Strongheart: The Lost Journals of May Dodd and Molly McGill

by Jim Fergus

  “You’re going to like Indian,” I said as I rode in. “He’s real easy and biddable.”

  “I already like him,” JW said, cradling the horse’s neck in his arm and scratching his forehead. “I think he’s fair value for the money. And I liked your friend Lily. She’s the real thing.”

  “All of us Strongheart women are the real thing, JW.”

  “Knowing you and reading the journals, I can see that, Molly.”

  I dismounted and looked at all the gear laid out on a tarp under the awning. “Damn, you’re such a white guy, you buy all this on Amazon?”

  He laughed. “No. Can’t you tell? It’s all my dad’s old stuff. I had the sleeping bags and the tent cleaned before I left Chicago. They were a little dusty from the years in storage.” He picked up an old leather fishing rod case. “He bought me the bamboo fly rod in here when I was twelve. We used to camp out and fish a lot, and we took some pack trips into the high country together … but we didn’t have to buy our own horses back then.”

  “Did you pack something for our dinner, in case we don’t catch any fish?” I asked. “You know, it’s always bad luck to announce a trout dinner before you’ve actually caught any.”

  “You’re quite right, Molly,” he said, “and I have a backup, and also something for dinner tomorrow night. And I’m bringing some wine, if that’s OK with you. You know, we haven’t had time to talk about your edits yet, but we can discuss that later. I just wanted to say that I’m sorry for the troubles you’ve had in your life … all those you wrote about but haven’t been able to tell me.”

  “Writing about them, and letting you read it,” I said, “is just a different way of telling you, JW. And I don’t need you to feel sorry for me, because I don’t. Although I might wish that some of those things hadn’t happened, they did, and all of them have made me who I am today, and for that I have no regrets. I am not a victim, and I don’t want you thinking of me as one.”

  “I don’t, Molly.”

  JW locked up his trailer, asking me if I thought it would be safe here, unoccupied.

  “I can’t make any promises about that,” I answered, “but it looks to me like it would be no easy matter to get inside.”

  “It would if someone had the right tools and really wanted to,” he said. “I’m taking my laptop with me just in case.”

  “I don’t think anyone will mess with it. The crackheads are more likely to steal your vehicle.”

  “I put the hitch inside the trailer, so they couldn’t take both of them.”

  “I don’t think they’ll come back here. You haven’t seen them since I chased them off, have you?”

  “No.”

  Now we were under way, riding side by side. It was a good feeling to do something together besides having heated sex in the Airstream, and I think JW felt the same way, because we kept looking at each other and smiling in acknowledgment. It was late summer now, with just a hint of fall in the air and on the foliage, the time of year when the temperature is perfect, warm but not hot during the day, cool at night. Because it was already midday, after a bit over an hour, we stopped for the picnic and to make our camp in a stand of cottonwood trees beside the creek.

  JW served chicken he had grilled back at his trailer, salad, hard-boiled eggs, a baguette, and French wine and cheese, all purchased in Billings, where he drove once a week for supplies.

  “Are you trying to impress me?” I asked.

  “Maybe a little…”

  “I have to admit, JW, this is a whole lot better than the bologna sandwich you served me twenty years ago.” I don’t drink much for obvious reasons, but I took a sip of the wine he had poured for me in a small glass mustard jar he told me his father had always used for camping and picnics. It occurred to me once again what different worlds we lived in. We were a tiny microcosm of the vast chasm between our people—a privileged white boy, and an Indian girl from the res—never to be breached. “Are you trying to seduce me with good food and fancy French wine and cheese?”

  “I was just trying to make a nice lunch. Do I need to seduce you?”

  “I like you in the same way I did as a kid, JW,” I said. “But I’m the one who seduced you.”

  “That’s true,” he admitted. “Why did you, Molly?”

  “Because you’re different from what I know. That doesn’t make you any better, just safer.”

  “I don’t understand, safer in what way?”

  “You and I can never really be together. You know that as well as I do. Our planets are so far apart they may as well be in different solar systems. But that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy each other. After we get the tent set up, we’re going to take a nap before we go fishing, right?”

  “That’s what I was thinking.”

  “So instead of ‘sharing intimacies’ as you put it so genteelly, or ‘fucking’ as I put it so vulgarly, we’re going to make love for the first time. And then after we wake up, we’re going to talk about things … like you said, JW … things that people talk about to get to know each other. But understand this, JW, we’re living in the moment … and that’s all.”

  “Understood,” he said. “That’s a splendid idea, Molly. You know, we’re only a little farther upstream from where we went fishing that day when we were kids. I kissed you on the bank of the creek … do you remember that?”

  “Sure I do.”

  “You were the first girl I ever kissed.”

  “And you were the first boy for me.”

  “You think our ancestors May and Molly are watching?”

  I laughed. “God, I hope not!”

  “Yeah, me, too.”

  “The day after that, you got beat up when you tried to take me to the movies on a real date, and we didn’t see each other again until I showed up at your office. So much for young romance between different races…”

  “I never came back here with my father again,” JW said, “but for years, I wondered what had become of you. You were my first ‘crush,’ as we white kids used to say back then.”

  “Well, now you know what became of me. And you’re soon to find out more.”

  “I look forward to that.” JW held up his glass jar of wine in a toast, and I mine. We looked in each other’s eyes. “To the moment,” he said.

  After lunch we went about setting up our camp. We had already watered the horses and hobbled them so that they could feed on the thick grasses of the creek bottom yet not wander so far away that we would lose sight of them. When we finished putting up the tent, we strung a rope between two trees and picketed them. I collected some pieces of dry deadwood under the trees for our campfire, while JW dug a small firepit with a collapsible shovel his father had among his camping gear. He put his fly rod together, mounted the reel, strung the line, and tied a dry fly on the leader.

  As we went about these preparations, I think we were both feeling a certain self-consciousness, a kind of shyness, in the face of this unfamiliar domesticity. Somehow, by having mentioned making love, I had suddenly changed the nature of our relationship. Despite our numerous and often wanton couplings in his trailer, I felt again like that little girl, about to be kissed for the first time, and all aflutter with nerves. I believe JW felt the same way, because he went about his campsite duties with a certain quiet formality.

  “Well,” he announced, finally, looking around our tidy camp, “I guess it’s naptime.”

  “I guess it is,” I said.

  It was an old-style, two-man canvas pup tent, secured to the ground by metal stakes. We squatted down to enter. JW held the flap open. “After you,” he said.

  “Thank you,” I answered … God, you’d think we had just met …

  The sleeping bags were old-style, too, with a faded green-and-blue-plaid-flannel interior, and an Army green, box-stitched exterior. JW had zippered them together to make them one … which I found sort of sweet. I sat down, still fully dressed in my hide shift and moccasins. JW was wearing jeans, a light denim shirt, and his old cowboy
boots. He sat down next to me and pulled his boots off.

  “Since you slept in this tent with your dad,” I asked, “doesn’t it make you feel weird to be here with a woman, and about to make love?”

  “Damn, I wish you hadn’t said that, Molly…” he answered. “I feel weird enough as it is … I feel like a virgin, and I’m having performance anxiety … and now you’ve got me thinking about my dad?”

  I laughed. “I’m sorry, JW. I’m feeling weird, too. But your performance has never been an issue so I don’t think you need to be anxious.”

  “You know, maybe this lovemaking business is not such a good idea for either of us,” he said. “Maybe you should just straddle me, put your knife at my throat, and sit on my face.”

  We both started laughing then, which seemed to break the ice between us.

  “Look, JW, just because we’re going to make love,” I said, “doesn’t mean we can’t do all the other stuff, too. I mean, we don’t have to be like an old married white couple, consigned to a lifetime of the obligatory missionary position.”

  “OK, that’s good to know, Molly, but could you get my dad out of the tent, first?”

  He makes me laugh, which is a good thing, too. “That’s easy, JW,” I said, wriggling my shift up over my hips and lifting it off my head.

  He looked at me and took a deep breath. “Yeah,” he said, nodding his head affirmatively, “he’s gone … he got embarrassed.”

  I confess that our lovemaking that afternoon, and thereafter, was of a different nature than that described by the other euphemisms JW and I had previously used, including those genteel, impersonal, or vulgar. It was no longer simply a matter of taking our individual pleasure, but of giving it, of tenderness, exploration, and the raw, nearly overwhelming emotion of becoming one being together, experiencing both our own and the other’s erotic euphoria. I have spent my life thus far protecting myself against such closeness to a man, against such a union, and now I was beginning to wonder how I would manage to live without it.

  Afterward, we curled up together, and both fell asleep. When I opened my eyes, the light filtering through the canvas of the tent had turned to the softer golden shade of late afternoon. JW’s eyes were open as well. “Have you been awake for a long time?” I asked.

  “No, just a few minutes. I can hear fish rising in the creek.”

  “You made that up. But waking to the sound of the water running is lovely, isn’t it?”

  “That’s one of the best things about camping out by a river or creek.”

  “I sleep outside a lot,” I said, “but I have to admit your dad’s gear makes it more comfortable … though not as comfortable as the tipis where I sometimes stay in the other world.”

  He propped himself up on an elbow and looked me in the eyes. “I look forward to hearing more about that,” he said, “but right now we should go fishing while we still have the light. All we need is two fat trout for dinner tonight.”

  “What about breakfast?”

  “OK, four, then. Let’s get moving.”

  * * *

  It is a beautiful high prairie creek that meanders a winding path, with deep pools against the bank where it turns, fed by riffles spilling over shallow rocks, and stretches of long, gliding runs. Willow bushes grow along the banks, in places sometimes so thick that they are almost impenetrable. Moving through one of these spots to reach open water, we came face-to-face with a female moose with twin calves. These creatures have notoriously poor eyesight, and in such a situation frequently charge intruders with a mother’s protective instinct. She bellowed at us, pawed the ground, and readied herself to charge. I told her in the language of moose, which I speak fluently, that we meant no harm to her or her babies, and she turned and lumbered off into the willows, followed by her twins, all moving with the particular gangly yet graceful gait of the species.

  “What did you just do?” JW asked.

  “I became a moose,” I answered. “Didn’t you notice?”

  There was a late-afternoon hatch of insects on the water, and we could see the trout rising beneath them, leaving delicate circles of wake as they sipped them from the surface.

  At the first pool JW cast into, and on the first cast, I watched his fly land delicately on the surface, almost instantly disappearing in one of those circles, sucked down like a vortex by a trout. He was wearing a pair of old sneakers now, and, from the higher grassy bank from where he had made the cast on his knees, holding his rod high, he stepped onto the gravel beside the water. After a short struggle, he waded into the shallows to land the fish. It was a native cutthroat trout, nearly a foot long, and fat with the bounty of late summer, but this was to be his last ill-chosen meal. Holding him on his back, JW rapped the fish’s head twice sharply on a rock. We admired its beauty for a moment, with the same bittersweet gratitude the hunter feels toward his game, before he slipped it into a canvas creel he wore on a strap around his neck across his shoulder.

  We moved down to the next pool, and he handed me the rod. “Your turn, Molly, give it a try.”

  “No, that’s OK, you go ahead, JW,” I said. “Fly fishing is a sport for rich white guys and girls. They don’t send the Orvis catalog here. But maybe tomorrow, if we decide to fish, I’ll cut a willow branch, dig some worms, and borrow one of your leaders and a hook. I worked for a while as a bartender in Sheridan. In the summer, at the end of the day, a lot of out-of-town fly fishermen would come in for a drink. They were always congratulating themselves for releasing all the fish they caught. Sometimes they’d show me the grip-and-grin photos on their cell phones they had their guides take of them, smiling proudly and cradling their fish in their hands, before they put it back in the water. I only fish when I want to eat one, and I don’t throw them back unless they’re too small.”

  “I used to fish a lot with my dad,” JW said, “but I don’t do it much anymore, and I know just what you mean. The fly fishermen can be a little self-righteous. I’m a meat fisherman myself these days. It began to seem hypocritical to me to torture a fish for my own pleasure and then let him go, like it was an equally matched sporting event for both of us, testing our wits and brawn. Of course, the fish is fighting for his life, while we’re just having fun. So like you, Molly, I catch-and-kill-and-eat, and not very often, because I have rare occasion to fish. I remember we fished with worms the last time we were here.”

  “Yeah, but we didn’t catch anything because we were too busy making out.”

  In three more casts, in three successive pools, JW had our dinner and our breakfast (the latter he would serve with fried eggs).

  It gets cool here at night this time of year, and we ate early just as the sun was setting and there was still light in the sky. JW rolled the trout in flour and fried it in butter in a cast-iron skillet over the fire. He had a bag of small new potatoes he had purchased at a farmer’s market in Billings on his weekly trip there for supplies, and these he sliced thin and browned in the skillet with the fish. He had brought a plastic container of washed lettuce, with a jar of dressing he had made. And he had lemon.

  I have to say, he is not entirely helpless … That’s what I meant by different … white privilege rears its ugly head again. Here on the res, the vast majority of the jobs are held by women. The wives work all day, come home and have to do the housework, feed the kids and their deadbeat husbands, who have spent the whole day sitting on the couch watching television. It’s not entirely the men’s fault … as soon as we were put on the reservations, they were emasculated by the white man, a process that continues one hundred and fifty years later. They have no traditional male role to play. They can no longer train their sons to be warriors or hunters, for they are no longer warriors and hunters, and today many have largely given up. It is the women who do the work, who take care of the children, who keep the tribe alive. JW’s dad had obviously trained him well to take care of himself, his mother having died when he was quite young, and his father never remarrying. And, of course, they are white me
n, and I say that without bitterness; I simply state the reality.

  After we had finished dinner and cleaned the dishes, we put more wood on the fire and had a last glass of wine. Well over a three-quarter moon had risen just after the sun set. “Damn, JW, you brought a bottle of both red and white wine on a camping trip? You know, you are definitely a little too civilized for me.”

  “I know, Molly,” he said, “I was worrying about that myself. I was thinking maybe you could make me a buckskin outfit like Chance had. Maybe you’d be more comfortable with me like that?”

  “I’m pretty comfortable with you right now,” I said. “But you might look cute in buckskins. I do like that cowboy, Chance, though. Your ancestor May Dodd was lucky to have found him.”

  “And he was lucky to find her. Are you going to tell me what became of them?”

  “I told you, you’ll know when I bring you the rest of the journals.”

  “Since we didn’t have a chance to talk after our nap,” he said, “it seems like now is a good time to begin getting to know each other better.”

  “I feel like we already know each other better.”

  “We do.”

  “So go ahead and ask me anything you want, JW, and I’ll give you a straight answer … at least as straight as I know how. But I’m not going to tell you about the journals, because I want you to discover them for yourself. There is something about reading the originals, in their own handwriting, that gives you a completely different sense of what those people were going through, isn’t there?”

  “Yes, there is,” he agreed. “OK, Molly, so I’ll ask you an easy one for starters. You mention that you used to bartend in Sheridan. I’m curious to know how do you make a living now? You seem to have no home, no permanent residence … how do you support yourself?”

  “I work … kind of undercover, you might say … for a group that searches for and tries to bring back the disappeared … and, when possible, we identify and find the perpetrators.”

  “The disappeared?”