Big Medicine (A Novel)

This is a serialized novel. See earlier installments here.

My mother was three years older than Jesse. She was born in Seattle, where my grandfather had emigrated with his parents from Germany. Ira Sauer was his name, and I knew him only in photographs as a distant, brooding man. His father, Helmut, taught German literature at the University of Washington, but Ira was a slow reader and chafed against his father’s heavy hand. He enlisted in the Air Force and served as a tail gunner in the Second World War. Jesse claimed that his father shot down at least twenty German planes and was wounded three times himself, shot in the leg and arm and once in the shoulder. Despite his courage, Ira found little warmth when he returned to Seattle, where the sound of his name brought a cloud over people’s faces.

Ira married my grandmother, Becca, after she waited on him at a diner in south Seattle, where he was working as a mechanic. Soon after their wedding my mother was born, but Ira was sick of city life, so the family moved to a ranch near Spokane where he tended sheep and horses. Jesse was born there, in the little cabin where Ira and Becca lived. The job came with free room and board, and soon Ira had saved enough to buy his own land. He found forty acres in the Yaak Valley, twenty miles from Canada, built a house in the middle of the property, and spent the rest of his life deep in the timber.

Jesse and my mother attended a one-room schoolhouse in Sylvanite, a mining outpost that turned ghost town almost as soon as it was founded, until they were old enough to catch a bus to the high school in Troy. In the summers they roamed the forest surrounding the family land, eating wild raspberries and fishing the West Fork of the Yaak River, which was often so shallow they could wade across. Soon they learned that they could earn their own money by selling mushrooms and huckleberries to tourists at a roadside stand by the highway. My mother packed a lunch for the two of them, sometimes only bread and apples, and they carried buckets through recent burns where the mushrooms clustered beneath punky logs, sprouting from the ash like wrinkled fingers reaching from a grave. Later in the summer they canvassed the logging clearcuts, where brush grew thick and huckleberries thrived among the alder and seedling fir trees.

On Sundays the family drove forty miles to Bonners Ferry to attend a Foursquare church, a congregation of five or six families that met in a building that doubled as the food pantry the rest of the week. Unlike most Pentecostal denominations, the church had a doctrine. It was based on a verse in the book of Ezekiel which described the four faces of God and was popularized by a female evangelist, Sister Aimee, during a revival in California at the start of the Roaring Twenties. Sister Aimee saw a symbolic pattern in Ezekiel that she extended to the life of Jesus. The face of the man was the face of the Savior. The ox typified Christ’s role in bearing burdens, and the eagle signified his imminent return as king. The lion showed Christ’s baptism of sinners in the Holy Spirit and in fire. The doctrine appealed to Ira. It was simple, but profound. You could understand the Bible by this rule of fours. A pastor might help you see more of the symbolism, but you could work it out for yourself: salvation, healing, and baptism from the one true king.

My mother still follows this doctrine. But it made Jesse restless. He thought there had to be more to religion than sitting in rows of metal folding chairs week after week. It was a sterile place. A cube of concrete blocks painted white. Nothing like the movement when it began in California, where thousands flocked to listen to Sister Aimee, a fiery woman barely twenty years old. So where were the thousands now? Why had it withered away to a few families? My mother smiled as she recalled the arguments they had about it in the huckleberry patch. She was fond of quoting the proverb to me that Ira had quoted to her: “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” She said it so much it felt like a prophecy or a spell she wanted to cast over Jesse and me. She needed to believe that no matter how far Jesse might wander, no matter how many questions he might dream up, the faith they had been raised with would become a bedrock truth he could not shake as a grown man.

For much of my life, she was still waiting for that prophecy to come true. Before he finished high school, Jesse gave up the berry picking for a summer job in road construction, and by the time he graduated, he had enough put away to buy his Harley. He rode it down to Missoula to start the forestry program, but it wasn’t yet November when he dropped out. Come spring, he was back with the construction crew. Gone for weeks at a time, then home between jobs.

I wonder now if he ever really came home. Even when he’d take me out into the woods and we’d pass the day thinking our own thoughts within a stone’s throw of each other, Jesse was never at rest. It was how I felt driving to Lilah’s, knowing she would feed me and take me into her bed, but also knowing that I didn’t belong there. I thought if I could just find someone like Hannah, maybe it would quiet me down. But I should have known that it wasn’t that simple. Not if I was as much like Jesse as everyone said I was.

I never lingered long at Lilah’s in the morning. She made coffee and took her cup out to the patio with a book, and I understood that I was not to accompany her. I drank my coffee at the counter, looking out over the garden, and rinsed the cup, and set it in the rack to dry. It was a little after daybreak, still early, but I needed to get back to finish the bikes before Johnny opened at ten. I kissed the top of Lilah’s head on my way out to the car. She smiled and turned the page.

Maybe it was the worry I woke to or the melancholy feeling I had driving along cornfields that had begun to yellow for harvest, but I did not drive away from Lilah’s feeling cleansed that morning. A damp dread sat in my chest. It followed me into my apartment, onto the bike, along the alleyway where I parked the Schwinn, and into the shop.

I knew if I started tightening cables and lubing chains, I would fall into the trance that had kept me working for Johnny so long, and then the shop would open, and the day would slide away. But all the while the bad feeling I’d awakened to would sit like a frozen fist within me, waiting for me to pay it some heed.

I called my mother. She picked up on the second ring.

“Benjy?”

“Hi, mama. You’ve been up for a while?”

“Since four.” Her voice sounded older, frail.

“Sorry I didn’t call last night. Busy day. Anyway, what’s going on? I couldn’t really tell from your message.”

“Jesse’s been missing four days now, Benjy. The police found his pickup where Hannah told them to look, but it’s rough country down there, and Search and Rescue says…” She faltered, and I heard her swallow. “Search and Rescue says it could be days before they find him if he fell. And if he’s unconscious and can’t call to them, he’ll get hypothermic and if he doesn’t wake up and start to move, it will be too late.”

I asked her to slow down. Where was his pickup?

“Down on the Lochsa. You know, where he took you elk hunting that time?”

I knew the place. We parked at the Wilderness Gateway campground on the Lochsa River and hiked up the ridge past an old horse camp, deeper into the Nez Perce forest. I could see hundreds of miles from the ridgetops, the crags to the south, the Sawtooth mountain range farther away. It had been cold then, late November. But it was summer now, and I couldn’t imagine Jesse freezing, even if the overnight low dipped into the 40s.

From my mother, I learned that Jesse had gone there to scout elk after work on a Friday, that he’d planned to take Monday off and return home that evening. Hannah went to bed without him that night. When she didn’t see his truck the next morning, she was concerned. But maybe he’d gone straight to work and would be home by supper. When he didn’t turn up Tuesday evening, Hannah called my mother, and the two of them decided to give it another day.

“Why didn’t we get the search team out there right away?” She was near tears. “What were we trying to prove by waiting?”

“You know how Jesse is,” I said. “I would have done the same as you.”

“The thing is, Benjy, he’s been going to those home meetings up in the Yaak. They’re talking about revival again. Hannah won’t admit it, but I don’t think he really went down there to scout elk.” An edge crept into my mother’s voice. She had a way of setting her jaw when she warmed to her opinions, and I could see her gazing out her living room window as she talked, her chin drawn into her neck and her green eyes unblinking.

Growing up Foursquare gave my mother a simple faith. The four pillars of doctrine brought structure to her prayers. A solid rock to live on. What Jesse took away were the origin stories. Sister Aimee healing the sick, electrifying crowds in Los Angeles. He felt he belonged in those stories somehow, and it gave him an aloofness that impressed me as a child. But I wonder now if it was a delusion that grew out of his isolation, an imagined ancestry that he believed in after years of daydreaming in the woods. You can believe things like that in wild country. You can convince yourself that the greatness you see in a mountain face is within you, too, that it is who you really are.

Jesse rode out to Los Angeles once, but he was back in a week, shocked by the hookers and the dirty streets. My mother said he had a weakness for bohemian women, maybe because they were kind to him. But he could never shake his unease at their talk of chakras and crystals, and eventually he would slip away. He had tried Quaker meetings, big churches in Kalispell, one summer manning a fire lookout like a recluse. But he was a pilgrim without a tribe until he met Hannah.

“Home meetings?” I said. “In the Yaak?”

“I don’t know much about it,” she said. “Just that they’ve been going to revival meetings on somebody’s land out there. Hannah, Jesse, and the kids. I didn’t think it would last.”

“Doesn’t sound like Hannah.”

“It isn’t. She’s been going along with it, but I don’t think Sarah and Paul like it much, either.”

“I thought he was done with all that.”

“Oh, I hoped he was. There’s nothing good ever comes of pretending to be John the Baptist. It’s vanity, Benjy. I told him that. All this talk about laying down your life, laying your children and your wife on the altar. We’ve argued about it plenty.”

My temples began to pound. Should I drive out there and join the search? What could I do that the rescue team couldn’t if he’d already been gone four days? If it would take me two more days just to get there?

“Let’s just wait and see, mama. Maybe he’s just twisted a knee and it’s slowed him down. It’s still summer, and he’ll have berries to eat and mild nights yet. I bet they find him on the trail or down by a water source.”

“Jesus help him,” she said. I felt a tickle of irritation, the way I always did when she prayed out loud. It felt like a rebuke of my own disbelief, no matter how she meant it. And usually it felt pointless. Jesus hadn’t done anything to help when my father lay dying on the flagstones below the lodge. So far as I was concerned, if Jesse was in trouble, and if it had anything to do with his revival meetings, most of the blame could be laid at Jesus’ feet.

I told my mother not to worry, that Jesse knew what he was doing in the woods, and the search team did, too. She sighed, and we exchanged our love, and I turned back to the bikes. There was a girl’s Huffy with a bent wheel and a Gary Fisher mountain bike that needed a clean drive train and overall tune-up and a Giant road bike with a note about sluggish shifting. Johnny would charge half an hour for each job, even though I’d finish in half that time, and the customer would think he got a deal, and we’d all be happy. Some techs, usually the young ones who liked to pretend they were pros, would talk down to the schmucks who didn’t know how to tune up their own bikes, but Johnny thought that was stupid, and I tended to agree. Why guilt the customer into learning how to do it himself if you could do it with your eyes closed and make bank to boot?

More than that, I had come to depend on the steady flow of bikes, the straightforward problems they presented, the way I forgot that I even existed while working with gears and levers and wheels. There was a lot outside Johnny’s shop that I didn’t understand and even more that I could not control, but in the back with the tools, I was cobbling the world together one crooked rim at a time. When the Huffy wheel spun between the brake pads without even a hint of a wobble, when the Gary Fisher sat gleaming in the rack, when I spun the pedals on the Giant and listened to the gears click like the guts of a German clock as I worked the shifters, it was hard to imagine Jesse in any real danger.

Stay tuned for future installments. See the full manuscript to date here.

Joshua Doležal writes The Recovering Academic.