by Jim Harrison
It is now lunchtime and I have skipped breakfast watching the frost thaw. I’m still wearing my old wool navy blue robe, the hem tattered where Sonia used to pull on it as a puppy, then hang there to be dragged from bedroom to kitchen for morning coffee, a habit that sent Frieda into a dither of spleen. I can’t very well sit here watching a sharp-tailed grouse thaw, though it’s tempting as if I were some Chinese ancient in Jade Mountain. I have come very late to the pleasure of sitting still with little or nothing on my mind.
In the den, from the safe behind the bookcase with its difficult combination—1–2–3—I draw out the appropriate notebook. On the way out of the room I pause at a Burchfield and a Charley Russell, both bought for songs when my world was young and so was theirs. With age I need not make judgments about their comparative merits, having lost the impulse to be right. One is one, and the other is another. With age one loses all sense of the supposed inevitability of art and life. Vivid moments are no longer strung together by imagined fate. The sense of proportion in good and bad experience loses its appeal. Bad is bad and you let it go. Good you cherish as it whizzes by. Mental struggles become lucid and muted with particular visual images attached to them, somewhat irrationally or beyond ordinary logic. Money shrinks to money. Fear is always recognizable rather than generalized. It is sharp and its aim is very good indeed. If there is wisdom as such, it is boiled down by fatigue. On the very rare occasion that I check out an old notebook as I am doing now, the sweat rises in my hair roots and I wonder, What is this fool going to do next? There is a double melancholy in my notebooks up until I entered World War I at the comparatively ripe age of thirty-one. Until that time the notebooks are thick with sketches, nearly every page in fact, more drawings than prose, the world as seen rather than thought. It would be nearly pleasant to think that the war made me abandon what I thought was my calling to be an artist, but the truth is that my talent wasn’t strong or obsessive enough to overcome my disappointments. My soul was frozen for a long time and when it regathered its heat I was otherwise occupied.
Feb. 7, 1910—Coming up from well south of Magdalena in Sonora and headed for Nogales. At twilight it turned damnably cold so I used the horse blanket over the bed roll, having gathered a cushion of grass for underneath. Firewood scarce near the road so went well up a canyon & managed three sketches before sunset. I will leave this horse with regret as in a lifetime of horses this is the most intelligent I’ve owned. A roan gelding, he looks over my shoulder as I sketch and he chews his grass. I judge that he could be trained to fetch firewood but my security is in his hobbles. He did not shy at the troop of coatimundi (called “chulos” down here) that scurried off a side canyon as we approached. Odd creatures as if crossbred between an otter and a raccoon. Stopped at a hacienda around noon to replenish my water and met an interesting young Mexican rancher about my age who had been at University of Kansas for two years. He tells me it is a good time to leave Mexico as the refusal of Diaz to leave office will mean trouble, if not revolution. He admires my horse and is startled to hear that I have traveled on him all the way up from Mazatlan since September. I cannot give him a good answer other than to say I wander and sketch when it’s cool, and paint and trade horses during the hot summer months. There is enough of a far-off look in his eye for me to know he’d like to ride over the horizon from his big hacienda. Both his parents and wife live in Hermosillo, preferring society life to that of a ranch. He beckons a servant girl to bring me something to eat, and then embarrasses himself to admit that when he was a boy he wished to be a poet. The servant girl had put her baby down on a pillow in the shade, the days have been as warm as the nights are cold, and I glance over at it, itching to make a sketch. The baby begins to cry and I get up to tend it but he holds my arm. He tells me that the baby’s deformed and the girl thinks this is so because it was born out of wedlock. The girl comes back and she is of surpassing loveliness. She gives me lemonade and a bowl of stew, then moves over to tend the baby and in a brief glimpse I see that the baby’s face is twisted askew. He senses that I know his secret and looks away. Now the girl is looking at me rather boldly and I hold out my arms. She carries the baby over and places it in my arms and I hold it to my breast. We are all lost in the silence until she asks him a question in Spanish and he turns to me saying she wishes I would sing it a lucky song. I can think of nothing appropriate, then remember the Stevenson my Lakota mother read to me, which was her favorite:
“Whenever the moon and stars are set,
whenever the wind is high,
All night long in the dark and wet,
a man goes riding by.”
I put the notebook down and got dressed for equilibrium. In 1921 when I was again in the area I found the hacienda but it was in ruin, its stucco pocked with bullet holes. I wandered around Hermosillo a bit, thinking I might run into them, but it was not to be. I had no names to work with but it seemed that afternoon when they had asked me to stay I should have done so. We think of life as a solid and are haunted when time tells us it is a fluid. Old Heraclitus couldn’t have stepped in the same river once, let alone twice.
Feb. 10, 1910—I am in the Moctezuma Hotel in Nogales, Arizona, where I stepped off into this other world five months before. There are a number of doleful letters from home including too much money, then a telegram from Walgren, our neighbor, one of the original Swede carpenters who built our house and later had become a lawyer to the large immigrant community in the area. He was a grumpy, stern old bastard who could never resist an occasion for an homily. My parents are quite ill and I note the telegram is over a month old, having been sent shortly after the New Year. I make the short walk to the train station to book my passage, looking back across the border with regret to the distant hillside farm where I left my horse. I paid a year’s board and told them to ride it which delighted a boy of about ten years who was already brushing the horse down. If there’s a revolution what’s to become of my horse? Neither Walgren or my parents have a phone, they being rare in our area. I send both Walgren and the county sheriff, who dislikes me, a wire saying that I am on my way home.
Back at the hotel I sort and pack my sketches, then have my first hot bath in a month. There’s a lump in my throat and beneath my breastbone over my parents, but also a troubling image of a girl I saw that morning mounting a horse Apache style in one fluid leap. She smiled at me as I watched, then reined off at a good speed, her hair flowing out in the wind, toward the top of a hill where she decidedly did not turn around for another glance. One is enough. Dying parents and the specter of sex. My father somewhat opposed my art obsession especially early on, while happy with my evident talent as a horse, also a land trader, from which I’ve made a livelihood since fourteen. The two, art and money, didn’t go together in his mind. When I was but a snooping boy and he was gone I looked at his locked up papers concerning his tree nursery business he began after the Civil War. The key was under the rug beneath his chair, and he was forever secretive perhaps thinking business was a bad mix with his devoutness. Since I was early set in my ways in ambition to be an artist he made it his mission to comment from the peripheries about “graven images,” Edison’s possible blasphemy in recreating the human voice, the deceptiveness of the photographic arts, the error in the attempt to make “moving” pictures, and the profound dangers of the auto itself which was radically changing the sense of time, which before had depended so much on distance. Or so he insisted . . .
I chop an onion and put it in a pan with butter, then pluck a few leaves of fresh sage from Frieda’s herb pots in the window. She also churns the butter, the likes of which you can’t get in Chicago or New York, but must travel to far-off Normandy. I mince the bird’s gizzard in the pan with the onion, then tear some bread in pieces. Dalva likes the dressing roasted, not “gummy” from inside the bird. She will only eat rutabaga if it’s mashed with the potatoes, and brussels sprouts are out of the question unless halved and fried in butter rather than boiled. There is little in her life
that lacks her full attention. She has Sonia swimming in the Niobrara while I have trouble getting her to cross a creek. Lundquist carried Sonia around too much as a puppy, to protect her from the barnyard geese. When she grew she killed a single goose in vengeance. My thoughts turn to my friend Davis who was an excellent camp cook but died on my first trip to Mexico in 1909. He was from Omaha and much more talented at his sketchbook than I, but utterly foolhardy and captious. We were near El Salto west of Durango, camped in a canyon near precipitous mountains, two flatlanders but I was long on caution and he wasn’t. It was late spring and there were too many rattlers to make exploring comfortable except in the cool of the morning. In the noon heat I was sketching and Davis swigging tequila for a toothache when he said he was going to climb a mountain to catch the breeze. This irritated me and I said, “Go ahead you fool, you’ll break your neck” and he did, and more than that. He called out from a cliff a half mile up, or so I thought, and I looked up to see him teeter then teeter forward, shooting and pitching down a “couloir.” Oddly, there was a large snake near his body, which was fairly peeled with remnants of his clothing in blood-soaked tatters. He said no last words so crushed was his face but his eyes still moved for a moment or two after I reached him.
Feb. 25, 1910—Back home for a week now, the last seventeen miles in an ugly blizzard on a borrowed horse, but then late in the afternoon, when I could see all the trees we planted perhaps three miles distant, the wind turned suddenly around to the south as if to ask me why all the concern, with the temperature rising from twenty to over forty.
They are both dead and I have buried them myself, making myself quite ill from exhaustion and the terror of attempting to keep them alive when they wished not to be. It was transparent that they were holding on for my arrival and I was ashamed and begged forgiveness but he hushed me, making a biblical joke, “Let the dead bury the dead but you will have to do it.” It struck me that neither had eaten in several days though the larder was full. They drank quantities of Lakota tea which made them a bit dreamy but did nothing to still my father’s pain. I was always made to call my mother Margaret though he used her Lakota name, “Small Bird.” It occurred to me that though she was a full twenty years younger than his seventy-five she did not intend to be with us much longer after he went, so I vowed to keep a close watch on her. Other than Walgren his only friend in the area was the youngish doctor, an amateur scholar of Indian affairs, who had left pain medicine father refused, wanting to be “fully conscious” when he entered “the kingdom.” I don’t know if this was courageous or foolhardy. It went with the extremities the man had reached in his life. I got him to take a glass of whiskey which helped and at the same time made him more ill. He was to become a ghost before my eyes that evening. He said that though he knew I would take care of myself, I was well taken care of, and that the sin of his life was greed. I assured him that certainly this was not noticeable to anyone else, that though the house and property were fine and solid we had lived simply. He would have none of this and wept. We prayed before the fireplace with Margaret between us. It was plain that there was no time to summon any of his old friends from up on the Reservation, the dozens who had stopped by over the years in their secretive wanderings. He fell asleep during his prayer and I caught him before he could fall into the fire and carried him into his bed. Afterwards Margaret gave me a stone in a small leather pouch. We sat up late so she could hear about Mexico and look at my sketchbook. It was all quite peaceful until she shook me at dawn and cried out, pointing out the window where my father was dancing around the barnyard in his long underwear. I rushed out in my own and he was all howling, bloody and incontinent, having danced a circle in the snow. I could barely restrain him at first then by gesture, also by cries through his bloody beard, I understood he wanted me to dance around the circle which I did once before I hauled him indoors, startled at how light he was and still how brutally strong. I forced some medicine down him then held his nose so he swallowed involuntarily. I rode only a few miles toward Walgren’s before I was met by the doctor and Walgren coming toward me. By the time we got back home he was laying back out in the snow, quite dead, his head in Small Bird’s lap. The doctor couldn’t help but asked me what she was singing and I said I didn’t know. I was a white man, whatever the hell that was.
I laid my journal aside, the repressed tears a poor preparation for dinner. My image of my father had become so strange that when I thought of him I also saw in my mind’s eye a mountain goat up on a ledge down in the Pinacates. His blood was cold and Davis’s warm, growing warmer in the afternoon heat as I carried him to the horse, then packed him into El Salto.
I poured myself my daily drink of Canadian whiskey, stared at it long and hard, then dumped it out in the sink and opened a bottle of good red wine. Ducru-Beaucaillou, bought in Chicago because I liked the sound of the name though it was more than palatable. My father made godawful rhubarb wine which put me off the beverage for years.
Walgren had tried to help me dig the grave but was arthritic and the temperature had dropped well below freezing. The ground had frozen before the snow came so I had to use a pick-ax for the first foot or two, with Walgren admiring the quality of the topsoil through chattering teeth until I sent him inside. The doctor came for the burial, the four of us standing there in the blustery twilight. They looked to me to say something but I was unable so we merely bowed. Walgren went inside and Margaret stood there singing in her native tongue while the doctor and I filled the grave.
Two nights later after tucking me into bed as if I were still a child she slipped out of the house after I fell asleep. At first light I tracked her the three miles to a spring beside a creek that flows into the Niobrara. She sat upright against a tree in a thicket, thinly dressed and quite dead. There was a bit of humor on her part in this as when I was a boy I bothered her incessantly to go here, our favorite camping spot, and now she was leading me where I wanted to go. We kept a tipi in this place until I was about eighteen and some trespassing hunters desecrated it. My father was quick to forgive everyone except the U.S. Government, but I searched them out in a country tavern and they paid dearly for their crime.
I put the grouse in the oven, now eager for the arrival of my granddaughter. Out the kitchen window, in the cool autumn breeze between where I sat and our family burial ground, I felt for an instant I could see time moving in the air. I knew I was being foolish but it struck me as odd that time never went backward except in the fragile structure of memory. Everyone wanted to “get on with it,” whatever that meant, other than a distaste for what they had already done. At the “time” that I buried my parents I would have given anything, a meaningless gesture as we have nothing to propitiate these gods, to be an artist or even a writer, but I was to be neither, perhaps caught in the netherworld between the two, the space itself creating a hopelessly restive spirit. For a brief period I sought to blame it on the mixed genes of white and Native, but that configuration meant nothing to the living touch, except to fall through the thin ice of its making into a comic bath of self-pity, certainly the most destructive of human emotions.
The doctor helped me begin to dig my mother’s grave, though he was a poor shovel man and couldn’t help but ask questions that were inappropriate to what we were doing. Could he read the journals my father mentioned keeping? Shouldn’t the collection of artifacts be given to a museum? That sort of thing. It has always amazed me how people dither away the most sacred occasions. I sent him home in a huff, and before I tossed out the last shovelful, Walgren stopped by to ask when we might discuss my father’s will and he too was dismissed. Thus it was that I buried my mother alone and far from her own people, though with full knowledge that her spirit would wish to visit them had it not already done so.
I had barely made it back into the house just before dark after kneeling on the fresh earth and once again caught short of anything to say when an illness struck which was later determined to be a form of malaria I had caught well down int
o Mexico. I was half delirious for several days and my mind and dreams took such odd turns that twice I tried to sketch the visions. Smith’s young sister whom I had loved a great deal when we were both fourteen kept visiting me. She was called Willow and her parents were traditional people, our fathers close friends for many years. They discovered our affection and she was sent over to Manderson, some two hundred miles away, to live with an aunt, or so they said. When I went off to look I found no trace. That was in the late spring of 1900 and I didn’t speak to my parents until winter, building my own quarters out beside the barn and taking up horse-trading in earnest for my support. It was the first mortal blow of my life. Her parents did not wish me near her because I was half white, and later on, another set of parents with equal determination would cast me out because I was half “savage,” a word they mouthed with enthusiastic terror.
FEB, 27,1910—Odd sights, quite frightening, as if I could ever paint, or anyone could, the landscape of this fever. Inside the thresher. First the cow guts were pulled at in tug-of-war up on the reservation when I was three or four when they butchered the allotment. Men ate raw slices of heart. The women took the guts away from us after the dogs dragged us, holding onto the intestines. Waking I drink water that seems hot though I know it’s cold because the house is freezing with no fire. I’m too hot for a fire I think, breaking the ice in the pail. Now I am half-way up Harney Peak when I was ten where father hoped to show me a bear which we only saw through his glass far off at the edge of the meadow and forest. Willow wakes me by the spring. We are naked, having swum. The sand is hot at mid-day with ten million cicadas droning in the air. She said I heard them say they are taking me away to Manderson. I fall down the stairs to catch her and wake at the bottom wet and finally cold . . .
Dalva arrives in the yard on her dun gelding, greeted in a uproar by the dogs. I had dozed at the bottom of my ancient stairs and thought for an instant it might be Willow in the same yard fifty years before. At Dalva’s insistence Lundquist had built a tether rail in front of the porch. She bursts in and we embrace and I ask what happened to the school bus which she doesn’t answer, but announces she’s spending the night. What she thinks so becomes so, which stops a bit short of fibbing. She races back out to put her horse away, fetching her satchel on hearing I’m not up for a ride in the cold October wind.