by Jim Harrison
I was dawdling by the time I reached the side of the hillock above the lek. The dog’s hole which had been overgrown was now recently excavated by a coyote so I moved upward to avoid the specific odor coyotes manage. I began to think about the information advanced cognitive ethologists are suggesting, to the effect that each bird has a quite separate personality. I also remembered an essay Dalva had sent in the early spring by some admittedly goofy poet she cared for that said that reality is an accretion of the perceptions of all creatures, not just us. The idea made my poor brain creak in expansion like a barn roof as the morning sun heats up. I think some mystic said that we see God with the same eye he sees us with. Despite our age I made love with Paul this summer. We thought, Why not? I curled up there and went to sleep dreaming of the Airedales that used to come over from J.W.’s place to visit us and thoroughly ignored me in favor of their playmate Dalva. She rode her horses too fast.
Unfortunately, I slept until after four, waking a little chilled and astounded. It must have been accumulative exhaustion and I didn’t make it back to the pond until after five though I walked as fast as possible. Nelse met me there, trotting down the hill with a worried face. Dalva had sent him to look for me. I liked the way his face lighted up when he saw me.
Back at the house I had my first martini since our San Francisco trip in late spring, and we cooked the beef roast too fast because we were hungry. It was too rare with the potatoes, onions and carrots barely done. It was the best bad meal I could remember. The rawish meat was a contrast to Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony on the old stereo. After dinner I got out the medicine kit and dressed a bad blister on Nelse’s hand, a result of his fence making. Dalva watched us gravely and said, “Should I be doing that?” but then laughed. She looks more like his older sister than mother.
Nov. 29, 1986
He did come back. A few weeks ago, that is. The fact that I expected him to did not diminish the pleasure of when his truck pulled into the yard. He didn’t bring back his dog, Ralph, which surprised me. He said only that Ralph had nearly doubled in weight and seemed quite happy with the old couple. It was a dog’s version of retirement, with the fillip that if the couple became too infirm they’d ship him by air to Nelse.
It was evening when he arrived and he had stopped at Dalva’s but there was a strange car in the yard and he hadn’t wanted to interrupt if there was a boyfriend visiting. I said it was Lena’s car which he should have recognized, and Dalva’s visitor was her girlhood friend Charlene who was Lena’s daughter home from New York. Nelse is putting off the beginning of his phenology study until April Fools’ Day when the slow and niggling spring will at least have offered an indication of it arrival. Meanwhile, he will be busy disposing of the Native artifacts and is irked that the noteworthy authority in the state is a professor he offended while in college. Of course the biggest hurdle which even seemed to narrow my peripheral vision that evening by the stress it caused was whether or not he had read the dreaded memoir.
“Did you think it would scare me away?” he teased.
“I didn’t know. Perhaps it would some people.”
“It’s only a bit of linebreeding.” And then he sensed something in my face. “I’m sure you felt very bad about it but it’s thirty years ago. Besides Paul said there was an outside chance it was him. Why don’t you hold onto that possibility?”
“Because Paul was probably only trying to save my feelings. Rachel, Duane’s mother, seemed sure it was my husband.”
“Maybe because she liked him the best of the three, or even loved him for a short while.”
“The three?”
“Paul said he was sure his father was involved early on. There was a good deal of drinking. Historically, the westward movement was based on whiskey.”
“Oh Jesus Christ.” There I was swearing again but I was loosening inside. Think of that old bastard but then he wasn’t so old at the time. I appreciated Nelse’s attempt at humor until I began to cry. He leaned over my chair and put his arm around me.
“You’re the one that insists my mother get rid of the ghosts in her house. You better let this one go. From what I heard you’re lucky your husband and Paul were good men, compared anyway to their father who was a major league something. No, that’s not right. He was in the wrong century probably. Even after Paul tried to write between the lines of what I read I admired him but then I didn’t have to be his son.”
We were saved when he noted coffee cups on the dining room table, and two on the table in front of us. I’ve always found it chilling when people are forced to talk about the deeper and most grievous things in a matter-of-fact way as if we were all undertakers for our past.
“The first two”—I pointed at the cups in front of us—“are the parents of a little girl having problems in the third grade. They’re from Massachusetts and came out this way in the summer. Pulled up stakes in the Boston area. He’s the cousin of the wife of a big rancher in the area. His wife is purportedly an artist but he had decided in his mid-thirties that he wanted to be a cowboy though I heard they already have him doing the ranch books. Their daughter in my school thinks we are all dumb out here. She uses the word a dozen times a day. I told them she shows signs of melting and when she gets home she probably pretends she’s unhappier than she is to punish the people who moved her. The mother already wishes to move back East but the father refuses.
Nelse had quickly lost interest and I went on to the dining room. “Our Mission Group from church had their semi-annual meeting. We are partly sponsoring an orphanage in Central America.”
“The Rose Bud and Pine Ridge are pretty close to the north of here. You got plenty of semi-local orphans,” he said without a twinkle.
This wasn’t shifting down all that far from our family’s problems. The family also has a pretty good record of anonymous generosity but it was self-serving to say so to a young man with such a sharp eye for the economic brutalities.
“Maybe we prefer Central America because if we gave our money to the Sioux that would admit that our grandparents and great-grandparents shouldn’t have shoved them out of here, “I parried.
This answer pleased him and a glance at the kitchen told me he was hungry. I fixed him a late supper while he almost babbled about a matter of economics dear to him to which Paul had largely agreed. A certain class of people, many with a good start in the world and largely in reaction to the Great Depression, had devoted their lives to an absorption in meaningless work and made a lot of money. These grandparents and parents then “dumped” the money on their children which has had mixed results similar, according to Paul, to the history of the gentry in Europe. It’s hard for these younger people to find meaningful work, or obsessive work, because the necessity isn’t quite there. Often they feel like “jerk-off amateurs,” or so he said, to whom it is impossible to offer any sympathy when you think of the world at large. I mostly agreed but said any ordinary people I’ve known would prefer meaningful work to simply making money. And maybe ranchers and farmers tend to mythologize their supposed virtues and work to give it more meaning. It’s unfortunately harder to do in an office or factory because that’s more recent. I added that that’s why someone like J.M. or me, with our backgrounds, can feel a little remote from the rest of the family.
The latter made him quite melancholy for a few moments but then he abruptly left the kitchen for the dining room phone and called J.M. I gave an extra rattle to the dishes as I washed them to offer them more privacy. Oh my God but reality is difficult, I thought, and if the Christians are wrong and others right it might be pleasant to return to earth as a bird or a tree. I’ve always tithed and that amounts to something given my husband’s money but that scarcely buys you a good night’s sleep. The last thing someone like Nelse is looking for is a good night’s sleep.
Thanksgiving has always given me oddly mixed feelings partly, I suppose, because in my childhood the holiday actually represented the end of harvest, the late fall butchering, and putting the fa
rm somewhat to sleep for the winter. Neighbors would visit us and we’d visit neighbors and the elaborate cooking was scarcely limited to the turkey, an underwhelming bird. When you teach you notice all the wrangles centered on who is going where for Thanksgiving, what set of parents is to be honored. It is a little comic in its ups and downs, the raw nerves that have nothing to do with the earlier celebrations which were communal. For instance, I felt a pang when Ruth called and said she wasn’t coming home from Tucson, but this was immediately leavened when I heard she had a new gentleman friend, a widower, and she was cooking dinner for him and his adult children. J.M.’s parents are coming but just for the day. Nelse’s mother and her companion will stay a single night. Nelse will drive J.M. back to Lincoln the next day as she has her studies to tend to. Dalva loathes turkey and insists on a rib roast on the side which she will cook though the two don’t go together and I suggested a ham at which she turned up her nose. We decided to eat at her place to avoid the family portraits at the end of my dining room.
All of which makes me have some doubts about the “bourgeois” and the “bourgeoisie” as Dalva called them when she was at the university, and I also have heard Nelse use the terms. He, incidentally, is taking the holiday with the stoical good manners he said he got from his adoptive father who has sounded very appealing. I asked Nelse if he’d rather roast a road kill in a cave and he said, “Why, of course.” My own mixed feelings come from reading my books from my daughters’ rooms which are essentially the way they left them over twenty-five years ago, or books that they have sent me to disturb my peace. Because of Ruth I’ve read all of these biographies of musicians, including Robert Craft’s on Stravinsky and, later, Ned Rorem, and of course the older romantics. The evident scorn of middle-class flummery was startling and endearing. I also read a number of Dalva’s college novels including Lady Chatterley’s Lover which caused a lot of blushing in that my husband cherished making love out of doors and I didn’t mind it a bit. I tried to read a Henry Miller novel, who was certainly what we used to call a rapscallion, but it was too much for my background, though I did care very much for his Colossus of Maroussi and I fully intend to go to Greece at some point after I retire. Lena also loved the book and is going with me, mostly because my dreadful father-in-law left us a travel fund and I convinced Lena that because she was the old goat’s lover for a short while she certainly had earned some voyages. The all-time record for reading heartbreak was one spring vacation when Dalva was home from the university and she insisted I read The Brothers Karamazov. That was a long time ago and I can’t say that I am over the experience yet nor should I be. Second in this line was a Christmas present from Ruth, James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which was about dire poverty in the South with copious photos by a gentleman named Walker Evans. We certainly lacked any money during the Depression but we were never short for good food on the farm. The photos of these families in the South showed the most wretched signs of malnutrition.
All of which is to say that I’ve been much exposed but not in real life. I doubt what I know. From this hillock I see no other human dwelling. In other words I know my own place from which you can’t extrapolate the world. Dalva is three miles away and Athell Dodson’s place a mile and a half. He plows me out in the winter and on still, cold mornings I can hear his tractor start. Crow hates the tractor and once pecked Athell on the head so I go out in my robe and boots on blustery mornings and close up Crow in his cage.
With Thanksgiving close upon us again I’ve always seen the repetitive nature of my doubts as part of the darkness of the season. There is not quite enough sun to maintain life—I sensed this even as a girl. I quite realize that my fascination with the natural world has limited me and I should have traveled more in the summers, but I always thought, How can I leave my garden and my birds. I’m amazed at what cross-purposes we can be at with both ourselves and others, and these emphasize themselves in November and December. My gardening magazines arrive but without savor. Natural History and Audubon can’t quite hold my attention and Ruth’s gift of The New Yorker became quite irrelevant though I enjoy it during other seasons. Dalva used to collect her Nation magazines and send a packet every few months but I had her stop because as I got older the recounting of so many horrible problems became unbearable. On the rare occasions that I watch television the picture becomes thin as the screen itself, a basin of dishwater. My ordinary refuge, my religion, becomes dry around the edges and the edges begin to penetrate the center.
But how can this be when my religion has supposedly been my unwobbling pivot since childhood. I believe in Jesus as the true and only Son of God and the redemptive power of the Resurrection. There it is. Why then does December 21st, after which the days get longer, seize my heart’s core stronger than December 25th when we feel our Son of God was born? Of course I don’t know other than during this dark period I am more the ordinary mammal than I wish to be. I can almost imagine one deer saying to another in the thickets along the Niobrara, “At least it’s getting lighter every day.” This almost amuses me but beyond the window there is only opaque blackness and, if I move, my own reflection.
It is past midnight and a school night at that, an hour past my bedtime. I pour myself a rare small glass of sherry and replay a Bach partita, Bach because I don’t want a pillow but serenity. My world shrinks to the hundred and twenty-seven pounds I have weighed since I was nineteen. During the Korean War the voice of God seemed to be Edward R. Murrow and with Vietnam it was Walter Cronkite. I only lost one of my ex-students but a dozen were there, pleasant and eager boys. I slip to my knees and say my usual goodnight prayer for my family, my inward voice hopefully penetrating a billion galaxies. A hard job indeed. I have chosen an honorable livelihood, say compared to the rapacity of the greed of my father-in-law, but right now this adds up to sore knees and the slightly beechnut taste of the sherry. Every year at this time it’s as if I can taste faintly my mind’s blood and it is vaguely acrid and taints my life with my elemental humanness.
I put on my coat and go out on the porch. The stars are a little dulled by a three-quarter moon which reflects off a thin skin of snow. I shiver hard though it’s barely below freezing. Far behind me from the marsh I hear the delightful yelping of coyotes in chase, mindful that it is less delightful to whatever is being chased. My consolation tonight is simple enough and I can’t even call it humility. I’m just Naomi, definitely an older woman looking at the moon and stars, ordinary as the earth they shine down upon. If that’s not enough I have no more to offer, and to whom am I offering?
The next day I’m tired as a cowdog and I get home and there’s Nelse and J.M. on the porch swing, a full day early. They’re not even dressed warmly though it’s in the uncommon mid-forties. I’m so pleased to see them I nearly trip getting out of the car. Nelse has let out Crow who is scolding a group of starlings at the far edge of the hedgerow. J.M. runs out to greet me, smiling widely but with the fatigue of school in her eyes. She unnerves me because Nelse has called out for her to show me how high she can jump. She bounces tentatively, then jumps a little too high for my perceptions. I am nonplussed because as a grandma I have nothing ready for dinner. They don’t care and though it’s only four now they say they’re desperately hungry. I sense they made love in the car at some point on their trip up from Lincoln. I remember I had made and frozen some chicken soup when Lundquist brought me over a large batch of fryers. Nelse is always looking for more chunks of chicken in his soup so I’d put two in this batch. It is a Scandinavian version with rutabaga and potatoes in it and after eating two bowls each they nod off on the couch watching the six o’clock news. Nelse dislikes television but J.M. thinks of the news as an obligation.
I sit there watching them doze, thinking oddly of predestination. Is it presumptuous to think of a divine plan? All the evidence in the world seems to suggest the idea is absurd. I don’t have the courage to make a decision on the matter. Her sleeping hand is on his leg and his neck is flopped over on the a
rm of the sofa. From memory I can imagine their nights. The phone rings and it’s Dalva but they don’t stir at the noise. She’s pleased to hear of the early arrival. She was roasting a chicken and was going to bring it over and I tell her to go ahead, please. After so many years of camp cooking on the road Nelse seems to love everything we cook. I make a pot of coffee and J.M. wakes first with a shy smile. She puts the afghan over Nelse and we go into the kitchen. Dalva arrives and through the open door of the kitchen I see her pause, holding the roaster, and look at her son now spread out on the sofa. She adjusts the afghan, rather motherly for her, and comes toward us as if preoccupied, then nearly drops the bottle of wine she’s holding under the roaster. She hugs J.M., nods at me, opens the roaster and wonders aloud if she used too much garlic. J.M. opens the wine and we sip it and for some reason the wine seems sacramental.
My Lord it’s over. Nothing went really amiss though there was a brief, nervous moment when Nelse’s mother’s gentleman friend, Derek, asked over Thanksgiving desert, “How can you keep these paintings in an old farmhouse?” To his embarrassment Dalva helped him finish the sentence, then she said she was interested in art not the art market, quite different items. She has no idea what the paintings are worth and doesn’t want to know. She emphasized that her grandfather had been a contemporary of the artists, had known a few of them, thus got them quite cheaply but likely at a price that pleased the painters. Of all people, J.M.’s father said that if you like a “picture” in your living room why should you give it up to someone else and, besides, he had a keen eye for construction and this old farmhouse would still be standing when many modern buildings were rubble. Derek joked that he was “outvoted” and let it pass though he turned pinkish.