by Jim Harrison
From what the Sioux boy had told me in Pine Ridge I pretty much expected to see Duane’s mother at Grandfather’s hunting cabin. He showed no hesitation in sharing this secret with me though he waited until the last moment to do so. He’d had her traced to Denver after Duane showed up at the farm, and had settled her in the cabin where he’d first met her along with my father and Uncle Paul.
There were the remains of a well-ordered garden outside a door protected by a not very angry black Labrador. The log cabin was much larger than I had expected with a big screened porch facing down-valley to the south. Out beside a shed and small corral I could see Duane’s buckskin staring at us and whinnying. When I turned around she was standing in the open door, tall and thin, almost handsome, but with the somewhat dead eyes I would later recognize as those of a recovered serious alcoholic. She smiled and held her hand out to me. Her hand was strong but had the feeling of a hand that had been crushed and healed improperly. Later Grandfather said she had been run over by a car in Alliance when she fell asleep drunk on a side road. Her name in Sioux meant “kestrel,” or “sparrow hawk.”
Inside the cabin I was drawn naturally to the fireplace, and the startling photographs on the mantel. There was a photo of Paul and my father with Sparrow Hawk between them. Behind me they were talking in Sioux and I picked up little of it except numerous terms of endearment. There was also a photo of me with the Airedales, several of Duane, including a recent one on his buckskin. When I turned back to the room she was right behind me and asked me to call her by her American name which was Rachel. Then she asked me to return the necklace Duane had given me. She said she could see I was as strong as my father and Grandfather but Duane was a lunatic and needed the necklace. She pronounced “lunatic” in three distinct syllables as if there was no doubt that this word was a precise description of Duane’s character. I took off the necklace without hesitation and she fondled the unremarkable stone in her palm. She turned and said something mournful to Grandfather, who got up from the sofa and embraced her. Then she wailed, and I rushed from the cabin grabbing Duane’s old aviator jacket instead of my own. The jacket had been my father’s before Naomi gave it to Duane because she said he never looked warm enough.
My ears were ringing from Rachel’s wail so I saddled up the buckskin. I swore long and loudly to block out the wail. The black Labrador barked with excitement which helped. It was my first hard ride in over a year and I rode like a crazy woman. The buckskin was rank and willful so I put it through figure eights until it lathered, then took off up the valley with the dog laboring to keep up. I rode the horse as hard as I dared, then cooled him off with a long walk. I could still see the cabin a half-dozen miles down-valley and imagined the wails coming up through the chimney. I found a stock tank and let the horse drink, then tethered it and lifted the dog over the edge and watched it swim in happy circles. I got pretty wet lifting the dog out of the tank but didn’t care—there is something about doing a favor for a dog that calms you down. I stood there as if a statue, my hand against the buckskin’s neck feeling his slowing pulse. I had a feeling of dreamlike clarity and perhaps undeserved strength when I remembered something Grandfather had said when he found me after my walk in the hills on the far side of the Niobrara: how each of us must live with a full measure of loneliness that is inescapable, and we must not destroy ourselves with our passion to escape this aloneness. Leaning against that stock tank in the high neck of the valley I could hear the wind and the breathing of the dog and horse. Everyone I had ever known drifted through my mind and out into the air along with the sense that the resonance of their voices resembled the voices of birds and animals. I was somewhat surprised finally to look up and see the sun.
When I reached the cabin I found I had been gone three hours. Rachel warmed up my dinner while Grandfather slept on the couch. His breathing was coarse and his face looked feverish. She said she had hoped we would spend the night but he felt sick and wanted to go home.
A fine May morning on the balcony: my dawn walk was a bit melancholy, the heat I could feel coming signaling the advent of the beach season and its crowds. I took the phone out on the balcony and talked to Mother. We arranged to meet with Ruth in San Francisco the day after Naomi’s country school finished its season which was only a few days off. It would be the first time, she said, that she would miss the Memorial Day service at the country cemetery for the war dead in thirty-seven years, but she knew her daughters needed her and it was certain her husband didn’t. Then Andrew called somewhat anxiously to say that the authorities had lost track of Guillermo Sandoval in McAllen, Texas, and that Ted had insisted a man be put on my track full-time for protection. I explained my schedule and the fact I’d probably move back to Nebraska in June. He said it was safer if I didn’t know who this guard was since the psychopath in question was devious. Ted came on the phone and insisted on lunch. I rejected his elegant choices, picking instead a café a few blocks away from my apartment that was favored by all the Australians in Santa Monica. He agreed with his patented sigh.
The hour or so on the phone helped make me decide to accept Naomi’s teaching offer: barely a month out of work and I felt less than useful, though I had done a great deal of reading and writing. Perhaps it’s because the phone is a close tie to the government as the greatest source of enervation in our time. Actually teaching youngsters to read and write would be a wonderful tonic to the phone and California. Out of kindness, though, I quickly called Michael and told him I was leaning in his direction, and would probably see him on Tuesday. His voice quavered and he began speaking as fast as possible short of incoherence. I cut him off by saying I missed him and goodbye.
When I showered and dressed for lunch I felt a tremor of loneliness that I recognized as mostly sexual. This passed and was displaced by the vertiginous notion that another section, a largish piece of my life was coming to an end. The professor’s convoluted notions of time were not all that inaccurate though they owned too many sharp corners. Maybe that is an essential difference between male and female—I see my life abstractly in terms of interlocking spirals, circles, gyres, while the professor is more linear and geometric. I intended to talk to him about this again after I exhausted him in bed which, to be frank, didn’t take that long.
As I walked to the restaurant I felt a sharp pang beneath my breastbone that I was bent on leaving the place that had been a relatively happy home. All my moves had been so radical—New York City and Los Angeles had alternated with remote regions of Montana, Minnesota, Michigan, and Nebraska. There had been short, unsuccessful attempts to live in foreign countries—France, England, Mexico, Brazil—but I was so thoroughly an American that my homesickness led to a premature return; out of forty-five years well over forty-three had been spent in New York or Los Angeles, or in areas so remote that my friends in those cities found them laughable.
I was in the pub part of the restaurant and standing near the window when Ted’s car pulled up. As everyone knows, Californians tend to be car snobs with a sharp eye out for such small items as a limousine with rental licenses. Ted’s was his own, a silver 600 Mercedes with the back set up as an ambulatory and convertible office. He spent so much time between Malibu and Beverly Hills and the airport it was easy to justify the extravagance, and the IRS cooperated. I had ridden in the car only a few times before I decided the silliness was overwhelming. There was the additional idea that envy along with self-pity serve as our most repulsive emotions, and it was no fun getting out of the car only to be stared at by people to whom such things mean a great deal. Ted, however, dismissed this as bogus Midwestern modesty.
“You look awful,” I said. And he did as he smiled out from a pale and fatigued puffiness.
“I was celebrating. I passed the antibodies test. I’m clean, and now I’m going to be careful.”
I reached across the table and took his hand. To moralists the scene would be ludicrous, perhaps disgusting, but I’m not a moralist and he was a dear friend. He had refused to
take the test out of fear but I had helped him into it. If an act of love spreads a fatal disease, I argued, then you give up the act of love. His happiness was tempered by the fact that one of his closest friends had flunked the test.
“That’s it for him. Kaput. No more love. The odds are he won’t even get it himself. But what I want now is for you to talk Ruth out of marrying this Mexican grocer. He’s much more dangerous than the batty priest.”
“Behind every ex-artiste is a snot,” I countered, misquoting Auden.
“That’s true but you’ll admit Latin men are all sweetness, mi corazón and that sort of thing, until she says yes; then they become bullies.”
“That’s true generally but Ruth is smart enough to know if he’s different.”
“No, she’s not, for Christ’s sake. She’s full of vague longings. She’s pre the last three or four fucking wars. She’s Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf. She’s half goddamn nitwit every day and a hundred percent nitwit when it comes to men. I still love her but she won’t listen to me.”
“Of course you love her,” I said without irony, “but that doesn’t make you worth listening to on the subject. Some of your choices for me when I came to town weren’t quite on the money.”
“I agree. I thought you were different. Just promise me you won’t let her make the move until you look the guy over.”
I weakened and made the promise. We were interrupted by a young Australian graduate student from Darwin who said hello with a blush and slipped me an envelope. He said he was going home for a few months, then hurried off.
“I’ll give you a C-note if I can read it.”
“Where’s the money?” I said.
Ted handed over the bill, and took the envelope with pleasure. “What a disappointment! ‘My dearest Dalva, Here is the fifty I owe you. Thanks, Harold.’ Jesus, tell him to change his name. Harolds go nowhere. Harold Stassen. Name me another. I bet you slept with the poor boy.”
“Of course. One afternoon in here he was reading Doris Lessing and I like Doris Lessing. Now I’ve tripled my money.”
“Doubled! Ruth says you’re going back home. You’re going to have to down-shift to farmers.”
“There’re a few cowboys left. Besides I’m going back to work, buy some horses and dogs, and grow old.”
“I’d like to organize a large bet on your return here or to New York. You need neutral territory to live in. Ghosts make you old. You never heard from the boy again, did you?”
“No. I’m hoping he’ll contact Uncle Paul, who’s looking for him.”
“Good. Nothing shakes my faith like queer crimes. They’re terribly embarrassing.”
“Sex crimes always are. I took a whole graduate course in crimes of a sexual nature. It’s much worse than the newspapers print.” Suddenly in my mind it was winter in Minneapolis and I could hear the professor’s cold, passionless monotone, really the only sort of voice appropriate to the subject. There were too many photos, some in color.
“Are you listening? I said Why don’t you go to San Francisco a day or two early? Andrew said that creep might be back in town.”
“Of course. Why not.” I tried to regather myself from Minneapolis.
The food at lunch was so unremarkable as to be soothing—“bangers and mash” the English call it. Ted treated it as an adventure. He had the very rare ability to find life interesting in its most minimalist details. His early admission that he couldn’t create anything had served to broaden his energies rather than narrow them. Absolute self-acceptance isn’t all that common. He wanted to cancel his appointments so we could drive up to Trankas and take a beach walk. He had become active in a land syndicate composed of moguls anticipating growth to the north. Now he considered it all a “healthy pursuit” and wanted to show me part of the land. I begged off, saying the moving company had sent over cartons and I wanted to start packing. To prolong the meeting he tried to start a quarrel over my intention to drive my old ‘81 Subaru all the way to Nebraska.
Back at my apartment I decided to have a few drinks while packing, something I’ve always done when moving, to savor the full banality of the process. I would pack a box, I decided, then mix a drink and write in this journal, then pack another box, and so on, until I fell asleep. It seemed a delightful plan so I changed into my Levis and a “Fuck Hate” T-shirt that one of Ted’s musician friends had given me. There was a nagging desire to try to call my Australian graduate-student friend but I subdued it. I poured a few fingers of Herradura tequila and began by packing some precious objects while I was still totally sober: an alabaster peach given to me by a Brazilian; a stuffed crow, rather tattered, inherited from my father; a boar-hoof Yaqui rattle; a true pearl necklace that was my grandmother’s; a glass-encased Peruvian butterfly; a moon-white coyote skull found on a walk with Grandfather; my father’s high-school class ring. I remember at the time that Grandfather told me the coyote had died very old because the teeth were worn down, the incisors chipped. Two of the teeth were loose so we had glued them back securely into the jaw. Lastly, there was Duane’s necklace, which I had gotten back during a night-mare.
Tequila and a skull. Pearls and a butterfly, a stone-hard peach. We didn’t leave Buffalo Gap that day until late in the afternoon, because Rachel wanted Grandfather to sleep as long as possible. I called Mother, who kindly pretended nothing had happened. I said we should be home by midnight. The fire in the fireplace drew evenly and I noticed the wind had stopped. I went outside, sat on the ground in the afternoon sun, and petted the dog, who dashed off and retrieved his largest filthy bone. I didn’t hear Rachel come up behind me until she spoke.
“I’m sorry what my son did to you.”
“I’m not. Anyway, he didn’t do it to me, we did it together.”
“I hope you’re as strong as you talk.”
“I better be,” I said, laughing. “Or I’m really up shit creek.”
She sat down beside me on the ground and said something in Sioux to the dog, who immediately played dead. Then she pulled his ear and he came back to life.
“I look old because I was drunk as I could be for over ten years. I was a whore in Denver until I lost my looks. Then your grandfather found me. You know that Duane is no good for you.”
“That’s what I’m told. I guess we’re related and that makes it wrong.” Now my face burned and there were tears in my throat.
She put her arm around me. “Don’t blame your dad. We were after each other the moment we met. I was cleaning the cabin and washing dishes when your dad came in from hunting with your grandfather. Paul says, Look who I found to help us out in the cabin. Paul saw me in Buffalo Gap and gave my dad fifty bucks to get me to come help. That was more cash than we had ever seen. So I helped your dad cook dinner and I thought, This is the man in the world I want. Then your grandfather says to me in Sioux, which shocked me because I thought they were pure white, I better get you out of here before my sons get in a fight. Wesley is married and Paul isn’t so pick on Paul. Or me. That’s what he said. I think it was 1942. But next day I went off on horseback with your dad and that evening everyone got drunk and your dad and Paul got in a fight over me. The next day your granddad took me back to town. . . .”
Rachel stopped herself and turned around, hearing Grandfather close the door. He stood there with his otter-skin coat buttoned to the neck despite the freshet of south wind. He beamed feverishly at us and said “My girlfriends,” then was overcome and couldn’t continue as he looked out over the valley. I’m sure he was saying goodbye to this retreat he had discovered soon after World War I. Rachel rose and they embraced. She walked with him to my car which he patted, then laughed as if sharing the knowledge with us of how absurd the aqua convertible looked in the landscape.
The first stop was for whiskey to quell his cough. The late-October twilight was abrupt and soon we were driving straight into the moon which had emerged unrecognizably at the end of the road. This enormous moon delighted him and as the moon lifted the landscap
e brightened, the outlines of the Sand Hills against the sky were dulcet and blurred. When we hit a dip in the road where a creek crossed, the yellow cottonwood leaves swirled around the car. He fiddled with the radio and swore when he found nothing classical, then found a country station playing Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. He told me he had danced to this band with a pretty señorita on a horse-buying trip to Fort Worth before World War II. Then he asked me to pull over so we could put the top down. I said we shouldn’t because it was getting colder and he was sick but he insisted.
Later we stopped at a roadhouse owned by an old crony of his and ate fried steaks and looked at a scrapbook full of pictures of hunting, bird dogs, and horses. “So this is Wesley’s daughter. You don’t say,” said the old man. Back in the car it seemed colder but still he wanted the top down. He didn’t seem drunk, and I remembered that Naomi said in the old days you would have thought Grandfather was Lord Byron himself. Now we were only an hour or so from home and he told me to sing him asleep. I said I wasn’t too musical but sang Jim Reeves, Patsy Cline, awful renditions of Sam Cooke, and Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel.” He couldn’t sleep and chanted something in Sioux several times and I asked him what it meant. He said it meant “Take courage, the earth is all that lasts.” He seemed a little embarrassed by how somber the words sounded, so he sang a dirty song from World War I, which he copied down for me the next day: