True North

by Jim Harrison

  “You’re the loneliest asshole in the world. You need a dog,” Cynthia said, closing the issue. Before dinner she had shown me a letter she had received from a lawyer in West Palm Beach, Florida, asking her to write a letter in support of our father’s good character to be presented to a judge. She had called the lawyer out of curiosity and was told that my father had made an “understandable” mistake and had seduced a Cuban girl who was under the legal age. Under further questioning the lawyer had argued that for a white man it was impossible to determine the age of a dark-skinned Cuban girl. Cynthia told the lawyer she needed the prosecutor’s number to help him build his case and the lawyer hung up on her. We stood there near the stove while she was cooking dinner with a wave of melancholy sweeping over us. It was then that I told her of Riva’s insistence that we go to Mexico and apologize to Vera. Cynthia said that she and Vera still wrote to each other and that we had a seven-year-old half brother. At first I was unable to absorb this. Cynthia said that there was no reason for her to go but I should if it would make me feel better though I should think it over first. She then asked me if I wanted to see a photo of the boy Vera had sent and I said no. I asked if our father knew of the child and she said Jesse might have told him.

  I left Sugar Island and the Bay Mills Indian community with a pup named Carla and the knowledge of a half brother I’d likely never see. I had called Riva the night before to see if she had an idea of what I should do and she said that given the situation I might have to “grow some balls” before I went to Mexico. I also made a late call to Vernice after everyone had gone to bed. She was sweet and friendly on the phone and I said that it occurred to me that she might like to come up to the Upper Peninsula for a vacation. “When?” she asked. “As soon as possible,” I said, envisioning her lying on my green sleeping bag like a water lily on the surface of a northern lake. “I believe in words,” she said, “write me a letter and tell me who you actually are on earth. I felt drawn to you in the bar or I wouldn’t have given you my phone number, but you must describe yourself and what your intentions are in life. The other day an attractive man offered to take me to Paris. I’ve always wanted to go to Paris and I’ve probably read more about Paris than most Parisians but I believe more in people than in places, and have learned not to bow to my whims. For instance, when I first met this man on Michigan Avenue he was wearing a wedding band and the next day when we had a drink the ring had disappeared. He blushed when I said that Winnetka was an odd place for a bachelor apartment. So, no lies please. Pretend you’re on your deathbed, which we all are, and tell me the truth.” I said I’d write the letter but had sweaty doubts that I’d come up with something attractive enough to get her on a plane. “Try,” she said. End of conversation. I sat there on the couch with the puppy, little Carla, next to me and speculated on the mysteries of women. The phone call would have made any man seriously consider becoming a monk.

  I was off in the morning after Cynthia cooked me some illegal venison for breakfast. Donald tried to pay me a hundred bucks for my week’s digging but I refused it take it. I certainly had never seen Cynthia so happy. She kissed me good-bye and handed me a baby blanket for Carla.

  The pup cried for a while but I petted her tummy while driving and she fell asleep. As I drove west toward Marquette I felt firmed up with the green rumpled landscape appearing wider as it had begun to reveal itself outside of Cincinnati on the way down along the Ohio River. I began to question if I still believed in Christ’s resurrection and decided after two hours that I did. Anything was possible on an earth that creates for itself such a fabulous landscape of forest, swamps, and rivers. I tried to recall a German philosopher we discussed in theological school who had said, in effect, the miracle is that the world exists.

  Passing through the small town of Harvey on the outskirts of Marquette I noticed a restaurant that specialized in turkey dishes and had a good memory of my father. When Cynthia and I were quite young we liked turkey sandwiches. Late on Saturday mornings when we were doubtless driving our mother crazy my father would take us to the restaurant and all puffy-eyed would drink some coffee and smoke cigarettes while we ate. Afterward if it was summer we’d go to the beach east of Harvey, toward Au Train, and my father would doze on the sand while we played. Once, despite being dressed nicely, Cynthia who was about five at the time walked out in the water up to her neck and wouldn’t come back. My father said, “Do something about her,” but I couldn’t. One morning soon after that she poured out much of his liquor in the kitchen sink and he spanked her, she disappeared and by dinnertime the Marquette police and hundreds of citizens were looking for her. I actually knew where her hideout was but didn’t say anything because I liked the idea of pouring the liquor into the sink. About a block from our house lived a woman who owned a nasty German shepherd and Cynthia would often curl up in its doghouse. Just before dark I told my mother this and the policeman who retrieved Cynthia got bit by the dog.

  When I reached the back of our house I developed an insufferable knot in my stomach. Jesse was kind enough to bring me the camping gear from my room. Clarence and I loaded the rowboat. The next day Jesse had to fly down to Florida to bring my father a number of books and other items in jail. We didn’t discuss the issue other than for me to say that I knew about it and hoped that my mother didn’t, but then Jesse said she had paid for his lawyer. Clarence became philosophical about how much trouble a man’s brainless dick could cause. I knew that my father still owned a great deal of land down between Witch Lake and Amasa and asked Jesse why he didn’t sell it. He said it was because my father owned so much land jointly with his dead brother Richard and he couldn’t bear to sell land Richard had loved. He added that land was the last thing that you sold which I viewed as ironical what with my missing cabin. I felt both puzzled and sympathetic toward these two men who continued going through the precise motions of maintaining a family that had disappeared. Frank Lloyd Wright had said that the rich became janitors for their possessions but it occurred to me that they mostly hired out that job. Fred liked to say that people who had nothing to do had nothing, that the long-range product of greed was emptiness.

  20

  I admit that when I left Marquette I felt as if I were fleeing the scene of a crime, but then the actual scene of the sequence of crimes was embedded in memory so that there was nothing to be done with it. I couldn’t write a proper letter to Vernice because if I were truthful I would probably scare her away. Instead I would concoct an earnest description of my curiosity about what my family had done to what Henry Schoolcraft, an explorer early in the nineteenth century, had described as one of the most stunning, albeit foreboding, places on earth. Longfellow had never visited the Upper Peninsula when he wrote his Hiawatha. He had merely cribbed from Schoolcraft and the descriptions of Louis Agassiz. Vernice might be interested because it was concerned with poetry though I, in fact, loathed the poem. Peter White and the early Marquette fathers assumed that they cared for the Natives right up to letting them dance in the Episcopal church but that didn’t stop them from moving the Natives out of the way of imperial progress. There are limitations to virtue.

  The simple truth was that as a young man approaching my mid-twenties I had an overwhelming need for the opposite sex and I certainly hadn’t the strength to oppose this desire. What I could oppose with whatever remnant of Christianity in my soul was picking on a lovely vulnerable creature like Polly whom my melancholy obsessions had nearly devoured. Vernice was unlikely to be susceptible. Unlike my father I intended to control the damage I did.

  The only thing distracting about Vernice was that in my two-hour encounter she had reminded me of my English professors and so did our phone conversation. These professors appeared to believe that if you got the language right all other unpleasant considerations would simply go away which was not far from my own unvoiced belief that if I could balance things in my head reality would cooperate when there was no apparent connection.

  That first June night in the
village of Grand Marais I found the cheapest small tourist cabin for temporary quarters and unpacked my valise of maps. The knotty pine desk was too small so I spread several of the maps on the floor and knelt there. Some of them were quite old and I had to be careful as the edges would crumble. My family’s business activities had spread across most of the Upper Peninsula but I decided on the middle section rather than east or west for a beginning because I had so many good feelings about the area from rowing the boat with Fred to my first lovemaking with Laurie on a sandbar on Au Sable Lake. I intended to walk all summer long but starting slow in order to give my ankle a chance to build its strength. I casually drew a grid map of a twenty-by-twenty-mile area that included expanses about which I had already read.

  It was still light at ten-thirty when I walked down to the tavern for a sandwich having forgotten all about dinner. I talked to the bar owner Mick, a very large rusty-haired man, about brook trout fishing places. I had met him before and knew he had been a timber cruiser so would have ample knowledge of the places I needed to explore. I had decided to masquerade as a graduate student for reasons of privacy, the simple idea that my ambitions were too ill formed to share with another human. Anytime I had mentioned them before it was like describing a dream that was vivid to me but of no interest to anyone else. Fred, of course, was an exception though not a solid ally. After my Chicago fight with the police and my enforced therapy I had been quite angry at a psychiatrist for talking about my “obsessive compulsive” tendencies. Concealment was certainly in order. I had also pitched my prescription of lithium within minutes of my release. When a cop tears out a handful of your hair so that the roots bleed it is understandable that you resist. Being secretive comes naturally to the mammalian species.

  I agreed on a meeting place to fish with Mick the next evening then walked out in the gathering dark. A big yellow moon was rising in the east and I walked down to the harbor beach then east toward the cabin. I felt cleanly exhilarated that my disorderly apprenticeship was over and that I was beginning my life’s work though I had already hoped I might finish it in ten years or so. I was still young enough to think in the grandest of terms.

  I continued down the beach past the path to my tourist cabin toward the estuary of the Sucker River a mile or two distant. The moon’s sheen on the water followed me as I walked for reasons not clear to me. It occurred to me that my own point of view was unique on earth but this was not a comforting idea. Wherever I stood and looked I was the only one there. The few sounds of the village diminished, and I mostly heard my feet in the damp sand, and then a loon call ahead in the estuarine area. To the left far out in Lake Superior the lights of a freighter made their slow passage to the west. I heard a coyote out on a forested promontory called Lonesome Point and single dog answering the coyote from the village. My heart fluttered when I flushed a plover from a thickish stand of beach grass. There was a dense smell of wild roses mixing with the odor of cold water.

  I was disturbed for a few minutes recalling the idea that if I actually thought I was looking into the heart of evil in my family I ought to include their sense of Christianity which they viewed as a further entitlement for their conquests, and that my greatgrandfather coming out of England in the mid-1880s had also been to India and Africa but gave up those fields as being too full and competitive with others of his kind. Old journals are often fascinating but his were mostly filled with his speculations on business opportunities, accounts, and overweening notations on his faith in his own particular destiny intermixed with biblical verses and his profound faith and trust in God. He believed but did I?

  Luckily the tingling thought of Vernice and the presence of the moon overcame the arrogant old bastard. I would try to write her early in the morning before I set off in search of a camping spot. I’d also have to count what money I had in my duffel bag, a repellent process. A month ago a Chicago psychiatrist asked what I hated aside from the obvious police (the left side of my face was still blue) and I errantly said “money” and when he tried to track this back into my life I stopped talking. When Jesse had asked me how I expected to live on a hundred dollars a week he was apologetic about my bilked trust. If my father ever tried to sell land there was a court order to the effect that he had to return to me the sum for which my cabin had been sold. This had been engineered by the embarrassed title company who confused David the third with just plain David. And in a private moment at dinner at the Drake my mother was concerned with her usual “I’m always there for you” but I escaped by saying that I was thinking of going back to Michigan State for graduate school in history thus providing me with funds to live, albeit simply, as long as I was enrolled even if I stayed at the university until I died. It was all so squalid with the ready assumption that I deserved to live without lifting a finger in my own support. It made me think of hardworking Clarence as Saint Clarence, but Jesse less so as he was involved as a messenger in my father’s financial shenanigans and nonresponse to Vera’s rape. Frankly I wanted to be useful in this life and that could be defined only by work, not good intentions.

  My immediate downfall was the moon. I lay back and stared at it for an hour consciously trying to avoid one of my daffy trances. I knew what the moon was but not what it was for, anymore than I understood a bird or bear. There was a frightening image of my mother’s face as a yellow moon. It was before a costume party, their Midsummer Night’s gala up at the Club, and my mother was in her bedroom with us dressing up with her face as the moon out of which emerged fiery spangles. I was just out of kindergarten so Cynthia wasn’t quite four. Cynthia cried and tried to tear away the moon masque. Mother pushed her away and Cynthia’s head bumped against the corner of the bedstead. Mother’s red lipsticked lips emerged from the yellow moon face smelling of piney gin. Her robe was thin and white with her sizable breasts perking out. Cynthia screamed “shitty shitty shitty” and mother rushed out and father came in dressed as the Lone Ranger which didn’t frighten us because we knew the Lone Ranger. This did not stop Cynthia from continuing to scream “shitty” and my father said to me “take care of her” though there was a nanny who drank and chewed Dentyne with sharp snaps to cover the smell. Grandfather’s “cabin” was large with at least twelve bedrooms with fireplaces and a motorized conveyor belt to carry wood into the basement and a small man who couldn’t talk to carry wood to the rooms when there were many guests from Chicago. Cynthia led me to a room where we could watch the party out in the yard where ugly pink tents were set up. I told Cynthia to stop saying shitty so she said “pissy.” We heard mother walking from room to room calling out “good night children” but we didn’t answer because we didn’t want to see her. We played Crazy Eights by the window hearing that Glenn Miller kind of music while hundreds of costumed people danced and drank. The nanny brought up hamburgers and Cynthia threw hers out the window onto people on the lawn below us. “What’s that?” a woman yelled. Later we heard steps in the hall and hid in a closet. A man in pioneer leather clothes and a raccoon hat quickly screwed a woman dressed as Little Bo Peep on the bed. When they left I was upset but Cynthia jumped up and down clapping her hands and laughing. I think I was upset because the woman was the mother of a boy I knew and the pioneer guy wasn’t her husband. Cynthia came to my room to sleep and locked the door with one of many keys she carried in a small red purse. One morning she had put an earthworm in Mother’s coffee. I had a gold railroad pocket watch that read three A.M. when we heard Mother stumbling outside rattling the door to come in and tuck us in but we didn’t answer.

  It was the same summer at storytelling time when a college kid hired for that purpose had us seated in a pergola, maybe two dozen kids, and told us that we all had an animal who lived within us and told us what to do. It was this animal who controlled and dictated our bad behavior. It was hard work to get rid of this animal and that was why we had to obey our parents and go to church. It was meant to be a scary story and the narrative was couched along a line wherein a naughty little boy’s animal g
rew so large it devoured him.

  Sitting there on the beach in the motherly moonlight I realized that I had never reached a point where I actually disbelieved in the existence of this animal. It was probably still there wrapped around my spine. This way lies madness, I thought, listening to the rush of the river over gravel as it braided itself out into the bay. I also never asked my mother a half dozen critical questions that had frequently absorbed me, among them what truly had happened to my dead uncle Richard whom Fred told me she had loved to distraction. I would also ask her why she feigned weakness to deny any accountability for her behavior while we were growing up. And why since she had her own money didn’t she leave my father after I was born, and then Cynthia, when his behavior was acknowledged to have become out of control? But then even the slightest personal question had made her flutter a hand in front of her face as if it held a fan. Didn’t she know that her avowed phantom pain medically referred to those who had lost limbs and felt pain in the specific area of their absence? When I was twelve I chanced to see her standing naked near her dresser one morning and thought her the most beautiful creature in the world. My cock stayed intermittently hard for days and felt as if it were leaking despite the fact that I knew this desire was wrong. Fred told me that her beauty began to decline the moment she decided to marry my father. Fred also told me when he was quite drunk that he had caught my mother and her college roommate nakedly entwined. He told me this when I was in college and though I was shocked I researched it and found that it wasn’t all that extraordinary. Humans are unable to discover unique behavior in their own species. When I was supposed to read Matthew Josephon’s Robber Barons for a history course, a book dealing with capitalist predatory behavior in the nineteenth century, I dropped the class because I didn’t want to think of other descendants in my same position. We want to keep our wounds as lucidly unique as possible, though sitting there on the beach I began to see it as a vain effort. I recalled seeing a book titled Father of the Atomic Bomb. Maybe I just wanted, absurdly enough, to take control of the past that was so directly painting the landscape of my present life. There was a glimmer of the idea that if I could see and understand this past clearly enough I could throw it away.