The Farmer's Daughter

by Jim Harrison

  The phone rang and it was Nora. She was sending a cab for B.D. because she had to be at work in an hour or so. Berry was fine and playing with the terriers. A letter had come from someone named Gretchen.

  While B.D. dressed he thought how dramatic life had become. He had never ridden in a cab and there was a letter from his beloved Gretchen whom he hadn’t heard from since Christmas. He dressed hastily still feeling spongy from the drugs, the railroad spike in his bladder having become a thumbtack. While waiting at the door Eats Horses told him to get packed up as they would be leaving in a few days and B.D. replied that since they owned practically nothing he could pack in minutes.

  It was a fine glittery late morning with a specific warmth in the sun not felt since the autumn before. In the cab B.D. had a rare sense of prosperity sniffing the air which had that new-car smell. The driver was from far-off India and was nearly as small as Nora. They didn’t understand each other but that was fine. The driver pointed up through the windshield and said, “Sun,” and B.D. said, “You got that right.”

  Up in the fourth-floor room Nora was kneeling sideways on a kitchen chair, her body halfway out the window, watching Berry far below leading the terriers around with grocery string for leashes. B.D. couldn’t help but make contact with Nora’s jutting butt which she wiggled a bit.

  “I feel bad about snapping your weenie so go ahead if you wish. I have a boyfriend so I’ll pretend it’s an out-of-body experience.”

  He felt like the luckiest man in the world as he lifted her skirt. Her rump was so pretty his skin tingled. There was a song he should be singing but he couldn’t think of what one. He pulled down her delicate panties and planted a big wet kiss on target and then stood remembering that in his narcotic haze early in the morning Nora had drawn a small vial of blood while Dr. Krider watched.

  “Why?” he had asked.

  “To check your PSA, your prostate.”

  “You don’t have one,” he’d said, a little smug in this rare piece of knowledge.

  “I’ve got other stuff,” she’d laughed.

  “I’m aware of that,” he had said dreamily.

  B.D. liked this kind of confab, this banter or repartee, a word he didn’t know, because it meant the world was going along okay. Now he began to do his job admirably, staring down at the sacred mystery and beauty of female physiognomy, trying to divert his enthusiasm so he wouldn’t come too quickly. His mind started singing a song they sang in fourth grade, “A Spanish cavalier stood in his retreat and on his guitar played a tune, dear.” The kids sang this loudly though the meaning of “Spanish cavalier” was in question. Nora began to furiously rotate her butt counterclockwise and that was that. B.D. was in no way prepared for the pain caused by his urethra so abraded by the kidney stone. He yowled and fell backward on his ass, the passage of the sperm raising the image of the hot liquid lead Grandpa poured into molds to make fishing sinkers.

  “I could have told you the last part wouldn’t be fun but I was looking out for number one,” Nora said, looking down at him with a merry smile.

  “I forgive you,” he said, jumping up at hearing Berry climb the stairs. He recalled a magazine article in the office of his ex-lover the dentist, Dr. Brenda Schwartz, that said, “No gain without pain.” “I just pray we get another chance.”

  “This was a one-shot deal, kiddo.” Nora let Berry in the door and embraced her, then left.

  The blues descended lower than his sore dick with Nora’s departure. Never in his life had he been attracted to a small woman and the idea that it was a “one-shot deal” left him bereft. He was nearly irritable with Berry which was unthinkable. When she had nothing else to do she would jump straight up and down in place and in the year this habit had begun she had acquired the ability to jump astoundingly high. “Too bad she’ll never make a living out of her jumping and birdcalls,” Uncle Delmore had said.

  B.D. took a large package of pork steak from the mini-fridge and decided to cook it all in his outsized electric fry pan. Once the pork began to brown he opened Gretchen’s letter with a bit of dread. Delmore maintained that no one in the United States complained as much as those who’d graduated from college and that sure was true of Gretchen. Despite her beauty and good job as a social worker she was often lower than a snake’s ass, B.D. thought. Once a week she’d drive all the seventy miles up to Marquette just like Brenda the dentist to see a psychoanalyst. Brenda went for what she called her “eating disorder” and she had wept hysterically when B.D. had said, “You’re fine, you just eat too much.” Gretchen on the other hand was lithe and beautiful but beginning with her Christmas letter she’d said she was discovering in therapy that she was sexless and it was driving her batty. After college she had discarded men as “horrid” and B.D. remembered poignantly her nitwittish young woman friend who had discarded Gretchen. Once when he and Gretchen had had a couple of drinks in her kitchen he had asked about the mechanics of Sapphic lovemaking and she only said, “You’re disgusting.” Now in her early thirties Gretchen was thinking about having a baby and was seriously considering B.D. as a sperm donor. He was proud as a peacock but couldn’t understand why she would refuse him the pleasure of slipping it in for a minute rather than an artificial method.

  While chopping a head of garlic to add to the pork steak, B.D. meditated on the letter. Gretchen’s analyst had said that her sexless nature was “rare but not unheard of.” Once when they had taken Berry swimming Gretchen had fallen asleep on her huge flowery beach towel and B.D. had slowly studied her body from the vantage point of an inch distance trying to memorize it for recall on cold winter nights. She had awakened and looked down under her sunglasses and thought he was on the verge of probing her pubis with his nose.

  “What are you doing?” she’d shrieked.

  “I’m memorizing your body for cold winter nights. Turn over because I’m missing the butt side.”

  “You asshole,” she’d said, raising her foot and pushing him away. Her soft warm insole against his neck was one of his most cherished memories.

  Berry nudged him to remind him not to burn the garlic. She used to like burned garlic but now she wanted it softened. They ate the entire pan of pork steak with a loaf of the French bread he bought daily from a bakery down the street, the likes of which was unavailable in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The bread was so delicious it mystified him. They were always passing stupid laws, why not make it a law that this sort of bread be available everywhere in America?

  B.D. began to doze in his chair from his long uncomfortable night and full stomach. Berry was making a variety of birdsongs and he knew she was begging for an afternoon walk. She also made a couple of guttural mutters, a struggle for the “b” consonant that might mean she was on the verge of saying “bird” after nearly four months of speech therapy. Berry loved the teacher which led B.D. to the obvious fact that Berry at age ten needed a mother and the sadder fact that her own birth mother would be in prison a couple more years for, among other things, biting a thumb off a cop when a group of malcontents had raided an archaeological site. The therapist had pointed out that Berry hadn’t felt an urgency toward speech since B.D. was basically her only current human reality and they communicated perfectly well. B.D. had nervously confessed that he had whisked Berry out of Michigan rather than subject her to a state school and the therapist had said Berry would still need “socialization” with kids her own age in some community. B.D. had thought of moving her over to the Sault Sainte Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians rez near Sault Sainte Marie but he was persona non grata in the Soo area for reasons of past misdemeanors.

  He dozed for a few minutes while she brushed his hair and brought him his coat, and then they headed out for the Lower Don Parkland. Outside, B.D. wasn’t sure of reality because the long night of pain and narcotics made the world uncommonly glittery and vivid. There was also a brisk southwest wind and suddenly the temperature was in the low seventies. It was Saturday afternoon and the streets were full of nearly frantic walke
rs trying to shake off the lint and cobwebs of a long winter. Younger people, say under twenty, were moving into dance steps as they walked and kids were jumping up and down a bit envious of Berry’s jumping power. It all reminded B.D. in his floating body of those musical comedies from the forties that Uncle Delmore loved on television. Delmore’s highest admiration was saved for Fred Astaire. He would say, “Just think if Fred had learned Indian dance steps and showed up at the Escanaba Powwow!” B.D. admitted it would be quite a show. Delmore also loved Gene Kelly who could run up a wall, do a flip, and land on his feet. It would be fun to do that in a tavern, B.D. thought when he saw the movie.

  When they reached the area Berry ran up the gully to their snow cave. B.D. followed slowly noting that the snow and ice had collapsed part of the cave and if he had been in there with Deidre when it happened they might have been suffocated or, more likely, he would have pulled an Incredible Hulk move and burst upward through the snow and ice saving his true love. Only she wasn’t much of a true love. She and her turd husband were going to a place called Cancún to renew their vows. At least Nora, who had also removed herself from the list of possibles, wouldn’t die if she touched a peanut butter sandwich. Nora had said she was a gymnast in high school and could move her butt like a paint mixer in a hardware store.

  B.D. sat on a big rock while Berry called in groups of crows, not a difficult thing to learn to do as the Corvidae are curious about why humans might wish to talk to them. What’s the motive? they wonder. Soon enough, though, Berry had attracted a massive number of crows and a group of bird-watchers, those cranky coup counters known as twitchers to the Brits and some Canadians, made their way up the gully and scared the birds away. Birds have finely honed memories for people and they were familiar with Berry from the dozens of trips into this part of the Lower Don Parkland. Berry was irked and crawled into what was left of the cave.

  As B.D. dozed in the sun his half-dream thoughts turned to Deidre’s heat source. A thousand Deidres making love in a gymnasium would melt candles. He opened his eyes to the departing birds not knowing that their raucous cries were his Canadian swan song. In his view far too much had been happening and he craved the nothingness of the Upper Peninsula, a feeling he shared with the ancient Chinese that the best life was an uneventful one.

  They walked. And walked and walked. Because of his tough night B.D.’s feet were marshmallows which nonetheless dragged him along. Berry teased the bird-watchers along the paths by hiding in thickets and making the calls of dozens of northern songbirds that had not yet arrived from their winter journey south. A man with thousand-dollar binoculars told B.D. that Berry could be a “valuable resource” and B.D. agreed, lost in his diffuse homesickness for brook trout creeks and the glories of snowmelt time when the forest rivers raged along overflowing their banks, and bear fed happily on the frozen carcasses of deer that had died of starvation, and icebergs bobbed merrily in Lake Superior on huge waves often carrying ravens picking in the ice for entombed fish. On this afternoon Toronto seemed vividly beautiful, a characteristic in the perceptions of those who had endured extreme pain and survived it. The world, simply enough, became as beautiful as it does to many children waking on a summer morning.

  By late afternoon Berry had shown no signs of tiring while B.D. was barely shuffling along. He saw a young man taking a Tums and asked for one.

  “My fried pork lunch is backing up on me,” B.D. said, explaining himself.

  “I had pizza with too many red pepper flakes,” the young man said in a strange accent. They spoke for a few moments and it turned out that he was a country boy from near Sligo in Ireland. B.D. had been amazed by how many of the foreign-born he had met in Toronto and had often wished he had recorded the nationalities in his memory book which, of course, he didn’t own. Geography had been his best subject in high school but he had found to his dismay in Toronto that someone had changed many of the names of countries in Africa after they gained their independence.

  He was asleep on his feet by the time they reached Yitz’s for supper. He settled for a bowl of beef borscht while Berry had three orders of herring and a serving of French fries which she ate at a back table with the children of a couple of waitresses who were kind to her. B.D. in his semi–dream state was thinking that it was only ten days from trout opener in Michigan which seemed so fatally far away. The first week of the season he often visited a daffy hermit north of Shingleton who was a fine angler but had some peculiar ideas. One of the theories the hermit mourned over was that there was a hidden planet in our solar system that contained an even million species of birds but we would never be allowed to visit them because of our bad behavior as earthlings. The hermit painted watercolors of these birds and one that B.D. especially liked was a huge purple bird with an orange beak that had three sets of wings. Who was to say it didn’t exist? B.D. had never cared for the naysayers of the world of which there were far too many.

  They took a cab home after they proved to the driver that B.D. had the estimated ten-buck fare. Berry was frightened of the driver who was angry over the war in Iraq and decidedly anti-U.S. B.D. was helpless to say anything but “It’s not my fault.”

  B.D. fell asleep in his clothes while Berry danced for an hour or so to country music which she did every evening. He drifted off to Patsy Cline singing “The Last Word in Lonesome Is Me.” It was a full seven hours but seemed only moments when there was an alarming knock on the door, startling because it was the first time there was a knock at the door in their five months of residence. B.D. heard Nora’s voice and his heart took flight as he turned on the lamp. She had obviously returned for more of the same and in his pleasant drowsing head he had a vision of her delightful paint shaker doing its sacred job. But no, when Berry opened the door it was not only Nora but Charles Eats Horses and a sturdy Indian woman in her fifties who wore a business suit and was introduced as the Director.

  “We move out at dawn,” said Eats Horses. “I heard that line in a movie once and always liked it.” Eats Horses was wearing a leather jacket with beaded lightning bolts and looked ominous. Berry who was wary of strangers went to him and took his hand. He picked her up. “We’re going home.”

  Nora and the Director helped them in their hasty packing. B.D. was miffed when they said there wasn’t room for his big, used electric fry pan which had set him back five bucks. The Director also shook her head no when he tried to put the last remaining beer from the fridge in his jacket saying that no alcohol was allowed on the “tour bus.” B.D. was confused and picked up Gretchen’s letter and sniffed it for signs of life feeling an ever more insistent tug of homesickness. Nighttime wasn’t his time for clear thinking. In troubled times B.D. tended to cut way back on alcohol to avoid feeding the fire of chaos but at the moment he felt the need for a double whiskey because Nora was sniffling at the door and bounteous tears were falling.

  “You poor redskins. I love you.”

  “I can’t be more than half. I’m just a mongrel,” B.D. said, embarrassed.

  “My great-grandmother was married to a Jewish peddler in Rapid City in 1912. There aren’t hardly any Lakotas with a streak of Jew,” Eats Horses joked.

  “I’m a mean-minded, ass-whipping pureblood,” the Director said, embracing Nora.

  It took only minutes to arrive at the arena parking lot a dozen blocks away. B.D. was irritated because the Director beat him to the front seat where he had fully intended to feign sleep and let his head fall onto Nora’s lap.

  The tour bus was an immense affair with THUNDERSKINS painted in large red letters on the side surrounded by yellow lightning bolts, all on the black metal skin of the bus which was lit up like Times Square and ready to go. The Director explained that the Thunderskins was a Lakota rock-and-roll group with only two more stops on a month-and-a-half tour, one in Thunder Bay, on the north shore of Lake Superior, and the last in Winnipeg, after which they would head south to Rapid City and Pine Ridge to drop everyone off, “everyone” being the usual assortment of r
oadies and soundmen, both skins and whites who were now outside drinking from pints and perhaps dragging at joints before entering the bus where the Director manned the door like a guard dog. The four stars of the band would fly on a plane to Thunder Bay and the Director explained to B.D. that the plane wouldn’t work for him and Berry and Eats Horses because of the tight security at all airports. B.D. noticed that the small crowd of employees all nodded to Eats Horses and then averted their eyes.

  “They think I might be a wicasa wakan but I’m not,” Eats Horses whispered to B.D. who was even more confused not knowing that wicasa wakan meant medicine man, often a somewhat frightening person like a brujo in Mexico.

  Eats Horses took over the door frisking while the Director showed B.D. and Berry to a small compartment at the back of the bus across the aisle from her own. There were two cots, an easy chair, a miniature toilet, and a window looking into the night. Before B.D. fell back to sleep after a cheese sandwich and two cups of strong coffee he wondered how so obvious a bus was going to smuggle himself and Berry back into the United States. He was diverted by seeing Nora drive away and how when they’d kissed good-bye she had rudely pushed his hand off her ass when only yesterday at high noon she had allowed him to grip her hip bones like a vise. Berry was sitting on her cot looking frightened and B.D. held her hand but the Director came back and got Berry saying she needed some mothering. B.D. fell asleep to the wheezing of the big diesel engine beneath him as the bus moved north on Highway 400 toward the landscape he called home, dense forests of pine, hemlock, tamarack, and aspen surrounding great swamps and small lakes that had wonderful fringes of reeds and lily pads. There were creeks, beaver ponds, and small rivers where B.D. would always find complete solace in trout fishing. He was observant of the multiple torments people seemed to have daily and felt lucky that he could resolve his own problems with a couple of beers and a half dozen hours of trout fishing and if a female crossed his path whether fat or thin, older or younger, it was a testament that heaven was on earth rather than somewhere up in the remote and hostile sky.