by Jim Harrison
*
Within a few days of our roundup I began to congeal — in stasis we begin to congeal at the bottom of our characters — and I entertained the idea of writing down my insights, then feared that would prevent more from coming. There was the fleeting memory of something William Blake said about kissing the bird of joy as it flies, but he’s scarcely the man to go to for advice, any more than Clare or Smart.
Poor Magdalena has had an accident while training a neighbor’s recalcitrant horse, a badly sprained wrist and a slight ankle break, so she has to be in a foot cast for a few weeks. Last evening at dinner she got drunk and was insulting to everyone. Again, only the grandma thought it was funny. Lillian told me that J.M.’s mother had lived out her life as a totally beaten down, impoverished Mexican woman, so Magdalena amazes her.
It has been raining hard again and I am flipping through Deirdre’s nature books like a dullish boy looking at his first Latin primer. I can see the creek rising out the window. J.M. got angry and told Magdalena she could either behave or go back to her boyfriend in his Nogales hellhole. Lillian wept but reassured us that it was mostly because the kids at her school can’t go out for recess on rainy days and she was enervated. Latinos are so emotional, or do little to conceal their emotions, like children. As I walked back to the cabin in the rainy dark, there was a moment’s temptation to become an outwardly emotional person but I supposed the necessary gestures had to be learned early.
This morning just after Lillian left for school J.M. drove off with his mother so she could visit her cousin in Agua Prieta, a border town south of Douglas and to the east of here. I was leafing through Frank W. Gould’s Grasses of the Southwestern United States, curious to see what the cattle ate, when I heard the dinner bell ringing. Through the monocular it was amusing to see Magdalena standing in her robe in the rain, jerking at the bell as if the house were on fire. I didn’t want to leave the coziness of my cabin and the mesquite embers in the fireplace but thought it might be Deirdre on the phone.
When I got to the house Magdalena was sulking at the kitchen table, watching a game show in Spanish, the same kind as our own only a great deal more animated. You would think they were handing over Fort Knox rather than a set of luggage. I had been called in for the uncommon chore of taping a kitchen-wastebasket-sized garbage bag around Magdalena’s foot so she could take a shower without getting her cast wet. I held the bag open and she stuck her foot in, with the red painted toenails visible out a hole in front of the cast. I used a roll of duct tape to secure the bag tightly to her calf. She went off to the shower, gesturing with her injured wrist as she would to a dog, telling me to wait so I could take the contraption off when she came back out.
I turned up the television volume to drown out her singing in the falling water, replete as it was with Latino sobs, shrieks, trills, and extended notes that faltered off into evident despondency. There was an after-buzz in my ears and a shortness of breath I decided not to admit to myself. I dithered around the living room and kitchen, on impulse taking a swig from the tequila bottle, certainly the first morning drink of my life. I sat on the sofa with the Bible to compose myself (and perhaps for protection!) but it was the grandma’s Spanish edition. The game show turned to a soap opera with a fake beach scene including fake palm trees and a bogus ocean. There was an ample woman in a scanty bathing suit cooing at a skinny young man who twirled a volleyball expertly with his fingers until she grabbed it away to get his attention.
The shower and singing stopped. I thought I could hear her toweling herself, unless it was my imagination. She came out in a slighter robe than the terry cloth version she had gone in with. This robe was a ridiculous shade of purple emblazoned with big white, drooping flowers. I did not look at her eyes as she plopped down on the sofa, handing me a small pair of scissors. I slid off the couch and knelt before her, searching for the tape end.
“You don’t look near as bad as when I caught you screwing the ground.”
“Not ‘near’ but ‘nearly,’” I corrected. When I began to pull on the tape attached to her bare skin she shrieked and jerked up her leg. It was plain as day that she had neglected to put on her underthings. It was as if the bone and cartilage had fled my body and I managed to get the garbage bag off only with great difficulty and trembling hands. She leaned over and put a strong hand behind my neck, pulling me down to her.
III
WHAT I WANT to know is if I don’t find freedom in this life, when will I find it? That one’s got me by the cojones, as J.M. is fond of saying. Until recently I never got more than a mere taste of the sensations that surround you when you are shorn of your obligations. In academic life you live within the strictures of the sonnet form, and even the meter of your heartbeat becomes iambic. Growing up in Toledo, I could hear a distant drop forge day and night, the immense iambic hammers crumpling metal to its design. I think my father said the forge was making car fenders, and by the millions.
It is late February and spring is here. The days are much longer for reasons I can’t quite recall, and their middles encapsulate a period of warmth from about eleven to three. There’s a tinge of green in the cottonwoods, and in the closest village, seventeen miles distant, the strange tribe of birdwatchers has arrived. After Lillian made me an elaborate map I drove way over to a bookstore in Tubac, north of Nogales, in the valley that stretches way up to Tucson. There the trees and fields are already green, the area being three thousand feet lower in elevation than our own in the mountains.
After Magdalena left a month ago, J.M. noted I had become a little low and set me to work repairing fences. It took a few simple lessons before I got the hang of it and would saddle up Mona at mid-morning, returning by mid-afternoon. “Half days for half pay,” J.M. called it, but it was perfect for me what with working myself into a frenzy of notetaking from dawn until I caught lovely old Mona in the corral by proffering a carrot. J.M. was critical about the carrots, saying that one day I’d be out of carrots and also without a horse to ride. One of the dogs would accompany me and the other two would go with J.M., who was handling the fence in the highest locations.
Frankly, I have discovered nature. I’m quite aware that billions have discovered her before and no doubt millions have studied nature exhaustively. For my purposes, that is neither here nor there. We are not in this one together. My excommunication made me quite alone and I have to use what’s at hand to keep my soul from evaporating. If there’s nothing there worth saving, we’ll have to build something new. Simple as that. My somewhat cretinoid gestures of destroying clocks and calendars were not all that ill advised. I only quit smoking out of irritation at the dependency. The spleen over maintaining my position as the last smoker in the English Department went away with the English Department.
So I’d put Deirdre’s nature books in the saddlebags with my lunch, sort out my fencing tools, and I’m off into the hills, not altogether unlike a woodchopper in the twelfth century. Uniqueness is another illusion of personality. When I first began closely observing nature a month ago I found the experience a bit unbalancing, though the concepts weren’t new. Notions such as “otherness” and the “thinginess” of reality are scarcely new to a literary scholar. What is new is the vividness of the experience. For instance, one afternoon I was stretched out under a silverleaf oak (Quercus hypoleucoides, the identification got from Francis Elmore’s splendid Shrub Trees of the Southwest Uplands) when I noticed movement under a clump of trees on a grassy hillside a few hundred yards away. There was a virtual pack of wild animals romping and flouncing around, reminding me immediately of the otter at the Toledo Zoo that Deirdre as a child had favored watching when we visited Florence. Now I recalled from a children’s book I read aloud to her, Ollie the Otter or something equally otiose, that otters lived in rivers of which there were none locally. I crawled over to Mona, who watched me quizzically, and stealthily got a guidebook out of the saddlebags. The beasts were called coatis (Nasua narica) and were larger, more elongated members of t
he raccoon family. Quite suddenly they disappeared without my noticing how they managed to do so, leaving me with a hollow excitement in my stomach. They were described as social animals, and perhaps they had dashed off to their coati house or cave. The kicker was that when I got back on Mona a large owl flew out of the tree, startling me witless and making identification unlikely. I wondered how long this sort of thing had been going on without my noticing it.
To be truthful, this is all recollected in tranquility, and that’s putting it in its mildest terms. After my experience with Magdalena I went daft, the condition intensifying a great deal when her boyfriend swept her away a few days later. I didn’t actually meet the boyfriend, only glassed him from the cabin window with my monocular. He wore a pigtail and was big as a house, his ample belly folding over his belt, though somewhat light on his feet. He tossed her suitcase in the back of a car I recognized as a Corvette, which was frequently driven by rich sorority girls.
Making love — a wretched euphemism — to Magdalena was a mistake. Not making love to Magdalena would also have been a mistake. I read a parable in the New Testament that when you sweep a figurative room clean you’re supposed to fill it with good things or the demons will return. My cattle roundup had been a purge of sorts but the follow-up was akin to beating one’s head against a boulder, although I couldn’t imagine not doing it. Such is the perversity of human behavior. I don’t for a moment think it’s possible to both love and loathe a woman at the same time, but then what does it matter what I believe against the sheer weight of my feelings? After she left and when no one was around I went into the bathroom at the Verdugos’, hoping for what, I don’t know. A scent, a trace, a touch of her malign spirit. In a closet there was a Kleenex with a blotch of her bright pink lipstick which I tucked in my pocket and later burned.
All these sensations after our time on the couch recalled a singular childhood trauma. My father’s labor union was having an annual August picnic at a park on Lake Erie. I was shy and walked far down the beach from the other kids, rolling my inner tube in front of me. I paddled far out in the lake, a stupid thing to do because I swam poorly. Out of nowhere a fog swept in and there I was adrift and unable to locate shore. Naturally I wept. After an hour or so of inconsolable dread I made out the strains of merry-go-round music from the amusement park near our picnic area. I reached shore and made my way back to my parents. The fog had lifted. No one had missed me.
A few days after Magdalena left I rechecked the Alzheimer’s text tucked away in my briefcase and tried to study it, then abandoned the task in favor of my nature guides. Why on earth should I care if I have this disease? Dementia seemed childish compared to my torments about the present. My arms still feel her weight. She was lighter than I thought possible and even stronger than I had suspected. Her hair smelled densely of sunlight and green leaves. It is evening now, and perhaps this is “sundowning,” the clinical term for the way Alzheimer’s patients lose control at sunset.
My nature studies have intensified for a number of reasons, none of them rational, but I don’t care one whit. First of all I have had a Technicolor dream that instructed me to walk the border of the forest and open land, and at the same time to rename the birds of North America. This will be a long project indeed as there are over seven hundred of them. I do not question this dream assignment. It’s certainly more pleasant than when Ballard assigned me Contemporary Poetics 373 when he knew I loathed the subject. If I completed the bird project before death, I could publish a new guidebook. So many of the current names of birds are humiliating and vulgar. For instance, “brown thrasher” or “curve-billed thrasher” for these lovely, secretive birds is an abomination. The thrasher is now called the “beige dolorosa,” which is reminiscent of a musical phrase in Mozart, one that makes your heart pulse with mystery, as does the bird.
I have concentrated on birds and flora for the time being. Mammals are difficult, and other than the coati, I have only seen deer, a single coyote, and a group of javelinas, diminutive hairy creatures of the pig family. I’m already fatigued with Linnaean taxonomy, as the impulse behind it, admirable in the life sciences, is the precise motive that made graduate English such a hoax in retrospect. Literary scholars can be, too often are, guilty of science envy, creating absurd schemata as if Shakespeare needed a sounder defense for being unanswerably Shakespeare. I suspect my own bird taxonomy, as I progress with this project over the years, will be a private one based on the spiritual consequences of the natural world.
I must add that nature has erased my occasional urge toward suicide, along with not wanting to bring Deirdre sorrow. I suspect it’s because this new world is not asking me to hold it together like the other one. For the time being I am too much of a neophyte to take part in defending it against the inroads of human greed. There is also the idea that I’m a newborn babe with a soft spot on the top of my head. My natural enemies, like Magdalena, could still crush me.
*
The other event that intensified my nature studies was a nasty piece of punishment. The morning mail brought a registered letter from Ballard notifying me that my hearing on the possible reinstatement of my position had been put off until summer due to budgetary considerations. This mouthful of mush meant, as the letter later implied and I had overheard the year before as gossip, that the “Endowment” had made certain unwise investments and each department had to sacrifice a position or two. Ballard urged me to accept the half-pay disability pension, not stating the obvious fact that it came out of our group insurance fund rather than the budget itself. Of course this would be paramount to admitting a type of mental incompetence, based mostly on the red check on my dossier and two joint visits by the college doctor, whom I knew well, and a female psychiatrist, also a college employee, whom I didn’t know, who was a dumpy little parody from the Baltics. I allowed her two brief interviews through my screen door which, as Deirdre and Bob had pointed out, was not the best possible idea.
At age sixty-two the disability pension would slide into my regular one, but a quick tote meant about twenty-three grand per annum, not a lot in our world. In fact, barely a secretary’s or instructor’s wage. Deirdre had always insisted that she was holding a nest egg for me. When my mother died seven years ago she had left me nothing, out of her basic ire over my divorce from Marilyn. The Presbyterians got the bulk of her estate that came from her house and the urban-renewal sale of the diner. Deirdre had received thirty thousand in the will, which she said was growing and was to be mine when I needed it. I had always become quarrelsome over the matter, refusing the idea, even after she told me her husband, David, gave her more than twice that every Christmas in stock from his inheritance. Perhaps it was time to stop being prideful. I could buy a little cabin at some point and become a secretary of nature. Ballard’s letter, however, brought me to the realization that I wouldn’t return to the college at gunpoint.
This was not the nasty event in itself but what caused it. I was at the very hindmost part of the property, a Forest Service lease scarcely fit for grazing, with a hoop of new wire to replace a section destroyed by a falling corkbark fir (Abies lasiocarpa var. arizonica). To remove the compromising aftertaste of Ballard’s letter, I was meditating on Keats’s notions of “the vale of soul-making” which I had never properly understood. I had been guilty like so many in controlling myself when there was nothing left to control. In short, I didn’t have enough substance to perceive what Keats was up to. Now in the deep forest glade it occurred to me that if you kept your heart and mind utterly open and were still full of incomprehension, you were exercising the glories of your negative capability and thus were plumb in the vale of soul-making. It was clear as day and I tingled with pleasure.
Of course J.M. had admonished me over and over to pay complete attention during the dangerous chore of fence stretching. When you cranked the ratchet handle you wanted to draw it drum tight but well short of breaking. If you were careless, the wire might break and come whistling back and “tear an e
ye out,” he had said for emphasis. At the exact instant my mind had lapsed from Keats to a brief vision of Magdalena’s bottom, I heard the ping of the wire but had no time to react. The wire missed my eye but hit my cheek and shoulder like a hideous lash. I must have screeched because Mona snorted and the dog came running from her sport of digging up ground squirrels and eating them for lunch.
I stood there for moments listening to the panting of the dog and my own scattered breathing, looking down at where I traced my finger along the bloody line where the wire sliced my shirt. The line broadened with red but the slice didn’t appear deep. My left cheek was another matter and I lifted my hand to catch the cascading blood. I had nothing to stanch the flow so I used my undershirt, pressing it to my cheek lightly, then with more firmness. The shirt quickly soaked itself red but I was still calm, thinking it unlikely I could bleed to death through my face. I sat down in the grass against a tree, feeling the numb ache similar to the aftermath of getting a wisdom tooth pulled. Of all the things to do, I fell asleep there in the warm sunlight, only waking when the shirt was dried and caked against my face, still clenched in my hand. The doctor later said the sleep was the aftermath of shock.
By the time I got back home it was late afternoon. J.M. hollered “Holy shit!” and off we drove to the emergency clinic at the hospital in Nogales an hour away. Lillian had wanted to get me a clean shirt from my cabin, which seemed inappropriate, while Grandma merely handed me the tequila bottle from which I took a deep gulp. The doctor, who was a pleasant old man, asked if it was from a knife fight or fencing, evidently familiar with both. He was also disturbed that I hadn’t come in immediately, as the elapsed time made a “neat job” impossible. It was then that he said something I shall cherish forever: “If you weren’t such a worthless old cowboy, I’d send you up to a plastic surgeon in Tucson.” He also asked if I had any money and I said no, because I’d left my wallet in the cabin. I was going to say my insurance would pay, or I had a friend out in the waiting room, but he wrote “indigent” on the form the receptionist had given me and sent me packing, my forty-nine stitches for free. It pleased me to no end to be taken for a cowboy.