by Jim Harrison
“They remind me too much of my husband’s voice,” she said, kissing me goodbye.
After she left I stood in the yard altogether too long. I felt a level of anxiety that I had been taught during the period of my treatment to regard as a warning signal. I refuse to flip in this foreign land, I thought, before an audience of geese and horses. I need some noise. The woman’s husband was dead in Korea nearly forty years ago, in 1950. There is the question of whether life is long enough to get over anything. I sat down on the ground to avoid tipping over from the enormity of it all. Here comes the pictograph as if I’m in an airplane. I should be in the Mitchell Brothers porn palace in San Francisco watching Jap tourists go crazy over naked girls while drinking seven-dollar weak Scotches. This loneliness at supper hour. I had studied war and reparations. The Japs and Germans did very well, while the Indians were too incomprehensible. What can you do if the fuckers won’t learn to grow potatoes? Sitting down was also vertiginous, so I got up and walked purposefully over to the lilac grove that contained the family cemetery. It was overgrown by design, and the only inexplicable marker was for someone named Duane Stone Horse, who died in 1971. I remembered that he was the one who had read Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage. I’d ask Dalva, if she ever returned from her Rapid City lover. To what degree were these people actually dead? Who the fuck were Indians? I made a tight-assed trot out of the graveyard as if pursued. Why am I curious about anything beyond the professional level, or am I? I didn’t dare have another drink in this state. I had read the inconclusive information on the possible origins of Indians, all bleached with supposition and speculation. The Bible wisely settles for Adam and Eve. A lovely, frazzled lady in the No Name bar in Sausalito told me the Indians had arrived by spaceship in Peru and made their way north, which was as viable as Lundquist’s lost tribe of the Children of Israel. Back home I relied on television news, especially Ted Koppel, to settle this sort of mental indigestion. A twenty-inch screen was the requisite glue. If it weren’t for the waiting pheasant I could very well go into the barn (which frightened me), set the barn afire, and go up in smoke along with it. I tried to approach the geese over by the creek, but they were more cynical than the horses. I got in Dalva’s Subaru, started it, and turned on the radio, but the smell of her gave me a lump in the throat. I listened carefully to a local county agent talking about grain and livestock prices, which helped. Then he began a dirge about farm foreclosures and I flicked the dial, pausing at a country station with its freight of unendurable sentiment. I settled for PBS and a dose of soporific Brahms, and began to repeat aloud certain things I liked, a nostrum from the psychiatrist: the first year of my marriage, my daughter, certain birds, garlic, Bordeaux, exotic dancers, the ocean when it’s not rough, Gary Cooper movies, John Ford movies, John Huston movies, Victoria’s Secret catalogs, cassoulet, Stravinsky, ZZ Top videos (where the girl gets out of the old car), New York City on Saturday afternoons, fresh copies of the American Scholar and American History in the mailbox, the river Liffey at dawn, Patrick Kavanaugh, the Tate Gallery, Cheyne Walk. . . . There, I went back to work, forgetting dinner for the time being. I want a pet whippoorwill!
Oct. 21, 1890
They painted us white & we danced day and night until we could no longer move & then we rested, got up and danced again though the day turned dark with high winds and sleet . . . . “
Not what I need now: Northridge during the decline of the Ghost Dance movement. I will save this for a bright, clear morning, not a lonely evening. I put away the journals and read in two supplementary texts—Carlson’s Indians, Bureaucrats, and Land and D. S. Otis’s The Dawes Act and the Allotment of Indian Lands.
At nine, when it began to get dark, I went back in the house and put the pheasant in the oven. I thought it was safe to have a drink, though the first sip made me wonder whether or not Karen was going to show up. The girl was a toss-up—they say a hard dick has no conscience, but a scholar’s dick is a shy item full of question marks, guilt, ironies. My attempts to keep a distance from my material were losing ground. There is a reason why scholars work in libraries. A number of studies of the Holocaust have clearly illustrated that it constituted the most repellent series of events in human history. I doubt, though, if any of the writers and scholars of the studies had set up shop in Buchenwald, Belsen, or Treblinka to compose. Here, I was too much in the thick of it. I envisioned an apartment above a friendly pub in Dublin, the two trunks of journals safely under the bed, or, barring that, two trunks of Xeroxes of the material, if that were permissible. Of course, the problem was, what I had read so far made me timid; it was too stark and poignant and I could foresee how the bad parts were going to scan. If the Nazis had won the war the Holocaust, finally, would have been set to music, just as our victorious and bloody trek west is accompanied on film by thousands of violins and kettle drums.
I had just begun some interior pissing and moaning about the locked up Bordeaux in the cellar when Karen’s car swerved in under the yard light. I went to the pump-shed door with a flock of butterflies and a thumping heart. From the shadows she said she didn’t want to come in, but could we go to the bunkhouse? She seemed flitty and skittish, and I couldn’t quite keep her pace across the barnyard. As I opened the door I could smell schnapps and the singed furze of marijuana. Under the light she was wet, and wore a skirt over a leotard-type bathing suit. She somehow looked taller, her eyes glittering, her speech a little slurred. She handed me an envelope with a pealing giggle.
“My friend Carla took these with her dad’s Polaroid camera. We had to have some drinks first, and now we’re swimming, so I have to hurry, because my boyfriend’s going to meet me and I don’t want him to think I’m off in a car with someone else . . . .”
The photos were a cattle prod to the nape nerve, a masturbative fantasia, candid candy: clumsy but explosive pics of Karen in bra and panties, in several bathing suits, also three total nudes. She was looking over my shoulder and continuing the prattle: “. . . so I hope these are OK though they aren’t too professional.” I flipped them on the desk and turned to her. “Actually, this is a bathing suit . . . .” She dropped the skirt and adjusted the wet suit around her crotch and bottom. She paused, then smiled a bit crudely at my hopeless look. “I almost thought you were going to go down on me today in the den. Jeez, I thought, this guy is serious. I’m straight with my boyfriend but maybe it wouldn’t hurt to do the other thing.” She pulled the straps down her shoulders and peeled out of the wet suit. “Don’t try to put it in, buster.” She came nakedly into my arms, dropping a hand and unzipping my fly. I undid my belt and button and my trousers dropped. “Boy are you ever ready!” I stumbled with her toward the bed, where she sat on the edge and engulfed as much of me as she could with a wide-open mouth. I collapsed beside her, and she threw a leg and thigh over my face, smacking her parts with energy directly into my face. I did my best in the short time allotted me, noting the way the cooling effect left by the wet bathing suit quickly dissipated. Then I was a violent goner. She quickly jumped up and daintily wiped her mouth and chin with my pillow, putting the pillow back down on my wobbling red wiener. “You guys always look silly,” she said, as she hastily dressed. “Sorry I can’t stay. See you later. Let me know.” And she was gone.
Some call it sex. A twinge of angina, and a blur in the vision. Her car starts and a rattle of gravel, the ears and their blood tympani. Even at thirty-nine I’m getting on in years for this sort of thing. Why not throw myself under a moving car? I felt like my face had been slapped, which was technically correct. I lay there until the ceiling focused itself, waiting for some oxygen flow and postlapsarian wisdom. I was lonely for Dalva but I did not think she was lonely for me, wherever she was. I reached up overhead and grabbed a journal from the pile, thinking, “I came to Carthage, where a cauldron of unholy loves boiled round about me.” Poor Saint Augustine. Who would guess, or bother to guess, that the average scholar is as full of self-drama as those dipshit bliss ninny actors on afte
rnoon soap operas?
Month of February, 1871
Have been shut in by weather for three days now, a fearsome blizzard so that heaven and earth alike are a solid, blinding white. I am without visitors since early January when He Dog stopped with a haunch of elk. At the time we discussed how each of his people is guided to some extent by their dreams. We spoke of this several days & I told him that in my own experience I have observed that I dream more actively in the waxing rather than the waning moon. He thought this was true but said he would consult the medicine man who helped preserve my life over five years ago & who asked me last summer why I walked so much in the middle of the night. I knew it was unlikely I was observed and so was discomfited by his statement. I then asked him how I might rid myself of my re-current nightmares of the war, especially one that came from being near horses when they were blown apart & I was covered with coils of their entrails. I was deafened for a week but could still hear in my deafness the screaming of horses. When this nightmare came I would awake and force myself to sing a song. He said I must dig a small hole and put a fire in it. I was then to sleep by the hole until the bad dream came which would happen quickly. When I awoke I was to “chase” the nightmare into the hole where it would burn, then smother the fire and dream with dirt, and it would never come to me again. I pondered this advice for several weeks, wondering if it should be considered unchristian. It was August then and on the waxing moon & I was again covered with the guts of horses & wept for the creatures. I prayed to no avail and was afraid to sleep again. Then I did as he advised in defiance of science & my religion and the nightmare was gone & the horses in my dreams were transfigured into the most beautiful of creatures.
I have not a single apple or a convert to show for myself in five years. He Dog and some of his friends will listen to the Bible but they prefer passages of war. They say above all they prefer to hunt, dance, fight, make love & feast. They also love to hear this passage from Nahum:
Woe to the bloody city all full of lies & booty no end to plunder!
The crack of whip, the rumble of wheel, galloping horse and bounding chariot!
Horsemen charging, flashing sword and glittering spear, hosts of slain, heaps of corpses, dead bodies without end—they stumble over the bodies.
One of He Dog’s friends, a dour warrior named Seven Knives, sings me the song of a battle I know to be the Fetterman Massacre of December 1866, when Crazy Horse used the tactics of decoy to lure 80 soldiers from Fort Phil Kearny to their deaths. I have been shown scalps from this battle & have inspected them politely, fearful to offend.
My Winter Count is much doubt repeating itself. With the Sioux I may have chosen the wrong tribe to aid. An old missionary I spoke with last summer in Omaha says the Arikara who once were in Nebraska and driven out by the Sioux were splendid farmers. These Arikara by actual count had developed 14 varieties of corn, and many of beans, and tapped elder trees for liquid sugar as maples are tapped in the East. At this meeting of missionaries we were addressed by a Reverend Dillsworth who has spent years in Arizona and northern Mexico. He suggested that our Sioux may be as hopeless as the Apache in terms of conversion to Christ. I do not care for this man so am not much discouraged by his suggestions. He did make an intelligent discussion of the progress of the papist Jesuits with many Indian tribes of the Southwest. These Jesuits do not so much convert, he said, but add another coat of Catholic paint to what is already there. This is thought by us to be dishonest but I am not sure. It is indeed difficult to convince the Sioux of the uniqueness of the Sabbath when in his beliefs every day of the week is Sabbath. He Dog teased me saying if I would fast three days and three nights on a mountain top he knows in the Black Hills I would give up my Sabbath notions. His humor is often coarse and he said if I would not make love to a woman on the Sabbath she would run to someone else.
I have ordered 10,000 root grafts of fruit trees from Monroe, Michigan for ten cents apiece. My trees will survive by the force of their numbers! I shall have a busy spring & now when my door shudders from the force of the storm I long to put my hands in the warm earth.
It was nearly midnight when I remembered my braised pheasant, which meant the bird had been cooking nearly three times as long as it should have. This newest disaster was a less pleasant slap in the face than the last one. A brisk run to the house might save a minute from the overcooking time. I stood up, stretched, and tried to pretend I didn’t notice the stack of a dozen or so photos, the top one an aperture-to-aperture face-off. There was a nudge to the joint. Like many literary men, I’ve read widely on the vagaries of lust, a course of inquiry as confused as the history of Italy. It is an experience not to be learned from, like death, only far more comic. I had noted the attempts in Ireland to ignore or drown the problem. On a side a good deal brighter than sex or pheasant was the notion that the journals were going to bring me fame as a historian—surely not the “fame” bandied about by the media, but a solidly marked trail that might very well result in an Endowed Chair by the time I hit forty-five.
In the kitchen my sense of well-being was doubly renewed. Dalva called from her cabin in Buffalo Gap, sounding rather merry and bright-eyed for so late an hour. Had Frieda told me about the surprise bottle of Bordeaux left for me in the breadbox? Nope, as they say out here, of course not. Things would go better for me if I tried to be a little charming with Frieda. I spoke about the progress of my work with excitement, which pleased her. She was glad that I had “settled in,” then asked about how Karen’s interview had gone. I breathed deeply to keep my voice from pinching into a tight little shriek of guilt. “Neither here nor there,” I said, “not enough energy in the situation to make it enervating.”
“I talked to Naomi and I heard you’re going to become a model’s agent. Is that lateral or a move up?”
“Oh, fuck you, darling.” I felt too good to bother defending myself. Her laughter was soft and rich.
“I’ll be back in a day or so. Just remember you won’t hear the bullet that hits you. I miss you.”
“I miss you too.” When I heard her receiver click I began to reflect on the heartiness of frontier humor: those folkloric tales of life in our early raw. “Well, then Tad put the boot to the blackguard’s head till he was spitting teeth, and we all ponied up to the bar glad to see the day well ended and justice done. The man had learned not to put a burr under the saddle of a cowboy from the Two Dot outfit.” That sort of thing.
The second thrill was that the pheasant wasn’t really ruined, and the breadbox Bordeaux was a ‘49 Latour, an outstanding wine, the gift of which moistened my unworthy eyes. This is the kind of farming I could get used to. The wine made me a little sorry I would not be permitted to look into the grandfather’s papers, as he was apparently a great deal less austere than his own father. This home and wine revealed the spender I would wish to be. The bird itself was overly loosened, falling apart as I took it from the Dutch oven, but the juices had an excruciating flavor, and I picked the thing down to its bones. I am not by nature a hunter, but I meant to ask old Lundquist to snare me a few of these critters. I stretched out the bottle of Latour through a pointless but happy reverie about my first year of marriage. In reaction to me and a number of difficult years, she had managed to develop a well-oiled survival mechanism, and I had to be discarded like a vestigial appendage.
Just before dawn there was a terrible commotion among the geese, a fury of honking and flapping. I very nearly went outside to check but didn’t have a flashlight, and my imaginings wouldn’t permit a foray without one. I was confused by what had been a wonderful dream at the beginning, where Dalva and my daughter, Laurel, were riding through the pasture on splendid gold-tinged horses, but when I went out to meet them their faces were of old Indian women and looked like shucked pecans. If my daughter is that old, then I must be dead, I thought, when the geese woke me. It didn’t occur to me to turn on the light, so I lay there another half an hour until I could see the room clearly. I looked out the back window to
the west and there, on a mound of earth surrounded by burdocks, was a coyote feeding on a goose, his muzzle red with blood. He (or she) saw my movement at the window and dashed off through the weeds with the remains of the goose. Sad and startling though it was, I hoped the dead one was the pesky goose leader. At that moment Frieda pulled in the yard and went into the house to make my breakfast. I pulled on my trousers to inspect the morning, and any additional goose carnage. I counted thirteen but the number was meaningless, since I didn’t know how many there were in the first place. I was pleased to see the geese were a good deal more friendly. The arrogant leader had survived, and he led the flock to me, with all of them apparently trying to explain the terrible thing that had happened. I was a little touched and felt called upon to make my first speech to geese, wherein I told them I would build a shelter, a sleeping bungalow they could enter in the evening, and sleep sound and safe from predators. I bowed and made the sign of benediction. I meant to check out the unvisited barn for cage materials. It was impossible not to be pleased with my progress with animals. I gave a hearty hello to the horses and went to the house.
“You walk barefoot around here, you’ll sure as hell get lockjaw,” Frieda greeted me from the stove. I saw she was making me a low-calorie, low-cholesterol breakfast of thick bacon, fried new potatoes, and a giant omelet. I also saw her eyes were red, as if from weeping. I secretly hoped to get through breakfast without an explanation for recent sorrow. I pretended to listen attentively to Paul Harvey’s first word for the day, glad tidings from a town in Iowa where welfare lay-abouts were put to work sweeping the streets and washing all the cars in the courthouse parking lot.