Dalva

by Jim Harrison

  DALVA

  PRAISE FOR JIM HARRISON AND DALVA

  “FASCINATING . . . A work of humor and a unified lament . . . Voices that cut through time and cross the barriers of culture and gender to achieve a work in chorus . . . THERE IS NO PUTTING ASIDE DALVA UNTIL THE TIME BOMBS GO OFF, THE IDENTITIES ARE REVEALED, AND THE SKELETONS ALMOST LITERALLY TUMBLE FROM THE CLOSETS . . . DALVA IS SUSPENDED IN ITS OWN BEAUTI . . . A BOOK TO . . . READ WITH TRUST AND EXUBERANCE.”

  -Louise Erdich, Chicago Tribune

  “Entertaining, moving, and memorable. A CAST OF FASCINATING CHARACTERS.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “HARRISON’S STORYTELLING INSTINCTS ARE NEARlY FLAWLESS . . . The people in DALVA reemerge as full-blooded individuals who almost incidentally embody much of the innocence, carelessness, and urgency that played so large a part in the settling of this country. Best of all, perhaps, are Mr. Harrison’s descriptions of the land—the untamed deserts, plains, forests, and arroyos of what was once the Western frontier . . . tough but rhapsodic language.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “A fascinating novel about an American woman . . . Harrison uses his pen as a sword to right wrongs and settle scores. . . . He takes bigger risks, letting go of old habits and surrendering to his own impassioned imagination.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Moving, interesting, and satisfying . . . DALVA is Harrison’s most ambitious novel to date. . . . HARRISON HAS SUCCEEDED ADMIRABLY.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “DIAMOND-IN-THE-ROUGH ELEGANCE.” AN EXQUISITElY CARVED PORTRAIT OF THE LNES AND LOVES OF 45-YEAR-OLD DALVA . . . Harrison as a novelist continues to grow deeper and more beautiful.”

  —ALA Booklist

  “Harrison’s style is flexible, and capable of great intimacy . . . DALVA turns out to be a festival of life’s poetry.”

  —Christian Science Monitor

  “HARRISON . . . TAPS DEEP AND TRUE WITH THIS PORTRAIT OF A FAMILY. . . .

  —Kirkus Reviews

  Also by Jim Harrison

  FICTION

  Wolf: A False Memoir

  A Good Day to Die

  Farmer

  Legends of the Fall

  Warlock

  Sundog

  The Woman Lit by Fireflies

  Julip

  The Road Home

  The Beast God Forgot to Invent

  True North

  The Summer He Didn’t Die

  Returning to Earth

  The English Major

  The Farmer’s Daughter

  The Great Leader

  The River Swimmer

  Brown Dog

  CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

  The Boy Who Ran to the Woods

  POETRY

  Plain Song

  Locations

  Outlyer and Ghazals

  Letters to Yesenin

  Returning to Earth

  Selected & New Poems: 1961–1981

  The Theory and Practice of Rivers & New Poems

  After Ikkyū & Other Poems

  The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems

  Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry, with Ted Kooser

  Saving Daylight

  In Search of Small Gods

  Songs of Unreason

  ESSAYS

  Just Before Dark: Collected Nonfiction

  The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand

  MEMOIR

  Off to the Side

  JIM HARRISON

  DALVA

  A NOVEL

  Grove Press

  New York

  for Linda King Harrison

  Copyright © 1988 by Anna Productions

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or permissions@groveatlantic.com.

  Excerpt from “Gacela of the Dark Death” from The Selectd Poems of Federico Garcia Lorca, translated by Stephen Spender and J. L. Gili. Copyright © 1955 by New Directions Publishing Corporation. Reprinted by permission of New Directions.

  Lyric from “Heart of Gold” by Neil Young used by permission. Copyright © 1971 by Silver Fiddle. All rights reserved.

  This edition first published in 1989 by Washington Square Press, New York.

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-8021-0222-6

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Any and all misrepresentations of historical fact in this book are intentional. In Book II I poke fun at a tradition of scholarship, mindful of the fact that without this tradition we are at the mercy of the renditions of political forces which are always self-serving and dead wrong. I have used dozens of source books and monographs too numerous to mention here. However, I want to thank Douglas Peacock and Michael and Nancy Rothenberg for their research efforts. Also Peter Matthiessen, Tamara Plakins Thornton of Yale University and Cooperstown, John Harrison of the University of Arkansas, Bernard Fontana of the University of Arizona, Mick Harris of the University of Kentucky, and Bernie Rink of Northwestern Michigan College.

  CONTENTS

  BOOK

  DALVA

  BOOK

  MICHAEL

  BOOK

  GOING HOME

  We loved the earth but could not stay.

  —OLD SAYING

  BOOK I

  * * *

  DALVA

  DALVA

  Santa Monica—April 7, 1986, 4:00 A.M.

  It was today—rather yesterday I think—that he told me it was important not to accept life as a brutal approximation. I said people don’t talk like that in this neighborhood. The fly that flies around me now in the dark is every fly that ever flew around me. I am on the couch, and when I awoke I thought I heard voices down by the river, a branch of the Niobrara River where with my sister I was baptized in a white dress. A boy yelled water snake and the preacher said get thee out of here snake and we all laughed. The snake drifted off in the current and the singing began. There are no rivers around here. Turning on the lamp above the couch I see he’s not here either. I can hear a car screeching on the coast highway even at this hour. There are always cars. The girl in the green bathing suit was hit seven times before the last car tossed her in a ditch. The autopsy said California speedball. Her suit was the color of winter wheat as I remember it, almost unnaturally green when the snow melted. It was so nice to have another color on earth other than brown grass, white snow, and black trees. Now between the cars I hear the ocean and the breeze lifts the pale-blue curtains with a sea odor the same as my skin. I’m quite happy though I may have to move after all these years, seven, actually. There is an abrasion, almost like a slight burn, from his mustache on my thigh. He asked if I wanted him to shave his mustache and I said You’d be lost without it. That made him somewhat angry as if his vanity depended solely on something so fragile as a mustache. Of course he wasn’t listening to what I said but to all of his imagined reso
nances of what I said. When I laughed he became angrier and marched very dramatically around the room in his jockey shorts which were baggy in the rear. It was somehow warm and amusing but when he tried to grab my shoulders and shake me I told him to go back to his hotel and screw himself in front of the mirror until he felt he wanted to actually be with me again. So he left.

  I thought I was writing this to my son in case I never get to see him, and in case something should happen to me, what I have written would tell him about his mother. My friend of last evening said, What if he isn’t worth the effort? That hadn’t occurred to me. I don’t know where he is and I have never seen him except for a moment after his birth. I can’t go to him because I’m not sure he knows I exist. Perhaps his adoptive parents never told him he was adopted. This is all less sentimental than it is unfinished business, a longing to know someone I have no particular right to know. But to know this son would complete the freedom men of my acquaintance seem to consider their birthright. And then, perhaps, my son is looking for me?

  My name is Dalva. This is a rather strange name for someone from the upper Midwest but the explanation is simple. My father’s older brother was a victim of rebellion and adventure magazines, and was at odd times a merchant seaman, a prospector for gold and precious metals, and finally a geologist. Late in the Great Depression Paul was somewhere in the interior of Brazil from which he returned, after squandering most of his earnings in Rio, to the farm with some presents including a 78 rpm record of the sambas of that period. One of the sambas—in Portuguese of course—was “Estrella Dalva,” or “Morning Star,” and my parents loved the song. Naomi, my mother, told me that on warm summer evenings she and my father would put the record on the Victrola and dance up and down the big front porch of the farmhouse. My uncle Paul had taught them what he said was the samba before he disappeared again.

  I just now thought that you can only meet a man at the level of his intentions. When my father and mother met and courted in the thirties the intentions were clear; they were both from fourth-generation farm families and the point was to marry and to continue traditions that had made their predecessors reasonably happy. This is not to say that they were simple-minded people in bib overalls and flour-sack gingham dress. There were several thousand acres of corn and wheat, Herefords, hogs, even a small slaughterhouse that at one time supplied prime beef to certain restaurants in faraway Chicago, Saint Louis, and Kansas City. From scrapbooks Mother has stored there are records of their trips to Chicago, New Orleans, Miami, and once to New York City which was my mother’s favorite. From World War II, when my father was a fighter pilot stationed in England, there is a photo of him with three gentlemen in front of the Hereford Registry in Hereford, England. He is in a jaunty hat and looks rather like one of the early photos of Howard Hughes. As Naomi would say, or prate, “Blood will tell,” and his unstable streak came out in his passion for airplanes. He was not called up but reenlisted for the Korean War because he wanted to learn to fly jet fighters. So between the ages of five and nine I knew my father, and I have still not exhausted the memories of those years. Beryl Markham said that when she stopped in Tunis on the way back to Europe in her small plane she met a prostitute who wanted to go home, but didn’t know where home was because she had been taken from her parents at age seven. She only knew that in her homeland there were tall trees and it was occasionally cold.

  But I’m not one to live or subsist on memory, treating it as most do, the past and future as an encapsulated space or nodule we walked into, and then out of, rather than a continuum of the life we have already lived and will live. What was my father, really? Genes provide the fragilest of continuities.

  On the farm we had a small plane called a Stinson Voyager. We’d go for Sunday rides when the weather was right. If I had been sick and out of school my father would tell me I’d feel better or be well by the time we landed and I believed him. I liked seeing the water birds on sandbars in the Missouri River, the way they flew up in clouds, then landed again when our immense shadow passed.

  What upsets me is the terrifying and inconsolable bitterness of life; at close range in certain friends, and particularly in my sister who regards her mid-life as an arctic prison though she lives in Tucson. She’s never been given much to going out of doors. She lives in a fine home with a gray-and-white interior backed up against the Catalinas though she has never walked in these mountains. I thought of her yesterday at daylight when I walked the beach. Someone had spray-painted the word MENACE on the benches in Palisades Park, and on the steps going down to the beach, and somehow on a highway overpass. I stopped counting at twenty. Fortunately most lunatics don’t have the vigor of Charles Manson. I was interested in someone who spent a whole night spray-painting MENACE virtually in the face of the Pacific Ocean. Perhaps this vandal is the flip side of my sister. It is somewhat a mystery to me how the rich can feel so utterly fatigued and victimized. She drifts back and forth without specific density across the line of what she thinks is the unbearable present, but then she surprised me this March, during Easter, when my mother and I visited. I asked her how it was possible to live so thoroughly without nouns. At that moment she was waiting for the single drink she allowed herself each day at six.

  “Why don’t you save up for six days and have seven drinks on Sunday?” Naomi asked. My mother does not stand back from any of the forms life takes. “You could have yourself a party.”

  But my sister just sat there looking at the martini she would make last an hour, thinking about nouns as if on the lip of speaking the sentence my mother and I knew wouldn’t come. Ruth went to the piano and played a Mozart exercise my mother favored which also served as a signal for me to begin fixing dinner.

  “Nouns are a burden to people these days,” Mother said. “Maybe they always were. Tell me about your latest fellow.”

  “Michael is in the history department at Stanford. He heard about our journals years ago and last fall in Nebraska traced me back to Santa Monica. He’s about twenty pounds overweight and self-important. He tends to lecture at you and might talk about the history of food over dinner, the history of rain when it’s raining. He’s an expert at everything awful that ever happened in the history of the world. He’s brilliant without being very conscious. He’s a bad lover but I like being around him.”

  “I think he sounds just wonderful. I’ve always preferred men to be a little goofy. If they’re trying to be men in the movies they get tiresome. I had this little fling with an ornithologist because I liked the way he climbed trees, waded up creeks, or into stock ponds to take photos. . . .” My mother is sixty-five.

  We hadn’t heard the music stop and Ruth was right behind us at the kitchen door. Grandfather, who was half Oglala Sioux, called her Shy Bird Who Flies Away. Though Ruth is only one-eighth Sioux she had assumed certain Sioux qualities as she grew older, a kind of stillness that she forced to surround her.

  “I think you’re right about nouns. Think of ‘car,’ ‘house,’ ‘piano,’ ‘food,’ ‘priest.’ ‘’ We were prepared for the rush of words that came not more than once a day when we visited. “We have always been lapsed Methodists but I met this priest and we talk about love and death, art and God, which are all nouns of a sort I believe. He’s not a priest in a church but works with a charity for Indians and I know he sees me partly as a contributor. He loves to drive the car Ted sent me for Christmas.” Ted is her husband from whom she had been separated for fifteen years, the father of her son, a man who at twenty-eight discovered he was conclusively a homosexual. Ruth was born four years before Father died in Korea, losing the two central men in her life to quirks of history and sexuality. Ted and Ruth met at the Eastman School of Music where they intended to become famous in the music world, she as a pianist and he as a composer. Instead, she raised her child who apparently doesn’t care for her, blaming her specifically for the loss of his father. From my distance the arts always have seemed brutal, with the chances of the work being durable far less likely th
an had the aspirant tried to become an astronaut. And the failures I know are filled with an indefinable longing and melancholy for a flowering that was stunted in preparation for any number of reasons.

  I was studying a Chinese recipe and ignoring Ruth until I heard the word “boyfriend.” It was akin to touching an electric fence as a child. I turned to notice that Mother was equally shocked, reaching nervously for the cigarettes she had abandoned years ago.

  “Yes, I have a boyfriend. A lover. He’s my only lover in fifteen years. The priest is my lover. He’s really quite homely. He even told me that one reason he became a priest was because he was so homely. Singly, the features wouldn’t be that bad but arranged together as they are, the result is homeliness. Remember our cow dog, the mongrel we had when we were little called Sam who was so ugly? Anyway, Ted sent me some scarves from Paris, then an expensive car from a local dealer a few days later to go with the scarves. I had read about an Indian charity and checked it out with my neighbor who runs the newspaper. So I drove the car down there and met the priest. I gave him the signed title and the keys and asked him to call a cab for me, but he insisted on driving me home. I made him iced tea and he loved all the paintings and prints Ted and I had collected. Then he asked if I’d like to take a ride to the Papago Reservation the next day. He said the head of the diocese was in Los Angeles for a few days and he had never driven such a wonderful car. I was unsure and said I had never met any Indians in Arizona but I grew up around some of the Sioux and they frightened me. That’s because Granddad told me he was really a ghost who had never been born and would never die. I didn’t realize he probably was kidding. The priest wondered why I’d give a forty-thousand-dollar brand-new car to people who frightened me. I said Because I can read. Remember Grandpa’s Edward Curtis books? We had to wash our hands before we looked at them. So the next morning I made a picnic basket and he picked me up. He was originally from near Indianapolis and grew up loving fast cars as boys must do around there. It is a mystery how anyone could be that thrilled by a car. We took the long way, driving down toward Nogales, then across the Arivaca Canyon road through the Tumacacori Mountains. It’s a narrow dirt road with many curves and my priest loved the trip, though I thought he drove alarmingly. Nothing would have happened if there hadn’t been a sudden, brief thunderstorm. The clay on the road turned to butter and we were caught in a big dip in the mountain road. He said we would be OK when it dried out so we had a picnic in the car and drank a bottle of white wine. Then the rain stopped and the sun came out and it was hot and clear again. I got out of the car, crawled through a fence, and walked down a hill to a spring-fed stock pond. You know I’m not very enthused about nature so it was quite an adventure. The priest was frightened because there were cattle in the pines near the pond, one of them a bull, but I said that Hereford bulls aren’t dangerous so he joined me. He said it would take an hour for the road to dry off. I took off my shoes and waded in the pond, washing my face in the spring. I was terribly excited for no particular reason. Maybe I was feeling desire without admitting it. I don’t think so. It was just that I was doing something different. Then the priest said I should take a swim and that he had four sisters and bare skin didn’t bother him a bit. So I took off my skirt and blouse and dove in the water in my bra and panties. He stripped to his shorts and followed. It was absolutely perfect swimming though he was intensely nervous. I said that God was busy in cancer wards, Africa, and Central America, and wasn’t watching him. I got out to sun on a warm rock but he stayed in the water. Finally he said I guess I have an erection. I said You can’t stay in the water the rest of your life. He said Don’t look, and got out of the water and sat beside me staring straight ahead. I thought I am not going to let him get away so I stood up and took off my bra and panties hanging them on a bush to dry. Then I told him rather sternly to lay on his back on the grass and to close his eyes if he wished. he was shaking so hard I thought he’d fall apart like an old car. So I made love to him.”