Returning to Earth (3 page)

I feel like I'm running on at the mouth but Cynthia says no. I should get back to the beginning of the story but I'm still in an odd mood from waking up at first light on this warm morning and smelling the lilacs in bloom. It seemed like when I woke up I couldn't understand anything and my heart ached. I looked down and took the sheet off and my muscles are nearly gone. Cynthia says not but I know otherwise. Even a pencil or a glass of water weighs something now. For twenty-five years I made a fair living laying blocks, pouring and finishing cement, and sometimes roughing in houses. Now I have too much spit and I don't want to eat. On Sugar Island I used to carry the rowboat down to the river for the kids and it weighed three hundred pounds. I would hold an arm out and my little daughter would swing on it like a monkey. I could hold a ninety-pound corner block out straight and now I can scarcely hold my arm out. These things happen to people but some days it can be hard to handle. So this morning my reality broke down and I wasn't sure of anything. Just before I got sick I finally made a three-day fast, which I'd failed at four times before I succeeded. What you do is go up into Ontario to a certain mountainside and spend
three days without food, shelter, or water. I'm not going to talk about my religion because it's too private. Maybe a little. There's another hillside from which you can see Lake Superior where I'm going to be buried. You can't think of a thing that lives that's not going to die. I had hoped in these three days to find out how I was going to get rid of my fears and how to grow older with grace. I found out in a hurry! Here I am on my way. [Donald is now laughing. It takes courage to laugh until you cry at death. Cynthia.] Anyway, while I was up there after about a day and a half reality fell apart, which I'll explain to you later without any religious conclusions.

My last long walk alone was only a few months after I got sick last year. My doctors told me I had been sick for a while but I didn't want to let on. Cynthia noticed because it's an old joke in our marriage that when I really want to make love I charge upstairs in the evening while she reads in bed. Cynthia has always just read and not watched television where like to watch sports. Only suddenly one day I couldn't charge upstairs. That was that. She waited a long time to question me but it scared me too much to talk about it until we finally went to the doctors.

Well, on my last long walk K drove me over to Grand Marais so we could fish for early pike just like I had done thirty-five years before with Flower. The fishing was so good that K drove into town to get some ice so we could keep the fish in good shape. I told K I was going to take a stroll up into the dunes and he wondered if this was a good idea because Cynthia had told him not to let me out of his sight. I said I was feeling fine, which wasn't quite true. It was hot and sunny and I knew if I got up into the dunes I could get away
from the deerflies. I'm not so fast at swatting them away anymore. What I was hoping to find was this beautiful, cool grove of birches that my brother-in-law David had shown me years ago. My kids used to refer to their uncle David as “the loon.” He heard about his secret nickname and just laughed. David has spent so many years around here at this cabin that he knows some fine places that seem to carry a weight of their own. Flower knew such places. Actually there's a tinge of resemblance between them. If you spend that many years in the woods it's bound to be a share of your body and soul.

So I half crawled up the dunes because I already wasn't very strong but I made it up and over a ridge and descended into a bowl of sand about a mile wide. Out in the middle of the bowl was the grove of birches and poplars. It occurred to me that this place was the same as it was back in the time of the first Clarence. Maybe I'm him, I thought, which is an odd thought. I had a handkerchief and wiped the sweat out of my eyes feeling lucky because there weren't any deerflies up in the dunes. Way off to the northwest I could see a single bear grazing on beach pea and wild strawberries on a grassy hillside. I wasn't worried though he was close to the birch grove because there were no cubs. It's the female who is ornery when she has cubs. Well, it took me about a half hour to reach the grove because my muscles were seizing up and sometimes I crawled because it was easier, also faster. I made my way into the grove and crawled up on this huge low-slung birch limb where David showed me how you could lay back on it and the slightest breeze off Lake Superior would rock you gently. That's what I wanted. It was a miracle of sorts but there was no breeze until I laid out on the limb and my body
calmed down. Within minutes there was no inside or outside to the world if you get what I mean. My sick body disappeared plain and simple, at least for a while, and then it slept. There was a spirit in the place that gave my body some peace. Maybe it was only because the wind came up and the huge branch rocked me as my mother once had in the rocking chair. My eyes were closed but I started to see things just as I had up in Canada in my three days on the hill. My mind brought up the vision of the bears with big wings the old woman told me about when I was in the boat with Flower. One had a face that looked a little like my own. I wondered how you could see things with your eyes closed? [Donald wants an immediate answer to this but I'll have to ask the neurologist. Cynthia.] Of course when I die sooner rather than later and my eyes don't work I wonder how long my mind will keep seeing things and what I'll see? This seems to me a natural question. If we have a spirit how and what does it see? All around the bears were ravens, which always follow bears to share the food. They follow the wolves up here too. I was there a fair amount of time and when I finally opened my eyes there was K sitting against the tree smoking a cigarette.

“How did you find me?” I said.

“There was a little rain last night and you leave a real big track, especially when you're crawling.”

K helped me up and it wasn't too hard to get back to the lake though I knew I'd never again be able-bodied.

Enough of me. Back to the first Clarence. He worked for that farmer about five years the story goes but then the
farmer died of heart problems and his wife and son, who were spoiled, put the farm up for sale. They wanted to move to Minneapolis and live a higher sort of life. Their lawyer wouldn't pay Clarence the five months of wages still due to him but these things happen so Clarence headed toward Duluth, where he heard there was plenty of work to be had. Here he was back on Sally and still only seventeen. Now he was at the age when he needed the company of women and they weren't hard to find in those days because this was 1876 and there were so many Civil War widows in the towns and countryside. These women also needed affection. Up near Crookston he stayed with a widow and her three children on a farm for a year but then she got a chance to marry a pure white man who owned a hardware store so that was that. In his sorrow he got drunk and when he woke up at this campsite an Indian was trying to make off with Sally, so he hit the man a bit too hard and then had to take care of him for a week until he was up and around. Though it was early May one night it snowed a foot and then the next day a rain began that lasted seven days so that Clarence and the injured man were stuck between flooded creeks. Lucky for them Clarence snared a young deer so they had plenty to eat and wood to maintain a big fire. I mean it was still a hard life but if you're warm and got enough to eat and a tarp over a lean-to to keep dry, you're about covered for your needs. The horse thief turned out to be a pretty good person and when they parted ways after the man's ribs felt better from the punch they agreed they'd probably meet up again, which they did in Marquette thirty years later.

Clarence had a stroke of luck when he reached Bemidji and met a logger who admired the size of both Sally and Clarence and gave him a job skidding out big logs, which were used to build ore docks over in Superior and Duluth. He had bad luck in love, though. He was struck down with love for this Indian girl but her father said no because he wasn't pure-blood. First he lost the widow because he wasn't pure white and then he lost this girl because he wasn't pure Anishinabe and her father was a Mede-wi-win. Clarence couldn't believe it and stuck around Bemidji for two years but then the girl married someone else so Clarence moved on east to Duluth. He hadn't yet seen the “big waters” that are Lake Superior. Well, he was thrilled with Lake Superior and camped out over east near Odanah for a month just looking at the endless sea. For some reason Sally loved big waves and swimming and he'd ride way out in the lake on her broad back even if the waves were high. Of course this was June and swimming would take her away from the blackflies, which drive both man and beast crazy. My dad said when he was young and cutting pulp down near Seney he just went crazy one day and dropped his chain saw and started running and jumped into this lake scaring the deer, who were already there submerged with just their noses peeking out.

Before Clarence went to work in Superior he rode even farther east to see some remnants of the big forests and didn't know until later that he didn't go far enough. He avoided settlements and loggers because people were always trying to get his horse, so he didn't have much information. He found a river gorge that was over near Nisula or Pelkie I
think and on a flat there was a group of the largest white pines in creation. It was Eden he told his son, who told his son, who was my dad killed years ago when a boat slipped off a hoist. Anyway he got starved out of Eden because you can't just eat wild meat you also need flour for bread or potatoes. As I've said Clarence was real big but he measured one white pine as the spread of his arms four times around the tree. I wish I could have seen a tree like that. My brother-in-law David has found some great big stumps southeast of Grand Marais, which is not the same thing. He and I sat beneath one during an August thunderstorm once and you could almost imagine the tree that lived on that spot. Even one of the roots was bigger than about any tree you see nowadays. I went back there several times including once alone when I spent a moonlit night under there and a small bear looked in between the roots and I said, “Hello, mugwa,” which means bear in Anishinabe, but there's a lot more to it than just saying “bear.” Suddenly laying here talking to Cynthia I'm falling apart in many directions.

[Donald is having a real hard time. The neurologist has an elaborate word for it,
dysarthria
, but it means Donald loses his ability to talk. Sometimes he thinks he's talking but it's not comprehensible. Once I get him started he so badly wants to finish telling the story of his family for his children. These people are good storytellers but they never write anything down. When I was a little girl his father, Clarence, would tell me stories while he worked in the yard constructing elaborate flower beds for my ditzy mother, the gardens being the only viable part of her life (her problems being pills, alcohol, dealing with my father, who moment by moment could drive an auditorium full of women to
batty tears). Clarence and Donald tell their stories in measured tones, ever so slowly, as if they are re-creating the story's content visually in their minds then sending it out in words. They would not dream of writing the stories down, Clarence quit school in the fifth grade and began working full-time at age eleven. Donald is the most purely physical person I've ever met in my life. After an exhausting summer day working construction he would take Herald and Clare fishing until darkness fell. He would sleep five hours and then be up at six a.m. to cook breakfast because I'm slow in the morning and because he liked to cook breakfast, a habit that started when his mother was taken away and Clarence often worked nights running his trapline or reconditioning boats in addition to working for my family. Right now I'm trying to make sense of my exhaustion. Our kids, Clare and Herald, wanted to move home from Los Angeles to help out but Donald wouldn't allow it. David volunteered to return from Mexico early but I told him frankly that he would generally be more of a problem than a genuine aide. My main hope is when Polly's son K comes back from Ann Arbor in three days. He's going to live in the garage apartment out back and Donald likes and trusts him. Other than K it's just me. He turns to stone with the neurologist and nurses. The simple fact is that Donald is deeply embarrassed by his illness and I don't think that he's going to get beyond this state. When I sleep on a single bed beside his own in the den it's like when Clare was sick as a baby and I could hear her every breath even when I thought I was asleep. We've been lovers since I was fourteen and he fifteen, almost sixteen. Our children were raised almost by the time we were forty. We were so proud of them and then they were gone. I have enough money from my parents, mostly from my mother's estate, but it was unthinkable
for Donald not to go on working. Despite this money when we went on trips, usually to the West with the kids, we didn't stay in lodges or motels but camped. Donald wasn't a tightwad, he just liked to camp. And not at regular campsites but off in the woods or beside rivers. Once in Wyoming we were camped beside the Green River and this old gentleman rancher came by on a horse and told us we were trespassing but then he and Donald started talking and we ended up staying four days while Donald and Herald, who could do a man's work at fourteen, jacked up a bunkhouse and laid a course of cement blocks under it to stabilize the foundation. Like his father, Donald liked to be useful. I used to wonder if I first loved him because he was the opposite of my father, who was so aggressively useless and would lamely put on a pair of calfskin gloves while rigging his sailboat, which almost never left the harbor. Once Laurie and I caught my dad with a ninth-grade classmate of ours on his boat but I didn't tell my mother because I didn't want to hurt her feelings. I know K has an affection for me though at forty-four I'm nearly twice his age. I do realize that I'm not exactly homely. I like the neurologist, who is divorced, but he has an odor of offices and medicine, which I find repellent. Donald teases me that I better start looking for a boyfriend and that was nearly a year ago. When Polly came over for dinner two weeks ago she said she was worried because I was getting skinny and haggard from being with Donald around the clock but I said I love him and that's what you do. Polly was very smart not to remarry my brother David, who is very nice but has been basically goofy since he was a little boy. He couldn't accept the fact that Dad was a lost cause. I went through a long stretch when I thought the male and female were more similar than they turned out to be. Strangely,
though there is a big age difference, Donald and K are more like boyhood friends. When they packed the SUV for their trip to see the glacier early last fall, they acted as if they were simply off on a fishing trip though Donald stumbled twice in the yard. K is slender but very strong and could help Donald to his feet. K used to ride his bike all the way from Marquette to Sault Ste. Marie and later Bay Mills to see Clare, whom he had a crush on, and also, frankly, myself. Polly is always worried about K partly because she has given up on her daughter Rachel, who has always had drug problems and lives in New York City. Before Donald got sick I went to New York City with Polly to do a possible “intervention” with her daughter. David wanted to go along and help out but Polly said that he'd probably just give a lecture on the history of drug use in America. We had a fine time in New York City because it turned out Polly's daughter wasn't in bad shape. She worked as a receptionist and a general helper for a small off-brand record company in the Lower East Side. Her hair was orange, she had tattoos, and rings in her nose and belly button. We went to a strange concert with her and all her friends, who seemed to comprise a tribe of sorts. She lived with a rather tiny young man who was a singer with a large discordant voice. All in all we were relieved. I'm going to stop interrupting or maybe I'll just edit out my comments. I think that a good deal of my exhaustion comes from trying to make sense out of all of this. I envy Donald's mostly unspoken religion though it is maddeningly stoic. This religion has evolved from both his life and childhood stories plus the traditional three-day fast. Cynthia.]