True North

  One June Sunday morning through the stained window above the workbench while we were talking about where we might fish in the evening and had decided on the Yellow Dog we saw my father walk across the yard and approach Cynthia who was now doing calisthenics in a bathing suit which the prig in me thought far too brief for Sunday morning. He must have said something truly awful because Cynthia grabbed a large wooden stake that propped up a rose trellis and swung it at Father hitting him in the chest, hip, and knee before he could retreat to the back porch where Jesse was standing on the steps. Father was hobbling but Jesse made no move to help him. I made a move toward the work shed door but Clarence grabbed my arm. Jesse brushed off my father’s pant leg where the dirty end of the garden stake had soiled them. I looked back at Cynthia who was now reading a magazine as if nothing had happened. She was fourteen at the time, ruled her own world, and kept her bedroom door locked.

  I went out the back door of the work shed and down the alley to the street where Jesse now stood by the old Packard waiting to drive my parents to church. I told him I was going to hitchhike or take the Greyhound down to Ohio while my parents were at church. When something went wrong with my family I always fled for a week or so. Jesse’s real name was Jesus Tomás Sandoval but the people around Marquette couldn’t accept the occasional Mexican custom of naming a son Jesus so he was called Jesse by everyone except my father, who called him Sandy, a private joke that had never been explained to me. They had met at basic training for World War II near Houston and where Jesse had come north from Veracruz when he found out you could earn citizenship by fighting for the United States. They fought together, I think at Corregidor and the Philippines under MacArthur, and my father had quite literally bought Jesse’s life what with his becoming a faithful manservant, “amanuensis,” bookkeeper, valet, travel agent, and whatever to my father. Jesse was efficient rather than subservient while my father’s appearance was such that if you saw him in a bank or airport you’d think there’s a man who knows what he’s doing, always well groomed and tailored, checking his watch as if time was of consequence, a shell actually on which the culture had slowly painted all of the characteristics of a WASP cock of the walk, an alpha white male, while inside there was only a decayed question mark, a living grave soaked with booze and desires so errant that all but a few people wished to run from him.

  I told Jesse my intentions only because I didn’t want my mother to launch a search party, or sit there in her nest in the breakfast nook in the kitchen with the table stacked with books of reassurance, from theosophy to the further reaches of domestic double-talk.

  Jesse was faithful to my father and I don’t recall a single word of criticism to anyone else though once I was in the basement and could hear a conversation in the den up a furnace vent, and then Jesse was brisk and trenchant trying to reason with him.

  I was simply going to head down the street but Jesse reminded me that I was wearing my Sunday suit. I was confused of course. Seeing your sister beat on your father with a club is an uncommon experience. I thanked him and shook hands good-bye in case I didn’t return before he left on vacation. Every year I could remember Jesse went home for the months of July and December to Veracruz where he had a wife and a daughter. It was less a vacation than a stipulation for his continuing services. Jesse had relatives that grew coffee up near Jalapa north of the city of Veracruz but still in the province. My father would complain about his departures, actually whine because he was quite lost without Jesse and disliked Clarence as a driver because he drove so slowly. My father had accumulated a number of drunken driving tickets and the family name and political influence couldn’t get his license back after he passed a dozen violations. The complaints were meaningless anyway because my parents spent most of the summer at an old-money club about fifty miles north of Marquette and December took them to Florida. It’s odd but I’ve never been able to refer to my father as anything but “Father” while my childhood friends had actual “Dads,” many of them quite wonderful, though Fred has often reminded me that in Clarence and Jesse I had dads who were better than most anyone had. The biological collision of parenthood meant nothing to him, even though his sister was half the quotient.

  Back to the lake which I couldn’t find though I’m fairly good in the woods, especially so when I was sixteen and overconscious of where I was headed. That morning, however, I had mostly thrashed through the underbrush in an enraged state. Fred had said despite my religious beliefs which I thought profound that I was no better than my father whom I loathed, and deserved loathing, or better than my daffy mother about whom I was beginning to have doubts. For instance Cynthia and Father would carry on these brittle, acerbic conversations when my mother was down in Chicago three or four days a month to get a physical condition she called “phantom pain” corrected. My father and I believed in the reality of this infirmity probably because it was suggestive of our own mental ills. Cynthia, however, had told me that the doctor mother was seeing had been a friend of hers when she was at Stephens College and he was a poor kid at the University of Missouri. I couldn’t accept this though I didn’t inquire how Cynthia knew it to be true. Cynthia merely asked that if you were married to Dad (she called him that) wouldn’t you seek outside comfort? A young man can accept a father’s unfaithfulness but a mother’s is definitely in a much higher category of pain, but then Cynthia added that she didn’t mean that they were necessarily sleeping together. She said that my helpless young male imagination construed any male-female relationships as sexual. That Sunday morning when I went back into the house to get out of my suit, nodding to my parents as they came down the steps to go to church with my father still limping from his daughter’s assault, I packed a small bag and then went out in the yard to say good-bye to Cynthia who had been joined by her friend Laurie. I simply couldn’t understand how she could do what she had done and not feel confused and remorseful. Not a chance. They were singing Beatles songs then laughed at me because I always reddened when Laurie was in her bathing suit, a two-piece flesh-colored suit only slightly less daring than a bikini. I stared off at the lilacs and Cynthia said, “Don’t feel badly. You didn’t do anything. Dad should be locked in a zoo.” And that was that to a fourteen-year-old girl who tried hard to make her brother as tough as she was. Far later when I was a graduate student in theology in Chicago taking a course in Oriental religions I read a Japanese twelfth-century philosopher who said, “No changing reality to suit the self.” Cynthia, Clarence, and Jesse were experts at reality while mother, father, and myself were tormented speculators in the area of self-deceit and Fred was a tightrope walker between the two worlds.

  By noon I had reached a steep hillside from which I finally could get a firm sense of my location. I had climbed several trees in the lowlands but couldn’t get high enough to see anything more than other trees and I hadn’t paid enough attention to the position of the sun when I was first lost to have it be of help. Now I could see miles to the north to the beige and lumpy outlines of the dunes that abut Lake Superior, all too many heartless miles away. My bug repellent was in a kit in the rowboat and my face was so swollen by mosquitoes, blackflies, and deerflies I could see only in a squint. My mouth was dry as dust and my stomach rattled with hunger. I had smeared my face and bare arms with swamp muck which helped with noxious insects. Blackflies, however, had made their way well up my pant legs. The mud poultice had been shown to me by Clarence one evening when we were fishing the Yellow Dog and had forgotten our insect repellent. We built a smudge fire and fried some trout. Clarence always packed along bread, salt, an iron skillet, and a baby-food jar of bacon grease. I can’t say Clarence was wise in any orthodox sense. At one time he was a famous bar fighter in the Upper Peninsula but one day his wife took the two children and went back to her parents’ home near Ontonagon. Clarence decided to kill himself and jumped off the pier with a cement block tied to a leg but down on the lake’s bottom while running out of breath it occurred to him all he needed to do was quit drink
ing, not kill himself. My father who used to bet on Clarence’s more organized fights with his equally despicable cronies hired Clarence when I was about five years old and soon after that I was taught to fish. Around the smudge fire on the Yellow Dog I heard the only story with which I could directly connect Clarence with religion. When he was in the Korean War and it was January several of his friends had lost toes to frostbite and Clarence began to worry about his own. One dawn after he pulled the boots off a crying soldier friend and some toes came with the boot he shot a “gook” running out of a hut. Clarence took off his own boots, slit open the dead man’s stomach, and stuck his feet among the warm guts until they began to cool. He still lost the little toe on his left foot which he saved for his medicine bag. The problem was that the Chippewa are expected to have respect for the dead so years later Clarence was still worried about the method with which he had saved his toes. It was especially hard after shooting and gutting a deer. He told me that since he was half Finn he thought it was the Finn in him that forced him to save his toes. It was ten minutes sitting there around the fire before it occurred to me that I was supposed to make a judgment. It was a strain but I said I had heard that it was hard to walk well without toes and perhaps that Clarence’s gods knew how badly he would need to walk in the future. After the night of struggling with the knot in the black cold water and nearly drowning Clarence would take off walking for hours in the woods when he felt he had to have a drink. Later in a theology class I brought up Clarence’s religious questions but my fellow divinity students found them repellent.

  After I had rested on the hill for a half hour Fred’s surly cur No showed up and began growling and barking at me. Fred’s canteen was wrapped around the dog’s neck and I detached it after a struggle laughing to think that the dog owned some of my sister’s character. It was after I drank the water that I realized what Fred probably meant about the failure of religion. He knew I went to the Baptist church in part to piss off my parents. He didn’t know that I had read the New Testament a dozen times because I hadn’t been brought up to read it. Fred was more interested in the long-term socioeconomic aspects of Christianity and lacked confidence in such basic matters as the Resurrection which I believed in irrationally because I had lost faith in rationality.

  All the way following the dog back to the lake I felt lightheaded, even amused by the blisters on my feet. When I fell behind the obnoxious dog would bark and wait for me, stopping where I had peed in the morning and giving me a knowing look. Maybe I’m only an animal in human clothes, I thought. Only a month before when Laurie was sleeping over Cynthia had teased her into opening my bedroom door and mooning me. I knew they had been drinking beer and smoking pot. This was the sixties and marijuana had made its way into all the nether regions of America. I was sitting at my desk reading C. S. Lewis, the door opened, and there was Laurie’s bent-over nude butt. Then she was gone. I virtually swooned like a Victorian lady. When I said my long nightly prayers I was unable to dismiss the image of Laurie’s butt. Most of me viewed her butt as satanic but when I told Fred while we were building the row-boat in Ohio he laughed and said a butt can be lovely but not satanic. I was already having trouble with my Baptist minister who startled me by disapproving of C. S. Lewis, also Mozart who had helped so much in lifting me out of depression.

  It was years before the full comic volume of that day reached me. It was five in the afternoon before the dog and I reached the point on the shore where I had leaped from the boat. I was crestfallen when Fred wasn’t there but then I heard him hollering from the dock at the launch site a half mile up the lake. I waved and the dog took off, and then I floundered into the lake rinsing off my mud-caked body before I noticed that Fred had left the rowboat behind for me.

  At the campsite Fred joked that an eight-hour walk had been good for my health. He fed me three hot dogs and a can of warmed-up beans, then bathed my blistered feet in hydrogen peroxide. In defiance of my vows to be unlike my father I drank a bottle of beer. I fell asleep and awoke weeping from a bad dream at midnight. Fred stoked the campfire and made coffee. I was embarrassed over my tears and hobbled down to the dock and watched the moonlight glistening on the placid water. In my dream Laurie was thin, red-eyed, and bald, obviously terribly ill (ten years later when I visited her in the Marquette hospital where she was dying of breast cancer she looked similar and I remembered the dream). I composed myself, a state that lasted at best no more than a few minutes, then walked back to the fire, turning to see that the dog who had followed me was still on the dock and apparently staring at the moon, a possible metaphor for man’s relationship to God, or so I thought at the time. I mentioned this to Fred who said, “That’s pretty good.” I asked Fred if he thought that I was a prig and he answered “probably” which destroyed my short-lived composure. “Prig” is what Cynthia called me the day after I confronted her about teasing Laurie into her errant behavior. The word “prig” wasn’t used in the U.P. but then Cynthia read a lot, especially long nineteenth-century English novels by George Eliot, Jane Austen, and the Brontës that I didn’t care for. Cynthia had said, “I’m tired of having a prig for a brother. All you do is read and mope around disapproving of the world.” It had truly pained me to discover that at age fourteen Cynthia was no longer a virgin. Neither was Laurie for that matter. They had selected two boys, one of them Clarence’s son, Donald, who was a bright but tough athlete who affected insensitivity in public but in private—we had grown up together—was a wonderful companion.

  I sat there by the fire trying to listen to Fred, who poured whiskey in his coffee, rail on about the treachery of governments, the chicanery of the Catholics, the sodden stupidity of the Protestants, but I wasn’t listening. I was trying to figure out how not to be a prig, how to stop thinking about myself, how to enter real life, the dimensions and specifics of which 1 had no idea. I kept thinking of a quote in the nightmarishly confusing Book of Revelation that ended the New Testament that said, “I would that you were either hot or cold because if you are lukewarm I will utterly cast you out.” A prig was lukewarm for sure.

  Over thirty years later while recapturing all of this I become again a tenuous and hormonal prig somewhat frightened of the night, Fred’s dog, the glitter of the moon on the water, the power of Laurie’s bottom jutting in the door, the madness of girls, the Book of Revelations, my drunken and perverse father, my mother so densely surrounding herself with fluff that she was a ghost, how sometimes I prayed on the hardwood floor on my knees for the clarity of pain. This far away I seem to have exhausted all my fears though 1 can re-create them.

  “Where are you?” Fred asked, bringing me out of my reverie. “There’s a sure way to stop being a prig. Just figure out what’s wrong with your family and avoid doing likewise. That doesn’t mean doing nothing. That doesn’t mean walking around with your head up your ass.”

  There was an immediate visual image of a man trying to get his head out of his own ass. Fred was close to drunk but that didn’t keep me from taking him seriously. It was the first truly important night of my life. Despite my aching bones and blistered feet I sensed a possibility of strength, of a mission that drew solace and the chance of success or victory from the fire, from the dog, from my fellow human Fred, the night, the bright moon and stars, even the owl we were hearing intermittently. This sounds vaguely absurd now but then so many changes in the direction of our lives come as a result of accidents, happenstances, the slightest pushes in any direction, and on the more negative side the girl you met at a gathering you didn’t want to attend who infected your life to the extent that the scar tissue will follow you into old age.

  2

  We woke at midmorning not having turned in until dawn when Fred tipped over backward asleep and I rolled him into his sleeping bag and spread insect repellent on his face.

  “Don’t believe anything I said last night,” to which he added, “What was the last thing I said last night?”

  “You said that I couldn’t comprehend what
was good until I comprehended what was bad.” I wanted to take a walk but looked in despair at my blistered feet.

  “Disregard that. It might be true but it’s dangerous.”

  I had heard rumors that one of the matters that had displeased Fred’s parishioners had been his excessive interest in black culture, including an affair with a prostitute which made his wife cut and run after only three years of marriage. Fred had told me a number of times that he was sick of white language and could “no longer operate on that level of discourse,” a matter of which took me years to understand.

  We gave up our heavy talk and spent two days rowing. In my own life strength has come from unfolding, subtracting, rather than adding. We simply took turns rowing the new boat. I didn’t have a fly rod along which robbed me of the chance to show off my expertise to Fred, and also to myself, a skill often becoming a trifling and dishonest thing (Clarence always teased me about making long casts when short ones for were called for —he’d say “stop fishing with your dick”). Fred had a battered spinning rod and we trolled enough to catch a few bass and pike to eat. On the two overwarm afternoons we hiked out on the massive Grand Sable Dunes having discovered that the insects were averse to this sandy terrain. It was hard walking but there were shaded sandbanks of blooming wild sweet pea and sea rose, and wild strawberries which we’d eat despite the sand embedded in them. On the highest edges of the dunes you could sit and simply stare down at the icy clarity of Lake Superior, or look far out to sea and note passing ore freighters. The ore freighters irritated Fred because that was the business his and my mother’s father was occupied in to the point that Fred claimed he and my mother were but an afterthought in their life in Lake Forest just north of Chicago. I tried to tease him about the freighters saying “I thought we were supposed to meet this head on.”