Faithful Travelers

by James Dodson

  “Nice. Will you go to the Pacific?”

  “Perhaps. My daughter would probably like to see it.”

  “She’s not alone. I’d like to see it, too.”

  She went back to her evening reading and so did I. Norris was now talking about how in the Dakotas you are about as far from the sea—any sea—as possible. You are in a world turned upside down, she says, a place where angels drown.

  The boy on the sled was named Matthew, like the author of the gospel. He was thirteen. His father was the sexton at the big Catholic church in town. The boy sat in a wooden chair by the kitchen woodstove, sobbing nearly uncontrollably, overwhelmed by the immensity of what had just happened. The kitchen was extremely warm. The constable was outside watching a wrecker winch my truck from the ditch. His mother turned to me and said, with the conviction of a true witness: It was a miracle. I have no doubt about that at all.

  I had doubt, plenty of doubt—doubt about it being a miracle, doubt about my sanity. A little while later, I drove home, made myself a large Scotch, and sat in my favorite chair in the den, numbly staring at chickadees dive-bombing the bird feeder, where I’d just put out new seed. Under normal circumstances the chickadees would have given me great pleasure. They amazed me—the way the smallest creature in Maine is able to stand up to the worst that winter can dish out. Their will to endure was astonishing to behold. The storm ended and my wife took the children out to do some Christmas shopping in Freeport. I remember Maggie, then almost three, pausing as she left to kiss me and to ask if we could make a real snow angel when they returned. I promised we would, though I didn’t really believe it.

  “Dad?”

  That same voice, older now, brought me back to the High Plains.

  The Indian boy was in the water and Maggie was standing on the diving board, watching him, waiting with her hands on her slim hips. I noticed, for the first time, how the land fell abruptly away behind her. You couldn’t see the dusty little town below and nothing was visible but the tops of a few treeless bluffs in the purpling distance. She was framed by the dimming sky, pleats of gold and rose.

  “Dad, watch!” she called out, and I called back, “I’m watching.”

  The woman was watching, too, and so was her grandson. Maggie stood erect for a moment, releasing her hands to her sides. The board was perhaps three meters high. I was pretty sure she was going to jump, because she had never dived and had always jumped.

  She loped slowly toward the end of the board, bounced lightly once, then rose upward in the arc of a dive. For a split second she hovered in the air, like a girl diving into the sky. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

  It wasn’t a perfect dive but it was her first dive and I know I’ll never forget it. She surfaced a second or two later, spitting water and grimacing with either pain or joy.

  “My God, Maggie. That was great!” I got up to go see how she was.

  The Indian woman clapped her hands. “Wonderful. Really wonderful.”

  A couple of the teenagers even turned their heads to see what had happened. The Indian boy was smiling, too.

  —

  After the accident, I sat in my darkened den watching the chickadees dive-bomb the feeder for nearly two days, trying to figure out what the hell had happened or was happening to me. You read about people having nervous breakdowns, unable to shake a feeling of impending doom. My malaise wasn’t quite like that—it was more anger with myself, and anger with that damned old woman who put it in my head to slow down. After all, if I hadn’t slowed down I wouldn’t have nearly killed the kid. Finally I gave up and called my father, recounting every detail of the incident to him and admitting it was one of the worst moments of my life.

  “Maybe so, maybe not. Maybe it’s the best day of your life. You obviously want to change something.”

  The remark was so like my father, so Opti the Mystic. He was asking me to turn the proposition on its ear, consider the problem from another angle. I went back to my chair and thought about that possibility for a while, staring at the chickadees. The chickadees flitted up, flitted away.

  The mules angels ride, poet Wallace Stevens said, come slowly down from Heaven. Something happened I wasn’t even aware of at first. It really took weeks to notice, perhaps even months. My mood perceptibly changed, brightening with the days, and I realized I felt an almost palpable hunger to move deeper into the stream of my own life. The children, my work, the house—all were fine but none of it was enough alone. I needed something deeper, a stronger connection to my own life, a truer place to be, a genuine knowledge of where I stood on earth.

  Perhaps I was seeking a mystical experience. I’ll never know. Something happened, though. Something changed. It wasn’t at all what I hoped and prayed for—our carefully constructed world was beginning to fall apart and I didn’t even know it. Careful if you ask for true enlightenment, goes an old Eastern saying. For God will set your hair on fire.

  —

  “We’re going for ice cream,” the Indian woman said, gathering their things. “Would you two like to join us?”

  We all went together down the hill into Murdo and I learned the woman’s name was Helen. She was the boy’s grandmother, visiting from Sturgis. Her husband, Bill, was helping her son raise a barn but she and Bill always liked to get out of town when the Harley bikers converged on Sturgis; last summer they’d gone to Yellowstone. The boy’s name was Vern but they called him Lootie. I congratulated Lootie on his cannonballs and asked his grandmother, a little awkwardly, what tribe they hailed from. My terminology felt stiffly self-conscious, like that of a dude straight from Beantown.

  She smiled and said they were Crow-Creek. In the old days the Crow were fierce enemies of both the Lakota Sioux and the American horse soldiers, which may explain, she said, why they vanished first. We were all eating cones of chocolate ice cream at the convenience market, except Lootie, who was having cookies and cream.

  “Of course,” Helen said, with immaculate timing, “we never really vanished. That’s the joke. We’re still here.”

  She asked me what I was reading. It seemed she worked in a bookstore in Sturgis. I showed her Norris’s memoir and she nodded. Lootie and Maggie were down the aisle looking at water guns now. She’d read Norris’s memoir and thought it was excellent, particularly the bit about South Dakota’s being a place where whites and Native Americans live alone together, with a windy silence between two worlds. In books, she’d found, some turn of phrase simply catches you. That one had caught her and seemed so true. I asked what she was reading and she showed me—a paperback edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays.

  We smiled. How amusing. I was reading a poet of the West, she a poet of the East. I admitted I loved Emerson but hadn’t read his stuff in quite a while. She handed me the paperback.

  “Here, take it with you,” she said. “I’ve got half a table back home covered with these things. This guy almost sounds like an Indian.”

  —

  The plains where we lay in the darkness had once been a prehistoric seabed. What an astounding thought. That world had changed, too. Vanished before someone’s eyes.

  “Dad. Are you awake?”

  “Yes, babe.” I was lying with my hands behind my head, a sheet covering my sweaty skin, staring at the darkness and listening to the Bates Motel air conditioner wheeze. My unquiet mind was churning. Had I unearthed my own eureka piece here on the remains of an ancient seabed somewhere near the exact heart of North America?

  “You told Lootie that you liked his cannonballs.”

  “I was just being polite. He’s a kid who probably doesn’t get much encouragement from strangers.”

  “Did you like my dive, too?”

  “Maggie, I thought your dive was awesome. I really mean that. Did I forget to tell you? I’m sorry. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”

  I caught myself before I said it. Then I went ahead and said it.

  “In fact, do you remember asking me if I believed in miracle
s?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I do believe in them. I think I saw my very first one tonight. That dive, kiddo, was a real miracle.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Silent Sam

  Dear Pocahontus,

  Today when we traveld a cross Ameraka with Amos we wnt to Mount Rushmore which was good because we saw a poodel with a leather jacket and a helmit on. The man who had the poodel had a beard and talked to Dad a long time showing him his mothercycle. Mount Rushmore was so big and cool and I like pressident Teddy Roosyfelt the best because he came out here too and did stuff like wear doing. I wanted a picture and some guy took the picture for us and he loved Amos and held his leed while Dad and I walked up to look at the pressidents. Then we went camping and stayed in a cool cabin by a lake where the Sue Indians used to live and thot the world began. I would never be able to count all of the hells angels on there mothercycles but later we met a buffolow and named him Stan like my cat and Amos touched his nose with his nose and well that’s my part of the story for now, Love, Maggie.

  P.S. Tumorrow we are going fly fishing again.

  P.S.S. I Love you, Love, Maggie (Dodson)

  “It ain’t one damn bit like it used to be, man. I shit you not. You got all these rules and regulations now, cops who’ll bust your ass for havin’ an open beer. Fancy little dudes walkin’ around with walkie-talkies. No more weed, no more whiskey. It’s like one damn big Amway convention or something.”

  “It’s a wonder you can bear to come anymore.”

  “Hey, it’s America. I got a right. It was mine before theirs. See that dude over there?”

  I looked at the guy he was pointing to, a guy decked out in black leather, with a filthy bandanna on his head, a hook earring, and several days’ growth of beard. His vest had a nice embroidered skull on the back. He was talking to a blonde biker moll in tight-fitting jeans.

  “Know what that sucker does for a living?”

  I almost said he murdered families in their sleep. But it would only have been an educated guess. Instead, I shook my head.

  “Dentist from Ohio. No shit. I met him last year. Him and his wife come out to Sturgis every year, hauling their Hogs on a trailer behind their big shiny Suburban. They park the truck fifty miles east of here and ride in like real bikers. Toy bikers, I call ’em. Turns your goddamn stomach, don’t it?”

  I was chatting with an aging Son of Thunder who was concerned about what the annual Harley Bike Rally in Sturgis was turning into, one big friendly costume party for dentists and proctologists. The Son of Thunder had a large mane of flowing gray hair like an Old Testament prophet’s, a faint aura of the King of Beers, and real knife-wound scars on his face. Beyond that, he seemed like a perfectly nice sort of person and even graciously offered to take our photograph and hold Amos’s lead while Maggie and I hoofed up to the main observation deck at Mount Rushmore to view the presidents’ heads. The long walk up would be too much for the old fellow to negotiate in such heat and I considered the man’s offer, remembering that Jesus had called his disciples Sons of Thunder. When I said yes, Amos looked deeply relieved and immediately took a seat by the man’s Harley, which was parked under a leaning pine tree. As we walked away, I heard the biker ask him if he’d care for a Budweiser.

  The Black Hills were crawling with bikers from the rally ninety miles away and we’d followed a noisy line of cyclists and their molls all the way up to the monument’s main parking lot, where we found several hundred more cyclists already parked and milling around, including a man who had a standard poodle straddling the seat behind him. The poodle, wearing a leather vest and aviator’s goggles, seemed perfectly at ease on the back of a Hog.

  The four presidents, half a mile or so distant, seemed strangely detached from this scene and deeply embedded in their own thoughts. George looked slightly prim and disapproving while Tom was gazing heavenward as if in a kind of dreamy trance; Teddy’s chin was set in a no-nonsense manner, his eyes looking a tad suspicious, while Abe merely looked as if he’d seen a ghost. They looked unreal or perhaps unnatural and a great deal smaller than I’d expected. I also wondered why none of them had been depicted smiling. In the natural rock to George’s right, I could almost make out the face of Mr. Magoo, but maybe I was just seeing things.

  We walked up for a closer inspection, weaving through the dense crowds in the hot sunshine. I was anxious to keep moving because we had a reservation for a cabin on Sylvan Lake near Harney Peak in Custer State Park and Maggie wanted to try and see a buffalo before dark and I wanted to put Norumbega Girl in the lake and get back to slinging a line and tippet for trout.

  We stared up respectfully at our four great presidents for a few minutes until Maggie asked, “Why isn’t there a girl up there, too?”

  “Good question. Probably because we haven’t had a woman president yet. My guess is, you’ll be the first. When you’re safely in the White House just promise me that your old man can have unlimited access to the presidential putting green.”

  “Okay. But I think I’d rather be a movie actress or a scientist instead. Would you mind?”

  “No problem. Maybe Aileen will be the first Mrs. President.” Aileen was her best friend back in Maine.

  Maggie nodded and smiled, then demanded to know what each of “those guys” had done to warrant having his likeness carved on a mountaintop. I gave her a thumbnail sketch of each president. Washington was “father of our country” and had declined the option to be named king. He supposedly refused to lie about hacking down his father’s cherry tree (a double lie, as it turns out, because it never happened), once supposedly tried to toss a dollar coin across the Delaware (ditto), suffered grievously from gout, the effects of wooden dentures, and a stiff back from sleeping in too many fine country inns. The truth was, I didn’t know much about George Washington, though the more I gazed up at him, with his bobbed hair and prim mouth, the more he uncannily resembled my old nemesis Miss Wettington.

  Jefferson was a different story. I’d read virtually everything written about him. He was, in my view, to borrow a phrase from a certain Son of Thunder, the most impressive dude America had ever produced. Tall, cerebral, a philosopher farmer, wine lover, creator of the most liberating document in human history, devoted father, slave owner, visionary architect, restless house builder, an old soul but a new gardener, a lonely theist who created his own Bible by editing down the Gospels, a man who lost virtually everyone he loved and died nearly penniless, an aging statesman who made lists of ordinary things to try and escape grief and beat depression. A true American original—and enigma. John Adams called him “the Shadow Man.”

  Call me crazy but I could relate to Jefferson a bit. He tore down his house on a hill at Monticello and rebuilt it several times, never quite content with its arrangement, and never finished it as a result. I’d built my post-and-beam house on a hill in Maine and was forever changing something about it, too. Like Jefferson’s, my flower gardens were an endless source of joy and frustration, and like his my children were the primary source of light in my life. My faith was of the same eccentric bent, and I also compulsively compiled lists of things—things to do, things I didn’t wish to forget; things upon things. The first stories both our fathers told us, mine when I was about six, were Indian tales, and the older Jefferson got the more he just wanted to sit and read philosophy and religion and watch his roses grow. I hoped all similarities ended there, though, because I couldn’t bear the prospect of outliving my children, as he had.

  During our trip through the Adirondacks, I’d filled Maggie in a bit on Teddy Roosevelt—why he went West to find a new life, how he rediscovered himself in the Dakota Badlands and became a pretty swell president, creating, among other things, America’s first national park system based on the success of Yellowstone. And Lincoln she already knew a fair amount about thanks to the good offices of Louise Colburn, her first-grade teacher. She knew Abe Lincoln was a man of the people who’d freed the slaves and held the Union together dur
ing its greatest period of trial, then been shot and killed by a fool who did the one damned thing that could finish off the South. She knew his likeness was on the American penny, which some idiot in Congress was determined to try and scuttle. What she didn’t know was that Lincoln suffered woefully from migraines and nightmares and was subject to periods of the blackest despair, or that his wife went crazy as a widow loon after his death and the country drifted into rancorous stagnation for nearly thirty years.

  “Dad, can we go see a buffalo now?” She had her heart set on seeing a live buffalo—and, come to that, I’d never seen a real one, either. The best part of wandering through America, I was learning, was that we could simply go when we’d had enough.

  “Sure thing, babe,” I said, still gazing up at maybe the four most famous sad guys in American history, holding my daughter’s hand amid the bikers; then we went back down and discovered the aging Son of Thunder and our dog dozing peacefully side by side beneath a leaning lodgepole pine. I almost hated to disturb them.

  —

  The bikers still outnumbered us at Sylvan Lake, where we stopped at the general store near the cabin to provision for the drive in the morning across the Bighorn Mountains into Wyoming. The bikers were having a cookout on the lawn and I saw Maggie eyeing the hot dogs with a wistful remembrance of wieners past and suggested she and the big guy go get one while I used the pay phone to check my messages back home.

  We’d been down the rabbit hole sixteen days and I hadn’t felt the slightest desire to check my messages even once. There were twenty-six messages waiting, mostly from people I could safely forgo speaking with until autumn or the next century, but one call from the wife of an old college friend that couldn’t be ignored. I heard tremendous anxiety in her voice.

  “Hi, Jim. It’s Maureen. I’m calling because of Robert. I think he really could use a ph one call from you. He’s having kind of a rough summer. Could you give him a call sometime?” Curiously, she left her work number, which suggested to me she wouldn’t mind speaking to me first. I hung up the phone and dialed her number.