by Jim Harrison
It was cool and windy in the morning with Superior too rough for the coasters. We fished the beaver pond with success and then I took a walk to work the creaks out of my body gotten from sleeping on the beach. Behind the cabin in a grove of hemlocks I was startled to find a simple gravestone partially covered with moss. My curiosity overcame my good taste and I scraped off the moss and read:
AMANDA SWENSON BURKETT
October 7, 1913-June 12, 1937
Sixteen-year-olds aren’t good at mortality and my skin prickled. I went back to fishing but without energy as if the property had become an immense mausoleum.
It’s almost appalling to think that a busted carburetor could make a specific difference in one’s life. We got back to Iron Mountain on Sunday evening and I wrote a thank-you letter to Sprague. I made bold mention that he had promised to send some information. I wanted to ask about his peculiar cabin and the gravestone but then thought that neither was any of my business. I added a number of gratuitous comments about the nature of ancestral wrongdoings. Few sixteen-year-olds are wise enough to squirm at their pomposities. I had not yet come to consider that my arrogance in attacking this enormous project was simply another family trait.
On Monday morning Herbert woke us at five A.M. He had lost his sassy waitress and come to his senses. He was clearly panicked over the idea that we were well behind on our work and in a few weeks he would lose both of us to school. We began to work ten-hour days, and then included Saturday which precluded our weekend fishing trips. In the last week our hours went up to twelve. The other workers earned time and a half for overtime but Glenn and I stayed unfairly on straight time. Glenn had an ugly quarrel with his dad one night when they were beered up. Glenn swung and hit Herbert a glancing blow that teared up his eyes. Herbert threw Glenn through the screen door into the yard. I turned up Marquette public radio until Brahms, not my favorite, was booming through the cabin.
There was nothing left of me after working twelve hours and eating too much to keep going. This was definitely the flip side of manual labor where all the good feelings were lost to exhaustion. It occurred to me to quit but I didn’t want to go home until the last possible moment. I took to drinking too much beer in the evening like Glenn and Herbert and talking as stupidly as they did under the influence. I also hadn’t touched the half dozen books I had promised to read for extra credit. My English teacher, Mrs. Schmidt, had told me that I was her only student who wasn’t utterly disappointing. I closed my duffel so I couldn’t see the European novels she wanted me to read by Stendhal, Hamsun, Céline, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, and Alain-Fournier. In short I felt dumb as a stump.
The Friday evening before I left I ran into Polly on the street. I was well oiled from drinking a whole six-pack after we had finished work, and then Herbert also had snuck us whiskey in the darkened booth of the Italian restaurant. I walked off with Polly, with Herb and Glenn yelling that they would leave without me for the cabin.
We went to the city park but I was too drunk to talk intelligently though naturally I told her I loved her. Given my condition she thought this was very funny which made me angry but only for moments because I suddenly threw up. Polly helped me wash up at a drinking fountain and then I fell asleep for an hour or so sitting in the grass leaning against a tree. She was still there when I awoke so I walked her home. I had never felt stupider, a record I was to break several times in the ensuing weeks.
6
Laurie was pregnant. I found this out minutes after driving up the alley that Saturday. While I was talking to Clarence and Jesse, who said I now looked like a boxer, Cynthia came out of the back door of the house and told me right in front of the others. I felt a little dizzy and then suddenly coarse.
My parents and a lawyer met with Laurie’s parents that Saturday afternoon and that evening she and her mother took a flight to Chicago. My father didn’t say a single thing but my mother was absolutely disgusted holding her drink in the kitchen, saying, “The fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree.” I supposed that the tree meant Father.
Laurie returned within a week from Chicago and never mentioned her abortion when we took a walk out to Presque Isle. She started to a couple of times but couldn’t talk. She pretended to be quite angry because I had throttled her halfback boyfriend Brent the first day of gym class when he confronted me. I had no idea how to fight so I threw him down and got him in a choke hold.
I had gained a bunch of weight and muscle and an assistant coach suggested that I go out for the football team because I caught the ball well when we played touch football in gym class, but then we had too many good players in the end position so they made me a middle linebacker, a fine way for a young man to vent his anger. In the fifth game of the season on a frozen field in Sault Sainte Marie I broke my left ankle which was put in a cumbersome cast. After the cast was taken off in January I rebroke the ankle coming out of the Peter White Library onto an icy sidewalk. I spent a month in my room in a state of clinical depression with Cynthia bringing home my schoolwork.
I wasn’t the only news in the family. A week before Christmas while my father was visiting his Yale crony Seward in Duluth they both had been arrested for “consorting” with underage girls. It certainly never made the Marquette newspaper, and it wasn’t a family crisis because my mother fled for Chicago to be under the care of her phantom-pain doctor. I must say that my father handled it with aplomb, not missing his annual tradition of having a hundred roasts of beef distributed to the poor so they could have a “proper” Christmas. My own knowledge of the prosecution of my father’s crime was thirdhand, if that, but by February he was off for six weeks to a medical facility for alcoholics outside of Minneapolis, a plea bargain with the judge. I’ve always found it odd in American jurisprudence that the punishment for certain crimes is mitigated if the perpetrator is drunk. I’m also certain that a goodly amount of money went to the parents of the underage girls. Jesse was busy that winter driving my father to Duluth though he also made two trips alone. Mrs. Plunkett left the dining table in tears one evening when Cynthia said, “They should put the fucker in jail,” meaning our father. After he got out of the alcohol clinic he spent most of the winter in Florida.
After two months in Chicago my mother returned for a week in March to discuss my father. I don’t know what she expected us to say. Cynthia kept glancing down at a novel she was reading by Alan Sillitoe. For want of anything better to say I offered that she and Father should try six months of counseling before making such a big decision about divorce. Cynthia looked at me in astonishment and I realized that she had also read Ann Landers that day in the Detroit Free Press. That evening Cynthia told me that she suspected that Mother looked so nice because she was having an affair in Chicago. “At her age?” I said loudly, and Cynthia said, “She’s only forty-three and as usual you don’t know shit.”
When the cast from the second severe break came off I was put back in the hospital because my ankle hadn’t healed properly. An orthopedic surgeon would decide the next morning whether to operate and then put me back in yet another cast. It was an unusually warm March evening and the whole town was melting from two hundred inches of dirty snow. Cynthia brought me in a portion of Mrs. Plunkett’s lasagna and a full jar of red wine. Cynthia had recently found the hiding place for the key to my father’s wine cellar and we had been availing ourselves to some bottles. “Lynch-Bages 1953,” she announced pouring into a spare water glass. There were “get well” cards from my father and Laurie with his postmarked Key West, with a note that said, “Fishing is great” which I doubted. My ex-minister from the Baptist church stopped by on his pastoral rounds of the hospital. He gave me a fresh Gideon copy of the King James Version of the Bible. I introduced them and Cynthia sat down gravely as if hanging on every word the minister said. She was on her way to a party and her miniskirt revealed a lot of leg if not more. The minister had begun a longish wandering metaphor of Christianity as both a militia (onward Christian soldiers) and an athletic contest (the
race goes to the swift). Cynthia lit a cigarette which even then was questionable in a hospital room and I thought I caught the odor of cannabis in her Old Gold filter. She plainly unnerved the pastor and would have likely upset any man except her brother.
Late that evening with moonlight flooding the room I got up and dressed having pretty much decided against an operation and more months in a cast. I had been reading Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed for extra credit in Mrs. Schmidt’s class and had reached the part where Krylov bites Stavrogin’s ear in a dark room. The novel, among other things, had shown me how infantile my search for the source of evil in my family had been. I had continued the project by reading background books on the timber and mining industries, and exchanging several letters with Sprague who had sent along a carton of material from his corner of the family. My last letter had gone unanswered and I wondered if he had died.
I sat down by the window and stared at the moon making sure I had reached the right decision about leaving the hospital without the ankle operation. I stared at the moon so long that my mind went quite blank to everything including the passing cars, the hospital sounds (a dropped bed pan in the hall and a male orderly saying “damn”), and the contradictory voices in my own mind. In the furthest corner of my brain, however, I realized that I was helplessly experiencing the same sort of trance I had gone through in the alley behind the work shed near the lilacs though this time I was less frightened about losing my mind. Time became foreshortened and I could see the moon move. It was hyperreal and at the same time soothing to “lose” my mind. Toward the end my brain visited several locations including the cliff over Lake Superior where my father’s brother Richard had fallen and died, Sprague’s “nothing” cabin west of Ontonagon, and a lovely stretch of the Fence River where I had fallen asleep while fishing. The difference was that I was seeing everything much more vividly than when I had actually been in these places. I had visually recorded them with much greater clarity than I had thought possible and there was the delicious freedom of not thinking about myself to which I had aspired. In the last few moments of the trance I had moved to the shadow behind Polly’s ear and then to the back of Laurie’s knee beaded with lake water. I lost the moon when a nurse on her rounds interrupted me with “why aren’t you in bed?” and I answered “because I’m sitting in a chair,” which she found amusing. A few minutes after she left I slipped out of the hospital. I noted by my watch, I had spent hours in this strange state, that it was nearly six A.M. and the diner downtown would be open. I had a slight limp from the bum ankle and was careful what with melting snow and puddles having refrozen in the night so that parts of the sidewalk were miniature skating rinks.
Clarence was there with two of his trapping buddies. During the winter Clarence ran a trap line and when the moon was big he could check it at night. He told me that he needed the extra money to feed grandchildren and he was hoping Donald would get a football scholarship so he wouldn’t have to chip in. Clarence waved me over to their table and I was amazed how much these scruffy men were eating but supposed that walking all night on snowshoes would make you pretty hungry. One of the other men called Bobber was darkly Indian and had recently healed slash marks on his face. He saw me looking and humorously explained he had an argument over a woman down in Rapid River. After eating their breakfasts the men dozed on their chairs waiting for their day jobs to start. Clarence would often cat nap and Cynthia and I would try to sneak up on him unnoticed but never succeeded. Jesse joined us wearing an overcoat and blue suit and carrying an alligator-skin briefcase he had brought up years before from Veracruz. Despite his dark color everyone in Marquette seemed to like Jesse for his ready smile and impeccable manners. He was thought to be razor sharp on business matters though he didn’t seem to care if he was wearing his blue suit or the white jacket my mother demanded when he served at her tea or cocktail parties.
After his coffee and donuts Jesse nodded me outside and on the street asked me why I wasn’t at the hospital. Clarence had already said, “I thought they were going to cut on you today,” after his friend Bobber had explained his own scars. I told Jesse that I needed a break and couldn’t bear to be back in a leg cast, and then he smiled, shook my hand, and said that late the evening before he had gotten a phone call from a lawyer in Ontonagon and I had inherited a cabin and property from cousin Sprague.
I stood there tingling and then walked up the steep hill and down Ridge Street to our house where I got in the pickup and drove to Ontonagon to see my second home. I was now a landowner and the feeling was nearly as extreme as losing my virginity. I could now totally escape my family and live on fifty bucks a week. I was now seventeen and a free man. Absurdly, I sang the current civil rights anthem “O Freedom” in my awful voice. I was an hour out and west of Champion when I noted the heavy snowbanks along the road and it occurred to me that I might not be able to get close to the cabin. I drove on into a gathering blizzard which was a near whiteout by the time I reached Ontonagon. The last two miles of the county road up to the property gate were unplowed and covered by immense snowdrifts formed by the wind off Lake Superior. I sat there counting my money with the engine heat ticking away and the truck shuddering in the cold wind. I had enough to buy snowshoes or perhaps hire someone to haul me out to the cabin on a snowmobile though the latter was improbable because snowmobiles are designed for trails and when I got out of the truck I sunk into my waist beyond the end of the plowed road. The snow also made my questionable ankle ache as if there had been a nail driven in it. Despite the disappointment my heart was still full when I drove back to town and found a motel. It didn’t make the cabin less mine that I might have to wait until late April or early May to see it again.
I stood in the motel room for a while looking at the blizzard out the window then walked over to Sprague’s house but it was dark and closed up tight. I couldn’t remember his housekeeper’s last name, her first was Nelmi, nor could I figure out standing there on a residential street in the blinding snow why I wished to see her anyway. I was cold and exhausted and went back to the motel room, drew an easy chair up to the window, then fell asleep staring at the frightening whiteness of the world. It was clearly a blank canvas on which you could paint your life if you cared to. Just before sleep I imagined sitting at the cabin window and painted the interior of what would be my cabin, including the front window from which the only visible thing was Lake Superior and the line of the horizon, but there was the nagging idea Fred had explained that as a putative Christian I had to learn how to function in the world before I earned the right to retreat. Fred joked that one had control of the world when sitting on the toilet but that was a limited venue.
When I awoke late in the afternoon the snow had stopped but the wind had further lifted so that the window rattled and Lake Superior in the distance was rumpled. I took the ubiquitous Gideon Bible from the dresser and it seemed almost too heavy to lift. There was a single piece of motel stationery in the drawer and a ballpoint pen near the phone. I wrote:
1. God created the cosmos billions of years ago then departed leaving everything up for grabs.
2. God probably doesn’t monitor our activities with our genitals.
3. Jesus was the son of God but then he said in a mystifying passage so is everyone else.
4. You can separate the words of Jesus from the rest of the New Testament and see that most of it is add-ons for the convenience of the temporal church.
5. The Church seems to encourage people to be evil. Fred says this is to ensure the Church’s power.
6. Fred says that when he sees a politician who has further crushed the poor pray in public he wants to pick up a gun.
7. When the Church wedded itself to worldly power it lost its actual connection with Jesus.
8. Laurie no longer will speak to me. I told her I had bought condoms. She is seeing a psychologist counselor who told her to spend a full year without fucking anyone. Cynthia has settled down to only Donald. I still say my prayers including my wis
h to stop thinking about fucking Laurie but this hasn’t panned out. It’s the most pleasure I’ve ever had and now it’s gone. It’s easier to write about sex than God and Jesus. Glenn pointed out a kingfisher last summer and asked aloud, “Who made that up?” On the way back to Crystal Falls a bluebird flew into the truck radiator. We stopped and the bird was stuck in the grill, its eyes still flickering. Then its eyes closed for good. Glenn asked, “Why did this have to happen?” I said, “Birds will never figure out cars.” It is startling how light in weight birds are. I crossed a ditch, slipped through a fence, and dug a small hole with my hands. I was already kneeling so I prayed, “God take the spirit of this bird to heaven.” I put a stone on the bird’s grave, thinking that I kill lovely fish and eat them.
9. Why did God allow evil people like my parents and their ancestors to be created? Or me for that matter.
10. I think I’ll call Polly in Iron Mountain. Is this a good idea?
I had used both sides of the piece of paper so I called Polly. She was depressed because her dad was in the Veteran’s Hospital getting another operation on his legs that were crippled in the mining accident. My family had started the mining company in the nineteenth century. We were still big stockholders though the stock wasn’t going to be worth much anymore according to Jesse. I didn’t say so but I believed my family would have been better off broke.
I asked Polly if I could drive down to Iron Mountain and see her. She told me I was nuts because the weather was awful. I was lucky enough to follow a series of snowplows but it was slow going and I didn’t make Iron Mountain until eleven in the evening. I sipped from a pint of schnapps Glenn kept under the truck seat and ate a ham sandwich. When Polly came over to my room she said she had told her mother where she was going and her mother had said, “My father hated your dad because he was only a miner. This is just the reverse.” Polly thought this was funny but then she was always in a good mood. Much later I found out this condition was called “hyperthymia” where the victim is always happy. We talked and necked on the bed and she told me she wasn’t going to go “all the way” and never had. I asked why and I proudly drew a condom from my wallet. “That’s not the point,” she said. “I’m not sure about you.” It turned out she had a cousin in Marquette who called her about the gossip surrounding Laurie’s abortion and later my father’s “problem” in Duluth. I had the unvoiced feeling that it would be nice to live in New York City where not everyone knew your secrets like they did in the Upper Peninsula. She declined a sip and I finished the rest of Glenn’s schnapps in two gulps. I had recently read the disturbing Brothers Karamazov and it dawned on me that I was all three brothers plus the idiot half brother in one body when I wanted to be the holy younger brother Alyosha. I was downcast but then she announced that we could fool around and within a few minutes I was nude and she was down to her panties which she said would stay on until she “tied the knot,” a peculiar idiom for marriage. I wasn’t prepared for the nudeness of her nudity. It was almost too much of a good thing, as they say, and compared to Laurie, Polly was soft and lush and with breasts large enough to be embarrassing to her. We did everything but the final connection and I easily admitted to myself that it was more fun that way. While I gnawed at her panties I felt too much of her teeth and when I winced I heard a muffled “sorry.” She became spasmodic and flopped around in slow motion and I was briefly afraid that she was having some kind of seizure. I had to massage a cramp out of her foot and was delighted at the fullness of her laughter. I was as happy as I had ever been and I laughed myself which was rare. When she left I stood by the door in my underpants letting the icy wind cool my body. I told her that I loved her and she gave my dick a yank and said “you just love coming off” and her laughter enclosed the snowy parking lot. I stood there until she drove off in her ancient Plymouth with the tires spinning in an icy moan.