The Road Home

by Jim Harrison

  I had plumb still for several hours the better to absorb the landscape, or better yet, become absorbed by the landscape. You don’t really become it but it becomes you. I felt as much an earthling as the red-winged blackbird that landed on a cattail a few feet away only to flee with a squawk when I batted an eyelash. True stillness always seemed to be a hard to accept gift. A great blue heron landed in the shallows of the far side of the pond where the creek began to form. Beyond that was an ultimate thicket, dense looking as a deep ocean. Not that it mattered but if Naomi’s quip was true this was a good place to be conceived. As time filtered away into the landscape the birds set up their good-night chorus like excited children. Here I am whoever wants to know. Their names didn’t matter and if you knew their nature well enough you’d know what they call themselves, so said my Ponca friend. Maybe the names we give them mean no more than the names we give ourselves, a fragile hedge against mortality.

  At twilight I lit a small fire and ate the ham sandwich, dead smoked pig and damned good at that. Ralph would have gone swimming a dozen times by now for no reason other than he liked to do so. Rather than toting dog food when backpacking we shared our meals. It was fair exchange for my using his vastly superior scenting abilities. As the fire burned down to coals I curled close to it adding a little grass as a mosquito smudge. My head was as light as my beloved birds.

  Naomi appeared about seven A.M. with a thermos of coffee and some cheese biscuits. She said she couldn’t stay long because Dalva’s uncle Paul and her sister Ruth were being picked up in Denver by a neighbor’s small plane and she wanted to get to the grass strip right after they buzzed the house. I said I’d walk over the back way whenever she wished, and she said late morning was soon enough. She looked at me quizzically and then said, “Are you sure you’re going to show up?” For want of anything to say I gave her a hug and watched her walk away, raising her binoculars for a moment at a larkspur I’d heard singing.

  I sat back down for another three hours like the evening before, thinking it might be good training for my mind in addition to being a fine thing to do. My lost master map would have appalled any sedentary souls. For a change one part of my mind didn’t have much to say to another except when it started talking about food. My guts were fluttering when I stood up and I had to remind myself I wasn’t going to my execution. And when I started the hour-long walk I had to put my feet down hard in order to feel the ground. It was so disconcerting I changed courses and walked back up the mile-long slope to Naomi’s to get my pick-up. In my remnant of snake brain there was the thought that I didn’t want to be there without a means of escape.

  No one was at Naomi’s so I guessed I better head for the picnic. I couldn’t feel the gas or clutch pedal any better than the ground. I was relieved that after I went up the long drive and into the yard Naomi came out of the house to greet me. She introduced me to Dalva’s uncle Paul, a tall, slender man in his sixties, and then to his ward, a young Mexican boy who wanted to ride a horse. The old hired hand Lundquist was carrying a saddle out of the barn and I took it from him and put it on the horse, who was nervous. I took the reins and calmed the horse, whispering nonsense and letting it smell my breath. Lundquist adjusted the stirrups and then Naomi tapped me on the shoulder. I turned and there was my actual mother looking quite frightened.

  “Dalva, this is your son,” Naomi said.

  “I know it,” she said, and we walked slowly out toward the driveway and down it for a quarter of a mile until she stopped and looked at the ground. “This is where I first met your father.”

  “Looks like a better place than most,” I said, staring off at the immense pasture to the south. She seemed a little wobbly so I took her arm.

  “Why didn’t you say something before?” she said looking away. It was startling to perceive that some of her features resembled my own.

  “You’ve just been home a month, and I wasn’t sure you wanted to know me. Naomi figured it out a week or so ago when we were working. I tracked you down this spring. A few days ago I called my mother, the other one, and she said you two had met. So I figured it was okay.” I hadn’t breathed during this little speech and felt dizzy. We hugged each other stiffly and I added, “Naomi said my father was quite the young man but not necessarily the kind you wanted in your living room.”

  “She was trying to look out for me but I guess it didn’t work,” she said. Now we were both smiling and we walked slowly back to the house and up the back stairs to her room which had a fireplace. On the mantel there was a photo of my father on a buckskin, darker than myself but the resemblance was so clear my breath was short. She said that she hadn’t seen him again after she became pregnant until the day he died when he’d insisted that she come to Florida and marry him so she could get his armed service benefits. She said he shot himself but he was as much as already dead from war wounds and the battering of Vietnam. I was unstable on my feet and she ran downstairs, returning with a bottle of brandy. We toasted each other several times straight from the bottle. I said she didn’t look old enough to be my mother and she said, “Oh my God I was only a kid when I had you.” I hugged her while she cried for a minute, and then we heard music and went to the window. It was old Lundquist and his not very expert miniature violin wandering around gravestones in the lilac grove. Naomi looked up at us and we waved and she covered her face. What was left of her whole family was down there around the picnic table. I couldn’t say it was my family but it was a start when we went down to join them.

  III

  NAOMI

  Oct., 1986

  I suppose that the most intimidating thing about teaching at a remote country school is that you are actually teaching those of ages five through twelve how to look at and understand the world. After 1953 the young people of high school age traveled the forty miles to the county seat with some of them boarding in town, but were only nominally out of my reach because they often visited. On cold clear winter mornings when it was still dark we’d assemble in the school yard to look at the stars through my birding binoculars, a fine pair of Bausch & Lombs John Wesley brought me home from World War II. The average number of students during nearly forty years was fifteen and we’d stand there in the snow-crusted yard passing the binoculars and looking at the constellations while a half dozen horses tethered at the rail would steam from their rides to school and we’d hear the steady munch of hay and distant crow calls in the winter dawn. I remember that a rather limited farm boy named Rex would bellow out, “Jesus H. Christ, what’s going on up there?” and quickly pass the binoculars. I didn’t chide him for swearing because he was so shy over his lack of intelligence that he’d rarely say anything. After passing the binoculars and vigorously shaking his head Rex would go over to his tethered horse, Dolly, lean against her for comfort, and stare at us until his world regained its shape. His nickname was “Badger” because he was a student of the ground, always looking downward and trying to catch things, including rattlesnakes. The nickname came from when he was still very young and tried to dig up a badger he’d seen disappear into its hole, losing his small dog when it tried to protect him from the cornered beast. Now thirty years of age his livelihood is putting up fences, hand digging the postholes in difficult terrain, the kind of work all others wish to avoid.

  Of course by the mid-sixties nearly everyone had a television and for better or worse some of my duties were lightened, but from 1945 until that date I was the student’s main access to the world, along with the parents, whose solitary concern appeared to be discipline. For instance, everyone cuffed Rex, his schoolmates, his parents, his sister the most ardent punisher as if to differentiate herself in the eyes of others from her slow-witted brother. Now he stops by once a month on a Saturday for a short visit but won’t come into the house. He brings me samples of grasses, weeds, wildflowers, and descriptions of birds but he rarely remembers their true names. His visits delight me even though in winter I have to bundle up on the cold porch. I’ve never stopped wondering ab
out the particulars of the world he thinks he lives in. Rex is confident that the sun sets on Edson Gale’s ranch some seventy miles west of here, and the westward perimeter of his world. Typically, it is only Lundquist who speaks to him with enthusiasm. All others are put off by his shaggy wind-burned appearance, his old dirty clothes and bad teeth, his speech which is barely more than a mutter and inept at consonants.

  Which brings me to the sudden appearance of my grandson, Nelse, this summer. The mind is a curious thing indeed and since they were the same age I had always imagined my unseen, unknown grandson in conjunction with the very real Rex. Any relation between the two is, of course, a mere incident of brain chemistry. For instance I first read Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us out in the yard near my bed of dianthus when they were flowering, thus this noble woman is fixed in my brain with the flower. But Nelse had pulled on me for thirty years, and five years after his birth, and adoption by the couple in Omaha, I would look at the two boys who were my kindergartners that year and wonder how Dalva’s son was doing in his distant kindergarten. Of the two little boys I was teaching one was a bright, towheaded Norwegian and the other was Rex who mostly offered the problem of peeing on the cloakroom floor. Knowing that Duane was the father of my grandson I certainly had to discount the well-mannered miniature Norwegian and settle on Rex as a focus point.

  How many thousands of times have I thought I should have raised Dalva’s son and then halfheartedly blamed my father-in-law who’d insisted it was out of the question. My dead husband was the only one on earth who could remotely stand up to this man who acted the gentleman but whose eccentricities were always bursting through the seams, often not pleasantly. But then my husband had his own obsessions, perhaps as strong as his father’s, and always acted rather than reacted, a tendency passed on to Dalva.

  Which brings me back to Nelse, who seems to be cut from the same cloth, as we used to often say before people stopped making their own clothes. When he appeared that early summer morning in a peculiar green pick-up with lightning bolts on the door panels I had, of course, no idea who it would be other than a seasonal employee of the Department of the Interior and that seemed odd as we had done a bird survey only a few years ago. He had barely taken a step out of the pick-up before I recognized him to be the son of Dalva and her misbegotten lover. What else could a mother think when her fifteen-year-old becomes pregnant? His immediate mannerisms were almost too male. There is such a thing, God knows. When he came toward me from the truck I actually prayed I’d like him as the opposite was possible. Shyness and arrogance can both be close to narcissism and he seemed to possess both, though I very soon recognized that like a few of my students over the years Nelse, rather than being arrogant, had simply made up his mind about too many things when he was too young. His speech was abrupt as if he had held onto what he was going to say moments too long, paused to reconsider his surroundings, then let go. When we first sat on the porch there were the briefest of sidelong glances while he was evidently deciding that I didn’t know who he was. I had trouble keeping my composure because after a few minutes I could tell I would like him in part because of his resemblance to my daughter, and in part because of his immediately obvious interest in the natural world.

  While I cooked him breakfast I enjoyed his discomfort sitting out there in the dining room trying to understand all of the resonances of where he was. Why didn’t he simply introduce himself as he was? But then I quickly decided there might be some modesty involved in the idea that given the circumstances of the past he might not be welcome, and if not quite that, perhaps I myself was on probation. There was also the eerie sense that when Duane had appeared so long ago he already looked familiar which was impossible at the time but which I later discovered had a basis in truth. I really didn’t want Duane around because given Dalva’s volatile nature he was simply the sort of young man she would succumb to, as perhaps I would have so many years before that.

  When I served him breakfast I teased Nelse with the identity of the three portraits at the end of the dining room, wishing I could add that he would make a not awkward fourth to the male part of the family line. It was then he made mention of his decade of camping out and that offered a crack in the linoleum revealing the dark pitchy nature of what was beneath the pleasant surface. First of all, why in God’s name would anyone put themselves through that optimum level of discomfort? Of course he didn’t see it that way, but then my student Rex had no idea how strange he was either. What could such a number mean? Four hundred and three camping spots? I said, “Four hundred and three?” and he nodded, then we both allowed ourselves a smile at the tentative silliness of numbers. “I prefer stars to ceilings,” he said.

  I studied him unobtrusively while he ate, my eyes flickering down at some topographical maps I had laid out, when he glanced my way. He had Duane’s eyes but his mother’s cheekbones and chin, Duane’s thickish dark hair but Dalva’s rather delicate mouth. His forearms were striated with muscle in a way that belied his upbringing. I certainly couldn’t pry as it would have been improper and would imply that I knew his background.

  So we had a fine day and the following morning together. He was only fair to middling at birds but that appeared to be an indication of his turmoil. At one point he walked directly into a small cottonwood down by the spring but seemed not to notice the collision. He had little gift for small talk and admitted he wasn’t partial to the radio, television or newspapers. Collectively they didn’t reveal the world he wished to understand. His deepest injury seemed to be his loss by theft of this pick-up in Arizona which contained his journals, small library and, most important, his dog.

  When he left I felt tremulous, fearful that he wouldn’t come back. I did my best to conceal this from Dalva who had returned and was likely preoccupied with settling in and the almost daily problems of her houseguest, Michael, who was thoroughly obnoxious but somehow still charming. Way back when she was at the University of Minnesota she had brought home an equally brilliant oaf. I suppose there are women who find intelligence erotic. Not many certainly, but some. That was one of the qualities that Ruth found appealing in Ted, his homosexuality notwithstanding. I liked him enormously but the whole thing was quite damaging to my daughter Ruth, also to my other grandson, Bradley, who, it seems, has permanently withdrawn from all of us except Paul who finds him interesting but unpleasant. Bradley is involved in the new world of computers in Connecticut. Paul loaned him some ungodly sum to start a company despite the fact that Bradley’s father, Ted, has done very well in the entertainment business. Ruth told me that this hurt Ted’s feelings but then Paul explained by letter that he had already forgiven the debt in favor of Bradley giving up any eventual claim on the property here. I asked Paul why he would do such a thing as his visits here are rare. He said it was only his bachelor sentimentality about where he grew up and if anyone ever ruined the property it would be that “money-grubbing little bastard Bradley.” This statement is very unlike Paul who is grave and kind while his brother, my husband, was impulsive and temperamental like their father. I liked their mother though all she really did was drink too much and read. She moved back to Omaha when the boys were in their teens and I never had the chance to know her well.

  What did I ever wish but that my family, torn apart in various ways, would come back together in this place. Of course they did for our summer picnic and I now feel that Dalva might stay. There is no larger event in my life than the birth of my daughters except when Dalva finally met her son that hot afternoon. Ruth’s love of music makes this a poorer place now. How could two daughters be so unlike each other, as unlike as Paul and my husband, as unlike as I and my brother who though quite the success as a wheat farmer was seemingly born a brute and a bully. The head can spin thinking of this. If I look at the class pictures of all my years of teaching at the country school I can recall the nature of the voice of each student. None of them were actually alike. Not their voices and not their characters. Maybe that’s why we are start
led by good mimics? Of course their behavior was less unique. Boys with tough and laconic fathers tended to act tough and laconic, aping their father’s gestures and speech mannerisms. Certain of the very tight-lipped girls were either the first to eventually become pregnant and marry before finishing school or to leave, if possible, at sixteen when they were entitled to quit school for Denver, Rapid City, Grand Island, Omaha or Lincoln. Of course the tight and embittered faces revealed an unhappy home life, parents in disarray, or perhaps featuring an uncle or hired hand who didn’t wish to keep his hands to himself. I wish the latter weren’t so frequent as it is, or that it at least was less frequent in church-goers. There aren’t apparently so many clues to the way men are except the way men are. Explanations for truly bad behavior are always inept, pathetic. One little girl, barely ten, confided in me and after I told the parents a hired hand was beaten just short of death. I’m unsure of the ethics here. I do know that when our houseguest historian, Michael, seduced (or vice versa) a senior in high school and a waitress at Lena’s, he didn’t deserve the beating he got from the father, but then I have known both father and daughter from their infancy and the outcomes in this case were predictable. When Karen was only in the sixth grade she got a group of five boys in the thicket behind the school to take off their clothes by lifting her own skirt. She had them turn around, then grabbed their clothes, ran to the front of the school and threw the clothes in the horse trough. It wasn’t the sort of event that I would threaten to share with the parents, furthering the boys’ shame as they sat in wet clothes all afternoon. She was notoriously devious and by the time she was thirteen caused many fights among the athletic boys at the county seat, and among young cowboys at rodeo time. But then perhaps she is better fit for the world we live in than most. She has gone to California by way of Michael’s contacting Ted and it will take a shrewd man in that state to take any kind of advantage of her.