After a while, the singing stopped. Amelia raised her hands to clap and saw that the moonlight went right through her skin.
In the far darkness, she recognized the swimming pond of their childhood. It had frozen and was almost too bright to gaze upon. Figure eights swirled across its surface, made by the winking blade of her own confident skate. It etched the glassy pond, threw up a little shower of crystals that fell to the earth with the sound of distant applause.
She closed her eyes, then opened them again and adjusted her blanket and her ice bag.
She sat back and watched the rest of the night move slowly through its colors, black to deep blue to lavender with fire on the edge, and she listened to the calm exhalations of everyone around her, and then she slept.
MORNING
July 11, 1973
AMELIA ROSE from the couch very early and went to the door to see the day. It was a calm and delicate morning, all pastels, and the birds were a torrent of music.
She felt absolutely rested, very light on her feet, though she could have slept only an hour or so. If Jerry made money from the oil, they would go on a cruise, or perhaps to Seattle to see the Aïda production with the real elephants. She clearly had the stamina for it.
Her ankle felt much better. The swelling was down, though it was still tender. She took two more of Doc Mineaux’s pills for energy.
She thought about going back to the couch until Jerry woke. Then she thought, This is a new day, and she inserted her teeth and repinned her wiglet and looked out the door again. There was no one about, not even the paperboy or a dog.
She examined her dress. It was not the one she wanted to wear that day—it was all wrong for this particular day, and wrinkled too—and so she folded it and put it on the arm of the couch, her girdle tucked discreetly beneath it. She placed her hat on top of the dress.
She found Jerry’s long coat in the closet and put it on over her underthings. She put on her gloves. In the corner of the closet, she found a tinny curtain rod to use for a cane.
She sat down for a little while to gather her thoughts. She drank a glass of water and took another pill.
She would go home and write a letter right away to the people who put on the old-timers’ banquet, telling them what a perfectly beautiful job they had done. She would write a follow-up letter to the parole board on behalf of the young man who set fire to her storage shed, this time including a few programs from her musical performances to give them a better idea about her credentials.
She would also get all her letters and photographs in order for the boy who wanted to make the moving picture about their young lives, that Michael Cage. She’d choose a piece of music that he could use as an overture to the film—she believed formal overtures should be reinstated—and she’d choose it with great care and sensitivity. An orchestral piece that conveyed the appropriate combination of apprehension, sorrow, and triumph.
Her feet were too swollen for her little black shoes, but she didn’t need shoes to walk three blocks. She left them neatly next to her folded dress and her velveteen hat.
Verdi would be meowing, and it was time to get an early start on this day.
The world is absolutely new. She walks through it. Her painful ankle feels like nothing more than an annoyance, a piece of furniture that must be stepped around. A part of life. As she does every morning, she searches inside herself for her soul, and finds it hammered and dented but still there, still glowing like comet dust.
She begins a list in her head of some of the highlights of her life. For Michael Cage. She will need pencil and paper and a long, uninterrupted day. She hopes he will wait until tomorrow to call. That he gives her the necessary time.
She walks slowly because she is thinking and because her knee now has a sharp little pain in it too. Her head feels as if it rides the air, some distance from her body.
She leans a little more on the curtain rod and decides to walk in the street, where there is more room. Then she decides to go back up on the sidewalk. She sits resting for a few moments on a low brick wall, her coat open to the cool morning because no one is about.
She watches the breeze ruffle a honeysuckle bush so that it looks like a sea of tiny clapping hands, and then she thinks about the clapping hands in the prizefight film—how, watching them, she had heard again the cowboy yodels for Gibbons and then the way the Blackfeet had picked up the cry and turned it into a thing that soared straight to the sun. One of those high, true notes you hear only two or three times in a lucky life.
She rises, buttons her coat the best she can, and walks again. Now she is not sure whether the new pain is in her knee or her hip. It has grown rather urgent. She will rest for a while when she gets to the house. Have her tea.
There he is, Mr. Verdi, in the window. Waiting for her. She waves to him and turns to cross the street.
The bone of Amelia’s hip has an old lady’s porosity. Over the decades it has thinned and grown delicate. A crack the size of a filament appeared in that ancient, chalky bone when she twisted her ankle, and it has been moving slowly along the slope of the ilium for an evening and a night and an early morning.
It does not zig or zag but follows the same horizon, an inch and a half below the surface of her soft, tired skin. It runs minuscule between the limestone cliffs of that world, sending false clues to its whereabouts via nerves that refer the pain to her knee. She would tell you most of the pain came from her knee.
She stands on the curb, leaning lightly on the frail curtain rod, and waves again at her vigilant little cat. He disappears from the window to meet her at the door.
She reaches with the curtain rod and plants it just beyond the curb. In the corner of her eye, she sees the sun glint off a metal roof at the bottom of the long hill. She smells the sweet prairie, a freshly mown lawn, the honeysuckle bush. In the far distance, she hears the cry of the No. 2, the train that brought her here.
As she steps off the ledge, the rod begins to bend. She tightens her grip, one foot in the air, and the rod sags more abruptly, yanking her hand like a headstrong child.
Her eye frantically and futilely tries to gauge the distance to the street. Her arm flies up for balance and the curtain rod clatters to the ground. Her heart flails in its cage.
And then Amelia is leaving the curb. And for a moment that seems to her as long and short as life itself, she feels herself to be perfectly poised. She is motionless and soundless on the crest of a high turn.
There is time in the world for her to spread her arms as wide as they will go. Time to raise her old eyes to the light that is raining on them, and to begin a low hum at the bottom of her throat.
And then she is on her way. Everything about her is wildly alive. She leans into what is about to begin, and the sound from her mouth joins the climbing wail of the No. 2.
Acknowledgments
THE AUTHOR is particularly grateful to the following: the Corporation of Yaddo, the Thurber House, the Montana Historical Society, the Marias Museum, Ron Levao, Steve Lott at The Big Fights, Inc., Curt Noltimier, William McNamer, Megan McNamer, Leonard Wallace Robinson, Patricia Goedicke, Kate Gadbow, Kitty Herrin, Andrew Wylie, and Terry Karten.
Readers’ Guide for
One Sweet Quarrel
Discussion Questions
What does the title mean? What is a “sweet” quarrel? Who is the quarrel with?
Why do you think McNamer didn’t have this novel move from past to present in chronological order? What does the novel gain (or lose) by her decision? Did it add or detract from your enjoyment of the novel?
What would have been lost, or gained, for you as a reader if the novel had been set in an imaginary location, rather than a real place?
If McNamer had chosen to tell the story from one point of view—Carlton, Daisy, or Jerry’s—who should it have been? Why do you think she chose to tell it from an omniscient narrator’s point of view?
Why did Daisy leave T.T.?
Suggestions for Further Reading
IF YOU enjoyed the Montana setting of Deirdre McNamer’s One Sweet Quarrel, try these:
Debra Magpie Earling’s novel Perma Red takes place on a reservation in Perma, Montana, and relates the heartbreaking story of the beautiful Louise White Elk and the two men who love her.
I thought about Jonathan Raban’s Bad Land: An American Romance all the time I was reading One Sweet Quarrel; this award-winning nonfiction is an account of the history of homesteading in eastern Montana in the first three decades of the twentieth century.
The Girls from the Five Great Valleys by Elizabeth Savage, one of the forthcoming Book Lust Rediscoveries, features five teenage girls growing up in Butte, Montana, in the 1930s.
James Welch’s devastating novel, Fools Crow, is set on the Blackfeet Indian reservation in Montana; it depicts its characters’ struggles to find a balance between their traditional way of life and the white world that is rapidly encroaching on the tribal lands.
With a time frame roughly similar to both Raban’s history and One Sweet Quarrel, Percy Wollaston’s memoir Homesteading is the story of his parents’ attempts to make a home on the Montana prairie.
If you want to read more about homesteading and are willing to leave Montana as a setting, take a look at these:
Elizabeth Corey’s Bachelor Bess: The Homesteading Letters of Elizabeth Corey, 1909-1919 complements Gloss’s novel (below), as it’s about a single woman trying to prove up a homestead in South Dakota as shown in the letters she wrote home to her family in Iowa.
Honey in the Horn by H.L. Davis won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Like The Jump-Off Creek (below), it takes place in Oregon in the first two decades of the twentieth century. As one reviewer said about this coming-of-age novel, “It’s a rollicking good story.”
Bethany and Wade Cameron, the newlywed couple at the heart of The Edge of Time by Loula Grace Erdman, leave their home in Missouri to homestead in west Texas in the 1880s.
Edna Ferber’s Cimarron tells the engrossing story of a young married couple who settle in tiny Osage, Oklahoma in 1899, right after the land rush began.
In Molly Gloss’s The Jump-Off Creek, we meet Lydia Bennett Sanderson, a widow homesteading in the Blue Mountains of Oregon in 1895. It’s a wonderful novel about the West that doesn’t make use of any of the tropes of Westerns.
Joanna L. Stratton’s Pioneer Women: Voices from the Kansas Frontier is a marvelous nonfiction account of what it took to succeed at homesteading: luck, courage, and determination.
About the Author
Mark Bryant
A native of Montana, Deirdre McNamer grew up in Conrad and Cut Bank. In addition to One Sweet Quarrel (a New York Times Notable Book of 1994), she is the author of the acclaimed novels Rima in the Weeds (winner of the 1992 Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award), My Russian (a New York Times Notable Book of 1999), and Red Rover (winner of the 2007 Montana Book Award from the Montana Library Association, and named a Best Book of 2007 by Artforum, the Washington Post, the LA Times, Bloomberg News, and the Rocky Mountain News). She teaches creative writing at the University of Montana.
About Nancy Pearl
Nancy Pearl is a librarian and lifelong reader. She regularly comments on books on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition. Her books include 2003’s Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason; 2005’s More Book Lust: 1,000 New Reading Recommendations for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason; Book Crush: For Kids and Teens: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Interest, published in 2007; and 2010’s Book Lust to Go: Recommended Reading for Travelers, Vagabonds, and Dreamers. Among her many awards and honors are the 2011 Librarian of the Year Award from Library Journal; the 2011 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association; the 2010 Margaret E. Monroe Award from the Reference and Users Services Association of the American Library Association; and the 2004 Women’s National Book Association Award, given to “a living American woman who…has done meritorious work in the world of books beyond the duties or responsibilities of her profession or occupation.”
About Book Lust Rediscoveries
Book Lust Rediscoveries is a series devoted to reprinting some of the best (and now out of print) novels originally published between 1960 and 2000. Each book is personally selected by Nancy Pearl and includes an introduction by her, as well as discussion questions for book groups and a list of recommended further reading.
One Sweet Quarrel (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 28
