by Jim Harrison
My host in Chicago, Samuel_______, for he wishes anonymity, is a prominent merchant of this city and a Quaker. He said I would have enjoyed the city more had there been fewer people in mourning from the War. Everywhere on the street one sees the dazed faces of survivors, many of whom have lost limbs, the faculties of reason and the will to work. It is this merchant who journeyed to Ithaca to visit his son at Cornell and struck the bargain with me & thus I ransomed body & soul, taking his son’s call to conscription. His son was headstrong, impetuous, and a drinker, and has disappeared West, not wanting to be a merchant. His parents are overwhelmed with sadness, nevertheless they fulfilled their obligations to me. This merchant will oversee my business until it is well established, hopefully by spring when I will return before my trip West. During sleepless nights, or when I wake from nightmares of prison, I wonder if my beloved and deceased mother in Heaven can see my shame, the sins of pride and greed that led me to gamble my life. I could not bear to spend my life designing & constructing gardens for rich men who often cannot tell a rhododendron from a pear tree. One is neither guest nor servant, but in between the two, and at close hand there is a preposterous laziness. I pushed both wives & daughters, cousins and guests from my bed. It is said in the Old Testament in Amos 3:15 “And I will smite the winter house with the summer house; and the houses of ivory shall perish, and the great houses shall have an end, saith the Lord.”
I noticed a rather grudging return to religion, so looked in the chest for the small notebook that included the passage on his departure from Andersonville. The notebook was evidently the survivor of the shipwreck. The dates meant that there were four months of missing material from Michigan, but, then, the history of that state at that time was the race between competing lumber barons to cut down every tree enclosed by Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. In my youth at a summer camp sponsored by my dad’s union up in Michigan I saw the few dozen remaining virgin trees, and they looked lonely indeed. The girls at a neighboring camp were not allowed to socialize with us poor union brats. These girls paddled the lake in swift green canoes, while we rowed heavy, shabby rowboats. They all seemed to be blond and one of them “mooned” us with her bare bottom when we rowed past their beach. It was an attractive insult and represented all that is unattainable about wealth. It suddenly occurred to me that Dalva’s horse business in Rapid City might be seen as a euphemism for visiting a gentleman friend, perhaps a rancher of wealth and power. The cuckold again.
June 1865. Georgia
I do not know the day, and none in my vermin-ridden pack of men knows the day. We are together for safety. Mother always abjured me to look daily after the condition of my soul, but yesterday I saw a man shot for a dead dog another man wanted for supper. In the land of dog eaters no one has a soul. I surprised our pack by snaring a deer near a swamp with a snare common to the Iroquois. I traded the heart and liver of the deer at a parsonage in Rome, Georgia, for the coat and collar of an Episcopalian cleric, and was again able to travel alone. It is unthinkable that the gov’t let General Sherman burn & pillage Georgia, and now wishes to starve the survivors. Have noted many non-indigenous plants: camellia, oleander, gardenia, tea roses, azaleas, kalmias. Have enjoyed some hospitality with Georgians with my new collar, also my knowledge of botany & gardening.
June. Solstice. 1865. Tennessee
Along the road I met a thin young woman who wished to sell herself for something to eat. I had caught some catfish in the Tennessee River & smoked them bathed in salt over green hickory, and traded one of the fish for a loaf. I shared this supper with her, and she was nonplussed by my refusal to bed with her. My confinement was short and I am now in good health so I brooded in the night about the sin of fornication. I turned with desire to her at first light, but she had slipped away, taking with her the remaining smoked fish. I was forced to laugh at this incident. Talked to old black witch about local medicinal plants—snake root, ginseng, carolina pink, angelica, senna, anise and spikenard. She shared with me her dinner, a stew of opossum and a squirrel and flavored by hot peppers she grew, also delicious wild-cherry wine. I impulsively gave her a silver locket of my mother’s. We prayed together though her prayers were more African than Christian. Her daughter, a high-spirited girl who was pregnant, came by the log hut and finished the pot of stew and joined us in wine drinking. I confess I slept with this black girl who smelled of woodsmoke and sassafras & was uncommonly happy in my sin. . . .”
This combination of the sacraments of food and sex drove me to the house. It was almost five in the afternoon anyway, and my belly burbled its need for a bite and a drink. I was pleased to see that Naomi had come over and we were to have a Sunday-evening picnic on the front lawn. Dalva went in the house to mix a pitcher of martinis. I pretended to be bored with the idea but my hair roots tingled at the prospect. While Dalva was off on her mission Naomi rather shyly said that an ex-student of hers was an intern on the county newspaper for the summer before she went off to college, and would like to interview me tomorrow, on Monday. Was this possible? I affected a little strain and agreed to do so during my lunch break. Dalva was coming down the porch steps and knew of the request.
“If you touch her you’ll doubtless get your ass shot off. I went to school with her father.”
“Dalva, he’s old enough to be her father,” Naomi said, not without merry irony.
My hands were sweating for the martini, but I looked off at the blooming lilacs of the family graveyard as if offended. “I think I’m capable of regarding beauty without leaping at it like a flying squirrel. In all my years of teaching I’ve never taken advantage of a student, even when it was thrust at me.”
“Oh, bullshit.” She handed me a cold glass and gave me a peck on the cheek. “I saw Karen in town yesterday and I assure you no one will ever take advantage of her—technically, that is. I’m just saying a deer rifle leaves a big hole in a deer.”
“If you like, I’ll come over and chaperone,” Naomi offered.
“I accepted an interview before I was aware of all of this. Now I’m a fucking deer with his guts blasted out. You forget I’m a father. In my wildest fantasies I haven’t poked anything under twenty since I was under twenty.”
They grew tired of teasing me and began discussing the possibility of a family reunion in July. I felt a little like a discarded trinket and edged toward the picnic table and the pitcher of martinis. Their base accusations had made me nervously gulp my first drink. My curiosity urged me to walk into their lilac-surrounded family graveyard but I hesitated—two years ago I had visited my father’s grave with my mother and I had hyperventilated, bawling like a baby. This was quite a shock, since I think I live readily under the assumption that I know myself, and understand others with some accuracy, despite the number of times I catch myself off balance. Most of life is lived, perforce, simplemindedly; to think of Spinoza when you’re taking a pee is to risk missing the bowl.
Naomi sensed my martini nervousness and refilled my glass half full. While Dalva sliced a ham, Naomi told me about her two days spent with a visiting naturalist, Nelse, talking about her bird-count records since the forties. From her description of the man I figured out he was the nature boy I met in the Lazy Daze Tavern. She made him Sunday breakfast; then he was off to Minneapolis to feed his data into a computer. Naomi said there weren’t as many songbirds or hawks anymore due to an amazing assortment of causes: high-tension wires, huge TV -transmitting aerials, auto traffic, pesticides, destruction of migratory habitats in Louisiana and Mexico, destruction of all hedgerows in modern farm practices, which reduced nesting possibilities. As I ate I admitted to myself that it never occurred to me that birds had living conditions.
I subscribe to a half-dozen food magazines that are blithely unaware how certain people eat at home: this afternoon it was a ham that the noble Lundquist had smoked and aged, tiny fresh new potatoes, the year’s first spinach in a salad; even the horseradish had been pureed from a root in the garden and mixed with heavy cream from a nei
ghbor’s herd. It was possible to resent the amount that Dalva could eat because she was so active. She and Naomi were talking about some disturbing aspects of the farm problem. Two more local farms and their families were going under, and there was the barely mentioned undercurrent that there might not be enough students to merit opening the country school, leaving Dalva adrift. Naomi was, surprisingly enough, on the board at the only local bank, and was upset with the misunderstanding spread by the national press: most rural banks are farmer-owned and -operated, so in essence they are borrowing from each other, rather than from some abstract banking community. It’s hard to blame the banker when the “banker” works the neighboring farm. Two men in the adjoining county had recently taken their lives—one a hired hand who had to be let go after thirty years of work. I wanted to say something incisive about money and credit in inexperienced hands but held my tongue. Instead, I told them that circa 1887 a half-million farmers were basically starved out of this longitude and to the west of here, because they had been lied to about the amount of rainfall, even though it could have been checked in an atlas or almanac.
“If it’s been raining for three years it’s been raining forever,” Dalva said. “Then the fourth year it didn’t rain at all.”
I tended to forget that she had read all the journals during her nervous collapse. I reminded myself to try to pry out of her the reasons, because she seemed the unlikeliest candidate I ever met for mental problems.
“Back then the first John Wesley went around buying up abandoned land for a dollar or so an acre,” Naomi said. “He tried to resettle some Lakota Sioux families but the government stopped him. My grandparents knew him and after I married into the Northridge family I was told that John Wesley was the bogeyman they used to make children behave. All that land and money, and this was a grand house to be built in those days, when everyone else was scraping by.” Naomi poured me the rest of the wine, for which I was grateful. “I was frightened of Dalva’s grandfather, but the old folks said he was nothing compared with his father.” Naomi got up from the table then, saying she was tired. She had checked out a prairie-falcon nest with Nelse at daylight and wasn’t getting any younger. She tousled my thin hair and said she was proud I had the courage to camp outdoors the night before. She laughed very hard at her own joke. So did Dalva, and so did I. “Teddy Roosevelt said you don’t know a man until you’ve camped with him and that includes yourself.” I offered this lame non sequitur, which further amused them. I began to understand that the main way of criticizing someone in rural areas is to make a joke at his or her expense. Despite the heaviness of the intent the joke was liable to be breezy. Dalva had said that when she looked out her bedroom window in the morning she was pleased to see her first mummy in the barnyard, and the geese were there as a temple guard.
When Naomi left we sat there listening to the gravel ping off the underside of her car. I made Dalva stay seated while I cleared the table and carried the leftovers and dishes indoors. Inside, I drank the rest of the martini pitcher, but it was mostly melted ice. Back on the front porch, I saw her in the far corner of the yard, pushing an empty tire swing as if it held an imaginary child. I am thought to be insensitive in such matters, but there was something poignant in the way she pushed the empty swing back and forth, a solemn rhythm in the twilight. For the first time in weeks I thought of her lost son and my rash offer to find him. She turned and walked toward me slowly, still dressed in her riding jeans. We embraced in the middle of the yard and I felt that rare feeling of being more than myself, that my human failings were being absorbed by the leaves in the trees above us, and perhaps the darkening sky above the trees was helping out. I felt an evanescent fatherliness, a wish to take any pain away with an embrace, something I had felt many times with my daughter. She whispered something in Spanish about wishing “to sleep the dream of apples,” which made me smell appleness. She kissed me with an open mouth and I’ll be goddamned if it didn’t dizzy me. For some not so incoherent reason the kiss drew me back to when I was a busboy at the country club and all lovely girls, near and far but mostly far, smelled of horses. There was clover and lilac in the air, and the yellowish light of the rising moon. I sensed all my ironical urges as a poisonous weight in a corner of my heart. In the small of her back I felt a strength I could never have, and wasn’t sure I would want. Way back there Northridge had said that if God has made us strong, then weakness is blasphemy.
We thought we’d make a run on the motel way down the road (over forty miles on the interstate), but my mouth opened to its carnival barker’s options the moment we got in her car. “We are all most lovely not making love but just before,” a poet friend had said, and if we had simply flopped on the lawn and made love the evening would have been perfect.
“This is fucking absurd. I mean driving this far, the same distance as San Francisco to Sonoma, Chicago halfway to Madison. Why don’t you and Naomi have a motel built down the road for entertaining your houseguests?”
She had started the car, but turned it off as if waiting for me to complete my thought. She gave me a look of complete incomprehension, and I tried to get out of the hole I was digging. There was always the chance I could lose her if I couldn’t become a little more than myself.
“For God’s sake, don’t just sit there looking at me. Start the fucking car. I’m sorry. I guess my nerves are a little frayed. I beg your forgiveness.”
“I really think you should go alone,” she said, handing me the keys. “I’ll see you in a few days. Be careful.” Then she got out of the car and walked toward the house. I sat there a full ten minutes examining all the dimensions of self-loathing. A few tears actually fell. I held up my hands before my face in the gathering dark and I didn’t like them. I heard a whippoor-will from over by the ditch and I craved a soul as serene as a bird’s. The light came on in Dalva’s bedroom and that yellow square made me unfathomably lonely. I went into the house and located a bottle of vodka. I wanted to leave a note but could only come up with “Have a good trip. I’m sorry. Love, Michael.” I stood there, wishing her down the stairs in a nightgown, all smiles with light step and heart. I have no secret powers, I thought.
Out in the bunkhouse I set the vodka on my desk, made a pot of coffee, and turned on the radio. I meant to work all night, like some Great Plains Faustus, or, to be less dramatic, like a penniless graduate student. I took a pull from the bottle and imagined myself in the Nebraska night to be on the verge of a discovery, a historical equivalent of DNA. I picked a Northridge journal at random, too excitable to continue the methodical beginning-to-end routine. I flicked the radio dial to a PBS station out of Lincoln that was broadcasting one of those “music from many lands” programs. You can only care so much; then you bury yourself in your work. At least this is what a nitwit says to himself after he’s created the kind of emotional shitstorm that drives the beloved away. The radio played a song by the Jamaican Bob Marley with a lyric that said “brutalize me with music.” My ex-wife danced to this very song for exercise while I sat at the kitchen table writing witty lecture notes. I’d plot a usually successful beery leap at her when she emerged from the shower. I held a journal in my hands, feeling unworthy, and tried to remember a small Latin prayer that a Jesuit professor of mine always uttered at the beginning of our Shakespeare class. I suppose I don’t feel unworthy often enough to remember such a prayer.
March 7, 1874
Summoned by a messenger from He Dog who says the little daughter of Crazy Horse, They Are Afraid of Her, is ill with the same cough as the trader’s children. I am useless against this whooping cough which is often survived by white children but almost never by the Sioux. I pack up my herbs and medicines, and all the dried meat I have left which scarcely fills one saddle-bag. Only last October I gave this little girl several apples I had grown and she laughed seeing the shadow of her reflection on the polished fruit. I headed out on the two-day ride seeing everywhere the dire effects of the worst winter in memory. In one draw there were the ca
rcases of dead deer, really only the skins after the ravens and coyotes had fed, as if the deer had decided to die together. Those who have stopped by my cabin say that both Sioux and settlers are alike near starvation. And with buffalo so sparse there is little fuel provided by their dried dung. If my pack horse had not died I could have brought potatoes, carrots, cabbages, and turnips I have grown.
March 8, 1874
I have made camp unsure of how to proceed. I am a few hours from the Tongue River where I was told to go. I am so disturbed I cannot help but weep. A few hours ago I was surveying the country with my ship captain’s telescope and saw movement on a far hill. Imagining I had found game I tethered my horse, and took my rifle to stalk the hilltop slowly. I crawled along a low rock abutment then sighted with my telescope again. The movement had been on a small burial platform and Crazy Horse sat beside the small, red-wrapped bundle that must be his daughter, They Are Afraid of Her. I was too late. He touched her playthings that hung on one of the posts, an antelope-hoof rattle, and a painted willow hoop. He lay down beside her and took her still body in his arms.