True North

by Jim Harrison

  Mother looked tired and jaundiced but was merry at the prospect of the arrival of Donald, Cynthia, and her two grandchildren. The day after New Year’s I was to drive her to Tucson and stay with her a month after which Cynthia would come out with the children. I thought the long drive to Arizona might be too much for her but she had become frightened of airplanes which she had never liked but had endured.

  She knew about Vernice and said she hoped I would bring my “sweetheart” home for a visit, something I couldn’t quite imagine. After dinner I set out for Vernice’s in Old Town, in Chicago, taking along Carla at Vernice’s insistence. I was apprehensive about my single page which was a description of Sprague’s peculiar life including two idiosyncratic passages from his journal about his need “to bite the hand that fed him,” a matter about which I was no longer worried.

  Vernice’s studio apartment was small and reminded me of Polly’s semisqualid little place in East Lansing near Michigan State University. There was no doorman for the building and I fretted about her safety. She lay on the couch cooing and kissing Carla but detected my disapproval without my saying anything. She called me a “rich asshole” and for a change I did a good job defending myself. If I cared about money why was I mowing lawns, planting shrubs, and living in a deer-hunting cabin? I hadn’t earned the money for supporting her so why shouldn’t she live in a place with more room? I was thinking about getting an advanced degree in human geography and teaching school. Did that sound like a rich asshole?

  She liked my indignation and we made love as we had passionately as on her first trip to the cabin. Afterward when I asked her if she would think about getting a larger place she said, “M.Y.O.B.,” which we used as kids, meaning of course “mind your own business.” She looked girlish when she said this and I backed away.

  We went out to an Old Town bar where I had a calming whiskey and Vernice ate an enormous cheeseburger. She couldn’t eat when she was writing, she said, as digesting food stole her imagination. I met a couple of her rather strident feminist friends who reminded me of Cynthia. They were altogether pleasant to me and I thought of all of the groups and organizations men have to remind themselves what they wished to be: Lions, Elks, Moose, Panthers, but never Possums.

  Mother was waiting up for me when I returned after midnight. She had been worried about my nighttime trip to Chicago but the true reason was that she had decided to tell me she was dying. She stumbled over her prefatory words so I told her that Cynthia had already let me know. We sat in her breakfast nook in the kitchen and I held both of her hands. An electric clock hummed. Her hands were dry and I had a sense of human mortality that I had never experienced before. My throat filled with tears but then she leavened the moment by showing me her brother Fred’s holiday card from the Hawaiian Zendo. It was a photo of Fred leaning against a hoe in a large vegetable garden. There were two attractive women with shaved heads standing beside him. Fred looked tanned and slender though his nose was still bulbous. Mother still referred to him as “my little brother” though he was now in his mid-fifties. He had told me in a recent note that he had one more year of being totally dry before Riva would agree to see him. She had sent him a cryptic postcard from Jackson, Mississippi.

  When I hugged Mother good night she said it was strange to think she would be celebrating her last Christmas. She was looking out at the falling snow through the window above the kitchen sink. I couldn’t think of a response but was saved when she wrapped a piece of cheese around Carla’s bedtime heart pill. It was strange looking at these two females whose bodies had doomed them to early departure. I meant to allow myself to celebrate the birth of Jesus and not dwell on how Christianity had been used as a club to beat the world into shape. I could not collect in a single place what was left of my religion except that I had acquired some compassion by looking outward rather than inward. The fact that I somehow still believed in the Resurrection was neither here nor there. As one among a few billion people I had allowed the world to become much larger and the glittering spray of stars so visible in Grand Marais, though only a memory in the ambient light of Chicago, reassured me that efforts to move away from strictly private concerns was the right thing to do.

  45

  Driving west toward Arizona with Mother and Carla dozing on the seat beside me I thought of waking Mother to see the Mississippi when we crossed it at Davenport, Iowa, but refrained because I was struggling to regather my equilibrium from the day before. It had been sunny but cold when I took a morning walk with Cynthia down to Lake Michigan. It all started innocently with talk about religion and politics. She felt a little envy for Donald because his religion was based so firmly in his locale where his people had lived possibly more than a millennium. There were a few Christian elements thrown in that didn’t bother him in the least. She had warned him when he recently became more involved in tribal politics that he’d have to be careful to avoid the politician’s trap of repeating things that weren’t quite true countless times until you believed them yourself. With Indians as surely as whites the culture demanded its leaders to say things that everyone knew weren’t true.

  We stood there looking to the gray sky above the gray windy lake hearing the invisible airliners above the clouds in their landing pattern for O’Hare. The hard part began when Cynthia mentioned that Father was filing a suit against her that would enable him, if successful, to see his grandchildren. She became suddenly quite angry and said she thought all of my feelings about forgiveness were the purest bullshit. To understand does not mean to forgive which she saw as a sappy abstraction. When she and Laurie were twelve she caught Dad “fooling” with Laurie in the lilac grove near the garage and started to scream. A few days later was when she had hit him with the garden stake. Cynthia said that girls know when they are quite young when a man wants them and they often flirt but they also know when it’s terribly inappropriate and how to step aside. It’s scary and confusing. She had told Mother about Dad’s attempts on Laurie but Mother ignored her. Cynthia had been pleased in the eighth grade when she found out Dad was having an affair with a waitress but it hadn’t lasted long. She very much wanted him to be normal. She had actually thought of cutting his throat during one of his drunken naps on the sofa. One evening in Rochester, Minnesota, when they were at the Mayo Clinic and Mother had become sure she was dying she told Cynthia that perhaps Dad had pushed his brother Richard who was swinging at him. She had rehearsed so many versions in her mind and now that it was more than forty years ago she could not feel confident in any of them. She felt partly guilty because she had slept with both brothers and with one gone she had felt compelled to marry the other. Cynthia said that Mother totally broke down when she said this.

  We stood there in the cold wind with the merest wisp of sun shining through on a patch well out on the rumpled water. She then asked me if when I saw him I had noticed anything awry in Vera’s son and I answered that he was too far away but that he had looked surly which was nothing special in a boy. Cynthia said Vera had left her husband and moved back to the countryside south of Jalapa rather than Veracruz because her son had become occasionally violent but was peaceful in the country. His nickname was Mañoso which meant cruel, he had no friends, and he spent all of his time exercising and working to make himself strong.

  “Why do you create hardships for yourself?” Cynthia had asked, adding that I seemed to spend my life attacking the impossible whether it was my project or women. She admitted that a few days before when she had said she was going shopping down on Michigan Avenue she had met Vernice for coffee and that they had speculated on my behavior. They wondered why I didn’t find someone I could marry.

  “How far did you go with Vera?” Cynthia asked abruptly.

  “Nowhere,” I said. “I told you that before.”

  “I just wondered if you weren’t constructing your life as a penance for you and Dad.”

  I felt helplessly irritated with my teeth clacking in the cold wind. It finally occurred to turn my back to
the wind as Cynthia had already done.

  “I guess we turned out reasonably well considering the circumstances. Donald said you’re a ‘mugwa,’ a bear, and you’re not liable to change directions. You’re helplessly what you are. I liked Vernice but when the time comes you’re going to get thrown out with the trash.” She grabbed my arm and hurried back toward the house when I told her Vernice had pitched me out long ago and both Carla and I were only occasional pets. Cynthia let go of my arm and ran across a small park leaping a park bench. Once a dancer, always a dancer.

  It was difficult on a more pleasant level when we reached Mother’s house. Cynthia had waited for me a few blocks distant to suggest that I burn down the Marquette house or sell it. She was sure she could get me a job teaching at the Soo or maybe up at the community college in Brimley. Indians liked slow-moving nineteenth-century creatures similar to myself.

  There was an older, compact car in front of the house which turned out to be owned by Polly who was there with her two children to say good-bye to my mother. I was stunned and had no idea what to say. Maybe anyone would be on seeing an ex-wife they hadn’t run into in more than a decade but I didn’t feel like an ex-husband. I just stood there in the dining room with blood rushing into my face. I stooped to pet Carla who approached with a garland of Christmas ribbons around her neck made by Cynthia’s daughter. Cynthia, Mother, and Polly sat at the table clearly amused at my discomfort. I’m not saying it was cruel but I had noticed for years that women enjoy a certain edginess that men like myself try to immediately resolve, the lowest example of this being when girls in high school apparently enjoyed boys fistfighting over them.

  “Hello, Polly,” I said and they all laughed. She looked harder and was relatively thin but then it turned out she coached girls basketball after school and that kept her moving. Despite their age difference I could see that over the years Polly and Mother had become pals and Polly’s children on some sort of imaginary level had also become my mother’s grandchildren. It was awkward talking to her and it didn’t lessen while she was there. I asked after her father and she said “terrible.”

  Coughlin arrived with a batch of Irish stew and a loaf of soda bread he had made for lunch. It was without excitement to me but passed muster with everyone else. I noticed that he and Polly flirted a bit on the lightest level possible. I also noticed that Cynthia and Donald’s twelve-year-old son was following Polly’s daughter of about the same age around the house. When he became discouraged by her coolness and turned on the television she would devise a way to get him started again. When Polly slumped on the sofa and I caught a glimpse of thigh there was a tremor beneath my breastbone. It seems no one is exempt before the grave.

  I went into the kitchen with Coughlin where we spread out fishing brochures and maps of Costa Rica and Mexico for a planned spring trip. He whispered that Polly was “fetching” and I was cast back to the cold winter morning at the motel in Iron Mountain where she wouldn’t let me penetrate her but we had writhed around nudely on the bed doing what she blithely called “the other stuff.” When Polly came into the kitchen to say good-bye Coughlin got up from his chair and bowed. I impulsively kissed her hand while devoutly wishing her hand was her ass. She said, “Wow, I heard you made a trip to France.”

  In Des Moines the weather forecast was a little ominous, cheating me of my intended route through Nebraska. I turned south on 25 and headed for Oklahoma instead. Mother whimpered for several minutes in her sleep like a puppy and Carla awoke and looked at her with concern. Mother had brought along the same pillow that she has taken on trips since my childhood. Cynthia said it had been Mother’s pillow ever since she was a little girl. It irritated Father when she carried it into a fancy hotel in New York City.

  My stomach was churning and raw from my conversation with Cynthia the day before especially from when she had said Vernice would dispose of me like trash. I had seen her twice in Chicago and the second evening had been inconclusive at best. When I entered her claustrophobic apartment she had virtually shrieked that she had had a “seven-page day” of fresh material to lengthen her sex novel. She paced in circles and flopped around with Carla. She hadn’t done anymore editing on my own work and I noted a spoon jutting out of an empty can of baked beans. I had hoped to take her out to dinner but she was too tired. She drank the nice bottle of Meursault I brought for her in half an hour flat. She lay on her tummy on the single bed and told me to go ahead and make love to her in that position because she was incapable of movement. By the time I finished she was fast asleep though she was also smiling. I wanted to leave a note but couldn’t think of anything elegant to say so settled for “Dearest Vernice, Glad you had a good writing day. Blah, blah, blah. Love, David.”

  Time began to race when we reached Tucson. After a few comments from me Mother was embarrassed by the grandeur of the home she borrowed from her cousin Maude up a mountain on the north side. It would have been nice if I had kept my mouth shut. She had thought of buying the house but then wanted to save her money for Cynthia and me. I said we could have sold it when she was gone and she replied, “That never occurred to me,” and I thought again how women of her generation and class were mostly taught to be decorations for the lives of their husbands. Her notions of money were basically distorted and I knew that her family would never let any of her money go to my father for his screwy investments. Like a kid she referred to her income as an “allowance.”

  I set up shop in a little guesthouse beside a swimming pool in a far corner of the yard. Are you living while you’re writing, I wondered? Days passed with breathtaking quickness and I invented errands for myself. I took over the grocery shopping from the Mexican maid to her delight. The yardman who was married to the maid was from a little town on the border named Patagonia and told me I might like walking in that area. I would try out my clumsy Spanish on him and he was helpful with slang. I would get up in the dark and drive south early in order to avoid the obnoxious traffic, taking Carla only once a week in order to conserve her heart. I’d walk for an hour or so with a guidebook to explain the utterly strange flora, then come back, shop for groceries to avoid Mother’s simple cooking, then write for the rest of the day. Except for the grand walks it was monochromatic. I had fallen three times in the first three weeks because a midwesterner is unused to being so careful about where he puts his feet. Everywhere I went on a Bureau of Land Management property known as the Empire Ranch it was either up or down and I severely skinned my ass doing the splits down an arroyo. I was lame for a few days, time enough for my wounds from the catclaw bushes and my cactus punctures to heal. I tried to climb in a small mountain range to the south called the Mustangs and was quite frightened and vertiginous making my way down. I was a flatlander, simple as that. One day I ran across a biologist disassembling a pack rat nest and midden and he said it took years to learn a new landscape.

  Years later I can still be brought to tears when I think of a particular morning in early February. It was close after dawn and I was taking a short walk with Carla up a remote canyon. It had rained the day before and small amounts of water had collected in rock pools. Carla barked farther up in the canyon. She was wise enough about her condition to trot rather than run. When I reached her I saw that she was growling having found a fresh set of mountain lion tracks. I beckoned her in the opposite direction back toward the truck and when we were almost there a large, gangly jackrabbit burst from a patch of catclaw. Carla gave chase at top speed and though I yelled she continued on for a couple of hundred yards until she fell and rolled. I ran toward her still body knowing that she was probably dead. She was. I sat down beside her and wept. I remained several hours with a hand on her cooling chest. How could her eyes become so suddenly lifeless? I thought about nothing but my beloved dog and our life together especially at the cabin where she was in full flower. I carried her to the car and found a veterinarian clinic in Tucson that arranged a cremation so that I could bury her ashes at the cabin.

  46

&n
bsp; The death of Carla was a juncture after which the times became confusing. That night I was trying to read Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet which Vernice had sent in hopes that by my studying it my prose would become less “geometrical and herky-jerky.” I loved the four novels and had been shocked when Vernice wrote that the last, Mountolive, had been written in ten days. When I had questioned this she said I couldn’t possibly write better than a good amateur unless I utterly gave my life over to it. This seemed unlikely indeed but that night reading the splendor of Durrell my eyes kept blurring with the sight of Carla skipping across the pages, Carla resting under our sacred stump, Carla swimming in Lake Superior, Carla floating down the river as if sightseeing, Carla crawling under the bed when irritated with the world, Carla following Clarence as he gardened as if she were helping, Carla’s form of prayer which was watching me as I ate and hoping for a bite of something more interesting than dog food. How could I not answer her prayers? How she loved cheese raviolis with a dab of marinara, how she loved fried whitefish skins or some butter with fried garlic and a sprinkle of good parmesan on her kibble. I sent death notes to Coughlin, Jesse, Mrs. Plunkett, and Mick in Grand Marais, those she cared for and especially cared for her. Coughlin wrote back that my grief was understandable because other than Polly, Carla had been the only creature in my life that had at least a few aspects of a good wife or lover. I remembered with inconsolable anger that the Church had decided in the seventh century that animals couldn’t go to heaven because they were unable to contribute monetarily. Anyway, I had to give up on Lawrence Durrell for the time being and return to Elaine Pagels whom I had designated as Saint Pagels, my patron saint who had reinvigorated the Christ who had died in my heart because He had been encrusted to the point of suffocation with heinous doctrine.