True North Read online

  Praise for True North:

  “David Burkett is part Holden Caulfield, part Stephen Dedalus —a young man who has exchanged privilege for guilt. He knows that his work is to find a place in the world, but the finding isn’t easy.… A story about love and forgiveness and the trials they entail… Our lives are gripped by forces we only dimly understand. The real effort, Harrison implies, is to act in spite of those forces, correct for deviance, and find our own true north.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “[True North] is a provocative tale that explores the roots of wealth and privilege in America and examines the troubled legacy of our nineteenth-century attitudes toward the land…. Harrison’s writing is superb, as always, rippling with thematic leaps and poetic insights.”

  —The Oregonian

  “A coming-of-age story, a familial saga of estrangement … a slow-burning revenge tragedy … There is no denying the urgency of Harrison’s storytelling, or his passionate involvement in the fate of his embattled hero…. In [Harrison’s] portrait of a father and a son he has made an indelible addition to the gallery of literature’s ‘bad dads.’”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “When Harrison writes about a blizzard, you shiver. When he describes a thunderstorm, you see lightning. And when writing about fishing, the author is at his most poetic.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Harrison combines a love of nature and life in the wild, which he describes in splendid, soaring prose, with a rich and troubled conscience tortured by the ambiguities of modern life.”

  —The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

  “Makes the crimes against the land painfully vivid … His father’s misdeeds propel Burkett into the woods or across international boundaries to unearth secrets. This human story of a son’s attempt to understand a parent’s cruelty is [a] deftly told tale.”

  —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

  “True North may be Harrison’s best work…. His work is deep and soulful; superficiality has no place in his world.”

  —Idaho Mountain Express

  “The genius of Mr. Harrison, it seems to me, is that his characters possess a uniquely human and endearing clumsiness as well as a gracefulness in the way they inhabit the sharp and sometimes exuberantly felt physical world and the restless (though also at times exuberant) realm of spirit.”

  — Rick Bass, The Dallas Morning News

  “A worthy addition to the great work [of Harrison], and shows a writer, who, while comfortable with his themes, places and people, is not complacent in them … The scheme here isn’t man against nature; it is man into nature, and it is this scheme that brings the book … its keenest pleasures…. The land is beautifully, lovingly described, the writing rich with impeccable detail and the lore of the woods.”

  — St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “[Harrison is] an accomplished and worthy writer who has written … multi-layered, earthy, and spiritual explorations of human appetites and needs, of action, art, sex, violence, love and death…. [True North] is a rich and satisfying read … [that makes] a rustic backwoods cabin in the forbidding frozen wilderness seem the quintessence of hearth and home. It certainly helps elucidate why a character would go to the ends of the world to safeguard his little corner of it.”

  —The San Diego Union-Tribune

  “If [Jim Harrison’s] style can be as clean and clear as Cather’s, he writes with Faulkner’s voluble, untidy spilling forth.… The past twenty-five years has been a timid time in American writing, pinched and cramped by ideology and theory, a time of rules and warnings. Harrison abides by none of these.”

  —The Boston Phoenix

  “A novel in the grand European tradition … Religion and history figure here on a huge scale, as they do in the works of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy…. An engaging read by a writer to be reckoned with.”

  —St. Petersburg Times

  “True North is a richly layered work of art.… As an artist, Harrison does what art is supposed to do whether on a grand scale — or small, one flawed human being at a time. He illuminates. He investigates. He shows us what we know but deny. He enlarges understanding.”

  —Traverse City Record-Eagle (Michigan)

  “A terrific book.”

  —National Post (Canada)

  “[A] transcendent new novel.”

  —Jay MacDonald, The News-Press (Florida)

  “One of our greatest living literary stylists.”

  —Great Falls Tribune (Montana)

  “[Harrison’s] words absorb you and carry you along so that the reading is a delight.… In True North, Harrison takes his ‘homeland’ novel a step further, with the Upper Peninsula emerging as a force, as much a fully developed character as many of the humans.”

  —The Burlington Free Press

  “Harrison is a writer of prodigal gifts … and a keen registrar of impressions. The book overflows with marvelous description and hard-bitten wisdom.”

  —The Buffalo News

  “It takes a writer of Harrison’s maturity and knowingness to elevate [True North] from merely another historical novel to an almost mythological story about man’s fate…. It’s a melancholy and beautiful performance by Harrison, taking the story of one prominent family and extending it as a metaphor for the country.”

  —News-Tribune (Tacoma)

  “Riveting … A master of surprise endings, Harrison pulls off a bravura climax. … Harrison’s tragic sense of history and his ironic insight into the depravities of human nature are as potent as ever and bring deeper meaning to his … redemptive tale.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “[Harrison] is at his best describing the simple pleasures…. He also has a keen memory for the complex and contradictory feelings young men have for young women…. His brawny prose cuts to the heart with clear-eyed insight into the prickly process of creating oneself.”

  —Book Page

  Also by Jim Harrison

  FICTION

  Wolf

  A Good Day to Die

  Farmer

  Legends of the Fall

  Warlock

  Sundog

  Dalva

  The Woman Lit by Fireflies

  Julip

  The Road Home

  The Beast God Forgot to Invent

  The Summer He Didn’t Die

  CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

  The Boy Who Ran to the Woods

  POETRY

  Plain Song

  Locations

  Outlyer

  Letters to Yesenin

  Returning to Earth

  Selected & New Poems

  The Theory and Practice of Rivers & Other Poems

  After Ikkyū & Other Poems

  The Shape of the Journey: Collected Poems

  ESSAYS

  Just Before Dark

  The Raw and the Cooked

  MEMOIR

  Off to the Side

  True North

  JIM HARRISON

  A Novel

  Copyright © 2004 by Jim Harrison

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  The quotations on pages 298-299 from Elaine Pagels’s The Gnostic Gospels were quoted by Pagels from another source, The Nag Hammadi Library by James M. Robinson, copyright © 1
977 by E. J. Brill, Leiden, The Netherlands, published by HarperSanFrancisco.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Harrison, Jim, 1937–

  True north: a novel / Jim Harrison,

  p. cm.

  eBook ISBN-13: 978-1-5558-4651-0

  1. Family-owned business enterprises—Fiction. 2. Upper Peninsula (Mich.) — Fiction. 3. Conflict of generations—Fiction. 4. Fathers and sons—Fiction. 5. Lumber trade—Fiction. 6. Michigan—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3558.A67T78 2004

  813′.54—dc22 2004040449

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  To Judy Hottensen and Amy Hundley

  True North

  Father wad wailing. I deduced from the morning sun and moving flotsam that we were drifting slowly southward with the force of an unknown current. He slumped on the back seat of the wooden rowboat and I leaned forward grabbing his shirt to keep him from pitching overboard. Both of his hands had been severed at the wrist and the stumps had been tightly bound with duct tape. His normally withered forearms now bulged with an unsightly color. When they had pushed us out from the estuary on a falling tide before dawn I had been given only one oar. When I clearly noted this at first light the humor wasn’t lost on me. I was equipped to row in circles with my left hand. The thumb of my right hand was missing and the pain lessened when I raised it high. In the early light I had seen a green or loggerhead turtle and took my thumb someone had stuffed in my pocket pitching it toward the beast but the turtle had submerged in alarm misunderstanding my good intentions. By midmorning the shore had arisen and I could see the coastline south of Veracruz. The current was carrying us toward Alvarado. My father woke from his latest faint. His face was too bruised for clear speech and now rather than wailing he bleated. His eyes made his request clear and I pushed him gently over the back of the boat. It was quite some time before he completely sunk. I would study the stinking fish scales and bits of dried viscera on the boat’s bottom and then look up and he would still be there floating in the current. And then finally I was pleased to see him sink. What a strange way to say good-bye to your father.

  Part 1

  1960s

  1

  My name is David Burkett. I’m actually the fourth in a line of David Burketts beginning in the 1860s when my great-grandfather emigrated from Cornwall, England, to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan which forms the southern border of Lake Superior, that vast inland sea of freshwater. This naming process is of no particular interest except to illustrate how fathers wish to further dominate the lives of their sons from the elemental beginnings. I have done everything possible to renounce my father but then within the chaos of the events of my life it is impossible to understand the story without telling it.

  My father was so purely awful that he was a public joke in our area but with his having moved to Duluth so long ago the jokes had become quite stale, truly ancient, and were now being raised to life only by older men, mostly retired, sitting near the breakwall in the public park next to Lake Superior watching boats they never boarded going in and out of the harbor.

  Perhaps it is strange for a victim of evil to see this evil become more local folklore than a vital force, but then I was a temporary victim abandoning both my parents at age eighteen when I had the strength of my anger though I admit my sister Cynthia at age sixteen beat me to the punch by a full month. Cynthia got herself pregnant by her lover, a mixed-blood Finn and Chippewa (Anishinabe) Indian, the son of our yardman, who was a senior to her sophomore, and a star on the Marquette High School football team. At the time, 1966, for a girl of Cynthia’s social standing to get herself pregnant by an Indian boy would be the same as a girl from a prominent Mississippi family becoming pregnant from an affair with a black man. In animal terms Cynthia could be likened to a wolverine, the most relentlessly irascible beast in North America, whereas I, in my teens, was more an opossum who wished to be a bear. Not oddly, it was a grotesque and unprosecuted crime committed by my father that drove us away, but then I have to work up to this dire event.

  I’m too impatient to start at the beginning, and besides, no apparent god knows when that might be. I’m averse to the mirror in my cabin toilet, having long ago unscrewed the single lightbulb, but since the toilet is on the north side of the cabin and heavily shaded by a clump of fir trees I never see myself anyway in more than dimmish light. I don’t dislike myself but there’s enough left of the outward thrust of jaw to remind me of my great-grandfather, my grandfather, and my father. More than a trace of luck came along when my mother’s small facial features moderated my own so that the old-timers in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula didn’t directly turn away in muted fear and nervousness. All but a few of the younger citizens, say those under forty, have forgotten the specifics of who we were.

  I’m not going to trap myself here. I wasn’t quite eighteen years old when I declared my intentions to Lake Superior on a stormy night near the grave of an old Indian on Presque Isle that I wasn’t going to use up my life thinking about myself which seemed to be the total preoccupation of my schoolmates and all the adults I knew except Jesse, my father’s aide since World War II, Clarence, and my uncle, my mother’s brother Frederick who lived in a cabin way down in southern Ohio across the Ohio River from eastern Kentucky. Fred had been an Episcopalian priest in Chicago who had lost interest in his calling a step ahead of his parishioners losing patience with his terminal eccentricities. He survived on family money and a small pension from the church given for his general mental incontinence. Fred told me when I was sixteen that modern man at the crossroads mostly just stayed at the crossroads. This notion is fine in itself but more importantly Fred taught me how to row a boat on lakes and rivers. He built one for me in two weeks during a hot Ohio June, lifted and secured it in the back of his pickup, and then we drove north straight through to Au Sable Lake near Grand Marais, Michigan, launching the boat at dawn, breaking a bottle of Goebel’s beer over the bow, but then Fred became confused over the names we might use to christen the boat. Fred owned an obnoxious dog, a mixed Airedale-bull terrier he had named simply “No” so I suggested “Yes” as a boat name because when we finally rowed the boat out on the lake that summer morning Fred had to forcibly detach No’s teeth from the oar and I wanted to put a positive feeling on the experience. Fred subdued the dog and said the name Yes would be “banal.” Fred liked to imitate the questionable behavior of his poor white neighbors but he was a learned man, his cabin stuffed with books. He broke another Goebel’s bottle over the gunnel and christened my rowboat “Boat.” It was then that a male loon flew near us disappearing into the mist at the west end of the lake with that circular and querulous cry which after a long silence Fred likened to the laughter before death of an insane saint. All of Fred’s frame of reference was Christian though he thought of it as a religion that hadn’t “panned out” and after three beers would present a long and repetitive argument that the religion of his calling had done more harm than good to the world. This point was a precarious teeter-totter that daily haunted him but after too many beers and a nap he would withdraw his blasphemies because I was thinking of the ministry at the time and he didn’t want to discourage me. How better could I renounce both my father and my own Western preoccupation with self than to take up a primitive form of Christianity? Of course my father ignored this right up to the point that I also refused the family tradition of Yale and enrolled instead at Michigan State University and then he knew that he had truly lost me, not that he seemed to care.

  This is a case where mere fact isn’t instructive. I had taken over the rowing and we were close to shore moving through reed and lily pad beds with the dog growling intermittently on the shore. It was already warm at eight in the morning and a slight
breeze kept the clouds of mosquitoes enshrouded in the forest. Fred was peeling a hard-boiled egg drawn from the cooler and dosing it with Tabasco. I had just asked a mawkish theological question about Mary Magdalene, a query about forgiveness attached to this woman in part because I was a virgin at sixteen and imagined Mary Magdalene to be a haunted seductress, her robes parted wantonly for those who took interest and gave her a few coins. This boat incident took place over thirty years ago and I see the bits of eggshell floating on the shaded water. Fred was tired and irritable from driving north all night.

  “That’s your main problem,” he said. “You can’t have religion without belief. You’re just using your religion to decorate your life to protect you from your father. It’s like your mother flying down to Chicago to go to a dress shop, say something pastel pink for Easter when the Lord was said to arise. That’s no better than your dad driving from Marquette to Duluth to fuck one of his fifteen-year-olds. What I’m saying is that you can’t be playing around with your Christianity like it was a tool kit to keep you going. How does that make you better than your dad? Right now you’d give your left nut for an hour with Mary Magdalene.” Fred was making light of my recent religious conversion wherein my soul was saved at the fundamentalist Baptist church, an event that offended my family’s Episcopalian sensibilities including Fred’s.

  The landscape turned reddish and I pulled hard on the oars and hit shore in a snake-grass reed bed. The dog understood my anger before Fred and barked loudly. I jumped out of the boat and headed into an alder thicket that immediately tripped me three times because my body was trying to move faster than my feet. I think I was yelling ‘fuck you” and even now my voice feels boyish and cracking with dry sobs. Two weeks before on the day I hitchhiked south from Marquette my sister Cynthia had been sitting on a blanket out in her special corner of the yard near her disused playhouse. I was in the work shed next to the garage where Clarence our yardman often stayed, and where he slept on an old leather couch. I was near the greasy workbench careful not to touch it in my Sunday suit. I was on my way to the Baptist church while my parents were dressing for a later service at the Episcopalian. I was checking to see if Clarence wanted to trout-fish that afternoon. Many Chippewa are large men and so are the Finnish and Clarence was half of each. I once saw him unload a four-hundred-pound woodstove from his Studebaker pickup and carry it into this self-same shed.