Dalva (24 page)

At lunch I had asked Dalva about the Indian wonder boy Lundquist had mentioned. And that's what I mean. It was thirty years ago but she bridled, reddened, became cross.

“There's no such thing as an Indian. You know that, for Christ's sake. There are Sioux, Hopi, Cheyenne, Apache . . . .”

“What about this magic Sioux boy Lundquist talked about?” I repeated.

“What did he say?” Her back was turned at the stove.

“Nothing much. He rode horses at night and talked to animals and scared people. That's all.”

“I barely knew him. He was just another sorry cowboy who stopped by for a few months of work.”

“There's a few months missing in the 1860s,” I said, sensing that a change of subject was in order. She relaxed and continued making one of my favorite hangover remedies (linguine in a sauce made of fresh peas, julienned prosciutto, a mixture of fontina and asiago cheeses).

“When you read on you see that after he delivered a letter to a widow in Sault Sainte Marie in Michigan, he boarded a schooner for Duluth that wrecked in a storm between Grand Marais and Munising. He seemed pleased that the rest of the widow letters were lost at sea.”

She poured my ration of wine as if nothing had happened the day before. Those not in the know vis-à-vis alcohol fail to understand that after a serious day of boozing the drinker can't simply quit, but must taper off and enter a temperate glide pattern. As she served lunch there was still a trace of flush on her face from my initial question. Of course I realized it was pointless to test the dimensions of her hospitality. Also I loved her. Also I was somewhat frightened of her.

“I've got a few days of horse business in Rapid City. I'm sure you can take care of yourself? Naomi will get you to your Rotary speech.”

“I'll bury myself in my work. If you're going away perhaps we could have a date tonight.”

“Perhaps.” The phone rang and I looked at her remaining food, having finished my own. I had reached over to nail a forkful when she shrieked and I dropped my fork, feeling like an asshole.

It turned out that the caller was her uncle Paul and he had
managed, with the aid of the Mexican detective, to find the abused boy. Despite her joy on the phone she noticed my discomfort and gestured to me to finish her lunch. She began speaking in rapid Spanish to the boy, then back in English with Paul. When she hung up the phone I gave her a hug, smelling the sunlight absorbed by her neck. Then she returned to the phone to call her brother-in-law, Ted, and his employee Andrew, and I went out the door and back to work.

What I mean with time: it is more the phone call that doesn't come than the one that did. The rage for order doesn't create a concomitant space in which order might occur. As Angus Fletcher quips in his powerful piece on Coleridge, “Time in our world displays an instantaneity so perfect in its slippery transit—its slither from one temporal fix to another—that there is nothing to mark, let alone measure, its being, its at-homeness.” And this, of course, is why some folks expire from dread. Coleridge is described as “a solitary haunted by vast conceptions in which he cannot participate.” He is a hero of consciousness, always standing at the threshold, an edge at which participation in the sacred and the profane are always simultaneous, always possible. This is not less poignant for the fact that the knowledge drove Coleridge batty, though the definition of “batty” has recently been redefined by a hyperthyroid Englishman named Laing.

To bring all of this down to earth, old Northridge devotes twenty-five years, from 1865 to 1890, trying to help the defeated native population adapt to an agrarian existence, but the native population is being driven hither and yon by the government and has never had a good piece of land that hasn't been removed from them instantly. And the effect of the Dawes Act in 1887 was, intentional or not, to further the swindle, so that within thirty years one hundred million acres of their initial one hundred twenty-five had been taken from them. To be sure, much of it was “purchased,” as if these nomads were cagey M.B.A.'s striking a tough bargain.

But this all is on the record, though largely ignored, and Northridge isn't. We academics are known for creating artificial questions to which we give artificial answers, thus ensuring our continuing employment. Northridge is interesting because of his consciousness and his conscience, just as Schindler alone
is fascinating while millions of Germans who didn't give a fuck are lost to history. . . .

Jesus Christ! There is a face peering in the window above my desk! It is Lundquist and I slide open the window, closed because I've been using the air conditioning. He is sweating but still wears the jacket buttoned to the neck. He wonders if I might have a beer for him? I ask him in but he doesn't want to be discovered by anyone. I pass a beer through the window and a small chunk of salami for the dog. Lundquist finishes the beer in a moment, then scurries off through the burdocks with the terrier backward over his shoulder giving a farewell bark. That means the old fool will be covering altogether fourteen miles on a hot June day. I caution myself against pitying the man—he is a full fifty years older than I am and it is apparent he is enjoying life, a matter at which I haven't proved myself. I mentally dismiss the idea that I could get family secrets from Lundquist by bribing him with booze. There are ethical considerations. Or are there?

December 26, 1865, Chicago

I have been here two weeks now and in the morning will set off for La Crosse, Wisconsin to learn more of my mission about which I have the gravest doubts. Chicago is a prison though a great deal less onerous than Andersonville. Traveling over five months I have avoided cities from Georgia to Sault Ste Marie at the nether end of Michigan, where there were snowflakes in early October, though when the sun came through roiling clouds there were the deciduous golds and reds of New England autumn. I wished to see the shoreline so I bought a ticket on a trading schooner that would stop at various ports rather than a steamer that would traverse Lake Superior directly from the Soo to Duluth. The schooner, Ashtabula by name, was manned by drunken fools, and the Captain, Ballard by name, the worst of a sad lot. This man would not be a third mate out of Boston. He brought the boat about suddenly & it broached, capsizing near the harbor mouth of Grand Marais, a trading post in a charmless swamp. All of us survived by God's grace & shallow water. It was
there I lost two precious journals of my trip north, saving a small one in my pocket from prison and month afterwards. From Grand Marais I made a two-day walk some forty miles to Munising, and I should say the moment I was beyond reach of the despicable crew I entered country that has few equals on God's earth. I studied this land at Cornell through the work of the great Scientist of Harvard Agassiz who made an expedition here many years ago. The Boston poet Longfellow wrote of this land in Hiawatha though I am unaware if he travelled there, poets out of tradition being of tall imagination and little good sense. Since the War I have lost my taste for Emerson but the good man should have walked here in country beside which the woodlots of New England are pale. I saw great bears, heard wolves howling in chase through trees three men could not have encircled with their arms. Before I left the Soo and the ingenious locks for which many men died in cold and cholera, I met an Ojibway at the local mission of the unlikely name of Chief Bill Waiska, who stood a full six and a half feet and weighed a little short of three hundred, though there was no surplus flesh on him. He was witty, kind, and tolerated my questions with humor. It is certain that if given enough land these vigorous people will endure and thrive despite living in the foulest climate in the United States. The Chief told me that two hundred years ago just west of here his people battled an Iroquois war party and in total a thousand warriors died. He is a reader and said with a twinkle that poor Indians could not match the magnificent numbers of Antietam, Gettysburg, Vicksburg. These people understand us with a clarity no one has supposed.

My host in Chicago, Samuel_______, for he wishes anonymity, is a prominent merchant of this city and a Quaker. He said I would have enjoyed the city more had there been fewer people in mourning from the War. Everywhere on the street one sees the dazed faces of survivors, many of whom have lost limbs, the faculties of reason and the will to work. It is this merchant who journeyed to Ithaca to visit his son at Cornell and struck the bargain with me & thus I ransomed body & soul, taking his son's call to conscription. His son was headstrong, impetuous, and a drinker, and has disappeared West, not wanting to be a merchant. His parents are overwhelmed with sadness, nevertheless they fulfilled their obligations to me. This merchant will oversee
my business until it is well established, hopefully by spring when I will return before my trip West. During sleepless nights, or when I wake from nightmares of prison, I wonder if my beloved and deceased mother in Heaven can see my shame, the sins of pride and greed that led me to gamble my life. I could not bear to spend my life designing & constructing gardens for rich men who often cannot tell a rhododendron from a pear tree. One is neither guest nor servant, but in between the two, and at close hand there is a preposterous laziness. I pushed both wives & daughters, cousins and guests from my bed. It is said in the Old Testament in Amos 3:15 “And I will smite the winter house with the summer house; and the houses of ivory shall perish, and the great houses shall have an end, saith the Lord.”

I noticed a rather grudging return to religion, so looked in the chest for the small notebook that included the passage on his departure from Andersonville. The notebook was evidently the survivor of the shipwreck. The dates meant that there were four months of missing material from Michigan, but, then, the history of that state at that time was the race between competing lumber barons to cut down every tree enclosed by Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. In my youth at a summer camp sponsored by my dad's union up in Michigan I saw the few dozen remaining virgin trees, and they looked lonely indeed. The girls at a neighboring camp were not allowed to socialize with us poor union brats. These girls paddled the lake in swift green canoes, while we rowed heavy, shabby rowboats. They all seemed to be blond and one of them “mooned” us with her bare bottom when we rowed past their beach. It was an attractive insult and represented all that is unattainable about wealth. It suddenly occurred to me that Dalva's horse business in Rapid City might be seen as a euphemism for visiting a gentleman friend, perhaps a rancher of wealth and power. The cuckold again.

June 1865. Georgia

I do not know the day, and none in my vermin-ridden pack of men knows the day. We are together for safety. Mother always abjured me to look daily after the condition of my soul, but yesterday I saw a man shot for a dead dog another man wanted for supper.
In the land of dog eaters no one has a soul. I surprised our pack by snaring a deer near a swamp with a snare common to the Iroquois. I traded the heart and liver of the deer at a parsonage in Rome, Georgia, for the coat and collar of an Episcopalian cleric, and was again able to travel alone. It is unthinkable that the gov't let General Sherman burn & pillage Georgia, and now wishes to starve the survivors. Have noted many non-indigenous plants: camellia, oleander, gardenia, tea roses, azaleas, kalmias. Have enjoyed some hospitality with Georgians with my new collar, also my knowledge of botany & gardening.

June. Solstice. 1865. Tennessee

Along the road I met a thin young woman who wished to sell herself for something to eat. I had caught some catfish in the Tennessee River & smoked them bathed in salt over green hickory, and traded one of the fish for a loaf. I shared this supper with her, and she was nonplussed by my refusal to bed with her. My confinement was short and I am now in good health so I brooded in the night about the sin of fornication. I turned with desire to her at first light, but she had slipped away, taking with her the remaining smoked fish. I was forced to laugh at this incident. Talked to old black witch about local medicinal plants—snake root, ginseng, carolina pink, angelica, senna, anise and spikenard. She shared with me her dinner, a stew of opossum and a squirrel and flavored by hot peppers she grew, also delicious wild-cherry wine. I impulsively gave her a silver locket of my mother's. We prayed together though her prayers were more African than Christian. Her daughter, a high-spirited girl who was pregnant, came by the log hut and finished the pot of stew and joined us in wine drinking. I confess I slept with this black girl who smelled of woodsmoke and sassafras & was uncommonly happy in my sin. . . .”

This combination of the sacraments of food and sex drove me to the house. It was almost five in the afternoon anyway, and my belly burbled its need for a bite and a drink. I was pleased to see that Naomi had come over and we were to have a Sunday-evening picnic on the front lawn. Dalva went in the house to mix a pitcher of martinis. I pretended to be bored with the idea but my hair roots tingled at the prospect. While
Dalva was off on her mission Naomi rather shyly said that an ex-student of hers was an intern on the county newspaper for the summer before she went off to college, and would like to interview me tomorrow, on Monday. Was this possible? I affected a little strain and agreed to do so during my lunch break. Dalva was coming down the porch steps and knew of the request.