by Jim Harrison
After another set of sketches had been sent off and a reply had been sent back that my efforts were becoming too pinched, I became quite depressed only to be saved by an experience that some might think of as transcendental. I had taken a long ride on a horse not fully broke, too sodden in spirit to pack along my sketch book. The night before there had been an ice storm that covered the snow of which there was still a fair amount in some places, and the horse hated the deeper drifts, finding the footing unsure as it broke through the crust. The sun had come out, and the temperature that I judged to be high in the thirties would, I hoped, melt the ice enough to pacify the horse who normally had no problem with simple snow.
There was a two-hour struggle with hard reining and an ample use of the crop before I finally reached my destination, a smallish canyon containing a spring that led down and emptied out into the Niobrara. I had intended to watch the chunks of ice float by on the river until my mind cooled off enough to function as an artist again. Making our way up the sun-dazzled, icy canyon a forehoof broke through the spring’s ice into soft muck and the horse became a bucking bronc. After a few radical leaps and twirls I was thrown clear, cracking my head against a rock and twisting my left arm. As I lost consciousness I remember thinking that at least it wasn’t my sketching arm.
I must have been passed out for at least an hour, I was a pretty good judge of the sun’s movement, when I rolled against the injured arm and the pain brought me awake. I sat up slowly and noted that a group of crows were watching me from up on the canyon’s edge. I squawked at them and they squawked back which lifted my spirits. The horse had long since headed for home and I had a good five-mile hike ahead of me. I checked my arm and judged it to be sprained rather than broken, then ate my fried venison sandwich that contained mustard and a particularly strong onion. When not chewing I whistled, quite happy for the time being to be alive. The canyon mouth narrowed the view, and a grand piece of ice floated by with a crow standing upon it. We exchanged glances for a moment and then I wished I had brought along my sketch book. When Davis had said my drawings were too pinched he had added that I had to do it all at once rather than starting off in the lower left-hand corner trying to make it perfect.
I sat there so long my ass fairly froze to the ground. I noted that my right hand was cold in the shadow of the canyon wall, but just above my wrist the sun was warmish on my arm. I watched the shadow moving up my arm as the sun descended, as if I were seeing time herself. I did not move except for my eyes which looked up and found the earth quite eerily unrecognizable, both outside and inside my brain. Everything seemed held together by the fragilest connections—rocks, trees, birds, deer, horses and most of all people. Blue sky. Brown mother. Black crow. White father. And the language my brain kept muttering to itself was supposedly the glue that bound it all together. Only it didn’t, at least during that hour or so it failed, and I was struck by the immutable presence of the nameless.
I was not far into my long walk home when my father appeared with a spare horse, my favorite buckskin. He had naturally guessed what happened when the other came vaulting into the barnyard, lathered and still mad as a hatter. When spring came I sold this horse to a pious and unsuspecting farmer who would be surprised indeed when snow fell and the first ice storm came along.
By the stupidity of coincidence I slipped while going downstairs to fetch some wine. I was inattentive, thinking of the treasures of Native artifacts my father had hidden away and I had not examined for many years because one corner of the hidden room contained some unpleasant skeletons with their clothes still on. A fully dressed skeleton is a poignant reminder of mortality and I had enough of that in my living body. I gave myself quite a thumping in the fall down the steps, but there was no consequent numinous experience, or at least it didn’t glow like my other one in the canyon. My agreement with my own peculiar world of spirits was to try to stay alive until my granddaughters, Dalva and Ruth, graduated from high school, and my fall struck me as a prelude to failure.
I stretched out against the bottom step feeling pained and lumpish. I then remembered reading a speculation in Scientific American on how rarely mammals, except for man, simply stumble and fall down, barring very youthful incidents. The notion was that other mammals are less double-minded and perhaps incapable of thinking of the specifics of one thing while doing another. My neck was sore enough from striking the ridge of stairs that I suddenly wasn’t sure whether I had actually read this article or my mind was making it up and putting it beneath a cover story of a galaxy that had been recently discovered at the nether edge of the cosmos. I had never had a peek through a powerful telescope and was unsettled by the idea that there are stars beyond those which we see in a dense floss on a cold, clear winter night.
A throbbing in my left arm returned me quickly from sidereal reality to that of the coolish basement floor. This was the body that once jumped a horse off a thirty-foot cliff into a deep pool of the Niobrara on a fifty-cent bet with Smith. We had to do it on a dead run and the horse never trusted me again. There was an urge to try to get up but my ass felt numb from its skid down the last few steps. I could hear Frieda far above me vacuuming rooms that no one had slept in for over a decade, save Dalva in my wife’s room. Frieda had returned from Lincoln, a triumphant Amazon with what she supposed an aura of the Holy Ghost round about her, but her eyes were a shallow pool of insensitivity to all but her own immediate concerns. In short, I did not want to elicit her help, doubting anyway that my voice at full yell could transcend that of the vacuum cleaner.
For irrational reasons I began to think of the women in my life, and the women in their own lives when I hadn’t been around. There had been no great number compared to the scorecards of Lotharios I had known for the simple fact I had difficulty liking people no matter how attractive. A Mexican woman with two children near Los Mochis comes to mind. I had sketched her for three full days to the disgust of Smith who stayed in a hotel downtown with a fair Conchita. My own was rather homely and “Indio” but she had a bowl full of wildflowers on her wood table in the small adobe with a dirt floor. Her son, about five years, carried around an old brindle cat missing one paw. I bought her a dozen laying hens and a fine nanny goat from her neighbor. I took her seven-year-old daughter for a ride on my horse and wanted to buy her a pony but the mother said it would be a burden to feed. I was in my earliest twenties, still full of obtuse piss and vinegar, and asked her how she supported herself when I shouldn’t have pried. Her husband was in prison for reasons she wouldn’t say, and a shopkeeper gave her a little money in exchange for her affections. He had kindly stepped aside, perhaps to save his pesos, when she had caught my eye. This upset and embarrassed me because I was quite stupid, and I left, throwing her some money which she threw back. After I saddled up I tucked the money in the little boy’s pocket and his cat gave me an ugly scratch on the hand which became moderately infected. I had a lump in my throat as I waved toward the door but she wasn’t standing there.
A Spanish poet, whose name I don’t recall, wrote that we leave small pieces of our hearts here and there until there is not enough left to give away and stay alive. Sitting there at the bottom of the steps with the sense that a nail had been driven into my elbow I doubted this was true. When I was in love it filled me up, and when I recovered, there was more to give away. Assuming that our energies are sufficient, love is interminable. Here I sprawled, a lonely geezer with memories that now caused an erection in my trousers. When the woman from Los Mochis had sponged off her strong brown body in the candlelight I’d felt my ears would pop off.
I moved around and drew myself to my knees, cursing the inattentiveness that had caused this pratfall. On my knees I was a child’s height, and looking up the stairs, I was a child again smelling the wood when it was newly sawn pine. Once again, as when I had been pitched from the horse in the canyon so long ago, the world lost its normal and inferior coherence. I was in an attitude of prayer to the incomprehensible—the abyss between the woman
from Los Mochis and the present which is time, the face of my first horse which I owned from age seven to age thirty-one when I went off to World War I, Willow naked by the creek singing a song she’d heard hiding in a lilac thicket outside the Methodist Church, a song about Jerusalem. How far is it from Standing Rock to Jerusalem? Three clouds I had drawn down in the Pinacates floated through my mind, and I heard the plaintive, insane voice of a Norwegian girl who hid in her room during the largest phase of the moon, and whenever some distant dust storm turned the rising or setting sun red. Now Sonia appeared in the square of light at the top of the stairs, and scenting trouble, began to bay and bark which brought Frieda to my temporary rescue.
Lundquist drove me to town where the doctor diagnosed a simple fracture of the radial bone in my left arm, and a mass of decidedly nonfatal bruises on my back and bottom. The arm could not be put in a cast or I would lose its mobility, so he gave me a simple elbow pad and told me to treat the limb lightly for a couple of months. He then questioned me and checked my heart at some length, full of false concern. The doctor was nearly my own age and was sure that his wife and I had made love one summer night thirty years before and neither of us had ever bothered disabusing him of his suspicions which were untrue. He also thought me a wicked Democrat when I was simply contrary. His politeness came from the fact that I had given the town its hospital, really only a twelve-bed infirmary, on John Wesley’s safe return from World War II. He announced that I suffered from “tachycardia,” which need not be fatal, charged me for a bottle of pills as the nearest pharmacy is seventy miles distant, and we nodded our good-byes. His wife had left him for a professor down in Lincoln years ago and he struck me as lonely with his big portrait of Eisenhower in the examining room.
We stopped at the butcher’s for a bone for Shirley who sat between us on county roads but had her forepaws on the dashboard to protect us from any oncoming traffic. At the far edge of town we, after some pause, stopped at a country tavern for lunch and a few whiskeys that are the dubious reward for a broken bone and a trip to the doctor. We anyway could not stop at the cafe which is owned and operated by my girlfriend, a woman in her thirties who had fled Chicago with her husband and daughter after World War II, bought the cafe from a cousin only to see the loutish husband return to Chicago. The affair had been going on at a sedate pace of twice a month for several years. Lundquist had been quite embarrassed one morning in the yard when he had pointed out a strange set of tire tracks and I admitted I had a lady friend. We might have gone to the cafe but then no whiskey was served there, the Rotary Club was having its weekly luncheon, and I had always been somewhat estranged, to put it in its mildest form, from the county’s business leaders.
The tavern owner, Byrnes by name, had got hold of a fine side of beef which we inspected in the kitchen. We used to hunt together now and then but he had lost a lower leg to diabetes, and gave away his bird dogs to a son-in-law who mistreated them, a fact which caused him some pain. We had several whiskeys and a T-bone steak which, to my embarrassment, Lundquist had to cut up for me because of my painful arm.
When we got home Frieda had a dishpan full of ice and water for me to soak the elbow. She quickly achieved a state of outrage over us being a tad drunk but did so out of my earshot, or so she thought as she upbraided Lundquist out in the barnyard. I watched out the kitchen window as she tried to make Lundquist pray with her while Shirley barked, which she did when people were upset. This aroused the Airedales, all of which I let out to join the fun. Frieda drove off weeping and yelling and Lundquist fled to his shop in the barn to play the fiddle which he favored when Frieda came down on him hard. He played poorly but “good enough for me,” as he liked to say.
There was a particular song he played, a Swedish barn-dance polka, that reminded me of those played by the norteño musicians of Sonora. Davis could dance like a madman to this music and his easy ways made us liked among the Mexicans. Lacking enough rope I had to tie his broken body over the saddle with barbed wire. When I led the horse into El Salto the locals at first thought I was bringing in a bad hombre I had shot. I telegrammed his parents in Omaha and received word from his father to “bury him there,” which I achieved with some difficulty by bribing a German Protestant missionary. Later, when I visited his parents to deliver his personal items, the mother was bereft to hysteria but the father and the sullen and prosperous brothers had avowed that they knew Davis would come to a “bad end.” When I asked what had become of his work, I was told it was none of my business. His mother showed me to the door, kissed my hand and said she prayed I would continue in my art, then looked furtively over her shoulder toward the bourgeois monsters in the interior of the house. So far as I know the only three Davis paintings extant hang in my bedroom. I doubt if he ever sold a thing aside from the quarter sketches of the girls at the State Fair. He was just getting started when he tumbled from the cliff with his toothache, a flask of tequila in his back pocket. The paintings aren’t all that good, though far superior to my own efforts. I mourned him that year before my parents died, and then was off on my nearly fatal misadventure with the main love of my existence.
I awoke with a strange cluster of sensations, having gone to bed quite drunk and letting cold wind blow through a wide-open window. I must have made odd noises in the night from rolling against my fractured bone because both my setter Tess and Sonia were on the bed with me at first light and they usually stayed clear of each other. My temples seemed to pound in unison with my arm and I reflected that that was quite enough whiskey for this life. I had heard Lundquist rise from the den couch about an hour before, sleeping off our long drunken talk about cattle, horses and, very late, life herself. I wondered if I was happy because Dalva was coming for the weekend, but then it was only Thursday and she wouldn’t arrive until tomorrow. It is in the obvious nature of overdrinking to become quite stupid, and I finally realized that the dawn breeze coming through the window was warming and that we might have a spate of Indian summer. I turned on the radio for the stock report, not Dow Jones but cattle, and caught the end of the weather which guaranteed at least three fine days to end October.
I got up quickly, wanting to have coffee and a bite before Frieda could arrive and cloud the day, wincing as I saw two empty wine bottles, one nearly empty whiskey bottle, a half-full cognac next to the coffee pot I warmed up. I wrapped bread around a piece of venison congealed on the platter, cutting the rest up and tossing it to the eager dogs.
I was out the door with my day pack and halfway to the barn when Frieda swerved into the yard in front of me with tear-red eyes and quaking jowls. “I’m praying for you, sir,” she said, to which I replied, “If you do so in the future, keep it to yourself.” That was a bit nasty but I had to cut it short. Unfortunately, when I was in the barn and reached for my saddle it occurred to me that lifting the saddle and reining a horse were out of the question with my injured arm. I did not pause for a moment but set off north toward the river, breathing in the springish air that owned the toast flavors of its true season, autumn. The dogs were quizzical about my not being on a horse, then slowed their usual pace.
I admit I was not half a mile into the two miles to the river when I damned myself for not bringing my doughboy canteen of water. I couldn’t take a chance on the river but made my way further upstream, gasping with effort, to the small canyon with the spring. I could not see the rock my head had struck because my elder son, Paul, had made it a month’s effort as a boy to dig out this spring to increase the flow after I had warned him and John Wesley about Pawnee graves at the other spring. Typically, Paul found he liked the spring better in its original form and filled in the excavation, though the rock my head struck still lay concealed.
I knelt and drank too deeply from the icy water, bringing on another slight attack of what the doctor had called “tachycardia,” certainly a homely word. I lay there in the thick grass watching the dogs flounder and roll in the mud below the spring where my horse’s hooves had broken through the ice
. The narrowed view of the river beyond the dogs was similar but I did not long for my sketch pad. As my heart stuttered along I reflected that the madness brought on by my art doubtless came from the fact that my ambition far exceeded my limited talent. Perhaps deep within myself I knew that early, and could not bear it, imagining that those truly gifted created their art with the grace and ease of taking an afternoon nap. I don’t mean those unquestionable gods like Caravaggio, Turner or Gauguin, but those of a lesser level, still unreachable to the millions who sensed what it was but failed to reach it: even such ignored Americans as Glackens, Piazzoni, Bellows, Dixon and Sloan were in the ageless guild hall of which the rest of us could only peek in windows.
Against the backdrop of the river in the manner of a slide show I reviewed their paintings but then let them drop away. There was a tinge of the feeling of how utterly enlivened I felt on my trip to New York City museums in 1913, but that also dropped away and I had dried white campion, side oats grama, a little wild rye, dead bloodroot, and a patch of buffaloberry before my eyes. In this part of the West one also had to paint invisible ghosts to inhabit the canvas, to thicken the texture of what could be seen. I forced a smile, remembering Smith’s contention that cows struck him as a poor substitute for buffalo. That was after my father told us the story of being treed by a herd of buffalo so vast he at first thought it the shadow of a storm in which the thunder was emerging from the earth.