by Larry Watson
There was another reason my mother wanted us to leave Montana for a tamer region and that reason had to do with me. My mother feared for my soul, a phrase that sounds to me now comically overblown, yet I remember that those were precisely the words she used.
My mother was concerned about my values, but since often the most ordinary worldly matters assumed for her a spiritual significance, she saw the problem as centered on my mortal being. (My mother was a Lutheran of boundless devotion; my father was irreligious, a path I eventually found and followed after wandering through those early years of church, Sunday School, and catechism classes.)
The problem was that I wanted to grow up wild. Oh, not in the sense that wildness is used today. I wasn’t particularly interested, on the cusp of adolesence, in driving fast cars (pickup trucks, more accurately in Bentrock), smoking (Sir Walter Raleigh roll-your-owns the cigarette of choice), drinking (home-brewed beer was so prevalent in Mercer County that boys always had access to it), or chasing girls (for some reason, the girls from farms—not town or ranch or reservation—had the reputation of being easy). In fact, I came late to these temptations.
Wildness meant, to me, getting out of town and into the country. Even our small town—really, in 1948 still a frontier town in many respects—tasted to me like pabulum. It stood for social order, good manners, the chimed schedules of school and church. It was a world meant for storekeepers, teachers, ministers, for the rule-makers, the order-givers, the law-enforcers. And in my case, my parents were not only figurative agents of the law, my father was the law.
In addition to my discomfort with the strictures of town (a common and natural reaction for a boy), I had another problem that seemed like mine alone. I never felt as though I understood how town life worked. I thought there was some secret knowledge about living comfortably and unselfconsciously in a community, and I was sure I did not possess that knowledge. When the lessons were taught about how to feel confident and at ease in school, in stores, in cafes, with other children or adults, I must have been absent. It was not as though I behaved badly in these situations but rather that I was never sure how to behave. I was always looking sneakily at others for the key to correct conduct. And instead of attributing this social distress to my own shy and too-serious character I simply blamed life in town and sought to escape it as often as I could.
And that was an easy enough matter. Though we lived in the middle of town, I could be out in minutes, whether I walked, biked, ran, or followed the railroad tracks just on the other side of our backyard. With my friends or on my own, I spent as many of the day’s hours as I could outdoors, usually out at my grandfather’s ranch or along the banks of the Knife River. (How it got its name I’ve never known; it’s hard to imagine a duller body of water—in dry summers it could barely keep its green course flowing and sandbars poked up the length of it; it froze every year by Thanksgiving.)
I 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.<
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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 cold. I have a little cold.”
My mother would have none of it. She went to the bedside and put her hand on Marie’s forehead. “Come here,” my mother commanded me. When I came close, she put her hand on my forehead. The comparison confirmed what she suspected.
“You have a temperature, all right.”
If my father had been there he would have been quick to correct my mother’s choice of words. “A fever, Gail. She has a fever. Everyone has a temperature.”
My mother gave my forehead a tiny little push as she took her hand away, a signal that I was supposed to get back—there was illness here.
I didn’t go far. I stood in the doorway and watched Marie while my mother went through her routine of questions.
“How long have you been feeling sick?”
Marie rolled onto her back and brushed her hair from her face. Her cheeks now glowed so brightly they looked painful, as if they had been rubbed raw. Her eyes seemed darker than ever, all pupil, black water that swallowed light and gave nothing back. Her lips were pale-dry and chapped. Her dress had ridden up over her knees and the sight of her sturdy brown legs and bare feet was strangely shocking, a glimpse of the sensual in the sickroom. (But nothing new. I had once seen Marie naked, or nearly so. In our basement laundry room we had a shower, nothing fancy—a shower head, a tin stall, and an old green rubber curtain with large white sea horses on it. I came galloping downstairs one day—obviously when Marie thought I would be out of the house a while longer—and caught her just as she was stepping out of the shower. She was quick with her towel but not quick enough. I saw just enough to embarrass us both. Dark nipples that shocked me in the way they stood out like fingertips. A black triangle of pubic hair below a thick waist and gently rounded belly. And above it all, shoulders that seemed as broad as my father’s. I stammered an apology and backed out as quickly as possible. Neither of us ever said anything about the incident.)
After another brief coughing fit, this time nothing more than some breathy, urgent chuffs, Marie answered, “I don’t know. A couple days maybe.”
“Have you been eating?”
Marie shook her head.
“Are you sick to your stomach?”
Another head shake.
“Have you been throwing up?”
Marie whispered no.
“Do you know anyone else who is sick? Someone you might have caught this from?”
I felt so bad for Marie having to put up with this interrogation that I finally said something. “Mom. She doesn’t feel good.”
My mother turned and said sharply, “You wait in the other room. I’m trying to find out something here.”
I took a few steps back into the kitchen, but I still saw and heard what went on in Marie’s room.
My mother brought two wool blankets down from the closet shelf and spread them over Marie. “The first thing,” my mother said, “is to bring your temperature down. We should be able to sweat that out of you in no time.”
To this day many Sioux practice a kind of purification ritual in which they enclose themselves in a small tent or lodge and with the help of heated stones and water steam themselves until sweat streams from them. My mother believed in a variation of that. A fever was to be driven away by more heat, blankets piled on until your own sweat cooled you.
Marie must have agreed with the course of treatment because she made no protest.
“David will be here this afternoon if you need anything,” my mother said. “You rest. I’ll come over again around three o’clock, and if you’re not feeling better we’ll give Dr. Hayden a call.”
This remark brought Marie straight up in bed. “No! I don’t need no doctor!” With that outburst she began coughing again, this time harder than ever.
“Listen to you,” my mother said. “Listen to that cough. And you say you don’t need a doctor.”
“I don’t go to him,” said Marie. “I go to Dr. Snow.”
“Dr. Hayden is Mr. Hayden’s brother. You know that, don’t you? He’ll come to the house. And he won’t charge anything, if that’s what you’re worried about.” Marie’s frugality was legendary. She hated waste, and on more than a few occasions she claimed what we were going to throw away—food, clothing, magazines—saying she would find a use for them. Finally we caught on. Before we planned to throw anything away, we checked with Marie first. Our old issues of Collier’s probably found their way out to the reservation.
Marie closed her eyes. “I don’t need no doctor.” Her voice was no louder than a whisper.
My mother left the room, closing the door halfway. “Keep an eye on her, David,” she told me. “If she gets worse, call me.”
“Is she very sick?”
“She has a temperature. And I don’t like the sound of that cough.”
I stayed out, as my mother ordered, but I walked past Marie’s room often. Marie slept, even when she coughed. I heard her voice on one of my passings and stopped, but it soon became obvious that she was not calling me but talking in her fevered sleep. “It’s the big dog,” she said. “Yellow dog. It won’t drink.” And then a word that sounded like ratchety. And repeated, “Ratchety, ratchety.” I didn’t know if it was a word from Sioux or from fever.
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nbsp; Later, as I was sitting at the kitchen table, Marie shouted for me. “Davy!” I ran to her door.
I stopped. Marie was lying on her back, gazing at the doorway. “I don’t need no doctor, Davy. Tell them.”
“My mom doesn’t want you to get worse.”
“No doctor.”
“It’s just my uncle Frank. He’s okay.”
Marie’s forehead and cheeks shone with sweat. “I’m feeling better,” she said. She pulled back the blankets and sat up, but as she did she began to cough again. Soon she was gasping for breath in between coughs. This frightened me. I went to the bed and held Marie’s shoulders until the coughing subsided, something I remembered my mother doing for me. I felt Marie trembling all over, as your muscles do after great exertion.
When she was done I helped her lie down again. “Maybe I should go get my mother.”
“No doctor.”
“Okay, okay. I’ll tell her you don’t want a doctor.”
Marie’s eyes closed and she seemed to be breathing evenly again.
“Marie?”
She nodded weakly. “I’m okay.”
I backed slowly away but hesitated in the doorway. Marie’s eyes remained closed and her breathing was deep and regular. My hands were damp from gripping Marie’s shoulders. Was the sweat mine or hers?
My mother and father came home together at five o’clock. If the evening followed its usual pattern, my father would read the Mercer County Gazette, have supper, and go out again for an hour or two if the evening was peaceful. He would be gone longer if it was not.
My father dropped his hat and briefcase (another lawyer’s touch—and a gift from my mother) on the kitchen table. “David,” he said, “I hear you’re baby-sitting the baby-sitter.”
How naive I was! Until that moment I believed that we had hired Marie to care for our house, to keep it clean and prepare the meals since my mother, unlike most mothers, worked all day outside our home. We called Marie our “housekeeper,” and I thought that was her job—to keep the house. It never occurred to me that she had been hired to look after me as well.
