Returning to Earth

by Jim Harrison

  I like to look at this photo of Clarence and Sally when they got married out on Presque Isle in 1906. Her mother and some relatives who were mixed-blood Cree and French came down from Manitoba and stayed a couple of months. One of the relatives was a shaman type. He was a real little fellow and liked to play jokes on people and had the talent of being able to disappear at will. Sometimes he scared people but mostly he was an ordinary fellow. He was said to commune with certain animals that God had never invented. He camped in a little tent in a thicket out behind Clarence’s house. Early one morning Sally saw out the kitchen window that the man’s tent and whole thicket were shaking and suddenly the man was up in the top of a fir tree. Sally was frightened because she was already pregnant before marriage and she sure didn’t want this man’s spirit to enter her baby. Outsiders don’t understand that no one wants to be a medicine man. It’s a calling, and the so-called spirits draw the man out into direct communion with what we can’t see but suspect is there. I don’t even want to say this man’s name though I’m not sure of much of this and my dad didn’t want to know anything about it. With the Anishinabeg you have the jessabked and the wabeno, who are men of dawn. That’s about all I’m saying as it’s coming close to my own religion, which is nobody’s beeswax as we said when we were kids. The Cree however left early because he thought he was being pursued by local spirits known as manitous. He needed to get back home up near Hollow Water in Manitoba, where the local spirits knew him.

  Clarence raised some draft horses but his meat-and-potatoes trade was that of a commercial fisherman. They had a pretty good life though Sally was upset that she could only have the one child. In addition to commercial fishing for lake trout and whitefish and raising draft horses, Clarence also built a smokehouse to smoke fish. Of course back then refrigeration was limited to ice boxes so that food that lasted, like smoked fish and meat, was much in demand. My own dad learned back in the Korean War from some guys from down south how you go about smoking meats like hams, brisket, and pork shoulder, which is my own favorite though Cynthia says it’s too fatty.

  The main content of my life has been getting married and raising children, but then when the children left a few years ago I felt high and dry. I missed fishing with Clare. If Herald was along he’d stay back at the campsite reading a science book or wander around identifying plants and flowers from one of his guidebooks. Herald was a bit spooked by the woods but we always took along our old malamute Jeff, which relaxed Herald. Jeff hunted ground squirrels all of his long life but never so far as we knew caught a single one. Cynthia liked us to go on these fishing trips because it gave her a chance to be alone. We’d go as far as the Nipigon area of Canada because Clare liked to fish for large brook trout. Her uncle David gave her some nice fly rods that I’m sure cost an arm and a leg. Clare always teased me because I’m a bait fisherman, either minnows or worms. She’s hoping to get in the movie-wardrobe business in Toronto rather than Hollywood because Toronto is closer to brook trout. She once caught a five-pounder when we were camped between Wawa and Chapleau. Herald was nervous because we heard wolves at night. Even Jeff the dog got into the tent with Herald when the wolves started howling. Herald was always in his own tent because he’d be up half the night reading by a lantern. He was a good camp cook though Clare rode him hard for following all recipes as if they were science.

  So when the kids left for the university I got a bit lonely though I had Cynthia and some pretty good friends. Cynthia and K found me some books to read in the evening and I can’t say they brought happiness. I’m a slow reader because I have dyslexia and maybe I dwelled too long on each page. A couple of years ago K sent me Rites of Conquest, which is about the history and culture of Michigan’s Native Americans. I wish my dad had been alive to talk this book over. K took me down to Mackinaw City, where the author, Charles Cleland, was on an archaeology dig but I was too shy to ask many questions. Though he was a professor the man was as regular as a keg of nails. Despite meeting the author I was lower than a duck’s butt for a couple of months. Cynthia and K cautioned me by telling woeful stories about the history of Jews, blacks, and Arabs. On Third Street near the IGA I saw a very white man and his white wife getting into their real expensive car which was also white and I wondered how much he knew of what his people had done to us back in history. I had insisted on walking way down to the IGA in the morning because I was going fishing with K and we needed something to take along on the Deadstream for lunch. Well I got dizzy from my disease though this was early on last year and I sat down on the curb. Within minutes a cop car wheeled up and I decided to just look at my feet. A cop yelled out his car window, “Are you drunk, boy?” But then he said, “Jesus Christ, Donny, is that you? Are you okay?” It turned out to be Ray Nurmi, who played defensive end in high school. Ray gave me a ride home in the squad car and I didn’t ask him if he called Indians “boy.” I asked him if he knew where Floyd was living and Ray said he’d heard Floyd was living up near Baraga and did I still have it in for him? I didn’t say anything. Floyd’s the man I wanted to murder for years.

  [Donald falls asleep from all the ibuprofen I gave him a half hour ago. This ordinary drug helps relieve symptoms temporarily, especially the severe cramping. Donald has never wanted to admit to me certain of his characteristics that he is thinking of as weaknesses. This Floyd thing has largely passed now though I see it can still arise as a minor blemish. Donald can be so secretive about such things except with K. I know that K and Donald drove up to Baraga last year to look for Floyd before they went to British Columbia to see the glacier. I don’t know the whole story because neither Donald nor K will talk about it. The trouble with Donald and Floyd started when they were children. They disliked each other from the start and were always fighting. Floyd was a logger’s son and as big as Donald though ungainly and not much of an athlete. Anyway, I think it was in the seventh grade when Donald’s terrier mongrel had a litter and Donald was trying to sell the pups door to door and one got loose on the sidewalk and Floyd kicked the puppy and killed it. Anyway I heard the police came because though they were only twelve these were big boys and adults couldn’t break up the fight. The police stopped Donald from dragging Floyd down to Lake Superior, where he was going to drown him. Boys and men used to fight a lot around here but now it’s largely out of fashion though you hear about it taking place in the more backwoods communities and among young men who take crystal meth, which is a real problem up here. Well, luckily in the ninth grade Floyd punched a teacher and got kicked out of school and the family moved farther west in the U.P. but not before Donald put Floyd in the hospital with a body check in a hockey game. But the grudge over the puppy never ended. K arrived the other day and his mother, Polly, is pissed off because K has a Mohawk haircut, which is a stripe down the center of his head with the rest bald. I, however, am pleased because I got to sleep a whole night. In a week or so our children are coming home and David is returning from Mexico, where his ex-lover Vernice joined him. Now that K is here looking like some sort of extravagant faux Indian and I got a full night’s sleep I thought this rest would create a miracle. Instead it caused more consciousness and it became unimaginable that my lover of thirty years will die. I sat there at the kitchen table studying my coffee and cereal as if they would reveal some sort of answer for my brain, which had begun to swirl in the face of the inevitable. I had just turned fourteen and Donald was midway through his fifteenth year when we first became close though in most respects we were old for our age. Of course I had met him a number of times because his father, Clarence, worked for my parents but I knew him only slightly because my parents were quite formal and it would have been unthinkable for Clarence to have his son hanging around the property. Now it’s thirty years later and I’m forty-four and my daughter, Clare, tells me that I better sort things out because I’m likely to live a long time without the love of my life. That morning so long ago Clarence had Donald help him digging out in the hard soil behind the garage because the garage and
Jesse’s apartment above were tilting a bit. My father was standing in one of his stupidly expensive summer suits waiting for Jesse to back out the car to drive him three blocks downtown. My father was leering as usual at my friend Laurie, who was sunning with me on the lawn in her admittedly tiny bikini. I was just really figuring out the power a girl’s body had over men and boys. When my brother David said hello to Laurie in her bikini it looked like he’d break out in hives. Anyway, my father and Jesse left and Laurie and I made Clarence and Donald lemonade because the wind was from the south and it was a very hot June morning. Donald was down in the hole when I stooped to hand him his lemonade, his head only at my knee level. He said, “Thanks” but he was staring downward. I said, “Why won’t you look at me to say thanks?” and he said, “I don’t want to” and his father laughed. At the time I never knew a man like Clarence who lived so much in the center of reality. Donald drank his lemonade and handed me the glass with his back half turned. His hair and body were wet with sweat. His shirt was off and sweat trickled down his back, and then he turned and looked straight up at my body, not my face, and said, “Thanks” again. His body smelled as sweet as the earth he was digging. I felt a buzzy sensation in my whole body. He was smooth and brown with these Finnish-Indian cheekbones. Now K comes into the kitchen and says Donald is awake and wants to talk. K puts his hand on my shoulder because I’m crying as I gather up my notebook and pens. He hands me some tissues. Donald is embarrassed when I cry as if he’s a burden. C.]

  Well, Clarence and his wife, Sally, were pretty happy out there on their small farm southwest of Negaunee. Their little son, Clarence, who was my grandfather, was born with a hair on his ass by which I mean he was a real wild boy. It’s said he shot his first deer at age seven with a .22. They had game laws back then and he got caught but the authorities couldn’t very well put a seven-year-old in jail. The family had ups and downs especially when Sally got sick from an infection and back then just like for many people now there was no health insurance. Sally was in the hospital in Marquette for a month but Clarence’s credit was good though it took him years to work off the debt. It was the need for money that drove Clarence to do a wrong thing so the story goes. Also anger. He had lost three out of a litter of five piglets to a bear, which represented lost money for his family and his debt to a hospital. You have to add on that now Clarence was over fifty and he wasn’t used to being responsible for a wife and son. That’s my own thought anyway as I’ve noticed men that have real late children always seem tired out. What happened was that the son of the Milwaukee brewer whose horse farm Clarence had worked on telegrammed Clarence and said he would pay five hundred dollars, which was about what a man could make in a year in those days, if Clarence would guide him to a big bear he could shoot so he could be photographed with the bear for a beer advertisement. They say the man was a drunken womanizer and he wanted to do something manly like the American hero Teddy Roosevelt. Clarence knew the whole thing was wrong but he went ahead anyway. The man showed up in a private railroad car and Clarence took him into the million acres the Longyears owned north of the McCormick Tract in the Huron Mountains. Clarence hunted there in the fall and trapped in the winter and knew the territory of an especially large female bear. It wasn’t much of a hunting camp as the man had some playboy friends with him plus a photographer and some servants to set up tents with rugs on the floors, and also a cook, who brought along liquor and wine. Clarence was disgusted and camped about a mile away, where he shot a deer to bait the bear and built a blind for the man to hide in. Well, the man hurt his ankle and Clarence had to carry him to the blind. The bear was shot with Clarence shooting at the same time to make sure he got his money.

  Clarence knew this was the worst thing he had done in his life. He looked on it as a curse because he loved bears. There were pictures in the Marquette and Milwaukee papers and in a sporting magazine. “Brewery King Shoots Monster Bear,” the article read, and though he paid his debts and bought more pigs Clarence never got over this action. It’s the old problem of what men will do for money and the answer is just about anything. Clarence took to drink for a month, which was full of bear nightmares. When he sobered up he realized that the bear had a cub he might save but when he found the mother’s den the cub was already dead of starvation. This was a sad tale and Clarence never hunted or trapped again because his dreams told him this was his penance.

  Meanwhile everyone called Clarence’s son Little Clarence. He was shorter but real wide in the shoulders. He tried to sign up for World War I when he was only twelve but someone recognized him at the recruitment center. Little Clarence always had money he made as the youngest bare-knuckle fighter and also shooting deer for rich hunters for five bucks a head. Little Clarence was the despair of his parents because he was always in trouble with the law. Nothing could subdue this young man but then when he was sixteen he fell in love with this pretty Finn girl. The girl was the daughter of a commercial fisherman who was a friend of Clarence’s. The man wasn’t against his daughter being in love with a young man who was mostly Indian but he wouldn’t put up with Little Clarence’s behavior. This Finn family were religious folks of the Lutheran faith. Little Clarence had already begun to see the light when he had done thirty days in jail for knocking out a policeman in downtown Marquette and had terribly missed seeing his girlfriend, who became my grandmother Nelmi.

  Things went well for about five years. You might say they were golden years but then things unraveled in the worst way. First, Sally took sick again and then was bedridden. Little Clarence and his wife, Nelmi, had a son who was to become my father. One stormy late October day Little Clarence and his father-in-law were lost off Standard Rock in a gale, which sad to say was not a rare event for commercial fishermen. The survivors on shore were heartbroken. Sally got even sicker and after a year the widow Nelmi remarried a miner over by Republic. This man didn’t like Indians so that Clarence and Sally rarely got to see their grandson, my father. Sally died in 1925 and Clarence somehow got her casket up to Hollow Water in Manitoba, which was the place of her people and where she wanted to be buried. Clarence never returned to the United States. He was last seen early in the Depression in 1933 up north of Flin Flon, which is way up there. He was living in a cabin on an island in the middle of a remote lake. A local trapper told the police that Clarence lived with two bears and it was supposed that the bears ate him after he died. No one knows but no body was found. Clarence was in his seventies then and with his up-and-down life it wasn’t a bad way to go. I ate some bear stew when I was about twelve and it gave me bad dreams. I asked my dad about it and he said it only meant I shouldn’t eat the meat unless for some reason I wanted bear dreams.

  Once when I was fifteen a bunch of us were driving around one night near Skandia drinking beer and I scooped up a bear cub near the road. I was hanging out of the car with a friend holding me by the belt. It was June and the cub was real little. It cried like a baby and I rocked it and it quit crying and stared at me under the dome light of the car. I felt real eerie and then ashamed of myself. The mother was roaring around in the bushes and when I put the cub back on the road’s shoulder it scooted back to its mom. K says that bears are distantly related to pigs. I can believe this because before my mother was taken away and we lived beyond the edge of town we raised some pigs. Holding a piglet is like holding a bear cub. You scratch their tummies and they calm down and look at you as if you might somehow belong together. When our daughter Clare was a baby and had colic and I rocked her there was this same feeling. There are bears all over the Upper Peninsula and people are never sure about their feelings for them. However, the traditional Chippewa are real specific about bears. I won’t go into this because it’s religious. I saw this evangelist on television and it embarrassed me that this man could talk about God as if he was a buddy next door. Before my mother was taken away to the Newberry State Hospital she told me it was best to talk to God in whispers or in your silent interior speech. She had trouble with sounds. S
he thought sounds were somehow alive. For instance, she could handle a screen door slamming or the hum of the hand-cranked cream separator. We had a cow when I was young. But a truck passing out on Route 28 or an airplane could make her eyes fearful. We had a black-and-white TV but the sound could never be on. She was uneducated but she liked classical music just like Cynthia. I admit I like Mozart myself because if I have a problem the music will take me away from it. My mother amazed my friends because she could do an exact imitation of a cow mooing or a dog barking. You couldn’t tell the difference. When she got worse she would moo or bark in the middle of the night or do frog croaks. Dad said her disease short-circuited her and she lost power over her behavior. Her own mother died when my mom was a little girl down near Bark River. My mom took to wandering out in the swamp thinking she might find her own mother. On their honeymoon my parents drove all the way to Detroit to see the Tigers play baseball. They had a roast beef dinner at a restaurant with a black couple they met at the ball game. They kept in touch but the man was killed by a random bullet during the Detroit race riot in the sixties. You can’t really understand dying by a random bullet.