave me some anxiety but I continued on, calling out his name and saying, “It’s good to see you” in my pidgin Lakota, cursing that my father had kept me as far as possible from the language. His own voice was soft and firm as ever, lacking the slightest of quavers I had begun to discover in my own. I wanted to embrace him but his words were utterly punishing: it was good to see that I was alive and he thanked me for the kindness that my family had shown him so long ago, kindness that had ill prepared him for the life ahead which had been brutal. He was a wicasan wanka now, a medicine man, and he no longer spoke to white people, and though I was half Lakota I lived as a white man and that’s what mattered. Now he wished that I would go away, but said that he would visit me in the last year of my life when he had risen above all the differences his life had caused. He bowed slightly and returned to his potato picking. There was a childish, perhaps natural, urge to ask him just when the last year of my life would be, but I knew it to be wrong so I left, my legs slow again with the thought that this was the man I had considered to be the best friend of my life.
This morning when I woke at the first, faint light, merely a blur, I could see that my world was covered by a thick frost. I had slept fitfully, driving myself half daft with Dalva’s question about my parents’ death. My desire for a wise answer kept dissembling with memories in the darkness so that I kept turning on the lights to return myself to what we think of as the actual world, a pleasant enough fiction. I put on my wool robe but forgot my slippers, passing through the den where the Airedales lay sprawled on a buffalo robe. Only the smallish female, Sonia, got up to greet me. The others settled for a collective rumble at this interruption of schedule when no danger was sensed. I stubbed my toe, catching myself by hand against the door jamb, fearing that my fingers wouldn’t miss a Maynard Dixon painting, a small one I cherished from his last years.
Sonia stayed on the porch steps as I wandered out on the bright frozen grass. The cold quickly penetrated my feet and I hopped a bit but not very high. I got close enough to the lilac grove to see the gravestones, then turned back, noting with delight how my feet had partially melted the frost, the choreography of my hops, remembering the hopscotch we played before I was withdrawn permanently from school. It was awkward to precisely retrace my steps but I did so, hopping right and left on numb feet until I laughed at my clumsiness, my wobbling frost dance.
I soaked my feet in a big dutch oven full of hot water, drinking my coffee and watching the frost slowly disappear in the none too strong October sun. Paul, the elder of my two sons, had traveled to South America several winters. His training was in geology though I suspect his main intent was for longer days. As a boy he told me he preferred it to be summer solstice every day if that could be arranged. He would travel with his mother to Arizona in the winters while John Wesley would stay on the farm with me. It’s certainly more ranch than farm but I like the latter out of habit so engrained is the popular misunderstanding of rancher. I once told a churlish woman in Kentucky that I operated a spa for cows to gain weight. That was at the 1947 Derby when I was staying with some hardboot horse friends and I sensed this woman wishing I were a captain of industry rather than a failed painter with a modest knack for land. Greed has always struck me as one of the most readily identifiable human vices and I’d spent far too long as its victim. My father, to whom God was more real than the milk cow in the barnyard, was also guilty on this count, though more excusably as he saw the Lakota suffer horribly for want of good land. Even that arch-enemy of the Natives, General Philip Sheridan, admitted that “a reservation is a worthless piece of land surrounded by scoundrels.” Very late in his life my father was delighted with Henry Adams’s radically low opinion of the “Western movement” while I found the book (The Education of Henry Adams) too long on the ironies and short on the primary colors that life can offer to those who are energetically curious. I suppose poor Adams never recovered from the suicide of his wife, though it is arguable whether anyone ever truly recovers from anything. I still twitch at ancient rifle shots, and an errant memory of Adelle, dead now forty-one years, can still make my body rigid with anguish. But then at other times, mostly when I am walking, her voice can become as musical as the May warblers in the thickets along the Niobrara. The dead do not offer themselves up as a consoling study when we loved them so.
Naomi has called from the country school where she teaches to see if Dalva can come for dinner. Naomi has to take Ruth to her piano recital, an event that Dalva loathes because they keep playing the same pieces over and over. This child is not sharp for the grace of repetition, no
r was I, though there are penalties for this restlessness. I will cook myself as my housekeeper, Lundquist’s wife, is off at a Lutheran conference down in the capital, Lincoln. This woman is forever in a state of spiritual high dudgeon, and a list of her dislikes is as long as the Omaha phone book. She is called Frieda and has given her daughter the same name though Lundquist told me he wished it otherwise, preferring Victoria for reasons of his own. Frieda has the conformation of a Hampshire sow and speaks in an irritatingly wee voice, and despite all of this, is on rare occasions endearing, being a master flower gardener, and I love flowers.
I judge that there’s time to thaw last week’s lone sharp-tailed grouse as Dalva likes what she calls “Indian food,” which she doesn’t get at her home, what with Naomi being a devout amateur naturalist who doesn’t want wild things in her kitchen. I’ve asked her teasingly if her God loves deer over cows, but she is so truehearted that I’m gentle on the subject. At one time I raised the best beef in the state and I would be unwilling to give up either. A few years back Dalva came running into the house from Lundquist’s pickup with the heart and liver of a deer in a small bloody paper sack. “It’s just like our own and now we can eat it for lunch,” she fairly screeched. Lundquist would pick her up on weekends on his way to work and at least once or twice a year would discover a fresh road kill in a ditch, the product of some late-night speeding drunk out on the country road who would outdrive his headlights and hit a deer.
Not very far back in my mind I am now begging the question of the day, the ends of my parents’ lives. She knows the end of her father’s story and wishes to know the end of mine. It won’t be comfortable dinner talk but children lack interest in these distinctions.