by Jim Harrison
Over dinner I once again wished that my wife and myself had managed at least one daughter. Daughters would have made me more human while my sons had tended to pull me apart in the daily struggle of wills. I suspect I was romanticizing a bit because the girls were a considerable chore for Naomi, with each going in a willfully opposite direction on every matter. Naomi had spent the day outside and there was a fine flush on her skin and for a moment I envied my dead son his wife, so gracefully accepting compared to my departed own who never awoke on a single morning without implicitly questioning her existence on earth.
In the middle of a restless night with a still-warm wind billowing the curtains I awoke thinking I heard the door open, a noise certain to put the dogs in an uproar. I got up and checked to find Dalva sitting on the porch steps with the dogs around her, and this at three a.m. Rather than being upset I sat down beside her and we stared wordlessly at a big yellow harvest moon, the breeze rattling the last of the yard’s maple leaves. There were even more geese than at dinner time, and we were lucky enough to see a skein of them fly across the moon, at which point Dalva gripped my hand tightly and we went inside.
I have no idea why I was so upset the next morning, or I didn’t understand when I first thought about it standing there in the yard with a knot in my stomach as they drove off to church. Even the dogs lay in a depressed clump near the edge of the bare lilacs, but then they were always sullen when Dalva went home. It was a selfish thought but it occurred to me that the two daughters and the mother in the car were my only anchors to earth, and I wandered the yard all hollow and trembling, averting my eyes from the graves in the lilacs where I would one day join my parents, my wife and my son. I certainly hoped to beat the rest of the family there, even my other son, Paul, whom I hadn’t seen since John Wesley’s funeral three years ago last spring. Then I was quite suddenly disturbed by the word “my,” as if I had somehow owned these beloved kin, when each in their own universe were joined in fragile contiguity without owning the others, much less their own fate.
It is at such rare and somewhat unpleasant times that we visit the part of ourselves that is incomprehensible. My incomprehension, in fact, was palpable to my skin, and I looked around at the forested shelterbelts that surrounded me, perhaps further then I could walk at my age, and felt a flash of anger that I had been so immovably stuck to the location, bound and tied here by not totally familiar parts of soul and mind. And this is improperly rational for the surge of pleasure and dread I felt for this place at that moment. It was a maddening struggle with ghosts, the ghosts of others, and the ghosts of my former selves that could not leave for more than a few months, excepting for the First World War, this trap my father had built, and I continued building, for body and spirit. I tried to breathe deeply and couldn’t. I looked at my hands and didn’t quite recognize them.
I turned to the house, at last recognizing the seizure that had begun to take place. I went from room to room, avoiding the mirrors. I put on my boots and emptied a bottle of Canadian whiskey into my canteen. I sliced a large raw steak in pieces for the dogs and drank nearly a quart of cold water. My temples were drumming and I still couldn’t quite catch my breath. I felt cold from the water and shuddered, then strode into the den, threw some books aside and opened the safe. I uncovered the folder that contained a single photo of her, also a thickish group of drawings I had made when she was riding, of her sitting on the leather couch I knelt by to spread the drawings out, nude except for the towel around her waist, another with only a scarf around her neck, another sitting in the spring up to her waist, another leaning against a tree. There’s nothing so nude as a girl eating an apple in an orchard. I gathered them together because I couldn’t properly see, and stumbled against the desks when I put them away. There was still part of me that was ashamed that I hadn’t killed her father. I passed the stairs I had fallen down when I’d dreamt of Willow in my delirium after my parents died. How strange it seemed to me now not to have known then that there would be another Willow, implacably more damaging, so that one went through life carrying an invisible gravestone that would disappear, then return with leaden fury, which, when dissipated, would arrange itself in the lucid and melancholy paintings the mind constructs of love.
I went out the door thinking that I hadn’t made this walk since John Wesley died but this time I headed north to cover the path counterclockwise, doubting as I crossed the barnyard with the jubilant dogs that I could make the whole walk but caring less. If I failed I could always stumble, crawl, even sleep like those tired cowdogs after roundup who make their way back on sore and bloody pads. If that threatened northern front arrived I could happily freeze to death in a thicket like my mother.
When I had sufficiently recovered from my illness in 19101 rode out of the yard one early April morning past the raw earth graves of my parents, pausing down the road at Walgren’s drive where he joined me on his fat sorrel. We made town in a short three hours, left our horses and mud dusters at the livery, and boarded the east-bound train for Omaha, arriving in the early evening and checking into, as per the instructions Walgren held dearly, the Paxton Hotel. We were shy at the place’s extravagance, but arrangements had been made for us by a law firm in Omaha that was an extension of one in Chicago which managed my father’s affairs, saving those of a local nature that Walgren dealt with. Elegantly dressed ladies and gents passed by in the lobby and I peeked into the dining room with chagrin at its opulence, figuring despite our fatigue that we might have to head down the street for supper. We were shown to two bedrooms joined in the middle by a living room in which there were vases of fresh flowers, and a small bar containing wine and whiskey. An assistant manager and bellhop stood there looking at us, then the former showed us a menu in case we wished supper in our rooms. Walgren grumbled at the prices and the man said the law firm was being billed for our stay. When the meal arrived Walgren scraped off the strange sauce that covered the meat, and further complained that there was no way to save the excess food. He then determined the dollar amount that it would take to bribe him into eating the plate of oysters that had been set before me.
After an unsettled night we were taken to the law offices a few blocks away by an officious young man in a well-cut suit who whined relentlessly that the sidewalk hadn’t been salted against a thin coat of ice. I was delighted when he fell down and amazed when he pretended he hadn’t. I had spent enough time at the Art Institute in Chicago to recognize a fop when I saw one, including in Mexico where some young cowboys are foppish. Besides I was an artist, somewhat a bohemian, and I had no intention of being swept away by a pack of bourgeois lawyers. I meant to get business over with quickly and head up to Duluth in Minnesota and paint the break-up of the ice on Lake Superior with a friend, an artist from Sweden who lived there because it reminded him of home.
We were led into a corner office that resembled a rich man’s den, and were greeted by the chief partner, Frederick Morgan, a stern and hard-edged man, but with a specific twinkle in his eye, who read the will. My father had told me most of the information the summer before, but I was quite surprised at the amounts involved in the sale of a half dozen tree nurseries in the northern Midwest. A goodly piece of property immediately north of Chicago would be held onto as it seemed to be in the path of “progress,” a word I already loathed at twenty-four. I was not to have full control of my holdings for another eleven years, until I reached thirty-five, but could draw on a yearly amount that was about ten times what I was used to spending in the pursuit of my art. Walgren was to look after the farm for the time being, including the hiring of his cousin as a farm manager as I was frequently elsewhere and otherwise occupied. There was also a provision for several thousand dollars each for Willow and Smith, and it was Walgren’s duty to track them down. Everything was to be administered by the law firm in conjunction with a bank in Chicago.
It was so hot in the room that my eyes became rheumy and I yawned. There was a very high quality portrait of two young ladies behind
Morgan and I wanted to study the painting more closely. He then dismissed Walgren and I also got up to leave but learned that I had to stay for the day to go over investment procedures. I felt trapped in a hothouse and when he showed Walgren to the door I studied the painting at close range. By the time I turned he had a large folder spread upon his desk. “My daughters,” he said. “We’ll have dinner with them tonight.” He then said I was very fortunate indeed to have such a grand start in life. I couldn’t think of a proper reply but suggested we take a walk while we discussed finances as I was far too warm to think. He opened the office windows wide and put on his overcoat, then sat back down at the desk. Everything with this man was a battle of wills. He thought of himself as a benign autocrat but could imagine no reality fully except his own.
Later, at dinner at his home which I viewed as a huge Victorian monstrosity, I studied the deference offered to him by his wife and two daughters that he readily mistook as sincerity.
But then let me stop and take a gun and knife to this nonsense, this garden toad hopping in short hops, and he will never get out of the well pit he’s fallen into by dint of will, and that he has begun to think of as his universe. I am both walking to the west along the Niobrara and remembering that dinner in terms of a reality I no longer believe in. It was a series of jolts only a little muted by wine. I was not so much confused but that I had lost my “self” soon after sitting down. Frederick Morgan’s wife was named Martha and hailed from Rhode Island, bright and more genteel than any woman I had ever met. First Neena entered, rather sweet and grave but one could never quite know what she was thinking right up to the day she died. She was the younger, sixteen years of age, deeply handsome like her mother rather than pretty, and one sensed iron in the spine of that girl. Then came Adelle and my stomach hollowed, both handsome and pretty, a year older than Neena, but captious, late for dinner, a falsely felt curtsy and a peck for her father’s face, but also a slight tweak to an ear at which he reddened a trace. She was the dancer, a lover of music while Neena read, and in reverse of the normal order Adelle, the older, was youngest in behavior. She stared at me critically too long for comfort as if I were an absolutely new creature brought to market. Her mother had been forewarned and she asked me if my art was thriving and I said I thought so. I was going to travel to Duluth in the morning and when I returned home in a week I hope to begin a series of paintings based on my last Mexican trip before my parents had died.
We all seemed to like each other, at least for the time being. The family had made three summer trips to Europe and I hadn’t been at all which amazed them. How could a burgeoning artist not travel to Europe, the living source of art? There was an odd urge to tell them, as Davis would have, that they were fuller of shit than Christmas geese, but I held my tongue. Adelle then asked teasingly how I knew if I was any good, which angered her father at the impertinence of the question. I said that I didn’t, of course, know at this point, and quoted the Bible, “Many are called, but few are chosen,” and said it would likely come to nothing, but that it was my calling and I had to live out my life within its strictures. “Which are?” she asked. “Hard work and absolute freedom.” Her father then interrupted with the predictable inanity that wealth in itself was a great responsibility in that it required itself to be multiplied. There was a flash of heat under my collar with this notion, so supported by the popular press, that our political notions of Manifest Destiny had to repeat themselves in every individual man.
Grave Neena saved us, but only momentarily, when she asked why I preferred Mexico when she had read recently that Mexican savages had been known to kill American travelers, as our own Indians had many years before. I answered that the wildness of the terrain was a far greater danger than the people, and then told them of my friend Davis’s fatal tumble from the cliff. We were in the middle of dessert and they fell morose at this story, and then Morgan with nervous pomposity said, “Surely, young man, you’ll admit that these brown folks are far less civilized than ourselves and can present the gravest dangers to the unwary. The savages may not boil you in a cauldron for dinner as they do in Africa, but I’ve read they’ll cut out your heart for lunch as did their neighbors, the Apaches.”
At this moment I had become a welter of confusion and there was a peculiar quaking sensation beneath my breastbone as I exchanged the longest look yet with Adelle, and Neena was amused as she watched this, and the mother pretended to overlook it. I found myself replying to Morgan just on the edge of impoliteness, “I’m half savage myself by birth so perhaps I sensed I had nothing to fear among my brethren. My mother was Oglala Sioux—Lakota they call themselves.”
Morgan could not have been more startled had I fired a revolver into the ceiling. The table was aghast, and I cursed myself for admitting this which I normally kept to myself to avoid drawing attention, and being forced to answer so many stupid questions. At art school Davis liked to introduce me to ladies as “John Indian” which oddly enough got my foot in the door with the more adventuresome.
“How wonderful!” Adelle said, breaking the leaden silence. Neena clapped her hands and Martha, the mother, smiled as if a joke had been played on her husband. Morgan pretended to be amused by his gaffe, but I could see I had immediately gone from being a possible suitor to a mere eccentric, albeit a rich one in his terms. Neena then asked me a curious question that had been asked by fellow students in Chicago, to the effect of why my language seemed a little ancient. I answered that I had been brought up rather remotely, quit school in the third grade, lasted but a month at Cornell, and my father always spoke as if he had just emerged from the Civil War, spending most of his ensuing time speaking with the Indians. Adelle piped in saying, “You’re so peculiar,” to which I replied, “I suppose I am.” I bid them good night, and at the door Adelle whispered, “I’ll see you early in the morning,” after which I shuddered my brisk way back to the hotel.
I made my way slowly to the direct rear of the property then cut my way into the spring doubting my ability to do the whole circumference turning from the vivid past to the ordinary present. The sun was still warm enough at midday but it began to look a little ominous far to the northwest, the horizon glowering there with the energy of the front in a grayish smear. My legs were trembling, and my clothes damp with sweat as I lay on the sandbank of the creek, swigging rather too deeply from my canteen of whiskey. Seeing Adelle that clearly again in my mind made me wish to get drunk and die, which was merely repeating the pattern set after meeting her.
Adelle preferred the moon to the sun, and in the short time we were together, no more than a month of days in total, she seemed to come only totally alive after the late afternoon. The twilight and the night were her times, from which she drew a curious and manic strength. When she arrived at my hotel rooms soon after daylight she was melancholy and without energy compared to the way she fairly glowed the evening before. At the time the hotel visit was considered daring and inappropriate for a young lady, but she carried a bag of books and said at the desk that I was her cousin and tutor. I was having coffee and still intent on making my Duluth train, and not at all of the mind that she would actually appear as her whisper had stated. She slumped in a chair and said nothing as I stood there in my robe looking out the window but not actually seeing anything. I finally sat down in an easy chair across from her, still unable to speak a single thought. Then she abruptly got up and took a pull from a whiskey bottle on the chest, coughed wildly and said in a broken voice that she wished to become an “emancipated woman.” Now it was my turn to get up and take a deep drink. I managed to look at her fully and at the moment thought that everything in my life was at stake. There was still plenty of time to catch the train, an idea so idiotic that I smiled. Why are you smiling, she asked? I was thinking of rushing off to take the train, I said. She dropped her arms and made the few steps toward me as if sleepwalking, but her eyes showing the life of the night before.
She did not leave until Neena sent a bellhop up late in the a
fternoon to fetch her. I went down to the lobby with Adelle and there was Neena with her school books thinking that Adelle should come along home to avoid discovery. Neena had covered for her at school and thought the whole thing “utterly thrilling,” staring at me in particular with the awe thought to be deserved by kings. Then the two sisters curtsied good-bye and off they went.
I took an evening train to Minneapolis, unable to reach Duluth until the next morning, exhausted and puzzled by my day and more than a bit embarrassed by my lips and neck covered by puffy love bites. Adelle was born for the bed and in my young but not inconsiderable experience I had never seen her like, or even close. I supposed it might be the energy and grace of her dancer’s body, and certainly her antic brain, not to speak of what she had read that prepared her for the day. I thought as I dozed on the train that if I were never to make love again I had reached the pinnacle. In the dining car I ate two fair beefsteaks to restore myself, and then was struck daft by the thought “What next?” for I already missed her. The answer came after my first full day in Duluth with my friend from the Art Institute, the Swedish painter. It was Saturday morning and we were packing up for a trip up the north shore to Grand Marais to paint the drift ice when Adelle appeared at the door with a valise. My painter friend was well known and she had no problem finding the house. She had told her parents she was visiting a friend outside of Omaha but could only stay with me until Sunday afternoon, unless, of course, I wished her to go away, the last possible thought in my mind.