by Jim Harrison
Back inside I rechecked the music room and Frieda’s rather elaborate arrangements for Michael’s new study, with everything moved over from the bunkhouse, including Karen’s nude photo stuck in a Gideon Bible in the middle of the desk. I didn’t disturb her little joke, mostly because it was quite funny. In the kitchen Frieda had stocked the refrigerator, and there were recipes for broths and purees on the counter, plus a case of an adult version of baby formula.
I thought of opening the second trunk of journals but sat on it instead. I had had my turn years ago and now it was Michael’s job. I felt a little sorry for him. All the suffering had leavened my own at the time, and had helped explain my family’s character to me. The images fluttered in my mind, focusing for a split second then passing on to others: the Bible, fruit trees, buffalo, Aase, He Dog and Crazy Horse, Sam Creekmouth missing one ear, a field of gathered buffalo bones; all full of earnestness, a journal of work, love, and grief, becoming a journal of madness and starvation, becoming a journal of madness partly drug-induced, because by the time of the Ghost Dance peyote had made its way up, from tribe to tribe, to the Lakota. After Wounded Knee Northridge had seen far beyond and through what we at present call, with an air of banality, the “back wall.” Our world is so drowned in suffering I suppose it meant more that it was a blood relation, an ancestor.
I borrowed a barnyard pullet from Naomi’s freezer and drove home. I was a little desperate to do something as ordinary as to cook old Lundquist dinner. There was also the temptation, since my life had become inadvertently bold, to visit the room below the basement and get it over with. From the journals and Paul I pretty much knew what it held but I also realized it was terribly important to resolve the whole thing by actually seeing it.
When I drove in the yard Lundquist was sitting on a milks tool in the shadowed, open door of the barn with the pup on his lap and Roscoe at his feet. I got out of the car and approached quietly since he and the pup were asleep, though ever-watchful Roscoe bared his teeth, then growled softly in recognition of his master’s snooze. The pup awoke and wriggled off Lundquist’s lap which startled the old man.
“Frieda brought me over. I baby-sat for you girls once and I took you swimming. That’s the last time I went swimming. You remember? Ruth wanted me to catch a muskrat and bring it home. I says you can’t make a pet out of a muskrat. They stroll along the bottom of the water eating weeds. I could use a beer because I walked home last night. You probably know that. Everyone I know who died, they die at the hospital so it made sense to get home. I got turned around in Swanson’s big cornfield because the clouds came and I didn’t have stars to point the way. Frieda locks the door so I went to sleep with Roscoe. And that’s why I could use a beer.”
I readily agreed and turned toward the house but first he wanted to show me how he had trained the pup not to bother the geese, and vice versa. He put the pup down next to a goose and they instantly turned in opposite directions. I asked him how in God’s name he’d accomplished it so quickly.
“I gave them both a pinch and then had them think about each other at close range.” He wobbled off toward the house as if this explanation covered everything, waiting for me at the pump-shed door with a bow. He put a finger to his tongue. “Dry as a bone,” he said, staring at the half-frozen chicken in my hands as if he recognized it without the feathers. Perhaps he did because it came from his flock.
After his shot and beer I tried to make him lie down on the couch in the den while I made dinner but he refused. It offended his notion of propriety, what with the sense of my grandfather’s so fresh in his memory. He took the pup’s pillow from the corner of the kitchen, then went out in the front yard where he nestled beneath the tree and tire swing, whistling for the dogs to join him. Watching him out the kitchen window I wanted him to live forever. Naomi had told me that the old gossip was that Lundquist had been quite the ladies’ man, a church-and-party tenor, and a fine dancer. As Grandfather’s amanuensis he had trailered horses and dogs all over the country though never spoke to me of these trips for fear of violating Grandfather’s confidence, no matter that he was long dead. There was a photo in a family album from Kansas City in the thirties with Lundquist holding the leads of three polo ponies and being admired by a young woman who looked like a blond version of Joan Crawford. In the photo he was natty and muscular in riding breeches, and staring now at his fragile heap under the tree, with both the dogs on his chest and stomach, I very much admired the way he had grown old.
I served him his chicken and biscuits in the dining room with candlelight and white wine. He said a rather long grace in Swedish in which I recognized my name three times though he resisted my questioning about it. It is eerie when you know someone is praying for you. He examined the white Bordeaux and said he had drunk the same kind of wine in the Brown Palace in Denver with Grandfather “way back when.” The Glenn Miller orchestra had played and they had all danced very late.
“Who were the ladies?” I mostly asked for the reaction.
“I won’t tell you!” He coughed into his napkin, tried to look stern, but there was merriment in his eyes. “They were fine young women but I won’t say they were churchgoers.” He always topped my glass off before he filled his own. “The week after Mister J. W. died my wife threw away my traveling clothes. She says, ‘Your fancy days are over, big shot.’ I didn’t care one bit. She got crazy over this snoopy religion but I never let her aggravate me. On her deathbed she said she was sorry she limited our affections to the first Saturday every month.” He blushed at this admission. “Wine loosens the mouth more than beer.” He paused and became grave. “I’ve been thinking this over and I think I should tell you. I’m pretty sure I saw Duane in the bar a few Saturdays ago. He should have been older though when I thought it over.”
“It had to be my son. You know about my son. I was told he was looking for me.”
He nodded as if in agreement. “There was someone here right after the professor came. Roscoe and me tracked him halfway down the drive and through the trees to the house and bunkhouse, then back out to the road. I didn’t say anything because I thought you might have had an extra gentleman friend.”
“If you see him again will you tell him to come see me?”
“Of course I will. I’ll bring him right out in the goddamned Studebaker. You waited long enough.”
I could see he was wondering if I wanted the last of the wine so I poured it in his glass, then suggested we take a look in the basement. He was calm enough, saying he would go along as far as the door out of the root cellar. That’s as far as he had gone with Grandfather when they had packed away all the Indian artifacts in 1950 after Father had died. He wouldn’t go further than that because he was Christian and the place frightened him.
“Maybe we should have a brandy first,” I thought aloud. He smiled at me as if I had read his thoughts. He got up and lit two Coleman lanterns from the stairwell. When I poured the brandy my hand shook a little which he noticed. I could see he was alarmed by what we intended to do. He glanced over at the window where a fresh breeze lifted the curtains and there was the sound of thunder from the east. Over the years I had noticed that the quality of his grammar varied depending on the formality of the occasion. It improved in situations that might recall my grandfather who loved what he thought of as the King’s English. If your language was bad, then so was your thinking. Just underneath my thoughts on language, which were evasive, was a slogan of Ted’s, bastardized from Montaigne and translated into Latin—he used it as a personal and business slogan and, though I couldn’t remember the Latin, the intent was clear—“The world is staggering in natural drunkenness.”
“I hope you don’t mind blacksnakes. They live in the root cellar and eat all the field mice that come into the basement in November when it becomes cold. I don’t know what they eat the rest of the year. Frieda says they eat their babies. I think they go out and in up near the pump shed. Do you think they eat their baby snakes to keep going?”
“This is a thing you should do at noon. The bogeyman never gets anyone at noon.” He scurried out into the kitchen to calm the pup and Roscoe who were setting up a racket over Naomi as she entered.
“I tried to call. Look at this.” Naomi held up both the pup and the well-chewed phone cord. I had unplugged the upstairs phone after Frieda’s call at daylight. Naomi was deeply tanned and weathered, thinner, but quite nervous. She heated up some leftovers as she talked of the progress of the research with Nelse, which included the suitability of certain properties for purchase by the Nature Conservancy. Nelse was going back to Minneapolis for a week and then they would resume the project. She had spent the last two days at Buffalo Gap sorting data while he helped Sam with my corral. She watched my reaction to the mention of Sam—she had been friends with his oldest sister, also a schoolteacher, for years. She glanced at the dining-room table where Lundquist sat before the lighted lanterns.
“One of the geese is missing. We were going to look for it,” I lied.
“Is it true blacksnakes sometimes eat their babies?” Lundquist asked, snuffing the lantern and oblivious to my fib.
“I don’t know but I can easily find out. You folks have been drinking.” She laughed and gave him a pat as he made his way out the door followed by Roscoe and the pup. We watched him from the kitchen window under the yard light until he reached the bunkhouse. She began to talk about the plans she had made years before to build a little one-room cabin back near the baptismal pool on the creek. At the time she had said she hoped I wouldn’t mind the cabin being on “my land.” I liked to tease her about this ownership thing, also that the cabin would enable her to watch birds twenty-four hours a day because I was going to buy her an army nights cope which used the light of the stars and the phosphorescence in the air. That way she could watch sleeping birds. She reminded me of when I returned from my sophomore year at the University of Minnesota with a quote from William Blake, “How do you know but that every bird that cuts the airy way is an immense world of delight closed to our senses five.” This idea had utterly thrilled her, and still does, she said. I distantly wondered if she were having a flirtation with her young friend, because she was acting ever so vaguely out of character. It was in the quickness of her gestures and so subtle that only a husband or a daughter would have noticed.
After she left I went into the den and opened the safe and took out the envelope. I sat on the couch with the envelope on my lap staring up at the John Marin seascape that Lundquist liked so much because he had never seen the ocean and the painting resembled what the ocean looked like in his mind. The note was terse, and mostly an admonition.
May 15, 1956
Dearest Dalva,
I am putting my affairs in order, and that is why you have this short letter from a dead man. I don’t intend to tip over tomorrow but I sense this will be my last summer. Unless we are insensitive we know our own weather.
It should be 1986 now—what a foreign ring that has to me! Because you are curious, and because I have asked Paul to urge you to do so, you have probably read my father’s journals, so the contents of the subbasement are no mystery to you. It is, however, a bit of a visual shock. “My father’s intent and my own was to preserve these artifacts from the graverobbers, the trinket vendors, and assorted filth who swindled my mother’s people out of their physical sacraments. Think of a Buddhist home in the Orient where vestments, rosaries, and altar pieces are hanging on the walls, the owners recently slaughtered. The other “things” are self-evident.
I don’t want this to pose a real burden to you, so at some point you may wish to give the whole lot to a museum with a protective covenant that none of it be sold. There are three labeled medicine bags that should go back to the tribes that are the rightful owners, assuming that you may find souls who are in the rightful mind to receive them. You may wish to bury what remains of the bodies by yourself, or with Paul, or with your son. I assume you will look for each other some day. If I owned my father’s faith I would pray that to be so. Along with my sons, perhaps more so, you were the grace note of my life. Now I am so far down the ghost road I can’t see you, but I still send you back a kiss and my embrace. We loved each other so.
Grandfather
I went to bed reassuring myself that I would handle the problem of the following noon, amused by the idea that I was taking Lundquist’s recommendation for a proper time. I sat in my rocker at the window with the lights out watching a tremendous thunderstorm not all that far to the west. It was a relief to see that the wind was wrong for it to come in this direction and that I could watch it sail ponderously to the north with its resplendent lightning striking the horizon in the shapes of tree roots, the arterial system, river deltas from the air, the blue light shimmering off my bare stomach. It was so fearsome that I turned away, got in bed, and faced the far wall where the reflected light was like an artillery bombardment in a war movie. An unpleasant memory came I hadn’t remembered in years: Dad swatted my bottom because I chased Ruth with a blacksnake I held which coiled around my arm. It is a bracelet, I said, and I’m wearing this black bracelet to Sunday school and I’m putting it in your piano so watch out. So I was spanked because he said the world is frightening enough without scaring someone on purpose. She will be afraid of snakes forever—only she isn’t as a matter of fact. The tears were the same as the hospital when I woke up and I was torn by the baby and they pushed more liquid out. The smell was chloroform or iodine, the salt in tears in the throat like salt water. In and out of sleep and dreams, perhaps nightmares, the dreams remembering and rehearsing other nightmares: The dead wolf I lifted into the pickup on a gravel road near Baudette in Minnesota came back in my sleep and went into my mouth so it filled my body. I rode a huge crow to the river with silver reins. He drank from a sandbar. When they came for me feathers came out of my body which jerked and I flew away and could see them below. The old Sam Creekmouth, not this one—and he had no ear and his cheek was like tattered leather—was teaching me to be a creek mouth like that one when I was young beside the cooking-iron pot on the Missouri. I was a soft old marsh hawk caught between buildings in NYC and the doctor helped me out. In the desert the coyote and cobra went into my spine to be part of my spine and skull. That’s too many animals for one body. The old man was trying to give me wisdom but I fucked him instead. All this chemical weeping somewhere near my heart. Who’s in there weeping?
Someone is calling dalva dalva dalva up and into the window. It is daylight and raining lightly. It is Lundquist who turns away from looking up at my bare breasts which are hard and I’m wet for some reason. You were yelling, he said. It was a dream, I said, the pup and Roscoe jumping against the house. Can I go home? I said yes and he put the pup in the shed. He shouldered Roscoe and I watched him walk off, still not quite awake.
In the shower I thought, Holy shit, the night is actually over. What would I say to a doctor and why would they recall each other, for the wolf had arrived more than ten years before. Making breakfast I remained groggy with dreams so decided to school Nick, my quarter-horse gelding, who had become a bit rank from neglect. He was fine in the beginning but then decided he would only do figure eights to the left, not the right. Michael had observed that Nick shied from the smell of alcohol but that isn’t what I smelled like. I worked until he was lathered, then gave up. When I unsaddled him he nipped my ass and I hit him so hard my thumb felt sprained. Now I was sweating and yelling as I schooled him on a lunge line. He behaved perfectly then, looking at me as if he wondered what all the trouble had been about. I resaddled him but he still wouldn’t do the figure eights to the right. I put him away thinking I’m not strong enough now to do the job. This isn’t like me. I better get strong enough. What I have accomplished is a horse-teeth-bruised bite on my ass. I went inside and packed a bag.
Michael didn’t look as good
as he thought he did. He was bleached and flaccid, but gave me a bright smile when I came in the kitchen back door at Naomi’s. He wore some of the clothes, freshly cleaned and pressed, I had bought him in San Francisco. The swelling had diminished but the bruise was still there, the left arm in a cast and sling. He stooped to greet the pup which had learned and imitated Roscoe’s growl. Michael offered a bone left over from Naomi’s stockpot which made them easy friends. He glanced at the door wishing to speak to me in private, but first helped Naomi pour some of the soup in the blender with a grimace of resignation. Naomi seemed sad and preoccupied so I kissed her cheek. She pointed at an open letter on the table from the county superintendent. I guessed that the country school would be closed, which proved true, but there was the fillip of the offer to counsel bankrupt farm families, working out of the office of the county agricultural agent. I impulsively went to the phone and accepted, partly to reassure Naomi, but mostly because I was goddamned sick of simple dangling. The fantasy of reactivating my farm might occur down the road but the present timing couldn’t be more inappropriate. To do so now would be to place myself in Sam’s category of “rich folk” playing at ornamental ranching, even though I had been born here. I waved to Naomi and went off to the music room with Michael in tow.