Dalva (20 page)

After a marvelous breakfast, accompanied by a four-day-old copy of the Sunday
New York Times,
Dalva took me off to the bank for a first look at the family papers. Rather than using her dusty and mud-spattered Subaru in the driveway, we went out to the barn and drove off in an ancient aqua-colored convertible. The top was down because there was no top left, but the car appeared to be in fine mechanical shape and the engine had recently been replaced. I was a little appalled to discover it was considerably faster than my BMW—because of the distances they are heavy-footed in Nebraska. We slowed down passing her Wesleyan Methodist church, then stopped at the country school where she intended to teach the coming year. It all reminded me of an America I had supposed to be vanished. Through the window the single room glistened with recent varnish, and the spirit of McGuffey hovered over the oak wainscoting. Near the back door was an iron railing for tethering horses. She said some of the children still chose to ride cross-country to school. I wondered aloud if there was an irony involved, whether children did this naturally, or if they had learned from television that it was admirable to be picturesque.

“Try to consider how much time your mind wastes figuring out how to make such asshole comments,” she responded.

“I just thought it was a valid consideration.”

“A lot of them love rock music, go to the movies, and some grow their own dope. They also feed the stock, help butcher pigs, join the 4-H, and ride horses. Where's the irony? I know rodeo cowboys who blow half their winnings on cocaine but they still love horses.”

I blushed. All I was trying to do was be witty, but, then, academic wit is by nature derisive. I didn't, in any event, like being looked at as if I were a dead frog in the middle of the road. There was the additional nervousness of going to town and being in public view after yesterday's dismal fuck-up. She read the nature of my moroseness.

“Don't worry about getting lost yesterday. They're all quite pleased and they'll talk about it for years. They think that's what happens to brilliant professors. There might be a small item in the weekly newspaper, ‘Scholar Loses Shoe.' We got a call from town this morning asking you to speak at Rotary Club lunch next Wednesday.”

“Should I do it?” I had an image of ample drinks and joints of rare beef.

“Of course you should,” she said with a twinkle that I wish I had recorded.

She suddenly looked so lovely that I wanted to suggest a trip out into the weeds but didn't dare. For some reason I mentioned the Nez Percé student on the rock pile in my dream. I suppose I wanted to make her less intimidating. In these semi-angry moods or after she had a few drinks she owned the edge of a predator. It must have come down through her father, because Naomi had none of these qualities.

“That's an interesting dream,” she said. “Maybe dreams are in the nature of the landscape? When I was in England and France I dreamt of knights and warhorses and I never do in America. In Arizona I dreamt of melon patches trailing all the way from Oraibi down the Sierra Madre in Mexico, which is where they think the Hopis came from. Here I dream a lot about animals and Indians, and I never did in Santa Monica.”

This threatened my scholarly integrity so I made a speech right there in the hot, muggy schoolyard, beginning with Freud's
Interpretation of Dreams,
with sidetracks into Otto Rank and Karen Horney. In the interest of winning the point I overlooked those irrational mushmouths Carl Jung and his contemporary camp follower, James Hillman. She laughed when I began to pound an imaginary lectern. Then she hugged and kissed me.

“You're an absolute living, fucking bookcase. What a marvel.”

The wind in the topless car was too loud for talk the rest of the way to town, so I had time to refuel my intellectual grudges. Our very first quarrel had taken place near the end, fortunately, of a fine meal she had treated me to at the puckish Chinois on Main in Santa Monica. To be kind I'll call it “Dalva's airplane theory.” The upshot was that from an airliner the entirety of the United States, except for a few spotty wilderness areas, looks raked over, tracked up, skinned, scalped—in short, abused. I said, I see
human history with a dignity, albeit tentative, and your vision is infected with a girlish infatuation with Wordsworth and Shelley. She said, Let me finish. What I mean, she said, is that in out-of-the-way places there's still a certain spirit, I mean in gullies, off-the-road ditches, neglected creek banks and bottoms, places that have only been tilled once, then neglected, or not at all, like the Sand Hills, parts of northern Wisconsin, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, or the untillable but grazed plains of Wyoming, Montana, Nevada, the desert, even the ocean in the middle of the night. She was excited to the point of breathlessness about this matter. Just where did you get your degrees? I asked. She was stunned and simply got up and walked out of the restaurant. I sat there a little upset with myself for being so acerbic and wondering how I was going to pay a big check with thirty bucks and an expired credit card. I left my wallet with the waitress and went outside looking for her. She was leaning against the car and I couldn't see
her expression in the darkness. I got down on my knees and begged her forgiveness, telling her the semi-fib that I had read something similar to her notion in Gaston Bachelard's
Poetics of Space.
I buried my face, snuffling, in her skirt. Two passing teenagers yelled, “Go for it.”

At the bank we were escorted, after Dalva was fawned over by everyone in sight, back to a cool room that was an extension of the main vault. I had kept my composure when I thought I heard some titters in the background—without doubt my sorry story had spread to the farthest reaches of the county. I had expected a jumble of boxes and cartons whose contents would take months to log: instead there were five
modest wood sea chests with bright brass fittings sitting on a table. Our guide, who was the oldest banker in existence and a near albino, begged his leave, and I looked at Dalva rather nervously.

“I expected more . . . . I mean I expected a mess. May we look at something?”

“In the early seventies I had a breakdown and spent the winter sorting everything out. I did a bibliography on the contents. The first two are Great-grandfather's which, for now, are the only ones you can look at, and these two are Grandfather's. The last one is shared by Wesley and Paul.”

She opened the first, revealing a researcher's dream of tidiness, with her typed list of contents resting on neat stacks of bound ledgers, and packets of letters. I lifted out a ledger in the middle of a stack and opened it at the center, reading it at a bookmarked place.

May 13, 1871: Rode hard our third day down from near Fort Randall with He Dog who was of bad humor & feverish he said from bad beef. We camped on the north fork of the Loup in fine weather & he made an emetic from a root he dug up (blue cornflower), retching half the night but woke in fine health. I studied the river bottom with a hopeless map and made several new specimen entries. He Dog trapped two marsh rats and made a fine stew which increased our strength. He questioned my statement on politics yet again, wherein I insist it is the process by which one man's rights are made more than another's. He is amused by this. Then I repeated on request more tales of the War where he is often less interested in men than the number of horses. It is curious that my given Sioux name which means “earthdiver” is never used in concourse, and the direct use of names is considered impolite, an attempt to thieve power, in fact. I was called thus because I am forever digging holes and inspecting the root systems of trees to determine their hardiness in certain soils. We napped in the heat of mid-day so as to explore until dark. It is somewhat disturbing but He Dog, ever alert to danger, naps upright & with his eyes wide open.

My heart beat wildly—this little passage alone meant that J. W. Northridge was truly in the thick of things. To offer a brief
gloss: The Sioux warrior He Dog was a crony, a close friend of the seminal war chief, Crazy Horse (“Crazy” is a vulgarism in contemporary terms; his true name meant “enchanted” or “magic,” really something more than all three). The north branch of the Loup was on the verge (in three years) of being overrun by settlers, in defiance of a treaty made with the Sioux, the area being in proximity to the Black Hills, the most sacred place of the Sioux (interesting to note that we never kept a single treaty with the Indians—beware, the rest of the world!). A traveler from the British Isles at the time, Lord Bryce, ridiculed our immoral capitulation to the railroads, land swindlers, and greedy settlers who rushed willy-nilly into legal Indian Territory, then bleated for God and the U. S. Cavalry to save their necks. Another point is Northridge as horticulturist and botanist, an agricultural missionary. As T. P. Thorton points out in her significant study “Cultivating the American Character: Horticulture as Moral Reform in the Antebellum Era,” the cultivation of fruit and other trees before the Civil War in New England and New York was considered to be morally uplifting, an antidote to the rapacity of greed that was consuming the nation. As an orphan and a bastard child Northridge worked at Wodenethe, the enormous fruit garden of Henry Winthrop Sargent in Dutchess County, New York. I could go on with animal husbandry, the care and breeding of horses among the Sioux, quite as intricate as in present-day Lexington, Kentucky, or among the former-day Cossacks and Mongols of the fabled steppes of Asia. And all of this, historically speaking, is in the recent past. Three hundred Sioux, mostly women and children, were butchered at Wounded Knee while, back in the Midwest, Henry Ford was tinkering with the idea of spare parts for his first auto. For those of us who are adults, most of our grandparents were alive in 1890!

In short, I was in a whirl, breathless, nearly faint. When Dalva helped me tote the first trunk out to her topless car I scanned the sky for rain clouds. I began to hyperventilate and the sorry street wobbled a bit. At my feet I imagined the street to be mud and Northridge tethering his horse before this very bank, avoided by the burghers, so Dalva tells me, because of his madness. She came to my aid and sat me in the car. She wondered if I needed to breathe in a paper bag, which is the
way to ameliorate a hyperventilation attack. I lowered my head into my shirt like a turtle for a few minutes, which did the job. Under my shirt I could see He Dog napping with his eyes open under a cottonwood, the flies circling around the leftovers of the marsh-rat (muskrat) stew, the grama grass responsive to the slightest breeze. Outside my shirt Dalva was talking to someone. I debated whether or not to poke my enturtled head back into the world. There was the notion that my behavior might be misunderstood. I emerged to be introduced to Lena, a café proprietress, a pinkish, slight old woman who reminded me of a crow. This unlikely woman had recently been to Paris, France, to visit her daughter, a somehow startling idea—Nebraska strikes one as a place where it never occurs to the citizens to leave.

On the way home we stopped at an uninspired-looking grocery store, but it was the only game in town, as it were. Dalva assured me that Mrs. Lundquist did the shopping, but my nervous nature requires snacks, and the refrigerator lacked a certain junkiness I enjoyed. I asked Dalva to guard the trunk, a request she thought amusing since the area is without thieves, or so she said.

There wasn't a single interesting item in the store except a jar of pickled “beefalo tongue” (!) from a herd raised by a local rancher and crossbred with cattle, the idea of which seemed a perversion of nature. When I got back outside Dalva was nowhere to be seen, and I rushed toward the Ford to make sure the chest was there. She waved from a pay phone at the service station next door. There is a question why a rich woman would own such a shabby car, the sun-blasted seat so hot on my ass that I barely could sit down. I opened the jar of pickled tongue and took a few bites, wishing I had a cold beer. It turned out she had been talking to a Mexican private detective in Ensenada, still on the unsuccessful track of the abused boy. There is something embarrassing about what the “Modern Living” pages of newspapers refer to as sexual abuse: the rampant id, murderous and nondirectional. The year before I had allowed my daughter to have three of her friends over for a pajama party. When I returned from the cinema and bar they were on the couch eating popcorn and watching a VHS horror film, the sharp odor of cannabis in the air. One of the
little chicklettes, a Nordic type named Kristin, wore a nightie that sent me hastily to my room with sweating hair roots. Until that moment I hadn't considered anyone that age since I was fourteen myself. I did penance by reading Wittgenstein, a pre-Nazi pederast cruising the Berlin and Oxford meat racks for sallow butcher boys, albeit one of the great minds of the century.

Dalva helped me unload my treasure at the bunkhouse, then went off to make some lunch. To my amazement the moving van had arrived and Frieda Lundquist had unpacked my clothing and books. There was a small refrigerator in the corner with a six-pack of beer and I sipped one slowly, not wanting to blur my senses as I began to turn the pages of one of the journals. The study of history is hard on the system; there is a continual struggle against the infantile wish to have control at least in retrospect. My Ph.D. dissertation,
Bitter Ore: The Life and Death of an Ohio Valley Steeltown,
passed muster with flying colors, though in fact the work was shot through with fraudulent detail, faked if plausible interviews.
Bitter Ore
was published by a university press and was well reviewed in academic circles, but there is this notion that I, like a tax cheater, might be found out some day. I had written the whole mess under the influence of booze and Dexedrine, with my blurred and electric peripheries avoiding any hard work. My travel grant back to the Ohio Valley was dissipated on Chicago high life. The point is that I have resolved to play this one straight, or as straight as possible. I am not capable of writing an etiology of the tribes of the Great Plains. To be flip, I can't believe God created history only in order to keep track of human suffering: any intelligent amateur might perceive that the Sioux and other tribes were poor agrarians because they were swindled into receiving the very worst farmland in a political situation not unlike that of contemporary South Africa—“apartheid” may be a Dutch word but it is a universal idea.