by Jim Harrison
I felt it was all unnecessary since Duane showed not the slightest sign of being anything more than minimally my “partner.” I tried becoming less pushy and doe-eyed which did serve to make him friendlier. He took me to some Indian burial mounds in a dense thicket in the farthest corner of the property. I didn’t tell him that my father had taken me there soon after I was given my first pony. Not far from the burial mounds Duane had erected a small tipi out of poles, canvas, and hides. He told me he slept there often and “communed” with dead warriors. I asked him where he got the word “commune” and he admitted he had taken to reading some of the books in Grandfather’s library. It was the first cool evening in September and the air was clearer than it had been all summer, with a slight but steady breeze from the north. I mention the breeze because Duane asked me if I ever noticed that the wind in the thickets made a different sound depending on which direction the wind came from. The reason was that the trees rubbed against each other differently. I admitted I had never noticed this and he said, “Of course, you’re not an Indian.” I was a bit downcast at the reminder so he gave my arm a squeeze, then gave me my first real hope by saying there might just be a ceremony to make me a bona-fide Sioux. He’d check if he ever got back to Parmelee. I hated to leave but my mother insisted I be home before dark when I was with Duane. I went to my tethered horse and Duane said, “If I asked you to stay all night, would you?” I nodded that I would and he came up to me, his face so close that I thought we were going to have our first kiss. The last of the sun was over my shoulder and on his face, but he suddenly turned away.
That summer I became friends with a girl named Charlene who at seventeen was two years older than me. She lived in a small apartment in town above a café that her mother managed. Her father had died in World War II and this misfortune of war helped bring us together. I barely knew her at school where she had a bad reputation. It was rumored that when rich pheasant-hunters from the East appeared in late October and November Charlene made love with them for money. Charlene was very pretty but an outcast; she didn’t belong to a church or any school groups. The only time she had spoken to me at school was when I was in the eighth grade—she told me to “be tough” when the older boys were bothering me. We didn’t get to know each other until we began talking in the town library.
On Saturday afternoons, Naomi would drive to town to shop for groceries and do errands. Ruth would tag along with me to the saddle-and-harness shop, and then we’d have a soda and all meet at the library. We never saw Duane in town because he would do farm errands on weekdays, claiming it was too crowded on Saturday. The town was the county seat but barely had a population of a thousand. I had been reading Of Human Bondage, Look Homeward, Angel, also Raintree County by Ross Lockridge. They were wonderful books and I was puzzled when I read in the paper that Mr. Lockridge had committed suicide. Charlene saw me with the books and we began talking. She was in her waitress uniform and said she came in on Saturdays after work to get something to read in order to forget her awful life. We met and talked on a half-dozen Saturdays, and I asked her to come to dinner on Sunday because I knew the café would be closed. She said thank you but she wasn’t our kind of people, but then Naomi showed up and talked her into it.
Charlene began spending every Sunday with us. Grandpa liked her a great deal when I brought her over. It was her first time on a horse, which thrilled her. Duane made himself scarce—it was always difficult for him to deal with more than one person at once. Naomi gave Charlene lessons in sewing and made some clothes for her that couldn’t be bought short of a long drive to Omaha. Naomi told me in private that she hoped Charlene wouldn’t sell herself to pheasant-hunters again in the fall. She said more than one upstanding woman in the area had done so, so it wasn’t an item on which a woman should be judged unfairly.
One night when she was staying over Charlene told me the rumors were true. She said she was saving up to leave town and go to college. I asked her what all the men did to her, but she said if I didn’t know already she wasn’t going to tell me. I said I did know but was interested in the details. She said she got to be very picky because they all wanted her, and one man from Detroit paid her a hundred dollars, which was what she made in the café in an entire month. The only embarrassing quality of her visits was the degree to which she was impressed by our house and Grandpa’s. It was natural of her but it upset me. We had few visitors and I certainly knew that we were what was called “fortunate,” but one tended to take it all for granted. Furniture and paintings in both houses had been accumulated on travels beginning with Great-grandfather, but mostly by Grandfather around World War I in Paris and London, and later by his wife, and also by my parents. It was the time in life when you wanted to be like everyone else, even though you had begun to understand there was no everyone else, and there never had been.
My bad luck, innocently enough, started with religion. We had always gone to a small Wesleyan Methodist church a few miles down the road. Everyone did for miles around except the Scandinavians who had a similarly small church that was Lutheran. Once a year, in July, the churches held a joint barbecue and picnic. It was all quite friendly and social, our religion, and our preacher, though very old and quite ineffectual, was admired by all. On this particular Sunday we had to get to church a little early because Ruth served as the pianist. Charlene was with us—she had never been to church until she began coming to our house for Saturday night and Sunday, and found it interesting though peculiar.
I remember it was the first Sunday after Labor Day and it was very hot after the brief cool spell when I was out at Duane’s tipi. Our regular minister was away on vacation in Minneapolis, and his replacement was a young, handsome preacher from theological school who was a fireball and aimed, according to the mimeographed announcement, to be an evangelist. We were accustomed to restrained homilies on the tamer aspects of the New Testament, and the substitute preacher swept everyone in the congregation off their feet, except Naomi who was quietly tolerant. He thundered, roared, strutted up and down the aisle, physically grabbed us; in short, he gave us drama and we were unused to drama. The gist is that many of the inventors of the atom bomb and hydrogen bomb were Jews, or “children of Israel.” God had called upon his Chosen People to be his tool to invent the destruction of the world, which would call forth the Second Coming of Christ. All those who were truly saved would be drawn up in the Rapture before the Conflagration. Everyone else, no matter how sincere, would endure unbelievable torture with millions and billions of radiation-crazed zombies devouring each other’s flesh, and the animal and sea world going berserk, and primitive tribes, including Indians, rising up to slaughter the whites. I remember thinking for a moment that Duane would save me. For the time being, the church moaned and wept. When the sermon neared its end and the wringing-wet preacher gave the invitation to come forward, there was a general rush to the front to give our lives to Jesus, including me, Ruth, Charlene, and more than two dozen others, including all the younger people.
In the confused but saner aftermath it was decided that we all should be baptized just in case hydrogen bombs were actually aimed at our part of the country. In the upper Midwest, no doubt due to the weather, many things are considered chores—including funerals, weddings, baptisms—that need to be accomplished with a certain dispatch. The plan was to meet at the swimming hole on our farm as soon as a picnic could be gathered (food is never neglected) and the proper clothing found, which was anything close to white.
We reassembled by midafternoon and the ceremony went well except for the appearance of a water snake. The weather was so hot that the water felt especially cool and sweet. Naomi looked at Ruth, Charlene, and me in our wet white dresses and said it couldn’t have done us any harm. While I was wiping my face with a towel I heard a bird whistle that I knew had to be Duane. The others went off to eat so I snuck through a grove of trees to where I saw Duane sitting on his buckskin.
“What were you goddamned monkeys doing in the river?�
� he asked.
“Well, we were getting baptized in case the war comes and the world ends.” I felt a little stupid and naked in my white wet dress. I tried to cover myself and gave up.
He told me to jump on the horse with him, which surprised me because I had never been asked to do so. He smelled of alcohol which also surprised me because he said alcohol was a poison that was killing the Sioux. At the tipi he put his hand on my bare bottom where my wet clothes hiked up as I slid off the horse. He offered me a bottle full of wild-plum wine from Lundquist. I drank quite deeply and he put his arms around me.
“I don’t like the idea of you getting baptized. How can you be my girl if you’re getting baptized and singing those songs?”
His lips were close to mine so I kissed them for the first time. I couldn’t help myself. He peeled the dress up over my head and threw it in the grass. He stood back, looked at me, then let out a cry or yell. We went into his tent and made love and it was the strangest feeling of my life, as if I were walking up the sun-warmed boards of a cellar door and my feet couldn’t keep my body balanced. I looked into his half-closed eyes but I knew he somehow couldn’t see me, and there was a little humor in the awkward posture because my knees were bent and so far back. I didn’t think I went in that far but he managed and I thought, whatever this is, I like it very much with my hands on his sweat slippery back slipping down to his bottom. When he was finishing he wrenched me around as if he were trying to drag and crush me into his body, and when he rolled off he was breathing like a horse after a hard run. Then he fell asleep in the hot tent and far off I heard Naomi ringing the bell. I went out into the late afternoon and slipped into my damp dress. I ran all the way, except for stopping to take a quick swim. I wondered if I would look different to everyone. That was the last time I saw Duane for fifteen years.
I’ve stayed in Santa Monica this long partly because of the trees. When we were young Ruth had the notion from books of photographs that the cities of the coasts, now thought of as our dream coasts, looked fragile and delicate. It was an interesting idea to us that in our lifetimes these huge buildings would very probably fall over. The idea is peculiar to the northern Midwest—anything too tall tips over. Stick your head out and you might get it cut off. Only the grain elevators are allowed to emerge, offering a stolid and comforting grandeur to the untraveled.
I didn’t tell Mother until November that I was pregnant. I told her I only had missed one period when it was actually two. That was so she wouldn’t think it was Duane, who had disappeared. I told her it was a pheasant-hunter. Her first reaction was a rage that I had never seen before, not against me—I was her “poor baby”—but against the perverted man. I had to add one lie to another because Naomi immediately called Charlene who swore innocence in the matter. I invented a tale of being out riding and meeting a handsome man who was looking for a lost English setter. I helped him find the dog and he seduced me, which wasn’t difficult because I was tired of being a virgin. Naomi took me in her arms and consoled me, saying it wasn’t the end of the world I had lived in so innocently. She withdrew me from school in November during Thanksgiving break, telling the superintendent that she intended to send me to school in the East. The only people who knew were a doctor in Lincoln, Ruth, Charlene—whose contempt for the world was so great she could share in any secret—and Grandpa.
It was hardest on Grandpa, perhaps harder on him than on me because I had the resilience of my age and he had none. A poet, I can’t remember who, said there is a point beyond which the exposed heart cannot recover. I was fifteen, nearly sixteen, and he was seventy-three. I was the “apple of his eye,” perhaps the feminine counterpart of my father.
From the time that Duane disappeared in late September until I was taken away the day after Thanksgiving, I rode over to Grandpa’s every day to see if there was any news from Duane. I never asked directly for news and he never mentioned directly that Naomi had told him I was pregnant. He was considered extremely eccentric well beyond the confines of our county, though never to me. In many ways he had been my substitute father for the nearly ten years since Dad died in Korea, the point in time in which he had ceased active life and retreated behind his successive walls of trees. He had had “too much life” he said, and wanted to think it over before he died. Not that there was grimness on my nearly daily visits—I had at least ten routes to ride over and back, and each of them were well-worn paths. He was grave if I was unhappy, and either went to the heart of the problem with subtlety, or sought to divert me with talk of books, travel, or horses. Naomi felt that he spent far too much on horses for me, but then he had been a horseman all of his life. Even in those days he thought nothing of spending ten thousand dollars on a horse, while a car was nothing more than a vulgar convenience.
His quarrel with Naomi was much deeper than I suspected at the time, because the bits and snatches of it I had heard were not totally comprehensible. As an instance, a few years after Dad died, I was reading in her upstairs bedroom to five-year-old Ruth who had the flu. I stopped because through a floor heating-register I heard Grandpa’s angry voice talking to Naomi. I knelt down and Ruth jumped out of bed and we both put our ears to the register. Grandpa used words and phrases that were tinny and muffled in the vent: You are being a martyr you shouldn’t raise the girls here he’s dead and you shouldn’t stay here as a goddamn monument to his memory the dead are the last people who want us to be unhappy find a gentleman friend a father please for his sake you are barely thirty you are a lovely woman. . . . I can still see Ruth’s face, smiling but flushed with fever.
I knew from Sunday school that a martyr was someone who died for others. Naomi said years later that growing up in a poor family in the Depression and marrying a man so prosperous and dashing as Father was a shock to the system, so that when he died in Korea she wanted to hold on to what they had had together. Strangely enough, it was my pregnancy that forced her into what she thought of as the outside world.
It is nearly thirty years ago and I still feel the pain of that October and November so that my heart aches, my skin tightens, and I can barely swallow. There was a stretch of Indian summer when I would sit with Grandpa on the porch swing watching autumn, then squeeze my eyes as if Duane were walking up the driveway back to me. There was nothing left of him, not a trace, in the bunkhouse except the two Airedales who dozed on his cot as if waiting. I groomed his buckskin but hadn’t the heart to ride the horse.
One afternoon, the day before Thanksgiving when I cleaned out my locker and said a tearful goodbye to Charlene, I rode over to Grandpa’s against Naomi’s wishes in a gathering snowstorm. I asked him to light the soft oil lamps because they cast a yellow light around the room, but the light made him look old and quite sad. Behind his head on the den wall was a folio print from Edward Curtis of the warrior chief Two Whistles with a crow perched on his head. Outside the sky was gray and full of snow with the wind buffeting the windowpanes. He put his favorite Paganini violin solo on the Victrola. He rejected more modern record players, having grown fond of and used to the bad sound reproduction. He repeated one of my favorite stories of seeing War Admiral win the 1937 Kentucky Derby, then drifted off into the splendor of the Dublin Horse Show. When he finished I was looking out the window, thinking I would have to stay the night, and happy at the prospect. I said something idle to the effect of “I could just shoot myself if Duane doesn’t come back.”
“Dalva, goddamnit!” he roared. Then for the first time I’d ever seen it, he began to cry. I rushed to him, begging him to forgive me for saying something stupid. You must never say that, he said. He repeated himself. He poured us each some whiskey, a full glass for himself and a little bit for me.
In the next hour I was to become old before my time. He told me that my grandmother had been somewhat insane and had committed suicide with whiskey and sleeping pills. She had been a lovely and kind soul but had left him to raise the boys. Now that my father was dead, and my uncle estranged, wasting his life wandering t
he world, I had to live, and he had deeded me this strange corner of the farm. They all could have their goddamn wheat and corn. Then his face darkened and he held my hand. Just before the war my uncle Paul had come home from Brazil, and he and my father, Wesley, had gotten along well, so Grandpa had taken them to a hunting cabin he kept out in the Black Hills. They had a fine drive out though they drank too much and Lundquist had followed in a truck with the horses and bird dogs. Grandpa and Wesley had had a good time hunting but Paul had disappeared for two days, returning with a lovely Sioux girl “to clean the cabin” he said. The girl didn’t care for Paul at all, but fell in love with your father and he with her. Naomi knows nothing of this. Paul and Wesley fought over the girl and I gave her some money and I sent her away while your father had taken a horse to town to be shod. I liked her a great deal and told her to get in touch with me if there ever was a problem. Actually I sent her away because I was taken with her also. It was all a god damn mess and I was relieved when we got back home. She wrote me a note with the help of a missionary saying she was pregnant. I sent a man out there to check and it was true. So I sent her money on a monthly basis for ten years or so, until I thought she disappeared or died of drink as many Sioux do; then I supported the child through a mission school. When Duane showed up here he didn’t know who you were. Then he came back the day you were baptized and said he wanted to marry you and I told him he couldn’t legally because you were his half-sister. He ran away. I know there is no pheasant-hunter. Naomi couldn’t bear to hear this. We’re the only ones who must ever know this. You have done nothing wrong except to love someone. I would have told him earlier who you were except I thought you were helping to keep him here.
Grandpa embraced me. I told him I loved him and I meant to stay alive.