by Jim Harrison
“I know I don’t have any rights in this matter. The most I dared expect is to find out what happened to him.” Now I felt as if someone had driven a spike in my skull. A fresh drink had arrived but I knew it wouldn’t help.
“Well, when that man called, at first I refused to talk about it, but then he said it was the only child you ever had. That brought back the hospital to me and how when I looked in your room you looked so lovely, and I thought, How can we take this girl’s baby from her? Later I understood no one owns a child, you just raise it. Everyone owns themselves. I keep wondering why he said he knew you. Many of our friends always thought he was arrogant and brash but he was quite shy in matters he really cared about. Maybe after he looked for you and found you he was just too shy to say anything. That must be it.”
“When he calls again will you tell him I want desperately to meet him?” I had begun to cry now out of utter frustration.
“Of course I will. Oh my God, but he could be such a bastard. But not about this sort of thing. He probably thought you might not want to know him.” Now she began to cry and gulped her drink. “How awful for you.”
“Please tell me a little bit more about him. I’m very grateful.” I dried my eyes and felt a specific relief, thinking, My God, he was looking for me, and he found me, though he didn’t say anything. He said to himself, That is my mother.
“He went to several colleges. . . .” She tried to lighten her voice. “First he was going to be a veterinarian, then a biologist, then a rancher. After the dude ranch he began to care for horses, but not the equitation sort. He started at Macalester, his dad’s school, then over in Lincoln, then to Michigan State to study cattle. It was hard to keep track. He got in trouble in Mexico for resisting arrest but his father got him out of that, though it was expensive. His father died five years ago, but just before that he used his political influence to get him into the Peace Corps in Guatemala. But he got kicked out of the Peace Corps, and I received a postcard from Alaska. The last time he called he was in Seattle. His father was very strict and orthodox with the girls, but he was never hard on John, though we never called him that. I was going to say, You’ll have to meet him because I can’t really describe him. It sounds funny but I know it isn’t.”
I began to phrase another question, but it became apparent there was nothing more I could ask that wouldn’t make it harder for both of us. It was the kind of silence that hurts your ears. She reached across the table and put her hand on mine. Two of her knuckles were swollen with arthritis and she caught my glance.
“I used to be ladies’ champion and now I can’t hold a club but I’m teaching my granddaughter. Life is goddamned awful, isn’t it? Everything that consoles us can be taken away, and how can I say this to you? He’ll call me again some day and I’ll beg him, I’ll force him to come see you. I’ll say, Go see her or I’ll shoot myself. I promise that. But now you must tell me who the father was. I’ve always wondered that.”
“He was a half-breed Sioux boy named Duane Stone Horse. I loved him but he died a long time ago.”
We both drew in as much breath as we could and said goodbye.
I was a full hundred miles out of Omaha on my five-hour drive home before I remembered that I hadn’t stopped to see Michael. I had driven quite near the University of Nebraska Medical Center and he simply hadn’t occurred to me. I absolved myself of neglect by remembering he said he wanted no visitors and, anyway, Frieda was going to retrieve him in two days.
The last hour of the trip home was in the dark. I was drowsy and hungry with all of the anguish of the day dissipated and replaced by the not very well-founded faith that I would see him some day. I even drove more slowly than usual as if I were being more cautious in my wait for the day to come. The adoptive mother was not the sort of person I would have liked on any immediate, social basis—I might have judged her as brittle and snotty—but by the end of our meeting she seemed rather grand. She had said nothing of herself other than that she was a lawyer’s wife and the mother of three, but then I hadn’t talked about myself either. It made me curious about her background. My thoughts drifted off to my gynecologist friend who told me his first wife had been a call girl. She had helped him through medical school and his internship and the unfortunate marriage had been his idea.
Back home I cleaned up after and played with the pup, made a drink, and called Sam at the cabin in Buffalo Gap. It was reassuring at this late hour to find his voice light and playful. He said that Naomi and her young scientist friend, Nelse, had stopped by and they had had dinner together. Naomi was going to come home for a few days but Nelse, who had “cowboyed” a little, was going to stay and help him build a set of corrals, also recaulk and varnish the cabin. I found myself almost begging him to stay there for a while and promising I’d be up within a few days after getting Michael settled. He said not to worry, that he liked the place so well he’d stay for a few weeks or as long as he could earn his “keep.”
I lay down on the couch in the den too tired to eat and looked at the mail. There was a letter from Michael and I hoped it wouldn’t further addle me, though the chances were remote that I could be reached in any meaningful sense after the day I had spent. I had been thinking of the words of a song that had been on the radio when I turned into the drive. It was a Neil Young and was something about being a “miner for a Heart of Gold.” I had heard the song a dozen times over the years and it had always made me uncomfortable. It didn’t occur to me until I drove into the yard that it was the song that they kept playing on my first night in Key West. The music was so imponderably plaintive that it was understandable that I forced it from my mind.
Dearest D.,
They tell me I am repairing well, though more in body than in mind. Brain repairs are inappropriate at this time. The senescence of quasi-mental health might deter my total immersion in the insanity of history. Thus I have a purpose, unlike when I lost my beloved wife because I was simply too stupid to seek help, afraid to lose the personal drama of a craziness that was, all in all, rather literary compared with that of history.
It is barely daylight and I’ve been remembering an evening when we sat on your balcony in Santa Monica. You had been telling me how your grandfather had been born in a tipi near Harney Peak in South Dakota in 1886 and that his own father had gone basically insane at about that time and until the winter of 18g1, when he moved his family to where you live now. You said it was the Dawes Act that pushed him over the edge. I’ve been reading The Dawes Act and the Allotment of Indian Lands by D. S. Otis, which was reedited by Prucha. I won’t bore you with details but wanted you to know some of my thinking on the matter.
Northridge was a witness to the twilight of the gods, beside which the Wagnerian constructs are pissant silliness. He was right there when it became dark, absolutely dark. He lived among people who talked to God and who thought “God” talked back to them through the mouthpiece of earth herself. There is no need, of course, to romanticize the Sioux or any other tribe. In the prism of history it is apparent that they all were destroyed because they were “bad for business.” Naturally we were and are Americans to ourselves, but to them we were perfect “Germans” and they obviously felt much the same way that the Poles and French later felt before the Teutonic conquering horde. The Indians were rather decorative at war. Maybe it was the somewhat Newtonian principle that a nation at war tends to remain at war, and after our “Civil” pursuit the Indians fell victim to a mopping-up operation, the sort of thing we tried later in Korea and Vietnam, and are presently aiming at in Central America. All the machinery was there, left over from the Civil War, so why not use it? This is truly the fatalism of a primitive species.
I didn’t intend the dourness of this note. To be honest, I have been unfaithful to you with a nurse called, inelegantly, Debbie. She’s from Iowa and brought me (from my recipe) a quart of homemade beef broth with plenty of garlic in it, certainly the best thing that ever passed through a hospital straw. My belly has so subsi
ded that for the first time in memory I can see my wienie while standing up! It remains unattractive though useful. Did anyone ever tell you that you were rather scary? I’m not saying you can’t be nice or pleasant, but you’ve always frightened me a bit, and I suspect all your other men friends have felt it. I’m saying this because without alcohol I’m dreaming a great deal and you always appear as somewhat feral and predatory in my dreams. The culture doesn’t prepare us for lionesses! See you soon, my love.
Michael
P.S. Greet the geese for me.
The last paragraph amused me. Way back in college Charlene and I concocted something that started as a game. One Saturday afternoon we began refusing to act as litmus paper for the moods of the men we encountered, and kept a journal for several months of their reactions. We were thought of as “twin bitches” for a while, and the pickings were slim indeed, mostly the shy, bookish, and somewhat masochistic errand-boy types. Then, though we were only sophmores, we begun hanging out with painters and writers who were graduate students and who didn’t find our behavior offensive. I suspect that neither of us ever totally abandoned this parlor game and that was what Michael was referring to. Charlene enjoyed playing the queen bee while I was more interested in the notion that the protective coloring girls are taught to adopt seemed to work to their disadvantage. We both felt like pioneers, and though we had no artistic talent we thought we were in the avant-garde of new emotions.
Frieda called at 6:00 A.M. to say she couldn’t come to work. Last evening Lundquist had been taken to the local clinic, a five-bed affair for minor illnesses that had been half underwritten by our family. He had a urinary infection and after being catheterized and put to bed he had disappeared. She had been up most of the night looking for him with the deputies and he had been discovered sleeping with Roscoe in the doghouse, which was a marvelous, ample structure with a weathervane and a birdhouse on the roof. Fearing death, Lundquist had walked the fifteen miles home cross-country at night. He had proved to the deputies and the doctor that he could pee, which had been the problem. Would I mind keeping an eye on him this evening because she needed to leave for Omaha to check Michael out of the hospital the following morning? Of course not, I said, looking forward to time spent in private with the old man.
When I got out of bed my muscles were sore as if I had spent the previous day hiking or putting in fence, or had been thrown from a horse. It was barely after six and the morning was cool and clear. Peach was staring up at my window from the corral and I called out to her, which sent her wheeling in a circle, upsetting the geese. I put on jeans and a sweater and went downstairs to the yodeling of the wakened pup, whom I put outside and watched scooting to the goose cage, where he sat down in puzzlement. I turned on the coffee maker and wished that Naomi were there to talk about yesterday. I went outside and walked through the dewy grass in my bare feet, wondering if my son had driven into the barnyard when I wasn’t there, or had seen me on the street in town, in the grocery store, walking on the beach in Santa Monica. Or in the British Pub between Ocean Avenue and Second Street. I caught myself short when I hoped in retrospect I had behaved well while being watched.
I put the pup—to be called Ted, I had decided—in the old kennel beside the barn, then rode Peach up and down the half-mile-long driveway bareback, regretting the lack of a saddle when she shied at a flushing pheasant. My ex-brother-in-law loved to point out that you could pay ten grand for a horse, go for a ride, and if an empty ten-cent potato-chip bag blew across the path, you could die. I told him—admitting that it was true—that people, cats, and horses liked to imagine threats and react to imaginary dangers. I reminded myself as the cock pheasant rattled off through the brush and I was clinging to Peach that I meant to stay alive. I would be more alert and less foolhardy.
I drove in to Lena’s Café and went in through the back door to find her in the kitchen. She embraced me when she heard the news that there was a chance I might see my son, or my “child” as she put it. After she said “child” we looked at each other for a moment and began to laugh. We continued to talk as she managed a dozen breakfast orders at once at the stove. She began her day at four in the morning, then closed after lunch. There was no transient business and people ate supper at home barring a special occasion that justified a long drive. Charlene wanted her to retire but to Lena the café was her life and now in her mid-sixties she still had an eye out for the perfect boyfriend. She liked to point to a framed award signed by a former governor that named hers the best chicken-fried steak in the great state of Nebraska. In the grand area between New York and California people are inordinately fond of giving each other trophies and awards.
Karen came into the kitchen in a prim blue uniform to pick up an order. She was startled to see me and blushed deeply. She looked up at the fan above the stove with a studied curiosity. Lena was kind enough to take Karen’s order out into the café.
“I guess all I can say is I’m sorry it happened,” she said.
“You’re not even ten percent at fault. He should know better but he doesn’t.”
“Is he OK? Dad has this bad temper. I told him I never did it with him . . . .”
I shushed her and told her I hoped it would work out well. I turned over a pile of fried potatoes that looked like they might burn, feeling the wooden handle of the big spatula that had worn to Lena’s grip. Karen said she was on “pins and needles” because she would hear that afternoon if the agency was flying her out to L. A. for more test photos or perhaps a contract. Looking at her I suspected the answer would be yes. I told her to let me know and I would alert Ted to keep an eye out for her. It was a neighborly gesture; she couldn’t really be protected but I sensed a streak of her father’s meanness that would help. All Ted could do would be to determine the level at which she was initially taken advantage of—models tended to prefer the easy confidence of rock musicians and drug wholesalers. Karen thanked me and Lena returned to say that the sheriff needed to talk to me. He had seen my car in the alley—I had forgotten that in a small town every auto bears its owner’s signature.
The sheriff and a deputy stood when I approached. They both looked tired from the Lundquist escapade. The deputy felt that Lundquist had missed his calling and could have made a “mint” building doghouses for rich folks. His food was nearly hidden by catsup. The sheriff gave me some papers for Michael to sign, saying he was glad the affair was over without anyone’s getting really hurt, a euphemism I decided not to respond to. All the silverware in the room had stopped clinking and I couldn’t help flashing a smile at the business folk pausing above their grits.
I stood a full ten minutes in front of the bank waiting for it to open, wishing I had eaten some fried food at Lena’s. In the cool morning air I could still smell the kitchen on my sweater. I was on the sunny west side and stared at the Edward Hopper shadows on the east side of the street. I waved at an old man opening the hardware store, remembering him in his early middle age when he helped Grandfather train bird dogs on pen-raised quail. Each year the life on the street was sparser and all the storefronts needed a little paint and repairs. There hadn’t been a truly good year for farmers since the grain embargo seven years before, and the beef business was a victim of change in eating habits and bad foreign-trade policies. It occurred to me that I might see it become a virtual ghost town in my lifetime but then there had been bad times before. There were very few new cars around and even the water tower needed a coat of paint. Lena said that of the eighteen graduating seniors only two were staying in town, and one of those was semi-retarded. The UPS had an opening in the county and there were three hundred applicants. There was work for the capable way over in Omaha or Lincoln but it was hard for people to accept that their land, or their houses in town, had sunk to half the previous value.
The bank opened and I fetched the second trunk with an air of busyness to avoid the socializing that would bring about a discussion of hard times. I no longer knew any local people well enough to be asked fo
r a loan, but I was aware Naomi had somewhat extended herself in this direction. I suspect rich people tend to live with each other in community compounds to avoid these unsecured loans, and the bruised consciences of seeing friends and acquaintances making the slow trek into insolvency. In farm communities people often carry each other well past hopelessness. I had noticed repeatedly there were fewer children playing on the streets than there used to be, and when I drove past the ball diamond on the way out of town there weren’t enough boys to make two teams so they settled for some girls.
A few hours later, on Naomi’s porch swing I realized the degree to which I had been knocked off balance by the event in Omaha. My skin began to prickle and my mouth grew dry. Nothing would be the same again but then I hadn’t wanted it to be, as if nothing could be preserved past that point unless it was vital. Only myths last, my professor had said, because myths are vital. I hadn’t thought much about that. What did it mean that I was forty-five and barren two-thirds of my life? I talked to Paul about it in Mexico but knew that after that first was lost I wouldn’t have borne another anyway. At the diamond the boy hit the ball into the air and it stayed in the air ever since they began playing the game. There is always the first horse, usually a pony. The first dog. The first lover, real or mostly imagined. Now on the porch it was as if there was too much oxygen in the green air of June, and the son had doubtless driven down this road, perhaps glanced through the porch screen to see Naomi sitting here talking to the dead in the evening. It was too large to be understood, it was not meant to be understood except to sense how large it was as if we were particles of our own universe, each of us a part of a more intimate constellation. The reach from the porch to three crows sleeping in a dead cottonwood down the road was infinite. So were father, mother, son and daughter, lover, horse and dog. I was on the porch on a hot afternoon in June, and before me on hundreds of June afternoons Sioux girls looked for birds’ eggs here, buffalo whelped, prairie wolves roamed, and far before that—in prehistory we’re told—condors with wingspreads of thirty feet coasted on dense thermals in the hills along the Niobrara.
