Jim Harrison - Legends of the Fall

He walked toward the lowering sun knowing that in October it was toward the southwest. He came to a pond he didn't recognize and flushed a raft of blue-winged teal. He walked around the pond through a blackberry thicket, snagging his suit a number of times. He walked up a small creek muddying himself to his knees in a seep until he reached higher ground where he dropped his trench coat and climbed slowly up a large white pine tree to get a vantage point. His hands were blackened and sticky from the resin that exuded from the tree but he could see for a dozen miles: he could see the white steeple of the Lutheran church where his father's funeral service would be held in two days, he could see a motorboat crossing a lake, a silo without a barn—the barn had burned when he was a senior in high school. He curled his arm around a limb for safety and lit a cigarette, hearing the shotgun blast of a partridge hunter far in the distance. A crow flew by and was startled by his presence, squawking away at a greater speed to warn others. There's a man up in a tree in a blue suit. Nordstrom looked down at his suit and was amused at how he had ruined it. He took out his gold pocket watch and aimed the 9 at the steeple knowing there was a section of road near the 12 if he needed to climb another tree for a sighting. His father liked to climb trees and was always creating deliberately lame excuses for doing so. Up in the tree for the first time in twenty-five years, Nordstrom thought it was part of his father's penchant for "looking things over." When Sonia was a little girl and they came to Wisconsin for a summer vacation she had brought along a diving mask. His father didn't care much for swimming and hadn't noticed diving masks before but he took to puttering around the lake with Sonia and diving overboard in his favorite fishing spots. At dinner he would say he saw a bluegill "as big as a goddamned frying pan" or a pike or largemouth bass "as long as your goddamned arm."

Nordstrom finally emerged from the woods just before dark near a small Indian reservation community outside of town. He walked down a gravel road toward a tavern thinking how his father would be amused at his ruined four-hundred-dollar suit not to speak of his Florsheim shoes now scarred and mud-caked. The last mile or so he had been concentrating on suits and the government and decided he no longer much believed in either. Suits obviously had helped to promote bad government and he was as guilty as anyone for wearing them so steadfastly for twenty years. Of late he had become frightened of the government for the first time in his life, the way the structure of democracy had begun debasing people rather than enlivening them in their mutual concern. The structure was no longer concerned with the purpose for which it was designed, and a small part of the cause, Nordstrom thought, was probably that all politicians and bureaucrats wore suits. He stopped in the parking lot of the tavern favored by Indians and regarded the dirty old jalopies and beaten pickups. Perhaps he should quit his job he thought, give all his money to his daughter and some to his mother whose small annuity was probably worthless in light of inflation. Then he cautioned himself for his wild thoughts, thinking that somehow they might be connected to death, to becoming lost and climbing a tree after a tiring flight and not having eaten all day. The bar smelled of piss and sweat and Nordstrom blinked to focus on the drinkers. He heard his name called out. It was Henry who was appreciably into a binge. Nordstrom stood next to him wondering whether he should embrace the old man whose head seemed to nod with the jukebox and booze.

"You better call home. They're all looking for you."

"Henry, I want you to be a pallbearer," Nordstrom said, then ordered a drink for Henry, a bourbon and beer for himself. Henry downed his in a gulp and stared intently at Nordstrom.

"There isn't any fucking way I'm going into that church. I worked all day yesterday with your dad and he didn't look too good. So we had a few drinks. And he says, 'Henry I'm not feeling too good and I think my heart is going.' So I took him home and your mother called the doctor and then we went over to the hospital because he wouldn't ride in an ambulance. So they said it was bad and he could hardly breathe up in the room and they brought oxygen but he said he didn't want to die in an oxygen tent. He just lay there staring straight ahead with me and your mother on each side. Around about midnight the doctor said there is no hope. To call you. We went back in and he held our hands. He made your mother get up in bed beside him to be close as he went. He had ahold of my hand hard, so I stayed. He talked a little about fishing. I told him I would go along with him into death as far as I could but I would have to turn back. He said for me to tell you good luck and to say he loved you and to give you a kiss good-bye."

Henry stood then and gave Nordstrom a hug and kissed him on the cheek because he was short and could not reach Nordstrom's forehead. They had another drink in silence, then Henry led him out the door to his pickup.

A few days later Nordstrom flew back to New York with Sonia, who had come for the funeral, and then took the shuttle up to Boston. Laura had cabled her regrets from Mexico, saying she would have come but word only reached her on the day of the funeral. Nordstrom did not doubt it as Laura had loved his father and there had always been a playfulness and banter in their contacts that Nordstrom never quite comprehended. She had even stopped by for a visit in the past summer on her way through the Midwest. Laura had once said she found his father "sexy," a statement that had horrified him at the time. Laura had had the advantage of knowing that people died whereas even the most ordinary events, and death is the most ordinary of all, took Nordstrom by surprise.

Now we have arrived where we began and are in continuous time, a wonderful illusion for those addicted to notions of yesterday, right now and tomorrow. Every evening after a long walk and light dinner Nordstrom dances alone, surely an absurd picture of a man of forty-three years, a father, formerly a husband, magna cum laude University of Wisconsin 1958, at thirty-five vice-president of finance for Standard Oil of California, and so on, as if such simpleminded clues were effective in tracking our mammal. But they are all discarded habits. Nordstrom means "north-storm" but it's not much more helpful than "crow." One learns little from a telephone book. It's winter in Boston, our St. Petersburg, and the man dances on, a bit clumsily to be sure, and with a witless tenacity. Sometimes he just jumps straight up and down. One night he went with the delicatessen owner to see a Celtics-Denver Nuggets' game to witness the greatest jumper of all, David Thompson. Thompson floated through the air in a three-sixty, and dunked the ball backward over his head and didn't even smile. The crowd rose to its feet, was hushed a moment, then exploded over this act that was not so much a defiance of gravity as a transcendence of what we have experienced of gravity. Sonia came up for the weekend and he took her and Phillip to the ballet to see Baryshnikov. Nordstrom wore a Cardin suit that Laura had selected for him years before but he had never worn out of embarrassment. In the lobby at intermission many lovely and not so lovely women smiled at him thinking Nordstrom must be someone they should know. They had a late celebratory dinner because Phillip had won a fellowship to spend the coming year in Florence studying at the Uffizi. Sonia would leave with him in June after her graduation. Phillip was prattling on about death at dinner. His own father had died when Phillip was fourteen and he had begun staying up very late, smoking cigarettes and wearing sloppy clothes. Lately he had read a certain French writer who talked about the "terrible freedom" that comes when the father dies. There is no one left on earth to judge. Sonia shushed him, thinking the conversation was insensitive to her father. Nordstrom said her concern was nonsense and though he found the whole notion appalling he guessed that it was probably true. He had been lucky with his own father who was all in favor of Nordstrom following his heart's affections, though it seemed odd that only recently had his son an inkling of how to go about it.