by Jim Harrison
Naomi fetched me promptly from the enchanted forest. She was slightly irritated with Dalva, who had driven the old convertible and had thus been delayed by the rain. I had noticed among my relatives that a woman can be sixty and her mother eighty, and the sixty-year-old will still be treated very much like a daughter.
“I don’t for the life of me understand why you consented to do this,” she laughed, hitting the big puddles on the gravel road with abandon.
“I felt it was an obligation. I mean, Dalva implied it was an honor.” The puddles brought the idea of a mudbath to mind. There was the same flutter in my guts as when someone tells you that you don’t look all that well.
“That girl is never beyond a practical joke. She’s not mean about it, though. I’d say you were in for it. Those boys at the Rotary can give an outsider a hard time. They like to probe but they’re not vicious.”
“I’m tempted to ask you to stop the car, but, then, I can handle anything short of a lynch mob. I presume they serve drinks.”
“Wrong. No one drinks around here at lunch.” She let the import of this push me to panic, then reached into her purse for two small, airline bottles of booze. “One now, and one for a trip to the bathroom later.”
“I owe you a million bucks.”
“It only lasts an hour. About the same time as a tooth extraction.” She flashed a smile.
1 had no idea what they actually did in these organizations, for which there are often little signposts on the road entering small towns: Rotary; Kiwanis, Chamber of Commerce, Knights aof Columbus, Masons, Lions, American Legion, VFW, Moose, Eagles, and the Elks. That’s all I could think of. Why weren’t there Bears?
Afterward, at the Lazy Daze, I felt the hour had been the equivalent of a fifteen-round fight. The big back room of Lena’s Café was stuffed to the rafters. I had guessed, which proved correct, that getting lost, public drunkenness, the little wreck with Lundquist, all by an ostensibly prominent person, would help build a crowd. It had also become clear that the Northridges represented a unique fiefdom in the area, and everyone is perennially curious about the rich.
The first shock was seeing Karen as the waitress for the head table. I wasn’t really seeing all that well because of nerves, but there she was, clear as day, and giving me a wink. The sea of faces at long tables were an even mixture of reddish and pale, those whose work took them out of doors, and those who manned the stores and offices. The master of ceremonies was a big, jovial soul, a farm-implement dealer named Bill. He slapped me on the back and whispered, “You Easterners always give us a lot of guff.” I told him I was a Westerner, which didn’t seem to record. Here is a skit of this homely movie:
All stood and sang “America the Beautiful.” Followed by “Rotary.”
“R-O-T-A-R-Y That spells Rotary;
R-O-T-A-R-Y is known on land and sea;” etc.
I was given a songbook but my heart wasn’t in it. I noticed that, other than Lena and the waitresses, Naomi was the only woman in attendance. It was a stag club, and back in feminist San Francisco the ladies would have torn these guys a new asshole. I must admit I felt a great deal of inscrutable good will, although there was the overlying sense that one better not break the rules, written or unwritten, of the locale.
I didn’t listen to my introduction, because I was watching Karen pass out bowls of iceberg lettuce covered by pinkish dressing. She attracted a lot of shifty-eyed, admiring looks. I had “telephoned her stomach,” as the witty French say. Suddenly the whole room rose and bellowed “HELLO, MICHAEL!” It was thunderous and my bowels loosened a bit. They all sat down and stared at me, amused at my confusion. Good ole Bill gestured for me to begin.
I began with a witticism that history hopes to create reasons for what we’ve already done. No reaction. I went on to talk about the Turner Thesis, Charles Beard, Bernard De Voto, Henry Adams, Brooks Adams, Toynbee’s adversary theory, and so on. No reaction. Sweat trickled down my chest and thighs. Holy shit, I thought, I better get dramatic. My first real salvo was that the entire westward movement between the Civil War and the turn of the century was a nasty pyramid scheme concocted by the robber barons of the railroads and a vastly corrupt U. S. Congress. The audience becomes perky, which encourages me to go too far. The Civil War was so vicious because the frontier was dead and all the yokels, hopped on murderous adrenaline, were stewing for a fight. Murmurs in the crowd. The settlers came out and swindled and swiped the land treatied to the Indians, protected by a government drunk on power, money, and booze. When the settlers needed more fuel for their greed they used Christianity, and the idea that the Indians weren’t using the land. If your neighbor leaves his land fallow, grab it. I saw Naomi frown at the back of the room but there was nowhere to go at this point. History judges us by how we behave in victory. I added a lot of apocalyptic blather on how we have extended this general swinishness into our current foreign policy, then sat down to generous but polite applause. The lectern was still in reach, so I poured my second miniature booze into my glass of water and gulped it down. MC Bill caught this and twinkled. Everyone else had begun eating, and I poked at my traditional chicken à la king. Bill asked me if I was willing to “field” some questions, so I got back to my sweating feet. A goofy fellow in a pale-blue suit raised his hand. “One thing I don’t like about history is that it doesn’t deal with the future. . . .” There were moans at this non sequitur and he became flustered. “What I don’t get is, where was all those immigrants supposed to go?” I admitted this was a good question but I was describing what happened, rather than what was supposed to happen. A rather smartly dressed man (the only lawyer in town, also the prosecutor) tried to catch me with a question about the farm problem in 1887. I said when a Nebraska farmer sells a bushel of wheat for twenty-five cents minus freight, and the middleman in Chicago or New York gets a dollar and a half, it proves that times never change. This brought pleasant applause. There were a number of inane questions before the mood darkened with a question about Jimmy Carter, whom I tried to defend, then a baiting query about Central America, Nicaragua in particular. I replied, Why should we be worried about a country with only five elevators? This brought mass confusion. Only five elevators in the whole country? Was I sure? Yes, I had been there. Of course this was a lie—I had actually got my information from a copy of my daughter’s Rolling Stone. Didn’t the president say these communists were only a day’s drive from Texas? I replied that how was a standing army of thirty thousand commies going to get by three million Texas deer-hunters armed to the teeth? This brought hearty applause. The last question was idiotically poignant, and asked by the oldest man in the audience. “A lot of our parents felt that old Northridge was on the wrong side of the Indian Wars. What do you say to that? With apologies to Naomi here, who is anyway a Jensen, some folks think that the first Northridge was a bona-fide lunatic. And if you think these drunken Sioux are so wonderful, why don’t you go up to Pine Ridge and try living with them? Anyway, you can’t fight history.” There was a moderate amount of cheering, and a tender sense that “drunken Sioux” was a slight against my own behavior in the locale.
I pulled a rhetorical trick and turned my back to the crowd to collect my thoughts. The vision of a hamburger with fried onions and a cold beer passed before my eyes. I stayed with my back turned until I felt their sharpening nervousness, somewhat in the manner in which the great Nijinsky had become a human statue.
“Of course you can’t fight history, but men of conscience occasionally help make it. You certainly don’t fight or make history patting each other’s asses at business lunches, or by the time-honored practice of buying cheap and selling dear. But, then, didn’t Northridge become what all you folks really want? I mean rich, quite rich, crazy rich. How would you behave if you and your relatives had spent the last hundred years in a rural slum, an arid concentration camp? I never said the Sioux were weeping-Jesus white Christians. I’m saying that history teaches us that your forefathers behaved like hundreds of thousands
of pack-rat little Nazis sweeping across Europe. That’s all. You won the war. Don’t sweat it. I’ve never been to Pine Ridge. I’ll go if you drive. I’ll buy a case of whiskey and we’ll have a party and you can give them a sermon on how they’re behaving like so many redskin Leon Spinkses . . . .” I was just getting cranked up but MC Bill quickly adjourned the meeting as a response to a wave of moans and gasps. The upshot was that my last questioner, the old man, was a retired Methodist minister, a leading citizen, a town father, that sort of thing. Naomi led me out as swiftly as possible, not without some sparse handshakes and merriment by several of the younger men. There were also a few older types who slapped my back and guffawed as if I were a great stand-up comedian.
I made a beeline to the Lazy Daze, followed by Naomi and the owner-editor of the newspaper, who wanted to clarify some details from my interview with Karen. On my sweat-soaked way out of Lena’s Café, Karen had been standing with several other waitresses and had given me another winning wink. For some reason I thought of Gene Pitney’s song “Town Without Pity.” The lassie could make for a real afternoon mood change if it were only possible. Instead, my solace was to be an immediate double Scotch and beer chaser. Naomi and the editor entered laughing. The thought that Dalva had set me up for the whole thing was a spear in my side.
“You’re the biggest news since we were runner-up in state basketball three years ago,” the editor said.
I glanced over his shoulder at the passel of burghers gathered on the sidewalk outside of Lena’s, looking across the street at the bar with a specific envy. Back to the cash registers, dipshits! I thought. But, then, curiously, there had been enough smiles to tell me that the frontier amusement with a real mess was intact. Naomi said a curious thing—in forty years of living near this community she had never been in the bar! It was frowned on for schoolteachers. If they wished to drink in public there was a lounge-restaurant in a town forty miles to the east. The editor, who was a younger fellow educated in Lincoln, said that carloads of teachers would go over on Friday afternoons, get drunk, and eat two-pound steaks. It was an attractive idea.
“Karen told me you’re going to help her become a model,” the editor said, with a ludicrous wink, and an elbow in my ribs.
Back to the safety of Sherwood Forest, or some such, though Dalva is a closer reach to Maid Marian than I am to Robin Hood, I suppose. When we came in she was standing by the kitchen table next to a bowl of half-eaten cereal, of all things, staring out the window. I went to her for the embrace I craved and felt I deserved, and couldn’t stop my momentum when she turned, looking utterly fatigued and haggard.
“Jesus, you look like you’ve been shacked up with a detachment of U. S. Cavalry.”
“Please shut up, Michael.” She avoided my embrace and went to her mother. “Rachel died. She said on the phone that she was sick but not that she was dying.” Now she was weeping and Naomi was attempting to comfort her. My face burned with embarrassment. She came over to where I was trying to slide out the door, took my arm, and bussed my cheek. “I need to sleep for a while.” I said I was sorry Rachel had died and left.
Out in the emotional safety of the bunkhouse it occurred to me that I didn’t know who Rachel was. I remembered a Northridge passage wherein a group of young Sioux warriors were practicing a game or rite they had learned from a “crazy society” among the Cheyenne. The warriors stood in a circle and fired hunting arrows straight up in the air, then waited fearlessly to see if anyone would be injured or die from the behavior, which was ostensibly religious in nature. I took off my damp and sorry professorial clothes and went into the shower to cleanse myself of my last two arrows, my Rotary speech and then my comment to Dalva.
Out of the shower, I put on my farmer costume in obeisance to an actor’s impulse to feel different. I glanced at my notes on a word and page count and figured I had looked at about ten percent of the journals from 1865 to 1877. I had not touched the trunk in the bank vault, which carried on from there. I picked up the second and last volume of 1877—a sparse year for the journals-and saw my marker on a place where Northridge described his dream of dead Aase, and the beating death of his friend White Tree.
Aug. 28, 1877
It is curious that my dream of Aase wherein she entered my body has relieved me of so much of the suffering of mourning this past week. One dream wakes one from another & it is as if I can see the world further and in more detail. I am not sure what has occurred here. I deduce that each mourner of a beloved is buried in thoughts of his uniqueness. This thought reminds me of the wild goose I shot for dinner one day up on the Missouri not far from Fort Pierre. The mate of the goose circled the area for two days & I moved my camp to rid myself of this melancholy sight. Sam Creekmouth assured me that this phenomenon is also true of wolves. I have spent a year where my soul was buried with her body & I was of no use to the people whom I came to help in the time of their great peril. Though it has been twelve years now the memory of our own war is still violent & fresh enough that I wished in my grief to keep my distance from their own. . . .
Northridge is referring at this time to the extraordinary last six months of “freedom” for the Sioux and other tribes of the Great Plains: they won against Reynolds on the Powder River, won again under Crazy Horse at Rosebud Creek, and against Custer on the Little Big Horn; after which came the horror of defeat at Slim Buttes, Bull Knife, the Battle of Lame Deer, and the murder of Sioux chiefs at Fort Keogh. These six months allowed the warriors to relive their glory, also the doom their leaders had foreseen for so many years. Not much more remained for them after the surrender of the last remaining band of Oglalas under Crazy Horse, another six months later, at Fort Robinson.
Aug. 29-Sept. 5, 1877
I awake well before daylight at last conscious of my obligation to my dead brother White Tree—he had seen a birch tree in a dream but never in reality. I must look after his widow who is called Small or Shy Bird—her name in Sioux means a bird who sitsrather deliberately on a branch & regards all the activities of man with suspicion and amusement.
I am packed by mid-morning & say my prayers under the oak tree where she died a year ago. Kneeling as I knelt then I see her on the cot I made where she wished to spend her days out of doors, wrapped in a blanket despite the heat of the sun. We talked and I read to her from the Bible & the Sonnets of Shakespeare which she preferred. On that day I was disturbed as she saw a large bird I could not see so at last I admitted I saw it to relieve her concern. She said the bird was bringing the thunder. There were no clouds & I went down to the spring for a fresh pitcher of cold water. When I came back she reached out for me & we embraced & I felt her last breath against my ear. I sat there with her until early evening when indeed the lightning & thunder arrived. I let the rain fall on us, the first rain in a month, until we were wet & baptized anew & then I carried her body into the cabin.
I make the ride to Fort Robinson which is normally three days in less than two. For reasons that are not clear to me I feel panic & have strapped a pistol to my leg I purchased from a fearful man I met on the trail who is headed back to the East. He says there is a sense of ugliness & despair at Fort Robinson as all the Sioux are to be moved from Nebraska up to the Missouri where they do not wish to go. He expects a great battle and I assure him there are no more free Sioux to do battle. He says he sent his family to North Platte from his cabin & ranch near Buffalo Gap in June not wanting them scalped by the savages. I say I know the area well & there is a glint in his eye as he offers to sell me his section of land for a hundred dollars. He shows me the deed & I make the purchase & he is off at a gallop as if I intended to change my mind.
At Fort Robinson the Sioux are encamped a few miles to the south of headquarters on the creek, but I am told I am not allowed to visit them. When I remonstrate I am arrested and taken to the small stockade and jail. By great and incomprehensible coincidence the Lieutenant in charge there is my friend from long ago at Cornell whose Quaker father last summer told me was sold
iering in the West. He dismisses the men who arrested me & we walk outside. He begs me not to tell that he did not serve his country in the Civil War. I look at him as if he were daft, saying that I am ashamed to have accepted gold to take his place & the secret is safe with me. I explain my obligation to White Tree’s widow & he sends two men for her. He tells me he is without sympathy for my efforts among the Sioux whom he will continue to help destroy, but feels somewhat bound by our past friendship. Small Bird is brought still soiled with the ashes of mourning & we are sent on our way after I have extracted a letter of safe passage from him. Since there are others in view he does not shake my hand when we depart.
Sept. 8, 1877
I have taken Small Bird on a two-day ride up to Buffalo Gap where I have purchased the cabin & property which is in reasonable repair. She had begged me to return to Fort Robinson to retrieve her mother who is not well. I would rather not do so but the memory of my own mother when she was ill spurs me toward my duty.
My classmate the Lieutenant is not pleased to see me again & smells of whiskey. The jail is hot & full of flies. He looks at papers & says Small Bird’s mother is recently dead of cholera. I do not believe him but have no recourse. He points to a large darkened spot on the floor covered with flies & says it is there that Crazy Horse died the evening before after trying to escape. On orders he was bayoneted by another Indian. He wears a smile as he offers his condolences. My head grows dizzy & I kneel and touch the blood-moistened floor. I say a prayer & he tells me to get out. Two guards escort me out & to my horse. Far off a mile or so to the South I see the Sioux encampment and ride toward there though there are shouts & gunfire, whether directly at me or into the air I do not know. I look for faces I know among the mourners & Sam Creekmouth tells me that it is true. I see Worm, Black Shawl. He Dog, and Touch the Clouds but do not approach them. All the Sioux are to be moved to the Missouri immediately. Two boys run up to us to warn me that the detachment is mounting near the stockade perhaps to come arrest me. I mount & ride through the Sioux camp to the South at all possible speed & thankful that I am on my best horse & the day is darkening. I circle to the West, then North toward Warbonnet Creek, discovering their pursuit to be short-lived. At nightfall I feel the coward in my heart for not drawing the pistol and shooting the man. Before I sleep I find I cannot ask forgiveness for this impulse so opposed as it is to my waning faith.
