Dalva (25 page)

“If you touch her you'll doubtless get your ass shot off. I went to school with her father.”

“Dalva, he's old enough to be her father,” Naomi said, not without merry irony.

My hands were sweating for the martini, but I looked off at the blooming lilacs of the family graveyard as if offended. “I think I'm capable of regarding beauty without leaping at it like a flying squirrel. In all my years of teaching I've never taken advantage of a student, even when it was thrust at me.”

“Oh, bullshit.” She handed me a cold glass and gave me a peck on the cheek. “I saw Karen in town yesterday and I assure you no one will ever take advantage of her—technically, that is. I'm just saying a deer rifle leaves a big hole in a deer.”

“If you like, I'll come over and chaperone,” Naomi offered.

“I accepted an interview before I was aware of all of this. Now I'm a fucking deer with his guts blasted out. You forget I'm a father. In my wildest fantasies I haven't poked anything under twenty since I was under twenty.”

They grew tired of teasing me and began discussing the possibility of a family reunion in July. I felt a little like a discarded trinket and edged toward the picnic table and the pitcher of martinis. Their base accusations had made me nervously gulp my first drink. My curiosity urged me to walk into their lilac-surrounded family graveyard but I hesitated—two years ago I had visited my father's grave with my mother and I had hyperventilated, bawling like a baby. This was quite a shock, since I think I live readily under the assumption that I know myself, and understand others with some accuracy, despite the number of times I catch myself off balance. Most of life is lived, perforce, simplemindedly; to think of Spinoza when you're taking a pee is to risk missing the bowl.

Naomi sensed my martini nervousness and refilled my
glass half full. While Dalva sliced a ham, Naomi told me about her two days spent with a visiting naturalist, Nelse, talking about her bird-count records since the forties. From her description of the man I figured out he was the nature boy I met in the Lazy Daze Tavern. She made him Sunday breakfast; then he was off to Minneapolis to feed his data into a computer. Naomi said there weren't as many songbirds or hawks anymore due to an amazing assortment of causes: high-tension wires, huge TV -transmitting aerials, auto traffic, pesticides, destruction of migratory habitats in Louisiana and Mexico, destruction of all hedgerows in modern farm practices, which reduced nesting possibilities. As I ate I admitted to myself that it never occurred to me that birds had living conditions.

I subscribe to a half-dozen food magazines that are blithely unaware how certain people eat at home: this afternoon it was a ham that the noble Lundquist had smoked and aged, tiny fresh new potatoes, the year's first spinach in a salad; even the horseradish had been pureed from a root in the garden and mixed with heavy cream from a neighbor's herd. It was possible to resent the amount that Dalva could eat because she was so active. She and Naomi were talking about some disturbing aspects of the farm problem. Two more local farms and their families were going under, and there was the barely mentioned undercurrent that there might not be enough students to merit opening the country school, leaving Dalva adrift. Naomi was, surprisingly enough, on the board at the only local bank, and was upset with the misunderstanding spread by the national press: most rural banks are farmer-owned and -operated, so in essence they are borrowing from each other, rather than from some abstract banking community. It's hard to blame the banker when the “banker” works the neighboring farm. Two men in the adjoining county had recently taken their lives—one a hired hand who had to be let go after thirty years of work. I wanted to say something incisive about money and credit in inexperienced hands but held my tongue. Instead, I told them that circa 1887 a half-million farmers were basically starved out of this longitude and to the west of here, because they had been lied to about the amount of rainfall, even though it could have been checked in an atlas or almanac.

“If it's been raining for three years it's been raining forever,” Dalva said. “Then the fourth year it didn't rain at all.”

I tended to forget that she had read all the journals during her nervous collapse. I reminded myself to try to pry out of her the reasons, because she seemed the unlikeliest candidate I ever met for mental problems.

“Back then the first John Wesley went around buying up abandoned land for a dollar or so an acre,” Naomi said. “He tried to resettle some Lakota Sioux families but the government stopped him. My grandparents knew him and after I married into the Northridge family I was told that John Wesley was the bogeyman they used to make children behave. All that land and money, and this was a grand house to be built in those days, when everyone else was scraping by.” Naomi poured me the rest of the wine, for which I was grateful. “I was frightened of Dalva's grandfather, but the old folks said he was nothing compared with his father.” Naomi got up from the table then, saying she was tired. She had checked out a prairie-falcon nest with Nelse at daylight and wasn't getting any younger. She tousled my thin hair and said she was proud I had the courage to camp outdoors the night before. She laughed very hard at her own joke. So did Dalva, and so did I. “Teddy Roosevelt said you don't know a man until you've camped with him and that includes yourself.” I offered this lame
non sequitur,
which further amused them. I began to understand that the main way of criticizing someone in rural areas is to make a joke at his or her expense. Despite the heaviness of the intent the joke was liable to be breezy. Dalva had said that when she looked out her bedroom window in the morning she was pleased to see
her first mummy in the barnyard, and the geese were there as a temple guard.

When Naomi left we sat there listening to the gravel ping off the underside of her car. I made Dalva stay seated while I cleared the table and carried the leftovers and dishes indoors. Inside, I drank the rest of the martini pitcher, but it was mostly melted ice. Back on the front porch, I saw her in the far corner of the yard, pushing an empty tire swing as if it held an imaginary child. I am thought to be insensitive in such matters, but there was something poignant in the way she pushed the
empty swing back and forth, a solemn rhythm in the twilight. For the first time in weeks I thought of her lost son and my rash offer to find him. She turned and walked toward me slowly, still dressed in her riding jeans. We embraced in the middle of the yard and I felt that rare feeling of being more than myself, that my human failings were being absorbed by the leaves in the trees above us, and perhaps the darkening sky above the trees was helping out. I felt an evanescent fatherliness, a wish to take any pain away with an embrace, something I had felt many times with my daughter. She whispered something in Spanish about wishing “to sleep the dream of apples,” which made me smell appleness. She kissed me with an open mouth and I'll be goddamned if it didn't dizzy me. For some not so incoherent reason the kiss drew me back to when I was a busboy at the country club and all lovely girls, near and far but mostly far, smelled of horses. There was clover and lilac in the air, and the yellowish light of the rising moon. I sensed all my ironical urges as a poisonous weight in a corner of my heart. In the small of her back I felt a strength I could never have, and wasn't sure I would want. Way back there Northridge had said that if God has made us strong, then weakness is blasphemy.

We thought we'd make a run on the motel way down the road (over forty miles on the interstate), but my mouth opened to its carnival barker's options the moment we got in her car. “We are all most lovely not making love but just before,” a poet friend had said, and if we had simply flopped on the lawn and made love the evening would have been perfect.

“This is fucking absurd. I mean driving this far, the same distance as San Francisco to Sonoma, Chicago halfway to Madison. Why don't you and Naomi have a motel built down the road for entertaining your houseguests?”

She had started the car, but turned it off as if waiting for me to complete my thought. She gave me a look of complete incomprehension, and I tried to get out of the hole I was digging. There was always the chance I could lose her if I couldn't become a little more than myself.

“For God's sake, don't just sit there looking at me. Start the fucking car. I'm sorry. I guess my nerves are a little frayed. I beg your forgiveness.”

“I really think you should go alone,” she said, handing me
the keys. “I'll see you in a few days. Be careful.” Then she got out of the car and walked toward the house. I sat there a full ten minutes examining all the dimensions of self-loathing. A few tears actually fell. I held up my hands before my face in the gathering dark and I didn't like them. I heard a whippoor-will from over by the ditch and I craved a soul as serene as a bird's. The light came on in Dalva's bedroom and that yellow square made me unfathomably lonely. I went into the house and located a bottle of vodka. I wanted to leave a note but could only come up with “Have a good trip. I'm sorry. Love, Michael.” I stood there, wishing her down the stairs in a nightgown, all smiles with light step and heart. I have no secret powers, I thought.

Out in the bunkhouse I set the vodka on my desk, made a pot of coffee, and turned on the radio. I meant to work all night, like some Great Plains Faustus, or, to be less dramatic, like a penniless graduate student. I took a pull from the bottle and imagined myself in the Nebraska night to be on the verge of a discovery, a historical equivalent of DNA. I picked a Northridge journal at random, too excitable to continue the methodical beginning-to-end routine. I flicked the radio dial to a PBS station out of Lincoln that was broadcasting one of those “music from many lands” programs. You can only care so much; then you bury yourself in your work. At least this is what a nitwit says to himself after he's created the kind of emotional shitstorm that drives the beloved away. The radio played a song by the Jamaican Bob Marley with a lyric that said “brutalize me with music.” My ex-wife danced to this very song for exercise while I sat at the kitchen table writing witty lecture notes. I'd plot a usually successful beery leap at her when she emerged from the shower. I held a journal in my hands, feeling unworthy, and tried to remember a small Latin prayer that a Jesuit professor of mine always uttered at the beginning of our Shakespeare class. I suppose I don't feel unworthy often enough to remember such a prayer.

March 7, 1874

Summoned by a messenger from He Dog who says the little daughter of Crazy Horse, They Are Afraid of Her, is ill with the same cough as the trader's children. I am useless against this
whooping cough which is often survived by white children but almost never by the Sioux. I pack up my herbs and medicines, and all the dried meat I have left which scarcely fills one saddle-bag. Only last October I gave this little girl several apples I had grown and she laughed seeing the shadow of her reflection on the polished fruit. I headed out on the two-day ride seeing everywhere the dire effects of the worst winter in memory. In one draw there were the carcases of dead deer, really only the skins after the ravens and coyotes had fed, as if the deer had decided to die together. Those who have stopped by my cabin say that both Sioux and settlers are alike near starvation. And with buffalo so sparse there is little fuel provided by their dried dung. If my pack horse had not died I could have brought potatoes, carrots, cabbages, and turnips I have grown.

March 8, 1874

I have made camp unsure of how to proceed. I am a few hours from the Tongue River where I was told to go. I am so disturbed I cannot help but weep. A few hours ago I was surveying the country with my ship captain's telescope and saw movement on a far hill. Imagining I had found game I tethered my horse, and took my rifle to stalk the hilltop slowly. I crawled along a low rock abutment then sighted with my telescope again. The movement had been on a small burial platform and Crazy Horse sat beside the small, red-wrapped bundle that must be his daughter, They Are Afraid of Her. I was too late. He touched her playthings that hung on one of the posts, an antelope-hoof rattle, and a painted willow hoop. He lay down beside her and took her still body in his arms.

Back to my horse I made camp though lit no fire. I prayed for her soul so that my heart twisted painfully in my chest. I wrapped myself in my buffalo robe and had no will but to watch the sky grow dark and the cold wind blow the colder stars around the sky, as my thoughts were those of a crazed man. I heard wolves and the beauty of their chorus I imagined welcomed the little girl into a better heaven than my own. I saw her again hold the shiny apple to her lips & heard her laughter when she first bit the crisp fruit. She gave the core to her pup, and her mother Black Shawl held her before the fire until she slept. My heart could not imagine
her dead, and in the night I prayed that this greatest of all Sioux men would bring his daughter back to life with his embrace, as Jesus did to Lazurus.

March 9, 10, 11, 1874

There is a trace of early spring today so I sit in a niche of rock like an Italianate statue feeling some warmth out of the wind. My dreams were too troubled to note & in the light of morning I think of my professor at Cornell who knew the myths of the Norse & Greeks. I wonder if our Lord is only the Lord of the Mediterranean area and something else is afoot in this sere landscape. Crazy Horse nodded to me the day after I brought the fruit last fall, but we have never otherwise spoken. He Dog said they were all troubled of late when three warriors found him sitting among a herd of buffalo speaking to the beasts who were not disturbed. My predilection for science leads me to cynicism about such tales, though there is something to the man of the god on earth as in the myths I have read. In former times before Christ came to earth gods & men were said to be confused in their identities.