Returning to Earth Read Online Free PDF Page B

that’s putting it lightly. I can’t tell you what good it did me to learn all of this but I think you’re better off understanding things like this than simply being pissed off. When you work a man twelve hours a day he becomes exhausted and careless and that’s when the fatal accidents happen. Men and women fall in love, mate, and have children and they have to be fed.
    I know something about what Clarence was up against building those giant ore docks. I’m modest about my knowledge but I was pretty good at geometry and algebra in high school. They were the only subjects I got A’s in. I nearly flunked Civics and History because their subjects never dealt with the raw deal the Indians got, which made me quite angry. I knew the story of how Flower’s grandfather lost a whole section of land, which is 640 acres. Anyway, my son Herald did some research on his computer and at libraries and came up with all of the details on how these giant ore docks were built. They had to be about a hundred and fifty feet high so that the ore could gravity-feed down chutes from the train cars to the huge freighters, which would then take the ore to Cleveland and Chicago to be made into iron and steel.
    It was on a March morning after an ice storm that Clarence lost Sally. He was hauling a load of planks out to the end of the ore dock. A man had been supposed to throw out rock salt on the side planking next to the rails but had run out of salt. The wagon started to slide and Clarence jumped clear only to see the full load skid off the side dragging the fully harnessed Sally with it. Clarence went down hand over hand on a big rope but Sally had hit the solid ice, which often doesn’t melt until late April or early May. The fall was about a hundred and fifty feet and Sally was just short of twenty years. Clarence borrowed a team and a log sled and supplies and took Sally about ten miles east along the shore and then up into the woods to a place they had once camped together. The ground was frozen deep because there had been a cold spell where it was below zero most of February, like in Ishpeming a few years ago when the city pipes froze eight feet down. The story goes it took Clarence three days and nights to bury Sally deep enough to be safe from the wolves and also the bears that would soon be coming out of hibernation. Clarence built a huge driftwood fire and worked right through the three days and nights until his beloved horse had her proper burial.
    Clarence quit his good job, bought a barrel of whiskey, and drank for a month or so. He lost his heart for a while. I was thinking just now that I understand his feelings because I have lost my body, which has been mine for forty-five years. [Donald stops talking and looks at me because I’m crying. When he resumes talking I can’t understand what he says except that I know he’s talking about a pet crow he had as a child. Donald is making squawking noises. Later on about midnightthe new Rilutek drug seems to have a good effect because Donald wishes to talk. I’ve dimmed the lights, so I can barely see to take dictation but we are both staring at the moonlight on the lilacs out the screened window. Their odor is nearly overpowering and it’s as if we’ve both given in to this living memory of earth. Moment by moment it’s lilacs. C.]
    Clarence had a sense of humor. He told his son, who was my grandfather, that he would have buried himself with Sally but couldn’t figure out how. There are things a man can’t accomplish. When he finished the whiskey he didn’t have any more to drink for years until he went to the World’s Fair in Chicago or St. Louis in 1903. Meanwhile he used the empty barrel as a food cache because flies didn’t like the whiskey smell. He ran it up to a tree limb with a rope and pulley because now he lived way back in the woods and had a problem with bears getting his food. He raised a tiny bear cub