True North

by Jim Harrison

  Meanwhile as February passed into March Mother began to fail and her dialysis procedure was increased from twice to three times a week. I did a lot of reading in the waiting room. Cynthia came out for a week and took things in hand by buying an expensive (about fifty thousand dollars) dialysis machine and finding a young doctor rather than a nurse to come to the house three times a week. I questioned this but Cynthia said Mother could afford it and besides she hated going to the clinic. Her sense of etiquette had stopped her from ever complaining to me. At dinner one evening Cynthia said that I seemed to thrive helping someone other than myself. I had cooked a crown roast of pork, an old-fashioned dish that Mother liked. Later, after Mother went to bed, I told Cynthia I was thinking of getting a graduate degree and teaching human geography because I sure as hell had no intention of being a writer. I was already a relatively lonely person and being a writer would only make me more so. She said that if I took a master’s degree at Madison or the University of Chicago she was sure a tribal community college would take me on. I looked at my sister in the lamplight that left her eyes in the shadows. We were watching a variety show on a Mexican network. I said, “I love you,” and she looked at me with sudden alarm then laughed. “I love you, too, even though we’ve never said it before.”

  I flew home the next morning and spent a few days sorting through family papers with an accountant who also kept the household books. I hired my young lawyer friend’s wife to keep track of things. There was a fair amount of land left with mine and Cynthia’s lien intact, also a few downtown office buildings. Out of lame curiosity I looked at my father’s credit card bills and was appalled at the money spent at restaurants and at Big Daddy’s wine and liquor store in Key West, and also for shipped wine and special groceries from Palm Beach.

  Mrs. Plunkett was becoming forgetful but finally gave me letters from Riva and one from Vera in Mexico. I read Riva’s in the kitchen but saved Vera’s for my room upstairs. Riva said she was quite happy at her government job in Jackson, Mississippi. She certainly loved the place compared to Washington, D.C. She recently began corresponding with Fred and thought that the “Orientals” had done him some good. She was having a pleasant affair with a bookstore owner which meant that she also got free books to read, his only illusion being that he could cook barbecue.

  I admit that I was fluttery when I opened Vera’s letter. In the back of a locked desk drawer I had a photo of her in her blue bikini that I hadn’t allowed myself to see in years. In an act of daring I looked at the photo before I read the letter and then stupidly wondered how the photo could retain its power after the passage of so many years. There wasn’t a trace of romance in her letter but a plea that I intercede with her father to allow her to live in Jalapa rather than out on the coffee farm where he intended to retire. She wrote that these were “modern times” and it wasn’t fair that she should be his economic captive. She would rather kill herself than be a farmer’s wife and could I possibly loan her two thousand dollars so that she could get an apartment in Jalapa and perhaps find another husband. Her son who had been so unhappy in the city loved the farm and would stay there. She ended by saying that perhaps one day I might wish to visit her in Jalapa.

  Of course the last suggestion made my ears hot and my heart race though well back in my brain there was the slightest neural pulse that told me the idea would be disastrous. How could you make love to a woman who had given birth to your father’s child? I would send her the small amount she requested but I certainly wouldn’t go to Jalapa I insisted to myself.

  Mrs. Plunkett wasn’t feeling well so I wanted to cook Jesse our last dinner together but he decided he preferred to go to the diner where he had taken so many meals. We had a stiff drink in the den and edged our way down the icy hill with caution. Jesse liked the idea of going home and being truly warm for the rest of his life. By tacit consent we decided to keep the evening light and my father never came up. We ate the simple meat loaf special which was covered with gravy of indeterminate origin, using up a fair portion of a small bottle of Tabasco. We talked of Clarence and Carla and Cynthia whom he admired without bounds though I noted that what he loved in Cynthia’s feisty nature he found unacceptable in his daughter’s. We had several rum nightcaps in his garage apartment listening to Veracruz music. It was melancholy seeing his packed luggage. There were only two suitcases, nice leather luggage my parents had given him one year for Christmas. We finished a third of a bottle of rum and there was no point in going on. I would take him to the airport for the earliest flight and he would reach Veracruz late in the evening. When I opened the door to leave he did a little jig and said, “I’ve taken care of my family.”

  That night I had a revelatory dream that began as a nightmare. I was working deep in an iron mine over near Ishpeming and a bell rang which meant that work was over for the day. I drove home through a forest with stacks of pulpwood along the road and was served dinner (meat loaf) by a middle-aged woman I didn’t recognize. I woke up then at five A.M. just a half hour before the alarm was set to go off. It occurred to me that I should have written my hundred-page story from the viewpoint of miners and loggers, but that was out of the question because I had never worked as a logger or miner. In my waking daze I realized this was easily solvable and spending a year at each profession wouldn’t be that hard to accomplish. By the time I got downstairs to turn on the coffee machine the whole idea seemed less clear but still possible.

  Before I had flown from Arizona Vernice in a letter had questioned if my hundred-page draft might be better in the first rather than the third person with the story now told by a not so old “ancient mariner.” The prospect of a new load of work hadn’t disturbed me because what else was I doing besides looking after my mother and taking walks in the desert and mountains? The act of writing filled up life until I could find something better. Vernice had liked my idea that when she felt my essay was finished I would merely publish it in a number of newspapers throughout the Upper Peninsula leaving the book form for real writers.

  47

  Time rushed on as it does when life is full of work and duties. It was easy to see helping my mother as more meaningful than my writing, especially the chore of turning the project into the first person. I wasn’t as fond of the word “I” and noted in Sprague’s journals how quickly he was able to get out of himself into larger concerns. “I” was the axis or pivot that transferred its energies to the world with all possible speed.

  Meanwhile I had bought a beautiful replica of a Hohokam pot at the curio shop at the Desert Museum for Carla’s ashes. She had been a dog from the far north but she had died in Hohokam territory where you frequently found small red shards of their pottery. I had examined the ashes fingering the small bits of bone that the crematory fire hadn’t devoured. There was nothing left of Carla but in the equally fragile minds of those who had known her. My melancholy letters to Coughlin had brought the response “you better get another dog.”

  On a warm early Saturday morning in late April when I had nearly finished the packing for our trip home I was sitting out in the yard with Mother trying to figure out what kind of migratory songbirds we were seeing when the maid Inez alerted us to a phone call. It was Polly’s mother saying that Polly’s husband had died in a motorcycle wreck. I didn’t want to tell my mother but of course I did. She stood up, teetered in a circle, and then began to weep. I knew she thought the husband “a bit crude” but then she was crying for Polly and her children.

  I checked the options including a charter ambulance plane but Mother rejected that saying she wasn’t an invalid. She flew to Chicago the next morning with Coughlin readily agreeing to meet her at O’Hare. I packed us up all that day into the evening wondering at the closet full of my mother’s matronly and doubtless expensive dresses. Another part of the code of her class was to look perfect at all times. It took her a full hour to get ready to accompany me to the grocery store. Once when she had quipped “a lady doesn’t eat garlic” I asked her who she was goi
ng to kiss and she laughed saying the year before I was born she and Clarence had kissed but that was as far as it went. This sounded so unlikely that I had to ask her why and she answered that Clarence was the only “manly man” she had ever known and that at the time he reminded her of her favorite movie star Robert Ryan.

  I loaded the truck in the middle of the night and headed for Chicago. I thought of driving straight through but that would only enable me to attend a funeral I didn’t want to attend. I reached Mother’s house late in the evening of the day of the funeral. Polly was there with her children and her parents the latter of whom were staying with my mother for a few days because it was awkward for her father to stay in a hotel and Polly’s apartment was small. Her father moved crablike in his walker but to my relief treated me warmly. We had a drink in the kitchen and he referred to my mother as an “angel.” He hoped Polly would move “up home” and get out of the hellhole of Chicago. It had been her husband’s hometown and now there was no reason for her to stay.

  The next morning I took a walk with Polly on the same route to Lake Michigan I had taken with Cynthia only now it was a warm spring day and the lake actually looked friendly. I didn’t have to bring up her moving north with her children. She said that she had been tired of Chicago for several years because you had to make so much money to live decently and that excluded teachers. Their insurance hadn’t covered her husband on a motorcycle because he had had three previous accidents. I caught myself saying that it would have been nice if he had been driving a car then blushed at my ineptitude. She looked at me gravely, shook her head, and then smiled. We sat down on a park bench and she said she didn’t want to teach in the Iron Mountain area because it would be too close to her parents and her father’s bitterness would be hard on her children if the exposure was frequent. Escanaba would be okay and so would Marquette because then her kids could go to college locally. I said that I could buy her a house and she corrected me saying that maybe she could borrow a down payment. She didn’t know it but it was a moot point because I knew that she was included in Mother’s will in an amount that would more than take care of a house. This was a true daughter-in-law and my mother wasn’t abandoning Polly because her son had.

  We said nothing for a full half hour though she held my hand loosely before she said that she didn’t want me to get the idea that we ever could be married again. Between me and her dead husband she had had more than enough of marriage. I didn’t have anything to say to that though I considered that the upheaval of the past four days must have been terribly confusing.

  “He had four expensive motorcycles,” she said. “Now it’s three. We were always making payments on motorcycles. I think he also had a girlfriend up in Kenosha but that’s neither here nor there. I think I loved him for a while and he was a good father, or at least a fair one. He certainly beat the hell out of you in the husband category.”

  “That was a long time ago,” I offered lamely.

  “Of course you’re different now but that’s irrelevant. Most women crave a good provider but I’m not one of them. Of course I’ll need some affection once in a while and I remember you’re not bad at that.”

  48

  Looking backward it was by far the strangest May and June of my life. It was good to see again the slow greening of the Upper Peninsula landscape. Cynthia had taken a leave from her teaching job and assumed my role as Mother’s caretaker. On the phone she bridled at spending May in the Chicago area. I opened the cabin and Sam and Teddy got our landscaping business started for the season. Polly quit her job and moved to Marquette in mid-May. I loaned her a down payment on a small bungalow about three blocks from my house. She asked me to steer clear for a few weeks so as not to further confuse her children. She had become so generally angry that she gave the remaining three motorcycles to her dead husband’s friends.

  Vera wrote that Jesse had intercepted and sent back the two thousand dollars I had sent for Vera’s escape to Jalapa which clearly wasn’t far enough away in the first place. This was a raw point but I realized that any further interference on my part at the time might be disastrous. She wrote that she might marry the farmer after all because he was kind to her son (my half brother!) and could control him. She prayed that we would meet again someday and she anyway wouldn’t marry the farmer until late in the summer just to show her father that he couldn’t bully her, all of which churned my stomach and brain. I kept thinking why jump in a bend in the river that had once nearly drowned me?

  My biggest comeuppance arrived June first when I published my hundred-page essay, “What My Family Did,” in a dozen U.P. newspapers, ten of which I had to pay for its inclusion. Vernice had pretty much given up, describing my last draft obliquely as “so-so.” I had simply exhausted her interest. In mid-May she had written that she was moving from Chicago to Boston to be nearer publishing circles and to help take care of her poet lover who had been hospitalized for acute depression in a private hospital in Cambridge.

  Nothing of consequence happened after the publication of my essay. I don’t know what I expected. Here is the concluding paragraph as a sample of my pomposity.

  Nothing is more ignored by the human race than it own historical record. It’s as if our forefathers wrote the true story in ink that would disappear in their own lifetimes so that their descendants would not be burdened by the woeful behavior of the past. Our timber barons in the Upper Peninsula virtually denuded the area leaving less than a hundredth of one percent of standing virgin timber. There is the question whether greed may be quantitatively measured because what mathematical figures can add the blighted lives of those who follow? The book is still open on man as the most virulent of all predators beside which the cancer cell is relatively innocent. These considerations are remote to most of us because knowledge of this sort is lost in the netherworld between generations, and lost even in terms of emotional content to scholars who so willingly adumbrate the record to continue to assure their own living. In the course of my study I needed only to unearth the history of my own family and offer it to the citizens of the Upper Peninsula whether they cared to look at it or not. Having done so I can’t say that I’m at peace, but only that I have a shred of hope that these dark chapters might offer a corrective for the future.

  It occurred to me again that life wasn’t going to be what I wanted it to be whatever that was. I received a total of nineteen letters most of them fond reminiscences of the “old days” which totally missed the point. A few were cranky and nasty, “Nice to see a rich fucker crying over spilt milk.” I was asked to speak to three environmental groups and one meeting of librarians in Escanaba, all of which I declined. Polly told me that the experience was probably like the postpartum slump a woman feels in the period after she gives birth to a baby. I said that my pregnancy had lasted nearly twenty years to which she only shrugged. When we finally made love one evening the week before my mother died I lasted less than a minute. Fortunately when she dropped off the dog I had bought for her son the next morning we tried again on the sofa and it was wonderful. Her years in Chicago had made her more abrasive and after our lovemaking she patted my sweat-damp hair and said I was a “good little soldier”—perhaps a holdover from being married to a veteran?

  A few days later I went to Chicago to say good-bye to Mother who was failing at an accelerated rate but then she seemed to recover a bit so I came back home. Cynthia had her children with her and my main function was to entertain them by taking them to the zoo and the Navy Pier. Cynthia chided me for buying them expensive presents but then I had had no experience with children and didn’t know any better.

  It was at the cabin in May that I knew conclusively that my life as I had known it was over. I took the same path back to my huge stump and wondered at my route because there were many ways to get there. Even Carla had been habituated to certain paths. Why was I behaving like a train that couldn’t abruptly turn right or left?

  When I was in the last stages of retyping my manuscript on my o
ld Olivetti I noticed that I did not spring out of my chair like I used to do. I was suddenly discouraged at the speed I was getting older. At my age nearly all professional athletes have retired. One morning I stumbled on a small pile of firewood I had been splitting and I felt a twinge of pain in my old ankle injury. This frightened me but it went away by evening and I celebrated with a mediocre steak and a good bottle of red wine. I was anyway old enough to have my mother die of natural causes.

  Some good things arrived when I finished my final typing. I understood again my love for moving water. I stared at the river for hours at a time and resumed my rowing in the harbor and on Au Sable Lake. I seemed to have lost all of my depths of perception in the shallows of busy work but when I finished the project my perceptions began to enliven. So much of my old life had been fueled by resentment against my father and had become vivid only when I somewhat emerged from myself. At the cabin during certain moments the world became so huge I felt vertiginous. I realized that nothing good came to me from the Romantic “I” that apparently had its origins in the Europe of the early nineteenth century, or so I remembered from the university. The wish to separate myself from mankind now reminded me of the way Carla would lick her wounded foot for hours at a time.

  One day I got lost south of the Kingston Plains and sat against one of the thousands of stumps in a snit refusing to believe my compass. I thought with regret about making love to Riva while Fred was busy having alcohol poisoning but then grew tired of the regret. The occasion had required love and I was the mammal to meet the challenge. Whomever I loved was totally another being, a private universe that was not me, a simple fact that is hard to learn. When I thought of the women that I had loved—Vera, Polly, Vernice — I understood how I could not be central to their lives considering my character. I had never believed I was in love with Laurie but there was the question that there was no specific name for what we meant to each other.