Dalva (21 page)

Dalva called me to lunch and away from my morose vision. I couldn't help babbling about all of this as I ate my
salade niçoise
and drank my lunch ration of four ounces of white wine. Most of us continue under the ready assumption that we are being understood, and that we understand others, forgetting
that the human level of attention isn't very reliable. Dalva had an uncommon level of attentiveness, which put almost too much pressure on me when I talked, since I have the habit of doing my mental exploring out loud. She listened carefully, paused, then responded. If she smiled there was a good chance I was going to take cannon fire amidships. When I spoke about Indian reservations and apartheid she answered by saying that her social-worker friend in Detroit had joked that local murders had kept pace with those in the entire country of South Africa. I asked her what that had to do with it.

“Dead is dead, wherever it is. You might as well have given a hoe to a Martian as given a hoe to a Sioux. They were nomadic hunters and gatherers, not farmers. The Ponca and Shawnee were pretty good at crops, but not the Sioux.” She heard something and went to the window above the sink. My heart stirred at her leaning bottom in the tight jeans. I suggested what is lightly known as a “nooner,” and it was then that I got the appalling news that she couldn't make love to me in this house or the bunkhouse. I was stunned into stuttering.

“Why the fuck not? How childish.”

“I just couldn't do it. We can go for a walk or a ride. There's a motel down the road.”

“I didn't see any motel.”

“It's actually about fifty miles away.”

A large horse trailer pulled into the yard, towed by a pickup. We walked outside and helped a sprightly old man unload four horses; rather, I watched, then was handed ropes attached to two of the horses while Dalva and the old man went inside the trailer to get the others. I knew from my reading that it was important to show these beasts mastery, and to exude no odor of fear, or they would take advantage of it, which they did immediately. One yanked mightily at the rope, which gave my shoulder a harsh jolt, while the other, I hoped playfully, bit my shirt sleeve and began to back away with the shirt in his or her mouth. It was a medievalist's vision of torture, and the shirt began to give way. I let off with a shout, which seemed to further anger and excite both of them. Dalva and the old man leapt out of the trailer and rescued me, but not my favorite linen shirt. The old man cuffed the bejesus out of the horses, which offered me minimal satisfaction. Dalva
laughed hard and I told her to go fuck herself. I walked to the bunkhouse, regretting that I had been so excited in town about the papers that I had forgotten to buy whiskey. If Dalva went off for a ride I intended to sneak in the house for a few hits of her precious brandy, a small recompense for my tattered shirt.

Back at my desk I picked another Northridge ledger at random. I would not become systematic until I read through them at least once. I could see that much of the material was of a tendentious religious nature, and many of the notes would be of interest only to a botanist. His spleen warmed me for I had not calmed from my brush with horses.

Sept. 3, 1874

It should not surprise us that swine are swinish and they are everywhere the Captains of our realm, and that everywhere down to the merest lad Greed thrives. My horse, poor soul drew up lame short of Yankton, and I was given a ride by a family of bone pickers who drew nine dollars per ton at the railhead for buffalo bones. They advised me that in west Kansas the same bones brought twelve dollars a ton. They were so wrathful on this subject that I finally chose to walk overland leading my horse. They had been driven out of Kansas by a gang who, so they said, picked five thousand tons of buffalo bones in a summer's work. These men shot Comanches on sight for fear of being murdered in their sleep. The bones in the fields block the coulters & moldboards of the steam plows. The bones are used for combs, knife handles, the refining of sugar, and ground for fertilizer. It is indeed a melancholy use for these grand beasts.

I checked my maps as I read further, noting that Northridge covered over twenty-seven miles in one day, leading his lame horse. Dalva said I walked four miles during my day in the wilds. I rechecked the figures in other passages, discovering that on the summer solstice in 1873 Northridge walked thirty-seven miles between dawn and dark in order to purchase a new horse. These were offered as navigational statements without a tinge of bragging. I intended to call a friend in the athletic department at Stanford who, though he enters Ironmen contests, drinks a great deal of beer. He would be able to verify if these figures were in the realm of probability.
I have my own opinion that rigorous exercise packs us far too tightly within our skin, and makes for an unhealthy old age.

It is interesting to note that in an approximately fifteen-year period up until 1883 an estimated twenty thousand buffalo hunters slaughtered between five and seven million of the animals, pretty much the continent's entire population. In 1883 Sitting Bull organized the slaughter of a remaining herd of a thousand buffalo by a thousand Sioux braves to prevent the white men from getting them.

May 29, 1875

On the fairest day of Spring came upon a family of Swede homesteaders quite lost in the tall prairie grass and had been so they said for two days. This is a common enough occurrence and I guided them south for three days as they were in Treaty land and I feared for their safety. These are a dour though handsome people, and I found them a creek bottom with several springs to build their sod houses, instructing them as best I could on their survival. A land manipulator had taken much of their money, a frequent story, so they had pressed on into empty territory from their unhappiness further East. I warned them sternly away from a hill far to the West as I had surprised a sow grizzly and her cub there, and it was only the quickness of my horse that saved the bear's life. I am loathe to shoot them as they are revered by all Tribes and only killed under the most special circumstances. Grizzlies are the Leviathans of our land as surely as the great whales own the sea, and the elephant is Lord of Africa. I moved on after a day as I saw the daughter of sixteen bathing in the creek and this sorely distressed my sleep. Not having consorted with harlots or been married I have never seen a woman of my own race completely devoid of clothing. I have vowed not to marry until I complete my work though St. Paul advises it is better to marry than burn. The sting of such threats was lost at Andersonville & I will content myself with women I know among the Sioux. I wondered why I fathered no children among them and a squaw told me they have herbs to prevent parentage until the proper time. I helped the Swedes make out their papers and assured them I would give them to the Gov't Land Agent of my acquaintance as they are fearful of another swindle. I reassured the father, telling him how to find me and that though I was a
man of the cloth I had proven good at correcting injustice. I would as soon thrash a grafter as eat my lunch. You cannot roll over as a plump southern possum to the evil of the frontier. I confess I gave a large Black Hills gold nugget to the aforementioned girl, Aase by name, saying it would provide a dowry, or a winter's food if the first crop failed.

I read and made markers until five, barely remembering to smoke and forgetting altogether to drink the beer in the refrigerator. My neck and eyes were sore, so I popped a can and went outdoors. Dalva's car was gone and the horses were in the corral. There was the childish wish to throw a few stones at the horses out of vengeance, but the two culprits weren't identifiable from the other two. I walked up to the corral and the four of them charged the fence, so I leapt back. They stood there staring at me intensely, and I couldn't help thinking they wanted to make friends. I told them we were going to have to work this thing out.

Back at the bunkhouse I opened another beer—my circadian rhythms demand a little alcohol late in the afternoon. I was weary for change, so opened my first packet of letters, which were for the year 1879. Much of the correspondence was of a horticultural nature with a firm called Lake Country Nurseries, which was centered in Chicago but had branch offices in La Crosse, Wisconsin; Minneapolis; Sioux Falls; Sioux City; and Council Bluffs. It was evident that each office had an agent who was responding to a series of questions from Northridge. The responses were generally of an apologetic nature and it didn't take long to determine that Northridge actually owned the nursery business. This fact became specific in the bank correspondence from Chicago, which showed Northridge to have a balance of some thirty-seven thousand dollars in August of 1879, not much in our day, but it must be multiplied by at least a factor of seven to bring it to current terms of buying power. I was astounded that a purported orphan and missionary to the Indians could acquire this much money, despite the enormous market for seeds, plants, root stock, and cuttings for the westward movement of settlers. I was too tired to look for clues and waited impatiently for the arrival of Dalva to ask where the capital came from. It was curious that none of the journal
passages mentioned this other life, as if it were a somewhat schizophrenic secret he was trying to keep from himself, though this was fragile speculation on my part.

Now it was six and I felt a pang of hunger. I was in somewhat of a huff as I walked to the house, bent on a sip of brandy. I gazed at the paintings for a few moments, touching their surfaces under the naïve idea they might be prints. I took a swig of a Hine that was bottled in the thirties, then one of a Calvados put away hastily on hearing Dalva roar down the long drive and into the yard. Passing through the kitchen, I quickly washed my mouth out with orange juice, then went outside.

“I peeked in your window but you were hard at work. These are sort of presents. I'm not trying to change your life overnight, just increase the braking power.”

It took a few moments for me to determine that the UPS and air-freight cartons stacked in the backseat were from purveyors of food and wine in New York and California. I was overcome and felt my face redden. I had a rather meager childhood, but, then, so did everyone in our neighborhood. Christmas usually meant bedroom slippers, a horn for my third-hand bike, my first alarm clock, a fishing reel for a dirty river with no fish, a rubberoid football. The simplest gift tends to knock me for a loop. She came around the side of the car and gave me a squeeze and a kiss.

“Brandy. Or is that Calvados?” she asked after a whiff of my breath.

“I couldn't find any whiskey. I just took a tad.” I was far too happy to pule and whine excuses.

Our first homestead evening went well, with a single discordant note: she wouldn't tell me where her great-grandfather got the capital to establish his nursery business. She thought it was important that I do my own detective work and arrive at conclusions that would gradually evolve. I verged on starting a quarrel, but she looked too good in a cotton summer skirt and pale-blue blouse, and the meal had been wonderful (a roasted, rough-cut filet of prime local well-hung beef, with a sauce
made of dried morels and wild leeks sent from her mother's cousin in Michigan). As a joke I was served my cabernet in a sixteen-ounce Texas wineglass some fool had sent her. At the end of dinner I began a speech I had been rehearsing, an attempt to change the possible locations of lovemaking into something more comfortable. She listened with the usual attentiveness, then stood and suggested a drive, making my speech for nought.

It was a strange drive, a sense that you could see the June heat lifting off the earth, the greenness darkening as the twilight waned. Far off to the west there were thunderheads that caught the sun we could no longer see and made the air yellowish. We took a gravel road north that dead-ended at the Niobrara River, the wind around the speeding car too loud for talk. Dalva adapted her habit of alertness to her driving, and I felt reasonably safe as she swerved to a halt along the riverbank. There was a breeze being pushed by the distant storm that kept the mosquitoes away. I pointed out a rather alarming light in the east that turned out to be the moon. She said as a girl she had driven here a lot when the car was brand-new, and one August night she had seen three flying saucers. I began to mutter about this, but then she passed me a bottle of brandy she had been kind enough to bring along in her purse. A swallow of it made me quiver, and I felt a nonspecific eeriness about being out in nature in the dark, and tried to think of another time, short of the few camping trips of my youth. When I turned back from the moon and my general prattle, Dalva had taken off her clothes and was stepping into the river. I declined the invitation to join her, though a very small part of me wanted to do so; stepping willy-nilly into a black, flowing river is not in my repertoire. She swam away and I could see the sheen of the moon on her back and bottom. Then she stood up where the water was shallow, shook her hair, and let off with a blood-curdling howl. This jellied my bowels for an instant, but she quickly called to me that she was fine. Her howl put a stop to the night birds and insects. I saw bats flitting around but that was OK, since flying creatures are a positive category. A full minute later there was a yodel of some sort from the hills on the far side of the river, which I thought at first was an echo. Dalva, still out in the river, made another
howl, in a much lower key, and the creature responded, or several of them did up and down the hills, and one of them downriver on our side. At first I supposed they were farm dogs, but there didn't seem to be any farms in the immediate area. She came out of the river and stood beside me, saying, Aren't coyotes wonderful? Instead of being a little frightened, I agreed—the year before I had helped my daughter with her science term paper on coyotes and thought of them as astounding, though it never occurred to me I would ever be in the middle of them. She shivered and I put my arms around her, moving her body around to dry her with my clothes. She laughed and kissed me; then we made love in the backseat of the car with an energy I could barely remember. We were both surprised by the lightning and thunder and had only made it halfway home when the rain came down in sheets of water. I know that when we got home, dried off and built a fire in the fireplace, and poured a brandy, she wanted to continue but felt she couldn't in the farmhouse. For a change, I said nothing on the matter.