Dalva (27 page)

She did a number of nimble but altogether nervous turns around the den, then gave me a shy but beseeching look.

“I just can't tell. Maybe this is all hopeless. I don't want to offer false encouragement but I just can't tell with all of your . . . you know.” I waved at her clothes with distaste.

Ambitious girl that she was, she quickly slipped out of her skirt and blouse, paused a moment, then kicked off her sandals, and repeated the turns around the den. I frowned, put my hands on her shoulders to straighten them, and tilted up her chin. Holy Toledo, I thought, moving around behind her and trying to rattle my brain for some anatomical terms. I kept my touch light as if helping to correct minor defects.

“Good mylofrisis, latimus, fine clavicles.” I knelt down until my nose was an inch from the white undies that were drawn up a bit into the crack of her buttocks, a bottom without equal in my experience. This was a critical point, as it were, and it took great force of will to contain myself. I made calipers
out of my thumbs and forefingers and ran them from her ankles up her legs, watching the goose bumps spring to the surface of her skin. “Marvelous metatarsals, fair knee backs, good gluteus maximus.” I kneaded the buttocks a bit as if searching for hidden problems, then scrambled around to her front, not wanting to lose this particular angle of vision. I had, sadly, used up all my terms, being short on the sciences, so muttered a few cooking and food terms in French. “Fine
ris de veau,”
I said, a flick of the tongue away from the pubis;
“bagner de Bourgogne”
to her belly button, and
“tête de veau”
to her ample titties. At that point I had to turn away in unrestrained anguish. I was overrevving like a runaway diesel. Where would this lead? I thought. “I just might have to call my friend Ted in Los Angeles. He's a major figure in show business, you might say, a real coastal tycoon. But maybe first I should see some flexation. Suppleness is a major consideration.” My mouth had dried out to an absurd degree but I didn't want to lose concentration by getting more wine. “Perhaps you could do a few exercises lying down, you know, sit-ups, knee and ankle grabs, anything.”

She quickly got to the floor in front of me and drew her knees back, then shot her feet out so her toes grazed my shirt. My wiener had become a wisdom-tooth ache, and there was a roaring in my ears. Karen heard the roaring too, and jumped up. It was Frieda roaring into the yard in her big
RAM
. The spell was broken.

“Jeezo!” Karen said, grabbing at her clothes. I whipped out of the den, through the foyer, and into the kitchen. I caught Frieda at the pump-house door and gave her a lazy smile, but blocked her entry.

“I'm doing an interview. Everything's fine.”

“I'm feeding the geese and horses,” she said, pushing past me. “Naomi said Karen's over here. She's my third cousin.”

I followed Frieda in with a prayer and a hot flash. I wanted to put my boot in her ass so far it would take a tow truck to pull it out. To my relief Karen was at the kitchen table adjusting her notes, cool as a bell pepper.

“Hi, Frieda. I just did the neatest interview. It's so fun to talk to a big brain.” She gathered her tablet and breezed out,
with a thank-you nod to me on the way. I found myself trotting out into the yard after her. She sat in her shabby little compact, her hands gripping the wheel, and staring straight ahead.

“Are you going to call that guy Ted?” There was a relentless set to her chin.

“Of course. This afternoon. Why don't you stop by about ten this evening? Bring some photos I can send Ted, preferably candid.”

“I don't think I'll be able to. I've got a date.”

“I'm sure you'll manage.” I turned away to avoid any lame excuses.

As she drove off I glanced at Frieda at the kitchen window, then to the barnyard and the fields. Just after I had met Dalva and broached the subject of the papers, she had said that her great-grandfather had a peculiar sense of the order and balance in his life, caused by his difficult youth and months at Andersonville. Looking out at the clearing, which Dalva said was about thirty acres, I remembered a map of the prison camp I had seen in a graduate course on the Civil War. Andersonville and this clearing were the same size, and both had creeks running through the center. The former held as many as seventeen thousand prisoners, with not all that many survivors. This made me eager to check the journals from 1891, when the main house was built, though the land had been owned since the collapse of 1887. There was the abrupt, burning vision of Karen on the floor and a stomach growl. Saved by Frieda from mischief. The obvious mixture of lust and relief—my local track record really wasn't good enough for this sort of gamble. I idly hoped that she'd go on her date and forget this tired professor.

Back in the kitchen there was the heavy odor of my favorite flavor, garlic. It turned out that Frieda had made me a Basque lamb stew the evening before and was warming it up. It was gorgeous, with fresh baked bread and a smallish glass of cabernet she had unfortunately tested in a tin measuring cup. She told me that when she was nineteen she had run off with a Basque sheepherder who had been shearing in the area. He had kept her captive in the Ruby Mountains of northern Nevada and that year had given her all the sex she wanted in life. Mr. Northridge and her father had tracked her down and
retrieved her from Basquaise clutches. The upshot was that she still liked the cooking her “crude” lover had taught her. I was pleased with this stew, but then she grabbed my hand and looked at me soulfully.

“You be careful with Karen. She's too fast for a school-teacher like you. Word around here is, last November she was frigging these pheasant-hunting doctors from Minneapolis. If her dad found out those docs would be hamburger.”

“You don't say!” I croaked. “I would swear she had to be a virgin.” The word “frigging” had a nautical air about it. Karen in the pirate doctor's rigging.

“You've got your poor head in books. You don't know a hot little slut from a worthwhile woman. That's for sure. She's as wild as Dalva used to be.” Frieda bounced up and flicked on the radio. She never missed listening to Paul Harvey.

“How wild was Dalva?” I asked, I thought, innocently.

“None of your beeswax, mister. Don't try to pry into family affairs.” Her umbrage was so grand I skipped up to Dalva's room to use the phone. Dalva had told me that any call I made in Frieda's presence would lose its confidentiality.

Ted turned out to be amused and alarmed by the idea that I had discovered a great model. He warned me rather sternly that local customs hadn't kept stride with California, and that he'd heard that a gay barber had been tarred and feathered in the fifties. I was somewhat surprised that he knew about my getting lost, also my drunken day with Lundquist. “You're making a real hit out there. You got a bullet.” He, nevertheless, assured me that he would pass Karen's photos around if I sent them. I remembered then that I had promised to call a friend in the rare-book business and describe the journals. This man had wiped a felony from my record when I was caught trying to swipe a book from a rare-book room at Notre Dame. I was a penniless student at the time and frequented his shop on trips to Chicago. The theft was actually an assignment, and he had anonymously secured an expensive lawyer to get me off the hook. On the phone he was thrilled to hear about my discoveries and begged for a Xerox of certain portions. He had a collector in Westchester and one in Liechtenstein who would pay a fortune for a few journals. I told him in no uncertain terms that this was out of the question.

Back at my desk I was troubled again by the notion of symmetry in the farm clearing and Andersonville. I had packed along Shelby Foote's hypnotic volumes on the Civil War but didn't want to pursue a possibly false lead. The recurrent temptation in my profession was to draw the strings too tight, to cut off the horse's legs to fit him in a stall. Unlike my mother, the discipline of history does not suggest that in the long run things have turned out the best and the neatest: you can collate research material until your hair is gray and your face blue and arrive at false conclusions that have been repeated a thousand times by other fools. The recent, infantile excavation of the Custer battlefield will reveal nothing of the nature of the men that fought there, the ultimate valid intent of an inquiry. But, then, I had to disallow myself this sort of grandness: I hoped I had all of Northridge before me and would stamp him into a book. I could not begin to diagram the sentence in history that is Crazy Horse, but I could certainly gloss Northridge's understanding of the Sioux. Ambition turns sane men into hysterics. I gave up Melville because the hanging of Billy Budd, not to speak of the whiteness of the whale, was a subject that would have caused me to end my life under psychiatric care.

I spent most of the afternoon trying to figure out Northridge's stay in La Crosse, Wisconsin, in the winter of 1866. It was full of relatively colorless botanical and theological ramblings. He was forever climbing the immense hill that abuts the city to the east and looking off across the Mississippi to the west. His mind was addled with his attempt to recapture his faith, and thus the journals were chock-full of pithy quotes from the King James version, musings about the obvious causes of the cholera that was afflicting the westward movement. I jumped forward to the late spring, which found him in the northwest part of Nebraska territory.

May, the week of the 22nd, 1866

Camped here ten days along a stream I take to be Warbonnet Creek. I am now more alone than I thought possible and am well shut of the filth along the Oregon Trail, and pioneers so enfeebled by illness and stupidity that they are marching toward their own Antietam. I have been warned overmuch since La Crosse and the
journey across Nebraska territory to keep clear of this area and its dangers. Men tell wild tales to excuse their cowardice & this is always true of soldiers & missionaries. If I lacked courage now I might better pack myself back to Barrytown and become a dainty gentleman. Perhaps I have some of my unseen father's blood . . . .

Jesus, he's supposed to be a bastard, illegitimate, but obviously knows who his father was. Ask Dalva.

. . . I have been planting my root stock along the creek bed well up from possible flooding. There is a northwest-southwest flow of air to help with frost at budding time. The tender root hairs [?] did not fare well on the journey and I have no high hopes for my first orchard. As I move to higher elevation I am digging deeper holes to examine the striations of soil, most ill-suited thus far for fruit trees. I continue an hour daily with my largest hole near a cottonwood tree to examine its tap-root. After a winter's ease except for hiking it is good to bury my hands in the soil.
Machaeranthera canescens
today! Pubescence roughish; stem purple, sparingly branched; leaves lanceolate, repand, mucronate.

The last sentence here is what I mean about the field notes—botany for the botanists!

My hobbled horses were nervous and fitful in the night and at dawn I found the tracks of the great bear, the grizzly, in the mud along the creek bank. I resolve to keep my fire better tended as it would be ironical for a man to survive the War only to provide a meal for this wild creature. The bears of the Adirondacks are often quite curious and range wide for food in Spring & perhaps these are the same, though the fierceness of these is said to be undisputed in the animal domain. Have dug too long today I suppose as when I poked my head from the hole I thought I saw a wolf on a hill stand upright and run away on its hind-legs. When I had my dinner of prairie chicken it occurred to me this was possibly a Sioux in disguise. I have craved to see my first Indian, wild & untainted by any settlement, not begging & trading their valuables for liquor which does not suit them. In Boston & New York it is said the Italians may drink wine, but liquor makes them
violent and they are often arrested without clothing. The Chaplain at Cornell said only the Chosen People, the Jews, can contain their vices & should be our example.

At first light a Sioux boy was looking at my horses but fled up creek into a thicket. I yelled after him in his language “Stay a while and speak with me” but he did not return. It is a solace to me if I am murdered there are no relatives to mourn me unless my father left other bastards on the Continent.

A melancholy Sabbath, or so I think as I may have forgotten to check a day on my calendar. In the night there was violent thunder & lightning, and my crude shelter leaked, so hastily built in fair weather. I bathe in the creek and try to spend the day with my Bible but it reads less well in the wilderness. In college I debated a quite brilliant Atheist on whether the savages needed our religion. In private I think they would not have needed it had we not disturbed their peace. We are too much a mystery to them, and they to us. When I sit here on this rock too long my mind ceases its activity and I seem to understand nothing or everything.

In the late afternoon I give up on bibles & sabbaths and take a long walk, after which I wish for two reasons I had taken one of my two horses, for the one was stolen in my absence, or perhaps the hobbles loosened, and the other would have saved me from danger. I climbed a hill two miles distant from my camp seeing on the way a lazuli finch & olive-backed thrush. From the hill through the telescope I surveyed the immense grasslands to the west & was puzzled by an enormous dark mass as if the darkest thunder clouds had dropped to earth. My skin pricked & tingled when I saw the mass was moving toward me and making a noise as of distant thunder. It was the buffalo,
Bos americanus,
and there could not have been a more awesome sight in God's creation. Over them was a red sun in the western sky and it burnished this sea of moving beasts. Still miles away but closing toward me their thunder increased as if they were trampling the life from earth herself. All manner of songbirds & hawks, sage hens & sharp-tailed grouse flushed before them and began to sail past me, and when the buffalo were within a mile or so I felt tremors
in the ground. It was then it occurred to me I was in their path on this treeless hill, so I tucked my telescope and sprinted for my camp, much startled when I was passed by deer & antelope in their fright. O to have a safe hole in the ground like the badger, gopher or ferret. I flew to the camp and somehow climbed the cottonwood as a tropical monkey would. From the tree I could see out over the ridge of the creek bed & the buffalo swelled over my hill then veered to the south, taking a full half-hour to pass completely. I will add I built a large fire & filled my tin cup with the whiskey I kept for illness. I smoked my pipe and sang many hymns to keep myself company. I felt I was being watched but was tired & resigned to my fate as a freezing drunkard in the snowbanks of Maine.