True North

  I finished the beer and said good-night. My father smiled.

  “Tell the young lady to trim her nails.”

  “Pardon,” I said but he was pointing at my shoulders. There was a little blood coming through my shirt on both shoulders from Laurie’s fingernails tightly holding on. I was too embarrassed to say anything. Maybe he thinks I’m like him, I thought.

  8

  It’s hard to admit cowardice even when you’re trying to be completely honest. I mean that however young I was at seventeen I liked to think of myself as a man and this experience turned me back into a boy for a single night. A few days after my falling out with Glenn I drove over to Ontonagon one afternoon to see the property Sprague had willed me. I was alarmed at the outset because within the severity of my depression I seemed to have tunnel vision and driving west on Route 28 in early May I was unable to enjoy the first pastel greens of spring. It was similar to driving through the kind of large pipe they use to construct water mains. My breath was periodically short and I couldn’t swallow properly as if there were a lump of coal beneath my breastbone I would never be able to dislodge.

  When I neared the cabin there were still patches of snow in the woods which were stark and bare with few signs of spring this close to cold Lake Superior. I unpacked my stuff and was surprised how cold the cabin was. In my haste I had brought along two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches which I didn’t ordinarily like and a can of sardines and crackers, but had forgotten anything to drink. I didn’t have a container for water so I went down to the beach and knelt drinking directly from the lake which was flat and slate gray in the twilight, eerily calm. In my haste I had forgotten a flashlight so I quickly gathered pine-twig kindling and deadfall branches to build a fire among a jumble of rocks in front of the cabin. I also cleared out a fairly even place near the fire and put down my sleeping bag. I had also forgotten a pillow but could use my duffel bag. It was too late to start fishing, especially without a flashlight. I tried to figure out why someone had left a pickax leaning against the front steps of the cabin. There had been tracks on the road coming in and someone had known the combination for the gate lock. I was a bit spooked and began to think about how black bears fresh out of hibernation occasionally but rarely kill and eat people, or so I had heard from Clarence who had told me how a drunken Indian had fallen asleep and been eaten near the Soo. I felt embarrassed when I strapped on my great-grandfather’s long-barreled Colt .44 pistol. My father had given it to me for decoration for the mantel of the fireplace in my room. Glenn had got hold of some shells through a cousin and we had shot it a few times but were discouraged by the kick and the deafening noise.

  It was now twilight and I lit the fire with difficulty. The deadfall limbs were still damp from snowmelt but I recalled seeing a few white pine stumps on a hillock to the west of the beaver pond. I took the pickax to try and separate some slabs of wood from the stump, but when I got around to the back of the cabin I saw that a small round hole about a foot wide had been dug near the grave of Sprague’s young wife. There was a pretty fresh mound of dirt and I inappropriately dug with my hand until I found a small Indian pot that I had seen in Sprague’s den. It contained his cremated ashes and tiny bits of bone I could feel with my fingers in the gathering dark. I might have known, I thought, feeling ashamed. I re-covered the hole and hurried up the hillock with the pickax and managed to gather some slabs from the ancient stumps. They got my fire going to a comforting roar which would dry out the damp limbs. I would have to use my wood sparingly to make it last as it was too dark to find more.

  I looked down at my hands which were dirty from the grave dirt and finally admitted why I had brought along the pistol. I was thinking about killing myself. I felt dizzy and sat down on my sleeping bag. I took out the pistol and examined it in the firelight. It looked utterly unfamiliar but it was loaded. Curiously, I was vain enough to decide against the mess that would be made if I shot myself in the head. The target would have to be the heart which was thumping rapidly. I looked up at the stars which were thick above the firelight. I knew my constellations but at this juncture of my life the stars meant nothing to me. I massaged my sore ankle thinking that it was about to escape this irritating pain. I was disturbed by the suicide cartoon images with the comic caption of “good-bye cruel world.” Did I wish to hurt my parents or merely remove myself from their world? For a few weeks now I had begun to suspect the character of my loneliness. I must relish it because it simply wasn’t that hard to make friends in the easygoing north, though in truth people similar to my own nature were hard to find. I thought of Clarence and Jesse and Cynthia and Polly and Laurie. And Fred. I was closest to Fred in terms of mental companionship and it was only a month before I’d see him in Ohio. I added a slab of dry white pine, the skin gray but the decayed wood an ocher color. Why save wood if you’re going to shoot yourself? I stood up. I wasn’t going to take it sitting down. I stumbled on a stone and barely caught myself at the edge of the fire. I burned my thumb and knew I should soak it in cold water. Should I bother? I looked to the east and saw the white crescent top of the moon, two days before full, beginning to rise out of Lake Superior. My burned thumb hurt like hell and I scrambled down the slope and soaked it in the creek. Since I was about ten my parents had allowed me to walk along the beach on nights the moon was in its larger phases. My daffy mother believed that the study of nature was a good thing though any details were quite beyond her. Half up and throwing a skein of light between us, the moon was as white as Polly’s panties. Goose bumps arose when I heard a rustling up by my campfire. I drew the pistol and crawled slowly up the bank and saw a tiny year-old bear of perhaps fifty pounds scooting off with my paper bag of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Luckily the slender container of sardines fell out of the sack. I stood there puzzled about what I should do and watching the big moon light up the world with the shoreline in both directions becoming visible. If I shot myself I clearly wouldn’t be able to bring Polly here, she of the white panties. Was this enough to keep me alive? I tried to remember where in the Bible it said you shouldn’t kill yourself. I had two allies, Polly and Jesus. I had an iron heart and never cried but right then I began to sob like a truly hungry baby. I wanted to throw the pistol out into the lake in case I changed my mind but then maybe a much larger bear would arrive looking for food. For a moment I thought I felt the moon herself beckoning me toward life.

  9

  When I left Marquette the first week of June there nearly was a song in my heart, almost but not quite, a tribute to the mercurial nature of my emotions. After the wet evening with Laurie and my suicide night I returned to the earth from wherever I was. I fished and rowed and studied for finals which were a pushover. I varied my listening to somber music with Jesse’s records from Veracruz, the distinctly Caribbean rhythms quite literally entering the body so that if you listened to the music late in the evening it entered your dreamlife. I shocked Cynthia by actually buying records by Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett which were a soul tonic compared to her Beach Boys and Beatles. My parents were wrangling over the visits to the marriage counselor of which my father described as “fatiguing” though he had nothing else to do except brood about his pratfalls on the stock market. The evening before I left they quarreled, of all things, about reincarnation. My mother had made pot roast at my request, one of the few dishes she made well, so I could pack pot roast sandwiches for my trip. They were getting ready for their summer at the Club in the big lodge my grandfather had built that to me had all the charm of a morgue. I was watching them closely but not listening carefully to the reincarnation quarrel about past and future lives, the logic of which was lost in the usual martini haze. My mother was making, as always, an attempt to stay high-minded while my father joked that in a past life he was a stray dog that got run over by a Model A Ford and in a future life he would return as a toad or a guppy. During dessert (tapioca pudding) I doubted if my father had ever considered suicide. He had an unfounded belief in the innate sup
eriority of his bloodlines. In short, it was a good time to leave town, and that’s what I did.

  Early the next morning I had a good-bye breakfast with Clarence and Jesse at the diner. I was anxious to get going but Cynthia wasn’t an early riser and I knew she was spending the night with Donald at his relatives near Au Train, a scant hour to the east. Jesse was thinking of bringing his daughter Vera with him when he returned in August after vacation. He thought of English as the language of the future and he wanted her to learn it fluently. I said I’d help coach her before she started school since teaching kids was to be my new profession. Jesse was an exception to my mother’s basic racial prejudice. She adored him and since she had basically given up on the captious Cynthia she thought it would be pleasant to have a girl around in whom she could instill the “proper values,” whatever they might be. It seemed to me that my father had always been in rapid decline while my mother’s was gradual. I often wondered why she hadn’t bailed out of a marriage that had been thought to be a brilliant piece of social matchmaking. I knew that Cynthia from about the age of ten had begun advising my mother to run for her life. I also knew she had enough of her own money from her family so the question is why didn’t she leave? It was years before I began to understand what muddy waters many marriages swim in.

  In the village of Au Train I stopped and studied the map Cynthia had given me and then headed south until I found a ramshackle house, really only a shack, in a forest clearing. A baleful mongrel sat on an open porch rumbling a growl and a big woman came to the screen door whose holes were plugged with a dozen cotton balls to keep away flies. She said that Donald and Cynthia had driven over to Bay Mills that morning. She had a round, brown, shiny face, and a soft, melodious voice. I went in for a glass of lemonade and she talked while she carved the head of a cane from an alder limb. There was a stack of canes near her worktable and she insisted on giving me one that had a lacquered loon’s head handle, my favorite bird. “I seen you limp on the way to the house,” she said, rejecting my offer of payment though there was a sign that read “canes five dollars” out by her mailbox. “Do you stay in the winter?” I asked, looking at the flimsy walls on which there were stretched pelts of beaver and otter and a single bobcat. “No, I go to my beautiful home on the ocean in Florida,” she laughed, then patted my hand as my face reddened. There was an urge to stay there and be her errand boy or whatever. When I reached my pickup I impulsively stuck twenty bucks for my new cane in her mailbox. She was watching from the porch and waved. I suspected she was in her mid-fifties or more but when I drove away I thought how grand it would be to have this woman as a mother or lover. She had said with a twinkle that Cynthia was one of the toughest bitches in the world and Donald was lucky to have her as a girlfriend.

  Bay Mills wasn’t that far out of the way, though I was anxious to get to East Lansing to see Polly. It had the specific poverty of any Indian reservation though the people didn’t act poor. I wasn’t as tired as Fred was with what he called the “white lie” where everyone was suffocating in white bread doing white things in the white world. It was ultimately a beautiful place on Lake Superior and of course I wanted to stay there and be part of something which might have been a portion of Cynthia’s motive with Donald. I found them frying up a mess of illegal pike at his great-aunt’s house. We ate the mess of fish which were delicious in the late spring that includes June this far north. It was a warm day with a south wind and we ate lunch on a picnic table out in the yard. Cynthia had her portable tape player and Indian kids were dancing around to Aretha Franklin’s “Respect.” I found Aretha’s strident voice almost frightening but the kids didn’t. One little boy did Indian dance steps to the black music and they all begged Cynthia to dance with them. She did and I was curiously proud of her for finding another life. She and Donald were fond of each other to a degree that I poorly understood. I told Cynthia that I was stopping in East Lansing to see Polly and she teased me about my evening with Laurie who had gone off to a big-deal tennis camp in California soon after our evening. There was an awkward moment when I realized that within Cynthia’s ethic you weren’t supposed to have two girlfriends at once. Donald teased her and she slapped at him and then he danced with her holding her straight above his head and she pretended she was doing a swan dive through the air. Even more so than his father Clarence, Donald was massively strong and agile. After his coming senior year of school Donald was a sure thing for an athletic scholarship to a college. On the track team he always won both the shot put and hundred-yard dash, a rare combination of strength and speed. Some people were troubled that as a mixed breed he was dating the most socially prominent girl in town but then every location has its classic Greek chorus muttering, chattering, moaning in the background.

  I had a nightmarish time finding Polly’s room in East Lansing. It was the day before graduation and the town was crowded and I had had little experience driving in heavy traffic. A squad car stopped me after I drove down a one-way street the wrong way but the cop was sympathetic when he learned I was from the Upper Peninsula and the equivalent of a “hick.” He admired my rowboat and I gave him some tips on fishing locations for his vacation. He also led me to Polly’s rooming house a few blocks from the campus. It was a discouraging place, an absolute mess with students moving out for the summer, beer bottles and trash in the yard and on the porch and in the halls of the house. Her tiny room had a broken lock but she wasn’t there. It was somehow neat and squalid at the same time.

  I drove over to the Kellogg Center and finally got to talk to her on the loading dock behind a huge kitchen. She was working a twelve-hour shift in preparation for a huge graduation banquet and smelled not unpleasantly of carrots, onions, and celery. She told me not to hug her because she was sweaty. She got off in eight hours but I could tell she would be too tired for anything and would have only six hours to sleep before she was due back to help on another banquet. I then made the mistake of saying I had a pocketful of money and wanted to help her rent a larger more pleasant room. She was smiling as always but a little offended. I couldn’t think of another move so we kissed good-bye. I was disappointed and the world looked unreal as a comic book when I drove away. A hundred miles south I very much regretted not having stayed. It was our first chance to sleep together and the idea it would have been actual sleep was fine by me for the time being.

  10

  I drove through the night arriving at Fred’s in Ohio the first faint light of Saturday morning. I didn’t want to wake him so I pulled off at the beginning of his long, rutted two-track driveway. It was sprinkling with a promise of real rain so I spread my sleeping bag under the back of the truck, rubbed on some mosquito dope, and slept for a few hours, waking when I saw bare black legs to the knees wearing sneakers, and heard a voice say “come on out, boy.”

  Her name was Riva and she described herself as Fred’s “aide” in the Catch Up program which she pronounced “catsup” with a twinkle. We walked down the two-track and it dawned on me that Fred had found his black Indian. She was from Sapulpa, Oklahoma, and was part Choctaw and part black. She said, “I didn’t join the counterculture, I am the counterculture.” She was homely, tall, and thin but managed to be sexy through her grace of movement and abrasive humor. She wouldn’t put up with a single moment of the white guilt posture. After my first morbidly unsuccessful day of teaching I mopingly said, “They try so hard. I’m not sure I deserve to live on the same earth.” Riva exploded. “Cut that bullshit. That’s all ego jive. You’re here to improve their reading and writing five percent in two months, maybe more but probably less. Why think about yourself in that bullshit way? You got your head up your ass, boy. You’re suppose to be helping these kids and you can’t do it with your head up your rich ass, kiddo.”

  My face burned while Fred laughed. We were cooking hamburgers, rather Riva was because she thought Fred’s cooking to be beneath contempt. I wanted to run and hide in a thicket but that would only be fulfilling her low opinion. Fred with two degree
s from the University of Chicago, plus a divinity degree, was the director, but Riva as his aide quickly ran the whole show. She was a graduate student at Ohio University a couple of hours away. The other two teachers beside myself, both from Ohio University, were Ed who was Jewish and from Pittsburgh and Lila, a bright, plump, whey-faced girl from Columbus, Ohio, who was irritated at me because her boyfriend would have had my job if it wasn’t for “nepotism,” or so she said. I felt so awkward I couldn’t respond. All five of us taught two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon in a group of shabby Quonset huts owned by the county that had neither heat for a cool morning nor-air conditioning for the hot days which were in the majority. In addition to orchestrating our meals Riva also made lunch for the thirty-five kids though we all pitched in in our various incompetent ways.

  Fred and Riva separated the kids in five groups of seven with me getting the twelve-year-olds, the oldest, who were thought to be largely hopeless. Riva administered a diagnostic test the first day, and another would be repeated halfway through the program, and then a final test the last day. (Midway my kids showed the least improvement with Fred’s next to the bottom. Ed’s were at the top, with Riva second and Lila third.)

  I lived in the pump shed attached to Fred’s cabin. He had whitewashed the floors, walls, and ceiling, and I had a cot, night table, and reading lamp and shared a bathroom with the lovers Riva and Fred. I would have preferred to join Lila and Ed in their small cabin down the road but there wasn’t enough room. Riva made a lot of noise during their lovemaking which caused discomfort during my sleeping and reading. We didn’t start teaching until ten in the morning so I fished early for bass and catfish and also would often fish in the evening. I took Ed with me once but he didn’t like to eat fish so didn’t get the point. Lila went with me several times and I admit we had a minor romance in physical terms. This was the mid-sixties and Lila had a friend who sent her regular letters from Haight-Ashbury. Lila felt she was missing everything in this backwater and she doubtless was. She got a “dear Jane” letter from her boyfriend and turned to me for comfort. “Any port in a storm,” she said which while not complimentary alleviated our loneliness. Ed pretended to be jealous but in fact he and Lila quarreled all the time.