Montana 1948

Photo of Native Americans 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 out 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 I was Marie’s mother, but I knew that wasn’t true.
We lived, you see, in a white two-story house frame house right across the street from the courthouse, and the jail and my father’s office were in the basement of the courthouse. On occasion I waited for my father to release a prisoner (usually a hung-over drunk jailed so he wouldn’t hurt himself) or finish tacking up wanted poster before I showed him my report card or asked him for a dime movie. 

Hawaii vacations offer opportunities for bird pictures.

  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 presences 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.)
 Then I turned into the laundry room and another odor replaced it. All those broken jars-the sharp vinegary smell of the pickling juices, the dill weed, the sweet apples and plums, the rotting, damp-earth smell of rutabagas and tomatoes, and another odor, sweeter, heavier, fouler than the other.

“My father was on the floor of the root cellar, and when I first saw the blood swirled like oil through the other liquids, I thought that he had cut his bare feet on the broken glass that was everywhere.

But I thought that only for an instant, for the split second before I saw the blood’s real source.

Uncle Frank lay on the floor, his head cradled against my father’s chest. The gash across Uncle Frank’s wrists had already started its useless healing: the edges of the wound had begun to pucker; the blood, what was left in him, had begun to blacken and congeal. I could see only his right arm, but I knew the cut was one of a catching set.”