Returning to Earth

by Jim Harrison

  I stumbled into the living room and collapsed on the sofa wishing I hadn’t read Cleland’s Rites of Conquest but Donald had asked me to because he needed help in understanding how the people he loved were utterly subjugated. What are any of us beneath the unbearable sweep of history including my father the elegant young Chicago gentleman heading off to the Philippines in his tailored officer’s uniform only to see ninety percent of his men drop down into war’s meat grinder. In my dreams everyone became blind and deaf in heaven and then I was back to earth dreams where everyone still couldn’t see very well, and then I was back as a little girl in this doghouse down the block where I could hide out with this big black dog that seemed to like me a lot. When I awoke and had a cup of coffee and another piece of the mincemeat pie I thought maybe Clare’s hut in the woods behind Flower’s with its five bearskins was like my doghouse with only David knowing about it. I could sit up in the back and the world was reduced to lawn and forsythia bushes out the opening. If a robin landed or a squirrel trotted by the dog would growl.

  Thanksgiving was a full house. Coughlin came north by noon on Wednesday and since deer hunters were still lurking in the woods we skied on the beach all the way to Presque Isle and then around it brushing the deep snow from a park bench and sitting there in the sunlight staring out at Lake Superior, which was only modestly rumpled in a northeast breeze. When he arrived Coughlin had given me the envelope of bear material but I had put it away for the time being. When he asked why I said Clare is coming tomorrow with Flower and I don’t want to dwell on her today. While we were out on the park bench a small bank of clouds came across the sun turning our mood somber. He said, “After all, the fact of death is the most brutal thing we humans are forced to accept,” but then the sun came out again and I told him that the day after the burial Herald had said, “Mother, it can’t be awful if it happens to every living thing.”

  While Coughlin was roasting two nice chickens he had brought up from Chicago following a recipe he got from David, who got it from Vernice, where you baste the chicken with lemon, garlic, butter, and tarragon, I drove out to the airport to pick up Herald, who was bringing home his Mexican girlfriend, Sylvia. I should have called ahead because the plane was nearly an hour late, a frequent problem for those coming up from Detroit and Chicago. Polly and K and the wayward daughter Rachel were coming in from New York City but the flight from Detroit was booked so they were going to drive the mere five hundred miles from Detroit hopefully arriving by morning. Rachel was refusing to live with her mother so she was going to stay in my little bungalow down the street from Polly’s with K to look after her until things settled down, as Polly said. I was indeed relieved when David said that he and Vera had decided not to come up from Jalapa but maybe they would come for Christmas.

  Sitting there in the terminal wishing I had brought along my García Márquez I pretended to be intently studying the local newspaper, the Mining Journal, so no one I might know would approach. I was anxious about meeting Herald’s girlfriend. I was so pissed on the phone the other day when Herald said that knowing his family were odd ducks he hoped we all behaved well so that his fiancée wouldn’t cut and run. I was on the verge of demanding just how we were odd ducks when I suddenly thought Clare hibernating like a bear might fit that category. In any event they were only staying until Friday afternoon because Sylvia wanted to visit a cousin in Ypsilanti, near Detroit. After Herald’s disastrous high school girlfriend jilted him Herald has limited himself to foreign nationalities and lately until Sylvia they have been either Japanese or Chinese young women studying in the sciences. When I questioned him about the idea of a girl working in a fancy strip club and what was he doing there he said several of the girls at the strip club went to USC and that mathematicians occasionally go to strip clubs just like other men.

  When they finally came off the plane I was impressed by how attractive they looked both separately and together. She was about five-ten when I’d expected her to be smaller like Vera. In the car she actually gave a little speech about her background so that I wouldn’t have to be curious. Sylvia was twenty-two and her father was the manager of a car dealership in Hermosillo and not a very happy man because he would always be a decently paid manager but never an owner. She was the oldest of four children and had escaped to Los Angeles when she was nineteen because her mother was a bully and insisted that she marry the son of her best friend. She danced at a strip club four nights a week and during the days she took business courses at a community college in Pasadena because ever since she was a little girl she had wanted to be the manager of a hotel near the Pacific Ocean. She had been out of touch with her family for two years and her parents wouldn’t answer her letters. She desperately missed her sister and two brothers so last year she and Herald flew to Hermosillo. Herald put on his best suit and went into the auto dealership just before lunchtime and introduced himself to Sylvia’s father and asked for her hand in marriage when he finished his Ph.D. in mathematics this coming June. Sylvia’s father called Sylvia’s mother and they all met for lunch. It was wonderful because she got to see her brothers and sister again.

  Herald had told me a very small amount of this on the phone but I was boggled by the whole story. She was obviously what they used to call a tough cookie but certainly no more so than I had been. We were nearly to the house when Herald upset me.

  “Mother, you’re not looking so good. You’re too skinny. You have to take care of yourself.”

  “I’ve been worried about Clare,” I said weakly.

  “Clare has always been half goofy, whether it’s Dad’s Indian side or something else in addition. She either wanted to be in the woods or wanted to move to San Francisco or New York City. Don’t you think that’s a little schizophrenic? Clare will survive as Clare. You have to spend time paying attention to yourself.”

  This was certainly the longest speech Herald had ever made and I had no response except that unworded tremulous feeling you have when somebody tells you that you don’t look well.

  We had a nice dinner except that Herald kept an eye on me to make sure I was eating enough. I mean I am frequently hungry but it goes away after a few bites and I become lost in thought. Everyone was a little tired, which is what airplane flights do to people, except me since I’d slept at the table half the afternoon. Sylvia’s laughter kept our spirits up when we talked about religion. Coughlin noticed when I glanced at his envelope of bear material over on the sideboard against the wall. He said that it was hard to imagine what any of a number of tribes of Indians felt when the first Jesuit or Franciscan missionaries instructed them in the sacrament of communion and they were told to drink the blood of Christ and eat his body in the forms of wine and wafers. Sylvia said her mother had a cousin who was a penitente and at a parade before Easter every year he flailed his own body with thorn branches until he bled profusely. No one else seemed to mind but I was unable to eat the wild raspberry cobbler I had made for dessert.

  Sylvia and Herald went up to bed at ten and Coughlin went to his hotel soon after. I felt abandoned and drank the nearly full remains of our second bottle of dinner wine, which didn’t help when I tried to read García Márquez or the bear material. “No, not rich,” he said. “I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.” This reminded me overmuch of my nitwit brother David who might have been a bum if he hadn’t had an inheritance. In the structure of his hardworking idleness his insanity required an outside means of support though he once seemed quite happy raking lawns with his landscaping crew. The bear material was simply frightening and I didn’t get very far into it. In old Ojibway tradition a girl at the beginning of her first menstruation was called a wemukowe which meant she was going to be a bear. She covered herself with soot until her period was over but until that time everyone called her mukowe, which meant she had become a bear. Afterward she resumed normal life or so the material said. But what did that have to do with my twenty-three-year-old daughter? That was enough for one evening and I turne
d on a television program about the nature of dogs. The nasty little dog Clare had brought home from California had disappeared but K had told me later that a neighbor had given him its collar without comment. Maybe I needed a dog. We always had dogs until our last one died, at the beginning of Donald’s illness. I fell asleep on the sofa but Herald woke me up at three a.m. and led me up to my bedroom, my parents’ bedroom in fact, but that no longer seemed relevant. I looked at the phone on the night table and wanted to call Coughlin to see if I should come to the hotel but then thought better of it.

  Thanksgiving went pretty well but not as I expected. I cooked a ham to go with the turkey because Herald had refused to eat turkey since he was a boy and we had tried to raise a few turkeys but a coyote had gotten in the pen and stolen them. There was only a single turkey foot left, which Herald buried in a funeral service with Clare, who continued to eat turkey. The surprise was Clare, whom I had hardly seen since before going to Chicago. She was thin and distracted but quite warm and ordinary toward me. She was proud of the three dried-fruit pies she and Flower had made that morning and was helpful during the dinner preparation making a roux so that the turkey gravy would look an attractive brown. She had also taken Rachel upstairs when she arrived with K and Polly, who looked bleak and exhausted from their New York City trip and all-night drive from Detroit.

  After dinner Polly fell asleep upright in an easy chair. The young people, Herald, Clare, Sylvia, K, and Rachel, went for a walk though Rachel was sullen and slow to respond. Suddenly the house was quiet except for the faint snoring of Polly on the sofa. Flower stared at Coughlin and properly assumed he was to be trusted.

  “Clare went on over to the Canuck Soo to see Donald’s teacher. I knew him a long time ago when he wasn’t too solid but he was real gifted at seeing things no one else sees. He once told me he was real surprised when he was born and probably would be surprised when he died. His mind flies around a lot so he became a land surveyor so he would always know where he was. I knew his teacher over in Manitoulin Island and he scared the shit out of everyone. I’m just an old lady and I stay away from most of this stuff. I live in the woods so I know a few things. Anyway this man spent time for three days with Clare. He took her back to a blowhole near her father’s grave. A blowhole is where the sleeping bear’s breath goes in and out of a frozen hole from the moisture in the bear’s breath. I’m not sure of all that Clare had in mind but this man told her that the fair thing to do was to let go of his spirit. Donald’s spirit might hang around a year, which would mean June, but she shouldn’t be clutching at him. She could spend a night a week at most in her hut and talk to him a little but she shouldn’t be holding on. It would be wrong to do so. He also said to her that it might drive her truly crazy to fool around with such matters. After all it took Donald fifteen years to sit his three days and three nights. He said she didn’t know where she already was in the world, which makes it dangerous. That’s about all of what she said the man told her.” Flower paused for a while as if searching for a conclusion then looked at me with a trace of hardness. “You and Donald should have let her come home a few months earlier. It would have been better.”

  I began weeping because I knew what she said was true. Donald didn’t want to be a burden to his children and that might have been right for Herald but not Clare.

  In the morning I walked way out to Presque Isle with Clare and Herald. Sylvia turned us down because she couldn’t get used to the cold on such short notice. We didn’t talk about much, which was blessedly pleasant. The night before when we said our good-byes I asked Coughlin if he wished me to visit him and he teased, “Of course not, you’ve become a patient.” I said, “No I haven’t” but he was probably right.

  When we were nearly to Presque Isle having walked quickly on the shore ice Clare said that despite K’s best efforts as a guardian she was sure Rachel would escape as soon as possible. Herald agreed. This made me feel bad for Polly and I questioned them. Clare said Rachel was in love with her musician boyfriend even though he was an addicted asshole. Herald rambled on about the nature of love, then came back to earth by saying that Rachel knows Polly’s world and doesn’t like it. Polly doesn’t know Rachel’s world but still doesn’t like it. Rachel’s language is music and the tens of thousands of hours of simpleminded music she has absorbed has become the way she thinks however primitive. The drugs that will probably kill her are an appropriate adjunct to the music. Clare and I stopped in our tracks while Herald crawled up a snowbank and waved to the world. Herald was normally as unlikely to judge people as his father. Donald would say about people’s behavior, “They likely have a reason. We just don’t know what it is.”

  That afternoon when I returned from taking Herald and Sylvia to the airport for their Detroit flight Rachel was sitting in an easy chair with her eyes closed listening through earphones to music that was so loud I could hear it clearly. I went into the kitchen and from Clare’s bedroom above me I could hear that she and K were making love. This made my stomach feel icy so I left the house and drove down to the hotel to see Coughlin, who said he would be involved in a long phone session with a patient until two o’clock. On the way up in an elevator a room service waiter smiled at me widely, which made me feel acceptably attractive, almost tingly. It turned out he was headed to Coughlin’s room with a sandwich and a bottle of ale. Coughlin looked frazzled having been on the phone for three hours with a suicidal expro athlete, a football player, who had lost his wife and two children in a divorce. The motive of suicide would be an unsuccessful attempt to hurt the ex-wife. Coughlin had talked to her and at this point she couldn’t care less except for their two children, little boys, who would be emotionally destroyed if their father killed himself. This gave me an instant headache, which Coughlin obviously shared. He wolfed his sandwich and beer then drew a videotape from his suitcase. It was a Brazilian film called Black Orpheus, which he said he watched once or twice a year when a patient pushed him into dire straits. We sat on the sofa and watched the whole wonderful movie holding hands but that was all.

  On Monday afternoon with everyone gone I began tutoring. There was a slight thaw so Clare had gone to Flower’s thinking it would be a judicious night to spend in her hut.

  My first student, Vincent, was a hard case. Though in his mid-twenties he was only a freshman hoping to major in forestry. I knew his family name because he was born on Sugar Island from a Chippewa father and a mostly deaf French-Canadian mother. The father had disappeared into the armed services and the mother had moved down to Pickford, where she lived with a man who was foreman on a hay farm. Vincent had worked as a pulp cutter starting when he was fourteen but had moved up to being a timber cruiser (the man who marks the trees suitable for harvesting) for a big timber company. He was very bright except in freshman English, which he was flat-out flunking. I had talked to his English teacher, who thought we could get him through on some minimal level. Part of the problem was that Vincent had a small room in a house with seven younger students who caroused all night.

  Our first hour was so basic in terms of grammar I felt as if I had been sitting in a dentist’s chair. On another level he was very attractive in a rawboned way and I admit that I felt my bottom become warmer than the rest of my body. I immediately decided to offer him the use of Jesse’s old apartment over the garage but I was too shy to say anything. He had taken off a sweater because the house was warm and he had the well-defined muscles of a workingman, so unlike those of bodybuilders. He smelled like Ivory soap and tobacco. He was highly nervous about his ignorance and I told him to go ahead and smoke. It made me want a cigarette though I had quit years before. When I came back into the den after fetching him an ashtray the way he hunched over the table studying the grammar book reminded me of Donald. When we finished our first two-hour session he bowed at the door and didn’t look at me directly. As he opened the door of his old black pickup I could have called out something intelligent like “Vincent, come back here and make love to me.”