by Jim Harrison
Dick Rathbone arrived with his telemetric receiver and we set off down the tangled riverbank with Sonia and Marcia both choosing to wade and swim along beside us. We had gone perhaps a mile before we found Joe fast asleep on a sand spit near an eddy. Dick pointed out the cairn of stones upon the bank where Joe had buried the baby bear which its mother had destroyed, so said Dick, because one of its front legs was deformed. Joe had found this detail to be unendurable.
When Sonia shook him awake aided by Marcia’s face lapping, Joe announced that he had seen something quite extraordinary, a brand-new mammalian species, a beast that he didn’t know existed. Dick whispered to me about adjusting Joe’s medication, then asked kindly about the whereabouts of the tracks. Joe said the animal didn’t leave tracks but he knew the general area it favored, mentioning a location well to the south which I won’t identify now to preserve it from curiosity seekers. For her good intentions, Dick gave Marcia a number of biscuits, which he kept for that purpose. Marcia’s sole real fidelity was to Joe and anyone else was fair game. Once I met her near a woodlot on a back street of the village. She acted alarmed and enervated so I followed her and she led me persistently to the grocery store so that I might buy her a snack.
I wasn’t inclined to sit there near the sandbar and watch Joe go back to sleep so I left the chore to Sonia, Dick, and the faithful Marcia. I was amused to note that every time Dick glanced at Sonia his big, floppy ears reddened. It was with relief that I silently handed over the burden of lust to my old friend and headed upstream toward my cabin for lunch and a hard-earned nap. Sonia reminded me of a miserable poem by Robert Frost called “The Road Not Taken.”
Horrors! It’s only July and we’ve had three days of dense cold rain with the wind northwest out of Canada. The life has drained out of me onto the maple floor. A business partner from Nebraska once told me that I kept my “lid screwed on too tight.” Maybe so, but not that I’ve noticed except at times like now when the weather and my own contentious moods throw me for more than a loop. Dear Coroner, I loathe everything I’ve said but out of laziness I’m not changing a word. These are the first I’ve written in several days and I’ll try to get more directly at the heart of the matter which, of course, is no longer beating. Right now I feel that my human tank is drained and I am the sediment, the scum on the bottom, the excrescence of my own years. It occurs to me that the memory of Sonia sitting in the chair a few feet from where I am now may have precipitated this funk. Nothing so much torments a geezer as the thought of the unlived life. For some reason she summons up an image of a steelworker shoveling coal into a blast furnace.
And I want to be fair-minded with Joe. This, after all, isn’t about me but my departed young friend. There is ever so slight an aura around him now in my mind that must resemble the origin of some primitive religion. I just recalled one late June dawn when he arrived quite literally covered with mosquito and blackfly bites, muddy clothes, quite eager to show me the one-hundred thirty-seven water sounds he had logged in his notebook. What was I to make of this? Frankly it was interesting. Here was a man who quite literally saw everything for the first time every single day but had a quite extraordinary (a euphemism!) perception of the aural, if not the visual, though this is open to contention. The list of water sounds included the names of the creeks, rivers, lakes, also the morphology and weather conditions that had a part in their creation. I suppose all water may be perceived to be going downhill except in tidal situations where the receding tide is functionally going uphill to gather itself. There were a number of rubrics, squiggles, beside each item in Joe’s list to remind him of the actual sound which he insisted over breakfast he could actually re-hear. Joe bolted his food like Marcia who was scratching the door. I made her a plate of several fried eggs in bacon grease, her favorite. Did I say that Marcia also disappeared the night of Joe’s drowning? His body was eventually found, of course, dear Coroner. You have it, whatever it really is, in your possession. Marcia was never seen again and it’s unthinkable that a Labrador retriever could drown. Perhaps she joined his imaginary creatures, if indeed they could be termed “imaginary.” More than likely this happy lady was carried off in a tourist’s car.
I’m getting ahead of myself. The water-sound morning came just before Joe’s announcement about the discovery of a new beast. I had asked my psychiatrist friend, Roberto, in Chicago about the aural phenomena and he said closed-head injuries could indeed be boggling because the brain itself (one is tempted to say “herself” for a number of reasons) is so massively intricate. Roberto Fed Exed me a brain text which I found largely unreadable in its complexity. I simply couldn’t quite believe “that” thing was in my head.
Joe’s log of water sounds also made me wonder if nature, adequately perceived, is all that tame? I am perhaps not competent to conjecture in this area but who is to stop me? Professors only police each other and largely ignore the common man among which I number myself. Yesterday when the rain and blustery wind let up for a few minutes I replenished my bird feeder and found a dead evening grosbeak in the grass. For some reason I smelled its wet feathers and determined that it had only recently died. I shuddered at its lack of weight, though, of course, how else could it fly? I admired its sturdy beak and the amazing yellowish and beige feathers, the streak of white. I recalled the first time as a young man when I had been fortunate to cup a girl’s pussy in my right hand. A mystery indeed. I’m sure every man remembers this encounter with a sense of true “otherness.”
Let’s re-adjust again. I’ve added a log to the fireplace I could barely lift. It was beech but not from the tree Joe struck so carelessly. I’m quite tired of being a querulous old fuck and I am beginning to wonder if this persona isn’t simply another cultural imposition. Americans seem to love sporting metaphors and I have certainly rounded third base and am headed for home plate, which is a hole in the ground. Naturally I’d prefer to be “buried” in a tree on a platform or in a little oblong wood hut like members of Native tribes. I’m only ninety-nine percent sure that this doesn’t matter but the remaining one percent is troubling.
I can try to determine the nature of Joe by my observations and what he told me; also from the three notebooks he left me. Or so I think. But then it would be needlessly exhausting to defend the nature of my mind that creates the perceptions about Joe. These last three rainy days I have begun to perceive certain limitations I hadn’t sensed before and am unwilling to defend as virtuous. I am possibly less nifty than I thought. This won’t precipitate a depression as the rain has already managed that quite well, though I admit it has been a lucid, reductive pratfall, a threshold rain.
In July, for instance, Joe was visited by a young woman I found quite unpleasant for the first few days. This girl blew her nose more often than any other mortal due, she said, to an allergy of some sort. She was of normal height but quite slender, wearing the kind of floppy clothes that conceal the actual shape. She was a graduate student in comparative literature at Michigan State University, down in East Lansing, a school I know little about except that their teams are referred to as the Spartans and are in the Big Ten. I went to Northwestern myself and though it has an excellent scholastic reputation this fact did not reduce the torpor I felt as a student. There I go again. Who gives a flat fuck? I am scarcely interesting even to myself. I am the personification of Modern Man, the toy buyer who tries to thrive at the crossroads of his boredom.
Anyway, this girl, to whom I’ll give the name Ann, had none of the physical vibrancy of Sonia. She was, however, bitterly intelligent and quite helpful to Joe in collecting botanical specimens for me, a meaningless hobby I’ve had since a child. Due to Joe’s visual confusion he kept returning with the same specimens as the day or days before. I paid Joe five bucks apiece for anything new and one day with Ann’s help he made two hundred dollars. Despite Ann’s obvious intelligence, not necessarily a pleasant item, she was irrationally in love with him no matter his hopeless injury. What in God’s name does this mean? How can yo
u continue to “love” someone with this sort of injury, who doesn’t physically recognize you when you get up in the morning, though memory resonances are there in conversation, touch, and probably odor.
My careless presumptions about her began to dissolve when I was standing in Dick Rathbone’s kitchen and he was describing how Joe and Ann had walked the Lake Superior shore over the Muskallonge Lake (twenty miles) and she had called him when the afternoon had become unpleasantly warm. We were looking out the back window into the garden, which surrounds the birdbath which is Joe’s navigational focus, when Ann and Joe came up from the beach. She picked up the hose, turned on the faucet, and sprayed the sand off Joe who did the same for her though the water had obviously turned colder. Ann shrieked, stumbled, then jumped over a stack of two sawhorses that Dick had left in the backyard near the small cabin that served as Joe’s quarters. Simple enough, but then I checked them out later and the sawhorses were three feet high. The mousy little girl was quite the jumper. What’s more she had the lithe power of a dancer which she turned out to have been several years before. While Dick was busy at the grill with his hallmark barbecued chicken I spoke to Ann about this, having admitted that she had startled me. She said I was the type that spent my life making false assumptions and presumptions about people, though she said so with a smile. True, I thought, though I didn’t say so. Instead I told her that when I was a very young man my mother hadn’t allowed any books of a sexual nature in the house, not even high-minded photographic books with nudes, but since she followed dance there were any number of books containing photos of ballerinas in the house and as the young used to say, these books “turned me on.” Ann was amused by this but then became unpleasant. Had I followed up my early obsession with ballerinas? No, of course not. Was I still attracted to them? Well, somewhat in the limited way an elderly gent is attracted to anyone. Oh bullshit, she said, I should have followed my desires, ballerinas are relatively easy as most of them could always use “sugar daddies.” Her own father had bored the whole family senseless by his “puttering.” She would have preferred he acted badly like Picasso (he taught painting at a university). To Ann her father’s maturity was a hoax and the fact that he gave up painting and drinking for home repairs was an impossible disappointment for her.
This made me uncomfortable enough to sidle over to Dick’s homemade barbecue machine and affect deep interest in the chickens. Ann, who was now wearing what I think is called a sarong, was helping Dick’s sister Edna set up the picnic for dinner. Joe was asleep on the grass using Marcia as a pillow as he often did. Ann sat down next to him and brushed his hair. It occurred to me then that she might be drawn to Joe because her father had apparently lost his wildness and that’s all that comprised Joe’s life. After a year and a half in and out of hospitals he had no intention of getting close to a hospital or a doctor again. But then it is presumptuous of me to say that he had any intentions at all other than what he simply “did.”
Dinner wasn’t pleasant for me except for the chicken and potato salad. Joe, as was his habit, ate an entire chicken in five minutes and went back to sleep. Edna covered him with netting to protect him from the early-evening mosquitoes. He twitched a lot and she wondered aloud if she should increase his medication. His pills made up quite a list, not that they had any positive effect other than to prevent something worse. Edna was amused when Ann began to pick on me over our dessert of fresh blueberry ice cream made with true unpasteurized Jersey cream Dick got from a friend over in Newberry.
Ann’s first caustic remark came over the matter of my being a rare-book dealer, mostly retired but with a hand still slightly into the business. She thought of us as necromancers and how could I poke fun at the stock market when I was essentially in the same business. Her somewhat daffy mother had sold a first edition of Frost’s North of Boston for fifty bucks to a dealer in order to buy her puttering geezer of a husband a special birthday present, a fraction of its worth. When Ann had found out she had gone to the dealer’s shop, waited until there were several other customers, and then read the dealer out in the vulgarest terms imaginable. She managed to extract another fifty bucks which she tore into confetti and threw in the dealer’s face.
This almost, but not quite, ruined my chicken. Guilty sweat trickled down my tummy over the memory of swindling a doddering academic wife out of her late husband’s Faulkner collection to add to my own large holdings of this peculiar author who reminds me of botany in that there are so many shapes and permutations in his work. I took a fine vacation in Paris by selling a duplicate of Soldier’s Pay for eight thousand dollars.
Meanwhile, I diverted Ann by guessing that she was a very late child so that by the time she reached adulthood she was very protective of her parents, in fact had probably become a parent to both of them. This wild, defensive guess electrified her to the point that the phrase “pissed off” was the mildest of euphemisms. She looked at me with the coldest contempt, woke up Joe, and led him into their cabin.
So now you’ve met Sonia and Ann and we’ve not seen the end of either. And there’s one more coming in August. To make things up with Ann I had my part-time secretary in Chicago send her my own copy of North of Boston, a generous gift in monetary terms though I have no fondness for the poet. Ann replied by sending me five hundred pages or so of material she collected off the Internet on closed-head injuries. This was an unwieldy and ghastly manuscript which, along with hard, scientific information from doctors specializing in the field, included hundreds of testaments from the injured themselves. Some of the latter simply made the heart flutter and ache, woeful tales of years of therapy with small chance of total recovery, but then any little advances were cause for family celebrations. The sheer numbers of the injured, of course, reflected the frequency of auto and motorcycle accidents, the Newtonian principle that an object in motion (your head) tends to remain in motion unless acted upon by an unbalanced or unequal force (in Joe’s case, a massive gray beech tree).
But why would I be so overwhelmed by these stories, a sophisticated student of language, of the best of world literature not to speak of legal documents, histories, the best newspapers and magazines? The answer I suppose lay in the charm of folkloric stories, primitive or “naive” art, the origins of third-world music, the recorded oral tales of our own Natives. A trucker swerves to miss a school bus (of course!). There are massive head injuries and his head becomes a partially cooked rutabaga. His wife and five children bathe and feed him for years in their humble shack in southern Indiana. Gradual progress is made and after a decade of heroic effort by the family and doctors the trucker is able to give his daughter in marriage at a country church though his head lolls uncontrollably and he can only walk by shifting sideways. His grammar is poor indeed but he’s able to send his valiant story to the closed-head injury Web site because the trucking company gave him a laptop! He is able by himself to catch catfish from a stream near their home. His family loves fried catfish, his only possible contribution to their welfare. Jesus Christ, this tale floored me!
That sort of thing. Reading these stories by the dozens reminded me how nearly all of our printed discourse is faux Socratic and contentious, a discourse without nouns of color and taste, a worldwide septic tank of verbiage that is not causally related to the lives we hope to lead. It is the language of the enemy and politicians lead the pack, with this verbal shit spewing out of their mouths on every possible occasion. Analogic, ironic, what we call common usage leaking its viruses from between book covers.
Perhaps I’m being excessive but I doubt it. Anyway, after carefully reading the five hundred pages I sent the packet back to Ann saying I couldn’t bear to have it in my cabin, but not before Joe saw it on my kitchen counter. His verbal memory is sullied but not to the extent of his visual. To a certain minimal extent he can recall nouns referring to trees, birds, water, that sort of thing, but he can’t directly relate, say on a walk, the nouns to the actual people.
For instance he insisted in June on
showing me a coyote den. At first I refused because, unless it’s quite windy, June walking involves blackflies which will turn you into a mass of itching welts. Of course I’ve noticed over the years that there have gradually been more reasons not to walk: too cold, too hot, mosquitoes, horseflies, deerflies, it’s raining, it’s too wet after a rain, or I’m too tired from reading, thinking, eating, twiddling my big thumbs (genetic).
Joe said that we could drive within a half mile of the place which was a fib. It was a full mile if not farther. The various bugs were savage in the damp, still air. Joe pointed to a white pine stump on a distant hillock that was partly surrounded by a nasty thicket of thornapple, a bush covered with two-inch thorns so sharp that a hunting friend had his penis speared to the hilt. I was using my expensive binoculars and saw nothing noteworthy. Joe who was without binoculars said he could see two noses poking from the dark hole at the base of the stump, and then a third smallish figure scooted into the hole. I missed this, too. The mother was watching us from beneath a chokecherry tree in lavish bloom. Joe stood behind me and I finally focused on the dim figure of the mother. Joe was upset because the pups evidently wouldn’t emerge because of my presence. He directed me to walk back to another hillock about three hundred yards toward my car. I sniffed the unpleasant air and he drew out a plastic sack of rank stew meat from his pocket with a smile.