Legends of the Fall

by Jim Harrison

Years later Nordstrom pondered the degree of accident in human affection as do all intelligent mortals. What if it hadn’t rained that Friday? How tentative and restless an idea: he ended up marrying Laura because it rained one Friday afternoon in May in Madison, Wisconsin.

“You’re looking up my legs,” she said. “No I wasn’t.” “If you’re honest you can kiss them.” “I was.” He kissed her legs until neither of them wore anything. And the hawk now perched in a tree in the woodlot could see an imprecise circle of flattened green wheat and two bodies entwined until late in the afternoon when it began to rain again.

Scarcely anyone can turn their backs on the best thing that has happened to them.

By dawn he decided he wanted to escape into the world rather than from it: there was nothing particularly undesirable or repellent in his life, only a certain lack of volume and intensity; he feared dreaming himself to death, say as a modest brook in a meadow eases along sleepily to a great river just beyond the border of trees.

The most vexing thing in the life of a man who wishes to change is the improbability of change.

I told him I would go along with him into death as far as I could but I would have to turn back.

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.

The world at face is so frightening no wonder.

They left before dawn with their father holding an oil lamp in the stable dressed in his buffalo robe, all of them silent, and the farewell breath he embraced them with rose in a small white cloud to the rafters.

Who reasons death anymore than they can weigh the earth or the heart of beauty?

both dogs and men were fatigued from the rare late October heat though the northern horizon was dark and they knew that snow was possible by nightfall in the vagaries of Montana weather.

And we can’t seem to go from large to small because everything is the same size. Everyone’s skin is so particular and we are so largely unimaginable to one another.

Later that night after everyone had gone to bed Tristan walked far out in the pasture in the moonlight: the snow patches were a ghostly white and far to the west he could see the even whiter peaks of the Rockies. He listened to the coyotes yelping and chattering in pursuit and occasionally a short howl. Back near the corral he heard the puppy crying and went into the barn and picked it up. He took it in the house and up to his room where he put it on the mule deer skin and built a nest around it with a comforter against the chill of the night. Tristan slept then until the middle of the night when the puppy growled and in the moonlight from the window he saw Two standing at the foot of the bed. He reached for her hand and after a while she joined his deep and dreamless sleep, wound about each other with all loneliness faded at last from the earth.

hieratica

No grace is isolate, and it was to a greater part the people he loved, but could scarcely comprehend as people when he left, who led him into light and warmth;