Dalva (35 page)

Fathers are habitually a half-decade behind their daughters' actual age. Pete had always been a bully and a lout, but a first-class farrier. His wife, who was in Ruth's class, was a devious neurotic, the sort of woman who gives Scandinavians an undeservedly bad name for looniness. How hopeless, I thought. It was too easy to be confused by the idea of personality, so I looked through a tack chest in the pump shed for the saddlebags that I had made for me in San Antonio years before. The view of the North Loup from the plane had reminded me of a swale near the Niobrara I hadn't seen since I was a girl, and I meant to ride there in the afternoon. First, though, I had the obligation to write Paul and tell him that Rachel had died, sending along a photo she wanted him to have of the two of them together so long ago in Buffalo Gap. There was the sense in the photo of my father's unseen presence, and I quickly slid it into the envelope, wondering if it was he or Grandfather who took the picture. Rachel was lovely but Paul never looked comfortable in a cowboy hat,
and even with a shovel in his hand he was melancholy and studious. He told me that after his mother died in Omaha in early May he came to the farm, started digging irrigation ditches, and didn't stop until September when it was time to go back to school. Grandfather and Wesley would ride out to see him but he wouldn't talk to them. He made his own meals on a hot plate in the bunkhouse.

By midafternoon I was saddled and headed for the swale. At the last moment I had packed a ground cloth and a summer bag in case I wanted to spend the night. After a half-hour or so the world I was tired of had disappeared, and the only thing I was missing was a dog or two. Naomi had mentioned that a friend over in Ainsworth had a litter of Labrador-Airedale crosses which would make an ideal ranch dog. I told her I would think it over but I wanted to make sure that the school was going to open in September.

I was riding Peach, a mare, on a trail on the south side of the Niobrara. She loved water and I let her swim a few minutes, soaking me to the upper thighs. This didn't do the job so I tethered her and took off the saddle and my bags, then took off my clothes. We found a deeper stretch—there was still plenty of water in June—and we floundered around together having a wonderful time. She was alarmed by minnows and stared at them with her ears perked as a puppy would. Bathing with horses; I let my mind slip back to the best parts of the afternoon in the Keys, the glittering blue creek in the mangroves, swimming with Duane and the buckskin in the tidal thrust, the whiteness of the scar tissue around the healed shrapnel and bullet wounds as if the insides had sucked themselves away from the incursion of metal.

I let myself sun-dry while Peach rolled in a sunken, dusty area that must have been an old buffalo wallow. After my conversation with Naomi in the hotel dining room I had considered trying to talk to Duane as she did Father but I didn't dare. I thought of Michael's agitation over the idea of Crazy Horse's being sent to the Dry Tortugas—Michael spent a lot of time trying unsuccessfully to avoid the human dimension, affecting the emotional distance of a surgeon. I wondered how he would hold up against the insanity of some of the volumes in the second chest, but then there was a vast difference between
being involved in the Ghost Dance movement and writing about it. Perhaps it was too peculiar and embarrassing, too unique to be imagined. There was a trace of obverse pride in Michael's actually not knowing an Indian, other than the day spent with the Nez Percé student, but then his sense of himself needed an improbable amount of protection. When I mentioned a particular novel or movie I enjoyed he would reject the idea because “it would set me off.”

I dressed and remounted Peach, riding as hard as she would allow for an hour only to discover the swale was no longer there. It had been drained, filled, and contoured for what remained of a cornfield—unplanted this year because the country had twice as much corn as it needed. Sometimes they needed help at it but farmers had always been pretty good at cutting their own throats. Hanging invisibly in the air, just above the ground, was the delightful hummock of cottonwoods, osier, and wild cherry, the clouds of birds that mated and nested there.

I doubled back and crossed the river, headed for the small box canyon favored by Grandfather, Paul, Duane, and myself. There was more than a little fear in my heart but the miniature canyon was intact; if anything the trees and bushes were more dense and the groundwater yielded up a fuller spring. I sat on the flat rock, ate a half-sandwich, and drank iced tea from a thermos. It was so curious to close my eyes and realize the sandwich tasted like Bleecker Street and Washington Square in the late sixties. If you wanted a sandwich you had to go to New York City or send for supplies.

I felt a mental tremor as I sat on the rock, as if I were being revisited by the emotions I had felt there the summer after the baby, both good and bad. Naomi had been canning tomatoes. I left it where it was, large breasts and all. New places and old bring on unstudied emotions. At one time I made a study of all of them. Grandfather wouldn't go beyond his volume of William James and that was the book that got me started. During an advanced graduate course in abnormal psychology at Minnesota five of us had gone on a week-long field trip of state hospitals with our brash young professor from New York. At one of the institutions we had met an inmate, a middle-aged Chippewa from the Red Lake Reservation up in Rainy River
County. The hospital guide assured us that the Chippewa was an incurable schizophrenic but when we were left alone with him the professor, who was passionate and quite Jewish, determined the Chippewa was a shaman who had been institutionalized through the efforts of the usual malevolent nitwits from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The shaman had been caught in the act of being trees and stones for a year and had been sent away. The first few years in the hospital he had answered his confinement by becoming a river. We were all sitting out on a lawn beside some flower beds. He told us to watch closely as he lay down and put on his “suit of running water.” The professor said later it was a specific type of group hypnosis, but the Chippewa did seem to become water. It disturbed us all a great deal except the professor who thought it was interesting. After a year of concerted effort he got the Chippewa released under the guise of further study. You're not legitimately schizophrenic if you can turn it off at will and return to consensual reality. The shaman, however, was quite unhappy in Minneapolis and disappeared. Later, when I saw the professor at a coffee house, he told me that the man had adopted a group of crows that fed out on the ice of the frozen Mississippi, and had probably gone off with them. Neither of us seemed sure if he was serious.

Peach stared, trembled, then shied away from a rock formation just beyond me at the head of the canyon. I was sure it was a rattlesnake but didn't bother getting up to check. At the Omaha airport in the morning the weatherman had said a cool front was headed down from Alberta in the early evening, which meant rattlesnakes would take cover and the canyon would be fine for sleeping. I brushed Peach down and gave her some oats from the saddlebags. She didn't need to be hobbled since I had trained her from a filly a few summers ago and she liked to stick close to the nearest human, not really a peculiarity. She also liked Lundquist's dog Roscoe and the two of them played tag. She followed me down the canyon to the river flats where I gathered firewood, studying all of my movements. I made several trips because I had pretty much decided to stay the night. I followed the eyes of Peach off to an enormous cottonwood by the river where a group of crows had gathered and were obviously discussing our presence.

When I awoke from my night in the desert two weeks ago I made a pot of coffee and drank it sitting cross-legged on the cot. The dawn was radiant with the sun coming up over the Sauceda Mountains, and there was the question why I didn't do this more often though I had enjoyed hundreds of such solitary dawns in my life. It was hot within an hour and I drove across the Papago Reservation, then south toward Sasabe, cutting off at Arivaca Canyon Road to Nogales, to Patagonia, and down to the San Rafael Valley where Paul now spent much of his time. My thoughts the entire day were subsumed in the aftermath of Duane's suicide fifteen years before, not in a grotesque way but there was something in the mood that made the memories of the night before continue their natural course.

I had driven back to my room at the Pier House and throughout the day I sat there being visited by the police, an armed-services representative (the benefits), the coroner who doubted the body would be found, an officer from the Coast Guard who doubted the body would ever be found, an obtuse reporter from the local Key West
Citizen,
and an intelligent young man from the Miami
Herald
who had also been in Vietnam. A Sioux on horseback committing suicide at sea was thought to be newsworthy—I was never able to read this article which was called “Requiem for a Warrior.” The reporter from the
Herald
was missing his left arm, at which sight I finally wept. It was as if with this missing arm I knew that Duane was gone from the earth and buried in the endless prairie of the ocean. It was the only day of my life I was to be addressed as Mrs. Stone Horse. I had been trying every half-hour or so to get through to Paul because I didn't want to worry Naomi. When I succeeded and told Paul the story he said to sit tight and he would come for me. Perhaps it is pretentious and doesn't matter but I have put in my will that “Dalva Stone Horse” is to be on my gravestone, and that my ashes are to be cast into the ocean in the Gulf Stream off Big Pine Key. I shall join him in the great ocean river.

Rather than take me to the Arizona ranch Paul had decided
that his cottage near Loreto, down on the Baja Peninsula, was a better idea. He told me later that he didn't feel the death of a husband should be survived in the same area the son was lost. Loreto had the same features of otherworldliness for me at thirty that southern Arizona had had for me at an over-plump fifteen so long ago.

Now in my canyon it occurred to me that I had reached Paul's ranch two weeks ago to this very hour. He had expanded the stucco house, the horse barn, and the kennels since my last visit a year before. Emilia was there, also a younger woman named Luisa with a daughter about five, an older woman named Margaret, perhaps in her mid-sixties, about Paul's age. She was a retired anthropologist from the University of Louisiana. At dinner she and Paul explained that they had met in Florence in 1949, and had an affair despite her art-historian husband who was hard at work at the Uffizi. I had the not altogether comfortable feeling that I was in the presence of three generations of his lovers. His gentleness and humor were so disarming that no one seemed to mind, and at one point all three of the women were discussing their current husbands. I was road-weary and had several drinks, but stayed up late to listen and ask questions. Paul went to bed first, after telling us that we couldn't talk about him in his absence which meant, of course, that we would. Margaret wanted to know about my grandfather because Paul never talked much about the way he grew up, except to say that a hundred years of intensive farming had made Nebraska a charmless place, the vast prairie utterly desiccated. I somewhat agree but then what state, including Arizona and Louisiana, hadn't tried to squeeze itself plug-ugly to make a final dollar? I said that until his late twenties or so Paul's father had aimed to be a painter but his will toward art hadn't survived World War I. Paul's notion was that his father had worked desperately to be an artist, then was rejected for the Armory Show in 1913, went to war out of depression, and returned understandably coarsened. In his postwar state of fatigue and depression he felt morally and artistically bankrupt and never picked up a brush again. All the energies he had given to his art were directed to horses and making money by buying, trading, and selling large landholdings, also commercial real estate in Chicago, Omaha, Lincoln,
and Rapid City. Paul felt that his parents were utterly unsuited for each other, and after the birth of his two sons, his father avoided Omaha, spending his time at the farm or in Texas and Arizona. With the death of Wesley he simply withdrew, though Paul felt that most of his motive was to try to act the father for Ruth and myself.

I felt this brief explanation was enough and resisted further probings by Margaret on the subject of money, except to say that I scarcely felt responsible for either the talents or the shortcomings of my forebears. When the three of them became insistently curious on the subject of why I hadn't married it was humorous. If you're cross at the time the easiest way to put a stop to this is by saying that you're a lesbian. It creates a wonderful aura of instant embarrassment and backpedaling. Instead I used Michael's idea that people completely change every seven years and the adaptation process was too much of a strain. Only Paul and Rachel knew I had been married less than a day, except for Bobby and his Bahamian wife, Grace.