by Jim Harrison
I got dressed, nudging Carlos with a foot to subdue his irritation, made coffee, bundled up and went outside for my advised walk, with all of the dogs accompanying me, at first without much enthusiasm. The outdoor thermometer said only sixteen degrees which is not what folks think about the Arizona-Mexico border but then the San Rafael Valley is a mile high. I only own a few hundred acres bordering the Coronado National Forest so we slowly walked the fence line with the first trace of light coming over the Huachuca Mountains to the east. The slightness of the new moon did nothing to diminish the density of the floss of bright stars above my head, the steam from my mouth rising upward to them punily but then we are not much in their sight. It occurred to me that it was my very ordinariness that was leading me back home, which at least was more comprehensible than the vast dome of the heavens above me. I smiled, remembering when I’d asked my father what happened when we died while he and Lundquist were butchering a steer. He turned to me with bloody hands and said, “If it’s nothing we won’t know it,” while Lundquist just behind him shook his head and rolled his eyes. I went back to the house and asked the same question of my mother who looked up from a book and said, “I have no idea.” As the sky got lighter the dogs ranged further and I supposed the central thing about loving someone is that it very much made you want to continue living.
DALVA
April 18th, 1987
I awoke just before daylight to the sound of Lundquist’s pick-up entering the yard. I could see over the windowsill and the lights were on in Nelse’s bunkhouse, and Lundquist’s silhouette was clear at the door with Roscoe over his shoulder. Ted barked from the kitchen below me and I whistled and he came trotting up the stairs and jumped onto the bed. I scratched his belly with its peculiar hair, half Airedale and half Labrador, a furry, roundish pig dog without the strong attributes of either breed. He always remained quiet if I let him up on the bed, a graceful piece of etiquette, and I fell back to sleep and I felt protected in an already threat-free local universe. As I dozed off I remembered the story of our only local murder except for a few family quarrels, some seventy years before when a hired hand got drunk and doped on spring tonic full of alcohol and tincture of cocaine, killed a ranch wife and boarded the train. The sheriff rode down the train on horseback, swung himself on and walked through the line of cars, blowing the murderer off the last car with his .44. The murderer was unarmed but that was widely considered an unimportant detail. Grandfather always told this story as if it were a joke but then his humor was a bit rough.
An hour later when it was light there was sleetish snow against the window and I was frankly pissed off because yesterday had been so beautiful, perhaps in the mid-fifties, and I had sat against a tree in the yard with my butt wet letting the sun warm my belly and my back coolish, watching the snow steam in the ditch beyond the bare lilac grove that surrounds our family cemetery. It is neither more nor less endurable in May when it is enshrouded by the heavy-scented purple and white flowers, a smell that on warm evenings is so dense as to be almost visible. All I ever needed was the song of the local whippoorwill to make the throat thick and the temples tighten backward so the chin lifted upward into the evening air. The sound of crickets arrived one by one until they were a chorus, and if you walked down the gravel road toward the Niobrara the frogs from the lower, marshy areas were so loud as to be barely endurable.
Downstairs I could hear the scrape of Nelse and Lundquist pushing their chairs back from breakfast, and Frieda’s “Eat more it’s cold outside.” Outside the team of Belgian-Clydesdale crosses stood harnessed to the wagon. Lundquist and Nelse had driven to western Iowa in February and bought the team off an Amish farmer for elaborately announced reasons: to haul hay to the cattle without gouging up the pasture with a tractor, to drag fallen trees out of the windbreaks, but ultimately, I thought, it was Nelse’s gift to Lundquist who had kept sets of harness at the ready since the 1940s. It was easy to love these geldings who weighed a ton apiece and were utterly docile in their great power, though they have to be pastured separately from the quarterhorses who seemed perpetually angered at them for private horse reasons. I watched as Lundquist and Nelse clambered onto the seat of the wagon full of fence posts as if they were about the true business of the world. Lundquist at the reins turned the wagon and Frieda came out to her truck in her baggy red Nebraska Cornhusker hooded sweatshirt, off to the county seat supermarket for Saturday-morning shopping, the horses’ ears tilting forward at the roar of her truck and the gravel she threw as she left the yard.
I went downstairs still slightly troubled by the remnant of a dream based on the early sixties when I had come home from the university for spring vacation and spent the first morning with Naomi and the county nurse shaving the hair from most of her students and dressing their heads against a plague of ringworm. It seemed the furthest cry from my coffeehouse existence in Minneapolis where the cognoscenti students were making the transition from existentialism to the homegrown beatnik movement. We had all been quite irritated by a visiting French professor straight from Paris who had found us quite comic in the way we tried to ape postwar European despair from the plenitude of Minneapolis. A gay friend (“homosexual” back then) had a crush on this professor and trolled with me, taking him to a steakhouse in St. Paul where the professor laughed until tears came at a huge porterhouse and said that though the steak filled him with ennui he intended to eat every bite. My beige skirt was quite ruined by the grease stains that came when he tried to fondle me under the table. There were none, certainly, on my friend’s trousers. The professor comprehended the situation in a New York minute and teased around it the entire evening, even saying that the “partouze” was a nasty bourgeois invention. On translation my friend fled the restaurant and I paid the bill. On principle I nearly refused to sleep with this man but within the texture of that time the strongest moral impetus was curiosity.
In the dream I couldn’t find my five-year-old son in the school yard to shave his head. I had looked down in the horse trough and my reflection in the water was mannish, looking more like Duane than myself. I poured my coffee, thought this over and came up with nothing. Beside the frying pan full of potatoes, bacon and a single pork chop was a note from Frieda saying “Eat this Miss Skinny.” I had been having the mildest ache in my lower abdomen nearly a week but it had been enough to kill my appetite until evening when a glass of red wine would prod it back to life. Frieda anyway had the satisfaction of cooking for Nelse who had to eat enormously to maintain his strength, his light coming on in the bunkhouse invariably at six A.M. and never going off before midnight. Since I had a measure of my uncle Paul’s insomnia I always knew. When J.M. visits they sleep down the hall in Paul’s old room which J.M. loves because she thinks of it as a “time warp” of old books, collections of rocks and arrowheads, framed magazine photos of far-off places such as the Vale of Kashmir, the Rift Valley, Glen Canyon and, for some odd reason, a tacky photo of the Rue Marboeuf in Paris.
My right hand was so stiff I spilled part of my coffee and howled “Shit” to the empty kitchen. I clenched and stretched the hand, quite sore from having spent the previous day brushing most of the winter coats off the horses, watching them do their kicking and bucking fandangos when they were released. This was an annual spring celebration I had been doing since I was a little girl and the thing I had looked forward to the most when I came home for a week in late April from the university. It was the ritual of brushing the winter away and the horses appeared to enjoy it as much as I did.
Quite suddenly I recalled the disturbing aspect of the ringworm dream. All of Naomi’s students had been dressed in the clothing of the poorest children from my considerable experience as a social worker. In my first jobs in Minneapolis and Escanaba, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, I had lied to my superiors and said that I had an uncle who was a sock manufacturer. There are always strict rules against direct gifts from social workers to what are euphemistically called their “clients.” The lie didn’t wor
k in Minneapolis which is full of rather Nordic strictures but my boss in Escanaba, a warmhearted Finn, saw nothing wrong with my dispersal of socks. I had always hated it when my own feet were cold and it was unendurable to see children, mostly Natives, wearing thin socks or frequently none at all in winter. Oddly, it wasn’t the poverty that ground against the sensibilities so hard that depressed me the most but the attitude of many of the more fortunate who weren’t satisfied with having money unless there were many who didn’t have it. This was particularly true in Santa Monica during the Reagan years when my occupation was largely seen as laughable, if not contemptible. Even quasi-religious people liked to quote Jesus as saying, “The poor you have with you always,” neglecting to add that he didn’t say to sit on your ass and don’t do anything about it. The thought that my country accepts the idea that a quarter of its citizens are destined to be social mutants peels my nerves. Our compassion quotient has seemed to lower a bit more every year of my adult life. I never much minded when my colleagues would tease me for being a “bleeding heart” because if your heart doesn’t bleed you’re dead, and you’ve become just another greedy little shit factory on life’s way.
In my dream some of the children didn’t have socks and they smelled of kerosene heaters. Their clothes were thin and shapeless and there were specific signs of malnutrition. I ate the leftover pork chop and potatoes mulling over this and how my childish disappointment with the weather, plus a harrowing dream, could affect my ability to keep my spirit afloat. When I was finally fired from my job mid-March it was under blizzard conditions and I was happy to the point of delirium. It’s remarkable how much more cowed people can be in a government job than in the private sector. I cleaned out my desk and walked out of the old county office building with the lightest heart possible and into a driving snowstorm as if trying to kiss the snow that hit my face. No one would look at me after the expected call came. I was being replaced by no one which was quite funny in itself. All of the money appropriated for counseling the families of downtrodden farmers had been expended in conferences on the subject in Lincoln and Washington, D.C. I went directly over to Lena’s and had a shot from her bottle of cheap brandy she keeps for dire events. I ended up helping her for her noon rush as the storm had made her shorthanded. I even waited on a table of county employees who had averted their glances a few hours before. At midafternoon Nelse arrived in his truck, not trusting my old, low-slung Subaru to get through the storm. He had stopped at the county building and had been appalled to learn I was fired. We sat in the tavern for an hour full of the pleasure of watching it snow. Heavy, wet late-winter snow is a matter of great pleasure in a ranching, farming community. It means more moisture for the winter wheat and soil better prepared for corn planting. Grazing land will burst with new and thicker grass and Naomi’s soul will dance at the prospect of a better crop of wildflowers. On the way home we spoke of a possible car trip together in late May when J.M. will be busy with her final examinations and won’t want him in her way. He had been a bit distressed over the collapse of his plans for a phenology of local birds. Naomi had finally and rather shyly told him the work had already been done by someone Nelse refers to as “the great Johnsgard” back in 1980 when Nelse was off wandering the country. He gave me a copy to look at and I was reminded again how I have sunken my life in generalities rather than particulars. I had asked Nelse for a definition of phenology as it kept slipping my mind and one evening I found a piece of paper taped to the middle of my bedroom’s dresser mirror. “The periodic recurrence of natural phenomena such as bird nesting and migrating as related to time, also mammals screwing and having their young, also tree budding and leafing, plants coming to flower, all related to local climate and precise time of year. Do not remove.”
Despite the base work having been done he hopes to recheck the printed data with his own observations and contribute corrections. I must admit his curiosity mystifies me and I supposed that one had to start quite young to know the particularities of flora and fauna. He said, “Why wouldn’t you want to know everything about where you live beyond the walls of this house?” and I was a little embarrassed despite not being a total slouch in the matter compared to those I know. I’ve never quite been able to stand back and look at things without them absorbing me in a distracting way as if every creature and plant or tree had an emotional equivalent that could be drawn willy-nilly out of my brain. I’m a little despairing when I leaf through the stack of field guidebooks he bought me in Lincoln. I’ve owned some of them, including different guides to western birds, even A Field Guide to Animal Tracks, but have misplaced them along the way. When Naomi would haul us children out on nature hikes Ruth could remember the name of everything but her true interest was strictly limited to music.
My only defense against Nelse as a stern teacher when he gets out of hand is to deftly raise some troublesome human element. As an instance, when he made some quip at dinner about what he’d do with the rest of his life while J.M. taught I used the old university catchphrase “terrible freedom” and his ears turned red and his gestures became nervous. This was from the black-turtleneck stage of college life the professor from France found so amusing. By the next year it had been largely supplanted by loud music, and the cheap wine traded in for marijuana. This, however, didn’t make the notion of terrible freedom less obnoxious for me. I nearly envied my friends who were so urgently seeking decently paying careers. I’d always been financially prudent but was well aware I didn’t need to depend on my own money-making abilities. I can’t say this detail troubled Nelse but he is mindful of it. He finds my social work stories nearly unbearable even though he’s seen much in his life on the road. Children are taught a sense of fair play and some of them spend the rest of their lives being bothered by it.
At age forty-six I can stand at the kitchen sink and look out at the barnyard where the event occurred and feel overwhelmingly blessed that I found my son. Both his parents were problematical and I suppose his mother still is. I conceived him out by the creek in a wet baptism dress at age fifteen. The father, Duane Stone Horse, was sixteen and has drifted far backward in time but is not the less vivid for being so long dead. I wonder if anyone can stand back from earth and get a clear look for more than a few moments at a time. Though we are of one body in some respects I am not fool enough to think I am his mother in the truest sense, the woman who raises and presumably nurtures you day by day. We are what is left of his father and my father except for Ruth who was too young to remember and who was frightened and distant with Duane. After seven months now I think Nelse and I are becoming the closest of friends and perhaps something else for which there is no category. When I see him out the window at dawn or twilight when the light is a bit blurred I think he could be either my father or Duane. After he drove me home on the day I lost my job and when by evening I became quite miserable with delayed rage we sat before the fireplace and he took my hand and held it. That has to be enough.
April 19th
I heard birds at daylight which meant the weather had turned. I got up and opened my south window and the breeze that lifted the curtains was soft. The smell of earth was much more convincing than the last, brief thaw. I was excited, put on my robe, and went down to have breakfast with Nelse and Lundquist though my tummy still felt a bit uncomfortable. They were surprised but seemed pleased to see me. Lundquist was animated, nearly upset over something Nelse had said which he repeated to draw me in. A noted entomologist named Hopkins had posited that what we think of as the burgeoning of spring in terms of the activities of plants and animals advances at a rate of four days of difference for each degree of latitude which is seventy miles. I was a little stunned and excited along with Lundquist and saw it as a massive spirit slowly flowing north. At the same time Frieda at the stove was chatting about the difficulties the University of Nebraska football coach was having with the behavior of his athletes but what Nelse was pointing out was too fascinating for this to distract us. Lundquist suggested that it w
as exactly the sort of thing that God wanted us to know compared to the junk that tries to drown us. I hadn’t advanced beyond the radical tickle in my brain. The south kitchen window was open a bit and when I turned in my chair there was a piercing call of a meadowlark, certainly not the first of the season but the most convincing in the density of its sound. Even Frieda turned from the stove for a moment. I quivered and Nelse laughed, saying that he felt the same when he had awakened in a pasture and had seen a meadowlark less than a foot away. Lundquist, who was deeply suspicious of Catholics, as many Lutherans are, wondered aloud if it were true that “this old-timey” Catholic saint walked around with birds on his shoulders, head and outstretched arms. He had seen a drawing of Saint Francis but doubted its reliability. Nelse teased that birds couldn’t tell the difference between a Catholic and a Protestant, but then Lundquist announced that in his entire life he’d had only five wild birds land on him for any length of time and then only when he was napping in a pasture or within a wooded shelterbelt. He had also sat all one afternoon beside one of Naomi’s bird feeders with sunflower seeds on his hat brim but had had no takers. He told us how disturbed he had been when Naomi had told him that humans were only trustworthy when asleep.
