Listen to the Silence

by Marcia Muller

  I said, “Speaking of family, Elwood claims you and I might be related.”

  “We probably are. Bloodlines’re kind of tangled in the Indian world.”

  “Frankly, I’m sick of thinking about bloodlines. For forty years I knew exactly who I was. Now…”

  “You’ll sort it out.”

  “How can you say that when you yourself don’t know who’s a relation and who’s not?”

  “Well, maybe you’ll decide it’s not important.”

  “What can be more important than your own identity?”

  “Maybe you’ll figure that out too.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “Being enigmatic today, are we?”

  He grinned.

  “Well, I’m glad we might be related,” I said. “And I’m glad I ran into you at the Warbonnet.”

  “No accident there. Elwood sent me to track you down and report on you.”

  “But how’d you know where to find me?”

  “Easy, in a town this size. I knew what motel you were staying at, because the owner had put the word out. And what’s near that motel? A gas station, two dead businesses, an auto-body shop, and the Warbonnet.”

  “Maybe I should hire you.”

  “If I ever get sick of the ad biz, I’ll give you a call.”

  We’d finished our sandwiches, and now I looked at my watch. “I should get going. Agnes Running Horse is expecting me.”

  “You’ll like her. She’s seventy-nine, going on thirty.”

  Suddenly I was reluctant to leave this maybe-relative who had shown me so much kindness. “You’ve got my card. You’ll keep in touch?”

  “Uh-huh. And you’ve got my card too.”

  I balled up the wrapper from my sandwich, tossed it in the trash barrel, and continued to sit there.

  “Hey,” Will said, “I know what you might find out is scary, but you’d better get on with it.” When I didn’t reply, he jerked his chin at my rental car. “Go. Now!”

  I smiled and stood, started walking away. Then Will called, “Hey, catch!”

  I turned, put my hands out for the small, flat cardboard box that was flying toward me. “What…?”

  “Open it tonight, wherever today takes you. And not a minute before.”

  3:45 P.M.

  Agnes Running Horse and I walked along the bank of the Flathead River across the highway from where her brown frame house nestled under a towering wooded ledge. The air was crisp and colder up here near Glacier, and the only sounds were the ripple of water as it flowed around the offshore rocks, the occasional swoosh of tires on the pavement, and the crunch of gravel under our feet. Mrs. Running Horse—a small, spry woman with a long gray ponytail and deep laugh lines around her eyes—had met me at her door and explained that this was the time she customarily took her daily walk.

  “Yeah,” she told me now, “your great-aunt was the way Elwood said. I liked her, even if she couldn’t do beadwork for shit.” When I glanced at her in surprise, she grinned. “I’m old. I can talk as dirty as I want. Believe me, that Fenella had a mouth on her. Tendoys do.”

  “So she told you who her mother was. When I spoke with Dwight Tendoy, he said nobody knew what happened to Mary.”

  “Not many did, but that Fenella had to explain herself. She told me and a couple of the other women, asked us not to spread it around. Her mother only talked about the family and the past once—because Fenella said she had a right to know—and she wasn’t happy with her for looking up the relatives.”

  “Why, d’you suppose?”

  Mrs. Running Horse motioned at a concrete abutment alongside a boat-launching ramp, and we sat. The river was narrow here, lodgepole pine and scrub vegetation crowding down the hills to the opposite bank. At its bend I could see the peaks of the national park, bluish in the haze.

  “I suppose,” she said, “Mary wanted to forget those times because they were so tough. Even after they moved from Lemhi Valley to Fort Hall, the government was chintzy with them. Chief Tendoy was dead, and none of his sons could get action out of Washington. Then there was that bastard agent, John Blaine: When the allotments did come, he took the best for himself and sold it. Took Mary, too. Dragged her down to Arizona, beat her, got her pregnant. Left her.”

  “She had a child?”

  “It died at birth. She almost died too. She was starving on the trail outside of Flagstaff when your great-grandfather came through, and plenty glad to go with him. Fenella said Mary blamed her brothers for not rescuing her from Blaine, so she turned her back on the family.”

  I didn’t remember my great-grandmother, but her picture had sat on a table in our living room: stern and stiffly posed, a simple gold cross the only ornamentation against her plain black dress. Religion, family, womanly duties—they were the walls she’d built against the memory of privation, abuse, and abandonment. I felt a wave of pity, both for the mistreated teenager and the immured adult.

  “Is there anything else you want to ask me?” Agnes Running Horse said.

  I reached into my bag for the photograph Elwood Farmer had given me. “Can you tell me who this man is, and where I might find these women?”

  She examined it for a long time, tapping her fingers on the frame. “Where’d you get this?”

  “From Mr. Farmer. He named the women, but he didn’t know the man.”

  “Yes—Lucy Edmo, Barbara Teton, Susan New Moon, Saskia Hunter. Barbara’s dead, breast cancer. Everybody thought Elwood would marry her, but they had a big fight the last time he came home to the reserve, and that was it. Saskia Hunter, I heard she went to college, made something of herself, but I don’t know what. I’m surprised Elwood couldn’t tell you; they were real good friends. The other two, I don’t know.”

  She paused, looking reflectively at the photo. “Nobody stays in one place anymore. Even me: I came up here from Fort Hall twenty-seven years ago to take care of my son and his kids when his wife died. Thought it’d be just for a year or two till he found a new wife, but he never did, and I never went home. Now he’s dead, the kids’re scattered, and I’m getting old enough to start thinking about going to live with my daughter in Kalispell.”

  I glanced at her, saw her face was free of sadness or regret. Those were simply the facts and, if anything, she was not displeased with how her life had turned out.

  “The man in the picture,” I said. “Are you sure you don’t know him?”

  “… I don’t know his name. Those days, there were a lot of white boys drifting around the country. They’d read that Kerouac, wanted to be beatniks, or whatever they called them. Usually kids whose parents had more money than good sense. They’d show up on the reserve, take up with a girl, then disappear.”

  “This man, he’s standing next to Saskia Hunter. Is she the one he took up with?”

  “Yes.”

  “And then he disappeared?”

  “… Yes.”

  “And you say you don’t know what happened to her, other than she went to college?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Can you think of anyone else I might contact regarding Fenella’s visit to Fort Hall?”

  She shook her head, eyes fixed on the distant peaks. “I’m sorry, but at my age you get forgetful. Lose track of people, too, when they scatter to the cities. That visit was so very long ago.”

  So very long ago, yet still such a strong force upon my present.

  11:51 P.M.

  By the time I got to the airport in Missoula, the last San Francisco flight had long departed. As always when stranded in transit, I opted for motion and boarded a 747 for Seattle. Once we were airborne, I decided this was the place where today had taken me and opened Will Camphouse’s gift.

  It was a small circle covered in pale beige skin. A web of delicate threads bisected its interior, each with a turquoise bead knotted into it. Three white feathers were secured to its bottom by silver-and-turquoise clamps. A note from Will accompanied it:

  It’s called a dreamcatcher, and here
’s how it works: you put it over your bed, or wherever you crash in your travels, and it catches the bad dreams but lets the good ones through. It’s the best gift I could think of for you, because you’ll probably need it in the nights to come. So sleep well, friend. My thoughts are with you.

  I fingered the soft feathers of the dreamcatcher, then placed it on the empty seat beside me. Maybe it would fend off the demons of the night.

  LISTENING…

  There’re a few silences in today’s conversations. Wonder if I can interpret them. It’s not all that easy with people I’ve known all my life, and Elwood Farmer and Agnes Running Horse are strangers from a different culture.

  “Who are these people?”

  “Young women from the reservation. Lucy Edmo, Barbara Teton, Susan New Moon, Saskia Hunter.”

  “And the man?”

  “… I don’t know. Could be a visitor like your great-aunt.”

  What’s Elwood thinking of when he hesitates? Picture his eyes, filtered as they are through the smoke from his cigarette.

  At first they’re uncertain, but then they harden. He’s made a decision and he’s sticking to it. What?

  Not to tell me who the man is, even though he knows? Why would that be?

  “Mr. Farmer, thank you so much.”

  “No thanks are necessary. But I hope—”

  Why doesn’t he finish the sentence? What does he hope? And what does that dark stirring in his gaze mean? Sadness there, distress too. Is he concerned for me, or for himself? Or for someone else entirely?

  “The man in the picture. Are you sure you don’t know him?”

  “… I don’t know his name. Those days, there were a lot of white boys drifting around the country.”

  Agnes Running Horse isn’t a very good liar. Like Elwood, she knows who the man is, but for some reason she doesn’t want to say. Why not?

  “This man, he’s standing next to Saskia Hunter. Is she the one he took up with?”

  “Yes.”

  “And then he disappeared?”

  “… Yes.”

  Another hesitation. This time she’s looking away at the mountain peaks, avoiding my eyes. The man didn’t disappear, at least not the same way other young men who’d gone on the road and ended up on the reservation had. That’s why Mrs. Running Horse doesn’t want to name him.

  She was forthcoming and lively when she talked about Mary McCone. It wasn’t till she saw the picture that she became reticent. The way she looked at it: there was pain in her eyes, but not for herself; she isn’t a woman who indulges in self-pity. No, the pain was for someone else.

  That picture. Why did Elwood Farmer give it to me? He could easily have offered a lesser gift. Unless he thought it important that I have it. Unless he considered it central to my search.…

  Monday

  SEPTEMBER II

  12:14 A.M.

  I took the photograph from my bag, turned on the reading light over my seat, and stared at it as if willing the people frozen in the frame to confide their secrets to me. Even Fenella seemed to be hiding behind her big sunglasses. The photo was not a very good one, the contrast curiously muted. Not taken by a good photographer or with a good camera. Or…

  I held it up to the light, examined it more carefully. Then I turned it over, bent the metal clips that held it in the frame, removed the backing.

  Slick paper with printing on the back. It wasn’t an original photo, but a clipping from a magazine. The dateline at the bottom of the page said Newsweek, February 13, 1959.

  I removed the clipping and turned it over to see if there was a caption for the picture that the frame had covered. It looked as if it had been cut off. Was Newsweek online? Did the available issues go back that far? Maybe.

  There was a phone in the seatback. I took out a credit card, ran it through, dialed Mick and Charlotte’s condo. Keim answered, sounding groggy. When I identified myself and asked for Mick, she said, “Shar, you’re pure hell on a gal’s beauty sleep,” and covered the receiver. Soon after, Mick growled into it.

  “I know it’s late,” I said, “but consider this a challenge.”

  Yawn.

  “I need an article from the February 13, 1959, issue of Newsweek.” I described the photograph, told him what was on the back of it.

  “I think I can get hold of it. Where can I reach you?”

  “You can’t, but I’ll call you when I get to Seattle.”

  “Why Seattle?”

  “It seemed as good a place as any.”

  “The picture you wanted,” Mick said, “was printed with an article about how well off the Indians were on the reservations. What was Fenella doing there?”

  “Trying to find her roots, like me. Does the caption identify the man?”

  “Yeah, I’ll read it to you. ‘Happy Fort Hall dwellers with outside friends, Fenella McCone, who is half Shoshone, and Austin DeCarlo, son of a prominent central California rancher.’”

  “Any mention of him in the article?”

  “Nope. Shar, this piece is a bunch of bull. I’ve been to reservations, and they’re not great places. I bet they were worse in the fifties.”

  “Lots worse, according to the file you prepared for me. It’s a puff piece, that’s all.”

  “You in Seattle?”

  “Yes, but not for long. I called a pilot buddy who’s always ready to fly, and she agreed to take me home for the price of fuel and breakfast.”

  “Why don’t I fax the article to your house, then?”

  “Do that. And first thing in the morning, start a check on Austin DeCarlo.”

  The box of Fenella’s papers that John had FedExed sat just inside my front door, along with a package containing some jeans I’d ordered from Lands’ End. Michelle Curley, neighbor kid and house-sitter extraordinaire, was being conscientious again. I paid her twenty-five dollars a month to take care of the cats when I wasn’t home, plus check for mail and deliveries. She earned every cent of it and often exceeded her job description: when I’d come home from San Diego, the dishes were washed and flowers from her parents’ garden brightened my sitting room.

  I left the Lands’ End bag where it was, but dragged the box down the hall. Tore the article Mick had faxed from the machine in my home office, then set the coffeemaker to brewing, in spite of already having downed three cups during an airport breakfast with my pilot friend. While the machine burbled, I took a quick shower and read the article while I dried my hair. A puff piece, all right. I particularly disliked the concluding paragraphs.

  Our federal government’s termination of ties to the reservation system has indeed, in the words of Senator Arthur Watkins (R-Utah), “emancipated the Indian.” Statutes calling for the preparation of final tribal rolls, distribution of assets to individuals, and the removal of Indian lands from federal trusts will give natives increased independence and self-determination.

  Already this new era in reservation life is producing positive results: Interest in traditional crafts and religion is surging; tourism is at an all-time high; tribe members are looking forward to a bright and fulfilling future. No wonder our team of reporters encountered so much joy and optimism as they traveled the country last summer visiting these havens of native culture.

  Joy and optimism, my ass! I had enough of a sense of history to know that the Indians had seldom had occasion for either, before or after termination. While under the auspices of the federal government, they’d waited desperately for food, clothing, and medical supplies that arrived late or not at all. They’d lived in substandard housing, been forced to convert to Christianity by missionaries of every stripe, and had their children snatched from their homes and shipped off to boarding schools designed to eradicate every trace of their traditional culture.

  And then, in the 1940s and ’50s, came termination. The Indians found themselves “emancipated,” all right—of their access to the Indian Health Service and educational assistance programs. Their lands became subject to state taxation, and many trib
e members were forced to sell to outsiders. State laws were extended to their territories, and they lost the right to police their own communities. The “joyful and optimistic” Indians watched their lives plunge into a downward spiral of poor health, illiteracy, and poverty.

  Admittedly, the Shoshones in the photograph with Fenella looked happy, but I doubted it had anything to do with the “new era” on the rez. More likely they were just having a good time together and mugging for the photographer—perhaps laughing at the white men who had come there with their minds already made up about what they’d find.

  Back in the kitchen, I realized it was going to be one of those Mondays. The coffeemaker had sprung a leak and grounds puddled the countertop. The fridge was making a familiar grinding sound, signaling that I’d soon need a new one. One of the cats—or maybe both—had attacked the garlic braid hanging from a cabinet. And now they emerged from wherever they’d been sleeping, eager for breakfast.

  “Right,” I said, regarding them sternly, “the human can-and-door-opener is home.”

  Allie gave me one of her adoring looks; Ralph brushed against my calves, purring. Were they strictly con artists, or actually glad to see me? I’d never know.

  The livestock fed, watered, and put out to pasture, I took my coffee to the sitting room and used a paring knife to cut the yards of tape that John—who is sure the contents of any package he wraps are seriously intent on escape—had swathed it in. When I raised the lid, all that made a break for it was musty air, the smell of paper stored too long in a damp garage. I dumped out the contents and began sorting them.

  A sentimental fool Fenella hadn’t been. There were no letters, photographs, or mementos. Just a great many legal documents, receipts, canceled checks, and bank statements, going back to about twenty years before her death. Again, my pack-rat father had kept the unnecessary.

  At first I was tempted to toss everything into the fireplace, but then I decided to go through it anyway. A will, dividing her property between Pa and Jim. Lease on an apartment she’d rented in San Diego. High school and college diplomas. Well-worn passport. Charge-account receipts. Pay stubs from her various jobs as a bookkeeper. Checks: to the grocery, the dry cleaner, the landlord, the phone company, PG&E, and—