The Summer He Didn't Die

by Jim Harrison

  He’s often sent off to the farm for questionable behavior. He’s at the kitchen table waiting for daylight with old John and Hulda who can’t help but get up at five A.M. First they were in the barn feeding the cows and draft horses, milking, then back in the kitchen turning the hand-cranked cream separator where he tires quickly. At breakfast he eats Wheaties with heavy cream, eggs, sausage that is preserved in a huge crock buried in its fat, wanting only the tail pieces of the pickled herring, and rye bread with butter Hulda makes in a churn with all the extra cream. The calves drink the pails of skimmed milk. In the parlor Great-aunt Anna listens on the radio to a Chicago station scratching her psoriasis. Like Nelse she was disappointed in love when young and never married. She worked for years as a servant in a mansion in Chicago. Burglars came and locked the family in the basement for a day and a night. There was nothing to eat so they drank foreign wine. She saved money and loans it to family members in distress. She listens to the radio so low no one can hear it but her. Grandpa has egg yolk on his chin and Hulda wipes it off. He drives his Model A so fast, teetering from side to side on the gravel road, that the family is sure he will die. Suddenly it’s first light and the boy can see his footprints in front of the window, realizing he is still small by the small footprints. Hulda smiles at the glint of yellow sun on the white frost and the noisy rooster prancing around the yard with his neck stretched.

  Everything was confusing except when he walked, swam, or fished. In winter he skied down hills on old wooden skis then walked back up the hill. Spring was wonderful with the first day of trout fishing coming in late April. In the evening they would spread his father’s tackle on the kitchen table and examine the dry and wet flies, the spinners for when the water was cloudy, the catgut leaders in their oily packet, the dozens of ornate bass plugs.

  He walked in the woods with his girlfriend with her retarded aunt in tow, a huge woman named Josephine who couldn’t talk but could make a lot of various noises which Mary said was a different language, more like the way animals spoke. They looked for morel mushrooms and ate wild leeks until their eyes teared. He carried a packet of Audubon bird cards so they could figure out what birds they were seeing. Sometimes they would run ahead of Josephine and then stop and kiss each other passionately. If his pecker got hard under his trousers, she snapped it with a thumb and forefinger at which point it wilted. Her mother was a nurse and taught her this trick to subdue rutting boys. At about this point, age ten or so, he used most of his savings to buy himself an expensive yellow shirt with a diagonal zipper. The shirt which cost six dollars was intended to give him the secret powers of the fictional Dave Dawson, a World War II ace pilot, or the Zane Grey frontier strongman Lew Wetzel, who saved Betty Zane from the Indians. The mirror, however, told him that the shirt didn’t banish the cowlick, the hair that stood up straight on the back of his head, or focus the milky blind eye that stared off to the side. Life had led him to think that outside was better than inside, thus he didn’t really read until the third grade. Their big old house had many exits, a basement garage door, a slanted cellar door, the back and front doors, the window over the porch roof that enabled you to climb down the flimsy morning glory trellis, the big rope his brother John found at the oil supply yard that had been abandoned. Learning how to escape was a prime fact of life. The most consequential book of his young life was called Two Little Savages. The book purported to teach white boys how to attain freedom by learning Indian ways. After studying this book which his father gave him he no longer wanted to be a cowboy.

  Knowledge came in bits and pieces but did not easily gather itself into a whole. The lives of the young can be a tentative dream with the same uncontrollable events that any dream owns. To a certain point we are where we live, and then reading and the radio lengthens the view with thousands of question marks. Place-names are studied on the globe and flat maps on the kitchen table or wall maps at school. The third-grade girls sang “Give My Regards to Broadway” with no idea of what Broadway was, and there was a song played on the Sunday evening program Manhattan Merry-Go-Round that used as the background the cacophony of hundreds of blaring car horns. In northern Michigan people rarely beeped their horns with the notable exception of when World War II ended and all one day and night people walked the streets and talked loudly or drove around beeping, started campfires right in town and cooked meat and drank whiskey and beer. The next morning he and his brother John walked over to a WPA shack, drank pop, and ate Vienna sausages with the two old men who had lived there since early in the Depression. One of the men, Frank, had seen both the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans, and another old man know as Dumby came by to visit. Dumby had suffered mustard gas in World War I and had lost his powers of thought. War had meant general fear so that when his Uncles Walter and Artie returned from navy service in the Pacific there was a big celebration at the family home near a tiny village named Paris six miles from Reed City. The uncles were skinny, hollow-eyed but happy. When they visited the cabin to fish and drink beer he walked with them for hours without them saying much at all. Artie had had many feet of his intestines taken out, the very idea recalling pig butchering.

  Stories collected his thoughts in one place no matter that his thoughts remained confused. His mother said of her family, “We weren’t poor, we just didn’t have any money,” which eventually meant that being poor meant not having enough to eat. They had to buy flour, salt, coffee, and a little whiskey now and then. Out near the stock pond behind the barn there was a hand pump and when the pond went dry by midsummer the five sisters would take turns until the pond was full enough for the cows and horses which drank a prodigious amount of water in hot weather. He could not imagine the five sisters doing this because the hand pump was his own duty at the cabin and it took a hundred and ten strokes to get the first stream of water into the pail. The five sisters also pitched hay on the wagon and then into the barn mow, helped tend the garden, feed the chickens and pigs, make their dresses out of the beautiful gingham material of the flour sacks.

  When the family was in town he liked the balance of working in their huge garden all morning for which he got a quarter which meant the movie at the Saturday afternoon matinee plus a chocolate soda at the drugstore. In his misunderstanding there was a cruelty to economics. When he saw his birth certificate in a scrapbook his mother said that the birth and the hospital stay in Grayling had cost thirty-five dollars which he took to mean as a price of admission so that no one could be born if they didn’t have thirty-five dollars.

  All winter long they went to the public library on Saturday mornings. His father was widely if erratically read, the only one on either side of the family who had been to college. Out in the garden one morning his father quoted Wordsworth saying, “The child is the father of the man” which meant that if you didn’t learn to work when young you’d turn out to be a “worthless sonofabitch.” He despaired of ever having his father’s knowledge of nature where every plant and tree could be named, but his father said that the names would come later after total familiarity with the earth. For some reason he was sure that ultimately he would be able to talk to bears like he did pigs, cows, and horses. You had an unimaginable lifetime ahead of you to visit the places on the globe, or so he was told.

  * * *

  When he was twelve the family moved south where the father took a job in order to be close to a college for the five children. It was an unhealable rupture as many such moves are for the young. His father insisted it would be good for them because the somewhat Edenic world they came from ill prepared them for the real world. That may be true, he thought, but there were no trout to catch in the new place and no near wilderness to walk in. There were woodlots everywhere on the neighboring farms but you no sooner entered a woodlot and you were out the other side. Even the snakes were different and the ruffed grouse and woodcock were replaced by gaudy pheasants. Luckily their new home was near a marsh and small woods full of birds. He and a friend built a small hut and under the earth in the
hut they hid a slender metal box in which they stored a photo of a nude woman.

  He became an active but mediocre athlete and read. They drove a half dozen miles into the library in East Lansing which was huge compared to Haslett. He was stunned and happy with this place and even more so when he discovered that his father’s new job enabled him to use the university library which made nearly any book on earth available. The trade of the woods and fishing was still an unhappy one but books were the only thing large enough to temper the injury. He discovered that you enter books, certain paintings, and pieces of music and you never totally leave. When you’re fourteen and listen to Beethoven and Grieg, Berlioz and Mozart, you are lifted above the banalities of Haslett Rural Agricultural High School if only for a few hours. When you read the historical novels of Hervey Allen and Walter Edmonds, the fiction of Erskine Caldwell and all of Sherwood Anderson, his father’s favorite, the world grew larger only to shrink again when you entered the school door, and the little series of Skira art books for a dollar apiece added considerably to the enchantment, especially Gauguin and Modigliani. These great artists were not only brave men but they got to see nude women when they wished. On wintry Saturday afternoons he could sit reading and listen with his mother to the Metropolitan Opera on the radio which did not preclude getting into fistfights on the football field, stealing liquor with friends, or trying to get your hands below the waist, the Great Wall of China, of your cheerleader girlfriend, an amazingly dense girl who was nevertheless very pretty. An exposed thigh of a homely girl could destroy geometry class, the trapezoid withering between her legs.

  You wake only occasionally from the limited sleep of your youth, a puzzled trance of hormones and study, reading and fantasy. The easiest solution to this anguish appears to be geographical but escape is unlikely with a bicycle. You’re nearly smart enough to know that you jumped the gun, that your mind couldn’t ultimately deal with the move from north to south, a more than scant one hundred fifty miles, so that when you visit back north a lump develops in your throat that doesn’t go away, but already the life in the north seems a little too artless, bookless, the lake another kind of Mozart but then you have come to need both.

  Years before he left home he was already upset about leaving. At dinnertime he’d look around at his unreasonably happy family: Winfield Sprague, Norma Olivia, and the children John Arthur, Judith Ellen, Mary Louise, David Sprague, not counting himself. How could he leave them for an uncertain future in Tibet or Mongolia, or for Central America where he would live camped among the Mayan and Aztec ruins, in Russia where he’d join the Cossacks and tend herds of thousands of horses which smelled better than people, or in the attic of a French castle, or in Scotland hunting grouse, or fishing in Argentina, or England where he’d stop and see where Keats lived, his passion at age fourteen, or go to Switzerland, or Sweden and marry a distant cousin named Bothilda, Bengta, Astrid, Inga, Karolina, Lillie, or Emilee? Where he was now was obviously not the right place and other places would help him become what he wished. He wondered at what point does a life become a full life similar to those in books, beyond the simple denominator, the mere biological fact. He knew he couldn’t become one of the hundreds of his fictional heroes, or the actual painters, poets, or musicians that he admired. They had already accomplished their lives in print or in history and he had to struggle to fill the vacuum of his own future.

  He wondered if anyone is not a little afraid of the dark. At fifteen literature, art, and music shrank as a certainty, a solo performance that needed a chorus for support, and he became rather violently evangelical for a year, but this evolved into something as frightening as reading Dostoyevsky; poring over the Bible ceaselessly and praying for hours infused his life with the sacred but also with demons. Female bodies were terrorists of the soul. At dawn the dismal horizon was covered by the hem of Isaiah’s robe three miles wide absorbing a barn, a wheatfield, and swamp. The pheasants’ morning cackle was the voice of a red-haired girl at the Bible quiz contest. The football coach had him lie on a wrestling mat because his nose wouldn’t stop bleeding because it and surrounding bones had been fractured. He wore a taped-on aluminum mask for weeks. On the wrestling mat smelling his own blood while he was looking up at the cheerleading squad rehearsing in shorts. Jesus couldn’t overpower their legs damp with exercise. “Are you okay, Jimmy?” asked one of the twins, June & Jean. He couldn’t tell which with his ears ringing in pain, also eyes closed in modesty then opening because temptation couldn’t be resisted. Smooth, pale brown legs coming together in a nest, so lovely compared to boys’ warmish inflated peckers and stinking locker-room bodies, crusty towels and gray jockstraps, liniment grease everywhere, pissing on each other in the showers. He saw his girlfriend’s pink-nippled conical protuberant left tit under the heat of the pale blue V-necked sweater. Heat came also from her legs. We’re furnaces, he thought.

  He left Haslett, a homely but not charmless place, with a missionary to drive south to visit Christian officers at the army base in Fort Benning, Georgia. He had rarely eaten in restaurants except for a stray hamburger but the missionary was a very large man so they stopped often. To his surprise nothing tasted very good except barbecued pork in Tennessee. The man drove fast and lectured about sex saying, “Save yourself for marriage” and he joked, replying, “That’s not hard to do in Haslett.” The man said sex was too serious to joke about but laughed himself. “Women will lead you astray,” but he wondered where he was that he could be led astray? High school was random activity. He became class and student council president then finally abandoned public office. The religion that seized his soul began to wane. Did he mostly wish to be a missionary in order to get to darkest Africa? Did he want to preach the Gospel as much as he wanted to see a naked cheerleader or even as much as he had wished to write a poem like Keats had done?

  His sixteenth summer he took the bus to Colorado thinking he might meet a girl as lovely as one he saw at Berea College on the way back from Georgia. She spoke with an Appalachian lilt and mussed up his hair which was dressed with Butch wax, looked at her hand, and laughed. In Colorado he worked at a resort and learned to drink beer with college girls who would neck stopping just short of the grand finale, which as sorority girls meant that they didn’t go “all the way” until they were “pinned” with a boy’s fraternity pin. He had packed along his leather-bound Schofield Reference Bible as a fallback position, also Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom and Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the three books evidence of an immodest schizophrenic gesture. The mountains were the grace note. On a clear late-May dawn coming into Denver he squinted at his first mountains, so overwhelming to a flatlander that his stomach hurt and he forgot to breathe. On any free time he headed up the mountains which were immediately behind the employees’ dorm. Unlike the dense forests of northern Michigan he couldn’t get lost in this Rocky Mountain National Park. He headed up for few hours, then headed back down, threading through boulders that looked impressively like those in a western movie. A wrangler for the resort’s horses showed him a welter of mountain lion and bear tracks near a spring. He raced horses beyond his capabilities as a rider with a wrangler and a bellhop from New Mexico. He had several fistfights, drank a lot of beer, and the bellhop introduced him to a waitress, a college student from St. Louis, who resolved his virginity, not so pleasantly he thought alone after midnight because the experience didn’t resemble anything in Emily Brontë. Naturally, he prayed for forgiveness but should have taken a shower first, a trace of the scent of lilac making him erect again.

  Coming back to eleventh grade in Michigan was emotionally unacceptable. Football season became even more violent and he was relieved when it was over. A saving grace was that some of his father’s humor had seeped into his system so that the melancholy became more artificial and literary. Stories were everywhere including his own. His father would draw him back to the world. He had bought him a twenty-dollar used typewriter so that he could become a writer but told him he
had to “meet the world” or he wouldn’t have anything to write about but himself. He worked at manual-labor jobs on weekends and whenever possible because reading and writing were sweeter when the body was exhausted. When you read the work of Sherwood Anderson and Erskine Caldwell it was immediately obvious that they had known hundreds of different people, mostly poor but a few of the rich. He was itching to get out in the world and the obvious solution was New York City which he visited in a ’49 Ford for which they had packed along a couple of extra second gears. That trip was between his junior and senior years in high school. More memorable, oddly, than the Eighth Street prostitute was the free chamber music concert one evening in Washington Square Park. It was obvious you could make a home here, a true home being a habitat for the soul. They walked from the East River to the Hudson, and at the Metropolitan Museum became truly aware that paintings weren’t the mere postcard- or postage-stamp-sized objects in art books. Ever afterward he thought of Gauguin as the Great Gauguin.