by Jim Harrison
This struck home. I have found it helpful at any given moment to know who I am, not to speak of where I am geographically, historically, botanically, geologically. I was amused in a beginning anthropology course at Northwestern to hear a junior professor say that the Navajo bow to the four directions on waking to remind themselves where they are within the nature of life. I spoke briefly to him after class and he advised me to read Clyde Kluckhohn’s Navaho Witchcraft, surely the eeriest scholarly text in Christendom. Of course you can shellac Catholicism onto these people but it’s a mere patina.
Well, we moved from place to place every year or two in tow to my nitwit father, dragging a U-Haul trailer behind an old Dodge. My two favorites were Bozeman, Montana, and Alpine, Texas, between my years of eight and twelve. I exercised a weak religion in both places in hopes that we could stay in each but it was a vain hope indeed. This was in the sixties but both places were conservative bulwarks against the social upheavals of the time. When we made the long slow drive from Tallahassee in Florida to Montana we were amazed to see actual cowboys doing cowboy things in Wyoming and Montana. I had never been interested in the usual cowboy-Indian myth but this quickly changed. In the parking lot of a shabby country cafe near Hardin, Montana, with an eight-year-old’s occasional boldness I introduced myself to two preposterously tall Crow Indians who were drinking morning wine leaning against their decrepit Studebaker. They told me that their grandfather killed Custer which proved to be untrue because it was the Lakota. My mother interrupted the usual quarrel with my father, apologizing to the Indians for my “cheekiness.” The drunker of the Crows said to my mother, “You’re quite a piece of ass,” and she said, “Thank you,” and curtsied. I noticed at lunch that my mother was particularly cheery.
We lived in a modernized bunkhouse on a small ranch about a dozen miles from Bozeman where my father taught. The rent was free on the condition that my mother look after the old rancher who showed occasional signs of dementia. This was all arranged by the rancher’s obnoxious son who ran an auto dealership in town. The old man was a dream grandfather for me teaching me how to trout fish on a spring creek that ran through the property, ride a horse of which he had several, and drive the ancient Ford tractor. Here I was an eight-year-old driving a tractor like other ranch kids. My father questioned the legality of this but the old rancher said, “I’m the law of the land,” which I learned was a typical Montana attitude, also true in our next stop two years later in Alpine, Texas. My father was forever complaining about the paucity of songbirds in Montana but my mother was generally delighted because the rancher’s deceased wife had left ample perennial beds and a good vegetable and herb garden spot. My parents were always squeamish about eating much meat but the rancher had to have it three times a day and I joined in. He was easier to cook for because Mother had only to fry his homegrown beef, spuds, and to a lesser extent pork which he only ate for breakfast. I can still see her sitting beside the luminous peony blooms reading Virgil’s Georgics, the text brought to vivid life by her surroundings. When we left Montana after two years I wept for days. When we said good-bye old Duane’s voice was quivery and he gave me his spurs saying, “I wish you were my son.” A couple years later when we left Alpine for Cincinnati which I immediately hated I called Duane and got no answer, and then his auto dealer son who said he was dead. I had intended to run away back to where I was happy.
After Bozeman our move to Alpine in west Texas was puzzling. There is a clarity to childhood because the attention you pay to what you are doing is total. Whether you’re currycombing a horse or trying to catch a brown trout in a spring creek or teasing a rattlesnake to its exhaustion that’s all you’re doing. You’re also a good listener because you’re unsure of what to say except to disagree on principle with your parents. When I sat on the porch one day with old Duane having a summer lemonade he told me that in his own childhood back at the turn of the century there were still a few wolves in the surrounding mountain ranges, the Bridgers and Gallatins, and the huge Spanish Peaks to the south. His talk was intensely vivid as wolves along with grizzly bears were mythologized creatures to me. It was hard to connect anything in my schoolbooks to the world I daily witnessed on that ranch.
It was even harder when we drove south from Montana to the soaring heat of west Texas that August, a region that seems a country of its own. I didn’t mind the extreme heat because it reduced my parents’ nattering quarrels. My mother would lean forward in the front seat vainly trying to find classical music on the radio as we chugged slowly up the mountains of western Colorado with the Dodge laboring in exhaustion pulling the U-Haul full of Father’s books and our odds and ends of battered furniture.
Looking back at my early life from age six I’m amazed at what trifling things determine our future. Being ignored by the rich girl in Cincinnati made me vow never to be as poor as my parents even though in my twenties I realized she was from a distinctly middle-class family albeit still far from our threadbare existence. And on the second day after our arrival in Alpine I was roundly pummeled by two neighbor brothers which caused me to begin a lifelong somewhat obsessive program of physical fitness that has lasted to this day. The brothers were aged ten and twelve and named Dicky and Lawrence Gagnon. I was saved by their sister Emelia who was eleven, not out of kindness but her view that she was destined to direct all activities. She whacked them with an old Mexican riding crop that concealed an actual dagger that no one knew existed except us kids. Emelia had had an early growth spurt and was taller than her brothers. Perhaps from reading a comic book she fashioned herself an Amazon princess and we had to call her “Princess.” She was rather pretty and I felt a yearning toward her that I didn’t recognize but began to understand in the two years of our companionship. Their family had only been there a year from Lafayette, Louisiana, and the father worked on pipelines. Their mother, Mina, was corpulent and mostly sat on the shaded porch, drank beer, read mysteries, and thought about what she would eat next. They were an odd pair but she and my mother became friends probably because Mina was knowledgeable about wildflowers. Our shabby little stucco house was on the outskirts of the poor side of town. I was lucky to be taken under the wing of Emelia, Dicky, and Lawrence because they were the toughest kids at the grade school. Their rarely seen father must have made good money because they all had newish bikes while mine was a pinkish girl’s bike my father had picked up at a yard sale. My tears over this indignity were brief because I had already come to understand that in practical matters he was a nitwit. To comfort me he said, “At least no one will steal it.”
We rode far and wide into the mountainous countryside that first fall, hiding our bikes and hiking up canyons, killing rattlesnakes with Lawrence’s single-shot Remington .22. Lawrence bought shells containing BBs and potted quail which Emelia expertly cooked on a flat rock surrounded by coals. Little Dicky carried salt in a belt pouch. He was quite outspoken and announced one day in a semimutiny that there were no princesses in Texas and that he was plumb tired of calling Emelia “Princess.” She slapped him several times though the next day she announced that her new name was Zora of the Amazons but that we only had to use the first part. Lawrence told me that she had power over him because she had caught him playing with himself and threatened to tell her parents unless he was obedient.
And so it went for nearly two years. Our clubhouse was in a shed behind our place where I did my exercises. We had a small woodstove for the cold winter days when we had to sit attentively while Zora sang country songs not very well. Her favorite was Patsy Cline’s “The Last Word in Lonesome Is Me.” We had a plan that once we could afford horses we would rob a bank and escape south into Mexico and lead a free life.
Curiously, my father was known as “Professor” in the neighborhood though he was only an instructor at Sul Ross State University. We were respected for this and what with my mother so fluent in Greek and Latin she picked up Spanish quickly which delighted all of our Mexican neighbors. I think that my mother thrived be
cause Alpine had a feeling of a foreign country to her.
Our second year together was more awkward because of Emelia’s early puberty. At twelve and a half she had become a very attractive young woman with her light olive skin and coal-black hair. Her physical changes seemed to make her unhappy and she dressed as sloppily as possible to hide them, becoming an even more pronounced tomboy if that was possible. One day I caught my father standing at our kitchen window watching Emelia bounce up and down on the small trampoline in their backyard. He blushed in a way I didn’t quite understand though I attributed it to his recent horrible mistake of having flown to Fayetteville, North Carolina, for an ornithological conference that was being held in Fayetteville, Arkansas. He was properly mortified and I felt very sorry for him though he rejected sympathy of any kind. Both he and my mother were distressed at the time because I was imitating the Cajun accents of Dicky, Lawrence, and Emelia. When their father had come home for Christmas that year I could barely understand his speech. The mother, Mina, who was from Mississippi, translated for me.
My own body changes began to fill me with anxiety as I was no more interested in joining the adult world than Emelia. I suspected that they were accelerated by the hour of violent calisthenics I did in the shed before school each morning. Emelia was the fastest girl in the seventh grade and I was the fastest boy. We’d ride our bikes down toward Cathedral Mountain, then take off into the backcountry running and leaving Lawrence and Dicky far behind. Texas has strict trespass laws but no one seemed to mind kids. A rancher even gave us a dollar once for locating a sick calf. One warm spring day Emelia and I took a dip in a stock tank to cool off. Far in the distance we could see Lawrence and Dicky plodding toward us. Emelia was wearing a blue T-shirt and soft cotton shorts and the water made her clothes transparent. “If you look at my titties I’ll slap your face,” she said. I swiveled around in the water because her slaps truly hurt. She came up behind me and tugged me saying, “You can look a little but don’t concentrate on my body. You’re my blood brother.” We had done the usual rite of making small cuts on our arms and exchanging smears of blood. She slid her hand down under my shorts and grabbed my erect penis. “Zora’s great powers have given you a boner,” she laughed. She massaged me with predictable results and when my sperm rose to the surface of the water she shrieked and laughed while I sweated with shame despite the coolness of the water. “That’s your future as a dickhead,” she said pointing at the floating effluent and continuing to laugh. “An eighth-grade girl told me how to do that. If a boy comes at you with a hard dick you do that and he becomes nice as pie.” I continued to burn with shame though it was leavened by her laughter as if she had told a joke and the joke was me. Since Emelia was a blood sister I had restricted my lust to a photo of Janet Leigh clipped from a Life magazine that I’d stare at in a mood of concern. When she expertly flipped herself out of the stock tank the very visible crack of her butt in the wet shorts gave me another hot twinge. At my age of twelve sexuality didn’t have a real aim or target but was a warm itchy feeling starting in the abdomen.
Emelia and I were to have two more collisions that melancholy May when our world began to disintegrate. Her family was moving to Albuquerque, New Mexico, in July to follow a pipeline’s construction and once more my father had failed to have his contract renewed though another low-grade teaching job was in the offing in Alpine after which we moved to Cincinnati. He said that there were more warblers in Ohio and when I in tears said, “Fuck warblers,” he tried to slap me but I ducked and ran out the back door.
Emelia and I found ourselves in the shed when her family went out to dinner and she had refused to go. She actually dominated her parents in the same way she did the rest of us. It was early evening and Emelia had brought over her mother’s Cosmopolitan which had an article on “effective kissing.” She was back in her soft blue cotton shorts and a white T-shirt that showed her braless titties. We sat on a dilapidated easy chair that smelled like motor oil. We kissed mightily and it shocked me when she stuck her tongue in my mouth. She tasted like peanut butter and grape jelly and let me rub her breasts but when my hands lowered she punched me in the Adam’s apple so that I choked. She apologized saying she had meant to hit my chin. She took out my peter from my trousers and jerked it then said, “Wipe it up dickhead” with a laugh, grabbed her magazine, and left.
Early June was murky with sorrow except for my mother who fairly glowed having won a grant to return to Radcliffe for six weeks. My father and I were to drive the Dodge down into Mexico to look for a very rare hummingbird that was said to be semicarnivorous. There were said to be thirty-eight species of hummingbirds in the area we were headed for, the idea of which did not enthuse me.
The gods are not kind to young people in love and I was hauntingly in love with Emelia that June. I had an explicit foreshadowing of the doom of our love. Our Mexico trip was only to comprise two weeks but I was sure she would be gone when I returned. My pillow would literally become wet with tears though she shed none in my presence.
After we took my mother to her dawn plane my dad went back to bed and I went out to the shed to exercise myself into a tranquil frazzle. I had barely begun when Emelia showed up on her bicycle saying that we were going to take a ride out toward our stock tank before it got too hot. She always ordered rather than suggested. Off we went on our bikes both silent at the oncoming unfairness of our lives. We tried to sprint toward the tank a mile distant but slowed our pace in the gathering morning heat. Far to the south there were ominous thunderclouds but I judged that they would move to the east of us. It was years later at the university that I recognized the true meaning of that literary term “foreshadowing.” There was a large rattler on the shaded west side of the tank that buzzed at us as we arrived. Instead of letting a man do the job Emelia in her Zora guise pitched a large rock onto its head and it shivered in its death throes. Rather than going into the tank in her shorts and T-shirt like the other time Emelia quickly shed to her skin. I felt squirmy in my innards at my first clear look at her sex. She folded her arms across her chest and challenged me with a stare. I slipped down my shorts and she said, “Your pecker looks dumb,” and then flipped into the tank. The water was cool that early in the morning and we shivered into an embrace. She ordered me to suckle her small breasts which were semiconical and told me to rub myself against her buttocks which were clenched. She said that if my “stuff” even got close to her pussy it could impregnate her through the water. Afterward she tried to drown me by holding my head underwater. I had become fairly strong and pitched her by running an arm through her crotch. My arm seemed hot where it rubbed against her chubby little pussy. She stared at me blankly and told me to touch her “one single minute.” I did so and she shivered. I was dumbfounded by touching her and looking off over her shoulder at a mountain and the thunderstorm that seemed to be approaching. My hand seemed to be thinking about what it was touching and coming to no conclusions.
A lightning bolt hit but a quarter of a mile away and there was a ripping crackle of thunder. We dressed and ran to the Emory oak about a mile away where we had left our bikes. We had only run a hundred yards or so when the downpour hit stinging our faces. It was a rough and rocky terrain so we ran with heads down and weathered eyes out for rattlers which were a fact of life in the area rather than something to be particularly frightened about. The rain was coolish and we rubbed each other briskly under the tree to warm ourselves. The oak gave us some protection from the driving rain. We began French-kissing and I told her I would love her forever and she said, “Why?” which has always puzzled me. I became hopelessly erect and we repeated our bare-butt grinding with Emelia pressed laughing against the tree. Afterward she went out into the rain past the tree’s shelter and let the downpour clean my sperm off her bare bottom, her high clear laughter mixing with the thunder. It was one of those few rare images the brain stores flawlessly.
Early the next morning, I recall it was dawn, we packed our crummy camping equipment an
d a carton of cans of my father’s favorite pork and beans and were off, passing the darkened Gagnon home at five-thirty A.M. with me swiveling in the seat for a last look. Her whole family had gone to a movie the night before and I had waited patiently on their porch for their return. I shook hands with Dicky and Lawrence and Emelia walked me out to their sidewalk gate. She said she was tired and had got her “monthlies” during the movie which was Butterfield 8. She said it was about rich people and that she was going to marry a rich man and live in a very high building in New York City. Our good-bye kiss tasted like Dentyne, a gum I didn’t like. It was to be almost twenty years before I saw her again.
We drove south toward Mexico, a scant ninety miles south on our fatal trip, fatal for me at least so that in later years I could see the slender, attenuated line of my destiny as Route 67 heading toward the border crossing of Presidio and Ojinaga. I was chief navigator, normally my mother’s job. Added to my father’s other difficulties he was a dyslexic so I couldn’t say “turn left” or “turn right” but had to point in the correct direction. On the other side of Marfa the Dodge had a flat tire which set my father to wailing. He was amazed when I expertly jacked up the car and put on the spare. Lawrence helped out at the corner gas station, changing and rotating tires, and had taught me the ropes. Lawrence got a dollar for changing a tire and when I helped I’d get a quarter. My father sat in the shade of the car reading Alexander Skutch’s Life Histories of Central American Birds. I knew the book because I had to read it aloud while he drove. When I finished the tire chores he asked me where I’d gotten my muscles. This surprised me as his tiny study had a window that looked into the backyard and he must have seen me go out to the shed hundreds of times to exercise but then he probably had never looked in through the shed door. He was without curiosity except for birds and their predators.