The Road Home Read online

  When Nelse and Lunquist left for work I took Ted for a long walk, carefully skirting the rock pile in the first pasture. Ted’s first trauma as a puppy had been when he trotted up to this rock pile and nudged a largish bull snake which lashed out at him. Now he stares at the rock pile fearfully from a safe distance of a hundred yards and barks at it wildly but will go no closer. His only unfortunate aspect is that he reminds me of Sam who gave him to me. You have at my age this mistaken feeling that you can read your new lover pretty accurately but then the unpleasant surprises begin to arrive. With Sam it was his ample collection of resentments he couldn’t manage to hide and I couldn’t help him resolve. I had so looked forward to seeing him the week after our family picnic. We met up in Hardin, Montana, and intended to go to the Crow Fair, the grandest of the powwows, then visit a friend of mine, a falconer, who has a small ranch between Belle Fourche and Sturgis. We barely made it through two days. His local friends struck me as mean-minded nitwits. There is a smugness about real cowboys over being real cowboys as opposed to the ninety percent who try to simply dress the part. They naturally have their own valid touches, mannerisms absorbed from their work, but then much of their behavior seems adopted from movies and television. Of course alcohol can vastly emphasize bad behavior that is only potential without it. All of Sam’s friends, including their wives and girlfriends, seemed terribly proud to have never read a book from “front to back” and became condescending racists when they heard Sam and I were headed for the Crow powwow. When Sam played chicken and said, “She’s just hauling me along” as if he were a stud horse I was so pissed I wanted to brain him with a beer bottle.

  By the first midnight in a Hardin bar it occurred to me that these people made Brooklyn Sicilians look like English gentlemen. I even began to cherish the memory of certain Ivy League graduates I had gone out with in New York and generally hadn’t cared for. There’s a terrible illusion that the grandeur of landscape contributes to grandeur of personality. The very last straw that late first night was when Sam’s best friend squeezed his drunk girlfriend’s arm so hard she turned pale and burst into tears. I abruptly got up and left and when Sam followed me into the parking lot he lamely said that the ugly incident was none of our “business.” I only said maybe so but I didn’t intend to stick around such behavior.

  The real argument didn’t start until late the next morning when we were in a fine mood driving in the lovely countryside down toward the Yellowtail Dam along the Bighorn River. I said it seemed odd that so many Eastern fly fishermen came here among the squalor of reservation poverty. We had been talking about my son, Nelse, and how wonderful it had been when he arrived at the picnic. The tip-off was that he mostly congratulated me on finding an “heir” to my property. When I mentioned the Eastern fishermen he said the best way to catch a fine mess of trout on the Niobrara was to throw a net in the river and some firecrackers upstream to drive the fish into the net. I knew he was baiting me because I had seen two fly rods in his trailer. I said I didn’t want to see his friends again and that I felt cowboys in Nebraska were far pleasanter than in Montana. He challenged me directly by asking if I was “too good” for his friends and I said, “Absolutely.” The fatal trump card was when he refused to pick up a young Crow girl who was hitchhiking despite the fact that the day was very hot. He said something nasty about the Crow being widely on welfare and since they didn’t work walking was good exercise for them. People like himself had to work for a living. This burned my ears and I pointed out that in my experience as a social worker I had never seen being on welfare as an enviable position, and that nearly all farmers and ranchers were in some respects on the government dole. When he replied, “I’m just a cowboy, darling,” I could see he was going to take a daily, though well-concealed, bath in self-pity, surely the most injurious human emotion. I wondered at the errancy of physiological attraction, how your body can fairly hum with desire for someone only to discover that your minds are as unsympathetic as Vermont and Nevada.

  When I reached the creek and pond Sam drifted away on the southern spring breeze and I couldn’t blame Ted for bad memories because he was only trying to chase a killdeer who affected injury to lead him away from her nest. I had left Sam at the motel and driven off to Crow Agency by myself with a rather light heart as if I had actually known this all would happen and only had to discover it in the filaments of reality. Ted jumped into the pond, swam across, then stood shivering and barking on the other side as if expecting me to retrieve him. I walked around the pond, pausing to study the burial mound in a thicket. Both my father and Nelse supposed it to be Ponca in origin. I also found my day pack containing a thermos and Van Bruggen’s Wildflowers, Grasses, and Other Plants of the Northern Plains, the book swollen with moisture, that I had left there two days before. So much for me as an amateur botanist! I reminded myself that since it was Nelse’s copy I better order another as the lovely book had fattened and many pages were stuck together. I felt another twinge in my stomach and then became irritated that I had come to the place again where I had conceived Nelse but not quite in the proper mood. The memory of an unpleasant love affair is unshakably similar to a root canal or a badly stubbed toe.

  I retrieved Ted and headed north at a brisk pace, diverting my mind to the reunion of Naomi and Paul, and the grave but rather comic evening when she announced in late March that he was arriving and she was going to live with him. I couldn’t help but tease by asking, “What will people say?” I am sure she is defying the laws and bylaws of the County School Board after forty years of teaching but then it is unlikely anyone would protest her living with her brother-in-law. Grandfather and I were always adequate for gossip fodder, and then Michael gave them a field day last summer. Nelse transcended any possible reproach by beginning to bring the ranch back to life. Circumscribed lives have tended to make gossip the central national pastime.

  Naomi was slightly upset when I said I had known about their affection for each other within a few years after my father died. Children don’t so much listen to specific words but the “why” of people saying something. They are also students of gestures and glances and of the invisible thing called moods. They notice this nonverbal language among themselves and it is a simple matter to apply it to adults. Ruth who was fixed on Paul as much as I was Grandfather used to ask in a querulous child’s voice why Paul wouldn’t become our father. And early in high school, when I was in the ninth grade and had begun to read the large collection of Native material in Grandfather’s library, I would occasionally wonder why Paul and Naomi couldn’t follow the Native custom of marrying the brother’s widow. It certainly would have helped Ruth who had been always a little fearful of Grandfather to the same extent she adored Paul.

  I wasn’t being attentive but snapped alert when Ted barked and the bark had a new and feral quality to it, rising from deeper in the chest and mixed with a growl. We were walking to the north along the edge of a dense shelterbelt out of which emerged a young mixed breed bull, doubtless the neighbor’s stock, and I suspected one of the shelterbelt trees had fallen across the fence, enabling the bull to cross over into our property. Though normally a relatively docile breed this bull thought he was a Miura straight out of Spain and began trotting back and forth, coming ever closer, roaring and blowing snot. Ted raised his hackles and charged, nipping the bull and driving it into a run for at least a quarter of a mile. I was breathless with surprise but also frightened that he might be kicked or hooked by a horn. After he had driven the bull into the distant shelterbelt across the pasture Ted returned at a comic gait with an occasional rumble in his chest, prancing and jumping sideways, wheeling around to make sure the bull wasn’t in pursuit. I knelt and petted him, reassuring him that he had done the right thing. It was especially funny a few minutes later when I stepped on a long dark stick in the grass and this new Ted nearly jumped out of his skin to avoid this imagined snake.

  We reached the Niobrara at noon and the sun was bright and dazzling off the high water
of April, the river turbulent and bulging where it passed over rocks which raised the level of its roar. I found a patch of dry, brown grass and lay down propped by an elbow, as I recalled doing on the Little Bighorn at dawn with the sun rising through the dusty air like a bruised peach amid the powwow’s incessant drums. After leaving Sam in Hardin I had watched the dancing throughout the hot afternoon, evening, and through the night with an occasional short nap in my car. There had been an embarrassing incident early in the evening when I took a swig of whiskey from a pint Sam left on the seat in plain view of a Crow policeman walking up behind me. He chided me strongly, saying it was a “dry” reservation. I handed him the bottle feeling tears form. He handed it back telling me that I could have one more drink before he destroyed it. I did so and then we both laughed.

  I had left soon after my riverside nap, driven away by processes of memory that I couldn’t control. I don’t think I had a trace of self-pity which I’ve always considered the most loathsome of emotions but in the middle of the night while I watched hundreds dance, several breathtaking “fancy dancers” entered the open kiva, one with a body strikingly similar to Duane’s. He was also an Oglala Lakota with the indented flesh of a bullet wound below his shoulder blade and beneath his rib cage on his chest, lightly colored in contrast to his darker flesh. I wondered if he had lived if Duane would have ever taken part in a powwow and thought not. To think so would have been a false balm. I very much liked the idea that such ancient enemies as the Lakota and Crow were dancing together, also a contingent of Blackfoot. These people with some grasp of the old ways, even when it was minimal, were better able to survive. All government strictures against the Native American Church, the peyote people, seemed quite corrupt as they interfered with essentially religious practices that had proved an excellent defense against the Native curse of alcohol.

  My turmoil had continued through the night with the briefest dream of a favorite history professor back at the University of Minnesota, a New Yorker who had thrilled us with his brilliant and wickedly laconic view of the most unsavory parts of our history. He was from Columbia University and spoke without notes in elegant and piercing paragraphs. I was so smitten with his mind that when I first reached New York City I took a West Side subway up to 115th Street to see the locale that produced such a creature. When he spoke of Native Americans in the last century he focused on the admirable tendency of a culture or civilization to protect its citizens from themselves. Unfortunately, in dozens of cases in human history, there was an invariable tendency to exclude the true Natives in this protection policy, whether it was Thrace, Gaul, Ireland, Brazil or the United States. Whom the conquerors would destroy they first described as savage. In contrast to the emotive sloppiness of my friend Michael this man’s voice was cold and calm and his words were rivets punched into his students’ collective ship which is always a ship of fools.

  Perhaps unfortunately this was the first time there was any public knowledge of our family papers. I had copied out several pages of my great-grandfather’s journal for this professor, including a long description of Crazy Horse spending three days on the burial platform with his dead daughter, also certain events leading up to the massacre at Wounded Knee. Naturally the professor wanted to see the entire journals but my uncle Paul thought it a bad idea. I avoided saying so until after the semester was over thinking it might jeopardize my grade. On hearing the bad news the professor was no colder than usual, but did point out that my family had no right to withhold information that might correct misunderstandings of a period in our history. My dander was raised a bit and I said if he drove out to Pine Ridge he could find plenty that needed correcting here in the present. I suppose that was why I became involved in social work. You worked directly in the face of poverty rather than limiting yourself to writing a history of poverty. I had an inordinate respect for this man but not of his judgment of my family’s reticence, though of course I didn’t know at the time, as Paul did, that actual skeletons were involved. In any event, the existence of our papers gradually leaked out into historical circles and any notice of their existence tended to create problems, including the final shit monsoon of Michael himself whose very being made me smile and irritable at the same time.

  Another not altogether pleasant event at the Crow Fair was when I ran into a Lakota couple my own age, both of whom I had known at the university. They were watchers rather than participants at the powwow and he now taught at a community college in North Dakota. They were rather threadbare and ironic about everything, nearly embittered, especially over the gradual dissolution of the American Indian Movement. In the late sixties, while home from New York City for the summer, I had joined them and several dozen others, a mixed bag of Natives and radical whites, to protest the dreadful smear of Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills, and also to punily demand the return of the Black Hills to the Lakota. We were all summarily arrested after threatening to dump blood-red paint on the massive stone head of George Washington. The others were sent to jail while I was sent packing, an unmarked government car following me all the couple of hundred miles to Naomi’s house. This was clear evidence again of the persistence of my grandfather’s name well after he was dead. Soon after, when I met up again with my radical friends, including the Lakota couple at the powwow, I was icily reminded by them that such people as myself, unlike themselves, always had a “return ticket.” I hadn’t the heart to be angry with them at the time because it was true. At the gathering what the couple still had was the questionable civility left over from ideological exhaustion. Demonstrating had been replaced by not very dramatic legal maneuvers, partly because the central firebrands had been faced with the intractability of white minds to whom the continuance of the emotional content of Manifest Destiny was as natural as morning coffee.

  So I merely chatted with the Lakota couple though when we said good-bye she hugged me and called me “sister.” Christ, life wears us out, I thought, watching them walk away with the studied gait of advanced retirees when they were really only my own age. I avoided a contingent of thoroughly white bliss-ninnies nearby, who are the source of much humor among Native Americans, along with the representations of them on television and in the movies. There is a false identification and wan hope of brushing against those who are falsely considered to have an almost genetic virtue, which in itself creates the additional difficulty of distance from the true problems. If you have been horribly swindled and desire reparations to survive you scarcely want to become a totem for the derelicts of the sadistic culture, however benign. If you want to help me don’t fawn but go home and kick your congressman in the ass is the plaintive, mostly unvoiced request. You can’t greedily suck out of another culture what you have failed to find in your own heart. You may recognize it in another culture but only if it already exists in the core of your own soul.

  When I left Crow Agency very early that morning my eyes seemed to grate against their lids but my heart was buoyant. I supposed that it was because I had watched a people celebrate what they already are, come what may, with some of the dance steps doubtless more than a thousand years old, as if for a brief time they could emerge fully from the suffocation of our own culture. Rather than justifiably violent protest against us, they were ignoring us.

  On the long, largely empty road east down through Lame Deer and Broadus toward Belle Fourche, I didn’t cringe from any of my memories of 1972 when I’d barely noticed the newspaper accounts of AIM’s occupation of Pine Ridge and the consequent deaths because Duane had committed suicide in the Florida Keys that year. I had flatly religious reasons for never using the name “Mrs. Stone Horse” that a fine reporter from the Miami Herald had used in his article. I certainly became quite blind to what is called “the larger world” in the ensuing year. I recovered an approximation of a sense of life, however slight, at Paul’s casita on the Baja beach near Loreto, and at home with Naomi, but mostly back in New York City where it seems quite impossible to completely disappear into yourself, and where I br
ought my hiking boots from home and took the simple measure of walking thousands of blocks in the following months. I’ve always felt sorry for rural people who out of fear or scorn have never comprehended the mystery of a great city which is a fulsome extension of our nature, good or bad. Nelse is too young to be a nature curmudgeon and I forced him to admit his pleasure in walking out Paris and other French cities in the wonderful early-morning hours while his mother was sleeping off her wine.

  May 3rd

  J.M. and Nelse were having a modest quarrel so I made myself scarce, riding Rose in a brisk large loop and ending up north near the river. The last words I heard were, “You deserve to be a bachelor, you self-centered asshole.” I didn’t totally disagree with her because she had come back from school for a brief two days and he was gone most of the first buying weaned calves with Lundquist. And on the second, this morning, he was irritable because the inventory lists from a museum curator seemed to show several items missing during the artifacts passage through the hands of several academics who had helped with the dispersal. I suggested a clerical error while he was settling on light fingers. Meanwhile, J.M. felt ignored and even after he had offered her his day she was still a little cranky. I sided with her mentally in that like my father, according to Naomi, Nelse is singleminded, running on one track at a time, and though the track is usually admirable it can be enervating to others.