Returning to Earth by Jim Harrison Page B

crush on each other but he knew it was wrong to touch her unlike his father who raped poor Vera when he was drunk. That was the end of the family. Cynthia and I ran away together. Her mother Marjorie took off for Chicago. The father, who wasn’t even arrested, moved over to Duluth and no one laid eyes on him for years. David stayed home in this big house with Mrs. Plunkett looking after him. Jesse took Vera back to Mexico the day after the rape where she had a baby, a boy that was never quite right in the head though part of it might have been when he got hit by a car while he was riding his bicycle. Who knows what came first, the chicken or the egg? Anyway, years later, right after Cynthia’smother died young David was stupid enough to go down to Mexico with his dad where a coffee farm was owned jointly by these two old men. Jesse and the dad had a drunken squabble and fight and Vera’s son steps in with a machete. David and his dad were pushed out in the Gulf of Mexico in a rowboat and since the old man was about dead anyway David shoved his father overboard. Strange to say I didn’t feel bad when at his ex-wife’s funeral this man wouldn’t recognize me or shake my hand. And here I was the father of his grandchildren. [This story isn’t hard in me. The story is as dead as my father. I’m just thankful to whatever gods there might be that my mother recovered after leaving him. C.]
    So my own father’s solution for the hard knocks of life was to work too hard and that’s also been a downfall of my own. It used to drive Cynthia crazy in the summer when I’d have two crews working two shifts and I’d sometimes put in a sixteen-hour day. Cynthia did my bookkeeping. She was a soft touch and made sure my men were paid well and had health insurance. Maybe the worst point in our marriage is that I didn’t want us living on the money that was left to her from her mother’s family and, later on, money left from the sale of her dad’s land. Our compromise was all of our camping trips though sometimes on them I’d fish from dawn to dark, which often in the summer was sixteen hours. Once I took Clare a couple hundred miles west to fish the Middle Branch of the Ontonagon near Bruce Crossing. We dropped Herald off in Marquette, where he was going to stay with his uncle David and hear an important mathematician speak at the university. We got delayed over near Sidnaw when two old ladies in a Chrysler up ahead of us hit a doe and mangledit up pretty well. Clare was about seventeen at the time but she had a real calming influence on people just like her mother. While she settled down the ladies, I carved two backstraps, the loins, out of the deer and put them on ice to eat the following day. Just like beef or pork, venison is not at its best when it’s freshest. We made camp just before dark and because there was a big moon we fished at night knowing that the next day might be slow if the fish were able to feed all night. It was warm and buggy so Clare did better with her fly-fishing than I did with bait. I built a fire about three a.m. and when the coals were right I fried up a nice mess of brook trout in some bacon grease mixed with butter so I could get the iron skillet red hot. We ate our fish with just bread and salt and then had some blueberry cobbler Cynthia had sent along. We took a short swim and laid out our sleeping bags, both of us deciding to skip the tent in favor of the big moon. We were freshened up by our swim and started talking about this and that, including how to get Herald over his grief about losing his girlfriend Sonia. We took a couple of hits from a small bottle of schnapps and I asked Clare why she had had so many boyfriends. She said, “I like affection,” which meant she took after her mother, then she said that Cynthia and I were lucky we had this great romantic love for each other to carry us through life, adding that most people