Dalva (16 page)

I said I wouldn't. The dogs were lying half in a pile in the sun. Only Sonia, the oldest female, realized with her chin on Grandfather's knee that something was wrong. He kept rubbing the top of her nose; then he fell asleep against Paul's shoulder for a while. Naomi and Rachel came out with sandwiches and a thermos of coffee. For a moment it was so still all you could hear was the slight gurgle of the creek, nearly dry from the fall drought. Then a heifer bawled out for company over near Duane's bunkhouse. Rachel knelt down by Grandfather's knee and petted Sonia. Naomi could tell the end was near and said she was going over to the school to get Ruth so she could say goodbye. We could hear her car all the way out to the section road with the stones cracking under the fenders and the gravel-road dust filtering through the windbreaks. Far off to the east where the yellowed alfalfa seemed to seep into the woods I could see a coyote trotting along. I was going to say something but Rachel and Paul had also noticed the coyote which I had often seen along that hedgerow. Rachel was alarmed and said the coyote might have come to get the soul of Grandfather.

“I hope so.” Awake, he startled us. “I always liked coyotes but then I never raised any sheep. Before Wesley died I had a fine bird dog that got into the pen one day and killed all the chickens. And stacked them in a mound. Coyotes would only take a chicken or two now and then. This barn is getting too warm.” He loosened the collar of the otter coat. The barn reflected the sun's warmth but the air was quite chilly. Rachel thought we should go in, with her eye on the distant coyote, but Grandfather said no. He made a strange humming sound. My hands were clenched because in my heart I wanted him to pray to God so he would go to heaven. I knew very little about the Sioux religion but I wanted to see him again. All he said of World War I when he lost his faith was that there were horrors that went beyond religion and banished it. We could hear Naomi's car pulling back into the barnyard.

“My own father said this was a great sea of grass. I only saw it that way in a few places when I was a child. If there had been enough water the place would have been crowded with people.
There's lots of water where Duane is in Oregon where the trees are like huge grass.”

Ruth and Naomi approached. Ruth was tearful. “I'm sorry you're dying, Grandfather,” she said in her matter-of-fact way. “I love you.” And he said something that frightened her: “I'm not going to die. No one ever dies.” Then he said in a whisper, “Jesus, the world is upside down and I'm falling through the sky.” And he died.

There was no funeral service but a home burial the next morning out in the middle of a huge grove of lilacs, planted for that purpose more than a half-century before. Other than the family there was Rachel, the Lundquists, and three of Grandfather's old bird-hunting cronies from town, the doctor, a lawyer, and the undertaker who brought out a pine box. I suspect a home burial is against the law now but in 1958 either it was legal or no one would have dared question it. Paul and Lundquist had dug the grave and you could see Lundquist was proud of the trimness of the hole. Mrs. Lundquist was calm, partly I suspect because the lawyer told her that Grandfather had willed them a pleasant farm down the road from our place. Paul told me later that Rachel sat up all night with the body and he could hear her singing from his upstairs bedroom. After respects were made—no words were said—we ate the venison stew and the pheasant and drank a great deal of fine wine from the thirties that Paul selected from the cellar.

So Grandfather was buried there on the farm with his mother and father, his father's first wife, his son Wesley—his wife is buried in Omaha with her own people. After lunch Paul and I saddled up two horses and took the dogs for a long run. I let him take the lead and wasn't all that surprised when we ended up near the thicket and burial mound along the creek. For some reason I rode around the exact spot Duane's tipi had been, not that it was sacred or anything but my heart had begun pounding. From a nearby tree there was a rope with bleached white coyote and deer skulls that Duane had hung in the thicket to scare any interlopers away. Paul looked at me and for some reason at that moment I knew he had figured out the whole secret. To this day he has never mentioned it.

“You know until Wesley died your grandfather could be a real hard son of a bitch. You got the best part of him. Now
you have lost two fathers; I'll have to pass for the third. But maybe you're old enough at sixteen so you won't need one too often. Everyone's different this way. Your sister Ruth seems sure of herself.”

“She wants one thing, to be a pianist. I don't have any idea what I want to be. My friend Charlene says my dreams will tell me what I should do but that doesn't seem very reliable.”

Paul began laughing and we rode north at a gallop toward the Niobrara River, a different route to the box canyon favored by both of us. At the river we watered the dogs and horses, then forded easily where the river was wide and shallow. We sat on the flat rock in the canyon for a half-hour or so.

“What do you dream about?” Paul asked.

“A lot of sexual stuff. Also about animals—wolves, bears, coyotes, deer, songbirds, and hawks.” A pair of migrating rough-legged hawks swooped past us headed downriver, probably waiting for the warmer afternoon air to make their way farther south.

“Sounds pretty good to me. I read where dreams are supposed to help the brain catch up with the life, sort of a Rube Goldberg machine to ease the pressure. I'm not sure. I used to dream a lot about being in bed with my mother. Maybe that's why I stick to Mexican women.”

“Do you believe in heaven and hell?”

“Holy Christ, Dalva, I've been your dad for less than twenty-four hours. Let's start with easier questions.”

“How about one from a popular song. Will my lover come back to me?” And that's when I began weeping. I hadn't wept at the burial service but all that I had already lost in life, two fathers, a son, and a lover, swirled in my brain, and in the air in the canyon, out over the river and up into the sky. I thought my chest and head would crack open like a melon. Paul hugged me and said a sentence or two in Spanish. A week or so later he sent a translation up from Sonoita, a few lines from a Lorca “Gacela” that he loved.

I want to sleep the dream of the apples,

to withdraw from the tumult of cemeteries,

I want to sleep the dream of that child

who wanted to cut his heart on the high seas.

I woke up Michael a full hour before we had to leave for the airport to pick up Naomi and Ruth. He fairly sprang around the room, assuring me he hadn't felt better in years. Along with an ample breakfast we had to ask room service for a popular stomach remedy so that Michael could counteract his duck feast and put yet more in his belly (sausage, eggs, potatoes). He began to bargain for future drinks—say, between the airport and the meeting.

“I thought you hadn't felt better in years.”

“I'm talking about precautionary measures, insurance, like two aspirin before an event that will cause a headache.”

“I'll put one of those little bottles in my purse just in case.” This satisfied him for the time being.

We picked Naomi and Ruth up at the airport and drove directly, if somewhat erratically, down to Palo Alto. Like many drivers Michael felt you must look at someone you're talking to and Naomi and Ruth were in the backseat. For reasons lacking clarity the talk jumped from the farm crisis, to the potential exhaustion of the Oglala aquifer, to marriage, on which subject Michael was manic and captious to the point where Naomi and Ruth interpreted his comments as part of a comic routine.

“I doubt if any of you know what it feels like to wake up from a sound sleep only to find that someone is beating you. My wife, to be exact.”

“You're fortunate she wasn't using a gun or a knife. In our county last year a woman shot her sleeping husband at close range with a shotgun.” Naomi said this though I doubted it was true because she sends me the county newspaper every week. She's always been capable of inventing an anecdote to prove a point.

“Is what you're telling me another tale of woeful spouse abuse where after two decades of beating Martha slaughters the jerk and is exonerated? I've never touched a woman in anger.”

“Not at all. We were quite surprised. The husband was an elder in the Swedish Lutheran church and ran the grain elevaotor.
The local gossip was that he drove her insane with boredom.”

“Jesus! How wonderful.” Michael swerved on the freeway but the traffic was light.

“That must have been the man that changed his socks three or four times a day, wasn't it?” Ruth asked. “Dalva, can you still do your marriage speech?”

“I haven't used it in years but I could give it a try.” Ruth was referring to a passage from C. G. Jung I had cribbed as a patented response to everyone who asked me why I wasn't married yet, beginning in my mid-twenties, through my thirties and early forties. I've always felt the question preposterously impolite though I respond in a quiet, conversational tone. “I think women nowadays feel there's no real security in marriage. What does her husband's faithfulness mean when she knows his feelings and thoughts are running after others, and that he's too calculating or too much of a chicken-shit to follow them? And what's the point in her being faithful when she knows she's simply using it to exploit her legal right of possession, and warping her own soul? Most women have intimations of a higher fidelity to the spirit and to a love beyond human weakness and imperfection.”

Naomi and Ruth clapped. “I can't handle that without a drink,” Michael said, and I handed him his miniature bottle. He was flushed and edgy as we entered the Stanford campus but, nevertheless, slipped the bottle in his sport jacket as a show of something.

The actual content of the meeting was perfunctory: the three of us signed a document giving Michael full access to our family papers for the duration of his sabbatical year. In attendance were the chairman, the dean of science and arts, a rare-book librarian, and a museum curator who inquired, in barely more than a whisper, what had happened to the collection of Plains Indian artifacts begun by my great-grandfather. I was the only one who knew, but fibbed by saying that they had been sold to a private collector in Sweden. The dean and chairman were subtly impressed by Michael's new tailoring—men are as critical on this matter as any woman—which must have seemed a contrast to the usual bleary, cheapish tweeds. Everyone was pleased that a sensitive matter had been cleared
up, the challenges from other, perhaps less qualified institutions put to rest. The rare-book librarian offered free storage for the papers under the notion that a bank vault in Nebraska probably wasn't temperature- and humidity-controlled. Ruth pointed out rather sharply that we had taken care of that matter. We all had an amicable cup of tea, had our hands shaken, and Michael's back patted.

“It's painful how some folks treat you when they think you're rich,” Naomi said, when we were back in the car with a parking ticket on the window.

“The major problem in the modern university is parking, just as the major problem in modern Christianity is evidently bare asses in magazines.” He uncapped his miniature, sighed, finished it in a single swallow.

We spent the next three days in what Naomi called utter “frivolity,” a word not used much anymore in a frivolous society. The hotel concierge found us a cancellation up at a bed-and-breakfast in Napa Valley—a difficult thing on Memorial Day weekend. The three of us drove up and Michael joined us with his daughter, Laurel by name, the next day. She was a shy, pretty girl, the soul of neatness. The first moment she could get me aside she begged me to intercede with her father to allow her to go back to public school the coming year. At the private boarding school Michael had sent her to nearly all the girls were rich and she felt lonely and out of place. I meant to keep track of his relentless fibbing. Laurel spent time with Ruth and myself while Naomi went off with Michael and a map to test the wine at all the vineyards in the area. One morning she woke him at 5:00
A.M.
on his boozy promise to take her bird-watching. While he was stumbling around the room it was interesting to note how his new clothes had disintegrated in appearance in a mere three days.

Ruth had decided not to marry her grocer, making the decision on the flight up from Tucson. We were walking down the main street of Saint Helena when she told me this; we had paused before a shopwindow that distorted our images in the manner of a funhouse mirror. While we talked we waved, mugged, flapped, and moved to change our reflections. Sleeping with the grocer wasn't erotic like sleeping with the “dipshit” priest who continued writing from Costa Rica. She had
recently reread Emily Dickinson, which had reminded her to take another look at Emily Brontë. What was the point of marrying if her soul wasn't stirred? I wasn't much help because the question made me think of Duane.
I was wet from the creek and he was hot and dry, the almost spoiled fruit smell of the wild-plum wine sour on his breath, dirt and twigs sticking to us, the small circle of light in my eyes from the top of the tipi. I didn't think I went in that far.
I returned to earth when a courtly old gentleman stopped on the street and asked us if we were sisters. Ruth smiled, and nodded yes. He did a Chaplin glance up and down the street, saying “Where are the lucky fellows?” Then did a little dance step as he walked away. I felt suddenly sad for I wanted more of this attitude in life. I teased Ruth about her girlhood crush on Robert Ryan. She brought me up short when she said she had loved Robert Ryan because she somehow imagined he acted like the father she was too young to remember.