Dalva

by Jim Harrison

  As he finished his story Lundquist asked me if it was a secret he should have kept, and I said no. Then he remembered why he had been sent over in the first place—Professor Michael was feeling “low” and Frieda didn’t know how to handle it. Naomi was gone and Frieda didn’t know the number where I was. He got up abruptly and literally dashed away. By the time I looked out the window he was out in the pasture on the backway to Naomi’s with Roscoe over his shoulder. My first impulse was to call but I knew she wouldn’t be able to talk about the problem if he was in the kitchen when she answered the phone. I took a quick shower and dressed, noticing that all the photos on the dresser failed to cause any heaviness in my chest. They were men and smiling, all quite as dead as I would be some day.

  Michael was sitting on the porch swing with the pup sleeping on his lap. He had his clipboard and legal pad beside him and he didn’t turn when I walked out on the porch. In the kitchen an utterly exasperated Frieda had given me a speech with indications that it had been prepared.

  “It starts when Naomi leaves yesterday to meet her friend in Lincoln to do library work. But he’s already blue. He writes down he can’t sleep so he works all night and wanders around in the yard with the pup all day though he’s been sitting there three goddamn hours and won’t eat his soup. He won’t talk to me because I wouldn’t drive him to Denver to pick up his car. I called the dealer for him and he was upset that what you paid to get the car fixed was an arm and a leg. I said that was no big deal to you. It’s like with Gus—when you do something for these guys they act like you were squeezing their nuts too hard. So early this morning I hear him crying and I think, This has gone too far for me. I drag him over near the phone with his tablet and we call this doctor in Omaha because I think he sure as hell needs nerve medicine. The doctor agrees, and this is what it is.” She gave me a slip of paper with the name of a rather radical tranquilizer. I immediately called a Grand Island pharmacist so he could put it on the afternoon bus. The pharmacist knew our family and my background so let the scrip go without a doctor’s call.

  Then I went out on the porch and sat beside him on the swing, thinking if he could just babble on as usual this depression might not have happened. I put my hand on the pup’s head. He yawned and went back to sleep. Tears were coming down Michael’s cheek so I stood and wiped them with my blouse. He tried to smile and I sat down and put my arm around him, and then he began weeping in earnest.

  “Michael, perhaps you are trying to do too much at once and there’s not an appropriate net. I think it’s admirable you’ve tried to stop drinking but maybe you should wait until you can talk. You could go to a clinic for a week or so then because you’ve already proved you can do it. The pills will be here this evening and I want you to take them for a few days even though you might not be able to work. I’ll take you for walks and rides and Ruth will be here this weekend. You said you like her. Remember when I told you that she said you were sexy in sort of a dirty, European way? I’ll make you the best purees in the world . . . .” Now my shoulder and a breast were wet with his tears. “I have some sleeping pills around here that I want you to take now because you’re too tired to think. When you wake up we’ll talk again.”

  I guided him into the music room where a single bed had been set up beside his desk, as per his request. I went for the pills and water, and when I got back he was under the sheet with the pup beside his ‘head on the pillow. He took the pills and pointed to a manuscript on the desk, gesturing for me to take it. I kissed his clammy forehead and he ran a hand up my thigh under my skirt in a show of spirit. His eyes were those of a frightened teenager.

  Dearest Dalva,

  My personality doesn’t seem to be panning out as sober, but I’ve been thinking my personality doesn’t really count at all, at least in the form I supposed it to have. It certainly is interfering with the work at hand, for both the work and the personality seem to want to change their dimensions, their peripheries, moment by moment. I have added considerably to my definition of “short circuit”—if I fall asleep at 3:00 A.M., I wake up at 3:15 A.M. eager for work. The span between my manic and depressive stages can be hours, minutes, seconds, milliseconds. I must agree with the great Russian that to be too acutely conscious is to be diseased. But not in the way I would have agreed in the old days (two weeks ago!) when I would awake brooding on matters of dark import and it was all mostly a distortion, the biochemical effects of drinking. Unlike yourself I’m not very Oriental, and there must be more to me than what I do and what I perceive. Right now I couldn’t tell you just what it is at gunpoint. I think it was in the fourth grade, when we were studying science, that I told the teacher I hoped to discover brand-new birds and animals, and she said, “They’ve all been discovered. Just learn your lessons.” A few minutes ago I dialed my ex-wife to hear her voice, then, of course, wept because I couldn’t speak to her, though I’ve been legally enjoined from attempting to do so. After that I dialed my daughter, Laurel, who said, “Is that you, Bob? Get fucked! No one’s here but me. Leave me alone, Bob,” which offered a little comic relief.

  To be honest, while you were away I found the journal you were keeping from me. I searched your house, which was admittedly shameless. At the last moment the journal, hidden as it was in your underwear drawer, was almost safe since the sight of those dainties swept me away. I won’t ask for forgiveness because none can be given for my heinous curiosity, but to set you at rest, I won’t mention any of the bodies (eight, I think) or artifacts in my study. I can handle Northridge’s efforts at an “underground railway” for pursued warriors by merely saying he hid them in a root cellar. Naturally, with your permission I’d like to include the splendid yarn of the lieutenant and two subalterns, but I could say the bodies were pitched into the Niobrara. I am at your mercy in this matter. In any event, I reborrowed kind Frieda’s Ram and returned the journal to its cotton nest. Naturally there was the temptation to go down to the basement with a crowbar but I stopped myself. Another consideration was my cast and that I am quite frightened of such things—as a child some proselytizing Catholic kids held me down and made me kiss the rosary and cross (like the Spanish did to the Indians of Central and South America!).

  So I read the second trunk in a little more than seventy-two hours, almost straight through. I snuck a few of Frieda’s diet pills out of her purse while she was in the bathroom. It was what the sports pages call a blistering pace, and I fear my mind was blistered in the process. What follows are some key passages with my gloss, to show you the nature of my current thinking on our project.

  At this point I was interrupted in my reading by Frieda asking for the night off now that I was home. Gus wanted to take her to dinner for the first time in a year on the proceeds of an old coin he had found in a deserted farmhouse. He was a member of a club of mostly indigent, middle-aged goofies called the Fortune Finders who traveled around the county with their cheap metal-detectors. They wore Fortune Finder T-shirts that never quite covered their bellies and Olympia beer caps. I said yes to Frieda’s request but asked her to see if Lena could run out with Michael’s prescription and stay for dinner. Frieda was showing specific signs of wear. She told me that Naomi was fine because she didn’t take Michael “personally,” another tribute to Naomi’s ability to handle anyone short of Charlie Starkweather. On her way out Frieda told me that Michael had asked for beef marrow for dinner because he had read in his “old-timey stuff” that it was good for you. The bones were in the fridge and ready for my attention.

  When she roared out the driveway scattering the usual gravel across the lawn I went to the kitchen thinking of marrow and gold, the poached marrow the Sioux fed themselves and the French still do. The center of bones. After the Custer-Ludlow expedition the Black Hills were aswarm with rapacious gold-miners and the Sioux never again had a chance to own their Holy Land. If they would stop drinking maybe they could get the Israelis to help them. Gus and his Fortune Finders. His sort gave our country California in a hurry. But you
must think of freedom and the peasants arriving on the boat, Aase’s parents and all the generations before them, who never owned a single acre they lived on. Suddenly they were here and gave me my mother. And Aase. Without the Aases there is no grace on earth. And Northridge, who could not accept the simplest, defensible injustice on earth, most of all his own.

  I poached the marrow, then pureed it with a little garlic, leeks, and a few reconstituted morel mushrooms. I tested it through Michael’s glass hospital straw-it was good though not quite like eating, a first course and no more. I thawed two veal chops for Lena and myself. When I heard him call out from the music room I looked up at the wall clock in disbelief for only two hours had passed and the sleeping pills should have worked much longer than that.

  He was staring at the ceiling with his clipboard on his chest, the pup’s head on the pillow beside him chewing his arm cast. He held out the message with his free hand—“I sense our romance is over. Will you make love to me one more time?”

  “Camille, what craw you have for God’s sake.” I didn’t think he’d dare ask, but perhaps he wished the further drama of refusal, so I said “no” and left the room. The pup followed me out and we played in the yard for a while and I gave him a marrow bone; then I mixed a drink and went back to my reading.

  March 7, 1886

  The clear air is blue with cold at daylight. We have no meat left in the larder, only dried apples, rutabagas, and softening potatoes, com flower. Small Bird does not wish me to leave the cabin to hunt. She has dreamed I will leave her in the middle of the coming summer on a train though she has never seen a train. The cabin is her fort and the land around it. She says she is feeling older and wishes to mother a child. We have been speaking of this since the past November. I had refused to countenance the idea but now in March I have less will to resist. She tells me it is improper for me to live my life without becoming a father. Who will take care of us when we are old, she asks? When I attempt to explain that there is money in the bank in Chicago and other places I see the weakness of my argument. How could she understand or place any trust in the “banks” of white men, or that I “own” a great deal of land well to the East of us. Her command of English is weak but extremely forceful & she refuses to discuss this in Sioux as her position would be weakened. She tells me that unlike myself she does not accept the doom of the Sioux, and there is the story that many centuries before the Sioux were driven from the forests into the plains by the Chippewa. The Sioux survived to become the strongest of all peoples until the white man arrived. How can the Sioux become strong again if I refuse to be a father? What if my own father had refused to be a father?

  March 23

  There is a dream of my father doubtless caused by her questioning. I have heard, though am unsure, that he was an Arkansas drover who came north to visit a brother, and thus conquered my mother. At some point well before the war he sickened of guiding settlers to the West thus moving to Montana territory and to the northwest of there, and was not seen again. It was said he became a solitary trapper in the mountains, but there was no specific knowledge of his movements. I wonder why he would wish to live his life in this manner but then all white men have to come to question my own life. I have brought neither Christ nor agriculture to the Sioux who desire neither.

  I have awakened from the dream where my father rubs his grizzled forehead against my own to give me strength. He is dressed in seal fur of which I only saw one specimen at Cornell. I am awake on a pallet before the fire where I’ve been for months thinking she will cover me in my sleep. I put wood on the fire and when it flares I understand how weak I have become these past years. In October I rode south into Nebraska with two pack horses to fetch my apples only to see that ignorant settlers had cut down one orchard the winter before for firewood, not understanding that they were fruit trees. I did not turn them off the land which I owned as swindlers had “sold” it to them. They were too pathetic to thrash. I gave them some money because their children were quite thin. They will all fail in the area due to inadequate rainfall & thus the Sioux land was stolen for nought. Before the fire I feel an anger I have not felt in a sorry decade. I have written my many articles, traveled to Washington & have bribed Congressmen & Senators only to be betrayed. In the fire I see I must murder Senator Dawes. I howl into the fire until I begin to weep. I turn and there is Small Bird sitting on the bed watching me. She is naked and comes down to the floor and sits beside me. She sings me a war song that says I must go to war or my shame will devour me. We make love until we have exhausted ourselves because we haven’t had sufficient nourishment for quite some time.

  At daylight I leave with my rifle in bitter cold. She will follow later if she hears a shot. The crust of snow supports my weight and it is my prayer—to whom I do not know—that I shoot a deer or elk before the afternoon sun warms enough for me to break through the snow. I climb as far as I can up a wooded draw, following tracks that are difficult to determine as there is a fresh skein of snow. I know I should climb higher but am quickly exhausted as dried apples do not offer much to the body. The prospect of eating one of my beloved horses upsets me & I pray a Sioux prayer He Dog used when we hunted. I fall asleep sitting on a rock & awake shivering uncontrollably. I sense someone behind me & turn to whisper to Small Bird who I think has joined me but it is an elk. I turn slowly with the rifle expecting the elk to bolt away but it stands there so that I doubt my senses & think I am looking at a dream elk. I fire and it drops as if poleaxed & I remember to bow to the beast as He Dog does. I look up to see Small Bird running across the meadow where she had lain concealed . . . .

  Lena called to say she’d be out in an hour. I read on through a long historical gloss of Michael’s which was an astute belaboring of the obvious—the quality of the umbrage was appropriate but a little beside the point. Northridge had finally been stripped of his Methodist affiliation but avoided being kicked out of the area through the political influence of Grinnell and Ludlow. This influence waned as Northridge came to be considered a menace by government Indian agents and the army. When he finally was ordered to return to Nebraska and make no further contact with the Sioux he went to Washington and used bribery, an easy convenience in the Reconstruction era. The irony of his malnutrition in Buffalo Gap with Small Bird was that his nursery business was thriving and widespread. On his way to Washington he had stopped in Chicago to “secure a carpetbag of money for the swine.” Meanwhile he was kept busy in the hiatus between the death of Crazy Horse in 1877 and the enactment of the Dawes Act in 1887 in teaching, feeding, and clothing the maverick Sioux who were avoiding the newly created Dakota reservations. His mission became pathetically ordinary to him—how to convince people that turnips, cabbage, salt pork, and bad beef were a substitute for buffalo. He was also battling against the government’s program of forbidding the Sioux to perform any and all ritual dances, or to meet in any but the smallest groups. The few Sioux who were attempting to learn farming tended to “squander” the harvest on feasting and giving away the crop to others. The point was if they couldn’t be made Christians they must be forced to behave like provident imitations.

  I noted that the Mohonk Conference was next in Michael’s manuscript so I put it aside and went up to my bedroom for a few minutes. I wanted to change my mood before I made dinner and could usually accomplish this by 100king through books of reproductions of my favorite artists, Hokusai and Caravaggio, an unlikely pair. This time, however, I was distracted by the James Dean poster, so old now the edges were crinkled and frayed. Duane had thought James Dean was wonderful and bought the same sort of red windbreaker Dean wore in Rebel Without a Cause. I adored him too despite the obvious and curious mixture of fatalism, bravery, arrogance, perhaps ignorance. I caught myself being drawn ceaselessly back into a past that I wished mightily to emerge from—I had come to know only recently that one could emerge without forgetting, and that to remember need not be to suffocate. It was unfair but funny to look at the poster and wonder what kind of
asshole he would have been as a grownup. It was anyway a tonic to Northridge’s coming madness, and I thought of a question a Cree had pointedly asked—“What do stories do when they are not being told?”

  Dinner went well. Michael was affable if groggy and was resigned to the tranquilizers. He brought his clipboard to the table to ask us questions. He sipped his marrow and was fascinated by Lena’s peculiar impressions of Europe and the life in Paris of her daughter Charlene. Michael reminded me of a graduate-student boyfriend years before who was startled on seeing Grandfather’s collection of paintings and wondered if they legitimately belonged in a Nebraska farmhouse, though it was to Michael’s credit that he enjoyed having his preconceptions destroyed.