The English Major Read online

  As I said the Wisconsin motto said Forward which is well enough because you can’t exactly go backwards. Vivian was behind me, that’s for sure. I didn’t pay attention over a year ago when she looked up from her Robert Ludlum spy book and said, “You look so forgettable, you’d make a good spy.” Maybe life is only temporary measures. Up in our green valley northwest of Boyne City I thought everything was glued together including the fate of nations. I only worried about the weather and if the cherry buds in the orchard would freeze in late May or early June. Now in one year I had learned you couldn’t keep the world together. You can’t keep anything like it already is so why try?

  On impulse I turned south near Florence knowing that if I kept on Route 2 I’d wind back into Michigan and a hundred miles where the road was only a tunnel through dense forest. I was hankering to see some of the central Wisconsin farmland and the northern Wisconsin forestlands were all too similar to Michigan’s. This thought reminded me of when I taught school and one September a duller student of which there were many told me that when he was on a summer vacation drive with his parents he noted that many of the states looked the same. I said that the land was there before it was divided into states. He said, “I guess maybe you’re right.” I asked him if he had owned a United States jigsaw puzzle as a child and he grinned and said as if a 30 watt bulb had sparkled in his head, “That’s the problem, by golly. In the puzzle the states next to each other are a different color.”

  I reached dairyland by mid-afternoon and took photos of some fine looking Holsteins, also a single beef herd of Herefords which you don’t see much anymore due to a genetic disease I read about in Michigan Farmer magazine. Now your basic beef herds are mostly Angus like I owned. Once when I crossed a ditch to take a photo about a dozen Holsteins turned around and pointed their asses at me in a feminine way. I’d never know why, I thought. I hoped to reach Prairie du Chien by suppertime. I did poorly in my one term of French at Michigan State but I always knew chien meant dog so when I looked at maps and saw Prairie de Chien I imagined a huge field with lots of dogs running this way and that. Of course this turned out not to be true so I turned back north along the Mississippi toward La Crosse because I had seen a photo in a history book of a big hill in La Crosse where Methodist missionaries used to stand and look west at their sorry destinies as converters of Sioux Indians to the Christian Faith. The thought of dogs got me down in the dumps about Lola. In May she was a great mushroom hunter and when she found a patch of morels she’d howl and I’d come running. Vivian loved mushroom hunting before she took up real estate.

  I was suddenly struck by the fact that until Lola and mushrooms came into my head I hadn’t thought about Vivian for a couple of hours. What a boon. Maybe after a couple thousand miles she’d disappear from earth. Maybe I’d drive to Hollywood and marry Hedy Lamarr though it occurred to me she must be about ninety now if she were still alive. My dad had a photo of her taking a bubble bath out in his tool shed. The world is a wobbly place and so is my mind. I had turned on Wisconsin NPR and then turned it off again because I was up to my ass in Iraq. I was trying to remember from history books if the Blackhawk Indians had come up this far from what is now Iowa? As the landscape unfolds it’s all we have to offer and it’s not even ours. We were always an army of occupation. You know that if you read history.

  I stayed in Lacrosse two days for the simple reason that I didn’t want to cover a state in a single day which would mean my whole trip would only take fifty days when I was planning on a year. I had intended to camp but a campsite near a slough of the Mississippi about deafened me with mosquitoes. I moved into a nice room at the Best Western where I could see the river. “Treat yourself, Cliff” I said to myself. It was too late for a full dinner so I had a hamburger in the bar and a beer with a couple of shots of Dickel to calm my giddy road nerves. The bar was pretty crowded with the younger set and I recalled that my alcoholic doctor friend has said that Wisconsin girls on the average are the biggest in the U.S. due to readily available dairy products plus fast food. He was on the money except for a trim lass up on the stage singing a karaoke George Jones tune. It was a tough song for me about a guy who can’t stop loving this woman until they put a wreath on his door which meant the guy was deader than a doornail. All in all, though, I would have picked the singer over Vivian. The singer wore one of those popular bare midriff outfits and her tummy rippled. Until I dated Babe after I got the bad news at deer camp I had been faithful to Vivian for thirty-eight years though when you’re farming you’re pretty short on the side of opportunities. Actually, to be honest I jumped the gun a few months with Babe.

  MINNESOTA

  It was dawn and my heart soared when I crossed the Mississippi from Wisconsin into Minnesota, The Gospel State, bird is the Common Loon, flower is the pink and white Lady’s slipper, and the motto, L’Etoile du Nord which means the star of the north, obviously from a time when our government wasn’t anti-French. Down at Babe’s diner they served freedom fries for a while but then everyone would forget and go back to ordering plain old French fries. Clark, the owner of the diner, also took Canadian bacon off the breakfast menu because the Canadians wouldn’t help us out in Iraq. When I crossed the bridge I flipped the Wisconsin jigsaw piece out the window, colored red with small drawings of a block of cheese and a square of butter. The Minnesota piece was pale orange with a drawing in the southern part of the state of a quart of milk, and the north a little sketch of lakes and trees.

  Driving northwest on the river road my thinking got shaken up when I took a left on Rte. 14 and up the forested hill into farmland toward Rochester. The river was so beautiful it made my breath short and the farmland, well, was just good farmland. My mind made an abrupt jump to the idea that my dad was a river town and my mom was farmland. Let me explain as best I can which is none too good. Dad was a section hand on the Pennsylvania Railroad which runs up through the center of Michigan, you know, Reed City, Cadillac, Mancelona, Alba, and which years ago connected with the Soo Line in the Upper Peninsula by train ferry crossing the straits. Dad was usually gone all week and just home on weekends and sometimes only Saturday afternoons up until Sunday later afternoon when he’d drive back to Mancelona where the section crew centered. Dad wasn’t too polished to put it lightly. Mother said this was because he was brought up mostly by his father, his mother having died when he was eight. He was raised on the edge of the Mackinaw State Forest west of Pellston where his dad was a logger and trapper. I only have the dimmest memory of my grandpa who finally moved way up to Chapleau in Ontario and died there soon after. Grandpa lived in a little run down bungalow and his Indian hired hand lived in a shack next to the house. The Indian never said anything because his throat and mouth got injured in World War II though dad said he talked a fair amount before the war. So mother said dad was rough in the corners due to his upbringing. She nicknamed him Fibber after the old radio program Fibber McGee and Molly because dad couldn’t say anything straight or plain. Everything in his talking was humor and contradiction. He didn’t drink during the week, or so he said, but he’d have a few on Saturdays. He just couldn’t say a plain sentence. He wouldn’t say his foreman was a bad guy, his foreman was “a sack of maggots.” We had forty acres of bad, sandy soil he mostly pretended to farm on weekends; fruit trees (plums, peaches, apples, sweet cherries), chickens, never more than three cows, two draft horses, a few pigs each year, and a half dozen acres of thin alfalfa. I was thirteen when Teddy drowned at age eleven. After that mom worked cleaning a mansion in Lake Charlevoix owned by real rich furniture people from Grand Rapids. Not much time passed before she was managing the other five servants plus organizing dinner parties and that sort of thing. I never saw the inside of their house past the kitchen where my mother had her little office in the corner. They were old fashioned formal people so that when I painted their dock mom made me wear a white canvas painter’s suit. Anyway, as my high school years went by mom became more refined and dad seemed to go the other way until w
e thought he might very well be becoming goofy. I suppose she had to go her own way to survive being married to him. He’d call her “WB,” short for wet blanket. He was sixty-one and I was a freshman at Michigan State when he fell out of the tree house, a fine one he’d built for Teddy and me. The doctor said dad suffered a massive heart attack and was likely dead when he hit the ground. When I was young mom and dad would take Teddy and me to the saloon on Saturday afternoons and she would drink beer, smoke cigarettes, and play euchre just like the other country women, but then she became a lady. She’d say to me, “You’re lucky you take after me rather than your father. You’ll make something out of yourself.”

  I suppose I did make something out of myself but after Vivian moved out some of my dad’s characteristics seemed to emerge. For instance Mike at the saloon wondered why I laughed so much one grim early March night when a fresh blizzard had come down from Alberta. I had drawn up elaborate plans for a tree house even though I knew the farm had to be sold. I could always build the tree house up at the deer cabin in the U.P. of which I was one-eighth owner and member. I had been doing a lot of snowshoeing north of Harbor Springs and had built a pack sling for Lola for when she got tired of walking. I carried her like a papoose and she would lick the back of my neck in appreciation. I never used much garlic while cooking dinner for Vivian because she said she had her clients to think of but I had noticed old Lola liked garlic so I threw in some garlic when I cooked three pieces of pork steak, one for Lola, careful not to burn the garlic which she didn’t like. With Vivian I had to cook all too many skinless, boneless chicken breasts to keep her ass in trim, but then late in the evening after I went to bed because out of farm habit I got up at 5 a.m. I could hear Vivian in the kitchen making popcorn. She would try to clean up the evidence but I called it the case of the disappearing butter. So I told Mike I was probably laughing a bit more because I was doing things differently then I had been for thirty-eight years and this caused a lightening of my mind.

  * * *

  Driving north toward the Twin Cities after a poor breakfast (they short commercial chickens on feed and thus the egg yolks are pale and flavorless) I began to get cold feet about my date. I had called my doctor friend’s “hot chick” from the diner and she was angry that I woke her up though the summer sun is high at 9:00 a.m. Her voice was shrill and she said my doctor friend was a “weird asshole that tried to get me to piss in his hat.” I was dumbfounded by this information. She told me to meet her at eight at this restaurant and to bring a “fat wallet.” It occurred to me that she was maybe a professional lady, a woman of the night as it were. Back in the car I checked out the restaurant in my set of Mobil Guides that Vivian gave me as a going away present and it was noted that this restaurant was the most expensive in Minneapolis. You could pick your own lobster out of the tank and the wine list was extensive. I didn’t even bring along a sport coat so I’d have to stop and buy one despite my dislike of clothing stores where nifty young salesmen look down their noses at hicks.

  My cold feet got even colder when I reached a suburb called Apple Valley where I didn’t see any apple orchards and the roads became crammed with cars. Some beeped at me because I kept a little short of the speed limit. Vivian got lots of speeding tickets but I’ve never received one in my life. I couldn’t understand the traffic because it was just before ten but then figured a lot of folks must start work late. I saw a pay phone near a liquor store and pulled off (more beeps behind me) to cancel my date. On the glass above the phone someone had written “fuck you jerk off” in lipstick and when the hot chick answered she said “fuck you” to my cancellation. I felt a little giddy with self-doubt as if the world was telling me something I didn’t want to hear. I had talked to my son Robert a few days before and he wanted me to get a cell phone so we could keep in touch. This seemed odd as I’d go months without hearing from him but I didn’t say anything. Robert carries three cell phones. He said it’s the way the world works nowadays. I tried to use Vivian’s a couple of times but it seems my fingers have been blunted by farm work and the numbers are so small it’s hard to hit the right ones. Her phone got to be a bone of contention in our marriage because she wouldn’t even turn it off when we were romantic. Her point was why miss a ten grand commission to fuck me for the five thousandth time.

  Back in the car I started sweating because there didn’t seem a way to get back into the traffic flow for the time being. I took a couple of photos of all the cars then studied my road atlas. I suddenly had no intention of driving through the Twin Cities though I had had a vague plan of taking Interstate 94 up to Fergus Falls just because I liked the name of the place. After Fergus Falls I had intended to drop down to Morris to see an old student of mine by the name of Marybelle who was married to a man who teaches anthropology at a college in Morris. In my ten years of teaching I had only three students I truly wanted to keep in touch with and Marybelle was number one. We had corresponded every few months for the past twenty-five years about the ups and downs of life. Marybelle could get as excited about pistils and stamens as she was about the novels of the Bronte sisters and the poetry of Walt Whitman. She was what you call an off-brand peach, real pretty to some tastes but a little exotic to the local boys. I recall she wasn’t invited to the prom. She was the only student from our school before or since to win a full National Merit and she went off to college at Sarah Lawrence in the east. She had arrived from Ann Arbor the last two years of high school I taught. Her dad headed some kind of government program for rural improvement but no one in our area much wanted to be improved so they stuck it out for only two years.

  I was pleased that I chickened out on Minneapolis because Rte. 212 West was real pleasant. Minnesota became Minnesota. I drove off my main route onto gravel roads any number of times to take pictures of cows and wildflowers. I saw a bunch of bluebirds which were my favorite as a boy along with the loon that sparsely populates the north. For a 4–H (Head, Heart, Health and Hands) project dad helped me build fifty little bluebird houses and mount them on fence posts around the countryside. Once when we were after pan fish on a small local lake and saw and heard a loon dad upset me by saying that each loon contains the soul of a pretty girl who died young. I was in tears and he reassured me that they would prefer to live within a loon and fly south every year rather than grow up and marry some dumb farmer.

  I checked into the motel and wondered what to wear for the picnic Marybelle suggested. All of my what Vivian called “presentable clothes” scarcely filled a small suitcase. I spent a long time in the shower and laughed at my presumption that a fresh shower might be needed when I had had one at dawn in Lacrosse. I hadn’t seen Marybelle since early in September before she took off for college twentyfive years ago. We took a ride in the country and when I let her out she hugged me and said, “Cliff, you’ve meant so much to me.” She had said in a letter that she never thought Vivian was worthy of my high mind. This wasn’t a lot to go on to try to uncover a buried treasure.

  NORTH DAKOTA

  I drove across the state line into North Dakota with a glad heart and a feeling of romantic triumph with Marybelle at my side. She was going to ride with me to Bozeman, Montana, where a well-heeled cousin was going to give her a used car. When I had stopped in front of her house in what Vivian would call an LMC (lower middle class) neighborhood it was obvious that someone isn’t attracted to academic life for reasons of greed. Only the sidewalk in front of the house which was a faded yellow stucco was in good shape. The yard was mostly mowed weeds and the screened porch was full of holes any dimwitted fly could find.

  But Marybelle was Spring herself. She actually wore a soft cotton skirt I had been drawn to when she was a high school senior. She called the color a “pale bruised rose” and I was flattered that she remembered that I liked it that late May afternoon when we had graduation rehearsal, leading up to a not always pleasant ceremony where you get in a donkey speaker who thinks he’s auspicious giving an hour speech on how education is the “ticket t
o the future.” Everyone is half asleep from a picnic of ham, potato salad, and deviled eggs. The auditorium is probably too warm and the seniors are sweating in their robes eager to get at their secret celebration which will involve beer, pot, perhaps meth, and certainly sex.

  Back to the present. Marybelle swept out of the house like Scarlett O’Hara or something like that. I’m not accustomed to women making a fuss over me. As luck would have it her husband was on a “dig” looking into an ancient buried culture up near Malta, Montana, along with their daughter who was a junior at Indiana University on full scholarship. This was where her father got his PhD which some of my friends call the “fud” degree. Their son was in Namibia in Africa working with an environmental group called “Round River,” the name of which I liked because my dad always said that it would be nice if rivers were round which meant you could float them for trout and end up where you started.