Faithful Travelers

by James Dodson

  My friend Robert was a successful lawyer who lived in Savannah. We’d known each other in college and kept in touch over the years. He’d built a thriving practice on marine law and had a beautiful wife and two teenage daughters, a big house on the Isle of Hope, a cozy summer place in the Carolina upcountry, a collection of vintage shotguns, and he belonged to the best golf club and a hunting club on Pamlico Sound where he and other lawyer types went every autumn to massacre ducks. He knew I’d quit hunting long ago but invited me every year, for old times’ sake, I think. I asked Maureen, when she came on, how Bobby, as I called him, was doing.

  “Fine, I guess, if you discount the fact that I found him sitting in the dark in the basement last Saturday afternoon holding a loaded shotgun saying he thought he might have to shoot himself.”

  I swallowed dryly at this news and gazed around at the bikers eating their hot dogs in the Black Hills sunshine. My daughter was having two hot dogs, I noticed, then realized she was breaking off pieces and hand-feeding them to Amos.

  “He reminds me,” she said, “of that statue you guys put underwear on up at Chapel Hill. Remember? The one that just sits there holding his gun and saying nothing?”

  “Silent Sam,” I said. Silent Sam was the popular name for the statue of a Confederate soldier that stood on a grassy quad on the university campus, a lone sentinel holding his musket and watching out for returning Yankees. One night after a fraternity party twenty-five years before, a group of us had put a jumbo pair of gent’s underpants on Silent Sam. It was pretty lame and innocent stuff but we found the stunt to be fall-down hilarious—a soldier going to war in his Skivvies. No wonder our side lost.

  Maureen explained that she’d persuaded Bobby to go to the hospital, where they’d placed him in an observation room and called in a psychiatric specialist. The diagnosis was acute clinical depression and Bobby still wasn’t saying much except that there was no way he would take any antidepressant medicine of any kind. At one point, he’d calmly told her his life wasn’t worth living and to go home and he’d figure out how to dispose of himself so the insurance company wouldn’t ask any questions. The thing was, he seemed almost rational about his clearly insane plan. Maureen was nearly at the end of her rope as a result, she admitted, and the girls were terrified, and she wondered if a call from an old friend might help—help him see the wisdom of taking the medicine or help him see how valuable his life was or at least coax him out of his scary silence a bit. She seemed to remember I’d gone through a rough time after a friend of mine was killed and wondered if it might help Bobby to hear about that.

  I promised I would call him and she gave me the hospital number. Then I said good-bye and hung up the phone, slipped the paper into my pocket, and stood there for a moment wondering what I could possibly say to my old friend that would help him. Mental depression is scary business and I knew several men in their forties and fifties who’d been cruelly afflicted by it, seemingly out of the blue, without warning, almost randomly, at the fullest stride of their lives, madness sent down by the gods. None of them had succumbed to it but a couple were still borderline cases. I think I’d had a spot of it myself after Kristen’s death and after running over the boy on the sled.

  Medical science understood a fair amount about what caused the disorder—a depletion of several naturally occurring chemicals in the brain, perhaps triggered by stress, and an increase of other hormones that caused a wrenching fluctuation in the brain tissue, a literal brainstorm that first depleted the brain of its resiliency and ultimately attacked the rest of the body as well.

  That was depression on paper. Profile of a silent killer. An idiopathic fog that settled on one’s world, scrambled neurotransmitters, and turned the brain agonizingly in on itself with cannibalistic intent, what the ancients called “a sickness of the soul” or acute melancholia, a pervasive sense of personal loss accompanied by systematic physical exhaustion, a despair beyond despair, the wind of the wing of madness, as Baudelaire was supposed to have described it. It had driven Roosevelt West and killed Hemingway. Given time and proper analysis, certain drugs could alleviate some of the symptoms of the disease, keep demons at bay, and perhaps even make life once again more than tolerable. Though some researchers were firmly convinced the critical factors that caused the onset of acute systematic depression in adults lay buried in their childhoods, the bottom line was that science, for all its technical brilliance and impressive pharmacology, probably understood more about the origin of the sun than about the root causes of depression.

  I’d recently read in Time that more Americans than ever were believed to be suffering from some form of mental depression and that twice as many women as men typically sought medical assistance for it. Men, it was believed, typically attempted self-medication through various outlets—addiction to work or booze, playing golf or the commodities market; perhaps even fishing was a form of self-medication. According to the statistics, twice as many men as women killed themselves, though, which led some experts to believe that the numbers of people who suffered from the disorder were probably about equal. Women were apparently just smart enough to seek help.

  On that cheerful thought, I chased away my own brain fog and realized that the guy using the pay phone beside me was none other than the same tough-looking hombre the Son of Thunder had pointed out at Mount Rushmore, the dental biker with the skull on his back.

  I couldn’t help overhearing his end of the conversation. “Hi, Chrissie!” he chirped pleasantly. “It’s Daddy! Are you being a good girl for Nana? Mommy and Daddy are having a wonderful time on Daddy’s motorcycle. We’ll be home sometime on Sunday afternoon, sweetie pie! We’ll bring you something nice. Okay, Chrissie, let me speak to Nana again…thank you. I love you, too. Bye, sweetie!”

  I smiled a much-needed smile, wondering if his earring was really a clip-on.

  —

  Late the next day, we saw our first bison.

  He was standing alone in a grassy meadow near a shallow stream off what’s popularly called the Loop Road, an eighteen-mile stretch that meanders through scenic open grasslands and pine forests in the southern half of Custer State Park. We were returning from Deadwood, where we’d gone to spend the afternoon after an unproductive fishing expedition on Sylvan Lake. The trout weren’t sipping flies so we left the canoe chained to a tree and became Black Hills tourists. Deadwood was full of bikers throwing money away in casinos but I wanted to see the town because it was where James Butler—Indian scout, sometime spy, stagecoach driver, bullwhacker, sheriff, and gambler—was murdered by a young drifter named Jake McCall, shot in the back while supposedly holding two aces, a pair of eights, and a nine of diamonds, known thereafter as the Dead Man’s Hand.

  Thanks to an afternoon walking tour, Maggie now knew a little bit about Wild Bill Hickok, as Butler preferred to be called, and the sad strange woman who some say loved him, Martha Jane Burk, aka Calamity Jane, an illiterate alcoholic whose checkered past included jobs as an army scout, mule skinner, nurse, prostitute, hotel cook, and Wild West Show performer. She drifted into Deadwood in 1876, at the beginning of the Black Hills Gold Rush, dressed in men’s clothing and boasting of her exploits as a Pony Express rider, and died penniless there in 1903. Her last wish was to be buried next to Bill Hickok in the town cemetery. In 1889, the year South Dakota gained statehood, the residents outlawed gambling, in large part because Deadwood had become such a raunchy hole of betting parlors and brothels, but exactly a century later the state legislature passed limited-stakes gambling, creating a second gold rush that brought in big gaming casinos and drove property taxes through the roof, chasing a number of longtime residents straight out of town in the process.

  One of the more recent arrivees was Kevin Costner, the movie star who owned a part interest in the Midnight Star Casino and promoted a well-financed campaign to raise betting-stakes limits from $5 to $100. But the citizens of the state, sounding almost sensible enough to be Mainers, handily voted down the measure. When I aske
d why, our young walking guide, a local high school honor student named Cindy, paused and solemnly glanced around to see if the telegenic star of Dances with Wolves or perhaps a representative of the Chamber of Commerce might be loitering within earshot, then confided: “Well, I think it’s because South Dakotans are a pretty independent breed and aren’t too impressed with movie stars. My grandfather says Kevin Costner’s no Jimmy Stewart and the only wolves he ever danced with wear nice Italian suits.” I told her with an attitude like that, she could move straight to Maine.

  The buffalo watched us park the truck. He stood perhaps thirty yards away in the tall grass, an old bull with a shaggy prehistoric face.

  I got out to take his photograph and Maggie got out, too, prompting me to tell her to get back in the truck because, as park authorities constantly warn visitors, the tranquillity of the American bison can easily lure you into a false sense of security. Observing them during his passage West in 1829, Meriwether Lewis wrote in his journal: The buffalo are so gentle we pass near them while feeding, without appearing to excite any alarm in them, and when we attract their attention, they frequently approach us more nearly to discover what we are, and in some instances pursue us to considerable distance apparently with that view. But as Lewis learned, the peaceful looks of America’s largest mammal can deceive. The average bison, weighing up to a ton, can run faster than a horse, turn on a buffalo nickel, and gore you quicker than you can say, “Kevin Costner’s sure no Jimmy Stewart.”

  I told this to Maggie as we stood there, face-to-face, so to speak, with a ton of hair on the hoof. She didn’t seem particularly worried and neither did the buffalo, so I moved forward a few feet, crouched, and snapped a photograph. The bull even helpfully turned his head a bit to the right so I could get a better profile shot. Maggie crept forward too, kneeling in the grass beside me. It’s believed that at the end of the fifteenth century, I whispered to her, close to fifty million bison roamed the Great Plains, and apart from their having been a steady meat supply for Native Americans, their fur and hides were used for clothing and shelter, their bones for weapons, utensils, and toys, their droppings for fuel. It’s possible no other animal on earth was ever as intricately woven into the lives of humans as the buffalo was into America’s native people’s, which explains the bison’s high spiritual standing with Indians. The Lakota believed, for instance, that the universe began when the Great Spirit caused the bison to emerge from a wind cave in the earth, and the Blackfeet held the holy beast in such reverence that they developed a ritual dance they performed before every hunt.

  “Can you do the dance?” she asked solemnly.

  “Sorry. White guys can’t dance. Except with wolves, of course.”

  Funnily enough, though, I told her, I remembered the origin myth of the buffalo dance from my Boy Scouting days (and, knowing we might soon see a buffalo, I’d boned up on it from a book of native myths I had in the Medicine Bag). In the Blackfoot legend, the plains tribes are facing a difficult winter when the beautiful daughter of a chieftain offers herself in marriage to the head buffalo if he will only persuade his brothers to stampede over the jump—thereby assuring the tribes a winter supply of furs and meat. The buffalo complies and the tribe’s holy man informs the girl she must now go off and live with the buffalo as his wife.

  “I don’t think that’s fair. A girl should get to marry who she wants to marry.”

  “I agree. It’s just a story. Feel free to marry the man of your choice, sweetheart, as long as you’re both over thirty and have legal written consent forms signed by both your parents, and he’s been fully cleared by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the FBI.”

  Maggie socked me on the arm and I continued the tale. The girl’s family rises in the morning to find her gone. They are very sad and worried. So the father takes his bow and sets off after her across the plains, followed by a magpie. The magpie explains to him what has happened and leads him to a buffalo wallow, where he encounters his daughter’s new husband. A struggle ensues and the buffalo kills the father and tramples his bones to dust.

  “That’s really sad.”

  “I know. I’ll avoid the temptation to say that another good man bites the dust. But luckily it’s not the end of the story.”

  “Continue,” she said evenly.

  Shattered by this news, the Indian wife tells her buffalo husband she can never really love him because of what he has done and the buffalo, perhaps feeling remorse, informs her that if she can restore life to her father, he will release her from her promise. The magpie finds her a bone and she performs a revivifying dance that brings her father back to life. The buffalo husband is astonished by what he has witnessed, but also saddened. He asks the girl and her father why they have never done this dance to help his people, the buffalo. They see his point and agree that from this moment on, before every hunt, warriors will perform the buffalo dance to ensure that each buffalo always returns from death.

  “How did the dance bring them back to life?” Maggie was wiggling her fingers at the buffalo.

  “Well, that’s not really explained. It’s part of the mystery, what the plains Indians called the sacred hoop of life. Indians did everything in circles. They traveled with the seasons in a kind of circle, set their tepees in a circle, performed all their ceremonies in circles. A circle symbolized the unity of everything, man and nature, life and death. Death comes from life, life comes from death.”

  “Like the story of Jesus.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it that way,” I admitted. “But you’re right.”

  “Dad,” Maggie said, “he’s coming toward us.”

  It’s true. He was. The big brute had moved a few steps toward us, shifting his massive girth and working those big moist black prehistoric nostrils, scenting us. I was about to herd us safely back to Old Blue when I realized the buffalo wasn’t moving toward us at all. He was coming toward Amos, who’d lumbered out of the open truck door and was calmly wobbling toward the bison and perhaps the golden retriever happy hunting ground.

  “Amos!” I hissed at him. But, of course, I might as well have been talking to the wind.

  The dog headed slowly down the slope and moved into the shoulder-high grass as if he and the buffalo were merely two old sons of the prairie saying howdy. He stopped a few yards shy of the buffalo and lifted his head to sniff. The buffalo turned his head slightly and advanced a step, lowering his own snout to sniff. Amos edged forward. The buffalo advanced, too. A moment later, their noses inched close enough to touch. A flurry of sniffs ensued. Then Amos turned around and walked nonchalantly back to the truck with a visible spring in his step, as if to ask What’s the big deal, pards, about befriending an American bison?

  “Cool,” Maggie said breathlessly. “Can I go touch him, too?”

  “Don’t even think about it.”

  We decided, at least, to give him a name to remember us by and on the spot came up with “Dances with Dogs” and “Too Big to Fit on an Indian Nickel” and finally settled on “Stan the Man” in honor of Maggie’s favorite cat but also her first heartbreak, a big silver tabby who showed up at our house one November night and made himself at home for almost two years. A teenage house sitter forgot to feed him for a week (“Geez. Like I’m sor-ree. Okay? But, like, can’t cats find something to eat in the woods or something?”) and Stanley had left us, perhaps feeling we’d abandoned him. Maggie had wept inconsolably for a few days and I’d been forced to make up a neat fiction about Stanley going back to his original owners—which may, in fact, have been the case, and I certainly hope so because it was my best hope, too. Perhaps one reason we tell ourselves stories is to simply offer grief a place to go.

  We bid good-bye to Stan the Man and drove back to Sylvan Lake and went swimming in the fading sunlight below Harney Peak, the tallest place in South Dakota. My daughter dived from a rock and I saw trout rises on the lake’s surface and seriously considered fetching my fly gear but we went up to the Lakota dining room instead and ate fa
bulous Black Hills trout next to an elderly couple who were relentlessly determined to fix each other’s flaws after all these years. He slurped his soup. She couldn’t read a road map worth beans. We heard them murmuring soft imprecations at each other over their plates. A woman I knew who’d been a summer waitress at Bar Harbor once told me her theory that people revealed their true selves while on vacation because there was no social pressure to be polite—no benefit, as it were, to be derived from holding your tongue in the presence of someone you’d never see again. Vacations, she believed, exposed our strongest likes and dislikes and either made us, as a result, extremely happy or pains in the ass to be around. It was an interesting theory—something, as I told her, some cranky intellectual at Harvard ought to look into when he’d returned from snapping at waitresses in Maine.

  “Dad, do you think Stan the Man will ever come back?” I was tucking my daughter into bed at our cabin above the lake. Her hair was combed, her teeth were mintily scrubbed.

  I’d feared that the mention of Stan’s name would open the floodgates of feline remembrances.

  “It’s hard to say. Sometimes I think he will. I’m certain he knows how much you loved him. He obviously loved you, too.” I decided not to tell her I sometimes saw a cat on our road that resembled Stan. And once or twice I’d even caught a glimpse of a silver cat watching our house from the edge of the woods. But he always vanished when I stepped out.

  “Too bad,” she said, “there’s no dance that would make a cat come back.”

  “The world could use it.”

  —

  I rose before dawn and pushed the canoe out into the lake, producing silvery fantails on the surface. I hadn’t slept well, unable to shake thoughts about my troubled friend. I pictured him sitting like Silent Sam in an air-conditioned hospital room in Savannah, too addled to shave, trying to remember who he used to be, staring at the fine grass-cloth walls. How do we mediate, asked the poet Robert Penn Warren, our self-divisions? I decided I would call him when we reached Wyoming, perhaps tomorrow night. That would give me time to try and think of what to say to him.