Dalva (38 page)

Peach nuzzles me. Thunder in elongated cracks. I am swimming on hard ground. I reach up into the rain and touch her soaked muzzle. Jesus, but I'm a wet girl. The rain just came because the fire still hisses. “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” they sang long ago.
“Tunkasila, mato pehin wan!”
“Oh, grandfather bear, here is some of your hair!” That was from a childhood game and the last thing she said. Rachel took the “Wanagi Canku,” the Ghost Road. Will I drive that far to feed
her ghost? she asked. Of course. Then she'll stay around for a year. My dog ran away and was eaten by coyotes so I knew I was going to die, she said. I called you and here you are. Could you bring my old sister Blue Earth Woman? So I drove to Pine Ridge and picked her up, then a doctor who was young and pleasant and said nothing was terribly wrong, she was just dying. He had seen it before. The thunder so loud I sat up which made Peach happy. Rachel said Duane's spirit had become part horse and part fish, a fish that breathed through its back. What a fine thing to call it, the Ghost Road.

The fire had withered too far to make coffee. I was startled to see the railroad watch in the saddlebag said ten in the morning. I had stayed up thinking until I heard the first bird. The violent part of the storm was passing and hard rain set in, so hard I couldn't see the river. I packed in an ankle-deep puddle, feeding Peach a few handfuls of oats. She wanted the hell out of here. I always wondered what horses and dogs thought thunder was. Barn cats, as ever, pretend they are bored. I tucked my chin down and let Peach trot me the hour home, wondering what day it was. Before Paul had kissed me goodbye he bet that Fred would call Ruth in Tucson by noon. He hadn't meant to chide Fred the night before, but it seemed to him that you never detected the spirit or soul of a landscape by purposely looking for it as if it were a Grail to be acquired and coveted. That sort of spiritual greed seemed to produce life as a linear nightmare: I acquire, then move on, and acquire more. After you learned what was actually in any landscape, including cities, you might finally perceive the character of the soul life of the area. He was not prepared to mock human effort by saying that the Sonoran wilderness had more virtue than Florence. I remembered reading that Geronimo hadn't cared for the New York World's Fair but then he was a captive visitor, summoned as he was in chains.

I have spent the last three days in bed with a slight fever and a bad cold, and haven't minded it a bit. This has happened before—a modest illness becomes a welcome relief, tempered a little in this case by another semi-legal problem: Frieda's
boyfriend, Gus, has slugged her and she can't make up her mind whether or not to press charges. She is embarrassed to appear in public with a black eye and will miss the last two evenings of the pinochle tournament. She has sent Lundquist over with a pot of the best chicken soup in the world, with the possible exception of that made for a mogul aquaintance of Ted's who has a private club in Hollywood. You can eat anything you wish at this club and drink the finest wines, but it is peculiar how soothing this chicken soup can be in Los Angeles.

This morning I watched Lundquist feed the geese under the watchful eye of his dog Roscoe. I have a Kennedy rocker drawn up to the window and wear my favorite twenty-year-old robe. Roscoe becomes a little irritable when Lundquist sits down, as he always does, to pet the geese. When he entered the kitchen with the mail I called down for him to come up for a chat. He is always a little formal, beginning with the same question ever since I can remember: “And how is my little girl doing today, heh?” He hands me a thickish letter from Michael, about whom he is deeply grieved, along with the recent situation with Gus and Frieda. Lundquist feels that if only Michael and Frieda would read the teachings of Swedenborg they wouldn't be susceptible to the “fruits of the devil” as personified by Karen and Gus. Lundquist points out that when he was sixteen Karen's grandmother tried to seduce him after an all-night threshing party “not three miles from where we sit.” The fact that this happened seventy years ago does not disturb his notion that lust probably runs in that family.

All the dominant events in Lundquist's life could have happened earlier this morning so vivid are they to him. Grandfather, John Wesley, and his own wife are merely absent rather than dead. Seven years ago or so this July I had him drive up to Livingston, Montana, with a horse trailer. I flew in from Los Angeles and bought a filly out of a famous stud, King Benjamin, who was standing at a ranch up Deep Creek Road. There were two fillies for sale and it took all afternoon for me to make up my mind. I was having iced tea with the owner and his lovely wife in the ranch house which was full of books, the walls covered with impressive landscapes. We heard a voice through a screened window and discovered Lundquist talking to their three ranch dogs about Nebraska, as if to explain why he was
there. The owner and his wife were impressed because the dogs were rarely manageable and now they were sitting in an attentive row listening to a stranger. On the two-day trip back to Nebraska I asked him about this and he said it was a common courtesy since he could tell the dogs were very curious about what we were doing there. I decided to let the problem of language go for the time being, but he continued by saying he had never met an animal that didn't know if your heart was in the right place. Humans could develop this ability with each other if they would only study the works of Emanuel Swedenborg.

Before Lundquist left I could see that he was anxious about the contents of the letter from Michael so I opened it, and fibbed by saying that Michael was fine and wanted to be remembered to him. I also said that he could have a bottle of beer on the way out which brought a beam to his face that must be described as radiant.

“A single bottle of beer can bring on a flow
of great thoughts,” he said, without irony, as he waved goodbye.

Michael's letter kept me rocking at the window for quite some time. There was a tinge of longing in me to be back in Santa Monica working with disturbed young people. Back in the sixties and early seventies it was faddish to say that certain people were troublesome but “worth the trip.” His letter was boldly titled “The Conditions of Life During the Plague Years,” and the handwriting was uncharacteristically even and readable, which I attributed to his unintended detoxification.

Dearest D.,

We all know the end but where is the middle? It occurred to me this morning that this mess I've been trying to extricate myself from all these years is actually my life! A circadian sump where every day is Monday morning. The time of spring floods when my dad and I would spend half the night bailing the muddy water out of the basement until a better-heeled uncle made us the gift of a Briggs-Stratton motorized pump. Your kiss of forgiveness technically meant the world to me two days later, on Monday, when I really woke up. It was evening and I was hungry, thirsty, and in pain. I reached over to the buzzer,
then hesitated, trying to remember if I had felt all three before simultaneously—hunger, thirst, and pain—not counting self-imposed hangovers. This acute gestalt of sensations opened a tiny door to the world, like the little door of a cuckoo clock, with me shooting out and seeing the briefest of glimpses of the world. I thought of Northridge, Aase, the Sioux, the pathetic settlers lost in the sea of grass. I thought of their hunger, thirst, pain. I thought of Crazy Horse on the burial platform, his arms around his daughter on a bitterly cold and windy March night. I thought of Aase burning with fever on a cot beneath the tree at noon & Northridge sitting beside her body in the rain. The incredible, physical bitterness of it all. I still held off from the buzzer on the pillow. I remembered my father coming home from the night shift at the steel mill just as I was getting up for school. I would sit there toying with my bowl of cereal while he drank a quart of beer and ate an enormous meal, the vulgarity of which offended me. I was an aesthete, a young fan of James Joyce and Scott Fitzgerald, and resented having to go off to the eleventh grade smelling like sauerkraut and pork, or whatever gargantuan pile of low-class slop he was eating. One morning his eyebrows and hair were singed and one hand was heavily bandaged. He wasn't eating but there was a bottle of whiskey on the table and he was weeping. Mother sat next to him and rubbed his head and arms. A furnace had blown, killing two of his friends—I knew the men from watching their horseshoe games on Saturdays, and sometimes they came over with their wives to play euchre. I went into the bathroom, looked at myself in the mirror, and tried to figure out what my emotions should be. I hated the oilcloth on the table, the linoleum on the floor, the coal-company calendar on the wall, the Christmas trip to our relatives down in Mullens, West Virginia, who were even poorer than we were. I hated the stories from World War II that I had loved when younger. I suppose that part of the problem was that we lived on the border of the school district and I was a poor kid at the rich high school, rather than being with the mill kids where I belonged. I was amazed when I went to dinner
at a friend's house and his parents ate fried chicken with knife and fork! Anyway, I was a contemptible, whining little snot, and perhaps I still am in some respects.

I finally pressed the buzzer and got my water, Demerol, and liquid diet. Coffee is not too interesting through a glass straw. The cuckoo went back into his hermetic clock and watched five hours of news on the twenty-four-hour news channel, but the door didn't close properly and I remained uncommonly conscious of the hunger, thirst, and pain I was watching. I was stoned as a monkey but I still sensed the world of hunger, thirst, and pain. A bureaucratic wag in a rep tie thought that a hundred million people might die worldwide from AIDS in the next ten years. I thought of my daughter, Laurel, and her generation trying to be Keatsian romantics while totally sheathed in preventive rubber. I saw extensive items on spouse abuse, child abuse, widespread starvation, the epidemic of teenage suicide. There were frequent news updates on everything awful that was happening in the world—this is the first time in history that we get to know all of the world's bad news at once.

The upshot of all of this is that I knew the beginning and end and this was apparently the unvarnished middle. I forgot nuclear proliferation, where an arms expert said within ten years every country in the world equaling or exceeding the budget of the state of Arkansas will have nuclear capability.
Nel mezzo del camin de nostra vita,
etc. Probably misquoted. I absolutely seethe to get at the second trunk of Northridge's journals, because all of the above leads me to think it is the first meaningful work of my life.

To be continued: love, Michael

P.S. The nurses are pleasant but dense. I have learned to make my notes to them simple. Nurse Sally wondered how I hurt myself and I wrote, “I let my wiener, like a baton, rule the orchestra,” which took a lot of explanation!

This letter slipped involuntarily from my weakened hand. I wanted to see a group of polled Herefords out the window
simply eating, then pausing to look at each other as cattle do. I was touched by his comments about the journals and his father but it was a little tiring to see a man of thirty-nine discover human suffering other than his own. That was the biggest problem when breaking in a newly hired social worker—suffering seems to have more dimension than the compensatory pleasures. I picked up a slip of paper Naomi had given me with the phone number of the owner of the puppies for sale. He was the brother of one of her friends with the somehow familiar name of Sam Creekmouth. After a few minutes I remembered that it was the name of one of Northridge's Oglala friends. The West was full of people that were a bit of this and a bit of that, and the man was likely no more Sioux than my own one-eighth. There is no such thing as “part Indian”—you either are or aren't out of a combination of some blood and a predilection. I made the call before I understood what I was doing but got no answer—ranchers don't hang around the house in the afternoon in mid-June. Then I impulsively called Andrew at Ted's house and begged him to take a few days off, go to Tucson, and start tracing my son. He heard the congestion and panic in my voice and after some dead pleasantries he agreed. If I felt like it, goddamnit, I'd drive way over to someplace and buy some bona-fide cattle, registered or not, or some cutting steers, a few dogs, some families with children to move into the area so I could teach school, a lover I was crazy about, a car that flew, a plane ticket, or whatever. I meant to do something besides rock at the window with a cold.