“What’s over the hill is likely only a brush fire,” says Cal, then he goes on to tell me how Red Adair blasted sea water into the Big One in Alaska in ’73. And he woulda told me about the whole ten days Adair worked on that runaway oilwell if I hadn’t pointed out that someone is coming running up the road.
“I be go to hell,” says Cal, “they is movin’ right along.”
“It’s Ma,” I say, ’cause I can see further than Cal even when he squints. “We better hop in the truck and go meet her.”
“No use gettin’ excited over nothin’,” says Cal. “Let’s just wait and see what she’s got to say for herself.” Cal is still squintin’ down the road and is about ready to believe me that it’s Ma runnin’ toward us. Cal is rollin’ a cigarette real careful, and asks me to fetch him another beer while he is strikin’ a wooden match on the seat of his overalls.
Ma is yellin’ at the top of her lungs. And as she gets closer we can hear that it’s all about Eddie and his new-to-him car.
“Burnin’, burnin’ up,” is what Ma is gasping. Then, “Couldn’t you guys see me comin’? Why didn’t you come meet me?”
“We didn’t know for sure it was anything serious,” says Cal. “Y’all just keep calm; you’re in the company of a pro-fessional firefighter.” All three of us are in the shiny red pick-up truck and Cal manages to do just about half a wheelie as we screech out of the yard, scattering them bedraggled chickens again. I’m pretty sure I seen Delly peeking out one of the curtainless windows as we roar away.
Sure enough, about a mile down the road, just overtop the first rise, is Eddie’s car, hood up, burnin’ like a spit-cat.
“I be go to hell,” says Cal, as he swings down outa his truck and walks slowly around the burnin’ car.
Eddie is bellowin’ like a young moose that just lost its mama. “Where the hell you bin? Put out the fire!” and other stuff like that.
“I’m the firefighter around here,” says Cal, climbin’ up and takin’ one of the shiny silver fire extinguishers off the back of the truck cab.
“Red Adair always takes his time,” Cal says, trying to decide the best angle to shoot the flames. Cal gets all set, his boots braced as if he expects the extinguisher to kick like a rifle.
“Let her rip,” shouts Cal, and pulls the handle on the extinguisher.
“Pffffft,” says the extinguisher, and drops a couple of globs of foam on the road.
“I be go to hell,” says Cal, and looks kind of puzzled.
Eddie is bellowin’ so loud that if he’d do it on the fire he might put it out.
Regina just stands in the ditch wringin’ her hands, and it’s a good place for her ’cause she don’t look anywhere near her six-foot-two standin’ in the ditch.
And Ma, who’s been watchin’ cars burn up for thirty years, knows better than to say anything at all.
Cal heads back for the truck, mumbling about Red Adair always being prepared for any emergency. Somehow I see kind of a combination of Cal and Red Adair in a pair of Boy Scout shorts, and I laugh like hell.
Cal gives me a look like I just shit in one of his boots. He is up in the box of the pick-up trying to wrestle the second fire extinguisher loose from the truck. The extinguisher has a mind of its own. Cal gets both his pudgy hands around that extinguisher as if he was stranglin’ it, and he braces his boots against the back of the cab and pulls with all his 225 pounds. Finally the extinguisher lets go and Cal crashes down on his back in the truck box and the extinguisher sails over his head and lands with a thunk in the dust.
Eddie pounces on it as quick as Eddie can pounce on anything, grabs it up, points it in the general direction of his burnin’ car and fires it. It shoots like a dammer. Only the foam swishes right overtop of the car and hits Regina at about the spot where her boobies might be, if she had any.
“Looks like a cat just fell in the separator bowl,” says Cal, picking himself up and relieving Eddie of the extinguisher.
“Gimme that thing, boy. Let a pro-fessional firefighter handle this.”
Cal finally gets the foam pointed in the right direction. When he’s finished the car looks like it’s been sittin’ in a blizzard for a week. It’s totalled. After it’s cooled off, me and Cal and Eddie push it into the ditch. Eddie is crying. And even Cal gives him a sympathetic slap on the shoulder. I mean you got to feel somethin’ for a guy has just had his first new-to-him car burn up on the side of the road.
“Let’s all go into town for a beer just the way regular oilfield firefighters do,” says Cal. If Eddie’ll stop cryin’ Cal will let him drive the shiny red pick-up truck, providin’ he promises to keep it on the road. “You can even have all the burritos you can eat at Taco Bell,” offers Cal.
All four of them cram into the cab of that pick-up. I beg off ridin’ in the truck box saying I’ll just walk back to the house and keep Delly company. I figure by now she’ll be over being mad about last night.
Dr. Don
“How come you don’t mind?” I ask Mad Etta our medicine lady.
“Hey, when you’re young like you, Silas, you don’t like nobody move in on your territory. But when you get old as me, you look forward to all the help you can get.”
Who and what I been asking about is Dr. Don. His whole name is Dr. Donald Morninglight. He is an Indian and a doctor who come to the reserve about three months ago.
“He ain’t as good as me. Never will be,” say Mad Etta, as she laugh and laugh, shake on the tree-trunk chair in her cabin.
Must be ten years since we had a full-time doctor here on the Ermine-skin Reserve. Maybe three times a year the Department of Indian Affairs doctors come around but they is all white and wear coats white as bathroom fixtures, smell of disinfectant, and to see them work remind me of a film I seen of assembly line workers who put cars together. Them doctors treat people as if they was cars need a new bolt or screw to be whole again.
But Dr. Don don’t be like that. Guess being an Indian helps. One reason we never been able to keep a doctor here is they never like to live on the reserve. Even Indian Affairs can’t get for them a fancy enough place to live. But Dr. Don when he come, just move into a vacant house near to Blue Quills Hall. He don’t act like doctors we know, except that he make sick people better, and, as I say, even Mad Etta like him. And you got to be liked by Mad Etta if you is to get any respect around the reserve.
“Dr. Don he know which side his medical practice be buttered on,” says my friend Frank Fencepost. And I guess Frank is right. Quite a few times in the first month Dr. Don was here, he come over to Etta’s place in the evening, have a beer with her and tell her about patients he having trouble curing. Etta give him her advice. I don’t know if he ever take it but it sure make Etta feel good. So good, that right now she would do just about anything for Dr. Don.
It is easy to tell by looking at Dr. Don that he is some kind of Indian. But he never say which kind.
“I’m a mongrel,” he say when asked, and laugh. “If you went far enough back you’d find Cree blood in me.”
Dr. Don ain’t a handsome man at all. He is about 40, got short legs and a little pot belly. His hair be thin on top and what he got stand out like it never seen a comb. His eyes is dark and deep-set, his nose too big, and he got a thick black moustache that droop over his top lip. But he got such a friendly way about him that everybody like him. He ask a lot of questions and he already know how to make a good try at speaking Cree.
His wife is named Paula. She is an Indian, too, and as shy as anything. She have a new baby the doctor say is called Morning After Rain. I think it was a girl.
He only been here, I bet a month, when I see him walking across the reserve with Chief Tom. At least Chief Tom is walking, taking long steps with his head down. Dr. Don have to almost dance to keep up with him, and to get a bit in front so he can talk to his face.
I’m a long way behind them, but the words carry in the cold air. From Dr. Don I hear words like clinic, Government Grants, nurse, disgrace,
and about ten times, money.
Chief Tom only shake his head. We all know the Chief, being a Government MLA, could do lots of things for us if he really wanted. But he is more interested in sell off timber or give away land to make himself look good to the white people.
It don’t take Dr. Don long to spot him for what he is.
“When is the next election for Chief?” he ask us.
“Next summer,” we tell him.
“We’d better get an organization started soon. That Chief of yours needs to be replaced and fast.”
We suggest he should run.
“Hey, I’m Indian, but not Cree. How about a woman Chief? Bedelia Coyote isn’t afraid of anyone, and she’s a very knowledgeable young woman where Indian problems are concerned.”
Some of us get working on that right away.
I sure hope Dr. Don knows what he is doing. Chief Tom be a dangerous man to have as an enemy, ’cause he know lots of white people in high places.
At Christmas time, Dr. Don he stay right on the reserve. All the doctors in Wetaskiwin and Ponoka run off to Hawaii or someplace hot, but Dr. Don just pitch in and act like he is one of us. Funny thing is that a few sick white people who can’t find their own doctors come to the reserve to see Dr. Don. Ordinarily, you couldn’t get a white man to the reserve with a gun to his head unless he want to convert us to his religion or repossess one of our cars.
On Christmas Eve, Dr. Don emcee the Christmas Concert down to Blue Quills Hall. Boy, he can tell good jokes and everybody have a happy evening.
At the end of the concert he make a little speech to say how happy he and his family is here at Hobbema, and how he plans to work here until he retires and then still stay here.
It make everybody feel all warm inside.
Then he take from his pocket a sheet of paper, and what he read is kind of a poem. I couldn’t remember it too good, so I went to see his wife just before her and the baby moved away and she gived it to me. It is the same copy he read at the concert, wrote in blue ink in real tiny handwriting. It seem to me it is both happy and sad at the same time.
Words are nothing
like pebbles beside mountains
Deeds are all that count
Watch and listen with me this Christmas
For it is the small daily deeds of men
that tell the heart what it needs to know
Quietly, as you have made me welcome
I will quietly go about my work
But listen not to my words—wait and watch.
Everybody is silent for about 10 seconds after Dr. Don finish. And, as Frank Fencepost would say, you could have heard a flea fart. Then everybody break into clapping for a long time. Finally, Eli Bird start in soft on his guitar and Mary Boxcar join in on the piano, and we all sing “Silent Night.”
One morning in January I meet Dr. Don walk down toward the General Store.
“You ever see anything this beautiful, Silas?” he say, and point at the pinky sky where two pale sundogs hang like grapefruit, one on each side of the sun. It is really cold and Dr. Don’s moustache be froze white as if he dipped it in flour.
“That’s what I want to be when I die,” he say.
“A sundog?”
“A child of the sun—just floating in the morning sky, free as a balloon. Do your people have any legends about sundogs?”
It sure embarrass me but I have to admit I don’t know.
“You should write one then,” he say.
“Legends aren’t really in my line,” I say. I sure don’t figure that in just a few weeks, I will be writing this story about Dr. Don.
It was Chief Tom’s girlfriend, Samantha Yellowknees, who started up the trouble. Chief Tom ain’t smart enough to do something like that himself. In fact, if it weren’t for Samantha, Chief Tom would still be cutting ties for the railway.
What she done, she tell us one evening at Blue Quills Hall, was to phone the Department of Indian Affairs. “I told them to call the College of Physicians and Surgeons and check out this Dr. Morninglight. There’s something not right about him. I can smell a phoney,” say Samantha, glare at us, mean as a schoolteacher.
“If anybody know the smell of a phoney, it be you,” says Frank Fence-post. That go right over Chief Tom’s head but Samantha look ugly at us and square her chin. Her and Chief Tom been living together for a couple of years in an apartment in Wetaskiwin, ever since the Chief left his wife Mary. Samantha be a city Indian, been to the Toronto University to study sociology.
When we tell Dr. Don what been done he just smile kind of sad and say, “A man should be judged by his deeds.” Then he stand silent for a long time.
It was about a week later in the late afternoon that the RCMP car pull up in front of the Residential School where Dr. Don hold his office hours in the Nurse’s Room. It is Constable Greer, who be about the only nice RCMP I ever known. Constable Greer got grey hair and sad pouches under his eyes like a dog. But he got with him a young Constable who be about seven feet tall in his fur hat, and speak hardly nothing but French.
Constable Greer read out the charge against Dr. Don, only the name he read don’t be Dr. Don’s, but three long words that sound like Mexican names you hear on the television. He kind of apologize, but say he got to take Dr. Don to the RCMP office in Wetaskiwin. What he read out say Dr. Don is charged with “Impersonating a Doctor.”
Dr. Don finish bandaging up the hand of Caroline Stick. Then he put on his parka and nod to Constable Greer. They is about to walk out when the French Constable step forward, pull out his handcuffs and snap them on Dr. Don’s wrists. Then he sort of steer Dr. Don in front of him, look like a giant pushing a child.
Some of us stand around as Dr. Don duck his head and get into the back of the RCMP car. We still stand around even after the car is gone. It is a big shock to all of us. For me it is like that whole place where my stomach is, been empty for a long time.
But the shock is ten times worse the next day when the word come from Wetaskiwin that Dr. Don is dead. Hanged himself with his shirt from the cell bars is what everybody say.
All of a sudden the reserve is crawling with reporters. One of them big trucks from CFRN-TV in Edmonton get up to the school before we tear up the culvert in the road so the rest of them got to walk instead of drive.
Them reporters is kind of angry that we can’t tell them anything they don’t already know. They are waving a copy of the Edmonton Journal with a story that start out:
HOBBEMA—Donato Fernando Tragaluz took his own life after he was unmasked as a medical imposter.
Tragaluz killed himself in the Wetaskiwin RCMP lockup after police arrested him here Tuesday for impersonating a doctor. Using the medical documents of the real Dr. Donald Morninglight, the 42-year-old Tragaluz practised as the town’s doctor for nearly four months.
The Journal has learned that Tragaluz posed as a doctor under several aliases in communities in Canada, the U.S., and Mexico for about ten years, evading medical authorities, police and the FBI.
One group is interviewing Samantha Yellowknees.
“I knew there was something wrong with him,” says Samantha, baring her upper teeth like a dog looking at you over a bone. “No real doctor in his right mind would start a practice out here.”
“What about his funeral?” they all want to know.
Mrs. Morninglight said she guessed he was Catholic if he was anything. She get some of us to call on the Catholic church, but the priests shy away from the whole deal as if they get germs if they get too close. “He can’t be buried by the church because he killed himself,” they say. “People who kill themselves is going to hell for sure,” is what they say. It seem to me the church do all they can to help them along.
Nobody know what to do for a while. Mrs. Morninglight, who always been silent, is even more now. She say she didn’t know he wasn’t who he said he was. They only been married a little over a year.
“All I want to do is go home,” she say. Turn out home f
or her is South Dakota.
Then Mad Etta step in. Suppose with Mad Etta, I should say waddle. “We got to show we ain’t as stupid as the white men, about a lot of things,” say Etta and she get me to call a meeting of all the newspaper people who been creep around the reserve on their tip-toes for the last couple of days, take pictures and talk to anybody who even say they knew Dr. Don.
Etta can speak English good as me, but she just sit big as a bear on the tree-trunk chair in her cabin, arms fat as railroad ties folded across her big belly.
“This here is our tribal Medicine Lady,” I tell them, squint into the glare of the lights that go with the TV camera. “You ask me questions. I’ll translate them to Cree for her. She’ll answer in Cree and I’ll translate to English for you.”
Things are pretty easy at first, except that Mad Etta she leave those easy questions for me to answer. She give a long speech in Cree that the white people think is her answer, but she really be saying things to make me and the other Indians laugh.
Like somebody ask how long she been Medicine Lady.
What she say to me in Cree is, “Look at that guy with the pointed face who ask the question. He got his hair stiffened up like it been mixed with honey. Try to imagine him naked, make love to a woman, or even a goat.” She say this real serious.
“Forty-one years,” I tell that weasel-faced man.
About two hours before, we buried Dr. Don after having our own service for him at Blue Quills Hall. Take Eathen Firstrider, Robert Coyote, and about a half-dozen other guys all morning to carve out a grave with pickaxes up on a hill where Dr. Don can look down on the town and up at the sky. Mary Boxcar play the piano and we sing the Hank Williams song, “I Saw the Light.” A few people say nice things about Dr. Don, like Moses Badland, who tell about the time Dr. Don walk eight miles into the bush to sew up the foot he cut while splitting wood.
“He may not have been a real doctor, but at least he show us the kind of medical attention we should expect,” say Bedelia Coyote and a few people applaud a bit.
I leave my ski-cap off as me, Eathen, Robert, Frank, Rufus, and Bedelia carry the coffin out of the hall. The wind chew at my ears with its little needle teeth.
The Essential W. P. Kinsella Page 24