by Jim Harrison
Hackleford picks me up in his Stinson Voyager on the gravel road in front of the farm, an extra-legal maneuver that we are both happy to make. It would have been nice to take the ride in his Stearman biplane but then we are both a year over seventy and an open cockpit is chilly in December. It was Hackleford who took John Wesley for his first plane ride but I can scarcely blame this fellow geezer for my son’s obsession.
We headed east, flying rather low along the Niobrara, and turning south over land when the river meets the Missouri. Once we unwittingly followed the Missouri south to Omaha and north of the city I was horrified to look down at the area where my Adelle had drowned herself.
I suspect that flying causes reveries dangerous to a pilot. I’ve always loved studying a river from the air and seeing the way a watercourse has shaped the land around it, the Niobrara braiding itself in her delta, her cleaner waters merging with the darker Missouri. Neena and I once camped on a high hill overlooking this confluence, one of the happier evenings of our life and one of the few when she set a book aside and looked closely at the world around her. To her credit she could tell me the entire rather bleak history of the gorgeous area, Indian and white, and the rest of the nation, and the world for that matter. She taught the boys even more rigorously than my father taught me.
Samuels, the senior partner of the law firm, picked me up at the airport in his golf clothes, a sport he only took up after I had exhausted both of us in my land dealings. The many years that I was so active strike me as a bit pathetic as neither Dalva or Ruth show promise as spenders. The government that dispatched my son had bought my beef during World War II in vast quantity, an irony as sharp as a Japanese sword.
The unhappy business at hand was to decide the fate of Dalva’s child. When Naomi had begun discussing the matter with me I favored keeping it, but was immediately disabused of this notion, bowing to her long experience as a mother and teacher. Some pregnant girls who are fifteen going on sixteen would be quite capable and disposed to raising a child, and some wouldn’t. Dalva was in the latter category, and then there was my unshared knowledge of who Duane’s father might be. Our aim must be to find a proper set of adoptive parents, and Samuels, my confidant in the matter, had come up with a junior member of the firm and his wife, a childless couple with whom we would have dinner.
I had Samuels detour for a melancholy drive past the Morgan home, now a big rooming house in a decaying neighborhood. No matter how irrational, it was difficult to accept that all of them were gone from earth. The parents were rather giddy when Neena and I returned from our impulsive elopement in the winter of 1917. For them I suspect, it somewhat healed the loss of Adelle, no matter that I kept my distance from Frederick. When we visited on occasion I walked the fashionable streets with a pair of coyotes I had tamed since they were pups and who were confident I was their parent. I joined the army three days after losing them up near Buffalo Gap on an April afternoon just before we entered the war. It was actually Neena’s mother, Martha, who prodded me into a minor scandal when I walloped a United States senator. Martha and I were talking in a cloakroom after a big dinner when we heard a shriek and saw this senator bending his wife’s arm and jerking her ear. She was a lovely and intelligent woman, though a bit flirtatious, and Martha said, “Do something” which I did.
At dinner at the Samuels’ the young couple seemed perfectly suited as adoptive parents after I questioned them at length. They were a bit shy and frightened at first and I was reminded again how we can think of ourselves as fine fellows but appear to others as a bit on the raw side. The world has become quite modern and most men are somewhat less definite than they used to be. I was finally able to set them at ease and the evening was over early when the young woman became a little ill. The junior partner was from Minnesota, a definite point in his favor, and lacked the slickness that had begun to infect younger members of the legal profession. I was struck by how deeply they craved to have a child, and felt confident that they would be excellent at raising one. There was the disturbing thought that I was doling out John Wesley’s grandchild but I knew I had to let that one rest.
Without reading my own thoughts the next morning I met Hackle-ford at the airport and asked him to fly straight up the Missouri despite Adelle, passing De Soto, then bearing left and over Winslow, following the Elkhorn for nearly two hundred miles to its source southeast of Bassett.
Samuels had felt relief over our successful dinner, and so did I. Consequently we drank too much Calvados, a passion of Samuels’s who had always been one of those peculiar Francophiles one finds among the prairie rich. I slept well until about 3:00 A.M. when I awoke thinking that I heard Smith’s voice telling me that nothing could be avoided, that you couldn’t change reality, past, present or future, to suit yourself, thus I threw caution away and had Hackleford fly low over the promontory on the Missouri where Adelle had drowned. The noise in the Stinson was such that again I heard Smith’s voice in my mind, this time speaking with my mother in Lakota out near the horse trough at dawn on the morning he left for good with my father giving him our very best horse and saddle and the small medicine bag of Smith’s grandfather’s my father had from the old days after the warrior himself had died at Twin Buttes.
So I looked straight now into the great, swollen, brown river and heard the muted laughter that came from Adelle in the late afternoon when her doldrums began to leave her. She was sitting on the rock pile in the first large pasture behind the rows of trees in back of the barn. It was still very warm and she wore only a white slip that clung to the sweat on her body because she had been chasing her pet calf around the pasture, and then it would chase her. The calf unnerved me a bit when we made love, standing so close we could feel its milky breath on our necks and shoulders. I was trying to sketch her on the rock pile with the calf off to the side, but she wouldn’t hold still because she was trying to catch some of the black snakes that always sunned themselves on the rock pile. She couldn’t catch any of the larger ones before they slipped away but then she knelt in the grass and caught several very small ones, cupping their writhing bodies in her hands until they became quite still. She swiveled from the waist, turning toward me with a rather mad smile, and raised her cupped hands like a supplicant and placed the infant snakes on her thick hair where they became alarmed with one wriggling down her forehead until it fell in her lap, and the others down her shoulders and back. “I’m the Medusa,” she laughed, and I could hear the laughter and voice in the plane nearly fifty years later, now looking down at the Elkhorn. She wanted to make love again so I drew her away from the rock pile, not sharing her fondness for the black snakes. Afterward, she began to talk, leaning over the back of the calf, scratching its ears and stroking its flanks. I want to be a boy or man on alternate days. You’re almost a woman while you’re drawing. Your face becomes softer and even when you talk you talk more softly. When I say something your head turns slowly and you look up in the sky slowly. Everything my father does is jerky and has sharp corners. Maybe paintings should be round. My father thinks he is the engineer of the train of the whole world. He sits in his easy chair after dinner farting because he’s eaten too much and reading financial magazines and talking to them in hopes he can change what they are going to say next. I don’t care for him anymore. He’d be happier if he had a mistress but he’s a little frightened of my mother whom I don’t think really cares for him anymore. Last summer we were sailing in Rhode Island and he kept glancing at my cousin who is a very pretty girl and he’d turn pink as a sunset. He thinks no one notices these things. Mother says he has a small bully in his heart that on some days gets bigger. I just think that he’s one of those men who believes the world only exists inasmuch as it is connected to him. I’m sure you’re not at all like that. I’m sure that’s one of the reasons I love you. Artists aren’t like that at all, are they? They paint the world so they can understand its beauty. I told my father that John Keats was the greatest man in the history of the world and he chuckled and ch
uckled and asked how I could overlook Teddy Roosevelt; and then he said come back to me in ten years and you will have forgotten John Keats. They all say come back to me in ten years to kiss the feet of their wisdom. I’ll have to take cooking lessons or will we be able to afford someone to cook for us? On the boat to France we’ll dance every evening like we did in Duluth. When we come back to America we’ll have a Buick car and I’d like a black horse. On the boat you can’t help but think how deep the water is over the rail. Back at the spring this morning when we were swimming how do you know how deep it is where that spring water burbles so coldly around our feet?
There was a brisk crosswind and we had a difficult landing on the county road. Hackleford normally flew the perimeters of the ranch so we could take a look but it was far too blustery at low altitude. He brought the Stinson in half sideways and flopped her down with us laughing all the way, not in relief that we were landing but in the peril of doing so. Lundquist had heard us and was pulled to the foot of the driveway in the pick-up. He nodded his head “no” when I looked at him. It’s been ten years since I cared about the mail but ever since Duane left in September I’ve been hoping to hear from him like a schoolgirl waiting for a catalog dress. Lundquist knows this though it remains unspoken. I turn to watch Hackleford take off and I almost said a prayer, an utterly unlikely thing in itself. Lundquist said that Naomi had called from Duluth where she and Dalva are stuck in a hotel waiting out a grand blizzard.
My heart has the jitters despite the medicine and I take a bowl of potato soup, the surface of which I’ve made pink with Tabasco to Frieda’s dismay, into the den where I may listen to my wobbly heart in privacy. Anyone who has examined and eaten as many deer hearts as I have will suffer an equally vivid picture of this tough, meaty organ. I am mortally tired out but then it occurs to me I have not led a tired life. There is a great deal of uneasy melancholy in Wordsworth’s notion that the child is father of the man, and Smith’s visit keeps drawing me back to the early, rather ordinary occurrences that seemed to have a later, momentous effect. At my age one can’t help but wonder at how skewed and irrational life becomes in the living, how wondrously strange the accretion of effects that lead from one interesting patch of life to another. Something so absurd as a boyhood book momentarily captures the mind and never quite releases it. I’d often accompany my father on buggy trips to town for supplies, and spend an hour or so at the library during his errands. I knew he’d disapprove but I loved to read Buel’s The Century of Progress: A Story of Heroic Achievements which was perfect fodder for a gullible boy with virtually hundreds of “true-to-life” illustrations of such things as the lamas torturing an Englishman, a flying African dragon, an orangutan tearing apart the mammoth jaws of a crocodile, seagulls fighting a giant octopus on the ocean’s surface, the suicide of the bare-breasted consort of the rajah. The latter was my earliest pornography and it seemed a terrible waste of beauty. It first occurred to me to smell a rat in the illustrations when I asked my father if it were possible for an Indian to jump on the back of a moose and stab it to death with a knife. He only said, “Of course not.” But then these images are not the less permanent for being so absurd.
It somewhat chills me to think that I have no real possessions excepting my memories and dreams. Money and property appear as too evanescent to be more than trifling. Once just a few years before they died I camped with my parents well up a creek near Long Pine and my father told me of the insanity and dysentery, perhaps cholera, that brought him so near to death the year after Wounded Knee when he was encamped with Lakota friends and my mother’s relations in the Badlands. As he gradually recovered he realized again that he was a white man and despite his sympathies even his God could not make him a Lakota. We were eating some trout we caught except for my mother who did not care for fish, describing them as “Anishinabe” (Chippewa) food. My father said he had hung onto life by the merest thread for my own sake, and if he had died at that time, I would have doubtless been raised by my mother and her people as a Lakota. She merely smiled and nodded at this, so matter-of-fact was her attitude toward fate.
This has always been not much more than an idle speculation, but then it’s impossible to avoid thumbing it over now and then. He wasn’t saying that I was necessarily lucky that he had lived, only that it all could have easily gone otherwise. At the time, in the summer twilight, he quickly passed on to railing at the distant sound of an automobile. This was in 1908, 1 think, and I have since read that there were short of six hundred cars in Nebraska in 1905 and over two hundred thousand in 1920, an item that I still find astonishing. My father thought of the auto as anathema, a possible Antichrist and a tool of greed, and he jumbled the motor car together with Edison’s work on the Victrola, and the silent pictures that had become so popular. He was a little less sure about electricity.
When I had jokingly told Rosenthal of my father’s rant, “What will become of all the horses who will never be born?” he was less amused than thoughtful what with being so aware of the sweep of history. Rosenthal thought that the influence of such a parent, for better or for worse, had prevented me from fully entering the twentieth century. I am still less than confident in this matter a month away from 1958. All of our dire and often errant warnings about the world to our children tends to close the doors for them? I think that’s what he meant. But then Paul and John Wesley showed little signs of timidity so I doubt I frightened them too much. Of course Rosenthai was speaking of my own father and his mental excesses, passing on the somewhat bitter notion that this place is my only possible refuge. Doubtless if I had continued in my art I might have sprung out of here more often as I did as a young man. I have to disbelieve that the landscape could be in my genetic makeup though it seems clear to me that it was in my mother’s. It seems the problem must be more in the nature of my early years when my company was limited to my immediate family, horses, dogs and cattle, Smith and Willow. And then I’ve often thought if I had not lost both Adelle and Davis I may have continued in my art past World War I. Of course this kind of thinking is not the less absurd for being inevitable. I certainly can place no blame on my father whose selflessness in behalf of the Lakota drove him past the limits of mental stability inherent in him, and this after his experiences in the Civil War, beside which my own late in World War I are tame indeed.
It was a grim, cold Sunday morning with the air a whirl of snowflakes around the house, and in the fields, blowing lateral to the ground in rumply sheets. The dogs were restive early with even Jake, the oldest of the Airedales, coming in to nose at my pillow, a rare appearance, and then Sonia began to moan from the den and I pulled myself from a warm bed into a cold room and hurried to the den to find old Tess quite dead upon the leather couch, a small pool of blood beneath her muzzle. To be frank I wept like an orphaned baby with the dead, beloved dog across my lap, the heat already gone from her body. The other dogs, led by Sonia, joined in a chorus of mournful, wolf-like howls.
I dressed, had a cup of reheated coffee, and carried her to the south side of the barn where we have our dog graveyard near another clump of lilacs. I took a pick-ax from the shed to soften the partially frozen ground, then dug a fairly deep hole, wrapped her in a good woolen blanket she favored, and buried her except for her soul which had fled elsewhere. I reflected again how dog years leap ahead of us and we are left a little breathless by how much faster their nature speeds them along. If they have any complaints about this they are exchanged with us in gestures and glances that are informed by benign incomprehension. Their deaths more naturally embrace the eternity before and after their lives. Should they see God their surprise would be momentary and unreflective. It must be God, they’d say, then go about their business.
As I rearranged the cold sod I was puzzling over the Lakota name for dog, shoohkah, and horse, shoonhawakon. I remembered it meant either little dog and big dog, or little horse and big horse, but couldn’t remember which. I looked at the weak sun that had peeked out enough to cast my shad
ow on the barn, and then the sun began to whirl and I sat down hard with an immense pain in my chest, my bowels loosening and vomit erupting. I was quickly soaked with sweat but oddly did not pass from consciousness. I remember glancing at my now shortened shadow on the barn and thinking that this was not a bad place to die. I dared not move nor did I feel able to do so. It did occur to me that Lundquist would find me in twenty-four hours frozen to the ground by my shitty pants. My nose began to itch and I had not the strength to scratch it but could only exchange looks with the row of four aging Airedales. I admit I became a foxhole Christian and prayed, for the first time since my youth, to survive this calamity, in order to help Dalva and Naomi through their troubles, and then I would die without a struggle.
I was a bit surprised by my lack of panic and wondered if all of my imaginings over this matter had somewhat diffused the actual event. My life didn’t pass before my eyes nor did I have a death song to sing like my half brothers, the Lakota. Instead I felt calm though quizzical over the way time had pushed me before her, ran over me, and now was probably leaving me behind. There was another sharp pang in my chest, though far less severe than the first, and it struck me that my limbs were dead because my heart was digesting a lump. I was singularly ignorant of medicine but quite suddenly recalled the look of a particular cow’s heart up on the reservation when I was a child and the government allotment was being butchered. I remembered touching this huge heart and playing tug of war with the intestines with a little boy with a burnt face until a dog raced in and won the contest.