True North

by Jim Harrison

  Mrs. Plunkett was ready for me with a batch of lasagna. Clarence wasn’t feeling well and had gone home at noon which was unheard of. I went out to Jesse’s apartment and for a change he invited me in. He refused my invitation for dinner but immediately opened the fine bottle of brandy I had bought him at Orly. He was tired, pissed off, nearly distraught, dropping the guard I was familiar with since I was a child. After I had left Vera had run off to Oaxaca with her schoolteacher and her son had decided to stay on the coffee farm with an uncle and aunt. Jesse admitted he was cash strapped because my father hadn’t paid him in nearly a year. His businesses were fine but he wished to help Vera and her husband to get set up in Oaxaca despite being angry with her. He was surprised and nonplussed when I offered to loan or give him some money for Vera. He asked how Vera looked, pouring us another brandy.

  “Beautiful. I would have married her in a moment even though her son is my brother.” It was hard to be light about a matter of which we had never spoken but thought fuck it and barged ahead. “I was surprised you didn’t quit.” It was a long time but that night was palpable in the room.

  “Taking care of my family was more important than my anger.” It was all he would say.

  “I wanted to kill him. I thought about it for years. I loved her.”

  Jesse nodded in agreement as if my impulse to murder my father was the most logical thing possible. The idea of “what might have been” brought us into a long silence. I turned down a third brandy which any fool would want considering what we were talking about. “Please call him and tell him I will be there in the afternoon. Tell him he must be honest with me or I’ll take his land in court.” Tears rose in my eyes but I didn’t know if they were from anger or from finally doing something about it. I realized many sons simply ran away but my mind would have been too heavy to carry along.

  While eating too much lasagna with Carla by my side I opened a note from Mick over in Grand Marais that said he thought the deer shack would be coming up for sale pretty soon. The hunting group had suffered quarrels and were splitting up. He thought I could get the shack and ten acres on the river for about fifteen grand cash. To the disapproval of Mrs. Plunkett I called Mick during dinner and said I wanted the place very badly and to keep in touch. Carla was drooling on the floor beside my chair so I made up a saucer of lasagna. She always had a hankering for Italian food and I supposed that garlic struck her nose affably. In Sprague’s journals he mentioned how his dog liked the Cornish meat pies called pasties. The only other piece of mail of any consequence was a book from Fred in Hawaii, The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels which concerned itself with the Nag Hammadi papyrus manuscripts dug up in Egypt. Fred’s note said, “This is you. Read it slowly.” if he got anymore cryptic in his Zendo he would end up saying nothing at all though the majority of our talk is made soundlessly to ourselves.

  I was abruptly tired but figured it was four A.M. in France so went to bed with my Elaine Pagels book. I suppose that few would think a book called The Gnostic Gospels was bedtime reading but Fred’s note intrigued me despite the fact that my eyeballs were hot and grainy and there was a trace of Meriam’s murky perfume on my skin. Of course it was midwestern childish of me to still think of sex as some sort of perverse opposite of religion, a schism that the Baptists and most other denominations seemed to encourage. The fact that I was in tears by the time I finished the book’s short introduction was the rawest reminder possible of my own fragility, which was untouched by my recent feeling of decisiveness:

  Jesus said, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

  I thought I would levitate with this quote that early Christian leaders had decided to leave out of the Gospels from the discarded Gospel of Philip. I read on to a quote from Theodotus who said that a gnostic was one who had come to understand: “who we were, and what we have become; where we were … whether we are hastening; from what we are being released; what birth is, and what is rebirth.”

  A following quote by a gnostic named Monoimus indicated that you had to find God in your “self”:

  Abandon the search for God and the creation and other matters of a similar sort. Look for him by taking yourself as the starting point. Learn who it is within you who makes everything his own and says, “My God, my mind, my thought, my soul, my body.” Learn the sources of sorrow, joy, love, hate … If you carefully investigate these matters you will find him in yourself.

  I paced the room like a forlorn geek in my underpants with sleet beating against the window. This was a form of Christianity where the church was not allowed to become a remote and dictatorial parent. My spine was still curved into a question mark but there was the suggestion that remedies were close at hand rather than a matter of galactic communication. Carla was irritated at my restlessness and I petted her good night with the quizzical sense that the earth was a far more fascinating place than I had allowed it to be. I was not inclined at the moment to blame anyone else for the number of ways I had been single-minded in the wrong direction. I put myself to sleep by thinking of trout fishing and my favorite stumps but not far away was the proposition that a woman’s ass was also the glory of God.

  34

  Before heading to Duluth I had breakfast at the diner with Clarence and Jesse. They got there first and I could see that Jesse had told Clarence that I was headed to Duluth to see my father. They were both in their mid-sixties and quite suddenly they looked as if life was wearing them out. Clarence said the doctor had told him that his heart was weakening and he could no longer work sixteen-hour days. What worried him more was that his mind was “loosening” and he had made the same order twice for shrubs to be planted in April. My mother hadn’t been around for twenty years but they still consulted over the phone about landscaping. Jesse was frail but I suspected he would recover now that he had lost his marriage quarrel with Vera. I knew that they were both curious about my intentions for my trip to see my father but I couldn’t say anything other than that I hoped to settle some matters. On the way out I slipped Jesse a check to get Vera and her husband settled in Oaxaca. At the last moment Clarence wondered if I had time to drive out to Presque Isle and though I was impatient I couldn’t say no.

  We parked and walked the last half mile through crusty snow that would support us for a few steps and then we would break through. We reached the grave of his great-great-grandfather who was said to have lived from 1798 to 1901, Chief Kaw-baw-gam. Clarence said a few Native words, then turned to me and said it was bad medicine for me to go too hard on my father. “He’s too old for you to kick his ass. You might have done that way back when and left town but now it’s too late.” And that was that. I drove him back home where he intended to spend that afternoon with Carla and his flower and shrub catalogs.

  I was halfway to Duluth when I recalled a line that Vernice liked from some poet I hadn’t read, “The days are stacked against what we think we are.” Everything was in question and the feeling reminded me of the day Carla had found a dead wolf in a dense thicket over south of Republic. Her hackles rose and she retreated growling. The wolf’s muzzle told me that it was very old. At the time I wondered how a dead animal could seem so much more than a dead animal but then wolves were rare enough to seem heraldic and a dead one in a thicket resonated the idea that the natural world is far more, rather than less, than we think it is.

  Coming into Superior, Wisconsin, I recalled the goofy remarks Fred had made after a visit to the Club about what a harebrained nitwit my grandfather had been. Given a certain amount of drinks Fred was an across-the-board expert on economics, especially the historical aspects. Great-Grandfather was the prime mover, the great acquisitor, and grandfather, the solidifier of the holdings in timber and mining but also one who thought his expertise was unilateral. By the time he died, however, late in the Depression, he had managed to diminish the family wealth by three-quarters mostly by pompous
ly thinking that his expertise in mining and logging was easily spread into other areas.

  The trouble with this in my own mind was not my grandfather but Fred’s notion of “really rich,” that the primarily theological bent of Fred’s mind was still making numbers sacramental. He had taken another path but was easily, in his cups, drawn back into the fact that he was a “dud” in my mother’s family and that his early interest in literature had made it plain to his own family that he was cut from the wrong cloth. Fred made a fetish out of pretending he was poor though I knew it to be otherwise. It took me a long time to figure out that the church pension for his mental breakdown was fiction. What struck me there in the car was his struggle to find a comfortable way of being that did not include his relentless sedation with alcohol. He had enough of his mogul father in his system to wangle grants with the flick of the wrist as Riva had pointed out, but that still left him in a world in which he was ultimately uncomfortable. His latest attempt at Zendo life made me wish him success.

  Naturally this thinking narrowed itself in my case to hoping my own liberation would become more complete. Drawing closer to Duluth I felt strong enough to know that I couldn’t create a life in terms of reaction to the father I was about to visit, that bringing forth what was possibly within me was not a matter of rebounding off someone else.

  Coming up Seward’s driveway I saw my father teetering out of the woodlot behind the carriage house in brightly colored exercise clothes. He looked absolutely silly as he waved to me. Of course I wanted a concision in reality that it was never prepared to offer. It was in the mid-fifties and he should have been sitting in a lawn chair in a warm coat looking out at Lake Superior with an air of receptive melancholy. I followed him inside and he poured himself a midafternoon drink. He looked rickety, the only word my mind could raise. His bruised leather luggage was by the door and he said he had delayed his annual fishing trip to Key West by a day in order to see me. I was aware that his luggage cost more than my own extravagant trip and taking a close look at the big room there were all the accoutrements of a rich gentleman, most of them old, which struck me as pathetic in terms of his diminishing capital. I cautioned myself against sympathy because no one really knew how much land he had left. The challenge at hand was to break down his impervious posture of control, his laconic attitude that no matter how fucked up life is he sees it clearly and just as clearly is in the driver’s seat.

  “You shouldn’t have driven all this way. If you would condescend to visit the bank and our lawyers you would know that for each piece of land sold you and Cynthia get your share. Some of my investing went awry and I was a bit careless dipping into money not explicitly my own.”

  “I’m not here to talk about the money you stole. I want to know why you tried to fool with Cynthia when she was a girl?” I had hoped to pour out everything in the manner of a Russian novel but this clumsy question arrived first.

  “She’s an insufferably cruel girl. She won’t let me see my grandchildren.”

  In other words, a blank. It was far too warm in the room and I was already down to my shirtsleeves. I noted that his formerly athletic body was now overthin though there was a small pot belly. The loss of facial muscle made his jaw seem even larger.

  “How did you become so sexually perverse?”

  He considered this question for a few moments though there was no emotional sign. “I was always a bit questionable. What’s the point? I’m still assuming this is about money.”

  “It’s not. I’m trying to forgive you.”

  “Why bother? I mean really, why bother?”

  “I wanted to kill you for raping Vera.”

  “There’s nothing new in that. I wanted to kill my father. He was a mean-minded, self-righteous asshole. The ultimate bully to Richard and me. After being raised by him World War II was a relief. He was in his late forties before he fathered us. We were inconsequential. He was busy losing money. We’d all ride down to Chicago in his private railroad car and he’d never leave his desk, never look out the window.”

  “What about your mother?”

  “She was an expert at leisure. She died when I was twelve of a supposed heart attack but I think it was suicide. Pills and booze.”

  “What keeps you alive?” I had no idea where to go with my questioning.

  “I love each day. You will too when you reach my age.” He said this without irony.

  “Why did you rape Vera?”

  “I recall that I was drinking.”

  “It has to be inside you when you’re not drinking. I mean there were many others.”

  “Well, I’ve wondered. Maybe it started in the Philippines during the war. Younger girls were less likely to have syphilis. We all seem to have errant desires in us.”

  “It’s what you do that counts.”

  “True, but where are we going with this? Few of us have more than nominal religious feelings unlike you or your uncle Fred. I wish you well. I’m actually proud that you seem not to have followed my behavior.”

  My throat filled up. There was nowhere to go from here. He averted his eyes from my obvious discomfort. He wasn’t going to say “Forgive me for raping your girlfriend” any more than he could ask Vera for forgiveness. I was the odd man out. The language I wanted from him didn’t exist in his world.

  I got up to go. I couldn’t talk and I couldn’t swallow. I wished then that I had brought Carla along so we could take a recovery hike though it would be a long one, maybe a year or so. I marveled that we were both speaking English.

  “Is this your old Jesus thing? I mean I now think you drove over here to try to forgive me. You’re worn out with thinking about it. Jesse said you went all the way to Mexico. You can’t forgive what I did. Don’t even try. You could forgive me for being a bad father. It couldn’t have been otherwise.”

  We went outside and looked at the receding sheets of Lake Superior ice in the distance broken by blue water. On the porch there was a large bowl of dog food he said he put out for the stray dogs that hung out in the woodlot. He leaned against the railing and his legs looked spindly. Age.

  “The people in Chicago say your mother is having a glorious life without me.”

  I couldn’t summon a response. There was the child’s feeling of the first time swimming over one’s head, a possibly bottomless lake.

  35

  I had some diversionary luck. On the way to see Mother in Chicago I stopped in Kalamazoo to close the deal on the river shack. Sensing my eagerness the price had gone up to twenty thousand. I was amazed at the purchase meeting with the two principal owners to see a Native name on the original deed, also to hear of the inane squabbles that had broken up the deer-hunting group. The younger members wanted to stay up late playing cards or would come home late from the tavern making a lot of noise. One of them had puked on a wood-burning stove so that it stunk the entire, cold November night. The younger members cooked carelessly, couldn’t split wood but bought it, and didn’t do their share of the chores. Both the older men worked in a furniture factory and were giving up a cabin they had owned for thirty years out of sheer spleen.

  I had brought Carla along and rewarded her hour wait in the pickup with a cheeseburger. The recovery from the meeting with my father the week before had been fast and bracing, aided by an hour’s phone conversation with Cynthia who thought my attempt both courageous and naive. I had sent her a batch of jaguar-woman postcards from Jalapa which irked her as she viewed herself as a soft and compassionate woman. When I reminded her of her combative past she viewed it as only “defending herself,” a quality her brother hadn’t learned. She said it was likely that our mother had a degenerative kidney disease but would live a long time. “Why couldn’t it be Father?” I asked. “You know that’s not the way it works,” she said.

  Rush-hour traffic in Chicago was a tonic because it obviated thinking about anything else. Carla insisted on protecting us from the hundreds of semis with barks and growls which drove me daffy until I drowned her o
ut with a good rhythm-and-blues station. As cities go I like Chicago though the congestion approached the incomprehensible. When we got out of the truck in front of Mother’s house in Evanston Carla flattened a male dog who tried to sniff her butt. I swung my duffel bag at her then grabbed her by the collar. She had pinned him to the ground by the throat. I apologized to the owner, a fey young man, who said, “Zeke hasn’t learned that some females don’t care for him.”

  I sat down in the kitchen with a glass of wine. Mother was inexpertly frying chicken and dumped in a can of mushroom soup for “sauce” before I could stop her. She was tanned from the Southwest but underneath her color wasn’t good.

  “How is he?”

  “He thinks he’s fine but he looks terrible, you know, rickety and spindly with a bulbous nose. It all makes his jaw look larger.”

  “Cynthia told me you wanted to forgive him.” She was drinking water and averted her eyes. I could see that I’d have to avoid anything rough.

  “Have you?” I asked.

  “It never occurred to me. I think of myself as Christian but then he never asked. On most days it seems long ago but then I always remember how long it lasted. I was never able to touch gin again.” Now she smiled which was a relief.

  “Well, I had to try it but he was as impervious as a good raincoat. He told me to forgive him for being a bad father but not for what he had done. It’s hard to separate. He said it never could be otherwise.”

  “His friends, you know, his classmates were all like that when I’d meet them here in Chicago, or in New York, or even up at the Club. They all seemed to think that everything about them was inevitable. They saw themselves as princelings but when I talked to their wives away from them it was peacocks that came to mind.”