by Jim Harrison
My own family place was over southeast of Gordon, not all that far in Nebraska terms from where Mari Sandoz of Old Jules fame was raised. No white person ever looked more clearly at our extirpation of the Natives, particularly the Sioux. Pine Ridge and its infamous site of Wounded Knee was but a hundred miles north so that Sandoz wasn’t some distant scholar. She was very much my hero by the time I reached my teens and the very thought that a local young woman could become an admired citizen of the world thrilled me. Perhaps my heart is weaker now because I no longer can bear to look at some of her books, especially Crazy Horse and Cheyenne Autumn. The cruelty of what happened to our first citizens is too great in dimension. But it’s not just the books, it’s because I was born and raised with stories of Native tribulations that had become the darkest part of our own family history. My father had told me that his own father had left Sweden to escape government oppression, including the draft, only to arrive in northwest Nebraska well before the Wounded Knee Massacre. Such aspects of local history were more thought about than talked about but we were no more ignorant of them than German civilians during World War II were ignorant of the death camps in their vicinity. The answers to childhood questions were the harshest because the children have so few buffers to their feelings. My father was a mediocre farmer but had a good mind and was an amateur student of our history. Oddly to most, his own social trauma was that he had married a Norwegian girl to the disapproval of both families. This seems garishly stupid now but the young couple was as much as forced to move from their mutual roots in Loup County to Sheridan near Antelope Creek.
Nelse knows so much of Native history though I’m pleased his contact with our historian, Michael, was limited by Michael’s inability to speak and by the time his injured jaw was unwired he was quite ready to leave. Nelse’s temperament is such that I knew he’d admire Michael but the influence wouldn’t be positive at this time. (I just sent Michael a check as a “loan” for the benefit, supposedly, of his lovely daughter but I have my doubts.) Michael could shape all history into a continual reign of terror. I have never met a man less in touch with the “dailiness of life,” so relentlessly blind to his immediate surroundings. Nonetheless, it was easy to be carried away by his wit and learning. Even austere Paul indulged him for the few days Paul was around when Michael could resume his talking. There is certainly a wicked streak to most tertiary alcoholics I have known. They are so utterly self-referential that the world only exists inasmuch as it relates to them. Paul and Nelse are both a bit remote with alcohol, Paul certainly because of his father, and Nelse from what he had told me of his adoptive mother, though this wasn’t apparent when he brought her up for a short visit in September. When I mentioned this Nelse said she doubtless had some booze in her suitcase. He speaks of her as his biggest problem though he treats her with courtly affection. Besides, his obvious biggest problem is the idea of whether or not he wishes to settle down and marry J.M.. He has begun his yearlong phenology of an approximate rough-edged section of land containing the marsh and pond, and following the creek to the Niobrara. He has also started the planning with Lundquist for some sort of agricultural experiment the nature of which he hasn’t completely announced though it involved fencing seventy acres into seven different portions. He even asked the county agent out for advice and I was teased in the county seat while shopping that this had to be the first time in an even century that a Northridge has asked anyone for advice. They are rather jolly about not holding me accountable for my husband’s family. There is also the idea that a country school teacher is a passive heroine and though she may have a secret life that would make the God-fearing upchuck, she is beamed at wherever she goes.
Dalva’s problems seem to be half drowning her. If it weren’t for Nelse and her horses and puppy I’d be fearful. Her man friend, Sam, has a sullen edge about money that he can’t quite control. I didn’t tell her that better she know this now, as I doubt the problem can be overcome. J.M. has a bit of this too, but is convinced somehow it isn’t Nelse’s fault. Even more problematic and wearing is Dalva’s job which failed to get adequate government funding after the original announcement of an appropriation. The Department of Agriculture prefers glowing items, and the rising amount of farm bankruptcies in the southern area of the county is a dominant item only to the press and the suffering families. One fourth-generation farmer hanged himself in the barn he no longer owned right after the auction that dispersed his cattle and equipment. Dalva spent several days with the wife and adult children and a number of relatives right before a program conference in Lincoln where, she admitted, she shot off her mouth enough to be called a “communist sympathizer” by a state congressman which she didn’t accept gracefully. I certainly have doubts about her career as a civil servant. I suppose an effective psychiatric social worker must learn to blunt perceptions and feelings to survive. She has also been harried by a number of museum curators, no doubt because of Michael’s big mouth, about the propriety of keeping such valuable paintings in “an old wooden farmhouse.” She has refused any attempts by the curators to visit.
I have often wondered why her fascination with natural history is so slight as if my own skipped a generation and landed on Nelse, but then she has never been one for details. The happiest I have seen her recently was last weekend when she was helping Nelse and Lundquist put up fence. The fence master Rex had also been hired at my suggestion and Lundquist’s agreement. Dalva drove the tractor with the power auger and Lundquist mostly supervised. He’s in his eighties but not really weak as he is most frequently carrying his dog over his shoulder. I brought over a picnic on Saturday but Rex wouldn’t share the food. He lives in a shed on his mother’s small place and each morning she gives him a modest piece of meat from the freezer. In his ragged denim coat he carries a small iron frying pan and by lunch the meat is thawed enough and Rex builds a fire. This is clearly a delight for him and he is not averse to carving up the good remaining parts of road kills, from deer to woodchuck to the occasional rattler which he skins to sell as hatbands. He rides an old balloon-tire bike with a basket, plus saddlebags for his fencing tools. Nelse has offered to pick him up and take him home but this is out of the question, though it is a matter of seventeen miles each way. “I like to ride my bike” is all he’ll say. There is much grumbling among ranchers who employ him because each summer Rex’s mother takes a charter bus with several dozen other women out of Scottsbluff bound for Las Vegas and there is the offensive idea that the money Rex makes is poured into slot machines. The whole notion of an evil mother is hard on men’s sensibilities. Way back in third grade Rex was in obvious pain one morning but wouldn’t tell me anything so I asked his sister who smugly explained that their mother caught Rex “playing with himself” and beat his genitals with a coat hanger. We had no social worker at the time so I called the sheriff and there were no more beatings. The sheriff let me know that he told the woman if anything happened again he’d skin her like a deer. This is scarcely good law enforcement but it worked.
I’ve been having a long-distance quarrel with Paul. The only grace note is that we’re conducting it by letter, mostly because Paul thinks a multitude of problems are caused by trying to conduct serious matters over a telephone. His contention is that who among us can speak aloud their mind precisely enough, while the process of writing it down requires hard thinking. It began when he offended me in August one evening on the porch when he said it was hopeless for me to try to shelter Nelse. He said that it’s as if I’m trying to prevent Nelse from running screaming off into the sunset. Paul is obsessively taxonomical in all matters and prefers the human world without shadows though he knows otherwise. He has in his possession an old manuscript of his father’s which he calls a “false memoir” because as a son he saw it all quite differently. Paul views the memoir as “engaging” and thinks Nelse should be allowed to read it since in a blinding week he already read the notebooks of the first J. W. Northridge. I refused to read the manuscript myself but, of course, D
alva loved it since he was in so many respects her father and could do no wrong. She thinks my objections on the matter of incest are absurd because the meeting of her and Duane was unintentional. The fact that my own husband was possibly the father of both of them grieved me terribly when I discovered it. I suppose it was the overriding issue in why we finally decided to give Nelse up for adoption. It wasn’t my husband’s infidelity that hurt me the most but the final result of it, a horribly biblical event where the illegitimate son, now nearly an adult, comes out of the hills and unwittingly mates his half sister. This was sheer accident. But why should their own son know? Isn’t it enough that he was given away? Dalva, untypically, has said that it’s up to me. She is quite tired of talking it over and is ever so vaguely suspicious of my motives. I can’t convince her that it’s not my husband’s infidelity that bothers me. If a man goes off on a hunting trip of two weeks’ duration he is an easy mark for temptation. Despite a lifetime of church-going I can’t see that the human animal has evolved beyond being circumscribed by ordinary lust that is immediate and spontaneous. And a hunting camp would have few barriers. Certainly not the presence of a brother and a father, the latter being a renowned reprobate himself. So it’s not sexual squeamishness on my part. Paul further irritated me the other day in a letter by suggesting that I never had a son to mother and since they are rather more slow to learn than daughters I am taking advantage of the situation. I wasn’t sure what to make of this as there was a nagging feeling beneath my breastbone and I couldn’t quite locate the cause.
Dalva came over for Sunday morning breakfast and we made potato pancakes like we did long ago. She said Nelse and Rex were working on the fence despite Lundquist’s lecture against working on Sunday. It was very warm for October and after breakfast we sat on the porch swing drinking too much coffee while she had a laughing fit over the possibility of losing her job after only two months. The state congressman she insulted is demanding she be fired and has managed to get ahold of some unfortunate comments from her work record in Santa Monica. Her superior in Lincoln has called to suggest that the best she can do at the moment is to offer a written apology and Dalva said that that would be like apologizing to a cow flop for the unfortunate experience of stepping on it. Evidently she had been asked pointedly by the state congressman why she thought the government should step in and help save a farm when the farmer couldn’t save it himself? She admits she was being a little flippant when she replied that all sections of the economy tend “to feed from the public trough,” including the congressman’s business in oil and gas leases. The expression was a very old one she got from her grandfather who was neither left nor right politically but merely crushed all forms of opposition to his land interests.
We went for a walk back to the pond and when we stopped to look at a patch of wild, dried-up globemallow Dalva quite suddenly said that Paul was correct, that I feared that if Nelse knew everything he might run for it. She thought that unlikely and besides his natural curiosity would finally pin down the truth. The little pang beneath my breastbone began to jiggle and I sat down to draw my breath remembering when my own father had left us though only for a scant month. My mother could become quite depressed but aggressively so, and usually she’d become quarrelsome. My oldest brother, Gus, about fourteen at the time was enough of a bully to ignore this, but Erik who was twelve would go out and sleep in the barn. I was ten or so and I remember clearly my father yelling out in the hall that if she wouldn’t make love to him he would go to North Dakota. And he did for a month. I think we were partly frightened because it was mid-March and by late April my father would have to begin getting the fields ready or there would be no crops and we’d lose the farm. Of course he returned in plenty of time but this mental vision of a man running away stuck with me and was further driven home when I was eighteen and Erik left us forever. There was still more than a vestige of primogeniture in our area and Erik could see clearly that Gus would inherit the farm and by the time he was in his teens he had developed an abiding bitterness over the matter. It seemed unfair to me at the time and still does, an ancient unjust system that kept the farms intact but ruined so many sons who weren’t first in line. So many became hapless wanderers, alcoholics, angry hired hands. The last we heard from Erik was in the early fifties and when I later traced him to Eugene, Oregon, his response was too cold to endure.
My reverie was so deep that my head began to droop. Dalva sang out a parody of a wretched country song about it being hard to be a woman and we both laughed, then continued down the hill to the pond. It was so warm for October there were still insects in the air and the remnant birds that should have headed south by now, a solitary flycatcher that perhaps was brain damaged, and a red-winged blackbird that couldn’t fly very well, its left wing a bit stiff. I didn’t want to think of the coming end to its story.
“You know Nelse is going to Arizona to check on his dog, then down to see Paul on the border. You think if he reads Grandpa’s manuscript he might not come back. Simple as that. I waited half my life for Duane to come back though my mind told me it was out of the question. Before that when you and Dad took trips I was always looking out the window, even at night thinking the stars on the horizon might be distant car lights. Even when Dad died in the war I thought he might come back with the smell of the airplane on his clothes, the mixture of oil and gasoline and sweat. I’m sure this kind of longing in the human race started back before we had a language.”
She was slightly embarrassed by her speech and tried to change the subject, then faltered. “What the hell will I do if I lose my job? I have no idea. Sit by the window and wait for no one to come back. You should know I sent Michael a check to bail him out of a drunk-driving charge. Now he has to get an apartment nearer the university because he isn’t allowed to drive for six months which is a real public service. But you calm down. If Nelse doesn’t come back I’ll track him to wherever he is. And you can give him more advice. He said your advice was the only good advice he had gotten in this life. That’s quite a compliment. With me he said he could see where he got some of his peculiarities.”
It was my turn to be embarrassed and I suggested a long walk which she declined. She intended to take a nap right there on the sandbank of the pond. I needed to exhaust myself now that my fluttering sense had subsided. The whole subject of Nelse leaving had been clarified and I inwardly cringed at the idea of approaching it again so I set off for the northwest to a far corner of the property I visited less than once a year because it is well beyond the last of the windbreaks and shelterbelts and the birding is poor except for the land immediately adjacent to the Niobrara. The terrain is rolling and the grasses indigenous because it has never been tilled. When we were first married I’d often go there with my husband when he was bird hunting. There was a nearby prairie chicken lek, which is what they call the immediate area where those splendid birds do their spring mating dances, the males strutting in heraldic display. There are also many sharp-tailed grouse in the area and when we were first married my husband had a senseless old English setter named Bob whom you couldn’t stop hunting until he dropped with exhaustion, and then my husband would carry him over to a slough off the Niobrara where he’d revive. I’d pack us a picnic and after lunch we’d sometimes make love, quite glorious in these surroundings. The spring that the dog died, at the advanced age of thirteen for setters, he’d run off to this area and point the prairie chickens strutting on their lek from a discreet distance, never moving in his distant point. The last time it was raining and Bob had enlarged a badger hole which he had partly backed into and when we found him he appeared to be pointing, rigid and drooling from this vantage point. The birds at the lek, perhaps a hundred yards away, appeared undisturbed. Bob’s hips had gone out and my husband had to carry him the nearly three miles home which took some time as the dog weighed a good eighty pounds and was ungainly to carry. I walked behind them with poor Bob regarding me mournfully from his position slung over my husband’s shoulder.<
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I looked at Dalva from the far side of the pond and she already seemed to be dozing. I set out at a good pace wanting to return by midafternoon to make a good dinner for her and Nelse. I was so preoccupied that I’d sincerely forgotten to go to church today, the only time I’ve missed this year except for an early March ice storm. I was going to ask Dalva to go but then she’s only been once since coming home, not liking our new minister transferred here by the Luther synod. Like me he’s at the end of the road before retirement though I’m giving school my heart rather than droning through the motions like this poor nearly dead soul.
On the far side of the marsh there was a buck snort, the deer bursting from willows. How do they make this harsh nasal wheeze? Remnant blackbirds were flocking like airborne minnows. Good-bye. After this year I’d obey Paul and go places, mostly to see birds, like Mexico and Central America. My Amazon boat ride was a bit of a flop as I couldn’t walk. The same reason the Everglades fell short for me. A friend says that Costa Rica is the place for birds. When Lena, Marjorie and I went to Brazil we had two days in Rio before we flew north and we laughed relentlessly, feeling so lumpish and dowdy sitting on a bench before the grand beach at Ipanema. Thousands of thonged girls, a sea of bare bottoms, and we sitting there in our flowered Nebraska summer dresses. A poor boy tried to grab Marjorie’s purse but she had come prepared with the strongest strap and she jerked him off his feet on the sidewalk. She’s certainly stronger than most men. The best trip ever was between World War II and Korea, 1948 I think, when I went to England with my husband though old J.W. followed us with overseas telegrams concerning land sales that had to be attended to at the time. We took the train up to Hereford and while he visited the Hereford Registry to talk about cattle breeding I went to this splendid cathedral. Back in London it became hot and he bought me a sarong at which I laughed knowing he was keen on the actress Dorothy Lamour. I wore it in our room anyway. He also liked Claudette Colbert. I liked Robert Ryan because he reminded me of my husband. Paul too. I loved England because it further brought to life all the stories I read to my students from the Book House, from nursery rhymes to “Tom Thumb” to “Una and the Red Cross Knight.” Often students love most the stories furthest from their own background.