As “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” was to the Plains Indian tribes who confronted the Clearances of the Prairie, so is the "Foley Report" (An Historical Analysis of the Administration of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation by the United States, 1855 - 1950) to the Blackfeet. Impassioned, detailed, full of research, this report needs to be read by more people than can check it out of the library at the University in Bozeman. But first, who WAS Michael Foley anyway? This eulogy from a Georgeton University publication gives us some clues.
Prairie Mary
********
Friday, October 16th, 1998
One Georgetown Great: a Tribute to Micheal Foley and His Legacy
By Terence W. S. McCormick
President Clinton has not yet invoked the name of Michael Foley on television, nor is there a building or a chair in his name. However, in light of recent developments at Georgetown, it seems that the time has come to revisit the career of this outstanding educator, who often courageously defied the arrogance of administrators when it threatened to diminish what was and is best about the university.
Professor Michael F. Foley taught the history of Great Britain and Modern Europe at Georgetown until his death in 1984. Among students in particular, he was noted for his generosity with his time and academic advice. In a period of Georgetown’s history when lucrative jobs and the "values" of the 1980s defined for many the purpose of a university degree, he persistently refocused our priorities. "There should be a great sign over the gate at Healy Circle to warn you all," he said once, "and it should read, ‘You Are Presumed to Be a Consenting Adult From the Day You Enter Here.’" He recognized, of course, that for 18 year-olds that presumption is a shaky one.
This was so, in part, because Professor Foley had to take control of his own undergraduate education, which he was only able to afford on a basketball scholarship. I suspect he was "underwhelmed" by his undergraduate environment, for he supplemented his studies by forming a group of students who agreed each week to read and discuss a work of some literary or historic significance. These discussions became, I suspect, the model for his courses.
Professor Foley was a Christian Socialist, influenced by the career of Arnold Toynbee. This was a lonely philosophy in the Georgetown of any time, even if the professor’s socialism, like Toynbee’s, was informed by his Christianity, not vice versa. The following pronouncement by Toynbee summarizes well Foley’s philosophy regarding the social and historical imperative facing all nations:
"We – the middle classes I mean, but not merely the very rich – we have neglected you; instead of justice, we have offered you charity, and instead of sympathy we have offered you hard and unreal advice…You have to forgive us…We will serve you, we will devote our lives to your service …We are willing to give up the life we care for, the life with books and with those we love. We will do this and only ask you to remember one thing in return…if you get a better life, you will really lead a better life. (Peter d’A. Jones, The Christian Socialist Revival, 1877-1914 [Princeton: Princeton University press 1968], 85-6, n.2)
Although Foley’s views were no secret, he gave traditional and Marxist historians equal time; Hugh Trevor-Roper and Eric J. Hobsbawm each got his lumps. Moreover, whatever well-considered lumps his students had to offer (even if at odds with his own views) were welcome. Foley was commited to teach what happened in Great Britain and Europe, to make us read what academics said about what happened, and then to ensure that we wrote critically about what they said. It is heady stuff for any teenager to reconstruct Hugh Trevor-Roper’s thinking and then presume to explain why Trevor-Roper was wrong, or how bias undermined the credibility of his conclusions. Yet it was by this method that we came to understand what Metternich described, when distinguishing after the Congress of Vienna between "what happened, and what really happened."
If the foregoing description of Professor Foley’s style and vision for Georgetown seems unremarkable, one need only consider a recent, unflattering report from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The report criticized a pattern among premier universities of assigning graduate assistants to the task of teaching undergraduate, and particularly freshman classes. ("Undergraduate Education is Lacking, Report Finds," The New York Times, April 20, p. A12, col. 5.). This, to be sure, was never characteristic of Foley’s Georgetown.
The professor was as eager to do battle within the university about the hot topics of the day as he was to debate whether France or England was the first nation-state, or whether the Cromwellian Commonwealth was the product of a rising bourgeoisie. Professor Foley never perceived an issue so dangerous that he could not risk taking a public stand. Some alumni may recall a controversial proposal he defended to reduce the standard semester course load from five to four -- an intriguing position in view of his insistence that the standards of undergraduate education not be diluted. His frank disgust concerning the improper role of outsiders in the denial of tenure to a distinguished professor was another example of his investment in Georgetown, expressed in defiance of orthodoxy and authority.
We have recently witnessed several disquieting academic developments at Georgetown. For example, the School of Languages and Linguistics is now a memory. The academic leadership of the Main Campus itself is becoming more reminiscent of a Russian Cabinet than I would find comfortable. And the integrity of the undergraduate curriculum in the undergraduate colleges -- particularly that of the English Department -- has been placed in question, at times in the context of unflattering national press. Consequently, it seems inescapable to this writer that we still need a voice as fearless and respected as that of Professor Foley in our ongoing discussion of Georgetown’s future. (Perhaps the successful dissent by some faculty from the astonishing scheme to dismiss the Law Center’s Dean Judith Areen has brought some latter-day "Foleys" into the open.)
I exhort undergraduates to evaluate today’s faculty and today’s administrators by the standard he set. The "Great Professor" at Georgetown is set apart by the principle that undergraduate education is as much about cultivating a thinking process as it is about conveying information. The "Great Professor" lights a fire in the mind and makes that mind work on its own forever.
Late in the afternoon of March 17, 1982, Foley abruptly concluded his lecture on the European Enlightenment with a speech beginning with the following pronouncement: "Ireland has been ruled by priests, poets, prelates and politicians, and has been betrayed by all four." It is due to the memory I have of him that I have spent my free time reading the history of that island, a long neglected topic. This is his enduring contribution to my idea of Georgetown: although I now spend my week practicing law, my undergraduate education is not really over. And Foley’s balance between respect for Georgetown’s history on the one hand and his willingness to be an outspoken critic on the other remains an equally important contribution. I, for one, entered Georgetown as a worshipful product of Jesuit education, and left as a confirmed member of the Loyal Opposition. With his imprint on my idea of Georgetown, I have never since doubted that it was the "Great University."
Terence W. S. McCormick (SFS ’85) currently practices law in New York City. John R. Tennant, Esq. (SFS ’85) and Dr. Peter Leopold (COL ’85) also contributed to this piece.
Saturday, February 17, 2007
Friday, February 16, 2007
"WIRE IN THE BLOOD"
My animal control boss, Mike Burgwin, likes to say that when he was trained to be a police officer, he learned two things: take names and kick butt. Helen Mirren, in her “Prime Suspect” incarnation, says she only knows two ways to solve cases: plod and intuition. The distinction between the television series “Wire in the Blood” and the book series written by Val McDermid is not quite captured by either dyad. I’d say it’s the difference between a painting by a French impressionist -- all vivid slashes of color -- and by a pointellist -- many small monotonous strokes that finally create a picture. The book is the latter.
My sample is not very big. I’m only halfway through the series episodes on DVD and have just finished reading “The Wire in the Blood.” The title comes from T.S. Eliot, the "Four Quartets," but there’s nothing particularly literary about either version of the story. I suppose one could squeeze out some philosophical existentialism, but that’s always a possibility. You could get it out of a turnip.
Clearly McDermid came up with the central notion of this tale: a serial killer is motivated by the loss of his athletic career but is never suspected because he’s now a successful and charming talk show host with a closeted lesbian wife for cover. The central pair of solvers is Tony Hill, a constrained and busy-brained profiler, and his friend Carol Jordan, a tough female copper. They are classic sidekicks: in sympathy, bonded, but not “an item.” The dynamic is that Tony is the quicksilver thinker and Carol is the grounded “yes-but.” Romantic dimensions are only hinted in both video and book, more successfully in the video, I think, where the actors stand close and look into each other’s faces -- even lean towards each other, but never kiss or embrace. Robson Green is a natural for this. As an actor in these series of stories he is tremendously charismatic but quite restrained. (In the “fluff” he did previously, he was often goofy and always sexy.) In the book we are told the character is impotent, but that’s pretty hard to believe about Robson Green and, anyway, one might not care! Simple intimate talk with him might be as satisfactory as sex with someone else!
In the previous Robson Green crime series, “Touching Evil,” he was nearly supernatural, an explicit shaman who had come back from the dead, but in this series he is a nerdy little fellow whose strength is persistence and detail, plus formidable amounts of theory from books. “Profiling” is the technique of both series as well as it was the idea behind “Cracker,” the first series to come anywhere near the power of “Prime Suspect,” which was pretty much straight policing. “Cracker” depended upon the larger-than-life main character, a huge man of appetites and drama, and upon a darker, more confrontive and cynical sort of Irish writing, near political in its irony and social bitterness. “Cracker” nearly assaulted the suspects, telling them what they thought when they didn’t know themselves. In this version of profiling, Green is almost suffering, filled with compassion and empathy for the deranged killers, though that comes through much less in this particular story. The strongest of the stories are the ones where he deals directly with the suspect, even just talking across a table.
The book is filled with minor characters, most merely sketched, and a few others crucial to the plot. The action goes forward, conference by conference, in a constant naming of places and what the English call “bevvies;” that is, coffees, teas, beers, and wines -- all named and described. Police jargon mixes with regional slang that approaches pidgin English, which is one of the charms of the book.
In the video version of this particular story it’s clear that a script committee sat down and completely restructured the plot. The character whose death propels the book, an over-eager cop named Sharon who prefers to be called “Shaz,” is horribly murdered, but she is removed from the screen version. Her murder is replaced by the death of one of the lesbian lovers, not quite so horrible. McDermid is out of the closet herself and uses the idea of a web of formerly closeted homosexual police, especially women, as a source of plot devices. They know things they aren’t supposed to know and are used to keeping secrets among themselves.
A whole subplot about arson drops out, along with its theme of unreliable cops and firemen. The video gains remarkable coastal scenery which greatly enriches the story for Americans. Also, the video plot adds a deranged stalker as a source of clues that isn’t in the book. The video depends for much of its effectiveness on camera tricks: out-of-focus that gradually comes into focus, long smearing speed pans, overlaps of sound and image, abrupt cuts, echoing cuts, and so on. Things move fast. I’m glad to have the DVD from Netflix long enough to watch everything twice, maybe three times, so that I can catch detail I lost the first time. But I feel no need to reread this book. In fact, I don’t think I could face all those bevvies again.
Green is a musician but I don’t know how much he has to do with the soundtrack, though he is part “owner” of the series. “The Insects” play ominous, ticking, sliding music. In this particular story the sound effect of the huge wind mills along the coast road the victims travel is blended into the music -- “swooop, swoooop,” rhythmic, inhuman, inevitable. It seems to be always cold, with everyone in jackets.
The final victim is saved in the video but not in the book. The book implies that the killer will somehow get off.
To watch and compare the styles of these English profiler series is already interesting, but when the books as well are thrown into the mix, one begins to learn a great deal about “mimesis,” the concentrating and patterning of stories and images based on reality. The book is probably closer to real police work, which really IS mostly plod and taking names, with occasional adrenaline rushes when it’s time to follow intuition and kick butt. But the video is somehow more satisfactory, probably because we aren’t filtered through description, we SEE. This could be pretty disappointing with less competent actors and less vivid scenes for them to play. But the gruesome aspects of the crimes are muted -- what is described in the book would be too intense, possibly provoking objections of a formal regulatory nature.
Anyway, one has the feeling that McDermid really doesn’t care about the inner lives of the torturers and monsters -- at least nowhere near as much as Tony Hill does, when he’s played by Robson Green.
My sample is not very big. I’m only halfway through the series episodes on DVD and have just finished reading “The Wire in the Blood.” The title comes from T.S. Eliot, the "Four Quartets," but there’s nothing particularly literary about either version of the story. I suppose one could squeeze out some philosophical existentialism, but that’s always a possibility. You could get it out of a turnip.
Clearly McDermid came up with the central notion of this tale: a serial killer is motivated by the loss of his athletic career but is never suspected because he’s now a successful and charming talk show host with a closeted lesbian wife for cover. The central pair of solvers is Tony Hill, a constrained and busy-brained profiler, and his friend Carol Jordan, a tough female copper. They are classic sidekicks: in sympathy, bonded, but not “an item.” The dynamic is that Tony is the quicksilver thinker and Carol is the grounded “yes-but.” Romantic dimensions are only hinted in both video and book, more successfully in the video, I think, where the actors stand close and look into each other’s faces -- even lean towards each other, but never kiss or embrace. Robson Green is a natural for this. As an actor in these series of stories he is tremendously charismatic but quite restrained. (In the “fluff” he did previously, he was often goofy and always sexy.) In the book we are told the character is impotent, but that’s pretty hard to believe about Robson Green and, anyway, one might not care! Simple intimate talk with him might be as satisfactory as sex with someone else!
In the previous Robson Green crime series, “Touching Evil,” he was nearly supernatural, an explicit shaman who had come back from the dead, but in this series he is a nerdy little fellow whose strength is persistence and detail, plus formidable amounts of theory from books. “Profiling” is the technique of both series as well as it was the idea behind “Cracker,” the first series to come anywhere near the power of “Prime Suspect,” which was pretty much straight policing. “Cracker” depended upon the larger-than-life main character, a huge man of appetites and drama, and upon a darker, more confrontive and cynical sort of Irish writing, near political in its irony and social bitterness. “Cracker” nearly assaulted the suspects, telling them what they thought when they didn’t know themselves. In this version of profiling, Green is almost suffering, filled with compassion and empathy for the deranged killers, though that comes through much less in this particular story. The strongest of the stories are the ones where he deals directly with the suspect, even just talking across a table.
The book is filled with minor characters, most merely sketched, and a few others crucial to the plot. The action goes forward, conference by conference, in a constant naming of places and what the English call “bevvies;” that is, coffees, teas, beers, and wines -- all named and described. Police jargon mixes with regional slang that approaches pidgin English, which is one of the charms of the book.
In the video version of this particular story it’s clear that a script committee sat down and completely restructured the plot. The character whose death propels the book, an over-eager cop named Sharon who prefers to be called “Shaz,” is horribly murdered, but she is removed from the screen version. Her murder is replaced by the death of one of the lesbian lovers, not quite so horrible. McDermid is out of the closet herself and uses the idea of a web of formerly closeted homosexual police, especially women, as a source of plot devices. They know things they aren’t supposed to know and are used to keeping secrets among themselves.
A whole subplot about arson drops out, along with its theme of unreliable cops and firemen. The video gains remarkable coastal scenery which greatly enriches the story for Americans. Also, the video plot adds a deranged stalker as a source of clues that isn’t in the book. The video depends for much of its effectiveness on camera tricks: out-of-focus that gradually comes into focus, long smearing speed pans, overlaps of sound and image, abrupt cuts, echoing cuts, and so on. Things move fast. I’m glad to have the DVD from Netflix long enough to watch everything twice, maybe three times, so that I can catch detail I lost the first time. But I feel no need to reread this book. In fact, I don’t think I could face all those bevvies again.
Green is a musician but I don’t know how much he has to do with the soundtrack, though he is part “owner” of the series. “The Insects” play ominous, ticking, sliding music. In this particular story the sound effect of the huge wind mills along the coast road the victims travel is blended into the music -- “swooop, swoooop,” rhythmic, inhuman, inevitable. It seems to be always cold, with everyone in jackets.
The final victim is saved in the video but not in the book. The book implies that the killer will somehow get off.
To watch and compare the styles of these English profiler series is already interesting, but when the books as well are thrown into the mix, one begins to learn a great deal about “mimesis,” the concentrating and patterning of stories and images based on reality. The book is probably closer to real police work, which really IS mostly plod and taking names, with occasional adrenaline rushes when it’s time to follow intuition and kick butt. But the video is somehow more satisfactory, probably because we aren’t filtered through description, we SEE. This could be pretty disappointing with less competent actors and less vivid scenes for them to play. But the gruesome aspects of the crimes are muted -- what is described in the book would be too intense, possibly provoking objections of a formal regulatory nature.
Anyway, one has the feeling that McDermid really doesn’t care about the inner lives of the torturers and monsters -- at least nowhere near as much as Tony Hill does, when he’s played by Robson Green.
Thursday, February 15, 2007
ROSALIE ALLISON LAFROMBOISE
ROSALIE ALLISON LAFROMBOISE
(from the Glacier Reporter There is a photo.)
Rosalie Allison LaFromboise, 80, former Browning resident, died of natural causes Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2007, in Tacoma, WA. Funeral mass was celebrated at Little Flower Church. Burial was at Willow Creek Cemetery.
Rosalie LaFromboise was born July 25, 1926, to Charles and Mary (Gerard) Allison in Browning. She was raised in the Browning area and attended schools there. She married Robert LaFromboise in May, 1942, and they had twelve children: Mary Ellen, Robert Charles, Conrad, Roy, Lois, Lorna, Jeff, TJ, Don, Steve, Vickie and Lori.
Rosalie was first and foremost a homemaker during the time being a homemaker meant something. Beginning in Oakland, CA, before the war, she made a home for her new husband and their first child, Mary Ellen. When Robert went into the Air Force, she continued to care for her young family until he returned. By this time they also had a son, Robert Charles. After the war, Robert took advantage of the GI Bill and started college at Montana State University in Bozeman. Rosalie quickly set up housekeeping at the “strip houses.” After college they moved to Conrad where Robert taught school. By this time their family had grown to include Conrad, Roy, Lois and Lorna. In the fifties they were part of a farming community in Fisher Flat that included the Pepions, Mombergs, Wipperts and Smiths, to name a few. This is where Rosalie learned her talents and skills at being a homemaker. Rosalie had none of the modern conveniences. She carried water, prepared three meals a day, many of these meals from “scratch,” while caring for her six children and supporting her husband’s career. After a few years living in Fisher Flat, they moved to Browning and their family grew to include Jeff, TJ and Don.
Robert served on the Blackfeet Tribal Business Council at this time and then began the first of their moves to various reservations when he took up his career in Indian Health Service. During their time in Poplar their son Steve was born and became disabled after an illness. The whole family later moved to the Flathead Reservation, residing in Ronan, where Vickie and Lori joined the family. Robert and Rosalie found themselves moving their family back to Poplar and then to Billings where Robert passed away in 1985. She moved back to Ronan after Robert’s death and continued to care for her son, Steve.
Rosalie created a home for a large family and exended her home to many of the family’s friends. She created a home that supported her husband’s career while encouraging her children to finish high school and go on to higher education. Robert set a standard for high expectations, and Rosalie ensured, encouraged and supported her children to reach these expectations. Rosalie valued education because she was not able to finish her high school education. She made a point that all of her children would help provide and care for Steve so he could stay at home.
She developed lifelong friendships wherever she lived. Her friends included Eileen Pepion, Jeannie Wippert, Aurice Show, Margie Kennedy, Lucille McKay, “Snookie” Schlenski, Merle Cobell, Katherine Eder, Lee Lozeau, Opal Cajune, Adele McClammy and her best friend of all, Patsy Momberg.
Not only did Rosalie maintain a welcoming and comfortable home, she was a career woman herself. She worked many years as a nurse’s aide in nursing homes and hospitals in all of the communities where she and her family lived. Rosalie worked hard but also made time to have fun. she loved to knit, crochet and listen to country music and travel. Rosalie was able to go to Nashville and see the Grand Ole Opry, Washington D.C., Reno, Las Vegas and Germany. The Seattle-Tacoma area was Rosalie’s favorite place and she thought herself fortunate to be able to live there for the last fourteen years, coming back often to visit her family in Montana.
Our mother leaves us a rich heritage of independence, hard work, family loyalty, concern and caring for others and a wealth of memories gathered over the years with family and friends. She built the foundation of our lives and the lives of the lives of her grandchldren. She helped us to become who we are today. We thank her for being our mom. We are proud to be her children.
*********
SALLIE ALLISON
35 years old (in 1908), 3/8 Piegan
Her father was William Wright, white. Her mother was Mary Split Ears, 3/4 Piegan.
Her maternal grandparents were Spotted Eagle and Bead Woman.
Her maternal uncles and aunts included: John Spotted Bear (half-brother, same father); James Spotted Eagle (half-brother, same father); Made Coup in the Middle, wife of Iron (half-sister); Lodge Pole, wife of Round man (full-sister); Joseph Spotted Eagle (half-brother); Nellie Spotted Eagle, wife of Eddie Running Crane (half-sister, same father); Lucy, wife of Wades-in-the-Water (same father); Thomas Spotted Eagle (half brother, same father.)
Sallie’s siblings were Mollie, wife of Devlin (full-sister) now living with Mike Sullivan; Bert Kennerly (half-brother); Perry Kennerly (half-brother); Agnes Kennerly Round Face (half-sister); Jerome Kennerly (half-brother); Susie Split Ears (half-sister, same mother); Maggie wife of Lone Eater (half-sister, same mother). Kennerly was an early trader.
Sallie’s husband was Alfred Allison, 42 in 1908, white. They were married November 1890 by the priest at the Holy Family Mission.
Alfred’s father was Arlington Alison, born in Virginia and living in Madisonville, Rawls County, Missouri, which was Alfred’s birthplace. Alfred’s mother was Mary Cox, born near New London, Rawls County, Missouri.
Alfred’s sibs were Joe Allison, a full-brother who lived in Texas; William Allison, a full-brother who lived in Oklahoma; Beulah Allison, a full-sister who lives near Chelsea, Oklahoma; and Anna Laura Allison, full-sister, who died without marrying in Pipe County, Missouri.
Sallie’s children were all 3/16 Piegan. In 1908 they were William (16 years old), Lafe (14), Wendell (12), James (10), Annie (8), Seraphine (7) and Charles (3).
Charles became the father of Rosalie Allison LaFromboise.
FRED GIRARD
36 years old (in 1908), 3/8 Piegan
Fred’s wife was Rose Girard, 24 years old, 1/4 Piegan. They were married March 24, 1903, at Augusta, MT, by the priest.
Fred’s father was Theodore Douglas, white. His mother, Mary Douglas, was 1/2 Piegan and lived at Augusta, MT. Her father was unknown, but her mother was Mary Kaiser.
Rose Girard’s uncles and aunts included Jack Miller (half-brother, same mother); Maggie, wife of Frances Goss (half-sister, same mother); Margaret, wife of Jack Schmidt (half-sister, same mother).
Fred’s siblings were James Douglas; William; Robert; Theodore; Millie, Julia, Peter (died, leaving Isabelle Douglas at St. Peter’s Mission -- her mother is Mary Lewis who also lives at St. Peter’s), and John.
Fred’s children were Mary Girard (4 years old) and Charles Robert Girard (born August 15, 1906). It was this little girl who became Rosalie LaFromboise’s mother.
Other notes: Mary Lewis Douglas in 1915 married a whiteman named Kologi and is living at St. Peter’s Mission. Millie Douglas married James Steele, a Cree. She had a child on January 21, 1909, which died February 15, 1906. The entry says that Millie is now living with Fred Girard on the Middle Fork of the Milk River.
(This information is from the book called “Blackfeet Heritage, 1907-08” which can be bought at the Blackfeet Heritage Center in Browning, Montana.)
Quite a bit of information can come from these raw facts (with the caution, as I’ve discovered in speculating on my own birth family, that one might be wrong). The most obvious thing I see here is that Girard is a French name and might mean a Metis background. Allison is not just English but from the American South. Rosalie’s grandfather might have had Confederate connections and have escaped from trauma after the Civil War or he might have been trying to avoid the war by moving West.
On Sallie’s side, his wife’s Blackfeet side, there are many prominent and important names. One that always intrigues me is “Bead Woman,” who might be the same as “Blue Bead Woman.” A single blue bead on a necklace and two more on wristlets were in the early days a sign of being a Bundle Keeper. Since most of the people who look at Blackfeet history are male, they tend to neglect or just overlook the reputations and important functions of women. A man cannot be a Bundle Keeper without a wife. “Blue Bead Woman” pops up in the background of many notable Blackfeet. It would be fascinating to work out her life and relationships.
From my own background, I can see one overwhelmingly important factor. In the Sixties people like Rosalie and Benton Juneau were in their prime, strong and vital parts of the human infrastructure not just of the Blackfeet Reservation but also of the shared networks among reservations -- often through Indian Health Services -- and of the Blackfeet diasphora created in part by the World War II effort when so many went to work in boatyards and at Boeing. They were eager to defend the United States and quick to fit into big cities.
These are the “bridge” people, far more significant than the Bering Straits land bridge that so fascinates some people. These folks were (some still are) a bridge across centuries between a collapsed empire and today’s world. Their children are the people who are in their prime now -- educated leaders, many put into important BIA positions by Indian Preference, and the beginnings of the reservation middle class. People like to look romantically at the ones who aren’t making it or the ones who seem to have completely leapt out of the reservation world, so they look away from the steady, caring, still-Blackfeet parents who get the work done. The idea is that they’re boring, predictable, conformist.
If you look at the names of friends in Rosalie’s obituary, you’ll have a pretty good list of the so-called “half-breeds” whom I prefer to call “double breeds” since they each have mixed double genealogies. The phrase “half-breed” suggests drunks, incendiaries, malcontents, and degenerates. But these people are solid citizens, contributors, people who had long successful marriages, who earned college degrees and raised happy children. These are the people the agents encouraged to learn how to dryland farm grains out on the eastern flats of the reservation, driving expensive machinery, watching the stock market for the best time to sell, reading to discover the best seed stock and planting techniques. The wives and mothers were proud and diligent, highly skilled in the arts of caring and comforting while at the same time instilling discipline. They gave their children what it has become fashionable to call "resilience."
I only know a couple of Rosalie’s children: Mary Ellen, who is a counselor of considerable skill and effectiveness; and Conrad, who became a Bundle Keeper, or so I believe. They are like their mother and I guess that’s about as good a compliment as I can pay.
(from the Glacier Reporter There is a photo.)
Rosalie Allison LaFromboise, 80, former Browning resident, died of natural causes Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2007, in Tacoma, WA. Funeral mass was celebrated at Little Flower Church. Burial was at Willow Creek Cemetery.
Rosalie LaFromboise was born July 25, 1926, to Charles and Mary (Gerard) Allison in Browning. She was raised in the Browning area and attended schools there. She married Robert LaFromboise in May, 1942, and they had twelve children: Mary Ellen, Robert Charles, Conrad, Roy, Lois, Lorna, Jeff, TJ, Don, Steve, Vickie and Lori.
Rosalie was first and foremost a homemaker during the time being a homemaker meant something. Beginning in Oakland, CA, before the war, she made a home for her new husband and their first child, Mary Ellen. When Robert went into the Air Force, she continued to care for her young family until he returned. By this time they also had a son, Robert Charles. After the war, Robert took advantage of the GI Bill and started college at Montana State University in Bozeman. Rosalie quickly set up housekeeping at the “strip houses.” After college they moved to Conrad where Robert taught school. By this time their family had grown to include Conrad, Roy, Lois and Lorna. In the fifties they were part of a farming community in Fisher Flat that included the Pepions, Mombergs, Wipperts and Smiths, to name a few. This is where Rosalie learned her talents and skills at being a homemaker. Rosalie had none of the modern conveniences. She carried water, prepared three meals a day, many of these meals from “scratch,” while caring for her six children and supporting her husband’s career. After a few years living in Fisher Flat, they moved to Browning and their family grew to include Jeff, TJ and Don.
Robert served on the Blackfeet Tribal Business Council at this time and then began the first of their moves to various reservations when he took up his career in Indian Health Service. During their time in Poplar their son Steve was born and became disabled after an illness. The whole family later moved to the Flathead Reservation, residing in Ronan, where Vickie and Lori joined the family. Robert and Rosalie found themselves moving their family back to Poplar and then to Billings where Robert passed away in 1985. She moved back to Ronan after Robert’s death and continued to care for her son, Steve.
Rosalie created a home for a large family and exended her home to many of the family’s friends. She created a home that supported her husband’s career while encouraging her children to finish high school and go on to higher education. Robert set a standard for high expectations, and Rosalie ensured, encouraged and supported her children to reach these expectations. Rosalie valued education because she was not able to finish her high school education. She made a point that all of her children would help provide and care for Steve so he could stay at home.
She developed lifelong friendships wherever she lived. Her friends included Eileen Pepion, Jeannie Wippert, Aurice Show, Margie Kennedy, Lucille McKay, “Snookie” Schlenski, Merle Cobell, Katherine Eder, Lee Lozeau, Opal Cajune, Adele McClammy and her best friend of all, Patsy Momberg.
Not only did Rosalie maintain a welcoming and comfortable home, she was a career woman herself. She worked many years as a nurse’s aide in nursing homes and hospitals in all of the communities where she and her family lived. Rosalie worked hard but also made time to have fun. she loved to knit, crochet and listen to country music and travel. Rosalie was able to go to Nashville and see the Grand Ole Opry, Washington D.C., Reno, Las Vegas and Germany. The Seattle-Tacoma area was Rosalie’s favorite place and she thought herself fortunate to be able to live there for the last fourteen years, coming back often to visit her family in Montana.
Our mother leaves us a rich heritage of independence, hard work, family loyalty, concern and caring for others and a wealth of memories gathered over the years with family and friends. She built the foundation of our lives and the lives of the lives of her grandchldren. She helped us to become who we are today. We thank her for being our mom. We are proud to be her children.
*********
SALLIE ALLISON
35 years old (in 1908), 3/8 Piegan
Her father was William Wright, white. Her mother was Mary Split Ears, 3/4 Piegan.
Her maternal grandparents were Spotted Eagle and Bead Woman.
Her maternal uncles and aunts included: John Spotted Bear (half-brother, same father); James Spotted Eagle (half-brother, same father); Made Coup in the Middle, wife of Iron (half-sister); Lodge Pole, wife of Round man (full-sister); Joseph Spotted Eagle (half-brother); Nellie Spotted Eagle, wife of Eddie Running Crane (half-sister, same father); Lucy, wife of Wades-in-the-Water (same father); Thomas Spotted Eagle (half brother, same father.)
Sallie’s siblings were Mollie, wife of Devlin (full-sister) now living with Mike Sullivan; Bert Kennerly (half-brother); Perry Kennerly (half-brother); Agnes Kennerly Round Face (half-sister); Jerome Kennerly (half-brother); Susie Split Ears (half-sister, same mother); Maggie wife of Lone Eater (half-sister, same mother). Kennerly was an early trader.
Sallie’s husband was Alfred Allison, 42 in 1908, white. They were married November 1890 by the priest at the Holy Family Mission.
Alfred’s father was Arlington Alison, born in Virginia and living in Madisonville, Rawls County, Missouri, which was Alfred’s birthplace. Alfred’s mother was Mary Cox, born near New London, Rawls County, Missouri.
Alfred’s sibs were Joe Allison, a full-brother who lived in Texas; William Allison, a full-brother who lived in Oklahoma; Beulah Allison, a full-sister who lives near Chelsea, Oklahoma; and Anna Laura Allison, full-sister, who died without marrying in Pipe County, Missouri.
Sallie’s children were all 3/16 Piegan. In 1908 they were William (16 years old), Lafe (14), Wendell (12), James (10), Annie (8), Seraphine (7) and Charles (3).
Charles became the father of Rosalie Allison LaFromboise.
FRED GIRARD
36 years old (in 1908), 3/8 Piegan
Fred’s wife was Rose Girard, 24 years old, 1/4 Piegan. They were married March 24, 1903, at Augusta, MT, by the priest.
Fred’s father was Theodore Douglas, white. His mother, Mary Douglas, was 1/2 Piegan and lived at Augusta, MT. Her father was unknown, but her mother was Mary Kaiser.
Rose Girard’s uncles and aunts included Jack Miller (half-brother, same mother); Maggie, wife of Frances Goss (half-sister, same mother); Margaret, wife of Jack Schmidt (half-sister, same mother).
Fred’s siblings were James Douglas; William; Robert; Theodore; Millie, Julia, Peter (died, leaving Isabelle Douglas at St. Peter’s Mission -- her mother is Mary Lewis who also lives at St. Peter’s), and John.
Fred’s children were Mary Girard (4 years old) and Charles Robert Girard (born August 15, 1906). It was this little girl who became Rosalie LaFromboise’s mother.
Other notes: Mary Lewis Douglas in 1915 married a whiteman named Kologi and is living at St. Peter’s Mission. Millie Douglas married James Steele, a Cree. She had a child on January 21, 1909, which died February 15, 1906. The entry says that Millie is now living with Fred Girard on the Middle Fork of the Milk River.
(This information is from the book called “Blackfeet Heritage, 1907-08” which can be bought at the Blackfeet Heritage Center in Browning, Montana.)
Quite a bit of information can come from these raw facts (with the caution, as I’ve discovered in speculating on my own birth family, that one might be wrong). The most obvious thing I see here is that Girard is a French name and might mean a Metis background. Allison is not just English but from the American South. Rosalie’s grandfather might have had Confederate connections and have escaped from trauma after the Civil War or he might have been trying to avoid the war by moving West.
On Sallie’s side, his wife’s Blackfeet side, there are many prominent and important names. One that always intrigues me is “Bead Woman,” who might be the same as “Blue Bead Woman.” A single blue bead on a necklace and two more on wristlets were in the early days a sign of being a Bundle Keeper. Since most of the people who look at Blackfeet history are male, they tend to neglect or just overlook the reputations and important functions of women. A man cannot be a Bundle Keeper without a wife. “Blue Bead Woman” pops up in the background of many notable Blackfeet. It would be fascinating to work out her life and relationships.
From my own background, I can see one overwhelmingly important factor. In the Sixties people like Rosalie and Benton Juneau were in their prime, strong and vital parts of the human infrastructure not just of the Blackfeet Reservation but also of the shared networks among reservations -- often through Indian Health Services -- and of the Blackfeet diasphora created in part by the World War II effort when so many went to work in boatyards and at Boeing. They were eager to defend the United States and quick to fit into big cities.
These are the “bridge” people, far more significant than the Bering Straits land bridge that so fascinates some people. These folks were (some still are) a bridge across centuries between a collapsed empire and today’s world. Their children are the people who are in their prime now -- educated leaders, many put into important BIA positions by Indian Preference, and the beginnings of the reservation middle class. People like to look romantically at the ones who aren’t making it or the ones who seem to have completely leapt out of the reservation world, so they look away from the steady, caring, still-Blackfeet parents who get the work done. The idea is that they’re boring, predictable, conformist.
If you look at the names of friends in Rosalie’s obituary, you’ll have a pretty good list of the so-called “half-breeds” whom I prefer to call “double breeds” since they each have mixed double genealogies. The phrase “half-breed” suggests drunks, incendiaries, malcontents, and degenerates. But these people are solid citizens, contributors, people who had long successful marriages, who earned college degrees and raised happy children. These are the people the agents encouraged to learn how to dryland farm grains out on the eastern flats of the reservation, driving expensive machinery, watching the stock market for the best time to sell, reading to discover the best seed stock and planting techniques. The wives and mothers were proud and diligent, highly skilled in the arts of caring and comforting while at the same time instilling discipline. They gave their children what it has become fashionable to call "resilience."
I only know a couple of Rosalie’s children: Mary Ellen, who is a counselor of considerable skill and effectiveness; and Conrad, who became a Bundle Keeper, or so I believe. They are like their mother and I guess that’s about as good a compliment as I can pay.
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
BENTON CHARLES JUNEAU
BENTON CHARLES JUNEAU
(From the Great Falls Tribune)
Benton Charles Juneau, 86, a retired plumber who enjoyed fishing and golfing, died of natural causes Saturday at a local hospital.
His funeral is noon Wednesday (Valentine’s Day) at the Browning Methodist Church with burial in Willow Creek Cemetary.
Survivors include his wife, Janet L. Juneau of Browning; a daughter, Jennifer Wood of East Glacier; son, Patrick Juneau of Cortez, Colo; a sister, Martha Vaile, of Havre; brother Kenneth “Joe Crow” Juneau of Browning, three grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.
Benton was born Aug. 22, 1920, in Heart Butte to Charles and Alice (Rose) Juneau. He was raised in Browning and graduated from Browning High School. He went on to attend Montana State University in Bozeman.
Benton married Phyllis Lucia and they later divorced. In 1968 he married Janet Nordin in Monson, Mass. Benton worked in the maintenance department as a plumber at the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital in Browning.
He enjoyed fishing, hunting, golfing and picnics. Benton was a member of the United Methodist Church.
He was preceded in death by daughter, Janice E. Juneau; a son, Donald C. Juneau; his parents; a brother, Franklin Juneau; and sisters Cynthia Juneau, Juanita Atkins, Josephine Big Horn and Marlene Heavy Runner.
CHARLES JUNEAU (From the 1907-1908 census) might be Benton’s father from a marriage after the one recorded there, or might be his grandfather. As the name indicates, he was Metis.
“Thirty years old, one half Piegan, Charles was born at Fort Benton, Montana, on February 25, 1879. He lived there eighteen years and then moved to the reservation, where he has ‘been ever since.’
FATHER: Antoine Juneau, white. His brothers Edward and Joseph lived in Montreal.
MOTHER: Josephine Juneau, full Piegan, deceased. Her sibs included: No Runner, full brother; Julie Vallieux was Josephine’s sister and she died, leaving Oliver, John, Nels and Henrietta Vallieaux and Philomena St. Goddard. Also, Mrs. Hazelett, who died leaving William Hazelett.
Charles’ brothers and sisters were Josephine Livermore, who died, leaving Clara and Lillie; and Mary Cetch who died, leaving Frank Cetch.
In the year of 1988-89 I was the interim minister of the Browning Methodist Church while they waited for a proper Methodist to be assigned. Benton and Janet were among the great pleasures of that year. I lived out at the Methodist Parsonage, a long rambling ranch house meant to accommodate children who needed emergency shelter. The attached garage had been converted to an extra room and Benton set up a huge wood stove out there for me. The main heat was electric and in this part of the world electricity fails often under the winter storms. When the inevitable subzero temps, deep snow, and violent winds arrived, I was snug as a bug and blessed Benton every day. In fact, some school folks came out to “rescue” me and spent the rest of the day keeping warm and cooking on that stove. When I preached, I always looked out to locate Benton in the pews and felt deprived if his smiling face wasn’t there.
Janet, always composed and energetic, was a school nurse and one of the better things in students’ lives. It was she who scrubbed the parsonage down before I moved in and again when I moved out. Janet and Benton’s daughter, Jennifer, and her children have brought enormous joy and renewal, especially since she came late in Benton’s life.
Benton (possibly named for Fort Benton?) was the kind of Blackfeet man who gets very little “press,” but who in my experience is typical of the backbone of the tribe. Steady, protective, warm, and devoted to “the right thing,” he could get angry and stubborn over perceived wrongs, but persevered in what would help people.
His earlier marriage to Phyllis, the daughter of a remarkable couple, R.W. and Edythe Harris, was painful and difficult. The Harrises were school teachers -- I knew them well because of teaching with R.W. and because they were friends of Bob Scriver. R.W. was the Future Farmers of America advisor and the shop teacher. He was brilliant, as was Edythe, and no respecter of authority. His joke repertoire could have taken him to Las Vegas. In the years that the Scriver bands were winning top honors, the FFA was doing the same.
I taught all three of Benton’s earlier children Phyllis was a person who could not get her balance but at least she had the sense to marry Benton, who was enormously protective of those children and stood by them even after divorce and tragedy. Two of them followed their mother into oblivion. Today modern medicines could probably have saved all three. The third, Patrick, is brilliant and successful but has had a heavy burden to carry.
When I look at the old census facts, they are more suggestive than conclusive, since I can imagine some clerk sitting at a wooden table with a pencil and a stack of cards, scribbling down what people standing in line tell him -- some of it little more than rumor. But Charles’ “pedigree” is interesting. Antoine, his father, was a Montreal man, a Quebecois, whose brothers remained in the city. Antoine must have been a trapper or trader. Antoine’s son, Charles, was born in 1849, the year before the reservation was created, and moved to the reservation at eighteen, barely adult. Judging from the birth date, this Charles was probably Benton's grandfather.
Benton considered himself progressive and was not afraid of assimilation, and yet, in that quality, he was very much Blackfeet as well as French and never needed braids to show he was Indian. Indian and European traits are not always contradictory. I’m very interested to see that William Hazelett was a cousin to Charles. Hazelett was one of the really prominent characters of Blackfeet history and controversial, as all such people tend to be. I’ll blog about him sometime. I can imagine Benton and Hazelett in earnest argument right this minute -- whereever they might be. If I were there, I’d probably side with Benton.
(From the Great Falls Tribune)
Benton Charles Juneau, 86, a retired plumber who enjoyed fishing and golfing, died of natural causes Saturday at a local hospital.
His funeral is noon Wednesday (Valentine’s Day) at the Browning Methodist Church with burial in Willow Creek Cemetary.
Survivors include his wife, Janet L. Juneau of Browning; a daughter, Jennifer Wood of East Glacier; son, Patrick Juneau of Cortez, Colo; a sister, Martha Vaile, of Havre; brother Kenneth “Joe Crow” Juneau of Browning, three grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.
Benton was born Aug. 22, 1920, in Heart Butte to Charles and Alice (Rose) Juneau. He was raised in Browning and graduated from Browning High School. He went on to attend Montana State University in Bozeman.
Benton married Phyllis Lucia and they later divorced. In 1968 he married Janet Nordin in Monson, Mass. Benton worked in the maintenance department as a plumber at the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital in Browning.
He enjoyed fishing, hunting, golfing and picnics. Benton was a member of the United Methodist Church.
He was preceded in death by daughter, Janice E. Juneau; a son, Donald C. Juneau; his parents; a brother, Franklin Juneau; and sisters Cynthia Juneau, Juanita Atkins, Josephine Big Horn and Marlene Heavy Runner.
CHARLES JUNEAU (From the 1907-1908 census) might be Benton’s father from a marriage after the one recorded there, or might be his grandfather. As the name indicates, he was Metis.
“Thirty years old, one half Piegan, Charles was born at Fort Benton, Montana, on February 25, 1879. He lived there eighteen years and then moved to the reservation, where he has ‘been ever since.’
FATHER: Antoine Juneau, white. His brothers Edward and Joseph lived in Montreal.
MOTHER: Josephine Juneau, full Piegan, deceased. Her sibs included: No Runner, full brother; Julie Vallieux was Josephine’s sister and she died, leaving Oliver, John, Nels and Henrietta Vallieaux and Philomena St. Goddard. Also, Mrs. Hazelett, who died leaving William Hazelett.
Charles’ brothers and sisters were Josephine Livermore, who died, leaving Clara and Lillie; and Mary Cetch who died, leaving Frank Cetch.
In the year of 1988-89 I was the interim minister of the Browning Methodist Church while they waited for a proper Methodist to be assigned. Benton and Janet were among the great pleasures of that year. I lived out at the Methodist Parsonage, a long rambling ranch house meant to accommodate children who needed emergency shelter. The attached garage had been converted to an extra room and Benton set up a huge wood stove out there for me. The main heat was electric and in this part of the world electricity fails often under the winter storms. When the inevitable subzero temps, deep snow, and violent winds arrived, I was snug as a bug and blessed Benton every day. In fact, some school folks came out to “rescue” me and spent the rest of the day keeping warm and cooking on that stove. When I preached, I always looked out to locate Benton in the pews and felt deprived if his smiling face wasn’t there.
Janet, always composed and energetic, was a school nurse and one of the better things in students’ lives. It was she who scrubbed the parsonage down before I moved in and again when I moved out. Janet and Benton’s daughter, Jennifer, and her children have brought enormous joy and renewal, especially since she came late in Benton’s life.
Benton (possibly named for Fort Benton?) was the kind of Blackfeet man who gets very little “press,” but who in my experience is typical of the backbone of the tribe. Steady, protective, warm, and devoted to “the right thing,” he could get angry and stubborn over perceived wrongs, but persevered in what would help people.
His earlier marriage to Phyllis, the daughter of a remarkable couple, R.W. and Edythe Harris, was painful and difficult. The Harrises were school teachers -- I knew them well because of teaching with R.W. and because they were friends of Bob Scriver. R.W. was the Future Farmers of America advisor and the shop teacher. He was brilliant, as was Edythe, and no respecter of authority. His joke repertoire could have taken him to Las Vegas. In the years that the Scriver bands were winning top honors, the FFA was doing the same.
I taught all three of Benton’s earlier children Phyllis was a person who could not get her balance but at least she had the sense to marry Benton, who was enormously protective of those children and stood by them even after divorce and tragedy. Two of them followed their mother into oblivion. Today modern medicines could probably have saved all three. The third, Patrick, is brilliant and successful but has had a heavy burden to carry.
When I look at the old census facts, they are more suggestive than conclusive, since I can imagine some clerk sitting at a wooden table with a pencil and a stack of cards, scribbling down what people standing in line tell him -- some of it little more than rumor. But Charles’ “pedigree” is interesting. Antoine, his father, was a Montreal man, a Quebecois, whose brothers remained in the city. Antoine must have been a trapper or trader. Antoine’s son, Charles, was born in 1849, the year before the reservation was created, and moved to the reservation at eighteen, barely adult. Judging from the birth date, this Charles was probably Benton's grandfather.
Benton considered himself progressive and was not afraid of assimilation, and yet, in that quality, he was very much Blackfeet as well as French and never needed braids to show he was Indian. Indian and European traits are not always contradictory. I’m very interested to see that William Hazelett was a cousin to Charles. Hazelett was one of the really prominent characters of Blackfeet history and controversial, as all such people tend to be. I’ll blog about him sometime. I can imagine Benton and Hazelett in earnest argument right this minute -- whereever they might be. If I were there, I’d probably side with Benton.
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Golden Wheat/Black Coal Chapter 7
“Not far away” turned out to be three days’ journey on foot. Cate was mercifully unconscious as Demeter led Crossroads, talking forcefully to the little black horse. Luckily, the mare didn’t fight the travois. Toby came along behind with the push cart they had invented to carry the small amount of baggage left, including Demeter’s box. Both people were so shocked and enraged that they could think of nothing but getting to a safe place.
Toby had warned them that the village was much shrunken by smallpox, but they were not really prepared for what they saw. First they came to a broad river, then walked along a road that weeds had begun to repopulate. They began to pass fields, mostly neglected and often showing evidence of flooding in the past. Corn stalks and the dried vines of bean vines and squash plants stood in a few patches. This was comforting to Demeter, almost familiar. “Are you sure these people are Indians?” she asked. Palisades stood, now in some disrepair, at points where defense against hostiles would be possible.
But then Toby called to Demeter to stop. They unhooked the travois so that Crossroads could rest and graze a bit and lowered Cate to the grass in the shade of a tree. “Come with me,” said Toby. Demeter didn’t want to leave Cate, but he said, “We’ll still be able to see her. I just want you to come to the top of that ridge.”
Toby got there first and waited for her, knowing that she would have a strong reaction to the shocking sight. It was a cemetary, but the graves were in the air, on scaffolds. Some of them had collapsed, scattering bones on the ground. There were many, many scaffolds. “These were only some of those who died,” said Toby. “So many died that there weren’t enough left to build scaffolds or to gather the bones of those whose scaffolds had collapsed, so they could finally be buried. Properly, the skulls should have been taken to the Circle of Souls over there.”
“Circle of Souls?”
“That’s what I call it. I suppose the term is too Christian.”
Turning, Demeter saw a white circle of round shapes, like the circles of round fungus puffballs that sometimes formed on the prairie. “We go to talk to them, tell them how the family is doing. Sometimes we tell them jokes, and that’s why they’re always smiling.” Demeter saw the grins under the dark eyeholes.
She wheeled and left. “Such things are not a laughing matter.” Her back was stiff and straight as she jolted back to the road.
Toby shrugged, “The Queen is not amused!” He flashed his own grin over his shoulder at the skulls. “But now she believes that you’re Indians!”
Demeter’s lack of sophistication about Indians meant she had never imagined the earth houses, mounded up along streets in an orderly way with neat little porch-like entrances. Nor could she decipher what seemed to be flagstaffs flying tattered emblems. Toby pointed out a central tree inside an enclosure. “That’s Lone Man. When the Great Flood came -- you’ve read about this in the Bible? How Noah built an ark? Well, Lone Man showed how to save the village by building a wooden wall.” Three steps on, he mused, “But he told us nothing about disease.” Demeter didn’t seem to be listening. "No wall could stop that."
When they stopped in the village square, the place seemed deserted. They waited until, very slowly, a few old people and women appeared, wary and hesitant even when Toby spoke to them in their language. Finally, one of the old women recognized him and they became welcoming, leading them to one of the oven-shaped houses where a fire burned, its smoke wandering out a hole in the middle of the domed roof. The interior was dark but orderly and quiet -- safe.
When they carried Cate inside, Demeter started to arrange her on a pallet, but the old ladies objected loudly and vigorously. Toby had to explain that Mandans never sleep with their head to the northwest and their feet to the southeast, because that is the way the dead are arranged. So Cate was rotated to be better oriented for recovery. Water was brought from the river and when Demeter bathed Cate for the first time since her injury, she stirred and began to wake. She appeared coherent but remembered very little about the attack, which was just as well.
For the next few days nothing much happened except talk, which can be a major happening. It was the Mandans who had a lot to say, telling about how they had once lived expansive, important, civilized lives and had even welcomed the terrible belching boats that brought strange people to visit. Somehow their hospitality -- which surely could not be wrong -- had brought some kind of curse on them and many, many people had died within a year. Now they were afraid to help others. Cate and Demeter looked at each other, understanding that this curse was smallpox brought by fur-trader’s steamboats.
The Mandan old folks went on telling, searching for the terrible thing they had done to make this curse descend on them. They reflected on all the shortfalls and errors of their ways, but none seemed an adequate cause for the erasure of the tribe. Nor could they think of any enemies who would wish them to be totally destroyed -- they had no such thoughts about other tribes. It must have had something to do with the water, maybe some kind of being that lived down under the water.
But they were on good terms with water. Their lives were based on their gardens and fields where the Three Sisters -- beans, squash and corn -- grew together, the corn providing scaffolding for the twining and climbing plants. Each year the river flooded their low-lying fields, but that was good, because it brought fertile new soil. This terrible dying baffled them. They gathered in the village plaza to ask Lone Man, but could not perform the proper ceremonies because none of them were the kind of vigorous young men who could stand to have their chests pierced and be hung from the ceiling in the ceremonial lodge. This “Okipa” ritual was the ultimate test of bravery, and bravery is what could have saved them in the old days.
Cate was more interested than Demeter, and not ready to move around much, so she lay listening with interest as the old ladies told her stories while Demeter cleaned out and fumigated one of the smaller earth houses. It seemed clear that Cate would not be ready to travel for quite a while, maybe the rest of the winter.
An old lady with blue eyes -- blue eyes? -- told Cate that all Mandan people have four different souls. The first soul, a shooting star, was white. The second was a light brown singing bird with a speckled bib. (“A meadowlark?” suggested Cate.) The third was the “lodge spirit” that never really left the lodge and were crowded around them invisibly, watching and listening, guarding the woman whose lodge it was. (All lodges and gardens belonged to the women.) “And the fourth soul?” asked Cate.
“It is black and it leaves us forever. Those black souls go to another village where they live as they did here, but we never see them again.”
“In our ways,” Cate offered, “We don’t group things in fours, but rather in threes. However, I’m inclined to like the idea of four, as at a crossroad.”
The old blue-eyed lady was not impressed. “Of what use are your ideas to me?” she demanded. “Can you bring back my strong sons and beautiful daughters?”
Cate snorted. “I don’t even know whether Demeter can bring back her own daughter.” She turned over and seemed to sleep, but in fact she was turning all the stories over in her mind, trying to fit them together. Did all people have such stories? Were they really about the same things?
That evening she and Demeter talked. “Toby says...” Cate began. Demeter was growing used to this beginning. "There is a very old stone not far from here that is covered with Viking runes. Those would be your ancestors, Demeter! He says that they have a person called “The Old Woman Who Never Dies.”
The two European women looked at each other, thinking of the three old women in their lore, the Three Fates or the Three Norns: one who spins the Thread of Life, one who measures it, and one who cuts it at the end. Cate said, “If we added “She Who Never Dies,” there would be four old women. Four. These people believe in the four directions, like a compass, like a crossroads. But what is the duty of She Who Never Dies?”
Demeter seemed not to listen. But when some of the younger women demanded to know what was in the box on her cart, she wouldn’t tell them. Guided by what Cate had gleaned from Toby, she said it was like the Mandan “Medicine Bundle,” which kept many things safely together, wrapped up for prayer and contemplation. They understood this and did not pry into her box, not even the youngest woman, who was known to be very curious.
One morning they woke to snow. “I’m going on,” declared Demeter. By now her companions knew better than to argue with her. “But before I do, I want to vaccinate these people. I have serum in this box.” To the Mandan Toby didn’t explain vaccination as modern medicine but offered it as a protective ceremony coming from Demeter’s Bundle. Because he did a good job of it and because Cate seemed to be recovering well, which showed that the travelers were good-hearted and skillful, the small group of villagers accepted the prickles and smearing solemnly. “A scab will form,” said Demeter. “You must NOT pick at that scab or bad things will happen.” They agreed to obey. They were used to such restrictions about Bundle matters.
The next morning at the edge of the village Cate stood propped on a crutch Toby had whittled. He held the halter of Crossroads, the mare, to keep her from following Demeter. Crossroads would stay with them until spring when Cate would be well enough to follow. Toby, it was pretty clear, would be with her.
Demeter had a thick coat with a hood that she had sewn from a blanket. Over the top was the shawl she had knitted on the train. She was stronger than she had been in those days and she trundled her cart along briskly. A single figure on a snowy prairie is a lonesome sight, but Demeter was indomitable.
Toby had warned them that the village was much shrunken by smallpox, but they were not really prepared for what they saw. First they came to a broad river, then walked along a road that weeds had begun to repopulate. They began to pass fields, mostly neglected and often showing evidence of flooding in the past. Corn stalks and the dried vines of bean vines and squash plants stood in a few patches. This was comforting to Demeter, almost familiar. “Are you sure these people are Indians?” she asked. Palisades stood, now in some disrepair, at points where defense against hostiles would be possible.
But then Toby called to Demeter to stop. They unhooked the travois so that Crossroads could rest and graze a bit and lowered Cate to the grass in the shade of a tree. “Come with me,” said Toby. Demeter didn’t want to leave Cate, but he said, “We’ll still be able to see her. I just want you to come to the top of that ridge.”
Toby got there first and waited for her, knowing that she would have a strong reaction to the shocking sight. It was a cemetary, but the graves were in the air, on scaffolds. Some of them had collapsed, scattering bones on the ground. There were many, many scaffolds. “These were only some of those who died,” said Toby. “So many died that there weren’t enough left to build scaffolds or to gather the bones of those whose scaffolds had collapsed, so they could finally be buried. Properly, the skulls should have been taken to the Circle of Souls over there.”
“Circle of Souls?”
“That’s what I call it. I suppose the term is too Christian.”
Turning, Demeter saw a white circle of round shapes, like the circles of round fungus puffballs that sometimes formed on the prairie. “We go to talk to them, tell them how the family is doing. Sometimes we tell them jokes, and that’s why they’re always smiling.” Demeter saw the grins under the dark eyeholes.
She wheeled and left. “Such things are not a laughing matter.” Her back was stiff and straight as she jolted back to the road.
Toby shrugged, “The Queen is not amused!” He flashed his own grin over his shoulder at the skulls. “But now she believes that you’re Indians!”
Demeter’s lack of sophistication about Indians meant she had never imagined the earth houses, mounded up along streets in an orderly way with neat little porch-like entrances. Nor could she decipher what seemed to be flagstaffs flying tattered emblems. Toby pointed out a central tree inside an enclosure. “That’s Lone Man. When the Great Flood came -- you’ve read about this in the Bible? How Noah built an ark? Well, Lone Man showed how to save the village by building a wooden wall.” Three steps on, he mused, “But he told us nothing about disease.” Demeter didn’t seem to be listening. "No wall could stop that."
When they stopped in the village square, the place seemed deserted. They waited until, very slowly, a few old people and women appeared, wary and hesitant even when Toby spoke to them in their language. Finally, one of the old women recognized him and they became welcoming, leading them to one of the oven-shaped houses where a fire burned, its smoke wandering out a hole in the middle of the domed roof. The interior was dark but orderly and quiet -- safe.
When they carried Cate inside, Demeter started to arrange her on a pallet, but the old ladies objected loudly and vigorously. Toby had to explain that Mandans never sleep with their head to the northwest and their feet to the southeast, because that is the way the dead are arranged. So Cate was rotated to be better oriented for recovery. Water was brought from the river and when Demeter bathed Cate for the first time since her injury, she stirred and began to wake. She appeared coherent but remembered very little about the attack, which was just as well.
For the next few days nothing much happened except talk, which can be a major happening. It was the Mandans who had a lot to say, telling about how they had once lived expansive, important, civilized lives and had even welcomed the terrible belching boats that brought strange people to visit. Somehow their hospitality -- which surely could not be wrong -- had brought some kind of curse on them and many, many people had died within a year. Now they were afraid to help others. Cate and Demeter looked at each other, understanding that this curse was smallpox brought by fur-trader’s steamboats.
The Mandan old folks went on telling, searching for the terrible thing they had done to make this curse descend on them. They reflected on all the shortfalls and errors of their ways, but none seemed an adequate cause for the erasure of the tribe. Nor could they think of any enemies who would wish them to be totally destroyed -- they had no such thoughts about other tribes. It must have had something to do with the water, maybe some kind of being that lived down under the water.
But they were on good terms with water. Their lives were based on their gardens and fields where the Three Sisters -- beans, squash and corn -- grew together, the corn providing scaffolding for the twining and climbing plants. Each year the river flooded their low-lying fields, but that was good, because it brought fertile new soil. This terrible dying baffled them. They gathered in the village plaza to ask Lone Man, but could not perform the proper ceremonies because none of them were the kind of vigorous young men who could stand to have their chests pierced and be hung from the ceiling in the ceremonial lodge. This “Okipa” ritual was the ultimate test of bravery, and bravery is what could have saved them in the old days.
Cate was more interested than Demeter, and not ready to move around much, so she lay listening with interest as the old ladies told her stories while Demeter cleaned out and fumigated one of the smaller earth houses. It seemed clear that Cate would not be ready to travel for quite a while, maybe the rest of the winter.
An old lady with blue eyes -- blue eyes? -- told Cate that all Mandan people have four different souls. The first soul, a shooting star, was white. The second was a light brown singing bird with a speckled bib. (“A meadowlark?” suggested Cate.) The third was the “lodge spirit” that never really left the lodge and were crowded around them invisibly, watching and listening, guarding the woman whose lodge it was. (All lodges and gardens belonged to the women.) “And the fourth soul?” asked Cate.
“It is black and it leaves us forever. Those black souls go to another village where they live as they did here, but we never see them again.”
“In our ways,” Cate offered, “We don’t group things in fours, but rather in threes. However, I’m inclined to like the idea of four, as at a crossroad.”
The old blue-eyed lady was not impressed. “Of what use are your ideas to me?” she demanded. “Can you bring back my strong sons and beautiful daughters?”
Cate snorted. “I don’t even know whether Demeter can bring back her own daughter.” She turned over and seemed to sleep, but in fact she was turning all the stories over in her mind, trying to fit them together. Did all people have such stories? Were they really about the same things?
That evening she and Demeter talked. “Toby says...” Cate began. Demeter was growing used to this beginning. "There is a very old stone not far from here that is covered with Viking runes. Those would be your ancestors, Demeter! He says that they have a person called “The Old Woman Who Never Dies.”
The two European women looked at each other, thinking of the three old women in their lore, the Three Fates or the Three Norns: one who spins the Thread of Life, one who measures it, and one who cuts it at the end. Cate said, “If we added “She Who Never Dies,” there would be four old women. Four. These people believe in the four directions, like a compass, like a crossroads. But what is the duty of She Who Never Dies?”
Demeter seemed not to listen. But when some of the younger women demanded to know what was in the box on her cart, she wouldn’t tell them. Guided by what Cate had gleaned from Toby, she said it was like the Mandan “Medicine Bundle,” which kept many things safely together, wrapped up for prayer and contemplation. They understood this and did not pry into her box, not even the youngest woman, who was known to be very curious.
One morning they woke to snow. “I’m going on,” declared Demeter. By now her companions knew better than to argue with her. “But before I do, I want to vaccinate these people. I have serum in this box.” To the Mandan Toby didn’t explain vaccination as modern medicine but offered it as a protective ceremony coming from Demeter’s Bundle. Because he did a good job of it and because Cate seemed to be recovering well, which showed that the travelers were good-hearted and skillful, the small group of villagers accepted the prickles and smearing solemnly. “A scab will form,” said Demeter. “You must NOT pick at that scab or bad things will happen.” They agreed to obey. They were used to such restrictions about Bundle matters.
The next morning at the edge of the village Cate stood propped on a crutch Toby had whittled. He held the halter of Crossroads, the mare, to keep her from following Demeter. Crossroads would stay with them until spring when Cate would be well enough to follow. Toby, it was pretty clear, would be with her.
Demeter had a thick coat with a hood that she had sewn from a blanket. Over the top was the shawl she had knitted on the train. She was stronger than she had been in those days and she trundled her cart along briskly. A single figure on a snowy prairie is a lonesome sight, but Demeter was indomitable.
Monday, February 12, 2007
Golden Wheat/Black Coal Chapter 6
They were in badlands now. Nothing was green. Dazzling shapes of buff and orange twisted and fell away and rose up again around them, almost like flames of stone. Rarely it was possible to distinguish the dried of remains of some plant that had started in a long-ago rainy season. Barley and Rye plodded along without interest in their surroundings. Except that the neat little black mare, Crossroads, was coming into season. Even though they were geldings, the Belgians paid attention to that. When the wagon stopped for something -- maybe to clear debris from the trail or take a look around from a high place -- though it was hard to tell much in such a labyrinth -- Crossroads would get herself around to where she could scratch her itchy hindquarters against the back corners of the wagon, making it jounce on its springs. Barley and Rye bent their heads around and stared at her. They blew out the dust in their nostrils.
Partly because of the mare’s pesky behavior, Demeter decided she would take up the position of outrigger scout. Anyway, Cate -- wanting to talk to Toby -- stuck around too close. After Demeter rode off on the mare, Cate and Toby sat driving shoulder to shoulder on the springwagon seat, not talking much now, but clearly gaining strength from each other. The people were as tired as the horses but it was their human minds that were the danger -- suggesting outcomes no one wanted.
One seemingly lucky day, miles out from the trail, Demeter found a kind of bowl shape in the stone where rainwater surprisingly lingered as a pond. She took the saddle and bridle off Crossroads, knowing that the horses felt part of the little company now and would not stray from it. It was good to let the horse graze on green grass and she lay back against the saddle listening to the sounds. She dozed a bit.
Suddenly there was a scream like a panther. But that wasn’t the right animal -- it was a horse -- a black stallion screaming and rearing at the top of a ridge. He ran, silhouetted against the darkening sky, and his flying mane and tail writhed in the wind like fire. For a moment she thought, hoped, it was a nightmare, but the horse’s hooves came pounding and now Crossroads sent her own scream into the shimmering air. The small meadow of grass that had seemed a protected place had become a trap.
The stallion put his head down parallel to the ground, impossibly, so that he looked unlike a horse, snaking forward with ears back until he was biting at the mare’s heels. His white teeth were bared and his eyes were rimmed with white. Demeter could hear his teeth clacking. He was trying to sever the mare’s tendons so she couldn’t run away, but she kicked out at him. THUMP -- she connected but the big male horse hardly seemed to notice.
They were both running hard now, with the male passing and then cutting back again. He closed in on her to bite her round hindquarters hard enough to make blood blossom red in the setting sun. She reared and lashed, landing both hind hooves on his broad chest, strong enough to send him off course. But then he curved back around to inflict more tearing bites on her withers. He grabbed for her neck.
But she was dancing, running, arching, rearing, doubling-back, bowing, in a dance so complicated that the next step could not be predicted. The stallion put his head down again and drove her, darting in again and again from side-to-side. The confrontation went on and on until both horses were panting, their nostrils flared and their mouths open. Veins stood out on their sweated sides.
Crossroads could bear it no longer. She stood, quivering. Surcease -- for that’s the horse it was -- stopped, too, watched her for a moment, and then approached. Whickering softly, no longer biting, he rubbed his mouth the length of her neck and back. He embraced her neck with his own thick arching neck and they rubbed together. Finally she stood with her hind legs apart, braced and open. He reared onto her back and entered.
Laughter rang across the meadow. Mort Lethe stood on the ridge with his fists on his hips, his long coat tail flapping. He was as aroused and triumphant as if it were he who had mounted the mare.
“If I had a rifle, I’d finish you off!” shouted Demeter.
“Wrong kind of harvest for you, my dear! Stick to what you know!”
“Where’s my daughter?”
The only answer was the sound of the stallion driving Crossroads out of the grassy valley and the echo of laughter as the black clad man disappeared behind the ridge.
It was dark. She was alone. She was outraged. Somehow she had to find her way back to Cate and Toby. Once she found the trail again, she stumbled along, barely able to tell the hard-packed dirt from the grazed-down dry grass along it. The moon rose as she walked but the camp was not where she expected it.
Behind her she heard horses running and thought it was Toby and Cate with the team. She stood still in the road and was nearly run-down as half a dozen horses pounded past her. The men on them were dark, even their faces were dark as though they were masked or painted or coal miners. Coal miners. Now she began to run, though it meant occasionally falling.
Ahead she heard firing and came around a corner just in time to see the men rushing down on the camp she had thought would mean safety. Barley and Rye, unused to attack, were rearing and striking out with their front feet. Cate jumped onto Barley’s back, grabbing at the harness, while Toby fired a rifle at the men. He was not a warrior and his marksmanship was not good. The men grabbed Barley’s bridle and struck his rear end hard with their rifles while Cate whipped at them with a rope she had seized. Where was her pistol? The men cut Barley loose.
Where was Demeter’s pistol? In the pocket of her canvas apron, then in her hand and firing before she even thought. One man was struck in the shoulder. Another screamed and grabbed his leg.
But then the attackers turned on the horses, firing until Rye dropped alongside the wagon. They threw ropes onto the wagon tongue and towed it crazily down the trail, Rye’s body dragging, so that it flailed against trees and rocks. The wagon flew to pieces and its load scattering everywhere. She couldn’t see Toby.
Demeter heard Cate scream far ahead and Barley scream -- then a great crash and the receding scramble of disordered men on horseback. She ran forward with her empty pistol -- extra cartridges had been in her saddlebag on the mare -- and realized that Toby was running ahead of her. She doubled back to the campfire and and seized a burning branch for light. There was a cliff where the trail turned, but they had forced Barley to go over it, Cate on his back.
Toby scrambled down over the twenty foot fall of rock. The big Belgian horse was groaning, mortally hurt, two legs broken and a rib driven into his great lungs, now filling with blood.
Cate lay separately, a dark heap. She did not move and made no sound. Toby stooped over her while Demeter found a way down to them. “Don’t straighten her until we know what’s broken,” said Demeter.
“Yes.” His voice was hoarse, rough with worry.
They stayed there with her until daylight, listening to her breath go in and out -- stop for a moment -- then go in and out. The horse, not far away, groaned and gurgled until the first light in the sky -- then went quiet. Birds began to sing and then coyotes yammered.
“Do you know who they were?” asked Toby once.
“Yes.” She said no more and Toby didn’t ask anymore.
When the daylight came, they saw that the trail turned down the face of the bluff sideways but then came back below itself hairpin turns so that if they made a litter, they might be able to carry Cate back to the remains of the camp. It became lighter and they looked farther, to the edge of a patch of sagebrush. There stood Crossroads, saddled and bridled, tied to a bush. The mare stamped her feet.
“Don’t you stamp your feet at me, you doxie!” Demeter was enraged, even though they really needed the mare -- maybe BECAUSE they needed her.
Toby looked at her, unable to decipher what was happening. She told him, “Mort Lethe brought the horse back just to taunt me. He’s the man who has my daughter and now he knows we’re coming to get her back. He’s showing he doesn’t care.”
Toby stared at her a few more moments. Finally he said, “With the horse we can make a travois.” A careful search with gentle fingers had convinced them that Cate had a blow to the head, one arm broken in two places, and a broken leg. They couldn’t tell much more without talking to her, but she did not regain consci ousness. They had straightened her and made splints. “I’ll go back to camp. I think there must be a spring nearby,” said Toby. The sun was already growing warm. “My home village is not so far now.”
Badlands stretched out ahead of them. The bees, whose hives had been smashed, finally warmed enough to rise into the air, swarming in a twisting flight like glittering smoke. They would have to stay here. Demeter was already planning how she would make a cart to push, but there would only be room for her box and a few other things. Not the water barrels, which were smashed anyway.
Partly because of the mare’s pesky behavior, Demeter decided she would take up the position of outrigger scout. Anyway, Cate -- wanting to talk to Toby -- stuck around too close. After Demeter rode off on the mare, Cate and Toby sat driving shoulder to shoulder on the springwagon seat, not talking much now, but clearly gaining strength from each other. The people were as tired as the horses but it was their human minds that were the danger -- suggesting outcomes no one wanted.
One seemingly lucky day, miles out from the trail, Demeter found a kind of bowl shape in the stone where rainwater surprisingly lingered as a pond. She took the saddle and bridle off Crossroads, knowing that the horses felt part of the little company now and would not stray from it. It was good to let the horse graze on green grass and she lay back against the saddle listening to the sounds. She dozed a bit.
Suddenly there was a scream like a panther. But that wasn’t the right animal -- it was a horse -- a black stallion screaming and rearing at the top of a ridge. He ran, silhouetted against the darkening sky, and his flying mane and tail writhed in the wind like fire. For a moment she thought, hoped, it was a nightmare, but the horse’s hooves came pounding and now Crossroads sent her own scream into the shimmering air. The small meadow of grass that had seemed a protected place had become a trap.
The stallion put his head down parallel to the ground, impossibly, so that he looked unlike a horse, snaking forward with ears back until he was biting at the mare’s heels. His white teeth were bared and his eyes were rimmed with white. Demeter could hear his teeth clacking. He was trying to sever the mare’s tendons so she couldn’t run away, but she kicked out at him. THUMP -- she connected but the big male horse hardly seemed to notice.
They were both running hard now, with the male passing and then cutting back again. He closed in on her to bite her round hindquarters hard enough to make blood blossom red in the setting sun. She reared and lashed, landing both hind hooves on his broad chest, strong enough to send him off course. But then he curved back around to inflict more tearing bites on her withers. He grabbed for her neck.
But she was dancing, running, arching, rearing, doubling-back, bowing, in a dance so complicated that the next step could not be predicted. The stallion put his head down again and drove her, darting in again and again from side-to-side. The confrontation went on and on until both horses were panting, their nostrils flared and their mouths open. Veins stood out on their sweated sides.
Crossroads could bear it no longer. She stood, quivering. Surcease -- for that’s the horse it was -- stopped, too, watched her for a moment, and then approached. Whickering softly, no longer biting, he rubbed his mouth the length of her neck and back. He embraced her neck with his own thick arching neck and they rubbed together. Finally she stood with her hind legs apart, braced and open. He reared onto her back and entered.
Laughter rang across the meadow. Mort Lethe stood on the ridge with his fists on his hips, his long coat tail flapping. He was as aroused and triumphant as if it were he who had mounted the mare.
“If I had a rifle, I’d finish you off!” shouted Demeter.
“Wrong kind of harvest for you, my dear! Stick to what you know!”
“Where’s my daughter?”
The only answer was the sound of the stallion driving Crossroads out of the grassy valley and the echo of laughter as the black clad man disappeared behind the ridge.
It was dark. She was alone. She was outraged. Somehow she had to find her way back to Cate and Toby. Once she found the trail again, she stumbled along, barely able to tell the hard-packed dirt from the grazed-down dry grass along it. The moon rose as she walked but the camp was not where she expected it.
Behind her she heard horses running and thought it was Toby and Cate with the team. She stood still in the road and was nearly run-down as half a dozen horses pounded past her. The men on them were dark, even their faces were dark as though they were masked or painted or coal miners. Coal miners. Now she began to run, though it meant occasionally falling.
Ahead she heard firing and came around a corner just in time to see the men rushing down on the camp she had thought would mean safety. Barley and Rye, unused to attack, were rearing and striking out with their front feet. Cate jumped onto Barley’s back, grabbing at the harness, while Toby fired a rifle at the men. He was not a warrior and his marksmanship was not good. The men grabbed Barley’s bridle and struck his rear end hard with their rifles while Cate whipped at them with a rope she had seized. Where was her pistol? The men cut Barley loose.
Where was Demeter’s pistol? In the pocket of her canvas apron, then in her hand and firing before she even thought. One man was struck in the shoulder. Another screamed and grabbed his leg.
But then the attackers turned on the horses, firing until Rye dropped alongside the wagon. They threw ropes onto the wagon tongue and towed it crazily down the trail, Rye’s body dragging, so that it flailed against trees and rocks. The wagon flew to pieces and its load scattering everywhere. She couldn’t see Toby.
Demeter heard Cate scream far ahead and Barley scream -- then a great crash and the receding scramble of disordered men on horseback. She ran forward with her empty pistol -- extra cartridges had been in her saddlebag on the mare -- and realized that Toby was running ahead of her. She doubled back to the campfire and and seized a burning branch for light. There was a cliff where the trail turned, but they had forced Barley to go over it, Cate on his back.
Toby scrambled down over the twenty foot fall of rock. The big Belgian horse was groaning, mortally hurt, two legs broken and a rib driven into his great lungs, now filling with blood.
Cate lay separately, a dark heap. She did not move and made no sound. Toby stooped over her while Demeter found a way down to them. “Don’t straighten her until we know what’s broken,” said Demeter.
“Yes.” His voice was hoarse, rough with worry.
They stayed there with her until daylight, listening to her breath go in and out -- stop for a moment -- then go in and out. The horse, not far away, groaned and gurgled until the first light in the sky -- then went quiet. Birds began to sing and then coyotes yammered.
“Do you know who they were?” asked Toby once.
“Yes.” She said no more and Toby didn’t ask anymore.
When the daylight came, they saw that the trail turned down the face of the bluff sideways but then came back below itself hairpin turns so that if they made a litter, they might be able to carry Cate back to the remains of the camp. It became lighter and they looked farther, to the edge of a patch of sagebrush. There stood Crossroads, saddled and bridled, tied to a bush. The mare stamped her feet.
“Don’t you stamp your feet at me, you doxie!” Demeter was enraged, even though they really needed the mare -- maybe BECAUSE they needed her.
Toby looked at her, unable to decipher what was happening. She told him, “Mort Lethe brought the horse back just to taunt me. He’s the man who has my daughter and now he knows we’re coming to get her back. He’s showing he doesn’t care.”
Toby stared at her a few more moments. Finally he said, “With the horse we can make a travois.” A careful search with gentle fingers had convinced them that Cate had a blow to the head, one arm broken in two places, and a broken leg. They couldn’t tell much more without talking to her, but she did not regain consci ousness. They had straightened her and made splints. “I’ll go back to camp. I think there must be a spring nearby,” said Toby. The sun was already growing warm. “My home village is not so far now.”
Badlands stretched out ahead of them. The bees, whose hives had been smashed, finally warmed enough to rise into the air, swarming in a twisting flight like glittering smoke. They would have to stay here. Demeter was already planning how she would make a cart to push, but there would only be room for her box and a few other things. Not the water barrels, which were smashed anyway.
Sunday, February 11, 2007
Golden Wheat/Black Coal
Inching along in thirty-mile increments, the two women worked always West across the rising prairie as the tall grass gave way to short grass, sparsely vegetated. Though the rutted and churned clay of the road showed that there had been rain earlier, now there was none and dust became part of their daily existence, especially during the day when the spring wagon was jouncing along. Rarely they overtook other travelers with heavier vehicles and slow oxen teams, but such outfits were old-fashioned and their owners were not particularly friendly since they wished to conserve both their supplies and their ideas about the future.
Now and then they came to a crossroads and if it were major enough, there would be an inn or tavern with maybe a stagecoach connection. Once in a long time they saw a ranch house, never very large and none with trees, though there was sometimes evidence that saplings had been planted, only to die in place. Since there were few to rob, there were few robbers, though once a pair of dubious hombres approached them over the curve of a hill. The women took out their guns, casually polishing them on apron or coat tail, and the men caught the gleam of sun on metal far enough away that they only changed their path without any confrontation.
Cate continued to cast her own path out to the sides of the road, riding the high places. Demeter had a telescope in her box and Cate took it with her to scout for places that might have water. She watched for signs of declivities eroded by watercourses or for clumps of green or trees that would signal a spring. Occasionally she shot a rabbit or even a deer but the women mostly depended upon the supplies in their wagon. There were no bison nor signs of them, though people had told them how they once were so thick.
When it was dark they sat together near their cooking fire while it dwindled after they had eaten and cleared up. Cate got out her pipe and smoked a bit. Demeter was more inclined to knit. As the days got longer, they did less of this and sank down to sleep early. But especially at first they talked.
Demeter could not stop examining her own actions. Had she done something to make Pers so glum and introverted? Or was she born that way? Was sending her out West the way to wake her up, or had the effort merely doomed her to some unknown fate far worse than sulking at home? Should she have been more strict or more lenient?
Cate listened patiently night after night. Finally she made a little speech. “Human beings can’t see far ahead. You’ve got to choose your path most times without really knowing where it will go. A mother can give advice but in the end the daughter has to make her own way. It’s like bein’ a gardener. You can prepare the soil and provide the water -- maybe a bit of fertilizer -- but in the end the plant has to do its own growin’. Much of a plant is under the ground where you can’t see it. If you pull it up to take a look at the roots, you’ll likely kill it.”
Demeter nodded. And knitted. And continued to question herself, but inside where Cate couldn’t give her good advice. She had her own underground roots. Cate asked, “Whatcha knittin’?” She didn’t know -- it was a way of thinking about something that had no real definition -- but that was so much along the lines of Cate’s point that she said, “Oh, I guess a shawl. Winter’s always closer than we think.”
One afternoon Cate came back to the road to report that there was a small house up ahead with a well beside it. This appeared to be the only water for a long distance. There were no humans apparent -- perhaps the place was abandoned. Given this, it seemed like a good place to spend the night, perhaps with a fireplace if not a real stove. There was no smoke, but one could find a way to be optimistic about that. The best possibility was that the stove was there but not an interfering human being.
Travelling over the rise and down into the broad saucer where the house stood, both women located their pistols just in case. Demeter pulled up in the yard and tied the horses to the rudimentary pole fence. Even that was more than many places had. This cabin even had a porch.
Dismounting, Cate went to the door, which was hanging a little open on its leather hinges. The windows were shuttered so that it was dark inside. Gingerly, Cate pushed the door open and waited for her eyes to adjust. Demeter watched from the path to the porch as Cate finally disappeared inside. She was too far from the house to hear the small noises Cate was trying to interpret. Packrat or human? Metal or wood? She saw the door to a second room and went carefully to peer in.
When Cate came back to the door, she was motioning Demeter to come. She hissed, “I don’t want to go in there alone. Come see what you think.”
“What is it?”
“There’s someone dying in the back room. I don’t want to go in there if they have smallpox.” They looked at each other gravely while they thought it over. They had both been vaccinated before they began this trip, but smallpox was only one of the possible diseases.
“I’ll look,” said Demeter. “We might be able to help.”
“I got no cure for smallpox,” grumbled Cate. “Once they’ve got it, they either survive or they don’t.”
They went quietly and gingerly to the inner doorway where they studied the shape on a homemade bed built into the angle of the wall so as to use as little wood as possible. “I think it’s an old man,” hissed Cate.
“Yes,” came a weak and quavering voice from the heap of ragged quilts. “It’s an old man and sure enough I’m dying, but I ain’t contagious. Might be hallucinatin’, though. Seems like I see two women in my doorway but there ain’t been women here since my wife died.”
“Why are you dying?” asked Demeter,coming a bit closer.
“Oh, jest old, I guess. Nuthin’ else to do. A body can’t live forever.” He shifted around a bit and they saw the gleam of light hitting an eye like a rodent peering out of its hole.
Cate marched to the single window and threw open the shutters, which made the heap squirm. ‘Ooooh, Lord! I like the dark so much better! I kin jest sorta dream away the time until I go.”
Demeter looked more closely. “No rash or poxes I can see. His color is bad and his breathing is rough. Mostly he’s filthy and emaciated.”
"What kin you expect?” the old man whined. “I TOLD you I’m dyin’.” Indeed his whispery voice was growing more faint.
“Can you walk?” Cate asked.
“Nope. Cain’t even stand up.”
“How long have you been here like this?’
“Dunno.”
“Are you thirsty?” The truth was that Cate herself was thirsty. They had not exactly been rationing their water, but being mindful of their use of it.
“Yep. But it ain’t no use.”
“I’ll go get water from your well.”
“Ain’t no use, I said. Thing’s gone dry.”
Cate, never one to accept second-hand reports, went out to check for herself. Sure enough, the bucket on a rope lowered to solid earth with a thunk. No splash. Not even a mucky sound that might mean a little seep. She refilled her canteen from the barrel of water they carried and saw that the bucket was low. But no one should deny another living person water, even if they wouldn’t be living very long.
Cate found a tin cup in the clutter of the kitchen. Demeter had emerged to size up the front room. There was indeed a cast iron stove with its pipe complete, but there was no firewood. They had a little in the wagon. “Enough water to do some cleanup?” she asked Cate as she passed on through.
“Not any at all. This is mighty droughty country.”
Demeter only shrugged and used a rag to move some of the dust around on the single table, setting dirty dishes in a pile on the floor.
The old man sipped a bit. “Won’t do no good,” he said, “But it tastes all right.” Cate waited for him to absorb the first water so she could give him a bit more. His breath rattled. Maybe pneumonia. After the second sip, he rallied a bit. “You gotta do something for me,” he whispered.
“What’s that?”
“You gotta take care of them that’s out back.”
“Who’s out back?”
“Promise me you’ll take care of them, my golden lovelies! My wealth! My precious beings!”
“What beings are those?”
“Don’t let the Indians get ‘em! Promise me!”
Suddenly he stiffened, his back arched, his mouth formed a gasping O, and his limbs shook. In a few moments he was dead, turning blue. “Well, saved some water in the long run, I guess,” said Cate and went to tell Demeter. “Prob’ly means he’s got some loved ones buried out back somewhere. Wife or something.”
“We’ll look after we eat.” Canned beans were heated and ready to serve on their own dishes. She had made coffee in a proper percolator. They ate sitting on the edge of the porch. They were not hard-hearted women, but they knew death and didn’t waste energy on it. They would give it some thought as the time came available. Cate lit her pipe and smoked while Demeter cleaned up. She scoured with sand in order to save soap.
Then they strolled out to the back of the cabin, looking for headstones. There were none. They were stumped for a few minutes and then Demeter, hearing the familiar sound, realized. “He was talking about bees. The man was a beekeeper.”
Sure enough, a couple of bee skeps stood on platforms in the grass. In the slanting evening light they could see the bees returning for the night, each golden and fuzzy. It was hard to guess where they might have been finding pollen, but the women took notice of the direction the insects came from. If the bees had found pollen, something must be blooming, which meant there was water of some kind.
They stood and watched, the rich tobacco smoke from Cate’s pipe seeming to calm the bees. Each landed neatly and walked in the small doorway to their fort. “Must be honey in there,” noted Demeter. “Come with me and bring that pipe.” They moved slowly to the boxes and while Cate produced smoke, Demeter lifted a lid enough to see the hexagons of honeycomb inside. “Ah yes.” The memory of honey on her tongue made her mouth wet.
Back on the cabin porch, the women decided not to bury the old man. They didn’t want to touch him and didn’t want to spend time with a pick fighting to get him into the dry earth. If he were dead, the best thing they could do for him was take along his bees to a place where they could survive. Demeter went in to see if the room contained anything else they ought to take along, but there was nothing. Using only two fingers, she pulled the ragged quilts back to survey his curled-up body, then lifted the nearly disintegrating covers over his head.
After giving the porch a good sweeping, they spent the night on it and next morning before first light, with Cate puffing mightily on her pipe as insurance, they plugged the entrances to the skeps and moved the bees into the wagon. Demeter rigged some shade over them with canvas.
Next day their progress was slower than usual because of not wanting to jounce the bees around more than they had to. About noon Cate took the telescope up to a bluff, traveling slantwise up the side on Crossroads, who didn’t like noisy shale underfoot with its sliding and bouncing. She came back in a hurry, taking no heed of Crossroads’ preferences. “There’s a fire behind us, about a half-days’ travel.”
“Think it’s the cabin?”
“To be sure, that’s what it looks like. A column. Looks like wood burning, not grass.”
“I ought to have told you earlier. The old man couldn’t have come back to life. I pulled down his covers and saw he had a bad wound to the chest, untended. That was his disease.”
“A wound from what?"
“Didn’t look like a bullet wound.”
“Indians?”
“We’ve been in Indian country for a while.”
“Think they’ll follow us?”
“No idea.”
Cate turned to go back up on the ridge, but Demeter called to her. “Maybe it would be better if we stuck closer together. If they come, hold off on guns. They might just want a kind of tithe -- flour, coffee, so on. Since we’re women.”
“Not to make us their slaves?”
In silence both women dealt with vivid mental images of rape, torture and captivity. “Let’s wait until they’re behaving badly before we use our guns.” Maybe their mental images weren’t quite the same. Demeter looked sideways at Cate, who hadn’t sounded as though she entirely objected to being enslaved by Indians. Cate once mentioned that she’d read several captivity narratives that didn’t make Indian life sound half-bad. In fact, the captured women had resented being returned to their families, insisting that the Indian life was more civilized. The Irish are so romantic, Demeter thought to herself, but she couldn’t see under Cate’s bonnet. She herself figured that Indians wouldn’t consider white women much of a treasure. Couldn’t tan hides. Couldn’t put up a proper lodge. It might come down to her blonde hair or Cate’s red and whether they fancied such for decoration.
A few hours later the Indians, having circled around them behind the ridge, appeared on the road ahead of them. They were a thriftless looking bunch, not a half-dozen of them, but when the leader put up his hand to signal a halt, the women stopped. Encouraged by this, the Indians came closer and it was clear that they were ragged young men, not very organized and not very resourceful as individuals either. They were energized by being a gang.
The boldest rode around the wagon, craning his neck to size-up the load. His eye lit on the improvised shade over the bee skep and he jabbered to the other boys. Then he rode up to Demeter, whose team craned their necks to see what was going on. “Whoa, Rye. Calm horse, Barley. Take it easy.” Actually, she was talking to herself as much as to her horses.
The young leader burst out, “Sugar bugs!” A smile wreathed his face and his eyes were wide with anticipation. “Sugar bugs!” Then a long spiel in his own language.
“I reckon he knows a bee hive when he sees one,” remarked Cate, who had pushed her bonnet off her face so it hung down her back. She wanted to see as much as she could, like a prey animal. “We gonna just give them bees to ‘em?”
“It’s not what we promised that old man.”
“Think they’re the ones who gave him that wound?”
“Wouldn’t be surprised. But I kinda doubt it. They would’ve taken the bees then.” Cate’s hand was deep in her apron pocket, clenched over her pistol. She knew that Demeter’s gun was close at hand but she’d have to drop the team’s reins and that was tricky. Steady as they were, they’d not been tested by nearby shooting.
Suddenly the young men swarmed the wagon, two of them sliding into the wagon bed, knocking aside the shade and then yanking out the plugs the women had put into the bee entrances. The young men were sweaty and hot. They stunk and they were full of adrenaline with their adventure. The first bee waddled out of the dark hive and reacted as bees do.
“Yeeaaaaaaeeeeiiii!” screamed the first mighty warrior. “Aaaiiigghh!” yelled the second as other bees found his bare hide. All the boys had a lot of bare hide -- thighs, shoulders and faces with tender parts. Slapping madly at the bees, the boys managed to knock them stunned and angry into their ragged clothes where the increasingly angry bees stung them in their creases and personal places.
After a few minutes of circling, the boys -- both on foot and on horseback -- took off running with their horses pell-mell mixed in with them. Screaming, they headed over the ridge and could be heard receding into the distance. Some bees went with them, but most of the swarm subsided and clustered on the skeps and other contents of the wagon.
Then there was another sound. Male laughter. An older and calmer Indian man sat on a rock just on the road side of the ridge, laughing so hard he couldn’t stop. The women looked at him, at each other, and also began to laugh, but there was a bit of an hysterical edge in their voices. Would this clearly more competent Indian now attack them? He wore trousers and an Indian-style calico shirt with an old suit vest. No war decorations. Elastic arm bands to keep his cuffs high.
When he was able, he walked down to the wagon and women. Calmly he brushed a few bees off the horses. The women gently flapped more off their skirts and hats.
“The bees are not stinging you,” remarked Demeter.
“I am a Tobacco Man. Bees like me. They like what I grow.”
“What in the world is a Tobacco Man?” demanded Cate.
“I grow tobacco -- for sacred purposes. My people respect the plant and therefore they respect those who know how to tend it. It is a sacred plant with many virtues.”
“You seem quite a good English speaker.” Demeter was making flat statements, partly because she was still a little shocky and partly because that was her way.
The Tobacco man bowed and made a gesture of doffing a hat, though he was only wearing a browband to control his hair. “I am a graduate of Carlisle, Madam. Fully educated.”
Cate was charmed, Demeter saw. She was smoothing her hair and trying to decide whether to reinstate her bonnet. “What is your name, Mister Tobacco Man?”
“In my language, you couldn’t pronounce it. Call me Toby.”
“Then call me Cate,” Cate instructed. “And that’s Demeter.” The less said the better, but people do have to have names.
They all began to move on down the road. The bees were partly riding and partly flying in a little cloud over the bee skep. Everyone moved slowly. By the time they camped that night, rather early, they knew a lot about each other.
Toby was Mandan, a tribe that gardened. His village was just a few weeks further along, on the banks of a river, but it was a much diminished village because of smallpox in the past. Toby had been vaccinated at school, but now he had lost most of his family, including his wife and children. “There are many empty lodges there,” said Toby. “You could stay in one. They are not tents but like houses.”
The women agreed to veer towards Toby’s village. But Demeter didn’t want to stay long. Nevertheless, they had been traveling for many weeks now, repeating the same tasks of making camp, finding something for the horses to eat, coping with short water, maintaining the gear, sleeping with their ears open, and breaking camp again the next morning. They talked less as time went on -- there was little need after they estabished their patterns.
But the horses were suffering, especially the big team. Their flesh was diminishing and their hides no longer shone. Such big animals needed a lot of fodder and water, while the neat little black mare could get along with less. Days were hot though nights were beginning to cool. They could have withstood the heat if there had been enough water.
At every chance they refilled their barrels, even if it took a day to collect from a trickle, and it was clear that this was the only way to get from one water source to the next. Demeter took her maps out of her box every night and studied them with her hand lens, but they weren’t much help. The makers had a lot of imagination or relied too much on hearsay.
It helped to have Toby along. He often -- not always -- could find water and he was enough stronger to bring in more firewood and also better at knowing what would burn. By now they were using buffalo chips as much as wood. He didn’t scold them for being two women alone traveling on the prairie -- just took that for granted as a fact and did his part both traveling and in camp.
In the short interval between scouring out the tin pans with sand or rushes and rolling up for sleep (using blankets as much for protection against the insects as for warmth), he and Cate formed the habit of sitting by the coals of the cook fire with their pipes. They were both botanizers and would sometimes show each other their day’s find, flattening the plants out on their knees to look at how the leaves were connected to the stem or small puzzling structures that might become seeds. Plants were endlessly inventive, and yet they stuck to the same themes.
Demeter took a square of canvas and a hand scythe and in the last of the daylight walked out beyond where the horses were picketed, sometimes even several miles, to cut what grass and edible browse there might be. She piled it on the canvas and towed her load behind her. Her diligence didn’t add a lot, but she knew that a small margin could make a wide difference.
Anyway, she wanted to think about Mort Lethe and why he would kidnap her daughter. She thought back to the first time she met the man.
It was a battlefield of the War between the States, a field with a split rail fence along one side seeming to hold back trees that were dark because it was evening. She’d had a bucket of water and a dipper and was trying to find men who thirsted in their agony on the ground. Mostly she was guided by the groans of the soldiers tossed like matchsticks. She could not tell gray from blue, even when the moon began to rise. There seemed to be no color in the world. Blood seemed black. The bodies were thick as cut grass.
At first she didn’t notice the man at the other end of the field, also stooping over the men, one after another, methodically. But he didn’t carry a bucket. He had a saber and he seemed to be plunging it into the men. The blade flashed in the moonlight. She thought surely she misunderstood, but when he came closer, she realized that it was true. He was finishing off the wounded.
“Stop,” she cried. “What are you doing?”
“They’re through,” the man said calmly. “They want to die.”
The man at her feet asked, “Sister, may ah hev some watah?” in a soft, courtly voice. She stooped to him and her dipper reflected moonlight a little duller than the saber did. He sipped a bit, shuddered, and then, his mouth gone slack, let the water run out of his mouth over his face, so that the moon shone off that as well.
She had been young but even then she wasn’t afraid of death. “The men in this field are mine,” she said. “Go kill somewhere else.”
The dark figure threw back his head and laughed. “Yours, are they? What will you do? Plant them? Grow corn here, fertilized with soldier bodies? They’ll have to die for that, won’t they?”
“Doctors are coming. Litters. Ambulances. We will heal them so they can grow up and become old men telling the stories of this battle.”
“Nothing is coming. Do you hear any wagons? Do you even hear voices except ours? No one will come until morning, maybe not even then.”
“I’ll go and get them! I’ll find help.”
“When the sun comes up, the real suffering will begin. These men are in agony -- let them go to the Elysian Fields where warriors wander forever.”
“No! I will not! I fight for life!” she screamed, and when he came closer, she threw the bucket of water in his face. But even then he was not angry. He laughed, as he turned away and swung over the fence into the woods.
A boy ten feet away said in a Yankee accent, “Sister, oh, Sister! Water, please!! I could live if I just had a drink of water.” But she’d thrown it all on Mort Lethe. Around her the voices of grown men had begged, “Mother, I need you. Help me. Ma, where are you? I hurt so much.”
Now and then they came to a crossroads and if it were major enough, there would be an inn or tavern with maybe a stagecoach connection. Once in a long time they saw a ranch house, never very large and none with trees, though there was sometimes evidence that saplings had been planted, only to die in place. Since there were few to rob, there were few robbers, though once a pair of dubious hombres approached them over the curve of a hill. The women took out their guns, casually polishing them on apron or coat tail, and the men caught the gleam of sun on metal far enough away that they only changed their path without any confrontation.
Cate continued to cast her own path out to the sides of the road, riding the high places. Demeter had a telescope in her box and Cate took it with her to scout for places that might have water. She watched for signs of declivities eroded by watercourses or for clumps of green or trees that would signal a spring. Occasionally she shot a rabbit or even a deer but the women mostly depended upon the supplies in their wagon. There were no bison nor signs of them, though people had told them how they once were so thick.
When it was dark they sat together near their cooking fire while it dwindled after they had eaten and cleared up. Cate got out her pipe and smoked a bit. Demeter was more inclined to knit. As the days got longer, they did less of this and sank down to sleep early. But especially at first they talked.
Demeter could not stop examining her own actions. Had she done something to make Pers so glum and introverted? Or was she born that way? Was sending her out West the way to wake her up, or had the effort merely doomed her to some unknown fate far worse than sulking at home? Should she have been more strict or more lenient?
Cate listened patiently night after night. Finally she made a little speech. “Human beings can’t see far ahead. You’ve got to choose your path most times without really knowing where it will go. A mother can give advice but in the end the daughter has to make her own way. It’s like bein’ a gardener. You can prepare the soil and provide the water -- maybe a bit of fertilizer -- but in the end the plant has to do its own growin’. Much of a plant is under the ground where you can’t see it. If you pull it up to take a look at the roots, you’ll likely kill it.”
Demeter nodded. And knitted. And continued to question herself, but inside where Cate couldn’t give her good advice. She had her own underground roots. Cate asked, “Whatcha knittin’?” She didn’t know -- it was a way of thinking about something that had no real definition -- but that was so much along the lines of Cate’s point that she said, “Oh, I guess a shawl. Winter’s always closer than we think.”
One afternoon Cate came back to the road to report that there was a small house up ahead with a well beside it. This appeared to be the only water for a long distance. There were no humans apparent -- perhaps the place was abandoned. Given this, it seemed like a good place to spend the night, perhaps with a fireplace if not a real stove. There was no smoke, but one could find a way to be optimistic about that. The best possibility was that the stove was there but not an interfering human being.
Travelling over the rise and down into the broad saucer where the house stood, both women located their pistols just in case. Demeter pulled up in the yard and tied the horses to the rudimentary pole fence. Even that was more than many places had. This cabin even had a porch.
Dismounting, Cate went to the door, which was hanging a little open on its leather hinges. The windows were shuttered so that it was dark inside. Gingerly, Cate pushed the door open and waited for her eyes to adjust. Demeter watched from the path to the porch as Cate finally disappeared inside. She was too far from the house to hear the small noises Cate was trying to interpret. Packrat or human? Metal or wood? She saw the door to a second room and went carefully to peer in.
When Cate came back to the door, she was motioning Demeter to come. She hissed, “I don’t want to go in there alone. Come see what you think.”
“What is it?”
“There’s someone dying in the back room. I don’t want to go in there if they have smallpox.” They looked at each other gravely while they thought it over. They had both been vaccinated before they began this trip, but smallpox was only one of the possible diseases.
“I’ll look,” said Demeter. “We might be able to help.”
“I got no cure for smallpox,” grumbled Cate. “Once they’ve got it, they either survive or they don’t.”
They went quietly and gingerly to the inner doorway where they studied the shape on a homemade bed built into the angle of the wall so as to use as little wood as possible. “I think it’s an old man,” hissed Cate.
“Yes,” came a weak and quavering voice from the heap of ragged quilts. “It’s an old man and sure enough I’m dying, but I ain’t contagious. Might be hallucinatin’, though. Seems like I see two women in my doorway but there ain’t been women here since my wife died.”
“Why are you dying?” asked Demeter,coming a bit closer.
“Oh, jest old, I guess. Nuthin’ else to do. A body can’t live forever.” He shifted around a bit and they saw the gleam of light hitting an eye like a rodent peering out of its hole.
Cate marched to the single window and threw open the shutters, which made the heap squirm. ‘Ooooh, Lord! I like the dark so much better! I kin jest sorta dream away the time until I go.”
Demeter looked more closely. “No rash or poxes I can see. His color is bad and his breathing is rough. Mostly he’s filthy and emaciated.”
"What kin you expect?” the old man whined. “I TOLD you I’m dyin’.” Indeed his whispery voice was growing more faint.
“Can you walk?” Cate asked.
“Nope. Cain’t even stand up.”
“How long have you been here like this?’
“Dunno.”
“Are you thirsty?” The truth was that Cate herself was thirsty. They had not exactly been rationing their water, but being mindful of their use of it.
“Yep. But it ain’t no use.”
“I’ll go get water from your well.”
“Ain’t no use, I said. Thing’s gone dry.”
Cate, never one to accept second-hand reports, went out to check for herself. Sure enough, the bucket on a rope lowered to solid earth with a thunk. No splash. Not even a mucky sound that might mean a little seep. She refilled her canteen from the barrel of water they carried and saw that the bucket was low. But no one should deny another living person water, even if they wouldn’t be living very long.
Cate found a tin cup in the clutter of the kitchen. Demeter had emerged to size up the front room. There was indeed a cast iron stove with its pipe complete, but there was no firewood. They had a little in the wagon. “Enough water to do some cleanup?” she asked Cate as she passed on through.
“Not any at all. This is mighty droughty country.”
Demeter only shrugged and used a rag to move some of the dust around on the single table, setting dirty dishes in a pile on the floor.
The old man sipped a bit. “Won’t do no good,” he said, “But it tastes all right.” Cate waited for him to absorb the first water so she could give him a bit more. His breath rattled. Maybe pneumonia. After the second sip, he rallied a bit. “You gotta do something for me,” he whispered.
“What’s that?”
“You gotta take care of them that’s out back.”
“Who’s out back?”
“Promise me you’ll take care of them, my golden lovelies! My wealth! My precious beings!”
“What beings are those?”
“Don’t let the Indians get ‘em! Promise me!”
Suddenly he stiffened, his back arched, his mouth formed a gasping O, and his limbs shook. In a few moments he was dead, turning blue. “Well, saved some water in the long run, I guess,” said Cate and went to tell Demeter. “Prob’ly means he’s got some loved ones buried out back somewhere. Wife or something.”
“We’ll look after we eat.” Canned beans were heated and ready to serve on their own dishes. She had made coffee in a proper percolator. They ate sitting on the edge of the porch. They were not hard-hearted women, but they knew death and didn’t waste energy on it. They would give it some thought as the time came available. Cate lit her pipe and smoked while Demeter cleaned up. She scoured with sand in order to save soap.
Then they strolled out to the back of the cabin, looking for headstones. There were none. They were stumped for a few minutes and then Demeter, hearing the familiar sound, realized. “He was talking about bees. The man was a beekeeper.”
Sure enough, a couple of bee skeps stood on platforms in the grass. In the slanting evening light they could see the bees returning for the night, each golden and fuzzy. It was hard to guess where they might have been finding pollen, but the women took notice of the direction the insects came from. If the bees had found pollen, something must be blooming, which meant there was water of some kind.
They stood and watched, the rich tobacco smoke from Cate’s pipe seeming to calm the bees. Each landed neatly and walked in the small doorway to their fort. “Must be honey in there,” noted Demeter. “Come with me and bring that pipe.” They moved slowly to the boxes and while Cate produced smoke, Demeter lifted a lid enough to see the hexagons of honeycomb inside. “Ah yes.” The memory of honey on her tongue made her mouth wet.
Back on the cabin porch, the women decided not to bury the old man. They didn’t want to touch him and didn’t want to spend time with a pick fighting to get him into the dry earth. If he were dead, the best thing they could do for him was take along his bees to a place where they could survive. Demeter went in to see if the room contained anything else they ought to take along, but there was nothing. Using only two fingers, she pulled the ragged quilts back to survey his curled-up body, then lifted the nearly disintegrating covers over his head.
After giving the porch a good sweeping, they spent the night on it and next morning before first light, with Cate puffing mightily on her pipe as insurance, they plugged the entrances to the skeps and moved the bees into the wagon. Demeter rigged some shade over them with canvas.
Next day their progress was slower than usual because of not wanting to jounce the bees around more than they had to. About noon Cate took the telescope up to a bluff, traveling slantwise up the side on Crossroads, who didn’t like noisy shale underfoot with its sliding and bouncing. She came back in a hurry, taking no heed of Crossroads’ preferences. “There’s a fire behind us, about a half-days’ travel.”
“Think it’s the cabin?”
“To be sure, that’s what it looks like. A column. Looks like wood burning, not grass.”
“I ought to have told you earlier. The old man couldn’t have come back to life. I pulled down his covers and saw he had a bad wound to the chest, untended. That was his disease.”
“A wound from what?"
“Didn’t look like a bullet wound.”
“Indians?”
“We’ve been in Indian country for a while.”
“Think they’ll follow us?”
“No idea.”
Cate turned to go back up on the ridge, but Demeter called to her. “Maybe it would be better if we stuck closer together. If they come, hold off on guns. They might just want a kind of tithe -- flour, coffee, so on. Since we’re women.”
“Not to make us their slaves?”
In silence both women dealt with vivid mental images of rape, torture and captivity. “Let’s wait until they’re behaving badly before we use our guns.” Maybe their mental images weren’t quite the same. Demeter looked sideways at Cate, who hadn’t sounded as though she entirely objected to being enslaved by Indians. Cate once mentioned that she’d read several captivity narratives that didn’t make Indian life sound half-bad. In fact, the captured women had resented being returned to their families, insisting that the Indian life was more civilized. The Irish are so romantic, Demeter thought to herself, but she couldn’t see under Cate’s bonnet. She herself figured that Indians wouldn’t consider white women much of a treasure. Couldn’t tan hides. Couldn’t put up a proper lodge. It might come down to her blonde hair or Cate’s red and whether they fancied such for decoration.
A few hours later the Indians, having circled around them behind the ridge, appeared on the road ahead of them. They were a thriftless looking bunch, not a half-dozen of them, but when the leader put up his hand to signal a halt, the women stopped. Encouraged by this, the Indians came closer and it was clear that they were ragged young men, not very organized and not very resourceful as individuals either. They were energized by being a gang.
The boldest rode around the wagon, craning his neck to size-up the load. His eye lit on the improvised shade over the bee skep and he jabbered to the other boys. Then he rode up to Demeter, whose team craned their necks to see what was going on. “Whoa, Rye. Calm horse, Barley. Take it easy.” Actually, she was talking to herself as much as to her horses.
The young leader burst out, “Sugar bugs!” A smile wreathed his face and his eyes were wide with anticipation. “Sugar bugs!” Then a long spiel in his own language.
“I reckon he knows a bee hive when he sees one,” remarked Cate, who had pushed her bonnet off her face so it hung down her back. She wanted to see as much as she could, like a prey animal. “We gonna just give them bees to ‘em?”
“It’s not what we promised that old man.”
“Think they’re the ones who gave him that wound?”
“Wouldn’t be surprised. But I kinda doubt it. They would’ve taken the bees then.” Cate’s hand was deep in her apron pocket, clenched over her pistol. She knew that Demeter’s gun was close at hand but she’d have to drop the team’s reins and that was tricky. Steady as they were, they’d not been tested by nearby shooting.
Suddenly the young men swarmed the wagon, two of them sliding into the wagon bed, knocking aside the shade and then yanking out the plugs the women had put into the bee entrances. The young men were sweaty and hot. They stunk and they were full of adrenaline with their adventure. The first bee waddled out of the dark hive and reacted as bees do.
“Yeeaaaaaaeeeeiiii!” screamed the first mighty warrior. “Aaaiiigghh!” yelled the second as other bees found his bare hide. All the boys had a lot of bare hide -- thighs, shoulders and faces with tender parts. Slapping madly at the bees, the boys managed to knock them stunned and angry into their ragged clothes where the increasingly angry bees stung them in their creases and personal places.
After a few minutes of circling, the boys -- both on foot and on horseback -- took off running with their horses pell-mell mixed in with them. Screaming, they headed over the ridge and could be heard receding into the distance. Some bees went with them, but most of the swarm subsided and clustered on the skeps and other contents of the wagon.
Then there was another sound. Male laughter. An older and calmer Indian man sat on a rock just on the road side of the ridge, laughing so hard he couldn’t stop. The women looked at him, at each other, and also began to laugh, but there was a bit of an hysterical edge in their voices. Would this clearly more competent Indian now attack them? He wore trousers and an Indian-style calico shirt with an old suit vest. No war decorations. Elastic arm bands to keep his cuffs high.
When he was able, he walked down to the wagon and women. Calmly he brushed a few bees off the horses. The women gently flapped more off their skirts and hats.
“The bees are not stinging you,” remarked Demeter.
“I am a Tobacco Man. Bees like me. They like what I grow.”
“What in the world is a Tobacco Man?” demanded Cate.
“I grow tobacco -- for sacred purposes. My people respect the plant and therefore they respect those who know how to tend it. It is a sacred plant with many virtues.”
“You seem quite a good English speaker.” Demeter was making flat statements, partly because she was still a little shocky and partly because that was her way.
The Tobacco man bowed and made a gesture of doffing a hat, though he was only wearing a browband to control his hair. “I am a graduate of Carlisle, Madam. Fully educated.”
Cate was charmed, Demeter saw. She was smoothing her hair and trying to decide whether to reinstate her bonnet. “What is your name, Mister Tobacco Man?”
“In my language, you couldn’t pronounce it. Call me Toby.”
“Then call me Cate,” Cate instructed. “And that’s Demeter.” The less said the better, but people do have to have names.
They all began to move on down the road. The bees were partly riding and partly flying in a little cloud over the bee skep. Everyone moved slowly. By the time they camped that night, rather early, they knew a lot about each other.
Toby was Mandan, a tribe that gardened. His village was just a few weeks further along, on the banks of a river, but it was a much diminished village because of smallpox in the past. Toby had been vaccinated at school, but now he had lost most of his family, including his wife and children. “There are many empty lodges there,” said Toby. “You could stay in one. They are not tents but like houses.”
The women agreed to veer towards Toby’s village. But Demeter didn’t want to stay long. Nevertheless, they had been traveling for many weeks now, repeating the same tasks of making camp, finding something for the horses to eat, coping with short water, maintaining the gear, sleeping with their ears open, and breaking camp again the next morning. They talked less as time went on -- there was little need after they estabished their patterns.
But the horses were suffering, especially the big team. Their flesh was diminishing and their hides no longer shone. Such big animals needed a lot of fodder and water, while the neat little black mare could get along with less. Days were hot though nights were beginning to cool. They could have withstood the heat if there had been enough water.
At every chance they refilled their barrels, even if it took a day to collect from a trickle, and it was clear that this was the only way to get from one water source to the next. Demeter took her maps out of her box every night and studied them with her hand lens, but they weren’t much help. The makers had a lot of imagination or relied too much on hearsay.
It helped to have Toby along. He often -- not always -- could find water and he was enough stronger to bring in more firewood and also better at knowing what would burn. By now they were using buffalo chips as much as wood. He didn’t scold them for being two women alone traveling on the prairie -- just took that for granted as a fact and did his part both traveling and in camp.
In the short interval between scouring out the tin pans with sand or rushes and rolling up for sleep (using blankets as much for protection against the insects as for warmth), he and Cate formed the habit of sitting by the coals of the cook fire with their pipes. They were both botanizers and would sometimes show each other their day’s find, flattening the plants out on their knees to look at how the leaves were connected to the stem or small puzzling structures that might become seeds. Plants were endlessly inventive, and yet they stuck to the same themes.
Demeter took a square of canvas and a hand scythe and in the last of the daylight walked out beyond where the horses were picketed, sometimes even several miles, to cut what grass and edible browse there might be. She piled it on the canvas and towed her load behind her. Her diligence didn’t add a lot, but she knew that a small margin could make a wide difference.
Anyway, she wanted to think about Mort Lethe and why he would kidnap her daughter. She thought back to the first time she met the man.
It was a battlefield of the War between the States, a field with a split rail fence along one side seeming to hold back trees that were dark because it was evening. She’d had a bucket of water and a dipper and was trying to find men who thirsted in their agony on the ground. Mostly she was guided by the groans of the soldiers tossed like matchsticks. She could not tell gray from blue, even when the moon began to rise. There seemed to be no color in the world. Blood seemed black. The bodies were thick as cut grass.
At first she didn’t notice the man at the other end of the field, also stooping over the men, one after another, methodically. But he didn’t carry a bucket. He had a saber and he seemed to be plunging it into the men. The blade flashed in the moonlight. She thought surely she misunderstood, but when he came closer, she realized that it was true. He was finishing off the wounded.
“Stop,” she cried. “What are you doing?”
“They’re through,” the man said calmly. “They want to die.”
The man at her feet asked, “Sister, may ah hev some watah?” in a soft, courtly voice. She stooped to him and her dipper reflected moonlight a little duller than the saber did. He sipped a bit, shuddered, and then, his mouth gone slack, let the water run out of his mouth over his face, so that the moon shone off that as well.
She had been young but even then she wasn’t afraid of death. “The men in this field are mine,” she said. “Go kill somewhere else.”
The dark figure threw back his head and laughed. “Yours, are they? What will you do? Plant them? Grow corn here, fertilized with soldier bodies? They’ll have to die for that, won’t they?”
“Doctors are coming. Litters. Ambulances. We will heal them so they can grow up and become old men telling the stories of this battle.”
“Nothing is coming. Do you hear any wagons? Do you even hear voices except ours? No one will come until morning, maybe not even then.”
“I’ll go and get them! I’ll find help.”
“When the sun comes up, the real suffering will begin. These men are in agony -- let them go to the Elysian Fields where warriors wander forever.”
“No! I will not! I fight for life!” she screamed, and when he came closer, she threw the bucket of water in his face. But even then he was not angry. He laughed, as he turned away and swung over the fence into the woods.
A boy ten feet away said in a Yankee accent, “Sister, oh, Sister! Water, please!! I could live if I just had a drink of water.” But she’d thrown it all on Mort Lethe. Around her the voices of grown men had begged, “Mother, I need you. Help me. Ma, where are you? I hurt so much.”
Saturday, February 10, 2007
Golden Wheat/Black Coal Chapter 4
Two sons were born, Philomelus and Plutus, who were never on good terms, for Plutus, who was richer, gave nothing of his wealth to his brother. Philomelus, however, compelled by necessity, bought two oxen with what he had, and became the inventor of the wagon. So, by plowing and cultivating the fields, he supported himself. His mother, admiring his invention, represented him plowing among the stars, and called him Bootes. –Hyginus Astronomica 2.4
Boots was there to greet the two women on the train platform, looking earnest as he always did. He had brought two men to deal with the trunks but handed his mother and Cate into a fine brougham with a pair of high-stepping horses. They were happy to leave the surging mass of the depot quickly and to arrive at Boots’ calm home at the edge of town where his wife welcomed them warmly, though she was just the least bit intimidated by her mother-in-law.
A real wash-up, a wholesome supper and a good night’s sleep later, the two women were ready to tackle the open prairie. Boots’ wife shook her head. No one would ever catch her going off into the wilderness like that, even if one of her children was at stake. That sulky dark Pers had no business going out there in the first place. She’d told Boots that at the time and reminded him now.
But he paid no attention. He was delighted to be equipping his mother from his fine collection of stock and vehicles. Instead of a buckboard, which would soon be pounded to bits on the rough trail, he chose for his mother a springwagon, pulled by a fine team of Belgians called “Rye” and “Barley.” Indeed, their grain-colored hides shone in the sun while their manes and tails, fine and white as pounded out flax fiber, riffled in the stirring air. The baggage went into the back, including a watertight box his mother would not discuss, and barrels of good water. For Cate there was a black mare, strong and attentive, named “Crossroads.” She liked the horse at once and picked out large canvas panniers to go behind her saddle, rather than leather saddlebags. In Boots’ office the two women went over some maps, but all agreed they would be of little use in finding the man in black and his captive.
Boots was anxious to persuade the women, especially his mother, of the huge importance steam engines would have out on what some were calling the “ocean of grass.” How deeply they could plow, how quickly they could thrash, going from one homestead to another on their huge iron cleated wheels. But Demeter had little taste for machinery. Cate thought of the people -- what about the men and women who used to make a little cushion of wages for the winter by working on the harvest? Surely it was very hard work, but still hard work was better than none and there was plenty of good company, singing, and, well, a bit of fun. The huge steam thrashing machines would end that.
On the last night in town Demeter lay awake, thinking of Boots’ father. The Reverend Jason Christianson -- what a wonder he was! He came to their town as an evangelist, not the Puritanical sort of preacher they were used to, but a shining vision of a new life! He had baptized dozens of folks down by the stream and all crowded to take Communion from his hands. He handled the materials so beautifully, with never a false move, never bumping the wine decanter against the polished chalice or making crumbs when he snapped the wafer above the platen. “My body, broken for you,” he cried, but she never heard past “my body.” And she didn’t think of Jesus, only of Jason and his smooth body.
That spring they were both at the traditional beginning of the plowing season -- three furrows across the rich earth, three bands of darkness in the stubble field. When everyone had gone home, they came back under the moon and lay in the furrows to make a son, Plutos. A son who would be rich as the earth, who would make others wealthy as well. Jason made her believe that prosperity was the product of virtue, that diligence would always be rewarded by God with happiness and safety.
They had intended to marry. Before they could, there was a summer storm that endangered the ships belonging to the island village. People went up to the top of the cliff to watch through the wind-driven rain, as though that might bring the ships more quickly and safely. They asked Jason to pray for their seamen and so he did. Standing up there with his golden hair whipped by the wind, his cossack knotting around his legs, he raised up his arms and prayed mightily, half-singing, defying the storm. That’s when the lightning struck him dead as though the sky were jealous. The next day the ships came into harbor safely, including the ship belonging to Jason’s brother Dan. There were no funerals for sailors, but only one for the evangelical preacher who had brought them such assurance and grace for a while. Did he sacrifice himself for them, offering himself in place of their men? Or had he angered God by asking for more than the people were entitled to, refusing the tithe the sea had always demanded?
When the ships came in again again, Demeter had lived for months with her now fatherless boy, Plutos, and her dark but red-cheeked little daughter, Persephone, before she had felt the need for a new beginning and had gone along on Dan’s ship. Somewhere along the way, in an act of mutual consolation, they had conceived Boots. They married in Halifax. Cory had come later. By the time Dan’s ship went down, he had amassed a major fortune which Demeter managed carefully, mostly investing in agricultural land. That’s what she knew best and that’s what she loved most. Her family knew this dimly and did not ordinarily expect her help, especially after Dan was lost at sea. In a while she emigrated to Boston. By then all the children had found lives of their own except Pers.
Soon after dawn the Belgians leaned into their jingling harnesses and hardly felt the spring wagon that rolled along behind them. They were far beyond the horsepower necessary to move the light wagon, but possibly it would be a long trip and if one were lamed -- or worse -- along the way, one horse could pull the wagon. “Crossroads” stepped out lightly, willing to undertake the role of out-rider, going along the ridges and covering many miles by circling ahead to scout the trail. Cate had made herself a bonnet with a deep brim and a wide skirt so as to protect her freckled skin from sunburn. Her bony face looked a little strange in the shadowed tunnel of the bonnet with a bow tied under her chin, but no one dared comment. Demeter clapped on a broad-brimmed straw hat with a black grosgrain band and a strip of black elastic to hold the hat on in case of wind. Otherwise, they wore their traveling clothes, dusters over shirtwaists and skirts, full enough for Cate to drape her shins decently.
At first they passed along on a road that was well-traveled, passing houses with porches and yards, then farmsteads with chicken-houses and fields, finally the tarpaper shacks of the newcomers trying to scrape enough of a living to qualify for a free government-granted homestead. Everywhere were sheets of grain, growing as high as their shoulders, bowing in the wind. The corn was so high that they could only see over it because they were on horseback. By the end of the day they had passed most of the habitation and weren’t seeing fences anymore. At sunset they camped by a small stream, clearly a place where others had stopped earlier so that they had to cast around a bit for grass long enough to graze.
Demeter opened her box and laid out some things she hadn’t wanted her daughter-in-law or the townspeople to see. Split skirts with leather reinforced seats for each of them. Knee-high lace-up boots with caulked soles and riding heels. And a pistol for each to tuck away somewhere on her person. Clothing for adventures, for action.
After their supper Cate walked along the stream and then back farther, outside the clustered trees and along some hills. Here and there she stooped to gather an herb to thrust into her deep apron pockets. When she was back by the firelight, she sorted them, and laid some on hot stones near the fire to dry. Then she settled with her corncob pipe to smoke and think about what she had found.
Though Cate spoke about the wild plants aloud, Demeter only half paid attention. She valued domestic plants: fields, gardens and orchards. First peas in the spring. Peaches in August. And the golden grain threshed and safe in bins for the winter.
Boots was there to greet the two women on the train platform, looking earnest as he always did. He had brought two men to deal with the trunks but handed his mother and Cate into a fine brougham with a pair of high-stepping horses. They were happy to leave the surging mass of the depot quickly and to arrive at Boots’ calm home at the edge of town where his wife welcomed them warmly, though she was just the least bit intimidated by her mother-in-law.
A real wash-up, a wholesome supper and a good night’s sleep later, the two women were ready to tackle the open prairie. Boots’ wife shook her head. No one would ever catch her going off into the wilderness like that, even if one of her children was at stake. That sulky dark Pers had no business going out there in the first place. She’d told Boots that at the time and reminded him now.
But he paid no attention. He was delighted to be equipping his mother from his fine collection of stock and vehicles. Instead of a buckboard, which would soon be pounded to bits on the rough trail, he chose for his mother a springwagon, pulled by a fine team of Belgians called “Rye” and “Barley.” Indeed, their grain-colored hides shone in the sun while their manes and tails, fine and white as pounded out flax fiber, riffled in the stirring air. The baggage went into the back, including a watertight box his mother would not discuss, and barrels of good water. For Cate there was a black mare, strong and attentive, named “Crossroads.” She liked the horse at once and picked out large canvas panniers to go behind her saddle, rather than leather saddlebags. In Boots’ office the two women went over some maps, but all agreed they would be of little use in finding the man in black and his captive.
Boots was anxious to persuade the women, especially his mother, of the huge importance steam engines would have out on what some were calling the “ocean of grass.” How deeply they could plow, how quickly they could thrash, going from one homestead to another on their huge iron cleated wheels. But Demeter had little taste for machinery. Cate thought of the people -- what about the men and women who used to make a little cushion of wages for the winter by working on the harvest? Surely it was very hard work, but still hard work was better than none and there was plenty of good company, singing, and, well, a bit of fun. The huge steam thrashing machines would end that.
On the last night in town Demeter lay awake, thinking of Boots’ father. The Reverend Jason Christianson -- what a wonder he was! He came to their town as an evangelist, not the Puritanical sort of preacher they were used to, but a shining vision of a new life! He had baptized dozens of folks down by the stream and all crowded to take Communion from his hands. He handled the materials so beautifully, with never a false move, never bumping the wine decanter against the polished chalice or making crumbs when he snapped the wafer above the platen. “My body, broken for you,” he cried, but she never heard past “my body.” And she didn’t think of Jesus, only of Jason and his smooth body.
That spring they were both at the traditional beginning of the plowing season -- three furrows across the rich earth, three bands of darkness in the stubble field. When everyone had gone home, they came back under the moon and lay in the furrows to make a son, Plutos. A son who would be rich as the earth, who would make others wealthy as well. Jason made her believe that prosperity was the product of virtue, that diligence would always be rewarded by God with happiness and safety.
They had intended to marry. Before they could, there was a summer storm that endangered the ships belonging to the island village. People went up to the top of the cliff to watch through the wind-driven rain, as though that might bring the ships more quickly and safely. They asked Jason to pray for their seamen and so he did. Standing up there with his golden hair whipped by the wind, his cossack knotting around his legs, he raised up his arms and prayed mightily, half-singing, defying the storm. That’s when the lightning struck him dead as though the sky were jealous. The next day the ships came into harbor safely, including the ship belonging to Jason’s brother Dan. There were no funerals for sailors, but only one for the evangelical preacher who had brought them such assurance and grace for a while. Did he sacrifice himself for them, offering himself in place of their men? Or had he angered God by asking for more than the people were entitled to, refusing the tithe the sea had always demanded?
When the ships came in again again, Demeter had lived for months with her now fatherless boy, Plutos, and her dark but red-cheeked little daughter, Persephone, before she had felt the need for a new beginning and had gone along on Dan’s ship. Somewhere along the way, in an act of mutual consolation, they had conceived Boots. They married in Halifax. Cory had come later. By the time Dan’s ship went down, he had amassed a major fortune which Demeter managed carefully, mostly investing in agricultural land. That’s what she knew best and that’s what she loved most. Her family knew this dimly and did not ordinarily expect her help, especially after Dan was lost at sea. In a while she emigrated to Boston. By then all the children had found lives of their own except Pers.
Soon after dawn the Belgians leaned into their jingling harnesses and hardly felt the spring wagon that rolled along behind them. They were far beyond the horsepower necessary to move the light wagon, but possibly it would be a long trip and if one were lamed -- or worse -- along the way, one horse could pull the wagon. “Crossroads” stepped out lightly, willing to undertake the role of out-rider, going along the ridges and covering many miles by circling ahead to scout the trail. Cate had made herself a bonnet with a deep brim and a wide skirt so as to protect her freckled skin from sunburn. Her bony face looked a little strange in the shadowed tunnel of the bonnet with a bow tied under her chin, but no one dared comment. Demeter clapped on a broad-brimmed straw hat with a black grosgrain band and a strip of black elastic to hold the hat on in case of wind. Otherwise, they wore their traveling clothes, dusters over shirtwaists and skirts, full enough for Cate to drape her shins decently.
At first they passed along on a road that was well-traveled, passing houses with porches and yards, then farmsteads with chicken-houses and fields, finally the tarpaper shacks of the newcomers trying to scrape enough of a living to qualify for a free government-granted homestead. Everywhere were sheets of grain, growing as high as their shoulders, bowing in the wind. The corn was so high that they could only see over it because they were on horseback. By the end of the day they had passed most of the habitation and weren’t seeing fences anymore. At sunset they camped by a small stream, clearly a place where others had stopped earlier so that they had to cast around a bit for grass long enough to graze.
Demeter opened her box and laid out some things she hadn’t wanted her daughter-in-law or the townspeople to see. Split skirts with leather reinforced seats for each of them. Knee-high lace-up boots with caulked soles and riding heels. And a pistol for each to tuck away somewhere on her person. Clothing for adventures, for action.
After their supper Cate walked along the stream and then back farther, outside the clustered trees and along some hills. Here and there she stooped to gather an herb to thrust into her deep apron pockets. When she was back by the firelight, she sorted them, and laid some on hot stones near the fire to dry. Then she settled with her corncob pipe to smoke and think about what she had found.
Though Cate spoke about the wild plants aloud, Demeter only half paid attention. She valued domestic plants: fields, gardens and orchards. First peas in the spring. Peaches in August. And the golden grain threshed and safe in bins for the winter.
Friday, February 09, 2007
GOLDEN WHEAT/BLACK COAL Chapter 3
Mort Lethe loved mines, the going down deep into the earth where it was dark and often warm. He loved the danger of it, death rubbing alongside with no sound unless it might be the hiss of gas or a distant sudden fall of rock. Many men only tolerated mines because they loved the resulting wealth, the bright metals or the glittering stones. They only worked there in expectation of escaping. But Mort had been going down in mines since he was a boy and there was a kind of perversity in his love of them.
On the one hand he loved the adrenaline rush of danger, the nearness of death in his own miscalculation or from an anomaly of the surrounding rock or a failure of equipment. It aroused him. But on the other hand, when he had gotten into some narrow tunnel of the main mine deep in the earth, so deep that the oxygen of the air was low and the temperature was high, he liked the smothering, slipping-from-consciousness feeling. It increased the risk at the same time that everything became dreamlike, hallucinatory, filled with strange images. In the darkness, his eyes invented shapes and colors that seemed to dance, to taunt him in an almost pornographic way.
Above ground, he was a physical man with muscles developed by his own youth as a miner -- oh, yes, he had put in his years as common labor. The muscles themselves held knowledge. He wasn’t the sort of thinker who could reason, add numbers, analyze market forces. Rather, he did things by impulse, his subconscious mind forming intentions that demanded to be acted out in ways that surprised and frightened the people around him. Sometimes he was a bit startled himself.
His horse, the huge black stallion he had named “Surcease,” was neither surprised nor afraid of him, but rather absorbed the hidden mind of his rider so accurately that Mort rarely had to use the reins or speak to the beast. He hardly pictured something in his mind before the horse had undertaken it with such force and sustainability as to be nearly superhuman. If he had suddenly unfurled wings and flown through the sky, no one would have been surprised.
When Mort began to make money, he used it to equip his horse with the finest saddle and bridle of black leather with silver trim. He entertained himself by making sure the cast silver insets portrayed skulls and swords. The saddle blanket was a soft fleece, blood-red. Both horse and equipment were kept as clean and polished as labor could make them, but not his labor. He always had men under him.
“Surcease” had followed Mort into a mine or two in the early days, before there was a shaft that required miners to be lowered in a mechanical cage, when a person could just walk up to the opening as though it were a natural cave. This gave Mort an idea and later, when the ore had to be brought out on cars that ran on rails, he bred the stallion to large burros to produce strong mules to pull those wagons of broken rock. Born in the mines, they never emerged. After a year or so the mules went blind, but they stayed strong, adapted to being underground, and lasted much longer than any horse or mule that was used to ranging over grasslands.
When he was wealthy enough, he built a huge house in the high mountain town nearest his mines. Imported Italian stone cutters pieced it together of granite found nearby, adding stone stairs and chimneys. The fireplaces burned coal, since even wood would have had to be hauled up there above the treeline. Not many windows penetrated the thick stone walls, but that was better for keeping the rooms warm and Mort liked rooms dark. In winter, when snow piled up, the reflecting white stuff would hurt eyes outdoors and flood through the windows like searchlights. His mother had always worried about her fine furniture being faded by sunlight and made sure that she had thick drapes to pull when necessary. Mort was careful to include in his house both the fine furniture and the drapes. He liked the way they muffled sounds. Underground it was comfortably dark and so his ears had grown supersensitive in compensation. In the house he heard every creak and click.
Thus, he was distressed that the girl in her suite of rooms whimpered. She didn’t scream, as she had at first, but she never stopped whimpering and he could hear the small animal sound through the heavy mahogany doors, inlaid with ebony. It never seemed to stop. He meant her no harm.
He only wanted a mistress for his house, but he couldn’t make her understand. At great expense he sent for an armload of deep red roses, long-stemmed, thorns removed, and took them to her. But it was a mistake. She had screamed at him, thrown them on the carpet, and marched back and forth over them, talking incoherently about natural living things and how these were from a hothouse, trapped and forced. He hadn’t argued. Simply left and sent someone to get the trampled flowers before they stained the carpet.
The next gift was opium. She liked that much better. The whimpering stopped.
On the one hand he loved the adrenaline rush of danger, the nearness of death in his own miscalculation or from an anomaly of the surrounding rock or a failure of equipment. It aroused him. But on the other hand, when he had gotten into some narrow tunnel of the main mine deep in the earth, so deep that the oxygen of the air was low and the temperature was high, he liked the smothering, slipping-from-consciousness feeling. It increased the risk at the same time that everything became dreamlike, hallucinatory, filled with strange images. In the darkness, his eyes invented shapes and colors that seemed to dance, to taunt him in an almost pornographic way.
Above ground, he was a physical man with muscles developed by his own youth as a miner -- oh, yes, he had put in his years as common labor. The muscles themselves held knowledge. He wasn’t the sort of thinker who could reason, add numbers, analyze market forces. Rather, he did things by impulse, his subconscious mind forming intentions that demanded to be acted out in ways that surprised and frightened the people around him. Sometimes he was a bit startled himself.
His horse, the huge black stallion he had named “Surcease,” was neither surprised nor afraid of him, but rather absorbed the hidden mind of his rider so accurately that Mort rarely had to use the reins or speak to the beast. He hardly pictured something in his mind before the horse had undertaken it with such force and sustainability as to be nearly superhuman. If he had suddenly unfurled wings and flown through the sky, no one would have been surprised.
When Mort began to make money, he used it to equip his horse with the finest saddle and bridle of black leather with silver trim. He entertained himself by making sure the cast silver insets portrayed skulls and swords. The saddle blanket was a soft fleece, blood-red. Both horse and equipment were kept as clean and polished as labor could make them, but not his labor. He always had men under him.
“Surcease” had followed Mort into a mine or two in the early days, before there was a shaft that required miners to be lowered in a mechanical cage, when a person could just walk up to the opening as though it were a natural cave. This gave Mort an idea and later, when the ore had to be brought out on cars that ran on rails, he bred the stallion to large burros to produce strong mules to pull those wagons of broken rock. Born in the mines, they never emerged. After a year or so the mules went blind, but they stayed strong, adapted to being underground, and lasted much longer than any horse or mule that was used to ranging over grasslands.
When he was wealthy enough, he built a huge house in the high mountain town nearest his mines. Imported Italian stone cutters pieced it together of granite found nearby, adding stone stairs and chimneys. The fireplaces burned coal, since even wood would have had to be hauled up there above the treeline. Not many windows penetrated the thick stone walls, but that was better for keeping the rooms warm and Mort liked rooms dark. In winter, when snow piled up, the reflecting white stuff would hurt eyes outdoors and flood through the windows like searchlights. His mother had always worried about her fine furniture being faded by sunlight and made sure that she had thick drapes to pull when necessary. Mort was careful to include in his house both the fine furniture and the drapes. He liked the way they muffled sounds. Underground it was comfortably dark and so his ears had grown supersensitive in compensation. In the house he heard every creak and click.
Thus, he was distressed that the girl in her suite of rooms whimpered. She didn’t scream, as she had at first, but she never stopped whimpering and he could hear the small animal sound through the heavy mahogany doors, inlaid with ebony. It never seemed to stop. He meant her no harm.
He only wanted a mistress for his house, but he couldn’t make her understand. At great expense he sent for an armload of deep red roses, long-stemmed, thorns removed, and took them to her. But it was a mistake. She had screamed at him, thrown them on the carpet, and marched back and forth over them, talking incoherently about natural living things and how these were from a hothouse, trapped and forced. He hadn’t argued. Simply left and sent someone to get the trampled flowers before they stained the carpet.
The next gift was opium. She liked that much better. The whimpering stopped.
Thursday, February 08, 2007
Golden Wheat, Black Coal Ch. 2
Demeter, shining goddess, joined in love with Iasion the hero, on the rich island of Crete; They lay on fallow land which had been ploughed three times, and she gave birth to Ploutos, splendid god who travels far…and everyone who meets or touches him, grows wealthy, for great riches come from him.
Hesiod, Theogony
The two women settled on the train, wearing dusters and veiled hats to protect them from the soot and grit that penetrated the train car and became embedded in the emerald green upholstery. Once they pulled out, the noise of the steam, the wheels and the whistle was nearly unendurable. Stops were frequent to load on more wood, more water, more passengers, more freight. In addition, there were stops for animals and objects that had somehow drifted onto the tracks, rock slides and fallen trees, even in Massachusetts which was supposed to be civilized and orderly. Only after they had spent time in the West would they realize that these were small slides and mere saplings.
Gradually Demeter became dulled, drifting into a kind of dreaming swoon. She was limp, drained, after all the hurrying around to get arrangements made. Leaning back, she stripped off her gloves, baring hands that were soft-skinned but hard muscled. They were broad, long-fingered hands that had swung a scythe in her girlhood when she worked in the family fields of the Old Country. A steady rhythm and the grass went down, done for the season. Was that to be the fate of Pers? There was plenty of time to contemplate the countryside of the eastern United States and to imagine how it might be different from the Great Western Desert, but she couldn’t focus. They were traveling alongside a canal where mules towed loaded barges.
A land salesman sat across from them. “Yessirree! The canal used to be the secret of prosperity. No use growing a bumper crop if you can’t get it to market. But that canal can’t be moved to a new location once it’s dug. The railroad now, that’ll get your crops to where they’ll sell high. The railroad goes everywhere! Now I got some land in these here brochures that will take your breath away -- and all of it within a day’s wagon drive to the railway.”
Cate’s face was red with heat and she was looking for something to fan herself. “Hand me one of them brochures, sir!” He did and she used it to create a small breeze, ignoring his disappointment. She’d left off her hat and her red hair fluttered around her face, but the sweat still trickled.
“You ladies goin’ clear out to the West?”
Cate gave him a tight nod.
The land drummer was not to be discouraged. “It’s grain land out there in the West, you know. Flat land, plow up that grass like you was cuttin’ butter, no trees to chop, hardly a stone to pick, black earth.”
Cate thought of Ireland, where she’d grown up. Potatoes is what had kept them alive -- potatoes grown among the rocks in earth that was practically peat. Rocks to pick -- ah, yes. But what a snug tight house a body could make with them. Dig the floor down a bit and set the stones together artfully... a big hearth on one end. “If there are neither stones nor trees, of what does a body make a house?”
The salesman glowed with his success at provoking interest. “Why the grass sod itself is cut as bricks and stacked up to make the warmest, cleverest house. All you need to buy for a house is window glass and a stovepipe! The rest you can cut right out of the yard.”
Cate laughed at the ridiculous idea. Like the fairytale old man and his wife who lived in a vinegar cruet, except that the thing kept breaking. So they’d go off down the road with their door on their backs, looking for a new vinegar cruet and a sour task it was. But an Irish story for sure.
The salesman, who sometimes thought of being a preacher, began to overreach himself. “Grain is at the heart of civilization! It was only with the development of grain that the city could be invented and the city is the heart of all the arts and sciences. But the greatest cities of all will be built in the West, because that’s where the grain can be grown from one horizon to another, so far and wide that a horse couldn’t cross the field in a day! Massive steam engines will be needed to thrash it all.”
“Damn machines,” cried Cate. “Puttin’ honest people out of work.” At last the salesman shut up.
Demeter thought of her four children topologically, as though they were a flat, square field divided into four equal flat squares, so that she would be fair in her judgment of them. Two boys and two girls. But the four were entirely different from each other. Plutus was a capitalist, a natural elitist who understood Wall Street and lived well on that understanding. His house was three stories tall and refined in design, his wife was proud and well-dressed, and he managed his assets so cleverly that he was able to send his daughters abroad and his sons to good schools.
Boots was a country-man who raised horses and sold farm machinery. His pride was not in his house, which was very nice, but rather in his fields and barns. His great delight was not in running the business, though he was careful to hire reliable and resourceful people to do that, but in going onto the floors where his workmen assembled the steel rakes and plows that his horses would pull, creating a harvest that would spill over in grain and corn. Just now they were designing new sod-breaking plow blades that would cut down through the tangle that made the prairie fit for nothing but roving buffalo and their attendant Indians. Soon it would be civilized. A combination of railroads and elevators would transform the nation, feed and transport the immigrants who crowded onto the continent, and ready the land for cities.
The two boys were a comfort to her. The two girls were not. Cory was always defiant, noisy and daring. A blonde like her mother, she was pretty in a way that her mother was not -- she was rosy and made funny faces with her little red mouth and big blue eyes. She was totally disrespectful of propriety and constantly throwing off any kinds of restraints. As soon as she was a grown woman, Demeter had set her free -- she preferred to think of it that way rather than as throwing her out and anyway she could not be prevented from leaving -- and she had gone West until she was out-of-touch. None knew where she was -- but a person could be fairly confident that whereever it might be, a party was in progress.
And then Pers, the dark one, who had a sweet but melancholy streak. Left alone, she would sit in the house quietly, looking out the window, and never even think to eat unless someone came to get her. Her claim was that she was not particularly unhappy, she just was not interested in much. But she did like teaching little children, and Demeter had managed to get Boots to take her on one of his selling trips, so as to find her a teaching job someplace invigorating -- maybe near mountains.
It had seemed to work. She had learned to ride horseback on a fat pony and everyone made much of her. Her natural darkness was brightened with pink cheeks and flashing eyes. Demeter had thought the young woman was finally on her way, and now this.
She lay back against the train seat, stiff as cut and dried grass, trying to think of the root of it all. She had birthed her children in the Old Country and begun to raise them there. But there were not enough opportunities and too many constraints from the past. The land was tiring and people were not open to new ideas about fertilization. She had decided to emigrate to America.
Now in this new country, her sons did well but her daughters not only refused marriage, they refused housekeeping at all. They weren’t even like their cousin, Hester, who at least owned a beautiful small house of her own in Hartford, Connecticut, and followed literary pursuits, often with great impact on the whole nation. Maybe the daughters didn’t marry because the likely men had been killed in the War between the States. Maybe the prospects were better out West. They both denied a new generation of children for Demeter to enjoy in her old age, but at least Cory did not deny her body. Until now Pers had resisted even a casual liason with a suitable young man.
To what dark uses was she subjected now? She knew who had her. Mort Lethe could not be less suitable. Too old, too cold, too overbearing and small-hearted. He was a law unto himself who obeyed no jurisdictions and did as he pleased, no matter the consequences.
Demeter sat up straight on the train seat, impatient and determined. She would not think of the worst darkness of the world, but strive towards the light. Cate looked at her, knowing what she thought. She didn’t have to be psychic to understand Demeter. She too thought that Pers had been taken out of her sunlit maiden’s life, but she felt certain the girl was not dead, not in a grave.
Rather, when she reached her mind out past the horizon, the image was roads, travel. Pers had been moved across the country from where she was seized, but she was alive. And they were in pursuit along this double steel snake of a way, curving around the land and along waterways, in pursuit of the setting sun.
As they went, civilization thinned. The towns grew farther apart and the cultivated fields began to give way to a tall grass, unending tall grass that might conceal anything.
Hesiod, Theogony
The two women settled on the train, wearing dusters and veiled hats to protect them from the soot and grit that penetrated the train car and became embedded in the emerald green upholstery. Once they pulled out, the noise of the steam, the wheels and the whistle was nearly unendurable. Stops were frequent to load on more wood, more water, more passengers, more freight. In addition, there were stops for animals and objects that had somehow drifted onto the tracks, rock slides and fallen trees, even in Massachusetts which was supposed to be civilized and orderly. Only after they had spent time in the West would they realize that these were small slides and mere saplings.
Gradually Demeter became dulled, drifting into a kind of dreaming swoon. She was limp, drained, after all the hurrying around to get arrangements made. Leaning back, she stripped off her gloves, baring hands that were soft-skinned but hard muscled. They were broad, long-fingered hands that had swung a scythe in her girlhood when she worked in the family fields of the Old Country. A steady rhythm and the grass went down, done for the season. Was that to be the fate of Pers? There was plenty of time to contemplate the countryside of the eastern United States and to imagine how it might be different from the Great Western Desert, but she couldn’t focus. They were traveling alongside a canal where mules towed loaded barges.
A land salesman sat across from them. “Yessirree! The canal used to be the secret of prosperity. No use growing a bumper crop if you can’t get it to market. But that canal can’t be moved to a new location once it’s dug. The railroad now, that’ll get your crops to where they’ll sell high. The railroad goes everywhere! Now I got some land in these here brochures that will take your breath away -- and all of it within a day’s wagon drive to the railway.”
Cate’s face was red with heat and she was looking for something to fan herself. “Hand me one of them brochures, sir!” He did and she used it to create a small breeze, ignoring his disappointment. She’d left off her hat and her red hair fluttered around her face, but the sweat still trickled.
“You ladies goin’ clear out to the West?”
Cate gave him a tight nod.
The land drummer was not to be discouraged. “It’s grain land out there in the West, you know. Flat land, plow up that grass like you was cuttin’ butter, no trees to chop, hardly a stone to pick, black earth.”
Cate thought of Ireland, where she’d grown up. Potatoes is what had kept them alive -- potatoes grown among the rocks in earth that was practically peat. Rocks to pick -- ah, yes. But what a snug tight house a body could make with them. Dig the floor down a bit and set the stones together artfully... a big hearth on one end. “If there are neither stones nor trees, of what does a body make a house?”
The salesman glowed with his success at provoking interest. “Why the grass sod itself is cut as bricks and stacked up to make the warmest, cleverest house. All you need to buy for a house is window glass and a stovepipe! The rest you can cut right out of the yard.”
Cate laughed at the ridiculous idea. Like the fairytale old man and his wife who lived in a vinegar cruet, except that the thing kept breaking. So they’d go off down the road with their door on their backs, looking for a new vinegar cruet and a sour task it was. But an Irish story for sure.
The salesman, who sometimes thought of being a preacher, began to overreach himself. “Grain is at the heart of civilization! It was only with the development of grain that the city could be invented and the city is the heart of all the arts and sciences. But the greatest cities of all will be built in the West, because that’s where the grain can be grown from one horizon to another, so far and wide that a horse couldn’t cross the field in a day! Massive steam engines will be needed to thrash it all.”
“Damn machines,” cried Cate. “Puttin’ honest people out of work.” At last the salesman shut up.
Demeter thought of her four children topologically, as though they were a flat, square field divided into four equal flat squares, so that she would be fair in her judgment of them. Two boys and two girls. But the four were entirely different from each other. Plutus was a capitalist, a natural elitist who understood Wall Street and lived well on that understanding. His house was three stories tall and refined in design, his wife was proud and well-dressed, and he managed his assets so cleverly that he was able to send his daughters abroad and his sons to good schools.
Boots was a country-man who raised horses and sold farm machinery. His pride was not in his house, which was very nice, but rather in his fields and barns. His great delight was not in running the business, though he was careful to hire reliable and resourceful people to do that, but in going onto the floors where his workmen assembled the steel rakes and plows that his horses would pull, creating a harvest that would spill over in grain and corn. Just now they were designing new sod-breaking plow blades that would cut down through the tangle that made the prairie fit for nothing but roving buffalo and their attendant Indians. Soon it would be civilized. A combination of railroads and elevators would transform the nation, feed and transport the immigrants who crowded onto the continent, and ready the land for cities.
The two boys were a comfort to her. The two girls were not. Cory was always defiant, noisy and daring. A blonde like her mother, she was pretty in a way that her mother was not -- she was rosy and made funny faces with her little red mouth and big blue eyes. She was totally disrespectful of propriety and constantly throwing off any kinds of restraints. As soon as she was a grown woman, Demeter had set her free -- she preferred to think of it that way rather than as throwing her out and anyway she could not be prevented from leaving -- and she had gone West until she was out-of-touch. None knew where she was -- but a person could be fairly confident that whereever it might be, a party was in progress.
And then Pers, the dark one, who had a sweet but melancholy streak. Left alone, she would sit in the house quietly, looking out the window, and never even think to eat unless someone came to get her. Her claim was that she was not particularly unhappy, she just was not interested in much. But she did like teaching little children, and Demeter had managed to get Boots to take her on one of his selling trips, so as to find her a teaching job someplace invigorating -- maybe near mountains.
It had seemed to work. She had learned to ride horseback on a fat pony and everyone made much of her. Her natural darkness was brightened with pink cheeks and flashing eyes. Demeter had thought the young woman was finally on her way, and now this.
She lay back against the train seat, stiff as cut and dried grass, trying to think of the root of it all. She had birthed her children in the Old Country and begun to raise them there. But there were not enough opportunities and too many constraints from the past. The land was tiring and people were not open to new ideas about fertilization. She had decided to emigrate to America.
Now in this new country, her sons did well but her daughters not only refused marriage, they refused housekeeping at all. They weren’t even like their cousin, Hester, who at least owned a beautiful small house of her own in Hartford, Connecticut, and followed literary pursuits, often with great impact on the whole nation. Maybe the daughters didn’t marry because the likely men had been killed in the War between the States. Maybe the prospects were better out West. They both denied a new generation of children for Demeter to enjoy in her old age, but at least Cory did not deny her body. Until now Pers had resisted even a casual liason with a suitable young man.
To what dark uses was she subjected now? She knew who had her. Mort Lethe could not be less suitable. Too old, too cold, too overbearing and small-hearted. He was a law unto himself who obeyed no jurisdictions and did as he pleased, no matter the consequences.
Demeter sat up straight on the train seat, impatient and determined. She would not think of the worst darkness of the world, but strive towards the light. Cate looked at her, knowing what she thought. She didn’t have to be psychic to understand Demeter. She too thought that Pers had been taken out of her sunlit maiden’s life, but she felt certain the girl was not dead, not in a grave.
Rather, when she reached her mind out past the horizon, the image was roads, travel. Pers had been moved across the country from where she was seized, but she was alive. And they were in pursuit along this double steel snake of a way, curving around the land and along waterways, in pursuit of the setting sun.
As they went, civilization thinned. The towns grew farther apart and the cultivated fields began to give way to a tall grass, unending tall grass that might conceal anything.
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