Dalva (46 page)

In the shower I thought, Holy shit, the night is actually over. What would I say to a doctor and why would they recall each other, for the wolf had arrived more than ten years before. Making breakfast I remained groggy with dreams so decided to school Nick, my quarter-horse gelding, who had become a bit rank from neglect. He was fine in the beginning but then decided he would only do figure eights to the left, not the right. Michael had observed that Nick shied from the smell of alcohol but that isn't what I smelled like. I worked until he was lathered, then gave up. When I unsaddled him he nipped my ass and I hit him so hard my thumb felt sprained. Now I was sweating and yelling as I schooled him on a lunge line. He behaved perfectly then, looking at me as if he wondered what all the trouble had been about. I resaddled him but he still wouldn't do the figure eights to the right. I put him away thinking I'm not strong enough now to do the job. This isn't like me. I better get strong enough. What I have accomplished is a horse-teeth-bruised bite on my ass. I went inside and packed a bag.

Michael didn't look as good as he thought he did. He was bleached and flaccid, but gave me a bright smile when I came in the kitchen back door at Naomi's. He wore some of the clothes, freshly cleaned and pressed, I had bought him in San Francisco. The swelling had diminished but the bruise was still there, the left arm in a cast and sling. He stooped to greet the pup which had learned and imitated Roscoe's growl. Michael offered a bone left over from Naomi's stockpot which made them easy friends. He glanced at the door wishing to speak to me in private, but first helped Naomi pour some of the soup in the blender with a grimace of resignation. Naomi seemed sad and preoccupied so I kissed her cheek. She pointed at an open letter on the table from the county superintendent. I
guessed that the country school would be closed, which proved true, but there was the fillip of the offer to counsel bankrupt farm families, working out of the office of the county agricultural agent. I impulsively went to the phone and accepted, partly to reassure Naomi, but mostly because I was goddamned sick of simple dangling. The fantasy of reactivating my farm might occur down the road but the present timing couldn't be more inappropriate. To do so now would be to place myself in Sam's category of “rich folk” playing at ornamental ranching, even though I had been born here. I waved to Naomi and went off to the music room with Michael in tow.

It turned out that Frieda had been able to check Michael out late the evening before and they had driven halfway home before stopping at a motel—with separate rooms at her insistence. He had been hard at work since midmorning and there were several open journals on the desk, plus a list of questions in handwriting that had become small and cramped. If I hadn't been trained in the area the hour we spent would have pushed me over the lip of daffiness. The minimum immediate recovery period for an alcoholic is at least six weeks and after ten days Michael verged on the delusional. Naomi's farm wasn't the place to recover but it was a decision I didn't intend to interfere with, one way or the other. His first written question made my skin itch and I spoke slowly as if to someone dull-witted.

“Northridge came for a few minutes to my hospital room in a dream. There was a bullet hole in his head. How did he die?”

“He died at home in bed in 1910 three days after his wife died.”

“The journals stop a few days after the return to the farm in the February after Wounded Knee. Are there more?”

“There's one more I'll discuss with Paul when he comes here in July. You'll probably be able to see it when you reach the end of your week.”

“That's not fair, goddamnit!” His forehead burst with sweat and I felt some empathy for his panic. We were a few feet away at the big desk but I could smell his sour odor.

“Calm down. I'm going away for a while, perhaps a week.
Maybe I can talk to Paul on the phone. It entails a great deal of money and I could be putting myself in physical jeopardy.” This was a matter that in my confusion I hadn't been able to deal with. If I decided to give the materials to a museum I could simply excise the “other things” from the journal with a razor blade and dispose of them myself. Then Michael could finish his work. What wasn't needed now was the sort of grandmotherly compassion that indulges someone because they feel a childlike desperation.

“I can see you don't trust me!” Now he wrote in bolder strokes.

“Please stir your recent memory. You've been a tremendous pain in the ass. However, I admire the direction your conscience and intellect have been taking you. Just be patient.”

“You look exhausted yourself. You're cold and distant. I don't get it.”

“I've found out my son is alive and he's seen me several times though I don't know who he is. I'm waiting and it's very hard to wait after so long.”

He was startled and reached over for my hand, pressed it to his forehead. Naomi came in to call us for lunch, and when we got to the table there was a small glass of wine at each place. Michael immediately drew his in through a glass straw, then stuck the straw in his pureed soup with a smile.

“May he have some more?” Naomi asked me, but Michael shook his head and made a writing motion to say he intended to work.

Out by the car Naomi told me that Ruth had tried to call me last night. She had flown to Costa Rica this morning and would stop for a visit on the way home next week. I thought Naomi was still acting a little strange but her humor returned and so did mine when we talked about Ruth, who was meeting her priest at an expensive seaside resort under the notion that it would be unlikely that anyone he knew would stop by.

“Is she going to try to get pregnant?”

“I don't think so. She's been spending a lot of time with Paul and she's agreed to take on some of his orphan projects when he passes on. I like the ambition you girls show. All those
years in the great world you come up with a priest and a cowboy.” Now she began to laugh helplessly, leaning against the car for support. She didn't do it often but when she did it was infectious. We made so much noise Michael rushed out on the porch and watched us through the screen in bafflement.

“It's just a joke,” I called out to him. It certainly could be looked at that way, I thought.

The trouble with western Nebraska is that there's only one way to get to most places. Any other route would have added hours to the trip to Buffalo Gap. This means you have to put up with what you thought about on the road on other trips, as if these previous thoughts were hanging on the phone poles and power lines—even sexual fantasies from the distant past can lie in wait along creek bottoms and ditches, the village limits of no longer occupied crossroads, the name announcing nothing but itself and the memory of what you were doing and thinking other times you passed this way. But the susceptibility depends on drift, and I had begun not to drift, aware that I had been acting out effects rather than causing anything new. It was as if I had made my decision, gradual as it was, to come home, and I was hoping that would supplant all other considerations, save my phone call to Andrew.

It also occurred to me I had known Michael well a bit more than two months, and the only resonance got from seeing him today was regret. I wondered at the power of my melancholy in Santa Monica which accepted the idea that this brilliant nitwit would find my son in exchange for our history. It felt silly enough for me to laugh at myself in the car, but of what value was it for me to see it as clearly as Paul? And perhaps unconsciously, I had chosen Michael to rid myself of it. The idea of a major mistake made me turn on the radio but it was news time and the world's anguish quickly became a confusing substitute for my own so I turned it off. The questions became more oblique, involving conscience and history, winnowing down to the pettiness of the thought of Northridge's becoming a mere feather in Michael's sorry academic hat.

In Chadron I opted for a longer route, driving over to Crawford, then north to 71 through the Oglala and Buffalo Gap National Grasslands. I congratulated myself on stopping short of a quick return visit to Fort Robinson—depending on your knowledge of history and conscience the area was the Sioux equivalent of the Warsaw Ghetto. My anger gave me a leaden foot and I passed three campers with Iowa licenses, swerving way off the left shoulder to avoid an oncoming car. The drivers all shook their fists and beeped at me before they continued on. I was partly mired in the ditch so put it in four-wheel drive and fishtailed along until I made it back up to the shoulder. My heart was racing and I couldn't catch my breath so I stopped and got out of the car. I walked as fast as I could manage out into the ocean of grass and sat down hidden from the road. All that had just happened disappeared into the density of green with abruptness: “What I am trying to do is trade in a dead lover for a live son. I'll throw in a dead father with the dead lover and their souls I have kept in the basement perhaps. Even if I don't get to see the son I have to let the others go. The world around me and the world of people looks immense and solid but it is more fragile than lark or pheasant eggs, women eggs, anyone's last heartbeat. I'm a crazy woman. Why didn't I do this long ago? I'm forty-five and there's still a weeping girl in my stomach. I'm still in the arms of dead men—first Father then Duane. I may as well have burned down the goddamned house. Whether I see the son he is at least a living obsession.”

Sam stayed ten yards away with cold feet when I reached the cabin. He showed me the fine new corral with well-concealed pride, a laconic cowboy shyness I had been familiar with since I was a child. With the corral done he had started wire-brushing the flaked varnish off the logs of the cabin to prepare for a new coat. When the shyness continued through the two drinks before dinner I began to wonder.

“Is there something wrong?” I was impatient, having decided so much that afternoon, or at least approached an area so critical that my relief reminded me of patients I had worked
with the day after they emerged from successful shock treatment.

“I guess I'd have to say something's wrong with you. You act like you been sick.”

I bristled but didn't know where to go next. I poured myself a third drink and pushed the bottle toward him. He shrugged, then joined me. We entered the neutral territory of the condition of the cabin, horses, the price of hay as the summer was shaping up for drought. He said he'd never figured out why Omaha could get forty inches of rain while the western border turned brown with ten inches. The whiskey had begun to relax us when he blurted out that he hoped I would start feeling better. My stomach and joints began to loosen when he said both his mother and younger sister had always had “nervous problems” so he knew it was as real as breaking a leg. I still refused to let go when I gave him an explanation in an affected, even voice. I said I'd found out that the son that I'd been forced to give up for adoption was looking for me, which was something I'd been hoping for all these years.