The Big Seven

by Jim Harrison

  He remembered another night of camping when a half mile across a clearing he had seen a lightning bolt hit a tree. He was over there at first light to look at the still smoldering tree that had been vertically split in half. Marion told him how lucky he was to see such a thing as his people revered a tree that had been split by the gods. Sunderson had revisited the now dead tree a number of times and always felt a little eerie.

  Chapter 23

  The shock of the day was when Monica came home late from work and said she had seen Lemuel who had asked her to marry him. In short she was asking Sunderson for permission.

  “Why are you asking me?” he stuttered.

  “Because you’ve been taking care of me.”

  “You can’t marry him, he’s your uncle.”

  “I’m thinking it over. I don’t want my child to be a bastard and you’re not going to marry me.”

  “Why do you say that? It’s possible.”

  “Because I can tell you only want to be married to your ex-wife.”

  No matter how true that put Sunderson in a hole from which he couldn’t emerge despite struggling to do so. The rest of his life would be cursed by this missing woman, however long that was. Monica was only saying she couldn’t step in between. Lemuel probably thought that he would do better with the judge in his upcoming prosecution if he was married to a pregnant girl, but how could he think the marriage would be legitimate? Sunderson was abruptly sorry that Sara had agreed to testify as his life would have been better with Monica’s future settled. There was an ounce of forgiveness in his heart when he thought of Sara’s only remaining child dying in a house fire probably set with Lem­uel’s knowledge, another motive. The boy was too crippled to run for it. He had crawled to his open door but the stairwell was ablaze. He doubtless heard the screams of his mother as she got burned.

  Monica sat across the table with tears in her eyes. “Life is so hard,” she said. He asked her to pour him a drink. She looked beautiful. It would be hard to lose her. Their life together had been comfortable but so what? Even now he smelled the beef stew that she had put on to slow cook while he was with Smolens.

  “I think you should go with him. He told me he has good savings. Maybe he’ll take you to New York so you can be a real chef. Anyway, he’ll take care of you well. You have my blessing.” Sunderson nearly choked on the word blessing and poured himself a big drink. She’d be confronted with reality soon enough but maybe if he didn’t go to jail they could move to New York and have a decent life away from anyone who knew they were related.

  “Thank you so much.” She went to the phone and called Lemuel and merely said “yes” before hanging up with “I can’t talk now.” Then she went upstairs to get ready to go back to work.

  “Why go to work?” he called out.

  “They need me,” she called back.

  He sat there in a fresh kind of doldrum. He recalled that after his father had first met Diane and they had gone brook trout fishing his father had said, “Isn’t she a little classy for you? You’re just a poor boy who went to college.” His father was always frank and he thought about this for a long time. What did classy mean after all? He decided that his father’s generation after the Great Depression and all of that was much more conscious of social inequities. His father’s main hero had always been Walter Reuther, the labor leader, and Sunderson shared the admiration, but this was a period when business types referred to labor as “communistic.”

  When he first went to Diane’s parents’ lovely home on Lake Michigan near Ludington not a thing seemed out of place. Her father had gone to Dartmouth and her mother to Vassar. What he noticed most was that they never used slang when they talked. He always felt like a bit of an oaf in their company. Once when he ate lunch there he found out that they had no catsup in their home. This amazed him but thereafter he thought of his passion for catsup as lower class.

  He sat there for a full hour after Monica left for work. He was thinking about the consequences of her decision. It came down to sex and food, both of which he would miss. He couldn’t make a good beef stew at gunpoint, he thought, smelling the delicious air. There was a knock on the door and through the oval glass he could see it was Diane of all people.

  “I was feeling tingles as I walked over. I should have called.”

  “No you shouldn’t have. Who is more welcome than you?”

  “Maybe a dozen bathing beauties,” she laughed.

  She asked him if they could take a long walk. She needed to talk to someone other than her women friends to whom having money and no husband was a perfect world. “Everyone seems so unhappy and I want to be an exception,” she said.

  He suggested that they should drive to his cabin which she wanted to see for a “platonic” night. He admitted there was only one big bed and she said she would bring her tent and a chicken cacciatore which he loved.

  He was giddy by the time he picked her up at noon the next day. Naturally he hadn’t slept well with his mind a whirl of unlikely possibilities. She was sitting on her front steps with her gear piled beside her finishing a call on her cell.

  “My friend is scandalized that I’m going off overnight with my ex-husband. I teased her and said that if you want good sex you head for a man in his sixties. And then I hung up.” She thought this was very funny while he felt mildly ridiculed.

  They talked softly about nothing in particular for many miles. He felt it was important not to act what some called “needy.” She said it might do him good if Monica left him. In her mind he needed a more intellectual woman, someone who could divert him from himself and give him new ideas to ponder. She used to think it was odd to be married to an intellectual detective, one who was always thinking of the exception rather than any rule. They stopped by a creek to eat ham and Swiss sandwiches. He saw a fair-sized rainbow trout near a boulder and would have fished for it had he been alone. Now it didn’t seem important whereas the woman next to him in the front seat seemed critical to his future in a way that he couldn’t bear to think of. Often he regretted having to retire. What in God’s name did people do with all of their free time? Now that he had endless free time to fish he wasn’t doing as much of it as he planned. He thought he should try some new rivers farther west. Even buy that new edition of Sibley’s bird book. He was currently very sloppy, actually incompetent, at bird identification. When fishing he’d remember where he saw the bird last rather than its name. He wondered oddly what birds called themselves then dismissed the question as silly though interesting. He had long been fascinated with the big northern ravens and their obvious intelligence. They were thought to roost on the outstretched arms of Odin in Scandinavian mythology which he preferred to Greek as it was more his own and less remote. Of course there were creatures in the deep forest no one ever saw. You sensed them.

  Diane had always been a hard news junkie. He had read up on Syria in case she brought up the subject. He was mostly interested in weather forecasts which was typical for someone from the U.P. The subjects of the news never seemed to touch the U.P. while the generally horrid weather was with them every day. So when he saw Diane he would freshen up on health care or Afghanistan. Afghanistan particularly enraged him. He would think, why don’t we help Mexico rather than waste our money way over there?

  It was a very warm day and Diane’s skirt was over her knees which naturally gave him an itch. The weather said a colder front was coming through this evening. Maybe it would force her out of her tent and into the cabin he thought hopefully. She could have the bed and he would sleep on the floor in front of the little fireplace. He had quite a pile of dry hardwood—beech, maple, oak—to burn. Rather than nervous he was giddy. This was the woman of his life and he had blown their relationship to hell. She began talking about Mona, not a totally safe subject for him, but at the moment the sins of the past did not seem to burden her. For once he knew he had done a terrible thing.

  M
ona had sent her two papers for which she had received perfect scores. One dealt with molecular biology which Diane couldn’t really read but the other came from her course on astronomy. The professor had written on the top of the paper, “You write beautifully.” It was about the future of black holes, a subject of which Sunderson was unsure. This reminded him that he had packed along his copies of Nightwood and Ada in case Diane went to bed early.

  Diane was delighted with the beauty of the area around the cabin except for the burned-out phantoms of the two houses. Lemuel had gotten in a landscaper from Escanaba and now his house was surrounded by many lovely flower beds and some transplanted bushes. Sunderson morbidly thought that when Lemuel went to the big house for life without parole Monica would have to take care of the place assuming she wasn’t in prison herself.

  The cacciatore was wonderful as expected and afterward they took the remains of their wine out front and sat near Diane’s assembled tent. He told her that she could have his bed and he’d sleep in the tent but she said she wanted to. Early in their marriage they had done a great deal of camping and should never have stopped. She hadn’t camped as a child and loved it as an adult. He tended to focus on her discomfort although when he camped alone or with friends discomfort was just part of the experience, the tormenting mosquitoes, the can of beans they used to carry to heat beside the fire, the sardines for breakfast. He always worried so much about her smallest complaints that he began to hate camping. Actually Diane had always made it quite pleasant and if it was too warm she would pack along sheets and a blanket, sleeping bags like steam heat being tolerable only if it was cold. And with Diane the food was always masterful.

  They had eaten late so that after staring for an hour into a small campfire he had built the stars slowly began to emerge. Diane could identify all of the constellations, another thing about which he was totally unsure. In the detective business he had had to be accurate and hard on details but that didn’t apply to the rest of his life except fishing where he could identify dozens of streamside insects, then pick out from the fly boxes the closest imitation to what the fish were feeding on that day. Trout could be improbably choosy in what they ate so you needed to find as precise a match as possible. Sometimes the flies you tied on were so tiny that you could barely see them other than infinitesimal humps or dots on the current. The trout had no trouble seeing them because it was lunch or dinner, pure survival.

  “We should have bought a little cabin early in our marriage. You were always uncomfortable camping,” she said softly.

  “You’re right. If we had we might still be married.” He immediately regretted saying this. His plan had been to stay away from hot topics.

  “That’s possible. Nobody understands their marriage until it’s too late to save it.”

  “I remember when we were thinking about trying to buy that cabin on a river near Grand Marais. It was too expensive.”

  “That was my fault. I could have gotten the money from my dad overnight. But you wouldn’t take money from him because of pride.”

  “So we lost the cabin and lost the marriage.” Sunderson was pissed to have it on his lap. “Of all the Seven Deadly Sins pride is the hardest to figure out.”

  “That’s partly because you’re afflicted with it and can’t see the details. It must have come with your job. At all times you needed to be brave but also safe.”

  “Of course,” he spit out, irked at the obvious.

  “People who think about safety all of the time get buried to the point of suffocation in their egos. The world exists only in terms of their safety. I have a friend who I really can’t see anymore because she is so obsessed she might get breast cancer that it’s become the sole subject of her life. No one will give her a mammogram anymore she’s had so many. In short, she’s a nutcase.”

  Sunderson laughed. “I hope I was never that bad. I suppose that pride is directly tied to narcissism.”

  “I’m sure it is. It’s one of the Seven Deadly Sins for its disastrous consequences. All of the cheating husbands I’ve met have been full of pride for no apparent reason.”

  They were startled when Lemuel walked into the firelight. He sensed it was awkward and left quickly after Sunderson introduced him to Diane.

  “What a lovely damsel you are,” Lemuel said.

  “Why, thank you. I’ve never been called a damsel.”

  Lemuel handed Sunderson a fresh chapter of his book and then walked back into the dark along the river.

  “Is the novel any good?” Diane asked.

  “I’ve only read a little of it.”

  “You might check it out. Beginning writers invariably write about themselves. You might get a clue.”

  Sunderson shined his penlight on the sheaf and groaned when he saw the chapter was called “The Murder Club.”

  “You read slow and I read fast. I’d be glad to read the manuscript for you,” she persisted.

  “Okay. Okay. But he can’t be dumb enough to write about murdering people.”

  “It’s not dumb. It’s self-infatuation. We’re back to pride again. Prideful people tend to think that everyone in the world is dumb except themselves. I’ve seen men at the grocery store picking up a loaf of bread who can’t do so without saying to themselves, ‘I’m picking up a loaf of bread.’ You see them overdressed in line for the movies. When I was growing up our neighbors had peacocks. These men remind me of male peacocks who never stop saying ‘I am a male peacock.’ They might as well add, ‘I have a huge splendid ass.’”

  Her words gave Sunderson a murky feeling knowing how often on certain days he could manage no esteem for anyone but possibly himself. He naturally didn’t admit it.

  “One of my biggest problems at the hospital is the number of smug and prideful doctors. You could suspect they were born that way if it weren’t possible. I actually think it’s in the training. If you can make your way through med school you feel generally superior. That’s why they are so miserable at their own investments. They think their superiority in the medical field also applies to finance. You would be appalled at the childishness of the complaints I get. I don’t argue, I just listen until they wear out which is usually pretty fast. I say, I’ll think it over, which is hard to argue with.”

  “I was thinking that they make so much money they should be pretty happy.”

  “You know that’s not true, darling. The only rich doctor I know who is happy is also an amateur naturalist. He spends every available moment in the woods, swamps, beaches, hills with his guidebooks. He built a tiny cabin, also near Grand Marais, about fifteen by twenty feet. I’ve seen it. No power or anything. He never takes his cell phone. He got lost last year and found himself thirty miles from his cabin down near Newberry. He basically walked around the clock including the night of the full moon. Now he never misses his moon walking. He’s made friends with an old female bear who often walks with him. If he stops for a rest she stops and snoozes too. Anyway he is the happiest doctor I know. His wife and children are flagrant spenders but he seems not to care. He took them to an expensive resort in Costa Rica, dropped them off at the resort hotel, and then wandered the countryside. He got bitten in the left foot by a fer-de-lance and knew he had to cut his toes off to avoid death. He did so and now he walks with a limp but it doesn’t slow him down much. He is the total opposite of prideful because he’s obsessed with the natural world outside himself. You were always obsessed with the natural world, but you could never stop trying to make it safe and comfortable for me.”

  This all made Sunderson feel tawdry and lazy. He used to take very long aimless walks and realized that afterward he often forgot to have a drink. Marion teased him about this. Marion knew a Zuni poet who had walked all the way from southern Arizona up to Pine Ridge in South Dakota. Sunderson had pondered heroic walks of this sort but then forced himself to admit he wasn’t a hero. He mostly imagined sore and blistered feet. Every
boy fantasized about being picked up by a girl in a hot red convertible and so forth. This likely never happened on earth. The truth was that everything you do is what you do. No plus or minus. It was a college coffeehouse argument taking place in your own head.

  The talk meandered into his essay adding violence to the Seven Deadly Sins. Violence made glandular lust look pathetic.

  “How far along are you?” she asked.

  “Just a few pages of notes,” he admitted.

  “That’s not writing. Every morning when you get up don’t do anything except drink a cup of coffee until you’ve written a page. I used to use this tactic on term papers I didn’t want to write. Just do it and I’ll help you edit it.”

  “I’ll try.” Now he had a down-to-earth motive if writing the damn thing gave him more time with Diane.

  “Don’t say I’ll try. That’s too weak. Just say, I’ll do it. Start tomorrow morning. We’re in no hurry to get back early.”

  “Okay. You may remind me.”

  “Oh bullshit. You’re thinking about it all the time instead of just doing it. You’re paralyzing yourself with interior jabber.”

  He had rarely heard her say bullshit. Maybe a couple of times in a forty-year marriage.