Light Action in the Caribbean Read online

  In the letter, Emory told us the birds would fly to Montana, to the part of northern Montana along the Marias River where he grew up, and that each person would then become the animal that he had dreamed about. They would live there.

  In the Great Bend of the Souris River

  My father, David Whippet, moved a family of eight from Lancaster, in the western Mojave, up onto the high plains of central North Dakota in the summer of 1952. He rented a two-story, six-bedroom house near Westhope. It was shaded by cottonwoods and weeping willows and I lived in it for eleven years before he moved us again, to Sedalia in central Missouri, where he retired in 1975. I never felt the country around Sedalia. I carried the treeless northern prairie close in my mind, the spine-shattering crack of June thunder—tin drums falling from heaven, Mother called it—an image of coyotes evaporating in a draw.

  I went east to North Carolina to college the year Father moved us to Missouri. When my parents died, within a year of each other, my brothers and sisters sold the Sedalia house. I took no part of the proceeds. I looked back always to the broad crown of land in Bottineau County that drained away into the Mouse River, a short-grass plain of wheat, oats, and barley, where pasqueflower and blazing star and long-headed coneflower quivered in the summer wind. I came to see it in later years as the impetus behind a life I hadn’t managed well.

  That first summer in North Dakota, 1952, the air heated up like it did in the desert around Lancaster, but the California heat was dry. This humid Dakota weather staggered us all. I got used to the heat, though the hardest work I ever did was summer haying on those plains. I’d fall asleep at the supper table still itching with chaff. I grew to crave the dark cold of winter, the January weeks at thirty below, the table of bare land still as a sheet of iron. Against that soaking heat and bone-deep cold the other two seasons were slim, as subtle and erotic as sex.

  Considering my aspirations at the university in Chapel Hill—I majored in history, then did graduate work in physics—the way my life took shape seemed not to follow. The summary way to state it is that I became an itinerant, a wanderer with an affinity for any kind of work to be done with wood. I moved a lot—back to California from North Carolina, then to Tucson for a while before going to the Gulf Coast, Louisiana—always renting. After that, I worked in Utah for six years, then moved to eastern Nebraska. I considered moving to North Dakota, but that country seemed better as a distant memory. I felt estranged from it.

  Over those twenty years of moving around I installed cabinets and counters in people’s homes, made fine furniture, and built a few houses. In my notebooks, dozens of them, I wrote meticulous descriptions of more than a hundred kinds of wood, detailing the range of expression of each as I came to know it. I wrote out how these woods responded to various hand tools. In line after neat line I explained the combinations of human desire, material resistance, and mechanical fit that made a built object memorable. I was in my thirties before I saw what I’d been straining after in North Carolina, obscured until then by academic partitioning: the intense microcosm of history that making a house from a set of blueprints becomes; and the restive forces involved in physical labor. It becomes apparent in wiring a house or in routing water through it that more than gravity and the elementary flow of electrons must be taken into account. The house is alive with detour and change. Similarly with squaring its frame. The complex tensions that accumulate in wood grain affect the construction of each house. Nothing solid, I learned, can ever be built without shims.

  Aging got me down off roofs by the time I was forty. Pride, I have to think, a desire to publicly acquit myself by choosing a settled and respectable calling, precipitated my first purchase of a house, in Ashland, Nebraska, in 1986. Attached to it was a spacious workshop in which I intended to build cabinets and hardwood tables and chairs for the well-to-do in Omaha and Lincoln. I also found for the first time since a divorce ten years before—and not incidentally, I think—an opportunity for long-term companionship. The money was good. A year into it I felt steady and clear.

  It was faith and not nostalgia that eventually sent me up to Bottineau County. The harmonious life I’d found with Doreen, a tall, graceful woman with a gift for design and for the arrangement of things, was disturbed by a single, insistent disaffection. Neither human love nor her praise for what I did could cure it. I had not, since I’d left North Dakota, felt I belonged in any particular place. During the first years in Nebraska I’d reasoned I could settle there permanently if it hadn’t been for an entity still missing, like a moon that failed to rise. If I found a place to attach myself in North Dakota, I would muse, I’d stand a chance of bringing all the pieces of myself together in a fit that would last. It did not have to be a life lived in North Dakota, but if I didn’t go back and see, I’d forever have that emptiness, the phantom room in a house.

  The drive up to Bottineau County from Ashland takes two days. In the fall of 1991 I spent a week crisscrossing farmland there in the hold of the Mouse River, trailing like a lost dog in the big bend the river makes north and east of Minot. Not finding, or knowing, what I wanted, I finally drove up to Cedoux in Saskatchewan, where the river heads in no particular place and where it is known by its French name, the Souris. The river bears east from there, passing near small towns like Yellow Grass and Openshaw before turning south for North Dakota.

  That’s all the distance I went that first year.

  I went back the next spring to the same spot and followed the river southeast to Velva, North Dakota, traveling slowly, like a drift of horses. The river swings back sharply to the northeast there, the bottom of its curve, and picks up the Deep River west of Kramer. Then it runs a long straight reach of bottomland, the Salyer Wildlife Refuge, all the way to the Manitoba border. North of the border the Souris gathers Antler Creek. I parked the car frequently and walked in over private land to find the river in these places. The Souris finally runs out in the Assiniboine like the flare of a trumpet. The Assiniboine joins the Red River near Winnipeg, and from Lake Winnipeg, in a flow too difficult to trace, the diffused memory of the Souris passes down the Nelson and into Hudson Bay.

  I needed a sense of the entire lay of the river in those first two years. But it was in the great bend of the Souris in northern North Dakota, the river we called the Mouse when I was a boy, somewhere in that fifty miles of open country between Salyer Refuge in the east and the Upper Souris Refuge to the west, that I believed what I wanted might be found. I rented a motel room in Sherwood and concentrated my search north of State Highway 256, the road running straight east from Sherwood to Westhope. Each day, from one spot or another, I’d hike the few miles from the road up to the Canadian border. Sometimes I’d camp where I thought the border was and the next day walk back to the truck. What I was alert for was a bird’s cry, a pattern of purple and yellow flowers in a patch of needlegrass, the glint of a dragonfly—a turn of emotion that would alter my sense of alignment.

  In the spring of 1994, walking a dry stretch of upper Cut Bank Creek, I came on the tracks of three or four unshod horses. I followed the short trail out of prairie grass onto fine silt in the river bed, where it then turned abruptly back onto prairie grass and became undetectable. I tested the rim of the hoofprints with my fingertips. I marked the way the horses’ hooves had clipped small stones and sent them shooting sideways.

  In several places the tracks nicked the ground deeply enough to suggest the horses had been carrying riders.

  It was hard for me to get away a second time that year. It wasn’t until September that I was able to complete and deliver promised work, and when I finally drove north it was with complicating thoughts. Doreen had proposed, and I had enthusiastically accepted. The home we’d made in Ashland suited both of us, and for a while that summer the undertow that had pulled me north went slack. I felt satisfied. It often happens in life, I knew, that while you’re searching ardently in one place, the very thing you want turns up in another, and I thought this was what had occurred. But Doree
n said I should go on with it. She saw our time spread out still as moonlight on the prairie. She didn’t see time being lost to us. She had a deliberateness of movement about her, a steady expression, that led me to consider things slowly.

  So that fall—anticipating a familiar motel room and the stark diner in Sherwood—I went back, in a state of wonder at the new arrangement of my life. And I was thinking about the hoofprints. Some of the land north of 256 lies fallow, and Canada’s border, like the sight of a distant fence with no gate, turns travelers away here to the west and east toward manned border crossings. The international boundary tends to maintain an outback, a deserted plain on which one traveler might expect to find no trace of another.

  I arrived in Sherwood on September 16. With the help of an acquaintance I rented a horse and trailer to let me explore more quickly and extensively along the upper reaches of Cut Bank Creek. On the morning of the seventeenth I parked the truck off the side of the road a few miles east of town and rode north on the mare, a spirited blue roan. I found no fresh horse tracks along the creek bed. Somewhere near the border I turned east. I’d forgotten how much being astride a horse freed the eye. It is the horse, then, that must watch the ground. I’d ridden horses since I was a child, but not recently. I recalled with growing pleasure the way a good horse can measure off a prairie, glide you over its swells.

  I was certain I’d walked across parts of this same landscape earlier, but it seemed different to me now, the result of being up on the horse, I thought, and taking in more of a place at a glance than I would on foot. Or it may have been that with the horse under me, traveling seemed less arduous, less distracting. I was watering the mare at a pothole, one of many scattered over these grass plains, when another rider rose up from a swale astride a brown pinto. He did not at first see me. I had a chance to steady myself before our eyes met. The blue roan raised her head from the water but gave no sign of alarm. At her movement the other horse crow-hopped sideways. It took me a moment to separate horse and rider. The pinto bore yellow bars on both forelegs. A trail of red hoofprints ran over its left shoulder, and two feathers spiraled in its mane. The man’s dark legs were similarly barred, and there were white dots like hail across his chest. Above a sky-blue neck his chin and mouth were painted black. The upper right half of his face was white. From the left cheek, a bright blue serpentine line rose through his eye and entered his hair. The hair cascaded over his horse’s rump, its gleaming black lines spilling to both sides. The man held a simple jaw-loop rein lightly in his left hand. In his right he held out a short bow and an unnocked arrow.

  The bold division of his face made its contours hard to read, but the forehead was high, the nose and middle of the face long, his lips full. The adornment of horse and rider blazed against the dun-colored prairie. A halo of intensity surrounded them both, as if they were about to explode. I could read no expression in either face—not fear, not curiosity, not aggression, not even wonder. The man’s lips were slightly pursed, suggesting concentration, possibly amusement, as if he had encountered an unexpected test, a stunt meant to throw him.

  Of the four of us, only my horse shifted. As she did so, the polished chrome of her bit and the silver conchas on her bridle played sunlight over the other horse and rider. The man’s first movement of distraction was to follow the streaks and discs of light running like water across his thighs.

  In that moment I remembered enough from a studious childhood to guess the man might be Assiniboin. In the eighteenth century Assiniboin people lived here between the upper Saskatchewan and Missouri Rivers. He could be Cree. He looked half my age.

  I turned my reins once around the pommel of the saddle and showed my empty hands, palms out, at my sides.

  “My name is Adrian Whippet,” I said. “I am only passing through here.”

  Nothing in his demeanor changed. I’d never seen a human being so alert. He slowly pursed his lips in a more pronounced way, but the trace of amusement was gone. Just then I smelled the other horses, which I turned to see. Another man, his face cut diagonally into triangles of bright red and blue, sat a sorrel mare behind me. He led three horses on a braided rope—a pale dun horse with a black tail and mane carrying pack bags, a black pinto, and a bay with a face stripe. Their flaring nostrils searched the air, their eyes rolled as they took it all in. The second man wore a plain breechclout, like the first. He held no weapon, but studied me as if I were something he was going to hunt.

  In a gesture made in response and without thinking, I raised my right arm to point beyond him across the prairie, as though I had something to show or was indicating where we were all headed. I turned the blue roan firmly and started in that direction. It was the direction in which my truck lay and seemed, too, the direction they were traveling. The skin beneath my shirt prickled as I passed before the second man, a chill of sweat. They drew up quickly on each side of me. I was surrounded by the odor of men and horses.

  We rode easily together. From time to time they spoke to one another, brief exchanges, unanswered statements. I said nothing. The second man, about the same age as his companion, was leaner. His hair was cut off at the shoulders and raised in a clay-stiffened wall above his forehead. He wore ear pendants of iridescent shell. Wolf tails swung from the heels of his moccasins. I didn’t want to stare, but maneuvered my horse in such a way as to fall slightly behind occasionally so I could look more closely at them. From the number of things they carried, skin bundles and parfleches, I guessed they were coming back from a long trip. That would explain the extra horses. Or perhaps they’d been somewhere and stolen the horses.

  They, too, tried not to stare, but I sensed them scrutinizing every article of my tack and clothing, every accoutrement. I thought to signal them that we might trade horses, or to demonstrate for them the effect of my sunglasses on the glare coming from the side oats and blue grama grass. But, just as quickly, I let the ideas go. I felt it best to give in to the riding, to carry on with calmness and authority.

  Eventually, we stopped glancing at one another and gazed over the country more, studying individual parts of it. In a movement so fast it was finished before I grasped it, the first man shot a large jackrabbit, which he leaned down to snatch from the grass without dismounting. He gutted it with a small sharp tool and spilled the intestines out as we rode along. His movements were as deft as a weaver’s, and I felt an unexpected pleasure watching him. He returned my look of admiration with what seemed a self-conscious smile. The harsh afternoon light silvered in a sheen on the horses’ necks and flanks, and I heard the flick of their hooves in the cordgrass and bluestem when we crossed damp swales. Hairy seeds of milkweed proceeded so slowly through the air that we passed them by. More often than I, the two men turned to look behind them.

  I knew these people no better than two deer I might have stumbled upon, but I was comfortable with them, and the way we fit against the prairie satisfied me. I felt I could ride a very long way like this, absorbed by whatever it was we now shared, a kind of residency. It seemed, because of the absence of fences or the intercession of the horses, or perhaps only as an accident of conducive weather, that we were traveling a seam together. There was nothing to do but ride on, marking the country in unison and feeling the inspiritedness of the afternoon, smelling the leather, the horses, the prairie.

  When we came to what I recognized as the intermittently dry bed of Cut Bank Creek, I said the words out loud, “Cut Bank Creek.”

  The second man said something softly. The first man repeated his words so I could hear, “Akip atashetwah.”

  I lifted my left hand to suggest, again, our trail. First Man mimicked the gesture perfectly, indicating they meant to go in a different direction from mine, north and west. We regarded each other with savor, pleased and wondering but not puzzled. I laid my reins around the pommel and pulled off the belt my father had given me as a wedding present years ago. I cut two of its seventeen sand-cast silver conchas free with a pocketknife. Dismounting, I handed one to each m
an. Second Man pulled a thin white object from a bag tied to his saddle frame. When he held it out for me, I recognized it as a large bird’s wing bone, drilled with a line of small holes. A flute. I remounted with it as First Man stepped to the ground. He lifted a snowy owl feather he’d taken from his horse’s mane and tied it into the blue roan’s mane.

  We rode away without speaking. The first time I looked back, I couldn’t see them. I sat the horse and watched the emptiness where they should have been until dusk laid blue and then purple across the grass.

  The Deaf Girl

  The girl’s problem appeared to be deafness, but deafness was only a pivot around which part of her psyche turned and an easy thing to notice. Once, standing on the porch of the hotel, I watched her move through a field of high grass below an abandoned pear orchard a half mile distant. It was a bright day in November and the grass was turning saffron and magenta in the sweep of the wind. She moved in such a tentative way down the hillside I thought her sightless. But I knew her to be the deaf girl from this place, and so imagined it was only how she examined the world that made her appear blind.

  She was twelve, the lone child of parents who projected austerity on the street, one of perhaps eight or nine children around the town. Occasionally I saw her playing with another girl, older by a few years, but most often when I saw her she was walking alone. Her parents called out after her, “Delamina,” but the name came to her in some other way, a vibration passing through her body, and she would turn. Closer in, she read the muscles moving in a speaker’s face.

  I didn’t arrive in the town by accident, exactly, but initially it was not my intention even to stop. I drove out of Great Falls on the Missouri before dawn, late July, and headed for Williston in North Dakota. At Lewiston I turned north on the road for Malta. I’d crossed the river, and somewhere south of the Fort Belknap Reservation I turned east on a state road I thought would shorten the distance to Glasgow. North of the Fort Peck Reservoir, in a series of crests and troughs, the cottonwood draws and their bare hills, I became confused. After an hour of just pushing on regardless, I drove in to what I thought was Telegraph Creek, but it wasn’t, it was Gannett. A few storefronts and houses on its main street, a few standalone buildings, and a scatter of mobile homes at the end of dirt tracks splayed like tendrils away from the road, which ended here.