by Jim Harrison
But first to Smith. He is the reason I began writing this again last evening. If you suppose you are to die within a year you may think there are a few more things worth mentioning.
Lundquist suggested he come along and that we take one of the shotguns, but I said no, it must be Smith, and Lundquist recalled that Smith was the Lakota I had been speaking with in the potato field in the rain four years ago after Tess had her last hunt. Lundquist then apologized for saying “Injun.” It was the television’s fault, he said, a passion of Frieda’s that had nearly surpassed religion. He preferred going to the movies the once a week that they changed features in town as television made up things smaller than life, or so he said. I keep to the radio myself so that I may continue painting my own pictures of the world though, of course, only in my mind’s eye.
I drove the ’48 Studebaker pick-up down the long driveway reflecting that I had turned it into a junk heap but rather liked it that way. There was Smith inside the gate lecturing the Airedales as if he were a professor. As opposed to my cold reception in the potato field he smiled broadly as I got out of the truck. “That’s a redskin truck. You hiding your money from the government?” he said. “No, I just don’t give a shit. It works as well as I do.” We shook hands and then he embraced me, and I couldn’t but feel overcome. He pointed and said it was over by that dead tree that we pulled Sally and won a dollar. Sally was a huge and ornery Belgian brood mare weighing about twenty-five hundred. We had pulled directly against a neighbor’s mostly Clydesdale gelding on a bet. Sally wouldn’t quit and pulled the struggling gelding halfway across the ditch. The other kid tried to cut the rope to save his horse so Smith had leapt on Sally and pulled back her ears. We got them separated, and then Sally had tried to kick the hell out of the gelding and Smith grabbed her halter and she swung him in a circle shaking her huge neck. Even when we got her under control and were leading her away she kept turning her head and staring back malevolently at the gelding.
There is something weak about the light in November that makes things disappear at their outer edges. Even a footfall or a voice is flimsier in texture. Smith turned to release the dogs and they scurried over to greet me. “We’ll likely be dead by this time next year,” he said, with what must be described as a chuckle. “Suits me fine. I wore out long ago.” I could not politely ask of his intentions so we let our memories unwind as we looked out over the fields. “Willow sends a greeting. She’s up near Lodge Pole at Fort Belknap. You know, way up in Montana.” This news brought an absurd heat to my old scalp. “Does she need some help?” I asked, lame for my own response. “Hell no. She’s got a piece of land and a dozen cows. Bought the land with what your father left her. I spent mine in a week on a party and my head still hurts fifty years later.” He again laughed then suddenly stopped. “I need something you have from the old days.”
We drove up to the house then. I knew what he wanted and had actually gotten it up from the basement the day after I saw him in the potato field. It was an unadorned but very large grizzly claw that had once been owned by Kicking Bear who had been actually sentenced by a judge for various imagined crimes to two years of service in Buffalo Bill’s “Wild West Show.” My father had given it to Smith in the spring of 1906 when he was preparing to join a Wild West show headed for Europe. Smith didn’t want to take it along because he might get drunk and lose or sell it, and plus, as he confided to me, the old-time stuff tended to frighten him. It lay in the safe in a small leather pouch of doe hide next to the photo and my sketches of Adelle.
We sat in the den and looked at the claw on the bare oak desk, then Smith put it back in the pouch, shaking his head. “Saw one in August when I visited some Wind River folks, and then I remembered this one was here. I heard they used to be way out this way years ago.” I told him that the Spanish vaqueros used to fight grizzlies against longhorn bulls out in California way before we reached that state, and when it was still part of Mexico. There was the silent question who had won, and the equally silent answer, neither. My father had run into Custer and Ludlow on their early government expedition into the Black Hills. Ludlow and a group of his men, including One Stab, a Cheyenne guide, had run down a grizzly in a ten-mile chase, lassoed it, then released it after their resident scientist, George Bird Grinnell, had inspected the beast. Those weren’t today’s cowboys who spent all their evenings in town.
Smith went to the window. “I killed too many people back in the Great War. They took our horses away because they were useless against the Boche. I was a butcher, that’s what I was. One of the finest things I saw was the Polish cavalry but they pretty much got wiped out to a man. I kept trying to get in World War II but they wouldn’t let me. I was working horses up at Fort Robinson in the thirties.” He paused until we could hear the last leaves skittering in the yard. “You didn’t do too badly considering how we started out. The way I heard you were behaving you’re lucky you didn’t get shot.”
I had had a number of pretty bad years, six or seven, between Adelle’s death and the day I flippantly signed up for World War I on a bellyful of whiskey. Somewhat evasively I brought up the fact that our old lean-to and the dogs had saved me about a month after I had seen him in the potato field. I gave him the shortened story of my long walk and the memory of Adelle, ending up in the lean-to in the storm with a frantic heart but curled up closely with the four dogs for warmth. For his own peculiar reasons as a wicasan wanka, medicine man, he was animated by the story, saying “There’s worse things than getting yourself killed by a ghost.” He added that the dogs doubtless figured out what was going on so hung in there with me. I was immediately struck by these two different versions of what had happened, my own and Smith’s, and perhaps the truth, however futile, was in between the two. If I consented to Smith’s I might be insane, though that could not be thought of as a pressing problem.
We then, at his insistence, bundled back up and walked the mile or so out to the lean-to. Halfway there we stopped in our largest field and Smith studied the sky which was a dullish and solid gray, but a number of shades brighter than slate. Smith asked if I had noticed that the sky was an immense “pasture of light,” and I said no I hadn’t, but that was certainly a striking way of looking at it. “Well, that’s what it is,” he answered.
At the lean-to he pointed to Sonia and said she was likely the dog that had helped the most and he was right. I had put my coat half around her and she had lain close to my chest. Smith then began poking into the ground with a longish jackknife the French called a mouche for the silver fly on its helve. He paused in thought, then crawled to the back corner and began thrusting the knife as deeply as possible into the ground, smiling as he hit metal. He sliced the earth until it softened, then dug out the small tin box, opening it and revealing the photo of the dancing girl with the bare breasts. I attempted a jest but he shushed me, treating the photo as a holy object. He passed it to me and it seemed to have the same dense but almost plaintive eroticism it possessed for me as a boy. This is one area, I said to Smith, that I have stopped trying to figure out, and he nodded in agreement, then put the photo back in its tin box and reburied it, covering the site with twigs and leaves. I was struck by how light Smith was without making light of anything, or rendering those muffled opinions that are our habit.
On the way back toward the house Smith stopped to look at the sky in the same place he had before, saying that he used to love this spot. I reflected that it would be hard for anyone to detect it as it was a bit off center in the pasture and undifferentiated from its surroundings. He abruptly began to talk in fond terms of my father’s Christianity which did not exclude the world of the Lakota or any other tribe. Part of Smith’s point was that my father had made a beautiful place on the earth by using natural ingredients. Smith said my early aspirations to be an artist were the same thing. He gracefully didn’t ask me why I had stopped after the war, but then I said that the war had evidently brought me too far down to earth. The grief and horror of war coarsens us and
about the time I saw him in the potato field I had begun to understand life again without becoming enraged at least once a day.
Far off and between the trees I could see a man leaning against an old car near the foot of our driveway. “That’s my grandson,” Smith said, “the most pissed-off young man in God’s creation.” That unfortunately made me think of Duane who had disappeared two months before. Smith started to joke about the time we were about ten and decided one day we were tired of playing cowboys and wanted to become Indians. My father helped us out by gathering costumery from the then closed-off den, building us a fire in the barnyard, and dressing us like warriors. My mother painted our faces and we danced around the fire in the evening until we were exhausted with my parents showing us the steps. Quite suddenly my mother wept and ran into the house and that was the end of that game forever.
We were nearly to Smith’s car when Dalva came galloping down the road on her gelding and Sonia broke away to greet her. Dalva was pregnant and certainly wasn’t supposed to be riding but this sort of captiousness had to be dealt with by her mother not myself. Not giving lectures to anyone, including yourself, was quite a relief. Dalva unhorsed herself to greet Smith, saying, “I’ve heard a lot about you” with a smile, then glanced down the road with a start at the young man leaning against the car, thinking it might be Duane. She then got back on her horse, unable to talk, gave us a wave and thin smile, and was off.
“That young lady is having a hard time of it,” Smith said, with a shadow on his face, and turning to me for explanation. I gave him a foreshortened and rather lame version of a young man who left town in September. He brought me up painfully by saying he knew the young man from Parmelee, also his mother, Rachel. He’d heard that the father was one of a group of three hunters she met over near Buffalo Gap just before the war. He peered at me closely then laughed at my stricken appearance, saying that we’re just wonderful animals like the others. People, the earth with her mountains, rivers, prairies, animals weren’t put here for our purposes but their own. I nodded in ready agreement, suddenly wishing for the first time that I hadn’t given up my art. It was only what I did with my hands and heart. Nothing more. Why had I confused the entire heartbreaking issue when everything else in the world was well out of my control?
When I emerged slowly from my thoughts Smith was still looking at me, and then we headed to the car. Smith’s grandson had muscles of stone in his face but was polite. He shivered in his thin denim jacket and I took off my thick sheepskin coat and said, “Let’s trade.” He glanced to his grandfather for approval and we made the swap. We checked pockets for possessions and he gave me back my red kerchief and a bruised Mclntosh apple. I handed him a dollar bill crumpled to softness, a switchblade, and a popular brand of condoms. “I won’t be needing these,” I jested. “Yes you will. I smelled your girlfriend on your collar,” the young man said. Smith sniffed and nodded, and I did too. Lena’s lilac scent was there. “Maybe see you on the other side,” Smith said, and they left. There was a slight odor of kerosene on the denim jacket and I had to let each of the dogs have a whiff.
* * *
In reverse of what might be expected I found it utterly liberating to think that I had but a year left in my life. I immediately drew a sparrow in the crabapple tree outside the window, then celebrated the clumsy attempt by making a piece of toast and putting on it the excellent crabapple jelly Frieda made every August. I drew eleven versions of the sparrow, the best with a smear of jelly near the branch. I felt less alone than in years. I began to tentatively forgive myself for being an angry and wild asshole much of my life, partly because forgiveness seemed to exhaust the alternatives. I put away the drawings with an abiding satisfaction and I didn’t care whether it was temporary or not. The sparrow flew past the window and the length of that flying moment seemed to represent the length of my life, in addition to being a sparrow simply flying past the window. I took the photo of Adelle out of the safe and gazed at it on the desk, tilting it this way and that. I fell asleep with my cheek, I should say my wattles, pressed against it.
I was in the middle of a dream about a lost dog when Dalva set a cup of tea down on the desk. This cowdog with the unlikely name of Ed (Lundquist’s idea) had been stuck in the well pit of an abandoned farmstead well to the rear of our property for at least a week when we found him. He was very pleased in his weakened condition to ride home draped over the swells behind the pommel of my saddle.
Dalva touched my shoulder to rouse me but I didn’t want to rise and let her see the photo of Adelle so I said I needed a glass of water. She had told Naomi she might kill herself and she scarcely needed the encouragement of Adelle. I slipped the photo in the desk and she returned with the water, reminding me that Naomi was coming over with Ruth and her school friend Carol Johnson whom Naomi wanted to see my paintings. Naomi had shown me this young lady’s sketches which were without particular merit but there was a little essay accompanying the drawings, “Why I Wish to Be an Artist,” that was truly extraordinary for one so young. It reminded me of the level of skill of Willa Cather’s high school valedictory address a friend from the University of Nebraska had shown me.
They arrived shortly thereafter and I recognized the girl as the thin-faced waif who washed dishes at Lena’s Cafe where her mother was an employee. I assumed that she and Ruth were drawn together because of Ruth’s obsession with the piano. While I showed the girl the paintings Naomi talked with Frieda in the kitchen, and Dalva was upstairs playing Bob Wills’s music on the Victrola which made Ruth roll her eyes in embarrassment. I was distracted for other reasons as the music had the emotional texture of the music Davis and I had so loved on our trips to Mexico. And Carol standing shyly beside me was not so far away from myself standing before the Frenchwoman talking about Courbet. These were but a moment’s feelings but the continuum nagged at my mind. She paused a long time before a lesser painting of Stuart Davis’s, then a Burchfield I had bought for three hundred dollars, which she found frightening for good reason. She blushed wildly at a Modigliani sketch and then regathered herself in front of a Gottardo Piazzoni and a Dixon. The fact that I had known the latter two, however slightly, amazed her. In the San Francisco of those days one had merely to stand a round of drinks, blaspheme common enemies and quarrel about technique to know another artist. Fame for everyone, such as it was, remained well in the future and was to be organized by others, mostly art dealers.
We were just sitting down to dinner when she asked me almost in a whisper if I cared for Picasso. I said there were seven Picassos and I liked at least five of them. Naomi felt the need to interpret this and I watched the girl pick at her food, her fingers reddened from her dishwashing chores. She hoped to go to the Art Institute in Chicago when she graduated from high school and wondered if I had liked it there. I said it was doubtless a good place but I hadn’t liked it anywhere at the time. After dinner I gave her a sketching lesson at my desk in the den while Ruth played the piano. I showed her my eleven sparrows of that afternoon and what was wrong with each. I was so preoccupied it didn’t quite register on me that Naomi and Dalva were close behind Carol and were watching intently. I had never acted the artist in front of them before and decided to let it pass as if they had caught me at something so simple as pouring a drink.
After they thanked me and drove off in the dark I remembered clearly the youthful feeling in the pit of my stomach, the hollow fear of my first days at the Art Institute. Davis had not arrived for the fall session yet and I was unable to make sense of a place so large as Chicago. A local attorney, who represented my father in the tree nursery business, had secured me rooms which I suspected were a bit nicer than they should be what with my romantic notions of the bohemian life I expected to unfold before me. I think it was 1903 and the noise of Chicago was quite maddening for one used to the silence of the prairie where you could hear the heart of your horse over its breathing, a far-off meadowlark, a cow lowing in the creekbed a mile away, even a delicate breeze approachi
ng across the sea of grass. I spent my first few days in the silence of the museum which only served to intimidate me well past the fear of failure. One windy evening I walked north up the shore and the waves of Lake Michigan washed the air of other noises. Oddly, I spoke for a few pleasant minutes to a shopgirl from Kansas who was doing the same thing. Further up the beach I damned myself for not finding out her name or where she lived but the enormity of the city had made me so shy I could barely croak out an order for a meal. Finally, on my fourth day in the city, there was a reception for new students with everyone from Midwest states and further standing around stiffly in new clothes. One, an effete fellow named Simmons, from the city itself, took me in hand to an Italian restaurant where one received an enormous bowl of delicious spaghetti and a large glass of bad red wine very cheaply. It was a foreign place and the native babble of the working men made us feel quite artistic.
It occurred to me standing there and watching Naomi’s car disappear that Carol Johnson would find Chicago, assuming that she made it there in a few years, no less strange than I had. I went back inside and for a moment I pitied this poor girl, not for her poverty but for her dreams that had made me so agitated. I looked at my not very talented sparrows on the desk and had to laugh at my grandmotherly sentimentality. Of course she must dream. Only our dreams gave life any coherence. The common political fantasy was simply to maintain America as a safe place to do business, which was short rations indeed for a young girl scrubbing a meatloaf pan at a cafe. When I had early on branded cattle, broke horses, dug irrigation ditches, or simply hoed my mother’s garden I could fashion myself as one of Millet’s peasants, or better yet, Turner watching the fog lift on the boats along the Thames.