The Road Home Page 4

  My own misshapen and rebellious nature was drawn to these trees because they were so unplanned and haphazard, so utterly wild compared to my father’s shelterbelts that had taken so much of our time, virtually since I began remembering in the ten years since we were off the reservation area. I began helping with a child’s shovel but soon graduated to an adult one by the time I left the country school, now Naomi’s, at age nine. My father’s grand plan for this succession of windbreaks to grid three thousand acres was to protect enclosed pastures and tilled fields from the violence of Great Plains weather, to retain moisture, and later to amend the local shortage of firewood and lumber. While also raising cattle and my own growing collection of horses, and row crops of corn, wheat and oats, we spent just short of ten years planting staggered and mixed rows of bull pine and ponderosa, caragana, buffaloberry, Russian olive, wild cherry, Juneberry, wild plum, thornapple, and willow, with sturdier inside rows of the larger green ash, white elm, silver maple, black walnut, European larch, hackberry, and wild black cherry. I never questioned when we picked up the huge bundles of rootstock at the train station, with their discreet and formal labeling of Northridge Nurseries from different locations in Illinois, Iowa, and New York State. My father said they came from our cousin and it was years before I questioned the idea of the cousin when my father had insisted he was alone in the world. The idea that he felt shamed by his business acumen was tied to the fact that he had mortgaged his life for a grubstake in this world, taking another’s place in the Civil War for pay. Anyone but a cretin knows that nearly all men mortgage their lives for survival or profit, but such was my father’s fidelity toward what he thought was the truth of the Gospels that his own activities made him miserable with guilt. His essentially orphaned youth and his later efforts with the landless and penniless Lakota certainly gave him adequate motive.

  All of this was but a moment’s thought when I told Dalva about my first wild forest, a forest presumably devised by some god with a level of genius incomprehensible to us, who need not bother designing ordered rows or digging a hundred thousand holes in the ground, or constructing hydraulic rams for irrigation water. But then we loved this marsh, spring and creek for its true wildness that we had no part in making. Now, fifty years later, when these endless shelterbelts present themselves to strangers as owning the beauty of a forest, I am grudging to admit they are beautiful indeed, but a portion of my heart belonged to the grand woodlands of northern Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan. If I had not been a dreamy and cantankerous youth I would have noticed those forests were doomed by the gathering and enormous fields and hills covered with giant stumps, but back then the remnants of the virgin forest herself seemed endless.

  I played the fool in a number of not very unique ways in Duluth. The harbor and Lake Superior, the hilly city herself seemed gorgeous, so why did I lose half my money playing cards in a saloon? I was served a piece of beef at a dockside restaurant that no one in Nebraska would consent to eat, paid for the uneaten meal, then strolled down the street and saw a saloon that offered free Lake Superior trout and perch as long as you kept buying drinks. I had no experience with alcohol short of my father’s homemade wine, the taste of which encouraged moderation, but I was bold enough to order a shot and a beer, and was given a basket of fried fish on the side. I was fully grown and strong from work at fourteen but my capacity far exceeded my talent for booze. I was shortly quite drunk, chock full of fish, and losing at a poker game until a Norwegian logger guided me back to my cheap hotel. A very big lady on the street tried to wrest me away but the Norwegian got me safely to my room. In the middle of the night I vomited on myself, an experience that kept me away from both alcohol and fish for quite some time. And at dawn I was wakened by a bellowing and cursing group of loggers fist-fighting in the street, the group evidently having failed to go to bed at all. I was suddenly quite homesick for my horses and mother, though I stopped short of any fond memories of my dad. I drank a whole pitcher of water, was sick again, then left the hotel in a nauseous rush, eager for the open air.

  This questionable dawn was further compromised when I opted for steamer passage from Duluth to Marquette near Ishpeming, rather than take the train. The muggy weather had dissipated and there was a fresh cool breeze out of the northwest, rare indeed for a Nebraska summer, but commonplace in Duluth, or so I was told. What I wasn’t told was the effect this bracing wind had on Lake Superior, and straightaway out of Duluth harbor our ship began being pounded by waves that I found uncomfortable. These waves, which no one else thought worthy of notice, continued on throughout the day and evening, and grew even more fearsome when we passed the Apostle Islands and received the full brunt of the sea. My misery continued through the night until the steamer came around the Keweenaw Peninsula and we received a full lee, traveling south to Houghton for a brief stop before heading on another hundred miles or so to Marquette. Much as I loved Willow I was in the deepest state of regret over this trip. A sympathetic sailor had given me salt crackers which helped a bit and said we’d be in Marquette by nightfall. I bolted the ship, however, in Houghton, resolving to crawl to Ishpeming if I had to, any measure that would get me off the water. Once the world stopped rocking, I stumbled into town and tried to buy a cheap horse but couldn’t find anything I could afford except draft horses in miserable health from overwork. On the advice of a drunken lout I jumped a logging train, sharing a flat car with a group of men in far worse shape than myself, it being a Sunday night after a day off and a night of pleasure. The train sped by Ishpeming before dawn, and I got off in Marquette and walked a dozen or so miles in the early morning back to Ishpeming where I had no difficulty finding Smith’s “cousin” by asking a policeman who first advised me that they were hiring at the mine. This did not tempt me as I had no more wish to spend a life underground than I did at sea.

  I bought two chickens and a bottle of whiskey, not wanting to arrive empty-handed. Smith’s cousin called himself Jake and was an enormous fellow, a mixed breed in whom there was a definite trace of a Buffalo soldier (black). His hand was wrapped from two crushed fingers but he hoped to get back to work in a few days. He immediately opened the whiskey and I heartily declined a drink. His wife was a very large Finnish woman who set about frying the chickens and drawing me a bath. Quite naturally they hadn’t heard a thing about Willow, but after a few drinks Jake supposed she must be up near Mobridge, South Dakota, with the Standing Rock people. Her mother had a sister up there somewhere, he thought, adding that I should give up my quest before I got “my ass kicked real good.” After dinner we went out to the town dump and watched bears pick over the garbage, a melancholy sight indeed.

  I made my uneventful way home and finally spoke to my mother who wept at my new intentions. I sold another horse for a grubstake, saddled up, taking a string of two more, and rode way up to Watauga, west of Mobridge, with my loaded Iver Johnson at my belt and my rifle in a scabbard. It was a five-day ride, all day and half of each summer night. I saw Willow only for a few moments at the door of a shack, and then was asked to leave by a gathering of men. When I strongly resisted I took a beating that I still remember clearly, and one of my horses was seized for good measure. I made my way back south but fainted from pain outside Pierre where a doctor wrapped my broken ribs and pulled two busted teeth. It took me a full ten days to make it home as my taped-up chest didn’t greatly reduce the pain in my ribs, and riding was difficult. Despite all of this I enjoyed the countryside as much as I had on my trip to Ishpeming. The young are resilient and I had done as much as I could to retrieve my lost love. When I got home I presented myself at the front door, was embraced by my parents, went to bed for twenty-four hours and ate a half of an apricot pie on arising.

  Dalva was inconsolable over my story having read Wuthering Heights several times to the neglect of her school work. Naomi had brought over dinner but was a great deal less sympathetic over my beating when she caught the tail end of the story. I then admitted that I had pressed the attack, sens
ing that it was “all or nothing,” an attitude I got from dime novels rather than the large stack of classic literature my father gathered for me. Dalva was pleased to learn that I had started the fight, adding, “That’s what I meant when I said you pretended you were always nice. The worst case of this is our minister.” She was referring to the Methodist minister up the road who had been there a couple of years, and it had recently come to light that he beat both his wife and children regularly. I was a great deal less amazed than his parishioners, not being a church-goer myself. Lundquist as a devout Lutheran was sure that if the minister would only read Swedenborg he would behave, while Frieda thought he should be lynched.

  Naomi sighed and got up for a deck of cards for our gin rummy game which Dalva always won out of a superior level of attention. She loathed the minister and was merely baiting her mother with the sorest of subjects. Naomi didn’t want to have the minister run out of the area which would only leave the wife and children in a further lurch. She had even indicated that I as a total outsider might speak to the minister though I’d met him only a few times in passing. I viewed the man as a vicious pest, and told Naomi that since she had lots of money she’d never get around to spending why not intercede herself? She could give the woman and two children a new start in life far from this pious lout. Naomi was currently getting up the courage to do so.

  The long ride made me doze through the rummy game and I played badly. During the badinage of the game Dalva admitted she hadn’t spent a moment with her homework, and was sent upstairs to pack her suitcase, rather than being allowed to spend another night. Despite my sleepiness I remained curious about the peripheral way the female argues, so unlike the quarrels between father and son. With Dalva out of earshot Naomi asked me not to tell the story of Adelle for a few more years and I nodded in assent. I was startled because I had never heard her mention the name, but then presumed John Wesley had told her the story. When we die we are only stories in the minds of others, I thought, then dismissed the notion as Dalva kissed me good night, saying, “I love you,” always splendid words.

  There was the slightest hope in her face that I might interfere in the idea of her going home to catch up on schoolwork but I wouldn’t think of doing so. My having left school at age nine had always intrigued her, even when she knew my father had tripled the learning load. At the encouragement of some older boys, I didn’t need much, I had set fire to the country school outhouse during recess, then as the enormity of the act had registered on everyone I had escaped for home on horseback, hiding out in the haymow of the barn. The teacher was in hot pursuit but on a slower horse. I peeked out through the slats of the barn as he banged and hollered at our back door, still carrying his whipping stick. When my mother was not able to offer up the culprit the teacher, a pompous young man from Hastings, called her a “damnable squaw,” which my father heard from the den. He rushed out and flung the teacher off the porch into an icy March puddle. “Damnable squaw” was not a wise choice of words to use within the hearing of a man who had spent twenty-five years with the Lakota and had lost so many dear friends at the massacre at Wounded Knee.

  When I walked Naomi and Dalva to the door I stood out in the moonlight until I shuddered from the cold air, watching their tail lights bobbing out the long bumpy driveway and down the gravel road, the stones rattling under the fenders. The moon on the trees stung my memory. My mother had been married to White Tree (because he dreamed of birches though he had never seen one), an adoptive brother of my father’s, and when White Tree died in the mid-1880s my father felt called upon to take his place. She was the quietest of women but with a fine sense of amusement and an implacable will. My father had not thought the world worthy of raising children and my existence had been my mother’s idea. Her affections were tender and boundless as long as I was obedient, which I was with her because she was never unreasonable. Previous to the last trip to Mexico before their death, my father and I had both been reading William James’s Principles of Psychology, which had enlightened me to some of the subtleties of her behavior. For instance, we could sit on the banks of the Niobrara for hours on a summer morning simply watching and listening to the nature of nature, or whatever one calls all that happens without immediate human intervention, and not speak a word to each other but I would be left with the feeling we had communicated perfectly. I’ve read this is true of people who have been married a long time and still love each other. I doubt if there’s anything mystical in this matter but that people have never been taught to be truly attentive except to the banalities. When I was a child she’d announce her brother was coming for a visit often days before he would appear. Despite my father’s deeply religious nature such experiences were not in his tenets and they mystified him to the point of irritation. To the white people, among whom I helplessly number myself, life is a very long and high set of stairs, but to my mother life was a river, a slow and stately wind across the sky, an endless sea of grass.

  When I had finally gotten settled after my pair of doomed trips to find Willow I had to sit down and fill in the whole canvas of the trip for my mother like the pointillist Seurat. Nothing could be left out. She picked the bears in the Ishpeming dump, and the profusion of white birches I had seen from the log-train flat car shimmering in the moonlight, to dwell on. Of course this was because her first husband was White Tree and if he hadn’t died he certainly would have traveled to this area. To her, the saddest thing about Native dispossession is that the people weren’t able to live out the cues from their dreams. She told me that when she was a child she was with a small group of Lakota who had traveled to the south and east to trade buffalo meat and tanned hides to the Pawnee for corn, of which the Pawnee are said to have developed fourteen kinds. What my mother remembered was the delight of her grandmother on the trip, who had dreamt she would meet the Pawnee and now she was doing so.

  Long after she died my mother had kept one of my legs ever so slightly in her world, despite my father’s active insistence that the future of the world was grievously white. She was so utterly ordinary she was as real as the moon to me after she had been dead forty years. I stood there, an old fool shivering on a cold October night, and could still hear her soft but bell-clear voice offering me the names of birds in Lakota, none of which I remember though the voice is clearer than my own, or Sonia’s bark down near our graveyard. Sonia allows none of the other dogs in front of her when they are let out to pee before bedtime, though the two males pretend they are defending her from the rear and her daughter strays just behind her flank. I suddenly remembered that my mother talked to the dogs in Lakota which they seemed to understand clearly. And to Smith, whose departure at eighteen she mourned because she had dreamt he’d have a difficult life. When I called the dogs to go back inside I thought perhaps she wasn’t dead in any meaningful sense. This gave me a further shiver that my nightcap glass of brandy did not dispel.

  In the den a twinge behind my left kneecap forced a smile. After my extended pratfall in the search for Willow my character took on a melancholy bent, and Smith had made some effort to cheer me up, as did my father who had failed terribly by telling me of the loss to tuberculosis of his beloved first wife, Aase, shortly after they had been married. This increased my desperation, rather than healing it, as it hadn’t occurred to me that anyone I loved could die.

  Smith had come up with a plan to make money by capturing an unbranded and wild longhorn bull his father had seen in a big thicket along the Niobrara some twenty miles upriver from our place. The bull was a remnant of the herd Texans drove north for the thick pasturage of the Sandhills. There was a Norwegian farmer in the area who had offered Smith’s father ten dollars for the death of this beast that had become a fence-breaking nuisance provoking a reign of terror among more civilized cattle. The local cowboys had given up trying to catch or kill it, which should have offered a tip to us that the project was over our heads. If we could somehow haul or lead the creature to the cattle sale over in Bassett we would clear a
hundred dollars, a fortune in those days. There also was the added incentive in that the young men in the dime novels I had begun to lose interest in often became cowboys or desperadoes after losing in love. It had been suggested in print that if a fair lass had offered Billy the Kid some female tenderness he might not have started, or once started might have ceased his murderous ways. A dull-witted beast, no matter that he weighed a wild ton, was no match for two bright young men. Smith was even a distant relative of Crazy Horse, though it might have occurred to us that the bull was ignorant of this fact. Our main, nearly fatal error was in confusing longhorns with other cattle breeds, all of which are dull indeed compared to this fabled Texas beast who had had none of the difficult brilliance bred out of him.

  We took a pack horse loaded down with hammers, saw, wire, an ax and a few days’ grub. My father, who was worried sick about the project, loaned us his third-best cowdog, a half-feral pooch named Buck, who I once caught trying to mate a calf. Smith was riding an Indian pony he claimed came from an old buffalo-hunting line, surely a match for any white man’s bull which, of course, a longhorn wasn’t. I rode my best cow horse, a claybank dun gelding who didn’t seem to know he was gelded. His idea of what to do with a difficult cow was to punish it. Our aim was to build a trap pen at the end of a small canyon leading down to the river, drive the bull into it, de-horn it for safety, tie its nuts to a hind leg with a leather thong to hobble it, a Mexican trick I had read about in a letter to the editor from El Paso in a stock magazine. Battle weary, we’d then lead the beast way over to Bassett and collect our money, and not incidentally, become renowned. I suspect the renown was foremost in our minds as money had not yet become the widespread motive for all activity in those days. The country itself was still a bit of a teenager. Smith could scarcely read and my father would not allow a newspaper into our home, but we’d seen and heard enough of them to think that our imminent heroism might catch the public attention. Two years before at age twelve we had both felt embittered that the Spanish-American War had taken place without us. It was clearly the right moment for a daring feat to be followed by wide admiration.