The Woman Lit by Fireflies

by Jim Harrison

  “I don’t care. I’ve passed through a few times since and I don’t care if I’m disappointed.”

  Clare signed off on the phantom conversation with a wave at the oncoming thunderheads that had begun to rumble. She rechecked the edge of the thicket, noting that there were narrow breaks and holes that raccoon and perhaps deer made. She crawled in a small opening in the greenery and looked upward, seeing enough of the sky to know it would still be wet in a hard rain. She remembered with a smile something she had overheard her gay decorator say on the phone, to the effect that his friend should fasten his seat belt because it was going to be a bumpy night. President Reagan had also liked to quote from the movies. Then she recalled as a child at Thanksgiving time on her grandparents’ farm how she liked to make small caves in dried corn that had been stacked in shocks. She felt this memory comprised her first bright idea of the day other than leaving Donald, and she busied herself uprooting the green stalks which came up easily, and which she layered on top of the thicket. It was easy so she erred on the side of excess until, when she crawled into the thicket hole, there was a large area that blocked out the sky. If she hadn’t been so thirsty she would have been happy in the choice. She emptied out the bag containing her small purse, compass, address book, the beret, the empty juice can (she didn’t want to litter) and the passport. It had been Zilpha’s notion that the act of taking your passport with you everywhere added drama to life. She arranged these objects like talismans, then scooted back out and spread the bag’s mouth open.

  The thunder deepened in its volume and she looked up to see lightning shattering the sky like luminous tree roots. The thunderclap that followed had a sharp edge as if the sky were being torn, and the wind came up suddenly so that the leaves down the row were pale and flapping. Clare backed into her makeshift cave with a feeling that things were well in hand, at least for the moment, but the torrent that followed, brief as it was, cast her behavior in a fresh light. When she gave birth to Laurel that early May so long ago she could hear a cloudburst beyond the walls and windows of the delivery room, and there was a tinge of déjà vu in the present rain. I had two children and lived with a man nearly thirty years. I don’t seem to have a real idea what occurred to me. Maybe nobody does, or just a few.

  The driving rain splattered mud upward and formed puddles in the opening, but she was dry and warm and drowsy, the remnants of pain merely diffuse and endurable. She froze then, startled at the slightest movement to her left, but then saw it was only a cottontail, the same kind of rabbit that made her put chicken wire around her herb garden back home. The rabbit studied Clare from half a dozen feet away, then continued feeding on wild clover shoots, but with its ears alertly erect and its nose trying to determine if Clare presented a danger. Within its ears on the pinkish lobes wood ticks dotted the flesh, gorging on blood. Clare counted seven. She and the rabbit stared at each other so long that Clare didn’t notice that the rain had stopped and the water caught by her bag was both being absorbed and draining slowly out. The rabbit’s ears stiffened for an instant at the sound of a cock pheasant crowing from the direction of the creek, followed by the sharp clear notes of red-winged blackbirds. There was a new dimension of stillness in all of this and Clare felt somehow heartened that the rabbit didn’t feel in danger, much less know what a human was. She stayed absolutely quiet, breathing soundlessly and not even blinking her eyes for fear the rabbit would leave her alone. Laurel should see her now, she thought, well within her body, moving gracefully in the heart of time, but then the rabbit hopped off for reasons of its own. The message was dim but Laurel seemed to be asking a question.

  “Mother, what about the water?”

  Clare scrambled out, her hands skidding in the fresh mud. “Oh fuck!” she yelled, for the first time in her life. The bag was soaked but nearly empty with scarcely a gulp left down in a corner. She pressed her face into it for fear of losing any of the precious water, which tasted a little of the sunscreen lotion that had leaked there years ago.

  How dumb. There was the sense that she was stuck in a children’s story of enormous dimensions, one of those old Europeans out of The Book House: Ramona fled, watching the barbarians destroy the village, hiding herself behind a tree on the edge of the dark forest. Clare supposed that even if she did make her way back to the rest stop and drop a quarter in the pay phone the world could never repair itself. With a smile she imagined Donald’s umbrage when the police asked him if he had abused his wife. And did he know who might own the red car traveling east? It was she who had set fire to the village before running into the dark forest, and now the consequences enlarged themselves as the sun reappeared casting a golden late afternoon light off the tassels. She was a free woman but would gladly have traded anything for a quart of cold water. Donald was also free to go home and soothe his wounds with his Bing Crosby collection that he liked to tell visitors “was known far and wide,” at least among other collectors. Clare was not a bully, though, and raised in her mind some of Donald’s good points: he was, surprisingly, a relentless lover; he had taken Laurel and Donald Jr. everywhere, from Disneyland to Busch Gardens, the Smithsonian and the Museum of Natural History in New York (while Clare was at the Whitney), to Detroit Pistons games, to the Lions, to the Red Wings, to their corporate box for the Detroit Tigers, while Clare stayed home and read or went on outings with Zilpha. Donald loved the life outside the mind and slept like a rock, though he had recently surprised her with a first edition of Tar to round out her Sherwood Anderson collection. And last Christmas he had managed to find Faulkner’s book of poems A Green Bough, which, she overheard him telling a friend, cost him “an arm and a leg.”

  Clare cleaned the drying mud off her hands with a sharp stone and tried not to think of water. Perhaps the beginning of the end had been five years ago just after Donald Jr. had graduated from the University of Michigan. Clare and Zilpha, on whim, had been late additions to a list of matrons who wished to go on a Detroit Institute of Arts tour of the museums of Moscow and Leningrad. Zilpha’s visa had come in ten days but Clare’s had never arrived despite repeated phone calls from her travel agent to Washington, and they had missed the trip. Zilpha’s husband, whom Donald loathed, was a big-time liberal dope lawyer, and through the intercession of a black congressman he discovered that Donald had jinxed the visa with a phone call to a friend in the State Department, the sort of favor that is due a major Republican fund raiser like Donald. When Clare confronted him he had affected a minor breakdown, saying he couldn’t have borne up under the strain of his beloved wife’s visiting the “evil empire.” Untypically, Clare thought of shooting him while he slept, but instead she and Zilpha went off to Costa Rica to visit one of the children whose survival the brochure and a letter said she sponsored. This trip had also made Donald frantic despite the assurances of his State Department friend that Costa Rica was “as safe as Switzerland.”

  Clare was beginning to feel the mild dizziness brought on by hypothermia, a lightness in the head from her extreme thirst; vomiting plus the long hot walk had pushed her to the edge of tolerance, and though the late afternoon sun was cooling she found it unendurable. Back in her green cave she felt she was due another reassuring message from Laurel when her eyes lit on the cranberry juice can. The camping book said to boil suspicious water for fifteen minutes. Of course. She grabbed the can and scrambled on her hands and knees through the dense thicket toward what she thought of as the distant sound of water, much increased after the cloudburst. Unfortunately the Guernsey was less than twenty feet distant and Clare nearly catapulted down the slick, muddy bank into the sluggish, dark brown water, an inadvertent baptism by immersion, but she came up waist deep and laughing. The world that had been so narrowed by her physical and mental anguish became quite suddenly larger as she filled the cranberry juice can, resisting the strong temptation to drink the water straight.

  Half an hour later Clare had the water bubbling away, the can stuck in a small mound of dirt and the fire crackling around it
, with the dry grass and reed stalks kindling the dampish sticks found beneath the cottonwood tree. To extend her patience to the advised fifteen minutes she looked at her only book, the Tao Te Ching, for a few minutes but she was far too excited about the boiling muddy water to concentrate. The counselor at the pain clinic had told her that if she adapted all the principles of the volume to her life she could very well be cured of her migraines. Dr. Roth had not been sanguine on this prospect, saying that if she were Pope John XXIII or Martin Buber or Saint Theresa she would also be free of the disease. Clare carried the book along, though she had a childish aversion to Orientals, because the translator was the same as that of her favorite volume of Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus. The aversion had been occasioned by her father’s service as a major during World War II, though he never got beyond Washington, D.C. One day Clare stayed home from kindergarten in order to ride along with her mother when she took her dad to the train station. He had been home on leave for only a few days when he was called back to Washington, and both of her parents had wept at the station. After the train pulled away her mother had told her that “he’s off to fight Tojo.” Clare knew that Tojo chopped the heads off American soldiers and she was terribly frightened at the idea of a headless father.

  At the clinic in Arizona she had become friendly with a wheat farmer from Fort Dodge, Kansas, who was suffering a spinal defect, the accompanying spasms of which could strike him to the ground at any time. When they had all been given the Tao one evening at dinner he had been irritable, but in the morning he assured Clare that the “secrets” of the book might save them. She was startled at this statement because Frank, the farmer, was critical of their counselor whom he referred to as a “goofy bastard,” partly because the counselor wore an earring. Frank had also been outspoken against an Italian from Albany with a bone disease who had told Clare at the dinner table that she had “nice stems.” Frank had fairly shouted at the Italian to mind his language. A plump woman from Pasadena had piped up that there was nothing dirty about good legs, and the table had agreed, with Frank leaving in a huff before dessert. After that, despite the heat, Clare had worn slacks rather than hiking shorts.

  She carefully eased the can out of the mound of dirt with her handkerchief, managing to burn the tip of a finger which she ignored. Now she had to wait for the water to cool sufficiently and glanced to the west at the setting sun, guessing that she had another hour of daylight. She hoped to do at least three more of the six-ounce cans, plus an extra for the night, before dark, and the sure thought of removing this manic thirst made her feel giddy. It was so utterly ordinary, this thirst, that it returned her solidly to earth, the only concern being for immediate comfort.

  “Laurel, I’m doing rather well considering. I was just wondering if there were rattlesnakes around here.”

  “That’s unlikely. They prefer rocky hillsides where they can find rodents. I heard there are a few moccasins in the southern part of the state but they’d be a rarity and you’re well up in the middle. The main problem might be mosquitoes.”

  “I’ve already noticed that. At what point does the daughter become the mother?”

  “You’re not ready for that. I bet you still get a few passes.”

  “Perhaps. I certainly don’t want to talk about it to my daughter.”

  “Back in high school my friends and I used to wonder if you and Zilpha had some boyfriends stashed on your outings. We thought you two were so thrilling.”

  “Everyone suspected that we might have gentleman friends, and it was fun to let them think so. It used to drive your father a bit crazy, and I’d say, ‘But dear, you go on business trips at least once a month and I don’t wonder about you.’”

  “You never suspected him?”

  “I didn’t really care.”

  “Then why did you hold on so long?”

  “I had my friends, my books, dogs, garden, my children. Why does a husband have to be the absolute center of a married woman’s life?”

  “I don’t know but they always are. Actually, I know you’re the center of his life, with making money a close second.”

  “Are you suddenly getting warm about your father?”

  “No, it was only an observation.”

  “I’m the center like a prized possession. Remember when I wouldn’t go to any more fund raisers after I was introduced as a ‘prominent Republican wife,’ with no name attached. It seemed to stand for something quite out of focus.”

  “That was funny, also sad. I’m sure you were sorely missed. Dad always liked to pretend we had more money than we did. I mean, we had plenty so why pretend? Kevin pointed out my trust would have grown as much in a savings account as it did under Dad’s care.”

  “Was Kevin upset?”

  “Not at all. It’s just Dad always treats him as if as a veterinarian he has his head in the clouds, when if you pull a difficult calf or help a mare drop a foal it’s pretty realistic.”

  “Businessmen would be utterly destroyed if they didn’t think they were the most practical men on earth. Lawyers tend to be that way too. Zilpha’s husband used to say that a lawyer was society’s proctologist. Sadly, that was the only charming thing he ever said.”

  “You miss her terribly, don’t you? And Sammy too?”

  “More than I dreamed possible. Strangely, I couldn’t have done this if they had still been with me. It was a pleasure to give so much to them because I loved them. Then they were gone and I had to do something. I just tasted my hot water. It’s somewhere between truck stop coffee and the average veal glacé in a Detroit restaurant, the kind where they slip in a bouillon cube. I’d better get busy now.”

  “Keep me posted. Remember, you don’t have to spend the night. There’s still time to make it back to the highway if you hurry.”

  “No thanks, dear.”

  Clare finished her first can of water with pleasure, spitting out a bit of grit that had accumulated at the bottom and setting out for the next. It was similar to weeding her large herb garden because she didn’t think about anything except what she was doing, though thoughts might float easily in and out. The difference was that she didn’t try to hold on to the thoughts so that the bad ones disappeared on their own accord.

  On the third trip, when her thirst was somewhat abated and the sun was beginning to set, she made her way down the river-bank searching for more wood. Just past the single cottonwood tree there was a large branch she tugged away from clinging vines as if she had found the mother lode. If she could keep a small fire going she wouldn’t miss a flashlight so much. If you’re going to leave your husband, take a flashlight. That was about as sensible as the rules could get for the time being. A movement in the vines startled her and an opossum scurried out, looked at Clare and flopped over in fake death. She had seen this twice before in her garden back home and it was difficult not to draw certain parallels, amusing ones, though if you played dead long enough the act of coming back to life was questionable. Of the seven women who had been in her tennis group (the A class) a decade ago, four had been divorced in the past few years and none of them were doing very well, but then it was so easy to be smug about her own passivity, the way she let the years float gently by, relying on Zilpha’s natural ebullience, two long walks a day with Sammy, hours of reading and cooking, the latter more for herself than for Donald who ate everything she cooked him with equal gusto.

  Back at the campsite she coaxed the dwindling fire back to life, broke up the branches and put the sticks in a neat pile, stooping there, impatient for the water to boil. There was a reassuring chatter of birds but she guessed there was at most only a half hour of daylight. She put down a layer of corn leaves, then pulled enough dry marsh grass to cover them, to protect her sleep from the ground’s dampness. She took off her skirt and blouse, hung them on a stick and held the clothes over the fire to draw out the slight amount of moisture left from her river plunge. It was a balmy night, but with nothing to wrap herself in but her own arms she was sure she would be c
old by morning.

  It was so strange to stand there nearly naked, feeling the smoke and heat purl up her body, with just enough darkness to make her legs and tummy golden. She felt good enough for the moment not to have to think of herself as an admirable person. If Zilpha had been there she would have been smoking the cigarettes that killed her. It had been her nature to defy everything, just as many intelligent men drink themselves to death. Right up until the last day Zilpha had said she had no regrets about dying, and on the last day she had only joked, “I’m not absolutely sure this is a good idea. Too bad I can’t call and let you know.” With her husband her eyes had brimmed with tears and she had merely shook her head. It was by common consent the lousiest marriage in the neighborhood and everyone wondered why they bothered to hang on.

  Clare stuck her clothes stake in the ground and decided once again to make sense out of the Tao, especially a single line Frank had thought was so wonderful. The line was disappointingly sparse: “Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible is a disciple of death.” Frank had said that he’d spent thirty years being angry at the United States Department of Agriculture over grain prices and all of that energy had been wasted, and the anger had vastly accelerated his back problems. Clare and Frank had been talking in the shade of an enormous boulder; hiding, in fact, from the counselor who was being especially captious and unnerving that day, or so they thought. The twelve of them were being led on a “meditation hike” and were supposed to be dispersed in a boulder-strewn valley to sit alone and concentrate on a double-faced question: “Do you want to live?” and, simply enough, “Who dies?” There was also an admonition to keep alert for rattlesnakes. To break up the obvious tedium and anguish of the questions, Frank and Clare, through hand signals, had met behind the boulder for a chat.

  “What the hell does that hippie mean? Suicide’s not Christian.”