by Jim Harrison
In the next two days before I left I saw Coughlin twice more. We met at a tackle shop outside the Loop and had lunch, and then he came for dinner my last night in town. I had no doubt that my mother had at least made the seating arrangements but I didn’t care. What was important was that I was getting a dose of oxygen in a life that badly needed fresh air. The whole trip to Chicago had been pleasantly unsettling with an ordinary sense of what Christmas was all about, something that I had never experienced growing up.
On the plane back to Marquette a seat mate asked what I did for a living and I blithely said that I was a spiritual and economic historian. This was out of character for me but I wanted him to commit first. I guessed right when he turned out to be a banker from Escanaba. I was surprised when he had three heavy drinks in quick succession but he said his wife was picking him up in Marquette for the long drive home. He had been a marine captain in Vietnam and “lost” seventy of his original one hundred and twenty men. I reflected on how different it was to talk to someone who had been there compared to the suburban abstractions, the easy blather, the sheer logorrhea of television and newspapers.
Most often that winter the snow was too deep to take Carla along so I left her with Clarence who would walk her around a couple of blocks. She would bark wildly when I walked to my truck but Clarence assured me that she quieted down the moment I left the alley. One afternoon in February I made a careless turn for a shortcut between Sagola and Northland. I was thinking about a text I had been reading that morning by Louis Agassiz that had been published in 1850, “Lake Superior: Its Physical Characters, Vegetation, and Animals, Compared with Those of Other and Similar Regions.” Agassiz had corresponded with Charles Darwin on the Upper Peninsula’s uniqueness. This made me feel that my project, however minimally, had a part in a grander tradition of inquiry. The eye of Agassiz was breathtakingly concise and lucid.
Meanwhile the storm that had been predicted had arrived and I began to have doubts about making it to Route 35 from my side road. After a couple of hours of very slow driving I churned to a stop in a drift a scant quarter of a mile from the highway. I sat there for an hour and saw the dim orange lights of a single snowplow pass and knew that I should sit tight. I had less than half a tank of gas, not enough to keep the heater on all night, but had had sense enough to pack an emergency kit and take along a sleeping bag for such possibilities. The kit included two boxes of candles of twenty each. I had read that a single candle would give off enough heat in a stuck car to keep an occupant from freezing so I lit three. Within a half hour I was warm enough to douse one, and then a second, keeping the third in a tin cough-drop container on the dashboard. I wrote in my journal for a couple of hours and ate two awful “nutrition” bars I had bought at a camping store. I also wrote a note to Coughlin with whom I had been corresponding once a week since Christmas.
Dear C.,
I’m stuck in a snowbank for the night in a remote location. This is not a suicide attempt similar to the one I mentioned long ago. I’ve confidently decided over and over to see this whole life item through to the end. I’m heating my truck cab with candles and it would be nice to have a bottle of red wine but the closest drinkable one is seventy miles and trillions of tons of snow away. Three days ago I made love briefly to a youngish librarian in a storage room and we were both pleased with ourselves. This act stood clearly on the side of life and against the guilty self-laceration you’ve seen in my character. To be sure I’m stuck in a truck all night in a zero-degree blizzard but not making more of the situation than simply being stuck in a truck in a zero-degree blizzard.
Yrs., Jack London
Coughlin had told me that as a boy in Ireland he had read all of Zane Grey and Jack London and couldn’t decide whether he wanted to fight Indians or be a hunter and trapper in the wilderness. Becoming a psychoanalyst in Chicago had presented a different sort of wilderness and less visceral but equally daunting challenges. Now he wished simply to become a master at untying human knots.
That spring and early summer it became clear that Laurie was dying. Her husband even glared at me at the funeral. When I walked down the hill to Gertz’s to buy some clothes they told me I hadn’t been in the store in a decade and I had shrunk a bit. After the funeral I sat up with Cynthia until she fell asleep against me on the sofa. Laurie’s moronic husband had insisted on an open-casket wake so that when mourners passed by they looked down at a skeleton barely covered by skin in a blue dress that she never would have worn. Walking past was walking in the darkest air possible despite the bright June sun coming through the stained-glass windows. A single fly circulated above the casket like a miniature bird. The organ droned. The flowers wilted.
28
I’m in the den and it reminds me of a huge pack rat nest I helped a biologist dismantle in the desert in the Southwest last winter. There are thirteen labeled cartons of papers along the south wall, and a thousand or so books on the north, all of which will be trucked over to Northern Michigan (now a full-fledged university) in a few days, ridding me of all the material of my nearly endless project, my skirmish with the unknowable that intermittently seemed so obvious. All I’ll have left save my memories are seventy or so of my own journals, and a few of Sprague’s, in which there are many items of a personal nature. Above all, what I’ve discovered is that certainties aren’t appropriate to the evidence.
I’ve been sitting here since before dawn when Cynthia called from Chicago to say that Mother had died of a pulmonary embolism, not really a bad thing because she had a severe kidney disease, nephrosis, that required daily dialysis and when I visited her a week ago she could not envision continuing to live in this manner. She was matter-of-fact and accepting rather than unhappy. Not ever having been that ill I couldn’t understand her mood, her quiet state of suspension behind which there must have been all sorts of mental activity she was unwilling or unable to share, though Cynthia told me that after Mother had emerged from a semicoma of several days’ duration she had told Cynthia that during the entire time she had actually been sitting on a big boulder in midsummer up near the Huron River Point and that she had been ten years old again. She had also seen the most spectacular northern lights of her lifetime. I immediately read a copy of Kübler-Ross Cynthia had given me and learned that this near-death state was frequently quite forgiving except for those left behind.
I’ve closed the den door but in the kitchen I can hear Mrs. Plunkett making breakfast at midmorning for Polly’s daughter Rachel who is thirteen and has been staying in Cynthia’s room for three days because of a quarrel with her mother. Rachel stayed out late with her boyfriend after the ceremony in which he was a graduating senior. I can’t really follow the lingua franca of these mother-daughter quarrels so have been carefully noncommittal though thirteen seems radically young to have a boyfriend.
“La-tee-fucking-da. You can tell that little bitch I’m not loaning her my favorite blouse.” Rachel is as brash on the phone as Cynthia used to be. I hear Mrs. Plunkett say, “Your language, young lady,” and Rachel say, “Sorry.”
Polly lives down the hill a few blocks west of the old Coast Guard station. Last month when she came back north I prepared a special dinner for her with the help of Mrs. Plunkett and “popped the question,” as they say locally. She laughed and said that she wouldn’t remarry me at gunpoint. I was more startled than hurt. We’re lovers and she insists that I’m far better off as her boyfriend. Perhaps that’s so. Her daughter Rachel is beyond my capabilities but I’ve been helpful raising her son Kenneth who is nine. I mean I take him fishing whenever he wants, maybe twice a week, and buy him things he thinks he needs that are a bit beyond Polly’s teacher’s salary, the most recent being an expensive racing bicycle that alarms me and Polly too who fears that his penchant for speed is the same as his father’s, who died on a motorcycle outing in Wisconsin. He was in all respects a good husband and teacher but on Saturdays when the weather was good he and his friends, all Vietnam veterans, would take off on their mo
torcycles and blow off steam. I’m not trying in any way to replace Kenneth’s dead father but was amused when Polly said he was sent home from a scout meeting for fighting with a friend who had referred to me as a “high-class fuckup.” I had called Donald over in the Soo for advice on Kenneth, but Donald only said, “Make sure he likes you so that when he needs advice he’ll ask you.” I impulsively bought him a dog but with the kids busy figuring out Marquette and Polly teaching summer school the dog who is named Sally mostly stays with me. She is a yellow Labrador, the kind of dog I wanted as a kid. She has been enough of a problem so that I have fenced in the entire backyard where she has dug large holes in Clarence’s once peerless lawn and flower gardens. Clarence died two years ago at the age of seventy or so when a boat hoist strap broke and the sailboat crushed him. I own a small landscape company that employs two of Clarence’s nephews full time. In the winter the nephews plow out driveways.
Jesse retired this late winter and returned to Veracruz after suffering a slight stroke. Before he left I asked him how long it had been since he had received a regular paycheck from my father. He said he had always been able to take care of himself and had recently sold three small apartment houses he owned up near the college having bought them many years before at a bargain. Had he kept them a secret or had I failed to notice? He also owned a combination auto wash and gas station and a self-service laundry. I began to wonder to what extent his exile had been a true exile but then my rationality in regard to Jesse had been totally corrupted by my father’s rape of Vera. A few days before he left for good I asked him about the coffee plantation land he had purchased with my father when I was in the ninth grade. He was pleasantly noncommittal and said there had never been enough capital to properly develop it. I also asked him why he had driven hundreds of times back and forth to Duluth instead of moving there and he answered that my father didn’t like to be under close observation, and also that it was expected of him to keep track of me. For instance, my father had predicted that my marriage to Polly wouldn’t last because I was too restless and angry for any woman to stay with me. This naturally angered me but Jesse laughed and said that proved the point. This calmed me down and we sat and had a drink during which I asked him why he hadn’t shot my father that evening. He said that would only be punishing himself and hurting Vera further, not to speak of many others. He had come from a large family and he was the padrone to many younger brothers and sisters and their children. He had missed his homeland but what could he have done for so many people if he had stayed in Veracruz? And my father had given him two months off each year to spend back home. I naturally said nothing of the number of times my father had drunkenly said something about his “brown embezzler.”
It was at this point that I felt foolish wondering if I had ever truly seen this man other than as someone who had helped me countless times. We sat there for hours and I apologized for not having had the curiosity to understand him. He said that very few people bothered understanding each other, even brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, though he thought that Cynthia and I had done a pretty good job. The point was that through working for my father so far from home he had liberated his family from generations of acute poverty, and now forty-five years later his job was finished.
He withdrew a bit when I asked him about World War II and the immediate aftermath but then threw up his hands as if to say why not tell me everything. My father didn’t enter the service until 1941 when he graduated from Yale. He was Jesse’s immediate officer and right away Jesse could tell that here was a man who wished to die and needed someone to watch his back. They became uncommon friends and the night before they shipped out of San Francisco they had become quite drunk and my father had told him why he didn’t care if he died. The summer before he had had an argument with his brother Richard about a woman and Richard had committed suicide by jumping off a cliff in the wrong place. There was only one good place to jump and knowing this Richard had intentionally jumped off the cliff into the water. My father had liked the young woman but Richard had loved her. My father had known since he was very young that he would never be a good person but still he loved his brother and because he caused his death afterward he and the young woman, my mother, had decided that the only good thing they could do was to become married.
Of course I could have guessed much of this if I had paid attention to certain things Fred had said, but then if you hate someone you don’t want to know their details.
Two years ago a lawyer called from Grand Rapids, Minnesota, to say that my father had been beaten up and might go to jail and needed my help. I was in Grand Marais at my cabin but Mrs. Plunkett tracked me down. I called the lawyer to see if I couldn’t avoid the trip by sending a check but it wasn’t possible. Someone from the family was required by the local judge. I left at dawn and got there in the evening and went directly to the lawyer’s home. It was the usual only this time my father had gotten himself thoroughly trashed by a man his own age, mid-sixties, who owned a small logging operation. My father was in the area grouse hunting with some “swells from Duluth,” the lawyer’s description, and had “diddled” with a girl who was a little too young, the logger’s granddaughter, whose parents were divorced. The logger had found out, tracked down my father, and beat him with a tire iron. The logger would be charged with assault to do great bodily harm and the jail time would ruin his business. My father would be charged with statutory rape which would look “terrible” for a man of his name (our family had done business in the nearby Mesabi Iron Range). I wanted to walk out immediately after I told the lawyer that my father had a long history of this crime. The lawyer asked me not to mention that again and that I should have some “Christian compassion” for my father. We drove over to the hospital where in a private room he was sipping whiskey and chatting with a nurse through swollen lips. He looked like a wrinkled purple prune from the facial hematomas. “Hello son. I’m so happy you could come over. My friends have abandoned me.”
We had a meeting in the judge’s chambers at six A.M. to avoid untoward observation. The judge who was my father’s age clearly wanted to rid himself of the problem. The sheriff, a mammoth Swede, said nothing at all. The logger grandfather glowered and righteously puffed. The judge actually congratulated my father on his distinguished armed services record and our family’s record of having brought so much employment to the area. The mother who was brassy in her Sunday best wept throughout the fifteen minutes it took. My father sat there in his expensive sporting clothes, a vicuña shirt and pressed chinos, as if everything had been a regrettable mistake. The potential charges which had not yet been filed were dropped. It cost me two grand for the lawyer who also orchestrated the five grand I gave on the side to the girl’s mother. The mission was accomplished, a minor foray into the banality of evil.
On the way to Duluth and before he dropped off to sleep from the pain medicine he mumbled how sad it was with upcoming important engagements that he would not be able to appear in public until his face lost its purple hue. He fiddled with the radio trying to find a news program. He had always been a news junkie and the Walter Cronkite news program that immediately preceded our dinnertime was a sacred half hour during which no one was allowed to speak except during the commercials. Both Fred and Coughlin have mentioned that they have never met a human being less interested in current events than I am. I suppose this is a simple reaction to my father’s obsession but there is the natural extension that the news of political mayhem and business corruption flowed inevitably from his class of men. I had been observant enough to note that most high members of the State Department, cabinet appointees, and major CEOs seemed to be cut from the same questionable roll of cloth and were engaged in the same level of discourse whether they were talking about political opponents, war, or economic recovery.
I cut off to the east rather than drive on a straighter line toward Duluth, unable to draw any conclusions over the fact that both Judy Garland and Bob Dylan had been born in the Grand Rapid
s-Hibbing area. I passed an iron mining theme park that was not well attended this late in the fall. All of the preposterously huge antique machinery loomed on the hillside. I slowed near a gas station to watch a tiny woman smoking a cigarette climb up the ladder and into the cab of a truck that could carry a three-hundred-ton pay-load of iron ore. I had heard that the immense tires cost forty thousand dollars apiece and it was so bizarre that the child in me wished to drive this truck down a country road.
