Returning to Earth

by Jim Harrison

  [Donald is having a real hard time. The neurologist has an elaborate word for it, dysarthria, but it means Donald loses his ability to talk. Sometimes he thinks he’s talking but it’s not comprehensible. Once I get him started he so badly wants to finish telling the story of his family for his children. These people are good storytellers but they never write anything down. When I was a little girl his father, Clarence, would tell me stories while he worked in the yard constructing elaborate flower beds for my ditzy mother, the gardens being the only viable part of her life (her problems being pills, alcohol, dealing with my father, who moment by moment could drive an auditorium full of women to batty tears). Clarence and Donald tell their stories in measured tones, ever so slowly, as if they are re-creating the story’s content visually in their minds then sending it out in words. They would not dream of writing the stories down, Clarence quit school in the fifth grade and began working full-time at age eleven. Donald is the most purely physical person I’ve ever met in my life. After an exhausting summer day working construction he would take Herald and Clare fishing until darkness fell. He would sleep five hours and then be up at six a.m. to cook breakfast because I’m slow in the morning and because he liked to cook breakfast, a habit that started when his mother was taken away and Clarence often worked nights running his trapline or reconditioning boats in addition to working for my family. Right now I’m trying to make sense of my exhaustion. Our kids, Clare and Herald, wanted to move home from Los Angeles to help out but Donald wouldn’t allow it. David volunteered to return from Mexico early but I told him frankly that he would generally be more of a problem than a genuine aide. My main hope is when Polly’s son K comes back from Ann Arbor in three days. He’s going to live in the garage apartment out back and Donald likes and trusts him. Other than K it’s just me. He turns to stone with the neurologist and nurses. The simple fact is that Donald is deeply embarrassed by his illness and I don’t think that he’s going to get beyond this state. When I sleep on a single bed beside his own in the den it’s like when Clare was sick as a baby and I could hear her every breath even when I thought I was asleep. We’ve been lovers since I was fourteen and he fifteen, almost sixteen. Our children were raised almost by the time we were forty. We were so proud of them and then they were gone. I have enough money from my parents, mostly from my mother’s estate, but it was unthinkable for Donald not to go on working. Despite this money when we went on trips, usually to the West with the kids, we didn’t stay in lodges or motels but camped. Donald wasn’t a tightwad, he just liked to camp. And not at regular campsites but off in the woods or beside rivers. Once in Wyoming we were camped beside the Green River and this old gentleman rancher came by on a horse and told us we were trespassing but then he and Donald started talking and we ended up staying four days while Donald and Herald, who could do a man’s work at fourteen, jacked up a bunkhouse and laid a course of cement blocks under it to stabilize the foundation. Like his father, Donald liked to be useful. I used to wonder if I first loved him because he was the opposite of my father, who was so aggressively useless and would lamely put on a pair of calfskin gloves while rigging his sailboat, which almost never left the harbor. Once Laurie and I caught my dad with a ninth-grade classmate of ours on his boat but I didn’t tell my mother because I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. I know K has an affection for me though at forty-four I’m nearly twice his age. I do realize that I’m not exactly homely. I like the neurologist, who is divorced, but he has an odor of offices and medicine, which I find repellent. Donald teases me that I better start looking for a boyfriend and that was nearly a year ago. When Polly came over for dinner two weeks ago she said she was worried because I was getting skinny and haggard from being with Donald around the clock but I said I love him and that’s what you do. Polly was very smart not to remarry my brother David, who is very nice but has been basically goofy since he was a little boy. He couldn’t accept the fact that Dad was a lost cause. I went through a long stretch when I thought the male and female were more similar than they turned out to be. Strangely, though there is a big age difference, Donald and K are more like boyhood friends. When they packed the SUV for their trip to see the glacier early last fall, they acted as if they were simply off on a fishing trip though Donald stumbled twice in the yard. K is slender but very strong and could help Donald to his feet. K used to ride his bike all the way from Marquette to Sault Ste. Marie and later Bay Mills to see Clare, whom he had a crush on, and also, frankly, myself. Polly is always worried about K partly because she has given up on her daughter Rachel, who has always had drug problems and lives in New York City. Before Donald got sick I went to New York City with Polly to do a possible “intervention” with her daughter. David wanted to go along and help out but Polly said that he’d probably just give a lecture on the history of drug use in America. We had a fine time in New York City because it turned out Polly’s daughter wasn’t in bad shape. She worked as a receptionist and a general helper for a small off-brand record company in the Lower East Side. Her hair was orange, she had tattoos, and rings in her nose and belly button. We went to a strange concert with her and all her friends, who seemed to comprise a tribe of sorts. She lived with a rather tiny young man who was a singer with a large discordant voice. All in all we were relieved. I’m going to stop interrupting or maybe I’ll just edit out my comments. I think that a good deal of my exhaustion comes from trying to make sense out of all of this. I envy Donald’s mostly unspoken religion though it is maddeningly stoic. This religion has evolved from both his life and childhood stories plus the traditional three-day fast. Cynthia.]

  The next piece of luck Clarence had over near Duluth was again caused by his horse Sally. They were building ore docks near Superior and Clarence got a job as a teamster hauling timbers, but then finally became a foreman of a big crew building the ore docks before he was twenty years old. I’ve spent quite a bit of time worrying about this man even though he’s long dead. Here’s the idea. The hours were so long your work was your life. Clarence’s workweek was six days a week, twelve hours a day. The only vacation you might get was if you got injured and then you didn’t get paid a dime. The powers that be could get away with this because there was plenty of available labor, a lot of them immigrants—Finns, Swedes, Germans, Norwegians, Bohemians, and suchlike. There was an endless supply of iron ore from up on the Mesabi Range near Hibbing and Grand Rapids in Minnesota. That was open-pit mining while over in the Upper Peninsula it was deep-shaft for both iron and copper. My dad said that at least Clarence got to work aboveground. By and large your basic Indians don’t want to be deep-shaft miners. They’re leery because of the idea that to go deep underground would be coming close to the living world of spirits. For all I know this may be true.

  Anyway, I’ve been troubled by this idea of work. On occasion I’ve worked a fourteen-hour day laying blocks or finishing cement and I can tell you that you just become cement. That’s your life. The same with miners or loggers for that matter who got a day off a week at logging camps for thirty bucks a month. It must have been twenty years ago that David told me that between 1890 and 1910 in three mines over near Republic, west of Ishpeming, two thousand miners died in accidents. You can’t believe everything David says so I had Cynthia look it up in the Soo library and it turned out to be true. It was like the owners sent men to war underground. The company gave the miners a house and a milk cow and if the miner died the family got to live in the house for a month and then they had to move on. This is the history of our life up here. Cynthia helped me calm down a bit by having me read two books to show me it also happened in other countries. One took place in the mining areas of England and was authored by A.J. Cronin and the other was based in France and called Les Misérables, which of course means the miserable ones and that’s putting it lightly. I can’t tell you what good it did me to learn all of this but I think you’re better off understanding things like this than simply being pissed off. When you work a man twelve hours a day he becomes ex
hausted and careless and that’s when the fatal accidents happen. Men and women fall in love, mate, and have children and they have to be fed.

  I know something about what Clarence was up against building those giant ore docks. I’m modest about my knowledge but I was pretty good at geometry and algebra in high school. They were the only subjects I got A’s in. I nearly flunked Civics and History because their subjects never dealt with the raw deal the Indians got, which made me quite angry. I knew the story of how Flower’s grandfather lost a whole section of land, which is 640 acres. Anyway, my son Herald did some research on his computer and at libraries and came up with all of the details on how these giant ore docks were built. They had to be about a hundred and fifty feet high so that the ore could gravity-feed down chutes from the train cars to the huge freighters, which would then take the ore to Cleveland and Chicago to be made into iron and steel.

  It was on a March morning after an ice storm that Clarence lost Sally. He was hauling a load of planks out to the end of the ore dock. A man had been supposed to throw out rock salt on the side planking next to the rails but had run out of salt. The wagon started to slide and Clarence jumped clear only to see the full load skid off the side dragging the fully harnessed Sally with it. Clarence went down hand over hand on a big rope but Sally had hit the solid ice, which often doesn’t melt until late April or early May. The fall was about a hundred and fifty feet and Sally was just short of twenty years. Clarence borrowed a team and a log sled and supplies and took Sally about ten miles east along the shore and then up into the woods to a place they had once camped together. The ground was frozen deep because there had been a cold spell where it was below zero most of February, like in Ishpeming a few years ago when the city pipes froze eight feet down. The story goes it took Clarence three days and nights to bury Sally deep enough to be safe from the wolves and also the bears that would soon be coming out of hibernation. Clarence built a huge driftwood fire and worked right through the three days and nights until his beloved horse had her proper burial.

  Clarence quit his good job, bought a barrel of whiskey, and drank for a month or so. He lost his heart for a while. I was thinking just now that I understand his feelings because I have lost my body, which has been mine for forty-five years. [Donald stops talking and looks at me because I’m crying. When he resumes talking I can’t understand what he says except that I know he’s talking about a pet crow he had as a child. Donald is making squawking noises. Later on about midnight the new Rilutek drug seems to have a good effect because Donald wishes to talk. I’ve dimmed the lights, so I can barely see to take dictation but we are both staring at the moonlight on the lilacs out the screened window. Their odor is nearly overpowering and it’s as if we’ve both given in to this living memory of earth. Moment by moment it’s lilacs. C.]

  Clarence had a sense of humor. He told his son, who was my grandfather, that he would have buried himself with Sally but couldn’t figure out how. There are things a man can’t accomplish. When he finished the whiskey he didn’t have any more to drink for years until he went to the World’s Fair in Chicago or St. Louis in 1903. Meanwhile he used the empty barrel as a food cache because flies didn’t like the whiskey smell. He ran it up to a tree limb with a rope and pulley because now he lived way back in the woods and had a problem with bears getting his food. He raised a tiny bear cub after a hunter had shot the mother. She slept with him until she was three except in winter—then Clarence talked to her down the blowhole in the snowbank covering the deadfall where she hibernated. Her hot slow breath melted this breathing hole but so deep was her sleep she didn’t hear him. This old Indian jokester in the area asked Clarence if he made love to this bear and Clarence said that like many women she plain didn’t want to. She made love to a male bear but stayed in the area and would visit Clarence and sit by the fire with her two cubs. He lived only a mile from Lake Superior and they would share a pail of lake trout he’d catch. Naturally he called this bear Sally. Any dog or horse that lived with him the rest of this life he called Sally. When he married this mixed-blood French-Canadian woman named Lucretia when he was fifty he also called her Sally. Clarence believed spirits were alive and moved in and out of creatures. Even birds could carry human spirits and vice versa. I have no proof of this but it might be true. It’s not for us to say no to it.

  One winter night Clarence had a dream of horses. In the dream there was a green pasture with many draft horses that were related to Sally. There was a marsh nearby full of red-winged blackbirds, which have a song Clarence liked, so in April he headed toward the southeast and worked at a sawmill in Ladysmith, Wisconsin, for a year to gather a little money. By the time Clarence left the woods he was about tired of just eating fish and venison, and the rutabagas, cabbages, carrots, and potatoes he grew in his garden. He had a craving for tomatoes, which are almost impossible to grow that far north. Once when Cynthia’s tomatoes froze in mid-June on Sugar Island near the Soo she was steamed up all summer and then in August drove a couple of hundred miles to buy five bushels of the right kind of tomatoes both to can and to make sauces for the freezer. If you want tomatoes nothing else will do. Unlike many in the Great North Clarence wouldn’t eat bear meat.

  Clarence got tired of Ladysmith and moved on farther south to find the sources of his horse dream. He was a month or so around Marshfield and won fifty bucks at the county fair in the anvil-lifting contest, which was a lot of money in those days. Clarence knew his limits because he had met the big Chippewa up north who had portaged nineteen miles carrying over four hundred pounds but this fellow weighed over three hundred fifty. Some of these Indians got real big because they had hundreds of years of all the fish that they wanted to eat from the Great Lakes just as Cynthia tells me the Crow Indians got so tall because of centuries of buffalo eating. She says that’s why Desert or Pueblo Indians are smaller. The food is harder to find down that way.

  The stroke of luck at the county fair at Marshfield was that Clarence met the foreman of a big farm over inland from Milwaukee. This farm was owned by a German that also owned a big Milwaukee beer company. This farm bred and raised hundreds of draft horses to pull beer wagons and suchlike but also for sport like pulling contests. When Clarence arrived at dawn after walking ten miles in the moonlight he saw the marsh full of red-winged blackbirds and the field full of horses just like his dreams.

  Just now I thought of the walks I used to take with Clare near Bay Mills in the moonlight. Herald was always a little scared of the dark though he denied it. Clare and me would walk up the hill to the cemetery and she liked to pretend she was afraid of the spirits but I knew she wasn’t. When she was just a child she was a tough little cookie. Once over near Rudyard when the whole family was picking huckleberries on a hot day we went swimming in a creek and when we got back to our pails there was a small bear eating our berries. Well, little Clare ran at the bear screaming her head off while Herald and our dogs got behind Cynthia and me. Most dogs know better than to bother a bear. Once in the woods I helped a bear hunter staple about two hundred stitches in a hound that mixed it up with a sixty-pound bear. Well, Clare loved to walk in the moonlight. In high school she was six feet tall and was a real good power forward on the girl’s basketball team.

  Clarence thrived on the horse farm and moved up the ladder among the help so that in a couple of years he had his own shack rather than staying in the bunkhouse. He went down to the World’s Fair in 1903 and drove a twelve-team hitch, that’s twenty-four horses, pulling a big McCormick reaper in a parade. I still got the medal he received at the World’s Fair. It’s not gold but it’s a nice medal, sort of like the one I got for winning the shot put at the state track meet down in Lansing.

  Clarence didn’t like Chicago too much. He thought it might catch fire again like it did in 1871 when he first traveled east on Sally and the world was full of smoke. He was also upset that his boss sold the twelve-team hitch to another beer company owner from St. Louis. He had worked with these special horses for two
years and now they were sold. He had come down to Chicago from Milwaukee in a railroad car with the horses and returned in the private railroad car of his boss and started taking a few drinks. He went on a bit of a bender and got in trouble when he took this French-Canadian girl out of a whorehouse where she had got roughed up. Out on the street the whorehouse bouncers had followed Clarence and attacked him, which was their mistake. They wanted to get their girl back. Clarence made short work of the three of them though they had blackjacks. The police tried to arrest Clarence but one of the spectators of the fight worked for the big-deal brewing owner and interfered. Clarence took the girl home and they stayed together until she died on their little farm near Ishpeming thirty years later. She didn’t mind being renamed Sally.

  [Donald seems asleep with his eyes open. I am thinking that I must let Herald and Clare come for a visit despite Donald’s embarrassment. His decline is precipitous. The neurologist is from Cleveland and doesn’t really understand why Donald hid the early stages of his illness for God knows how long. I said some old-style men in the Upper Peninsula are like that. Life is hard and you don’t complain. If you smash a hand while logging you joke about it. So many of them are broken-down and crippled early, like the cowboys in their forties and fifties I saw in Wyoming. My other reason for getting Herald and Clare home is my worry about having overheard Donald on the phone with K in Ann Arbor. I thought I heard Donald say that he doesn’t want to live beyond his ability to walk down the street to the water near the old Coast Guard station and museum. I was immediately damp with cold sweat. K brings Irish smoked salmon up from Ann Arbor. Donald has always smoked lake trout and whitefish and can’t understand how the Irish turn out a better product. The salmon is easier for him to eat than most things with his disease. Later: I slept two hours and now it is dawn with loud bird noises and a cool breeze off Lake Superior. Donald is awake and I can tell he wants to make love but we tried it a week ago unsuccessfully. I could see his rage at life, similar to early last fall before the trip to the glacier when he still wanted to murder that man over near Baraga.]