Returning to Earth

  Praise for Returning to Earth:

  “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 narratives in turn pull readers into the underlying depths and currents of this tale with the quiet force of a river. Returning to Earth is a watershed work for Harrison.. . . [A] view of death that is as earthbound and humble as it is spiritual and profound.”

  —The Seattle Times

  “Harrison has always written with muscular force and startling compassion.. . . We watch as Donald’s family members enter the essence of grief and as they take the first small steps towards acceptance of loss. When the book ends, many readers will, I suspect, hold it quietly and wonder how to let these people go.”

  —The Oregonian

  “Each voice has its Joycean digressions and obsessions.. . . Although these characters share a common heritage and interests, they remain so distinct, so memorable, that you would recognize their voices in a crowded bar, even if you had your back to them. As for the places they love and inhabit, the chokecherry and dogwood and porcupine-quill baskets and feathers and stones—well, let’s just say that all five senses were used to re-create them.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Harrison’s newest novel, Returning to Earth, contains some of the most poignant moments he has ever imagined.. . . [He] has crafted something remarkable, a set of interlocking stories set in a complex, evolving geography. Any reader who emerges dry-eyed from this powerful but beautifully underwritten scene isn’t paying attention.. . . an important work by a major writer.”

  —The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

  “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. . . I never miss a book by Harrison, and am glad I did not miss this one.”

  —Star Tribune (Minneapolis-St. Paul)

  “Time, memory, and the land all play key roles in Harrison’s remarkable new novel.. . . A deeply felt meditation on life and death, nature and God, this is one of Harrison’s finest works.”

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  “A quilt of family intimacy narrated by disparate voices. . . Harrison deftly shows the intimate details of a family facing the death of a loved one.. . . Returning to Earth is a beautifully written account of one man’s passing and the effect on his multifaceted and multicultural family.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  “Vintage Harrison. . . The themes are as stark and inevitable as life itself: love, loss, death, guilt, redemption.. . . More like Faulkner than Hemingway in the telling. . . It is told in a prose so pure and scraped of excess that a paragraph can seem like a novel, a sentence a poem.. . . Breathtaking.”

  —The Grand Rapids Press

  “[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. . .. A luminous, sad calm pervades this novel.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “[Jim Harrison] has become a major figure in American literature, and nowhere are the reasons for that more clear than in his newest novel, Returning to Earth.. . . A prodigious achievement. It is both familiar and strange, rooted and rootless, endlessly dark and occasionally hilarious. It is above all human: raucous, literary, bawdy, goofy, and wise. It is heartbreakingly sad. And it registers the redemption of love, the power of the word to speak the truth, the peace that comes to those who live even when it is time to die.”

  —The San Diego Union Tribune

  “Harrison’s meticulous attention to the sensualities of life are still present in the beautifully lucid writing.. . . Returning to Earth is a poignant and powerful reflection of how all stories become one in the end, and it is a story told with bare-bone honesty and simple eloquence.”

  —Livingston Weekly

  “Poses the big, searching questions about life and death that we’ve come to expect from this robust, vibrant author. . . He posits an intriguingly receptive attitude toward mortality in a society that largely finds death aberrant and unfathomable.. . . 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

  “[Harrison is] one of America’s most life-affirming writers. . . with a vision of life as a stormy and hardscrabble affair.. . . Recalls Williams Faulkner and Louise Erdrich—two writers who stand behind Harrison’s writing, not to say his vision of reality.. . . What drives these knotted stories forward is Jim Harrison’s acute sense of abundance: the abundance of talk—these folks are such talkers—of food, of spirit, of drink, and of life itself.”

  —The Buffalo News

  “Harrison is one of the most remarkable writers on the planet. He is one of the few who can write a book about death and dying that is at once dignified, uplifting, and hilarious.. . . Redemption and courage flow from Harrison’s heart to ours. We’re lucky to have him. He’s a genuine treasure.”

  —The Wichita Eagle

  “For more than four decades his sinewy prose and poetry have been exhorting us—without timidity—to embrace life in all its sensuality. Now, with his splendid new novel, [Harrison] delivers a treatise on love, loss, and longing.”

  —Santa Fe New Mexican

  “[Jim Harrison’s] fiction is rooted in primitive feelings of earthy connectedness and the mystical bonds shared by human beings and nature, or that could be shared were not our innocence corrupted by greed and unholy aspiration.”

  —The Commercial Appeal

  “At the center of the novel, the irreducible conundrum: what matters after life is stripped away? That is the question. It is not an easy question and it is the question we most often look away from, in a culture swept up in the distractions of the everyday. Be kind, Harrison might say by way of a sideways answer. Be true and be kind.”

  —Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

  Returning to Earth

  JIM HARRISON

  Copyright © 2007 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.

  Printed in the United States of America

  FIRST PAPERBACK EDITION

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Harrison, Jim, 1937–

  Returning to Earth / Jim Harrison,

  p. cm.

  ISBN-10: 0-8021-4331-8

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-4331-0

  1. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—Patients—Fiction. 2. Death—Fiction.

  3. Indians—Mixed descent—Fiction. 4. Upper Peninsula (Mich.)—Fiction.

  5. Family—Fiction. 6. Memory—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3558.A67R4 2007

  813’.54—dc22 2006050802

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  Ne
w York, NY 10003

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  07 08 09 10 11 12 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  to Peter Lewis

  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

  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 & Other Poems

  After Ikkyū & 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

  Part I

  Donald

  1995

  I’m laying here talking to Cynthia because that’s about all I can do with my infirmity. We’re living in Cynthia’s old house in Marquette in order to be close to the doctors. Her brother David usually lives here but he’s off taking a look at different parts of the world but mostly Mexico. Cynthia and I ran away in our teens and got married and now she’s back where she started. My dad, Clarence, did the yard work for her family for about thirty years. My bed is in her father’s den because it’s too hard for me to get upstairs. One wall of the den is full of books with a moving ladder to get to the top shelves. Cynthia says her brother lives inside these books and never really got out. I’m forty-five and it seems I’m to leave the earth early but these things happen to people.

  I don’t have the right language to keep up with my thinking or my memory or all of my emotions over being sick so I’m speaking this to Cynthia [I’m interfering as little as possible. Cynthia] because she wants our two children to know something about the history of their father’s family.

  Starting a long time ago there have been three Clarences but when they got to me my father thought there hadn’t been all that much luck in the name so they called me Donald in honor of a young friend of his who died in a mining accident over near Ishpeming. The first Clarence, named after a Jesuit priest who was a missionary to Indians out in Minnesota, waited until he was fifty to father children because he wasn’t too sure about the world. He had tried to come east in 1871 because his mother had told him about the great forests of the Upper Peninsula. Some of her family had moved west to Minnesota from the U.P. because the white men were moving in for the copper up in the Keweenaw Peninsula. Her people were Chippewa (Anishinabe) but she slept with an immigrant who had come over to the Pipestone area of southwest Minnesota. This man was from the country of Iceland and a bunch of them had come over to farm that real good soil down that way. It was hard on Indians then because the Sioux had killed a bunch of farmers near New Ulm and the settlers were leery of any kind of Indian. So the first Clarence’s mother died when he was about twelve and he had never met his father in person. He was real big for his age and he ran off and worked for a farmer near Morris for a year but they made him sleep in the root cellar beneath their pump shed. He was a good worker and they didn’t want him to get away. They kept him locked down there a whole winter week for stealing a pie. Who is to say how angry a young man would get trapped in a root cellar for a week? By and by he got loose and walked down to Taunton near Minneota and found his father, whose name he had memorized, a farmer named Lagerquist. It was a Saturday morning when farmers come to town but the man was with a wife and two kids so that young Clarence wasn’t sure what to do. The story goes that the man came up to him and said, “What do you want, son?” Clarence was real glad the man recognized him. So Clarence said, “I’d like a horse to ride to Michigan if you can spare one?” The man got him a horse but it was a draft horse so it was slow going. That’s how the first Clarence started out for Michigan. It’s hard to think of a thirteen-year-old doing such a thing nowadays.

  Here I am on the sofa at age forty-five and I have Lou Gehrig’s disease. [Donald has had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis for nearly a year now. His case is especially aggressive and it appears he will fall short of the three years of the disease that fifty percent of patients last. Cynthia.] I never knew much about Lou Gehrig though my dad, Clarence, used to talk about him. Gehrig played baseball, which I never had any time for because the coaches at Marquette decided they needed me for track where I could be counted on to win the 100, 220, and the shot put, though my true love was for football where I was the quarterback, and a linebacker on defense.

  The children are both in California where Herald is taking advanced degrees at Caltech and Clare is an apprentice for wardrobe in the movie business. We talk on the phone to them for about an hour every Sunday.

  You wonder how a girl from the Upper Peninsula could end up working on movies but that’s the way the world goes these days. Clare got this interest from her stepcousin Kenneth, who doesn’t like his name and just goes by the letter “K.” He’s Polly’s son and is a crazy bastard but I like him. Years ago K would ride his bicycle all the way two hundred miles from Marquette to Sault Ste. Marie for a visit. Herald is more like his uncle David. Mathematics is enough for Herald though he’s also interested in botany. He’s a big strong young man but finds people confusing. Herald and Clare have an apartment together in Los Angeles and look after each other like a brother and sister should. Why I say Herald takes after David is because when I read David’s rundown of what his family did in the Upper Peninsula for a hundred years I was puzzled. It was published in the Sault Ste. Marie newspaper among others and I was proud that a relative knew so much but there weren’t any real people in it. I like the stories with people myself. I mean he told the story of the bad details of the logging and mining his ancestors were involved in but not the actual story of the people who owned the logging companies and mines and the working people. I’m not being critical; I just prefer stories.

  Of course I’ve got a foot in both worlds. My dad figured I’m over half Chippewa. In fact I’m due benefits from the tribe for my sickness but Cynthia has some money salted away and we figure tribal money should go to the folks who really need it.

  Let’s go back to the first Clarence. I remember when I first heard the story from my dad when I was a kid and I worried about the hardship. Here was this boy only thirteen being kept in a root cellar who after he escapes sees his real father only half an hour and then he’s gone to the northeast riding a big draft horse toward a future. The story goes that he only had seven dollars and a letter that said the horse was his because he looked pretty Indian and people were liable to take the horse from him claiming it was stolen. I said all these worries to my dad and he said, “Life is real hard for some folks,” but then he added that riding off on that horse was likely a good feeling for his grandfather compared to losing his mother and being trapped in a root cellar. So maybe it wasn’t too bad to be him on a draft horse riding east. For instance I’m real sick right now but I’ve been able to live with it except for a few times when it got out of hand. Back in high school when I ran track or played football you were likely to get a cramp. With this disease at times you are a cramp, your whole body seizes up so that even your mind seems inside a cramp. You’re all cramp, pure and simple. That’s why K goes with me when I feel good enough to take a walk. I’m too big for anyone to carry but K can go for help.

  When I was a kid of eight or nine years and first listened carefully to the story of the first Clarence I was upset when Dad said that he rode his
horse through fields so wide out on the prairie that you couldn’t see across them. This fact upset me for a few weeks because I couldn’t imagine such a landscape. In most places in the Upper Peninsula you can’t see very far because of the thickness of the forest and that’s why it’s a relief to be in the hills along the coast of Lake Superior, where you can see a long ways. When I finally questioned my dad about these fields with no end to them he said they were something like Lake Superior, which you can’t see across to the other side in Canada. This all became clear to me when Cynthia and I took the kids on a camping trip out west years ago. Cynthia explained that in 1871 when Clarence began his trip there weren’t many trees in western Minnesota and the eastern Dakotas except for cotton-woods along the creeks and rivers. At that time the trees the settlers had planted hadn’t grown up much to speak of.

  The upshot was that it took the original Clarence thirty-five years to reach the Marquette area, in 1906. His first try heading east frightened him because by late September in 1871 and early October every morning the sun rose red and the world was full of smoke. It had been a real dry season in the northern Midwest and there were fires everywhere, mostly the tops of trees and limbs left behind by logging. This was the year of the great Peshtigo fire in northeast Wisconsin that killed over a thousand people. Clarence heard from travelers that rivers boiled, and birds high in the air caught fire, and the wind everywhere was a hundred miles an hour, more than the worst November gales on Lake Superior.

  So he turned around near Bad River and never saw the great uncut forests his mother had told him about. He had some bad luck and then some good luck. He was camped on the Red River north of Grand Forks and two outlaws tried to steal his horse. He threw them in the river and one drowned. He moved his camp north and one day a rich farmer up that way saw him riding the horse, which was a sorrel mare by the name of Sally. The farmer wanted to buy the horse and Clarence explained that the horse was all he had of his father and needed to keep it. The farmer hired Clarence to take care of his twelve teams of draft horses and work on his farm. Clarence got to live in a small log cabin, which was good after many months of camping and besides it was November and getting pretty cold that far north. The farm was so big that there was a cook to make food for the many hired hands so he got to eat regular. Snared rabbits, muskrat, and beaver can be pretty tasty but anyone hankers for some beef, cabbage, and potatoes.