by Jim Harrison
Last evening I got my comeuppance halfway through dinner where she ate far more than I did. She asked, “When you tell me stories about your life why do you always pretend you were such a nice person? Naomi says you weren’t. Everyone in town says you were the scariest man in the county. Old people at church say you were even worse than your father. They say you’re not even a Christian person. So I wish you wouldn’t just tell the good parts about yourself. I’m not some little kid, I’m eleven.”
This struck me as more interesting than upsetting. Have I ever met a man who didn’t wish his daughter or granddaughter would stay unspoiled by the likes of us and a substantially evil world? But what is behind this wish aside from hoping that a living being will stay a porcelain figurine of our mind which she bears no resemblance to except in our minds, and in societal deceit in the first place? I’ve yet to know a woman who carries any true resemblance to what society seems to wish her to be. They are not constructed thusly, any more than we are.
Instead of telling her of the deaths of my parents, her original question, I painted a tale of the aftermath of Willow being taken from me. I shot my father’s best bull as it drank from the Niobrara. It trusted me and let me come close and I put my Iver Johnson revolver to its ear, shooting three times before the bull dropped to its knees in the water, then floundered further into the river, roaring and bawling, shooting gouts of blood from its nose and mouth before it tipped sideways and floated off.
I plotted the deaths of Willow’s father and my own but what stopped me, sensibly enough, is that I’d never find her if I was in prison. It took me but five days to ride to Manderson and when her relatives would tell me nothing I again drew my revolver but was subdued by an old man and he and several other ancient Lakota warriors bound me hand and foot and took me home. Among them was He Dog, a friend of both Crazy Horse and my father. These were not tame souls but bore the full weight of battles from Little Bighorn to Twin Buttes. To say that they frightened me was the mildest of euphemisms. One of them who was Willow’s uncle said that if he saw me again in Manderson he’d feed my balls to the crows. He waved a knife the others said had taken a hundred cavalry scalps. He became so overwrought in his threats that he leapt from his horse, though I judged him to be seventy, and danced madly around my own, howling and yelping so I nearly peed my trousers. These were not Methodist Indians but warriors with a lineage that owed nothing to the white man. We did not live upon the same earth that they did and we flatter ourselves when we think we understand them. To pity these men is to pity the gods.
The group of old warriors, I seemed to remember there were five, stayed three days. Like others before them they gave my father parcels wrapped in deer hide for safekeeping. They camped out in the barnyard, doubtless giving my father counsel on my behavior, also discussing the old days after Wounded Knee when my father had suffered a nervous disorder and was encamped with these friends up in the Badlands. To my later regret I stayed well clear of the others, sulking out at the spring but reappearing at dinner for fear they would track me down which was their sure intention. To my further regret my father had been out on a ride that day and had heard the shots and had seen the floating bull, dragging it out of the river with our Belgian draft horse Tom. He never pointed the finger at me but the last evening when we feasted on the meat Willow’s uncle thanked me for being a good shot, following the comment with wild laughter.
After they left I set about building my shack, part of which is now one end of the bunkhouse. Smith tried to help but had even less talent for carpentry than myself. He wisely suggested bringing up my parents’ tipi from the spring but I wanted nothing from them. I’d have to filch some of last year’s potatoes, cabbage, and rutabagas from the root cellar but other than that I’d live on game that I shot. Smith brought up the question of heat but since it was late spring I said I’d worry about it when the first snowflakes fell. It rained hard for a week and we struggled in the mud with our inept carpentry, studying from the pages of a shed booklet I’d ordered from Nebraska Farmer, a magazine guaranteed to fill an adventuresome lad with the direst boredom possible. I horribly missed the pies my mother made from dried fruit and when the wind was right from the east I could smell their odor wafting across from the farmhouse a hundred yards in the distance. Smith missed the pies, too, and suggested with Native wisdom that my mother had probably had nothing to do with the decision over Willow and I could forgive her by asking for pie. Smith soon abandoned our mutual tipi camp in favor of his parents’ shack on a far corner of our land on the banks of the Niobrara. There was a grace note in a good dinner every evening, though he’d arrive at dawn punctually with a wedge of cornbread for me.
One June morning when my miserable shack was nearly erect Smith had arrived with what he thought was a solid clue to Willow’s location. He had left his place at dawn then returned having forgotten my cornbread and had overheard his parents talking about a mixed-breed cousin who worked far to the east in an iron mine in Ishpeming, Michigan. This was Chippewa country (anishinabe, they called themselves) so the cousin could scarcely admit that he was part Lakota because of ancient enmity. He was a daring fellow, Smith said, and had once bought them a milk cow on a visit, and had married a white woman from Finland.
I straightaway rode to town to get some tar paper for my roof, but also to check out the location of Ishpeming. It was certainly too far for horseback and anyway my prolonged disappearance might alert Smith’s parents and my own that I was again on the track of Willow. I must strike quick, I thought, while checking the atlas and train schedule at the county library. I judged that I’d have to sell three of the eleven horses I’d accumulated to afford the journey, a trifling price for a young Romeo hell-bent for his lost love.
At this point it was Dalva’s bedtime and I stopped my woeful tale. She was teary and dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief I gave her. Her first comment was, “It all makes you want to be a dog.” She knelt on the rug and kissed the Airedales good night, then was startled by her own thoughts. “If you had married Willow when you were fourteen then I wouldn’t exist,” she said. I had noted before that young people were struck by the fragility of their existence but this seemed premature for a little girl. “It is always good to know how the story ends,” I teased her, but she was already off on another tangent. “Why wouldn’t your father let you love an Indian girl? He was married to one.” I told her I’d think that one over, although all my thinking on the matter had long since finished itself by exhaustion. I sent her upstairs to her grandmother’s bedroom which she adored for its ornate dollhouse qualities, so unlike the rest of the house. My long since departed wife hadn’t slept there the last ten years of her life, having left me for Omaha and Chicago in 1930. “You’ll be much happier,” she had said. “You’ve been a bachelor since you were a child.”
I had a Hine cognac and listened to the scratchy and plaintive strains of “You Can’t Be True, Dear” (“There’s nothing more to say”), through the den’s ceiling, picking up a phrase now and then that I already knew. Dalva always played the song on an old crank-up Victrola before going to bed because it was “romantic,” unlike her mother’s steady diet of Brahms and Dvorak since losing her husband, my beloved son John Wesley. How irreparably changed the world becomes when the loves of one’s life are dead. It is always the last day of Indian summer. We are caught out in the cold and there’s no door to get back in.
I chided myself for my sentiment, remembering the great ladles of Dickens my father would pass my way to ensure that I developed a proper compassion. My captious nostrum for Copperfield and Cratchit was to shoot their tormentors or beat them into the ground, an idea that made no headway with my father. The last draught of cognac sent me coughing and I considered something so adventuresome as a visit to the doctor, feeling my heart wobbling, but then I remembered Maynard Dixon and his courageous wheezing. I had also noted in others that life largely passes while they are still making grand plans for it. I had certainly committed no sins
of omission but this was less virtue than obsession. I could not help myself. My mother liked to stare at the map while I described the specifics of places I’d been on my early sketching trips, and then I’d wait for her soft questions. What did they eat? What kind of horse did they ride? Were there Indians and were they treated well? With the latter I didn’t want to be honest, but was so out of obligation to her own lucid, albeit limited, sense of history of other people: Seri, Tarahumara, the Yaqui sold into slavery from their native southern Sonora down into the Yucatán where they died of the weather; the greatest proportion of the Seri (thousands) butchered by vaqueros and the Mexican army over a cattlestealing incident. The Tarahumara seemed safe in their mountain fastness but one doubted this to be a permanent arrangement. I remember the three of us sitting at the kitchen table before the atlas and her wondering why the invaders of our own country had bothered crossing a dangerous ocean, when we could have traveled east to the vast bare stretches her brown finger pointed out in Russian Siberia. I was perhaps ten at the time and my father looked to me for help, a unique gesture on his part. I piped in that people liked to ride on boats to which she disagreed. At the grand Trans-Mississippi Exposition in 1897 in Omaha we had gone to as a family she had felt unpleasant on a Missouri steamer, and crossing the bridge into Iowa for my boyish sake had been nightmarish for her. She wouldn’t get in the small johnboat we used when we wanted to float or cross the Niobrara, but she did take pleasure in swimming across in late summer, whereupon she’d call out childishly, “I’m on the other side.”
The most poignant moment for her at the grandiose Exposition had been a meal at a Chinese restaurant where she didn’t eat the food but thought the Chinese resembled the Cheyenne. My father kept her clear of the mock battles being performed by the gathering of tribes for fear of further strengthening the melancholy of her nature. The trip had been for my own benefit so I could see what was to become of the modern world in order that I might adjust to the change, but what had impressed me most as a bumpkin was not the immense absurdity of the filigreed architecture, but the sight at the French exhibition of a lovely Frenchwoman speaking French. She looked exactly like a woman in a Courbet reproduction some thirty feet from where she was speaking. I drew close enough to the platform from which she spoke to scent her lilac odor and admire her skin and trim figure, which even a ten-year-old notices. For less than a second she glanced down at me and smiled, and thus by happenstance began my obsession with art.
I was awakened early by the sound of Dalva in the kitchen, thankful again that Frieda was still in Lincoln on her religious binge. Dalva had a single breakfast recipe wherein she’d cut a round hole in a piece of toast, then fry the bread in butter with an egg in the hole. She was pleased to make this for me before our Saturday morning rides, though she didn’t eat it herself, preferring cereal. I had heard Lundquist’s pickup arrive before daylight for chores, then turned on the radio out of habit for the livestock report, shutting it off quickly before the political inanities could begin. I was thankful that the air out the window was still and that there was the sun. An old rider is far less resilient on a shying horse, and a strong wind makes all creatures nervous. That thought turned me again to Willow who sat a horse better than anyone I’ve ever known, including jockeys. It was a mixture of temperament and athleticism, a removal of any distance between her and the animal. And she left Smith and myself far behind in the breaking of young horses. Far later it occurred to me this was because she had no “will to power,” but rather a marriage of her intentions and the horse’s. Her loudest voice with an animal was a crisp whisper, and dogs were also quick to co-operate, while they would shun the manly shouting of Smith and me, doubtless thinking it resembled the angry bark of one of their compatriots.
Willow’s mother must have given her some herbal concoction against pregnancy because we made love whenever the impulse seized us, which was often, beginning with the aftermath of a Fourth of July celebration, through the rest of the summer and winter, whenever possible, on into spring when we were parted by force. On the Fourth we had ridden toward town in the evening of a big moon, stopping at the outskirts near the park. Both Willow and Smith were forbidden by their parents to go to town so we sat there well out in a dark field listening to the distant band music and watching the fireworks, the music broken intermittently by the explosions. Willow snuggled close to me, finding the music rather than the explosions frightening. Smith was of an irritable bent that evening and snuck off with his coup stick, feather attached, to mockdestroy some wasichu on the edge of the gathering. With her brother gone Willow kissed me one long kiss until I noted the moon had moved a foot or two across the sky in our mating, and we had to light matches to find our clothing. We didn’t know any better, because there wasn’t any. And when it was truncated my youthful emotions aimed themselves for bear.
When we reached the barn Lundquist had us all saddled up, a relief as I was still feeling a tad quaky. I called my “thank you” up into the mow door but he was over in the shop at the far end of the stanchions from when we kept a few milk cows. I had been irritated that I couldn’t get good cheddar like they made in England so we set off on our cheese project which turned out to be far too labor intensive. Lundquist’s diminutive mutt, Shirley, barked from the work bench at the Airedales thinking herself at that height to be their equal. Lundquist was busy saddle-soaping a set of show harnesses we hadn’t used since before World War II. He was a bit worried about Frieda’s stay in sinful Lincoln and I again reassured him that it was unlikely she’d be molested.
We made our habitual two-hour ride upstream on a ridge along the Niobrara, cutting well inland after three miles along the property border, bearing left along our favorite shelterbelt to the fortyacre thicket with its spring and creek, the home of the tipi so many years before. My sons, Paul and John Wesley, began to excavate a mound here when they were young, possibly a Pawnee or Ponca gravesite, but ceased when I told them they were bound to release a few ghosts. This digging of the graves of others for sport or science has always struck me as wretched, another more peculiar form of greed than the usual.
We rested here and Dalva brought out two blueberry muffins and lemonade while we watched the Airedales thrash around in a cold pond trying to catch any of a family of muskrats that lived there. Well out of their element in the water the dogs swam until mournfully exhausted, then flopped near us on the bank for a snooze, except for their ringleader Sonia who sat ever watchful at the water’s edge, continuing her alertness even as she ate the half muffin that Dalva gave her.
In summer we’d unsaddle the horses and let them have a swim but now they too seemed autumnal, stirring the lid of yellow cottonwood leaves on the pond for a drink. I glanced at my granddaughter wondering for the thousandth time how poor a substitute I made as a father. Naomi disagreed with this, insisting I was doubtless better with Dalva than I had been with my sons. She could be sharp-tongued indeed and offered little comfort when honesty was at stake. She was a handsome woman and I had imagined that over the years hundreds of farm boys she had taught at country school had become infatuated with her.
At odd moments life will take an abrupt bite out of the heart. Dalva sitting there in the clear October sun on the sand bank had a look on her face similar to Willow’s when she was in a state of contemplation. She wasn’t trying to overcome life, only to get along with it, to blend with processes she could scarcely understand in a world that had permitted her no solid ground. After profound and nearly universal violence we settle back into business, Willow without a homeland, and Dalva without a father.
She asked then when it was that I found Willow, and said it seemed a shame that she had been sent to Michigan, so far from home. Well, she wasn’t sent there after all, I said, that was Smith trying to be helpful, and only a fourteen-year-old boy would tear off on a journey on so little evidence. I did sneak into the house and leave a note for my mother, perceiving that Smith was being sensible when he said she had no part in th
e decision. My father slept soundly but I was sure my mother heard me pack a satchel with clean clothes, a skinning knife and a revolver. I left the note under a pie tin, having cut a large wedge of blackberry pie for my breakfast.
The train ride as far as Minneapolis was uneventful though I saw altogether too many cornfields, and was confident that some of the shifty-eyed fellow passengers might be intent on stealing my satchel. My money was dispersed in my pockets and left boot, the latter giving me a limp so I wouldn’t wear the money out. I was somewhat ashamed when a saucy young married woman with an urchin in tow caught my eye. Here I was bent on finding Willow but having unhallowed thoughts about a married woman who rubbed my neck as her child slept. That was as far as it went, though she gave me a peck on the cheek after I helped her with her trunk in Minneapolis. I quickly caught the wrong train northeast out of Minneapolis on purpose—one traveling across northern Wisconsin was a shorter route—because I had noted on the library map that Duluth was on Lake Superior and I had not yet seen a large body of water. Right away the train was coursing along amid trees so densely situated that a few square miles of them could have replaced all of the trees in western Nebraska. The sight was wondrous to me, even in the large areas where all the trees had been cut for lumber, which gave some relief to the landscape. I questioned my seat mate, a somewhat prissy middle-aged man who had earlier announced himself to a be a “Duluth businessman,” as if this in itself carried a special virtue, on how one would learn to find one’s way amid such a forest. He said it was death without a compass unless one were a “redskin.” I doubted to myself that my half-breed nature would keep me from getting lost in such a forest. It was easy, though, to understand that the locals could survive the bitter climate with this endless supply of firewood.