The Road Home

by Jim Harrison

  Nelse had cut a small tree, which stood upright against the side of the hole, in order to get himself out. I admired the hole’s size in contrast to the hurried job on the military remains. He clambered down to the bottom and I slid the bound tarp to him. He cut the thongs and spread out the five facing east, then climbed back out with the tarp. We were at a loss for something to say over the grave so we sat down on the piles of dirt with our backs to the wind and had another cup of coffee. As I have said, you can’t get anything true from another people unless it is already in your heart in a dormant form and you discover it there. All of the cross-cultural spiritual shopping you see seems quite hopeless to me but then this is scarcely my area of expertise. I can only see spirit in the flesh, not spirit in spirit. I had once joked to Nelse that I might be able to contribute to a phenology of the human heart. He looked at the ceiling, laughed, and said I should have been married to John Keats, and how could I continue such romanticism when there was an actual world of evidence to the contrary. I had delicately said, “Fuck that world.”

  We watched three skeins of geese fly over heading south and then Nelse began the long job of filling the hole, wishing to finish well before Naomi might arrive on her Sunday-morning hike. He asked if he could have some more of the steak for breakfast and I said of course. I walked through a thicket to the pond and looked downward into the water, seeing myself distorted on the rippling surface. When I came back he was throwing on the last of the dirt and then we gathered brush from the thicket to cover evidence of the hole. We then saddled on up and headed home.

  May 13th

  Yesterday when I drove down to Lincoln I bought a camper shell for my pick-up to keep our equipment dry and safe on our trip. We had spent the night before working on maps and I daresay that Nelse was as excited as I was. In Lincoln I met J.M. for lunch and she was terribly pleased to announce that the chances for a teaching job in our area looked good, probably because of Naomi’s recommendation and Naomi knowing everyone on the school board. I said that it must have something to do with her academic record too, at which she blushed and agreed. I lied and said I had driven down to see the doctor because of a recurrence of migraines that often happen in late spring. For some reason I doubted that she believed me but she let it pass. When we said good-bye she wished me a wonderful trip with Nelse and said she’d be with us up home the minute she finished her finals. I had a little time to spare before the doctor so we walked a half hour or so, stopping and laughing before the strip club where she had met Nelse. “Isn’t it strange when you see how badly they want you,” she said. I agreed, adding that it is also strange how successfully we can conceal our wanting them. We decided there must be an anthropological reason for this but we wouldn’t bother asking Nelse.

  The visit to the doctor was even more unpleasant than I had expected it to be. If you have any sense you prepare for the worst, perhaps have even expected it for quite some time, but you really don’t get the job done because the work has taken place in your mind, and that doesn’t include all the decidedly nonsensuous realities of a doctor’s office, the bad art and bad furniture and bad magazines and bad wall colors. My old friend was now a gynecologist and I guessed his office was mostly a spartan funnel for the operating room. We had known each other quite well as undergraduates at the University of Minnesota, he being the only science type in our sorry little group, but with an incredible collection of modern jazz. He had gained a good seventy pounds since then which is not all that surprising in Nebraska and was still friendly on the surface, but really quite brusque in the manner of doctors who try valiantly to protect their emotions from the nature of their practice. I had known a number of them in Santa Monica, two of them in the area of oncology, and one of them said, “I almost always lose unless they move away. Then someone else loses.”

  We had been lovers for a short weekend way back when and he was cheeky enough to whistle when I disrobed, much to his nurse’s embarrassment. We were barely into our diagnostic talk and the beginning of the examination when he couldn’t conceal his anger with me. I admitted my first little inklings had come before Christmas, maybe before that with a few unpleasant biological details. His illtempered question was how could I be as intelligent as he remembered me being and behave so stupidly with my own body. I was naturally close to tears and said, “I don’t know.” He went on with a pelvic ultrasound, then said we may as well head for the hospital. I said no and got dressed, and then in a long rush said I was going camping with my son first and after that I’d submit to whatever was possible to prolong my life.

  He remembered clearly my story of giving up a baby for adoption in my early teens and was quite pleased that my son had found me. Rather than face me with a prognosis he stared out the window while we talked. I wouldn’t agree to a CAT scan that afternoon because I wanted to go home, pure and simple. I rejected the idea of a local hospital or even Mayo in Rochester, Minnesota, after my camping trip because I wanted privacy which really meant secrecy. He suggested Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and I said I had learned to loathe the general area of Washington, and then he came up with Sloan-Kettering in New York City which was amenable to me. He immediately called an old friend and colleague there and set me up for June 7th. I thanked him and he gave me a hug, finally looking at me directly. He said this was the kind of moment when he wished that he had become something sensible like a mountain climber or a jazz musician. On the way out he gave me an assortment of pills to make me comfortable on our camping trip.

  It rained nearly all the way home, but it was a warm gentle rain, a specific tonic to hearing terms like “bilateral salpingoophorectomy” which I had the doctor write out when my ears refused to accept such a pathetic word. Why not call the procedure “nasturtium” or something similarily sensible. Maybe “rhododendron.”

  I stopped to watch the Loup River rising near Dannebrog, then took an early-evening walk in the rain near the Calamus Reservoir, watched some birds I didn’t, of course, recognize near Long Pine though I had the wit to know they were of the plover family. I got home in the middle of twilight and the lights were on in Nelse’s bunkhouse but his truck was gone. He was probably over at Naomi’s for dinner, I thought. I mixed my first martini since Santa Monica, and took one of the pills marked for general discomfort. Within a half hour I felt quite well, so much so that I danced around to a nitwit song on the radio, heated up a can of hot chili con carne that was made in Texas and Nelse swore by. He loves good food but will eat just about anything for fuel. In the bunkhouse he has a large jar of peanut butter and a spoon, also a sack of venison jerky that Lundquist made him. While eating the chili I pondered my possible death sentence and strained to remember a Victor Hugo quote Paul had used to the effect that we are all condemned to death with an indefinite reprieve. Tricky but nice. The last time I saw my grandmother Neena at Wickford before she died of cirrhosis she didn’t seem unhappy. In fact I think she was having a martini while Paul grimaced on the sofa beside her. She gently teased Paul, saying that she had read enough to know what this was all about.

  While eating my questionable chili I propped up Johnsgard’s phenology, The Birds of Nebraska and Adjacent Plains States, and Van Bruggen’s Wildflowers, but like a child (and many adults) I opted for the latter because of it colorful photos. Due to my tentative health I had the naive but rather poignant feeling that I should memorize the earth. At age forty-six I was starting very late and the names of everything were quite out of the question but not my eyes and how things look. I had always been incapable of dwelling on what religious folks call “eternal questions,” the unknowable country, if any, after death, but then I could at least become more attentive to the actualities. I, of course, wasn’t assuming that memory existed after the body died, but if anything did, memory would have to be it. The question of where the memory might reside was as specious as the fish swimming in air that I had seen in a Brueghel painting. When I was very young and we were camped in a meadow near the Missouri River I had wandere
d off on a sandbar trying to catch waterbirds, and when my father reached me and carried me back to the tent I remember his muscular neck and bristly face and, when I pushed back, his brown eyes, the small mole above an eyebrow, his breath smelling faintly of whiskey and tobacco, the damp feather of a pheasant we had plucked stuck to his soft flannel shirt. I had a heron feather I had found on the sandbar clutched in my hand, and I still have it up in my bedroom. Is that what is left of my father? I don’t know, and the soul says, “How the hell do I know?” Wounds seem common but each cure unique. Paul likes to quote Aristophanes, saying, “Whirl is king,” but then I’ve noticed he has spent years staring into his wood fires. He also says, “Technically speaking rocks are alive,” but I’ll be damned if I can remember quite what molecules are. When I was wandering in that rain-soaked field near the Calamus I began counting, a nervous, perhaps neurotic, habit from my childhood. Seven bees. Nine birds. Five june bugs. My dog Sonia had never let me count her teeth. I liked to tell my activist girlfriends in Santa Monica that women should learn from bitch Airedales. They are wary, suspicious, intelligent, improbably tough, curious to a fault, but when they make the decision to let loose they are utterly jubilant. That’s how I’d help train the daughter I never had but dreamed of having. Ted at my feet is half Airedale but it is generous to call him a dope like Paul’s Carlos who used to mate the garbage can. I wondered idly if my current problem was connected to the severity of my infection in Marquette that awful winter when I was carrying Nelse in my belly. It would be too much like original sin, with Duane as Adam full of plum wine out by the mock tipi by the pond. Eve is fifteen but can’t wait another moment. When you are young you are always seeing the world for the first time. Anyway when I was near the Calamus I had that sensation, rare when you’re older, of looking at this sea of grass closely for the first time. It made me nervous and I began counting weeds and grasses but stopped at seventeen when a crow flew by to check me out. I memorized the crow, then walked back to the truck through squishy puddles thick with grass, then went into the water above my knees in the ditch. We certainly don’t know how old we are unless we remind ourselves. For a half hour or so I was five, lacking only my bright red boots, and little Ruth tagging along beside me, squealing “hundred” for how many times she wanted to be pushed in the tire swing.

  * * *

  It was a good day packing up gear for the camping trip through I needed two pills to get through, trying a new one that made me feel too dull and wispy for several hours, then the reliable one for dinner with Naomi and Paul. It would have been nice to have someone to talk to about my problem but Naomi appeared happy as a newlywed with Paul. J.M. might be the best but then I couldn’t interfere with her last two weeks at the university. I came close with Ruth on the phone but then she announced yet another new boyfriend, this one a naturalist. She has admitted that she tends to select boring men then wonders a few weeks later why they are so boring. She confided with a girlish trill that after dining out they had made love over a sawhorse in her garage. I said that that certainly sounded promising. I couldn’t very well enter my illness into her newfound adventure. Her son, the pompous asshole Bradley, had stopped in Tucson on business, met the naturalist and pronounced him a “no-nonsense real man,” certainly a questionable recommendation.

  That left Nelse, and I doubted I had the heart to tell him such news. I also found my sense of language to be deeply suspect. There had simply been no sense of preparation for this, other than the wordless mulling that goes on when our bodies are askew. The first indicators suggest the old New York feelings of being trapped in an elevator. How can this possibly happen, especially to me? It’s a little slower and less dramatic than when an airliner has mechanical difficulties. Once on an elevator in the Chrysler Building three of eight men began whistling when we stopped between floors. Counting again. Four women suspended with them, one giggling.

  My pile of gear in the front hallway was judged much too large by Nelse who properly said I’d spend exhausting time looking for stuff. I pared it down, with him stooping beside me. He was startled when I winced and I lied and said I had overstretched my back getting off Rose. I had the urge to take Ted along but Nelse disagreed. You see less in the natural world with a dog along though they alert you by their scenting abilities to what you’re not going to see. There also was the point that I had become softheaded of late and hadn’t trained Ted nearly as well as my previous dogs. After we finished sorting my gear with Nelse smiling at my twenty-five-year-old unused North Face pack he out of the blue asked me why he hadn’t simply been aborted and was the decision a close call? I said I didn’t recall it ever coming up. Back in the late fifties the undercurrent of abortion was strenuously dark, and though I knew at the time that it happened it wasn’t commonly practiced by reputable physicians. Charlene had heard of doctors in Omaha and Kansas City who performed abortions, also there was gossip of an undertaker doing so down in Lincoln. I said that the only close call had been when I was so ill up in Marquette during my fifth month. He seemed relieved as if he had spent time thinking about not existing, the most problematical of all questions. For some reason while we were sitting on the floor I told him about how after Duane died down in the Florida Keys I had received a death-benefit check of ten thousand dollars from some sort of armed services insurance group. I hadn’t felt entitled to it, plus our family had ample money so I sent it back. They re-sent the check, saying that it was up to me to dispose of the funds, so I gave half of it to a group raising money in New York for the neediest families, and the rest to semi-indigent friends who were trying to paint or write, the two professions in which one is least likely to succeed. Afterward, I was struck dumb with my stupidity and got an equal amount from the trust from my grandfather and sent it to Duane’s mother, Rachel.

  Frieda had made a simple potato soup for lunch, something my system could easily tolerate, and while eating we continued my modest art history lessons for Nelse that we had started the week before. I had had two semesters of it at the university, admittedly because I liked to sit in the dark and look at the slides but mostly, I supposed, because of my grandfather. We were interrupted by Nelse’s wondering where I got my “idealism” which in a real sense, he thought, was almost nonexistent in his generation. He rhetorically decided on Naomi and I agreed she had set the groundwork, but then my own generation had been intent on saving the world in every respect, from war and racial problems to hunger.

  When we tried to return to art we were both yawning with the warm lilac-scented breeze floating in from the yard. Looking at our pile of luggage down the hall I wanted to say, “Let’s go now” because I was fearful that something would stop our trip.

  “What’s wrong with you?” he said, his voice coming to me from afar.

  “Nothing that can’t be handled,” I answered with a smile.

  “I mean you always look like you’re looking out a window even if a window is not there.”

  “I’m trying to decide what I should do with the rest of my life. I’ve always worked and now it’s been three months. I have a friend who can help me get a social work job in New York. I’m thinking about it.” This was a lie for my own convenience in explaining my upcoming trip after the current one with him.

  “I wish you would wait until the fall,” he said almost boyishly.

  I nodded gravely, but felt terribly pleased he wanted me around. This grew with the decisive sense that he wanted to stay here himself. I also felt confident that Naomi could wangle J.M. a job. I wished that they would immediately get married and have a baby all in one week, a fine if irrational notion. I looked over at Nelse who was fingering a small stack of art books but clearly wanted to go outside. I knew he had barely cracked the Berenson and Gombrich I had given him but then I didn’t want to hassle him or question his peculiar idea that many paintings reminded him of what you see out of the corner of your eye when you’re looking directly at something else. He was an easy student not because of any particular kno
wledge but that his mind was quite naively open on the subject. To him the physiology of human vision was a great mystery and what could be more natural than to frame and contain it? His adoptive mother had a considerable library of art books but when he was a boy she had kept those with any nudes in a locked cabinet. He would look at paintings but rebelled at reading a single word of text. I reminded him that we were having dinner with Naomi and Paul, then I went off to a blanket that I had secreted behind the grape arbor and slept for a couple of hours. Before I dozed I turned over and beneath the lower vines I could see Nelse saddle Rose and Lundquist start the old Ford tractor with Roscoe beside him in a milk crate he had bolted to the fender. Ted glanced around, presumably for me, then followed Nelse out of the barnyard. I allowed a few tears to form while I looked upward at the undersides of the grape leaves. Later a bee stung me awake but it really wasn’t that bad. In fact it was a grace note that awoke me from a sodden dream that I was being buried with those military men deep beneath the manure pile. I had looked at all those skulls and I had somehow known that none of them were Duane.

  We had a fine dinner with Naomi and Paul. A second pill and a glass of wine before we went over gave me a pleasant illusion that I was fine during dinner, aided by the exuberant mood of Naomi and Paul. They were nearly startling and I was reminded again of the possible variance between the outward age and that of the interior which builds itself on thousands of factors including the sweetly irrational aspects of love. I felt a small but niggling envy of them that they could withhold themselves so many years and still arrive at this apparent vivacity of affection. I don’t mean, of course, the magnetized bodies of young lovers, but the subtle way Naomi and Paul had all their antennae construed toward each other. There also was the slight angle of despair over why they had waited so long though I was now aware of their various meetings. It’s not so comic the way that clocks race themselves with us in fragile tow and it’s not enough to say “What are we waiting for?” or “Why are we holding back?” though that might occur to us later. We are far less capable of those radical emotional moves advocated by magazines that specialize in puddle-deep psychologisms, the usual seven steps to a victorious emotional life, as if we could put ourselves on a figurative grease rack or automated assembly line for overhaul.