by Jim Harrison
I could not help but think again that those countable years obsessed with art, seventeen in all, were the most fractious preparation for a life which, after all, could not be lived. My elder son, Paul, came home from a lengthy trip to Brazil the year before John Wesley left for World War II. He had a record we played on our old Victrola, the music coming softly through the window and visiting us on the front porch before which the lilacs bloomed in the wildest profusion. One of the songs, “Estrella Dalva,” gave my future granddaughter her name, with John Wesley and Naomi dancing on the evening porch as if the rest of us, even the world, did not exist. We were drinking wine and Paul told me that there was a word in Portuguese called saudade that appeared to represent our farm and lives, a homesickness or longing for something vital that had been irretrievably lost and only the dream of it could be recovered, as if for a brief period you had loved a woman with every ounce of body and soul and then, quite suddenly, she had died. He fell dumb and stricken, then said, “Oh my God, Father, I am sorry,” and rushed away. I sat there until well past midnight, watching a yellow moon turn white as it rose above the lilacs and cottonwoods.
Paul was that rare young man whose essential melancholy was equal to his great energies. Apart from physical resemblance it would be impossible for an outsider to think of him and John Wesley as brothers. He was a scant sixteen, his brain as old as the hills, when he confronted me with the question of why, since I was an artist when his mother and her sister first met me, did I give up so noble a calling to become a monster. It was outside the pumpshed near the back door and I knocked him to the ground. John Wesley saw it and came running from the barn, and said, “Goddamn you, Dad, don’t be such a goddamn bully!” I drove off then for a month without so much as packing a suitcase, but it was two years away on a hunting trip before I had the stomach to apologize. This was an unpardonable act for one who pretended to so despise the utter, unerasable primitiveness of man in matters of war and greed, race and religion. The adequate response was to cut off the hand that hit him.
I lifted the hand high and looked at it against the backdrop of a single memorable cloud that was pushed along quickly by a stiff wind not present on the ground. It was a hand doubtless more gifted for reining horses, branding cows, picking potatoes than its higher aspiration. I smiled as Sonia abruptly nuzzled me with her muddy snout. She was pleased with her dense coat of fresh mud and seemed to want my approval. In reverse of the usual order of dogs she was the youngest, but had taken over control of the pack, and the others waited rather impatiently for their turns to be petted.
My breath and heart had returned to normal so I made my way down to the river and began throwing sticks in for the dogs to fetch and cleanse themselves. Sonia was stubborn so I used the nonironical voice that made Dalva so successful with the dogs, and Sonia jumped in the river and out in a trice, much of the mud still clinging to her. When we got back home I’d have to brush her out which she also loathed, her black eyes sparkling in anger. Anyone with frilly notions of the feminine, as opposed to masculine, ought to study the sex characteristics in canines to be drawn up short.
In that beginning year of my art obsession Smith made a number of efforts to draw me out, and we made brief forays into the world of the heroic by getting into fistfights with other young men on trips to town. Smith had quarreled with his parents and left home so my father had taken him on as a ranch hand since my art had made me a great deal less useful. We had plenty of room but Smith refused to live in the house despite my mother’s wishes. He bunked in my art studio to my dismay, but then my father had our distant neighbor, the Norwegian, expand these quarters. The Norwegian was a shy and frightened man but an amazing carpenter, helped by his ten-year-old son who was as withdrawn as the father. Smith took pity on the boy and rather laboriously taught him to ride our worst horse, an old plug we kept out of sentiment. Throughout the winter my father had been taking the family food, having seen quite enough starvation among the Lakota. The man had begged Smith’s forgiveness for firing the shotgun but he had thought a wild Indian was attacking his daughter. Smith was merry at this and told him he was “right on the money” which the man didn’t understand.
By midsummer we were involved in a rather shameful business that we were too insensitive to quite understand. While riding our border fence to look for breaks Smith had snuck up on the Norwegian girl while she bathed in a pond well behind their farmhouse. He figured she did so on warm summer mornings and invited me along. We drew two days of blanks, then were rewarded by a vision without equal in feminine shape. It was especially comic since I had been reading William James again in an effort to keep my head from whirling off my trunk and this nude girl reminded me of James’s chapter on “the strongness and weakness of sensations.” In this vision “lust” was a euphemism. The breath drew short and blood drummed.
This went on a number of mornings and I took to sketching my first nudes from memory as we had to lay too flat in the grass for me to draw directly from life and that was certainly what we were looking at. On separate mornings we were disturbed by a king snake and a rattler, either of which would normally have startled us. After a week or so we were betrayed by my very loud sneeze with a result we least expected. Though we only knew her well enough to nod hello she waved us over to join her swim. She made love to us that and every other morning for a month or so until her little brother discovered us and we fled.
The word “craven” comes to mind for our actions because what I first perceived as mysterious and winsome in her behavior soon appeared to me as merely daft. We were simply taking advantage of a retarded girl, and this spooked Smith as much as me, though we still continued on until we were discovered. Parents visited parents and my mother made a Lakota herbal concoction to ensure that the girl miscarried should she be pregnant. Naturally I never knew this until later. My mother in her matter-of-fact way wasn’t disposed to be angry with me, while my father upbraided me with the fact that the retarded were children. I said I didn’t know this at first, and he said but you continued when you did. At his insistence I ended up trading my five best horses for a team of Belgian mares because the Norwegian badly needed a pair of draft horses for his farming. I walked the horses over in a good set of harness, presented them, bowed and walked home, my face deeply reddened by the laughter of the girl behind the screen door.
* * *
Dalva called before school on Friday morning to check on the health of my arm and to request foreign food for dinner by which she meant steak and spaghetti, the latter with olive oil, parsley and garlic. This would, as always, be accompanied by my tales of my trip to France and Italy the year after my parents died. We had worked our way slowly to this point in my life and I was careful to avoid the slightest mention of the young woman I had so loved at this time. Naomi needn’t have warned me of that, but I had understood her concern, so great were the dire consequences of that period of my life.
In preparation I checked my journals for that European trip and was amazed at their banality, as if a literate chimpanzee had been taken on its first trip to the zoo. None of the emotions, the feelings, the moods, as it were, had any interest, while descriptions of buildings, crowds, meals, and paintings still held a tinge of fascination. The latter were textural concretia while the former were romantic filigree that required a Tu Fu or a James Joyce to give substance. A young man wandering in Europe in 1911 caressing his moods was an embarrassment, as if it were unique to see a life swallowed up by an obsession. I met Edward Curtis once down in Arizona, and then again in Mexico, and the litany of his complaints, mostly about marriage and money, were silly indeed in the light of the splendor of his work. Of course, I was guilty of the musings but not the first-rate work. I might better have painted a nun’s goiter than the bridge over Pont Neuf or a far corner of a Medici garden. My heart favored the remote corners of Mexico, and Europe was an obligation I could not begin to comprehend until older when, quite sickened by the cant that we do everything better over her
e, I saw the glories of Paris anew. There was the disturbing thought of how Davis had teased me for trying to read Henry James before the campfire where we were roasting the smallest of cabrito, which he was basting with garlic and hot chiles. I admitted I had been strenuously on the same page for days.
Quite comically Dalva was concerned with communism over dinner rather than my European travels. She ate the Florentine steak and spaghetti with gusto but I sensed something was wrong, and she said she had expected the spaghetti and meatballs I had made for her Labor Day weekend. I felt apologetically senile and said she could help me make the dish tomorrow. The communism fear had arisen again that morning when the county school superintendent had stopped by to warn the children about the world threat. Dalva couldn’t remember a “b” word and I suggested “bastion” at which she nodded with pleasure. According to this nitwit, Nebraska was one of the last bastions against godless communism. After the man left the children were quite frightened and it took some time for Naomi to calm them down. A 4-H girl was crying because the Russians were going to drop an A-bomb on her pet heifer.
It was hard to allay this fear in a simple fashion when, what with my bad arm, I was unable to strangle it at its source. The prairie and Great Plains could generate a quality of bumpkin idiocy that would quickly die elsewhere under intelligent scrutiny, the exception being the Deep South where the shenanigans of such men as Huey Long had always provided shock and amusement for the literate. This particular man had been hired partly because he had advertised himself as “God fearing” and bore a Ph.D. from a Bible college that I viewed as doubtless bogus. It all made one yawn with a bone-deep despair, recalling how my own two sons received their true education from my den library.
After I had assured Dalva that the Russian attack was unlikely at the moment we looked at horse and cattle scrapbooks from the twenties and thirties, and then I helped her with her history lessons so that she wouldn’t need to be dragged off home by Naomi after Saturday-night dinner. She had always been fond of the photos of the polo games up at Fort Robinson before World War I, when the fort was a remount station for the U.S. Cavalry, a force that became a pleasant illusion when it met the horror of modern armament in France. Dalva’s history lesson seemed quite complicated but then her teacher was Naomi. Who would you have voted for, Theodore Roosevelt or William Jennings Bryan, and I could scarcely offer the young lady my answer of “neither.”
I struggled to give her some sense of history beyond memorizing a few details from the textbook. She loved our canyon so I reminded her that when you sat well up in it, the walls narrowed the view of the river but the movement was the same. Whether it was Bryan or Roosevelt, or Heathcliff and Catherine in her favorite novel, you could imagine them with the passage of the river taking place in a segment of time that then went onward. No matter that historical phenomena disappear, they are still a part of the substance of the river and continue to affect what we are. Roosevelt and Bryan might have immediately less to do with her life now than the passions of Emily Brontë, but they were very much part of the structure of what our country had become, and since this country was her home, it was best to know about them.
She was very much in agreement with my fatiguing attempt to explain history, but I could see her mind had drifted elsewhere, her eyes beginning to tear as they always did when they thought of her father, John Wesley. She stopped herself, and smiled at me, dismissing where John Wesley might fit in my worn-out metaphor of the river.
“You sound like Professor Rosenthal,” she said, and I agreed. We’d met Rosenthal two springs before, shortly after the news came of John Wesley. We were riding down the tail end of the county road to the Niobrara when we saw an old man in a suit and tie sitting under a cottonwood tree with a picnic hamper, and an open bottle of wine on its lid, and reading a book. It was Saturday afternoon and the radio in his parked car was playing the opera. I am normally stern with the very few trespassers we get, usually hunters, but this man represented a unique and extraordinary sight, his tailoring similar to the suits men wore in London back in the thirties. He stood to bid us good day, gesturing at his wife well down the riverbank, saying that she was a lepidopterist, continuing at our puzzled looks to explain that this meant a student of butterflies. He added that the opera on the car radio was Mozart’s Cosïfan tutte and that was the limit of his knowledge of his immediate surroundings. He was an ßmigrß scholar at our state university in Lincoln, via Germany, Cambridge and the Warburg Institute in London. I commented that there was no trace of German in his accent and he replied that that was something he had worked to get rid of; for obvious reasons. He then asked us if he could pet our horses, announcing that he had never actually touched a horse before. This startled both Dalva and myself, but she was the first to respond, jumping off her mare and leading it under the tree. Dalva said, “Go slow” because her mare was skittish and this man, Rosenthal by name, slid his hand ever so softly along her flank, then laughed and said, “Amazing.”
His wife made a muddy appearance, a jolly woman with the paraphernalia of her trade, and called Dalva “Rapunzel” for her long hair. Dalva was so pleased she asked me if they could come for tea and I readily agreed, though I am worse than a Frenchman about whom I let in my home. Dalva assured the woman, Sarah, that Lundquist knew every butterfly in the book and Sarah said she’d like to meet this creature. Dalva was only eight at the time and paused at the word “creature,” chiming in that Lundquist was actually a Swede.
I was lucky enough to spend the afternoon with this man while Dalva and Sarah, guided by Lundquist, were off looking at a fresh assortment of butterflies, after Lundquist in the barnyard had assured the woman that butterflies were the direct cousins of birds. Rosenthal was curious about the paintings and the books in my den but we only touched lightly on our separate backgrounds. His area of interest he referred to as the “history of ideas” which was sometimes as hard to track as the history of rain. He was altogether willing to sacrifice the most profound thing he said to an apt witticism, and I was delighted at the lightness of his mind, and the way he was able to deliver his ponderous knowledge as if he were commenting on a fascinating dinner menu. I had never met the like of him and I recalled that even the brightest men I had met early in the arts world were basically sunk in the emotional content of any day, while this man flitted and skittered in the history of world cultures to pluck out what he needed to prove a point or fuel the conversation.
He was curious about the Natives that had lived in the area, the Pawnee with the Lakota on the western edge, though I sensed he knew the answers to most of his questions before he asked. We prodded each other with questions and I was eager to be the student when he began talking about the idea of land. The Jews, blacks, and Natives had had a far more tribal notion of land than the dominant Anglo-Saxon or northern European cultures. The Jews, blacks, and Natives tended to be shunted aside or oppressed partly for this reason of specific land ownership. If you want someone’s wealth, or the area in which they live, or their bodies themselves in the case of the blacks, your motives are basically economic but you attack them on religious grounds, portraying them as godless savages, the Antichrist, or worse yet, having no discernible religion at all because it had become gradually lost when they were uprooted from their homeland. And after the utter and complete defeat of the enemy you want nothing more from them, they have nothing more to give, except that the remnant behave themselves. You only give reparations or rebuild in the economies of the like-minded as in the case of Germany and Japan.
I cracked a bit here, admitting that I was half Lakota though it showed in my appearance only lightly, and that I later perceived my father had tried to make me a gentleman to escape the pain he had witnessed among the landless who had been forced aside into the country described by Sheridan, the reservations themselves, as “worthless pieces of land surrounded by scoundrels.” I also admitted that I had bought a great deal of land in western Nebraska when the agricultural depression hit
early in the mid-twenties, and then bought a great deal more throughout the West during the Great Depression of the thirties, only to sell nearly all of it after my son had died in Korea.
I felt a bit embarrassed as I rattled on and when I finished he put me at ease by saying that in this country the very perception of reality is economic. Artists and poets get away from that but not their collectors, he joked. He exempted me from the latter when on questioning I said I had never sold one of my collection of paintings and had no idea of their worth, nor was I curious. There was a slightly raw moment when he asked how long I had painted myself, but then we were interrupted by the butterfly collectors.
The Rosenthals visited again in August, this time staying the night, and we had a grand time including a picnic way back at the spring. The professor had ridden his first horse and butterflies were abundant. I planned on taking Dalva down to Lincoln to visit them in the fall, but around Labor Day we received the alarming news by letter that they had made a rather sudden decision to move to Cambridge in England. There was a slight reference to the fact that foreign-born intellectuals were particularly vulnerable during the current red scare. I immediately called our governor, not a bad fellow and a longtime acquaintance, and he had looked into the matter, the upshot being that Rosenthal was under some suspicion, but would have managed to keep his job had he not flown the coop. I felt melancholy indeed though I still managed to exchange a few letters a year with them in England where he is doing quite well, though Sarah terribly misses our butterflies.
I was strangely full of anxiety after Naomi and Ruth picked up Dalva for church on Sunday morning. They had also come over for our spaghetti and meatball dinner the evening before. The meatballs somehow disintegrated in the sauce, Naomi said because we had forgotten the egg to bind the meat, and Dalva said it was on purpose because she didn’t like eggs because they came from a chicken’s butt, a simple enough dislike. We went out twice during dinner in the twilight to watch great numbers of wild geese flying over us on their way south. There was a severe cold front heading slowly down to ward us from Canada and North Dakota but it would be another full day for it to reach us.
