Harrison - Legends of the fall

LEGENDS

OF THE FALL

BOOKS BY JIM HARRISON

FICTION

Wolf: A False Memoir

A Good Day to Die

Farmer

Warlock

Sundog

Dalva

The Woman Lit by Fireflies

Julip

The Road Home

The Beast God Forgot to Invent

True North

The Summer He Didnt Die

Returning to Earth

The English Major

The Farmers Daughter

The Great Leader

The River Swimmer

Brown Dog

CHILDRENS LITERATURE

The Boy Who Ran to the Woods

POETRY

Plain Song

Locations

Outlyer and Ghazals

Letters to Yesenin

Returning to Earth

Selected & New Poems: 19611981

The Theory and Practice of Rivers & New Poems

After Ikky & Other Poems

The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems

Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry, with Ted Kooser

Saving Daylight

In Search of Small Gods

Songs of Unreason

ESSAYS

Just Before Dark: Collected Nonfiction

The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand

MEMOIR

Off to the Side

LEGENDS

OF THE FALL

Jim Harrison

Grove Press

New York

Copyright 1978, 1979 by Jim Harrison

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, 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. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the authors rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or .

The lines from Gacela of the Dark Death (translated by Stephen Spender and J.L. Gili). Casida of the Reclining Woman (translated by W.S. Merwin) and The Faithless Wife (translated by Stephen Spender and J.L. Gili) are from The Selectd Poems of Federico Garcia Lorca , translated by Stephen Spender, J. L. Gili and W.S. Merwin. Copyright 1955 by New Directions Publishing Corporation. Reprinted by permission of New Directions.

The novella Legends of the Fall and a shorter version of Revenge first appeared in Esquire.

This edition first published in 1994 by Dell Publishing a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

eBook ISBN: 978-0-8021-9221-9

Grove Press

an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

154 West 14th Street

New York, NY 10011

Distributed by Publishers Group West

www.groveatlantic.com

TO GUY AND JACK

REVENGE

Revenge is a dish better served cold.

(Old Sicilian adage)

CHAPTER

I

You could not tell if you were a bird descending (and there was a bird descending, a vulture) if the naked man was dead or alive. The man didnt know himself and the bird was tentative when he reached the ground and made a croaking sideward approach, askance and looking off down the chaparral in the arroyo as if expecting company from the coyotes. Carrion was shared not by the sharers design but by a pattern set before anyone knew there were patterns. The vulture had just eaten a rattler run over by a truck outside of Nacozari de Garca, a little town well off the tourist run about a hundred miles from Nogales. The coyotes would follow the vultures descent out of curiosity whether or not they were hungry from the nights hunt. As the morning thermals developed more vultures would arrive until the mans dying would have an audience.

As the dawn deepened into midmorning and the heat dried and caked the blood on the mans face, the blood lost most of its fresh coppery odor. The man was dying fitfully now, more from the heat and dehydration than from his injuries: an arm twisted askew, chest a massive blue bruise, one cheekbone crushed in with a hematoma rising like a purple sun, his testicles inflated from a groining. And a head wound that darkened the sand and pebbles and drew him down into his near fatal sleep of coma. Still, he kept breathing, and the hot air whistled past a broken tooth and when the whistle was especially loud the vultures were disturbed. A female coyote and her recently weaned pups stopped by but only for a moment: she snapped at the pups saying this pitiful beast is normally dangerous. She nodded in passing to a very large, old male coyote who watched with intense curiosity from the shadow of a boulder. He watched, then dozed, even in sleep owning an alertness unknown to us. His belly was full of javelina and watching this dying man was simply the most interesting thing to happen his way in a long time. It was all curiosity though: when the man died the coyote would simply walk away and leave it to the vultures. And it had been a long vigil for him, having been close by when the naked man had been thrown from the car the night before.

In the first comparative coolness of the evening a Mexican peasant (pene in Mexican slang) and his daughter walked along the road making short forays into the brush for stray pieces of mesquite firewood. Rather, the man walked doggedly under his light load of wood and the daughter pranced, hopping from one foot to another, skipping, running then waiting for her father. She was his only child and he wouldnt let her pick up firewood for fear she would be bitten by a scorpion, or a corallo, a coral snake which unlike the rattlesnake gave no warning though it was shy and retiring and meant no harm. It simply bit when cornered or provoked, then slid away and calmed its nerves under another log or stone. The daughter carried a bible. She helped in the kitchen of the Mennonite mission where her father had long been the custodian.

The daughter began to sing and that flushed the vultures still another hundred yards down the road. They were about to leave anyway for the safety of their mountain rookery before evening deepened. The coyote withdrew a little farther into the gathering shadows. He recognized the voices of the man and his daughter and knew from the seven years of his life that they werent dangerous to him. He had watched them on their way to the mission countless times but they had never seen him. The great birds flushing in the evening sun aroused the curiosity of the father and he quickened his pace. He had a hunters inquisitiveness, not unlike the coyotes, and he remembered the time when he had found a large deer freshly fallen from an escarpment by following a descending gyre of vultures. He told his daughter to wait at a distance and he cautiously entered the dense chaparral along the road. He heard a rush of breath and a faint whistle and quickly opened a long pearl-handled knife. He crept noiselessly toward the whistling, smelling a trace of blood amidst the vulture dung. Then he saw the man and whistled himself, kneeling to feel the pulse. At odd times he had accompanied the missionary who was also a doctor on his treks into the mountains and he had learned the elements of first aid. Now he stood, whistled again in unison with the dying man, and looked at the sky. He was mostly Indian and his first thought was to simply walk away and avoid any contact with the Federales. But then the doctor was friends with the Federales and the man remembered the parable of the good Samaritan and looked back down at the body somewhat fatalistically, as if to say, Ill help but I think its too late.