by Jim Harrison
“You are. I couldn’t.”
There was a tinge of redness in his face not caused by the sun and I wished I hadn’t said what I had said, dispelling the sense of the idyll, the sand dunes, and Lake Superior growing dullish with the mood change.
“My sister is no longer a virgin,” I said idly, trying generously to change the subject from Fred’s torments to my own.
“That’s no one’s business but hers. Cynthia is fourteen years old going on fifty. She’s the only honest human in the history of your family.” To Fred young Cynthia was a heroine of specific dimension. From an early age, say about seven, Cynthia had a pungency and lucidity of speech that nearly everyone except her friends found nerve-racking. She had been encouraged in her precocious reading by a gay (a word not yet used in the sixties) teacher out of the University of Michigan who my father had managed to get fired by framing him, an incident that began at the age of twelve her campaign, somewhat merciless, of revenge against Father.
“It’s natural for me to worry about my sister. Didn’t you worry about my mother when she was young?” I asked lamely.
“Not really. I had the reverse of you. She was two years older and a mean-minded girl which she covered with a patina of good manners. She got nicer after Richard died.”
I never knew my father’s younger brother, Richard, who would have been my uncle. My parents’ families were both members of the Club, north of town, an elaborate social retreat for the mogul families of the Midwest containing seventy thousand acres of lakes and rivers on Lake Superior. Many of the members were from Chicago and Cleveland with backgrounds of timber and mining and Great Lakes shipping. When I was about ten and heard the rumor that my mother was first in love with my father’s younger brother I discounted it. The child’s refusal to accept confusion in his parents’ lives is a good protective measure. At that age parents are still gods though growing smaller by the year. Richard had supposedly drowned but those who told me this never appeared to be totally convinced.
On our third evening at the campsite, actually the summer solstice, the warm air seemed to gather a yellow tinge to add to its unnatural stillness. Fred claimed he could feel the drop in barometer in his eyes and ears. The sun had sunk behind the dunes on the day of its farthest northern course but then it grew suddenly darker. Fred immediately started to pack up our messy campsite. We began to hear deep thunder and wind to the west and our vigilant dog trotted down to the dock to threaten the oncoming storm. We were packed and finally in the pickup when the first stiff blast hit and the truck shuddered. Not liking thunder the dog shrunk to the floor and curled around my feet.
We found a slightly shabby tourist cabin on a hill in the village of Grand Marais. There was a kitchenette and two bedrooms barely larger than closets with an obligatory set of deer horns. Fred looked around fondly saying that the cabin held “romantic memories.” My essential but I hoped waning priggishness doubted that as there was a scent of beer, mouse turds, and fish in the air, and the cabin walls shook in the storm as if there was a question that they would hold up. Fred stood puzzled in the kitchenette and I could tell he was trying to remember which of the bedrooms had created the memories. He shrugged when the dog No made the choice for him, sprawling across the pillows and growling for general reasons.
Fred poured himself a whiskey and asked if I wanted one. I shook my head and took a shower to get ready for the inevitable trip to the tavern. Fred claimed he liked taverns for the “plain speech” and their admirable lack of Episcopalian patrons. When I came out and Fred took a shower I tasted his whiskey and poured myself a small one. My mother thought of her brother as a “problem drinker” but close observation led me to believe that he drank less than she did. While we built the rowboat he drank two beers before dinner and that was that, and we were up at dawn to beat the heat, while my mother’s daily two martinis were in the direction of the outsized. Fred’s two beers made him relaxed and quite happy while my mother’s two martinis had no visible effect one way or the other except to pacify her errant mind. When Father was there he shook their martinis in a silver lidded container over his shoulder as if he were creating a masterpiece or a ritual without which polite society could not healthily proceed.
At the tavern the owner called Fred “Preacher” from past familiarity but when I was introduced the owner became a little stiff and formal. After all it was only eighty years before that my family had finished laying waste locally to a half million acres of white pine. In the mid-sixties the virtue of this was not in question, and the grandeur of the destruction had been mythologized in story and song. Fred ordered a whiskey and though only sixteen I was served a beer as if it were unthinkable for the owner not to do so. I looked old for my age, was just short of six foot, and had to shave every morning but the reason I was served was my name and as the evening progressed the word got around the fairly crowded tavern and many people, usually middle-aged or beyond, looked over at our table where Fred was buying drinks for two lumpy women in their thirties one of whom was eating a snack of french fries with a ladle of gravy on it, a localized Upper Peninsula custom. A retired logger and trapper who had to be in his eighties and quite drunk stopped by our table to say hello to Fred, but then he looked at me and joked, “I met your grandfather and great-grandfather, the biggest thieving assholes God ever allowed to live.” There was silence in the tables around us but I only said “that’s probably true” and the ambient chatter began again. I was embarrassed to be looked at as a young potentate and wanted to leave but Fred was making a speech to me about language, drawing my attention to the nature of what those around us were saying about weather, sport and commercial fishing, alcohol, mosquitoes and blackflies, love and adultery. By comparison, Fred maintained, nothing in my father’s language was causally related to anything he might actually feel or with any accuracy to the world around him. My mother was close behind him. Their language was wry, ironical, and loaded. Throughout this the two women sitting with us gazed around in puzzled boredom that they didn’t try to conceal, then the storm knocked the lights out and everyone cheered. The owner lit two lanterns and in the dim light Fred was kissing the woman closest to him. The other woman had disappeared and I got up to leave but when I reached the door the lights came back on and I nodded at two college-age girls at the door who were drinking pop and watching their seniors with amusement. “Why leave?” asked the prettiest who wore a tight, scanty T-shirt. Lacking an answer I shrugged and went out in the rain. I intended to sit in the truck but No went berserk when I touched the door having decided he didn’t recognize me. I walked the mile or so to the cabin in the rain and wind, listening to the roar of Lake Superior rather than thinking long thoughts.
In the middle of the night there was loud banging at the door which was stuck because of the moisture rather than locked. I was slow to respond and Fred shouted at my window. I jerked the door open and was startled to see him with the college girl in the scanty T-shirt. It was the prig in me that would think that Fred in his mid-forties couldn’t come home with a girl so lovely. I was standing there like a geek in my underpants and she winked and laughed.
Back in my room I suspected it might be a long night and actually prayed that they were drunk enough to fall asleep promptly. No such luck. The thin wall between our rooms seemed to amplify rather than muffle the sounds of their lovemaking. I had nothing to read but the small leather-bound New Testament (King James Version) I had carried in my pocket for a year and half since being “saved.” I flipped through Thessalonians and Colossians, but nothing St. Paul had to say could compete with next door’s sexual racket. This was definitely Boy Christian hearing a world he hadn’t made, had no part in, and wished for the time being to keep remote to avoid imagining dire consequences as extreme as his parents’ marriage. My fishing friend Glenn, a poor kid, had papered his tiny room entirely with Playmates of the Month from Playboy, and when we sat there at his desk tying our Muddler Minnows, Adams, and Fan-Winged Coachman fishing flies, I w
ould glance up at the wall amok with tits and butts, feel my loins squirm and face redden, then despondently go back to tying trout flies.
This experience, however, was unequaled and I put away my New Testament for fear that it too could hear the groans, slurps, whimpers, the soprano shriek of “fuck me harder,” the dog’s bark. I turned off the light and could make out Laurie’s bottom in the wall created by the wind-swung streetlight near the entrance to the cabin. My door opened and Fred shoved the dog in my room with a “sorry.” Finally after more than an hour by my watch I could hear their alcohol snores and both dog and I were able to sleep.
I slipped out very early for a walk with No. The wind had subsided clocking around to the east and though the air was coolish there were still rumpled whitecaps on Lake Superior. The sky looked washed, glistening blue, and the sunrise made my tired heart ache. No led the way downhill on a path through alders and dogwood to the beach, a path he evidently knew. Fred would come north in the summer for a month or so, stop briefly to see us, go up to the Club for a necessary visit to his old father and a maiden aunt who moved into their log lodge as early as the snow would allow them, usually in early May, then as soon as possible Fred would retreat for a few weeks each in Grand Marais, a shack near Whitefish Point, the Canadian Soo, and then he would drive north all the way around Lake Superior through Wawa and Thunder Bay, on to Duluth (a city he loved), to Houghton, back to Marquette to see me and Cynthia, take an overnight hike with Cynthia near the McCormick tract in the Huron Mountains, back to Marquette to avoid Father and have lunch with Mother, then back to Ohio by Labor Day.
To be frank I admired him beyond all other men, followed by Jesse and Clarence. Fred was the black sheep who was so black everyone had ceased talking about it. He was a fact of life I anticipated with as much joy as I could muster every summer. By the time I was ten I was welcomed to walk with Fred and Jesse from the monstrosity of our old house out to Presque Isle for a picnic. For the first few years the two of them would lapse into Spanish when they didn’t want me to hear what they were saying, but then by the time I was fourteen I was allowed to hear everything. For instance, last summer Jesse had paused, looked at me and then at Fred, and said that wealth was like the breast of a pretty woman but there was no woman attached. You had to make up the rest yourself. Fred thought that inheritance taxes should be ninety-five percent while I kept thinking of my recently acquired Baptist experience and the preacher saying, “Idle hands are the devil’s work tool,” or something like that, my father obviously being a case.
I got back to the cabin on the hill in an hour and Fred’s beloved was standing in the yard brushing her wet hair. “Isn’t it beautiful,” she gestured at the landscape with her hairbrush. “You should’ve hung in there last night. My friend was horny as a toad.” Naturally I envisioned an actual toad, but then managed to think of the other girl standing near the tavern door. My stomach flipped over the idea that I had been that close to losing my virginity or not. She offered a hand without the brush and I could smell Ivory soap emerging from her T-shirt and swinging breasts. She seemed to be exuding steamy heat from her shower. “Cat got your tongue?” she teased and I shook her hand, still not having managed a word. Fred saved me, calling us for breakfast.
Robin was her name. She and her friend were from Livonia near Detroit and had just graduated in teacher’s education at Central Michigan, then headed north for an “adventure.” She hugged Fred when she said this then let the dog lick egg yolk with a small piece of bacon off her spoon, and continued using the spoon on a bowl of Cheerios. Both Fred and the dog seemed to be smirking. Robin slurped her coffee and then drew a wrinkled joint from her purse, lit it, and drew deeply, her breasts jiggling with her cough. I naturally turned down a drag, but Fred shrugged and took a puff. “I’m on vacation,” Robin fairly shrieked. Fred sensed my discomfort and pushed the pickup keys across the table. “Could you come get me in a few days? I’ll give you a call.”
3
I was passing through Munising and halfway home before my composure fully returned though I recognized for the first time that this composure couldn’t be a significant item if it took a full hour to come close to the condition. It meant only that I had succeeded in keeping the world from intruding on the pickup cab. The paper mill in Munising was changing shifts and a dozen cars were pulling up at a tavern for the morning beer. Two heavily laden logging trucks were parked out front and with my windows open there was the heavy scent of torn bark and tree sap that reminded me of Robin after her shower. In stoned enthusiasm she had hugged me tightly good-bye and as I went up the hill out of Munising toward Au Train it occurred to me that it had been a full year of my new fundamentalist religion and I hadn’t hugged a girl in that period. The last had been the previous June when my buddy Glenn’s girlfriend, a big Finnish girl our age, had hugged me next to our campfire on the Middle Branch of the Escanaba River after I caught a brown trout of at least three pounds. She was far too burly for my taste but I admit that I became excited when she embraced me. She and Glenn would split a six-pack he had swiped from his dad, and I’d drive us home from fishing in my late-model Ford my mother had given me when she bought a Buick. At fifteen it was illegal for me to drive at night on my learner’s permit but my parents were too distracted to be aware of this. Anyway, after fishing I’d drive the hour back to Marquette and Glenn and his girlfriend would make out in the backseat and I’d turn on the radio loud to drown out the very audible sounds of Glenn getting a blow job, an act beyond my ken. She had said loudly several times that she didn’t want to get “PG.” When Glenn came off he’d kick at the front seat and I’d yell for him to stop.
I was short of making the turn in Harvey when I pulled off at an uninhabited beach and dozed for an hour. I couldn’t have had more than three hours’ sleep and I felt giddy looking at Marquette a dozen miles west along the shore. If I had picked up my binoculars off the seat I could have seen our home looming in the trees on Ridge Street above the harbor. The week before I had gone south to Fred’s in Ohio I asked my Baptist preacher what it meant when Jesus said, “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,” which clarified it as more an individual thing rather than a group effort. The passage sounded strenuous and cruel to me. The preacher was always sucking on hard candy lemon drops and popped a fresh one when he said, “We worship together but we die alone so we have to work real hard to keep our faith on the right track.” This struck me as a lame exegesis but then the preacher was deeply enmeshed in the problems of his hell-raising oldest son who we could see out the parsonage study window smoking a scandalous cigarette while he washed his car. He was tall and somewhat fat and sold condoms and beer on the side, all in all a poor advertisement for his father’s religion though in the folklore of the Upper Midwest the sons of preachers were always problematical items. Many thought the preacher’s wife to be too attractive to be suitable. She was a southern woman (Missouri) and her silken voice struck us as sexual. Her breasts were protuberant and when she lifted her angelic chin for a solo of “Fairest Lord Jesus” my body hummed with the lowest chords of the church organ. When I had been baptized by immersion with several others in a big metal tank with underwater steps she had helped her husband and her wet white dress was distracting. I had grown up going to St. Paul’s Episcopal Church a mere three blocks down the street from our house though Jesse still had to drive my parents as my father put great stock in what he called “family traditions.”
It was strange driving into Marquette that late morning because, though I had been gone only a little over two weeks, the city looked different to me, somehow more attractive and interesting with all of the old buildings on the hillside in fairly good repair. I felt a twinge when I passed the Peter White Library because this man stood in noble contrast to my own questionable ancestors as did the relatively benign Longyears. So did Mather who actually believed in educating loggers and miners, a revolutionary concept among the robber barons of the nineteenth century.
Sitting there staring into the dense clumps of lilacs I didn’t feel a trace of irony over this youthful epiphany. I supposed years later that a sixteen-year-old is still unformed enough that his path is elastic. He is not yet as rigid as the iron railroad tracks that adults find themselves moving on. At sixteen you can still jump off to the left or right, go backward, or simply fly away. It all had the purity and simplicity of feeling I had experienced at age twelve when I had helped Clarence dig a garbage hole at the back of a garden for a rich old lady down the street. When we were finished she gave us lemonade, Clarence five dollars, and me a single dollar bill. We were hungry and walked down the hill to a workingmen’s diner I was forbidden to enter. My mother didn’t want me to have a trace of the U.P. Finnish accent. My dollar paid for a delicious hamburger and a bowl of potato soup. This relationship between labor and food when you are terribly hungry made a distinct impression on my frivolous young mind. It was wonderful. At home my mother would have served me Campbell’s tomato soup and an American cheese sandwich. I imitated Clarence and put hot mustard on my hamburger and a liberal sprinkle of black pepper on the potato soup. Walking home up the steep hill I felt manly for the first time. When I walked into our house my mother hissed “you’re dirty” and I was a fragile boy again. There was certainly no point in telling her that I had earned a dollar on my own.