by Jim Harrison
The real problem for me is that my tummyache had been increasing and on this, the first very warm day of the year, I felt a trace of nausea. Whether I walked, rode, sat or slept there was no getting away from the discomfort. I knew enough about human physiology to have specific fears but was intent on totally dismissing them because Nelse and I were leaving on our car trip within a week. Of course I knew that I better get down to Lincoln to see a doctor I had gone to school with before the trip rather than after. I no longer knew any doctors in this part of Nebraska and short of flying to Los Angeles and seeing an ex-boyfriend, a somewhat familiar face in Lincoln seemed the answer. I also wanted to be secretive on the long shot that something was seriously wrong. I had begun to feel that something was subtly amiss soon after Thanksgiving and now I felt quite stupid for not getting a checkup sooner.
When I reached the river I let Rose drink, tethered her loosely to a willow and then went through the obnoxious process of throwing a stick in an eddy ten times for Ted. Each time I throw I speak the number loudly and after only four training sessions Ted has learned that a loud “ten” means the game is over and he must stop pestering me. He then takes a nap and I do too, using his ample damp body as a pillow. I have noticed three different species of raptor on this ride but my bird book is in my saddlebags hanging over the top slat of the corral, along with binoculars, a sandwich and a bottle of water. I remembered when I was a little girl and my dad teased me that I’d forget my butt if it wasn’t “tied on.” I also remembered ignoring the lesson and mostly wondering just how my butt was tied on. Ted growled and I turned over to see Naomi’s retarded friend, Rex, repairing fence up a hill on the far side of the river.
When I again thought of our home burial last October I started laughing despite the pangs in my stomach, then looked down at a burgeoning wildflower that Ted had crushed. My Van Bruggen guidebook was also back in my saddlebags so I picked the flower and put it in my vest pocket for Nelse. Luckily it was blue which dramatically limited the possibilities. Down on the border in Arizona Paul would laugh and call me “Penstemon” because that was the only flower I could readily identify, partly because I had seen it encircling a petroglyph of a figure that was half man and half lizard. I had camped beneath this petroglyph with Douglas under a big moon and its sleep-encouraging properties were nil. The next morning after the earth began to warm, quite quickly in May in the Altar Valley, a tuft of grass wiggled and we watched a rattler slowly emerge. It kept on emerging and we renamed it the “great mother of snakes,” possibly the least friendly creature I have ever watched closely. Douglas reprimanded me, saying that “friend” was a limited human term.
The burial involved a rather long and nervous wait of several weeks. We were finally enabled in mid-October by a homely incident down in Lincoln. It’s impossible to do anything around the ranch without Lundquist’s notice, but then Frieda had gone off to a Cornhusker football game (the name of the Nebraskan team) and in the surge of the crowd after the usual victory she had punched a campus policeman who promptly arrested her for assaulting an officer. When the phone call came Lundquist was inconsolable over his failure as a parent though he was in his mid-eighties and Frieda in her late forties. His wife, also Frieda, had died a decade before and he doubted his capacity for guidance for this immense, violently opinionated woman. On the phone it was Frieda’s contention that the policeman had grabbed her breasts, somewhat difficult to avoid in my opinion as they were at least size forty-five triple Ds. This was early on a Saturday evening and while I tried to calm Lundquist Nelse managed to get through to someone at the family law firm we shared. There was no possibility of springing Frieda until Monday morning which terribly upset Lundquist who jumped up and said he was off on the long drive to Lincoln to visit his poor daughter in the “hoosegow.” He refused the loan of my new pick-up because his dog Roscoe wouldn’t be comfortable in it. He puttered out of the yard in his ancient Studebaker which would add several hours to the trip, then Nelse looked at me and suggested we get started while I thought Sunday would be adequate. He said he wanted the surface of the hole to have time to dry out so hopefully Lundquist wouldn’t notice it.
It became a grandly comic night. We carried a flashlight and lantern down the stairs to the basement and with Nelse’s mixed approval I took a magnum from Grandfather’s wine cage which no longer had to be locked with Michael absent. Nelse went on ahead while I went back upstairs for a corkscrew and two glasses and when I returned I regretted having to go through the root cellar and down the steps to the sub-basement alone. It was cold enough for the black snakes to be quite dormant but while juggling the wine bottle and glasses plus the flashlight I stepped on a large one, heard its verbless hiss and felt its body whip against my boot.
When I reached the sub-basement Nelse was in the far corner with the lantern lit. This part of the house had never been wired because Grandfather thought it would be blasphemous. It was forever dark down here, darker than the night outside, and I felt a tremor to the effect that this business should have been conducted at noon. The lantern made Nelse cast a monstrous shadow as he packed the three clothed skeletons, the lieutenant, sergeant and private, all of whom had been intent on destroying my great-grandfather and his family. Their remains were to be buried in a hole yet to be dug beside the horse-manure pile behind the barn. The five warriors in full regalia would be buried together in a hole Nelse had already dug out near the pond. During their diaspora they wished to have their remains kept safe from grave robbers, a common practice then which still continues under the aegis of archeology. I always wondered why AIM hadn’t simply entered Arlington on horseback with shovels in hand as a protest. I suppose if you went back far enough in time Native remains might be a proper subject of inquiry but the gravesites of the Indian Wars hold the remains of the grandfathers of many still living.
I called out to Nelse to say something reassuring and he muttered, “It’s a lovely evening.” I shined the flashlight on the long oak table where most of the artifacts had been packed in cartons for a museum. The intent behind the contents was my grandfather’s and his father’s keeping them safe from the artifact predators of the time in that they had been given to my great-grandfather for secure storage. Nelse had already given three medicine bags of strictly religious nature back to the Lakota, Cheyenne and Paiutes. The rest was going to a museum because finding the descendants of the original owners was hopeless in that few records had been kept. These included braided sweet grass, otter-skin collars, fur bands of mountain lions, badger skins (Northridge’s clan), Crow bustles of eagle and hawk feathers, a painted buffalo head, kit-fox wrist loops, grizzly-claw necklaces, turtle rattles, painted buffalo hides, a full golden eagle into which a Crow holy man’s head had fit into the rib cage, buffalo-horn bonnets, ravens, otter-skin-wrapped lances, rattlesnake-skin-wrapped ceremonial bows, mountain-lion sashes, bear-skin belts, dog skins, a grizzly-bear headdress with ears and two claws, wolf and coyote skins, owl-feather headdresses, weasel skins, a knife with a grizzly-jaw handle, bone whistles, full bear dancer hides, huge buffalo-head masks, wolf-hide headdresses with teeth, snake-effigy rattles, dew-claw rattles . . .
When Nelse had finished packing the military remains we toasted them with wine, the hole in the lieutenant’s forehead made by the .44 quite garish in the lantern light, a fatal mouse hole into the skull.
“Poor dentistry back then,” Nelse said, tapping the three sets of teeth. The sergeant’s nose and jaw had both been broken at one time, and the private has one of the smallest cranial cavities I’ve ever seen in an adult.”
In contrast to my great-grandfather’s journal, where it was easy to hate these men who were on a journey to end the lives, for all practical purpose, of my ancestors, the skeletons themselves were utterly disarming. I raised my glass.
“If it had turned out otherwise we wouldn’t be here.”
“I don’t think along those lines very well,” Nelse said, standing and lifting the carton.
I gui
ded him out and up through the root cellar, noting in the far corner a knot of black snakes, gathered in a tight ball for warmth. I was about to draw them to Nelse’s attention but then his only phobia seems to be people in general. He does okay in particular cases, but the general swarm, especially his own class, puts him off his feed, as we used to say.
Out in the barnyard the horses ran toward the edge of the corral to see what we were up to and, I suspect, arrived at no conclusions. We walked past the stanchions and stalls of the barn and out the back door. At the far edge of the manure pile Nelse put the carton down, took the lantern from me and went to retrieve a shovel. I quickly and childishly took the flashlight from my coat pocket and turned it on. This was not a time to be in the pitch dark with only the slip of a new moon and a floss of stars to keep one company, even for a few minutes. I shook the carton and heard a muffled clack and rattle, the final sound these men would make, dead now for about ninety-five years. I saw Nelse’s lantern coming and shivered, thinking that we all lose each other along the way. Everyone loses everyone, mothers, husbands, children, mere lovers, both the good and the evil.
Nelse began digging with an energy that reminded me of what it had been like to be thirty, when with my friend Charlene, some white-cross amphetamines and lots of coffee, we had driven straight through from New York City to way out here in Nebraska. Naomi had been irritated but only said, “Go look at yourself.” Added to my city pallor were very red eyes.
In an hour or so of chat, mostly from me, the hole was deep enough and Nelse unceremoniously dumped in the mortal contents of the carton. It was certainly irrelevant but I thought he’d leave them in the box. He turned to me, nodded and leaned on the shovel.
“A prayer, if you please.”
“What the hell can I say?” This request startled me.
“Just say something breathtakingly wise,” he teased.
“Pause here, son of sorrow, remember death.” I couldn’t remember where it came from but it would have to do. I poured more wine but Nelse only sipped his, then dumped the rest on the skeletons in their still natty uniforms.
“Here’s to us for being here,” he said, then began filling in the hole. “First we’re here and then we’re not. That’s what my dad said when I asked him about death. I took a half-dead starling away from our cat and tried to keep it alive but failed. It died right in my hand.”
It was after midnight when we had finished wrapping the five warriors tightly in a tarpaulin, binding it with leather thongs, and bringing it upstairs to the den and putting it on the coffee table between the sofa and fireplace. We’d wait for first light, pack the tarp on a horse and ride out to the pond for our second burial. While Nelse built a fire he said he figured from reading the journals and what the warriors wore that all five were Oglala. He would have delivered them for proper burial but Paul had disagreed saying it would bring on unwarranted attention. I poured more wine and wasn’t sure I agreed with Paul but let it pass wordlessly. Nelse was hungry so I cooked him part of a large sirloin I intended for Sunday dinner. It was fun to watch the improbable gusto with which he ate, studying each rare chunk a moment before he put it in his mouth.
By then it was after one in the morning and rather than bothering to go to bed we sat up on the soft leather sofa, probably as old as the house was, dozing now and then, and talking. The rare amount of wine had loosened his tongue a bit and he told me a wonderfully funny story about a Spanish woman he had loved near Espanola, New Mexico, whose husband had returned by surprise and sent the half-clothed Nelse sprinting down a mountainside. I told him about a brief fling with a Brazilian diplomat who had fibbed about his marriage and we agreed that some people have a desperate and understandable need to add a bit of drama to their lives. I clumsily explained my own modest theory that we can only go so far with thinking, and then our minds must be refilled by the “thinginess” of life—landscapes, creatures, any sort of travel, people we could not imagine not having existed. Even Sam who had worked out so wretchedly was worth the price of grief he offered, partly because I was led to that Crow Fair and could visually imagine again as I had as a girl reading Mari Sandoz, an entire culture within our boundaries that had run counter to the worst aspects of our own. I wasn’t talking about flowers or birds here but human beings who pillaged and made war as we did, but also had a great deal of soul life that was not totally wiped out by clutter and greed. And there was another incident, I said, back when I was in New York and walking and grieving over the death of his father to the point that I had tunnel vision, however the peripheries had managed to dissolve themselves. A musicologist friend who was gay and lived in the same pleasantly slummish building down on Second Avenue took me up to St. John’s, the cathedral, where a half dozen black choirs were performing. We were early and got seats well up to the front. By the end of the evening I was totally dumbfounded but could finally see well off to both sides as if the music had re-ordered my dried-up brain. In wild contrast to the droning Methodists and Lutherans of my youth I had finally heard “a joyful noise unto the Lord” and most of we rich-poor whites, several thousand of us, left the cathedral in a jouncy daze. It still struck me as mysterious that music could have made me see well again.
The latter story bothered Nelse a bit from his scientific tack but then he spoke of a “semi-dipshit Zen girl” he had once loved but had found him wanting (he couldn’t stop eating hamburgers) who quoted some sage saying to the effect that “all over the body are hands and eyes.” This had bothered him a great deal until he had talked to a visiting cultural anthropologist who specialized in ancient China who told him that the earliest roots of Zen “sitting” probably evolved from a hunter-gatherer stage. If hunters sat very still beside game trails a long time they were more likely to be successful. From that post-Pleistocene period evolved a practice that also stilled the mind and made it unresistant to the phenomena it observed. Nelse took it from there to mean that if you spend a great deal of time in peopleless areas you are sensing your local habitat with your whole body rather than simply your eyes. He then asked me about my grandfather’s friend Smith, whom he had read about in the memoir. I said I only had met him that once when I was pregnant but the experience was memorable. There was no point in pretending people were all in the same boat when someone like Smith had obviously stepped out of the boat and been out there for quite some time. Such souls tend to be discounted among the intelligent because there haven’t been enough of them for a meaningful study, assuming that they were going to be direct with an anthropologist in the first place. Nelse told me about an old Ponca who claimed he had invented hockey on the frozen Missouri but then Nelse later realized this was only a comic barrier to test him. I said I had known the daughter of such a man when I had been a social worker in Escanaba. She was quite contemporary but the father was a traditional Medwiwin Anishinabe (Chippewa) who lived deep in the woods on the Wisconsin-Michigan border. She took me to meet her father and when we walked down a long hill to where he was sitting by a pond a group of turtles scrambled off of his legs and back into the pond. Anyone knows how hard it is to sneak up and catch a turtle, but she laughed at my surprise and said that the turtles trusted her father. Nelse was as upset with this story as I had been surprised with the event itself, but despite his questioning I had nothing more to add.
We dozed then for a couple of hours before I got up to make a large pot of coffee and fill a thermos. I put on a Mozart tape to establish a more comfortable form of reality. Nelse came into the kitchen smiling at the music, then rinsed his face in the sink. We drank a cup of coffee wordlessly listening, then Nelse went back to the den and shouldered the bound tarpaulin of the five warriors. I remembered the thermos and we walked out the kitchen door and through the pumpshed, our feet crunching on the frost-stiffened barnyard. We saddled up Rose and a pretty-faced mare named Grace. Nelse bound the laden tarp to the back of his saddle, and I poured us another cup, then put the thermos in my saddlebags with my barely touched nature guidebook
s which made me fear passing a test. We stood there in the dark staring at the east, shivering and waiting for the light, feeling but not seeing the steam of the coffee rising up our faces. Then there was a slight smear of light through the oaks and lilacs that surrounded our own graveyard and we could finally see each other standing beside our horses which gave off warmth. Then we left on the three-mile ride to the pond with a trace of bone clack and the first waking meadowlarks in the air, most of them soon to be gone south, the creak of leather, and the horses breathing. I felt it was a gift from God knows where to have spent this night with my son.
It was fully dawn when we reached the gravesite with a stiff wind from the northwest that teared our eyes and a late-October sun that offered light rather than heat. I had been wondering how long the men in the tarp had been dead before their remains had been brought to old Northridge. Nelse said that three of the five must have been on burial platforms for a long time as what they wore had been particularly weather-beaten. The other two could have been stored in Badlands caves as their elk-skin shirts were imbedded with a minuscule gravel substance like “caliche,” and there were also many particles in their moccasins. There was a darkly comic aspect to Northridge’s lifelong struggle as basically an agricultural missionary to the Lakota who had no interest in or cultural preparation for farming. The form which his Christian interest took in doing good was totally alien to these people and largely still is. The buffalo was their commissary and to defeat them you only had to destroy seventy million buffalo which was easy enough for us in that we had a bagful of additional motives. I’m sure their trust in Northridge came from his complete fluency in their language and that as a botanist he was dealing in the sources of food in the manner of a functional shaman. Botanists are welcome everywhere, and if this botanist marries one of your own, fathers a child and tries to protect you and your interests from the predations of his own people then you have the ultimate in trust, more than enough for some to offer up their dead in protection from the huge market for artifacts which still exists.
