Bear and His Daughter (24 page)

Passing an alder grove with his windows down, he was startled to catch for a moment the robotic bleating of a backhoe. The sound made him pull off the road.

The grove was deserted. The prairie wind carried a weight of silence and he realized suddenly that the sounds were those of a mockingbird. It must have listened for days to a road crew’s machines and incorporated the backhoe into its repertoire.

It was impossible for him then not to poetize. And it was impossible for him not to think: How the Russians would have loved such a poem once. Nature and machine in literal harmony, labor and wilderness under the broad sky. The fact was that, these days, Smart was not nearly as welcome over there as he had once been. Time was, his appearances had filled hockey rinks; he had gone drinking with Yevtushenko. Perhaps they thought, the new bunch, that he had been a little tight with the old crowd, a little too accommodating of the cultural command, the official poetasters and their masters. He had seen it as working against the Cold War He had never thought of his work as political; he had assumed people there had genuinely liked what he did and would continue to do so.

It even seemed that the end of the Cold War had undermined his status in the United States, his credentials as rebel. As though people were less interested as the dangers waned. Then he had had his campus problems. Harassment. Absurdity.

Back in the
cat,
he thought for a while of the Bird and the Backhoe. Of course there was a poem there. But so Russian, so Soviet, so much uplift and muscularity. Was it really worth doing? Someone somewhere had said of Rilke that if he had cut his chin shaving in the morning he would have bled poetry. Smart had once secretly thought that was equally true of himself.

They make me feel like cheering,
These fish, mere fish, at the cost of such voyaging, such heroism, such wild adventure
Fulfilling a purpose that was never their own.
The mighty merciless will that made Leviathan
Made them, sent them to sea, willed them unending strife.

He supposed that was hardly Rilke. He might have made a middle-level Soviet poet or the equivalent of one. Or else, he thought, he might after all be better than that. Starting out, his model had been Thomas McGrath, another poet from his part of the country. And as for the salmon poem—if he could only bring it back, it might be improved, honed into something worthy of its conception, the wonderful moment that had inspired it. In any case, he thought, except for fragments it seemed to be gone. But the excitement of the recollected poem, what seemed to him its possibilities, stirred a swelling of angina pain in his breast.

…in order that there be fish, that there be something rather than nothing
In the appointed place.
To serve that inscrutable disposition,
Welcome them home now, with carnivore cries
Life’s champions
Let them teem and die.
To survive and teem and die is glory.
God’s will be done.

It would probably, he thought, be well to take the God pan out.

There had not been that many visitors to the monument that afternoon. Fewer than a dozen in all, enough to constitute two groups. They would pass through the gate to park headquarters and tickets from Phyllis Stowe and, if they chose to, they might file into the little auditorium to watch a film on western North America during the early Cenozoic Era and the formation of volcanic structures. Watching it, Rowan had to muster all the goodwill of which she was capable—a thoroughly boring film and not even specific to that particular site. At least three other parks with volcanic configurations to display used it.

During the second showing of the film, Rowan went into the ladies’ room and took the envelope out of her breeches pocket and licked the icelike crystal from her fingers and put some on her gums. She made it to the auditorium just as the lights were coming on. She had a quick look around to see if there were any children in the house. She always liked to make sure that children saw the part about the fossil record, the Eocene plants that had been carbon dated back millions of years. Her readiness to point out the implications to youngsters occasionally involved her in controversies with God-fearing parents. Sometimes she found these disputations tiresome. At other times she could barely get enough of them. The park superintendent, Mr. Bondoc, the man who had just assigned her to enforcement, preferred her to overlook difficult points of science. Fundamentalists ought to enjoy the parks too, and often wrote letters to their legislators.

“Do you have any films emphasizing creationism?” a bearded paterfamilias with a beaten-down wife and half a dozen children had once asked her.

“At the moment, sir,” Rowan had replied, “we lack the documentation. We have folks in the field though.”

“And what are they doing?”

Taking a shit, she had dearly wanted to say, but she had been sober at the time.

“Many people believe that the Garden of Eden is where Reskoi, the sky spirit, created Rainbow Girl,” Rowan had told the man. “And where would we be without Rainbow Girl, kids?” she asked his children. “Without Rainbow Girl we wouldn’t have turkey every Thanksgiving. Or corn.”

“We don’t happen to believe in Rainbow Girl,” the man had said.

“C’mon,” she asked him, “on a day like this? Everybody believes in Rainbow Girl.”

Fortunately for Rowan, the man’s complaining letter to Mr. Bondoc, attempting to refute the doctrine of Rainbow Girl and containing sarcastic references to Her had made him sound like a lunatic to that unimaginative official.

Conducting the five tourists through the lava bed, Rowan was at her most enthusiastic. From time to time she was afraid there might be some spittle running down the side of her mouth, but that was just her imagination. The men appreciated her dashing uniform and the women seemed not to mind. Glimpsing herself in the reflective glass of the park headquarters on the way to the field, it seemed to her she looked like Ella Raines in
Tall in the Saddle.
Queen of the Cowgirls, the big iron on her hip.

As usual, she explained to her group that the field through which she conducted them was a composite lava field of fluid mafic formation. It was mainly cinder and ash which gave it its grim and witchy appearance, although there were also examples of lapilli and even some brachiated granite of volcanic origin, among which, in season, wildflowers grew. A few of the wildflowers, she pointed out, were still in evidence, withered and mummified: Indian paintbrush, lupine, death camas.

A teenage girl, the youngest person in the group, wanted to know why it was called death camas.

“Because some say it used to grow over graves, honey. Along the trail. And others say because the flower looks a little like a skull.”

The brachiated lava had other plants.

“Wintergreen,” Rowan told them. “And phlox. And I like this one because it’s called ranger’s buttons.” And, as always, that got her a titter as though it were amusing. “So when I die,” she said, “and they bury me here on the lone prairie, you’ll see some death camas over me and some ranger’s buttons.”

Another lesser polite titter.

“And maybe a mountain ash,” Rowan said. “Anyone guess why?”

No one did. Rowan showed them her name tag, on the side of her shirt opposite her gold badge, holding it out between her fingers.

“Because my name’s Rowan. And back in the old country that’s a tree with red berries you hear about in songs, and here in our country it’s a related tree that’s got red berries too and they call it the mountain ash.” She looked around at the lunar landscape. “Except I don’t think they can get one to grow out here. Even for me.”

Some of her colleagues unkindly called her lectures “The Smarty Rowan Show” because instead of being about mafic fluid and volcanic rock, they often had a lot to do with Rowan Smart.

Finally she led them all into the volcanic tunnel that led to the Temple, past the polychrome stalagmites to the table of ash and cinder. Rowan had them spread out around the black chamber while she mounted a rise behind the table. Phyllis Stowe had locked up the park headquarters and come to the Temple to oversee Rowan’s wrap-up. Things were running late and Phyllis was annoyed.

“Now this,” Rowan told her charges, “is what they call the Temple. Can you all see why?”

Everyone nodded.

“It does look like a temple, doesn’t it? In fact, some Latter-day Saints at first thought it might be a temple of the tribe of Zebulon come to America. But that proved not to be.”

“Who built it?” a middle-aged man asked. Someone always seemed to ask that question. The place was so fantastical in its range of color and light that people resisted the idea of its natural formation. It was as though they had lost their faith in nature.

Once she had had a European visitor on the tour who plainly refused to believe Rowan’s insistence that the cavern was natural. It was America and the visitor had required inauthenticity and illusion. But there were a thousand caves in the same colors within a few hundred miles, all quite natural.

“Do you think if we had made it,” Rowan had asked the visitor, “we’d only charge you a buck to get in?”

It had been back in the days when the Europeans had fallen in love with New York subway graffiti and brought spray-paint cans with them on rafting tours and harassed the Indians.

“No one built it,” Rowan said. “God built it.”

The crystal was catching up with Rowan. She remembered that her father was on the way and all it entailed. She began to think of the times he had left her weeping, of the stories he had started to tell her and then gone away, leaving them incomplete. Sometimes she would imagine endings for them, hoping one day to surprise him with his own tales, but he would never remember what she was talking about.

“Were there like human sacrifices here?” the teenager asked. Everyone murmured echoes to the question. Phyllis Stowe looked at her watch.

“Seems like that kind of place, doesn’t it?” Rowan asked. A certain type of kid always asked that question, and this girl, gawky, tomboyish, innocently flirting with Rowan, was the type. “There might have been. Someone used the cavern for ceremonies. Before the modern Indians lived around here there were Caddoan-speaking people who practiced a kind of human sacrifice.”

A special silence fell. Rowan held them with her bright eyes.

“They had a legend like the one about Abraham and Isaac. They believed that the sun couldn’t move unless blood was shed. Sun couldn’t move because he couldn’t see. Nothing would grow. Children would not grow up. So sometimes captive boys or orphan girls from the Bear Clan were put on the stone and killed. The girls were the ones who had a dream where they died. They were killed when a certain star appeared in the morning, and the people called the killing Morning Star Ceremony. We don’t know what the star was. Probably it was the planet Venus.”

“Were they like tortured?” the teenager asked.

“They were never tortured,” Rowan said. “They died very quickly with an arrow through the heart because they were important girls. They were the grandchildren of Sun through his sons and daughters the Bears, and Sun needed their eyes to see. When Sun saw their blood he ran through the sky. We cannot make our sun stand still,” Rowan declared, “yet we can make him run. This is where the girls might have been killed. Here in the Temple.”

“Whoa,” said the teenager.

The ones like her, Rowan thought, strange things would be going through their heads about now. Outrage about the orphan girls. Unfamiliar urges involving death and sacrifice. At least that was how it had been for her, and that was how she imagined certain kids felt. She would have liked to take this one aside.

“And the Bears,” Rowan said, “to conceal the blood, to fool the other animals and to fool the girls, spread black cornmeal all around. And that’s why the ash is here, and the cinders, all that black world, the mafic fluid. The world around here.” She raised a hand, checking the pulse in her forehead. Her face felt hot and dry. “Well,” she told her public, “that’s all we have time for. I hope you’ve enjoyed your visit to Temple Cavern as much as we’ve enjoyed having you.”

And she
had
enjoyed having them. In her present frame of mind, she might have gone on for hours.

“Where the heck did you get that sacrifice bit?” Phyllis asked discreetly as the visitors filed out. “I sure never heard it before.”

“It came as a revelation,” Rowan told her. “I was reading Karl Bodmer. I mean spiritually it was pretty fucking sublime.”

“Thanks but no thanks,” said Phyllis. “Well, I guess you’re the expert.”

“Sure,” said Rowan. “I’d do it.”

“Well,” said Phyllis, “you certainly had them eating out of your hand.”

“Thanks. Sorry I kept you late.”

“I guess it’s all right,” Phyllis said. “Good luck on enforcement tomorrow.”

The turnoff for Temple State Monument was in a village called Deerdrum, thirty miles from the college town in which Smart was scheduled to read. Just before arriving in Deerdrum, the highway passed through the Shoshone reservation where Rowan’s friend John Hears the Sun Come Up had spent his childhood. The reservation was scattered over a vast plain of sage and greasewood that stretched toward distant mountains. Here and there over the plain were clusters of beige rectangular buildings and khaki trailers. These were the clinics, schools and meeting halls, some enclosed within chain-link fences. Each cluster was equipped with a few government-issue street lights of the sort found around prisons or military bases. The lights were automated, geared to daylight, so that as the weather changed in the enormous sky overhead they would flash on and off in reaction to passing banks of clouds. Near the road was a square white wooden church, freshly painted, with a little bell tower trimmed in green and a gold-colored cross.