by Jim Harrison
It turned out that Frieda had been able to check Michael out late the evening before and they had driven halfway home before stopping at a motel—with separate rooms at her insistence. He had been hard at work since midmorning and there were several open journals on the desk, plus a list of questions in handwriting that had become small and cramped. If I hadn’t been trained in the area the hour we spent would have pushed me over the lip of daffiness. The minimum immediate recovery period for an alcoholic is at least six weeks and after ten days Michael verged on the delusional. Naomi’s farm wasn’t the place to recover but it was a decision I didn’t intend to interfere with, one way or the other. His first written question made my skin itch and I spoke slowly as if to someone dull-witted.
“Northridge came for a few minutes to my hospital room in a dream. There was a bullet hole in his head. How did he die?”
“He died at home in bed in 1910 three days after his wife died.”
“The journals stop a few days after the return to the farm in the February after Wounded Knee. Are there more?”
“There’s one more I’ll discuss with Paul when he comes here in July. You’ll probably be able to see it when you reach the end of your week.”
“That’s not fair, goddamnit!” His forehead burst with sweat and I felt some empathy for his panic. We were a few feet away at the big desk but I could smell his sour odor.
“Calm down. I’m going away for a while, perhaps a week. Maybe I can talk to Paul on the phone. It entails a great deal of money and I could be putting myself in physical jeopardy.” This was a matter that in my confusion I hadn’t been able to deal with. If I decided to give the materials to a museum I could simply excise the “other things” from the journal with a razor blade and dispose of them myself. Then Michael could finish his work. What wasn’t needed now was the sort of grandmotherly compassion that indulges someone because they feel a childlike desperation.
“I can see you don’t trust me!” Now he wrote in bolder strokes.
“Please stir your recent memory. You’ve been a tremendous pain in the ass. However, I admire the direction your conscience and intellect have been taking you. Just be patient.”
“You look exhausted yourself. You’re cold and distant. I don’t get it.”
“I’ve found out my son is alive and he’s seen me several times though I don’t know who he is. I’m waiting and it’s very hard to wait after so long.”
He was startled and reached over for my hand, pressed it to his forehead. Naomi came in to call us for lunch, and when we got to the table there was a small glass of wine at each place. Michael immediately drew his in through a glass straw, then stuck the straw in his pureed soup with a smile.
“May he have some more?” Naomi asked me, but Michael shook his head and made a writing motion to say he intended to work.
Out by the car Naomi told me that Ruth had tried to call me last night. She had flown to Costa Rica this morning and would stop for a visit on the way home next week. I thought Naomi was still acting a little strange but her humor returned and so did mine when we talked about Ruth, who was meeting her priest at an expensive seaside resort under the notion that it would be unlikely that anyone he knew would stop by.
“Is she going to try to get pregnant?”
“I don’t think so. She’s been spending a lot of time with Paul and she’s agreed to take on some of his orphan projects when he passes on. I like the ambition you girls show. All those years in the great world you come up with a priest and a cowboy.” Now she began to laugh helplessly, leaning against the car for support. She didn’t do it often but when she did it was infectious. We made so much noise Michael rushed out on the porch and watched us through the screen in bafflement.
“It’s just a joke,” I called out to him. It certainly could be looked at that way, I thought.
The trouble with western Nebraska is that there’s only one way to get to most places. Any other route would have added hours to the trip to Buffalo Gap. This means you have to put up with what you thought about on the road on other trips, as if these previous thoughts were hanging on the phone poles and power lines—even sexual fantasies from the distant past can lie in wait along creek bottoms and ditches, the village limits of no longer occupied crossroads, the name announcing nothing but itself and the memory of what you were doing and thinking other times you passed this way. But the susceptibility depends on drift, and I had begun not to drift, aware that I had been acting out effects rather than causing anything new. It was as if I had made my decision, gradual as it was, to come home, and I was hoping that would supplant all other considerations, save my phone call to Andrew.
It also occurred to me I had known Michael well a bit more than two months, and the only resonance got from seeing him today was regret. I wondered at the power of my melancholy in Santa Monica which accepted the idea that this brilliant nitwit would find my son in exchange for our history. It felt silly enough for me to laugh at myself in the car, but of what value was it for me to see it as clearly as Paul? And perhaps unconsciously, I had chosen Michael to rid myself of it. The idea of a major mistake made me turn on the radio but it was news time and the world’s anguish quickly became a confusing substitute for my own so I turned it off. The questions became more oblique, involving conscience and history, winnowing down to the pettiness of the thought of Northridge’s becoming a mere feather in Michael’s sorry academic hat.
In Chadron I opted for a longer route, driving over to Crawford, then north to 71 through the Oglala and Buffalo Gap National Grasslands. I congratulated myself on stopping short of a quick return visit to Fort Robinson—depending on your knowledge of history and conscience the area was the Sioux equivalent of the Warsaw Ghetto. My anger gave me a leaden foot and I passed three campers with Iowa licenses, swerving way off the left shoulder to avoid an oncoming car. The drivers all shook their fists and beeped at me before they continued on. I was partly mired in the ditch so put it in four-wheel drive and fishtailed along until I made it back up to the shoulder. My heart was racing and I couldn’t catch my breath so I stopped and got out of the car. I walked as fast as I could manage out into the ocean of grass and sat down hidden from the road. All that had just happened disappeared into the density of green with abruptness: “What I am trying to do is trade in a dead lover for a live son. I’ll throw in a dead father with the dead lover and their souls I have kept in the basement perhaps. Even if I don’t get to see the son I have to let the others go. The world around me and the world of people looks immense and solid but it is more fragile than lark or pheasant eggs, women eggs, anyone’s last heartbeat. I’m a crazy woman. Why didn’t I do this long ago? I’m forty-five and there’s still a weeping girl in my stomach. I’m still in the arms of dead men—first Father then Duane. I may as well have burned down the goddamned house. Whether I see the son he is at least a living obsession.”
Sam stayed ten yards away with cold feet when I reached the cabin. He showed me the fine new corral with well-concealed pride, a laconic cowboy shyness I had been familiar with since I was a child. With the corral done he had started wire-brushing the flaked varnish off the logs of the cabin to prepare for a new coat. When the shyness continued through the two drinks before dinner I began to wonder.
“Is there something wrong?” I was impatient, having decided so much that afternoon, or at least approached an area so critical that my relief reminded me of patients I had worked with the day after they emerged from successful shock treatment.
“I guess I’d have to say something’s wrong with you. You act like you been sick.”
I bristled but didn’t know where to go next. I poured myself a third drink and pushed the bottle toward him. He shrugged, then joined me. We entered the neutral territory of the condition of the cabin, horses, the price of hay as the summer was shaping up for drought. He said he’d never figured out why Omaha could get forty inches of rain while the western border turned brown with ten inches. The whiskey had begu
n to relax us when he blurted out that he hoped I would start feeling better. My stomach and joints began to loosen when he said both his mother and younger sister had always had “nervous problems” so he knew it was as real as breaking a leg. I still refused to let go when I gave him an explanation in an affected, even voice. I said I’d found out that the son that I’d been forced to give up for adoption was looking for me, which was something I’d been hoping for all these years.
“I’d say that would call for a celebration. You shouldn’t be too hard to find for Christ’s sake. This all happen since last week?”
I nodded and now tears were brimming in my eyes. He came around the table, lifted me up, and sat down with me on his lap. He said this was the kind of thing that made it worthwhile for me to have a boyfriend. I’m not the sort of person who sits on laps but it was OK at the moment. It was wonderfully ordinary, as if I had made human contact after a long absence. He didn’t ask a single question—just sat there with me on his lap. Then we made love and cooked dinner. He told me a story that he tried to make funny. When he was a boy of nine someone stole his horse which had been pastured with a dozen others. It was a fine chestnut mare. Twenty years later when his dad was dying in a VA hospital he had said, “Sam, it’s time to stop thinking about getting that mare back.”
It took three days to varnish the cabin. It was the kind of repetitive, menial work, similar to vegetable gardening, that allowed the world in my mind to retrieve its shape. I did the ladder work since even minimal heights made Sam feel queasy, and anything higher than a horse was out of the question. He disliked admitting this but once he let his guard down a few other confessions came along, usually funny: while other soldiers on leave enjoyed the massage parlors of Saigon he played the tourist, having overheard one of his dad’s World War II stories, how Japanese women could entrap a man so that they had to be surgically disconnected. Knowing my training he wondered about the background of this phobia. I said that in my experience I had noticed that men generally worry more about their dicks than their jobs. Looking down from the ladder I could see him blush under his tan.
Late on the third afternoon, while he was packing for his departure the next morning, we had a quarrel. He had spent a full hour in the hot sun laboriously cleaning the paintbrushes while I had been in favor of throwing them away. I didn’t catch myself in time and the paintbrushes quickly became a matter of money. The degree of his resentment was understandable considering his experiences in the horse business but I wanted him to be able to see me in a different light. I was sitting on the same couch where Grandfather had napped while Rachel looked over him. Where did my father make love to her? Off in the hills someplace. Sam talked or argued with his back to me which, frankly, pissed me off ungovernably. Naomi had told me his family had lost their ranch to the bank during the Depression and I realized whatever else he was saying this was the overwhelming fact that fueled his anger, and had limited his life to that of a foreman.
“If you’d turn around you could see I’m not the bank or your creditors or any of the ass holes you’ve worked for. If you want to see yourself as a victim that’s your business, but I could tell you some stories about the real thing because I’ve spent the last seven years working with them.”
His hand was on a chunk of quartz on the mantel. He suddenly turned and threw the heavy chunk as hard as he could the length of the cabin. It was a perfect strike on the Dutch oven full of chili on the stove, blasting contents all over the stove and wall. Now he was stricken, and covered his face when we walked over and looked at the damage.
‘’I’m dead broke. You’re going to have to buy dinner,” he said.
“I stuck some money in your wallet when you were in the shower. Also some in the glove compartment of your truck. I put fifty gallons of gas in your truck and in the auxiliary tank when I went to the store this morning.”
“You buying me, is that it?” He put his arm around my shoulder and ran a finger through the spilled chili on the stove, tasting it and approving of the flavor.
“Not me. Actually, I’m just renting. Our hired hand Lundquist likes to say that every boy needs some change in his pocket.”
“That’s about it. If I start that shit again tell me to move on.”
We drove over to Hot Springs for dinner, then north toward Harney Peak to see the moon rise. It was nearly full and some thunderheads in the east reminded me of a passage in Northridge’s journals. I got out of the truck and walked away from the ticking of the motor heat, until I was several hundred yards up a meadow slope where the trees began. Way down the hill I could see Sam lighting a cigarette. Halfway up, Harney was bathed in moonlight and watching closely you could see the light slowly move down the mountain as the moon rose. My mind felt so clear it shivered inside. I had told Sam I was going to the Crow Festival in August and would meet him in Hardin or Billings, Montana. For the time being at least, seeing him every month or two was all the traffic would bear.
I left at dawn when he did. After I had driven off and lowered the visor against the rising sun, half the money I had given him fell down in my lap. “I’m not that expensive, love, Sam” was all it said. This was about as far as you could get from the fast lane, and in a single month Santa Monica had become an imprecise image of trees and the ocean.
Crossing Cherry County on its only lateral road I was stopped by a deputy for going seventy-five, and told to get Nebraska plates if I was going to live there. I agreed and didn’t get a ticket. He was very large and battle-scarred and I wondered how many drunken Sioux down from the Rosebud he had fought with.
I made the farm by noon, the appointed time. I walked around the barnyard, working the travel out of my limbs, then headed for the house and stairwell where I lit two lanterns. Inside the wine cage, I pulled hard, and the last long rack which was heavy rolled out revealing the bin door of the root cellar. I lifted this bin door up and attached it by a hook to the rafter. The root cellar was twenty feet long and perhaps four feet deep, designed to store potatoes, cabbage, turnips, and so on through the winter. The light of the two lanterns revealed the door on the west end, also a fine mess of blacksnakes, the largest of which lifted its head into the air and moved toward the source of light as if it was a guardian. I whispered to it and reached down and out letting it scent my hand. It paused, then turned away. I climbed in and the vibration of my feet on the cellar floor disturbed the snakes which now slid around frantically as I made my way to the door. I’m not frightened of snakes but this seemed to be pushing my bravery a bit. At the door the largest wrapped around my boot and it was difficult to unwrap him. I opened the door, quickly closing it after me so none could follow, and made my way down the cold stone steps to the other door. The fact that I pretty much knew what to expect, and was moving quickly, diminished what would be a normal fear of what I was doing. My only irrational feeling was that I was in some way by this act releasing the souls of Duane and my father.
The room was large, perhaps twenty by thirty feet, and surprisingly airy because it was vented straight up through the wall between the bedroom and the den, and out through the roof. The only clear space was a slab-oak table with two oil lamps—I lit them both, then stared: at the west end on the bench sat the lieutenant’s skeleton, and those of the sergeant and private still in their cavalry uniforms, and with a large hole from Northridge’s .44 in the lieutenant’s forehead. Along the north side on wood cots lay five warriors in full regalia, friends of Northridge who in the diaspora wished to have their remains kept safe from graverobbers. With all of his compulsive journal-keeping the identity of these warriors remained a secret though Paul said he was sure his father knew. The rest of the room was full of tagged and labeled artifacts from tribes of the Great Basin: braided sweet grass, otter-skin collars, fur bands of mountain lions, badger skins—Northridge’s clan, Crow bustles of eagle and hawk feathers, painted buffalo heads, kit-fox wrist loops, grizzly-claw necklaces, turtle rattles, horned ermine bonnets, rolled ermine tails, cou
p sticks and three medicine bags, painted buffalo hides, a full golden eagle into which a Crow holy man’s head had fit into the rib cage, buffalo horn bonnets, ravens, otter-skin-wrapped lances, rattlesnake-skin-wrapped ceremonial bows, mountain-lion sashes, bearskin belts, dog skins, a grizzly-bear headdress with ears and two claws, wolf and coyote skins, owl-feather headdresses, weasel skins, a knife with a grizzly-jaw handle and incisor, bone whistles, full bear dancer hides, huge buffalo-head masks, wolf-hide headdresses with teeth, snake-effigy rattles, dewclaw rattles . . . .
I sat there for a full hour in the state that perhaps approached a prayer without words, not thinking about anything except what I was looking at. My father and Duane seemed to be with me, then went away as did the weeping girl I had felt in my chest. She went out an upstairs window where she had sat watching the summer morning, the descent of the moon. Then I heard a cry or a moan far off behind me. It was Lundquist calling Dalva, Dalva, Dalva . . . . I put out the oil lamps and left with a tremor up my spine and through my ribs.
He had come over and was worried that I had been “swallowed up” when he reached the bin door of the root cellar, and the door to the subbasement was closed. He was breathing rapidly and huddled against the corner of the wine rack, claiming that all the snakes in the root cellar had come to the bin door to prevent his saving me. I closed everything up and helped him upstairs where the sun shone strongly through the kitchen window. Now I was shaking and could feel my body moisten with sweat. I could swear there was a hollowness in my chest where the weeping girl had been. The “reality” of the kitchen was sharper than ever and when I rinsed my face in the sink my hair was already wet with sweat. I got Lundquist a beer and we sat down at the kitchen table. He finished his beer so quickly I nodded at the refrigerator to give him permission to have another. He was so unlike the Lundquist of five evenings before that I marveled again at the costumes of personality. He began rambling slowly about the summer of 1930 when Paul and little John were seven or eight or so. John W. had three Sioux men and one woman come down from near Keyapaha and erect a big tipi in the front yard to show the boys where part of their blood had come from. Lundquist smiled when he said he was the only “pure-white” person there. He sidetracked telling how John W. used to tease him about an issue of National Geographic that showed Lundquist’s ancestors wearing animal skins with big horns on their heads, though that was before they learned of Jesus. Anyway, when evening came Lundquist had gathered wood for the Sioux and they had started a big bonfire. John W. and two of the Sioux men came up from the basement and out the front door and danced dressed up like warriors for the boys. The other Sioux beat on a drum and the old woman explained to the boys what was happening. When they became sleepy she shook them awake.