Sundog (Contemporary Classics)

by Jim Harrison

  “You boys are under arrest. The season's been over a month.”

  “I was out in Fiji getting my ass shot at. I thought when I got home I had some venison coming.”

  “I should probably arrest you, Karl. You fired a pistol right in town.” The constable was confused by the lawyer's wife, who was hugging and kissing my brother.

  “There's not a man good enough to arrest me around here. You know that.” There was an unpleasant edge to Karl's voice, and I was scared.

  “Just try to behave while you're home. I'm keeping an eye on you.” The constable walked off down the snowy street before his dignity could be further wounded.

  When we got home, we had a fine feast. Karl gutted the deer outside, then we stripped the loins in the pumpshed while the other men watched with admiration. We all ate the loins and the liver, the preferred pieces, but not before Dad offered a longish prayer on nature's bounty.

  The night before Karl left to go back to the Pacific, I heard a conversation when I was supposedly asleep. What kept me awake was the idea that I would be left alone again with Violet, Mom and Dad. Karl and Violet were in the kitchen, and I could tell by Karl's voice that he was drinking.

  “You drive me to St. Ignace, and I'm catching the bus. The car is yours.”

  “I can't take your new car. You're just being kind....”

  “God damn you, Violet. I've got no use for a car in the South Pacific. The navy is not in the business of shipping cars. He's almost grown up. He doesn't have to have you here anymore.”

  “I can't leave him here with Mom and Dad.”

  “Jesus, I already said I talked to Ted and Ted wants him. It's been over twelve years, and I can't stand the idea of you waiting for the mail to come every day. You got to make a life for yourself. If anyone, whomever he is, was coming back it would have been by now.”

  “Let me think about it. You're being kind. . . .”

  “Stop it, Violet. You're my sister, and I love you. Don't ever say I'm kind again. You said you always wanted to go to college and be a teacher. You're twenty-seven and you better get started.”

  So Karl left, and it was a decade before any of us saw him again. The drift of the overheard conversation didn't really sink in at the time—I was far too disappointed by Karl's departure to think about anything else. I prayed for friends, but we were too far from town for much chance of that. I studied hard and passed my high school graduate equivalency test at age thirteen with flying colors. Not to be arrogant, but our family didn't realize we were smart until we got out in the world. The high point of that winter and spring were the long rides we took in Karl's Chevy. Ted sent a monthly check, and we lived so simply that there was plenty of money left for gas. Once a week we'd stop at the small county library and see if anything new had come out of interest. We did this during school hours so I wouldn't be running into anyone my own age and incur any embarrassment.

  I was thirteen the summer of 1948, the most difficult summer of my life. It was not in my nature to question the way things were, but I was sorely put to the test. First of all, I grew from about five foot five to nearly six feet, and I lost any sense of the perimeters of my body. I had a couple of seizures and quite logically upped my pill-taking to account for my growth. Dad's health was in precipitate decline, so Violet and I switched off looking after him, because Mother had become weaker. Dad had new visions almost daily, many of them including my particular destiny as a great preacher. People don't realize how similar the rural north is to the rural south. It's too cold for writers to live in the rural north, so we get short shrift. Dad put me through several, largely incoherent, hours of Bible study a day. He made me promise to go to the Moody Bible Institute, where he had taken night courses and where he had met Mother. She was an immigrant servant girl from the Alsace and had stopped into the Institute one evening to get out of the ferocious Chicago wind. To show you how bad it was getting, we spent the entire month of June building an Egyptian waterwheel from a picture book on the Bible. The county newspaper had an article about it: “Preacher Invents Egyptian Waterwheel.” There was a photo of Dad in a nightshirt, which he wore night and day, and me looking severely embarrassed. I must admit that the contraption did a wonderful job diverting water from a creek to our garden. Dad had to be watched even closer after he showed up in town in his nightshirt trying to pass himself as the prophet Isaiah. Ted, Laurel, Ivy, Lily, everyone came for a visit that summer and tried to reason with Dad, but without luck. Ted, aided by the postwar boom, owned what had become a sizable construction company. When he visited, he told me there was going to be a place in his company for me and dropped off all manner of books on civil engineering so I wouldn't end up as a “laboring stiff.”

  What forced me back to religion with a terrible energy wasn't Dad's teaching or his visions or the Bible itself, but guilt over Violet. Can you remember when you were thirteen or fourteen and what sex meant to you then? It was a strain that daily tore you to pieces. It had been over a year and a half since Edith had left, and I had no affection whatsoever except for Violet's sisterly caresses. Maybe that potion I took is making me talk about this—you know, like a truth serum—but in the light of later developments, the whole situation must be regarded as comical. You see, Violet was a little daffy and totally without any sense of personal modesty. She thought of herself as an honest drudge, a hardworking young woman, without charm and attractiveness. When anyone would try to flirt, it would pass right over her head for some reason. I can remember brushing her hair after she had a bath when she only had a towel around her waist. I would be looking down over her shoulders at her breasts, which would rise with the pleasure of getting her hair brushed. She would continue reading to me from Romain Rolland's Jean Christophe.

  One hot day in July, after a long session in the garden, we went swimming at this little lake way back in the woods that only Karl, a few Indians and trappers knew about other than us. After a short dip, Violet lay back on a towel to read a book and drink a bottle of pop. I was swimming around, looking at the bottom of the lake with a pair of goggles Karl had sent me from California. I followed a school of minnows right up to the shallows in front of where Violet lay, reading aloud from a novel by Louis Bromfield. I lifted my head up from the water and saw her legs and thighs and sex through the water-spattered goggles and got a fierce hard-on. This brought tears to my eyes, tears of guilt and shame, so I kept the goggles on, which only put her body at one remove, like a dirty picture. I lay there and ejaculated right under water on the sand. Relieved, I swam around for an hour or so, but when I came back she was laying on her belly and, against my will, I became excited again. Imagine a thirteen-year-old's confused lecture to himself on incest, especially when the Bible came out so directly against it. She turned back over, sat up and brushed the sand from her body.

  “R.C., let's go. We've got to pick up the mail and make dinner.” She stood and drew on her skirt, then her underpants, with that curious little shuffle women often make. “I guess I got some sunburn on my breasts, or what Karl calls tits.”

  “I don't want to go. We never get any mail, anyhow.” This was the wrong thing to say, as Violet was unnaturally sensitive about the mail. I gave my hard-on a painful squeeze in a vain effort to make it go away. This brought forth an involuntary yelp, and I dropped my face into an inch of sandy water.

  “R.C., what in God's name is wrong with you? Are you having a fit? Oh, Jesus, you'll drown.”

  I looked up as she bent over and grabbed my arms, jerking me to my knees. She tore off my goggles and held my head to her chest, which didn't help matters as she hadn't put her blouse on. Then she knelt down to look into my eyes to see if they were whirling.

  “R.C., haven't you been taking your medicine? Are you okay?” Then it dawned on her. She had ahold of my arms, and I couldn't cover myself. I suddenly burst into tears and she into laughter. “That's fine, darling. That's what people are like. All men are like that, sweetheart. You're just growing up to be a man, an
d I should start wearing a bathing suit. I'm sorry. You need a girl friend. There must be some girl at church you could fool around with, but just be careful.”

  We finished putting on our clothes somewhat awkwardly. She blushed a little and gave me a hug.

  “Robert Corvus, don't let your religion make you mean-minded about sex. The Bible is full of love, but Saint Paul was a little off his rocker. You're a much better boy than your brother Karl. He lassoed me once and took off my pants.”

  “Jeezo, what did you do?” Karl always went for the immediate solution.

  “I kicked him in the pecker, that's what I did. That put a stop to that nonsense.”

  So I returned to religion with a vengeance, not wanting to be cast into hell for incest and generalized lust. In fundamentalist denominations, to wish to do an act is equated with actually performing the act. Catholics have more sense than to believe that human thought can be significantly controlled for long. When you watched your mother canning tomatoes with a pressure cooker, you hoped the valve on top was working, else the whole works would blow apart. This is a tad corny, but I read in one of those miscellany columns in the newspapers that American legislators as a whole had passed over three and a half million laws trying to enforce the Ten Commandments. It's wonderfully ludicrous, isn't it? This priest down in Venezuela loaned me the autobiography of Saint Augustine, which mirrored my situation. “I came to Carthage where a cauldron of unholy loves rose round about me.” It was a horrifying tightrope.

  At the time, our church had been through a phase of auditioning new preachers. The elders had just tossed out the kindly old man who had been our preacher for twenty years or so for being too “modernist.” This meant that the preacher had been caught red-handed out fishing with the Catholic priest from Epoufette and, what's more, this priest had beer in the rowboat. My father, as daffy as he had become, was depressed in his moments of clarity to see his old friend so flippantly tossed from the pulpit. Violet and I laughed hysterically one day when Dad said of the elders, “Those chintzy bastards ought to be horse-whipped.” Deep in the past there was a Chicago street kid who had wanted to move north to go fishing.

  Since my father was much respected by the older members of the church as a holy man, albeit a bit of a fool, the new preacher immediately took me under his wing. I didn't understand it at the time, but it was the second occasion where I was being manipulated—the first time was when the doctor tried to wangle out of me our bird-hunting spots. Now this new preacher was from Tennessee and was an accomplished orator. When I was elected the president of the youth group as sort of a cruel joke because nobody wanted the job, he drew me aside and began to lay out the principles of leadership and crowd control. It was a pragmatic amalgam of everything he had learned: look them right in the eye, bring up something to shock them out of the stupor of their last meal, on occasion be spontaneously overcome with tears, pace yourself, use the rhythm of repetition, save a surprise for the end of any talk, let yourself go and Jesus will take over, move around the platform, when you're lost just shout “Come quickly, Lord Jesus!” or “Oh Lord, how long?” and so on. I feel a little odd in admitting now that this training put me in good stead in the world when I became a foreman. You've got to win your men over if you want them to produce. I guess I'm not really embarrassed; I suppose my errors were based on energy and enthusiasm, the discovery that there was something I could do in public after years of suffering a private infirmity, not to speak of those raging hormones plinking around in my system in the manner of the Brownian movement.

  Under the tutelage of the new preacher, I perfected a thirty-minute sermon, which I must have delivered, with a few variations, fifty times in two years. If you like, I could probably dig up this artifact. I began with a winter theme and called it “Toboggan Slide to Armageddon” and ran on at the mouth about the atom bomb being the first gong of Armageddon. The mostly pleasant homilies of the New Testament weren't to my taste, other than the Book of Revelations. I preferred the language of the prophets and their keen sense of dire portents. Remind me to dig this sermon out of my papers. We'll look at it like we were these paleontologists I met in the Rift Valley in Africa.

  Well, I must say that Violet's advice was right on the money. In no time at all I had all the girls I needed—in fact, far too many to keep my balance. Mother ordered me a pale blue suit from Montgomery Ward. At a tent meeting at the Soo I was a warm-up for a traveling evangelist and was given twenty dollars in an envelope as part of the take. It was at a church group over in Munising that I met my first wife, Emmeline, during what's called “The Invitation.” That's when you ask if anyone wants to come forward and take Jesus as their own personal savior. You've seen it on television. The choir sings “Just as I Am,” a truly hypnotic hymn, and there was Emmeline, big as life, sobbing at the altar. It was during a church camp revival at a lake near Munising where several hundred people were living in tents, praising the Lord and carrying on, because this was the prime opportunity for young people from far-flung towns to meet each other, to meet someone new. It's deliciously funny when I think it over. We were both fourteen at the time, and Emmeline was what young men call “stacked,” still trim in a girlish way but amply endowed. The evening after she came to Jesus we took a long walk around the lake over to where a farmer had cut a hayfield. Our conversation was austere and ethereal, dealing with certain Scriptures that might help us at our troublesome age when, for all we know, the devil might drop the A-bomb square on our heads. Emmeline was in the first glow of redemption, which is, at least partly, a sexual experience. When we reached the still-soft stubble of the freshly cut hayfield we could hear them singing “The Old Rugged Cross” across the lake. The hymn was written by a preacher down in Reed City. We sat down to listen to the music and watch an osprey diving for fish. I remember being attentive to the osprey when Emmeline decided to unburden herself to the “man who saved my soul.” I had heard enough of these paltry sins to listen with only half an ear. Emmeline, however, was so original that my hair stood on end and my pecker was at frantic attention.

  “Well, Dad died over in Italy in the war. There was just me and my little sister and Mom, who worked at Myron's Wonderbar. Uncle Earl, my dad's brother, had a bum leg and didn't have to go in the service. He looked after us and sometimes would take us girls way over to Marquette to the movies while Mom worked nights. On the way home, when my little sister slept, he started putting his hand on my leg. I sort of knew it was wrong, but I loved going to the movies and, excuse my language, didn't want to piss him off. Every-time we did something, a picnic or a movie or a ride, Uncle Earl was always trying something. Well, this last May on my fourteenth birthday, my little sister got the flu right in the restaurant. We took her home and put her to bed and called Mom and said everything would be okay. So he started sipping at his Guckenheimer whiskey, and I suddenly started crying. You see, I had been invited to the prom by a senior boy, but we couldn't afford a formal—a dress, you know—and Mom didn't have time to make one. I really wanted to go to that dance. So Uncle Earl says, I'll buy you the dress if you do what I say and don't tell your mother. I sort of knew what was coming and said, you can't make me pregnant—”

  “There, there, now. . . . The Lord forgives everything. . . .” Emmeline was crying with more than a touch of the dramatic. I was afraid I wouldn't hear the rest of the story. “It would probably be good to get it off your chest.”

  “I'm not saying it was all his fault. He limps, but he sort of looks like Tyrone Power. We kissed a lot with our mouths wide open, and we took off all of my clothes, even my underpants. I'd never been that far before with anyone because I didn't want to get pregnant.” Emmeline paused again and leaned against me. I was after the story now like a weasel in a henhouse.

  “Confession is good for the soul, Emmeline. The Lord died for your sins, and all guilt should be lifted now. Get rid of the old and start anew.”

  It came out of her somewhere between a shriek and a sob. “He licked
my bottom and put his wanger in my mouth!” Then she flopped over like a sack of oats, apparently in a dead faint, with her skirt askew and well up the backs of her thighs. Holy shit, I thought, this is more than I bargained for. I looked to the sky for help, a beseeching prayer for guidance. Being a youth ignorant of the variations of sexual behavior, her announcement was the equivalent of having a hatchet sunk in my forehead. This Uncle Earl would surely burn in Hell, the sooner the better. I helped her up with the slightest peek under her skirt. Lest you think this was a case of child abuse, Emmeline admitted years later she had “more or less” seduced Uncle Earl to get that prom formal. In any event, I was putty in her hands until I left for Africa seven years later. It was on the following evening that we repeated Uncle Earl's moves, under our mutual assurances that the Bible hadn't made any specific statements against it. In this variation to avoid sin, we literally mouthed each other into incoherence every time we met. What grand sex it was, with body and mind sunk equally in the mystery of it all, a true marriage almost impossible to repeat later in life, when dozens of meaningless but inevitable questions arise whenever man and woman meet.

  The following October was the coldest on record, without the marvelous fillip or savory of an Indian summer. In addition to preaching, I was studying construction textbooks, learning trigonometry, and digging wellpits by hand for Ted, just as Karl had done. Your basic wellpit has to be underground up here to avoid freezing. You probably don't know it, but down a few feet the earth maintains a basic temperature of about 56 to 58 degrees Fahrenheit. Then I caught pneumonia and had to spend a few weeks in bed. I was just beginning to get around again when Violet showed up in my room one morning at daylight. She was crying, so I followed her in alarm. What happened was that she heard Dad carrying on, which wasn't unusual, but when she went into their bedroom, Mother was dead and Dad was clutching her and wailing. When we got in there, Dad had his face in her neck and was singing softly a popular love song, “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine. . . .” We didn't know what to do, so we got down on our knees beside the bed and I prayed, “Lord, You have taken Mother to Heaven. Bless us who are left behind.” Dad finally joined us, and we had to sing some hymns, though at this stage he got the words all mixed up, so we drifted from one hymn to the other until our knees got too sore to bear it any longer. We'd go from “Washed in the Blood of the Lamb” to “Wonderful the Matchless Grace of Jesus” to “Safe Am I in the Hollow of His Hand.”