The Road Home

by Jim Harrison

  I was not home ten minutes before I began sketching. Before that I got down on the den floor and wrestled with the dogs which I hadn’t done for years, and then I was at my desk sketching Duane in the driveway, sitting in the road dust with his belongings in a burlap sack where Dalva had come upon him. He was an uncommonly strong lad but when he arrived his ribs were all visible beneath his skin while he washed at the horse trough. He was not so much embittered but taciturn, and Rachel later admitted she sent him along with the thought that I could curb the fighting tendencies that destined him for prison. It was at this time that on hearing from Duane that she was in a bad way that I had her move over to the cabin at Buffalo Gap. There was a childish wish on my part that Duane could be a replacement for John Wesley but he quickly disabused me of that. He seemed born a hard man whom life would doubtless make a great deal harder.

  Naomi called to say that she and Dalva would be home in two days, and when she asked me what I was busy with I said I had months of sketching ahead of me. There were a few beats of silence before she said, “That’s wonderful” and it occurred to me we had not spoken much except slightly in passing about my early life in art.

  I impulsively went out to the barn and asked Lundquist to make me a one-sided stile to ease my getting on a horse. While he drew a plan on butcher paper I saddled up Peach and made it aboard without difficulty. Evidently my heart made me stronger on some days and weaker on others. Since I was no longer standing on pride I had Lundquist go ahead on the project.

  Back in the house I did a number of sketches of Rachel, then of her dog, then of my own dogs which were better what with being drawn from life. My energies began to flag and I opened a bottle of wine to keep me going. It was nearly dark before I felt my hunger and was pleased to discover in the refrigerator that Frieda had sent over a pot roast. I dusted off our parlor Victrola and played a Bob Wills record during my dinner remembering dancing to the same music after a Fort Worth stock exhibition where Lundquist and I had lost track of each other for two days while in pursuit of separate nonsense. I had meant to continue sketching after dinner but fell asleep on the den sofa where Charlene had sat not very demurely.

  It is a warm rainy Friday and last evening I went to dinner at Naomi’s to see Dalva. They had arrived earlier that afternoon with Hackleford picking them up over in Denver in his Beech Twin. She was polite, friendly, but wan, and it seemed that everyone was near enough to tears to tread so lightly that nothing could be talked about. We said good night early and out on Naomi’s porch Dalva said she’d pay me a visit the next day.

  When I got home I reviewed my sketch pad but was so tired from my granddaughter’s evident grief that I couldn’t carry on, though at first light I was up with an aerial photo map Hackleford had made of our entire three thousand acres unrolled upon the desk. I marked at least three dozen spots I wanted to work with closely, and this has served to make me lose interest in writing my record which, after all, is not my “mßtier,” but then my problem is that I don’t really have a “mßtier,” isn’t it? I was quite spectacular in the cattle and land business but that doesn’t quite “dollar up” as the auctioneers say.

  I was saved from these dank thoughts when I heard the front door open and then Dalva was on the floor of the hall in her yellow rain slicker embracing the dogs who were twirling, jumping and howling. She let them out and I watched from the window rocker in the parlor as she ran around the yard with the dogs scooting through the burgeoning lilacs in the graveyard, down the wet ditch and around the tree that held the tire swing. They were fascinated when she was swinging, it being a game that was both incomprehensible and unavailable to them. She saw me through the window, waved, then came back in, shedding her slicker, cooing and chirruping at the dogs, getting them treats from the refrigerator. When she came back into the parlor she took Neena’s old afghan from the love seat, approached me with a smile and asked, “May I?” I nodded and she nestled on my lap covering herself with the afghan and I rocked her as I had a thousand times since my son had died.

  Oct. 9, 1958

  I’ve become a bit daffy in the past five months which, on reflection, is not surprising. Anyone with any sense can feel the skull beneath their skin. I am not at my best but I’m having a very good time of it. Early this morning Lundquist drove me clear down to North Platte to pick up Dalva’s birthday car I had arranged for on the phone. Naomi agreed on the idea of the car as Dalva has been driving an untrustworthy ’47 Plymouth. Naomi had requested that I buy something “sensible,” which irritated me, though when I reached the Ford dealership with Lundquist there was a definite feeling I may have gone too far. It was a brand-new aqua-colored convertible with a white top, spoke wheels, a big engine with four-barrel carburetors. Lundquist said, “Golly,” and I quipped that I hadn’t seen one in Nebraska before. When the dealer said, “Just the thing to recapture your youth,” I didn’t bother correcting him. While he and Lundquist went over the operator’s manual I was remembering my sleek 1914 Buick Racer I had bought and made a mess of within a year on my extensive sketching and painting trips. I had driven it to San Francisco in the fall and had gone up the coast for a picnic with Piazzoni and Dixon, and fueled by a case of wine we had done a great deal of damage to the undercarriage backing over a stump.

  I drove the convertible home, having brought along my somewhat tattered otter-skin coat for that purpose. The car had the feeling of a biplane and I was stopped for speeding outside of Thedford. I was pleased to be let off though the young constable, whose father I knew, asked, “Mr. Northridge, are you recapturing your youth?” and I answered, “Not in the least. It’s a birthday present.” Come to think of it, I have not the slightest interest in recapturing my youth. Once is enough. Neena had a Blavatsky-type theosophist friend in Omaha who was forever babbling abut reincarnation, to whom I asked, “How do you know you’re not coming back as a microbe buried out of sight in a dog turd?” It was a pleasant after-dinner show stopper.

  In any event, Dalva loved the car and Naomi and I watched from the porch as Dalva, Ruth and Charlene sped off on a trial run to town and Naomi said, “Think what a mess you would have made out of two daughters.” Feeling this might be too close to the bone she apologized, but my mind was already elsewhere, wishing I had painted her portrait, and that I still owned my favorite vehicle, a 1925 Runabout I had drunkenly driven into the Niobrara during spring flood. I was occasionally quite the fellow in those days. Neena would pack herself and the boys off to Omaha, New York, or Rhode Island until I cooled off.

  I think I’m fairly close to the end. I’m frequently surprised and thankful when I awake in the morning. My vision sometimes blurs and often my heart flutters like an injured bird. I sketched, beginning at dawn, all summer long but by late July I could no longer sensibly ride a horse what with occasional dizzy spells. My last long ride had been after Naomi had called to say Dalva had taken off for a walk early in the morning and had been gone all day. She was worried she might have been bitten by a rattler, that sort of thing. I said I knew she had Sonia with her and I had never seen a snake without Sonia seeing it first. That calmed her down somewhat, and then I added that I’d go take a look. It was a lucky break that I had subdued my pride and had Lundquist build the stile because I couldn’t have mounted my sorrel without it. I led another nag because Peach didn’t care to be led. I checked the thicket and pond spring first, then headed north to the small canyon with the spring on the Niobrara where I found her. She seemed in good shape other than for a sunburn, and terribly pleased that I had arrived. I told her this was the place that at her age I had been thrown from a horse and busted my noggin.

  In late June I had ordered oils from an art supplier in New York but had never opened the carton. A simple task like fetching a bottle of wine from the basement would be exhausting one day, easy the next. I had pretty much covered the places I had marked on the aerial map in late April, and by early September was resigned to an easy chair that Lundquist had hauled out to the sout
h pasture with a pickup. It was covered with a tarp against the rain, and I needed only to drive out, take off the tarp, sit down and begin sketching. We placed it in the approximate location that Smith had found so fascinating, to the puzzlement of Lundquist. A family of field mice quickly took up joint occupancy in the chair and I had to be careful when I sat down. Not being familiar with the power of humans they would scurry up and down the arms of the chair, across the sketch pad, and one morning a mouse perched on my shoulder as I sketched. The smallest of hawks, the kestrel, flying by would send them diving for cover. I took to carrying a coat pocketful of oats for them to feed on and they soon became smart enough to go for the pocket rather than waiting for a handout. I mostly sketched thickets from memory, also cloud formations, birds in flight, and some native grasses that surrounded the chair: bluejoint, buffalo grass, marsh muhly, side oats grama, sand bluestem. These reminded me of my father’s botanical sketches, though not so finely rendered what with having a different intent. The thickets drawn from memory posed a bit of a mystery. I had not thought up to this point in my life that thickets were of such great interest. I drew riverine thickets near Durango, Mexico, where I had camped with Davis, a thicket a dozen miles from La Paz on Baja where the quail were thickly coveyed and hiding from raptors. There was a thicket near Sarlat in the Dordogne where a mare dropped her foal, and not far from the small hospital where I had seen the bottom that provided a miraculous cure, and dozens of thickets from Nebraska, especially from along the Loup, the Missouri, and the Niobrara, There was the idea that the farm itself appeared as a monster thicket from the county road, and that was where I had always retreated, lived and would doubtless die.

  One cool rainy September day when I was somewhat angrily confined to my desk I timidly rechecked my notebook sketches from my teens and twenties to compare them to the work of the present. There was an interesting early drawing of a line of Negro infantry at Fort Niobrara outside of Valentine in 1902 when I was sixteen. I had been invited to lunch with these enlisted men and saw the odd phenomenon similar to Davis sketching the girls at the State Fair: all people have a peculiar fascination with artists as if they were some sort of lower-rent witch doctors. Many a young woman of high station and otherwise good sense will bed an artist before she will a stockbroker, perhaps out of curiosity. Davis thought this boon helped make up for an inevitable life of penury.

  My work now seemed to stand fairly well with that of earlier years except that now the lines were a bit dreamier, more tentative, less likely to own a bold but inappropriate touch. But many of the journal entries were jejune and captious. At fifteen I had evidently discovered the word “hedonist” in the dictionary or Britannica and decided a hedonist was what I wished to be. That was a Modigliani, or hormonal phase, where a fanny and a Botticelli chalice are thought to be of equal value, with the judgment wavering to the former. Just the other day I had thought of having Charlene pose for me in the buff for a last look at the vision that has fueled so many nights and days. From May 1916, there was a not very intelligent observation leavened by humor: “If our actual lives are but parodies of our ideals, then when we hit periods where we lose our ideals we can become quite a mess. Written on a severe hangover, also recovering from a fist fight with a rather large and impudent cowboy outside the Bassett Tavern over a young lady who was trying to get in my car rather than his.” Later in the month there was a sententious item, “Politics would convince one that life is a burbling cesspool, while organized religion sees it as a disciplinary system in which the administrators must be well paid. Only in the arts and literature, and natural history, are we led to that invisible altar where life may be sensed as the vast mystery that it is.” Now, this is a noble sentiment but if it were a meal it would be thin gruel indeed. I somehow hear the droning voice of Eeyore, the donkey in Winnie-the-Pooh, a book I read to Dalva and Ruth so many times when they were little girls that the book became a fact of nature. All through life one hears nitwits bleating their versions of wisdom. I rather like Keats’s notion of “negative capability” where one cherishes and nurtures the thousands of contradictory ideas in one’s head, rather than trying to reduce them to functional piths and gists. What vanity! There is also the melancholy thought that you could study and write poetry from dawn to dark and not come off with a quatrain equal to what Keats may have written on the back of an envelope on Hampstead Heath and then discarded as inferior. Staring out at the downpour that enveloped the south pasture I had shuddered with the mad urge to eat and drink the ground, to swallow the sky with its rain, and then I slept and dreamt of Adelle, Neena, my mother and Rachel, standing out in the pasture in the rain, smiling quite fully and looking back at me behind the den window. I waved but they did not wave back. When I awoke I looked for them but it was getting dark outside.

  I think I am quite close to my end, so much so that I have told Lund-quist where to put the large manila envelope stuffed with this little story. He is quite frightened, perhaps sensibly, of our sub-basement and said, “I’ve never been down there alone.” There are tears in his eyes and I cajole him saying that Lutherans are quite safe from goblins and suchlike. He admits that he’s crying because he fears I will die soon to which I nod. I’m feverish from what I take to be bronchitis and the merciful onset of pneumonia, a disease said to be an old man’s friend. Naturally he wants to fetch the doctor which is out of the question. There is an open bottle of whiskey on the desk for my violent coughing fits but he refuses, for the only time in memory, to accept a drink. I am so startled that I agree when he asks me to pray with him. We kneel and as he prays I stare through the ribs of my chair at the large folio art books on the bottom shelf of my library. I fix on Caravaggio who was said to be an unpleasant person, but then how does it finally matter who made the painting or book when the mystery is in the collective understanding, both unmeasured and immeasurable. Lundquist prods me, and I’m supposed to ask God to forgive me. I mutter that I’d rather ask forgiveness from those I offended but nearly all of them are dead. He asks again so to humor him I say, “God forgive me.” He’s so pleased that I can’t help but think I’ve done the right thing. I grab the desk edge and pull myself to my feet. Now with his mission accomplished Lundquist is ready for a drink. We rehearsed for the last time our unique meeting down in Lincoln a few weeks after Armistice. Neena had met my train in from New York via Chicago but Paul, who was an infant, was only beginning to recover from the flu that killed hundreds of thousands in the U.S. that year. She wanted me to go ahead up-country knowing that I didn’t care for her wealthy friends we were staying with, but then Paul who was only two seemed to enjoy my hospital visits. I took to driving out to the stockyards and the auction barn and the presence of cattle alleviated my homesickness. On the first day I had had perhaps too many sips from my whiskey flask and was critical at the way a feisty and muscular young Swede was sorting cattle. He marched right up to me and offered to kick my ass, at which he was chided by a superior because I was a rancher in an expensive suit. In the ensuing days I got to know this young man, Lundquist, from Minnesota and on the last day in Lincoln I drove out and offered him a job at double his present wage, plus the house I had bought from the Norwegians down the road who were desperate to leave the area. We were capable of going on endlessly with these memories, and there is a question of what else an old man has, when Dalva drove into the yard to see me and Lundquist left.

  I looked out the window and could see Charlene sitting in the car with the sunlight gathering in her hair. Of course I should have asked her to pose. Dalva came in and hugged me and felt my forehead to check for fever. She said I was burning up and became tearful. She remains sure that she is the cause of my illness and I tell her I had this bronchitis well before her adventure. I also tell her the comic story of my first heart attack and she fails to see the humor. She begins to apologize again and I draw her up short by telling her to invite Charlene in and we’ll have a short game of rummy. I tell her I have never been happier in my life whi
ch is utterly true.

  What she did several days ago is jump in her car before dawn and race off to find Duane. Naomi came over at midmorning when she heard that Dalva had never arrived at school. I was sitting out in the pasture in my chair with a thermos of coffee laced with whiskey for my cough, enjoying a spate of late Indian summer and watching the dogs sleeping in the grass except for Sonia who was digging at the edge of the chair to get at the mice. Naomi came swerving through the gate and sped toward my chair, bouncing over the lumpish ground. On hearing the news I guessed that Dalva would have looked in Parmelee, and there she would have heard Duane was in Chadron in jail. I knew this because the week before on hearing from the sheriff of Dawes County I had asked Quigley to drive over from Valentine and bail Duane out and give him some money. Quigley did so and told me on the phone that Duane said he was headed for Oregon to be a logger. This sounded unlikely for a young cowboy but who knows? I said I would check with the sheriff in Chadron in case Dalva showed up at the jail, also with Rachel in Buffalo Gap in case Duane was there though the odds were against it. Naomi listened carefully then headed back to her country school, saying she’d return in the afternoon.