by Jim Harrison
I left shortly after 4 A.M. and passed through Valentine at dawn, stopping for coffee and chatting for a few minutes with two very old stockmen I knew. On parting one asked if I was paying a visit to my “mother’s people” and I nodded in assent and let it drop. Northwest of Valentine I hit the valley of the Little White River and gave a short ride to an old Lakota stumbling along the road and mildly drunk. It unnerved me when he said he remembered me from the only Sun Dance I had attended, and that back in the early thirties when the ceremony was illegal, the U.S. Government having decided that the Indians that they were starving to death should not be allowed to puncture their breasts with thongs. Back then at the request of Willow’s cousin I had brought up a bull that for reasons of its own had grown too fat to breed. The animal was admired through much of the ceremony during which he was fed heartily under a distant grove. I suspect he weighed just short of a ton and was devoured by the crowd with enthusiasm.
My hitchhiker knew Smith quite well and when I dropped him off at his one-room tar-paper shack he gave me more specific directions as Smith had concealed his dwelling. I tried to offer the gift of fifty dollars which he refused as he didn’t want to drink again until it got cold in the fall. He furthermore refused my pocket watch as being too valuable and he also wasn’t interested in what time it was. I said, “Neither am I” and we had a good laugh. He said then if I wished I could leave some money with Smith to buy his granddaughter and her children a milk cow as theirs had been stolen and doubtless eaten by marauding cousins from Pine Ridge.
I found Smith’s shack with the door open, and the interior clean and nearly bare, with a spartan army-surplus cot and a small table with a patterned rose oilcloth. There was a Coleman lantern in the corner and a privy out back. I followed his trail down through a gully, crossing a creek that obviously emptied into the Little White, and then down the creek to a grassy bench surrounded by a dense thicket. I paused and whistled our boyhood signal and heard his in return, and thought this whistle was perhaps silly in seventy-year-olds, but perhaps not.
And there he sat before an old and worn but traditional tipi, smiling broadly. He adjusted a coffee pot on the coals of a fire, got up and bowed. I gave him a packet of Bugler tobacco and the ornate bow, the latter which he examined closely and then thanked me for. He ducked into the tipi and came out with a small leather bag which he handed to me. It contained a coyote skull with Smith’s “medicine” delicately painted on it in black ink. It was my turn to bow and we sat down for coffee. He pointed off to a small sweat lodge in the bushes and asked if I wanted to do a sweat. I said I had had a heart attack and doubted if my system would take it. He had me describe the heart attack and laughed with gusto when I said I had shit in my pants. He said he had “let go a bit” when the longhorn bull charged down the bank toward us. Now we laughed together and he said the last gift of the government is when a hanged man shits his pants, then he asked me why I had come so far to see him on a fine spring morning. I described in a rush my torment over my poor little Dalva giving birth and he quickly corrected me saying she was neither poor or little but a handsome girl of childbearing age, and since I couldn’t give birth for her I’d better calm my mind on the matter. He put some of the Bugler tobacco and a few dried plants in the fire and said I should pray for Dalva and not bother her spirit with my worries. That settled that. I went on with my dreams about my mother and also Rachel, Duane’s mother, over in Buffalo Gap. He answered that I was dreaming about my mother because she was welcoming me to her world late in the fall. She was only helping me get ready. With Rachel he maintained her appearances in a dream several times meant she wanted me to come over for a visit and possibly some loving. I said I was getting pretty old for that and he said, “Bullshit.” I then described some of my animal and Indian dreams which he greatly enjoyed and he said they were attributed to the landscape of my life since dreams emerged from the ground. He was especially fascinated by how I escaped the German troops by becoming a huge bird and flying down a river only to discover I was half bird and half bear. Smith said that that dream was a real stroke of luck and I better work hard at my life to make sure I was deserving of such a dream. I asked how I was supposed to do that, and he answered if I didn’t know by now I was a cow flop. “Just do your art and be good to people,” he added. “It’s that simple?” I asked. “That’s really hard as you probably already know.” And that was that. He said a prayer for me in Lakota and I didn’t ask its specific meaning, then I felt drawn suddenly to wonder what exactly happened when we die. He said, “Got me by the ass” and laughed, adding that it wouldn’t do us any good to know and would certainly steal life’s greatest surprise. He walked me back out to my car and said it would be good of me to go see Rachel so I headed west.
In retrospect it was the grandest of days. I stopped back through Valentine and had an early lunch with Quigley, a raffish lawyer whose people had come up from Texas in the 1880s. We had known each other so long in land dealings a midmorning drink seemed in order. I was feeling a tad drowsy but made it to near Gordon before I pulled off through a gate onto a rancher’s two-track and took a nap with my back propped against a cottonwood. As I dozed off I thought of old Jules Sandoz, a friend of my father’s I had met several times. Jules was an unappealing character in many respects but they got on quite well. His daughter Mari, who became a writer of note, was the fiercest young woman I had ever met and she eventually became friends with my wife, Neena, in Lincoln, and also New York City. I had also meant to ask Paul about Neena’s diaries that she kept so relentlessly. I supposed he had them in his possession but had certainly never offered me a look.
When I woke from my nap I had slumped to the ground and was looking straight up at the pale green buds of the cottonwood just beginning to leaf. I turned sideways and stared off across the verdant pelt of grass where it seemed a great number of singing meadowlarks had collected, with each call trilling within my skull. Some were rather close to my prone carcass, perhaps thinking of me as a snoring log. I recalled that I had read somewhere that in the Middle Ages hell was envisioned as a place without birds. That thought increased their volume substantially as if they were giving assent to my thinking. There was a trace of fear when their song merged with my dream of God’s voice as that of a billion songbirds so I got up hastily and made my way to the car. I wanted to die at home.
I headed further west, turning north outside of Chadron, resisting an urge to go over to Fort Robinson for a look, thinking that it might decrease the sweetness of the day. I used to take the boys over for the polo weekends in the twenties and thirties when Fort Rob, as it was known, was a center of the game, and at one time the home base for our Olympic polo team. As the main remount station for the army there had been as many as five thousand horses at once. This was at a time when to be an army officer was considered a proper career for the young monied swells from the East with equestrian interests. The enormous emotional drawback of the locale was that it also was the site of the murder of Crazy Horse and on that day I wasn’t up to a sidelong glance in the direction of his immense, doomed spirit.
My nap did not quite appease my drowsiness and I stopped at a country hardware store outside of Chadron, bought a thermos and filled it at the truckers’ cafe next door with their wretched version of coffee. In this part of the country the closest place for a good cup of coffee, other than home, is Mexico. It occurred to me that my heart wasn’t doing a good enough job to accommodate my before dawn wakening, a long drive, the emotionally fatiguing session with Smith, plus a couple of whiskeys and a T-bone for lunch. There was a corrective thought that my body was somewhat less than immortal, an idea that was getting repetitive.
I was troubled by the oddly crisp planes of light as the altitude grew after entering South Dakota, and the cooler landscape became more austere and less friendly. When I was young and arrogant I had tried mightily to paint this light which only puzzled the other students in Chicago, and later, my fellow artists, but then art and
literature have always been rampant with xenophobia, and when in New York City I admitted I was from Nebraska I may as well have said I hailed from Ultima Thule. Showing one’s art to others had always been similar to being limited to a bottle of bad wine when needing a drink. As far as they were concerned I may as well have been painting the moon. But then it is difficult to extrapolate the Sandhills from the Hudson River, or vice versa. We have always been regions rather than states or a country, and full of a tribal intolerance for anyplace else.
On a very hot August morning I had brought three of my paintings to Stieglitz’s Photo-Secessionist Gallery in New York City. The great man, unfortunately, was in the country, a sane move during the heat wave, though the possibility of his being absent had not occurred to me. I knew the gallery had shown Marin and Hartley, both artists I admired. A polite assistant had a moment to say “How interesting,” and then was off to lunch, adding at the door that I might come back in an hour. I came back but he didn’t. I ensconced myself in a bar across the street, leaving fairly drunk in the late afternoon when he still hadn’t returned. After a mostly sleepless night walking the city I tried to see Davies and Walt Kuhn the next morning. They were organizing the upcoming Armory Show to be held in February and in my wildest dream I hoped to successfully enter the competition to be shown there. The Kuhns turned out to be up on Cape Cod. I had a letter of introductions to George Bellows but he was also out of town. It struck me, and still does, that the only way to get your foot truly in the door was to live in this city or its environs. I had another introduction to a gallery near Washington Square that turned out to be closed for the month of August. I had enough vitality at the time to begin to think of the whole trip as quite comic. It was as if I had landed in Poland without knowing a soul or a word of the language. It was so hot I was without my ordinary interest in food and wine and I walked until my clothes soaked through with sweat. I will admit I was downcast a bit at the gallery that was closed for August and stopped at McSorley’s for a half dozen schooners of ale, after which I walked out into the miserable slums of the Lower East Side where Glackens loved to paint. That was when I actually saw the man walking down the street which made me feel a great deal better, no matter the absurdity of the emotion. It was several hours after I left McSorley’s that I finally noted that I was no longer carrying my portfolio of three paintings. I returned to the tavern without a trace of panic to discover that they were gone, thus escaping my post-World War I bonfire. I like to think of them in simple, middle-class drawing rooms where for years the generations of families have wondered idly over these peculiar landscapes.
By the time I reached my log hunting cabin near Buffalo Gap I was plumb worn out. Quite naturally Rachel “expected” me and had a pot of Mexican tripe stew called “menudo” that I favored simmering on her wood range. After bearing Duane she had left him with her mother in Parmelee and had gone off to Denver where she was a prostitute during the war years, in addition to being a severe alcoholic. She lived in the barrio and learned to cook a number of Mexican peasant dishes and both her phrases of affection and cursing tended to be a mixture of Spanish and Lakota. I had somehow caught myself a chill and was quite distracted by my thoughts which were still back in New York City in August of 1912. I called Lundquist so he wouldn’t be alarmed by my absence but connected with Frieda who replied to my simple statement by saying, “Oh yes, sir. Thank you for calling, sir. God bless you, sir,” an evident parody of some sophisticated fluff she had watched on television.
Rachel made me a peppery herbal tea and then I flopped on the sofa where she covered me with one of my father’s buffalo robes I had given her. I quickly dozed but my unconscious mind would not let me leave New York. There in a dream was the immense sixty-story Woolworth Building they were finishing that summer. At the moment I set eyes on it I had doubts that there was any place for me in a locale where such a structure could be built, and though I was still in my twenties I was truly from another era. It was so hot that people came out of their stifling tenements to sleep on the banks and piers of the Hudson and East Rivers and in Central Park. In my night walks I heard singing in a dozen languages, and with my art left well behind, I became quite taken by this improbable music of the streets. I was a bit well dressed for some of the crowds and had been forced to pitch two attacking hooligans off a pier into the Hudson. I came awake when seeing the startled face of the second as he hit the river. I had left hastily and did not know if they had drowned.
Rachel was wiping my steaming face with a towel. She drew a bath as I had sweated through my clothes under the robe, but in the tub I still could not escape New York. On a dozen consequent trips I visited museums and the race tracks and did not pass by a gallery without a twinge of nausea. Mari Sandoz once told me that the briefest visit to her publisher’s office would freeze her writing hand for a few days thereafter. If we move well forward to 1957 there appears to be a great deal of confusion with art and the art market, literature and the publishing business, in that the operative ethic of the country may be reduced to open and rabid greed.
We ate our menudo supper late and in the last light took a walk with Rachel’s dog, a burly Labrador lost to a hunter which Rachel had adopted. This dog was not overly fond of me or of anyone except Rachel, keeping a weather eye out at me as if I were up to no good. We paused in the small log barn and Duane’s buckskin came running toward us from the pasture, then the dog and the buckskin traded places, chasing each other in a game of tag. It was an especially fine horse if a bit headstrong like its owner. Rachel came in under my arm and I drew her close as if in the buckskin Duane was making a wordless visit.
That night heralded the first thunderstorm of the year and the frightened dog scratched wildly at the door. It normally slept in the barn with the buckskin but I got up and let it in whereupon it jumped on the sofa and quivered. I wrapped its large soaking body in the buffalo robe and then Rachel came out from the bedroom and out the west window we stared at the show of lightning against the distant Black Hills, a magnificent storm pushed in from the southwest so that when we opened a window the air was now warmer than it had been all day. We went back to bed with the dog following and crawling underneath, then growling when we inadvertently made love, so that we barely held our laughter until we finished. Despite Smith’s admonition I could not have been more surprised on making love had I won the Olympic marathon. As I drifted into sleep the full impact of this golden day came upon me and I had the visual illusion of the surface of my life melting into the truer content beneath it. I was unsure if this meant anything but when I awoke frequently for moments during the night I could see all of the separate places on the farm back home that needed sketching.
* * *
I stayed three days at the cabin, and late on the evening of the third, Lundquist called to say that Naomi and the adoptive parents had flown off to Tucson because Dalva had entered labor, and then had given birth early this morning. Naomi would bring her home within a few days when she felt well enough to travel. When Rachel asked me if it was a boy or a girl I said I hadn’t inquired. She was in tears so I called Lundquist back and he didn’t know. I said to Rachel that perhaps we shouldn’t know because by tomorrow this child would be gone from us forever. She wept bitterly, then became enraged over the idea that her son’s child had been given away by the wasichu, the white people, when she could have raised it herself. What kind of people were we?
I left at dawn with Rachel sleepless and unappeased, alternately cursing me and pacing the room, though she did laugh a moment when the dog began to snarl and bark at me as if all of his suspicions had been confirmed. She did walk me to the car and kiss me good-bye in the gray light, though her eyes had become stones, her face impassive. I certainly could not admit that it had never occurred to me to think of her becoming the mother of the child.
On the long drive home Rachel’s sadness left me, and I felt a little guilty that I could let it drift away by the time the sun rose above the horizon outs
ide of Pine Ridge. I dismissed an urge to detour north for a last look at the Badlands where my father had holed up for nearly a year with the most recalcitrant Lakota after Wounded Knee, and where he nearly died of cholera. That was the slender thread between generations again, but then it was impossible to quite imagine that had he died I would have been raised as a Lakota in the most miserable period of their history. So much of my trip home was through virtually empty grasslands that once again it struck me as a horror that these people were not treated justly. Bartlett’s Spade Ranch alone had been nearly a million prime acres and would have properly supported several thousand Lakota. One need not read very deeply in history, despite the otiose trappings of patriotism, to see how irrationally vicious we were with our Natives. We have rebuilt Germany in a scant dozen years and have utterly ignored our first citizens, and are confident in this sodden theocracy that the God of Moses and Jesus has been quite enthused over our every move.