did what boys usually did and exulted in the doing: I rode horseback (I had my own horse at the ranch, an unnaturally shaggy little sorrel named Nutty); I swam; I fished; I hunted (I still have, deep in a closet somewhere, my first guns from those years—a single-shot bolt action Winchester .22 and a single-shot Montgomery Ward .410 shotgun); my friends and I killed more beer cans, soda bottles, road signs, and telephone pole insulators than the rabbits, squirrels, grouse, or pheasants we said we were hunting; I explored; I scavenged (at various times I brought home a snakeskin, part of a cow’s jawbone, an owl’s coughball, a porcupine quill, the broken shaft and fletch of a hunter’s arrow, an unbroken clay pigeon, a strip of tree bark with part of a squirrel’s tail embedded in it so tightly that it was a mystery how it got there, a perfectly shaped cottonwood leaf the size of a man’s hand, and a myriad of river rocks chosen for their beauty or odd shape).
But what I did was not important. Out of town I could simply be, I could feel my self, firm and calm and unmalleable as I could not when I was in school or in any of the usual human communities that seemed to weaken or scatter me. I could sit for an hour in the rocks above the Knife River, asking for no more discourse than that water’s monotonous gabble. I was an inward child, it was true, but beyond that, I felt a contentment outside human society that I couldn’t feel within it.
Perhaps my mother sensed this, and following her duty to civilize me, wished for a larger community to raise me in, one that I couldn’t get out of quite so easily and that wouldn’t offer such alluring chaos once I was out. (The impression is probably forming of my mother as an urban woman disposed by background to be suspicious of wild and rough Montana. Not so. She grew up on a farm in eastern North Dakota, in the Red River valley, flat, fertile, prosperous farming country.)
That was our family in 1948 and those were the tensions that set the air humming in our household. I need to sketch in only one more character and the story can begin.
Because my mother worked (she was the secretary in the Register of Deeds office, also in the courthouse across the street), we had a housekeeper who lived with us during the week. Her name was Marie Little Soldier, and she was a Hunkpapa Sioux who originally came from the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota. She was in her early twenties, and she came to our part of Montana when her mother married a Canadian who owned a bar in Bentrock. The bar, Frenchy’s, was a dirty, run-down cowboy hangout at the edge of town. Among my friends the rumor was that Frenchy kept locked in his storeroom a fat old toothless Indian woman whom anyone could have sex with for two dollars. (One of my friends hinted that this was Marie’s mother, but I knew that wasn’t true. Marie’s mother once came to our house, and she was a thin, shy woman barely five feet tall. She reminded me of a bird who wants to be brave in the presence of humans but finally fails. When Marie introduced her to my mother, Marie’s mother looked at the floor and couldn’t say a word.)
Marie was neither small nor shy. She loved to laugh and talk, and she was a great tease, specializing in outrageous lies about everything from strange animal behavior to bloody murders. Then, as soon as she saw she had you gulled, she would say, “Not so, not so!”
She was close to six feet tall and though she wasn’t exactly fat she had a fleshy amplitude about her that made her seem simultaneously soft and strong, as if all that body could be ready, at a moment’s notice, for sex or work. The cotton print dresses she wore must have been handed down or up to her because they never fit her quite right; they were either too short and tight and she looked about to pop out of them, or they were much too large and she threatened to fall free or be tangled in all that loose fabric. She had a wide, pretty face and cheekbones so high, full, and glossy I often wondered if they were naturally like that or if they were puffy and swollen. Her hair was black and long and straight, and she was always pulling strands of it from the corner of her mouth or parting it to clear her vision.
And I loved her.
Because she talked to me, cared for me. . . . Because she was older but not too old.... Because she was not as quiet and conventional as every other adult I knew.... Because she was sexy, though my love for her was, as a twelve-year-old’s love often is, chaste.
Besides, Marie had a boyfriend, Ronnie Tall Bear, who worked on a ranch north of town. I was not jealous of Ronnie, because I liked him almost as much as I liked Marie. Liked Ronnie? I worshipped him. He had graduated from Bentrock High School a few years earlier, and he was one of the finest athletes the region had ever produced. He was the Mustangs’ star fullback, the high-scoring forward in basketball; in track he set school records in the discus, javelin, and 400-yard dash. He pitched and played outfield on the American Legion baseball team. (I realize now how much I was a part of that era’s thinking: I never wondered then, as I do now, why a college didn’t snap up an athlete like Ronnie. Then, I knew without being told, as if it were knowledge that I drank in with the water, that college was not for Indians.) During the war Ronnie was in the infantry (good enough for the Army but not for college). Marie told me he was thinking of trying his hand on the rodeo circuit.
Marie’s room, when she stayed with us during the week, was a small room off the kitchen. My bedroom and my parents’ were on the second floor. (And as I go back in my memory I realize we had a third bedroom on the second floor. Who decided that room should not be Marie’s? I had long known that I was destined to be an only child.) I mention Marie’s room because it was there, and with her, that this story began.
It was mid-August 1948. Our corner of the state had been, as usual, hot and dry, though even in the midst of all the heat there were a few signs of autumn—a cottonwood leaf here and there turning yellow and sometimes letting go, and nights cool enough for a light blanket.
Marie stayed in her room all that morning, and when I passed the door I heard her coughing. I peered in once and saw her lying on the bed. She came out only long enough to set out lunch. At our house meals were never fancy, but the food was always abundant and varied. Marie probably brought out cottage cheese, perhaps some leftover ham or chicken or sausage, a wedge of cheddar cheese, a loaf of bread, butter, pickles, canned peaches, cold milk, and something from the garden—carrots or radishes or cucumbers or tomatoes.
The noon whistle blew and within five minutes my mother was walking through the door, and if my father was in town, he would soon follow.
I stopped my mother in the living room and whispered to her, “I think Marie’s sick.”
“What’s wrong?” My mother was instantly alarmed. She feared nothing more than disease, but she was not cowardly or meek in its presence. No disease, common or exotic, faced a fiercer foe than my mother. She spent a good deal of energy avoiding it or keeping it away from herself and her family. She would not accept or extend invitations if she knew it meant someone sick might get too close. If we were walking down the street and someone ahead of us coughed or sneezed, my mother slowed her pace until she thought those germs had dissipated in the air. It all sounds silly, but it must have worked. We were seldom sick, and I did not get the usual childhood diseases until I left home. (And then they hit me hard. I had to drop a French class my freshman year in college because measles laid me up and put me too far behind. Years later my fever ran so high when I had chicken pox that my wife took me to the emergency room, where they packed me in ice.)
“I’m not sure,” I told my mother. “She’s been in her room all morning.”
My mother walked quietly through the living room and kitchen to the door of Marie’s room. I followed close behind.
The door wasn’t shut tight, and my mother knocked hard enough so it swung open. “Marie? Are you all right?”
Just then Marie had another coughing fit, and she couldn’t answer. She rolled onto her side, brought her knees up, and barked out a series of dry coughs. When the spasm subsided, she nodded. “A
