Returning to Earth (17 page)

I said to my uncle Fred on his brief visit this summer that we tend to live within a gray egg and rarely break through the shell to see life as it is, and he said, “No we don't, we just think we're within the egg but we're outside of it. We feel safer in there.” I was irritated of course but came to no conclusions. There had been a rare heat wave and after a sweaty night we took a dip in the river at dawn. A group of noisy ravens watched us and there was distant thunder from the south. I stood in the river and said, “Right now I'm outside of the gray egg.” Fred and a raven in a fir tree were staring at each other as if the bird had hypnotized the man. It took a number of cautious years for the ravens to determine if I was safe enough for them to hang out in the yard.

I had been sitting in my stump chair for about an hour when I smelled something strong and rank. I thought at first that maybe the breeze had shifted bringing the scent of a dead deer, a coyote, or some other decaying animal. But there was no breeze and my skin began to prickle and crawl with the obvious thought that there was something behind me. I certainly hadn't heard anything approach but then I had been lost in thought, a long-term habit that has gotten me into trouble a number of times. I was half encased in the stump and swiveled awkwardly until I could see behind me. The bear I had seen earlier was sitting in a sunlit glade not fifty feet away. I went from dry to sweaty in seconds, my breath shortening, while I thought of what to do. In all of my sightings and encounters in my twenty years locally I've never had a bear behave in this manner. With bears you always part company as soon as possible, usually with the animal leaving with all possible speed. No one can outrun a
bear and I could see just a glint of my car parked about two hundred yards to the south off a log road. I gave up thinking, stood up and turned around and whispered a stupid “hello.” I began walking toward my car with a tight ass and quivering innards and it was naturally the longest two hundred yards of my life. It was only when I opened the relative safety of the car door that I thought, “Maybe it's Donald.”

I drove the ten miles or so out of the woods faster than usual with a new and peculiar itch in my brain that I figured could be dispelled only by the sight of the harbor of Lake Superior or, more likely, a cheeseburger and beer at the Dunes Saloon. It was a simple case of cowardice in the face of a new experience. I had always stuck to the idea offered by my ninth-grade science teacher that all genuine phenomena have a natural or scientific explanation and driving out of the woods my faith in this had become a bit wobbly. I hit a long puddle too fast and fishtailed then slowed until I almost became stuck and downshifted into four-wheel drive with the windshield covered with mud. I felt relieved when I finally reached the blacktop that led to the village. I reminded myself that my persistent life question, “How do we live with what we know?” didn't cover everything and that I might humorously add, “How do we live with what we don't know?”

At the bar my sometime lover of last night, Carol, at first ignored me though there were only two other customers, old Finns making a whiskey dent in their Social Security checks. She hissed at me, “You're an asshole,” which the Finns thought very funny. I called Cynthia from the pay
phone at our appointed time of twelve-thirty, which doesn't always work because on some days she's a substitute teacher until Polly can get her on as a regular. On this day her voice is bell clear and musical, which means her mood is good. She tells me that Clare is letting K accompany her on her way over in my direction to clean out a hundred or so bluebird houses on the Kingston Plains. She has sent along a pot roast for our dinner, which pleases me.

When my purposefully overdone cheeseburger arrives I have a confusing memory of Cynthia from when we were in our early teens. It was an early June morning in the last week of school. I was having breakfast alone and leafing through some of my mother's art books for prurient reasons. A bare-breasted Courbet woman and a series of Degas dancers always hit me the most directly. I went upstairs to get my schoolbooks with the accustomed hardon and through the open door I could see Cynthia toweling off after a shower, a disconcerting reminder of the Degas drawings I had just stared at with lust. I averted my glance from the taboo Cynthia, who was singing a Beach Boys song, and wondered how my nasty, ugly parents could produce a girl with such a lovely shape. At the time she was reading the Brontë sisters, Jane Austen, and George Eliot and called me Squire Glum.

On the way back to the cabin after the pleasant denial in the tavern I naturally returned to Donald and the bear so that by the time I passed the village limits my discomfort had palpably returned. I was a boy again walking past a cemetery in the dark. Donald loved bears. One had visited him during his three nights without food, water, or shelter.
Bears would occasionally visit the bird feeder at the cabin because of their affection for sunflower seeds but they would leave if I rapped at the window. Years back a young one had followed me on a long hike out in the sand dunes though at a distance of a couple of hundred yards, but until this morning I had never had one approach so closely. I had nowhere to go with my unrest. I had read a dozen books on black bears but none of my knowledge was doing me any good because these books were of a scientific nature. Perhaps ten years ago I had loaned my copy of Rockwell's
Giving Voice to Bear
to Donald, who in turn loaned it to a friend, who consequently lost the book when he moved to Thunder Bay up on the north shore of Lake Superior. Donald was upset about the lost book, which dealt with various American Indian tribal attitudes toward the bear. I assured Donald that I could find another copy but I never had mostly because I felt more comfortable with a purely scientific approach to the mammal. Donald teased me about this once when we were brook trout fishing and on our long walk into the beaver pond stopped so he could inspect a large oak tree that had been blasted by lightning. These are meaningful spots to the Anishinabeg, places where the gods have touched the earth directly. Donald had noted my lack of real interest and said, “You think a bear is just a bear.”

At the cabin I sat on my creaky porch swing wishing that Clare and K were already there so I wouldn't have to deal with these scattered thoughts of bears, death, and lightning trees. The oak had been large and its upper half had been shattered into scorched splinters, the green wood too damp to burn for long. I tried to decide if it would have been
good to be there when it happened as sort of an aimless Moses to whom a burning bush was only a burning bush.

I went into the cabin and poured myself a rare midday whiskey thinking it might allow me to take a nap after which my perspective would be changed. A few days before on the back porch of our house in Marquette I had been having a drink with Cynthia and Polly and had become irritated at their matter-of-fact confidence about absolutely everything that was passing through their minds. Cynthia started my eventual disintegration.

“I was thinking when I got up this morning that how can death be bad when it's happened to every single living creature and plant since the beginning of the earth? I said this through the door to Clare's room but she didn't answer. Instead she turned up the volume of a Schumann record. On the way downstairs I remembered reading that Schumann died in an asylum at age forty-two.” While Cynthia spoke she watched with amusement at the way I gulped my highball.

“I know what you mean,” Polly said. “When I was at Iron Mountain last week I helped a nurse bathe my dad. All the time I was growing up he made sure I never saw his bare crippled legs. Anyway when I rubbed his legs with a warm washcloth I thought, 'Those can't even be called legs.' I wondered if his life had been worth it in ordinary terms. It was nearly forty years since his legs had been mangled in the mining accident. The question was whether his life was worth it?”

“Did you even ask him?” I questioned stupidly.

“That's not the kind of question you ask your dad. When I was in high school a friend drove him home from the union
hall and the both of them were truly drunk. Well, Dad fell down in the yard and wouldn't move and his friend had fallen asleep in the car. Dad was still pretty big then and Mom and me couldn't move him. It was a cool May night and Mother was afraid it might rain. She took the oilcloth from the kitchen table and spread it out on the grass and we rolled Dad over onto it so he wouldn't get damp. We covered him with a few blankets and a piece of canvas tarp. At first light Mom went off to work and out the window I saw her standing there in the light rain with her lunch bucket looking down at her sleeping husband. A little while later I heard him yelling for coffee so I took out a thermos and cup. He was staring up into the crab-apple tree, which was full of birds, and he said, ‘These goddamned birds woke me up' but I could see he was very happy. After that he took to sleeping outside quite a bit.”

“That doesn't seem like much to carry a person.” I sipped at my ice toting up life's balance on my imaginary board.

“Oh for Christ's sake, David. Go listen to your Coast Guard weather report so that you can say something sensible like ‘It's windy' or ‘It's cold' or something solid. Where are you today, anyway? I mean for Christ's sake you've never learned small measures. A hungover cripple wakes up under a crab-apple tree and smiles at birds. Go sleep under a crabapple tree.” Cynthia was pissed.

Of course she was partly right. I had spent basically twenty years thinking and come up with a fifteen-page undistinguished essay. Now dozing on the porch swing with its homely creak the sound of which irritates a local downy
woodpecker I am obsessed with how fragile art, literature, love, and music, even the natural world are in the presence of severe illness and inevitable death. Four months after Donald's passing we're still staring off into the middle distance even when we're facing a wall three feet away. Five years ago my life was saved by finding a dead man under a manzanita bush, and a week later seeing a photo of a dead girl, her face covered with large sun blisters. But I didn't know and love them.

When I awake Clare and K are standing in front of me in their silly-looking camouflage suits. Clare looks thin but is smiling and K is drinking a beer. This is my last day at the cabin and it's passing quickly what with mid-October sunlight being so flimsy this far north.

“I found a car for you. It's a used Subaru four-wheel drive, five years old but with only forty thousand miles on it. It's pretty ugly and needs a paint job but I know that's not what you want. A mechanic friend checked it out and says it's aces.”

“Thanks. I'm glad you're here partly because I'm hungry. Cynthia said you're bringing food.”

“It's only four-thirty and we walked our asses off. I want a shower and then a margarita at the bar.”

Clare began stripping her clothes off on the way into the cabin. K looked a bit haggard, perhaps from the effort of trying to bring equilibrium to Clare. I was looking at him trying to think of something helpful to say in Clare's absence but then he disappeared behind the memory of a dream I
had been having on the porch swing. The dream was chaotic but began with milk cows and numbers. Around the turn of the century, say from 1890 to 1910, when mine disasters were at their worst in terms of fatality numbers, the victims' families in company housing were welcome to stay in the housing but only for a month. For this time the families continued to have the use of a milk cow. I had seen old photos of these often gaunt milk cows in rocky pastures near the company row houses and women on stools milking the cows into buckets often with children watching. For a moment in the dream I thought I saw Cynthia on a stool but the woman more closely resembled my mother. Then numbers began to appear in the landscape. Numbers often marred my interesting dreams but in this case Donald was number one but the number was blurred. This was an area where in three major mines nearly two thousand men had died in a twenty-year period. In the dream I finally understood that death and numbers don't cohere. Everyone is “one.” An accident report might say that nine died, four of them in their teens, but each death was “one.” Each of six million Jews was “one.” With death it is a series of “ones.”

I came back to ordinary consciousness when K jumped up on the porch, an upward leap of four feet and thus beyond my immediate comprehension. He showed me a letter he and Clare had received from Fred at his Hawaii Zendo, which mostly described Fred's difficulties growing exotic fruits like pomegranates and figs. This immediately made me homesick for Mexico, where at a roadside stand in the province of Veracruz Vernice and I had bought thirty-two kinds of fruit. Fred concluded the letter by saying about
Donald, “I never knew anyone who so thoroughly was what he was.”

K and I tried to pin this statement down into a sensible framework but then Clare came out on the porch from her shower. When I'm with K he often drives and I sit in the back seat and regularly this position causes different perceptions and emotions. Cynthia says this is because I know so few people that I rarely get to sit in a back seat. It worked better when I picked up Vernice at the Guadalajara airport a few years ago. After a fine night in a fancy hotel where we had a room service dinner on a balcony and could hear acoustic guitar music from a club below us we set out early in the morning toward Zihuatanejo with me at the wheel thinking about nights of music, love, and laughter.

“If we're heading southwest toward the coast why are we driving into the sun?” Vernice had asked quite irritably. She was quite intense over seeing the Pacific Ocean for the first time.

I had stopped on the road's shoulder and mapwork revealed I had made a wrong turn an hour before, which made Vernice even more irritable. I got in the back seat of the spiffy rental car after a little quarrel and fell promptly asleep, a habit started early when my parents quarreled loudly and I'd take to my room for a nap while Cynthia would head out the back-porch door. Anyway, I didn't wake up until four hours later, at noon, whereupon Vernice told me I had missed some gorgeous mountainous landscapes.