by James Welch
WINTER IN THE BLOOD
JAMES WELCH (1940–2003) was the author of five novels, including Fools Crow, which won the American Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Book Award; one work of nonfiction, Killing Custer; and one work of poetry, Riding the Earthboy 40. He attended schools on the Blackfeet and Fort Belknap reservations in Montana, and studied writing at the University of Montana under the legendary writing teacher Richard Hugo.
LOUISE ERDRICH is the author of thirteen novels, including Love Medicine, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and, most recently, The Plague of Doves. She has also written volumes of poetry, children’s books, and a memoir of early motherhood. She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
ALSO BY JAMES WELCH
The Heartsong of Charging Elk
Killing Custer
The Indian Lawyer
Fools Crow
The Death of Jim Loney
Riding the Earthboy 40
PENGUIN BOOKS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
penguinrandomhouse.com
First published in the United States of America by Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. 1974
Published in Penguin Books 1986
This edition with an introduction by Louise Erdrich published 2008
Copyright © James Welch, 1974
Introduction copyright © Louise Erdrich, 2008
All rights reserved
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the South Dakota Review, in which a portion of this work first appeared.
Publisher’s Note
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Ebook ISBN: 9780525507345
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Welch, James, 1940–2003
Winter in the blood / James Welch ; introduction by Louise Erdrich.
p. cm.—(Penguin classics)
ISBN: 9780143105220
1. Montana—Fiction. 2. Siksika Indians—Fiction. 3. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PS3573.E44W5 2008
813’.54—dc22 2008019394
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Version_1
For my mother and father
Contents
Cover
About the Authors
Also by James Welch
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction by LOUISE ERDRICH
Epigraph
PART ONE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
PART TWO
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
PART THREE
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
PART FOUR
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Epilogue
Introduction
In 1974 no fiction award was given for the Pulitzer Prize, but it should have gone to the book you are holding. Winter in the Blood was and still is a central and inspiring text to a generation of western regional and Native American writers, including me. More than that, Winter in the Blood is a quiet American masterwork. That it was overlooked for the prestigious prizes of its year only speaks of its visionary simplicity and the raw depth of the heart that wrote it.
A work of slim majesty, lean, rich, funny, and grim, Winter in the Blood contains the complications and contradictions of a doorstop book—the kind you have to prop on a pillow to read. This book began as a poem. James Welch has said that he wanted to write a poem about the landscape of the Montana Great Plains, where for a time his family ranched and where he grew up, part Blackfeet and Gros Ventre, a little Irish. The novel grew out of this poem—one reason it retains its resonance and elegance.
Welch added to the specificity of his visual images an intimacy of family narrative and a sense of humor haunted by abiding loss. With a perfect sense of timing and a dead-on sense of character, the novel moves between private memory, family story, and everyday action. Welch’s poem grew to encompass a wild drinking binge, bar conversation so accurately odd you feel you’re eavesdropping, the ache of grief, brutal tribal history, and the gradual understanding of an unknown bond of blood.
* * *
• • •
James Welch studied with Richard Hugo at the University of Montana, and taught at Cornell and the University of Washington. Winter in the Blood marked a transition from his first book of poems, Riding the Earthboy 40, and begins with a quiet elegy for the Earthboy family place.
The roof had fallen in and the mud between the logs had fallen out in chunks, leaving a bare gray skeleton, home only to mice and insects. Tumbleweeds, stark as bone, rocked in a hot wind against the west wall.
The restless eye of the narrator, returning to his boyhood home, fixes upon one indelible image after the other. Then something interesting begins. The storyteller takes over. The narrator’s mother, Teresa, and the ambitious rancher Lame Bull leave the house for groceries and come back married (Teresa wearing a shimmery turquoise dress). Raymond Long Knife, who has the knack of sweating before he even starts working, gets tired of baling and begs off work but wants his money right that minute. Lame Bull tosses a crumpled twenty over his shoulder and Long Knife picks it up, then tries to pay him to drive him to town. Grandmother’s rocking chair sounds twice in the next room, her only comment on a conversation that doesn’t include her. She murderously contemplates her grandson’s Cree girlfriend, movie magazines spread across the floor. The girl reads and tosses them down, unaware of the knife hidden in the old lady’s legging.
That’s writing. Suddenly, there is a novel, driven by observation, alert to crazy undercurrents. There will be a search for two wildly disparate stolen objects. Slowly, the reader will come to know the history uttered by weeds that hiss near the windswept, sunken graves.
* * *
• • •
James Welch knew that small gestures between people tell big stories, and there is a natural gr
ace to his work that allows his sympathy for all of his characters, bad or good, white or Native, drunk or sober or beyond the law, to show in every scene. Sometimes characters get less than a paragraph, but the description is unforgettable. One of my favorites is this speculation about the reluctant ranch hand, Long Knife, and his mother:
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 the way dumb men are shrewd.
There’s a whole book there. There is also a book included, much later, in one encounter with a hapless woman named Marlene. Drunk, naked, she arouses in the narrator a helpless pity in one instant and cruelty in the next. He describes her body with a mixture of tenderness and contempt. Desperately conflicted, he tries to lose himself in her but again and again returns to consciousness, bewildered with pain. He strikes out at her. This scene, with its combination of ugliness and yearning, is also delicately sad—the woman is wistful, even kind. Welch always allows even the most miserable of his characters a sort of rough dignity. Hungover, weary, embarrassed at his meanness, the narrator gives Marlene all of his money and leaves.
Everything had gone out of me, and I felt the kind of peace that comes over one when he is alone, when he no longer cares for warmth, or sunshine, or possessions, or even a woman’s body, so yielding and powerful.
In one of the few places where the narrator speaks directly of his feelings, he could be describing his own death. As the novel moves from the borrow pits where his father froze, into disorienting flight, and back to the graveyard where history lies in sunken ground, the central tragedy is gradually revealed. Welch grounds a simple narrative—rounding up cows for winter with his brother—with images both ordinary and unforgettable: His father, who loves them, frying eggs that blacken at the edges in hot grease. The dry roan heifer. The horse that does the right thing and brings down disaster.
That horse will return, as everything returns, in the perfect ending of the book, which resolves the fate of the tiny old lady in the rocking chair who never succeeds in killing the Cree girlfriend. From the first arresting visual image of her hands, “small and black as a magpie’s feet,” to the appalling story of her survival, to her burial, so inadequate and yet fitting the mixture of degradation and grandeur that was her life, the grandmother is the fierce core of the book. Welch describes in detail everything that the family wears at her burial—Lame Bull’s shiny green suit, Teresa’s hard lipsticked mouth and black cupcake hat—but the grandmother whom he calls “the old lady” just wears a coffin. The coffin is never opened. That is because to my mind the old lady is not really there. She is the presiding spirit of both anguish and tenacity, and she stands for the mysterious and undestroyable will of a people.
* * *
• • •
Part of the genius of this book is that Welch uses a style that Franz Kafka would call “transparent,” that is, a simple description of events and a taut poeticism that never tries to impress the reader. The consciousness, the eye, the beholder and observer, is present and absent. His inner life is revealed through what he chooses to notice. Still, because Welch rarely allows his protagonist to show an emotional reaction to what occurs in his life, this novel is sometimes misunderstood as a work about alienation. To me, the absence of personal affect in the narrator is more about the modesty of his despair.
To refuse to feel is to refuse to be a victim, it is true. But in the end, all you really own is your indifference.
Whenever I met James Welch I was struck by a sense of his kindness and humility. That emotional strength informs this novel, so powerful in its brevity. This sort of unostentatious and grounded sense of humanity made Welch a writer who stood apart from any particular fashion in writing. Because he always wrote from the integrity of his vision, his books are increasingly admired everywhere. James Welch’s 1987 novel, Fools Crow, received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writer’s Circle in 1997. He was beloved in France and was given the Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres medal and full knighthood. When James Welch died at age sixty-two, we were deprived of a generous teacher and solid friend. Moreover, he was working at the height of his power, and the books of genius he would have written were lost.
* * *
• • •
I wanted to write the introduction to this book because Winter in the Blood was a touchstone for me when I began to write. I was living far from the Great Plains, but as I am from North Dakota, and part Turtle Mountain Chippewa, I could see and feel everything that happened on every page of Winter in the Blood. I first read this book many times, not to find the secret of the writing but to go home. I knew what the title meant. I found comfort in this book. Even in the bar scenes there was, for me, a great solace of affinity. I thought the book had a great sense of the absurd and admired Welch’s precise and funny way of looking at people. This book first helped me to understand that I came from the place I was supposed to write about. Reading the book now, I learned even more about good writing and the resonance of simplicity.
What astounded me after a while was that something so familiar could be made into literature. Welch had done something nobody else had—written about Indians without once getting pious, uplifting, or making you feel sorry for The Plight. That is why, finally, I love this book so much. Welch took all the chances in the world with it. He told it right out. He took no prisoners. Although he was always self-effacing in his interviews, I think it annoyed Welch that this book was called bleak. That world of bones and wind may be stark but it is filled with life, and life is stories.
James Welch himself said, very beautifully, that “we are storytellers from a long way back. And we will be heard for generations to come.” I do believe that as time winnows away so many other books that dazzled people back in 1974, a new generation of readers will find in Winter in the Blood their own article of faith. To be loyal to the earth and to the dead who loved you, to found yourself in all that is most dear, to observe without judging and write from your own direct core, is not ever the fashion. But it is always the right thing to do. Truth wears well, and Winter in the Blood is a true book.
—LOUISE ERDRICH, MINNEAPOLIS, 2007
Bones should never tell a story
to a bad beginner. I ride
romantic to those words,
those foolish claims that he
was better than dirt, or rain
that bleached his cabin
white as bone. Scattered in the wind
Earthboy calls me from my dream:
Dirt is where the dreams must end.
PART ONE
1
In the tall weeds of the borrow pit, I took a leak and watched the sorrel mare, her colt beside her, walk through burnt grass to the shady side of the log-and-mud cabin. It was called the Earthboy place, although no one by that name (or any other) had lived in it for twenty years. The roof had fallen in and the mud between the logs had fallen out in chunks, leaving a bare gray skeleton, home only to mice and insects. Tumbleweeds, stark as bone, rocked in a hot wind against the west wall. On the hill behind the cabin, a rectangle of barbed wire held the graves of all the Earthboys, except for a daughter who had married a man from Lodgepole. She could be anywhere, but the Earthboys were gone.
The fence hummed in the sun behind my back as I climbed up to the highway. My right eye was swollen up, but I couldn’t remember how or why, just the white man, loose with his wife and buying drinks, his raging tongue a flame above the music and my eyes. She was wild, from Rocky Boy. He was white. He swore at his money, at her breasts, at my hair.
Coming home was n
ot easy anymore. It was never a cinch, but it had become a torture. My throat ached, my bad knee ached and my head ached in the even heat.
The mare and her colt were out of sight behind the cabin. Beyond the graveyard and the prairie hills, the Little Rockies looked black and furry in the heat haze.
Coming home to a mother and an old lady who was my grandmother. And the girl who was thought to be my wife. But she didn’t really count. For that matter none of them counted; not one meant anything to me. And for no reason. I felt no hatred, no love, no guilt, no conscience, nothing but a distance that had grown through the years.
It could have been the country, the burnt prairie beneath a blazing sun, the pale green of the Milk River valley, the milky waters of the river, the sagebrush and cottonwoods, the dry, cracked gumbo flats. The country had created a distance as deep as it was empty, and the people accepted and treated each other with distance.
But the distance I felt came not from country or people; it came from within me. I was as distant from myself as a hawk from the moon. And that was why I had no particular feelings toward my mother and grandmother. Or the girl who had come to live with me.
I dropped down on the other side of the highway, slid through the barbed-wire fence and began the last two miles home. My throat ached with a terrible thirst.
2
“She left three days ago, just after you went to town.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said.
“She took your gun and electric razor.”
The room was bright. Although it was early afternoon, the kitchen light was burning.
“What did you expect me to do? I have your grandmother to look after, I have no strength, and she is young—Cree!”
“Don’t worry,” I said.
“At least get your gun back.” My mother swept potato peels off the counter into a paper sack at her feet. “You know she’d sell it for a drink.”