True North

by Jim Harrison

  Sitting there with an extra glass of red wine my brain began to get a little sore when I thought that people like Sprague, myself, and Vernice didn’t deserve the compassion that one must generally apply to other people. We set ourselves aside. What were Riva, or Susie, for that matter? How could I think of Susie as a “waitress”? Or what to call Riva whose obsession was to help the poor? Susie and Riva were drawn into their lives with open hearts. Sprague cast the coldest eye on everything and everyone except his dead wife, while Vernice insisted that her calling was poetry and the essence of the act of language, and her obsession with the intrinsic playfulness of words dominated her life. I was startled reading in a Sprague journal a quote from the Constance Garnett translation of Dostoyevsky that said, “Two plus two is the beginning of death.” At Michigan State my professor of European literature named Adrian Jaffe had quoted us the same sentence and told us to write a one-page explication. Jaffe spoke in ornate and convoluted paragraphs and intimidated all of us. Some class members met in a coffee shop and discussed the assignment until our heads ached. He dropped all of our papers in a wastebasket without comment. The quote became what Fred in a recent letter had called in his new practice a koan. When I read a note on “35,000,000 board feet from Baraga County” (which translates into immense acreage) I ran into the same wall.

  I put on a coat and took Carla for a late-night walk. It was in the mid-twenties and windless with the largest snowflakes possible softly falling and when I looked up at them falling out of the darkness under a streetlamp Carla also looked up. The snow made a half-inch of icy film on the sidewalk and, no longer worried about my ankle, I would trot and glide thirty feet or so. Carla as usual ran ahead to check for imaginary dangers. We went down to the harbor and looked at the mountains of ice piled up over the breakwater. The harbor was enshrouded with ice that wouldn’t begin to break up until April when from the city you could hear the ice break far out in Lake Superior like shots from big cannons. The lights of the business district two blocks away were baffled by the snow so that the old brick and stone buildings were blurred in their outlines except the granite Cohodas bank. It was all quite lovely and for a change I felt attached to my home place as if I were recognizing that some of the works of man were good indeed. It was easy to imagine the population as a Greek chorus commenting on one another and certain purported woeful citizens like my father and perhaps myself. I could see our house on the hill but quickly turned away and walked down an alley to a boat barn. We used to store our basically unused sailboat here. Through a window’s yellow square of light I could see Clarence putting away his tools. I opened the door and Carla backed away repelled by the smell of varnish. Clarence was at the end of his sixteen-hour workday and was pleased to see me.

  It was midnight and we decided to have a nightcap in a workingman’s bar where Clarence was sure Carla would be welcome. After I left Clarence would take her there for a cheeseburger. According to Clarence, because of their short lives dogs were due a birthday every two months or so. We drove to the bar in his ancient DeSoto which seemed to float through the snowy streets like a boat. At the tavern Clarence had his ginger ale and ordered the cheeseburger for Carla who drooled on the floor. I had a shot of cheap whiskey that reminded me of a childhood cough syrup. Clarence advised me to have a bouquet of flowers ready when I met Vernice.

  “You shouldn’t let your father steal from you the pleasure of having children,” he said.

  My stomach jumped at this but I let it pass. Jesse had told him that day that a doctor in Duluth had advised that my father be put away for a year. According to the doctor my father showed signs of being fifteen years older than he was. Clarence speculated that my father got out of college “fit as a fiddle” but then four years of World War II began the long slide.

  “Over there they got so hungry on them South Sea islands they fried up snakes. I guess that was Filipino country.” Clarence’s faraway look was amusing.

  My mind drifted away to my Mexico trip and something Fred said in his cups in Grand Marais years back when I admitted that Vera had shown me her bare butt. “Girls flirt,” he said. “When we were young we went on dates and French-kissed for hours, dry-humped and pawed. That’s a tradition with young people. Then your dad comes in as an anti-Dante closing the deal and destroying life’s poetry. I was eighteen when I finally got to make love. She was a Boston secretary in her mid-thirties and I got a thumping that put me on the right course. Sad to say there’s a hundred things that can go wrong with sex. If you avoid it you feel left out and that’s not a good motive. Who knows?”

  “Could she live in the U.P.?” Clarence asked.

  “No.” It was moments before I realized he was talking about Vernice.

  “Well, I doubt you could live anyplace else. There’s no point thinking about how you let Polly get away.”

  31

  When you get on a plane just before daylight it is easy to be filled with the Great Doubt, again the obvious question of “What is it that I’m doing?” For an ex-theological student there is the fourteenth-century English devotional work The Cloud of Unknowing. As I’ve said I haven’t traveled much. I was the first one in line at the departure gate, a full hour early, and moving backward I could remember Montana and Wyoming, Chicago many times. New York City once, and then Ohio. Legally I was a hick or a bumpkin. In an American literature course at Michigan State I had read Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad and the memory of it gave me pause.

  By unpleasant luck one of my mother’s ex–bridge player friends sat down beside me and quickly detached a price tag from the cuff of my new sport coat and a pin from the back of my new shirt collar. I pretended not to notice and when she began to gab at top speed I looked out the tiny oval window as if preoccupied with the dawn. My mind flooded itself with obtuse questions. What would I be doing if I didn’t have my project? Did I have a higher opinion of myself than was merited? When my Baptist preacher so long ago sucked on his lemon drops after hearing a complaint about my father why did he say, “The sins of the father are visited onto the sons until the seventh generation”? The plane trembled as its engines revved and the woman blabbered. Her son was on one-quarter disability as a Vietnam War veteran. I was 4-F due to my problematical ankle. Her son was the biggest jerk in high school. Everyone knew that he used to get blow jobs from a retarded girl. Once at a swimming party Donald had held him under water until he apologized for being alive. “You boys are still having problems,” she added.

  I looked down at the glow of the rising sun on the frozen Ford River and recognized the woebegone village of Sagola, the white landscape with the woods looking like chin bristles, and the few dark lines of roads. Of course once you’re on a plane it’s absurd to question if you belong there but I felt a deep sense of my awkwardness as if my parts might not be in their proper places. Coughlin called this “dislocation” but the word seemed fragile compared to the physical sensation. Maybe dislocation falsely assumes that there’s a place you should be other than my shrine of stumps or under the largest stump in the gully.

  “Something stinks,” the bridge player said.

  “It’s my sandwich made of Italian cold cuts.”

  “I was so sorry about your parents’ divorce. They were such a handsome couple.” She was trying to cut to the chase from a distance.

  “Win some, lose some,” I said as a petulant goad.

  “So many of our grand families have fallen into disarray.”

  I faked a yawn and slumped in the seat. I thought how easily hell can become other people. Or ourselves, 1 corrected. I struggled to remember our coffee shop quarrel about Marshall McLuhan in theological school. My favorite professor preferred an anchorite’s approach. How could you be of any help when you hadn’t worked out your own salvation with fear and trembling? McLuhan claimed that we had put our nervous systems outside ourselves. My professor claimed that you were lost if you joined the long, winding trail of civilization into this particular hell, but what was the choic
e? if I hid in the woods it was because the woods fit my character. The U.P. was a virtual hotbed of cranky hermits to whom the public culture was unacceptable or unendurable. I had met one in my wanderings who had cut and stacked three hundred cords of wood. He was at least fifteen years ahead on the heat supply for his shack, somewhat like a nuthatch who stores more than a dozen times its required food supply each year. “I like to split wood,” he said.

  I dozed and dreamt of some Objibwe friends of Donald’s over on Sugar Island. One evening we had stopped by and they were in a garage practicing a dance for an upcoming powwow. They had an old phonograph on which to play their drumming songs. I had been amazed at how well and intricately these large men danced, but in the dream the men were moving so fast that they were nearly invisible and when Donald and I turned to leave it was a previous century and we couldn’t find my truck, and there were no roads so we walked back home on a path. There were far too many birds in the air.

  When I awoke we were coming into Chicago. A few years before Clarence had shown me a coin from the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair his Chippewa grandfather had brought back after dancing there. I thought again of Peter White having the Indians dance at the Episcopal church and then the idea that since the Indians were part of the land they also got cleared away when the land got cleared. I had been amazed at Michigan State and at theological school about how no one seemed to know anything about American Indians except my professor Cleland. Out of sight, out of mind. History is the story of what men in suits did, said a radical friend. When the plane landed I thought that there was a specific etiology of the disease but then the disease quickly became an accepted economic reality.

  Trees could be regenerated but not forests. Indians could be exterminated or driven onto paltry reservations but they were strong and resourceful enough to remain tribes. Of course they were widely scorned for being poor but so were Jesus and his disciples and followers.

  When I got off the plane I walked up the concourse behind a pretty woman in a tight skirt. Invariably a religious thought was accompanied by earthly concerns. If my hearing were as fine as Carla’s I could have heard her butt cheeks squeak as she walked. I pulled abreast to make sure she was old enough for me to look at. Yes. She had a Roman nose and a few gray hairs. I faded back until it occurred to me that I was on a mission. I had a fresh journal and needed to sit down and rehearse what to say to both Vera and Vernice.

  32

  Chicago, March 2 (from travel journal)

  Mexican airline lounge. An elegant Mexican businessman drinks a rum and coke and tells me I must fish in Zihuatanejo where there are marlin. Pacific sailfish, roosterfish, etc. “It’s cheap for you rich Americans,” he says, again it’s the travel agent’s fault I’m in this fancy lounge where my stomach and brain quiver.

  “Vera, I’m sorry for what my father did.”

  “Vera, I apologize for what my father did to you.”

  “Vera, do you need some money?”

  “Vera, so this is my half brother.”

  “Vera, my father should die for what he did to you.”

  “Vera, I still love you.”

  “Vera, I have no idea what to say to you.”

  Only five people in first class. I’m embarrassed as usual but who else gives a fuck. Reading Black Elk Speaks which Donald sent as his favorite book. I’m back inside The Cloud of Unknowing. Also Wildlife in America by Matthiessen. Grim as the missing trees. The stewardess glows with a flowery scent.

  Mexico City airport: lost, confused after sleeping. At customs I say I’m here to see friends in Veracruz. American Mennonite family who farm in Mexico direct me to Veracruz connection. As I get closer my stomach eats itself.

  On the Veracruz plane there are only three passengers up front. A big fancy Latino woman covered with jewelry and across the aisle a Mexican man who is a version of my father wearing casual, understated, but elegant clothes, drinking coffee and reading U.S. News & World Report. Other than a few porters at the Mexico City airport there hasn’t been anyone, including on the plane from Chicago, who looks like Mexicans, mostly farm laborers like those I’ve seen in Ohio and near East Lansing, though I’ve seen a number of prosperous Mexicans in Chicago. I’ve had two shots of delicious tequila. I’ve fingered a Spanish phrase book until some pages are softened with sweat. I’ve made several copies of the three addresses Cynthia has given me for Vera who sometimes stays with relatives near Jalapa, or in Alvarado, though she mostly lives in Veracruz. I also have phone numbers though I don’t want to give her advance warning for fear she’ll run for it. The stewardess took my hand and showed me Mount Orizaba out a far window. It is somehow frightening with its peak covered with snow and descending to the greenest jungle with the top catching the twilight sun and the jungle in darkness. The stewardess writes down the Aztec name “Citlaltepetl.” I’m pleased to translate her meters into feet. The mountain is nearly nineteen thousand feet, so much larger than those of Montana and Wyoming, looking that way partly because it begins nearer sea level. She points ahead to the dark azure of the Caribbean and the lights of the city of Veracruz. She tells me that the jungle below us is full of jaguars and snakes and an eagle that steals babies. The businessman smiles and rolls his eyes. “Don’t believe that peasant bullshit,” he says. She flounces off insulted. When I enter the terminal I see that there’s a plane boarding for Havana and immediately want to go there. A man who is dark, short, thick, and muscular sidles up to me. He introduces himself in Texas English though he is clearly Mexican. I am suspicious, of course, but he gives the name of the Marquette travel agent. I am still suspicious and wonder if the travel agent told Jesse I was coming here though I asked him not to. I ask the man if he knows Jesse and he shakes his head though not convincingly. He calls himself Bob or “Roberto” if I wish. He says he is there to show me around. I decide to go along with it. I intend to call the travel agent in the morning though it occurs to me that Jesse goes through all of the bills that come to the bank for Cynthia and me. I give up. It is hot and humid and Bob’s car has air-conditioning. The soft music on the radio also softens me thinking of summer nights and the music coming from the window of Jesse’s garage apartment. Bob tells me he was a cowboy near Corpus Christi in Texas and that a horse pitched over and crushed his hips and he became a cook. He swerves off from the main road to the city and when he reaches a shore road he points to a place where the first cows were unloaded on the continent by Don Gregorio de Villa-Lobos in 1521. 1 see nothing but dark water. At the hotel I show Bob the three addresses for Vera and he is noncommittal but then affects bluster and says he can find anyone in the province of Veracruz. We will meet in the early morning.

  Out the window to the southeast the city lights I think I see turn out to be an enormous ship being loaded with semitrailers driving inside. I stand on a balcony with a table and chairs and am incapable of thought except that I’ve never been in a place so “elsewhere,” so without familiar signs except the ship which would be too large to pass through the Soo Locks. I call Jesse. He is evasive but then admits Roberto is a friend. Jesse says I would be “lost” without him. I give up and ask about Vera and he says he doesn’t know where she is because she’s angry with him as he won’t let her marry a man he dislikes. I read Cynthia’s three addresses and he says that they are all good possibilities. “Good luck,” he says.

  Vera must be thirty-one years old. I have a lump in my throat. There is a vase of unrecognizable flowers beside a bowl of unrecognizable fruit. I’m homesick and my sentimental bullshit repels me. My father got me here. A ship’s horn blows far off. I go to the balcony and there’s another enormous ship being escorted by tugs a mile out. This is where Cortés the invader from Spain landed for his conquest of Mexico. Cattle and Cortés.

  At dinner I examine the tentacles of an octopus. The waiter asks if something is wrong. I say that I’ve never seen an octopus. He can’t quite believe me. I eat a wonderful fish that is called snook in Florida. It is roasted with garlic and li
me juice. It’s called “roballo” here.

  Back in my room someone has brought a bottle of Cuban rum, limes, and a bucket of ice with three beers. The card says “Jesus,” Jesse’s real name. All the furniture is old but nice. I want to take a walk but I’m falling asleep. My shirt is wet so I take a shower and have a drink. In an ideal world I would call Vera and she would come sleep with me. This is my ideal world, not hers.

  Veracruz, March 3. I get up at four-thirty A.M. to escape my dreams. I call down and a young waiter who looks very much like a Chippewa brings me coffee and fruit. I sit on the balcony and watch the loading of the second ship. I’m trying desperately to be honest if only for reasons of clarity and balance. I want the equilibrium of dozing against a stump with a hand on Carla. The question is whether I’m here to see my first love or to apologize for my father’s behavior?

  An hour later and the first glimpse of light in the east. The answer to everything is everything. She’s sitting on my chest on the beach out near Presque Isle. She presses her sandy toes against my ears. Cynthia glances over, laughs, and stares at the sky. Then there is the screaming and Mother and Cynthia are in the hall and my father stumbles out with his wagging bloody dick. Now I remember he fell to one knee, not with wild but with dead eyes. It’s odd to remember something new.

  When it’s light enough I leave my hotel Emporio making sure I know where it is. It’s only six A.M. and the city’s not really awake. I walk south along a black sand beach for a half hour then reverse myself to watch the ship being loaded while sitting on a bench on the malecón. Suddenly I am struck by the enormity of what I don’t know. Sometimes I think I know a great deal but now on the bench it disappears. It is possible to loosen up and tighten at the same time. Bits and pieces of unconnected knowledge flow out of me and into the questionable water of the harbor. If the first cattle on the continent were unloaded here it spawned hundreds of thousands of cowboys and much of the culture of the American West. For a long time there were more cattle than people. The alpha mogul, the urpredator, my great-grandfather and his cohorts drag along a hundred thousand loggers and miners who now have a livelihood. Our young lawyer said they taught human geography at the University of Chicago. Where people are and why and how they got there. Coughlin says our bodies are our truest homes. I’m here in Veracruz within my one-hundred-eighty-pound home. I have eyes and a memory and I’m looking for Vera. I’m unsure of how my parents got the way they are, but I’m pretty sure about myself. I understand Cynthia and Polly fairly well, less so Vernice and my dead Laurie. Clarence has stacks and stacks of gardening magazines and seed catalogs. He can recite ornamental shrubs and flowers by the hundreds. “It’s my line of work,” he says. He and Mother would spend hours deciding what to plant next. Every time I’ve thought I had Jesse figured out I didn’t. Why didn’t he quit when his daughter was raped? There is the idea that this maze I live within is not designed to be escaped. It’s life. The stevedores, the dock workers that I watch, are earning their daily bread as they used to say. My body is absurdly relaxed. I’m not even one of the smallest of the household gods the Greeks invented. I can’t see far and wide.