by Jim Harrison
Within an hour of my arrival Lundquist had rigged a gate between the kitchen and the dining room so I could toilet-train the pup in the kitchen with newspapers. Frieda sat across the table from me as I read my mail, more than a little disgusted at the idea of a puppy “pooping” all over her kitchen. I told her to take a few days off by which time she would be taking care of Michael over at Naomi’s. The core of her gossip was that this morning a “Jap” photographer and a big tall woman in a purple dress had shown up and taken about a thousand “pitchers” of Karen Olafson and the whole town was “abuzz.”
“Poor Professor Michael, getting his head broke trying to help that slut. She gets famous and he gets a headache. He ought to sue her for a cold million. Maybe she’ll be a bunny for God’s sake.”
While she prattled I sorted out the bills from letters from Michael, Paul, and a postcard from Naomi postmarked Chadron. I was waiting to call Andrew until Frieda and Lundquist left—he was sitting in the corner on the floor, admiring his gate with the pup on his lap, while Roscoe watched through the porch window. Roscoe had decided the pup was his and didn’t want the rest of us near his new possession. When I didn’t rise to the Karen bait Frieda began to talk about the Cornhuskers, the University of Nebraska football team, which is the state’s central passion. One of her Christmas presents from our family had always been two season tickets for prime seats secured by the Omaha law firm. Only God knows what she and her girlfriend Marge did on these football weekends in Lincoln. I was never around in the fall but Naomi said that Frieda and Marge would return on Sunday much the worse for wear. Frieda felt that nature’s worst joke was that most men were shrimps and not like the “big ole Cornhuskers.”
The phone rang and Frieda answered it with the usual “I’ll just see if she wants to talk to you.” It was Sam so I took the call upstairs. I could immediately sense the cold feet in his voice but overrode it by pretending I didn’t. He felt he couldn’t stay at my cabin unless he did something for his keep, so I said I would get some lumber delivered and he could expand and repair the corral. That satisfied him and his voice warmed to say “I miss you.” Late at night when we had had far too much to drink he had said he always wanted to go to New York City because when he was a kid his parents had taken him to see A Tree Grows In Brooklyn over in O’Neill. I had thought this funny but he was terribly serious, admitting that he had never been east of Lexington, Kentucky. He didn’t care for hot dogs and his mother had told him that according to the Readers Digest they eat three million hot dogs a day in New York. I assured him that they were a better quality than those red-dyed ones at rodeos, which seemed to bring a boozy relief.
Naomi had added two more birds to her life list and N else had taken photos to prove it. They would return in ten days or so. Paul wrote to ask if mid-July was an appropriate time for a visit from him and Luiz since they would be looking at two schools in Colorado. Included was a thank-you note from Luiz for “saving” him from a life which he detailed briefly. I was embarrassed by his thanks, partly because I knew he was one out of a thousand to be retrieved, and I had spent too many years just beyond the edge of sadness—barely, in fact—to equate retrieval with cure.
Michael’s note was a mercifully short response to a letter I had written. He agreed that a convalescence at Naomi’s under Frieda’s care was a good idea if I promised to visit. He would also agree to any capitulation of principles to avoid a court case and trial over Karen and his fractured jaw. He had been feeling well but rather “empty” what with the loss of his habits, and the depended-upon short circuits that were a source of energy. All in all, though, the experience had given him an “intimation of mortality” that had dropped him into a void; it was as if the world had grown not only too quiet, but too large. A rather pretty staff psychologist had told him that this was a “splendid opportunity” to quit drinking. She had quoted someone, he couldn’t remember who, as saying “you can’t do something you don’t know if you keep doing what you do know.” Michael was sharp on the subject of our com temporary infatuation with repellent psychologisms and wondered if this qualified? In anticipation of his daughter Laurel’s visit he had written her to say he had fallen from a horse. He thanked me for sending two books, Luchetti & Olwell’s Women of the West and Carter’s Solomon D. Butcher: Photographing the American Dream. Both books would have been unbearable to read, he said, on the usual hangover, and had extended his sympathies somewhat beyond the Indians to all those involved in the financial hoax of the westward movement. It was the unimaginable bleakness of being stranded in Cheyenne County during the drought of 1887 with a wife and children, the deaths by exhaustion and malnutrition. He closed by admitting an infatuation with a plumpish nurse who thus far had refused to get him a bottle of whiskey, though he had upped his offer to a hundred dollars.
Frieda called up the stairs to say goodbye. I watched out the window as she left, then went back down to the kitchen. Lundquist still sat in the corner with the pup in his lap.
“This child is related to Sonia. I can tell by the eyes.” He was referring to an Airedale Grandfather owned that was lily favorite. It seemed implausible, but could be true since some of Sonia’s pups went up to the Ainsworth area. I poured Lundquist a shot of whiskey and gave him a bottle of beer from the refrigerator. Both were gone in a minute. He had been letting the pup chew his denim coat and it was difficult to get the little dog to let go.
The moment Lundquist left I felt dry-mouthed and fluttery. I pretended to be interested in the idea that it was the summer solstice which was normally the most dramatic day of the year to me, far more than Christmas and New Year’s. It was time to call Andrew and my deepest, unvoiced fear was that my son was dead. Most people would think it a little pretentious for me to say “my son” when all I did is make love, carry him, and give birth, and all the actual mothering was done by someone else. But then I knew I was far beyond rationality, above or below it, and I had involuntarily thought so much about the subject that it had reduced itself to a knot, a lump of coal beneath my breastbone. I rinsed my face in cold water, then dialed Andrew as quickly as possible. Thankfully, he didn’t dally around.
“Omaha. He grew up in Omaha. The father is dead, the mother living. She was quite shocked but willing to talk to you, though only in the most general terms and in person. He’s alive. I know that’s your biggest fear.”
“How did you find out?” I had to repeat myself because I was unable to raise my voice above a whisper.
“I called your uncle Paul. Your grandfather arranged it, and Paul handled the legalities in Tucson. The adoptive father was a member of a law firm your grandfather dealt with in Omaha. I suppose he wanted to keep track but then he died. Paul would have told you if you asked but he hoped he wouldn’t have to.”
“I’m not sure what you mean.” My heart was pounding to the point of dizziness.
“These sorts of things usually don’t work out well. He could have been dead, maimed, crazy, or resentful. He’s not dead or maimed, but I don’t know about the others. She thinks I’m a private detective and won’t say much. You can see her tomorrow or wait two weeks because she’s going to Maryland to see her daughter. I can set it Up.”
“Please do . . . thanks.” That was as much as I could say. I couldn’t draw a clear breath and my stomach began to cramp. I curled up and stared out the window at the tops of the sugar maples moving slightly in the breeze. I began to breathe with the pattern of a cicada I singled out from the rest and that helped. Lying there I wondered what he looked like, where he was at this very moment, and if we ever met, would he dislike me for giving him up, no matter that it was not my choice? I stopped these thoughts just short of screaming by running cold water in the upstairs bathroom sink and putting my face in it. There was an unbearable sense of density and congestion.
I closed the pup in the kitchen, went outside, and saddled up Peach. She was overready and wheeled around, scattering the geese. I headed west, letting the horse warm before I allow
ed her to break into the gallop I sensed she wanted. We skirted the alfalfa fields and followed the old tractor and game trails between the alfalfa and the windbreaks. We were going fast enough that I squinted my eyes and the bugs that hit my face stung. In a clear quarter-mile stretch I let her go and when I pulled her up to a canter I discovered I had been yelling along with the wind in my ears. Goddamn the world who gives me no father and no son. No husband. It was much more, I hope, than self-pity, and when I continued to yell the eyes of Peach rolled backward to see if it was her fault. I leaned forward until my face was along her mane. I suppose I was yelling at God, not claiming a uniqueness in sorrow, but claiming what I was. The ache still came upward from my stomach to my heart to my throat and into my head and back down for another circle. Larks and kildeer skittered above the grass before us, and I slowed us down, running my fingers through the mare’s sweating flanks. We picked our way through the last .windbreak before the slough. Now the cattails’ were thick along the trail and red-winged blackbirds were perched bobbing on the cattail heads. What kind of fucking world is this? I asked them. Peach trembled as she smelled the water, and when we reached the creek and swimming hole I loosened the reins and let her go for it, which she did in a breathtaking leap and plunge. There was the creek bottom Charlene drew me up from when I wanted to stay there. We made a circle; then we were up the far bank near Duane’s tipi ring and hanging white deer skull. I jumped off and unsaddled Peach so she could roll in her beloved dust. The late-afternoon sun was warm so I shed my clothes, squeezed and wrung out water, and hung them over a bush. I shivered a bit; then for no reason I rolled in the sand and dust. I stood up laughing as Peach watched me, then I got back down and rolled in the sand again. It was so wonderful I wondered why I had never done it before. I rolled over and over and down the bank and back into the water. Peach ran up and down the bank, then made a marvelous leap into the creek. We’re quite the girls today, I thought.
When I lay stretched out on the damp and smelly horse blanket I realized that my stomachache was gone and with it the pain beneath my breastbone and in my throat and head. I rolled over on my belly and stared at ants. A number of times in my life I’d been told, or overheard, how much men had paid for whores, prostitutes, call girls, whatever, and I mentally toted up the amount I’d pay to have Sam there. As the auctioneers say, it would be “top dollar.”
With my eyes just above ground level I looked above the stones outside the tipi ring to the burial mounds in the thicket. An ornithologist had asked Naomi if he might bring in an archaeologist friend with the idea of clearing and excavating the mounds. She said no: enough mounds had been dug up. When she was way up Canyon de Chelly a Navajo told her that some college folks had dug up his grandmother who had only been dead a few years. The mounds weren’t Sioux, who had come to the area around the time of Columbus, driven westward by the forest people, the Ojibway. When my father showed them to me I rode a smallish bay mare and he rode a large black gelding. I must have been almost eight. Just before he left, with a witch-hazel smell on his chin. He said it was the best camping spot in the world and when he and Naomi were first married they camped there on summer nights and watched shooting stars: There’s one. There’s another one over there. He frightened Naomi before they slept by saying Sioux words to the mounds in the thicket, pretending he was asking the dead warriors about their great buffalo hunts. Duane had that skull in the barn. He’d let Sonia in there among the hay bales with him. I can see him looking out to the west wondering what his life would be like; then like all of us he found out. I lifted my eyes and there was a bird I didn’t recognize on the antler. I memorized its black-and-yellow markings knowing it was so small and fragile it had to be a warbler. It looked at me. I was a fellow creature, I thought. Peach napped standing up. I dozed until I heard the first mosquito of the evening, then dressed in damp clothes, saddled Peach, and made my way home.
I remembered the entrance gate of the Happy Hollow Country Club from somewhere in my childhood, perhaps right after World War II, on my first trip to Omaha with my parents; the landscaping was formed with hedges like trimmed 4-H sheep at a fair, and there was the feeling, absurd name and all, that one was transported back to Connecticut or Bucks County. The people who tended to make the money in the westward movement were Yankee in origin.
I felt uncomfortably fragile, and the sensation was as foreign to me as the onset of flu or food poisoning. It was similar to my illness in the Marquette hospital before the trip to Arizona—since waking before dawn I had tried everything to rid myself of the giddiness which was only a form of helplessness. The unvoiced prayer that was to be answered today—that I find out what happened to my son—enlarged itself and seemed to fill all the cells of my being. I even looked into a classic text on anxiety I had studied in graduate school but the words muddied themselves, blurred, and became senseless. Just after first light I rode Peach for an hour but rather than preventing the sweep of memory the ride abetted it; I turned around after emerging from a gully behind the country Methodist church, which only served to remind me of the lecture on sin I had received the summer after the baby. There was the temptation to become a foxhole Christian, throw myself before the altar in supplication as countless millions of women have done over their children but I knew that the church was locked. Besides, what I remembered in the Bible was the central lesson of the terrifying fragility of life.
The only thing, finally, that helped kill the hours before my departure for Omaha was to sit on a cottonwood stump in a grove of flowering crab behind the barn. It was near the creek and the geese followed me, nestling to doze in the green grass like huge white eggs. I began by breathing slowly and gave myself up to my thoughts rather than quarrel with them, which helped make them drift away: “He is not what is left of Duane. I hope he does not look like my father. It is altogether possible that he won’t care for me, given the conditions of his life. Perhaps his adoptive mother will tell me nothing this afternoon. This doesn’t mean I will ever see him, only that I’ll learn something of him. It has to be enough that he is not dead and that I learn he is not unhappy. Perhaps it would be better if he never knew I existed but I don’t want that to be so. Oh God he is the only child I ever had but so is my father the only father I will ever have. Oh Father wherever you are. Grandfather. I am strong enough but not for this. Life has gone by please let me know. Grandfather said the year he was born in 1886 it was the hottest summer to be followed by the coldest winter ever so that the sheep in the west died and the starving cattle ate the wool off the sheep and died beside them. He said in the car, Take courage, the earth is all that lasts. That is true but I am a woman sitting on a stump. I want to love my son or at least touch his arm and greet him.”
She was backlit by a window in the lounge so that when I came in from the sunlight I couldn’t see her features clearly. She stood and waved and a waiter took me to her. Her hand was thin to boniness when I took it, and so was her voice, which was also lightly slurred.
“My goodness, but I would have recognized you anywhere. You must not come to Omaha often. I thought I saw you at the hospital last week when I was visiting a friend. Were you there? I said it must be you, though it all was thirty years ago.”
I nodded yes, unable to find my voice. She was extremely thin, beautifully dressed, and I guessed in her early sixties. It was apparent she had done some drinking in her life but her eyes were kind.
“I’m having a Manhattan, because this is a bit nerve-racking. May I order one for you? I’m puzzled, confused. I don’t hear from him often, perhaps once or twice a year, but he said he’d seen you in Santa Monica, also in Nebraska last summer. He said during his Christmas call he would be seeing you again this summer. So when that man called for you I didn’t know what to think. He was always a bit of a fibber, but he described what you looked like.”
My breath was shallow and I could barely speak. “He never introduced himself if he saw me. Do you have a photo?” This immediately seemed the wr
ong thing to say.
“Oh my God, no. I went to a therapist this morning who helped me when my husband died. The therapist said it’s the young man’s decision. Of course, now that you know his last name you could obviously find him with your resources, but it wouldn’t be right. Or so they say.”
“I wouldn’t do that. I understand that. It’s natural for me to wonder what he looks like.”
“Of course. Let me think it over. There’s no way to prepare for this, is there? Your grandfather was a very intimidating man. We were fearful of him even though the adoption was legal. My husband was only a junior member of the firm. Your grandfather asked that the boy be named John. We agreed and that’s his legal name, though we resented it and never used the name. We saw your grandfather once more and that was during the August before he died. It was at a dinner given by a senior partner to which we had been summoned and instructed to bring the baby. My husband nearly resigned over the issue, but that evening he got along famously with your grandfather. My husband was from a poor family up in Moorhead, Minnesota, and very probably worked himself to death. Your grandfather came into a bedroom to see the baby and kissed its forehead. He said something to the baby in a foreign language; I suspect it was Indian, because I was told your grandfather was part Indian. Within a few weeks my husband was made the youngest full partner. I don’t know why I’m saying this, because what you want to hear is about the boy. We were in our early thirties and thought we were infertile, but after the adoption we had two daughters of our own. One lives here in Omaha and one lives in Maryland. I guess this sometimes happens. So it was all quite wonderful for us. To be frank, the boy was always quite contrary and only infrequently a good student. He was a better student in college. But he was kind to his sisters and was a superb athlete, which meant a lot to his dad and means a lot around here, perhaps too much. During his last two years of high school we let him work on a dude ranch in Wyoming, and we never had any real control of him after that. We had told him he was adopted, because you’re supposed to, but I’m not sure that’s right. Your grandfather didn’t help by leaving him a modest income for when he turned eighteen. The daughters were so easy, and he tended to be out of our control. But I guess so many sons are like that.” She stopped and waved away an acquaintance who was approaching, pointing to her watch. She appeared to be waiting for me to ask questions.