by Jim Harrison
41
I was in Marquette only for a day in late August when Vernice called from her parents’ house in Indiana. She had a few free days and was I interested in buying her a ticket for a visit? Of course. She had come home early from France in order to try to sell her sex novel to a New York City publisher but it was hard to pin anyone down in August. Thus far she had received two rejections with the only encouragement being a single phrase, “elegant but not very erotic, too literary.” She had been forced to accept a temporary job teaching at a junior college in Indianapolis starting in late September. A minor lightbulb lit itself in my brain and I said that it would make more sense if she would allow me to support her for a year or so with her only duty being to help me edit my project manuscript. This idea seemed to delight her and she said that we would talk about it.
I went off and helped Sam and Teddy mow and trim hedges for a couple of hours. I was forced to talk for ten minutes to the owner of the home, a prissy old retired insurance man who teased me that it must have been more than a hundred years since anyone in my family did an “honest day’s work.” I held my tongue but wanted to say that the insurance industry had never filled me with admiration.
That evening Cynthia called me from Rochester, Minnesota, where she had accompanied Mother while doctors did a week’s worth of tests on her kidney problems. I could tell Cynthia had been crying and held my breath for the bad news until I was dizzy. It was unlikely that Mother could live more than another year. This didn’t seem possible from what I had heard but Cynthia explained that our mother was from the “old school” where a woman could discuss her medical condition with another woman but not with a man. A son wasn’t an adequate exception.
It was a warm evening but I felt numb and cold when I hung up the phone. I was swept with anger that my father would likely outlive my mother. At the same time Carla was barking at me because while I talked to Cynthia I had nervously twirled the world globe near my desk. For unclear dog reasons Carla hated and was frightened by the twirling globe and her barking mixed with the terrifying news seemed appropriate rather than irritating.
I left the house with icy guts and walked Carla out to Presque Isle in the dark. It was a starry night with a slip of the new moon and we walked a full hour before I stopped and cried. For a new and curious reason I couldn’t detect I didn’t think of my situation as unique in regard to the unfairness of who death selects. I had nowhere to go with my childish anger that Mother would leave the earth before my father though there was a split-second urge to drive to Duluth and strangle him but then I remembered Jesse said he was out on the Apostle Islands in western Lake Superior sailing with his cronies.
On the way back from Presque Isle I was soaked with sweat and stopped on the beach to take a skinny-dip with Carla. I was reminded again of the errancy of the human mind because at one moment in the soft, watery darkness I was thinking of the fact of my mother dying and the next moment there were passing images of Vera in her scanty bathing suit on this self-same beach. Vera with lilac scent on her neck. Vera with sand sticking to her wet legs. Vera sitting on my chest. Vera’s foot on my bathing suit. And then Mother drunk on the lawn. Mother shaking the toaster so it would work. Mother stooping before flower beds with Clarence. Mother nude in the bathroom. Mother in her moon mask with her breath sweet with gin. I nearly swam out too far in the cold water but Carla turned back and I followed her.
A happy note. Coughlin called from London very early in the morning. He was jubilant. His sister was recovering from a rare pancreatic infection and it wasn’t cancer.
I worked brutally hard with pleasure with Sam and Teddy until late afternoon when I cleaned up and drove to the airport to pick up Vernice. She was still too slender but looked healthier than in Aix-en-Provence. It was Mrs. Plunkett’s day off so we stopped for groceries like a married couple. When Vernice took a shower before she roasted me a chicken for dinner she allowed Carla to join her, Carla who hated being clean. We had a fair amount of good wine and talked idly about her career. I was quite careful realizing that nearly everything I could say would be either flat wrong or simply uninformed. She was obviously very tired and I was disappointed but not surprised when she asked if it was okay if she slept alone. I said she shouldn’t ask and she teased that she felt like a courtesan writer and that it was her responsibility to please her patron. This upset me and she sat on my lap until the blush left my face. I kissed her good night at the door of Cynthia’s room and was mildly irked when Carla decided to sleep with her.
Sleepless and alone I recalled that Meriam at the Hotel de Suede in Paris had said that when the French were troubled they often referred to it as “black butterflies” in their brain. On the edge of sleep a butterfly wore my mother’s face as if I were still a child who couldn’t quite separate the species. Certain dogs in the neighborhood seemed to listen to me carefully when I talked to them though not as attentively as they listened to Cynthia who always carried biscuits with the keys in her red purse, and a Brownie camera around her neck.
Vernice joined me at first light. I heard the door open and she came toward me with a slow-motion lassitude. We made love without much energy at first as I imagined true adults did though my own energies gathered in volume toward the end. Afterward I thought how different we appeared to be compared to our first time together, and at breakfast when I mentioned this she laughed.
“People can learn to love living with their suckhole mental problems and when they get over them they often are lonely without them. Luckily they remember and don’t go back.” She said this while eating an entire muskmelon.
“I seem to be in pretty good shape for a change,” I said.
“So I noticed. My own problems are only professional. Why did I choose such a hard thing to be? Sometimes I wish I was still simply a cook but when I started writing poems the process seemed awfully similar. But with you I still can see a wide streak of melancholy.”
I told her the news about my mother and while we packed up for Grand Marais she told me that when she was a child and her favorite uncle died during a stock car race she couldn’t believe it even though she was there with her parents. The race was at the county fairgrounds and for amateurs only and the usual safety rules weren’t enforced. Her uncle’s car had busted through a wood fence, rolled over several times, and burst into flames right in front of the grandstand. Her uncle had turned his head toward the crowd as he was enveloped in fire. She still couldn’t imagine that he was dead and when she went into his garage she smelled his work clothes hanging from the door. She stole his lunch bucket and kept it on her desk full of her writing pens and lucky stones and marbles. Her mother had told her that her uncle had gone to a “better place” and she had answered, “No he didn’t.” With death her favorite man had disappeared.
42
Grand Marais was experiencing a not so rare late-summer heat wave with a slight breeze carrying the heat north from the interior. Lake Superior was dead calm and only dimpled by freshets so that when we rowed near the harbor mouth Vernice leaned over the gunnel and said, “I see big fish far down on the bottom.”
Vernice had me take along my bulky manuscript and on our second day at the cabin I went off brook trout fishing with Mick so that she could edit. I was unnaturally anxious about the whole thing for a good reason because when I returned at dinnertime she said she could salvage only thirteen pages of the actual writing and these were covered with red marks. She said that nearly all of my writing was mushy and slurred like a bad scholar’s, and quoted René Char, “Lucidity is the wound closest to the sun.”
“What the fuck does that mean?” I was hot, dirty, and irked cleaning a few trout at the sink.
“Figure it out for yourself. If you can’t you’ll always write shit. You’re dog-paddling in too much material. Start over. Give me a hundred clean pages called ‘What My People Did,’ or something like that. You’re trying to be a nineteenth-century curmudgeon. You’re starting twelve thousand years ago wi
th the glaciers then moving slowly onward like a fucking crippled toad. Get over the glaciers in one page, please. You quoted that beautiful prose of Agassiz. Try to understand why it’s beautiful and your prose isn’t. You wrote nicely in those thirteen pages because you forgot yourself and your thousand post-rationalizations and let your material emerge directly and intimately.”
I had pressed my thumb on the dorsal fin of a trout and now watched a raindrop of blood ooze out. I had asked for this speech and been roundly whipped by a schoolmarm. All these years after the inception and I had thirteen golden pages.
It was too warm in the cabin to eat at the usual time and we took naps in separate beds, awakening in the twilight. I was no longer pissed at her critique. She was the pro and I was the hubris-soaked unenlightened amateur.
We bathed in the cool river laughing at nothing in particular with Carla drifting downstream looking back at us, quizzically unused to laughter in her owner. Vernice got out on the grassy bank and I stood in the river looking up at her nudeness then flicked a mosquito off her ass leaving a little blood smear. I got out of the river and sat on a small deck I had built, the pine boards still warm from the sun. I put my face on her shoulder which smelled vaguely like Carla who had napped with her. I felt her skull beneath her wet hair and saw in the dim light her slightly canine smile. Mosquito whine. She’s a little dry as my cock visits her, so warm after the cold river water. The day birds wane and I hear the first owl above the river.
43
Four wonderful days and then she was gone. You couldn’t call it love because she wouldn’t permit that kind of talk or thinking. With my help she was resigning her Indianapolis job before she started and getting a studio apartment in Chicago. I adored her and she agreed to one visit a month at most. When I took her to the Marquette airport my heart and brain were lumpish with the leave-taking. Much of the oncoming loneliness would be less sexual than the enlivening grace of her company. One morning while drinking coffee on the riverbank I described to her what the river would have been like before its path had been gouged by thousands of giant logs during the timbering era. She said that I was cursed with this knowledge of a pre-Adamic Eden and that the river looked fine to her and so did the forest. I said that the river had achieved an explicit nature in the twelve thousand years since the glaciers and it had been shameful to destroy this nature in a few years of logging violence, adding that she could clearly see what was wrong with prose and poetry and I could see what was wrong in the natural world. “I don’t exclude people like you do,” she had said, adding that she was pleased with her innocent eyes that were still overwhelmed by the beauty of her surroundings. I agreed but then said if we don’t identify what we did wrong we’ll keep on doing it. “I just don’t want what’s wrong to swallow your entire life, then you’d only be a critic reacting to what others have done badly. You won’t have any balance in your life.” “Do you?” I asked and she laughed and said, “I’m not meant to have. My perceptions write my life.”
With the departure of Vernice all I did was work at trying to add to my lightweight base of thirteen pages. With my father torment largely expunged a great deal of the anger and anxiety in my writing process disappeared. It was as if I had removed much of my “self” from the process and could see everyone else in a more defined outline whether it was my great-grandfather or grandfather or Sprague, whose venom could be astounding, and my father whom all of them would look on with disgust as a mere spender. Sprague regarded the stock market as a “contemptible poker game” and its collapse gave him pleasure. My work developed into a kind of neutral freedom that at times became as pleasant as the landscaping and lawn work I continued to do with Sam and Teddy on alternate weeks. I was learning to write and when in Marquette I spent hours with Clarence discovering the subtleties of landscaping. Of the first thirty pages I sent to Vernice she judged seven as “passable” which encouraged me. I was thrilled when she marked a sentence I had labored over as “very nice but irrelevant.”
Coughlin came up twice to bird hunt, once in mid-September and then again three weeks later when the foliage had thinned and the grouse were a little simpler to hit. Carla was interested in finding grouse and woodcock for us with her talented nose but didn’t really want to give up the retrieved birds thinking of them as her own. Coughlin shot a grouse as it flew across the river and when Carla swam to the other side she stared at us then sat down and ate the bird we were already counting on for dinner. On the last day we hunted Carla seemed particularly weary so that after dropping Coughlin at the Marquette airport I took her to a vet named Randy Ryan who diagnosed her as having a bad heart. I was embarrassed when my tears fell profusely. She would now be limited to short walks.
Coughlin loved the cabin because on the cold mornings when we stoked the fire it reminded him of winter mornings in Sligo. He was in fine fettle with the recovery of his sister. He cautioned me to prepare for my mother’s departure by seeing her as often as possible. I didn’t mind going to Chicago because I could also see Vernice but the idea of visiting my mother in Tucson irked me. Coughlin reminded me that you get one mother in this life and that the sins of omission loom large with the passing of time. He thought it reprehensible that James Joyce had refused to pray with his mother. How could it possibly matter? Old ladies deserved being catered to even if I had to fib and forget my mother’s many years of questionable behavior. What kind of parent would I have been if I had had a child with Polly? This chilled my soul. Any child deserves a better father than the maniac I had been at the time.
It was a melancholy day in early November when I closed the cabin for the winter and churned out through the newly fallen snow. Our landscaping company had closed down with the work left being snowplowing for Teddy and Sam who had attached plows to their pickups. Our first season had been profitable but I reduced my share for the obvious reason that I hadn’t worked full time. This move wasn’t acceptable to Sam and Teddy who said “a deal is a deal” and that I had financed the equipment. It’s inexplicable how poor people are less greedy than the rich.
My work made me boring. I had to learn that those I knew weren’t equally fascinated with the subject of my writing. Mrs. Plunkett yawned and turned on the television or shuffled the playing cards impatiently. When we had an end-of-the-season dinner party at the Northwood’s restaurant Sam and Susie tried to be attentive to my ramblings but Teddy’s barmaid girlfriend Myrna, who wore furry white knee-high boots, told me blankly, “I don’t understand nothing you’re saying.”
At Thanksgiving dinner with Clarence and Jesse, Clarence became abrupt with me as he had done when I was young and drove my bicycle through a flower bed. “How were people supposed to live without work?” he said. “Everyone had to log or work in the mines. People died young because they didn’t have enough good food or because they couldn’t afford doctors. The Finns and Cornish worked the mines and that way they could afford to get married and have kids which is a natural desire. There couldn’t be any people without logging and mining. After those Italian hard rock miners helped build the Soo Locks they needed work. They couldn’t just go back home. You can’t have a world with no people.”
“What about your Chippewa relatives who got pushed out?” I was frantic for an answer without repeating the right-and-wrong-way speech I had delivered to Vernice.
Clarence stared at me thoughtfully, his fork poised above his pumpkin pie for several uncomfortable minutes. He could have said, “You miserable fuck, you never needed a dollar.”
“My son Donald tells me that everywhere in the world when white people took over a new country they just killed the natives or pushed them aside. Only God knows why history has to be so mean-minded.”
“After Cortés marched from Veracruz to Mexico City he burned down the aviaries. That would be the same as if the Japanese and Germans had won the war and burned down all our zoos and animals. It’s that kind of thing that made us fight.” Jesse was pleased to offer something.
A week
later Clarence was dead, crushed by a sailboat that had slipped from a hoist in the storage barn. I’ve already mentioned the funeral but not that when Mother and Cynthia and Donald and their kids arrived no one would stay in the house with me. They all stayed at the Holiday Inn which they doubtless viewed as a happier place. Mrs. Plunkett was upset when they wouldn’t even come over for a meal. Of course I fully understood their refusal. Cynthia was worried about Vera who was thinking of leaving her husband, and also about Jesse who seemed unhealthy to her. She took Jesse to his first visit ever to a Marquette doctor and it was discovered that he had severe hypertension. He was worried that the pills might damage his love life which Cynthia thought quite funny. “Would you rather die?” she asked. “I’m not sick,” he said. I had seen a schoolteacher less than half his age leave his garage apartment early one snowy morning. She held a finger to her pursed lips for our shared secret and I marveled in that Jesse had to be in his mid-sixties.
44
A week before Christmas I packed for our long trip. Carla had been distressed over the missing Clarence and went to the garage workshop every morning as if he were going to reappear. Since he hadn’t she was fretful that she might be left behind. Dogs adore a soft-voiced gentle person like Clarence had been.
I was fearful that I wouldn’t be able to write at my mother’s home in Evanston but was busy at it within an hour of my arrival. On the way down through Wisconsin on a snowy day with blustering winds I would stop and make exhaustive notes on the nature of a single page. I also counted the “cheese” signs as Cynthia and I had done as children on trips south to the Chicago area with our parents. I gave up after counting seventy-one.