by Jim Harrison
“I peeked in your window but you were hard at work. These are sort of presents. I’m not trying to change your life overnight, just increase the braking power.”
It took a few moments for me to determine that the UPS and air-freight cartons stacked in the backseat were from purveyors of food and wine in New York and California. I was overcome and felt my face redden. I had a rather meager childhood, but, then, so did everyone in our neighborhood. Christmas usually meant bedroom slippers, a horn for my third-hand bike, my first alarm clock, a fishing reel for a dirty river with no fish, a rubberoid football. The simplest gift tends to knock me for a loop. She came around the side of the car and gave me a squeeze and a kiss.
“Brandy. Or is that Calvados?” she asked after a whiff of my breath.
“I couldn’t find any whiskey. I just took a tad.” I was far too happy to pule and whine excuses.
Our first homestead evening went well, with a single discordant note: she wouldn’t tell me where her great-grandfather got the capital to establish his nursery business. She thought it was important that I do my own detective work and arrive at conclusions that would gradually evolve. I verged on starting a quarrel, but she looked too good in a cotton summer skirt and pale-blue blouse, and the meal had been wonderful (a roasted, rough-cut filet of prime local well-hung beef, with a sauce made of dried morels and wild leeks sent from her mother’s cousin in Michigan). As a joke I was served my cabernet in a sixteen-ounce Texas wineglass some fool had sent her. At the end of dinner I began a speech I had been rehearsing, an attempt to change the possible locations of lovemaking into something more comfortable. She listened with the usual attentiveness, then stood and suggested a drive, making my speech for nought.
It was a strange drive, a sense that you could see the June heat lifting off the earth, the greenness darkening as the twilight waned. Far off to the west there were thunderheads that caught the sun we could no longer see and made the air yellowish. We took a gravel road north that dead-ended at the Niobrara River, the wind around the speeding car too loud for talk. Dalva adapted her habit of alertness to her driving, and I felt reasonably safe as she swerved to a halt along the riverbank. There was a breeze being pushed by the distant storm that kept the mosquitoes away. I pointed out a rather alarming light in the east that turned out to be the moon. She said as a girl she had driven here a lot when the car was brand-new, and one August night she had seen three flying saucers. I began to mutter about this, but then she passed me a bottle of brandy she had been kind enough to bring along in her purse. A swallow of it made me quiver, and I felt a nonspecific eeriness about being out in nature in the dark, and tried to think of another time, short of the few camping trips of my youth. When I turned back from the moon and my general prattle, Dalva had taken off her clothes and was stepping into the river. I declined the invitation to join her, though a very small part of me wanted to do so; stepping willy-nilly into a black, flowing river is not in my repertoire. She swam away and I could see the sheen of the moon on her back and bottom. Then she stood up where the water was shallow, shook her hair, and let off with a blood-curdling howl. This jellied my bowels for an instant, but she quickly called to me that she was fine. Her howl put a stop to the night birds and insects. I saw bats flitting around but that was OK, since flying creatures are a positive category. A full minute later there was a yodel of some sort from the hills on the far side of the river, which I thought at first was an echo. Dalva, still out in the river, made another howl, in a much lower key, and the creature responded, or several of them did up and down the hills, and one of them downriver on our side. At first I supposed they were farm dogs, but there didn’t seem to be any farms in the immediate area. She came out of the river and stood beside me, saying, Aren’t coyotes wonderful? Instead of being a little frightened, I agreed—the year before I had helped my daughter with her science term paper on coyotes and thought of them as astounding, though it never occurred to me I would ever be in the middle of them. She shivered and I put my arms around her, moving her body around to dry her with my clothes. She laughed and kissed me; then we made love in the backseat of the car with an energy I could barely remember. We were both surprised by the lightning and thunder and had only made it halfway home when the rain came down in sheets of water. I know that when we got home, dried off and built a fire in the fireplace, and poured a brandy, she wanted to continue but felt she couldn’t in the farmhouse. For a change, I said nothing on the matter.
I was startled awake at first light by the feeling that someone was looking in the window at me. I rushed outside in my shorts in an act of uncommon valor but no one was there except the horses staring from the corral. Don’t they ever sleep? The geese along the creek set up a nasalated racket, and the red sky in the east gave the entire landscape a slightly pinkish cast. I could hear the excitable thud of my heart and a bird I recognized as a whippoorwill. I wondered idly if the Indians always got up at dawn or, if bored, they simply slept in like normal folks. It was probable that old Northridge never missed the first crack of day. One passage indicated that he was forever walking or riding his horse around when the moon was large. Different strokes, I thought, but, then, the mind is forever making comments the voice is wise enough not to speak.
Back in the bunkhouse I put a pot of coffee on the hot plate and took a shower. Certain thoughts had jolted my brain far too awake for me to go back to bed. One of them was the need for scholarly distance, which is far easier to manage in a carrel in a research library. We are not in business to lick the wounds of history but to describe them. While it is a truism that man has not learned much more than the sexual act, and that fire burns when you stick your hand into it, it behooves the scholar to immerse himself in the analyses of the problem, rather than the problem itself. One has to guard himself relentlessly against sentiment, mere opinion, speculation not based on fact. In the early seventies, when some of my fellow graduate students were involved in the American Indian Movement’s occupation of Alcatraz, I chided them for being unprofessional: How can you study the nineteenth century when you become so emotionally involved with its sorriest descendants? And that was a question that stared back at me from my coffee, not that Dalva was sorry, but I was beginning to see that she was somehow a spiritual heir of those who were. My uneasiness was so intense that I jumped out of my skin when there was a knock at the door.
She was bringing my breakfast tray and the explanation that she would be gone throughout the day and perhaps half the evening at a horse function called a “cutting.” I was instantly resentful enough not to inquire what a “cutting” was, though I had to admire her trim Western outfit. I peeked under the breakfast napkin and saw some bagels with cream cheese, and an ample pile of lox and raw onion. I had been so grotesquely involved in my work I had forgotten the food packages of the day before! Anyone who has known me would find this unbelievable. The moment she left I’d go inside and check the booty. I stood and hugged her, feeling her buttocks under the twill riding trousers, my wiener beginning to point through my parted robe. She gave it a friendly squeeze and asked if I’d mind going to town with old Lundquist, whom I hadn’t met, at noon to pick up horse feed at the grain elevator. She added to please not let Lundquist go in the bar because Saturday afternoons tended to get out of hand. I assured her that I would keep the old geezer in check. We turned to see a rather garish Lincoln entering the yard towing a horse trailer, and off she went.
I would have settled for any tripish newsprint to go with my breakfast. I couldn’t imagine a household without newspapers, magazines, or television, and here I was imprisoned within one, and my car in far-off Denver. We had meant to pick up Dalva’s other car over at Naomi’s. Maybe I’d call and fix her dinner: something incautious and Italian to counter this somewhat dismal outback. I begin to eat my lox and picked a later journal, from November.
Aug. 25, 1877
At my camp on the Loup in the gravest melancholy the first anniversary of her death. [?] I have tried
mightily to commune with her spirit and those of my dead friends among the Sioux but with only the very slightest of success. I have heard that there is a medicine man with the Cheyenne up in Lame Deer in Montana Territory that may help me in this matter, though my friend Grinnell says the most powerful men of this sort are to be found far to the southwest in Arizona. He counsels me to return to the strength of our own faith for solace. I said I do not sense the God of Israel alive in this land. Word was brought to me this morning that my friend and brother by his adoption, the brave White Tree, was clubbed to death at Fort Robinson for spitting on a soldier’s saddle. He was dragged from his tipi at night by the soldiers so they could murder him in secret. His wife hid and witnessed this and sent me word. I feel an urge to murder the murderers deep in my gullet.
In my dreams my dead wife told me to leave this place of ours and so I will. In the dream there was a profusion barely short of horror and she was thin as on her deathbed, but her voice was sweet and melodic. We were in the canyon where we found the wolf cubs and took care not to disturb them. They were the merest pups but the largest, perhaps ten pounds in weight, made bold to frighten us away. In the dream the canyon was full of her favorite birds: the purple martin (Progne subis), the killdeer plover (Aegialitis vociferus), the least sandpiper (Tringa minutillia), also curlews & heron-shaped birds beyond my familiarity. We sat on a rock amid choke cherry, wild black currant, red osier dogwood, wolfberry, all in densest bloom. Her breath was close to my ear but she spoke not. I embraced her and she went into my body, the canyon disappeared, and I was transported alone to the summit of Harney’s Butte. I suppose this to mean she is forever in my heart & blood.
Needless to say, this wasn’t the sort of breakfast reading fare I needed. I have no belief in the human soul, but I didn’t want my absence of a soul stretched that far this early. I quickly dressed to go inside, feeling some of the melancholy I do when I hear Petrouchka, or the Bach Partitas. Maybe I should start at the beginning, I thought, and avoid the surprise of lurid dreams and dead wives. It was difficult to imagine actually living through that period on a first-hand, intimate basis, as did Northridge: from the end of the Civil War to the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890, the Great Plains were in a state of historical convulsion. It seems that governments have never evinced any particular talent or inclination for keeping the citizenry alive. Perhaps life itself was the remotest of preoccupations in Washington, D.C. I stood in the middle of the yard trying to stop myself. The grass was the deepest green and the geese were the whitest white. A psychiatrist once told me to try to concentrate on the physical world when my brain became a frazzled whirl. My wife divorced me because I couldn’t stop. Period. I have to avoid novels and the cinema because they set me off. I have learned to guard my sympathies in order to minimize the range of my disappointments. The psychiatrist prescribed lithium but I was unable to complete my dissertation under the soporific influence of this drug. My marriage effectively ended on a two-day car trip up to Seattle to visit her parents. I had been reading an old text called Extraordinary Popular Delusions and Madnesses of Crowds, and talked about it nonstop while she drove. My jaw ached but I couldn’t stop. I continued talking after she got out of the car with our daughter in Seattle. I remember turning on the radio so I would have someone to talk to! I think of myself as ninety-nine percent cured, though the use of alcohol as a sedative is occasionally counterproductive. I have to stop. I decided to chase the geese to watch them fly, but evidently they weren’t the flying sort of geese. Several of them turned on me and I got my shins nipped while backpedaling. The largest—a male, I presumed—followed me right up to the pump-shed back door of the house. I hoped I hadn’t started a permanent war, what with having to travel to and from the bunkhouse.
In the kitchen I opened the fridge to inspect the imported goodies, but then closed it immediately. I had just finished breakfast and wanted to wait until I was hungry to get the full impact of the food. I went into the den and looked at a shelf of books, picking out Thomas Carlyle’s translation of Dante; it was a first edition and there was a dried flower marking a page with a passage underlined—“I wailed not so of stone I grew within; they wailed.” In the first Northridge’s hand was the note “The Sioux!” Fuck this melancholy, I thought. I went upstairs to Dalva’s room on a snooping expedition, but my skin began to crawl, so I only stayed a moment. There were a number of photographs, including old ones of the succession of the three J. W. Northridges, plus Paul as a young man leaning on a shovel. I was drawn to a peculiar-looking young man on a pale horse who reminded me of Rimbaud on the cover of the Varese New Directions translation. There was a photo of Dalva and another handsome young woman taken in what looked like Montmartre, and another of Dalva and a striking though greasy-looking polo player in Rio. She gets around. The phone rang in her room and I rushed downstairs to the kitchen in order not to be caught red-handed. It was my daughter, who was thrilled that Dalva had written to invite her out for July and August, and had included an open round-trip plane ticket. We chatted about Dalva’s offer to teach her to ride horses, and any number of things including her mother’s rather happy remarriage to a Seattle stockbroker who was actually footing the bill for the private school she didn’t want to go to. I was somehow pleased that she wanted to stay with me in San Francisco, however inconvenient it might be.
My next move was my most daring. I opened the door to the cellar but couldn’t find any light switch. There were a number of kerosene railroad lanterns and several flashlights on a shelf. I took the largest flashlight and proceeded nervously down the steps, reminding myself that it was 1986 and there was nothing to fear but fear itself. The cellar was a huge, dry room, with only the large timbers that supported the house interrupting the airiness of the space. It was neat as a pin and had a varnished plank floor, which seemed curious. I had no intention of moving beyond the bottom step but from this vantage point I could see stacked steamer trunks, furniture, huge wooden shipping cases, an office-sized dehumidifier. To my right was a sturdy wire cage some fifteen feet square containing bins of wine. There was a combination lock on the door of the wine cage. I let out a small shriek when I heard a voice say, “You can’t get at the wine.” It was a gnome at the top of the stairs.
Old Lundquist proved to be inimitable; that is to say, there is no reason why another human should achieve his unique confirmation. I won’t attempt to render the Swede accent that persisted despite the fact that he spent the entirety of his eighty-seven years in Minnesota and Nebraska. The accent was absurdly singsongy, with the end of a sentence or comment lifting upward but declining in volume, as if he were running out of breath. When I walked up the stairs and into the kitchen he repeated the comment about the wine several times, each time more woefully. Then he reached in the refrigerator, grabbed a can of beer, and quickly chugged it while backing away, as if I were bent on stopping him. It was at this odd moment that I mentally bet that Northridge had returned to the Swede settler’s encampment and married the girl he had seen bathing, and that perhaps Lundquist was a relative—rather, a descendant. His nose seemed his largest feature, and he wore a soiled denim jacket buttoned to his Adam’s apple despite the June warmth. On the way out through the pump shed he helped me on with a pair of coveralls, as if I were a child, or as if he had accurately estimated my incompetency. I had never worn farmer’s coveralls before and they made me feel like a son of the soil.
So off to town we went in his 1947 Studebaker pickup, the best vehicle ever built in America, or so he said. Between us on the seat his ancient small terrier growled and humped at a pile of oily rags as if I were competing for the rags’ affections. Lundquist drove painfully slow, his pale-blue eyes never leaving the vacant road, his arms stiff at the wheel. He said with an air of sternness that Dalva had told him I was a “drinker” and there was to be no stopping today at the tavern. Normally his daughter, Frieda, gave him two dollars, which allowed him two bottled beers or three drafts on Saturday afternoon, or one bottled
beer and two schnapps—he went on with the permutations, but the upshot was that there were to be no treats because I was along. He saddened me, so I showed him the two twenty-dollar bills I had in my pocket. His face brightened, but then he said no, that my health was at stake.
To change the groggy subject, I began to interview Lundquist on his employer’s family history. By experience I know these rural types insist on beginning at the virtual dawn of creation; in this case, the murder of his own grandfather during the Sioux uprising near New Ulm, Minnesota, in 1862. Lundquist had decided, for reasons he didn’t care to explain, that all Indians were members of a “lost tribe of Israel,” and our mistreatment of them would bring our eventual doom. I attempted to divert him from this gibberish back to actuality, with mixed luck. I damned myself for not having brought along my small dictaphone-recorder. After all, the man was eighty-seven and liable to drop dead at any moment. He began working for Dalva’s grandfather in 1919, and thus had been a family employee for an astonishing total of sixty-seven years. I was tempted to inquire after his wages, but then he said he had received his own farm in a will when Dalva’s grandfather had died in 1957. Lundquist had never expected to own anything—under the system of primogeniture the family farm had always gone to the oldest son. Immigrant families tended to perpetuate this European custom, creating the class of disaffected hired hands made up of younger sons, which helped fuel the Populist Revolt. I was brought up abruptly then by his statement that he would say nothing about the family without Dalva’s permission. His deceased wife had mentioned a secret to a preacher and had been banished from the household the last year of “Mr. John W’s” life. If he talked to me maybe his farm would be somehow taken back, and then what would happen to his daughter, Frieda, who had always been too big to find a husband? I attempted to get him rewarmed by directing him back to the Indians. He said Indians were ignored because they were bothersome. They were bothersome because they were a different kind of “animal” compared to us, wolves as opposed to foxes, horses compared to cows. This was peculiar enough to me to be interesting. We in the academic world like to think we are bathing the country in logic and right reason, when all you have to do is stop at a service station or read a newspaper to find out otherwise. There is a spine of goofiness in America that has never been deterred by literacy. It’s not that we are in a genetic sump but that literacy, the educative system, barely scratches the surface of the ordinary consciousness. Just as we hit a bump on the gravel road and were choking on the road dust filtering up through the floorboards, Lundquist announced that once a Sioux boy had worked for the family. This boy had “secret powers,” could beat up the toughest men, ride his horse at night while standing on it, and talk with wild animals. Everyone in the family and in town was happy when this boy disappeared. I made a note to question Dalva on the wonder boy. On the outskirts of town Lundquist looked at me with a trace of scorn and said that Dalva should have married the president of the United States, or at least the governor. He left me feeling like small potatoes when he stopped at a butcher shop, returning quickly with a single frankfurter for his dog. The terrier held the wiener in his mouth during a few moments of frantic growling, then closed his eyes and ate it with grim pleasure.