by Jim Harrison
We were both crying by then, and I’m sure that others in the hotel dining room were a little disturbed by us. When we got up to leave the maitre d’ rushed over and in a thick accent said the surgeon had called to say the operation had gone well and “everyone” was alive. His pronunciation of “everyone” was so dramatic that we had to laugh, which added to the confusion.
Early in the morning, on the way to the airport, we stopped at the hospital. A friend of my mother’s, a farm-implement dealer named Bill Mercer, was flying down to pick us up in his small Cessna. I looked forward to the trip because I loved flying close to the ground. Michael’s quarters turned out to resemble a pleasant enough suburban bedroom though overdosed on paisley. He had a fresh newspaper in front of his face and didn’t hear us enter. His left arm was in a light cast from his palm to his shoulder. I said “Hello” and we gasped with shock when he dropped the paper. His face looked like an overripe plum and one eye was completely closed. He quickly wrote a note—“These hot shots do the knife work from the inside to avoid marring my beauty. Was there ever a plum so fair?” I picked up his free hand and involuntarily kissed it. He closed his good eye, then handed me a prepared note with a list of things and books he needed, adding that for “God’s sake” put the journals back in the bank vault for the time being. At the bottom of the note it said “I’m terribly sorry. Save me the embarrassment and leave me alone, though don’t forget to pick me up in two weeks. Before you go, tell me you forgive me, if possible.” I handed the note to Naomi and kissed his forehead. Naomi kissed him, and then a rather pretty nurse entered with a smile. It was impossible not to see her as his probable victim of one thing or another. She placed a plastic straw and a small paper cup to his lips. She said it was a liquid tranquilizer to compensate for lack of such items as solid food, nicotine, and alcohol. He gave us the peace sign and we left.
We flew northwest into the morning with the sun behind us, and once well outside Omaha and past Columbus, we descended and followed the North Loup. Naomi was up in front with Bill and as soon as it was polite to do so, I took off my earphones and mike, not wanting to talk or be talked to. Bill had been full of gossip about the great event, including the irony of Karen’s interview with Michael in the weekly newspaper yesterday. Town opinion was split but many felt the punishment was too great for “you know what,” which seemed to be public knowledge. There was his nervous laugh on the earphones over their euphemism for what men in jocular moments call “eating pussy” and “sucking dick.” Then Bill began to tease Naomi about her new job, which included camping trips with a young man. It was at this point that I had had enough sexual innuendo at three thousand feet.
What I craved was loneliness, and could see there were plenty of possibilities down on the green and verdant earth. I felt a giggle in my stomach remembering a visiting poet in college who quoted Charles Olson’s “I take space to be the central fact of America” in an oracular baritone. At a gathering after his reading this poet had spent more than an hour verbally seducing me when I had already decided to make love to him. He was led off by an assistant professor’s wife when his speech to me got too loud. He was similar to Michael, only more so, and I wondered if this penchant for eccentric men came from being raised in the horse latitudes of Nebraska. The poet appeared the next morning at the apartment I shared with Charlene and began his speech again, and I hurriedly took him off to my bedroom. Charlene was involved with a Minneapolis businessman at the time. Years later I had seen this poet weaving around a Greenwich Village bar, pathetically bloated with alcohol and whatever was being ingested at the time. I didn’t approach him.
When we landed I said goodbye to Naomi who was headed off to Sheridan County with Nelse. I hadn’t met him yet but was without curiosity about anyone for the time being. On the drive back to the farm I began to wonder if my life was winding down or merely adjusting itself. If two more children left the school district I would be without a job in September.
In the mail was an enormous bill for the repair of Michael’s car in Denver. I wrote a check with no irritation whatsoever. Another letter, without a return address, was a clumsy note of apology from Pete Olafson. His lawyer would disapprove, but, then, he likely didn’t have a lawyer—that was reason enough to compromise. “So in closing I say, I did not mean to slap your friend that hard. I just grabbed his arm and saw red. I thought who is this man who wants to see naked pictures of little girls. One more money setback and we will go bottom up, that’s for sure. My life is in your hands. Usually if you hit a guy he rolls with the punches and no one gets hurt. If you see fit to be understanding I will shoe your horses free of charge for 10 years. I should never have left the business. My wife is crying day and night. Yr. friend Pete O.”
Fathers are habitually a half-decade behind their daughters’ actual age. Pete had always been a bully and a lout, but a first-class farrier. His wife, who was in Ruth’s class, was a devious neurotic, the sort of woman who gives Scandinavians an undeservedly bad name for looniness. How hopeless, I thought. It was too easy to be confused by the idea of personality, so I looked through a tack chest in the pump shed for the saddlebags that I had made for me in San Antonio years before. The view of the North Loup from the plane had reminded me of a swale near the Niobrara I hadn’t seen since I was a girl, and I meant to ride there in the afternoon. First, though, I had the obligation to write Paul and tell him that Rachel had died, sending along a photo she wanted him to have of the two of them together so long ago in Buffalo Gap. There was the sense in the photo of my father’s unseen presence, and I quickly slid it into the envelope, wondering if it was he or Grandfather who took the picture. Rachel was lovely but Paul never looked comfortable in a cowboy hat, and even with a shovel in his hand he was melancholy and studious. He told me that after his mother died in Omaha in early May he came to the farm, started digging irrigation ditches, and didn’t stop until September when it was time to go back to school. Grandfather and Wesley would ride out to see him but he wouldn’t talk to them. He made his own meals on a hot plate in the bunkhouse.
By midafternoon I was saddled and headed for the swale. At the last moment I had packed a ground cloth and a summer bag in case I wanted to spend the night. After a half-hour or so the world I was tired of had disappeared, and the only thing I was missing was a dog or two. Naomi had mentioned that a friend over in Ainsworth had a litter of Labrador-Airedale crosses which would make an ideal ranch dog. I told her I would think it over but I wanted to make sure that the school was going to open in September.
I was riding Peach, a mare, on a trail on the south side of the Niobrara. She loved water and I let her swim a few minutes, soaking me to the upper thighs. This didn’t do the job so I tethered her and took off the saddle and my bags, then took off my clothes. We found a deeper stretch—there was still plenty of water in June—and we floundered around together having a wonderful time. She was alarmed by minnows and stared at them with her ears perked as a puppy would. Bathing with horses; I let my mind slip back to the best parts of the afternoon in the Keys, the glittering blue creek in the mangroves, swimming with Duane and the buckskin in the tidal thrust, the whiteness of the scar tissue around the healed shrapnel and bullet wounds as if the insides had sucked themselves away from the incursion of metal.
I let myself sun-dry while Peach rolled in a sunken, dusty area that must have been an old buffalo wallow. After my conversation with Naomi in the hotel dining room I had considered trying to talk to Duane as she did Father but I didn’t dare. I thought of Michael’s agitation over the idea of Crazy Horse’s being sent to the Dry Tortugas—Michael spent a lot of time trying unsuccessfully to avoid the human dimension, affecting the emotional distance of a surgeon. I wondered how he would hold up against the insanity of some of the volumes in the second chest, but then there was a vast difference between being involved in the Ghost Dance movement and writing about it. Perhaps it was too peculiar and embarrassing, too unique to be imagined. There was a trace of ob
verse pride in Michael’s actually not knowing an Indian, other than the day spent with the Nez Percé student, but then his sense of himself needed an improbable amount of protection. When I mentioned a particular novel or movie I enjoyed he would reject the idea because “it would set me off.”
I dressed and remounted Peach, riding as hard as she would allow for an hour only to discover the swale was no longer there. It had been drained, filled, and contoured for what remained of a cornfield—unplanted this year because the country had twice as much corn as it needed. Sometimes they needed help at it but farmers had always been pretty good at cutting their own throats. Hanging invisibly in the air, just above the ground, was the delightful hummock of cottonwoods, osier, and wild cherry, the clouds of birds that mated and nested there.
I doubled back and crossed the river, headed for the small box canyon favored by Grandfather, Paul, Duane, and myself. There was more than a little fear in my heart but the miniature canyon was intact; if anything the trees and bushes were more dense and the groundwater yielded up a fuller spring. I sat on the flat rock, ate a half-sandwich, and drank iced tea from a thermos. It was so curious to close my eyes and realize the sandwich tasted like Bleecker Street and Washington Square in the late sixties. If you wanted a sandwich you had to go to New York City or send for supplies.
I felt a mental tremor as I sat on the rock, as if I were being revisited by the emotions I had felt there the summer after the baby, both good and bad. Naomi had been canning tomatoes. I left it where it was, large breasts and all. New places and old bring on unstudied emotions. At one time I made a study of all of them. Grandfather wouldn’t go beyond his volume of William James and that was the book that got me started. During an advanced graduate course in abnormal psychology at Minnesota five of us had gone on a week-long field trip of state hospitals with our brash young professor from New York. At one of the institutions we had met an inmate, a middle-aged Chippewa from the Red Lake Reservation up in Rainy River County. The hospital guide assured us that the Chippewa was an incurable schizophrenic but when we were left alone with him the professor, who was passionate and quite Jewish, determined the Chippewa was a shaman who had been institutionalized through the efforts of the usual malevolent nitwits from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The shaman had been caught in the act of being trees and stones for a year and had been sent away. The first few years in the hospital he had answered his confinement by becoming a river. We were all sitting out on a lawn beside some flower beds. He told us to watch closely as he lay down and put on his “suit of running water.” The professor said later it was a specific type of group hypnosis, but the Chippewa did seem to become water. It disturbed us all a great deal except the professor who thought it was interesting. After a year of concerted effort he got the Chippewa released under the guise of further study. You’re not legitimately schizophrenic if you can turn it off at will and return to consensual reality. The shaman, however, was quite unhappy in Minneapolis and disappeared. Later, when I saw the professor at a coffee house, he told me that the man had adopted a group of crows that fed out on the ice of the frozen Mississippi, and had probably gone off with them. Neither of us seemed sure if he was serious.
Peach stared, trembled, then shied away from a rock formation just beyond me at the head of the canyon. I was sure it was a rattlesnake but didn’t bother getting up to check. At the Omaha airport in the morning the weatherman had said a cool front was headed down from Alberta in the early evening, which meant rattlesnakes would take cover and the canyon would be fine for sleeping. I brushed Peach down and gave her some oats from the saddlebags. She didn’t need to be hobbled since I had trained her from a filly a few summers ago and she liked to stick close to the nearest human, not really a peculiarity. She also liked Lundquist’s dog Roscoe and the two of them played tag. She followed me down the canyon to the river flats where I gathered firewood, studying all of my movements. I made several trips because I had pretty much decided to stay the night. I followed the eyes of Peach off to an enormous cottonwood by the river where a group of crows had gathered and were obviously discussing our presence.
When I awoke from my night in the desert two weeks ago I made a pot of coffee and drank it sitting cross-legged on the cot. The dawn was radiant with the sun coming up over the Sauceda Mountains, and there was the question why I didn’t do this more often though I had enjoyed hundreds of such solitary dawns in my life. It was hot within an hour and I drove across the Papago Reservation, then south toward Sasabe, cutting off at Arivaca Canyon Road to Nogales, to Patagonia, and down to the San Rafael Valley where Paul now spent much of his time. My thoughts the entire day were subsumed in the aftermath of Duane’s suicide fifteen years before, not in a grotesque way but there was something in the mood that made the memories of the night before continue their natural course.
I had driven back to my room at the Pier House and throughout the day I sat there being visited by the police, an armed-services representative (the benefits), the coroner who doubted the body would be found, an officer from the Coast Guard who doubted the body would ever be found, an obtuse reporter from the local Key West Citizen, and an intelligent young man from the Miami Herald who had also been in Vietnam. A Sioux on horseback committing suicide at sea was thought to be newsworthy—I was never able to read this article which was called “Requiem for a Warrior.” The reporter from the Herald was missing his left arm, at which sight I finally wept. It was as if with this missing arm I knew that Duane was gone from the earth and buried in the endless prairie of the ocean. It was the only day of my life I was to be addressed as Mrs. Stone Horse. I had been trying every half-hour or so to get through to Paul because I didn’t want to worry Naomi. When I succeeded and told Paul the story he said to sit tight and he would come for me. Perhaps it is pretentious and doesn’t matter but I have put in my will that “Dalva Stone Horse” is to be on my gravestone, and that my ashes are to be cast into the ocean in the Gulf Stream off Big Pine Key. I shall join him in the great ocean river.
Rather than take me to the Arizona ranch Paul had decided that his cottage near Loreto, down on the Baja Peninsula, was a better idea. He told me later that he didn’t feel the death of a husband should be survived in the same area the son was lost. Loreto had the same features of otherworldliness for me at thirty that southern Arizona had had for me at an over-plump fifteen so long ago.
Now in my canyon it occurred to me that I had reached Paul’s ranch two weeks ago to this very hour. He had expanded the stucco house, the horse barn, and the kennels since my last visit a year before. Emilia was there, also a younger woman named Luisa with a daughter about five, an older woman named Margaret, perhaps in her mid-sixties, about Paul’s age. She was a retired anthropologist from the University of Louisiana. At dinner she and Paul explained that they had met in Florence in 1949, and had an affair despite her art-historian husband who was hard at work at the Uffizi. I had the not altogether comfortable feeling that I was in the presence of three generations of his lovers. His gentleness and humor were so disarming that no one seemed to mind, and at one point all three of the women were discussing their current husbands. I was road-weary and had several drinks, but stayed up late to listen and ask questions. Paul went to bed first, after telling us that we couldn’t talk about him in his absence which meant, of course, that we would. Margaret wanted to know about my grandfather because Paul never talked much about the way he grew up, except to say that a hundred years of intensive farming had made Nebraska a charmless place, the vast prairie utterly desiccated. I somewhat agree but then what state, including Arizona and Louisiana, hadn’t tried to squeeze itself plug-ugly to make a final dollar? I said that until his late twenties or so Paul’s father had aimed to be a painter but his will toward art hadn’t survived World War I. Paul’s notion was that his father had worked desperately to be an artist, then was rejected for the Armory Show in 1913, went to war out of depression, and returned understandably coarsened. In his postwar state of fatigue
and depression he felt morally and artistically bankrupt and never picked up a brush again. All the energies he had given to his art were directed to horses and making money by buying, trading, and selling large landholdings, also commercial real estate in Chicago, Omaha, Lincoln, and Rapid City. Paul felt that his parents were utterly unsuited for each other, and after the birth of his two sons, his father avoided Omaha, spending his time at the farm or in Texas and Arizona. With the death of Wesley he simply withdrew, though Paul felt that most of his motive was to try to act the father for Ruth and myself.
I felt this brief explanation was enough and resisted further probings by Margaret on the subject of money, except to say that I scarcely felt responsible for either the talents or the shortcomings of my forebears. When the three of them became insistently curious on the subject of why I hadn’t married it was humorous. If you’re cross at the time the easiest way to put a stop to this is by saying that you’re a lesbian. It creates a wonderful aura of instant embarrassment and backpedaling. Instead I used Michael’s idea that people completely change every seven years and the adaptation process was too much of a strain. Only Paul and Rachel knew I had been married less than a day, except for Bobby and his Bahamian wife, Grace.
Paul woke me at dawn with a cup of coffee to go for a ride. Out the window I could see two saddled horses, plus a group of dogs whirling around in excitement. I hurriedly got out of bed forgetting I was naked. Paul winked as he slid out the door, saying he hoped I wasn’t keeping all that to myself. I answered that I was trying not to, but success in this area was difficult to measure.