True North

by Jim Harrison

  It was a warm night and we took a dip after dinner. There was a heavy thrashing in the brush across the river and Carla scooted back toward the cabin. Vernice was alarmed and I said that it was only a harmless bear that was doubtless attracted by his or her first whiff of garlic. When she asked how I knew it was harmless I said that if it was the one rogue out of a hundred thousand black bears it would have been in our laps by now. Without the sun we shivered in the cold water and began to make love again but the mosquitoes drove us inside. I was disappointed when she wouldn’t sleep with me but she said that on no condition would she sleep overnight with anyone. It was grand to make love with bodies made cool by the river water, though when I drifted off to sleep there were painful memories of Laurie. Everything is attached and nothing is free, an odd thought for a geometrical man.

  25

  Despite the range of this pleasure we were a little slow and depressed in the morning, perhaps a trace of the sadness in knowing that despite our better human instincts we would push everything we had away and follow our own courses that we had embedded in ourselves so deeply, the willful loneliness that we could not be deterred by the possibility, maybe the probability, of loving each other. Maybe people used to fall in love despite having invented such barriers. Maybe the culture had begun to subtly teach that this servitude to ambition was the highest hope. Maybe at one time more people were just people, but perhaps neither of us had ever tried to be simply people. And maybe we were the kind of people that it was easy for the culture to denature. When we were children we were errant enough to wish to be birds for the day but there’s nothing easier to lose than playfulness.

  There was a brisk south wind early in the morning. I stood at the window watching Vernice drinking coffee on the riverbank, the breeze fluttering her hair, with Carla leaning against her leg. I knew the strength of the south wind would bring thunderstorms so I was packing my light rain jacket plus a poncho for Vernice. Breakfast had become a near disaster when I took out my largest map with its superimposed meticulous grid lines covering the entire Upper Peninsula. There were shaded areas and stickers to identify all of the family’s logging and mining activities. After showing it to Vernice I folded the map and took out another which was a more detailed blowup of the central U.P. area where we were now, superimposed on state police county maps so I could navigate the area.

  She nastily made it clear that she wasn’t a map person, teasing me without humor for being an anal compulsive or an anal retentive, I forget which. I was pissed off but kept it under control. My map work had made me quite proud of myself. Then without asking she began to read the newest of my stack of journals. I felt like I was watching a professor read a term paper dear to my heart. She read without comment a full fifteen minutes and I started packing for the hike out of sheer nervousness.

  “Well, the actual stories and details you’ve collected are fine, but everything else you’ve written is in that ricky-ticky old-time historical talk. You’re pulling all of your punches before you even throw them. Why be so timid? You’re setting up some dead people to murder them. At this rate you’ll finish in fifty years just before you drop dead yourself. Here’s an idea. Watch now.” She drew a lateral line though the center of adjoining grids which were partly based on townships, many of them totally unoccupied. Her forefinger followed log roads as much as possible. “Everything you’ve done so far meanders or vaguely resembles concentric circles. You’d be better off for effect just counting stumps, and adding severed limbs and crushed bodies from the stories. Thirty bucks a month and one day off to ‘burn out the grease’ in the closest tavern. That’s a nifty detail. Why the fuck call whorehouses ‘houses of ill repute’?”

  “May I read your poetry?” I asked petulantly but immediately regretted it.

  She poured another cup of coffee while considering the question in its highest form rather than in the mean spirit in which it was asked. “No. I’m curious about your world and you’re not curious about mine.” She went outside and I finished packing. I couldn’t help but smile at the mental battering I had taken in the past thirty or so hours. I was waddling like a duck through a gauntlet of my own possible irrelevancy. There she was out the window, the Queen of Poetry, an answered prayer to be sure, and I was looking at her wondering how many years it might take for me to digest everything she had said to me. At least I had told her to wear long pants today instead of shorts.

  I retraced the path I had taken when I got lost only backward, skirting along a ridge near the gully so we could avoid the swamp. The deepest thickets distressed her so I tried to stay on higher ground while still keeping my bearings. Vernice wanted to carry Carla to see “what it felt like.” After about an hour when I could see my great mother of stumps in the gully in the distance I skirted it to save it for last, and we entered the clearing which I thought of as a shrine of gorgeous stumps. Naturally I was testing her but once more she was ahead of me. The clearing had released her from the claustrophobia she had felt in the dense forest. She danced around, with Carla barking from the papoose.

  “Fabulous! Sell your dad’s wine collection and buy this field, what is it, forty acres? Build yourself a cabin. You’ve already told me how we’ve destroyed religion and nature. It’s time to save yourself, kiddo.”

  She sat down against a stump, took her shoes and socks off, and rubbed her feet in the soft green grass. I sat down beside her and did the same. I couldn’t remember doing so since childhood and the feeling was exquisite, the grass bunches rubbing against your bare instep so that you felt your toes might cramp from pleasure. I was only mildly troubled when I glanced at Vernice’s face and saw she had disappeared again God knows where. Evidently being called to be a poet in her terms was similar to being a religious ecstatic like a pillar saint or a Sufi whirling dervish. The southern breeze was brisk enough to keep the black flies and mosquitoes away so she took off her shirt and bra and itched her breasts and tummy against the grass, then off came her trousers and panties. I was becoming aroused but when I leaned toward her she shook her head no. “I’m just having my first grass bath,” she said.

  Carla heard the thunder first which frightened her, and within a few minutes we heard it too, the alarming violence that often ended a heat wave this far north. I led the way to my mother of stumps the size of which delighted Vernice. We crawled in dampened by the first drops of rain and then the sky truly unloaded so that looking out through the cracks between roots the world had vanished in the sheets of rain. Vernice held Carla, who was horrified by the thunder claps, tight to her chest. Luckily the stump’s protection had allowed the earth to mound up compared to its sides because wide rivulets of water were running down the gully on both sides of us. Vernice talked about a tornado she had seen at her grandmother’s near Springfield, Missouri, and then wondered aloud just what Carla thought the thunder might be. After fifteen minutes or so the storm lessened somewhat but I pointed out we were lucky we weren’t in the path of a bank of clouds to the west which were pitch-black with intermittent wide streaks of yellow lightning which exploded toward the ground. I curled up with my head in her lap and began nuzzling her belly but she said, “Stop it, you can’t fuck in your church.” My disappointment was alleviated when she thanked me ever so slightly for showing her “another world.” We talked then about how we think of ourselves as Americans but there are many worlds in the United States if you stray very far from freeways and stay away from television.

  26

  We had only one more quarrel and that took place the next afternoon. Vernice wanted to work on what she called her “stuff” and I needed to get started on the roofing job and Mick had brought everything but a hammer. I was surprised when she said she as the daughter of a small-town contractor could easily show me how to do the job. She had worked with her father and youngest brother for a couple of summers during high school and had roofed many houses. I supposed that was what made her body so illusively strong remembering what a summer with a shovel had done to my
own body. She gave me a grocery list and off I went.

  There was a letter from Cynthia and also one from Fred. Cynthia said that our “beloved” father had won early release, returned to Key West, then broke parole (he was forbidden to go to bars) and was back in the slammer for ninety days. It was obvious to Cynthia that he would have to seek greener pastures by getting out of the state of Florida. The letter from Fred was much more troubling. After a month he had “jumped over the convent walls” of the alcohol clinic. He was fucking sick of therapy of any kind and wanted to go home after a trip north after which through the influence of his Columbus friend he intended to enroll in a Zen monastery in Japan. The very idea boggled me. I suspected that he was back on the booze but he said he wasn’t.

  When I got back to the shack with two hammers and a bag of groceries she was irked because I had bought plain beer rather than the dark beer she had written on my list. She was making a Belgian beef stew called carbonnade and though the dish was still a possibility the dark beer would have been far better. During this lecture I could see the girl who when pushed had whipped her brothers into shape.

  She was just getting started. In my absence she had flipped through my whole stack of journals, which I had begun at sixteen. They covered nearly ten years but it was plain to her that rather than progressing I was moving backward in the manner of a junior Frantz Fanon. I was obviously “too dry behind the ears” to be dealing with such large material. I was preaching a half-baked sententious sermon to myself as if I wasn’t quite convinced. I sounded like I was writing about Cortés’s invasion of Mexico. Her trump card was that thousands of people had probably known the evidence but saw the story quite differently. Trees, iron ore, and copper weren’t people. Why had I glossed over the destruction or the removal of the indigenous population, the Indians? Again, the details and the stories were interesting but I was approaching the material like a not very intelligent Lutheran minister. I saw that she was only halfway down the list she had made so I bolted.

  I fulfilled my genetic promise by getting drunk at the tavern and falling asleep down on the beach where some locals were having a bonfire and party. I tried to make love to Shirley but I had had too much to drink. I went into Lake Superior with my clothes on to sober up but it didn’t work. When I woke up cold and wet it was nearly dawn and my head had cleared up enough to drive back to the cabin. Carla barked wildly but Vernice pretended she was asleep.

  When I got up at midmorning she was off somewhere with Carla. There was a note on the kitchen counter saying, “I’ve been too hard on you. Sorry.” I was feeling too ill to care but warmed up some of her beef stew, then went to work tearing off the old tar-paper roofing by scraping it up with a shovel. I barely made it down the ladder to vomit. This drinking takes practice I thought while brushing my teeth. I wasn’t up to getting back on the ladder so waded the river and took a hike in fresh territory in country my family hadn’t timbered. Only I couldn’t tell because the same stumps were there, cut by the ancestors of a family who lived down the street from us in Marquette. I could imagine what kind of ruthless quarreling had gone on between our great-grandfathers.

  In the next five days before we left for the Marquette airport we had a good time dealing with nothing. This was her idea that she finally admitted she’d gotten from her parents who, when pushed to the wall by the larger issues of this life that they were powerless to resolve, retreated into the lower range of day-to-day obligations.

  We finished the roof late on the first evening. In the following days we had left I taught her the rudiments of fly-fishing which she enjoyed. Each early morning we drove farther south to hike out a fresh grid for my project without mentioning the possible absurdity, then when we finished by midafternoon we’d row and fish. We continued to make love at least twice a day but on the lighter side and no longer as though the act were the last source of oxygen on earth. At my insistence she gave me a short reading list that might help me connect with what she was all about. On our last evening when she was a bit rosy with wine she said she thought she might have a child someday without getting married, and I dumbly repeated that I had read that every child needs a father. She didn’t say “like you” but we sat there in silence for a full minute before we started laughing. She said that a more ill-suited couple than we were couldn’t be invented. I pretended that I agreed but I didn’t. I now thought that I loved her far more than during our first wilder days. I thought it was unlikely I’d ever again meet a woman who was so totally alive and I wanted to hold on though I could see that she was more than ready to go.

  By chance Fred showed up late the next morning only an hour before we had to leave for the airport. He looked frail but appeared quite happy. When Vernice came around the corner of the cabin Fred acted for a moment like he was seeing a ghost, then looked at me as if I had pulled a fast one, though he was pleased when she hugged him.

  “Your nephew is a fine young man except that he wants to fuck all the time,” she teased.

  “How ugly. You must visit me in the monastery. A free trip to Hawaii.”

  Since the letter Fred had changed plans, deciding to study with a roshi named Aitken in Hawaii. If he decided to change his mind Japan would be too far away. He said that he was permanently fatigued with religion but wanted to achieve consciousness before he died. Ever the virago, Vernice said she had read that many Zen people were in favor of Japanese conquest during World War II.

  “I don’t expect more from any form of religion than I expect from people. Grandeur wallowing in smut.”

  Vernice took out her notebook and wrote this down. I realized it wasn’t so much that Fred had become frail but that his face had lost weight except for his bulbous nose.

  “Riva said she’d come back to me if I were dry for a year, but then on and on into eternity. I thought of camping on Everest but the permits were too expensive.”

  “Should I take the beer in the refrigerator?” Naturally I was concerned.

  “No, I carry a full bottle of whiskey just to remind me of my past. It’s to be drunk if my plane starts falling from the sky. That sort of thing. By the way, have you finished your history of America?”

  “Not quite.” It dawned on me that I was being traded male abrasiveness for female. I stood there staring across the river at a birch tree with a peculiar shape. I had found a woman who could gracefully handle what I was but then I wasn’t enough for her. At that moment I lost several degrees of my inner temperature as if my brain were beating a retreat back to my life before Vernice. I didn’t have to look far for what was lacking in me because she had been so explicit. The sudden question of to what extent was I a correctable item froze me in place until Vernice waved a hand in front of me to bring me back to earth.

  Halfway to Marquette I had developed full-blown jitters, a jumping stomach, a lump beneath my breastbone, a mind fixed on the idea that you don’t really know what you have until it starts to go away. Vernice was revising my reading list with the shoe off her left foot diddling the radio dials with her toes. She was wearing the light floral summer skirt that I met her in and it had fallen up her thigh to the degree that I kept my eyes on the road to avoid a collision.

  We had left early because Vernice wanted to see my father’s wine cellar. I felt no urge to talk early in the two-hour drive but it irritated me that she was writing in her notebook rather than speaking to me.

  “What are you writing?’

  “Piths, gists, images, speculations on the nature of nature. I wish we hadn’t left Carla with Fred. I already miss her.”

  I couldn’t think of a single appropriate thing to say. When we pulled up in the alley behind our home Clarence was tending the flower bed. The peonies were lavish.

  “I didn’t think it would be this fucking ritzy.” Vernice bounded out and shook Clarence’s hand.

  “You’re a beautiful woman,” said Clarence in his flat, even voice. She was a little taken aback as many were by his directness. He said Jesse had gone back to
Veracruz early.

  She was slightly nervous in the house, identifying certain pieces of furniture and early American landscapes I had always ignored. I would never have known where the key to the wine cellar was located except that Cynthia had shown me where she had found it when she was about twelve, though she told me her boyfriends had complained that French wine wasn’t sweet enough. The key was kept on a tiny hook behind my father’s framed Yale diploma. Magna cum laude, indeed.

  She was impressed by the wine cellar to the point that it embarrassed me. There were a number of cases of brandies and ports from before World War I that my grandfather had left, also wine from that era that Vernice thought might have gone bad. I admitted that I hadn’t been here since childhood. Once more her interest in something well outside myself irked me. I suggested that I ship the whole collection to her in Chicago where she could sell it and we’d split the money, and then she would go live in France for a year or so which was her avowed intention.

  “Actually several years. But it’s not yours to sell, it’s your dad’s.”

  I reminded her that I had told her about how my cabin near Ontonagon had been stolen out from under me, adding that much of the money from a trust for Cynthia and me was also missing. I didn’t want to say the large amount.

  “How much?” she asked, wiping off a label with a tissue from her purse so she could read it.

  “The last I heard about three million bucks is down to a few hundred grand. It was to be split with Cynthia when I reached thirty.”

  “What were you going to do with it?” She seemed to be cherishing two particular bottles so I stuffed them in her big purse. I didn’t answer the question clearly because I didn’t know how. There was dirty and clean money, or real dirty money and relatively clean money.