Calypso neighed at the post.
Odysseus, once inside, handed each mongrel a piece of dried meat. He limped toward the lantern and sat on a rough chopping block. He raised his arms, waved his huge hands near the lantern, and reached for the shadows.
Odysseus suddenly turned to the old healer and sang “The Last Rose of Summer” by the poet Thomas Moore. We were moved by the great voice of the trader, and the mongrels turned their ears and howled with the singer. The voices of the trader and the mongrels resounded in the cabin. Shimmer nuzzled the ankle of the trader. Mona Lisa smiled and moved closer to the lantern, and she crossed her paws at the feet of the trader. Ghost Moth sat directly at the side of the trader. He raised his head in the shadows and bayed with the music.
The last rose of summer
Left blooming alone.
Odysseus told stories about the creation of the melody and then recounted the story of the great opera singer Luisa Tetrazzini who sang “The Last Rose of Summer” two years earlier on Christmas Eve on the streets of San Francisco, California. He remembered the night was bright and
clear.
The trader recounted the great San Francisco earthquake, on April 18, 1906, as a personal experience. He must have read the news reports in the Tomahawk that more than three thousand people died from the earthquake and fire. He created a sense of natural presence in stories, more memorable than newspaper accounts, but he never experienced the earthquake or the actual outside concert by Luisa Tetrazzini.
Odysseus told stories that created an instant sense of presence and position. Time and duration were never necessary in his creative chants, and the stories he created that night were visionary peyote operas. The operas flourished as continuous dreams. He pointed in the direction of the stories he recounted to San Francisco, Montana, New Mexico, Lake Itasca, and White Earth with his eyes, a pucker and tack of his lips, and sometimes he would pause and gesture with his huge shoulders and hands. These gestures of direction created the actual and heartfelt scenes in the world of stories. Natives have always told stories with a sense of presence and direction, the natural scenes of a cultural opera. The trader was native by his stories.
Luisa Tetrazzini was sensuous that Christmas Eve. She wore an enormous hat and a white gown that shimmered in the light. The trader said she waved a stole of ostrich feathers and mounted the outside stage at the intersection of Kearny, Geary, and Market streets in San Francisco.
Odysseus arose from the chopping block seat near the lantern and his huge shadow reached across the entire cabin. The mongrels moved out of the reach of his shadow. His mighty voice teased and fluttered the lantern flame as he sang the final lines of “The Last Rose of Summer.” Nosy and Harmony moaned and moved closer to the healer in the light of the lantern. Only the mongrels dared to move as he sang.
When true hearts lie withered
And fond ones are flown
Oh! Who would inhabit
This bleak world alone?
The trader chanted and the mongrels bayed the sweet name of Luisa Tetrazzini. She was there that clear night in his song and stories, and we could hear the beautiful voice of the soprano, a pure and natural sound, the true words of withered hearts and mongrels in the white pine that summer, and at the same time in the memory of the trader on Christmas Eve. Tetrazzini was a natural presence that summer at Bad Boy Lake.
››› ‹‹‹
Aloysius convinced the trader that we had met Oscar Wilde at the Nicollet House, the old hotel, in Minneapolis. The playwright and snappy poet had long hair, and beautiful blue eyes. He wore a huge slouchy black hat, and a heavy fur-trimmed coat even in the summer. We told the trader about his lecture at the Academy of Music. The Tribune newspaper wrote a very critical review of his lecture on decorative art.
Odysseus leaned back on the block, smiled, touched his peace medal, and beckoned to show he understood our counter tease and story. Wilde died when we were five years old but the trader heard the sense of presence in our stories. Since we could not have actually met the playwright we imagined his presence in a story that summer night in the cabin, in the same way that the trader created the presence of Luisa Tetrazzini.
Misaabe waved one hand over the lantern, and the fidgety mongrels moaned and moved to the other side of the cabin closer to my brother. The trader shouted out his praise of our peyote opera, the visionary presence of Oscar Wilde at Bad Boy Lake.
The truth is rarely pure and never simple, the trader recited as his own words, and then paused to touch Harmony. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either easy, pure, or righteous, and peyote stories a complete impossibility. Many years later we read the original words in “The Importance of Being Earnest” by Oscar Wilde. The trader had changed “modern literature” to “peyote stories,” neither new, true, pure or simple. Some of his stories were peyote operas, and the scenes were original, never recitations or liturgy.
Odysseus was a trader and told stories to create a sense of presence, and the scenes were never the same. No wonder the stories of the trader were trusted by natives. The confidence of any trader is appreciated in original trail stories.
The Matchless Mine in Cloud City or Leadville, Colorado, was a salvation of teases and stories about fancy manners, vows of aesthetics, and the descent in a rickety ore bucket with unruly silver miners for dinner, drink, and cigars. Oscar Wilde descended into the dangerous earth with men of deadly risk in search of silver, stories, and deliverance.
Wilde had lectured on aesthetics at the Tabor Grand Opera in the Rocky Mountains. He lectured and read passages from an autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, and explained that the sculptor could not be there because he died three centuries earlier. A wild miner shouted out from the back of the audience, Who shot him?
The poet was courted by the miners to a saloon dance and read a notice over the piano: PLEASE DO NOT SHOOT THE PIANIST. HE IS DOING HIS BEST. Wilde commented that the simple notice was the “only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across.” Wilde had supper in the “heart of the mountain,” and the “first course being whiskey, the second whiskey, and the third whiskey.”
Wilde could have easily survived by stories, even the trickery of shamans on the White Earth Reservation. My original stories created the presence of the eccentric playwright on the reservation, and his name became an aesthetic tease. The federal agent and our teachers at the government school, however, tried to conceal the name of the decadent poet who wore black silk stockings and a purple jacket.
The playwright would have survived the lusty monks at the headwaters by stories, and he would have teased the priest and nuns with bestial stories. Every mongrel on the reservation would have been at his side ready to heal the wounds of godly sincerity.
Wilde was a poser of mock revelations, and one evening, after drinking cheap whiskey with the bank manager, the postmaster, and our uncle, he entered the confessional at Saint Benedict’s Mission Church. He closed the black curtain and waited to reveal his most outrageous secrets, aesthetic sex and heart booty, to the priest but he fell asleep on the hard wooden bench.
Father Aloysius nudged the poet awake that early morning and started the confession. Wilde created more stories and confessions than the priest could ever remember to absolve, the sins and sorrows of extravagance. Only a mighty act of comedy and ironic contrition could balance his universe of chance, original sins, and roguery.
The Matchless Mine was the site of his last confession, and the silver barbarians absolved his aesthetic sins forever. Wilde is the only silky poet who has ever found sacramental absolution in a silver mine.
Wilde was the utmost promise of the weird, showy, elusive, tricky, and decadent bother in a simple surname word that summer on the reservation, the perfect time and name and natural stories of deliverance on a federal and churchy colony.
› 7 ‹
BLUE HORSES
— — — — — — — 1915 — — — — — — —
The First
World War was underway, but the news reports of faraway military encounters hardly mattered on the reservation that summer. We were curious, and the names, empires, and places of the war were strange. We practiced the accent of names in the news to hawk the Tomahawk at the Ogema Station.
The Hotel Leecy livery stable was not a source of international stories, but we continued to pronounce the new names in the news, Hapsburg, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Gavrilo Princip, Ypres, Passchendaele, Marne, and many others that summer, and the names were mere captions of war in a distant colonial civilization.
The Great War became more immediate and identifiable only when we read that a German submarine torpedoed an American ship near England. The “Digest of World’s Important News: Epitome of the Big Happening of the Week” in the Tomahawk had been our primary source of news and names to hawk the newspaper, but then, as older stable boys, we read more closely and tried to understand a world war that would forever change our lives and the culture of the White Earth Reservation.
“The American oil tank steamer Gulflight” was “torpedoed” near the Isles of Scilly in the Celtic Sea by the Germans, reported the Tomahawk on May 13, 1915. The Gulflight displayed the flag of the United States, and German submarines had torpedoed “seven more vessels,” steamers and trawlers, from Norway and England.
President Wilson, Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, and experts on international law “decided to suspend judgment in the case of the American tank ship Gulflight.” Captain Alfred Gunter and two sailors died in the attack by the Germans.
A month later we read in the Tomahawk that a German Rumpler Taube, the very first monoplane, and military Zeppelins dropped several bombs on London and on the suburbs of Paris. The United States entered the war three years later, after a presidential dither in the name of international peace, and we were drafted for service in the American Expeditionary Forces.
The Lusitania was torpedoed and sank on May 7, 1915.
“President Wilson declared that a proud distinction might fall upon the nations of the three Americas,” reported the Tomahawk. “In an address at the Pan-American Financial conference at Washington he predicted that great results would arise from it and that it might be influential in restoring peace to war-ridden Europe.”
Augustus shouted and raved about the political milksops and maniacs of war. President Wilson was a milksop, more oratory than action, because he refused to denounce the submarine attacks, and Kaiser Wilhelm was the maniac war emperor of Germany. Our uncle published international stories about the war every week, and he ranted everyday about imperious federal agents and the obvious consequences of hesitant politicians.
The president negotiated peace by isolation, not by backbone, spirit, and power. He should have declared his outrage over the destruction of cities and libraries, and the murder of civilians. He should have considered the great visions and bravery of native warriors. The president instead announced that he was our Great White Father. He would rather capitulate in the name of peace than honor native visions and natural reason. Natives resisted colonial and federal occupation for centuries, and then natives served with the same government in several wars, and were always ready to fight again even though most reservation natives were not yet considered citizens of the United States. Naturally the federal agent saluted the president, but the agent has always been on the wrong side of native traditions and stories.
Foamy had no vision or backbone.
Robert Beaulieu, our uncle, was the first native photographer on the White Earth Reservation. That summer he collected some of his pictures for his older brother Augustus Beaulieu. He used a large camera on a tripod and took pictures of stores, the bank, the movie theater, hotels on the reservation, newspaper building, and natives at the annual celebration, but he never took pictures of traditional native spiritual or religious ceremonies. He was once the postmaster, a progressive native on the side of entrepreneurs, and he never talked about anything visionary, totemic, or traditional.
Robert photographed the Big Bear family at a maple sugar camp, and portraits of Maingans the Younger, Waweyaycumig and Nawajibigokwe, Odenegun, the native who told trickster stories to Frances Densmore, and Mary Warren English who was the native interpreter for the musicologist. William Warren, her brother, wrote the first history of the Anishinaabe. The federal agent and teachers never mentioned the native historian, but my mother owned a signed copy. The Minnesota Historical Society published The History of the Ojibway People in 1885.
Aloysius never painted or even mentioned his blue ravens in the presence of our uncle Robert Beaulieu. He was younger than our favorite uncle, smart, and rather distant. Actually he was vain and wore a ridiculous round straw hat on the reservation, and never told a memorable story. He cocked the straw hat to the side but it was not the right size.
We had hawked newspapers for our uncle, and later worked in the livery stable at the Hotel Leecy. Robert had no interest in our adventures, stories, or our talents. He probably considered the stable a lowly occupation. He never listened to my brother, or our mother, and he never commented on my first short local news notices and stories published in the Tomahawk.
Misaabe and the healers were our best friends.
Robert photographed the hotel and the bank but not his own relatives. He even posed with his bright cornet in one of his own pictures, stretched out on the ground with nineteen native brass musicians of the White Earth Band. He never took pictures of my brother or me, or our mother, not even when we were drafted with many of our cousins to serve in the First World War in France.
Aloysius carved three medallions last summer from paper birch trunks, round pendants with the raised image of ravens. The native birch was easier to carve than oak, and the bright blue paint was absorbed in the grain of the wood. The blue ravens were in natural motion, a native medal of peace.
Misaabe told my brother that the raven pendants must be carved from birch that had died by nature, not by storm, disease, or timber cutters. The spirit of the visionary ravens carved in the birch was entrusted with the memory of natural death, not with the cruel sacrifice of an ax or saw. He never mentioned lightning.
Aloysius presented the first raven peace medal to our uncle, Augustus, who was troubled that summer by his health. The second peace medal was a present to the trader Odysseus. The third medal was for the old healer. Misaabe touched the blue raven carved on the birch pendant, and then he turned the medal over and told stories about his son and the great mongrel healers. He scored the single name of his son on the back of the medal.
Animosh had been abandoned ten years ago near Bad Boy Lake. He was about three years old at the time and no one could name or remember the boy. He was stranded in a native mystery, and must have lived alone on the shoreline for several days, but he was not scared by the night. The boy told stories about the party of leaves, stones, birds, and slight waves on the shoreline. He created nicknames for the stones, the cattails, blackbirds, maple and birch leaves, and the clouds. The boy said his name was animosh, or dog, in Anishinaabe.
Animosh created a natural sense of presence and he was never alone. Soon he was more at home with the healer, the mongrels, and nature. The old healer taught the boy how to read and write, but he never attended a mission or government school.
Animosh told stories with a sense of presence.
Mona Lisa and the other mongrels had been abused, wounded, and wary when the old healer rescued them on the reservation. The mongrels gathered at the cabin, and many stayed for only a few days to heal their wounds. Misaabe saved many mongrels from the hands of abusers, and trained them to detect diseases, but some of the testy mongrels would rather mosey and meander than nose and heal with the old man and his boy.
Misaabe never actually described how he had trained the mongrels to become natural healers, but we learned from the doctor that the old healer collected urine and other body fluids from natives with diseases. The mongrels learned to nose and detect the scent of human malad
ies. The old healer described the trace and reek of disease as a brutal civil war in the body, not the scent and memory of natural death, but rather some cold treachery, a pious surrender, the sacrifice of humor. Diseases were held at bay with creative stories of trickster stones, thunder, and natural motions of the cranes.
Odysseus once invited us to participate in a peyote ceremony near Bad Boy Lake. That was our first experience with the shiver and mirage of peyote visions and stories, and it would be our last. We learned to trust our own creative sight and stories in the wild thrust of peyote visions that night, to trust the natural tease of bright colors, dreams, totems, and the touch of native mysteries.
Maybe we would return to peyote visions when we were older and not so curious about the secrets of the natural world. Yes, we understood that peyote was another sense of native presence, but we were not mature enough at the time to compare the mighty flight of peyote and natural teases of visions and stories.
Misaabe was our native teacher and the mongrels were our healers. We wondered, of course, why the old healer had not taken part in the peyote ceremonies near his cabin. Peyote customs and songs in the woods were natural attractions, but the old healer was evasive. He told us stories about a giant native who once had such intense peyote visions about moths and praying mantis he could never escape a miniature sense of his presence. He forever waved his arms as a moth to the light and walked slowly with the mantis. The giant hunted insects and soon vanished without a shadow.
Misaabe told the story of the giant native and the mantis in the faint lantern light of the cabin. The moths rebounded on the globe. The mongrels moaned over the stories, and we wondered if the tiny old healer, our teacher and best friend, was once the very native giant in his story. Misaabe might have been the giant who lost his shadow and returned to the reservation with his mongrel healers. The old healer, the mongrels, and the namesake boy rescued each other.
Odysseus arrived on the reservation that summer with a new song entitled “Unreconstructed Rebel” to tease the federal agent who had taunted him about the music of the American Civil War. When we heard the unmistakable voice of the trader we rushed out of the stable and tried to sing along but the words were not familiar.
Blue Ravens: Historical Novel Page 9