by Jim Harrison
At first light, and before Lundquist arrived, I went out to the barn and sat with the horses to give myself a firm grip on what I hoped was reality. I gave them all a good, vigorous brushing and I was delighted momentarily that I had made them happy.
Unfortunately for my sound sleep the following nights were chock full of Indian dreams, not just Lakota though they were in the majority, but Ponca dreams located at the confluence of the Niobrara and Missouri, Omaha Indians bringing Adelle back to life, Hopis dancing with snakes in their mouths, Chippewas in midwinter furs, the Tarahumara in their mountain fastness trying to put Davis back together. I took to drinking on an empty stomach which didn’t help.
Today I wondered how the mind could make up dream people that the eyes hadn’t seen. The whole experience was making me relentlessly irritable, if not more depressed. Sitting at my desk I finally had the wit to caution myself against becoming a goofy old bitch over the matter. I fetched Lundquist from the barn and insisted we go to town for a steak and a few whiskeys. He carried his old dog Shirley to the truck because she didn’t care for walking in the snow. At the last moment we decided on the car and loaded all of the dogs in the back seat. After lunch we played pinochle with other geezers, then stopped at the butcher shop for dog treats. When I napped I had a fine Indian dream based on an experience back during World War II when some cousins of Willow and Smith showed up looking for a medicine bag their grandfather had given my father for safekeeping. I found the bag with some difficulty down in the sub-basement, fed them a big lunch, talked about old times, and sent them on their way with a gift of three steers because of their reminder joke about the winter of two thousand horses (1931) when the Pine Ridge Lakota had to eat that many of their own to avoid starvation. The government could be bounteous on paper with Natives but rarely forthcoming so that thousands over the years had starved to death, none of them congressmen it could be noted.
My heart lifted almost absurdly this afternoon when the rural mailman brought two letters from Dalva, one a postscript to the other. Paul had her taking long walks with his dogs every morning what with his “Mexican” notion that a strong body would make for an easier birth and recovery. She was studying hard to not fall behind in school though she admitted to having read Wuthering Heights again for the ninth time, having found a copy in Paul’s library. Paul had also been teaching her the geology and natural history of the area, and would I prepare a special meal for Sonia, and give her two horses an extra handful of oats? The postscript was a bit stiff and was intended to remind me that if I heard anything from Duane I must call, and if I spoke to him I must tell him of her whereabouts should he wish to come and see her. I paused to damn the intensity of this kind of love that seemed to so deeply distort the rest of life, but then it was gone from my bones but not my memory. It was as inexplicable as much of the world and we could scarcely step off earth long enough for a clear view.
Lundquist tells me that it is mid-February and I have settled down to enjoy what I now truly believe to be the last year of my life. One part of my brain is no longer arguing with the other and I have made hundreds of sketches from memory. Yesterday was the beginning of a thaw and I sketched outside in the modest warmth when the sun was high and the shadows clean and crisp. I fetched my old elk-skin sketch case from a closet, overbundled myself, and went to the barn to saddle a horse, turning the rest out to frolic in the thaw, rolling, itching, rearing, with Dalva’s mare running figure eights of its own accord. Finally it began to herd the other horses, showing its early cutting-horse training, but they would have none of it, racing to the pasture’s four corners in unruly dismay at this attempt at discipline. I paused at my saddling to think of poor Lundquist who on that day was making the very long drive to Grand Island to take the “frazzled” Frieda to a “nerve doctor.” She had flogged their ungainly daughter and Lundquist threatened to move with the young woman, and his dog Shirley, out to my bunkhouse.
The saddling went fine but when I put my left foot in the stirrup my leg hadn’t the strength to lift me despite my hand pulling on the pommel. Jesus H. Christ, I thought, have I come to this. I tried again, and failed again. I felt and squeezed my leg for signs of a malady then cursed my two months of sedentary brooding that had atrophied my strength. The horse was getting restless with this nonsense so I went into the barn and got a milk stool for help, which meant I’d have to sketch from the saddle because I couldn’t carry along the milk stool for remounting. I continued to swear under the mockery that there was something to blame other than myself. I got my first pony at age three and after sixty-eight years in the saddle I needed a goddamn milk stool.
I had meant to head for the lean-to but Sonia spotted a coyote track and roared off and the other Airedales followed. The horse, Rose by name, felt drawn to join the game and I fought her for a moment but decided my direction didn’t matter. It was a brisk race indeed and my face burned despite the thaw but I was improbably enlivened, turning back to the house, a speck on the horizon, and wondering why I spent so much time within it. There are times when one is not only inept with other people but with oneself. The dreams and sketching were likely an unconscious prod in the butt to get me to live out my life.
I ended up well upriver and made several rather elaborate sketches of the foundation of Smith’s parents’ old cabin. Back in the twenties, after they had died, Lundquist said that Smith had come back while I was in Mexico and burned the cabin. I’m not sure what he had in mind but it seemed right at the time. Now there were a few charred timbers, a fieldstone foundation cracked by the fire’s heat, dried stalks of nettle, milkweed, and burdock, and a root cellar full of snow. Out back were the remains of a privy and three apple trees with a few frozen apples near the top, out of the reach of the deer. I doubted then if one man could truly comprehend another’s time, that the gaps were too large for our sensibilities. Smith’s father had been so valuable at branding and round-up, fearsome and massively strong, and I remembered him pitching a good-sized steer to the ground by main strength, and not the kind of scrawny corriente used in rodeos. There should have been a Glackens or Bellows to paint this man in his prime. I recalled watching Glackens walk down Fourteenth Street in New York City as if he were eating the scenery. I followed him for several blocks but saw no point in introducing myself.
Back home I snoozed at the desk for a few minutes but was troubled by a thought and flipped through my notebooks until I found a passage from Kipling’s “Notebooks” I had transcribed back in the twenties. “The Smithsonian, especially the ethnological side, was a pleasant place to browse in. Every nation, like every individual, walks in a vain show—else it could not live with itself—but I never got over the wonder of a people who, having extirpated the aboriginals of their continent more completely than any modern race has ever done, honestly believed that they were a godly little New England community, setting examples to brutal mankind. This wonder I used to explain to Theodore Roosevelt, who made the glass cases of Indian relics shake with his rebuttals.”
The radio has announced this will be, sadly enough, the last day of the thaw. I head out for a walk with the dogs, still working out the kinks of my ride the day before yesterday. Naomi came over for an early breakfast on the way to her teaching duties. First she washed several days’ of my dishes in a trice, and when I said, “I can wash my own dishes,” she said, “But you don’t.” She now talks to Dalva daily on the phone, an indulgence of Paul’s as country people usually keep long-distance calls under three minutes, but Dalva phones at length every afternoon when Naomi returns from school. We continue a modest quarrel of several years that started over, of all things, John Keats. Two years ago in the summer Naomi had gone off to the university in Lincoln to take a short course in the English Romantics while Ruth was at piano camp and Dalva stayed with me. Naomi came home transfixed with Keats’s notion that life, properly lived, is a “vale of soul-making.” At the time I quipped, “Along with everything else and to what purpose?” This did not occasio
n a smile, and we were off on this bone of contention over my favorite boyhood poet, an enthusiasm that has stuck with me to the present. Naomi had a more ethereal view of Keats while I continue to think of him as like other men only more so, the volume and intensity of his sensibilities at sevenfold, urged on by his impending death. Adelle considered Keats too poignant to be bearable, but then she would have been an appropriate bride for him. I reminded Naomi that while she loved her Wordsworth I had noted that she also read Kenneth Roberts, Erie Stanley Gardner and Erskine Caldwell. But I’m not Keats, she insisted, to which I answered, Neither is he, but aside from his work he is an accumulation of our opinions about him. These discussions tended to become humorous. Last year when she passed on to me By Love Possessed by the current most critically acclaimed American author, James Gould Cozzens, I said that Cozzens reminded me of that farting old mare that used to pull the milk wagon around town.
Jake, the oldest of the Airedales, is a bit ill with his arthritis but not so ill that he doesn’t growl when I force an aspirin upon him. I hold him on my lap despite his eighty pounds until he begins to snore and drool with the other dogs watching and questioning this privilege. There is an unknown car arriving in the yard and Jake roars off my lap, with one paw painfully using my nuts as a launching pad. I have become enough of a hermit to look out the window with irritation but it is Charlene, Dalva’s friend and Lena’s daughter. She is bringing a chicken casserole, the kind of dish I’m not fond of, but her mother, my occasional lover, has bet that I have prepared nothing for dinner which is true, and that I am drinking too much, which is not quite true. This said, Charlene stands inside the front door holding the casserole, without a coat, wearing her rather trim waitress uniform from which, with the rush of cool air, I can detect the slight fetor of her mother’s cafe food. At first I say nothing and she is a bit unnerved, then stoops slightly putting the dish on the table. I adore this cheeky girl though I rarely see her. She is brash and intelligent and though I don’t discount the gossip that she had made love to out-of-town pheasant hunters for money, it certainly means nothing to me, partly because I’ve been an out-of-town hunter myself with a weather eye out for a lady.
I offer her a glass of wine and she gracefully accepts. I open a fine bottle of Lynch-Bages and note a slight tremble in my hand as I pour. We go into the den and she sits on the soft leather couch and there is an unavoidable view of a fine thigh underside and she smiles. We talk about the weather, school, and Dalva and I’m grateful for her reassurances of Dalva’s strength. Charlene is a year older and doubtless knows that I’ve made sure she’s able to go to college. At least I suppose Lena has told her, though Charlene has straight A’s and may get a scholarship of some sort. There’s a bit of the Sapphist to this girl but that gives a wonderfully ambivalent edge to her sexuality. I notice this because it was always prominent in the painting community on my visits to San Francisco and New York where people who feel a bit odd seek others, the artists, who are naturally society’s outcasts. I pour her a second glass of wine and we chat on, and then a third and we have finished the bottle. With her questioning I speak at length of Paris which she views as her “life’s destination.” Her dress has hiked up a bit and then she asks with an odd look, “Are you trying to seduce me?” I am so startled I do veritable back flips of denial, “Oh my God no, I could be your father, grandfather, great-grandfather.” She laughs and repeats the popular vulgarity, “A stiff dick has no conscience,” and then she comes to full consciousness with tears of embarrassment saying that she hasn’t eaten much that day and the wine had hit her like a “ton of bricks.” I am confused enough to say that I also haven’t eaten and that she had doubtless read my pathetic thoughts. I put an arm around her to console her and she kindly says, “You’re not pathetic.” Now we are frozen in place for a full minute and then I mumble that I adore her but she had better go along. At the door she gives me a kiss full on the lips, and is off. I sit down at the kitchen table feeling absurd, a jelly-bean-sized tear running down my cheek. The experience possesses all the bittersweet melancholy of the milk stool and the horse. “I have a stiff dick with a conscience,” I say to Sonia who shrugs her dog shrug of incomprehension.
It is now April 7, and I put this away for more than a month while I did hundreds of sketches of which I only saved a half dozen and burned the rest during yesterday’s cool fog. It was a splendid deep orange fire and the dogs seemed to enjoy it except for Jake who was frightened.
My thoughts have put the dunce’s cap on my grizzled head. Since death is such an apparent mystery I had hoped to describe it in the minutest detail, but only out by my orange fire did it occur to me I wouldn’t be doing any writing during the last hour, or it would be most unlikely I would be doing so. Sad for you, Paul and Dalva, that you will not get this small peek at the void!
I laughed aloud and Jake crept out from behind the honeysuckle thicket near the grape arbor to check out the joke. These dogs have a sense of humor. Sonia will growl at a canyon boulder and when I check it out she’ll run off yapping with delight. She did this only once with a pile of deer turds, perhaps understanding that it would only work for the first time. On occasion they’ll run off to see Naomi in hopes that Dalva has returned. Naomi’s not overfond of them but rewards their intentions with a bite to eat. The other day I said I was leaving a travel fund for her and the girls and if she did not use it each year the accumulated interest would go to the NRA in her name, scarcely her favorite organization. This brought on a pink-tinged “Why in God’s name?” I said that there were plenty of good places for soul making on earth and she should at least take a look. She calmed down enough to ask me to make a list of places for her reference, then glanced off into the parlor where Ruth was laboring over Chopin and asked if I were thinking of dying soon, and I said not before October. We both laughed rather nervously over this selection of a month, both knowing the vast illusions over the control of our lives and final destiny when in the most naked reality we are but trajectories. When my mind lends itself in this direction I always think of Smith as a boy back when we were playing “Injun” and my father had bought us recurve bows rather too strong for our age. We would fire the arrows out over the big pasture to the south, then spend hours looking for them. Once Smith found only two of his three and strongly insisted the third had never landed. It was a magic arrow and would only land when the time was appropriate.
I have tracked down Smith’s location and am headed up to the Rosebud at dawn to get some advice. The problem is that as Dalva’s time of birth draws nearer I grow more sodden with anxiety over the matter, so much so that this nexus of worry has put a stop to my sketching. I was this way over the births of both of my sons to the point that it could be described as a torment. Neena was sympathetic and reassured me that countless millions of babies are born every year. She then went back to her current book which I specifically remember was Stendhal’s The Red and the Black. Neena was quite the Francophile and I remember back in the thirties when I came back in the house from branding and she was reading Proust at the kitchen table. I was bruised, soiled and hungry and so were the boys and she looked up as if we were aliens. We were suddenly quite sure she had forgotten dinner but she nodded to the dining room and then went back to her book. It was a hot day and there was a turkey she had roasted and chilled, a potato salad, a green salad, my bottle of whiskey, a bottle of white wine on ice, a pitcher of lemonade for the boys, and a rhubarb pie. For some reason I hesitate to write about my wife, either our joys or our horrors, as if this marriage were a fundamental sacrament that might lose its worth if babbled about.
Lundquist comes in from the barn after work, smelling of saddle soap from keeping a room full of tack in fine fettle. He is a puddle of despair over his wife’s mental instability and we have a whiskey while he questions me on the matter. I tell him that I have read that people often become mentally ill over real, or imagined, but not quite acknowledged guilt. I have already made the offer that Frieda may come ba
ck to work if she apologizes for her indiscretion, but she has refused to accept this condition. She has opted for a world in which she has done nothing wrong, and that she need answer only to God. This is a not very rare version of God in America which is often viewed as a godless place, ergo, the most ordinary behavioral ethic may be ignored by Christians. It is a version of religion quite similar to Senator McCarthy’s version of Americanism where all honor and civility can be righteously ignored.
Lundquist becomes more persistent about “mind doctors” and “nerve medicine” and I feel myself drift rather hopelessly toward the visual thought of the human trajectory, and how difficult it is to interrupt it in any positive sense. Frieda is being sedated and sits before the television like a big crock of lard. She doubtless misses vacuuming unoccupied rooms. My dear friend, her husband who is without guile, wants desperately, I perceive, for me to say she’ll get better and I find myself saying, “She’ll get better in the summer. I suggest you pull a tube or two on the television and maybe she’ll turn back to gardening and religion.” He’s pleased with this garden-variety advice while I feel distressed at what little help I’ve been. I tell him I’m headed up to the Rosebud at dawn and he wants to drive me but I say best I go it alone. When he leaves I wonder again if my early obsession with art rendered me quite useless as a human being to my family and friends or if, indeed, everyone is quite useless to one another.
Before I went to bed I went down to the sub-basement to select a gift for Smith. I knew it was “de rigueur” to take tobacco but I thought something additional might be appropriate as it was likely our last visit. I made sure the railroad lantern had plenty of fuel and when I entered the earthen root cellar, past the wine cage, the black snakes became immobile in the lantern light except for a very large one that decided to challenge me. I pushed it aside with a stick kept by the descending stairs for that purpose and could not help but think of my beloved Adelle as Medusa in a damp slip. I rummaged through the big room with only the slightest of soul quavers when the edge of the lantern light caught the uniformed skeletons. The last straw, as it were, was when the cavalry officer, my father’s nemesis, had thrown my rag doll into the fireplace. The rag doll had been Aase’s, his tubercular wife, which had tripped my father’s rage into the act of murder. I stood there overlong thinking first of the quality of Adelle’s voice, and then the old Lakota warriors who had brought me back home on my ill-fated trip to rescue Willow. How odd that such men had totally vanished in my lifetime though there were likely a few left that kept themselves hidden from public scrutiny. In a specific way Smith was one of them and it was more a matter of will than lineage. When I had impulsively enlisted for World War I the sharpeyed old recruiter down in Lincoln had asked me if I wished to enlist as a white or a Sioux. Can anyone actually be half of something, I wondered, and what part of me is my mother? This thought prickled my scalp and I hastily picked an ornamental bow made of Osage orange and wrapped tightly in two rattlesnake skins so that rattles hung from top and bottom. On the way out and up the stairs I shook the bow vigorously and the rattles frightened the black snakes in the root cellar. They disappeared into a hole behind a stack of potato crates. I decided I did not want to come down here again and I meant to call Samuels to add to my will that Dalva should deal with the collection when she became an adult. Back in the late thirties Paul had accepted a garishly painted buffalo skull he favored but John Wesley, in a rare show of superstition, wanted nothing to do with the room.
