Light Action in the Caribbean (6 page)

After people started dreaming like this, about the animals that had chosen each of us (as we understood it now), our routine changed. All the maneuvering to hold positions of authority or safety on the cell block, the constant testing to see who was in control, who was the most dangerous, who had done the worst things, for many of us this was no longer important. We’d moved into another place.

Emory himself didn’t make people nervous, but what was happening to the rest of us now did. The guards, just a little confused, tried to look tougher, figure it out. Any time you break down the tension in prison, people can find themselves. The gangs on our block, except for the Aryan Brotherhood,
had unraveled a little by this time. People were getting together in these other groups called “Horned Lark” and “Fox” and “Jackrabbit.” Our daily schedule, of course, never changed—meals, lights out, showers—but all through it now was this thing that had gotten into us.

What was happening was, people weren’t focused on the prison routine anymore, like the guards playing us off against one another, or driving each other’s hatred up every day with stories about how we’d been set up, who was really to blame, how hard we were going to hit back one day. We had taken on other identities, and the guards couldn’t get inside there. They began smacking people around for little things, stupid things. People like Judy Hendrix, who thrived on the sexual undercurrents and the brutality on our cell block, started getting violent with some of their clients. The Aryan brothers complained Emory had stirred up primitive feelings, “African feelings,” they called them. Their righteousness and the frustration of the guards and the threat of serious disruption from people like Judy Hendrix all made Emory’s situation precarious.

One day the story sessions just ended. They moved Emory to another cell block and then, we heard, to Marion in Illinois. With him gone, most of us fell back into the daily routine again, drifting through, trying to keep the boredom at bay. But you could hear those dream calls in the night still, and people told stories, and about a month after Emory left one of the guards smuggled the letter in from him that everybody has heard about, but which only Emory’s people actually read. And then we destroyed it. He told us to hold on to our identities, to seek the counsel of our totem animals, to keep
the stories going. We had started something and we had to finish it, he said. By the night of the full moon, June 20th, he wrote, each one of us had to choose some kind of bird—a sparrow, a thrush, a crow, a warbler—and on that night, wherever he was, Emory was going to pray each of us into those birds. We were going to become those birds. And they were going to fly away.

There were some who accepted right away that this was going to happen and others who were afraid. I would like to say that I was skeptical, but I was one of those who was afraid, a person for whom fear was the emotion on which everything else turned. I could not believe.

We got the letter on the fourteenth of June. The beatings from the guards, with people like Hanover and Judy Hendrix having a hand in it, none of that affected the hard-core believers, the guys they put in solitary. Especially not them. In solitary they’d turn themselves into the smallest birds, they said, and walk under the doors.

In that week after the letter came, a clear line began to divide us, the ones who were leaving, the ones who were going to stay.

The night of the twentieth, about eight o’clock, sitting around in the TV room, I was trying to stay with a game show when a blackbird landed on the table. It cocked its head and looked around the way they do. Then I saw a small flock of birds like finches out in the corridor, swooping up and landing on the hand railings on the second tier. A few seconds later the whole cell block was full of shouting and birdsong. The alarms started screaming and the guards stormed in. They beat us back into our cells, but by then birds were all over the
place, flying up and down, calling out to the rest of us. My cellmate, Eddie Reethers, told me he was going to be a wild pigeon, a rock dove, and it was a pigeon that hopped through the bars and flew past me to the window of the cell. He kept shifting on his feet and gazing down at me, and then he stepped through the bars out onto the ledge and flew away. I ran to see. In the clear air, with all that moonlight, I could see twenty or so birds flying around. I jumped back to the cell door. As many were flying through the corridor, in and out of the cells. The guards were swinging away at them, missing every time.

Five minutes and it was all over. They shut the alarms off. The guards stood around looking stupid. Seventy-eight of us were at the doors of our cells or squeezed up against the bars of the windows, watching the last few birds flying off in the moonlight, into the darkness.

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.

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 Doreen 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.