of morning sunlight.
Salo, the stout station agent, was a raven crony who shared his lunch with ravens and practiced the mighty croaks, but he was anxious around priests, and he was doubly shied by the strange gestures of puppets. He worried that puppets were shadows and souls of the dead, and ruled the world with jerky motions and satire. He knew my brother and me as war veterans, of course, and some twenty years earlier as the native boys who hawked the Tomahawk newspaper at the very same Ogema Train Station.
Salo turned away that afternoon to avoid the priest and our puppets, and pretended to examine the art more closely. He studied the shadows over the stadiums of war, fractured faces of soldiers and animals in bold colors, the double faces of the fur trade crusade with bright broken brows, cracks, creases, and distorted gestures of native soldiers as abstract blue ravens at the platform exhibition.
Aloysius, who could not escape the nickname Blue Raven, changed the style and form of his earlier ravens, the once great abstract blue wings with traces of rouge were revived with bold colors and broken portrayals, the natural motion of expressionism, the visionary sublime, or original totemic fauvism. My brother read newspaper stories and art magazines about modern art, abstract expressionism, the cubist teases, and together we visited museums and galleries in Paris at the end of the First World War.
Blue Raven was inspired by the dreamy traces and scenes of Henri Rousseau, the marvelous portraits, feisty faces, cerise lips, and the bold gawky features painted by Chaïm Soutine, the enchantment of colors and shapes by Henri Matisse, and, of course, the memorable, visionary, and naïve primitivism of Paul Gauguin.
Blue Raven was a spirited painter, and forever haunted by the crevice of nightmares, the broken scenes of memories, and dead totemic animals of the dreadful fur trade. He was tormented with the war scenes of humans and animals and created abstract blue ravens and fractured scenes of bold colors, an original style of totemic fauvism. The scenes were contorted motion, the maelstrom of natural motion with traces of animals, birds, and humans in the guise of ravens.
Marc Chagall painted double faces in motion.
Henri Rousseau created great forests of motion.
Blue Raven created the clout of natural motion and the truth stories of totemic fauvism. The French fur trade was an eternal cultural shame, and yet the memory of totemic animals continued as a source of stories and images in native art and literature.
The totemic images in my stories were more sublime than fauvism, and the animals were envisioned with the sway of poetic scenes, an ironic tease, the surreal words of description, and traces of visionary motion, that cosmic motion revealed in the expressionism of ancient rock and the cave art of our ancestors.
Salo praised the creative visions of my brother, “the fury of blue ravens, the bright colors and scraps of soldiers,” great abstract wings and “unearthly crimson claws,” and the station agent generously repeated scenes, to be fair in his favor, from my stories about the ruins of war and the later encounters with surreal and subversive art and literature in Paris.
Aloysius was directed to insert his fingers in the head, hands, and giant penis of the Niinag Trickster. He actually thrust his hand into the floppy puppet with a great gesture of confidence. He raised the wooden penis and shouted out comments about the sexual nature of totemic art and the lusty turn of seasons, nippy at the start and then a warm breeze with balmy seductions. Churchy art, the puppet shouted, was bloody, erotic, perverse, and the sacrifice of virgins. The most erotic and ironic native stories were about the giant penis of the trickster. The mission priests, nuns, missionaries, and native converts shunned the trickster and never ventured to repeat the lusty niinag stories.
The priapic trickster was overturned by the aroused heft of his huge penis in many versions of the lusty stories, and in other stories the trickster pecker was envied as a weather vane, ensnared with a shaman in a hollow tree trunk, captured by a hungry bear, the steady stump for a king-fisher or a paddle in a birch bark canoe, and a niinag disguised as a handsome lover in the natural, native course of jealousy.
Tricksters were always in motion, the natural motion of seasons and most stories, and the risky scenes were about incredible vitality, wily earth diver creations, magical and awkward conversions and sexual routs, mercy mockery, and hoaxers of jealousy. The ruckus created in trickster stories was never resolved with clerical or moral lessons, except in those chaste and heartless translations by early discoverers and righteous missionaries. The most erotic trickster penis stories were denatured by the romantic guardians of native cultures, and by the federal agents of decorous and devious assimilation policies.
Dummy was once captivated by words, entranced as a child by chant and chorus, and truly aroused by the voices of coloratura sopranos. She was inspired by the operatic sound of some words, the tones and sentiments, such as the last rose of summer, precious heart, the tender hand that rocks the cradle, old men and rivers, and the moody native dream songs, summer in the spring, beautiful as the roses, and the sky loves to hear my voice. Since the savagery of the firestorm that turned her love to white ash she mouthed the poetry and operatic arias only in silence, and was moved to tears by the voices of sopranos, but she never voiced a sound herself, not a single note or word, no rumors, rage, whimpers, whispers, or promises. Instead, she trained two tuneful mongrels to read the sly gestures of the opera puppets and to then sing, or rather bay and moan in various tones and unusual harmonies.
Dummy never regretted her silence, and she never carried a notebook to explain her presence. Pussy was concerned, however, and mounted a blackboard on the door inside the Manidoo Mansion. Only one message remained on the blackboard for more than thirty years. “The body is a great mystery, not the noisy words, not the blather of a congregation. Puppets tease the motion of the body, not the words, and tremble with the soul not the seasons. Listen in silence and you might hear stories in the motion of the puppets.”
Dummy directed the diva mongrels with waves and jerky motions of the soprano puppets, and more vitally with the deft gestures of a raised eyebrow, a pucker, and the count of puffed checks. The spirited union of loyal mongrels and native hand puppets was an original tease of creation and tradition, an obvious truth story. Dummy was derided by the enemies of silence, and by those natives who envied her secretive manners. She was cursed for the mere presence of hand puppets, a deadly union, and mocked for the jerky motion of the puppets. The mute puppet master was a great visionary of silence and praised as a shaman of liberty, a brave mute with music and mongrel healers. Dummy was the hushed storier of puppet divas and the natural motion of the seasons.
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DIVA MONGRELS
Dummy carried two puppets with perfectly carved birch faces in the wide sleeve pockets of her smock that afternoon at the Ogema Train Station. The names of the diva puppets, Geraldine Farrar and Alma Gluck, were world famous sopranos of the New York Metropolitan Opera. The great mouths of the sopranos were painted bright red, and each puppet wore a dark blue turban. The Farrar puppet was fashioned with embroidered crimson images of the cross and crown on the border of a stained altar cloth. Gluck wore a silk chiffon gown with a gold metallic floral weave that was tailored from a remnant of exotic cloth delivered some twenty years earlier by the old trader, Odysseus.
Odysseus traded fabrics, absinthe, and peyote.
Dummy raised Alma Gluck to her breasts and with hand motions and silent facial gestures directed Miinan, the great blue mongrel singer, to moan, groan, and bay a worthy version of “Old Black Joe,” the popular parlor song written by Stephen Foster.
Salo, in spite of his resistance to puppets, returned
