Julip
Jim Harrison
Praise for Julip:
“Jim Harrison’s prose has its customary no-nonsense elegance, and [an] ability to suggest the essential mystery at the heart of the human experience.” —The Washington Post Book World
“What makes these novellas work best is the authority of Mr. Harrison’s voice. . . . a genuinely comic writer.”
—Jonis Agee, The New York Times Book Review
“A modern-day Hemingway with a sense of humor … superbly told, wryly comic novellas . . . As lucid as a mountain morning and funnier than the Comedy Channel, Julip is . . . refreshing and entertaining.”
—San Antonio Express-News
“A mature, visionary writer whose tales are guaranteed to elicit profound reactions . . . a powerful, challenging source of refreshing deep waters.” —The Commercial Appeal (Memphis)
“Julip displays the sheer breadth of Harrison’s abilities. . . . Save the qualifying hyperbole for lesser writers: let it be said of Jim Harrison only that here is a writer. It is more than enough.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“[A] fist-rate short-story collection . . . that features Julip Durham—one of the most entrancing literary ladies since Holly Golightly—in an oddball comic caper.” —The Detroit News
“Julip stands among his finest work, with each story wild with life and experience. . . . With Harrison utterly in command, the works move with the force of a lake storm.” —Long Beach Press-Telegram
“Every writer stakes out his or her own home turf. . . . With Julip, he proves again that Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is exclusively his . . . Julip is a walk with a writer who, like his heroine, fills out life to its limits.” —The Tampa Tribune
“[Harrison] seems destined to find a place on that short list of American litterateurs that includes Melville, Twain, Faulkner, and Hemingway.” —The San Diego Union-Tribune
Praise for Jim Harrison:
“No one has advanced and expanded the American literary ethos in the latter part of the twentieth century more cogently, usefully, and just plain brilliantly than Jim Harrison. . . . This is a matter to which all literate Americans should pay serious attention.” —Hayden Carruth
“Luminous . . . [Harrison’s] books glisten with love of the world, and are as grounded as Thoreau’s in the particulars of American place—its rivers and thickets, its highways and taverns. Bawdily and with unrelenting gusto, Harrison’s forty years of writing explores what constitutes a good life, both aesthetically and morally, on this planet.”
—The New York Times Book Review on Returning to Earth
“Among the very best fiction writers in America.” —Playboy
“An American original . . . His writing bears earthy whiffs of wild morels and morals and of booze and botany, as well as hints of William Faulkner, Louise Erdrich, Herman Melville, and Norman Maclean. There is a robust reflectiveness and sheer delight to Harrison’s prose. . . . a luminous, heartwarming reminder of what literature can achieve.”
—The San Francisco Chronicle on The Summer He Didn’t Die
“A force of nature in American letters . . . Harrison’s trademark prose, lyric and fluid, seamlessly melds perceptions, memories and dreams to capture his characters’ inner lives.”
—The Seattle Times on Returning to Earth
“Jim Harrison is a writer with bear in him. Fearless, a top predator, omnivorous, he consumes all manner of literature and history and philosophy. . . . one of the great writers of our age”
—The Star Tribune (Minneapolis-St. Paul)
“[A] robust, vibrant author . . . Harrison is one of few American writers equally at home writing about backwoods, mixed-race construction workers, and wealthy university intellectuals. . . . [The] saga bears strong traces of Southern classics by William Faulkner and Walker Percy.” —The Boston Globe on Returning to Earth
JULIP
Also by Jim Harrison
FICTION
Wolf
A Good Day to Die
Farmer
Legends of the Fall
Warlock
Sundog
Dalva
The Woman Lit by Fireflies
Julip
The Road Home
The Beast God Forgot to Invent
True North
The Summer He Didn’t Die
Returning to Earth
The English Major
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE
The Boy Who Ran to the Woods
POETRY
Plain Song
Locations
Outlyer and Ghazals
Letters to Yesenin and Returning to Earth
Selected New Poems
The Theory and Practice of Rivers and New Poems
After Ikkyū and Other Poems
The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems
Braided Creek (with Ted Kooser)
Saving Daylight
ESSAYS
Just Before Dark
The Raw and the Cooked
MEMOIR
Off to the Side
JULIP
JIM HARRISON
Copyright © 1994 by Jim Harrison
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or
by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including
information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing
from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a
review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part
or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain
permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries
to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.
FIRST GROVE PRESS EDITION
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN 10: 0-8021-4376-8
ISBN 13: 978-0-8021-4376-1
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
Distributed by Publishers Group West
www.groveatlantic.com
08 09 10 11 12 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
TO SAM LAWRENCE
When the wine is bitter,
become the wine.
RILKE
CONTENTS
Julip
The Seven-Ounce Man
The Beige Dolorosa
JULIP
JULIP GOT HER NAME, a mixture of a flower and a drink, by her parents’ design in the first flower of a somewhat alcoholic marriage. Her father bred, raised, and trained bird dogs of various breeds. Her mother was from one of the leading families of Ashland, Wisconsin. Lest anyone mock the fact, every community owns its leading families, which exist mostly as a result of hard work (if only in the distant past), at least modest prosperity, and being either Congregationalist or Episcopalian. It was, and is still, considered to have been a bad marriage for Julip’s mother, Margaret, whose father, a dry-goods merchant, had sent her off to Lawrence College (a Germanic suckhole) at no moderate expense in hopes that she would marry well. It was a sad day for her father when Margaret threw over her porkish fiancé from Milwaukee in favor of a quick romance with a young man of few prospects from Duluth, with no possessions other than an old Ford convertible full of English setters. Margaret’s father gave them a used car for their wedding because the convertible had no top.
It was a little startling to the dry-goods merchant to see his family business dissolve in the face of the usual shopping mall onslaught, while his daughter and her dog-trainer husband had their photos in society pages of Chicago and Milwaukee papers. It is a cultural oddity t
hat dog trainers, golf and tennis pros, horse trainers, fishing guides, much like writers and artists, are socially acceptable in a way that wealthy parvenus never are. The tycoons of the Midwest who continue their boyhood passion for bird hunting can scarcely train their own dogs for reasons of time and specific skills. These men develop an unbalanced affection for dog trainers for the simple reason that the outdoorsmen appear to be less abstract and venal (untrue), and are leading a more manly life than can be led in a law office or brokerage house.
So Julip’s father and mother had a foreshortened heyday until her birth and her dad’s drinking reached levels of true impropriety. The year was divided between South and North. From November and the beginning of quail season to its end in March, they lived in various locations of Alabama, southern Georgia, northern Florida, settling by the time she was ten at a large plantation near Moncrief owned by Philadelphia people. By the end of March they headed back to the Ashland area, to a small farm of a hundred acres surrounded by cedar swamp, then broken again by fallow fields dense with dogwood and aspen, ideal cover for grouse and woodcock and the training of dogs.
They lived well enough, especially after her mother began cooking for rich folks, which doubled a modest income. Margaret was totally without talent or instinct for motherhood due to a panoply of neuroses that would never be unraveled, but was a genius in the kitchen. There were never less than a dozen dinner guests at the quail plantation and she was preoccupied with cooking to the point that she neglected her children, Julip and Bobby, and her husband, which made them feel lucky. It’s an old word but Margaret was a virago, and even her silences were tortuous.
Julip liked to say she was raised in a trailer, but the quarters offered the dog trainer were a pleasant bungalow. She and Bobby had fled in her fourteenth year to a nearby trailer on the estate to escape their mother. Dad would frequently come over with a bottle of whiskey and they’d play a tearful game of gin rummy. Often he’d fall asleep on the trailer couch, waking at daylight to look after the dogs which at this estate numbered forty-eight English pointers and a few retrievers.
It was a schizophrenic upbringing, and if it were not for an interested teacher in each place she would not have been saved. She was not unlike the legion of dislocated armed-services brats to whom a true home has been, and will always be, an attractive fiction. But to the degree Julip was saved Bobby was shattered, both by the reality of their situation and by an imagination so errant it boggled the clinical psychologist after the shooting.
*
“Remember when,” she said to Bobby, who was behind a pane of glass almost permanently, the glass soiled by breath, tears, fingers — the longing between prisoner and imprisoned. “Remember when we cut the hole in the trailer floor?”
His face was dissected by what appeared to be fine chicken wire embedded in the glass. She had lost him. His Adam’s apple bobbed and his bad eye framed by the wire drifted off, ignoring her question.
“I like it here. I have a black friend named Ralph. I’m teaching him how to read and write because he doesn’t know how. Ralph’s gay.”
“Is that what you have in mind for yourself?” she asked, trying to prolong his attention.
“No. You know that I’m nothing. Mom and you and Marcia saw to that. At least that’s what they told me.”
“So it’s our fault,” Julip said. “I don’t doubt that. Everybody on earth fucks up everybody else. That’s not exactly new, is it?” She only added the question to keep him going. Until now he had refused to see her, nor had he answered any of her letters the past three months.
“I doubt that. I believe in free will, not predestination. I told them what I did so I could stay in the Forensic Center. Another prisoner told me: Keep bullshitting, it’s a lot better here than Raiford. There was a pond and birds out the window. So I said everything I could think of to keep them interested and stay there longer.”
She glanced over at the clock and then behind her at a guard, who seemed to be studying her fanny on the chair with an intensity she had grown accustomed to over the years. She turned back to her brother with the whisper of an ache beneath her breastbone.
“I saw a new lawyer,” she said. “He told me you would’ve got off if you admitted you were crazy. You would have spent a couple of years in the nut hatch, then got out. You still might be supposing that I can get your victims, judge, and prosecutor to agree to a change of plea on your part.”
“No way. I’m not crazy. I shot those fuckheads out of free will and that’s that. I admit that Dad told me it was okay.”
“Bobby, you know Dad is dead.” Tears flowed upward into her throat and his features blurred.
“Maybe he’s dead to you, but not to me. He told me to go right ahead and shoot those who defiled my sister.” Bobby became rigid for a moment at her tears which she hastily wiped away.
“I never once heard him use the word ‘defile,’ but maybe you did.” She added the last to humor him. “How come you agreed to see me after all this time?”
“I need my little bait box. You know, under the old trailer floor where we cut the hole. I need my arrowheads, stones, and marbles. Jim Crabb lives there now but he’ll let you in. The key’s under the doormat if he’s gone.”
Now he stood and stretched with the awkward muscularity of one who burns up his rage by pumping iron in the prison weight room. He affected, she thought, the wry smile of the doomed, but maybe that’s how he felt, doomed, but having done what he set out to do. Her voice became thin, plaintive.
“I pray no one hurts you in here.” She broke down again at the thought of how her life had twisted his own.
“They don’t fuck with a crazy who shot three men. I love you, Julip.”
“I love you, Bobby.”
“I’ll tell Dad I saw you.”
He waved before she could respond, turning and walking out the door where a guard waited. In her throat a sob married a scream and became nothing.
*
At the motel the maid had refused to pick up the condom that the lawyer had dropped, unused, beside the night table. Julip reflected that men put on condoms as if they were dressing a simple-minded doll, and often, as in this case, a doll with a broken neck. The maid had also turned off the air conditioner, and Julip felt she could smell distinctly the odor of everyone who had stayed there in order to visit husbands, brothers, fathers, and friends at Raiford: the sharp, cheesy odors of grief and loneliness. She shook some cologne into the air conditioner, turning it to HI COOL, took off her clothes, and showered without drying off, the better to imitate a breeze off a northern lake. She disliked Florida or anywhere south in early summer, except for Key West when she visited the Boys and there always was a sea breeze. Inland the wet heat was frightening as if walking through invisible blood, the air the same temperature as your body. She took out her dog album and diary from the bottom of her suitcase, both singularly intimate, leafing through the photos as sacramental reminders that glued the world together: every dog she had owned and also those she had trained for others, like her father had done. She had given the animals a sense of purpose and they had loved her for it — Labradors, springers, setters, Brittanies, English pointers. Under “Florida, Bide-A-Rest Motel, May 23rd,” she wrote:
Saw a pug in a car. What for? Don’t know. Irish setter near road, clipped short for heat, dancing around dead toad. Not too smart. I stopped. Eager to show me toad. I said “go home.” He did. Bench-bred nitwit. Lawyer, so-called friend of Dad’s. Paid with sex as he is an expensive lawyer to help Bobby who is nuts period. Got to get the wounded Boys to accept change of plea. All three to forget the holes shot in them. We had dinner of good seafood. I ate like a Lab as lawyer drank five manhattans and bottle of wine. About fifty I guess. Normal fee three thousand to start. Would settle for “friendliness,” or so he said, if in fact he does anything for Bobby who has never been the same person for even one day. My Emily Dickinson is out in the car dammit. Call Frank to see if Rose is in heat. Ship her
to J.D. in N.D. Dragged recently hit raccoon off road into weeds so he would not keep getting run over. Lawyer cried then left.
*
By the time she started the car she was frankly pissed at Bobby. She stepped outside to let the air conditioner kick in, wondering just how he had come up with the word “defiled,” whether it was from TV or perhaps something he had read. One year younger than her own twenty-one, Bobby had always owned a relentless gift for self-drama. Perhaps, like Dad, he simply had too many emotions. Dad would have a single drink, admittedly a big one, and tears would well up, leaving others present to wonder if the weeping that day was due to sadness, anger, incomprehension, or nothing in particular.
She decided the car was cool enough now so that her ass wouldn’t stick to the seat. The new Subaru station wagon with dog screen had been a winter gift from one of the three wounded, Charles. It had been dealer-delivered on a blustery day in Ashland, Wisconsin, the air thick with snow carried by what was known locally as an Alberta clipper. There was a red ribbon on the steering wheel and a note card reading, “To my darling, Julip. Con Amore, Charles.” The dealer, who had known her parents, wondered what “con amore” meant. When she told him, he said, looking at the new car, “That’s quite a bit of love.” Now she was embarrassed as she backed out of the parking space, glancing over at a coal-black woman she had seen earlier at the prison trying to start an old Dodge. Julip called out, “Can I help?” But then the Dodge turned over and the woman smiled and waved. This fragile bit of contact lifted Julip’s spirits and she set off for Moncrief, north of Tallahassee up on the Georgia-Florida border, perhaps two hours distant, to retrieve Bobby’s bait box, hidden under the linoleum where they had tried to conceal the wild piglet.
*
Jim Crabb stood in the hot yard in the de rigueur white-trash camo outfit, leaning against a blue pickup as battered as the trailer that had once been her home. Julip had called from the gas station back down the country road, and she supposed that this was the pose, of all others, he had decided on: careless, bored, needing the support of the truck as if his legs could not quite bear up under the weight of his balls. Jim Crabb was the definitive ex-Marine, a category as pronounced, specific, and hallowed as the ex-Princetonian. She had known him since childhood, and if anything the sense of general dreariness he filled her with had increased. He was, simply enough, the lamest dickhead she had ever met. As she drew closer she noted that he had doused himself with a cologne reminiscent of car deodorant, which warned her of a pass.
