True North

by Jim Harrison

  I dropped off Mrs. Plunkett back home then retrieved Susie from the restaurant. She asked if I minded if we stopped at a bowling party. I was already aroused but managed to conceal my lack of enthusiasm. At the bowling alley there were at least a dozen of my classmates but none with which I had more than a passing acquaintance except for Glenn who was sullen and barely coherent. There was general silence after Glenn bellowed, “This big shot is slumming and he’s after Susie’s pussy,” but then Clyde who I remembered as an effective tackle on the football team told Glenn to shut up. Despite his state I sat down beside him and had a beer and he warmed up talking about our fishing and the summer working in Iron Mountain. He was sorry about Polly and said he had lost two wives who thought they could wean him from booze. Of course I didn’t know how to bowl and we left after I shook hands with everyone. In the car Susie remarked that “they weren’t going to let you be a person like everyone else.” I already knew I was largely regarded as a nut case around Marquette, though a much more benign type than my father. Before we got out of my truck at Susie’s house she asked if I minded if we made love and I said I sort of had it in mind. I had detected that our pass through the bowling alley had been to make one of the men at the party jealous, hence more interested in her.

  I didn’t get home until three in the morning and when I got out of the truck in the wintry alley I was happy indeed. Jesse’s light in the garage apartment came on and I waved up at him.

  I won the ten-mile snowshoe race though I was nearly ten minutes late at the start. There were a dozen other competitors and I was plainly the only entrant who had been on snowshoes for most of the last ninety days. I passed the surprised young lawyer at a dead run about a mile from the finish line. It was all a fresh emotion to me because I couldn’t remember having won a contest in my life. Actually it was by default in that throughout the course I was overwhelmed by a series of strange insights and wasn’t conscious of the race. It occurred to me that I was three people instead of the one I needed to be. This had started in a dream and was revivified in the race. Along with this there were the images that the destruction of God, nature, and love were a living tradition. In the dream we ate them up and shit them out in a desiccated form. All of this was blurred by the texture of dreaming and I wasn’t really convinced there was a meaning. Three-quarters of the way through the race when I was soaked with sweat the world appeared to have expanded again as it had done that day with Fred after leaving Cincinnati and driving along the Ohio River. For a long stretch I didn’t remember my snowshoes touching the ground. I had read about athletes feeling that they were “in the zone” and that must be the experience I was having. I became fully conscious only when I passed through a length of pink yarn stretched across the finish line. There was a small group of the wives and friends of the entrants and they clapped and an older man handed me a can of very cold beer, the best one of my life. I wavered back and forth between thinking hard and shaking hands. How could all of this have been precipitated by taking Mrs. Plunkett out for a birthday dinner, a bowling party, making love to Susie, and a snowshoe race? I loved the comic aspect of it. When I went over to my truck and wiped off my sweating face with paper towels I returned to a waking sense of the dream where my first and lowest person was an ugly howling boy trying to somehow detach the animal from his spine and wanting to kill his father. The second and middle person wore welder’s goggles and was a whiny drudge who read and wrote around the clock with false passion and an air of phony kindness. The third person was a smaller version of the second and the facial features were too sanded or burnished as in a not quite finished painting. This third person’s mind whirled with images of Polly and Vernice and Cynthia and remembered beautiful landscapes, even from youth, that I hadn’t noticed when I saw them. Obviously I didn’t know what to make of it. How could you eat God or nature or love and shit them out?

  The young lawyer, Ted by name, tapped me on the shoulder and I barely had the sense to recognize him. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be alone so I invited him and his wife over. Mrs. Plunkett was merrily hungover and made us lunch. Ted mentioned that he kept an eye on the family paperwork dealing with Cynthia and me and was sure that since my father was guilty of fiduciary malfeasance or some legal term like that he could get a court to put some sort of lien on any future property sales until the matter was resolved. Ted’s wife criticized him for talking business on a Saturday. I let the matter drop because I couldn’t imagine being in a courtroom with my father. I would certainly rather go without the money than do further damage to myself.

  30

  On a Monday morning I got Mrs. Plunkett to call Vernice’s university press and pretend she was a sick aunt who needed to get in touch with her niece. Vernice and her poet were living in Aix-en-Provence where he was a guest professor at the university.

  I got out the world atlas only to find locations weren’t quite where I expected them to be. My mother was spending two months in Tucson and I thought of stopping by to see her but Veracruz was well to the east down in Mexico, almost on a vertical line south of Houston. I also remembered my mother’s tearful reaction when I had mentioned going south to ask forgiveness of Vera. France was another matter but then there would obviously be a plane from Mexico City. For the first time I felt absurdly sunk in the Upper Peninsula. When my parents wanted Cynthia and me to join a trip to Europe organized by a cousin from Lake Forest it was out of the question primarily because they wanted us to go. I decided not to dwell on this because it painfully recalled Vernice’s schoolmarm lecture on living my life as a reaction to my father. I got an early start.

  I had breakfast with Clarence and Jesse before going to the travel agent. I had decided not to tell Jesse that I was going to visit his daughter because I mostly didn’t want to be dissuaded. I told them I was on my way to the travel agent to book a flight to France to see a woman and they were delighted at the idea, having briefly met Vernice. Clarence had been up most of the moonlit night following his trap line and I watched him eat three pork chops with his eggs and potatoes, then fall half asleep. I had an idle insight on greed. If there were six hungry people at a table and one man grabbed all six pork chops for himself that would be greed. If Clarence had three pork chops by himself that was hunger. I didn’t want to think about how many people he was supporting or Jesse for that matter. When I was young I was puzzled by what to answer schoolmates when they asked what my father did for a living. My mother told me to say “investments.” This didn’t seem clear so I turned as usual to Jesse. He was a famous poker player in a local Tuesday night game and explained it in those terms. An investment is like a card you bet on and you hope this card helps you win money. I was a little disappointed that that’s all my father did.

  At the travel agent’s I had to listen to an older man who was said to be gay, or “light in his loafers,” as they say locally, reminisce on how much my family used to travel “hither and yon.” Rather than listening I looked at travel posters which ended up costing a lot of extra money because the agent assumed I wanted to travel in the manner of my parents. Later on I felt limp with stupidity over this matter. Clarence was always saying “it pays to listen” but I hadn’t learned this lesson. I hadn’t thought about the passport question but remembered I had gotten one in Chicago with Polly for a planned trip to the Holy Land with a group of theological students but then our divorce interfered.

  I felt a little manic and flighty but still sure of myself. There was a slight thaw and when I took Carla down to the beach she found a half-frozen rotting fish in the heaps of drift ice and I couldn’t get it away from her. I supposed that with dogs greed was a survival mechanism. I would also have to bathe her because after a few tentative bites she rolled on the stinking fish. When I chased her off she had the attitude of go ahead and take it, it’s yours. She slept on the end of the bed so I’d have to do something about the smell.

  I called Coughlin on his lunch hour and told him I was going on a Mexico-and-France trip but held
off on my puzzling dreams. I had described one to him the week before about falling off a cliff on Presque Isle with all of my journals in my arms. I had ended up nearly dead but my journals were okay. This was charmlessly obvious, like another where I dreamt there were three blockages in my spine preventing the free flow of whatever. We talked a few minutes about our plan to tow a johnboat, or strap it on the camper roof, to Montana the following late summer to fish long stretches of the Yellowstone and upper Missouri. He had found out this wasn’t safe because of turbulent waters and we agreed to split the cost of a high-prowed Mackenzie drift boat. He then posed a question I hadn’t thought about. How did I feel about all of the people in the burgeoning environmental movement who were also examining the logging and mining past in the U.P.? One group had successfully sued to stop a mining company from dumping millions of tons of taconite ore waste into Lake Superior. I said I had had some correspondence with other people in this category and it didn’t bother me. I had no feeling that they were poaching on my territory because the prominent difference was that it was my relatives that had done the dirty deeds. The subject was intimate to me. I was trying to subdue the family trait of megalomania and limit my inquiry. “What comes afterward? History is taking place in your head. Life is outside.” I answered that he was talking to a man who had gone to a bowling party, slept with a waitress, won a snowshoe race, and was about to bathe a dog. He thought that was a pretty good list.

  While I was bathing Carla Riva called and Carla jumped out of the tub and crawled under the bed which I had come to think of as an intelligent way for any young mammal to deal with an unpleasant reality. All kids have looked up at those coiled springs and out at the shoes of the searcher. Riva said she had misplaced Fred’s address but after talking to her for a few minutes I doubted a lost number as her excuse to call. She told me that she had gone home for two weeks and run into her first love who had been violent with her in high school. He seemed to have changed dramatically so she slept with him and had become very distressed with herself. I couldn’t quite believe that she seemed to be asking me for counsel. I was sitting at my desk and looking at Carla staring at me from under the bed. I couldn’t bear to ask Riva how her evening had turned out though I suspected poorly. We talked about how errant human behavior could become. I said I was going to Mexico to see Vera and she said I still felt badly because I had probably still “wanted Vera’s ass.” I had long since admitted that to myself but said, “I didn’t do it. What you don’t do is pretty important.” She laughed and agreed, then thanked me for listening. She was working in Washington, D.C., but had a chance for a job she very much wanted in Memphis. I questioned this and she said that there was more oxygen at the scene of the crime. Washington was too metronomic for her taste. The men were “dumpy bureaucratic fucks.” I suddenly remembered a line I had read from one of Vernice’s favorite poets, the inscrutable Rilke, “Only in the rat race of the arena can the heart learn to beat.” Riva liked that but then asked why I was still hanging out in the woods.

  Carla wouldn’t come out from under the bed so I brought her dinner up. Susie’s sister was taking care of her kids so she came over for the hour she had off between her jobs as a typist and waitress. She was a little nervous and told me that when she was a kid all her friends thought our house was haunted because my ancestors were bad. She was polite enough not to bring up any gossip about my father. Carla didn’t want Susie in my room. She growled so loudly when we sat on the bed that I closed the door on her and we went to Cynthia’s room. When she was taking her clothes off Susie asked me to keep an eye out for someone she could marry. She was tired of working seventy hours a week at two jobs. This managed to cool my erotic energies and I was struck by the idea that within an hour I was being asked to help out two women, not including Carla who was still pissed at me. If you step out in the daylight you are called upon. For Susie I thought about Clarence’s nephew who had moved back home from Detroit after learning how to become a top Chevrolet mechanic.

  “Does he have to be lily white?” I asked.

  “Who?” She was nude on her back and running a finger down my spine.

  “This husband I’m supposed to find for you.”

  “Indian or black or what?”

  “I think his dad was part black from Sawyer and the mother is mostly Indian with a bit of Finn thrown in.” Sawyer is the local air force base.

  “That doesn’t sound too bad. Is he cute?”

  “Not to me but probably to you. He played the trumpet and basketball. About six feet with good teeth. You’ll have to check out his dick yourself. 1 know he’s looking.”

  She laughed which enlivened me. We could hear Carla baying in the other room.

  I had a strangely revelatory evening when Susie left. It was Mrs. Plunkett’s night off in which she took part in a senior’s bowling league. She was proud of the gold-colored bowling ball I had bought her for Christmas though she admitted it hadn’t improved her score. All of the “girls” on her team envied it. While I heated up some meatballs and sauce I wondered at the idea of seventy-year-old ladies still referring to themselves as girls. But they were. In December I had gone to a game dinner with Clarence. He said, “Us boys are going to cook up some deer meat, partridge, and ducks.”

  I went into the den for a few minutes and leafed through a thousand pages of notes I had typed up on my old manual Olivetti for my project. I had abandoned them this winter in favor of simply “seeing” what had been done. I had stood on top of the false mountains of tailings in Republic with Carla and seen a long way. She didn’t like it because there was no animal scent up there.

  I now saw clearly why the thousand pages were meaningless except as a nominal background. I recalled how when young I had dropped out of Scouts because I didn’t like learning to tie knots and march. In winter we’d march up and down the gymnasium ten abreast in each row. Once I carried the American flag. Marching was embarrassing and so was group singing when my mother forced me to join the boy’s choir at the Episcopal church, or in school when we had to sing “Give My Regards to Broadway.”

  It was all mechanistic. And so were my thousand pages of material, all technical in detail except for a sprinkling of anecdotes from old loggers and miners. There were surveyor’s details, township and county grids, production graphs, shaded tree species maps, latitudes and longitudes, numerical rows of millions of board feet per family area.

  Back in the kitchen I had to cook a fresh batch of noodles because the first had turned to putty. This time I stared at the boiling water and got them perfect.

  I speculated that maybe my project was a spiritual problem though I cautioned myself against leaping to conclusions that might negate years of work. All of the numbers were not so much lies but irrelevant in terms of the history of my family, not to speak of the history of other dominant families. At base my battle against my father, and consequently my battle against my grandfather and great-grandfather, was described in the wrong language. Their language of conquest was the language of war. And my vocabulary, the language of my project thus far, was on the same level of discourse which perhaps made it hopeless. I was abruptly sure that this was what Vernice had meant. I was dealing with the language of the enemy. Greed was a spiritual problem that gradually overwhelmed the economic realities of the area. My great-grandfather’s warlike language of conquest fluidly drew God into his business tribulations.

  I stopped eating my spaghetti to find a passage of his in the den: “With God’s help I will beat Felch to that thirty thousand acres south of the Ford River.” The fact that he failed in this particular case goaded him to further religiosity. A month later he won out against Felch by bribing corrupt surveyors who were supposedly working for the state of Michigan. If you won the right to timber something as minimal as a section, 640 acres, you invariably tried to cut the contiguous sections without the theft being immediately detected. The obvious spiritual crime was involving God in the predatory violence as if He were directly coo
perating in your theocratic trance. In reference to my awful dream, their behavior was obviously turning God into mere human shit. This all lacked the subtlety of my spaghetti and meatballs, my glass of red wine. I reminded myself to recheck Sprague’s journal of his 1920 trip to France where he compared many post—World War I landscapes, the massive carnage of the natural world, to the timbering areas around Ontonogan where the landscape had been “shredded” of beauty. He had also compared an area of France, I think it was called Belleau Wood, to his own father’s reminiscences about the great Peshtigo fire that had killed twelve hundred people near the Michigan-Wisconsin border. It couldn’t accurately be called a forest fire because the area had already been timbered. What burned with inconceivable intensity were the leftover tops of trees and logging detritus. Local rivers were said to boil around the poor souls who jumped in and a train full of escapees caught fire. Kegs of nails in a local hardware store turned solid after their molten state and flaming birds crisscrossed the sky. The bones of many were no more than ash heaps.

  At times when I read Sprague’s journal I thought of Vernice’s aesthetic principles that allowed hyperbole if it read well. In contrast to my own notes and prose, and certainly including the journals and ledgers of my grandfather and great-grandfather, Sprague’s journals reflected his interest in painting and art collecting. He had clearly placed himself by choice in a different category than anyone else in his extended family and I supposed it was partly our similarity that caused him to will me his cabin.