The English Major

by Jim Harrison

  At the motel desk a lady in curlers (blue) explained to me that the little dog who was named Bob belonged to one of the girls who cleaned rooms. She said that Bob was a pest but everyone seemed to like his obnoxious attitude. She also said that Bob liked beef but refused chicken and pork and any other kind of snack.

  In the car I became distracted by the idea that as a displaced person I had no central location from which to do some minimal research for my project. The bird names that very much needed changing would only require East and West bird books and my imagination which was not exactly rampant. The states posed problems which could only be solved by some library work. The Britannica or the simpler World Book would suffice to jog my imagination on the many states I hadn’t visited. Perhaps I had encountered a life’s work too late in life? Marybelle was a whiz on the computer and could easily get me needed information but I didn’t want her horning in with advice. All of those years as a nickel-plated farmer had made my brain a shabby compass. I ruminated like the cattle I raised but lacked their three stomachs to digest the information at hand. Perhaps the dozen times I had read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Individualism had made me a unique individual but the exact contents of my person had yet to be determined. I was a bundle of intentions but was missing my mother’s overused, loathsome word, pluck, one of those Horatio Alger words where if you have pluck you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps and make your mark in the world.

  What I really needed was breakfast having driven away from Dillion without it. Last evening’s beef hadn’t been aged enough and was rubbery though it was good enough for little Bob the wonder dog. Bob’s forthrightness about his desires made me recall that my soundest thinking had taken place while I was fishing or trimming cherry trees. There were no cherry trees hereabouts but lots of rivers. Dad used to say we love rivers because that’s what we’re made up of, that our blood vessels and veins and arteries were rivers of sorts. I’ve never been confident of the truth of this but it made a kind of sense. Mother said after dad died that he had never been too good at reality but he kept his job.

  I turned off in Melrose with the Onstar buzzing but I didn’t answer it because I figured that my thoughts on my project demanded my complete attention and I had already been diverted by my hunger and the sight of a fishing tackle shop. As an English major I was familiar with the stories of dozens of writers trying to get their work done amid the multifarious diversions of the world and the hurdles of their own vices. A professor had said that what saved writers is that they, like politicians, had the illusion of destiny which allowed them to overcome obstacles no matter how nominal their work. Destiny seemed to be a religious concept on the order of the Methodist idea of predestination.

  At a restaurant and bar called the Hitch’n Post a winsome, Spanish-looking girl served me eggs with biscuits and sausage gravy plus a sausage patty. A codger sitting next to me eyed my plate while eating a bowl of cornflakes.

  “Lucky you. That’s the Montana heart-stopper breakfast. Haven’t had it since my quintuple bypass,” he said.

  I couldn’t very well reply to this so I asked him how far away was the Big Hole River and he said about two hundred yards due west. My friend Ad used to fish this river after he got out of medical school and told me to be sure to take a look at it. The beautiful waitress took my plate away without looking at me and I thought again that when you reach sixty younger women tend to put you in a biological dumpster. She was transfixed by a young man in a wheelchair so I couldn’t exactly say “lucky him.”

  I sat out in the car for a while pondering this momentous morning when my project was beginning to take shape. I certainly had no intention of becoming a writer. I’m too much of a noun person to be a writer. They have to spend a lot of time inflating the peripheries to fill out a book. Their minds daily run to their work while I’m a simple walker. All I wanted to do is change the names of specific birds and states that had seemed to demand my attention for a long time. But now, sitting in this car after ten in the morning in mid-July I felt called to do so. I don’t mean like Moses and his burning bush or Paul on the way to Damascus, just a retired farmer who sees a job that needs to get done.

  I drove past the tackle shop to take a look at the river for its hopefully soothing effects. I parked the car and stood in the middle of the bridge looking down into the mystery of the water. I needed to consider certain pratfalls in my calling. For instance, would I use too much alcohol for inspiration or for sedation if my mind becomes too rampantly spirited? My Hart Crane alarm button went off. When I was a college junior I waffled over the subject for a term paper and my impatient professor assigned me Hart Crane. He had rejected my idea for Edna St. Vincent Millay whom he referred to as “a bourgois lust crazed street slut.” This was in the sixties when “bourgois” was a swear word and my frizzyhaired assistant professor would wear his bell bottoms at a student café in the evening and say “All the power to the people.” I was never sure what people he meant.

  Anyway, Hart Crane provided a truly miserable experience that spring. What an incredibly unhappy life I thought wandering among the flowers along the Cedar River on Michigan State’s lavishly landscaped campus. Hart Crane made me thankful for my own daffy, kind father. Crane’s father was one of those nasty minded Republican businessmen that had been a curse on the body of our country. Crane was a hopeless drunk in his early twenties and committed suicide by jumping off a boat called the Orizaba in the Caribbean when he was thirty-two. Without liberal amounts of alcohol Crane couldn’t compose his lovely but largely inscrutable poems which were so overwhelming compared to the torpor of Sandburg and Steven Vincent Benet. I vowed right then staring down at the river not to use alcohol to facilitate my project, or maybe just a little bit.

  There was a specific anxiety in the tackle shop when I noted that the fly rods cost as much as seven hundred dollars. When I had entered the shop the owner was at his desk and computer and I thought I saw a naked lady on the screen but he quickly tapped an erase button. I browsed until I sweated, not wanting to spend a bunch of money when Ad would bring out my equipment in a couple of weeks. The single rod I had brought along was a junky five piece travel rod that I loathed.

  “This stuff would set a man back an arm and a leg,” I said.

  “That’s a forty grand SUV you got out front.”

  “It’s a loaner from my son.”

  “I got a cheap beginner’s outfit.”

  “I’ve been trout fishing for fifty years.”

  “Then it doesn’t matter what you use if you’re any good.”

  He rummaged in a storage room in the back and came up with a somewhat delaminated outfit he had found in the river and reconditioned. I bought it for fifty bucks. I figured I didn’t need waders because it was warm enough to wade in sneakers which proved not quite true. I drove down to an area called Notch Bottom, a name with a sexual tinge, and after an hour the water was so cold I couldn’t feel my legs. I didn’t care because I was catching and releasing brown trout plus seeing birds I’d never seen before. I fished about nine hours until twilight with the delight my little brother had when he would throw himself into the pond behind the barn.

  MONTANA REDUX II

  When I stepped into the river near Notch Bottom I had presumed it to be knee deep but the clarity of the water made the depth an illusion and I plunged in to my breast. I sucked in air mightily and felt my peter retreat into my body. O well, I thought, tossing my two remaining now wet cigarettes onto the bank where I might find them later all dried out from my unpleasant baptism.

  I fished and fished. At first there was no hatch so I used a wet fly, an olive wooly bugger but then after an hour at about noon insects appeared that resembled the green drakes back home and I caught a half-dozen brown trout on a dry fly, a no. 16 Adams which was invented in Michigan. There was a hiatus in the action and I slept for an hour on the bank. I wasn’t sure how long because my pocket watch had stopped with its dunking. When I awoke I saw a mother moose and her
calf disappearing into the greenery of a cottonwood flat across the river. At mid-afternoon another insect arrived in plenitude and the river was covered with the circular dimples of rising fish. I successfully imitated the insect with no. 14 caddis. I later found out the insect was a spruce moth. I was terribly thirsty but didn’t dare drink the river water because of giardia, a parasite, but in the late afternoon I found a rivulet, a tiny spring emerging from the rock face of a cliff. I filled my sweaty hat and drank what seemed the best water of my life. In the early evening I caught a brown trout over three pounds on a deer hair coachman, a fish that would have been a life trophy up in Michigan. I confess tears formed when I slipped this divine creature back into its watery home.

  I noticed the oncoming darkness and spent a full half hour thrashing my way through the bush back to my vehicle. I found the two cigarettes and while smoking I renamed the western tanager the firebird in honor of Stravinsky whom I learned to love because my mother didn’t. If Viv was around when Stravinsky was on NPR she’d yell “turn that shit off.” Still with all of those memory nodules of unpleasant difficulties I felt a fondness for Viv. Early in our marriage when Robert was little the two of them would sometimes come trout fishing with me. Viv would bring a picnic basket featuring a fried chicken recipe passed down from her mother. You have to fry the chicken in homemade lard, not the store bought kind. You soak the chicken overnight in buttermilk adding lots of Tabasco, then flour it and fry. Since I hadn’t eaten since breakfast and it was nearly dark the idea of this fried chicken was maddening. When it was late May or early June Viv and Robert would pick lots of morel mushrooms and when we got home we’d have trout and fresh morels for supper.

  Unfortunately by the time I reached the Hitchin’ Post the kitchen was closed so a big meal was out of the question but the barmaid made me a very thick ham and swiss on rye plus nuked a bowl of beef barley soup. When I washed up, I looked comically awful in the toilet mirror: sunburned, tiny leaves and sticks in my hair and clothes, dirty hands and clothes and face, and sweaty clothes. I had wrestled all day with my first love. While I ate it came to me that I wasn’t in first rate mental shape when I had left Michigan, and perhaps for some time afterwards. The fishing had opened a window in my mind’s room and the new fresh air and light had made my state of mind on my departure grim indeed. Wife. Farm. Dog. Gone. What is left, Me, Viv, Robert.

  A hand waved in front of my face. The tackle store owner had sat down beside me and I hadn’t noticed it. We talked about fishing but after my second drink I was too wobbly and drowsy to continue. I walked the hundred yards to my motel, The Sportsman’s Lodge, forgetting my vehicle and stumbling along in the dark, laughing as I figured out that my share of the farm, my life’s work, came out to a profit of four grand a year, not much in today’s terms.

  I was physically exhausted and my legs were still cold from the river and I slept the sleep of Cora, a family idiom. Cora was an old sow that gave us a half-dozen litters in successive years and then came up dry. As a child I wept so piteously when dad was going to butcher her that he relented and said that she was now my responsibility. She was old, very obese, and mostly slept, weighing probably five hundred. I was getting a little too big but Cora would let my little brother Teddy ride on her back though she’d only take a few steps before falling back to sleep. Dad said that Cora would die from sleep, fat, and no exercise so all by myself, I think I was eleven at the time, I rigged a circular narrow passageway of a hundred yards out of fencing and fed Cora at the furthest part of the circle from the pig pen which abutted the corn crib. We grew a lot of fruit, apples, sweet and sour cherries, concord grapes for dad’s awful wine, pears and peaches. Cora dearly loved fruit and when I’d dump a couple of gallons of it in her trough she’d close her eyes and gobble with pleasure. With ordinary hog slop and corn she’d keep her eyes open. After her dinner she’d stop for a couple of naps on her way back home to her shelter under the corn crib. Often she’d quiver and churn her feet while asleep as if she was dreaming and dad said she was likely dreaming about food. When she finally died, in her sleep of course, it took me three days to dig a hole big enough to bury her. My little brother Teddy tried to jump in the hole with Cora but dad held him tight during the grave service which mom didn’t attend. Afterwards Teddy would put his ear to the ground at the gravesite.

  I felt good in the morning what with a nice dream about Viv’s stroganoff, her other good dish besides fried chicken. She’s use a pint of fine Jersey cow cream got from a neighbor and also reconstituted dried morels. I drank my coffee holding onto this dream state and decided to call her before breakfast. To cut the cream I’d eat some wild leeks I would dig up and pickle. We’d use our own best beef.

  I can’t say the conversation made me warm all over. It was mostly Viv spinning figures in real estate language to the effect that “tax wise” I’d have to be her employee while I remodeled the bungalow and that it could be amortized if I’d let her sell the back twenty of the forty acres. I said no because this was the location of the hillock where I’d sit with the Indian who couldn’t talk because of his war wound. I’d have a life lease and she would retain title. I asked, “What if you die first” and she said, “Then it would go to Robert, stupid.” Not very charming. I also asked if I’d get paid and she answered “a little something,” adding that under no condition could I bring my “wicked waitress” onto the property. I teased her with the question of whether she expected us to remarry and she said, “No, I want to keep my options open. I’m just lonely for you now and then.” That was that. There’s always been something icky to me about the word compromise, perhaps because all of my reading in the New England Transcendentalists, especially Emerson and Thoreau, also the English Romantics. Did Byron compromise? Not hardly, but then the long road from Lord Byron to this English major fan didn’t exist. My senses hadn’t totally left me. I had lost the farm and Lola and the thread between me and Viv was fragile indeed. I had lost much of my past but not all of it. I could live out my life at Grandpa’s place nearly enveloped by State Forest, the tiny gravel road leading to it passed through a dense cedar swamp, and then came the scrubby clearing and the old Sears bungalow built in the twenties, and the other tar paper shack. There was some reasonably good trout fishing and when I needed to look at a woman I could drive over to Cross Village on Lake Michigan or down to Pellston. I’d buy some good camping equipment and drive to the southwest in the winters, live in the desert, and Bert could be my teacher in this new area. I certainly wouldn’t camp in his snake infested yard. This would have to be enough.

  The vision of the body of Bert’s meth-ditzy girlfriend made me long for Marybelle so I made the mild mistake of calling her cell.

  “Cliff, Cliff, Cliff, my heart cries for you as the song used to go. And other parts too. My life is blooming. Last evening I got the part of Blanche in the upcoming Street Car Named Desire. I don’t get their choice of Stanley. He’s a gay guy with thin arms. My life is blooming, Cliff, and it’s all because you delivered me to your wonderful son. I just didn’t belong in Morris, Minnesota. I’m a bright lights, big city girl. For instance this morning I absolutely knew my son had been captured by guerillas in Africa.”

  “Gorillas or guerillas?” I felt I had to say something.

  “That’s a good question. Did you know gorillas had miniature penises? About the size of a filter cigarette?”

  “No I didn’t know that.”

  “Anyway, I had coffee and said to myself, Marybelle, you don’t really have a son so how can he be in Africa? In short, Cliff, I’m becoming less delusional in San Francisco.”

  And so on. My sexual needs seemed to diminish with the phone call and there was a vague pang of feeling sorry for myself. Dad once warned me about this when I was mourning the loss of a girlfriend to a quarterback. I was a lonely lineman. I moped and moped, and then when we were cutting wood on an icy October morning and he told me that self-pity was a ruinous emotion. “Look at the world, not up your ass,”
he said. It took me a while to figure this out.

  I went fishing and got caught in a violent hailstorm. It came from the west but I couldn’t see far in that direction because of the mountains. It was far to the east and after I lost a very large brown trout that would have been the largest of my life the fishing went dead. This trout had run downriver full blast through a narrow stretch that was too deep to wade and I had tried to crawl along the thick brush at the river’s edge and then the line went slack. I had seen the thickened body of the fish right after he or she struck and was deciding an escape route.

  Anyway, the hailstorm struck when I was sitting on a log musing on the trout and what I thought might be sonic booms from jet fighters in the west. All experienced anglers know that the odds of landing a big brown trout are small indeed. I was inattentive to the change in the weather because it occurred to me that it was likely dishonest to change the name of a bird or state if I hadn’t actually seen the bird or visited the state. I certainly had no first hand experience of artistic integrity but now the theoretical aspects loomed large. Some sort of thrush I didn’t recognize was staring at me from a nearby bush. I had heard that during migration thrushes will stop for a nine second nap. You heard it right, nine seconds. It was then that the hail hit from a black sky that had crept on me and I hadn’t seen it because I was fishing. I fled across the river, stumbling in the current because I was trying to shield my eyes from the stinging ice pellets. I fell face forward and drifted in the current for a way trying to catch my breath. It was eerie what with the river covered with a moving sheet of whiteness. I crawled up a steep muddy bank and headed upstream to where I had seen a very old abandoned Dodge Power Wagon loaded with rocks out of which grew grass and wild flowers. In fact with my head down I walked smack into the truck then scraped my back crawling under it. Holy shit, my ass was freezing. The temperature must have dropped from the high seventies to the forties. I hadn’t eaten breakfast, instead ordering a roast beef sandwich to go, but the bread was soaked with river water. Who can eat bread soaked in river water? I chewed hungrily on the meat and onions looking up at the greasy undercarriage of the truck. It was then that I thought I might take some sort of artistic vows for my project. The non serviam of James Joyce wouldn’t work because I had already spent so much of my life serving cattle, the cherry orchard, not to speak of Vivian after she took on a real estate job and gave up on our home.