by Jim Harrison
In grade school the boys who all dressed like junior cowboys had called her a “wimp” for her tenderhearted view of the lowliest creatures. Her mother had given her Charles Roberts’s The Naturalist’s Diary for her birthday. Her concern was widespread and it seemed that every boy craved to shoot a deer, elk, moose, bear, anything would do in the local ethic. Only one mannerly boy was interested in bird dogs and hunting for Hungarian partridge and sharp-tailed grouse with his father. She had a crush on him but he ignored girls. Catherine’s mother was also softhearted about animals. She convinced her to let go a turtle she had caught in the cattails at the edge of the pond. Her mother’s point was “Why should the turtle’s only life be to amuse you?” Her mother had studied biology in England but was largely unaware of American wildlife. On an early trip south to Yellowstone her parents had seen a sow grizzly kill an elk. Her father thought they were lucky to see it but her mother was totally repelled and had grizzly nightmares. The junior cowboys loved to scare each other and the girls with stories about rattlesnakes and grizzlies. A boy in her sixth-grade class was bitten in the arm by a baby rattler in the school woodlot. His arm had become horribly swollen but they got him to the hospital in time for the antivenom to be effective. She was shocked and told her father about it at dinner. He laughed saying that boys get bitten because they’re always fooling with snakes to show their daring, same as when he was young. This was why she was trying to aversion train Hud to rattlers. She had used a choke collar for a few weeks whenever they saw snakes and now on the rare occasion when they saw one on a walk he would shrink back and whine. There were no grizzlies in the Crazy Mountains nearby but there were some in the Absaroka Mountains less than fifty miles to the south. There was a written record of Lewis and Clark killing one locally when they passed through. Catherine had hiked with friends in the Absarokas but had never seen a grizzly and hadn’t wanted to see one.
Jerry called to say that he was sending her mother’s ashes by Purolator courier adding that she should go ahead and distribute the ashes by the “lake” as he had an important business trip to make for several weeks in Key West. It took her breath away. The heel. He couldn’t be bothered. She felt a flash of anger that upset her stomach.
The next day the ashes arrived and along with them a check for fifty thousand dollars with “Tim’s education” written in the memo field. She guessed Jerry was buying off his conscience. She didn’t care. Did he have to fly to Key West to get laid? Surely someone closer to New York would make sense, or the summer place in Rhode Island where the entryway was cold marble. She would put the money in the bank where it would reproduce and Tim could go off in eighteen years in new clothes. What more could she want of life? She had no lover but certainly didn’t want one for the time being. But she had a farm, a few horses, about fifty cattle, three piglets, and of course the beloved chickens, also a tiny boy who seemed to like them too. The other day she stupidly ran to the house for the phone and left Hud to guard Tim. When she returned a hatchling was nestled in his diaper and he was smiling from ear to ear while Hud growled at it. Catherine had taught Hud to stay clear of the hatchlings though it enraged him when they pecked at his feet. With one hand Tim brushed the feathers with little coos.
Another piglet escaped, and she called Clara who caught it with difficulty, finally offering it more scratch which it ate out of her hand.
“Doesn’t make you want to eat pork, does it?”
“No!” Catherine laughed. It was best not to name a pig or cow who would end up as meat. The piglet squealed in anger when Clara put him back in the pen and plugged up the escape hole. He simply wanted to wander around freely.
Chapter 17
The parents of a ten-year-old Mexican girl had died locally in a car accident and the township was looking for a foster parent who spoke Spanish to take care of her until relatives came from Mexico to retrieve her at the end of the summer, some months away. It was commonly known that Catherine was the only white person in the area who spoke Spanish and she had a decision to make. A recent cold snap had left snow on the ground and Catherine shivered on her way to meet the girl, Lola, and a social worker at the drugstore for a chocolate sundae. The girl held Tim and then quickly changed his diaper on the counter. Her deftness won Catherine’s heart. She spoke soft sibilant Spanish to Tim who enjoyed it. At dinnertime the social worker brought Lola out to the farm. Hud had taken off across the pasture that afternoon and not come back but she couldn’t look for him with the girl arriving. She was sure he’d be all right. Lola had a pathetically small amount of belongings. Her English was fair and full of American slang. She was amused by Catherine’s Spanish and called her “profesora.” Catherine put her into her old bedroom adjoining the new addition so she could hear Tim.
The next morning it felt as warm as a Chinook wind as she looked out at the distant Crazy Mountains, named for the woman who had gone fatally crazy there. Catherine remembered the Chinooks of her childhood fondly. Once it was only ten degrees in the early morning and by noon it was sixty. Kids at school loved them and ran around in shirtsleeves.
Lola looked after Tim, playing with him on the living room rug where he shrieked with laughter, while Catherine carried her mother’s ashes out behind the barn across the lingering snow. She sat on her egg rock holding the box of ashes inside of which was a lovely urn, no doubt Jerry’s idea. There was a thin lid of ice on the pond which was quickly melting. She cast the first handful of ashes out on the ice feeling with her fingers and seeing small bits of bone which was eerie. She was able to take off her coat in the warm wind. She continued to toss handfuls of ashes saying, “Goodbye, Mother.” How could her mother become ashes? She reminded herself of the ways of the earth.
When she finished and the ashes were sinking into the water she thought about how much her mother loved this place and all of their early little picnics. Now the two horses and a calf and a cow were watching her over the fence with curiosity. She would try to keep Tim off of horses for as long as possible. The area was full of the maimed and injured from horseback accidents. Other places boys wanted to be football and basketball stars but here they wanted to be heroes of rodeo, much more dangerous even than football.
Suddenly, with both her parents gone she felt like an orphan and missed her grandparents in London. When she had called her grandmother about her mother’s death Catherine kept sobbing and whispering, “It’s not fair.” Of course it wasn’t. It had been more than a decade since she had turned to her parents for anything. So many people she knew carried their parents around in emotional backpacks. Her own story was largely unknown to anyone but herself and Robert in prison whose sentence had recently been lengthened for beating up a guard. This was plainly the curse of the father. She herself felt no curse and had often thought that her early trip to England to see her grandparents had successfully detoxified her life. She would fly over this summer so they could see their great-grandson and she would also visit Tim’s family. They were getting very old and had just lost their only child. She planned to take Lola with her to help with the baby.
Thoughts of Robert reminded Catherine of another childhood experience that had started as a truly horrid summer evening. Her father had been drunk and raged about stock market losses which he blamed on the “Jews.” Catherine and her mother didn’t believe anything he said and ignored him so he fixed his anger on Robert. They had been eating at the picnic table in the backyard and her father had fallen down twice trying to chase Robert. Robert was much faster which further enraged him. He demanded Robert stop so he could beat him but Robert cut through the hedge and was headed downtown. After dark he came home and thought it was safe because peeking through the window he saw his father was asleep on the den couch. Robert came up to Catherine’s room and said that he was running away at dawn. She said she wanted to go along. She got up and made several peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to take. Robert filled his Boy Scout canteen, packed a day pack with warm clothes, an
d rolled up his summer sleeping bag. After midnight Father awoke, went to Robert’s room, and beat him. Catherine’s mother tried to stop him and he pushed her to the floor. Robert’s lip was cut from a punch and there was blood. Catherine went into the room and screamed, “Daddy, stop that!” The scream was so penetrating that he stopped and walked out the door. That cinched their departure.
They left in the first scant light of dawn walking north to a big woods to conceal themselves if they were being followed. By midday they were lost despite Robert’s Scout compass. They were headed toward Martinsdale where Robert had a friend. Their feet hurt and they spread the sleeping bag and slept a couple of hours in the heat of the afternoon. They hogged their sandwiches but were still hungry. Robert judged that they were too high in the foothills of the Crazy Mountains. They continued to walk, refilling their canteen in a safe-looking creek. They both knew the danger of giardia from animal waste in the water. Late in the afternoon she was sure she recognized parts of the landscape. She mentioned this to Robert who became angry realizing that like many lost people they had walked in a big circle and they were now about two miles behind Grandpa’s farm. They had circled all the way back to the southeast.
When they reached the pond Robert built a small fire and they heated a can of baked beans, all that was left of their food supplies. She ordinarily didn’t like them but on this evening they were delicious. They snuggled up in the sleeping bag near the fire where Grandpa found them at dawn.
Catherine remembered this fondly twenty-five years after the fact. Mother drove out to pick them up. She had a black eye. Dad had pounded on her until she called the deputy who hauled Dad off to the jail in Livingston where he would be spending a second night. He never forgave her for the public shame of this.
Catherine tilted the urn to the side and dumped out the rest of the ashes into the water. Her finger touched what was obviously a piece of vertebra and she felt a chill. She felt oddly serene sitting there until she thought that she must go back to the house and feed Tim his lunch. Hud was asleep, tired from his night of wandering. She would have Clyde build a pen to contain him at night when he wasn’t sleeping inside because of bad weather. He was having a pretty good life with her and little Tim and now Lola who was obsessed with sweeping the floors. Hud already fawned over Lola and Catherine remembered the man’s joke about interspecies love as she passed the chicken yard. There she had sat in the second grade, making notes outside the henhouse while sitting on the milk stool.
The Case of the
Howling Buddhas
From his upstairs bedroom at 6:00 a.m. Sunderson could dimly hear his cell phone in his jacket pocket down in his study. It was more irritating then getting up to pee on a cold night. He was proud of the way his prostate was holding up at his age, also of his ears and their acute hearing in an era when many had destroyed their hearing with loud rock music.
The phone calls had been nearly continuous since 5:00 a.m. and he wanted to jerk the caller’s teeth out with his Griplock pliers. He normally arose shortly before 7:00 a.m., flipped the coffee machine on, and went to his study, pulled out a book from the shelf that blocked the window, and gazed at his neighbor Delphine doing her nude yoga. She knew he was watching and was enthused because it helped what she called “sexual repression.” Last Thursday she had masturbated in plain view, then called to say that her husband had gone to East Lansing and they could enjoy themselves. He hustled over to the back door in his old terry-cloth robe and she met him in her bare skin smelling of Camay soap.
Sunderson was ready early with his coffee and had pulled a study titled The Jongleurs for his view. She was flat on her tummy in a position called Snake’s Pose, one of his favorites as it showed her sumptuous ass and the concealed goodies. In the year or so they had been playing the game her husband had showed up only once to make love to her. Sunderson had quickly replaced the book. He didn’t want to start the day seeing a nude man, always a laughable sight. Her husband was a stiff who taught American literature at the local university. She taught anthropology and was tremendously popular with students while these same students ignored a course of her husband’s devising called “Faulkner vs. Hemingway,” as if the two writers had been in a foot- race. He had told Sunderson that he had hoped to become the department chairman and perhaps a dean someday. He was without apparent personality and she had told Sunderson that he had some money on the side which afforded them the opportunity to spend their summers in Europe. That was why she married him. The money enabled her to visit archaeological digs in southern France and Spain. Her academic career was limited because she had never finished her Ph.D. dissertation despite working on it for fourteen years. Her excuse was that her mentor professor at Cornell had died and no one else was capable of dealing with her complicated writing.
Sunderson had noted that his voyeurism lacked the punch it had when he was watching his young ex-neighbor Mona, whom his ex-wife had later adopted, in her nude calisthenics. His neighbor shifted into the Royal Flux with her legs flopped up and over her head. He actually yawned rather than feeling his worm turn. He was not prone to fully accepting aging though he knew very well that it was what caused his sexuality to be less than rampant.
The other day on a warm afternoon he was sitting on the front porch reading the paper, the Mining Gazette, when Barbara, a lovely girl from down the street, broke her bicycle chain in front of his house. He fetched his pliers and small hammer from the kitchen and fixed it, removing a link. It was too loose anyway. Meanwhile she squatted in front of him with her weight on her haunches. It was simply electrifying with her bare lovely legs under the blue skirt leading upward to the white undies with a slight indication of pubic hair. He was naturally engrossed and tarried at the simple job. She had done well in the state high school gymnastics championships but was lithe rather than short and muscular like most female gymnasts.
“There you are,” he said, finishing the job.
“Did you enjoy the view?” she asked coquettishly.
“Yes, frankly, it was wonderful,” he said taking a last look before she got up.
“My uncle Bob will sit on a chair for an hour if I’m on the sofa with my dress up a little. It’s really quite funny.”
“It’s the nature of man,” Sunderson said self-righteously. She had to be sixteen and above the age of consent.
“Boys are terrible now. All they want day after day is blow jobs.” She was apparently eager to talk about sex.
“Well, I suppose you avoid pregnancy.”
“I simply don’t like it one bit. I’m saving for college if you have any work you need done. I’m good at weeding. I get two bucks an hour.”
“I have a flower garden that needs work when you have time.”
“Sure thing.” She hiked up her dress to throw a leg over the bike seat, a view which gave him a jolt. She smiled and rode off.
She hadn’t returned as of yet. He meant to have her rake some leaves which he loathed doing. People in Munising used to be cheapskates. You’d rake for hours and get blisters on your hands for a couple of quarters that you very much needed. He was always saving for another fishing reel he’d seen in the Montgomery Ward catalog.
It was a warm day for September and later that morning he saw Barbara in a pair of tan shorts in the grocery store buying a box of Cheerios. He imagined her eating from her bowl in her early morning nightie. When she saw him she cocked her hips and apologized for not yet taking care of his flowers saying, “Maybe this afternoon.” He had no plans other than to watch the University of Michigan–Michigan State football game on television. When he got home he arranged a peeking laboratory up in his bedroom where a window looked out on the backyard flower garden. He adjusted its shade for concealment and polished his binoculars. Barbara made him lonesome for his ex-girlfriend Monica who had worked at the Landmark Inn in town, but now had a boyfriend close to her own age, a college student at that. Monica like
d sex even more than he did and during their months together he was frankly so worn out that he missed a lot of the last week of trout season. Since Monica left a couple of months before, he had made love twice to his ex-wife Diane. He had had dinner at her place and been lucky enough to see Mona, who was home for the weekend from college, step out of the shower. He winced and ran for the kitchen where he had a nasty glass of Diane’s cooking sherry.
An insane desire occurred to him to go down on Barbara, as unlikely an idea as world peace. Did this call for the services of a mind doctor? Sexual fantasies could easily become tiresome, the mind migrated anywhere it could get its nose tweaked. He defended himself with the contention that Barbara was aesthetically overwhelming but even he had to admit that this was truly lame. Her father was on the city council and they had been at odds several times. He was a classic liberal who was sure the police were forever on the verge of taking away human rights from everyone.
He finally checked his cell for an explanation for all of the irritating predawn calls. They were from Ziegler, Marquette’s only possible tycoon. When Sunderson was still on the force and Ziegler’s son was thirteen, one of his friends had sneaked a five-pound joke turd, a true monster, into their toilet at a party and Ziegler had called the station demanding a police investigation to catch the guilty perp. The captain had Sunderson answer the call because Sunderson was thought to have married well and therefore to be a gentleman by the movers and shakers of the city. The captain of course knew this was an illusion. Ziegler was a local boy who had done phenomenally well, becoming an all-American tight end at the University of Michigan. He had graduated with high honors and his senior thesis had been published as a book. It was an exposé of his own family’s turpitude in the mining business. When they came in contact, which was not often, Ziegler always pretended he couldn’t remember Sunderson’s name, an old tactic.