by Jim Harrison
Andrew thought this was a major-league story. He asked Ted why, if I excited him so much, he had become homosexual? Ted was unnaturally thoughtful for a few minutes, then said, “It’s not what turns one on, but what turns one on the most strongly.”
My three letters were all rather startling. Ruth wrote that her grocer had presented his financial statement, then asked her to marry him. He wanted her to see the statement so she wouldn’t think he wanted her money. She was a little confused and wanted us to visit either in Santa Monica, Tucson, or wherever. Mother’s note was an abrupt proposal which required a phone call. She had to know within a few days if I was interested in coming back and teaching for a year at the country school from which she was retiring. The members of the county schoolboard, all in their sixties like Naomi, had kept the school open for years due to her persistence. Otherwise most of the children would have spent a full hour each way on the school bus. The enrollment was down to seventeen in grades one through eight, but she had wangled one more year just in case I cared to come home. Between the lines this meant that Ted had told Ruth, who told Naomi, that my life might be in some danger. She didn’t expect me to live with her. My own place, which had been Grandfather’s, had been “house-sat” for over twenty years by a finicky Norwegian bachelor cousin of the Lundquists. He was supposedly retranslating Rölvaag’s Giants in the Earth though no one saw any of the evidence. On my visits he moved into Duane’s bunkhouse which had been nicely redone by a traveling hippie couple Naomi had befriended.
Part of Naomi’s peculiar, hard-won sanity is that she doesn’t think of her private quarrels as acts of heroism. Her strategies are quiet, her suggestions tentative. My first impulse was “Why not?” Her note ended with the tease that while I wouldn’t find any drug problems, there were two seventh-grade twins who were potential drunks. One of them was sexually precocious and she was busy saving the virtue of three of the girls, also saving the boys from irate Lutheran parents.
Professor Michael’s letter permanently changed my idea about the man. I was a little suspicious after the first paragraph—when someone pulls off a mask you are left wondering if the new face is yet another mask. The prose owned none of the acerbic, contentious quality of his scholarly articles or his public personality. The letter was a half-dozen pages, beginning with an ingenious biographical sketch. There was an occasional call for violins but the attempt was at naked honesty, albeit lyrical: born in the Ohio Valley to marginal farm-factory parents and relatives, fundamentalist Protestant, fair-haired student winning a scholarship to Notre Dame which caused a break with his family (a Catholic college!), factory work in summers, a year in a writing program at Northwestern with a failed, awful novel to show for it, long and arduous graduate work at the University of Wisconsin and Yale, ending with a Ph.D. in American studies, a couple of nonscholarly books, marriage and divorce, daughter in private school which cost him a full third of his take-home pay, six years of teaching at Stanford but still without tenure.
The bottom line was on the last page, in the form of a supplication and an offer. He had just returned from Loreto on Baja to meet with my uncle Paul in the hopes that my denial to see family papers could be circumvented. Uncle Paul, whom he “adored,” said it was still up to me. The problem was his sabbatical, for which he had been given a large additional foundation grant, would begin in the summer. Tenure depended on the book he would write during his sabbatical. The center of the difficulty was that a professor from the University of Wisconsin on the grants committee had previously been denied access to our papers and had demanded proof of Michael’s access as a contingency to the grant. He had to deliver this permission in a week’s time to his own chairman at Stanford. At this point, if he couldn’t do so, he would lose his grant, sabbatical, and very probably his job due to “moral turpitude”— i.e., lying—no matter that the students had voted him teacher of the year for his lecturing techniques, his wonderfully amusing oratory. If he lost his job his daughter would have to be withdrawn from private school which would break her heart. He rented an apartment and there was a loan on his BMW exceeding its current value due to a minor collision with his mailbox. In other words, his fate was entirely in my hands.
It was such a sorry mess I began to laugh, reminding me as it did of a more grotesque version of parts of my own life, and the lives of many of those I knew. His offer, however, brought me to despair; I lost my breath and wandered out to the balcony but my tears blurred the Pacific. “Remember that night,” he wrote, “when you ridiculed my mustache, or at least teased me about it? I grabbed your arm and you became justifiably angry. I don’t think I have any violence in me or perhaps it all comes out my mouth, or is subdued in drinking! My ex-wife used to slap me and I never defended myself. Coleridge said somewhere that we are like spiders who spin webs of deceit out of our asses. Perhaps along with my scholarly bent I have the temperament of an unsuccessful horse-player, a binge gambler. My frantic quarreling with you over at Ted’s was a signal of the depth of trouble I was in. Anyway, the night at your place you mentioned that you wanted to find your son, or you were going to write something to explain yourself and your background. You could monitor my project which would cover the background. And I could find your son. I know I could because I am trained as a researcher and have a great deal of credibility. This is all I have to offer and perhaps you would rather do it without me. I beg, I implore you to consider my situation. To be sure, I have lied repeatedly to my collective profession thinking I could bend your will. I truly care for you, but that’s another matter. Frankly, I have wondered why you bothered with me in the first place, traveling in the circles that you do. Ted spends more than my salary in wine every year. Finding your son is all I have to offer. Please call me the minute you finish this letter. I have given serious consideration to suicide but couldn’t do it because of my daughter. Otherwise I would threaten you with it.”
Out on the balcony I thought that certain kinds of suffering are altogether too ambitious. I remembered childhood stories of abandoned dogs who found their way, after numberless torments of weather, bridges, highways, dogcatchers, a thousand miles back home. Their compass evidently was their longing to be there. It’s a nice story but what of all the young people I’ve worked with who have run away from some impossible situation, then return to find the door closed? It is difficult to help someone who feels discarded. They think of themselves, finally, as garbage and are willing prey to all those who victimize them sexually, and later on, emotionally. Somehow the fact that there is no home doesn’t decrease the longing. I’m not sure why. Of necessity we can create layers of activities to cover this longing but it is always felt beneath the surface. To become inert has always been to me the worst of survival tactics. The professor says that time is the most natural of artificialities, and that no one but a nitwit lives within its mechanistic specifics. An event of a few moments dominates years. Just now I was thinking of the precise moment I had to give up Duane’s necklace.
On my seventeenth birthday, on October 10, my grandfather, with the grudging permission of Naomi, gave me my first car. It was a new turquoise-colored Ford convertible with a white top and looked desperately inappropriate in the Nebraska landscape, especially parked next to Mother’s drab and muddy Plymouth. I stood embarrassed in the yard in front of everyone—Charlene and Lena were out from town—until I took my cue from Ruth who was jumping around wildly. We went for a ride, with me driving and Charlene and Ruth on the seat beside me. It was sunny though cool for October but we put the top down anyway and drove into town, stopping at the single drive-in which was a meeting place for young people. Everyone was friendly, even one of the boys that Duane had beaten up. There is a haphazard resilience in young people that is not shared by adults, an ability to forget bitterness. Something as stupid and vulgar as a pretty car can be a tonic to all, at least for an afternoon.
I think the car hastened the death of my grandfather though he tried to absolve me of this notion on his deathb
ed. What happened is that the car equaled freedom to me, and naturally a longer-range freedom than that of walking or horseback. Perhaps this is less true of women than men, but in my upbringing the differentiation wasn’t emphasized. On sleepless nights I would go downstairs, flick on the yard light, and look out at the car. Sometimes I would take an old road atlas and touring guide out of the parlor desk and study the possibilities. I began to slowly draw small amounts of money out of my savings account before I had a definite plan. For the first time in several years I counted my collection of silver dollars I had started as a little girl. There was also a stack of ten twenty-dollar gold pieces that Grandfather had found behind some books in his library in the summer. He had said “Spend these on a gewgaw or whatever.” It occurred to me that it would look suspicious if I tried to buy gas or a motel room with a twenty-dollar gold piece. I was on the verge of jumping into one of those holes in life out of which we emerge a bit tattered and bloody though we remain nonetheless sure that we had to make the jump.
One evening a few weeks after my birthday, when our part of Nebraska had entered a warm Indian summer, I was out in the driveway wiping the car windows with a chamois cloth. The insides of the car windows were covered with the nose prints of Grandfather’s Airedales. That day, when I had driven to his house after school, he had suggested we take the dogs for a spin with the top down. The dogs sat in the backseat rather grave and self-important as we drove down mile after mile of gravel roads. Grandfather had bronchitis and sipped whiskey from a flask, talking about how in the fine, early years of his marriage he and his wife (this was in the late thirties) would jump in their car and drive all the way to Chicago in less than three days just to eat in a bona-fide French restaurant. At a crossroads he permitted the frantic dogs to jump out and chase a coyote—in a lifetime of chasing coyotes they had never caught one save the pups in the den. This coyote had a sense of humor and ran in great circles, passing the car several times with the dogs kept at a consistent hundred yards behind him. When the dogs flopped in exhaustion beside the car the coyote sat down in the exact place the chase had begun, and continued to watch us until we left.
So in the evening while I was cleaning the car and the dusk disappeared into dark I heard a coyote. I walked out into the pasture into the warm darkness beyond the sound of Ruth’s piano practice. My skin tingled and my stomach hollowed because I somehow thought it might be Duane who could imitate coyotes to the point they would answer him. Duane said the coyotes didn’t believe his call, they were only curious and amused. But out there in the pasture I admitted to myself I was going to try to find Duane.
Mother had been cautious with me after the baby on the advice of something she had read, not to pry, not to submit my every moment and mood to scrutiny, and in exchange I offered as much honesty as I could muster. I slipped out of bed the next morning at 5:00 A.M. and left a note saying not to worry, but that I was going to visit my old friend Duane. To make sure I wouldn’t be stopped I woke up Ruth, gave her the note, and told her to give it to Mother after school. Ruth was reading Wuthering Heights at the time and thought my search for a lost love was “utterly thrilling.”
I reached Route 12, then drove west until I arrived at Valentine at daylight where I stopped for breakfast, but my butterflies were so bad I couldn’t eat the meal. The waitress, who reminded me of a spindlier version of Lena, expressed concern. I said I was worried about my grandmother who was quite sick in Rapid City. The waitress sat down with a cup of coffee and chatted for a while. She admired my sheepskin coat and Paul Bond boots. She said, “Don’t talk to no cowboys. They just want to get in your pants.” She said this rather loudly, glancing at a table of cowboys eating their eggs. I felt my face redden and stared out the window at a stock semi full of steers probably headed to the feedlots of Sioux City and eventual slaughter. I paid my bill, thanked her for the advice, and left. What is so wrong with loving a half-brother? I thought.
I took Route 83 north toward Murdo, turning off on 18 in the Rosebud Indian Reservation on the road to Parmelee. I didn’t have much hope that Duane would be there as if waiting for me but I hoped to at least cold-track him as the local hunters called it. White people have a hard time understanding why Indians live the way they do, identifying it with the manner our own peculiar “white trash” live; I mean the bare-ground lawns, broken fences, discarded, picked-over cars, ramshackle houses. Grandfather said you don’t want to understand someone if you are stealing, or have stolen, all their property. It might make you feel bad about what you did if you understood them.
Parmelee was indeed a sorry-looking place. Indian summer had suddenly disappeared and a cold wind out of the north blew icy dust in my eyes as I knocked on doors which quickly closed in my face. Some kids and barking dogs began to follow me at a polite distance. The kids laughed and shrieked when I spoke to them in a few words of rudimentary Sioux. I did see an old man working under the upraised hood of a junk car. He poked out, smiled, and said, “May I help you, daughter,” in Sioux. When questioned, he said that he had heard that both Duane and his mother were down in Pine Ridge.
Pine Ridge was another hundred miles down the road but my heart was light as I drove with the wild and blustery north wind rocking the car. I even sang along to the country songs on the radio from a Rapid City station—thinking that Duane might be listening to the same station. It was easiest to sing with Patsy Cline because that was how I felt.
Pine Ridge was terribly unfriendly but again my rather clumsy attempts at the Sioux language got me the unpleasant information. Duane had been drunk and had beaten up a cop down in Chadron a month or so before and was in jail there. If he wasn’t in jail he had left the area because you were a dead duck if you beat up a cop. This was told me by a tall, skinny young man in tattered clothes who coughed so hard he wobbled. He added that Duane’s mother was supported by a rich man up in Buffalo Gap.
On the way to Chadron I lost my confidence and began weeping. It was now midafternoon and the world seemed a cold and violent place. I was ashamed and began to despise my fancy car which looked so garish in Indian territory. A few weeks before, in our county, a Norwegian farmer had died from general exhaustion. He was in his late forties, his parents had lost their farm in the Depression, and he was afraid of losing the farm he had secured through marriage. I knew his children at school, a half-dozen of them, and they were always exhausted, sunburned, wind-chaffed, and gaunt. If their corn picker broke down they picked by hand until well after dark. The newspaper quoted the bank as saying the man was paid up but was working for a -down payment for more land.
I lost all my courage when I drove past the jail in Chadron. I circled the jail three times without stopping. It somehow seemed unimaginable that Duane was in there, or that, if he was, the authorities would let me see him. I started shaking so hard I pulled off near a park and looked at my map. I decided to drive the twenty miles out to Fort Robinson to regather my composure. Duane said his mother had taken him to Fort Robinson when he was a little boy because it was the location of the murder of Crazy Horse. That afternoon with the clear cold wind and empty parking lot the cavalry barns were ghostly and the fort and officer quarters didn’t look like they belonged in the beauty of the rolling, sparsely forested landscape. Across the road at the location of the stockade, where the actual murder took place, a ranger said I had to leave because it was five and they were closing for the day. The ranger was obnoxious and wondered why a “pretty girl” like myself cared about Crazy Horse in the first place. For some reason I said I was an extremely distant relative and was trying to get the guts to kill some white folks. The ranger snorted and laughed and told me to get on my way.
Back in Chadron I walked directly into the sheriff’s office in front of the jail and was just as directly arrested. My car keys were taken and I was seated next to the sheriff’s desk as he made some phone calls in a whispery, noncommittal voice. He was a small, kindly man. He brought me a cup of coffee and told me my boyfriend, who was a
“mean sucker,” had been bailed out and was long gone. Soon the local rancher who had sold us Duane’s buckskin two years before arrived and picked me up. I spent the night with him and his family. I didn’t feel bad by then because I had given up. I helped the rancher’s daughter who was my age do chores. Out of earshot of her father she said her dad would whip her ass if she went out with an Indian boy.
Next morning I slept late and Grandfather arrived at breakfast red-faced and jubilant in his old otter-skin coat and a hunting hat. Our doctor had flown him over in his Stearman biplane and the trip had been wonderful if a bit chilly. He was coughing and sipped whiskey as he ate. The rancher took us to the sheriff’s office where pleasantries were exchanged. The sheriff looked at me oddly and said that everyone should be in love at least once. This is the kind of inexplicable comment one remembers forever.
When we were alone in my car Grandfather asked me why, knowing what I knew, I had gone to look for Duane. I said I couldn’t help myself. He said that was a good answer and directed me north out of Chadron instead of east toward home. Just south of Hot Springs, an hour or so out of Chadron, we turned off toward Buffalo Gap, then off again on a narrow gravel road going into the mountains. We had been talking about nothing in particular but the history of the landscape. He knew the area and its history well because we were on the way to his hunting cabin. Some of the very last buffalo had hidden out in this area. He said General Sherman brought the South to its knees by burning crops and destroying all the livestock. The Indians were starved into submission by the destruction of the buffalo as government policy. The South recovered its crops, cows, and pigs but the buffalo were gone forever except as isolated novelties. He liked in these moments of anger to quote General Philip Sheridan who had said, “To destroy the Indian, you must destroy the Indian’s commissary. For the sake of lasting peace let us kill, skin and sell until we have exterminated the buffalo. Then your prairies will be covered with speckled cattle and the festive cowboy.”
