Dalva

by Jim Harrison

  After dinner Lena suggested we do some weeding in Naomi’s garden so she wouldn’t get too far behind. Michael helped by amusing the pup, taking it for a walk down the road. While we weeded Lena spoke of Charlene and it was nearly dark when she turned to me with a question.

  “The girls were talking to this customer last week, a young man, and I went up to remind them to clean off the tables, and I could have sworn he looked like Duane. Do you think he could have been your boy?”

  We washed up and made a nightcap, sitting out on the porch where Michael was drying the pup, having bathed it after it rolled in a road-killed rabbit. The sounds he made through his wired jaw must have reminded the pup of its mother. My efforts to soothe Lena were interrupted by the phone. It was Paul to say he and Luiz would come up with Ruth on Saturday. They would meet at Stapleton and Bill, the farm-implement dealer, would come down to get them in his plane. It seemed an awkward match but Bill and Paul were boyhood chums who had once planned to roam the Seven Seas together, as Bill called it. At his request Paul was enrolling Luiz in a military prep school in Colorado Springs for the coming fall. I nearly protested this choice but let it go in the good feeling of the impending visit. Later it occurred to me the choice was quite natural—if you had been hurt that badly a spiffy uniform and the rigors of military discipline would be a comforting posture of defense.

  Lena left after making plans to take Michael to the movies the following evening. You would have thought he had been invited to the Inaugural Ball, which made me plan to wean him from the tranquilizers as soon as possible. There was this image of an ambulatory cabbage wearing a smile. I tucked him in bed as one would a child while he monkeyed with the old Zenith radio on the night table, tuning in a popular but contentious talk show where the evening’s discussion was to be the Star Wars controversy. Before going upstairs to read myself to sleep I went outside to look at the uninterrupted stars themselves, the night a “deep throw of star” as some poet said, a silken and thickish Milky Way accompanied by the war of thousands of grass frogs calling out to one another, land miniatures of those Baja sea lions of long ago, a call to life so dense, so impenetrable, that it perhaps equaled the magnitude of the night sky.

  July 17, 1886

  I am quite abashed on my fifth morning in jail. The authorities are drawing up papers that when signed will insure my release, or so I am told. I am to be taken to the train in Albany, there to board a train going west, & am not to get off the train in the state of New York, or ever return there on pain of prison internment. I have failed thoroughly as John Brown with not a corpse to my credit, and my wife’s dream will not be fulfilled, as I left her pregnant & wailing despite my assurances to the contrary. She had managed to never see a train though she had heard of one. She is staying with He Dog & his band, who comforted her telling her that my mission was essential to the Sioux.

  I was welcomed to the Mohonk Conference on the “Indian Question” with a great show of friendliness from my hosts, due to my efforts with Congress and my articles in Harpers and McClure’s. By evening, though, the participants began to shy away from me, sensing I was utterly serious in my plan to create an entire Indian Nation out of the western Dakotas, the western parts of Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma, the eastern portions of Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, northeastern Arizona, and northeastern New Mexico. No matter that it is just, this plan is viewed as madness by these folks who are said to be the conscience of our Nation, both religious and political. Dawes is not here and is said to be vacationing, perhaps from the rigors of chicanery. These are not landgrabbers but men, I am told, who wish to help the Indians by destroying their tribal organization in the Dawes Act. I am told that at Mohonk last year Dawes said, “When you have set the Indian upon his feet, instead of telling him to ‘Root, hog, or die,’ you take him by the hand and show him how to learn to earn his daily bread.” This man I vainly hoped to shoot to stop this horror would give each Indian a small farm to till or sell! Without their tribal authority they will be swindled and die.

  Despite my anger I am amused the second day to discover that only three of the eighty participants have actually lived among the Indians, an item that ascribes us no particular authority as we are said to be blinded by this contiguity. Of the other two men, one has worked as an agricultural missionary to the Apaches in Arizona and has witnessed the slaughter of ninety of them by a posse from Tucson in Arivaca Canyon. The other has been teaching the Cheyenne to grow crops, and being quite poor is dressed in buckskins which elicits amusement from the gathering. The three of us are asked after a lavish dinner to speak of the pleasures of lives spent “tenting in God’s nature,” but decline to do so. Here in the East, and elsewhere, I am told there is a great deal of aping of Indian outdoor customs.

  My downfall came on the afternoon of the third day. It had become clear to me that I was not to be permitted to present my case, and was everywhere avoided and shunned except by my two colleagues who had taken to drink out of despair. At a luncheon on the grass we were to be entertained by groups of dancing Mohawks & Iroquois. At one time the latter would have been quite happy to roast and devour their hosts. I refused to witness this humiliation and took a walk in the woods along the lake, seeking a quiet spot to pray for guidance. My prayers, however, stuck in my craw and I returned for the afternoon guest address determined to seize the lectern. I listened attentively to Reverend Gates who was also the President of Amherst College, who said something of the following, “The Savior’s teaching is full of illustrations of the right use of property. There is an immense moral training that comes from the use of property and the Indian has all of that to learn. We have, to begin with, the absolute need of awakening in the savage Indian broader desires and ampler wants. In his dull savagery he must be touched by the wings of the divine angel of discontent. The desire for property of his own may become an intense educating force. Discontent with the ‘teepee’ and the starving rations of the Indian camp in winter is needed to get the Indian out of the blanket and into trousers—and trousers with a pocket in them, and with a pocket that aches to be filled with dollars! . . .”

  On hearing this blasphemy I found myself running to the front of the hall. I shook the fool and hurled him into the crowd & attempted to begin my speech but was restrained by many from doing so. It was determined I had caused some injuries and was ultimately cast in jail from which I now await my deliverance.

  The house had been quiet except for the muffled sound of Michael’s radio, but now a slight and distant thunderstorm was causing sharp static and the pup began to whimper. I went downstairs and turned off the radio, picked up the pup, and dimmed the light—Michael refused to sleep in the dark, for which he had offered me a dozen reasons, including if he awoke in the dark how would he know conclusively if he were alive? I rocked the pup back to sleep on the porch swing, feeling not so much that I was getting old but indeterminably older. It was an oddly pleasurable sensation, and up to that moment quite unique: at forty-five I had finally accepted my life, a matter that given my supposed intelligence I might have managed earlier but hadn’t. Somehow you are trying when you don’t even know that you are trying. It is peculiar how people who think they are helping others—in my own family, from Northridge to Paul to Naomi, to myself—often are so neglectful of the most ordinary realities that men like Grandfather would counter directly and with dispatch: Paul in his drifting after the most viable abstractions, Naomi sitting on this porch for more than thirty-five years talking to a dead husband though all the while giving youngsters her energetic literacy. I was a mixture of Paul and Naomi.

  My ears popped from the low pressure in the air and the dense smell of corn and wheat was oppressive, so different from the alfalfa and varied trees at my own place just three miles away. I recalled this sort of weather before a violent storm when I was a child. The wind-driven rain and hail had demolished that year’s crops. We went to the basement when Father saw it coming just before dark. It was a storm-cellar room they had prep
ared with two beds, a couch, a table, and oil lamps. Our dog Sam lay frightened and stiff on the floor and Ruth and I comforted him while my parents played gin rummy. Then Mother read to us from the Book House while the actual house creaked above us and the wind was a hollow roaring sound. When we all awoke in the total silence of daylight and went upstairs the trees were stripped of their leaves and the wheat and corn were flattened in the fields. Ruth and I ran around in the big pools of water in the lawn while Father comforted Naomi for her destroyed garden. The trees restored themselves but it was too late in June for the crops to recover. My parents had been amazed to discover that the storm had struck only a small portion of the county before sailing off to the northwest.

  Northridge had returned home after paying a fine and damages which were ample when the authorities discovered the amount of money in his carpetbag. He had learned the desperate and not very attractive measure, passed on to his son, that when things become impossible you must try to buy the obstruction. It never seemed to work more than temporarily. When he went home he literally became an Indian, or a version thereof, started a headquarters in the Badlands, away from ranchers, as a small fiefdom supporting as many as fifty charges, including a miniature army of a dozen headed by He Dog and Sam Creekmouth. Other than several irritating visits by his officer nemesis and former friend from Cornell, the government ignored him, using the effective policy of benign neglect to combat a man who was anyway widely considered in the West to be a total lunatic.

  Grandfather was born late that year in a tipi on December 11, 1886, on the verge of the worst weather in the history of the Republic, a fact he always relished as a closet romantic. The drought followed by this severe winter drove literally hundreds of thousands of farmers back east, abandoning much of western Kansas and Nebraska, though only for a short time, and freezing a million or so cattle on the hoof. The Dawes Act became effective in 1887 but due to the impoverished nature of the area it was a few years before the land grabbers took full advantage of Indian innocence in matters of property. Even William Tecumseh Sherman defined a reservation as “a worthless parcel of land surrounded by white thieves.”

  Michael’s litany contained nothing new except the names of Kicking Bear’s children, which enabled me to figure out that Rachel had been Kicking Bear’s granddaughter. Kicking Bear had ridden alone out to Nevada where he met Wovovka, and consequently began the Ghost Dance movement among the Sioux, joined by Iron Hail and Ben American Horse and others. The great chief Sitting Bull was noncommittal on the Ghost Dance but was murdered as a direct result of the controversy. During this period the government sought greater control over the Sioux by banning the Sun Dance (the ban wasn’t lifted until 1934) and forbidding the killing of wild game on reservations, a rule so eccentric it could only have emerged from Washington. But this is all a matter of public record, of well-documented history.

  Northridge himself drowned as an Indian in his Badlands camp. He lost the checks and balances of his religion and education, though he continued his journal in the few but intermittent periods of lucidity. Were it not for his wife and the occasionally noted responsibility of his son he would have surely died from his foolhardiness. He had sold one of his tree nurseries located in Omaha to support his charges, buying cattle, grain, and whiskey.

  June 1889

  I have been drinking far too much in this heat and have been led to fear for my mind. I have learned that so many years ago when Crazy Horse was murdered my classmate the Lieutenant ordered that his legs be broken in many places so he could be jammed into a small wooden coffin. Perhaps God was telling me that day to shoot this man and I did not listen to His voice, thus insuring greater indignities.

  My little son takes great joy in riding on the saddle with me & weeps with rage when he is not allowed it. When the cattle are killed he tugs at the guts with the rest of the children & I was a little troubled. To some extent or range I have become what the Sioux are in terms of custom and language. But I am also Quite different and I am not allowed by my soul to forget this. My love for these people whom my gov’t and religion have abandoned is great, but I have begun to fear that becoming a Sioux is an illusion I may not indulge. . . .

  This was the first time in several years he had expressed such doubts, which actually were perceptions of the limits of how much he could do to help. In effect, he had become a privately endowed Indian agent and the logistics were becoming impossible. When you are traveling west on Interstate go in South Dakota and look off to the left at the country between Kadoka and Box Elder the term “badlands” becomes euphemistic. Yet this group which grew smaller in the blistering heat of summer stayed there as the location exhausted their options. The oldest of them also knew that it was the secret burial spot of Crazy Horse, a place so alien that his bones were safe there, though there is some speculation that the bones were eventually moved.

  There is another consideration that took years to occur to me though Michael noticed it immediately: the journals tended to form Northridge’s conscience which became a good deal more idiosyncratic as the years passed. By 18go he had spent a full twenty-five years “in the field” as missionaries call it, and his sense of accomplishment had become as brutalized as the landscape itself. His secretive business dealings had always provided a semi-schizoid overtone, a restrained bet-hedging, the orphan always mindful of his future nest. As an obvious instance, the business documents show that he met with his nursery agents who had been summoned to Rapid City in August of 1889. One of these, a Swede from Illinois, stayed on for three days with Northridge and received the design and instructions for the building of the current homestead. For reasons of his inherent secrecy the entire carpentry crew was secured in Galesburg, Illinois, and they worked with little or no contract with the local Nebraska population.

  Still, the farm was there for more than a year before Northridge moved in with his wife and son and spent virtually the rest of his life, a little over twenty years, planting trees. Eighteen eighty-nine was the year the Great Sioux Reservation was further broken up through the efforts of General Crook and the most powerful of the area’s land grabbers, with the loss of eleven million acres. Northridge saw that the twilight was quickly fading into dark. By the onset of winter in November he was back in Buffalo Gap alone with Small Bird and his son. He leased his pasture to a local rancher for two steers for the winter’s meat. He kept separate from the far-flung ranching community by saying that he was doing a fresh translation of the New Testament into the Sioux language. ae was regarded as peculiar rather than dangerous except by the lieutenant, now a lieutenant colonel under General Miles, who was aware-through his network of surveillance by the “metal breasts,” Sioux police in the employ of the government—of the power Northridge held among the Sioux. Despite his sense of his own abysmal failure, the Sioux thought of Northridge as a holy man in his many roles as one who fed them, who taught them to grow things no matter that they despised it, and who had become a capable if amateur doctor over the years.

  The beginning of the end was a visit from Kicking Bear in mid-January of 1890.

  Jan. 13, 1890

  Kicking Bear made a not altogether pleasant visit this morning before daylight. I have met this great warrior several times over the years & have always found him friendly though somewhat frightening. In his presence Small Bird is nearly rigid with fear though she warmed for him last evening’s stew & went out in the snow to feed his horse. He is said to have inherited the powers of Crazy Horse and wears around his neck a stone worn by that greatest of men. He is lonesome for his own children and holds my son on his knee & stares long and hard at Aase’s doll as if it were a religious artifact similar to the Kachina dolls brought up by traders from the Southwest. He tells me of a vision that came to him on Jan. 1st when the sun was eclipsed. I draw him an involved picture of why the sun was eclipsed & he is not interested in this morsel of science. He is on his way to Nevada to see the renowned shaman, Wowavka, who has devised the Ghost Dance much tal
ked about for years. Grinnell in a letter has given me a description of this & I attempt to dissuade Kicking Bear from his travels as the Dance appears a mishmash of heretical Christianity and Paiute beliefs. He is sure of himself & sleeps the day, leaving at dark as he has been forbidden to leave the reservation though the metal breasts are awed by him, and avoid contact.

  Michael and Frieda wakened me by midmorning, neither of them wanting to do it by themselves. I had slept in my clothes in a sprawl of his manuscript, part of which had fallen on the floor and been stained by pup pee. This amused him as did the sight of the brandy bottle on the night table. I accepted the coffee tray from Frieda and shooed them away. She looked a bit bleary herself from her evening with Gus. I burned my mouth on a quick cup of coffee, stuffed the manuscript in my purse, and made my way out of the house without the civility of a goodbye.

  Back at the homestead Lundquist was sitting on a milk stool in the open door of the barn saddle-soaping the draft-horse harness for the second time in a month. The geese were watching attentively and the fact that the harness had not been used in forty years, and very probably wouldn’t be used again did not decrease the thoroughness of the job he was doing. He had prepared a little joke about Frieda’s having spent the night with Gus in a motel and perhaps there should be a shotgun marriage. I agreed, noting that the distant motel I had stayed in with Michael was a synonym for sinfulness with the elders in the community. They all seemed to know about the “naked” movies and two friends of Naomi had gone so far as to actually see one at the motel. Before I could get away Lundquist wondered if his sore tooth might justify a cold beer.