Dalva (32 page)

Back on the north fork of the Loup. I am pleased to see the Norwegian and his crew up at daylight and working hard. I ride off to find my Sioux friends at their summer camp to invite them to my wedding & am dismayed to find only a few of the very old, and three crippled children in their care. One of the old is the medicine man I have known ten years & whose name I am not permitted to write down. He says all my friends have gone off to war in the West: White Tree, He Dog, Short Bull, Sam Creekmouth, and thousands of others led by Crazy Horse. They hope to engage with other groups of Sioux (Tetons, Lakota, Minneconjou), General Custer and any others who may wish to fight in Wyoming & Montana. I spent the day and night with the old man who is quite palsied & his joints are swollen. He tells me that this is his eighty-sixth summer which means he was born around 1790. He speaks long and slowly about the glory & decline of the Sioux & insists his observations & dreams tell him the end is near for his people. In honor of my name he gives me a necklace of badger claws, advising me to keep it on my body as in the coming years I will be in the gravest danger because of my efforts to help the Sioux.

I bid him adieu at first light and ride off in a state of melancholy despite the fine weather. I question my accomplishments which are few. I ride everywhere to tend my trees in dozens of locations & have tried to offer by word & example the Gospel to the Sioux. I tell them that all white men are not evil & they seem to know this though nearly all of their land has been stolen. The Sioux also know that I am thought to be a lunatic by the white men at various Forts, by soldiery and civilians alike. They are not disturbed by this though there is humor on the matter, having a
different notion of what constitutes a lunatic. White Tree told me that I had been around long enough now to begin having dreams & visions. I have tried to tell them I will only have the vision Christ has given me, but they say they have already heard that from all manner of thieves & swindlers. I am recently of the opinion that the Antichrist is Greed.

At the cabin my spirits lift when the Norwegians say they will finish four days earlier than promised. I am desperate to see Aase & bury myself in the hard work of the cabin to exhaust myself. On the afternoon the Norwegians are packing to leave, Aase's brother Jon rides up & tells me that I am to come tomorrow if I will. His sister is not feeling well and Jensen has relented on our waiting time. Jon helps me put the furnishings in the house & we pack up the wagon and are off for the wedding.

It was past midnight and I was not up to a wedding, especially in regard to the uncertain results. I poured a nightcap and craved for something less high-minded to occupy myself with—a magazine, television, a trip to the bar. The car was there but I doubted I could figure out how to get to town or, if I got there, whether or not the Lazy Daze would still be open. I dismissed the urge to look at my single photo of Karen. There was plenty of time in the morning, before Naomi picked me up, to prepare notes for my address to the Rotary. In any event, I had planned tidbits, piths, gists, and witticisms from American History 102. There was the temptation to knock them off their seats with the story-behind-the-story. A note of caution was the idea that the burghers might be lying in wait for another of my pratfalls, and I didn't want to oblige them.

There was a single goose honk and I rushed outside without thinking. The geese were huddled together against the cage but not inside, and were staring off in the dark in a single direction, where their doom apparently lurked, watching us. I rushed to the pump shed to look for their food but couldn't find it. I filched a sack from Frieda's hidden cache of corn chips in the kitchen, rushed back out, poured the contents in the cage, and managed to shove and cajole them to safety. The last one in leaned against my leg for a moment in possible thanksgiving. The fine feeling this poor bird gave me substituted for
another nightcap, and I fell asleep thinking about blessed nothing. I had almost yelled “Fuck you, coyote” into the dark, but thought better of it.

At eleven in the morning I am dressed in my suit of lights, an anti-bullfighter in gray flannel trousers, brogans, Harris-tweed jacket, my only J. Press shirt. The day is cool and dark with rain and a strong northerly wind. The change in weather is exhilarating, reminding me as it does of my home in the Bay Area. I sort through some notes, waiting for Naomi to pick me up. I had been a bit miffed when Frieda hadn't showed up, then remembered Wednesday was her day off. It occurred to me then that I had completed my first full week in Nebraska and had settled in quite nicely.

Earlier, when I made my coffee (after releasing my grateful geese), I sat at the big Northridge desk and got out the Edward Curtis portfolio for breakfast reading. When I untied the first folio there was a note—“Dalva & Ruth. Wash your hands. I love you. Grandpa.” A simple old note, brittle with age, but I was momentarily overcome with loneliness for her; at the same time, though, I knew in a deeper sense that I was totally out of the running. In the long and short of it, love is a more difficult subject than sex. Or history. I began to flip through the photos: Bear's Belly, the Arakira chief, stared back at me in his grizzly robe, an image of such singular magnificence that I took my coffee to the window to watch the rain. These folks used to wander around in this area, I thought, watching the wind push against the empty tire swing. When Dalva returned I would become noble. Maybe I'm like the sun, who doth allow the base, contagious clouds to cover up his beauty. Or not.

I returned to Bear's Belly and thought my father's eyes had some of the same quality. Maybe it was the insistence of physical strength got from forty years in a steel mill, or of time spent in the Truk Islands and Guadalcanal in World War II. I flipped through the prints, stopping at the Crow chief Two Whistles with a crow perched on his head. I had done my senior thesis at Notre Dame on Edward Curtis and never
found out why this man had a crow perched on his head. Curtis probably never found out either, because after thirty-three years in the field taking photos of the Indians he went crazy and was placed in an asylum. When they let him go he went down to old Mexico and looked for gold, with a diffidence in recovery that characterized the behavior of many great men—let's go to the edge and jump off again.

Naomi fetched me promptly from the enchanted forest. She was slightly irritated with Dalva, who had driven the old convertible and had thus been delayed by the rain. I had noticed among my relatives that a woman can be sixty and her mother eighty, and the sixty-year-old will still be treated very much like a daughter.

“I don't for the life of me understand why you consented to do this,” she laughed, hitting the big puddles on the gravel road with abandon.

“I felt it was an obligation. I mean, Dalva implied it was an honor.” The puddles brought the idea of a mudbath to mind. There was the same flutter in my guts as when someone tells you that you don't look all that well.

“That girl is never beyond a practical joke. She's not mean about it, though. I'd say you were in for it. Those boys at the Rotary can give an outsider a hard time. They like to probe but they're not vicious.”

“I'm tempted to ask you to stop the car, but, then, I can handle anything short of a lynch mob. I presume they serve drinks.”

“Wrong. No one drinks around here at lunch.” She let the import of this push me to panic, then reached into her purse for two small, airline bottles of booze. “One now, and one for a trip to the bathroom later.”

“I owe you a million bucks.”

“It only lasts an hour. About the same time as a tooth extraction.” She flashed a smile.

1 had no idea what they actually did in these organizations, for which there are often little signposts on the road entering small towns: Rotary; Kiwanis, Chamber of Commerce, Knights
aof Columbus, Masons, Lions, American Legion, VFW, Moose, Eagles, and the Elks. That's all I could think of. Why weren't there Bears?

Afterward, at the Lazy Daze, I felt the hour had been the equivalent of a fifteen-round fight. The big back room of Lena's Café was stuffed to the rafters. I had guessed, which proved correct, that getting lost, public drunkenness, the little wreck with Lundquist, all by an ostensibly prominent person, would help build a crowd. It had also become clear that the Northridges represented a unique fiefdom in the area, and everyone is perennially curious about the rich.

The first shock was seeing Karen as the waitress for the head table. I wasn't really seeing all that well because of nerves, but there she was, clear as day, and giving me a wink. The sea of faces at long tables were an even mixture of reddish and pale, those whose work took them out of doors, and those who manned the stores and offices. The master of ceremonies was a big, jovial soul, a farm-implement dealer named Bill. He slapped me on the back and whispered, “You Easterners always give us a lot of guff.” I told him I was a Westerner, which didn't seem to record. Here is a skit of this homely movie:

All stood and sang “America the Beautiful.” Followed by “Rotary.”

“
R-O-T-A-R-Y
That spells Rotary;

R-O-T-A-R-Y
is known on land and sea;” etc.

I was given a songbook but my heart wasn't in it. I noticed that, other than Lena and the waitresses, Naomi was the only woman in attendance. It was a stag club, and back in feminist San Francisco the ladies would have torn these guys a new asshole. I must admit I felt a great deal of inscrutable good will, although there was the overlying sense that one better not break the rules, written or unwritten, of the locale.

I didn't listen to my introduction, because I was watching Karen pass out bowls of iceberg lettuce covered by pinkish dressing. She attracted a lot of shifty-eyed, admiring looks. I had “telephoned her stomach,” as the witty French say. Suddenly
the whole room rose and bellowed “
HELLO, MICHAEL!”
It was thunderous and my bowels loosened a bit. They all sat down and stared at me, amused at my confusion. Good ole Bill gestured for me to begin.

I began with a witticism that history hopes to create reasons for what we've already done. No reaction. I went on to talk about the Turner Thesis, Charles Beard, Bernard De Voto, Henry Adams, Brooks Adams, Toynbee's adversary theory, and so on. No reaction. Sweat trickled down my chest and thighs. Holy shit, I thought, I better get dramatic. My first real salvo was that the entire westward movement between the Civil War and the turn of the century was a nasty pyramid scheme concocted by the robber barons of the railroads and a vastly corrupt U. S. Congress. The audience becomes perky, which encourages me to go too far. The Civil War was so vicious because the frontier was dead and all the yokels, hopped on murderous adrenaline, were stewing for a fight. Murmurs in the crowd. The settlers came out and swindled and swiped the land treatied to the Indians, protected by a government drunk on power, money, and booze. When the settlers needed more fuel for their greed they used Christianity, and the idea that the Indians weren't using the land. If your neighbor leaves his land fallow, grab it. I saw Naomi frown at the back of the room but there was nowhere to go at this point. History judges us by how we behave in victory. I added a lot of apocalyptic blather on how we have extended this general swinishness into our current foreign policy, then sat down to generous but polite applause. The lectern was still in reach, so I poured my second miniature booze into my glass of water and gulped it down. MC Bill caught this and twinkled. Everyone else had begun eating, and I poked at my traditional chicken à la king. Bill asked me if I was willing to “field” some questions, so I got back to my sweating feet. A goofy fellow in a pale-blue suit raised his hand. “One thing I don't like about history is that it doesn't deal with the future. . . .” There were moans at this
non sequitur
and he became flustered. “What I don't get is, where was all those immigrants supposed to go?” I admitted this was a good question but I was describing what happened, rather than what was supposed to happen. A rather smartly dressed man (the only lawyer in town, also the prosecutor)
tried to catch me with a question about the farm problem in 1887. I said when a Nebraska farmer sells a bushel of wheat for twenty-five cents minus freight, and the middleman in Chicago or New York gets a dollar and a half, it proves that times never change. This brought pleasant applause. There were a number of inane questions before the mood darkened with a question about Jimmy Carter, whom I tried to defend, then a baiting query about Central America, Nicaragua in particular. I replied, Why should we be worried about a country with only five elevators? This brought mass confusion. Only five elevators in the whole country? Was I sure? Yes, I had been there. Of course this was a lie—I had actually got my information from a copy of my daughter's
Rolling Stone.
Didn't the president say these communists were only a day's drive from Texas? I replied that how was a standing army of thirty thousand commies going to get by three million Texas deer-hunters armed to the teeth? This brought hearty applause. The last question was idiotically poignant, and asked by the oldest man in the audience. “A lot of our parents felt that old Northridge was on the wrong side of the Indian Wars. What do you say to that? With apologies to Naomi here, who is anyway a Jensen, some folks think that the first Northridge was a bona-fide lunatic. And if you think these drunken Sioux are so wonderful, why don't you go up to Pine Ridge and try living with them? Anyway, you can't fight history.” There was a moderate amount of cheering, and a tender sense that “drunken Sioux” was a slight against my own behavior in the locale.