“Out and around,” I summarized. “How’s the burying business?”
“Mortally slow,” he answered as he always did. “Isn’t that Riley Wright I just bumped into?”
“I’m sorry to report, it is.”
“Mariah and him are back together, eh?”
“They are not. They’re just doing a bunch of these centennial stories togeth—with each other, is all. I’m traveling around with them while they do.”
He studied down at me. “All three of you are together?”
“Well, yeah, together but not together. Thrown in with one another, more like. Howard, it’s kind of complicated.”
“I imagine it is,” Howard said and departed.
My next visitor was none other than Mariah, who by now had cut her photographic swath across the room to those of us at the sewing frames and tables.
“I bet you never knew Betsy Ross had a beard,” I addressed to her, jabbing my needle elegantly into the flagcloth as she neared.
It didn’t even register on her. She wore a puzzled frown and even more uncharacteristically had dropped the camera from her eyes and was drilling a snake-killing gaze across the room.
I leaned out and saw for myself what was bugging her. Our centennial bunch was not exactly a youth group and wherever there was a Gros Ventrian wearing glasses, which was to say virtually everywhere, bright points of light glittered off both lenses. Or if a person happened to be anywhere near a wall, his or her skin was paled out and huge shadows were flung up behind the wan spectre. Any shot by Mariah was going to look like fireflies flitting through a convalescent ward.
Perfectly unconcerned about dazzling the populace, Tonsil Vapor had decided our centennial flag was a backdrop worthy of him and was having his cameraman move the lightstands here and there in front of the sewing tables. What astounded me was that everybody was pretending to be unaware they were being immersed in a pool of television light. Squint and bear it, was the code of the televised.
Not with Mariah. Under the pressure of her glower, the TV cameraman roused himself enough to shrug and indicate with a jerk of his head that Tonsil Vapor was the impresario here. Tonsil Vapor meanwhile was holding his sport-jacket sleeve against the wall of flag to make sure robin’s egg blue went well with golden.
Mariah marched on him.
“Hey, I’m getting bounce from your lights in every shot I try. How about please holding off for a couple of minutes until I’m done back here?”
“We’re setting up for my opening stand-up,” Tonsil Vapor informed her.
“I can tell you are. How-about-turning-off-your-lights-for-two-minutes-while-I-finish-shooting-here.”
“Television has every right to be here,” Tonsil Vapor huffed. “This is a public event.”
“That’s the whole fucking point,” Mariah elucidated. “It’s not yours to hog.”
“Let’s do my stand-up,” Tonsil Vapor directed past her to his cameraman and focused his concern on whether his tie was hanging straight.
“Whoa,” Mariah told the TV pair. “If you’re so determined to shoot, we’ll all shoot.”
She reached in her gear bag and pulled out a fresh camera, aiming it into the pleasantly surprised visage of Tonsil Vapor. I was more than surprised: it was the motorized one she’d used to take the rapid-fire photographs of the marauding buffalo bull at Moiese. Tonsil Vapor Purvis didn’t look to me like he was that much of a mobile target.
With the bright wash of light on him, he fingered the knot of his tie. Brought his microphone up. Aimed his chin toward the lens of the TV camera. “Ready?” he asked his cameraman, although with a little peek out the corner of his eye at Mariah to make sure she was set to shoot, too. The TV cameraman echoed “Ready” flatly back.
“This is Paul whingwhingwhing Purvis, bringing you another Count-down 100 whingwhingwhing moment from here in whingwhing—”
“Cut!” yelped the cameraman, pulling the earphones out away from his ears. Mariah quit firing the motorized shutter and the ricochet sounds stopped.
Tonsil Vapor swiveled his head toward her. “Your camera. We’re picking up the noise.”
“That’s okay, no charge,” Mariah answered calmly, keeping the offending camera zeroed into Tonsil Vapor’s face. “You’ve been donating all kinds of light into my photography.”
“Seriously, here,” Tonsil Vapor said, a bit pouty. “We have an opening stand-up to do.”
“Up you and your stand-up both,” Mariah told him. “This is a public event and my gear has every right to be here.”
Tonsil Vapor stared at her. Uncertainly he edged the microphone up toward his mouth. Mariah triggered off a couple of whings and he jerked the mike back down.
With a scowl, Tonsil Vapor swiveled his head the other direction and addressed his cameraman. “Can we edit out her noise?” The cameraman gave him the French salute, shrugging his shoulders and raising the palms of his hands at the same time.
Tonsil Vapor visibly thought over the matter. Mariah did not bring the commotional camera down from her eye until he announced, “Actually, the bar is a more picturesque spot to do my opening stand-up.”
Riley, prince of oblivion, sashayed back in from the Bago with his tape recorder as TVdom was withdrawing to the bar and Mariah was setting to work again on the sewing scene at the far end of the flag. He made a beeline to me.
“Quite a turnout, Jick,” he observed brilliantly.
“Mmhmm,” I replied and sewed onward.
“Lots of folks,” he said as if having tabulated.
“Quite a bunch,” I confirmed.
“I was wondering if you could kind of sort them out to me, so I can figure out good ones to talk to,” he admitted, indicating to the tape recorder as if this was the machine’s idea rather than his. “You know more about everybody here than they do about themselves.”
“Gee, Riley, I wouldn’t know where to start.” I did a couple more stitches before adding: “Everybody in the Two country is equally unique.”
Had I wanted, I indeed could have been Riley’s accomplice on almost anyone in that filled room, for the Two Medicine country was out in force tonight. These are not the best of times for towns like Gros Ventre or the rural neighborhoods they are tied to. The young go away, the discount stores draw shopping dollars off to bigger places, the land that has always been the hope of such areas is thinner and thinner of people and promise. Yet, maybe because the human animal cannot think trouble all the time, anybody with a foot or wheel to get here had come tonight to advance the community’s centennial rite. All the couples from the ranches along English Creek: Harold and Melody Busby, Bob and Janie Rozier, Olaf and Sonia Florin. From up the South Fork, Tricia and Gib Hahn, who ran the old Withrow and Hahn ranches combined. My longtime Noon Creek neighbor Tobe Egan, retired to town now. A number of the farm families from out east of town, Walsinghams and Priddys and Van Der Wendes, Tebbetses and Kerzes and Joneses. Townspeople by battalions: Joe and Myrna Prentiss from the Merc, the Muldauers who ran the Coast-to-Coast hardware store, Jo Ann and Vern Cooder from the Rexall drugstore. Riley’s infinite faith in me to the contrary, one pair I didn’t know the names of yet—the young couple who had opened a video parlor where The Toggery clothing store used to be. The bank manager Norman Peyser and his wife Barbara. Flo and Sam Vissert from the Pastime Bar three doors down the street. Others and others—not least, the new Gros Ventrian whom I addressed now as he bustled past Riley and me carrying a coffee urn as big as he was. “Nguyen, how you doing?”
“Doing just right!” Nguyen Trang Hoc and his wife Kieu and their three kids were being sponsored by a couple of the churches there in town. They were boat people, had come out of Vietnam in one of those hell voyages. Nguyen worked as a waiter here in the Medicine Lodge cafe, already speaking English sentences of utmost enthusiasm: “Here is your menu! I will let you look! Then we will talk some more!”
Naturally Riley was scanning the night’s civic outpouring in his own cockeyed way. “Who
’s the resurrection of Buffalo Bill over there?” he asked, blinking inquisitively toward the figure hobbling ever so slowly through the front door.
“Aw,” I began, “that’s just—” and then the brainstorm caught up with me.
I identified the individual to Riley with conspicuous enthusiasm. “Been here in the Two country since its footings were poured. You might find him highly interesting to talk to. Garland’s kind of a shy type, but I bet if you tell him you’re from the newspaper that would encourage him a little.”
“History on the hoof, hmm?” Riley perked right up and headed toward the front. “You’re starting to show real talent for this centennial stuff, Jick.”
While it is true I was the full length of the cafe away from Riley’s introduction to the arrivee, there was no lack of volume to hearing what followed.
“NEWSPAPER! JUST THE GUY I WANT TO SEE! YOUNG FELLOW, WHAT YOU OUGHT TO BE WRITING A STORY ABOUT IS ME! YOU KNOW, I WAS BORN WITH THE GOSHDAMN CENTURY!”
Eyes rolled in all of us who were within earshot, which was to say everybody in the Medicine Lodge. Multiply the crowd of us by the total of times we had each heard the nativity scene of Good Help Hebner and you had a long number. Riley didn’t seem grateful to be the first fresh listener of this eon, either. The look he sent me still had sting in it after traveling the length of the cafe. I concentrated on needlework and maintaining a straight face. “BY NOW HALF THIS COUNTRY IS HEBNERS, YOUNG FELLOW! AND I STARTED EVERY ONE OF THEM OUT OF THE CHUTE!”
Riley had no way of knowing it but that particular procreatorial brag was as close to the truth as Good Help was ever likely to come. Which made me shake my head all the more at the fact that it had taken the old so-and-so until his eighty-ninth year to start looking paternal, let alone patriarchal. For as long as I could remember, Good Help—need I say, that nickname implied the exact opposite—had lazed through life under about a week’s grayish grizzle of whiskers; never enough to count as an intentional beard, never so little as to signify he had bothered to shave within recent memory. But now for the centennial he somehow had blossomed forth in creamy mustache and goatee. To me it still was a matter of close opinion whether Good Help more resembled Buffalo Bill or a billy goat, but definitely his new facial adornment was eyecatching.
“YOU GOT TO GO DO WHAT, YOUNG FELLOW? SPEAK UP, I’M GETTING SO DEAF I CAN’T HEAR MYSELF FART!” I couldn’t actually hear either the excuse Riley was employing to extricate himself, but Good Help provided everybody in town the gist of it: “GOT TO GO SEE A MAN ABOUT A DOG, HUH? YOU KNOW WHAT THEY SAY, STAND UP CLOSE TO THE TROUGH, THE NEXT FELLOW MIGHT BE BAREFOOT!”
While Riley now tried to make an invisible voyage to the men’s room in the bar half of the Medicine Lodge, I chuckled and checked on Mariah’s doings. Easily enough done. She was wearing the turquoise shirt she’d had on at the Fourth of July rodeo and you could see her from here to Sunday. As she gravitated through the crowd, ever scouting for the next camera moment, it struck me what a picture she made herself.
“Oh, Jick, I’m so relieved to see you here,” Althea Frew pounced in on me out of nowhere. In her centennial getup of a floor-length gingham dress with a poke bonnet, she looked as if she’d just trundled in by prairie schooner. “We were afraid you’d given up on the committee.”
“Would I do that?” I denied, right then wishing I had.
“It’s nice to see you back in the swim of things,” she assured me and patted my arm. Althea was the kind of person full of pats. “Can’t I bring you a cup of coffee?” she offered avidly.
Only if it is big enough for me to torpedo you in, I thought to myself. Dave Frew had died of emphysema a year or so ago and all too evidently Althea had formed the notion that because she was a widow and I now was a widower, we were going to be an ordained pair at gatherings such as this. My own notion was, like hell we were. Already I had dodged her on card parties and square dancing at the Senior Citizens’ Center. Althea seemed to regard me as an island just waiting to have her airdropped onto it. Let her land and there’d be an instant new civilization, activities for all my waking hours. Christamighty, I more than anybody knew that I needed refurbishing of some kind from my grief for Marcella. But to put myself up for adoption by Althea . . .
“You take it with just a dab of cream, don’t you?” Uh oh. She’d already started to catalogue me. I knew where that would go. If she inkled out the dosage in my coffee, as the night follows the day it would lead to how crisp I like my fish fried and from there onward to my favorite piece of music, on and on until she would know my underwear size.
“Black,” I lied. “Don’t bother, I’ll get myself a cup, I was about to head that direction anyhow.”
As I recessed from my sewing and tried to tactically retreat to the coffee urn, Althea fell in step as if I’d invited her along. Wasn’t this just ducky, now. She had us in motion in tandem in public, a hearts-and-flowers advertisement for the whole town to see. I craned around for Mariah’s reaction to this. For once I was thankful to have her immersed in her picture-taking, across the room with her back to Althea and me as she immortalized Janie Rozier zinging a seam of the flag through her sewing machine.
I will swear on any Bible, I did not have anything major against Althea Frew. But I had nothing for her, either. True, Marcella and I had known her and Dave ever since we were young ranch couples starting out. Neighbors, friends, people who partnered each other a few times a night at dances, but not more than that. You cannot love everyone you know. Love isn’t a game of tag, now you’re it, now she’s it.
I sipped at the plastic cup of coffee Althea bestowed on me and tried not to wince at its bitter taste. For that matter, I had no illusions that Althea was after me for my irresistible romantic allure. Simply put, pickings were slim in the Two Medicine country for women who outlived their husbands, as most of them showed every sign of doing. Here tonight for instance, Howard Stonesifer was one of those mother-smothered bachelors; Althea knew that even if old lady Stonesifer ever passed on, there was no denting Howard’s set of habits. Tobe Egan over in the corner was a widower but his health was shot, and why should Althea take on another ill case after the years she had spent with Dave’s emphysema? Go through this entire community and the actuarial tables were pretty damn bare for Althea’s brand of husband-looking. Which was why yours truly was about to be the recipient of a whopping piece of the Happy Birthday, Montana! cake Althea was now adoringly cutting.
Right then Riley re-emerged from the direction of the men’s room, cautiously checking around for the whereabouts of Good Help Hebner. I was not keen on fending with him just then, particularly if he was going to notice the close company Althea was keeping me, but it turned out Riley was pointedly ignoring my existence and instead migrated directly to Mariah.
Whatever he was saying to her, for once it seemed to be in earnest. She listened to him warily, but listened. Then came her speaking turn, and he nodded and nodded as if he couldn’t agree more. It dawned on me that they must be conferring about whether to do a piece about tonight. I willed Mariah to tell him to go straight to hell, that their mutual woe of ending up in marriage had started here when she shot and he wrote that earlier Gros Ventre centennial shindig. Instead she studied him with care, then turned and pondered the cafeful of people as if taking inventory. While Althea yattered at me and I took solace in cake, Mariah led Riley over near us where Nan Hill, snow-haired and tiny with age, was sitting sewing.
“Nan, this man would like to talk to you for a story in the newspaper. How about telling him about doing the washing at Fort Peck while I take a picture, would you mind?” As Riley moved in with his tape recorder and a smile that would make you want to take him home and give him a bed by the fire, Mariah checked her light meter, then stood back, biting her lower lip as she held the camera up under her neck, lens pointing up, waiting. Waiting. Then ahead of the moment but somehow having seen it on its way, she swiftly but unobtrusively shifted the camera over to her eye as the old w
oman warmed into the telling.
Age is humped on her small back. It began to descend there in 1936 in daily hours over a washboard, scrubbing at the Missouri-mudded clothing of the men at labor on the biggest earthen dam in the world, Fort Peck. “We went there with just nothing and J. L. got on as a roustabout. I wanted to find some way of earning, too, so I put up a sign Laundry Done Here. I charged 15¢ for shirts—and that was washed, ironed, mended and loose buttons sewed on—and 10¢ for a pair of shorts, another 10¢ for an undervest, 5¢ for a handkerchief, and 10¢ for a pair of socks. Any kind of pants was 25¢ for washing and pressing. I had the business, don’t think I didn’t. Those three years at Fort Peck, I always had six lines of clothes hanging in the yard.”
The waltz of the camera, Riley following, led on from Nan to the Hoc family, Mariah poising in that long-legged crouch of hers while focusing on the little Hoc girl, her left hand under the camera cupping it upward in an offering way, right hand delicately fingering the lens setting, her shoulderlong flow of hair behind the camera like an extravagant version of the hood a photographer of old would hide his head under, and her voice going through a repertoire of coaxes until one brought out on the little Hoc girl what was not quite a smile but an expression more beautiful than that, Mariah telling her as if they had triumphed together, “Thaaat’s what I want to see.”
They are Asian delta people, newly come to American mountain headwaters. Their immense journey pivots on the children, especially on the lithe daughter made solemnly older by the presence of two cultures within her. Driver’s license, income tax, television, food budget, rock music, all the reckless spill of America must come to her family through the careful funnel of this ten-year-old woman who is now the mother of words to her own parents.
Althea was saying in my ear now, “It’s so nice to see Riley back in your family. He and Mariah make such a wonderful couple.”
“They are not—”
“People their age, they should take happiness while they can, don’t you think?”