Dalva

by Jim Harrison

  Back to my horse I made camp though lit no fire. I prayed for her soul so that my heart twisted painfully in my chest. I wrapped myself in my buffalo robe and had no will but to watch the sky grow dark and the cold wind blow the colder stars around the sky, as my thoughts were those of a crazed man. I heard wolves and the beauty of their chorus I imagined welcomed the little girl into a better heaven than my own. I saw her again hold the shiny apple to her lips & heard her laughter when she first bit the crisp fruit. She gave the core to her pup, and her mother Black Shawl held her before the fire until she slept. My heart could not imagine her dead, and in the night I prayed that this greatest of all Sioux men would bring his daughter back to life with his embrace, as Jesus did to Lazurus.

  March 9, 10, 11, 1874

  There is a trace of early spring today so I sit in a niche of rock like an Italianate statue feeling some warmth out of the wind. My dreams were too troubled to note & in the light of morning I think of my professor at Cornell who knew the myths of the Norse & Greeks. I wonder if our Lord is only the Lord of the Mediterranean area and something else is afoot in this sere landscape. Crazy Horse nodded to me the day after I brought the fruit last fall, but we have never otherwise spoken. He Dog said they were all troubled of late when three warriors found him sitting among a herd of buffalo speaking to the beasts who were not disturbed. My predilection for science leads me to cynicism about such tales, though there is something to the man of the god on earth as in the myths I have read. In former times before Christ came to earth gods & men were said to be confused in their identities.

  I am here another night. I could not help but stalk the platform within a half-mile and saw he still lay there with the body of his daughter. I wondered at his thoughts and whether he would make war again on us who brought this pestilence to his country. The Sioux commonly think we purposefully infected the trouble-some Mandans with smallpox so as not to have the bother of hanging them as we did 39 Santees up in Mankato. Ate a thin sage hen I snared and am sleepless before the small fire.

  A cold stormy day, and a night when the constellations seemed to draw too close until I was frightened.

  This morning I made my way to the encampment but stopped a good distance away as I heard wails of mourning. He Dog rode out to greet me and I made him the gift of the dried meat. He said he watched me sit in the hole in the rock during two days but did not approach me as this is a place where men go to understand the world. At that moment he looked over my shoulder & saw Crazy Horse riding toward the encampment. I bade He Dog goodbye, not wanting to intrude. As I rode off toward home I became so lost in my thoughts I did not direct my horse which carried me within a hundred yards passing the platform. I looked up from my mind & saw the small red bundle and the ravens encircling it far overhead. This loosened my tears so I rode hard into the cold wind.

  On my second day riding & within an hour of my cabin I encountered a detachment of Cavalry headed by Lieut. __________ whom I despise enough to shoot if I could do so with impunity. Once near the Dismal River he wished to question me on Sioux movements but I would only answer in Latin which disgusted him & his men. They would drive me from the West were not the Methodists such a fearsome political power, a fact that holds some humor. On this day I rode on as if the detachment did not exist & the Lieut. shot in the air as a joke to startle me but I did not swerve. They are still angry as before Christmas in Yankton several years ago I thrashed two drunken soldiers who rode me down in the street, thus spilling a 100 lbs. of flour I was carrying into the mud, and no charges were brought against me. This was witnessed by several Sioux who were amused and spread the tale. General Miles questioned the head of our Mission in Omaha about the nature of my religious and agricultural activities among the Sioux. The head of Missions is a sanctimonious fop but knows I am by comparison wealthy & defers to me as religious leaders do to Mammon. General Miles does not understand I have no pact with the Sioux or any other tribe but that my preoccupation with trees, plants & herbs, rather than Jesus is thought among them to be a sacred calling. I am also a student of their language & dialects and on long winter days & nights I speak to myself in Sioux. He Dog, however, was once troubled by my graftings, slips & plant breeding, wondering if I had abrogated the proper work of the Earth.

  A red bundle & antelope-hoof rattle. I poured another drink and went outside. It was well after midnight but the moon was bright and, though ignorant of the stars, I studied them, wondering if they were the same ones to be seen on a March night so long ago. I had made a note to buy a general horticulture text, since half the journals were full of that sort of material and it was as distant to me as trigonometry. Sensing a presence, my skin tingled, but it was the horses staring at me from the corral. The Sioux were weak on taxonomy and at one time thought of them as “sacred dogs.” I begin to speak to the horses in a low, even voice, repeating nonsense syllables, bits of poetry (“what can ail thee, wretched wight”), snatches of commercials, all the while shuffling closer to them. They stayed there until we were almost nose to nose over the top slat of the corral; then one shied away. Maybe he smelled the booze and had been beaten by a drinker as a child! The others stayed, but I didn’t attempt to pet them. I accepted it as a small triumph that I didn’t piss them off. Tomorrow I might try to extend my luck with the geese. Then I heard a distant coyote and turned for the comfort of the bunkhouse, the guitar music of Soria I could hear through the screen.

  I read and skimmed all night, avoiding passages that held any violent emotional impact. Frankly, I found some of the Northridge passages too extreme for my disposition, tending to scramble and fray my nerve ends. When my daughter, Laurel, was a very little girl and was either sick or had bad dreams, I would hold her and dance slowly around the living room to the radio. She had a bright-red terrycloth robe she wore until it was tatters, and then she still slept with the shreds. It finally doesn’t matter that fathers are misunderstood. I went over in the corner and stooped before a bookcase holding volumes that had been there when I arrived, including a complete set of Zane Grey. On the flyleaf of Riders of the Purple Sage, I read, “This book owned by Duane Stone Horse from Parmelee S. Dakota 1956,” whoever that was. I heard a crowing that Dalva had said was a cock pheasant. Like roosters, they announced day—it is rather like a male to announce the obvious. I headed for my bed, being reasonably sure that the ghosts that might bother me had fled back into the ground. Out here the spirits required more than a light bulb to keep them away.

  A rapping. “Are you in there, sir?” More rapping. “Should I come back some other day?”

  I hustled to the screen door, forgetting I was naked, and my confused morning wiener was pointing forty-five degrees upward at a dream. It was a girl of incomparable loveliness. She held up my ravaged breakfast tray and spoke in a whispery voice, politely averting her eyes.

  ‘’I’m afraid the geese ate your breakfast. Shall I come back later?”

  “Not at all. Of course not. Just a second.” I turned and scrambled for my robe. There was no way I was going to let her out of my sight. I tapped my dick against the desk to bring it to its senses.

  She brought in my coffee thermos and two notes. “I’m Karen Olafson. I’m just floored to meet a man who has written books. Naomi said you were just the smartest man she ever met.”

  She was tall, probably five nine, with darkish blond hair, green eyes, in a beige summer skirt, sandals, a white sleeveless blouse. She rounded her shoulders slightly to misannounce the size of her breasts. She was blushing and toyed at a large class ring hanging from a silver chain around her neck. I stared at it, pretending ignorance—for a while my daughter wore the ring of a pimply oaf who delivered rather good pizzas.

  “Does it look stupid? I suppose it does. Really, if I’m in your way . . .” She glanced at the messy desk and half-empty vodka bottle. I sat her down, poured myself coffee, and took my two notes into the bathroom. The first was Dalva’s and a reflection of the sad ending to our evening—“I can’t help
liking you even though you’re an asshole.” What a way with words. The other note read, “Dear Mister Lazy Bones. We brought your car over. Please call if you get lost or drunk. Your servant, Frieda Lundquist.” Out the bathroom window I could see Dalva’s muddy Subaru. I hadn’t quite got a fix on Big Frieda. In the kitchen she kept a stack of the sort of romantic, bodice-ripping novels my mother still read in her sixties. In the shower I thought of the tall, virginal, blushing Karen, her tanned calves and knees disappearing upward, presumably into thighs. I could always push her over a goose for a peek at the legs.

  As it turned out the goose ploy wasn’t necessary. No, I didn’t tup the heifer, though the call was heart-drummingly close. When I got out of the shower there was a frantic second when she wasn’t there, but through the window I could see her in the corral petting two of the horses. Dalva must have taken the other two to her Rapid City assignation, a long way to avoid my company. While I dressed in my neatest best I plotted a campaign like Rommel about to enter Egypt, Timoshenko before his maps of war.

  To keep the upper hand I had Karen conduct the interview in the den. I sat behind the immense Northridge desk, and placed her on the deep leather couch, the better to see her limbs. She was utterly flabbergasted to be in the house, shy to stiffness, holding her hands and steno pad behind her back. She said she had been in the barnyard years before when her father had come to shoe the horses, but never in the house.

  “This is quite the day. Here I am interviewing a famous man in a mansion.” She actually said this and I had to think she was putting me on, but the questions that followed said no. How did I get my start? How old was I when I started writing? What were the names of my books? Was there a message for today’s youth? Was education the ticket to the future? Did a girl have an equal chance in today’s troubled world? ‘What was the future for Nebraska? What is the main lesson of history? Should today’s farmer rely on the government? In a nutshell, was there hope for the future of the world?

  Holy shit, but my hair roots began to sweat a few minutes into this mudbath. If she hadn’t been a beauty I would have sent her packing. As a long-term teacher I have developed a subtle bedside manner. I answered all the questions with just a sliver of a British accent, affecting a Noël Coward weariness but an actor’s intensity. I acted worldly, troubled, morose, so sophisticated that my answers tended to streak off into airy tangents. My bedside manner slowly rose to the surface as I began to turn the tables by asking her questions about her hopes and fears. She adjusted her skirt, flattered and nonplussed that I cared. With a millisecond glimpse of thigh my worm turned. I got up and poured us each an ample glass of cold white wine, not so much as a trick but to break the ice. I said the wine must be confidential, since I wasn’t sure she was of drinking age. She blushed again and said they had had a dilly of a graduation party the week before, and a lot of kids drank so much they “blew lunch,” a puzzling new euphemism, it seems, for puking. Now that I had tilted her off balance a little, I had to finish the job. I stared into her eyes long and hard without speaking—actually I was thinking about lunch. When she was sufficiently nervous I began to speak in the tone used on the horses.

  “Karen, to be frank, I sense that you aren’t very happy. You’re an attractive young woman on the verge of going out into the world, but you are restless, fearful, unsure of yourself. I sense you need something more than this town or even the university in Lincoln can offer. You are trembling on the lip of self-knowledge, but it frightens you, just as some people are afraid of war, death, the never-ending dark. You’ve been told you have a bright future, but on this warm summer day you feel like you’re sleepwalking. You crave direction, guidance, you’re sick of the dread that greets you every morning. Am I correct?”

  “I just don’t know where to turn,” she began, with moist eyes and clenched hands. It occurred to me I needed something with anchovies for lunch as her words began to pour out. “I might just be hearing a different drummer like I read in school. My home life is not too good and I don’t have any privacy. It would be better if Dad had stuck to horseshoeing but he got into farming and now he thinks the bank is going to repo the new tractor. I want to give him my college savings but I also want to get out of town. My brother got drunk and joined the navy, so he’s no help. My mother’s got nervous problems, so she can’t work. All she worries about is whether I am doing it with my boyfriend. It’s my dream to pledge either Pi Beta Phi or Kappa Kappa Gamma if they’ll have me. When I visited college this winter both sororities liked me and thought I might have a chance of being homecoming queen some day. Two weeks ago when we went to Chicago on our senior trip this guy that worked at the desk of the hotel said I should be a model and make big bucks. He wanted to take my picture and all the girls thought I should because it might be my big break but our teacher chaperone got wind of it and said no. I just couldn’t help but cry.”

  Now she began to cry. I got up and refreshed her wineglass, wanting to give her a pat but knowing this gesture was premature. She hadn’t stewed in her banal juices quite long enough. I went to the window and looked out, lost in thought. Maybe a frittata with anchovies, eggs, shallots, fontina . . .

  “Maybe, just maybe . . .” I finally said, turning with dramatic slowness from the window, my brow creased with worry. I walked over and stooped so that our eyes were level. “Maybe, maybe, maybe . . .”

  “Maybe what?” she sniffled.

  “I was just thinking about the modeling business,” I said, standing and walking away with careless diffidence. “I’ve known a lot of models in L. A., San Francisco, New York City, catalogue models, superthin high-fashion models, bathing-suit models. There’s a slight, outside chance you could cut the mustard as a bathing-suit model.” I mentioned the name of a famous model, the wife of a rock star, I had met very briefly emerging from Ted’s house. This elicited an excited “Oooo” from Karen, who I had guessed read the gossip rags. I sensed it was time to try to close the deal.

  “Stand up and walk around. Try to relax. Pretend you’re on the beach at Waikiki in a bikini. Imagine that a group of lifeguards are watching you and you just don’t care because you’re a pro and you’re damned proud of your body.”

  She did a number of nimble but altogether nervous turns around the den, then gave me a shy but beseeching look.

  “I just can’t tell. Maybe this is all hopeless. I don’t want to offer false encouragement but I just can’t tell with all of your . . . you know.” I waved at her clothes with distaste.

  Ambitious girl that she was, she quickly slipped out of her skirt and blouse, paused a moment, then kicked off her sandals, and repeated the turns around the den. I frowned, put my hands on her shoulders to straighten them, and tilted up her chin. Holy Toledo, I thought, moving around behind her and trying to rattle my brain for some anatomical terms. I kept my touch light as if helping to correct minor defects.

  “Good mylofrisis, latimus, fine clavicles.” I knelt down until my nose was an inch from the white undies that were drawn up a bit into the crack of her buttocks, a bottom without equal in my experience. This was a critical point, as it were, and it took great force of will to contain myself. I made calipers out of my thumbs and forefingers and ran them from her ankles up her legs, watching the goose bumps spring to the surface of her skin. “Marvelous metatarsals, fair knee backs, good gluteus maximus.” I kneaded the buttocks a bit as if searching for hidden problems, then scrambled around to her front, not wanting to lose this particular angle of vision. I had, sadly, used up all my terms, being short on the sciences, so muttered a few cooking and food terms in French. “Fine ris de veau,” I said, a flick of the tongue away from the pubis; “bagner de Bourgogne” to her belly button, and “tête de veau” to her ample titties. At that point I had to turn away in unrestrained anguish. I was overrevving like a runaway diesel. Where would this lead? I thought. “I just might have to call my friend Ted in Los Angeles. He’s a major figure in show business, you might say, a real coastal tycoon. But ma
ybe first I should see some flexation. Suppleness is a major consideration.” My mouth had dried out to an absurd degree but I didn’t want to lose concentration by getting more wine. “Perhaps you could do a few exercises lying down, you know, sit-ups, knee and ankle grabs, anything.”

  She quickly got to the floor in front of me and drew her knees back, then shot her feet out so her toes grazed my shirt. My wiener had become a wisdom-tooth ache, and there was a roaring in my ears. Karen heard the roaring too, and jumped up. It was Frieda roaring into the yard in her big RAM. The spell was broken.

  “Jeezo!” Karen said, grabbing at her clothes. I whipped out of the den, through the foyer, and into the kitchen. I caught Frieda at the pump-house door and gave her a lazy smile, but blocked her entry.

  “I’m doing an interview. Everything’s fine.”

  “I’m feeding the geese and horses,” she said, pushing past me. “Naomi said Karen’s over here. She’s my third cousin.”

  I followed Frieda in with a prayer and a hot flash. I wanted to put my boot in her ass so far it would take a tow truck to pull it out. To my relief Karen was at the kitchen table adjusting her notes, cool as a bell pepper.

  “Hi, Frieda. I just did the neatest interview. It’s so fun to talk to a big brain.” She gathered her tablet and breezed out, with a thank-you nod to me on the way. I found myself trotting out into the yard after her. She sat in her shabby little compact, her hands gripping the wheel, and staring straight ahead.

  “Are you going to call that guy Ted?” There was a relentless set to her chin.