True North

  I was distressed when Clarence came out of the work shed and Jesse came down from his apartment above and neither made a pleasant commotion about my new rowboat. Clarence’s eyes were red rimmed and Jesse was somber. I felt my heart thump assuming someone dear to us had died but instead it was a dire family crisis, what my father after several martinis liked to call a shit monsoon. Mother had gone off to a normally daylong bridge game but then felt oncoming sniffles and returned home early to discover Cynthia and Clarence’s son Donald making love on the living room carpet. Mother had fainted and Cynthia hadn’t called the doctor. My father, mother, and Cynthia were waiting for me in order to start a family conference. My father had even gotten the state police to look for me in Grand Marais. My mother was insisting that Clarence should be fired. Jesse explained all of this while Clarence looked at me imploringly. He had worked for the family since just after World War II. The imploring look grieved me and instead of stumbling toward the house I strode. Cynthia was in the kitchen making a batch of lemonade for the meeting. She rolled her eyes, grinned, and gave me the thumbs up. Her smile irritated me slightly though I quickly admitted to myself that she was the master of difficult situations. She whispered, “If they fire Clarence we both leave.” I nodded in agreement.

  My father sat at the head of the dining room table with his chin in his hands, his elbows firmly set, his eyes half closed as if almost irretrievably lost in thought. Cynthia and I referred to this as his “Wise Old Owl” position which he assumed during the rare family conferences, a function that a therapist in Chicago had recommended to my father who, we sensed, rather liked the drama of it all. My mother sat beside him playing with several handkerchiefs, her face tilted, trying to manage the appearance of a mother in a war-torn country looking for her children.

  “I was called away from an important board meeting at the bank to deal with this,” my father began but with insufficient conviction to trap us.

  “If you fire Clarence we’re both leaving,” Cynthia said flatly.

  “Cynthia!” mother said in a thin sob with a tinge of the Judy Garland diction that told us the doctor had sedated her. Both she and my father looked at Cynthia as if totally unprepared.

  “Clarence is no more at fault for his son’s behavior that you are for Cynthia’s,” I said judiciously.

  Cynthia glared at me with fake hate and flounced from the room. I got up and stood between my parents, hugging each with an arm in commiseration for the monster daughter they had to deal with. They slumped against me and my father actually asked, “O God, where have we failed?” with a tinge of radio baritone. I stood there proudly feeling that any compromise was worthy if it saved Clarence his job. Cynthia returned with a tray of lemonade and when my father said, “You’re not to see that young man again,” she gave off a high trilling laugh.

  4

  It was another two years before my family achieved complete disintegration. Unfortunately my stance at the family meeting made my parents ignore Cynthia and concentrate on me as a possibly fair-haired boy which Cynthia thought quite funny.

  The effort and aftereffects were worth it when I immediately returned to the work shed and told Clarence that there was no problem. He slumped to the sofa and Jesse leaned on the workbench soiling the elbows of his always impeccably white shirt. At that moment Laurie came up the back sidewalk wearing a new, extremely brief bikini, waved to us through the window, and Jesse said “Caramba” in relief. Clarence ignored Laurie, shook my hand, and said, “Thank you. I know it was you.” My ears tingled in embarrassment and then finally we went outside to inspect and admire the rowboat. Since Jesse was from the coastal city of Veracruz and knew his boats he was a little critical pronouncing the rowboat “more than serviceable,” an expression he got from my father, whereas Clarence thought the boat wonderful. True old “Yoopers” (citizens of the U.P.) like Clarence aren’t big on details. Much of the local workmanship is a bit hurried with the shortness of good weather and the winter often seven months long with high below-zero winds off Lake Superior, and the snowfall regularly exceeding two hundred and fifty inches, a lot for a sea-level city. Some of the big houses were built with imported labor. I had been told that the workman for our own home had been brought by my greatgrandfather from Sussex in England. One of the Longyears had liked her home so well she had had it moved stone by stone from Marquette to Brookline, Massachusetts, at considerable expense.

  Jesse was summoned by a buzzer and a half hour later while Clarence was still discussing the position of the oarlocks my father came out to say good-bye. He and mother had decided to go up to the Club a week early, I supposed to avoid Cynthia but he said Jesse wanted to start his summer vacation early. I was always curious about my father’s propensity to fib even when nothing was at stake. He glanced over at Cynthia and Laurie in the corner of the yard and shrugged. I dutifully went inside to say good-bye to my mother who scarcely noticed me in her sedative haze. She was flapping around giving old Mrs. Plunkett elaborate instructions on how to take care of us and the house. She pointed at an empty windowsill and said, “Water the flowers.” Mrs. Plunkett was the maiden aunt of one of Mother’s bridge partners and hailed originally from Iron Mountain, where there’s a large Italian population. We loved Mrs. Plunkett because she was daffy and cooked us Italian food which was a delicious and startling contrast to the anemic WASP food my mother fixed. Mrs. Plunkett watched television, played solitaire, sipped at cheap jug red wine that Clarence kept her supplied with, and cooked. My mother never allowed pizza, catsup, or garlic in our house but everything was possible with Mrs. Plunkett, including supplies sent via United Parcel Service from Iron Mountain. A full day before my parents would return all the doors and windows of the house would be opened and Cynthia and I would help Mrs. Plunkett by spraying down the house with room deodorizer to banish the smell of dangerous food and condiments.

  Clarence and I took the rowboat out to the Dead Stream for its local launch. It was too early in the afternoon for serious fishing. This far north there’s still a trace of light at eleven o’clock and the last hour before dark was always the best for trout. Clarence said a striking thing about rowing that I’ve always valued, the upshot of which was that he liked rowing because you were approaching life backward. You could clearly see the past, and you glanced quickly at the future over your shoulder mostly so you wouldn’t run into anything destructively immovable. Too much of the future was predestined by the behavior of others for you to be in control. The most you could hope for is to be ready and attentive. These aren’t Clarence’s exact words. Like many mixed-blood Natives I’ve known Clarence spoke slowly and drew word pictures out of what was at hand: birds, water, weather, shapes of clouds, trees, the comic behavior of people. “Just like today,” he said. “At noon I was fired, gut shot by my son who’s stuck wings to his dick. He doesn’t fight like I did at his age but he thinks there’s a whole world out there to fuck like a buck with a dozen does. Then about two o’clock you got me my job back.” This took about a half hour and a mile of rowing to say and he laughed about his son because what we can’t control is often comic. Luckily we caught two decent-sized brook trout. Mrs. Plunkett was very fond of trout and would clasp her hands and look upward as if in prayer when I brought home trout. She would eat a small portion of spaghetti or lasagna, then turn to her sautéed trout. She cooked many kinds of spaghetti, all of them previously unknown to us.

  When I got home from rowing with Clarence I drove Jesse with his single suitcase out to the airport for his flight to Chicago, thence to Mexico City, and a short flight in the morning to Veracruz. When I dropped him off I wanted desperately to go along and had been asking him for years without knowing I was being insensitive. Simply enough, he deserved to get away from all members of our family.

  Another front came through with two days of wet cold weather. I spent them at the Peter White Library, canceling a fishing campout with Glenn which would have meant trying to start fires with wet wood and drinking beer in
a cold moldy tent.

  Of course I didn’t know where to begin at the library and Mrs. Mueller (the assistant librarian I knew vaguely) at first thought I was interested in genealogy. I said I wanted to know precisely what my ancestors had done in the Upper Peninsula and she joked that it would take me a couple of years. There was a lot of material in locked bookcases in my father’s den but then I didn’t want to snoop around looking for a key for fear of finding more of the pornography I had seen years before when I was ten of so. Of course I also didn’t tell Mrs. Mueller about my secret mission to discover the sources of evil. I mostly read background stuff about mining and the timber industry in the nineteenth century and looked out the windows at the rain, and imagined my father with his cronies from Cleveland and Chicago up at the Club sitting around the lodge fireplace drinking and belittling in virulent terms Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society project. Mrs. Mueller was fairly stocky with flaccid arms but I still felt a buzz when she brought books and articles to my desk because her peculiar flowery perfume was similar to the scent Laurie—who had been spending a lot of time at our house in my parents’ absence—wore and emerged from her skin when she and Cynthia danced to Beatles tunes on the oak floor of the dining room. To please Mrs. Plunkett I’d play gin rummy with her for a while in the evening, positioning myself so I could see Laurie dance which though it enervated me was worth the bother.

  On the second rainy morning at the library I was in a storage room with Mrs. Mueller. She was trying to find follow-up material on an aborted court case dealing with the State of Michigan against my great-grandfather who had timbered twelve thousand acres near Ontonagon that he didn’t own. The state’s prime witness had disappeared, reemerging years later as a streetcar conductor in Chicago. I was propping up Mrs. Mueller who stood on a shelf about three feet up and was digging through a file carton on a higher shelf. When I helped her down she slid through my arms and my hands paused an extra split second on her ample, flubbery breast. She didn’t try to wriggle free. “It would be fun but it’s out of the question,” she said. Her hand dropped and she gave my penis a twitch and laughed. Evidently I said, “I’m sorry,” but I couldn’t hear my own voice. “Don’t be sorry. It’s just normal,” she said, hurrying through the door of the storeroom. Looking back there’s something preposterous about the amount of sexual desire in a sixteen-year-old. There I was trying to research evil with a very hard dick for a burly married librarian with three children, as far as you could get from the girls I had carefully studied on the pages of Cynthia’s Seventeen magazine. This lust was all down there on the level of a joke I had overheard one of my father’s cronies tell about an old logger whose girlfriend was a milk bottle full of pork liver. The change in me was that unlike a few weeks before I didn’t pray to God that he would remove my lust. I hadn’t given up on God and Jesus but had abandoned the idea that divine force was likely to banish my desire.

  The rain disappeared and early on the third morning Mrs. Plunkett knocked on my bedroom door to say that my uncle Fred was on the phone. I put on a robe to conceal the usual erection and trotted downstairs. In the mid-sixties it hadn’t yet occurred to people to put a phone in every room though Cynthia had had one installed in her own room with her own money against my parents’ wishes.

  “Come and get me. I’ve been rode hard and put away wet,” Fred nearly shouted.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means I’m a tired, physically abused horse. Or pony.”

  I started to pack immediately but then Cynthia caught me in the kitchen and decided she and Laurie would come along. I said no because I was taking Fred’s pickup and the boat and there wouldn’t be room for all of us in the pickup cab on the way home. After two days of cold rain and library work I desperately wanted to row my boat on Au Sable Lake if only for an hour or so. Laurie, who had slept over, came into the kitchen in her nightie and I naturally altered my decision. Cynthia noted this change of heart with her patented crazy little laugh. Laurie’s oldest brother was in the air force in Mississippi and had sent her a number of blues records that they had played late into the night so when I prayed on the cold air register I was hearing music from people who deserved to pray. Since my recent religious waffling I had stopped praying for the salvation of my parents which seemed as unlikely as my lust suddenly taking a powder. I mused on this and some troublesome dreams at the glass-topped breakfast table where Laurie ate her oatmeal and fruit with energy, and through which I could see her tan legs and her spare hand when she gave the inside of a thigh a scratch. She was a superb swimmer and tennis player, cheerleader, courted by our best athletes, but tormented by her freckles. Usually she treated me as if I didn’t exist, or was merely a piece of furniture to walk around. She chewed her nails constantly and did poorly in her studies, and smoked as much marijuana as she could get her hands on though it was of poor quality and known as “Indiana Red.” She had extended fits of depression and took the same pills, downers, that the same doctor had prescribed to me for the same reasons only I threw mine away and Laurie took hers which made her mumble disconnectedly at times like my mother. Cynthia returned to the kitchen and told Laurie that I was looking at her legs. Laurie spread them and stuck out her tongue. I told her not to worry, that I wouldn’t fuck her at gunpoint, a sentence so uncharacteristic of me that they were both startled. I was tempted to walk out of the kitchen like John Wayne but in truth I was far closer to Montgomery Clift. In the Upper Peninsula you would be far better off imitating John Wayne but I suspect that Montgomery Clift wasn’t that way because he wished to be. Marquette, in any event, wasn’t the kind of place where a young man would want his classmates to know that he needed pills to get through the day. Pills and any other kind of drug were okay for the students from Northern Michigan College (now a university) but then many of them were from southern Michigan below the straits of Mackinac and we supposed that if you lived in Detroit you needed to be narcotized.

  Out by the work shed where the pickup was parked Clarence was concerned that I was taking along Cynthia and Laurie but I said that we would be back by evening. Standing there petting my rowboat as if it were a dog I drifted off into a near trance wherein my sight became more intense and utterly vivid so that all of the various flower beds Clarence had planted became uncomfortably lurid. I could hear the girls singing from an upstairs window and it seemed I could see the sound drifting into the heavy clumps of lilacs. I scuffed the dirt with a boot toe and unearthed a penny from 1903. The penny was incomprehensible. I looked up at scudding and whispy clouds and I had the feeling I was seeing too far in space. I made an effort to draw back from this strangeness by staring at the girls as they came out of the screened back porch but they didn’t help when they broke into dance steps similar to those used by black music groups. A lump formed beneath my breastbone and I felt a desperate urge to be ordinary. Clarence patted my shoulder as if to awaken me. I was frightened when I turned the key in the truck’s ignition. The expression “to lose your mind” haunted me and I wondered that if I got out of the truck and lay facedown on the grass I might recover my equilibrium. Laurie was beside me and Cynthia said, “Let’s count our money.” We had ninety-one dollars between the three of us and this counting helped.

  The girls sang Beach Boys tunes on the entire two-hour trip. I was upset when we reached Fred’s cabin on the hill and Donald was waiting there in his old blue Chevy. It was a setup and I said, “Goddamn you, Cynthia,” then my stomach felt stricken because I had used the Lord’s name in vain for the first time in memory. Cynthia and Donald took off and Laurie and I stood there for a few minutes watching a group of ravens quarreling up in a tree which diverted me from my anger at Cynthia. Laurie said she was going to check and see if the harbor on Lake Superior was warm enough to swim and headed down the hill.

  I knocked before entering Fred’s cabin not wanting anymore surprises, but Robin wasn’t there. Fred looked bleak and exhausted sitting at the table drinking coffee and reading a boo
k. The cabin was in disarray with four pork chops congealed in a pan on the stove and a grand collection of beer cans and bottles spilling out of a garbage bag.

  “Don’t mix drugs, alcohol, and younger women,” Fred said in mocking imitation of a sage.

  “I don’t feel I’m in danger.” I poured myself a cup of coffee, squinching my nose at the odors of stale beer, sweat, perfume, an ashtray full of marijuana roaches. I should have known my timing was off but I stood there and poured forth my lack of progress in my mission to find the roots of evil in my family, also my recent religious doubts. It was immediately apparent that not only was Fred not listening carefully but he obviously didn’t recall his part in the inception of my mission. This put me in the emotional framework of my early childhood when my father would promise to take me sailing, fishing, or hunting but never did. Fred waved a book at me, an historical study of black Indians that he had been reading down in Ohio when we were building the rowboat. He began talking about the book but my head was heated by embarrassment and I couldn’t quite hear. I suddenly felt quite alone on earth when I thought I had a firm ally. Gradually I could hear Fred talking about black and Native intermarriages in southern history, and then it occurred to me that Fred wished he was a black Indian rather than what he was. He put his head on his arms on the table, spilling his coffee, which had been mixed with whiskey. And then be began to snore.