Dalva (29 page)

Some call it sex. A twinge of angina, and a blur in the vision. Her car starts and a rattle of gravel, the ears and their blood tympani. Even at thirty-nine I'm getting on in years for this sort of thing. Why not throw myself under a moving car? I felt like my face had been slapped, which was technically correct. I lay there until the ceiling focused itself, waiting for some oxygen flow and postlapsarian wisdom. I was lonely for Dalva but I did not think she was lonely for me, wherever she was. I reached up overhead and grabbed a journal from the pile, thinking, “I came to Carthage, where a cauldron of unholy loves boiled round about me.” Poor Saint Augustine. Who would guess, or bother to guess, that the average scholar is as full of self-drama as those dipshit bliss ninny actors on afternoon soap operas?

Month of February, 1871

Have been shut in by weather for three days now, a fearsome blizzard so that heaven and earth alike are a solid, blinding white. I am without visitors since early January when He Dog stopped with a haunch of elk. At the time we discussed how each of his people is guided to some extent by their dreams. We spoke of this several days & I told him that in my own experience I have observed that I dream more actively in the waxing rather than the waning moon. He thought this was true but said he would consult the medicine man who helped preserve my life over five years ago & who asked me last summer why I walked so much in the middle of the night. I knew it was unlikely I was observed and so was discomfited by his statement. I then asked him how I might rid myself of my re-current nightmares of the war, especially one that came from being near horses when they were blown apart & I was covered with coils of their entrails. I was deafened for a week but could still hear in my deafness the screaming of horses. When this nightmare came I would awake and force myself to sing a song. He said I must dig a small hole and put a fire in it. I was then to sleep by the hole until the bad dream came which would happen quickly. When I awoke I was to “chase” the nightmare into the hole where it would burn, then smother the fire and dream with dirt, and it would never come to me again. I pondered
this advice for several weeks, wondering if it should be considered unchristian. It was August then and on the waxing moon & I was again covered with the guts of horses & wept for the creatures. I prayed to no avail and was afraid to sleep again. Then I did as he advised in defiance of science & my religion and the nightmare was gone & the horses in my dreams were transfigured into the most beautiful of creatures.

I have not a single apple or a convert to show for myself in five years. He Dog and some of his friends will listen to the Bible but they prefer passages of war. They say above all they prefer to hunt, dance, fight, make love & feast. They also love to hear this passage from Nahum:

Woe to the bloody city all full of lies & booty no end to plunder!

The crack of whip, the rumble of wheel, galloping horse and bounding chariot!

Horsemen charging, flashing sword and glittering spear, hosts of slain, heaps of corpses, dead bodies without end—they stumble over the bodies.

One of He Dog's friends, a dour warrior named Seven Knives, sings me the song of a battle I know to be the Fetterman Massacre of December 1866, when Crazy Horse used the tactics of decoy to lure 80 soldiers from Fort Phil Kearny to their deaths. I have been shown scalps from this battle & have inspected them politely, fearful to offend.

My Winter Count is much doubt repeating itself. With the Sioux I may have chosen the wrong tribe to aid. An old missionary I spoke with last summer in Omaha says the Arikara who once were in Nebraska and driven out by the Sioux were splendid farmers. These Arikara by actual count had developed 14 varieties of corn, and many of beans, and tapped elder trees for liquid sugar as maples are tapped in the East. At this meeting of missionaries we were addressed by a Reverend Dillsworth who has spent years in Arizona and northern Mexico. He suggested that our Sioux may be as hopeless as the Apache in terms of conversion to Christ. I do not care for this man so am not much discouraged
by his suggestions. He did make an intelligent discussion of the progress of the papist Jesuits with many Indian tribes of the Southwest. These Jesuits do not so much convert, he said, but add another coat of Catholic paint to what is already there. This is thought by us to be dishonest but I am not sure. It is indeed difficult to convince the Sioux of the uniqueness of the Sabbath when in his beliefs every day of the week is Sabbath. He Dog teased me saying if I would fast three days and three nights on a mountain top he knows in the Black Hills I would give up my Sabbath notions. His humor is often coarse and he said if I would not make love to a woman on the Sabbath she would run to someone else.

I have ordered 10,000 root grafts of fruit trees from Monroe, Michigan for ten cents apiece. My trees will survive by the force of their numbers! I shall have a busy spring & now when my door shudders from the force of the storm I long to put my hands in the warm earth.

It was nearly midnight when I remembered my braised pheasant, which meant the bird had been cooking nearly three times as long as it should have. This newest disaster was a less pleasant slap in the face than the last one. A brisk run to the house might save a minute from the overcooking time. I stood up, stretched, and tried to pretend I didn't notice the stack of a dozen or so photos, the top one an aperture-to-aperture face-off. There was a nudge to the joint. Like many literary men, I've read widely on the vagaries of lust, a course of inquiry as confused as the history of Italy. It is an experience not to be learned from, like death, only far more comic. I had noted the attempts in Ireland to ignore or drown the problem. On a side a good deal brighter than sex or pheasant was the notion that the journals were going to bring me fame as a historian—surely not the “fame” bandied about by the media, but a solidly marked trail that might very well result in an Endowed Chair by the time I hit forty-five.

In the kitchen my sense of well-being was doubly renewed. Dalva called from her cabin in Buffalo Gap, sounding rather merry and bright-eyed for so late an hour. Had Frieda
told me about the surprise bottle of Bordeaux left for me in the breadbox? Nope, as they say out here, of course not. Things would go better for me if I tried to be a little charming with Frieda. I spoke about the progress of my work with excitement, which pleased her. She was glad that I had “settled in,” then asked about how Karen's interview had gone. I breathed deeply to keep my voice from pinching into a tight little shriek of guilt. “Neither here nor there,” I said, “not enough energy in the situation to make it enervating.”

“I talked to Naomi and I heard you're going to become a model's agent. Is that lateral or a move up?”

“Oh, fuck you, darling.” I felt too good to bother defending myself. Her laughter was soft and rich.

“I'll be back in a day or so. Just remember you won't hear the bullet that hits you. I miss you.”

“I miss you too.” When I heard her receiver click I began to reflect on the heartiness of frontier humor: those folkloric tales of life in our early raw. “Well, then Tad put the boot to the blackguard's head till he was spitting teeth, and we all ponied up to the bar glad to see the day well ended and justice done. The man had learned not to put a burr under the saddle of a cowboy from the Two Dot outfit.” That sort of thing.

The second thrill was that the pheasant wasn't really ruined, and the breadbox Bordeaux was a ‘49 Latour, an outstanding wine, the gift of which moistened my unworthy eyes. This is the kind of farming I could get used to. The wine made me a little sorry I would not be permitted to look into the grandfather's papers, as he was apparently a great deal less austere than his own father. This home and wine revealed the spender I would wish to be. The bird itself was overly loosened, falling apart as I took it from the Dutch oven, but the juices had an excruciating flavor, and I picked the thing down to its bones. I am not by nature a hunter, but I meant to ask old Lundquist to snare me a few of these critters. I stretched out the bottle of Latour through a pointless but happy reverie about my first year of marriage. In reaction to me and a number of difficult years, she had managed to develop a well-oiled survival mechanism, and I had to be discarded like a vestigial appendage.

Just before dawn there was a terrible commotion among the geese, a fury of honking and flapping. I very nearly went outside to check but didn't have a flashlight, and my imaginings wouldn't permit a foray without one. I was confused by what had been a wonderful dream at the beginning, where Dalva and my daughter, Laurel, were riding through the pasture on splendid gold-tinged horses, but when I went out to meet them their faces were of old Indian women and looked like shucked pecans. If my daughter is that old, then I must be dead, I thought, when the geese woke me. It didn't occur to me to turn on the light, so I lay there another half an hour until I could see the room clearly. I looked out the back window to the west and there, on a mound of earth surrounded by burdocks, was a coyote feeding on a goose, his muzzle red with blood. He (or she) saw my movement at the window and dashed off through the weeds with the remains of the goose. Sad and startling though it was, I hoped the dead one was the pesky goose leader. At that moment Frieda pulled in the yard and went into the house to make my breakfast. I pulled on my trousers to inspect the morning, and any additional goose carnage. I counted thirteen but the number was meaningless, since I didn't know how many there were in the first place. I was pleased to see the geese were a good deal more friendly. The arrogant leader had survived, and he led the flock to me, with all of them apparently trying to explain the terrible thing that had happened. I was a little touched and felt called upon to make my first speech to geese, wherein I told them I would build a shelter, a sleeping bungalow they could enter in the evening, and sleep sound and safe from predators. I bowed and made the sign of benediction. I meant to check out the unvisited barn for cage materials. It was impossible not to be pleased with my progress with animals. I gave a hearty hello to the horses and went to the house.

“You walk barefoot around here, you'll sure as hell get lockjaw,” Frieda greeted me from the stove. I saw she was making me a low-calorie, low-cholesterol breakfast of thick
bacon, fried new potatoes, and a giant omelet. I also saw her eyes were red, as if from weeping. I secretly hoped to get through breakfast without an explanation for recent sorrow. I pretended to listen attentively to Paul Harvey's first word for the day, glad tidings from a town in Iowa where welfare lay-abouts were put to work sweeping the streets and washing all the cars in the courthouse parking lot.

“Come and get it if you want it hot,” she bellowed, though I was only a few feet away. It was easy to see she was being brave. I reached for the Tabasco and got the usual “That stuff's going to eat out your guts.”

“You might have noticed my dad is a little goofy?” she began.

“In a pleasant way.” I wanted to slow her down, for I saw tremors in her full face.

‘'I'm fifty-seven and I'm not getting any younger. My boyfriend, Gus, wants to marry me but he's not sure he can put up with my old dad around the house. Gus has always been a hired hand, and in the back of my mind I'm thinking he might want our farm more than me. I just don't think I could bear to put Dad in the county farm . . . .” The poor soul put her face in her hands. Her big shoulders began to shake as I allowed a fly to land on my last bite of omelet.

“Does Gus come from a good family?” I was buying time with this stupid question.

“He's just a working stiff. He plays the banjo on Saturday nights. He's sixty-two but he looks a lot younger. When Dad goes I don't want to be lonely. I need someone to look after.”

“Deal from your strength, dear. Tell Gus it's your farm and his conditions are unacceptable. If he won't accept old Dad, tell Gus to take a fucking hike.”

She wiped her tears on my napkin. My advice seemed to stiffen her spine. “That's what Dalva said. The son of a bitch is getting pushy. He already owes me thirty-five bucks. He might just be on probation with me!” She rushed to the phone and I made my escape.

I felt strong at my desk and resolved to locate the wife Northridge had mentioned, thinking it might be Aase, from the Swedish family he had helped find a homestead. I murmured
a verbless prayer to the gods of scholarship not to confuse myself with my work, and after an hour of shuffling I discovered I was right!

May 20, 1876

I have been in bad humor as I was forced to ride five days southwest to Scotts Bluff to meet with the new Director of Missions, a porcine Reverend from Cincinnati who cannot mount a horse and finds carriages not to his liking, so is never found more than a block from the railroad. Our meeting is a short half-hour. He tells me of rumors that I have “gone over” to the Indians by my refusal to build the simplest church. I answer that I must teach them to grow food before I presume to build a church when lumber is in such short supply. I say that the Sioux are anyway nomads & it would be difficult to locate a church. He said he has it on good word from the government that in the coming year the Sioux will be moved to the southern part of the Dakota Territory & there to be confined. This news shocked me a good deal as it is in defiance of all previous treaties. He is of the opinion that the Sioux are dying of our diseases so quickly (including hunger) that I should busy myself with saving souls rather than with agriculture. He then advises me that I am the last of the church in free concourse with the worst of the Sioux, and the brethren all pray for my safety with little confidence. I thank him for his prayers & make a retreat to escape the heaviness of his talcum.