Dalva (22 page)

I was startled awake at first light by the feeling that someone was looking in the window at me. I rushed outside in my shorts in an act of uncommon valor but no one was there except the horses staring from the corral. Don't they ever sleep? The geese along the creek set up a nasalated racket, and the red sky in the east gave the entire landscape a slightly pinkish cast. I could hear the excitable thud of my heart and a bird I recognized as a whippoorwill. I wondered idly if the Indians always got up at dawn or, if bored, they simply slept in like normal folks. It was probable that old Northridge never missed the first crack of day. One passage indicated that he was forever walking or riding his horse around when the moon was large. Different strokes, I thought, but, then, the mind is forever making comments the voice is wise enough not to speak.

Back in the bunkhouse I put a pot of coffee on the hot plate and took a shower. Certain thoughts had jolted my brain far too awake for me to go back to bed. One of them was the need
for scholarly distance, which is far easier to manage in a carrel in a research library. We are not in business to lick the wounds of history but to describe them. While it is a truism that man has not learned much more than the sexual act, and that fire burns when you stick your hand into it, it behooves the scholar to immerse himself in the analyses of the problem, rather than the problem itself. One has to guard himself relentlessly against sentiment, mere opinion, speculation not based on fact. In the early seventies, when some of my fellow graduate students were involved in the American Indian Movement's occupation of Alcatraz, I chided them for being unprofessional: How can you study the nineteenth century when you become so emotionally involved with its sorriest descendants? And that was a question that stared back at me from my coffee, not that Dalva was sorry, but I was beginning to see that she was somehow a spiritual heir of those who were. My uneasiness was so intense that I jumped out of my skin when there was a knock at the door.

She was bringing my breakfast tray and the explanation that she would be gone throughout the day and perhaps half the evening at a horse function called a “cutting.” I was instantly resentful enough not to inquire what a “cutting” was, though I had to admire her trim Western outfit. I peeked under the breakfast napkin and saw some bagels with cream cheese, and an ample pile of lox and raw onion. I had been so grotesquely involved in my work I had forgotten the food packages of the day before! Anyone who has known me would find this unbelievable. The moment she left I'd go inside and check the booty. I stood and hugged her, feeling her buttocks under the twill riding trousers, my wiener beginning to point through my parted robe. She gave it a friendly squeeze and asked if I'd mind going to town with old Lundquist, whom I hadn't met, at noon to pick up horse feed at the grain elevator. She added to please not let Lundquist go in the bar because Saturday afternoons tended to get out of hand. I assured her that I would keep the old geezer in check. We turned to see a rather garish Lincoln entering the yard towing a horse trailer, and off she went.

I would have settled for any tripish newsprint to go with my breakfast. I couldn't imagine a household without newspapers,
magazines, or television, and here I was imprisoned within one, and my car in far-off Denver. We had meant to pick up Dalva's other car over at Naomi's. Maybe I'd call and fix her dinner: something incautious and Italian to counter this somewhat dismal outback. I begin to eat my lox and picked a later journal, from November.

Aug. 25, 1877

At my camp on the Loup in the gravest melancholy the first anniversary of her death. [?] I have tried mightily to commune with her spirit and those of my dead friends among the Sioux but with only the very slightest of success. I have heard that there is a medicine man with the Cheyenne up in Lame Deer in Montana Territory that may help me in this matter, though my friend Grinnell says the most powerful men of this sort are to be found far to the southwest in Arizona. He counsels me to return to the strength of our own faith for solace. I said I do not sense the God of Israel alive in this land. Word was brought to me this morning that my friend and brother by his adoption, the brave White Tree, was clubbed to death at Fort Robinson for spitting on a soldier's saddle. He was dragged from his tipi at night by the soldiers so they could murder him in secret. His wife hid and witnessed this and sent me word. I feel an urge to murder the murderers deep in my gullet.

In my dreams my dead wife told me to leave this place of ours and so I will. In the dream there was a profusion barely short of horror and she was thin as on her deathbed, but her voice was sweet and melodic. We were in the canyon where we found the wolf cubs and took care not to disturb them. They were the merest pups but the largest, perhaps ten pounds in weight, made bold to frighten us away. In the dream the canyon was full of her favorite birds: the purple martin
(Progne subis),
the killdeer plover
(Aegialitis vociferus),
the least sandpiper
(Tringa minutillia),
also curlews & heron-shaped birds beyond my familiarity. We sat on a rock amid choke cherry, wild black currant, red osier dogwood, wolfberry, all in densest bloom. Her breath was close to my ear but she spoke not. I embraced her and she went into my body, the canyon disappeared, and I was transported alone to the summit of Harney's Butte. I suppose this to mean she is forever in my heart & blood.

Needless to say, this wasn't the sort of breakfast reading fare I needed. I have no belief in the human soul, but I didn't want my absence of a soul stretched that far this early. I quickly dressed to go inside, feeling some of the melancholy I do when I hear
Petrouchka,
or the Bach Partitas. Maybe I should start at the beginning, I thought, and avoid the surprise of lurid dreams and dead wives. It was difficult to imagine actually living through that period on a first-hand, intimate basis, as did Northridge: from the end of the Civil War to the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890, the Great Plains were in a state of historical convulsion. It seems that governments have never evinced any particular talent or inclination for keeping the citizenry alive. Perhaps life itself was the remotest of preoccupations in Washington, D.C. I stood in the middle of the yard trying to stop myself. The grass was the deepest green and the geese were the whitest white. A psychiatrist once told me to try to concentrate on the physical world when my brain became a frazzled whirl. My wife divorced me because I couldn't stop. Period. I have to avoid novels and the cinema because they set me off. I have learned to guard my sympathies in order to minimize the range of my disappointments. The psychiatrist prescribed lithium but I was unable to complete my dissertation under the soporific influence of this drug. My marriage effectively ended on a two-day car trip up to Seattle to visit her parents. I had been reading an old text called
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and Madnesses of Crowds,
and talked about it nonstop while she drove. My jaw ached but I couldn't stop. I continued talking after she got out of the car with our daughter in Seattle. I remember turning on the radio so I would have someone to talk to! I think of myself as ninety-nine percent cured, though the use of alcohol as a sedative is occasionally counterproductive. I have to stop. I decided to chase the geese to watch them fly, but evidently they weren't the flying sort of geese. Several of them turned on me and I got my shins nipped while backpedaling. The largest—a male, I presumed—followed me right up to the pump-shed back door of the house. I hoped I hadn't started a permanent war, what with having to travel to and from the bunkhouse.

In the kitchen I opened the fridge to inspect the imported goodies, but then closed it immediately. I had just finished
breakfast and wanted to wait until I was hungry to get the full impact of the food. I went into the den and looked at a shelf of books, picking out Thomas Carlyle's translation of Dante; it was a first edition and there was a dried flower marking a page with a passage underlined—“I wailed not so of stone I grew within; they wailed.” In the first Northridge's hand was the note “The Sioux!” Fuck this melancholy, I thought. I went upstairs to Dalva's room on a snooping expedition, but my skin began to crawl, so I only stayed a moment. There were a number of photographs, including old ones of the succession of the three J. W. Northridges, plus Paul as a young man leaning on a shovel. I was drawn to a peculiar-looking young man on a pale horse who reminded me of Rimbaud on the cover of the Varese New Directions translation. There was a photo of Dalva and another handsome young woman taken in what looked like Montmartre, and another of Dalva and a striking though greasy-looking polo player in Rio. She gets around. The phone rang in her room and I rushed downstairs to the kitchen in order not to be caught red-handed. It was my daughter, who was thrilled that Dalva had written to invite her out for July and August, and had included an open round-trip plane ticket. We chatted about Dalva's offer to teach her to ride horses, and any number of things including her mother's rather happy remarriage to a Seattle stockbroker who was actually footing the bill for the private school she didn't want to go to. I was somehow pleased that she wanted to stay with me in San Francisco, however inconvenient it might be.

My next move was my most daring. I opened the door to the cellar but couldn't find any light switch. There were a number of kerosene railroad lanterns and several flashlights on a shelf. I took the largest flashlight and proceeded nervously down the steps, reminding myself that it was 1986 and there was nothing to fear but fear itself. The cellar was a huge, dry room, with only the large timbers that supported the house interrupting the airiness of the space. It was neat as a pin and had a varnished plank floor, which seemed curious. I had no intention of moving beyond the bottom step but from this vantage point I could see stacked steamer trunks, furniture, huge wooden shipping cases, an office-sized dehumidifier. To my right was a sturdy wire cage some fifteen feet square containing
bins of wine. There was a combination lock on the door of the wine cage. I let out a small shriek when I heard a voice say, “You can't get at the wine.” It was a gnome at the top of the stairs.

Old Lundquist proved to be inimitable; that is to say, there is no reason why another human should achieve his unique confirmation. I won't attempt to render the Swede accent that persisted despite the fact that he spent the entirety of his eighty-seven years in Minnesota and Nebraska. The accent was absurdly singsongy, with the end of a sentence or comment lifting upward but declining in volume, as if he were running out of breath. When I walked up the stairs and into the kitchen he repeated the comment about the wine several times, each time more woefully. Then he reached in the refrigerator, grabbed a can of beer, and quickly chugged it while backing away, as if I were bent on stopping him. It was at this odd moment that I mentally bet that Northridge had returned to the Swede settler's encampment and married the girl he had seen bathing, and that perhaps Lundquist was a relative—rather, a descendant. His nose seemed his largest feature, and he wore a soiled denim jacket buttoned to his Adam's apple despite the June warmth. On the way out through the pump shed he helped me on with a pair of coveralls, as if I were a child, or as if he had accurately estimated my incompetency. I had never worn farmer's coveralls before and they made me feel like a son of the soil.

So off to town we went in his 1947 Studebaker pickup, the best vehicle ever built in America, or so he said. Between us on the seat his ancient small terrier growled and humped at a pile of oily rags as if I were competing for the rags' affections. Lundquist drove painfully slow, his pale-blue eyes never leaving the vacant road, his arms stiff at the wheel. He said with an air of sternness that Dalva had told him I was a “drinker” and there was to be no stopping today at the tavern. Normally his daughter, Frieda, gave him two dollars, which allowed him two bottled beers or three drafts on Saturday afternoon, or one bottled beer and two schnapps—he went on with the permutations,
but the upshot was that there were to be no treats because I was along. He saddened me, so I showed him the two twenty-dollar bills I had in my pocket. His face brightened, but then he said no, that my health was at stake.