LILLIAN DOUGLAS

Today’s memorial was really an interment but, like yesterday’s, was a 95 year old person. Lillian Douglas was a quiet, composed, efficient, tender-hearted nurse -- everything a nurse ought to be. Her daughter, some relatives, and a few other former students were there -- all of us somehow right around retirement age. Karen and Larry, the son, had organized a little ceremony of music and readings. No officiant, not even the cemetery care-taker was in attendance, but since it was soon after Memorial Day there were flowers everywhere. A good thing, since otherwise this is one of the less distinguished -- just one of the more respectable -- cemeteries. Afterwards, we took a directory from a convenient rack and walked around the well-maintained lawn, looking for people's names. Then we went for lunch as a group. Very simple, very sincere.

In the early part of the Sixties the big question was always whether half-breeds should choose to be “white” or “red.” Leo and Lillian Douglas had gone to Haskell, a junior college for the assimilation of Native Americans that was pretty successful. Leo ran the Texaco gas station in Browning and Lillian worked at the government hospital, both of them with quiet reliability and competence, so that they were considered white. (A few white people chose to reverse-assimilate and were considered Indian.) Leo participated in both Masons and Knights of Columbus (they were Catholic) and Karen, the daughter, was included in what amounted to a set of “princesses” -- “Rainbow girls” and all that. (Rainbow had quite a different meaning then than it does now.)

Two stories I did not tell were about Karen. Late in high school these princesses, including both Karen and Bob Scriver’s niece Laurel (Whose son reads this blog!! Be careful, Jon!), were out driving around Browning. They didn’t have much practice at being wicked, but there were some unopened beer cans under the car seat that they didn’t even think of drinking. Their idea of delinquency was teasing the young handsome cop who had just moved back to Browning. Fast Buffalo Horse was his name as I recall. He didn’t take it well. He’d been a military policeman in the Marines. Things escalated and he took them all down to the station. I have to admit that I rather enjoyed the ensuing major scandal. Those girls didn’t mind tweaking me now and then either. Of course, the parents came down on the poor officer pretty hard. The girls seemed rather proud.

The second incident was more serious. Karen’s bedroom window was on the second floor and looked down through the window of the tribal jail, which was the converted brick bank of the early days. The kids kept complaining that the cops beat them up and I tried to use that as a topic for discussion in my English classes, which brought the chief of police to the classroom door -- he knocked politely. Then he wrote me a ticket for libel.

We went down to the superintendent’s office, who luckily was Phil Ward, and he reminded this cop (who awkwardly enough was on the school board) that the defense for libel was simply proof and that it would probably result in a countersuit for false arrest. When the chief had left, Phil tried to educate me about the facts of life on a rez. I didn’t absorb a whole lot.

Then Karen confided in me that she could see the cops beating up kids over in the jail. I carried this to Bob Scriver, who was City Magistrate and Justice of the Peace, and he got the right word to the right place to stop the practice -- at least with that particular cast of characters. I always admired Karen’s mix of justice with circumspection.

But what I remember about Karen even more vividly -- and she remembers it, too -- was that her dad asked Bob Scriver to give her some piano lessons for an upcoming competition. I stayed in the studio during the lesson as a kind of chaperon, but really because I was fascinated. I dream about this. In the dream she is playing on a concert grand piano. In reality Bob’s piano was a little spinet with fox toothmarks on the music easel. Karen still remembers this, too. Bob hadn’t given a music lesson one-on-one for many years and it snapped him into a part of his brain that had been aching for expression. He poured out everything with so much intensity that even I -- who know very little about music -- can remember some of what he said about phrasing and Karen, who understood, still remembers his voice when she plays the piece. Now she DOES have a grand piano in California where she lives.

The world has changed drastically since those naive early days. All the terms of everything are different. What at the time seemed pretty smart, now seems a blunder and vice versa. What remains -- at least to me -- is the memory of how decent Karen’s parents were, how orderly that world seemed, a respected piece of sheet music to be well-interpreted. Larry and Karen included with her mother’s ashes (buried on their father’s grave) Leo’s fancy Knights of Columbus fez and Lillian’s pleated sugar bowl of a nurse cap plus some other objects of sentimental value and a lot of rose petals.

Now no one thinks of life choices as either this or that. Rather, the struggle is to understand how to earn a living that won’t somehow dissolve under your feet. Several of the people present live at least half the year in a little coastal village in Mexico. None of their children attended and some had never had any. Laurel was feeling as though this might be a final goodbye as she intends to move to Nevada.

I go to visit that cemetery rather often. I buy a sandwich or hamburger in town and take it out to have “lunch with Bob.” It’s not so picturesque a place as Valier, which has a lake view, or Conrad which has a susurrating grove of evergreens, or Dupuyer with its hill of wild strawberries, or Heart Butte where the snowdrift of baby’s breath from old bouquets foams down the hill, or the old Clark cemetery up the hill from East Glacier where the graves nestle among tall trees the bears visit. But there are people buried in Cut Bank that I care about, the Douglases among them.