True North

by Jim Harrison

  Sitting there against the stump on a deeply cloudy day without the sun to correct my disbelief in my compass I thought that the natural world wasn’t meant to be soothing which was only an abstraction. People were nature too and it was schizophrenic to try to separate them from what we ordinarily thought of as nature. When you allowed your view of world to vastly expand the questions expanded with it.

  When I returned to Marquette from the cabin before Memorial Day there was a letter from one of my father’s Duluth cronies. A couple of weeks before during a dinner at a local restaurant a waitress had slapped my father and he had “punched her in the nose.” My father then threw a wine bottle through the front window. Several employees subdued him until the police came. My father claimed a shoulder injury and the crony had him hospitalized for a week to delay legal charges. A friendly judge advised that if my father would go to an alcohol clinic in Minnesota for six weeks the charges could be resolved more smoothly. The delirium tremens he had in the hospital “suggested” alcoholism. The crony hoped that the family could send a check to cover the hospital stay as he had recently experienced market setbacks. And would the family underwrite the time in the clinic? It was sad that this all had started with an “innocent punch” in a restaurant. Reading all of this I laughed thinking I would skip my father and send an equivalent amount to the Marquette Humane Society.

  49

  We’re back to June 17, 1985. Mother died early this morning, a condition she had looked forward to for months. It’s evening now. Polly is here and she’s crying, leaving her dinner uneaten. Mrs. Plunkett totters around the kitchen sniffling about Mother whom she described as “a grand old-fashioned lady.” I’m fairly peaceful having expected this for quite some time. Polly wipes her eyes and says, “I know she wasn’t much of a mother to you but she was wonderful to me and the kids.” In Tucson Mother had described herself as “a late developer on the motherhood front.”

  The next morning Polly and her kids fly with me to Chicago. At the house Cynthia is talking to three local women who had been friends with my mother since her childhood. They are sedate but at the same time a bit garish in their expensive clothing and jewelry. They are a little self-righteous about having refused to abandon Evanston for Lake Forest like everybody else. Everybody couldn’t be all that many.

  Coughlin comes over and Fred soon after, fresh from the Hawaii Zendo. I must say he looks good with his head bald, his nose still bulbous, in a Hawaiian shirt and frayed linen jacket. The three of us walk several hours until dinnertime. Coughlin had gone ahead to Mexico fishing Zihuatanejo when I had to cancel because of Mother’s illness. He had a splendid time catching roosterfish and snook but felt unfaithful to trout. Fred was a little unnerving in his quiet form because I had spent so much time listening to him babble. Coughlin talked about how the death of someone we love comes to us as a jolt but we perceive it as a whole only in the incidents when we feel poignantly their absence and this can go on for years. I said I had noticed this about Carla and had been very accepting for months until I had buried her pot of ashes in her hiding place under the stump and fell apart. Coughlin corrected me by saying that consciousness can’t be called falling apart. When we walked down the beach Fred blushed at a young woman bending over in a bikini. It was a very warm day and they were out in numbers. Coughlin asked Fred about Zen attitudes toward sex and Fred said there weren’t any which mystified me. That night Polly slept with me but we didn’t make love.

  The next afternoon when finalizing arrangements for a small private memorial service rather than a funeral Cynthia blanched when she answered the phone and handed it to me. It was Father. He was at the Drake and needed to talk to me before the services the next morning in Lake Forest. I naturally asked why and he assured me that he was fine having spent the first three of the prescribed six weeks at Hazelden, the alcohol clinic. I said I would call back after I thought it over. I drew Cynthia out on the back porch and she said she wouldn’t do it at the point of a gun but it probably was a good idea for me because I had never been able to quite write him off like she had. She hadn’t told me that he had written Mother the week before she died asking her forgiveness for his misspent life. Mother dictated a note to Cynthia in which she’d said, “I forgive you and hope that helps bring you some peace. Good-bye.”

  I took a cab to the Drake and was startled at how composed he was. His eyes were rheumy and I suspected he was on some sort of tranquilizers but he lacked the palsied twitches I had expected. His request was simple though at first it made my gorge rise. Would I go to Veracruz with him so he could ask the forgiveness of Jesse and also Vera if she was there? Asking forgiveness was part of the twelve-step program he was enrolled in. He couldn’t very well expect forgiveness but it was necessary that he ask. He had struck Jesse when he had come to Key West on business and the memory was unbearable. We would be gone only two nights and then I could go home to Marquette and he would return to Hazelden for three more weeks. As penance he intended to give Jesse his half of the coffee farm which was in joint ownership. This reflected my father’s typical misunderstanding of making amends. We continued talking through dinner in the Cape Cod Room at the hotel, both of us drinking iced tea. I was impressed with the gusto with which he ate his lobster, something I had never seen after he had his martinis before dinner. When we said good night in the lobby I gave a fateful yes to the Veracruz trip. I was nearly amused when I saw his eyes wander to a pretty young girl standing near the elevators. Overnight conversions are unlikely.

  The memorial service the next morning went without a hitch except for one awkward moment when my father entered the Episcopal church with two of his old Yalie friends. Cynthia and I were standing near the door as the welcoming survivors. Donald and their two children were off to the side. Cynthia stiffened despite her foreknowledge but handled it well. My father was smooth to the point of unctuousness though he ignored the presence of Donald. Cynthia beckoned her children and introduced them to their grandfather. The three shook hands and my father passed into the church after quickly embracing me. I stared at my hands throughout the service and remember little. Afterward I wondered how many of the hundred or so of my parents’ friends from Lake Forest, the Chicago area, and the Club could have had lives as difficult as my family’s. Not many, I thought, but who knows? After a long afternoon with Cynthia and Donald and their children, Coughlin whose company seemed to soothe everyone, and several of mother’s friends, I had a fitful night’s sleep of wondering why I had agreed to go to Veracruz. Maybe I only wanted to see how the very long story of my father and Jesse ended. Maybe it was just ill-placed compassion. I had only one father and there was something of the fool in his son. I had to see it to the end, pure and simple.

  50

  June 21st, the summer solstice. We’re off to Mexico City, first class of course, but my father supplied the ticket. Soon after takeoff he dozed and I looked at him and felt the same dislocation I had on my previous trip to Mexico. It is easier to be agreeable and he had hit me with the most sympathetic play possible. Fuck yes, if the plane crashed because the pilots were drunk I should forgive them as the plane sped earthward. This was obviously not a good frame of mind so I wondered how my father was enduring life and a plane ride without a drink. He must be taking powerful tranquilizers.

  When the stewardess brought our mediocre lunch (with iced tea) he ate with the vigor of a starving man and finished what I had left on my plate. Several other first-class passengers were drinking a fair amount but he seemed not to notice. We spoke idly about my published essay a friend had sent him in Duluth. He wasn’t critical other than over a few factual errors about his own father, nor was he troubled by my rather scathing conclusions. The tranquilizers were extremely effective, I thought, but then he added, “Making money is never very pretty.” He was also less kind than I had been about Peter White, the Mathers, and the Longyears. “They were better at public relations and our family simply didn’t give a shit.” He concluded by saying that
if I continued my interest in predatory behavior I might look into banking, oil, steel, ranching, or the Pentagon and Congress for that matter.

  In Mexico City our first flight to Veracruz was canceled and we sat in a fancy Mexicana Airlines lounge for a couple of hours. When he went out for a hamburger, a food item I had never known him to eat, I had two quick drinks. When he returned with a splotch of catsup at the corner of his lip he gave me a conspiratorial smile after obviously smelling the rum I had drunk.

  He was back asleep on the leg to Veracruz and missed the splendor of snowcapped Orizaba. Before he slept he flirted discreetly with the stewardess who complimented him on his tailored tropical suit beside which I felt shabby.

  The twilight heat in Veracruz was a moist shock so that you struggled for breath. Roberto was there waiting for us. He was warm to me but formal and noncommittal to father. He took us to the Emporio and said he would pick us up at eight in the morning. I told my father I wasn’t hungry, said good night, and went to my room and ordered a snack and a bottle of rum. It was the same lovely room I had before and I sat on the porch in the darkness drinking rum and watching a huge ship depart the wharf wishing very much that I was aboard.

  In the morning my father was far more chipper than I was. I asked Roberto to take us the long way around on our drive up to Jesse’s farm so my father could see the beauty of the mountain landscape. Roberto told me again that he preferred “Bob” and continued to utterly ignore the existence of my father who loved the drive which reminded him of certain mountainous areas of the Philippines. The plan was to spend the night at Jesse’s then Bob would take us to the airport by the main road in the morning.

  Thinking back I’d like to say I had an ominous intuition but the truth is I felt nothing of the kind. Jesse embraced us in the driveway of the trim farm at the bottom of a hillside of coffee bushes shaded by larger trees. He pointed out that coffee was better if it grew in the shade which kept it from being bitter. I looked off to where a young man was working on a tractor near a shed. It was at least fifty yards away but I could still see by his jaw line that it was my half brother. Jesse followed my sightline but pretended Vera’s son wasn’t there as did my father. Jesse said that Vera was in Jalapa with the farmer to whom she was betrothed but would be back in the morning in time to bid me good-bye.

  We had a nice lunch of broiled fish served by an attractive woman in her forties who I took to be Jesse’s girlfriend. Jesse had a beer with lunch but my father and I were served iced tea. He said he had had a nice chat with Cynthia in Chicago which explained our iced tea. I wondered if his drinking a beer was a way of sticking it in a little bit. My father and Jesse began talking about the “good old days” (without irony) during World War II in the Philippines. Bob saw that I was bored with the conversation and offered to take me on a tour of the farm.

  Outside Bob formally introduced me to my half brother who was still working on an ancient Ford tractor. I can’t say he was warm to me but was certainly polite and used the most formal Spanish possible. He had to be nineteen by now and was about my size but intensely muscular and wore a machete in a scabbard. When we got in an open Jeep and drove off up the hill Bob said, “He knows you are not bad but his father is very bad.” I nodded without saying anything because there was nothing to say though when we reached the top of the hill and looked at the view I tried to explain to Bob the motive of the trip. It was like giving a mountain lion a lecture on kindness and when I was finished with the idea of my father asking Jesse and Vera for forgiveness he said “bullshit.” I stood there flushed with embarrassment. In the silence that followed I tried to imagine that I was the father of Polly’s daughter who was twelve and a man raped her and radically changed her. Could I forgive him? This was close to home and “no” came into my mind easily. I tried to lighten the atmosphere by saying that my father intended to give Jesse his half of the farm as penance but Bob said my father hadn’t paid Jesse for three years and the amount of money my father owed Jesse exceeded his investment in the farm. It was only at this point that I recognized the absolute absurdity of our trip. The last filament of rationality lay in the idea that my father had to ask forgiveness for his twelve-step program whether it was successful or not. Standing on the hill with Bob and looking at the sweep of fabulous green hills and the mountains beyond my eyes misted with the sense of my own alien presence in this green kingdom. Bob put his hand on my shoulder as if to say nothing was my fault. We drove back down the hill to Jesse’s house, entering through the kitchen where an old woman was trussing up a piglet to roast for dinner. I was enthused about the piglet and when Bob showed me to my room I said a rather plaintive little prayer to a small primitive statue of the Virgin Mary. The baby Jesus was peeking out from under her skirt. Even Jesus was a victim of natural childbirth in the way he fell to earth, I thought before I slept.

  I awoke to a nightmare. Passing through the kitchen the old woman now roasting the pig gave me a cup of coffee. I heard yelling and my stomach jumped and I didn’t want to go into the living room where Bob and my half brother Mañoso were standing off to the side while my father and Jesse sat at the dining table drinking rum and arguing. I immediately had the faint hope that the rum plus his tranquilizers would make my father pass out but he was working in an opposite manic direction. Most of the bottle of rum was gone and they were yelling about money with my father’s hoarse and slurred speech saying that a classmate was an American consul in Mexico and he would use his powerful Mexican friends to make Jesse pay the money owed. I looked helplessly at Bob and Mañoso who clearly didn’t understand what was going on. Bob waved me away when I tried to approach the quarrel. Jesse was yelling half in Spanish that when my father raped Vera he had lost his half of the farm. My father stood up wobbly then abruptly dove across the table with his hands tightly around Jesse’s neck so that Jesse’s eyes bulged and his chair tipped over. They were rolling on the floor with Jesse’s face changing colors under my father’s grip. Bob rushed over and I followed with both of us pulling my father back with his hands still attached to Jesse’s throat so that we were pulling them both upright. Bob kept hitting my father in the face. I didn’t see the blade of Mañoso’s machete fall but it nicked off the end of my thumb and one of my father’s hands at the wrist. The blade fell again and off went my father’s other hand. I fell backward striking my head on the table’s edge and saw my father bleeding gouts of blood from his wrists and rolling back and forth on the floor. I must have passed out for minutes because when I woke up Mañoso was gone and Bob had finished wrapping my unconscious father’s wrists in duct tape. Jesse sat in a chair snoring. Bob wrapped my bleeding thumb and when I tried to talk he put a piece of tape on my lips and bound my hands and feet. I sat there until dark with my father still unconscious on the floor while Bob mopped up the blood. Jesse came over to me with tears in his eyes and then left. When it was dark my father and I were loaded into the back of a pickup by Mañoso who carried us each without apparent effort. We were covered by a tarp and I was sure I was going to my death hearing my father’s head thump on the bumpy road. The truck finally stopped in a grove of mangroves and we were loaded into a rowboat where Bob undid my legs and hands and peeled the tape from my face while Mañoso walked us out into the tidal creek that opened up on water where I could hear light waves. He gave the boat a good shove, shined the flashlight on us, and then it was dark.

  Father was wailing. I deduced from the morning dun and moving flotsam that we were drifting slowly southward with the force of an unknown current. He slumped on the back seat of the wooden rowboat and I leaned forward grabbing his shirt to keep him from pitching overboard. Both of his hands had been severed at the wrist and the stumps had been tightly bound with duct tape. His normally withered forearms now bulged with an unsightly color. When they had pushed us out from the estuary on a falling tide before dawn I had been given only one oar. When I clearly noted this at first light the humor wasn’t lost on me. I was equipped to row in circles with my l
eft hand. The thumb of my right hand was missing and the pain lessened when I raided it high. In the early light I had seen a green or loggerhead turtle and took the tip of my thumb someone had stuffed in my pocket pitching it toward the beast but the turtle had submerged in alarm misunderstanding my good intentions. By midmorning the shore had arisen and I could see the coastline south of Veracruz. The current was carrying us toward Alvarado. My father woke from his latest faint. His face was too bruised for clear speech and now rather than wailing he bleated. His eyes made his request clear and I pushed him gently over the back of the boat. It was quite some time before he completely sunk. I would study the stinking fish scales and bits of dried viscera on the boat’s bottom and then look up and he would still be there floating in the current. And then finally I was pleased to see him sink. What a strange way to say good-bye to your father.

  EPILOGUE

  Obviously I made it home. I was swept closer to shore by the tide that was flowing into the immense estuarine area next to Alvarado. A kid fishing near the bridge saw me and his dad towed me in with a motorboat. I rode the bus into Veracruz and bought some unappealing fresh clothes, then went to the airport. I called the farm from Mexico City and told Jesse that as far as I was concerned my father had disappeared when we were at the Emporio. “What happened?” he asked. “My father was lost at sea,” I said. When I hung up the phone I wondered if there would be any further complications but I couldn’t foresee any. In my imagination I could see him wandering off down the street from the Emporio looking for an especially young whore. His erratic behavior had prepared the world for anything.