Dalva

by Jim Harrison

  “You’re basically dishonest about everything, aren’t you?”

  “I think ‘playful’ is a better word. Obviously I get my ass in a sling once in a while. That’s what you’re doing in San Francisco isn’t it? I feel unworthy but grateful.”

  “Why would I want you to lose everything you haven’t worked very hard for?”

  “What an awful thing to say. You farm girls aren’t very romantic, for God’s sake. I think I’m owed a double whiskey for that insult.”

  “No. Maybe tomorrow afternoon. I want to see if you have the D.T.’s in front of your chairman.”

  “I was totally dry for ten, or seven, or five days when I had my appendix out. Also when I had the flu. Raymond Chandler said when he quit drinking the world lost its Technicolor. God created color to be seen. I will not blaspheme Him by ignoring the wonders of His handiwork.” And so on.

  Now in bed I’m wondering if sleeping with him isn’t more reality than I need, akin to a night in a dentist’s chair. When we work on the papers he’ll stay in Duane’s quarters and absorb Rölvaag’s spirit, whatever it might be. He likes to say, We are in hell. Hell is our culture and its flood of trash, its almost total inundation by trash. That’s part of his greed theory, and I am somehow a little guilty for having enough money to stay out of the trash flood. I said What about the work I’ve done, especially the last three years with those children? I didn’t have to, he said. But I did. Now I’m thinking of the legs of that Yaqui deer dancer at the Pascua in Tucson at Easter who danced three days and three nights so the Lord could arise again. Dancing seventy-two hours on legs with antlers on his head and a blindfold, at my age he was with legs made of cables and wires of flesh. What was that word in high-school physics? Specific density, I think. How much of him there was in one place so if he wasn’t dancing he would fall into the earth. Dancing under the overpass of Route 10 between L. A. and Texas with a thousand trucks per hour, he was from down in Mexico, they said, where he lived on a mesa getting ready to dance three days and three nights once a year. I can smell the red dust raised by his feet, the Pharisees in black robes swirling up the dust around him. He jumped so far sideways my stomach hurt and there was a dizziness in the air as if there wasn’t enough air to breathe. He was a deer.

  Awake at bare first light because I thought Michael’s rasping breath was Grandfather’s and I had become a bird floating earthward above the south, the sunny side of the barn where we sat with the dogs out of the Nebraska wind. After he retrieved me from Chadron it took him only a week to die. The next morning the doctor told us to get Paul to come home, his father was dying. It took Paul two days to get there from Chiapas, by which time the quarter-horse friend had brought Rachel from Buffalo Gap. Naomi and Rachel liked each other a great deal which made me nervous, though only Grandfather, Rachel, and I knew the entire story. Rachel and Paul tried to track down Duane but he had disappeared from the place Grandfather had sent him. One morning a few days before he died Grandfather told me he had seen Duane in his sleep near a river town up in Oregon. They had talked and Duane was fine. Rachel was taking turns with me sitting beside his bed so I called her in because Grandfather wanted to tell her about seeing Duane. They spoke in Sioux and she became quite happy.

  The usual late-November weather held off and every day was clear, sunny, but very cold. An ex-governor was there visiting Grandfather when Paul showed up. I don’t remember ever being quite so happy to see someone. Paul hadn’t been home since my father Wesley’s funeral, and after he arrived Grandfather asked us to post a sign out on the gate for no more visitors. Paul was a strong person in every respect and it made us all feel much better that he was there. The governor said goodbye and Paul went in with Grandfather and closed the door. I helped Naomi and Rachel make dinner. That morning Grandfather said he wanted to eat his last pheasant, but a half-hour later he added that he thought he should eat his last venison stew and Bordeaux wine. I sent Lundquist off for both a deer and a few pheasants, not a difficult chore on the property. An awkward moment came at lunch when Mrs. Lundquist, who had become quite crazy, showed up with the same Methodist minister who had been so unpleasant to me. Rachel and Naomi turned them away but they wouldn’t go willingly. The preacher and Mrs. Lundquist knelt on the cold ground outside Grandfather’s window—Lundquist made himself scarce out of embarrassment. I could see the kind old man peeking around the corner of the barn at the spectacle. Grandfather had been sleeping but when we reached him he was propped up by the window watching them pray with amusement. He gestured and I opened the window. “Thank you for your concern but I am going into the earth which is the best place I can think of.” That’s what he told them.

  The last morning of his life Grandfather was expansive, nearly ebullient, though he was so weak Paul had to carry him out to our seats on the hay bales behind the barn.

  “I carried him and now he’s carrying me. Isn’t that the goddamnedest thing! Wesley was the fighter but Paul was the strongest. When Paul was angry he would start digging another irrigation ditch, or go way back to Omaha and sit in the library. Isn’t that right, Paul?”

  “You’re right, Father. I’d do anything to keep off a horse.”

  “You own any horses now, son?”

  “As a matter of fact I got a half-dozen down in Sonoita. I bet Dalva told you. I like them because they’re simple-minded and unreliable, like politicians. It’s like owning a stable full of politicians that can’t talk.”

  “Dalva here can ride better than either of you boys could. Certain things skip a generation, though I’ve never been sure what they meant by that.”

  Paul sat on one side of him and I sat on the other. He hadn’t been drinking much but the doctor said it no longer mattered so I helped steady the flask at his lips.

  “I got things set up pretty well for everyone but that’s been so for years. I don’t regret what I did in life. I wish I had done more of it. More of everything. It never occurred to me I wouldn’t read all the books I owned. That’s a funny thought, isn’t it? I can see a hundred books right before my eyes I want to read right now. I never finished Bernard De Voto or H. L. Mencken. Son of a bitch. Dalva, I said to Paul I’m sorry I didn’t get down to see him, and he said I’m sorry I didn’t get up here more often. Don’t get angry with Naomi and run off forever.”

  I said I wouldn’t. The dogs were lying half in a pile in the sun. Only Sonia, the oldest female, realized with her chin on Grandfather’s knee that something was wrong. He kept rubbing the top of her nose; then he fell asleep against Paul’s shoulder for a while. Naomi and Rachel came out with sandwiches and a thermos of coffee. For a moment it was so still all you could hear was the slight gurgle of the creek, nearly dry from the fall drought. Then a heifer bawled out for company over near Duane’s bunkhouse. Rachel knelt down by Grandfather’s knee and petted Sonia. Naomi could tell the end was near and said she was going over to the school to get Ruth so she could say goodbye. We could hear her car all the way out to the section road with the stones cracking under the fenders and the gravel-road dust filtering through the windbreaks. Far off to the east where the yellowed alfalfa seemed to seep into the woods I could see a coyote trotting along. I was going to say something but Rachel and Paul had also noticed the coyote which I had often seen along that hedgerow. Rachel was alarmed and said the coyote might have come to get the soul of Grandfather.

  “I hope so.” Awake, he startled us. “I always liked coyotes but then I never raised any sheep. Before Wesley died I had a fine bird dog that got into the pen one day and killed all the chickens. And stacked them in a mound. Coyotes would only take a chicken or two now and then. This barn is getting too warm.” He loosened the collar of the otter coat. The barn reflected the sun’s warmth but the air was quite chilly. Rachel thought we should go in, with her eye on the distant coyote, but Grandfather said no. He made a strange humming sound. My hands were clenched because in my heart I wanted him to pray to God so he would go to heaven. I knew very little about t
he Sioux religion but I wanted to see him again. All he said of World War I when he lost his faith was that there were horrors that went beyond religion and banished it. We could hear Naomi’s car pulling back into the barnyard.

  “My own father said this was a great sea of grass. I only saw it that way in a few places when I was a child. If there had been enough water the place would have been crowded with people. There’s lots of water where Duane is in Oregon where the trees are like huge grass.”

  Ruth and Naomi approached. Ruth was tearful. “I’m sorry you’re dying, Grandfather,” she said in her matter-of-fact way. “I love you.” And he said something that frightened her: “I’m not going to die. No one ever dies.” Then he said in a whisper, “Jesus, the world is upside down and I’m falling through the sky.” And he died.

  There was no funeral service but a home burial the next morning out in the middle of a huge grove of lilacs, planted for that purpose more than a half-century before. Other than the family there was Rachel, the Lundquists, and three of Grandfather’s old bird-hunting cronies from town, the doctor, a lawyer, and the undertaker who brought out a pine box. I suspect a home burial is against the law now but in 1958 either it was legal or no one would have dared question it. Paul and Lundquist had dug the grave and you could see Lundquist was proud of the trimness of the hole. Mrs. Lundquist was calm, partly I suspect because the lawyer told her that Grandfather had willed them a pleasant farm down the road from our place. Paul told me later that Rachel sat up all night with the body and he could hear her singing from his upstairs bedroom. After respects were made—no words were said—we ate the venison stew and the pheasant and drank a great deal of fine wine from the thirties that Paul selected from the cellar.

  So Grandfather was buried there on the farm with his mother and father, his father’s first wife, his son Wesley—his wife is buried in Omaha with her own people. After lunch Paul and I saddled up two horses and took the dogs for a long run. I let him take the lead and wasn’t all that surprised when we ended up near the thicket and burial mound along the creek. For some reason I rode around the exact spot Duane’s tipi had been, not that it was sacred or anything but my heart had begun pounding. From a nearby tree there was a rope with bleached white coyote and deer skulls that Duane had hung in the thicket to scare any interlopers away. Paul looked at me and for some reason at that moment I knew he had figured out the whole secret. To this day he has never mentioned it.

  “You know until Wesley died your grandfather could be a real hard son of a bitch. You got the best part of him. Now you have lost two fathers; I’ll have to pass for the third. But maybe you’re old enough at sixteen so you won’t need one too often. Everyone’s different this way. Your sister Ruth seems sure of herself.”

  “She wants one thing, to be a pianist. I don’t have any idea what I want to be. My friend Charlene says my dreams will tell me what I should do but that doesn’t seem very reliable.”

  Paul began laughing and we rode north at a gallop toward the Niobrara River, a different route to the box canyon favored by both of us. At the river we watered the dogs and horses, then forded easily where the river was wide and shallow. We sat on the flat rock in the canyon for a half-hour or so.

  “What do you dream about?” Paul asked.

  “A lot of sexual stuff. Also about animals—wolves, bears, coyotes, deer, songbirds, and hawks.” A pair of migrating rough-legged hawks swooped past us headed downriver, probably waiting for the warmer afternoon air to make their way farther south.

  “Sounds pretty good to me. I read where dreams are supposed to help the brain catch up with the life, sort of a Rube Goldberg machine to ease the pressure. I’m not sure. I used to dream a lot about being in bed with my mother. Maybe that’s why I stick to Mexican women.”

  “Do you believe in heaven and hell?”

  “Holy Christ, Dalva, I’ve been your dad for less than twenty-four hours. Let’s start with easier questions.”

  “How about one from a popular song. Will my lover come back to me?” And that’s when I began weeping. I hadn’t wept at the burial service but all that I had already lost in life, two fathers, a son, and a lover, swirled in my brain, and in the air in the canyon, out over the river and up into the sky. I thought my chest and head would crack open like a melon. Paul hugged me and said a sentence or two in Spanish. A week or so later he sent a translation up from Sonoita, a few lines from a Lorca “Gacela” that he loved.

  I want to sleep the dream of the apples,

  to withdraw from the tumult of cemeteries,

  I want to sleep the dream of that child

  who wanted to cut his heart on the high seas.

  I woke up Michael a full hour before we had to leave for the airport to pick up Naomi and Ruth. He fairly sprang around the room, assuring me he hadn’t felt better in years. Along with an ample breakfast we had to ask room service for a popular stomach remedy so that Michael could counteract his duck feast and put yet more in his belly (sausage, eggs, potatoes). He began to bargain for future drinks—say, between the airport and the meeting.

  “I thought you hadn’t felt better in years.”

  “I’m talking about precautionary measures, insurance, like two aspirin before an event that will cause a headache.”

  “I’ll put one of those little bottles in my purse just in case.” This satisfied him for the time being.

  We picked Naomi and Ruth up at the airport and drove directly, if somewhat erratically, down to Palo Alto. Like many drivers Michael felt you must look at someone you’re talking to and Naomi and Ruth were in the backseat. For reasons lacking clarity the talk jumped from the farm crisis, to the potential exhaustion of the Oglala aquifer, to marriage, on which subject Michael was manic and captious to the point where Naomi and Ruth interpreted his comments as part of a comic routine.

  “I doubt if any of you know what it feels like to wake up from a sound sleep only to find that someone is beating you. My wife, to be exact.”

  “You’re fortunate she wasn’t using a gun or a knife. In our county last year a woman shot her sleeping husband at close range with a shotgun.” Naomi said this though I doubted it was true because she sends me the county newspaper every week. She’s always been capable of inventing an anecdote to prove a point.

  “Is what you’re telling me another tale of woeful spouse abuse where after two decades of beating Martha slaughters the jerk and is exonerated? I’ve never touched a woman in anger.”

  “Not at all. We were quite surprised. The husband was an elder in the Swedish Lutheran church and ran the grain elevaotor. The local gossip was that he drove her insane with boredom.”

  “Jesus! How wonderful.” Michael swerved on the freeway but the traffic was light.

  “That must have been the man that changed his socks three or four times a day, wasn’t it?” Ruth asked. “Dalva, can you still do your marriage speech?”

  “I haven’t used it in years but I could give it a try.” Ruth was referring to a passage from C. G. Jung I had cribbed as a patented response to everyone who asked me why I wasn’t married yet, beginning in my mid-twenties, through my thirties and early forties. I’ve always felt the question preposterously impolite though I respond in a quiet, conversational tone. “I think women nowadays feel there’s no real security in marriage. What does her husband’s faithfulness mean when she knows his feelings and thoughts are running after others, and that he’s too calculating or too much of a chicken-shit to follow them? And what’s the point in her being faithful when she knows she’s simply using it to exploit her legal right of possession, and warping her own soul? Most women have intimations of a higher fidelity to the spirit and to a love beyond human weakness and imperfection.”

  Naomi and Ruth clapped. “I can’t handle that without a drink,” Michael said, and I handed him his miniature bottle. He was flushed and edgy as we entered the Stanford campus but, nevertheless, slipped the bottle in his sport jacket as a show of something.

&nbs
p; The actual content of the meeting was perfunctory: the three of us signed a document giving Michael full access to our family papers for the duration of his sabbatical year. In attendance were the chairman, the dean of science and arts, a rare-book librarian, and a museum curator who inquired, in barely more than a whisper, what had happened to the collection of Plains Indian artifacts begun by my great-grandfather. I was the only one who knew, but fibbed by saying that they had been sold to a private collector in Sweden. The dean and chairman were subtly impressed by Michael’s new tailoring—men are as critical on this matter as any woman—which must have seemed a contrast to the usual bleary, cheapish tweeds. Everyone was pleased that a sensitive matter had been cleared up, the challenges from other, perhaps less qualified institutions put to rest. The rare-book librarian offered free storage for the papers under the notion that a bank vault in Nebraska probably wasn’t temperature- and humidity-controlled. Ruth pointed out rather sharply that we had taken care of that matter. We all had an amicable cup of tea, had our hands shaken, and Michael’s back patted.

  “It’s painful how some folks treat you when they think you’re rich,” Naomi said, when we were back in the car with a parking ticket on the window.

  “The major problem in the modern university is parking, just as the major problem in modern Christianity is evidently bare asses in magazines.” He uncapped his miniature, sighed, finished it in a single swallow.

  We spent the next three days in what Naomi called utter “frivolity,” a word not used much anymore in a frivolous society. The hotel concierge found us a cancellation up at a bed-and-breakfast in Napa Valley—a difficult thing on Memorial Day weekend. The three of us drove up and Michael joined us with his daughter, Laurel by name, the next day. She was a shy, pretty girl, the soul of neatness. The first moment she could get me aside she begged me to intercede with her father to allow her to go back to public school the coming year. At the private boarding school Michael had sent her to nearly all the girls were rich and she felt lonely and out of place. I meant to keep track of his relentless fibbing. Laurel spent time with Ruth and myself while Naomi went off with Michael and a map to test the wine at all the vineyards in the area. One morning she woke him at 5:00 A.M. on his boozy promise to take her bird-watching. While he was stumbling around the room it was interesting to note how his new clothes had disintegrated in appearance in a mere three days.