The Norman Maclean Reader

  The checkbook was still in my hand when I reached the jail. The desk sergeant frowned and said, “No, you don’t have to post bond for him. He covers the police beat and has friends here. All you have to do is look at him and take him home.”

  Then he added, “But he’ll have to come back. A guy is going to sue him. Maybe two guys are.”

  Not wanting to see him without a notion of what I might see, I kept repeating, “What’s wrong?” When the desk sergeant thought it was time, he told me, “He hit a guy and the guy is missing a couple of teeth and is all cut up.” I asked, “What’s the second guy suing him for?” “For breaking dishes. Also a table,” the sergeant said. “The second guy owns the restaurant. The guy who got hit lit on one of the tables.”

  By now I was ready to see my brother, but it was becoming clear that the sergeant had called me to the station to have a talk. He said, “We’re picking him up too much lately. He’s drinking too much.” I had already heard more than I wanted. Maybe one of our ultimate troubles was that I never wanted to hear too much about my brother.

  The sergeant finished what he had to say by finally telling me what he really wanted to say. “Besides he’s behind in the big stud poker game at Hot Springs. It’s not healthy to be behind in the big game at Hot Springs.

  “You and your brother think you’re tough because you’re street fighters. At Hot Springs they don’t play any child games like fist fighting. At Hot Springs it’s the big stud poker game and all that goes with it.”

  I was confused from trying to rise suddenly from molecules of sleep to an understanding of what I did not want to understand. I said, “Let’s begin again. Why is he here and is he hurt?”

  The sergeant said. “He’s not hurt, just sick. He drinks too much. At Hot Springs, they don’t drink too much.” I said to the sergeant, “Let’s go on. Why is he here?”

  According to the sergeant’s report to me, Paul and his girl had gone into Weiss’s restaurant for a midnight sandwich—a popular place at midnight since it had booths in the rear where you and your girl could sit and draw the curtains. “The girl,” the sergeant said, “was that halfbreed Indian girl he goes with. You know the one,” he added, as if to implicate me.

  Paul and his girl were evidently looking for an empty booth when a guy in a booth they had passed stuck his head out of the curtain and yelled, “Wahoo.” Paul hit the head, separating the head from two teeth and knocking the body back on the table, which overturned, cutting the guy and his girl with broken dishes. The sergeant said, “The guy said to me, ‘Jesus, all I meant is that it’s funny to go out with an Indian. It was just a joke.’”

  I said to the sergeant. “It’s not very funny,” and the sergeant said, “No, not very funny, but it’s going to cost your brother a lot of money and time to get out of it. What really isn’t funny is that he’s behind in the game at Hot Springs. Can’t you help him straighten out?”

  “I don’t know what to do,” I confessed to the sergeant.

  “I know what you mean,” the sergeant confessed to me. Desk sergeants at this time were still Irish. “I have a young brother,” he said, “who is a wonderful kid, but he’s always in trouble. He’s what we call ‘Black Irish.’”

  “What do you do to help him?” I asked. After a long pause, he said, “I take him fishing.”

  “And when that doesn’t work?” I asked.

  “You better go and see your own brother,” he answered.

  Wanting to see him in perspective when I saw him, I stood still until I could again see the woman in bib overalls marveling at his shadow casting. Then I opened the door to the room where they toss the drunks until they can walk a crack in the floor. “His girl is with him,” the sergeant said.

  He was standing in front of a window, but he could not have been looking out of it, because there was a heavy screen between the bars, and he could not have seen me because his enlarged casting hand was over his face. Were it not for the lasting compassion I felt for his hand, I might have doubted afterwards that I had seen him.

  The girl was sitting on the floor at his feet. When her black hair glistened, she was one of my favorite women. Her mother was a Northern Cheyenne, so when her black hair glistened she was handsome, more Algonkian and Romanlike than Mongolian in profile, and very warlike, especially after a few drinks. At least one of her great grandmothers had been with the Northern Cheyennes when they and the Sioux destroyed General Custer and the Seventh Cavalry, and, since it was the Cheyennes who were camped on the Little Bighorn just opposite to the hill they were about to immortalize, the Cheyenne squaws were among the first to work the field over after the battle. At least one of her ancestors, then, had spent a late afternoon happily cutting off the testicles of the Seventh Cavalry, the cutting often occurring before death.

  This paleface who had stuck his head out of the booth in Weiss’s cafe and yelled “Wahoo” was lucky to be missing only two teeth.

  Even I couldn’t walk down the street beside her without her getting me into trouble. She liked to hold Paul with one arm and me with the other and walk down Last Chance Gulch on Saturday night, forcing people into the gutter to get around us, and when they wouldn’t give up the sidewalk she would shove Paul or me into them. You didn’t have to go very far down Last Chance Gulch on Saturday night shoving people into the gutter before you were into a hell of a big fight, but she always felt that she had a disappointing evening and had not been appreciated if the guy who took her out didn’t get into a big fight over her.

  When her hair glistened, though, she was worth it. She was one of the most beautiful dancers I have ever seen. She made her partner feel as if he were about to be left behind, or already had been.

  It is a strange and wonderful and somewhat embarrassing feeling to hold someone in your arms who is trying to detach you from the earth and you aren’t good enough to follow her.

  I called her Mo-nah-se-tah, the name of the beautiful daughter of the Cheyenne chief, Little Rock. At first, she didn’t particularly care for the name, which means, “the young grass that shoots in the spring,” but after I explained to her that Mo-nah-se-tah was supposed to have had an illegitimate son by General George Armstrong Custer she took to the name like a duck to water.

  Looking down on her now I could see only the spread of her hair on her shoulders and the spread of her legs on the floor. Her hair did not glisten and I had never seen her legs when they were just things lying on a floor. Knowing that I was looking down on her, she struggled to get to her feet, but her long legs buckled and her stockings slipped down on her legs and she spread out on the floor again until the tops of her stockings and her garters showed.

  The two of them smelled worse than the jail. They smelled just like what they were—a couple of drunks whose stomachs had been injected with whatever it is the body makes when it feels cold and full of booze and knows something bad has happened and doesn’t want tomorrow to come.

  Neither one ever looked at me, and he never spoke. She said, “Take me home.” I said, “That’s why I’m here.” She said, “Take him, too.”

  She was as beautiful a dancer as he was a fly caster. I carried her with her toes dragging behind her. Paul turned and, without seeing or speaking, followed. His overdeveloped right wrist held his right hand over his eyes so that in some drunken way he thought I could not see him and he may also have thought that he could not see himself.

  As we went by the desk, the sergeant said, “Why don’t you all go fishing?”

  I did not take Paul’s girl to her home. In those days, Indians who did not live on reservations had to live out by the city limits and generally they pitched camp near either the slaughterhouse or the city dump. I took them back to Paul’s apartment. I put him in his bed, and I put her in the bed where I had been sleeping, but not until I had changed it so that the fresh sheets would feel smooth to her legs.

  As I covered her, she said, “He should have killed the bastard.”

  I said, “Maybe he did,?
?? whereupon she rolled over and went to sleep, believing, as she always did, anything I told her, especially if it involved heavy casualties.

  By then, dawn was coming out of a mountain across the Missouri, so I drove to Wolf Creek.

  In those days it took about an hour to drive the forty miles of rough road from Helena to Wolf Creek. While the sun came out of the Big Belt Mountains and the Missouri and left them behind in light, I tried to find something I already knew about life that might help me reach out and touch my brother and get him to look at me and himself. For a while, I even thought what the desk sergeant first told me was useful. As a desk sergeant, he had to know a lot about life and he had told me Paul was the Scottish equivalent of “Black Irish.” Without doubt, in my father’s family there were “Black Scots” occupying various outposts all the way from the original family home on the Isle of Mull in the southern Hebrides to Fairbanks, Alaska, 110 or 115 miles south of the Arctic Circle, which was about as far as a Scot could go then to get out of range of sheriffs with warrants and husbands with shotguns. I had learned about them from my aunts, not my uncles, who were all Masons and believed in secret societies for males. My aunts, though, talked gaily about them and told me they were all big men and funny and had been wonderful to them when they were little girls. From my uncles’ letters, it was clear that they still thought of my aunts as little girls. Every Christmas until they died in distant lands these hastily departed brothers sent their once-little sisters loving Christmas cards scrawled with assurances that they would soon “return to the States and help them hang stockings on Christmas eve.”

  Seeing that I was relying on women to explain to myself what I didn’t understand about men, I remembered a couple of girls I had dated who had uncles with some resemblances to my brother. The uncles were fairly expert at some art that was really a hobby—one uncle was a watercolorist and the other the club champion golfer—and each had selected a profession that would allow him to spend most of his time at his hobby. Both were charming, but you didn’t quite know what if anything you knew when you had finished talking to them. Since they did not earn enough money from business to make life a hobby, their families had to meet from time to time with the county attorney to keep things quiet.

  Sunrise is the time to feel that you will be able to find out how to help somebody close to you who you think needs help even if he doesn’t think so. At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.

  Then about twelve miles before Wolf Creek the road drops into the Little Prickly Pear Canyon, where dawn is long in coming. In the suddenly returning semidarkness, I watched the road carefully, saying to myself, hell, my brother is not like anybody else. He’s not my gal’s uncle or a brother of my aunts. He is my brother and an artist and when a four-and-a-half-ounce rod is in his hand he is a major artist. He doesn’t piddle around with a paint brush or take lessons to improve his short game and he won’t take money even when he must need it and he won’t run anywhere from anyone, least of all to the Arctic Circle. It is a shame I do not understand him.

  Yet even in the loneliness of the canyon I knew there were others like me who had brothers they did not understand but wanted to help. We are probably those referred to as “our brothers’ keepers,” possessed of one of the oldest and possibly one of the most futile and certainly one of the most haunting of instincts. It will not let us go.

  When I drove out of the canyon, it was ordinary daylight.

  I cannot end without mentioning another special reason that brought me to Missoula at this time of year. It was in early May when my brother was buried here.

  So we conclude our conference on the West by recalling, I hope not inappropriately, memories of it full of pain and joy, and everyday reality.

  The Woods, Books, and Truant Officers*

  The title of Maclean’s essay “The Woods, Books, and Truant Officers” reflects his penchant for triadic structures, which is appropriate in an essay that reviews Maclean’s devotion to rhythm in language. In the essay, Maclean describes his home-schooling regimen (during the mornings of his elementary school years) and his father’s influence over Maclean’s language, even claiming him as “co-author of the title of this book, A River Runs through It.” The essay reads as a companion to Maclean’s first book, and in it he offers close readings of the Twenty-third Psalm and the opening sentence of USFS 1919 that illustrate his professorial dedication to prose rhythms.

  Just how much I learned from my afternoon schooling in the woods, you are to judge, especially if you are experts at what I am talking about. I dedicated A River Runs Through It and Other Stories to my children and also to experts. I meant these stories in part to be a record of how certain things were done just before the world of most of history ended—most of history being a world of hand and horse and hand tools and horse tools. I meant to record not only how we did certain things well in that world now almost beyond recall, but how it felt to do those things well that are now slipping from our hands and memory. I meant when I said we fished with an eight-and-a-half-foot rod weighing four and a half ounces that it was a rod and not a pole and that it was four and a half ounces and not four, and if it had been four ounces it would have been an eight-and not an eight-and-a-half-foot rod; and I also meant that when the rod trembled in our hands our hearts trembled with it.

  But it is the morning part of my schooling that should be of most concern to us collectively, for it was in the morning that my father helped with the writing part of this book. The morning was divided into three hourly periods. We started at nine and ended at noon, and each of the three hours was divided into two parts, one of 45 minutes when I studied in my room across the hall from his, and 15 minutes when I recited to him in his study. I cannot tell you how much of life 15 minutes can be when you are six, seven, eight, nine, or ten years old and alone with a red-headed Presbyterian minister and cannot answer one of his questions and he won’t go on to the next and there is no one else in the room he can turn to and ask and it is going to be the same way tomorrow.

  But I can tell you that none of these three hourly periods was devoted to show-and-tell or to the development of personality, mine or his. They were devoted exclusively to reading and writing; while the kids my age in school were learning their ABC’s, he was trying to teach me how to write the American language. John Stuart Mill boasts that his father taught him to read Greek when he was so young that English almost became his second language. I have been a little slower to develop, being 73 before I thought I could write the American language as my father tried to teach it to me.

  Three basic things he pounded into me long ago about this book that I started to write after reaching my Biblical allotment of three score years and ten.

  (1) Being a Scot, he tried to make me write economically. He tried to make me write primarily with nouns and verbs, and not to fool around with adjectives and adverbs, not even when I wanted to write soul stuff. At nine o’clock, when the first period began, he would assign me a 200-word theme; at the end of the ten o’clock period he would tell me, “Now rewrite it in 100 words”; and he concluded the morning by telling me, “Now, throw it away.” Sometimes in my study room alone I shed as many tears as I sacrificed words. In the next period, to brace me up, he would say, “My boy, never be too proud to save a single word.”

  (2) To perceive clearly another characteristic of the writing in this book, you will have to realize that both my father and my mother were first-generation immigrants. Indeed I am told that when my father came to this country he had a heavy Scottish burr, but it had disappeared by the time I first remember him. Great as his pride was in his Scottish background, it had to make way for his love of his new land, and, as a small sign of his love, he tried to remove his burr and speak American. He despised Presbyterian ministers who came from Scotland and floated from church to church in this country trying to pick up a living by keeping on the move. My father swore that they were all fourth-raters in Scotland, where they couldn’t make a living, and t
hat they made a pitiful living in America only by exaggerating their Scottish burrs so their congregations would think they were the original Church of Scotland. By the time I can remember my father, he had no burr, but his speech, although flawless, was more English than American—and he knew it. So, like many other first-generation immigrants, he put upon the shoulders of his first-born son the job of becoming completely an American. I was taught to listen and then listen some more to American speech—its idioms and turns of phrase, its grammatical structures, and its rhythms. Then, I was told that I should take these pieces of American speech and put them together into something at least fresh and interesting and at times into something strange and beautiful if I could. You can start looking for this characteristic of style with the opening sentences of my stories: “I was young, and I thought I was tough, and I knew it was beautiful, and I was a little bit crazy but hadn’t noticed it yet.” “I was young” . . . “thought I was tough” . . . “was a little bit crazy” . . . and “hadn’t noticed it yet” are all ordinary pieces of American speech, but they allow something to sneak in unnoticed that is not a part of ordinary speech but is key to the whole feeling of the story, “I knew it was beautiful.” In addition, these pieces, when put together in their grammatical structures and rhythms, should fit together in no ordinary manner.