Resistance (5 page)

I can still, you see, be yanked into a gyre, circling back to the war, to the core of deception that lay at its heart. I can grasp this much: it has ever been this way, from the invasions of Macedonia forty centuries ago by Anatolians to the Wehrmacht’s blitzkrieg across Poland. Deceit, hypocrisy, self-delusion, breast-beating, greedy designs, the forbidden pleasure of violence running through wars that were sanctioned and ones that were not. Wars without beginnings, wars with pauses but without ends.

War is an appetite. It is its own reason for being.

Unfortunately, with every war the dead must come, the maimed, the deranged, the frustrated, the guilt ridden, all those for whom war’s champions, its believers, even its grateful survivors have no adequate answer. What is the question to which I am the answer, a blind eunuch with a face of melted wax?

How often, I ask myself, do these memories snare me? How hard do I go down? How long before I get up? Most of the bile is gone now. With Bo Ling, with my sheets of folded paper—here, young lady, a chrysanthemum and a tiger—I circle back less and less. I cannot undo the past, but I can make a present that will diminish its size, see to it that my experience of darkness does not take up more room than its due. My goal is no longer to ensure that the names of those who sent me to die are not forgotten, but to reach a place where I can recall their names only with difficulty.

Bo Ling has a plan to help us both. She wants to raise a child. She thinks we can adopt. I’m not strongly behind her on this, but she says this is because I cannot let go of enough of my anger. She may have something. Another goal, then: the loss of enough anger to become a father.

In my own terms—accepting the risk that comes with a loss of innocence, not knowing whether you are preparing yourself for darkness or for the realm of light—for
me
to choose parenthood has some heft. It will be loaded with consequence. But not to follow it out, not to take the risk, wouldn’t that finally leave you an isolate, your own grim island? Further, I tell myself, wouldn’t love, the plunge with the greatest risk of all, fall short of its final loss of innocence if it did not take this step, if I never said to a small child, I give you my life?

It’s this sort of thinking that makes me believe one day I will turn the putative tragedy of the world inside out. Having killed others, including a child, and been maimed, I might now raise a child I would never ask to compensate me for what I cannot resolve. I might love the child freely, asking no more from him—or her—than that he become highly discerning about the loss of the great pool of innocence with which he was born.

I would be vigilant, as once my father urged.

The wages of trauma, as I have written it out in my life, is anger. The resolution of that anger, say the therapists, breaks the grip of the traumatic event. But to resolve the anger—and this I got on my own—it’s necessary to love. It’s not enough just to arrive at a place where no one, not even yourself, is to blame.

You have to go further.

For several years now Bo Ling, from her own perspective, has also been telling me this. To wash out the anger, she says, fall in love. Be in love with a peach, she says, its summer juice running down your bare chest. Be in love with the sound of your brother’s truck as it pulls up to the curb on a summer night with supper just ready on the table. Be in love with me, she says, when my fingers move slowly across her small belly.

Reengage your innocence here, in the Dresden of my face, she says.

Harvey Fleming, Bravo Company,
Second Battalion, 27th Infantry,
military historian, author,
Incident
at Kabul,
on leaving Tangiers

The Bear in the Road

Virgil brought two mugs of black coffee to the table along with some fry bread. We ate without talking and watched dayrise through frost-rimmed glass in the double-hung window. Boys had broken out the lower pane that past summer with a baseball. Virgil had taped clear plastic over the triangular shards, enough of a fix until he had time and money to get a new pane of glass. We could not see the ground clearly from the table, only the sky through the upper half of the window.

“Hear them coyotes last night?” I asked.

“Mmm.”

“Wonder if they’re after that little bear cub.”

We’d seen a lone black bear cub the day before, out riding together. Virgil had marked it. He’d taken an intense interest in it.

“I’m going over to see Charlie Good Swan,” he said, “about those calves. You can come along.”

“I’d rather borrow a horse, if that’s all right. I want to go up Medicine Shield Creek, see if I can find that little bear.”

“That’s a good idea. Take that buckskin.”

Virgil ate his bread and gazed up at the sky, where clear-weather cumulus were moving east on a high wind.

“All right, I’ll go see Charles, and I’ll see you back here later.”

He went out to his truck and left.

I saddled the buckskin and rode away south, toward the escarpment where we’d seen the cub. I located our day-old tracks and began to range in the direction the bear had gone, looping back and forth looking for sign.

Whenever I studied the country around Virgil’s like this, searching hard for something or hopeful of some opening, I’d feel the mind’s language, the naming and analyzing of detail, slipping away from me. I’d feel again the wordless kinship I’d known with Virgil in my boyhood. It was an elusive and elevated physical sense of being present in the world. It chagrined me now, later in life, that I did not act on it then, that I was content to remain an observer despite the repeated invitation this sensation offered.

I looked close for the bear for a few hours. I found no trace of him, nor coyotes either, for that matter, and rode directly back in an opposite frame of mind, with thoughts of another life pressing in on me.

What strained at me about the state of the land I was riding through, if I allowed the thought to get in, was how it had emptied out. I never rode here with Virgil as a boy that we didn’t come on big herds of antelope. I hadn’t seen herds like that in fifteen years. The same was true for the other animals. Fewer fox, jackrabbit, badger, golden eagle. It was as though somehow they’d been sifted out without anything else being disturbed. All you saw anymore, really, were deer. Trophy hunting and varmint hunting is what did it, I believe. Poisoned baits, cattle ranching, fences. Thrill killing, whatever it is boys call it these days. Maybe once on a day’s ride now you saw a fox.

Virgil Night Crow met my mother in the thirties when she was a child growing up outside Glasgow, Montana. If she hadn’t been a girl, my grandparents probably would have let her run off with Virgil’s people, at least for a while. As it was they just put up with the fascination she took with them—and let Virgil know there was something not altogether right about his interest in their daughter, twenty years younger than he was. Virgil, I’m certain, was polite and reassuring, and finally paid them no mind. He’d locked onto something.

What he concentrated on, Mother said, was teaching her detail and association in the country they traveled over, how one small thing signaled another. It had once all been his people’s alone, south to the villages of the Mandan and Hidatsa on the Missouri, east to the Ojibwe country, north to where the Plains Cree were, west to the Gros Ventre, and southwest to the Crow. Assiniboine, Virgil’s people were called, Stony to some. Mother said he knew that country, twig and dirt, the way she knew me: what it liked and didn’t like and how all its known parts—the colors of the sky or chinook winds coming east to cross up a hard winter—could never together explain the mystery of what it was.

The country was broad and open to the Assiniboine, reeling plains of short grass and river breaks, wrinkling here and there into low hills and buttes. Buffalo country. When western Canada and the Louisiana Purchase were laid out, the dividing line ran straight through Assiniboine country.

“You could choose Canada or the U.S.,” Virgil said one time. I’d been trying to get him to talk about how it felt, being closed in on a reservation. “George III or Thomas Jefferson, you could take your pick.”

“You could?” I said, taken aback by the point in law but buying it anyway.

“Yeah,” he deadpanned, “some of us are still working on it.”

Virgil’s way with broken treaties, land grabs, assimilation, and the rest was to move on, regardless, like the big prairie rivers in spring melt, the Milk or the Poplar, a quiet, heavy flow, nearly out of sight beneath the cutbanks.

He treated designing whites like a series of bad storms he had to weather.

When I was born he took me into his life as though I were a grandson, a relationship my father was never easy with. Still, summers I got to stay with Virgil. We’d ride up into Canada together. He taught me to hunt. Over the years, I got to know most everyone on the Fort Peck Reservation.

Virgil’s place was on upper Porcupine Creek around Larslan. We lived off the reservation near Four Buttes, about forty miles away. My father moved us down to Wolf Point when I was about ten, when he quit ranching and went into real estate. I was back east at college when he moved everyone south to Miles City. My mother was killed there a couple of years later, a freak accident in a horse chute. My father was seeing another woman at the time. The first thing he did was clear the house of all the books my mother had bought and read, books she had impressed on me when I was young, and which had been for me a refuge from my father’s scorn for ideas.

My brothers and sisters later moved out of state. My father married the woman. He now lives with one of her children in Cheyenne. When Virgil asked if they could bury Mother in those hills up around him my father said no.

Wherever I went with Virgil, he would teach me about concrete and practical things—finding water, tracking animals, which cactus fruits were okay to eat. He never ignored my questions or made me feel embarrassed. When I was fifteen, Virgil rode us up north of where Willow Creek comes into Porcupine Creek and left me there alone for four days to fast and dream, to find out who I was and what I was to do. I was eager for a vision and tried hard to find my way inside all that Virgil had told me about, describing the country right in front of me where animals moved around like people, walking up to you like they had something to say. But that whole time fasting I just felt scared and dumb. No vision came.

After law school I moved back to Havre and began to practice. I handled mostly treaty cases from the Fort Belknap, Rocky Boy, and Fort Peck reservations. It was what I believed in. Sometimes I’d go over and spend a week with Virgil. He was in his seventies by then. I’d always feel around him that our business wasn’t finished.

Driving the Hi-Line back to Havre from Virgil’s one night, I ran off the road trying to miss a bear. I got out of the pickup, stuck pretty good in the borrow ditch but no great damage, and climbed back up to the highway. I’d pumped a rifle cartridge into the chamber of my old Colt .38-40, a slug that would knock a horse sideways. I saw the bear two hundred feet away, still standing the same place on the two-lane macadam, a shadow in the lesser darkness with his shoulders against the sky. No one in fifty years, I guessed, had seen a plains grizzly in northeastern Montana.

The bear did not move but faded, it and the night becoming one darkness.

I was twenty-six then. Two years later another bear—Virgil looked over the claw marks and said this, too, was a grizzly—tore the front screen door off my place. I didn’t want to get into it with Virgil just then, about why a bear would do this, just tear the door off and leave, but I was about to get married and anxious that Jill would now be living there with me.

I had to have an explanation from him. Virgil just shrugged. How was he to know?

The first fall we were married I took Jill up to Lake Thibadeau for a few days. We watched ducks and geese staging for migration, bald eagles hunting the stragglers. She liked hearing the red-winged blackbirds and meadowlarks in the afternoon, those fat, bright songs. Brewer’s sparrows. We’d set our tent up on the sandy doab of an old river bar. The last morning, we got up to find fresh grizzly tracks all around. I tried to follow the bear’s trail but lost it in shallow water in both directions.

When we got home I dropped Jill off and continued on alone another 218 miles to see Virgil. He didn’t have a phone.

“He’s trying to get your attention, I guess,” Virgil said.

“What do you think I should do?”

“Pay attention.”

“Jill is three months pregnant, Virgil, I can’t be taking any chances here,” I said.

He looked at me the way you might someone who repeatedly draws the wrong conclusions.

“Why don’t you come over again next week,” he said. “We’ll go back to that place up on the Porcupine, where I took you when you were a boy. We’ll look around.”

He was telling me, so I just gave him a nod, okay.

I had a hard time getting away. I was in court in Helena most of the week, working on a case for the Gros Ventre, arguing with ranchers who believed in a God-given right to go after a stock-killing bear, even on reservation land, and who were relentless in expressing their beliefs about the Christian foundations of our country and other assumptions which they held to be trustworthy guides to right living.

I got to Virgil’s late on a Friday night and found him already asleep. The next morning when he woke me it was still dark. We drove the highway north. Above where Porcupine Creek crosses a dirt road we got the horses out, the buckskin for me and a blue roan mare, and then rode some miles farther north to where a mixed stand of cottonwoods and box elder stood on a river bar. It was understood Virgil would wait for me there, just as he had twenty years before.

We both knew what this was about.

I continued up the dry streambed toward my old campsite, packing a blanket, a tarp, a jacket, and a couple bottles of water. Virgil had not been explicit, but I knew I was to attempt again to get a vision, the image of responsibility essential, in his view, to the leading of any kind of meaningful life. The intrusion of the bear, the bear’s almost human insistence, was not lost on me; but I felt no burning need to rearrange my life to accommodate the bear. What I wanted was an explanation, a direction to head.

It was still early when I set off up the coulee. At a place where the high bank had collapsed, I saw, not so far away, a herd of pronghorn grazing. Skittish as they are, they paid me no mind, no more attention than they’d have given a flock of birds. There were about a hundred of them, and I sat the horse awhile watching while they drifted the plain, the calves hieing up alongside their mothers whenever something in the wind or grass spooked them. Later I rode up on a badger, her new den obvious on a point bar with fresh dirt dark where she’d been digging. Like the pronghorn, she showed no alarm, but fixed me directly in her stare. About fifty feet away a coyote stood in the brush. When I reined in to see better what was up, the coyote gave me a look. It raised hairs in the runnel of my spine.

These signs made me more alert and hopeful. When I reached the head of the draw, I got off the horse and sat the ground awhile with the reins in my hand. None of the country around was familiar from the earlier time, though it had a freshness to it you didn’t see farther south.

I picketed the horse and waited out the late afternoon light with some expectation—and fear, should the bear show up. When dark filled out the last unshadowed ground, I went to sleep on boughs of sagebrush I’d cut and worked into a mat.

I awoke with no memory of dreaming, but with a heavy feeling of being in empty and unfamiliar rooms. I was hungry, though not yet light-headed. Right away I saw the horse had pulled his picket. From the drag marks, I saw he’d headed back down the coulee to where Virgil was camped. It was not so far I couldn’t walk it alone in a few hours.

I saw no one unusual thing that day. No bird flew over. I heard no movement close or far in the brush nor any animal call or cry. The landscape seemed as primed as I was for something to happen, though, its edges almost glittering they were so sharp. But night fell again and I turned in with my stomach empty and now in knots. Surely, I thought, tonight I will dream.

Awaiting sleep, kept from it by a kind of irritation, a frustrated desire for resolution, I thought my way eventually to a crossroad I knew well. On one side was this high plains country I lay in, resilient and uncapturable. In all the years I’d ridden through it, across its hills and dry water-courses, first as a boy and then as a man, it had seemed on the verge of an offering, a pronouncement. If I would but give in to it, it would speak. On the other side were what I might call the impulses of reason, the temptation to figure out every problem—personal, social, financial—the seduction behind the belief that one could engineer a solution.