by Jim Harrison
It was a full hour before she returned, at first coasting by without seeing me and then I shouted and she backed up. She slid over to the passenger side and tossed her pale blue panties to me with a blank face as I approached, then held up a pint of blackberry brandy, of all things. I took a glug before I got in the truck and we made love right there on the front seat, with her kicking off a radio dial with a sandal. We slid partway out of the cab, and I stumbled backward when I finished, then fell, imbedding some gravel in my bare ass. She managed to hold onto the steering wheel then frantically helped with my trousers because we could hear a car coming and I was still part comatose. It was the rural mailman and rather than being mortified as she had a number of weeks before she waved and smiled. He waved then politely looked off in the other direction, the dust his car left behind settling on our sweating skin in a dry brown cloud.
We headed north, turning left in Verdigre, then eventually north again to reach her favorite swimming hole on the Niobrara. I mentioned idly, and it turned out to be a stupid move, that we were about one hundred fifty miles east, but on the same river where I had tried to visit my mother. What do you mean by tried, she asked? Why was I so evasive? Did I tell my new grandmother who I was? Hadn’t it occurred to me that she’d perceive who I was? Her own mother felt I acted stupidly after my phone call. I was irked and said that rather than teaching literature and dance she might do well as a private detective. We had just pulled up to the river and she hissed, “Oh fuck you,” jumped out and headed west on a path. I followed but her track experience came into play and it was a while before I caught up. Her tracks on a sandbank ended near bushes with her yellow sundress and sandals on the ground. I glanced at a river eddy and she emerged from the water and threw a handful of mud and sand at me. She intoned, “The course of true love never runs smooth,” as if addressing the United Nations. I undressed while she stood in waist-deep water singing mock versions of “the course of true love never runs smooth,” explaining that that’s what her 4-H sewing instructor had told her and a group of other little girls when they reached their teens. They thought it was quite funny as they already were dealing with horny farm boys by then. We bravely made love on a sandbar in broad daylight then stared at our imprints in the damp sand wondering if a good tracker could figure out what had happened there.
I only stayed one night and half of the next day before we had worn each other out with permutations of the quarrels we had already had. It was as if the strength of our affection peeled our nerves other than when we were making love. There was the notion that I had never had so much at stake and didn’t know how to handle it. I even began to think if the bruise on her face hadn’t been so relatively recent she would have been easier to deal with, one of the stupider thoughts of my life. For a brief hour on a hike in the hills behind the farm we seemed to see the mess we were in quite clearly, she more than I. Her idea was that she had begun with her severe depression over her marriage in the spring, then met with me several times which had utterly rattled her brain, and then her husband had clubbed her to the floor. She went home and I quickly showed up and arranged a lawyer. Now I was back again without even a week passing rather than the month we both agreed was appropriate. My “evasiveness” hadn’t helped, a word I bridled at because my parents had used it a fair amount to describe my shortcomings. I had always wondered, and said so, why you had to tell everyone everything right from the starting gate, and she said you don’t but if you think you love someone you should. I had made a start with my list of the peculiarities I had admitted to, but I had left out a lot. I knew she meant the money thing so I suggested we get in my truck and go visit my mother which would give her a big dose of reality. That made her angry and she asked how the hell she could meet my mother with a big fucking purple and yellow bruise on her face? She began to cry and I felt like my stomach was going to drop out over what an insensitive asshole I was showing myself to be. I held her and we began to try to make love but her dog wouldn’t allow it. In fact I came close to being bitten and got a pant leg torn. On the way back down a series of diminishing hills to the farmhouse I had to walk at least ten feet behind her with the dog turning and growling if I came closer. She thought this was very funny and I did too though it made me miss Ralph.
The only long truce period was during dinner and the evening when her father expertly grilled some local chicken halves which her mother served with a blistering red chile sauce, and then the four of us played an involved card game called pinochle which I caught onto reasonably fast. It was pleasant to have all my bleak nervous energy absorbed in a card game so that for three hours, other than the exchange of wistful glances, J.M. and I could slam down trump cards as wholeheartedly as her parents. It was a little disappointing when her parents went to bed and we were left behind with difficult and separate selves. I offered to sleep out in the yard but she gave my pecker a tweak and said she was sure her dog wouldn’t allow it. He even growled at me through the screen door and J.M. gave me a piece of beef from the fridge to try to make friends. He accepted the meat on the front porch but growled while he ate it. The consolation was a big moon and J.M. had me recite some constellation details which I could tell from her comments she wasn’t listening to carefully but I didn’t give a shit.
I was a little worried about her room but it was big enough with plenty of windows, not at all frilly but stacked with books and 4-H mementos, including some small trophies and photos with J.M. and prize calves and heifers. Her husband had so far refused to ship her main collection of books and the mention of it made her flare with anger. I wondered how long this sort of thing would last. Her voice slackened a bit with fatigue and when she exacted a promise from me to see my birth mother her heart wasn’t in it and she began to sleep. I stared closely at her hoping to develop a subtle language that wouldn’t pinch her sore spots. I turned off the night-table light and looked out the western window and tried to imagine if this mother was really looking for me and why. I supposed that I wasn’t capable as a male of fully understanding giving away a baby you had made with someone you loved. Samuels had told me her grandfather and mother couldn’t keep her away from this half-breed Sioux hired hand who lived out in their bunkhouse. It must have been the one with curtains out near the geese and horse corral, I thought, then fell into the deepest sleep possible.
I awoke to a red-tinged dawn, tried to make love but she pushed me away and slept peacefully on. I heard noises downstairs and decided to help her father with any chores in the offing. While playing pinochle he had referred to J.M.’s husband as a “mouthy marshmallow” and I didn’t care to be categorized like that. His auger attachment for his tractor was hopelessly broken so that he had to do postholes by hand, a talent at which I was expert I’d told him over cards.
He was surprised to see me and put extra bacon on. We talked about pheasant hunting and he said J.M.’s obnoxious mongrel was pretty good though you had to run for a downed bird or the dog would make off and eat it. We then talked about grazing and I told him about a new theory and practice I’d read about where you partition your grazing land in seven pieces and move the cattle every ten days or so. That way your weight gain went up at a surprising rate with all the fresh grass. He countered with the simple fact that that was a lot of fence to build and I said I was up for it. He asked why, and I said I was taken by his daughter, but it all seemed too antique and idealistic for him. Maybe so, but I’d be glad to do it. I could see he’d had his ass in a sling over the farm often enough to have adopted a proper cynicism. The farm had worked well for the previous three generations but now all the crop moves he made, not to speak of the cattle, were “a dollar short and a day late.” This morbid talk began to sink us both but then the mother, Doris, appeared for a cup of coffee and a bowl of cereal on her way to her office job in Neligh. She seemed happy enough and looked handsome in a blue terry-cloth robe. Then the phone rang and she answered as J.M. came into the kitchen as if she didn’t quite recognize it, still half asleep
. Both father and daughter were concerned about a phone call this early so I went out on the porch. She could be a real puzzle, I thought, remembering that during the hillside growling fiesta she had said, “No greater dog hath man than his love.” I said you got dog and love backward, and she said, “No I don’t.” Bill came out on the porch looking pissed off and distracted and I asked if I could scythe the burdock around the barn, and he said, “Go ahead, I got permanent tennis elbow but not from tennis.”
I found the scythe in the barn where I’d seen it the other afternoon, also a metal file on a workbench in the corner. I put the scythe in the vise and sharpened it, then headed outside for the burdock. My grandpa had taught me how to scythe and I remembered you had to swivel your hips or your shoulder would wear out. I cut a few swaths while worrying about what was happening in the house and also about a period the year before when my mother had gone through some New Age spiritualist bullshit which, according to Marianne, had cost her a bunch of money. Though they quarreled incessantly Mother kept badgering Marianne to move back to Omaha so they could keep each other company.
I had just about finished scything when J.M. appeared and said my so-called friend, the lawyer, had called to ask if they would come down this afternoon because he had a hot chance to go fishing in Wyoming and wouldn’t be able to keep an appointment later in the week. Her father was pissed because it was his night for nickel poker with his friends though he wouldn’t admit that was the reason. Her mother couldn’t miss work. Naturally I offered to take her but that was out of the question because she was only twenty-one and her parents didn’t think she was capable of handling it without one of them. There was a flash when I wondered whether when you married someone you also married the parents. I mean I liked them fine but it was an illusion I’d noted long ago when we think of parents as anything but an older version of ourselves.
Her mother waved at us as she drove away and J.M. asked plaintively if I’d keep on writing her. This meant I was dismissed but for a change I could understand why. The family didn’t want me to share their private mudbath. I embraced her and she said I could use her shower. Then her father came out looking quite affable and I recalled how often my own father had acted pleasant and gentle to my sisters when he was eating out his guts over their problems. He put his hand on J.M.’s shoulder and asked if we were up to the final couple of hundred bales of hay as the radio said it might rain before they got back from Omaha. I was relieved at the chance for something menial and it only took us a couple of hours. While I showered J.M. made me a Spam sandwich to travel with, a specific delight as my mother had never allowed the stuff in the house. The same with catsup and bologna, which drew me strongly to all three. J.M. kissed me so ardently good-bye that my heart and mind purred like a cat. She said, “Don’t forget what you’re going to do and give me a couple of weeks this time.”
Rather than doing what I was supposed to do I headed north instead of west for the simple reason that within a mile down the gravel road it had struck me with dreadful finality that if I was going to join up with J.M. my career as a nomad would be over. This overshadowed the question of my Sandhills mother and I kept stopping along the road as if the lack of movement would make a decision. There was the usual yes, no, yes, no, yes, no. If it was yes was I truly capable of it? My sister Lucy liked to joke that I’d make an excellent traveling salesman covering the entire country except the eastern seaboard. I said yes if I could sell rain, or moonbeams, or leftover wind. But then what the fuck were decisions of this sort when J.M. had said we’d have to live together for quite a while in order to figure out if we could manage the long haul? How flowingly realistic compared to my geometric-decision bullshit.
I made my way north, passing up the idea of visiting a friend in Morris, Minnesota, whom I’d met in the Yucatÿn. He spent half his year in Morris as a civil engineer, then went native on the Yucatÿn coast for the fall and winter, but I doubted I’d be good company. He probably would advise me to see if J.M. would settle for a half-year marriage. For a number of miles I very much missed the advice my father might have given me despite our essential quarrels.
About an hour before nightfall I reached my grandpa’s land, about fifty miles east of Moorhead and fairly close to the White Earth Reservation. I set up camp on a hillock covered with sumac for concealment. From what I wondered? I was only about a hundred feet from the Buffalo River thinking the sound of moving water might soothe me. It must have rained the day before because I could smell the charred damp odor of my grandfather’s cabin not far away, carried by the slightest of western breezes. The cabin burned the summer after he died and the local sheriff had suggested it was probably lightning which my father accepted cynically. There had been a local storm that evening but not very severe and it was my father’s opinion that it was likely arson committed by one of the many poachers my grandpa had arrested as game warden. That was in my early teens and I remember thinking I had lost a possible home.
Lying there and watching my beloved stars gather in the growing dark didn’t prevent a modest tailspin about J.M. Life unwinds in the living and on this particular night my brain’s machinations were not worth a badger fart. My dad had said when irritated that my life was not unlike a hobo’s during the Great Depression but for less reason. Hoboes had begun by moving on to look for work but after a while they just moved on for the sake of moving on. Mother said one night in the backyard, her voice a little slurred, that the universe above us was God’s brain. I had agreed for a change which delighted her. But I know looking up at the stars that we don’t have even the sorriest clue to what is ultimately going on. The French writer Camus said we were supposed to be brave about this simple fact. I tended to like Camus in college because his name spelled backward was “sumac” which might betray me as an idiot. Once in Montana a girl in the middle of the night asked if I didn’t think it was wonderful that God created the Big Dipper. I smugly said that the stars were there before dippers so I doubted He had that in mind, which made her withdraw her affections. I had to start being careful because at that moment I felt I’d rather die than ruin J.M.’s life.
At dawn it began to rain fairly hard and I began to brood in earnest. Brooding leads to more brooding as if you were going to achieve some sort of clarity by continuing to stir the mud puddle. When it’s raining hard and you’re confined to a small mountain tent you’re bound to come up short in terms of self-judgment. Maybe a single life doesn’t amount to much but perhaps it should at least drift toward the common good.
I stayed there for three days and never got dried out. I wrote one ink-smeared letter to J.M. but mostly walked the perimeter of Grandpa’s forty acres over and over like a well-programmed bird dog. The excessive moisture caused blisters on my feet and I swathed them with a tape with the attractive name of “moleskin.” I got very bored talking to myself and talked to the hordes of mosquitoes and flies. I prayed for sunlight as a child might on a Saturday morning but it made me feel weird as hell. Even while walking I stewed in my own rank juices as if the overmemorized landscape from my youth was incapable of drawing me out.
On the morning of the third day I drove over to Naytahwaush on the White Earth Reservation (Anishinabe) to look up an old friend I hadn’t seen since my early teens when he’d occasionally fish with my grandpa and me. His mother still lived in a tar-paper shack and out back there was a remnant of long bluestem, an original prairie grass from when buffalo still roamed the area. I never feel more embarrassed as an American citizen than when I visit an Indian reservation. Nothing so much emphasizes our moral fraudulence than the way we treated these people from the time we hit shore to the last fifteen minutes. God must squint, turn his face and puke, when he’s not busy elsewhere.
The mother was there and smiled broadly when she saw me. She was as tall as I was, six feet, and her arms proved she had split the immense pile of firewood outside the shack. It turned out her son was in prison in Missouri. I asked when he was due out and she said, “Never.
” Her two daughters were fine, though, and both had jobs and husbands in Minneapolis. She served me coffee and I tried to give her fifty bucks to send to her son but she wouldn’t take it because he had “free room and board.” I left the money on the table for her and she gave me a ten-pound bag of wild rice. Then she said that I should visit my grandpa’s old girlfriend down the road. I was utterly startled that my grandpa had had a girlfriend, also mildly delighted as my grandmother had a big share of bully in her, perhaps a reason my father had always been oversubdued.
I was allowed a piece of starlight only a few minutes long that night and at dawn I packed and left in a steady downpour. For some reason the rain had purged my sentimentality and I was only interested in the business at hand. I stopped for gas in Sioux Falls and called my bird boss in Lincoln, and tried to wangle a few days of work for Naomi and myself. He said stop by in the afternoon, but then laughed at the idea of paying Naomi in that her father-in-law used to be one of the largest landholders in the state. I didn’t say anything more though I doubted the truth of what he said, or else Naomi made a fetish of living simply.
I reached Lincoln in the early afternoon and since it was also raining there I checked into my claustrophobic motel. I was given a room with a print of a sad-eyed donkey wearing a garland of flowers which barely beat the more usual purple twilight in snowcapped mountains. I didn’t want to but I called my mother in Omaha out of duty and she announced gaily that Derek was coming for dinner. I said, “Wonderful” and then she knocked my wind out by saying that Dalva Northridge, my “birth mother,” the term she insisted on using, had met her for a drink and a chat at the club yesterday. For want of anything else I said, “Thank you,” and then she continued on rather shrilly that I was obligated to look for this pleasant woman who was looking for me. My mother had had enough art not to mention to Dalva my visit to Naomi. I didn’t listen carefully and hung up, forgetting to say good-bye. I was back in my truck and driving downtown before it occurred to me that I was certainly entitled to go see her if she was already looking for me. Despite the clouds and rain the ceiling lifted quite a bit, a great deal, in fact.
