Dalva

by Jim Harrison

  At the bank we were escorted, after Dalva was fawned over by everyone in sight, back to a cool room that was an extension of the main vault. I had kept my composure when I thought I heard some titters in the background—without doubt my sorry story had spread to the farthest reaches of the county. I had expected a jumble of boxes and cartons whose contents would take months to log: instead there were five modest wood sea chests with bright brass fittings sitting on a table. Our guide, who was the oldest banker in existence and a near albino, begged his leave, and I looked at Dalva rather nervously.

  “I expected more . . . . I mean I expected a mess. May we look at something?”

  “In the early seventies I had a breakdown and spent the winter sorting everything out. I did a bibliography on the contents. The first two are Great-grandfather’s which, for now, are the only ones you can look at, and these two are Grandfather’s. The last one is shared by Wesley and Paul.”

  She opened the first, revealing a researcher’s dream of tidiness, with her typed list of contents resting on neat stacks of bound ledgers, and packets of letters. I lifted out a ledger in the middle of a stack and opened it at the center, reading it at a bookmarked place.

  May 13, 1871: Rode hard our third day down from near Fort Randall with He Dog who was of bad humor & feverish he said from bad beef. We camped on the north fork of the Loup in fine weather & he made an emetic from a root he dug up (blue cornflower), retching half the night but woke in fine health. I studied the river bottom with a hopeless map and made several new specimen entries. He Dog trapped two marsh rats and made a fine stew which increased our strength. He questioned my statement on politics yet again, wherein I insist it is the process by which one man’s rights are made more than another’s. He is amused by this. Then I repeated on request more tales of the War where he is often less interested in men than the number of horses. It is curious that my given Sioux name which means “earthdiver” is never used in concourse, and the direct use of names is considered impolite, an attempt to thieve power, in fact. I was called thus because I am forever digging holes and inspecting the root systems of trees to determine their hardiness in certain soils. We napped in the heat of mid-day so as to explore until dark. It is somewhat disturbing but He Dog, ever alert to danger, naps upright & with his eyes wide open.

  My heart beat wildly—this little passage alone meant that J. W. Northridge was truly in the thick of things. To offer a brief gloss: The Sioux warrior He Dog was a crony, a close friend of the seminal war chief, Crazy Horse (“Crazy” is a vulgarism in contemporary terms; his true name meant “enchanted” or “magic,” really something more than all three). The north branch of the Loup was on the verge (in three years) of being overrun by settlers, in defiance of a treaty made with the Sioux, the area being in proximity to the Black Hills, the most sacred place of the Sioux (interesting to note that we never kept a single treaty with the Indians—beware, the rest of the world!). A traveler from the British Isles at the time, Lord Bryce, ridiculed our immoral capitulation to the railroads, land swindlers, and greedy settlers who rushed willy-nilly into legal Indian Territory, then bleated for God and the U. S. Cavalry to save their necks. Another point is Northridge as horticulturist and botanist, an agricultural missionary. As T. P. Thorton points out in her significant study “Cultivating the American Character: Horticulture as Moral Reform in the Antebellum Era,” the cultivation of fruit and other trees before the Civil War in New England and New York was considered to be morally uplifting, an antidote to the rapacity of greed that was consuming the nation. As an orphan and a bastard child Northridge worked at Wodenethe, the enormous fruit garden of Henry Winthrop Sargent in Dutchess County, New York. I could go on with animal husbandry, the care and breeding of horses among the Sioux, quite as intricate as in present-day Lexington, Kentucky, or among the former-day Cossacks and Mongols of the fabled steppes of Asia. And all of this, historically speaking, is in the recent past. Three hundred Sioux, mostly women and children, were butchered at Wounded Knee while, back in the Midwest, Henry Ford was tinkering with the idea of spare parts for his first auto. For those of us who are adults, most of our grandparents were alive in 1890!

  In short, I was in a whirl, breathless, nearly faint. When Dalva helped me tote the first trunk out to her topless car I scanned the sky for rain clouds. I began to hyperventilate and the sorry street wobbled a bit. At my feet I imagined the street to be mud and Northridge tethering his horse before this very bank, avoided by the burghers, so Dalva tells me, because of his madness. She came to my aid and sat me in the car. She wondered if I needed to breathe in a paper bag, which is the way to ameliorate a hyperventilation attack. I lowered my head into my shirt like a turtle for a few minutes, which did the job. Under my shirt I could see He Dog napping with his eyes open under a cottonwood, the flies circling around the leftovers of the marsh-rat (muskrat) stew, the grama grass responsive to the slightest breeze. Outside my shirt Dalva was talking to someone. I debated whether or not to poke my enturtled head back into the world. There was the notion that my behavior might be misunderstood. I emerged to be introduced to Lena, a café proprietress, a pinkish, slight old woman who reminded me of a crow. This unlikely woman had recently been to Paris, France, to visit her daughter, a somehow startling idea—Nebraska strikes one as a place where it never occurs to the citizens to leave.

  On the way home we stopped at an uninspired-looking grocery store, but it was the only game in town, as it were. Dalva assured me that Mrs. Lundquist did the shopping, but my nervous nature requires snacks, and the refrigerator lacked a certain junkiness I enjoyed. I asked Dalva to guard the trunk, a request she thought amusing since the area is without thieves, or so she said.

  There wasn’t a single interesting item in the store except a jar of pickled “beefalo tongue” (!) from a herd raised by a local rancher and crossbred with cattle, the idea of which seemed a perversion of nature. When I got back outside Dalva was nowhere to be seen, and I rushed toward the Ford to make sure the chest was there. She waved from a pay phone at the service station next door. There is a question why a rich woman would own such a shabby car, the sun-blasted seat so hot on my ass that I barely could sit down. I opened the jar of pickled tongue and took a few bites, wishing I had a cold beer. It turned out she had been talking to a Mexican private detective in Ensenada, still on the unsuccessful track of the abused boy. There is something embarrassing about what the “Modern Living” pages of newspapers refer to as sexual abuse: the rampant id, murderous and nondirectional. The year before I had allowed my daughter to have three of her friends over for a pajama party. When I returned from the cinema and bar they were on the couch eating popcorn and watching a VHS horror film, the sharp odor of cannabis in the air. One of the little chicklettes, a Nordic type named Kristin, wore a nightie that sent me hastily to my room with sweating hair roots. Until that moment I hadn’t considered anyone that age since I was fourteen myself. I did penance by reading Wittgenstein, a pre-Nazi pederast cruising the Berlin and Oxford meat racks for sallow butcher boys, albeit one of the great minds of the century.

  Dalva helped me unload my treasure at the bunkhouse, then went off to make some lunch. To my amazement the moving van had arrived and Frieda Lundquist had unpacked my clothing and books. There was a small refrigerator in the corner with a six-pack of beer and I sipped one slowly, not wanting to blur my senses as I began to turn the pages of one of the journals. The study of history is hard on the system; there is a continual struggle against the infantile wish to have control at least in retrospect. My Ph.D. dissertation, Bitter Ore: The Life and Death of an Ohio Valley Steeltown, passed muster with flying colors, though in fact the work was shot through with fraudulent detail, faked if plausible interviews. Bitter Ore was published by a university press and was well reviewed in academic circles, but there is this notion that I, like a tax cheater, might be found out some day. I had written the whole mess under the influence of booze and Dexedrine, with my blurred and electric peripheri
es avoiding any hard work. My travel grant back to the Ohio Valley was dissipated on Chicago high life. The point is that I have resolved to play this one straight, or as straight as possible. I am not capable of writing an etiology of the tribes of the Great Plains. To be flip, I can’t believe God created history only in order to keep track of human suffering: any intelligent amateur might perceive that the Sioux and other tribes were poor agrarians because they were swindled into receiving the very worst farmland in a political situation not unlike that of contemporary South Africa—“apartheid” may be a Dutch word but it is a universal idea.

  Dalva called me to lunch and away from my morose vision. I couldn’t help babbling about all of this as I ate my salade niçoise and drank my lunch ration of four ounces of white wine. Most of us continue under the ready assumption that we are being understood, and that we understand others, forgetting that the human level of attention isn’t very reliable. Dalva had an uncommon level of attentiveness, which put almost too much pressure on me when I talked, since I have the habit of doing my mental exploring out loud. She listened carefully, paused, then responded. If she smiled there was a good chance I was going to take cannon fire amidships. When I spoke about Indian reservations and apartheid she answered by saying that her social-worker friend in Detroit had joked that local murders had kept pace with those in the entire country of South Africa. I asked her what that had to do with it.

  “Dead is dead, wherever it is. You might as well have given a hoe to a Martian as given a hoe to a Sioux. They were nomadic hunters and gatherers, not farmers. The Ponca and Shawnee were pretty good at crops, but not the Sioux.” She heard something and went to the window above the sink. My heart stirred at her leaning bottom in the tight jeans. I suggested what is lightly known as a “nooner,” and it was then that I got the appalling news that she couldn’t make love to me in this house or the bunkhouse. I was stunned into stuttering.

  “Why the fuck not? How childish.”

  “I just couldn’t do it. We can go for a walk or a ride. There’s a motel down the road.”

  “I didn’t see any motel.”

  “It’s actually about fifty miles away.”

  A large horse trailer pulled into the yard, towed by a pickup. We walked outside and helped a sprightly old man unload four horses; rather, I watched, then was handed ropes attached to two of the horses while Dalva and the old man went inside the trailer to get the others. I knew from my reading that it was important to show these beasts mastery, and to exude no odor of fear, or they would take advantage of it, which they did immediately. One yanked mightily at the rope, which gave my shoulder a harsh jolt, while the other, I hoped playfully, bit my shirt sleeve and began to back away with the shirt in his or her mouth. It was a medievalist’s vision of torture, and the shirt began to give way. I let off with a shout, which seemed to further anger and excite both of them. Dalva and the old man leapt out of the trailer and rescued me, but not my favorite linen shirt. The old man cuffed the bejesus out of the horses, which offered me minimal satisfaction. Dalva laughed hard and I told her to go fuck herself. I walked to the bunkhouse, regretting that I had been so excited in town about the papers that I had forgotten to buy whiskey. If Dalva went off for a ride I intended to sneak in the house for a few hits of her precious brandy, a small recompense for my tattered shirt.

  Back at my desk I picked another Northridge ledger at random. I would not become systematic until I read through them at least once. I could see that much of the material was of a tendentious religious nature, and many of the notes would be of interest only to a botanist. His spleen warmed me for I had not calmed from my brush with horses.

  Sept. 3, 1874

  It should not surprise us that swine are swinish and they are everywhere the Captains of our realm, and that everywhere down to the merest lad Greed thrives. My horse, poor soul drew up lame short of Yankton, and I was given a ride by a family of bone pickers who drew nine dollars per ton at the railhead for buffalo bones. They advised me that in west Kansas the same bones brought twelve dollars a ton. They were so wrathful on this subject that I finally chose to walk overland leading my horse. They had been driven out of Kansas by a gang who, so they said, picked five thousand tons of buffalo bones in a summer’s work. These men shot Comanches on sight for fear of being murdered in their sleep. The bones in the fields block the coulters & moldboards of the steam plows. The bones are used for combs, knife handles, the refining of sugar, and ground for fertilizer. It is indeed a melancholy use for these grand beasts.

  I checked my maps as I read further, noting that Northridge covered over twenty-seven miles in one day, leading his lame horse. Dalva said I walked four miles during my day in the wilds. I rechecked the figures in other passages, discovering that on the summer solstice in 1873 Northridge walked thirty-seven miles between dawn and dark in order to purchase a new horse. These were offered as navigational statements without a tinge of bragging. I intended to call a friend in the athletic department at Stanford who, though he enters Ironmen contests, drinks a great deal of beer. He would be able to verify if these figures were in the realm of probability. I have my own opinion that rigorous exercise packs us far too tightly within our skin, and makes for an unhealthy old age.

  It is interesting to note that in an approximately fifteen-year period up until 1883 an estimated twenty thousand buffalo hunters slaughtered between five and seven million of the animals, pretty much the continent’s entire population. In 1883 Sitting Bull organized the slaughter of a remaining herd of a thousand buffalo by a thousand Sioux braves to prevent the white men from getting them.

  May 29, 1875

  On the fairest day of Spring came upon a family of Swede homesteaders quite lost in the tall prairie grass and had been so they said for two days. This is a common enough occurrence and I guided them south for three days as they were in Treaty land and I feared for their safety. These are a dour though handsome people, and I found them a creek bottom with several springs to build their sod houses, instructing them as best I could on their survival. A land manipulator had taken much of their money, a frequent story, so they had pressed on into empty territory from their unhappiness further East. I warned them sternly away from a hill far to the West as I had surprised a sow grizzly and her cub there, and it was only the quickness of my horse that saved the bear’s life. I am loathe to shoot them as they are revered by all Tribes and only killed under the most special circumstances. Grizzlies are the Leviathans of our land as surely as the great whales own the sea, and the elephant is Lord of Africa. I moved on after a day as I saw the daughter of sixteen bathing in the creek and this sorely distressed my sleep. Not having consorted with harlots or been married I have never seen a woman of my own race completely devoid of clothing. I have vowed not to marry until I complete my work though St. Paul advises it is better to marry than burn. The sting of such threats was lost at Andersonville & I will content myself with women I know among the Sioux. I wondered why I fathered no children among them and a squaw told me they have herbs to prevent parentage until the proper time. I helped the Swedes make out their papers and assured them I would give them to the Gov’t Land Agent of my acquaintance as they are fearful of another swindle. I reassured the father, telling him how to find me and that though I was a man of the cloth I had proven good at correcting injustice. I would as soon thrash a grafter as eat my lunch. You cannot roll over as a plump southern possum to the evil of the frontier. I confess I gave a large Black Hills gold nugget to the aforementioned girl, Aase by name, saying it would provide a dowry, or a winter’s food if the first crop failed.

  I read and made markers until five, barely remembering to smoke and forgetting altogether to drink the beer in the refrigerator. My neck and eyes were sore, so I popped a can and went outdoors. Dalva’s car was gone and the horses were in the corral. There was the childish wish to throw a few stones at the horses out of vengeance, but the two culprits weren’t identifiable from the other two. I walked up to the corral
and the four of them charged the fence, so I leapt back. They stood there staring at me intensely, and I couldn’t help thinking they wanted to make friends. I told them we were going to have to work this thing out.

  Back at the bunkhouse I opened another beer—my circadian rhythms demand a little alcohol late in the afternoon. I was weary for change, so opened my first packet of letters, which were for the year 1879. Much of the correspondence was of a horticultural nature with a firm called Lake Country Nurseries, which was centered in Chicago but had branch offices in La Crosse, Wisconsin; Minneapolis; Sioux Falls; Sioux City; and Council Bluffs. It was evident that each office had an agent who was responding to a series of questions from Northridge. The responses were generally of an apologetic nature and it didn’t take long to determine that Northridge actually owned the nursery business. This fact became specific in the bank correspondence from Chicago, which showed Northridge to have a balance of some thirty-seven thousand dollars in August of 1879, not much in our day, but it must be multiplied by at least a factor of seven to bring it to current terms of buying power. I was astounded that a purported orphan and missionary to the Indians could acquire this much money, despite the enormous market for seeds, plants, root stock, and cuttings for the westward movement of settlers. I was too tired to look for clues and waited impatiently for the arrival of Dalva to ask where the capital came from. It was curious that none of the journal passages mentioned this other life, as if it were a somewhat schizophrenic secret he was trying to keep from himself, though this was fragile speculation on my part.

  Now it was six and I felt a pang of hunger. I was in somewhat of a huff as I walked to the house, bent on a sip of brandy. I gazed at the paintings for a few moments, touching their surfaces under the naïve idea they might be prints. I took a swig of a Hine that was bottled in the thirties, then one of a Calvados put away hastily on hearing Dalva roar down the long drive and into the yard. Passing through the kitchen, I quickly washed my mouth out with orange juice, then went outside.