by Jim Harrison
After all of these years of keeping track of my thoughts I’ve begun to doubt my ability to stand outside my life and give it a fair look. Some parts of the experience are similar to a tongue probing a sore tooth. You momentarily add to the pain, then back away, depending on your “mood” which in itself is suspicious. Say you are on a long Sunday walk early on a May morning and you see an uncommon bird in a thicket, then move up and over the knoll that overlooks the marsh and creek. You, of course, remember camping there with your husband, now dead, and you first pitched your tent near the creek but the mosquitoes were thick so you moved the tent up to the knoll. It is a wonderful memory in this habitat despite his death soon after. You made love at sunset and sunrise, a perfect balance. But such a memory can be unbearable on a Saturday morning in January when the electricity is off because of a blizzard, and you start the woodstove and the light is so dim at midmorning you start two kerosene lamps for cheer that doesn’t arrive. Out the kitchen window the bird feeder is empty of birds, and the millions of individual flakes of snow are but particles of the dark and brutal ghost of the past. Your husband’s chair is empty as it has been for over thirty years, but emptier yet than it has ever been. Your throat fills with tears. Your mood makes you remember quarrels rather than splendors, a scorched pot roast rather than a well-cooked feast, the vivid tremors you felt when he called from Bassett to say he’d wrecked the plane in an alfalfa field in a thunderstorm, admitting he shouldn’t have been flying. You didn’t weep because your little daughters were having breakfast. Or more closely, what does it mean when you remember in a good mood Dalva at five helping her father pluck pheasants and sharp-tailed grouse out by the barn and when you brought him a cold bottle of beer she seemed so preoccupied, then suddenly bit down on the plucked breast of a bird and solemnly stared at her teeth prints? You laughed at the time and often in memory, but at other more melancholy moments her act seemed a little appalling. She simply had to try everything in life and biting the raw bird was only the smallest of omens. Though it was a male country song she seemed to personify the lyrics of, “Don’t Fence Me In.”
Last winter a rather new, re-occurring mood stuck during another weekend blizzard. All the first night the house was buffeted and creaked. In the morning the windows of the ground floor were covered because the snow had started as wet before the wind turned to the northwest and became much colder. There was the unpleasant sensation of living within a spacious cocoon. After having coffee and reading the Bible (King James Version) I bundled up to go out to the garage to feed my crow whom I call merely Crow because I rather like the name, just as my first childhood cowdog was named Dog. Outside I noted the birds huddled in the thicket of barberry, honeysuckle and Russian olive I have planted for that purpose. The wind drove the snow so it was what we call a “whiteout” and the garage, only a hundred feet from the back door of the pumpshed, was barely visible. Back home on such a day we’d unravel a ball of binder twine when we fed the stock, having heard dire stories of frozen unfortunates, mythical or not.
In the garage Crow wasn’t in his winter quarters Lundquist had made of potato crates with a perch and one crate wrapped in my old terry-cloth robe so Crow could retreat into darkness. The door of the cage was always open so he could go and come as he liked, and was positioned on a slick metal pole so no stray cat could reach him. I was somewhat snow-blind and put my handful of pork tidbits into the cage expecting him to gently pick at them. He wasn’t there and I squinted up at the rafters but then he snapped a windshield wiper on my car, which he liked to do, squawked, fluttered and hopped to my shoulder where he preened against my hair and tugged at my stocking cap, a sixty-year-old stocking cap my mother had knitted. I asked him, as always during bad weather, if he wished to come into the house. He said no, and my eyes had adjusted enough to see why. He had somehow managed to catch a mouse and had tucked it against the windshield wiper and there was a small smear of blood on the window. He crowed mightily as if proud, a bit hard on my contiguous ear. Then we turned to the open garage door and stared outside at what was nothing more than a white sheet of snow stretched across the door. The mood was a delicious and particular sense of nothing as if my thinking mind had closed down. I focused on the perfect whiteness out the door feeling the animal warmth within my clothes, the crow against my ear, the wind moving the garage ever so slightly, and I shuddered from this wonderful nothing.
I was in this mood early the morning Nelse arrived again, after calling the night before about another likely invented assignment to check nesting raptors. I stood there after serving him breakfast, watching him study a sheaf of topographical maps, and thinking he’d never make a spy or businessman as he was no more deceptive than a rooster. Way back in the second grade one of my classmates, a diminutive Lakota girl, did so accurate a rooster imitation that even the dumbest boys were embarrassed. Nelse was so enthused over his breakfast and topo maps that he had momentarily forgotten his mission whatever he might think it was.
But a little while before when I still was sitting out on the porch swing waiting for him to arrive I was struck again by the splendid mood of nothing. Of course I was delighted that he was returning, to the point that my body felt hollow, but then I let my anticipation and worries go. I could hear both meadowlarks and the gentler-sounding longspurs. Crows’ wings were open for a morning sunbath, perched nobly on a fence post. Far off I could hear my neighbor Athell Dodson cultivating corn with one of his antique collection of tractors he kept in repair with simpleminded intensity. I stared up at the sky until mental pictures of my life disappeared and there was nothing left but sky. I did not talk to my departed husband as I often do in the morning except to say, “Your grandson is coming again.” I seem to have disappeared for a while before I heard Nelse’s truck coming from the wrong direction, from what we call the “old place” where Dalva now lives. She belongs there and I never quite did, mostly because of the personality of my father-in-law. It was not simply because he was a somewhat awesome and generally furious man but because I couldn’t bridge the gap that any of a dozen paintings in the house were worth more than what my own hard-pressed father could make in a dozen years. Old J.W. saw the world only from his own locus. I admit I was a little surprised to see how the death of his namesake, my husband John Wesley, so utterly crushed him. I was quite nervous about the way he so readily adapted to being a second father for Dalva, much less so for Ruth, but the influence struck me as measured and positive. I’ve taught enough young girls without fathers to know that it can present a long sequence of problems. It was odd indeed when in his last year he returned to his early obsession of art and became a gentle, if daffy, old man with no trace left of the overbearing scoundrel. The joke in town was that he used to act as if he owned all the women in Nebraska, and anything over the state line couldn’t be vouched for. Paul, with typical wisdom, said that the danger of art when the calling is obsessive and becomes ingrained is that there is no way to turn your back on it.
Nelse was nearly finished with his breakfast when I asked, “Don’t you have something to say to me?” and he stood up so abruptly that he tipped his chair over. When he glanced at me after righting his chair he looked just over my head, mute and stricken, grabbed his topos and my satchel and rushed from the house. I quickly rinsed the breakfast dishes and joined him, getting in his truck as if nothing out of the ordinary had taken place. He then peered in the driver’s-side window and said, “How did you know?” My answer was along the line of “How could I not know?”
Why didn’t I marry my husband’s brother, Paul? It didn’t seem the right thing to do though I certainly know it was almost obligatory in certain Native tribes. This question is always the most poignant in September and October when so many species of birds group up and fly south. How I miss them. But when I mentioned this to Paul a scant year after John Wesley’s death in Korea he said that was why he favored his retreat near the Mexican border of Arizona. I suppose I very nearly loved him but not quite enough. I warn
ed Nelse this summer over his beloved J.M. that such passion for most of us occurs only once in this life and seems quite unlikely if there is a next. Neither Dalva nor Ruth know of the dozen or so meetings with Paul over the years. Both had cajoled me in their late teens toward my getting remarried but I only said the talent pool in this part of Nebraska was rather shallow.
It was a full half hour down the road before Nelse could gather himself enough to ask questions but I refused most of them saying that it was proper to take them up with his actual mother. The hardest, of course, was, “Why did you give me away” which I had to address as it certainly wasn’t Dalva who gave her son away. I fibbed a bit. Perhaps “lied” is a better word. My father-in-law tore my mind to pieces over this and I did the same to him. We took both sides of the question and never met in any middle, reversing our previous positions on alternate days. After the decision to give the infant away we did not so much as glimpse each other for a couple of months despite our proximity. We all seem to have a touching conviction that for every problem there is a solution. There wasn’t and isn’t. Our two choices were both clearly wrong.
It was not until the next morning over near Valentine that I began to wonder about genetics, and then for only an hour until I abruptly gave up. There is so much in educational doctrine that says a child is in most respects a “tabula rasa” but then, after thought, I doubt if anyone believes it. Despite the surface good manners of the way he was raised there seemed to be a large quantity of his birth parents within Nelse, an “all-or-nothing” attitude toward life that I doubted came from his adoptive parents. I certainly had suspicions that such a quality could be transferred genetically but he nearly convinced me otherwise. I filed this mentally under things we are not meant to know or understand though in the future they might devise some means to accurately penetrate such a biological idea. Nelse seemed to have a good share of the acuity of Paul’s and Dalva’s intelligence but tempered by his father’s feral impulsiveness. Up near the Ainsworth Canal which is adjacent to the McKelvie National Forest, Nelse vaulted a fence rather than climbing it or crawling under. I know that Duane always did so, landing once rather too close to a rattler. The rattlesnake is beside the point but the vaulting is an almost violent gesture. He admitted that he had a nagging head injury left over from high school football which he recently re-injured on the door jamb of his truck. I told him that all the fauna he so admires have a measure of caution for survival. He nodded gravely in agreement but later in the McKelvie he climbed a pine tree for the view, a branch broke and he slid a dozen feet downward tearing his shirt and bruising his midriff. Of course his physical appearance could have been deceiving me, and I could not help falling back on breeds of dogs, horses and cattle. For instance, as you grow older you tend to slowly recognize that you are less unique than you thought you were earlier in life. Perhaps my mind and heart, as full of thanks as they were for his arrival, were trying to make Nelse into truly our own. And if he were so that would relieve me of the last portion of guilt over giving him up as a baby.
I will reach sixty-five in December. There are somewhat comic realizations in the aging process that you thought you understood previously but it was very much a surface understanding. Primary among these is that it all happens just once. Back at our pond I watch the cottonwood leaves begin to descend after the first frost, and within a month the trees are shorn, and on the bottom of the pond when the light is correct you can see the huge aureole of yellow leaves pasted to the muddy bottom from the shoreline to the depths. I see the features of my daughters change in ways that I do not notice in my own because the daily view of my own, pleasant enough, involves changes too gradual to notice. But often my daughters would only visit once or twice a year making the maturation process immediately apparent. You could always immediately read Dalva’s face but Ruth’s was so restrained it took study. Dalva never withheld herself from men she was interested in while Ruth spent months pondering the issue before opening her heart a bit. She even did so in high school and college well before her unfortunate marriage.
Reading your own face is, of course, a different matter. It often becomes so tiresome you don’t really see it. The idea that you are passing this way only once is well beyond mirrors to tell a significant part of the story. A long time ago when Dalva was at the University of Minnesota she sent me a pair of snowshoes at the onset of what appeared would be a hard winter. I set out alone on these contraptions which take some getting used to but after a while enjoyed the freedom of entering swamps and thickets that are barred to you in the winter if you are using cross-country skis. I had turned for home at midday on a long Saturday walk, crossing the snow-covered frozen pond which is fed by a dozen springs and from which the creek that runs north toward the Niobrara emerges. Anyway, I slowly and helplessly broke through the ice and floundered there quite wildly. I kept thinking of a girlhood experience when I watched a young deer struggling desperately, caught at its midriff by the high fence my father had built to protect a stack of hay. The snowshoes pressed down large sheets of thin ice so I sank quite slowly as I listened to the shrieks and chirrups I was making, my heart pumping spasmodically with fear. A crow flew over with only the briefest downward glance. I had verged on accepting my fate when the water was breast high and my snow-shoes touched bottom. I fairly shimmered there despite the cold blustery air that was driving the snow around me like ground mist. I realized quite quickly that I was on the deepest edge of a sandbar familiar from swimming and wallowed toward the near shore, half scrambling, then crawling where the ice was considerably thicker near the bank. It had been barely more than ten degrees when I left the house so that my wet clothing froze and crunched as I walked and gave me some relief from the wind.
My clearest memory of it after I reached the house was that the experience had been beyond prayer. Naturally I was thankful on the long walk back, a mile or so, but during the event itself I was simply another desperate animal facing very possible death. The deer stretched over my father’s haystack fence had also twisted itself free, not helped at all by my girlish tears. When I shed my clothes before the stove I spoke to my absent husband, mostly saying, “Your widow nearly joined you,” and he answered, “You only have to do that once.” I agreed and said no more though his words hit me deeply because they covered both the bad and good of the idea of “only once.” This strikes me the hardest at the times of the solstices, by which I mark my years. In the winter I’m pleased when the days get lighter but in spring and summer I often dread the passage of moments with the clearly banal thought that this summer will not re-occur except in intermittent memories.
When I think, as I often do, how my life before my marriage was so totally swept away by my marriage I now also think of Nelse. One early September dawn while we were birding I asked him if he had any regrets about showing up and meeting us all, and how that so utterly changed the routine of his life. He looked back in the direction of my house a couple of miles away, and then in the direction of the old place where Dalva lived, as if to truly locate himself, then he said he couldn’t have done otherwise. There was a specific rawness to the way he looked and spoke. J.M. had left for Lincoln the morning before and I had heard them quarreling in the distance when they walked down the country road just before dark. It was apparent that evening how unnerved he was by the radical change in his life and how upset he had been when Dalva had completely sided with J.M. over how much time he would spend in Lincoln. He was bargaining for three days a week in Lincoln and four up here and J.M. insisted on the reverse. He had stood up from the supper table waving a chicken drumstick and said, “Goddammit” very loudly. This somehow shocked and amused me. I had only taken “the Lord’s name in vain,” as we called it, once in my life when I had driven over to Bassett to pick up John Wesley after he had wrecked his plane. It was early evening and he was standing there leaning against a fence with several farmers passing a bottle of whiskey. I fairly howled, “Goddammit” and the men turned from me and looked a
t the crumpled plane. Men like to give foolhardy things a patina of rationality. John Wesley simply loved airplanes though he didn’t care for airports, thinking they somehow diminished the glory of what he called his “sport.” Of course on our road, his landing strip, there were many days no cars passed at all except the mailman. I am mindful of the fact that Dalva yelled out when she was twelve that if it were up to me nothing would have been invented. In defense I said I approved of books and binoculars and antibiotics but then began to run out of steam.
Nelse’s “goddammit” resounded with the ache of a male trapped by females. The dinner table was a cage we had built for him God knows why. We even tried to make him eat too much. Dalva brought over some nice wine from the old place, where Nelse insisted on staying in the bunkhouse like his father. He admits to being an occasional claustrophobe and he and Lundquist tore out a big section, making a screen out of a wall. Presumably glass will be installed later, I thought, but they built swinging doors like a barn door for when he is gone. Almost idiotically he said that on cold nights he likes the cold, and on warm nights he likes the warmth. Dalva thinks that part of his unrest came about last weekend when she showed him the Native artifacts in her sub-basement and asked him to help redistribute them to their proper place. He said there was no longer a truly proper place but he’d think it over, then he stayed down there an entire night which upset her. I think she should make the house her own and that shouldn’t include caring for the family ghosts.