by Jim Harrison
It began to snow again but the wind had subsided and I could feel the flakes touch my face. A sense of life began to return to my limbs and I at last was able to scratch my itching nose. There was a consoling lack of drama in the whole affair except for the unattractive smell and it occurred to me I had nearly died in the manner of my beloved old dog I had buried perhaps a half hour before. I got up unsteadily, and shuffled to the house to the relief of the leaping dogs. I had a large whiskey with a hot bath, then slept a dozen hours until the present time, midnight, when I got up and fried myself an ample piece of beefsteak, then sat down to make a short list of what I hoped to accomplish before my death which apparently was drawing nearer.
I awoke later than usual and Frieda made me an enormous breakfast thinking me a little pale. She fried some splendid pork sausage fresh from the pig they had butchered on Saturday. I went immediately to the den to avoid the chatter about television comedians, godless Russians, Lundquist’s grief over the pig he had dispatched, and the subtleties of sauerkraut making.
Naomi called to say that she had gotten Dalva settled in Marquette and was heading home. While we talked I looked over my list making on the desk, warmly confident that I was losing my mind. The process had gone on until four in the morning and there was a litter of sketches, snatches of sentences and paragraphs, and one larger sheet of drawing paper I had finished the night with from an old tablet a bit yellow at the edges. It was here that I’d made row upon row of miniatures of sketches in the manner of the Chippewa hieroglyphics discovered by Schoolcraft in his first exploratory voyage among these people in the early 1800s. It would not have made the slightest sense to anyone else but as I said good-bye to Naomi I recalled that I had always liked the three-volume record of Schoolcraft’s journey and had wondered if the pages of hieroglyphic reproductions had made sense to the entire sprawling tribe or if the signs, the ideograms, were more individuated and localized or could they possibly be reductions of larger works though I doubted this latter notion. I had been fascinated when Rosenthal had told me that the Chinese ideogram for “writing” was actually a tiny group of animal tracks. I never found out what it was for “painting” though I had meant to do so, and this sort of vacant intention filled the spaces between the miniatures, the interminable list of “I meant to do so,” which now had become rather more a puzzle than regret. I studied the large page, knowing what came last with poignancy, but bearing down on each to try to discern what I’d had in mind during my maddened night.
From left to right at the top were a series of a half dozen weathered fence posts, perhaps an eccentric idea to the nonrural but then fence posts seem to collect memories from their locations. Next was a rather fuzzy rendition of the spring bottom as if I were able to hover above it like a kingfisher. This was followed by a horse’s nose, infinitely soft and quaky to the touch, quite mysterious when looked at closely while thinking of nothing else. There was a small morel picked near Trenary, Michigan, and a chanterelle from well up Mill Creek in Montana, both eaten years apart with intense satisfaction. The next was hard to figure out for a moment but then it acquired shape as my father’s McClellan saddle stolen out of my pick-up near Chadron during the Depression. Naomi’s profile had a bell clarity, but my long-held sneaking desire for her had only come clear to me last night, a matter of amusement rather than guilt. There was a minuscule warbler’s nest blown loose from a dogwood which I had given to Dalva, and Lakota baby moccasins with intricate beadwork which I didn’t want to part with but gave to Ruth because she wanted them so badly. There were then a group of small squares from paintings of Gauguin and Cßzanne I had studied for a week in my twenties to my total distraction, thinking I might understand the secret of their genius piecemeal. I may have comprehended the technique in the haphazardly chosen squares but their randomness brought me to grief, leaving out the unsayable hearts of the two paintings. The attempt in itself was part critic, part a boy taking apart an alarm clock, a farm kid peering into his first engine cylinder. There were cattle from the air, and the stunningly intricate braiding of the Platte River, the gory wounds on the breast of an old Lakota warrior after the leather thongs broke loose during the Sun Dance. A simple blotch was my father’s blood on the snow, and a stark, sitting body outline was my mother in her fatal thicket. There was a petroglyph of a wolf’s outsized footprint from Utah, a girl’s bottom from down near Sarlat in the Dordogne in France, certainly the bottom of all bottoms she showed me on my request when I was too ill and weak to lift a hand to touch it. Sylvie her name was, a nurse’s assistant, who was confident I was death bound and saw no harm in this last wish. There were simple spokes of light from May 1918, when I saw from afar the German bombardment along the Chemin des Dames, some seven hundred thousand shells cast into the air landing upon the French and British troops. I was reminded again how the men who start wars invariably live through them to justify the behavior that has left millions maimed and dead. My eyes naturally flickered back to Sylvie’s bottom, not as a symbol of life, but as a gorgeous bottom. A high and turbulent river during snowmelt had a dead deer draped over a log in the current, caught in a branch crotch, its limbs wobbling in the torrent in a parody of living motion. Peavine, milkweed, and hollyhocks were followed by the image of Paul’s forearm and elbow which seized my sorry heart, his weight resting against them, looking up at me after I knocked him to the ground. My eyes blurred as they had the night before, making me incapable of anything beyond milkweed, penstemon and phlox, ineptly rendered.
Now I was troubled by my thoughts of Paul the day I saw Smith in the cold potato field, just barely over the lip of consciousness when seeing a Lakota child throwing a potato with a skewed intensity that reminded me of my older son. Perhaps, among other reasons, I am writing this to explain myself to him? I have never had a great urge to explain myself to myself, at least I don’t think I do. In my teens I was early exhausted by James’s notions of the consciousness of consciousness. Thinking of this overlong will send you to the barn to saddle a horse, at least it always did for me. Without the slightest question the striking of Paul to the ground was the most shameful moment of my life.
I impulsively called him in Arizona and his Mexican assistant with her peculiar, soft voice answered. I could hear dogs barking loudly in the background and when Paul came on the phone with his habitual “Hello, Father,” I became unsure of what to say. He seemed to sense this and quickly mentioned that he had spoken to Naomi in Marquette. I broke in and dumbly stuttered out my apology and there was silence only broken by the sound of his dogs, and then he began by asking if I didn’t remember that I had apologized on our hunting trip up to Buffalo Gap. I said I did but we had been drinking a great deal to which he laughed, “Sometimes that’s what it takes.” He asked about Rachel, Duane’s mother, whom we had fatally met on that trip and I only said she didn’t know where Duane was. There was the unspoken question of whether he had made love to Rachel, which I suspected he had, because I wanted him to be Duane’s father rather than John Wesley whom she preferred. He didn’t supply the answer and I knew he never would, what with his lifelong penchant for rejecting the obvious gesture. He asked if I had been “ill” and I said a little, but that I had been writing something for him he could read if he chose after my last gasp. I tried to repeat the apology but he would have none of it and introduced what I least wanted to hear, however true, his mother Neena’s idea that war closes off part of a human, both the good and bad, and this portion of our minds is forever stolen by history. I would only admit that this was less true of me than others. I was unable to continue and we bid an amiable but clumsy good-bye after he said his dogs were waiting for their morning hike.
Absurd as this might sound to a contemporary, I had joined the army like many other artists and writers to preserve the glory of France, though the impulse came rather late in the fray compared to the hundreds who joined as ambulance drivers before the United States entered the war. All the talk in artistic circles, not the most historica
lly conscious group, was that if the Boche were allowed to enter Paris they would pillage the Louvre, that sort of thing. Only the year before I had married Neena and fathered Paul, with Neena hoping for a girl which she intended to name Adelle. Neena never shrank for a moment from the horror of life, especially on paper, and I believe this led to her eventual decline. One must step back now and then.
Foolishly eager for battle, even if it couldn’t be upon a horse, I was in France a scant week before I was struck down by a malaria attack which the army doctors accurately diagnosed having gained experience in the Spanish-American War. However, mine had been a Mexican mosquito, and the drugs didn’t work as well, and my recovery was prolonged in a hospital in Tours. I was only out of the hospital a week when I caught a virulent form of dysentery, to which was added the flu I took on when I returned to the hospital. I had been sick nearly four months when it was determined I was well enough to be shipped toward the front to ferry the seriously wounded from field hospitals to a better facility near Paris. I was judged too weak to do any more than drive what was euphemistically called a gut wagon. It was, nevertheless, a great relief to be out of the hospital, beside which any Nebraska slaughterhouse could be thought charming. Those wounded by bullets or shrapnel, no matter how maimed, seemed fortunate beside the thousands of severely gassed with their howls and racked coughs, a condition from which there was no recovery. By great irony I volunteered in my own convalescence to write letters home for those who were shorn of their writing arms, just as my own father had done in the waning years of the Civil War. There is no more melancholy task than to help shape the thoughts of an armless farm boy from Missouri of nineteen years who will never guide a team of horses again. It seemed strange to hear no one curse God before they died. We are the eternal supplicants. It is a gift to have time to pray not to die.
It was in mid-May when I witnessed the great German bombardment which moved them only a dozen miles closer to Paris. Soon after that I had done a straight thirty-six-hour shift of driving the wounded when I was relieved, and drank two bottles of wine to put me to sleep. Within an hour I was roused, quite drunk, to drive again, and promptly badly smashed up the ambulance killing two of three severe gas victims who were my passengers. I was thereupon court-martialed for driving drunk with the extenuating circumstances that while they were sewing up my head after the accident the doctor, a wry Princetonian, discovered my trepanation scar behind by hairline that would have disqualified me from service had I admitted it.
I was saved by a rather pompous West Point colonel who hailed from Omaha and who successfully argued with the other officers that he had heard about me in Nebraska and my experience could be utilized by sending me south to help tend the fine French, British and American horses that had been removed far from the path of battle. It was by this odd turn of fate that I spent a comfortable time, except for another spate of dysentery when I witnessed the miraculous bottorn, far from the butchery, an army horseman until Armistice. It could be difficult to imagine a less distinguished service career. John Wesley as a boy had always been quite disappointed in me when he demanded tales of the glories of war and I told him the not so simple truth. Of course Neena’s contention was somewhat true. The exposed heart does not really recover from the smell of thousands of suppurating dead on an otherwise fine spring morning.
Lundquist saves me from these dour considerations by arriving with an article from a Minneapolis Sunday supplement and a request that I go with him to look at a very old Allis-Chalmers tractor for sale in a neighboring county. I feel a bit weak for an obvious reason but decide to go along with this lark. We have looked at this decrepit tractor a half dozen times in the past decade and the errand usually means that Lunquist has something he needs to talk about. First, however, I must read the article in what used to be called the “rotogravure,” and in this instance, a slightly silly piece about the “richest Swedes” in the upper Midwest with some of them very rich indeed in the areas of heavy industry, department-store chains, and the agra business. As we drive along in the cold but sunlit wind Lundquist wonders if his compatriots achieved their wealth by “fair means or foul.” I suggest that foul is always a definite possibility, but then perhaps the wealth in some cases was achieved by hard work, intelligence and thrift. There was also the likelihood, as in my father’s case, and to a lesser extent my own, that there had been no particular talent for spending, and in that way the money accumulates and multiplies on its own. He ponders this, muttering that one shouldn’t “lay up treasures on earth where moths and rust doth corrupt” to which I am agreeable, still wondering what is bothering him. He errantly points out a crossroad, where I had had a nasty fistfight with a Norwegian farmer over a horse trade. I was in my forties at the time, the putative winner, but when I reached home Neena was so appalled at my battered appearance I had to promise on my actual knees that I’d never fight again. When they got home from school Paul was disgusted with me while John Wesley wanted a blow-by-blow. Lundquist mentions the time we had been attacked by young Italian men in Chicago when we were selling our prime beef to the Black Hawk, Chapin and Gore, and the Corona restaurants. It had been a wonderful business in the late twenties but quite naturally declined with the onset of the Depression. The young Italians in question were justified as Lundquist and I had walked out of a speakeasy with two women who were unfortunately married to two of our attackers. They were arrested because it was the policy of Chicago at the time to protect vaguely innocent visiting businessmen. I still had enough conscience at the time to send a bellhop to make their bail.
We never make it to see the Allis-Chalmers. Lunquist pulls off the gravel road and with a tremulous voice says that Frieda thought he was napping after dinner last evening and he overheard her gossiping to their minister about Dalva’s problems. Lundquist clearly understands that this breach of confidence was grave, and despite the mixed fidelities involved, he feels he has to tell me. I reply, simply enough, that he must tell Frieda that she no longer works for me, adding that he should say I heard it in town and it could only have come from her. I then have to reassure him that this in no way affects the small farm I own that he lives on, and which I have given him in my will. He is forever trying to buy this farm with his savings, counting it his life’s triumph that he has overcome primogeniture and saved enough to get his own place. I sympathize with his dream but have said his wife and daughter would likely need the savings if he passed on, to which he answers that he has already dreamed he will live to be ninety-three and that is that. The only way to get anywhere with this man is to change the subject.
It is somewhere in January and naturally I miss Frieda’s vacuum cleaner. Lena comes out once a week with an odor of her cafe that perfume doesn’t cover. She knits and talks about icy roads and her daughter, Dalva’s friend Charlene, who is inevitably wayward in her terms, rather than being the delightful and rebellious young lady she actually is. The diseased strain of contentious Puritanism in America is never buried for long. Lundquist is sodden about his justifiably banished wife. The dogs are all cranky and semi-arthritic from the lack of their morning walk which the weather forbids but never really did before. That’s why we have warm clothes, I keep reminding myself, though I’m quite frozen to my desk reading snatches of a dozen books at once. It takes a great deal of strength to keep January out of the soul and I’ve failed this year.
What wrings my heart and mind is that over Christmas we waited for an opening of good weather and Hackleford flew Naomi, Ruth and myself up to Marquette to spend the holidays with Dalva, but then she suddenly had become quite ill and was confined to the hospital. I hesitated to do so but I gave her a card and a necklace sent by Duane, the latter a simply set ordinary fieldstone attached to a leather thong, doubtless the only traditional “medicine” he had to offer. After I passed it to her I was happy I did as her connection to life seemed so tentative. I had a rather angry time with Naomi, a euphemism indeed, and convinced her that Dalva should be taken to Arizona to s
tay with Paul where there is the probability of sunlight rather than the Upper Peninsula of Michigan where a three-day blizzard was in the act of suffocating us. Naomi’s cousin and I secured a logger’s ancient Dodge power wagon, churned through the drifts and finally brought her home through the snow-clogged streets. The weather turned clear, the wind subsided off the dread Lake Superior and I managed to have a rather grandiose company plane from Chicago pick us up for the flight to Tucson. Paul was quite touched at the prospect of caring for her and on the flight home Naomi wasn’t slow to admit that it now seemed a good idea. But all of that accomplished, I seemed to fall back into an unfamiliar darkness. When I kissed Dalva good-bye there was a strong sense of Adelle in her tearful distress.
Jesus H. Christ but these dreams are driving me mad! Several days ago it was God himself, or perhaps herself, and the voice was a billion deafening songbirds. I will tell you I hit the floor running on that one. I made coffee at three A.M. and woke up a grumpy Sonia, who is intolerant of moods, for company. At other times I might have been thrilled with the content of this dream but now I became querulous. Why hadn’t I had this dream before? Why did it come so late in life? Would more like it be possible? Was Smith pulling some distant rigamarole on me? Of course I hadn’t completely wakened from the dream yet and sat in the kitchen waiting for another billion-bird blast from the starless night.
