Legends of the Fall

by Jim Harrison

  He walked toward the lowering sun knowing that in October it was toward the southwest. He came to a pond he didn’t recognize and flushed a raft of blue-winged teal. He walked around the pond through a blackberry thicket, snagging his suit a number of times. He walked up a small creek muddying himself to his knees in a seep until he reached higher ground where he dropped his trench coat and climbed slowly up a large white pine tree to get a vantage point. His hands were blackened and sticky from the resin that exuded from the tree but he could see for a dozen miles: he could see the white steeple of the Lutheran church where his father’s funeral service would be held in two days, he could see a motorboat crossing a lake, a silo without a barn—the barn had burned when he was a senior in high school. He curled his arm around a limb for safety and lit a cigarette, hearing the shotgun blast of a partridge hunter far in the distance. A crow flew by and was startled by his presence, squawking away at a greater speed to warn others. There’s a man up in a tree in a blue suit. Nordstrom looked down at his suit and was amused at how he had ruined it. He took out his gold pocket watch and aimed the 9 at the steeple knowing there was a section of road near the 12 if he needed to climb another tree for a sighting. His father liked to climb trees and was always creating deliberately lame excuses for doing so. Up in the tree for the first time in twenty-five years, Nordstrom thought it was part of his father’s penchant for “looking things over.” When Sonia was a little girl and they came to Wisconsin for a summer vacation she had brought along a diving mask. His father didn’t care much for swimming and hadn’t noticed diving masks before but he took to puttering around the lake with Sonia and diving overboard in his favorite fishing spots. At dinner he would say he saw a bluegill “as big as a goddamned frying pan” or a pike or largemouth bass “as long as your goddamned arm.”

  Nordstrom finally emerged from the woods just before dark near a small Indian reservation community outside of town. He walked down a gravel road toward a tavern thinking how his father would be amused at his ruined four-hundred-dollar suit not to speak of his Florsheim shoes now scarred and mud-caked. The last mile or so he had been concentrating on suits and the government and decided he no longer much believed in either. Suits obviously had helped to promote bad government and he was as guilty as anyone for wearing them so steadfastly for twenty years. Of late he had become frightened of the government for the first time in his life, the way the structure of democracy had begun debasing people rather than enlivening them in their mutual concern. The structure was no longer concerned with the purpose for which it was designed, and a small part of the cause, Nordstrom thought, was probably that all politicians and bureaucrats wore suits. He stopped in the parking lot of the tavern favored by Indians and regarded the dirty old jalopies and beaten pickups. Perhaps he should quit his job he thought, give all his money to his daughter and some to his mother whose small annuity was probably worthless in light of inflation. Then he cautioned himself for his wild thoughts, thinking that somehow they might be connected to death, to becoming lost and climbing a tree after a tiring 8ight and not having eaten all day.

  The bar smelled of piss and sweat and Nordstrom blinked to focus on the drinkers. He heard his name called out. It was Henry who was appreciably into a binge. Nordstrom stood next to him wondering whether he should embrace the old man whose head seemed to nod with the jukebox and booze.

  “You better call home. They’re all looking for you.”

  “Henry, I want you to be a pallbearer,” Nordstrom said, then ordered a drink for Henry, a bourbon and beer for himself. Henry downed his in a gulp and stared intently at Nordstrom.

  “There isn’t any fucking way I’m going into that church. I worked all day yesterday with your dad and he didn’t look too good. So we had a few drinks. And he says, ‘Henry I’m not feeling too good and I think my heart is going.’ So I took him home and your mother called the doctor and then we went over to the hospital because he wouldn’t ride in an ambulance. So they said it was bad and he could hardly breathe up in the room and they brought oxygen but he said he didn’t want to die in an oxygen tent. He just lay there staring straight ahead with me and your mother on each side. Around about midnight the doctor said there is no hope. To call you. We went back in and he held our hands. He made your mother get up in bed beside him to be close as he went. He had ahold of my hand hard, so I stayed. He talked a little about fishing. I told him I would go along with him into death as far as I could but I would have to turn back. He said for me to tell you good luck and to say he loved you and to give you a kiss good-bye.”

  Henry stood then and gave Nordstrom a hug and kissed him on the cheek because he was short and could not reach Nordstrom’s forehead. They had another drink in silence, then Henry led him out the door to his pickup.

  A few days later Nordstrom flew back to New York with Sonia, who had come for the funeral, and then took the shuttle up to Boston. Laura had cabled her regrets from Mexico, saying she would have come but word only reached her on the day of the funeral. Nordstrom did not doubt it as Laura had loved his father and there had always been a playfulness and banter in their contacts that Nordstrom never quite comprehended. She had even stopped by for a visit in the past summer on her way through the Midwest. Laura had once said she found his father “sexy,” a statement that had horrified him at the time. Laura had had the advantage of knowing that people died whereas even the most ordinary events, and death is the most ordinary of all, took Nordstrom by surprise.

  CHAPTER

  III

  Now we have arrived where we began and are in continuous time, a wonderful illusion for those addicted to notions of yesterday, right now and tomorrow. Every evening after a long walk and light dinner Nordstrom dances alone, surely an absurd picture of a man of forty-three years, a father, formerly a husband, magna cum laude University of Wisconsin 1958, at thirty-five vice-president of finance for Standard Oil of California, and so on, as if such simpleminded clues were effective in tracking our mammal. But they are all discarded habits. Nordstrom means “north-storm” but it’s not much more helpful than “crow.” One learns little from a telephone book. It’s winter in Boston, our St. Petersburg, and the man dances on, a bit clumsily to be sure, and with a witless tenacity. Sometimes he just jumps straight up and down. One night he went with the delicatessen owner to see a Celtics-Denver Nuggets’ game to witness the greatest jumper of all, David Thompson. Thompson floated through the air in a three-sixty, and dunked the ball backward over his head and didn’t even smile. The crowd rose to its feet, was hushed a moment, then exploded over this act that was not so much a defiance of gravity as a transcendence of what we have experienced of gravity. Sonia came up for the weekend and he took her and Phillip to the ballet to see Baryshnikov. Nordstrom wore a Cardin suit that Laura had selected for him years before but he had never worn out of embarrassment. In the lobby at intermission many lovely and not so lovely women smiled at him thinking Nordstrom must be someone they should know. They had a late celebratory dinner because Phillip had won a fellowship to spend the coming year in Florence studying at the Uffizi. Sonia would leave with him in June after her graduation. Phillip was prattling on about death at dinner. His own father had died when Phillip was fourteen and he had begun staying up very late, smoking cigarettes and wearing sloppy clothes. Lately he had read a certain French writer who talked about the “terrible freedom” that comes when the father dies. There is no one left on earth to judge. Sonia shushed him, thinking the conversation was insensitive to her father. Nordstrom said her concern was nonsense and though he found the whole notion appalling he guessed that it was probably true. He had been lucky with his own father who was all in favor of Nordstrom following his heart’s affections, though it seemed odd that only recently had his son an inkling of how to go about it.

  Late that night Nordstrom found himself sleepless because he hadn’t had his two hours of dancing. He had enjoyed the ballet but he was losing what little of the spectator was left in him:
he was becoming an amateur in the true sense—one who loved the doing, and had the beginner’s openness about life that had been lost for transparent reasons since his childhood. Now in the middle of energetic insomnia he knew that he couldn’t turn on the stereo at three A.M. because Sonia and Phillip were sleeping. He got up and tiptoed into the den in his pajama bottoms and danced an hour without music, hearing only a clock ticking and the shuffle of his bare feet on the carpet.

  Feb. 17, 78: Have been planning this long trip for after I resign to include both S. America and Africa. Startling how close Rio is to Dakar. Desk covered with atlases, maps from National Geographic, guidebooks for a month now, but the energy is fast disappearing. Why should I want to know the strange when I am ignorant of the familiar. Really noticed my ankle the other morning for the first time in years. I like the crow on the cover of The Grateful Dead album but it is very difficult music to dance to. I bought a parka and snowmobile boots from a sporting goods store on Boylston and have been walking a great deal after work. The snow is wonderful this year despite the occasional near paralysis of the city. Between five and eight is the best time to walk. First the electric urge for people to get home from work, then the dinner silence and then the people going out for the evening. Have spent a great deal of time helping people get unstuck from their parking places. Wisconsin makes one an expert on snow and getting unstuck. Old man and wife buried in their Chrysler which I shoveled out as he was gasping, then rocked the car until it came free. He gave me a five-dollar bill refusing to take it back. He said it was for “a hot supper and a few drinks.” Gave it to a bum a few blocks farther on. Bought a dozen Hawaiian shirts off the rack at Jordan Marsh for the trip I perhaps have lost interest in though I told the travel agent to go ahead. Always thought them in bad taste but now I like the silken feeling, strange colors though I haven’t worn one out of the apartment not finding an occasion to do so. Have come to think in my cooking of the new cuisine minceur as narcissistic and partly silly though a few good ideas. People could eat what they chose if they did not ignore pushing their bodies a bit. Since dancing my belt has gone down two notches. Closely studied a flounder I filleted so as to get further sense of what I was eating. Fragile pearl-colored bones, spine in which through a filament of paste, the fish’s body receives instruction from its tiny brain. Swim there and there and there. Wonder what he had seen in his watery life. Made a small court bouillon so as not to waste this carcass which had assumed outsize importance by the time I finished studying it. Then I cooked a handful of vermicelli in the stock and had it for a snack after dancing. Had a streak of tripe this week as I bought too much by the butcher’s mistake: tripe Milanese, menudo—Mexican tripe stew—then the justly famed tripe à la mode de Caen. Old man in shipping department has cancer of liver so have put through an authorization for a bonus as he wants to die in his birthplace in Galway. Ireland. where his mother still lives. My own mother wrote to say she is getting along fine and her cousin, also widowed, is moving in. She said she had a fine letter from Laura. Got a hard-on in a taxi thinking about Laura’s butt, more picturing it than thinking. She had small breasts but was justly vain about her legs and butt. How clearly I remember her Debussy dance so many years ago in the hot gymnasium. It takes my breath away now but there is no bitterness. I have been having some intuitions about sex though ill formed as a whole. For instance I saw the movie Pretty Baby and though the girl is a superb beauty it was her mother that owned sexual appeal. It is the life unlived that makes men want so young a girl. To be twelve and thirteen, be careless and silly, with floppy grace. The world at face is so frightening no wonder. She becomes her mother in a night. I longed so often for that girl at the kitchen sink in Marblehead but it is the nature of such things not to return. For instance Ms. Dietrich as she chooses to be called is married to a city planner, childless, in her mid-thirties and my executive secretary though she could easily run the company. Last Thursday we did a twelve-hour day to prepare for audit, the last three hours at the apartment after I prepared a light dinner. It was hard and tedious work and afterward we drank a bottle of Korbel champagne to ease our sore necks and eyes. I have known this woman closely for three years but was startled by the effect of the wine on her. She wept and said she was crying for me because Jews had taken both my wife and daughter. So shocking it was funny and I said now, now Ms. Dietrich that’s utter nonsense. She embraced me and then I knew that she wanted to tumble, and though she is a little chubby to be my type, I thought to myself why not. So we carried on at some length and once when we were up and down on each other I “awoke” with a start when I was looking plainly at her bottom and I said to myself “this is reality.” The sensation lasted acutely for several days. And like the feeling when I was roasting the lamb last summer I decided not to doubt it as it seems to me that doubt is often an example of self-pity, a kind of whining about existence. Poor pitiful me, and that rot. Henry did not doubt that he could help my father into death, open the gate for him and shake his hand as he entered nothingness or whatever on earth eternity is. I don’t read books on mystical matters as, like Lutherans, special powers are ascribed. My dealings in Tokyo with Orientals do not lead me to think they are any different from us. Henry is one Indian among a hundred sorry ones I have known. He gave me a turtle claw. It was wonderfully funny at the office when Ms. Dietrich pretended nothing had happened, all rather Germanic. Intimacies can be frightening in the light of day. As on the walk after I was lost and then found the gravel road, I’d been thinking solidly of giving up money and power. I would rather make an omelette. When I was young and had to hoe the garden or dig a garbage hole I would resent it and then get lost in doing these things for hours. Ms. Dietrich is so self-conscious because she is trying to be Ms. Dietrich every minute. Like Phillip trying to be unique and doing so by this stream of talk as if he would vanish if he stopped talking. How strange we all are. One minute we’re laboring over the accounts and the next moment we’re chewing on each other’s bodies like dogs. Or bears. Henry and Father once saw two bears make love across a lake in Canada through binoculars. Read the other day that whales commit homosexual acts.

  Spring proved to be obnoxiously difficult for Nordstrom. It was incredibly complicated for him to resign his job. The owners of the company were a family of New Hampshire aristocrats, crankish Yankees who plainly didn’t want to be abandoned by their managerial wunderkind. They offered everything and when their largess was refused they grew resentful. It was even more difficult and confusing to give away the money. Sonia didn’t want it and his mother was hysterical. The E.F. Hutton man insisted he see a psychiatrist and Nordstrom readily agreed out of curiosity and his understanding that, to others, he was committing an outrageous act. His mother’s tearful attitude was that he had worked so hard all his life for the money. The broker went to New York to see Sonia, hoping that she could make her father behave sensibly. Sonia came to Boston and they had lunch with the broker whom Nordstrom actually had a great deal of respect for. But Nordstrom was diffident and ended up convincing them later that afternoon by giving twenty-five grand to the National Audubon Society though he had no special fascination for birds. He liked to watch shorebirds by the hour on weekends near Ipswich but wasn’t curious about the names given them. When he saw a particular species the second time he would remember the first time he saw it. That saved him from having to carry around a birdbook.

  And not that the concern for Nordstrom by others was unfounded. How were they, given their own natures, to know that Nordstrom wasn’t another dipshit cracking utterly under all those pressures, known and unrecognized, that make up our lives? Sonia, with the cynicism of youth, thought it was too late for her father to change. Laura, who had been contacted, had refused to interfere, thinking the whole problem to be at the same time silly and charming, believing as did the broker all of the vulgar lingo attached to notions of mid-life change and so on, language as blasphemous to life as the central fact of the government in everyone’s existence. His
mother simply believed, within the framework of Protestant thrift, that people should hold on to their money for a rainy day. She wrote Nordstrom about how a prominent citizen of Rhinelander had come down with cancer and some seventy thousand dollars had been spent on the medical community in a hopeless effort to save his life. Ms. Dietrich’s concerns were a bit more down to earth, centering on her hopes for another lovemaking session before Nordstrom cleared out. Her own husband was only nominally interested in sex and fell asleep after ejaculation whereas Nordstrom was a princely dallier who had obviously been well trained by his wife.