by Jim Harrison
“I'm not sure I can trust you, let alone your grandmother.” Always the cad, there was an air of irrepressible flirtation in my voice.
“Trust is for the feebleminded. It belongs with envy, jealousy and laziness. I can see that you have no cohones.”
Naturally, I drank the brackish liquid in one prolonged gulp. Strang pulled himself onto his chair, patting his knee pads with satisfaction.
“These are wonderful pads, Eulia.” He shook his head at me as I coughed. “Boy, are you going to be fucked up. You'll eventually be fine, and you won't have a hangover, but you need genes from south of the border to handle that stuff. It's one-fifty-one rum with various herbs, including lots of resinous cannabis buds.”
“But I don't like dope,” I said plaintively.
I sat there pleasantly enough for an hour or so until I could recapture my basic motor abilities; it is an error to fight against narcosis and offer up any evil energy that might be lurking in your brainpan. You go with it, as the young say, because that exhausts the alternatives. It was a honeyed somnolence, somewhere between De Quincey and Thoreau: The diminutive chickadee, the bravest of birds, landed on my shoe for a moment, and we exchanged glances not the less meaningful for being silly. You don't get to be both the dancer and the dance very often. If the potion had been one octave more potent, I'd have panicked. I was so busy tracking my thoughts—more accurately, images—that I didn't turn around when they left for Strang's therapeutic crawl. I felt warm to the point of tears toward Strang and Eulia, battling as they were against this seemingly inevitable disintegration. There is nothing quite like a summer skirt with thighs under it, is there? I offered this voiceless question up to the river, as the actual skirt raised on the usual wings of imagination and she waded in the river shallows, every bit as graceful and halting as a blue heron. I could feel the coldness of the water on her brown legs. Maybe I could save her from a rabid bear and she would be grateful.
It was a lust for food that brought me out of this uncanny, waking nap. It is, after all, the sublimated reason why many of us leave the Midwest in the first place. Even Boswell, with his bold knife and fork, would enjoy Zabar's, Manganaro's, the fey Dean & Deluca's. For a young poet from the Midwest, the discovery of garlic can be as poignant as the discovery of Rimbaud and Federico Garcia Lorca. Art without sensuality dwindles into the Episcopalian. But food is still pretty much a novelty, unbusinesslike, a signal of decadence in America: Nader, Nixon, Reagan, throw in Congress, sup at the same dreary table. Finally ambulatory, I sped toward town and the inevitable whitefish special. I felt a strong enough commitment to Strang, not to speak of Eulia, to find a cabin with a kitchen.
* * *
TAPE 3 : New quarters on a lagoon which was formed, so I'm told, when the mouth of the river changed courses in an enormous gale. According to a paperback book concerning itself with local history, I have noted that in a century and a half of successive Novembers hundreds have died at sea. The question naturally arises, Why didn't these folks stay ashore in November? It is probably similar to deer, who can't seem to remember the previous November when thousands were shot. Historians are twirps when they fail to remind us that memory herself is in short supply on Earth. A self-styled anarchist waiter in one of my favorite New York restaurants maintains that politicians have rarely seen anyone die, hence death is only temporary as in the movies, hence war remains a matter of rhetoric. I am resisting an impulse to call this restaurant and have them ship some raw materials by overnight express. Mother slipped in one of those Third World-type cook-books that specializes in fiber, which summons up an image of counterculture people boiling or braising rugs. Strang, however, presents a mighty lesson in mortality, a lesson I have decided to take advantage of. Every one of us has seen the phenomenon where a grotesquely homely old sculptor, painter, writer, inventor, owns an entourage of lovely ladies. Is it a kind of ineffable vibrancy or what? It is extremely irritating to more orthodox men who want to be rewarded for their hard work, their commonplace drudgeries, however successful. And some like myself who are quite literally not totally committed to anything find the phenomenon intensely curious. The wives of these vital creatures are often secure but cynical, a queen bee syndrome. On the other side (I've always hated the word distaff), successful actresses enjoy the same kind of attention. Strang has a peculiar attentiveness to life, to be banal. He takes it seriously but somehow with a light touch. The light touch idea is what is keeping me far from the civilities I love , a good meal, and an embittered career woman with whom to exchange caresses. A little while ago I tried to study Strang's dam handbook, along with a glossy folder Marshall gave me extolling his firm's expertise in overseeing these giant projects. I read how a dam in Brazil has taken a decade and thirty thousand men to build. Marshall told me scornfully that most people have no idea where electricity comes from. It's almost equally true with food, I responded. But many educated people find it unpleasant that either comes from anyplace. It is a philosophical inconvenience that rivers be diverted and controlled or animals destroyed. If your mind changes itself fast enough, the result is vertigo. Certain words, such as satori or epiphany, or that old saw conversion, come to mind. The Danish malcontent and humpback Kierkegaard insisted that” “purity of heart is to will one thing.” On that note, I'll get ready for the dance at the bar, which has advertised a live band as opposed to a dead one. I've eaten a fibrous soup of lentils, cabbage, and garlic and am waiting for health to arrive despite some recent belches that would have inflated the Hindenburg. Who knows if the night might hold romance? I'd wager against it heavily, but my like has been full of self-fulfilling prophecies. I doubt I'll ever see a cow without building a sentence around the poor animal.
Tape 3 cont. 3:00 A.M. : A word to the wise. Went to the bar and was forced to dance because everybody dances. Soaked with sweat. Wrestled with a woman my own age in car. She took advantage of me. Just threw soup into lagoon. The bar owner danced on the bar with the waitresses, one of whom fell off without injury. Am eating raw hamburger with black pepper.
CHAPTER VI
* * *
Another dawn, another tack which caught us by surprise. Much later I realized it was the wild thunderstorm, abetted by Eulia's singing in the kitchen. She played a twelve-string guitar so softly that, with our backs turned to her as we faced the fire, one could have sworn the music came from back in the forest. When I had arrived and found Strang staring at his barometer with delight, I remembered thinking rather dully when I left my cabin that there appeared to be immense black mountains to the west out in Lake Superior. So before the fire, whose banal attributes have evoked so many questionable tales, I prodded Strang into beginning his own:
* * *
Late in July of my seventh year, I became quite suddenly old. A thunderstorm did the job, which I didn't see coming because of the ridge of hills on the north side of the lake where I was fishing for perch and bluegills. At the same moment my dad called to me from shore, the wind began to howl and lightning strike around the lake. But before the lightning struck the boat there was a moment or two of silence, I think, when birds and fish became hyperactive before the storm—fish jumping and rolling, swallows performing maneuvers that would shame the most daring pilot. I heard a roaring from behind the ridge and then saw the black clouds and the yellowish pall beneath them, and then Dad called, his voice barely beating an enormous thunderclap to the boat. I was only seventy feet or so from shore, fishing between a reed bed and a patch of lily pads, with their small, yellow buds and an occasional large, white lily, which can be smelled a long ways away. Anyway, Dad shouted, and then there was this immense white light and the oarlocks, my fishing reel, and the screws that held the old wood boat together, all begin to glow. I was pitched backward out of the boat and only remember crouching on the bottom of the lake near the roots of lily pads, with my hands grasping at the roots and muck. I ran out of breath and pushed toward the surface, which was a sheet of white light from the storm. It was raining so h
ard that the rain almost drowned me. I swam toward Dad's voice in the driving rain, my ears sounding like trumpets and my vision smoky and diffused, and that's how I got my seizures.
That must have been in 1941 in the summer before Pearl Harbor. “Remember Pearl Harbor as we go to meet the foe,” everyone used to sing. Thinking back on that unique event—I mean the accident, not the war; wars are about as unique as cowshit or marriage—I realize how lucky I was to be a swimmer, particularly a night swimmer, as I was more than half-blinded at the time. I think I mentioned this night swimming to you. Starting at about age four, when Karl taught me I would swim anywhere the water was warm enough to bear, anytime I could get away with it, day or night. At our camp, that's what they call a cabin up here in the Upper Peninsula, I would slip out of the loft past four sleeping sisters and two brothers, down the ladder past my snoring dad and mom, and swim around the lake in the pitch dark. Karl knew what I was doing and told me there were werewolves out on the lake at night with heads of a regular wolf but with bodies like a black alligator, but I kept it up. It was this stubbornness that saved me in my accident in Venezuela, though I now question whether my current life was worth the effort.
* * *
I must interrupt Strang's tale. The most extraordinary thing just happened. Outside the rain was coming down in dense sheets. Eulia announced to us that it fascinated her and she was going out in the rain. She quickly removed her clothes except for her panties and bra, which quite literally shortened my breath. But then seeing her out through the window, hugging her chest with her face tilted upward, the vision became nonsexual, numinous, with the effect of a fine pre-Raphaelite painting. Strang stared out the window as if only Eulia still kept him anchored to the earth. The few minutes had achieved an almost embarrassing intensity when she rushed back into the cabin and wrapped herself in a blanket.
“When I was a child,” she said, “we had this dog that would hang around our shack outside Puntarenas. We fed him scraps, but he would never let us touch him except during a thunderstorm. Then he would crawl under the porch and we'd go in after him, and we could pet him because he was so frightened of the thunder. The minute the storm stopped he'd run off, but as long as it thundered he would be all limp and friendly like a baby. I loved him so much I'd pray for rain.” She laughed at this thought and abruptly went up to the loft to dress.
* * *
Isn't it strange that the place it rains the most on earth is an area of the Atlantic far off Trinidad and Venezuela? Torrential rains falling on the ocean, day after day. I like the whole idea for some reason. I've always been a student of water, especially rivers.
Dad, being a preacher of sorts, made hay out of my accident. He was really a crackerjack carpenter, profoundly religious, a layman preacher full of elaborate notions, often changing denominations with the shifts of his mind. He was a footloose man and didn't dwell on ancestors and relatives. I was the only one of the kids born up in Michigan; all the others were born in Chicago. I was what they supposedly call a love child, born when my mother was forty-seven, though that issue is somewhat confused now. Perhaps anyone's true biography is where they have arrived. Theodore was the oldest—named after one of Dad's countless heroes, Theodore Roosevelt. Then the girls: Laurel, Ivy, Lily and Violet—my mother was taken by flowers and plants. Next was Karl, and five years later me. I heard we were vaguely related to King Strang, the Mormon apostate scoundrel who, back in the nineteenth century, took over Beaver Island as a new country for his followers.
The petit mal epilepsy was caused, of course, by the trauma of the accident. It is an easily controlled infirmity now, but then during the war it was another matter, especially here in the outback. Dad didn't give credence to any doctor but the healing power of Jesus. Mother snuck me off to some drunken osteopath in the county seat who pronounced me hopeless. He shined lights in my eyes, which set off a seizure. “Three bucks, and get this kid out of here.” This osteopath was later run out of town for killing a child with nosedrops, of all things. He killed the wrong child, the child of the school principal. Who can count the damage this fool did before then? When this sort of injustice ceases to make the heart ache and no action is taken, we become the country we are becoming.
So Dad kept me in his power until he died when I was fourteen. I don't want to make this a pilgrimage backwards, because that's what humans do, they make pilgrimages back to a way they never were. Karl was always calling Dad “Dire Portents,” or “D.P.” because Dad drove us batty with that phrase. Hitler without doubt was the Antichrist, thus Jesus would be returning soon to preside over the only Apocalypse we'll ever have. My youth was in the arena between Dad and Karl. Karl was under no one's control by the time he hit thirteen in 1942. He was a big kid and awesomely strong for his age. He knocked out a teacher in the eighth grade and that was the end of his school days. The problem was, Karl had a trapline, and he'd get up at 4 A.M. and sometimes would fall asleep in school from fatigue. The teacher was one of those bully coaches, and he jerked Karl awake by his hair, which got him knocked cold. Dad would pray for Karl during grace at mealtimes because Karl refused to be baptized. Dad would keep repeating the story of the ninety and nine, how the shepherd would search all night in the storm for the single lost sheep, all of this with the potatoes cooling and the fat on the sidepork congealing.
“Number one, I'm not a sheep. And number two, I've never been lost. I'm about as good in the woods as anyone,” Karl would say.
Now my father wasn't one of these Bible Belt maniacs who doubles as a child-beater. He never raised a hand against any of us. We were sort of a sloppy, good-humored bunch, in fact. Karl couldn't make him angry, and Ted, when he was home, kept Karl from ever being truly insulting to Dad. Ted had the practical authority of being the oldest son and was already building houses by the time he got out of high school. Ted would pay Karl a dollar a day in the summers to dig well pits and foundations.
The real hold my father kept on me, as unlike other fathers as he was, was that I desperately wanted to go back to school with the kids I knew in first grade, but my disease kept me from doing so. Dad said he had a dream that Jesus would heal me if I did His will. If I did His will, then I could go back to school. Dad's interpretation of the “will” was to travel around the Upper Peninsula in an old Plymouth, testifying at churches about my miraculous accident. I did so right up until his death when I was fourteen, though it slacked off a bit toward the end as we had overcovered the territory and the invitations decreased and I had become a preacher.
I sometimes wonder if there wasn't some hidden pragmatism in my father's religion. After all, he moved up into this desolate area with a carload of children in the Great Depression. Thinking of it now, the situation reminds me a little of what I saw when I was working in India. American people support their holy men the same way they do in India. Brother Strang and his fine Christian family were always getting a donation of a quarter of beef, half a pig, a few crates of potatoes, even a deer.
I admit this religion thing was frightening at times to a boy, though I enjoyed the travel and socializing since I didn't get to go to school. What was scarey is how carried away Dad would become. In fact, it would scare anyone that came in contact with it, though under the guise of religious ecstasy it was acceptable behavior. It's acceptable now with blacks by our educated whites, but the fact that poor whites behave this way is found somewhat embarrassing. That's because these poor folk are misrepresented by the gouging, venal television preachers. So we might be driving from Moran way over to Iron Mountain or Laurium. We'd stop to eat a sandwich or take a pee, and he'd grab me and swirl around an arm in the sky as if he were orchestrating nature.
“Look, son! Precious Jesus, look around you. Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed the way Cod arrayed these natural wonders. Look at the forest and birds and this creek. Let's pray, son.” We'd kneel then in the grass off the roadside and pray, oblivious to any passing traffic. “O God of heaven and earth and the whole wide uni
verse, look on my little son and these fits he has with kindness. He lived through your great miracle and nearly saw Thy face but didn't quite, or else he'd be dead. Your power got into him, and he testifies to your grace and majesty. Heal him so he won't die in some woeful frenzy. Help also his brother Karl who has not taken Jesus as his own personal savior and mocks Thee, O Father. Spare Karl from harm and make him come to you. Amen.”
Karl, frankly, was no help. By the time I was eleven and maturing rather early, Karl would try to get me to squeeze these church ladies in the ass when they would smother me with kisses. It was beginning to be quite a trial when I'd help baptize people in a lake and you could see right through the nightgown the girls wore. Karl had bought some dirty pictures up at the Soo, that's what we call Sault Ste. Marie, and he made sure I saw them. The one that struck me the hardest was a photo of Hedy Lamarr, where she was swimming in a pond in the jungle and her bare bottom was raised out of the water. Dad burned Karl's photos in the kitchen stove, and he never was able to find that good one with Hedy Lamarr again.
Here is a story that might show you what Karl was like and the effect it had on me. In summers I'd earn extra money picking berries: huckleberries or blueberries, as they're sometimes called, blackberries, raspberries, wild strawberries. Before I could pick any to sell, I had to get Mother what she needed for the family for jams and preserves. I tended to shun the side of the village where the school was located and where the kids played ball in the summer. There is a specific cruelty to children that is really a veiled curiosity, and I was the brunt of it, except at church where everyone is compelled to behave. Some older girls even cornered me outside the post office and asked me to have a fit for them.