9:00 A.M.
“Come in, please,” Elwood Farmer said.
I stepped into his small living room. It had a woodstove at its center and was furnished simply in pine and braided rugs; the walls were covered with framed pictures. Not Farmer’s; judging from the childish technique of most, these had been done by his students. It fit with what I knew of the man that he would take little pride in his own work, but a great deal in that of the children he taught.
He motioned at one of two padded rockers facing the stove, and I sat. Lighting a cigarette, he took the other chair and scrutinized me for a moment through the smoke. I returned his gaze, expectant and nervous about what he had to tell me.
“You asked about Fenella McCone’s visit to Fort Hall,” he said. “That was in late summer of 1958.”
Quick to the point, once he made up his mind to speak. “Did you meet her?”
“No. By then I had already moved to New York. You know I’m an artist?”
“Yes. And I know of your work in the schools. It’s wonderful, what you’re doing for the children.”
He moved his hand as if to forestall further praise. “Most of the students aren’t as fortunate as I was. My mother encouraged me, and later my work attracted the attention of a benefactor, a rich white New York woman who had a summer cabin on the Snake River and connections with a good art school.” His lips twisted in amused memory. “She liked me, as well as my work. I guess I was good-looking back then, and I was certainly eager to please—in all areas.”
So Elwood had his lively side. I smiled, and I could have sworn he winked at me—or maybe he was only blinking away smoke. “If you’d moved away, how do you know about my aunt’s visit?”
“I believe my nephew has told you of the moccasin telegraph.”
“Will Camphouse is your nephew?”
“In a distant way. Our familial relationships aren’t as clear-cut as whites’, or as formal.”
“Does that mean he’s related to me too?”
“… Possibly. There’s been so much mixing among the tribes, and other ethnic groups as well, that those connections are very difficult to sort out. If you and Will want to be related, then you should consider yourselves so.”
His words opened up a startling and somewhat alarming array of possibilities. I pictured myself surrounded by circles of people, all of them strangers and each potential kin. While I wasn’t exactly a loner, I kept my own family at arm’s length and my close friends were limited to fewer than a dozen. Now, by virtue of blood, any number of people might be able to lay claim to me.
I said, “About Fenella…”
“She was the big news story on the moccasin telegraph that year. Remember, this was the nineteen-fifties. It wasn’t common for women to appear alone in sports cars and descend on relatives who, up till then, hadn’t been aware of their existence. And your great-aunt was very exotic.”
“Fenella, exotic?” It wasn’t a term I’d ever associated with her.
“Oh, yes.” Farmer nodded. “She looked Irish, with all that red hair and pale skin. The hair was dyed, the women said. She wore shorts and halter tops that showed off her figure, and usually went barefoot. The men followed her around like puppy dogs, but the women took to her too. They said there wasn’t any meanness in her. She was natural and friendly and cared deeply about her roots and our people. She was generous, and she laughed at herself, rather than others.”
“You speak as if you knew Fenella well, but you say you never met her.”
“I didn’t, but I feel as though I had. That year I returned to the reserve for Christmas, stayed into January. Talk of your great-aunt was rekindled when she sent presents, as well as two big crates of Florida oranges.”
“What did Fenella do on the reservation?”
“Mainly what my students call hanging out. She got the women to teach her the rudiments of some of our crafts, and she spent time with an elder who was a storyteller, learning about the legends and history. She took the younger people off on trips in her sports car, just piled them in and drove away. After six weeks she left, but she kept in touch by letter and sent presents till she died.”
So there might be some correspondence in that box John had found at Pa’s.
“Let me show you something,” Elwood Farmer said. He went to a bookcase where some framed photographs sat and brought one to me. The frame was bleached bone, carved to resemble buffalo moving nose to tail, and its contours were worn smooth by the passage of many fingers. I looked questioningly at Farmer.
“My father made it from the last scraps of buffalo bone that my mother’s father saved after the white man decimated the herds.” The sorrow in his voice was as great as if he had been of the generations who hunted the bison and used its body for food, clothing, shelter, tools, and weapons.
I looked down at the grainy black-and-white photograph: a group of six people, with Fenella at the center. My great-aunt smiled for the camera, clad in tight shorts and an off-the-shoulder peasant blouse, her eyes masked by big harlequin-style sunglasses. Her companions were four more conservatively attired Indian women, probably in their teens, and a slightly older white man, whose face was shaded by a cowboy hat.
“Who are these people?” I asked.
“Young women from the reservation.” He pointed them out. “Lucy Edmo, Barbara Teton, Susan New Moon, Saskia Hunter.”
“And the man?”
“… I don’t know. Could be a visitor like your great-aunt.”
“From the way they’re smiling, they look as if they’re all good friends.”
“They were.”
I studied the photo’s background, a stucco building with a sign, but I couldn’t make out what it said. “Where was this taken?”
“The old trading post in Fort Hall. It’s gone now, replaced by a mini-mart.”
I nodded and set the photograph on the table between our chairs. So much was gone now, maybe even all these people. “D’you know where I might reach the women in the picture?”
He shook his head, eyes turning bleak. I sensed one of the women had meant something to him, and that was why he’d kept the picture in the special frame all these years.
“Can you think of anyone who might be able to tell me more about Fenella’s visit?”
“Well, there’s Agnes Running Horse, my cousin. She lives on the Middle Fork of the Flathead River near Glacier National Park.”
“Would she be willing to talk with me?”
Something moved under the surface of his gaze, a deep, dark current that I couldn’t define. “I’m sure she will.”
“How far away is her place?”
“A hundred miles, give or take, but the roads aren’t fast ones. Still, you could be there this afternoon.”
“Will you call her and tell her who I am and that I’m coming?”
He nodded, took a pad from the table and scribbled directions.
When I stood to go, I said, “Mr. Farmer, thank you so much.”
“No thanks are necessary. But I hope—”
“Yes?”
He shook his head, dismissing whatever he’d been about to say. “I want to give you something.” He picked up the photograph from the table, caressed its frame gently, then pressed it into my hands.
My first instinct was to refuse such a precious gift, but then I remembered Will Camphouse’s caution against giving offense, and instead caressed the frame as Farmer had. “I’m honored,” I said. “I’ll treasure it always.”
The dark current in his eyes moved more strongly. “I hope so, my friend. Travel safely.”
11:48 A.M.
“What did Elwood give you?” Will Camphouse asked me.
“How d’you know that he did?”
“I just know.”
“Well, you’re right.” I slipped the framed photograph from my bag and showed it to him. He whistled softly.
“I guess it means he thinks I’m okay,” I said.
“More than okay. He’s accepted you as family.”
“D’you know any of these people in the picture?”
He shook his head. “I’ve seen it at Elwood’s place, though. I don’t know which he treasures more—the photo or the frame.”
“I don’t know either.”
We were seated at a weathered picnic table in the park across from Yesterday’s Cafe, eating deli sandwiches. The overcast continued, and the wind had picked up; it blew trash from a nearby barrel and sent it dancing over the packed earth.
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.…