by James Welch
“Yes, and when we came back, all the ducks were drowned. Except Amos. He was perched on the edge of the tub.”
“But he never went in. He must have been smarter than the others,” I said.
Lame Bull’s legs pumped faster. He poured some water on the spinning grindstone.
“He was lucky. One duck can’t be smarter than another. They’re like Indians.”
“Then why didn’t he go in with the other ducks?”
“Don’t you remember how gray and bitter it was?”
“But the other ducks …”
“… were crazy. You boys were told to keep that tub full.” She said this gently, perhaps to ease my guilt, if I still felt any, or perhaps because ducks do not matter. Especially those you win at the fair in Dodson.
We had brought the ducks home in a cardboard box. There were five of them, counting Amos. We dug a hole in the ground big enough for the washtub to fit, and deep enough so that its lip would be even with the ground level. Then we filled the tub to the lip so that the ducks could climb in and out as they chose. But we hadn’t counted on the ducks drinking the water and splashing it out as they ruffled their wings. That late afternoon, several days later, the water level had dropped to less than an inch below the rim of the tub. But it was enough. That one inch of galvanized steel could have been the wall of the Grand Canyon to the tiny yellow ducks.
The calf in the corral bawled suddenly.
The day the ducks drowned remained fresh in my mind. The slight smell of muskrat pelts coming from the shed, the wind blowing my straw hat away, the wind whipping the glassine window of the shed door; above, the gray slide of clouds as we stood for what seemed like hours beside the car glaring at the washtub beyond the fence. And the ducks floating with their heads deep in the water as though they searched the bottom for food. And Amos perched on the rim of the tub, looking at them with great curiosity.
My mother talked on about Amos. Not more than six feet away was the spot where the ducks had drowned. The weeds grew more abundant there, as though their spirits had nourished the soil.
“And what happened to Amos?” I said.
“We had him for Christmas. Don’t you remember what a handsome bird he was?”
“But I thought that was the turkey.”
“Not at all. A bobcat got that turkey. Don’t you remember how your brother found feathers all the way from the toolshed to the corral?”
“That was a hateful bird!”
“Oh.” She laughed. “He used to chase you kids every time you stepped out the door. We had a baseball bat by the washstand, you remember? You kids had to take it with you every time you went to the outhouse.”
“He never attacked you,” I said.
“I should say not! I’d have wrung his damn neck for him.”
Lame Bull sat on the wooden frame, the big gray grindstone spinning faster and faster as his legs pumped. Sparks flew from the sickle.
It was a question I had not wanted to ask: “Who … which one of us …”
Teresa read my hesitation. “… killed Amos? Who else? You kids had no stomach for it. You always talked big enough, Lord knows you could talk up a storm in those days, and your father …”
“First Raise killed him?”
“Your father wasn’t even around!” Her fine bitter voice rang in the afternoon heat. “But I’ll tell you one thing—I’ve never seen a sorrier sight when he did come back.”
Now I was confused. The turkey was of little importance. I could remember his great wings crashing about my head as he dug his spurs into my sides, his weight bearing me down to the ground until I cried out. Then the yelling and the flailing baseball bat and the curses, and finally the quiet. It was always my father bending over me: “He’s all right, Teresa, he’s all right …” It was he, I thought, who had killed the turkey. But now it was my mother who had killed the turkey while First Raise was in town making the white men laugh. But he always carried me up to the house and laid me on the bed and sat with me until the burning in my head went away. Now the bobcat killed Amos …
“No! The bobcat killed the big turkey,” she said, then added quietly, as though Lame Bull might hear over the grinding of steel, as though Bird might hear over the sound of the bawling calf, as though the fish that were never in the river might hear: “I killed Amos.”
9
“Why did he stay away so much?” I said.
“What? Your father?” The question caught her off-guard.
“Why would he stay away so much?”
“He didn’t. He was around enough. When he was around he got things accomplished.”
“But you yourself said he was never around.”
“You must have him mixed up with yourself. He always accomplished what he set out to do.”
We were sitting on the edge of the cistern. Teresa was rubbing Mazola oil into the surface of a wooden salad bowl. It had been a gift from the priest in Harlem, but she never used it.
“Who do you think built the extra bedroom onto the house?” she said. She rubbed her glistening fingers together. “He was around enough—he was on his way home when they found him, too.”
“How do you know that?” But I knew the answer.
“He was pointing toward home. They told me that.”
I shook my head.
“What of it?” she demanded.
“Memory fails,” I said.
It was always “they” who had found him, yet I had a memory as timeless as the blowing snow that we had found him ourselves, that we had gone searching for him after the third day, or the fourth day, or the fifth, cruising the white level of highway raised between the blue-white of the borrow pits. I could almost remember going into the bar in Dodson and being told that he had left for home the night before; so we must have been searching the borrow pits. How could we have spotted him? Was it a shoe sticking up, or a hand, or just a blue-white lump in the endless skittering whiteness? I had no memory of detail until we dug his grave, yet I was sure we had come upon him first. Winters were always timeless and without detail, but I remembered no other faces, no other voices.
My mother stood and massaged the backs of her thighs. “He was a foolish man,” she said.
“Is that why he stayed away?”
“Yes, I believe that was it.” She was looking toward the toolshed. Three freshly sharpened mower sickles leaned against the granary, their triangular teeth glistening like ice in the sun. “You know how it is.”
“He wasn’t satisfied,” I said.
“He accomplished any number of things.”
“But none of them satisfied him.”
Teresa whirled around, her eyes large and dark with outrage. “And why not?”
“He wasn’t happy …”
“Do you suppose he was happy lying in that ditch with his eyes frozen shut, stinking with beer …”
But that was a different figure in the ditch, not First Raise, not the man who fixed machinery, who planned his hunt with such care that he never made it. Unlike Teresa, I didn’t know the man who froze in the borrow pit. Maybe that’s why I felt nothing until after the funeral.
“He was satisfied,” she said. “He was just restless. He could never settle down.”
A sonic boom rattled the shed door, then died in the distance. Teresa looked up at the sky, her hand over her eyes. The airplane was invisible. She looked down at me. “Do you blame me?”
I scratched a mosquito bite on the back of my hand and considered.
“He was a wanderer—just like you, just like all these damned Indians.” Her voice became confident and bitter again. “You I don’t understand. When you went to Tacoma for that second operation, they wanted you to stay on. You could have become something.”
“I don’t blame you,” I said.
“You’re too sensitive. There’s nothing wrong wit
h being an Indian. If you can do the job, what difference does it make?”
“I stayed almost two years.”
“Two years!” she said disgustedly. “One would be more like it—and then you spent all your time up in Seattle, barhopping with those other derelicts.”
“They didn’t fix my knee.”
“I see: it’s supposed to heal by itself. You don’t need to do the exercises they prescribed.” She picked up the salad bowl. She was through with that part of my life. A dandelion parachute had stuck to the rim. “What about your wife?” She blew the parachute away. “Your grandmother doesn’t like her.”
I never expected much from Teresa and I never got it. But neither did anybody else. Maybe that’s why First Raise stayed away so much. Maybe that’s why he stayed in town and made the white men laugh. Despite their mocking way they respected his ability to fix things; they gave more than his wife. I wondered why he stuck it out so long. He could have moved out altogether. The ranch belonged to Teresa, so there was no danger of us starving to death. He probably stayed because of my brother, Mose, and me. We meant something to him, although he would never say it. It was apparent that he enjoyed the way we grew up and learned to do things, drive tractors, ride calves, clean rabbits and pheasants. He would never say it, though, and after Mose got killed, he never showed it. He stayed away more than ever then, a week or two at a time. Sometimes we would go after him; other times he would show up in the yard, looking ruined and fearful. After a time, a month, maybe, of feverish work, he would go off to overhaul a tractor and it would begin again. He never really stayed and he never left altogether. He was always in transit.
Ten years had passed since that winter day his wandering ended, but nothing of any consequence had happened to me. I had had my opportunity, a chance to work in the rehabilitation clinic in Tacoma. They liked me because I was smarter than practically anybody they had ever seen. That’s what they said and I believed them. It took a nurse who hated Indians to tell me the truth, that they needed a grant to build another wing and I was to be the first of the male Indians they needed to employ in order to get the grant. She turned out to be my benefactor. So I came home.
“I think your grandmother deserves to be here more than your wife, don’t you?”
“She’s been here plenty long already,” I agreed.
“Your wife wasn’t happy here,” Teresa said, then added: “She belongs in town.”
In the bars, I thought. That’s what you mean, but it’s not important anymore. Just a girl I picked up and brought home, a fish for dinner, nothing more. Yet it surprised me, those nights alone, when I saw her standing in the moon by the window and I saw the moon on the tops of her breasts and the slight darkness under each rib. The memory was more real than the experience.
Lame Bull had finished his work and was walking toward us. He slapped his gloves against his thigh and looked back at the bank of glistening sickles. He seemed pleased.
“There isn’t enough for you here,” said my mother. “You would do well to start looking around.”
10
Lame Bull had taken to grinning now that he was a proprietor. All day he grinned as he mowed through the fields of alfalfa and bluejoint. He grinned when he came in to lunch, and in the evening when the little tractor putted into the yard next to the granary, we could see his white teeth through the mosquito netting that hung from his hat brim. He let his whiskers grow so that the spiky hair extended down around his round face. Teresa complained about his sloppy habits, his rough face. She didn’t like the way he teased the old lady, and she didn’t like his habit of not emptying the dust and chaff in his pants cuffs. He grinned a silent challenge, and the summer nights came alive in the bedroom off the kitchen. Teresa must have liked his music.
We brought in the first crop, Lame Bull mowing alfalfa, snakes, bluejoint, baby rabbits, tangles of barbed wire, sometimes changing sickles four times in a single day. Early next morning he would be down by the granary sharpening the chipped, battered sickles. He insisted on both cutting and baling the hay, so my only job was the monotonous one of raking it into strips for the baler. Around and around I pulled the windrow rake, each circuit shorter than the last as I worked toward the center. I sat on the springy seat of the Farmall, which was fairly new, and watched Lame Bull in the next field. He tinkered endlessly with the baler, setting the tension tighter so that the bales would be more compact, loosening it a turn when they began to break. Occasionally I would see the tractor idling, the regular puffs of black smoke popping from its stack, and Lame Bull’s legs sticking out from beneath the baler. He enjoyed being a proprietor and the haying went smoothly until we hired Raymond Long Knife to help stack bales.
Long Knife came from a long line of cowboys. Even his mother, perhaps the best of them all, rode all day, every day, when it came time to round up the cattle for branding. In the makeshift pen, she wrestled calves, castrated them, then threw the balls into the ashes of the branding fire. She made a point of eating the roasted balls while glaring at one man, then another—even her sons, who, like the rest of us, stared at the brown hills until she was done.
Perhaps it was because of this fierce mother that Long Knife had become shrewd in the way dumb men are shrewd. He had learned to give the illusion of work, even to the point of sweating as soon as he put his gloves on, while doing very little. But because he was Belva Long Knife’s son and because he always seemed to be hanging around the bar in Dodson, he was in constant demand.
The day we hired him the weather changed. It was one of those rare mid-July days when the wind blows chilly through the cottonwoods and the sky seems to end fifty feet up. The ragged clouds were both a part of and apart from the grayness; streaks of white broke suddenly, allowing sun to filter through for an instant as the clouds closed and drove swiftly north.
Lame Bull of course drove the bull rake, not because he was best at it but because it was the proprietor’s job. He wore his down vest and his sweat-stained pearl stetson pulled low over his big head. Although he was thick and squat, half a head shorter than either Teresa or I, he had a long torso; seated on the bull rake, which was mounted on a stripped-down car frame, he looked like a huge man, but he had to slide forward to reach the brake and clutch pedals.
He lowered the rake and charged the first row of bales. The teeth skimmed over the stubble, gathering in the bales; then the proprietor pulled back a lever and the teeth lifted. He swerved around to deliver the bales at our feet. We began to build the stack.
By noon we had the first field cleared. Things went smoothly enough those first two days as we moved from field to field. Long Knife and I built the stacks well, squaring off the corners, locking each layer in place with the next one so that the whole wouldn’t lean, or worse, collapse. The cloudy weather held steady those days, at times trying to clear up, at other times threatening a downpour. But the weather held and Lame Bull was happy. He gazed lovingly at each stack we left behind us.
The third day there was not a cloud in the sky. We didn’t work that morning in order to give the bales a chance to dry out. Although it hadn’t rained, the humidity and dew had dampened them just enough so that they might spoil if we tried to stack them right away. After lunch Long Knife and I drove out to the field in the pickup. Lame Bull had broken two teeth on the bull rake and screwed up the hydraulic lift, so he followed us with the tractor and hay wagon. We would have to pick the bales by hand, which meant a long hard afternoon. In the rearview mirror I could see Lame Bull’s grinning face, partially hidden behind the tractor’s chimney. Long Knife leaned out of the cab window and turned his face to the sky. It was a small round face with a short sharp nose and tiny slanted eyes. They called him Chink because of those eyes. He was a tall man, slender, with just the beginnings of a paunch showing above his belt buckle. On the silver face of the buckle was a picture of a bucking horse and the words: All-around Cowboy, Wolf Point Stampede, 1954. The bu
ckle was shiny and worn from scraping against the bars of taverns up and down the valley. He was not called Chink to his face because of the day he almost beat the Hutterite to death with that slashing buckle.
“Jesus, beautiful, ain’t it?” he said.
I nodded, but he was still looking out the window. I said, “You bet.”
“How much does Lame Bull owe me?”
“Two days—twenty bucks so far.”
Long Knife continued to gaze out the window. To the north, just above the horizon, we could see the tail end of the two-day run of clouds.
“Twenty bucks—that ain’t much for two days’ work, is it?”
I didn’t say anything.
“It’s enough, though … By God, it’s enough.” He sounded as though he had made a great decision. “How much is he paying you?”
“Same thing—ten bucks a day.”
“That sure ain’t much.” He was still leaning out the window. As he shook his head, his black hair bristled against his shirt collar.
We crossed the dry irrigation ditch. This was the last field, but the alfalfa grew thickest here and the bales were scarcely ten feet apart. I killed the motor. I could hear Long Knife’s hair bristling against his collar as he continued to shake his head. We waited for Lame Bull to catch up.
He stopped the tractor beside the pickup and grinned at us as we climbed out. “You throw ’em up,” he said to me. “Raymond will stack ’em—ain’t it, Raymond?”
Long Knife looked uncomfortable. I could tell what was coming, but Lame Bull continued to grin. I walked over to a bale beside the wagon and threw it on. I heard Long Knife say something, but the noise of the idling tractor obscured it. I walked around the wagon and threw another bale on. Lame Bull leaned down toward Long Knife: “You what?” I threw another bale on. “You heard me!” I walked behind the wagon to the pickup. I took a drink from the water bag. “You heard me!”
Lame Bull popped the clutch on the tractor. It lurched forward and died. He stepped down and checked the hitch on the wagon. Then he walked to the front of the tractor and kicked the tire. “Remind me to put some more air in this one,” he said.
