Dalva

by Jim Harrison

  “Of course. This afternoon. Why don’t you stop by about ten this evening? Bring some photos I can send Ted, preferably candid.”

  “I don’t think I’ll be able to. I’ve got a date.”

  “I’m sure you’ll manage.” I turned away to avoid any lame excuses.

  As she drove off I glanced at Frieda at the kitchen window, then to the barnyard and the fields. Just after I had met Dalva and broached the subject of the papers, she had said that her great-grandfather had a peculiar sense of the order and balance in his life, caused by his difficult youth and months at Andersonville. Looking out at the clearing, which Dalva said was about thirty acres, I remembered a map of the prison camp I had seen in a graduate course on the Civil War. Andersonville and this clearing were the same size, and both had creeks running through the center. The former held as many as seventeen thousand prisoners, with not all that many survivors. This made me eager to check the journals from 1891, when the main house was built, though the land had been owned since the collapse of 1887. There was the abrupt, burning vision of Karen on the floor and a stomach growl. Saved by Frieda from mischief. The obvious mixture of lust and relief—my local track record really wasn’t good enough for this sort of gamble. I idly hoped that she’d go on her date and forget this tired professor.

  Back in the kitchen there was the heavy odor of my favorite flavor, garlic. It turned out that Frieda had made me a Basque lamb stew the evening before and was warming it up. It was gorgeous, with fresh baked bread and a smallish glass of cabernet she had unfortunately tested in a tin measuring cup. She told me that when she was nineteen she had run off with a Basque sheepherder who had been shearing in the area. He had kept her captive in the Ruby Mountains of northern Nevada and that year had given her all the sex she wanted in life. Mr. Northridge and her father had tracked her down and retrieved her from Basquaise clutches. The upshot was that she still liked the cooking her “crude” lover had taught her. I was pleased with this stew, but then she grabbed my hand and looked at me soulfully.

  “You be careful with Karen. She’s too fast for a school-teacher like you. Word around here is, last November she was frigging these pheasant-hunting doctors from Minneapolis. If her dad found out those docs would be hamburger.”

  “You don’t say!” I croaked. “I would swear she had to be a virgin.” The word “frigging” had a nautical air about it. Karen in the pirate doctor’s rigging.

  “You’ve got your poor head in books. You don’t know a hot little slut from a worthwhile woman. That’s for sure. She’s as wild as Dalva used to be.” Frieda bounced up and flicked on the radio. She never missed listening to Paul Harvey.

  “How wild was Dalva?” I asked, I thought, innocently.

  “None of your beeswax, mister. Don’t try to pry into family affairs.” Her umbrage was so grand I skipped up to Dalva’s room to use the phone. Dalva had told me that any call I made in Frieda’s presence would lose its confidentiality.

  Ted turned out to be amused and alarmed by the idea that I had discovered a great model. He warned me rather sternly that local customs hadn’t kept stride with California, and that he’d heard that a gay barber had been tarred and feathered in the fifties. I was somewhat surprised that he knew about my getting lost, also my drunken day with Lundquist. “You’re making a real hit out there. You got a bullet.” He, nevertheless, assured me that he would pass Karen’s photos around if I sent them. I remembered then that I had promised to call a friend in the rare-book business and describe the journals. This man had wiped a felony from my record when I was caught trying to swipe a book from a rare-book room at Notre Dame. I was a penniless student at the time and frequented his shop on trips to Chicago. The theft was actually an assignment, and he had anonymously secured an expensive lawyer to get me off the hook. On the phone he was thrilled to hear about my discoveries and begged for a Xerox of certain portions. He had a collector in Westchester and one in Liechtenstein who would pay a fortune for a few journals. I told him in no uncertain terms that this was out of the question.

  Back at my desk I was troubled again by the notion of symmetry in the farm clearing and Andersonville. I had packed along Shelby Foote’s hypnotic volumes on the Civil War but didn’t want to pursue a possibly false lead. The recurrent temptation in my profession was to draw the strings too tight, to cut off the horse’s legs to fit him in a stall. Unlike my mother, the discipline of history does not suggest that in the long run things have turned out the best and the neatest: you can collate research material until your hair is gray and your face blue and arrive at false conclusions that have been repeated a thousand times by other fools. The recent, infantile excavation of the Custer battlefield will reveal nothing of the nature of the men that fought there, the ultimate valid intent of an inquiry. But, then, I had to disallow myself this sort of grandness: I hoped I had all of Northridge before me and would stamp him into a book. I could not begin to diagram the sentence in history that is Crazy Horse, but I could certainly gloss Northridge’s understanding of the Sioux. Ambition turns sane men into hysterics. I gave up Melville because the hanging of Billy Budd, not to speak of the whiteness of the whale, was a subject that would have caused me to end my life under psychiatric care.

  I spent most of the afternoon trying to figure out Northridge’s stay in La Crosse, Wisconsin, in the winter of 1866. It was full of relatively colorless botanical and theological ramblings. He was forever climbing the immense hill that abuts the city to the east and looking off across the Mississippi to the west. His mind was addled with his attempt to recapture his faith, and thus the journals were chock-full of pithy quotes from the King James version, musings about the obvious causes of the cholera that was afflicting the westward movement. I jumped forward to the late spring, which found him in the northwest part of Nebraska territory.

  May, the week of the 22nd, 1866

  Camped here ten days along a stream I take to be Warbonnet Creek. I am now more alone than I thought possible and am well shut of the filth along the Oregon Trail, and pioneers so enfeebled by illness and stupidity that they are marching toward their own Antietam. I have been warned overmuch since La Crosse and the journey across Nebraska territory to keep clear of this area and its dangers. Men tell wild tales to excuse their cowardice & this is always true of soldiers & missionaries. If I lacked courage now I might better pack myself back to Barrytown and become a dainty gentleman. Perhaps I have some of my unseen father’s blood . . . .

  Jesus, he’s supposed to be a bastard, illegitimate, but obviously knows who his father was. Ask Dalva.

  . . . I have been planting my root stock along the creek bed well up from possible flooding. There is a northwest-southwest flow of air to help with frost at budding time. The tender root hairs [?] did not fare well on the journey and I have no high hopes for my first orchard. As I move to higher elevation I am digging deeper holes to examine the striations of soil, most ill-suited thus far for fruit trees. I continue an hour daily with my largest hole near a cottonwood tree to examine its tap-root. After a winter’s ease except for hiking it is good to bury my hands in the soil. Machaeranthera canescens today! Pubescence roughish; stem purple, sparingly branched; leaves lanceolate, repand, mucronate.

  The last sentence here is what I mean about the field notes—botany for the botanists!

  My hobbled horses were nervous and fitful in the night and at dawn I found the tracks of the great bear, the grizzly, in the mud along the creek bank. I resolve to keep my fire better tended as it would be ironical for a man to survive the War only to provide a meal for this wild creature. The bears of the Adirondacks are often quite curious and range wide for food in Spring & perhaps these are the same, though the fierceness of these is said to be undisputed in the animal domain. Have dug too long today I suppose as when I poked my head from the hole I thought I saw a wolf on a hill stand upright and run away on its hind-legs. When I had my dinner of prairie chicken it occurred to me this was possibly a Sioux in disguise. I have
craved to see my first Indian, wild & untainted by any settlement, not begging & trading their valuables for liquor which does not suit them. In Boston & New York it is said the Italians may drink wine, but liquor makes them violent and they are often arrested without clothing. The Chaplain at Cornell said only the Chosen People, the Jews, can contain their vices & should be our example.

  At first light a Sioux boy was looking at my horses but fled up creek into a thicket. I yelled after him in his language “Stay a while and speak with me” but he did not return. It is a solace to me if I am murdered there are no relatives to mourn me unless my father left other bastards on the Continent.

  A melancholy Sabbath, or so I think as I may have forgotten to check a day on my calendar. In the night there was violent thunder & lightning, and my crude shelter leaked, so hastily built in fair weather. I bathe in the creek and try to spend the day with my Bible but it reads less well in the wilderness. In college I debated a quite brilliant Atheist on whether the savages needed our religion. In private I think they would not have needed it had we not disturbed their peace. We are too much a mystery to them, and they to us. When I sit here on this rock too long my mind ceases its activity and I seem to understand nothing or everything.

  In the late afternoon I give up on bibles & sabbaths and take a long walk, after which I wish for two reasons I had taken one of my two horses, for the one was stolen in my absence, or perhaps the hobbles loosened, and the other would have saved me from danger. I climbed a hill two miles distant from my camp seeing on the way a lazuli finch & olive-backed thrush. From the hill through the telescope I surveyed the immense grasslands to the west & was puzzled by an enormous dark mass as if the darkest thunder clouds had dropped to earth. My skin pricked & tingled when I saw the mass was moving toward me and making a noise as of distant thunder. It was the buffalo, Bos americanus, and there could not have been a more awesome sight in God’s creation. Over them was a red sun in the western sky and it burnished this sea of moving beasts. Still miles away but closing toward me their thunder increased as if they were trampling the life from earth herself. All manner of songbirds & hawks, sage hens & sharp-tailed grouse flushed before them and began to sail past me, and when the buffalo were within a mile or so I felt tremors in the ground. It was then it occurred to me I was in their path on this treeless hill, so I tucked my telescope and sprinted for my camp, much startled when I was passed by deer & antelope in their fright. O to have a safe hole in the ground like the badger, gopher or ferret. I flew to the camp and somehow climbed the cottonwood as a tropical monkey would. From the tree I could see out over the ridge of the creek bed & the buffalo swelled over my hill then veered to the south, taking a full half-hour to pass completely. I will add I built a large fire & filled my tin cup with the whiskey I kept for illness. I smoked my pipe and sang many hymns to keep myself company. I felt I was being watched but was tired & resigned to my fate as a freezing drunkard in the snowbanks of Maine.

  A fair morning with many cups of tea & cold water. Back in my large hole before breakfast as a penitent. I laugh to think the buffalo would have forced Saint Paul into more than a little wine. I remember I should search for my missing horse but they will not go far from their own company. The hole is too muddy to dig well and as I begin to clamber out I smell leather and the copperish smell of blood. There are three warriors, a boy, and a garishly painted old man who stoops before my drying plant specimens dressed in animal skins. I am startled to breathlessness but say in Sioux “Welcome to my camp. I am pleased to see you.” The boy shys backwards but the warriors move forward staring at me closely. Their arms are covered with dried blood and I suppose they have been hunting. Two of the warriors are large & muscular and have rifles though they are not pointed at me. The third has a large belly and is unarmed except for a hatchet & club at his waist. I say to him in Sioux “It is good to see you on this lovely day. I have been digging in the earth to look at the roots of trees. I’m afraid I’m a little muddy. May I make you a cup of tea?” The painted old man approached & I take him to be a medicine man. Now the warrior with the large belly and no rifle smiled at me. “The boy said there was a white man who ate earth and burrowed as a badger in the ground. He took little trees from a blanket and planted them in the ground.” Then he gestured to one of the warriors. “Last night he saw you smoking a pipe and singing songs. We are very angry with white men now. I am wondering now if I should kill you. What have you to say to that?” I said that the Holy Spirit told me to come here several years ago but first I had to fight in the Civil War where I was captured. Now that I am here, if the Holy Spirit wishes me dead that is His affair. Big Belly answered that he had seen and heard of missionaries and that they were all liars and cowards. I said that if I were a coward why would I be here alone? I am a different sort of missionary. I rapidly named the wild fruits and berries his people ate and said that I was planting new fruits, not white men’s fruits, but fruits from the whole world. The medicine man stared in my left eye and said to Big Belly that he had never heard of a missionary covered with mud. He led me over and we discussed my drying herbs & specimens, and also looked at my root stock I had hilled up. At this time we walked back over to my large hole near the cottonwood. I jumped in and explained quickly the nature of the tree’s root system. The three warriors stepped off out of earshot and discussed the situation. I put on a pot of water to boil for tea & then showed the medicine man some dried apples, pears, and peaches, putting a handful of each in another pot with water to cook. I got out a pound of good tobacco as a gift and looked over to read Big Belly’s face as he approached. “You are a confusing man and we don’t know what to do with you. Why haven’t you asked about your stolen horse?” I offered a silent prayer as I knew I was teetering between life and death as if I were walking a narrow beam way up in a barn. I said that I wished to give my extra horse to the boy who had brought us together on this fine day. The boy heard this and jumped in the air. Now Big Belly took a private consultation with the medicine man, and when they returned to the fire where I was stirring the pot of tea & the pot of fruit, Big Belly said “You are too strange to kill. The old man says it would be bad luck to kill you.” They all laughed at this so I joined them though a bit weakly. Contrary to popular opinion, I’m told, Indians are full of wit, jokes & laughter. We sat down for tea, and stewed fruit, which they pronounced delicious. The boy was sent up the creek bed to fetch something & returned quickly with a bloody buffalo heart which was cut in chunks & roasted over the fire. The heart was very good indeed. . . .

  I turned to see Naomi driving in the yard. It was five in the afternoon and typical of her to wait until she thought my workday was at an end. By the time I reached her, she was holding up a dead cock pheasant, and looking very sad. The pheasant had flushed from a ditch and had run into the side of her car, breaking its neck. Cars haven’t been around long enough for creatures to have made a genetic adaptation, she said. She handed me the bird and told me to cook it for my dinner. I cringed a bit at the warmth I still felt in its breast. Most of us successfully ignore the fact that what we eat was once as alive as we are. She was quick to note my queasiness, took the bird back, and began to pluck it as we spoke.

  “Karen called me and said you were going to help her become a model. Is this so?”

  I glanced up at an imaginary cloud for a moment. “She’s beautiful, so I simply called Ted to check it out. He offered to help.”

  “I’m not being critical, I simply want you to be careful. Girls here are very matter-of-fact and gullible. She’s willful and doesn’t quite have both oars in the water. She’s also been teasing men around here since she was thirteen. I don’t want you to complicate your life with an errant suggestion.”

  “I need a drink,” I said, walking toward the house. It was as if my mother had caught me red-handed toying with my noodle.

  I was sitting at the kitchen table with five fingers of vodka when Naomi came in with the plucked pheasant. She patted me on the head an
d took a sip of my drink.

  “Don’t get flustered. I’m more worried for you than Karen. The high-school coach was fired over her but Dalva told me on the phone the same man had bothered her thirty years before. But enough of this. Look at the long spur here. It’s an older bird, which means you can’t simply roast it or it would be too tough.” She showed me the bony spurs on the pheasant’s legs, saying that they are used as defense, or in arguments over hen pheasants.

  We talked as she browned the pheasant in a small Dutch oven, added chopped leeks, white wine, and a few sprigs of thyme and rosemary from the kitchen window box. I could put it in when I wanted to eat in an hour. She couldn’t stay for dinner because a friend belonged to a movie club and had gotten a cassette in the mail of The Misfits with Montgomery Clift, Clark Gable, and Marilyn Monroe. It was her favorite movie, and she and two other widows regularly watched classic movies and had dinner together. I suddenly asked her if Dalva had a gentleman friend in Rapid City. Jealousy rose in my gorge when I thought of Arthur Miller putting up with Marilyn’s shenanigans. If you’re cuckolded by the president you can scarcely slap his face. Naomi laughed at my question, saying, “You’ll never know and neither will I,” and that Dalva had a cabin over in the Black Hills she used as a retreat. An old Sioux woman lived there and took care of the place. Then I asked what she knew about the building of the house. She said Northridge had made the design and brought out a group of Swedish craftsmen from Galesburg, Illinois. Dalva’s grandfather would have been five at the time. We went into the den and Naomi, innocently enough, showed me a hidden panel that concealed a half-dozen or so English shotguns that I recognized to be quite valuable. There was also a wall safe that aroused my curiosity. She said that between 1890 and the turn of the century there was a great deal of animosity in Nebraska toward Northridge because he was thought to have harbored Sioux and Cheyenne leaders who were fugitives from the government, in the manner of the earlier Underground Railway. In effect, he had been on the wrong side of the war, though he had enough political power—his property in Chicago had been sold for a large sum—that no one tried to bother him. I asked her why she hadn’t read the journals.