Returning to Earth

by Jim Harrison

  “Well, despite your being well-read and educated it’s natural to slide toward your daughter’s thoroughly irrational point of view. She’s also well-read and educated. You said last evening that you’d like me to come up to Marquette and talk to her but why should I dissuade her from thinking like her father’s people? Back to being well-read and educated. What does it offer us when someone we love dies? We keep talking about Clare going off the ‘deep end,’ especially David, who’s overfamiliar with that territory.”

  “But then what’s an appropriate response to death?” I interrupted.

  “There isn’t a singular response. You keep on truckin’, as that cartoonist Crumb said. You’re probably having a thousand responses a day because your brain simply can’t stop trying to comprehend what has happened to you. It’s the largest question mark we deal with in life and no response will make it go away. We envy the devout who experience the pain but have a surefire explanation. I’m curious if Donald gave you any advice before he passed on?”

  “He said, ‘You can remember me but let me go.’ He also said, ‘Find yourself a boyfriend.’” And then I collapsed as if the bones inside me had dissolved. I simply crumpled and began to sob for the first time since we buried Donald. I felt my chest might burst from sobbing. Coughlin knelt down on the sidewalk and cradled me in his arms. A passing jogger stopped, his face a blank.

  “Is this a medical emergency?”

  “No. Her husband died,” Coughlin said.

  “Oh Jesus Christ how awful.” The jogger sped off.

  The last evening in Chicago was a marvel of pleasantness. I had the somewhat giddy feeling that everything was beyond my control including the central problems of Clare and David and Vera for instance. They were very happy to be at a Mexican restaurant with an odd name, Topolobampo, eating Yucatán food. To be sure they were a nearly lunatic couple launched on an affair that would be startling if you knew the total background as I did. There was a near miss with a sour note when we were talking about the relative safety of travel in different countries and Coughlin said it’s hard to avoid the issue because the whole human sensorium is directed toward safety. I could tell that all of us were suddenly thinking of the same thing for a few moments, that the arena of death destroys the illusion of safety. We let it pass without comment, all sipping our margaritas in silly unison, seeking alcohol as a tranquilizer.

  David thought that since I was unsure about teaching middle-class white kids in Marquette I should come to Mexico and take a three-month course in intensive Spanish and teach there. I said that I couldn’t leave Clare until she achieved some sort of minimal stability. When this happened I was thinking of moving farther west to Minnesota, or farther yet, and teaching at a reservation school. I couldn’t really go back to teach at the Soo or Bay Mills, where Donald would be so overwhelmingly in the landscape, a presence like the weather. Besides I’d had so much experience with the foibles and difficulties of Indian kids though perhaps I should stick with Chippewas. I had talked to a retired teacher in Sault Ste. Marie who had taught both Zuni and Hopi children and she had assured me that they are radically different cultures from the Anishinabe. I mean I could learn the differences but why not take advantage of what I already knew.

  “You can’t just leave Clare with K?” David wondered.

  “Well, no, not for the time being. They’re lovers after a fashion but they’re more like quarrelsome cousins on some days. I mean they’ve known each other since they were ten years old. The other day before I left there was a mild wrangle about who left a book behind at a beach picnic fifteen years ago.”

  “Having children lasts a long time,” said David, an expert in solipsisms.

  “It’s easier when they’re in prison,” Vera said. “Every day I was waiting to hear that he hurt someone new.”

  “They could be wrapped in banana leaves like this pork,” David said, staring down at his dish.

  “Pigs are easy compared to adult children. It’s my profession and I’m not in full control of my mind and behavior. I’m sixty-five and in Montana this summer I became infatuated with a waitress at a diner. I even sent her flowers. A rather large local cowboy, her husband in fact, had to tell me she was spoken for. At my age I assumed I was beyond this but I wasn’t. This is why I like chaos theory.” Coughlin laughed so hard he nearly tipped over in his chair.

  We all walked together back to the Drake. I embraced David and Vera because I was leaving in the morning. They seemed eager to be alone. I was almost envious remembering that smoky feeling I’d have before making love, a sort of letting go like diving into a lake off a rowboat. It was only ten so I invited Coughlin up for a nightcap. We couldn’t help but return to the subject of Clare but he was concise and direct saying that normally the children follow the mother’s lead in the grieving process when the father dies. Our case was an exception with Clare going off on her own peculiar tangent. He had no idea what the dimensions of her search would be but thought there might be what he called “a way down and out” in her belief that her father’s soul had entered a bear. Meanwhile, no real harm was being done. This wasn’t the sort of pathology that was full of precedents in psychoanalytic literature. He knew a cultural anthropologist who spent a lot of time at the Newberry Library’s American Indian collection and this man might offer some guidance on the phenomenon for whatever it was worth. Meanwhile, I should be thinking of the millions of people who presume that on their point of death their souls will ascend to be with Jesus wherever. “This, in fact, is their perception of reality and it’s not subject to argument. Clare is drawn to what she thinks was her father’s perception of reality. It doesn’t matter one whit if it’s part of a Chippewa system of belief. It’s what Clare believes about her dad.”

  I found myself looking at this dear man and wishing he were forty-five rather than sixty-five, and then blushed inside myself. Despite all of my reading I suddenly felt I knew nothing. I was high and dry in Chicago at night in November with rain spattering off the window.

  “Twice seven plus three.” Coughlin laughed as if he read my feelings.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s French folk wisdom about men and women. A man is foolhardy to start an affair with a woman if he’s more than seventeen years older than she. I think we’ve missed by four years.”

  I sat there woodenly thinking this over, trying without success to understand the meaning of successive years. I recalled Polly saying she had had a “crush” on this man years ago. It wasn’t the time to wonder why he was attractive. He got up as if embarrassed, kissed my forehead, and left.

  K picked me up at the Marquette airport, fairly glum because Clare had suggested that he go back to Ann Arbor while she “worked things out.” While we waited for my baggage he admitted that he wasn’t optimistic because she mostly hung out in her room with her hundred bear books, and then last night she had slept out on the back porch in her sleeping bag despite the fact that it was near zero. She had also been visiting Flower every day for more bear stories and Flower was helping her build some sort of little hut in the woods where she intended to spend a lot of time this winter. Despite the coolness of the baggage area I felt sweat popping on my forehead with this last fact along with the image of my daughter freezing to death on a January night when the temperature could be twenty below zero or worse.

  Outside my spirits rose. To northerners there is an ineffable sweetness to the aftermath of the first blizzard. We had flown north in a cloud bank but now the sun was breaking through and glittered off two feet of fresh snow. K joked about how the state police and game wardens were busy finding marooned deer hunters. I recalled with some melancholy how much the four of us had enjoyed our first venison meal, with Donald at the stove inexpertly frying the meat and Clare jumping up from the table because Donald’s gravy always curdled when he added flour and cold milk to the pan juices and Clare shrieking, “Dad, you have to whisk it.”

  When we reached the house there was a note from
Clare saying only that she had gone to Flower’s. K’s luggage was stacked in the hall. He was leaving after he made sandwiches for the trip to Ann Arbor and I suddenly realized I would be left alone in the house where I had experienced my less than glorious childhood. I shivered though the house was warm.

  “I could stay until the morning if you’d like,” K said, giving me a not totally reliable look.

  “No, I’ll be fine.” I was watching how much hot mustard he was spreading on his sandwiches and thinking what a lithe, muscular body he had. Clare had complained to me when she was under the influence of wine that K’s lovemaking was “overenergetic.”

  K dropped his sandwiches in a sack, filled his thermos with coffee, and then I helped him carry his bags out to his pickup. He kissed me good-bye on the lips when I was slow to avert my face. I watched him drive off then made my way carefully up the icy walk thinking that it might somehow be a relief to fall flat on my ass. I lay down on the sofa and wept for less than a minute, and then said “Fuck it,” got up, and spent several hours cleaning the house, including scrubbing the kitchen floor on my hands and knees despite the fact that a cleaning woman was coming tomorrow. I thought idly of the fiction that there is an appropriate response to death. The only one I could think of was a modest culinary trick an Italian girl had taught me in college. Fry three eggs in an ample amount of olive oil that you’ve brought to nearly smoking heat. Eat with good peasant bread, which I didn’t have so settled for toasting an English muffin. Death faded for ten minutes at which point I decided to reread Love in the Time of Cholera by García Márquez, which Clare had sent me seven years ago when she was a college freshman. Since I couldn’t escape love and longing why not immerse myself in it until I drowned?

  Before going to bed after reading not all that many pages of García Márquez I peeked into Clare’s room, which was surprisingly neat except for the stacks of bear books on a card table below her bookshelves, which held her nature guides and large coffee table–sized books on the history of clothing. I noticed a number of fresh volumes on Ojibway customs and then backed out of the room. Married couples are daft and possibly destructive when they don’t allow each other privacy in some areas. I always avoided inquiring after Donald’s religious practices. When Clare was in her early teens she and Donald built a platform in a clearing in the woods well behind our house to feed ravens and crows roadkill and extra fish. I did ask about this and Donald said, “Ravens and crows aren’t just ravens and crows.” A little old man, a tribal elder, once dragged a deer mashed up by a semi back there. The deer was as big as he was so I helped because Donald, Clare, and Herald were at the basketball game over in the Soo. We struggled to get the deer up on the platform with the ravens gathering in the trees at the edge of the clearing and the old man calling them in with calls uncannily like their own. Afterward I made him coffee and a sandwich and he fell asleep sitting at our kitchen table. I was out in the laundry room and was startled when I heard convincing mooing. I returned to the kitchen and he said he had dreamt about a cow who was his best friend as a child. This man had spent thirty years of his life as a mechanic in the Air Force but when he returned home he slid back into the old ways. He no longer owned a car, didn’t eat much or drink alcohol, spent much of his time fixing bicycles for the local kids and courting old ladies, who Donald said complained about his ardor.

  My thought as I fell asleep was if ravens aren’t just ravens what are they? I had a momentary dream about a small bear Clare once chased when we were blueberry picking and then awoke in despair at three a.m. I walked through all the rooms of our haunted house turning lights on and off as I passed through. I tried to pray in the den where Donald had lain so long but prayer is not my habit and I couldn’t remember all of the Lord’s Prayer so settled for “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep,” which my mother said with David and me in the evening before bedtime, her voice often slurred with booze and downers.

  After a jumble of brief dreams I turned my night table light on at four a.m. and looked at a photo of Laurie in a tennis dress who had died at twenty-five of breast cancer. She was so instinctive and nonmental while I was always reading and trying to figure out my parents. Her own were as plain as day wanting so badly for her to become a famous tennis player. We had such fun behaving badly and though we were so unlike we were true pals. The parents kept her on a minimal five dollars a week so she would learn the value of money, or so they said. She envied the clothes my mother ordered me from Chicago but I was rangier in build so she couldn’t wear them and that’s why I hit my father with a garden stake. He offered her a hundred dollars to see her nude pussy and butt in the den while I was in the backyard and she did it. When she told me I broke into tears and she said, “What’s the big deal. That’s five months of my allowance. I’m buying something nifty.” Next morning, I think it was Sunday, he said something rude so I hit him thinking I was defending the honor of my friend. Only recently when I checked out the war in the Philippines did I momentarily wonder if my father’s obsession with girls was a result of the thousands of dead bodies he saw in the Philippines. It was too unpleasant in my memory to look further just as when I tried to read Nabokov’s Lolita. I stopped on page 3 while I had enjoyed the rest of his books. At one point girls are gawky and ignored by everyone and then they begin to burgeon and certain men take notice while boys want them to have tits. Uncle Fred used to slouch down while reading on the sofa the better to look up our school skirts or loose shorts. I actually talked Laurie into being nice to David thinking it might help him but then she loved him and couldn’t figure out why because he was such a dork. Sexuality is so varied, strange, and overwhelming compared to the way the culture presents it. Teenagers wander up and down the halls of school shrieking, punching, giggling, so puzzled at what’s happening to them. I was a very precocious fourteen and seduced Donald into going all the way as we called it on the third date. After that it was just some thing we did like drinking a glass of cold water on a hot day. We’d do it and then I’d help Donald with his geometry assignment. That sort of thing. Sometimes we’d make love again after we finished our homework. My brother David caught on and was appalled but then he was using religion to control himself. One night after he was judgmental I got Laurie to open his bedroom door and moon him knowing that he would be miserable with desire.

  It was about five a.m. when I fell into a deep sleep but then Polly called at six with a voice tight with hysteria. Her daughter Rachel had been busted selling drugs of some sort to an undercover cop in N.Y.C. and she was flying out of town on the eight o’clock plane via Detroit. I immediately dressed and drove down the hill to her place. She poured me coffee and wondered if she should suggest me as a substitute for the principal that day and I said no that I was exhausted by my Clare problems and I would have to back away from substitute teaching until I figured it out. Polly looked at me and we laughed a mournful laugh, two women whose lives had been taken over by wayward daughters, and then she said that K through a friend in Ann Arbor he had called when the news came had found a lawyer in New York City who specialized in dope cases. This required a hefty down-payment fee of ten thousand dollars and Polly pushed a signed withdrawal slip and the lawyer’s address across the table. She had to fly off before the banks opened and could I wire the money ahead? I tore up the withdrawal slip and pocketed the lawyer’s address and bank account number. I said to Polly that we were part of the same family and I was only doing what my mother would have done, adding that I had the feeling that Clare meant to hibernate in the woods this winter so my daughter’s problems were cheap compared to hers.

  On the way to the airport in the first light I was initially irked that I couldn’t live in the little house I had bought because I had to look after Clare. K had told me that Clare had said she intended to move a cot into the den where her father had spent his last days. This was before what I thought of as her hibernation plan.

  Polly was still uncomfortable about the money w
hile we waited in the concourse for the plane. I explained that our parents had inadvertently taught us to despise money. David merely spent his on his cranky charity and in my case the money left to me made Donald uncomfortable. He’d only say “Save it for the kids.” I kept the books and he did very well in the cement and construction business plus I had my teacher’s salary. He even paid Clarence’s debts when there was no real obligation. He would say, “I like to think I can put three squares on the table and a roof over our heads.” The kids got straight A’s and scholarships but Donald never knew that they couldn’t accept financial aid because of the money left me by my mother and the occasional sale of Father’s land. I even had to promise him I’d sell the big fancy SUV we drove him to Canada in. “What I’m saying is that I can’t bear to see your savings going to a lawyer for your daughter’s crimes when the amount isn’t important to me.” And that was that. I didn’t feel a shred of virtue.

  I was jangled and boneless when I left the airport and instead of doing something sensible like going back to bed I drove toward Au Train thinking I might lay down the law to Clare but then what is the law? I was confused and hungry enough to stop in Harvey for breakfast at the restaurant my father used to take David and me to for the turkey sandwiches we liked. There were a number of tables of deer hunters in the orange suits they wear to avoid shooting one another. They were pointing at and discussing a big buck deer draped over a pickup fender out the window and I had the sudden image of Donald frying venison at the kitchen stove. I could even smell it. At another table there was a group of men I recognized as cement finishers and block layers by the dried cement stains on their insulated Carharts and hooded heavy sweatshirts. The oldest man, probably the foreman, was eating a plate of fried potatoes and catsup as if his life depended on it. He stared at me, then looked away, then got up and approached my table.