by Jim Harrison
In Marquette the president of the bank kept his distance but the senior member of the law firm spent a full hour with me considering the options. It was obvious to him that the title company was liable in that they had guaranteed to the buyer that the seller was the sole owner of the property. If I wished to pursue the matter the title company would make sure that my father was prosecuted. The buyer would get his money back and I would eventually get my cabin back after a couple of years’ pursuit. “These things take time,” he said. He also said that my father had been a “disappointment” to him for a number of years, referring to alcohol and sexual charges plus my parents’ divorce. With all of this in mind, plus the transaction of his sailboat in Chicago against which there was a troublesome Marquette lien, the “right” judge might give him several years in prison. The question was, of course, was I as a son comfortable with sending my father to prison? Did I want the cabin back in its recent condition? He represented my father not me but he was willing to tell my father that if I wasn’t given the sale price he was certainly in danger of prison time. There seemed to be some waffling here as I knew that a member of the same firm looked after the interests of Cynthia and myself.
I went back home to think it over. Mrs. Plunkett was there and fixed me lunch during which I drank a big water glass of her awful wine. I saw through the kitchen window Jesse pulling up out in back. I drank another big glass of the wine and went out to confront him. He and Clarence were standing there talking and I began yelling “how could you do this to me?” I yelled until I was hoarse and then I lay down on the lawn and fell asleep. It was a cool day and Clarence covered me with a blanket. That evening Jesse tried to convince me that he knew nothing of my father’s intended sale of the cabin until it was completed but I didn’t really believe it, not that my belief mattered to anyone involved. I remembered one evening when we were still in high school and taking a walk downtown Cynthia had joked that she knew Jesse was stealing money from our father. This pleased Cynthia and certainly didn’t bother me.
14
Now five years later I return back to the diner the morning Laurie died in June of 1975. I had been up all night and been sapped by the power of death. Both Clarence and Jesse had liked Laurie very much. I told them she had died peacefully then suddenly put a hand on Jesse’s hand. I wanted our friendship to be like it was before my father had sold the cabin. Clarence told me he had recaulked my rowboat and painted it dull blue so I could be further invisible. Jesse like Laurie and Cynthia asked me why my face was wind-burned. I had been camped out since the first of May mostly in Chippewa and Mackinac counties figuring out my ancestors’ path of destruction. In courthouses I would pretend I was writing a book on the glories of the logging days which made clerks very cooperative. They would direct me to the ancient local men and women who could still remember the last days of big logging. The real treasure troves were at the local historical societies where you could see photos but the old people with their stories were essential. You needed the stories to put a human face on what had happened. Statistics and maps by themselves were suitable only to talented academics.
To be frank I had been periodically unstable ever since my divorce from Polly. Maybe the events of our marriage presaged its doom. Later on I thought of myself as a parasite on the body of Polly’s essential happiness. In a marriage the melancholy and depression of one partner will often win out over the happiness of the other. Polly had been saving for college since she was twelve, and then still had to take loans. My grandparents on my mother’s side established a college fund for Cynthia and myself which covered tuition and living expenses plus a hundred dollars a week for miscellaneous. Not much really, but enough, and a great deal in Polly’s terms. What she thought of as “easy money” made her uncomfortable. I had always been a family joke because of my lack of interest in spending money so I wasn’t the direct source of Polly’s unrest. At our small wedding in Iron Mountain my mother, Clarence, Jesse, Cynthia and Donald, and their two small children attended but my father wasn’t invited. My mother adored Polly and gave her a two-carat blue diamond ring she had inherited, plus a check for twenty-five thousand dollars that Polly was to manage to get us over what mother called the “bumps.” This amount made Polly hysterically nervous but I said that my mother thought of me as absentminded about money, adding that mother must spend that much money on clothing every year. This wasn’t, of course, the sorest point in our marriage but we could resolve it only by never talking about it. At Michigan State the year before our marriage I had been notified that my father had spent the trusts in his care for Cynthia and me. It meant little to me, partly because I had guessed as much, and there was the good side of the absent money, distancing me further from my father’s sins against the family. I warned Cynthia on the phone but she only laughed with the usual “fuck the nitwit.” She had taken a high school equivalency test and despite caring for two young children was going to college in Sault Sainte Marie (the “Soo” they call it up here) to get a teaching degree for a promised job at the Bay Mills reservation. The comic aspect of their elopement had been all the muttering and grief in Marquette over losing Donald as a quarterback. In my senior year of high school after the family implosion I had to hear about the school’s loss of Donald nearly every day as if I were partly at fault.
My mother was crushed over the divorce. Polly continued teaching in a grubby southside grade school in Chicago. She and my mother, in fact, became friends however unlikely that seems. My mother insisted she keep the nest egg which Polly tried to give back to me. Nothing could have meant less to me at the time. When Polly married a teacher the year after our divorce my mother attended. I should add that within a year after my mother was away from my father she had largely recovered through the efforts of an analyst. She lost her taste for heavy drinking and pill popping and though she was still a little fragile mentally she had become pleasantly human rather than one of those upper-class Judy Garlands. She lived in a nice old house in Evanston with a childhood friend, another divorcée. They were both what I called “all-star docents” at museums and libraries. She was appalled when I teased her about her doctor friend thinking she had gotten away with her phantom pain and understandable deception. He was still her boyfriend but she told me she had no intention of ever getting married again. It took a couple of years but she and Cynthia finally developed a fairly warm mother-daughter relationship, mostly on the basis of the grandchildren. I had become their only shared problem. By spring after my initial separation from Polly I entered what is thought of as a clinical depression though I viewed only it as being perplexed over the human race. Cynthia came down and Fred arrived from Ohio after I slugged an alderman on Clark Street who was leading his wife from a restaurant to their car by the ear. I probably shouldn’t have interfered but she was screaming. I admitted that I resisted arrest strenuously. If my mother’s family hadn’t been highly placed in the Chicago area I would have been in real trouble. I had to do six weeks of in-house care at a psychiatric clinic north of the city. It all reminded me sadly of my father’s plea bargaining but then one night in the Cook County jail was more than enough. I got pretty badly beaten up at the scene of my crime and my purple face helped with the judge. After I got out of the clinic it was agreed that I should let Fred keep an eye on me for a while in Ohio.
15
Actually, I’m being a little coy. Polly anchored me to earth and without her I floated in unpleasant ether. To admit that I was unstable is a euphemism. Once I sat at my kitchen table for two days and nights without sleeping or eating. I drank water, looked out the window, and peed. It was March, always my most problematic month. I was supposed to be writing a paper on the “liberation theologians” but had been stuck for weeks on the first sentence, virtually paralyzed by my thinking on the project. I found myself wishing I was Jewish, black, or Indian so I would have something valid to complain about instead of being a child of privilege.
When Fred retrieved me in May Cynthia had sugg
ested that I might come live near her and Donald but I said that if I lived near impoverished Chippewa I might shoot myself. I said this in jest but she broke into tears and I assured her that I’d never do such a thing if only because it would make her unhappy. Theology school made me remote from the Gospels but I recalled that I shouldn’t hurt people.
An odd, fateful thing happened the late afternoon before Fred and I left Chicago. We were coming down the steps of the Newberry, a private library of which Fred had long been a member and where we had been checking on the Upper Peninsula’s early Native history, when we met a striking girl who approached us as we were trying to hail a cab. She was tall, slender, and wore a short summer dress in a pale yellow print. She held a tray of small boxes of matches and introduced herself as Vernice “the little match girl.” It was so bizarre and we were both foolishly smitten. She wanted five bucks per box of matches and we both bought two. I rarely smoked but this seemed a good time to start. We were supposed to meet my mother and her roommate for dinner at the Cape Cod room at the Drake Hotel but we had time for a drink. I’m very slow in such situations. Actually I have no talent for it at all, but I felt a little glimmer of desire for the first time since I’d broken up with Polly six months before. Fred, however, thought of himself as a prime lothario despite his bulbous nose and pot belly. We went into a tavern and I had my first martini in memory while Vernice had a cautious iced tea and Fred stuck with the safe territory of beer. Vernice admitted her real name was Sharon but she wrote under the name of Vernice because it was more dashing. Her accent was similar to that of my student the diminutive Marli. She was from far southern Indiana but wanted to be a “city poet” so she moved to Chicago. She sold matches from about five to seven every evening after men sometimes had drinks and felt generous. She rotated her route to pass the better office buildings, cocktail lounges, and convention hotels and these two hours a day easily supported her poetry writing. Fred was impolite enough to ask her if she ever got propositioned and she said “dozens and dozens of times.” She laughed and gave us a card with her name and numbers. Fred beamed but Vernice said that the number was for the Salty Dog, a saloon. We sat there a full hour listening to this fascinating girl and then it was time to go so Fred asked her to join us for dinner. She said she would like to but couldn’t. Fred had been power drinking beer and acted the cad by offering her a hundred-dollar bill to come with us and she said coldly, “I make an honest living. Sir.” She was headed to a reading by the California poet Gary Snyder, who was one of her favorites, and wouldn’t miss it for the world. Fred was crestfallen and went off to take a pee. Vernice then gave me a card adding her actual phone number. I said I was leaving the next day and she said “whenever,” kissed me on the cheek, and was out the door leaving behind her fatal lilac scent and the acute memory of her hazel eyes and flossy hair. When she had gotten up to leave the bar I noted the slight sound of the bare backs of her knees detaching themselves from the red plastic chair seat. Irrational as this might seem the sound drew me back to Vera getting up from a metal lawn chair in her bikini one day so many years before. I had stood there deciding to avert my eyes but then turned to watch her climb the porch steps. When she opened the screened door she had quickly swiveled to wave at me and perhaps to see if I had been watching.
The good-bye dinner with my mother went fairly well. I disliked the effects of the martini with Vernice and so sipped a little wine but Fred plunged on. He also knew my mother’s divorcée friend and acted comically seductive. She pointedly asked him why he was pretending he wanted to make love to her when he was lucky if he could find his dick to pee. My mother thought this was very funny and Fred said wistfully that he was sure he’d be able to do the job by the next morning. After dinner we went out to the Drake’s main entrance and there sat a new yellow Chevrolet pickup, a gift from my mother to improve my spirits. The pickup immediately made me homesick for my rowboat and the north. There was an uncomfortable moment of clarity when I stared at the epaulets of the doorman opening the vehicle door. What in God’s name was I doing in this particular time and place? My sense of dislocation was absolute. I hugged my mother who felt very small in my arms. Fred was kissing the hand of my mother’s divorcée friend which amused a bellhop. I looked up at the night sky above the hotel marquee quite lonely to see stars which are scarcely visible in country terms in Chicago’s ambient light. I shivered though it was a warm night. I found myself praying for sanity.
16
The trip back to Ohio with Fred began poorly. I tried to awaken him at six A.M. to get an early enough start to beat the traffic but it was hopeless. He hugged the couch with snores and dream growls and whimpers, his flaccid body knotted up in the sheet. I had given away most of my nice clothes to a group of panhandlers the week before so I had only one suitcase. I found a tiny agate earring of Polly’s and was surprised by how much it upset me. The earring aroused me and I wondered how it could bring me back to a sexual earth along with my meeting with Vernice the day before.
I went for breakfast and brought Fred back a large coffee and bagel. We finally left at ten in the morning and Fred soon fell asleep rather than helping me navigate out of the city. He had recently been working with his old girlfriend Riva on another program for the rural poor but looking at him slumped in the seat and drooling it was difficult to see how he could help anyone, certainly not myself. I found a radio station that played country music to charm him back awake but he slept the three hours to Indianapolis waking near the outskirts and actually saying “what a beautiful day.” We stopped so he could buy a quart of cold beer and then we began a mild quarrel.
I idly said that I hoped to get my personal problems out of the way so I could resume my project. Fred said that it was obvious that the project was my only personal problem and it might be immediately helpful if I drove up to Duluth and shot my father in the head. This threw me off balance because I had considered murdering my father a number of times since the night he had raped Vera. This urge had developed at one point to reading a gun magazine because I remembered that my friend Glenn’s father Herbert owned a .223 rifle with which he claimed he had shot crows at four hundred yards. I loved crows and the idea of shooting one repelled me, but not so shooting my father.
While we were having lunch at a diner Fred decided it would be of considerable help if I promised him that I would read Don Quixote. I had to let this one pass because when I read the novel for a senior honors course at Michigan State I had noted the disturbing similarity to my own project and I didn’t feel up to talking about it there in the truck. There is nothing less pleasant for a college senior to admit than his own humorless absurdity. I dropped the course and didn’t take honors in English. My adviser, Weisinger, the most purely wise man I had ever known, convinced me to abandon my obsessions with Thoreau and Melville and leaven my sodden brain with reading Trollope, Chekhov, and Isaac Singer. Polly was delighted with the difference this reading made in our day-to-day life but I fell again with Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist Young Man when it occurred to me that my own obsessions were similar to the young men who wished to become novelists or poets.
We stopped for gas in a small Indiana town and the station was near the railroad tracks and an extremely poor neighborhood. A chubby little black girl with a dirty bandage around a bare foot stood nearby watching us. I turned away but felt my stomach jiggle with sympathy, empathy, or compassion. I had never quite figured out the precise difference between the three. I heard Fred talking to the attendant as I stared at a sorry-looking cornfield at the edge of town. The corn was stunted and pale and would never be knee high by the Fourth of July. The little girl walked around the front of the pickup to where I leaned against the hood. She said “my name is Lena” and curtsied. Her toes that peeked out of the bandage were swollen and I felt nauseous. I had no idea what to do and called Fred over. She was the attendant’s daughter and had stepped on a nail sticking out of a board. The attendant was embarrassed and said, “She’ll be okay.”
Fred said that he was a secret agent for the FBI and handed the man a fifty-dollar bill telling him to take the kid to a doctor. We would be back the next morning to make sure he had done so. The man said “many thanks” and we left.
It was a half hour down the road before we said anything but then Fred launched into what I first considered an attack on me but then I understood as heartfelt. He said that while it was true that my father’s people were big-jawed predators who violated and denuded much of the Upper Peninsula I knew the effects only abstractly. I should take a close look at the human race which isn’t fairly seen at Marquette High School, Michigan State University, and a year at theological school which Fred called a “fucking tea and sherry party.” I lamely defended myself by saying that I had read a great deal and had talked to retired loggers and a few old miners. He drank the rest of his warm beer and laughed at that. He said I hadn’t really noticed the aftereffects of the depredations my family had made. The small “junta” of my family and other alpha predators encouraged the miners and loggers to mythologize themselves including the thousands who had died in logging and mining accidents. At this point he became a little irrational and repeated the story of how the Chicago police had murdered the black activist Fred Hampton. I tried to get him back on track by saying that every wealthy Upper Peninsula family didn’t have a malignant past. Look at the Mathers, Peter White, the Cohodes, and many of the Longyears. Fred had become intent on ranting and wanted to stop for more beer but I refused. My mother had warned me that Fred had borderline high blood sugar and had promised her that he was no longer “sipping” beer all day long. Fred yelled “fuck it,” then abruptly fell asleep leaving me to navigate the late-afternoon Cincinnati traffic by myself. I was getting tired by the time I found Route 52 which ran southeast along the Ohio River. Most of the river towns were woebegone but I found them quite wonderful after the interstate highways. Rivers are decidedly female and I began to think of what Vernice’s body might look like and got my first daylight hard-on in six months, my tunnel vision expanding to take in far more of the life around me that my mind had buried.