by Jim Harrison
Now it is first light in the desert and I’ve watched the stars fade and disappear. There’s only enough dew to moisten the skin. A little while ago I turned in the sleeping bag, hearing the coyote, but I didn’t see him. It was pleasurable to be there and think where and how far I’d drive that day.
BOOK II
* * *
MICHAEL
MICHAEL’S WORKBOOK
June 6, 1986—Nebraska
I was shaken awake at 6:00 A.M. by a very large woman who wore the sort of baggy flower-print housedress my mother favored when I was a child. She said her name was Frieda and that my breakfast was ready. Dalva had told her over the phone that I liked my breakfast just after dawn. What humor! Frieda stood directly behind my chair while I ate, as if critiquing my performance. I knew this was the way old-fashioned Scandinavian women fed their families, but it made me bolt my food. She was disturbed when I only ate two of the three pork chops, half the potatoes and eggs. Then she brought a worn denim jacket and fairly pushed me out the door for the long morning walk she had been advised was my habit.
I stood in the backyard, not more than vaguely conscious, yet full of relief and a little fear. Dalva’s arrival had been delayed in order to meet her uncle Paul in Sonoita, Arizona. Dalva is punctual on a nominal level but never seems to know the date or year of anything within the nearest decade. She says she sees events, the past itself, in terms of “clumps” of years, which is a blithe evasion indeed. I told her that the study of history can’t afford such messiness, and that by the age of sixteen I knew the birthdates of all the kings and queens of England. She thought this quite funny, and described the amusement of the Indians when they were first exposed to calendars, also to the cartographers and surveyors who were measuring with exactitude the heights of mountains. Her high school history teacher had also been her basketball coach, and it had been his practice to hand out sheets of paper with raw historical dates, and the trick was to figure out what happened on them. Sad to say, this man seemed to turn her away from the only precision aspect history offers.
My precious BMW had shitcanned outside of Denver, blowing its engine and faltering to a noisy halt on the downside of a mountain pass. The dealership told me the car wasn’t designed to function on filthy oil, or to pull a U-Haul trailer laden with heavy cartons of books over the Rocky Mountains. I told them to fix it and issued a deposit check I couldn’t cover. They were kind enough, though, to help me find a moving company, and I spent a morning arranging this and that, then boarded a Greyhound bus for Nebraska, arriving at midnight aided by a pint of whiskey. The desolate little village was closed up tight, but Naomi was there waiting in her car. She had volunteered to drive the three hours to the closest airport when I had called, but I told her I was far too unstable to get on one of those cramped metal tubes used by feeder airlines.
Now I was trying to locate the precise nature of the vertigo that tugged strongly at my stomach and limbs, making me feel spongy, hollow-headed. I had escaped, for the time being, the academic firing squad and was on the loose: a year in which to prove myself worthy of tenure, of permanent employment, a small matter entailing close to an additional million dollars during a professional lifetime at one of the “top ten” institutions. When I left the house the back steps seemed three feet high—that was it—and the steps tried to recall the time I had stumbled walking out of the Moscow airport. During my divorce negotiations I had wangled a free vacation by escorting a student group to Russia. For this, I had sprinted to the bookstore, spent an hour devouring a Fodor guide, and won the job over a lumpy woman from the Russian department and a black linguist who actually spoke the language. My fibs about the wonders of Tashkent and the fleshpots of Kiev convinced the student committee. Naturally, the trip was not made less miserable by my ignorance, though it certainly was an eye-opener for this fading leftist. The following year, on a similar boondoggle, I found it was easier to be a Marxist in Florence and Rome.
In this barnyard I was emotionally back at the Moscow airport, though without student charges puking out Aeroflot vodka on the curb. Naomi had invited me to stay overnight at her place, but I said it would be better to wake up at the homestead headquarters. The fact of the matter was that I had been frightened. After showing me to a downstairs master bedroom slept in by the succession of John Wesley Northridges, she left and I headed for an old horsehair couch in the den. I looked out the window and watched Naomi’s red taillights heading down the drive. It was too quiet. There was no TV or radio to be found. I finally located the phone in a kitchen cupboard but couldn’t think of anyone to call. I sipped sparingly at my few remaining ounces of whiskey left over from the bus trip, then looked unsuccessfully for more. I was sweating, but when I took off my sport coat I felt less strong, so put it back on. I turned on every light and paced around, mostly to hear the reassuring sound of my own footsteps. My first survey told me that I could have called in a semi truck and packed the contents off to Sotheby’s or Christie’s, retiring on the proceeds. I don’t know much about china, silver, furniture, but the library and paintings were splendid (Remington, Charley Russell, a Sargent landscape, Burchfield, Sheeler, Eakins, Marsden Hartley, a smallish Hopper, Stuart Davis, some Modigliani drawings of the usual long-necked ladies), and a glass case held the entire Edward Sheriff Curtis folio, the current worth I knew to be over a hundred grand. A lucky probe of a cabinet revealed an assortment of brandy bottles, some of which were thirty years old back in the fifties. A judicious, concealed amount from each bottle would bring sleep. I fetched a glass from the kitchen, bowed at a portrait of the deceased owner, avoided a portrait of Dalva, and poured. I looked for a more contemporary book and selected a volume on the sorry life of Monet. There was a Yankee spareness about the house that didn’t baffle my night fears.
Now, in the dawn barnyard, I approached a small flock of geese strutting along a creek, but they proved unfriendly and I nearly had to boot some sense into their apparent leader. I looked back at the big farmhouse, weathered but still grand, that reminded me of New England, from which the man who had it built had arrived via Andersonville and the Civil War. I was a little alarmed to see Frieda staring back from the kitchen window as if urging me on my walk. It seemed curious that she drove a large, gleaming pickup truck with RAM lettered on the tailgate in bold letters. A land of big women and big pickups.
I walked out past the barn to the bunkhouse that was to serve as my home and study. The door was locked but it looked pleasantly rustic through a window. I could see a radio and a record player but no television, and the roof was without an aerial. I glanced back at the main house and could still see the outline of Frieda in the kitchen. I strolled off at a pace I didn’t intend to maintain, toward the first wall of trees in the west and away from the sun. Dalva was supposed to call at mid-morning, and the present need was to find a good place to snooze until that time.
The night before, on our ride from town, I had told Naomi that the soul of history could not be approached with the cautious servility of the scholar. She said that sounded fine but wasn’t sure what I meant. What it really meant was that I wanted her to think well of my high calling, but I certainly couldn’t say that directly. Naomi is less intimidating than Dalva, perhaps because of her age and because she lacks that edge of fierceness occasionally seen in her daughter. Sadly enough, I’ve never met a woman around my own age as companionable as Naomi. Our day of bird-watching and wine-drinking in the Napa Valley was perhaps the finest I’ve ever spent with anyone. Her high-mindedness is so gentle and forgiving that it was impossible for me to pull any of my captious, asshole moves.
The first wall of trees that constituted a windbreak was as thick as I imagined a jungle to be, but I made my way through to the other side, pausing after I was frightened witless by a flushed deer. There was an element of disappointment to find a forty-acre-or-so field of alfalfa which clung to my legs and soaked my pants with dew, surrounded by another windbreak. The symmetry became irritating and the deepn
ess of the June green in the field and trees seemed something to struggle with. Passing through another windbreak, this one thicker than the last, yielded the same thing, with the single unique quality of a rock pile in the center of the field. I made my way to it as if it were a pile of diamonds, took off my jacket in the gathering heat, and sat down. For lack of a better place, I could doze sitting on a rock.
It was partly the overwhelming substance of the place that bothered me: a wealth that was so subdued and hidden that it was invisible to the outside world. When I was in grade school a steel-mill foreman who lived down the street bought a new Cadillac. Everyone in the neighborhood knew he was thick with some crooks in the union, but this fact didn’t dampen our admiration for the car. One Saturday afternoon when he was drinking beer he let us help wash the car, though no one was allowed to sit in it. This house and farm dredged up some of those childhood memories of envious awe, not that I wanted a farm, but more what it all seemed to represent: the paintings and furniture, a dozen bottles of barely touched great brandy. And this was the factor that made Dalva forever out of reach except on some nominal sexual level. Sitting on this rock pile I could see her life so totally shorn of bric-a-brac, bibelots, as the French call them, living her life without much confusion, surrounded by beloved objects, and incapable of a graceless move. Why should this fire my anger? We often find out we are not quite what we thought we are. The boy sticks his head in the window of a brand-new Cadillac car and the man he becomes can’t quite get over it. The man rather glibly describes himself as a historian, that is, he studies the records of the large-scale habits of mankind, war, famine, politics, the fuel that is greed. What we are, what we have done, what we have made, weighs as heavily and usually as unnoticeably as gravity weighs upon us. It is the historian’s job to study this unseeable gravity, to take core samples from the past and bring them to the quasi-light of the present. Since those old outworn enormities like Arnold Toynbee have passed on, we have become minimalists. I chose the Nebraska area several years ago for a book, because I drove through the state and it seemed charmingly simpleminded. More specifically, I chose the advent of farming in the Great Plains and the final solution of the Indian question. Through good luck, chicanery, perhaps laziness, I further limited the field to the history of a single dominant family and its relation to the advent of farming and the Indian question. You can imagine scholars pillaging the attics of old farmhouses, the records of local historical societies. But in such material there is no concept of what was really going on at the time, just a brutal mishmash of everyday life, the Great Plains as a nineteenth-century gulag, where the leading cause of death was exhaustion. Professor Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip is a model sourcebook of this sort of thing. It is hard for a layman to imagine my excitement when I came across the only public material on the Northridge family in the Proceedings of the Nebraska Historical Society. Of course I’m not really interested in the Sioux but in how the first John Wesley Northridge looked at the Sioux, who are anyway as intractable as the African Masai. Only a few pages of his journal were allowed to be published, along with a dozen or so pages of the usual dreary commentary. Over the years there must have been dozens of scholars competing for the material, all receiving the form-letter rejection I first received from a trust officer in Omaha. Here is part of the printed sample in J. W. Northridge’s pungent style:
May 3, 1865
To see the countryside it is better to be on foot. Marching is good training for this, if for nothing else to a civilized man: in fact, absolutely nothing else. To march is to bear the Mark of the Beast. In Andersonville I did not march but starved, but then my time was mercifully short compared to others, and so I spent, was ordered to spend, my time burying the less fortunate than I with camphor in my nose to temper the stench of the dead. The depth of their graves depended on my waning energies. I must add that I much preferred burying the dead to writing letters for the dying—so arduous to make the final genuflection to the beloved for someone else. “My dearest Martha, My sight grows dim now and my hands that once held you strongly to my breast cannot bear the weight of a pen. I speak this letter to my friend named John Wesley, a godly soul who is from our native New England, a botanist & preacher conscripted by error in Boston. He has promised to deliver this letter, among others—perhaps too many to carry—should this terrible war ever end. Remember how we marched away thinking it a fortnight’s lark? Please tell little Robert and Susanah that their father who loves them with all of his heart died for the Republic. It is my prayer and trust that your youth, grace, and beauty will find you another to take my place, and the Lord will grant that I see you in Paradise someday.”
A man who writes a hundred or so such letters finds himself well shut of Heaven and Hell. This horror has returned me close to Earth and I would not trade a fragrant thistle along this road to the North for a warehouse of Bibles. Before I made my trade with the Devil which I cannot admit yet to paper I was bound for the Plains as a Missionary and Botanist to help the native population, the Indians, to make the inevitable transition from warriors to tillers of the soil, an occupation toward which I am advised they have no predisposition. I shall hide the preacher and show them how to feed themselves without buffalo. I was a captive of war, and they are captive of the Void that befalls a conquered people, their conqueror having emerged from Bedlam to slay millions in this Civil War. And so released by Victory I chose to avoid the stink of trains, the freight of living and dead, and walk north into summer, to give what knowledge I may to these Sioux Indians.
