Returning to Earth (13 page)

The good memory is easy. When I was in my mid-teens Polly and I went over to Bay Mills for a few days over Christmas. My sister didn't come along because she was in a home for troubled teens with “substance-abuse problems” for a couple of months. She would have come home for Christmas but she was angry at Mother. On our second day in Bay Mills a blizzard began with a gale out of the northwest across Lake Superior. I was helping Donald rewire a tiny house for an old Indian lady who mostly spoke Anishinabe. It was pretty exotic. Donald spoke some of the language. She was smart and wanted to know the precise nature of electricity. Clare stopped by and said we were needed at the day-care center Cynthia had started a few years before. Many mothers who worked in the Soo were going to be late getting back because of the snowstorm. The two women who worked at the day-care center were afraid of the storm and wanted to go home to their families. When we got there Herald had started a wood fire in the stove in case the electricity went off, which it finally did, but Donald waded through the snow and got Coleman lanterns from home, some sacks of candy, and hamburger and ground venison from the freezer. Polly hacked the meat into pieces and fried it on top of the woodstove. We had about twenty kids between the ages of two and five and they were quite a handful. Donald lay out on the floor and a half dozen of the
kids jumped up and down on him. It was a mixed bunch of pure-bloods and half-breeds and a few white kids. Clare and Cynthia got them singing Christmas carols and it was interesting to me how they sang loudly with no real idea what the words meant. By midnight all but two little boys had been retrieved and we took them back to the house, where they wanted to sleep with Clare. We sat around the kitchen table in the light of a lantern and each had a shot of peppermint schnapps. In the morning the wind had settled down and there was thirty inches of fresh snow.

Soon after I crawled in bed Clare began to cry. At first I thought that it was because for the first time I was physically incapable of making love. I was dead meat at the idea of fathering a child. I dozed off and on and she continued to cry. This was a girl who never cried. I even heard her whisper “Daddy,” which she never called Donald. It was either “Dad” or “Father.” I held her but it was like I wasn't there. Her pillow was actually wet. I became desperate at my uselessness. My mind smelled the flowers at my dad's funeral. My sister had insisted on sitting on my lap and she'd worn some of Polly's perfume. By predawn and the first birdcalls Clare was still crying so I finally said that maybe we should go out to my campsite and take a hike or something. She turned on the light, got out of bed, and stood above me naked. I reached out for her and she pushed my hand away. She made weak coffee on the little room machine and spilled most of hers on the floor without seeming to notice.

After a strange night it was also a strange dawn with the slightest breeze from the south in the warm close air. There was faint thunder but the clouds were so dense you couldn't tell from which direction. I turned on the radio to catch the weather but she turned it off.

“I dreamt I was pregnant.”

“I didn't know you slept.”

“I read that you can dream in seconds, you know, little neural pictures. I was big as a cow at your campsite.”

“Was I there?”

“I don't know. It was too fast. Are you coming to Berkeley?”

“What would I do?”

“Sign up for a few courses and take care of the baby. Cook dinner. Just plain
be
, like anyone else.”

I reflected that she was becoming her mother when we parked near the trailhead to the campsite and she left the pickup door open. Donald was always closing doors after Cynthia. Clare looked up into the heavy mantle of trees at the loudness of the songbirds. I said that the clouds were so low that all of the sound descended but Clare was already off on the trail. At one point she took a wrong turn and I let her walk a hundred yards before I called out. I tried to suppress my irritation with her because I knew that her near hysteria was due to her father's impending death.

As I neared the campsite I could instantly see something was wrong. Someone had stolen my cookstove, also my medicine kit, which contained the mosquito repellent. Nothing else was missing except a bag of peanuts and a couple of candy bars. The mosquitoes came at us in horrendous
clouds so I quickly built a smudge fire close to the tent flaps, adding green leaves, ferns, and also cedar branches for their delicious burning odor. Clare got in the sleeping bag with only her head sticking out. From under a tree I dug up my hidden cache, which contained bottled water, also a bottle of Calvados, a taste acquired on my graduation trip to France. I scarcely ever touch hard liquor but Calvados smells like an apple orchard in October. I got in the sleeping bag with both of us coughing from the smoke and sipping the liquor. We began to make love hearing violent thunderstorms approach from the south and the roar of the wind accompanying the storm. When the storm hit, the rain came down in bellowing sheets and soon there were a number of rivulets of water entering the tent from several directions and beginning to soak the sleeping bag. This didn't much matter as it was still warm and we were making love strenuously as if Clare expected my body to absorb her grief. Before we fell asleep we stared at a chickadee who had entered the tent mouth to get out of the still-raging squall. The tiny bird was only a foot away from our faces and regarded us with curiosity. I had one of those nearly imperceptible flashes, realizing I had never fully comprehended birds. Maybe one evening far back in prehistory all nine thousand or so types of birds had arrived on a cloud from the heavens.

When I awoke an hour or so later Clare was smiling in her sleep but shivering against me. The strong wind had clocked around to the north and I could hear the distant roar of Lake Superior, which had sunk the temperature to the mid-forties from the warmth of dawn. Not much more than
a month before the lake had had a lid of ice. Now the air was clear and glittery with mother birds shrieking over their young blown fatally from their nests. Clare got up abruptly, dressed herself in wet clothes, and ran down the trail for the warmth of the truck heater. I broke camp dragging the wet tent behind me.

At the house the doctor's forbidding car was parked in front. I dropped Clare off and drove over to my mother's and hung the tent and sleeping bag over the clothesline. Mom came out the back door and we walked down the street to the old Coast Guard station to watch the huge white-capped waves slamming against the breakwall. We've always loved storms and made this walk even in the dead of winter to watch a norther, but then on a still night of twenty below zero Superior will begin to freeze and you have to wait until spring to see the grand waves again. The wind, perhaps fifty knots, was too loud for talk and I began to shiver in my wet clothes.

Polly made breakfast and while I was in the steamy shower I prepared for what might be coming. She tends to limit her lectures of disapproval to a couple of times a year. On our cold, windy walk I could see by her stiff lips something was coming. She and Clare were friendly and I hoped Clare hadn't mentioned her intentions of getting pregnant, which might precipitate a major inquisition. I always got straight A's in high school and at the University of Michigan, kept my room clean and orderly, earned scholarships and my own money except for what David slid my way. Once on a cool morning in Arizona when we were hiking David found four one-hundred-dollar bills in his pocket. He
looked at the money in puzzlement as if the parka had created the cash. Not knowing what else to do he gave me two of the bills.

At breakfast with a forkful of egg and fried potatoes halfway to my mouth the hammer dropped.

“What you intend to do is illegal,” she said.

“I know it.” I wanted to say something smart like “No shit, Sherlock.”

“You could get in serious trouble. All of you.”

“I think of death as beyond paltry legalities. Donald should die in the way he chooses. I simply don't care what happens afterward.” The idea of civil authorities interfering knotted my stomach and I pushed my plate away. I could understand where Polly was coming from. Her family was relatively poor, the kind of people you see standing in lines everywhere at Social Security offices, emergency rooms at hospitals, and suchlike. She'd told me that if her father's disability check was a day late her parents would become desperate with worry. Such people have an extreme fear of laws, rules, regulations, which at any time might destroy the meager life they've cobbled together. Her mother, Nelmi, worked at everything, with jobs as a grocery store clerk, cleaning woman, and a nurse's aide, and when we would come up at Christmas she would be out shoveling the snow off the walk before daylight.

“I just don't want you to go to jail.” Now she was rising to anger at the world in general. “They can always find a reason to arrest a person. Maybe the Canadian authorities will catch you in the act. Remember you can't take a pistol into Canada.”

“For Christ's sake no one even owns a pistol. We're going to the place Donald wishes to die. When he dies we'll bury him. That's all. Of course it's illegal but fuck everyone.”

“Don't use that word in front of your mother.”

“Sorry. Anyway, David has talked to their family lawyer, who naturally advises against it. You have to register a death both here and in Canada and you can't just bury anyone where you might wish but since Donald's an enrolled member of the tribe here he's called a First Citizen in Canada and the civil law thus becomes mushy. First Citizens have different rights.”

“But the rest of you aren't Indians. You have to be half.” Polly's voice had become quavery.

“Who gives a shit!” I barked.

“Ssh. David's asleep on the sofa.” But then David appeared at the kitchen door and poured himself a cup of coffee, his eyes more widely open than usual. David is that rare type who on waking from a night's sleep or his multiple daily naps has to reconstitute the world. Last year he told me that he has cognitive problems wherein on waking he's not sure the world actually exists. He's unsure until he consciously rehearses his senses. Once while the three of us were fishing out on the Deadstream Donald said he was jealous of David's dreaming, which includes bears, wolves, the beginning or the end of the world, a landscape of female butts, whatever. When David saw the wildly colored Hubble galactic photos he said, “I knew it. I saw them in my dreams.”

Now he sat down next to Polly, hugged her, and began to eat my plate of tepid eggs and potatoes first sprinkling Tabasco liberally. “I heard part of your conversation. Don't
worry. It can be skewed so I can take full responsibility. Civil authorities never want to charge five people when they can charge one. Polly hates the word but this is that rare case where you can say fuck the government.” She pinched his stomach. He winced and laughed. It was clear they were still lovers. After my dad died and some of his friends would stop over when we were packing to leave Chicago I was upset at the way these men would look at Polly. She had a way of actually listening to men's complaints that they construed as affection. Some of his motorcycle group were tough guys who made much of their toughness in the manner of ex-servicemen. However, when we moved north I didn't much mind David looking at Polly with desire. Of course I knew they had once been married but most of all it was David's kindness. We didn't have the money and he convinced her to accept a down payment for a house. At age eleven I couldn't figure it out because David looked ratty and people in Chicago who had money looked like they had money.

There was a rap at the back door and Cynthia came in looking haggard, her hair blown into a bird's nest and her eyes reddish. She had been up all night with Donald, who had developed pleurisy, his lungs filling with fluid. The doctor had come twice and then she had finally persuaded Donald to be hooked up to a portable inhaler. He agreed but on the condition that Friday be his last day on earth. Herald would accept this but not Clare, who became hysterical when she came home from her night with me. Now Cynthia wanted a day or so with just the four of them together. This was Tuesday so there would be time to get ready for the trip on Thursday. She wanted to see the collapsible
stretcher I had bought in Detroit to make sure it was strong enough. I retrieved it from my room and put one end on a chair and David laid on it. I sprung it up and down and it seemed plenty strong. David weighs about one-ninety and Donald about thirty pounds more but well down from his pre-illness two-eighty. It was understandable that Cynthia would fix on details when the complete picture was unbearable. When she stood up to leave she and David embraced and I thought of brothers and sisters and wished mightily that my own sister didn't keep herself so remote. I suddenly intended when Donald passed on to visit Rachel in New York City. She recently consented to speak to Polly once a week on the phone, which Polly viewed as a major breakthrough.

When Cynthia left there was a nearly interminable silence as if we three were willingly lost in our universe.

“God damn life,” David finally whispered.

“Don't say that,” Polly hissed, covering her face with her hands. In the past year she had started going to Catholic mass again having dropped the habit late in her teens.

David and I walked down to the breakwall and then decided to drive over to Grand Marais to see a wolf den he had discovered late last October before going to Mexico. He said it might still be occupied and we could spend the night at his cabin, which a friend had recently opened up for him. We went back to the house and quickly packed. David invited Polly but she said she wished to be alone. On the way out of town we dropped her off at church. I was curious on what terms she had begun to talk to God. She was an odd mixture. Her Finnish mother had become Catholic when she
married Ted at his Italian and Irish parents' insistence. It took years for my grandma Nelmi's Lutheran family to forgive her. Consequently Nelmi never missed mass while Ted wouldn't go at gunpoint saying that the Catholic Church had always sided with the “powers that be” rather than the workingman. People used to take religious denominations very seriously. Maybe they still do. It's not something you'd notice at the University of Michigan.