Fools Crow

I recently read a novel called Fools Crow, written by James Welch in the mid-80s.  I cannot recommend it highly enough. 

In the book, Welch tells the story of a young man who is a member of the Lone Eaters, a band of Blackfeet (called Pikuni in the book) in Montana territory some time between the Civil War and the turn of the twentieth century.  When the story begins, he is a nebbishy eighteen year-old named White Man’s Dog who is frequently pushed around and talked over by the other kids, including his younger brother, Running Fisher.  Here is their father, Rides-at-the-door, a pillar of the Pikuni community, musing as he watches the two sons near the beginning of the book:

For so many sleeps, moons, his elder son had been morose, even timid, and there was talk around that he might choose the coward’s way, that he would never strike the enemies.  No one said this directly to Rides at-the-door, but he knew; one always knows these things.  As he refilled his pipe, he glanced over at his younger son, Running Fisher.  He was the one they talked about.  At sixteen winters he had already taken two horses from the Cutthroats, including one heavy spotted horse that he was training to be a buffalo-runner.  He was tall and wiry and the girls pointed him out.  Men teased him but not too far, while the women made sure their daughters crossed his path as often as possible.  Only the young men were wary of him.

The story is about White Man’s Dog’s transformation from nebbish to respected community leader.  Near the beginning of the book, he joins a raid against a band of Crows.  He acquits himself well and is given the new name “Fools Crow” because of the way he uses diversionary tactics to help the band capture a large group of horses.   In the rest of the book, Fools Crow gets married, becomes a father, engages in a painful right of passage, negotiates with the U.S. army, begins an apprenticeship with a tribal healer, and sees some of his childhood friends go bad.  By the time the book ends, he is the Native equivalent of a recent medical school graduate or special forces alum about to launch a promising run for Congress.

I am leery of the possibly too-easy parallels to modern life woven throughout the book, but parallels abound.  The revenge of the nerds.  The jocks, the stoners, the geeks.  The science teacher mentor.  The wealthy father worried about his place in the community.  The father afraid that his son is gay.  Small people dealing with an implacable bureaucracy.  The good girl, the bad girl, the just-be-friends girl.  I do not know whether these are there because they are universal to human existence or because they are the author’s projection of his own viewpoint on that of a pre-modern hunter-gatherer (James Welch had Blackfeet and Gros Ventre blood, but he lived in the late twentieth century and went to college), but they are powerful.  However, the most powerful aspect of the book is how the narrative voice makes familiar things strange by painting them from the perspective of someone from a radically different background, on the other side of history.  This is most evident in the language.  The reader is dropped into a sea of uncapitalized new vocabulary that is just there, and expected to swim.  The sand hills is the afterlife.  The blackhorns are the buffalo, although a strong horse is a buffalo chaser, not a blackhorn chaser.  The seizers are the U.S, military (not to be confused with the Napikwans, who are white people generally).  The backbone is the ridge of mountains that covers the western third of what is now Montana.  Here is Fools Crow describing a meeting between representatives from several Pikuni bands and Army brass:

“Coffee”, [Heavy Runner] said, using the Napikwan word.

General Sully laughed and instructed the striped-sleeve to bring the pot of coffee that was resting on the barrel stove in the corner.

While they waited for the sergeant to pour the coffee, General Sully spoke in low tones to the other two officers.  Rides-at-the-door couldn’t hear what they were saying, but he could see that they were not pleased.  One of the Napikwans at the other end of the table, a short man with a trim black beard, seemed especially agitated.  He talks and gestured sharply toward the chiefs with a sheaf of papers in his hand.  Rides-at-the-door had not caught his name, but he knew from the way the man was dressed and the way he spoke to the General that he was not one of the seizers.  At last he sat back, with an exaggerated sigh, and the sergeant put coffee cups with steaming black liquid before each man.  Then the sergeant sat down by the elbow of the General.

The chiefs watched Heavy Runner take a sip of coffee.  He made a face and spoke to Rides-at-the-door.

“He wishes the white sand to make it sweet.” Rides-at-the-door spoke Pikuni to the sergeant.

The effect is similar to that of being dropped into a total immersion language class taught by an Irish guy in Trieste.

(Another aspect of total immersion are frequent references to male urination.  I believe that this is a tic peculiar to the entire Welch oevre.  The first clause of the first sentence of his first novel, Winter in the Blood, reads, “In the tall weeds of the borrow pit, I took a leak”.  Many of the male characters of Fools Crow stop off to take a piss here and there.  I did not count the number of occurrences of verbs indicating micturition in the book – Welch favors “piss” – but I reckon there to be anywhere from four to seven such incidents in a book of 390 pages.  At first this is jarring and strange, but after a while it simply serves to capture an important part of the rhythm of everyday life.)

The strangeness further manifests itself in the animist view of the natural world that pervades the story.  The naming convention makes it difficult to tell when the narrator is describing a person, a time of day, or a constellation.  The boundary between the human and the outside world is more permeable than in a western sensibility:

Night Red Light showed her face through the thin clouds as the three men lay on their bellies on the crest of the hill overlooking the Crow encampment.  Seven Persons was at its highest point and the camp was darker and less active than it was on the previous night.  But there was enough light for Eagle Ribs to point out the lodges, the white traders’ camp and, downstream, the horse herds.

And it surfaces in a description of the aftermath of an attack by the army on civilians.  In this passage, the directness of Welch’s language leaves unsaid what it says quite clearly, i.e., that we, the people in whose language the story is written, are the Bosnian Serbs, the Khmer Rouge, or the Hutu:

A dog lay in the snow a few paces away.  Most of his hair had been burned off and his tongue was black against the white teeth.  Then Fools Crow saw something else lying in a patch of blackened, melted snow.  He kicked the horse in the ribs and moved toward it.  The sight made his stomach come up against his ribs.  It was an infant and its head was black and hairless.  Specks of black ash lay in its wide eyes.  Fools Crow fell from the horse and vomited up the handful of pemmican he had eaten earlier that morning.  He was on his hands and knees and the convulsions wracked his body until only a thin yellow stand of saliva hung from his lips.  He stayed in that position and gulped hard until the wracking stopped.  He wiped his mouth and his eyes, then stood.  And he began to pick out the other bodies.  Most of them had been thrown into the burning ledges but not all were black like the infant.  There were scraps of clothes that hadn’t burned.  There was skin and hair and eyes.  There were teeth and bone and arms and legs.  One old woman lay on top of one of the smoking lumps, only the underside of her dress burned.  Her feet were bare.  Fools Crow, through his tears, saw the purple welts on her legs where she had slashed herself a long time ago in mourning a lost one.

The attack described above occurs during an especially cold winter while a disease called the white-scab in Pikuni (smallpox, in English) is decimating the Native population.  But in the spring, they bury their dead and begin life again, as they have before.

When I read the book, I could not help but think that there are two levels of historical irony at work here.  One is the level that Welch intended.  Within the four corners of the book, Fool’s Crow’s story is a success story.  He rises brilliantly to meet the challenges that meet him.  By the end, he is well-launched on the Pikuni cursus honorum.  The problem is that we know that the world in which he has struggled and succeeded is slated to be destroyed in a decade or two.  But there is also an irony that we can see in 2021 that Welch could not see in the 1980s.  The Pikuni continue to hunt buffalo throughout the story.  There are references to many-shots-guns and white hunters, but there is no inkling that the buffalo will disappear shortly.  The Pikuni recognize that they have to travel farther to hunt now than they did previously, and they see that the herds are thinner, but they don’t plan for life without the buffalo because the buffalo are, well, there, as they will always be.  In the same way, the descendants of the Napikwans who cleansed Montana Territory now notice that summers are hotter than they used to be, that portions of the South and Southwest have exceeded the wet-bulb threshold and that coastal cities are inundated more frequently now than before – but they continue to dump carbon into the air and don’t plan for life on a radically changed earth because the earth is there, as it always has been.

Why do I mention this book in a blog about mobile home parks?  Because both involve son-on-stepmother action.

Fools Crow’s story intersects with those of three women.  The first is the third of his father’s three wives, Kills-close-to-the-lake.  The father, Rides-at-the-door, took her as a wife shortly before the story begins, after her father had suffered losses that made it difficult for him to support her or to find a match for her.  She is the same age as Fools Crow.  Wives number one and two freeze her out and Rides-at-the-door treats her like a servant.  The only person in the household who shows her any kindness is Fools Crow/White Man’s Dog.  Here is Fools Crow thinking about her in the early part of the book, still in his nebbish phase:

And then he thought of his father’s youngest wife, Kills-close-to-the-lake, and the way she sometimes looked at him.  That morning he had helped her stretch a blackhorn robe so she could flesh it, and he had felt her eyes on him and had left in haste.  He had never touched the body of a woman.  His friends teased him and called him dog-lover…even the bad girls who hung around the forts wanted nothing to do with him.  Because he did not own a fine gun sand a strong horse they ignored him.

A quarter of the way through the story, after White Man’s Dog has become Fools Crow, Kills-close-to-the-lake slips him a present before he sets off on a raid.  The present is a beaded sheath for the new many-shots gun that he captured from a Crow camp.  Now, that is a loaded gift.

When it is time for Fools Crow to marry, his parents try to set him up with a woman from another band of Pikuni with whose father Rides-at-the-door would like a business alliance.  The woman is described as plump, friendly and hard-working, but there is no oomph.  Instead, he chooses a woman from the Lone Eaters named Red Paint.  Red Paint is the right woman.  She is smart, strong, funny and capable, and their relationship has plenty of snap.  The marriage is a success.

Just when the reader has forgotten Kills-close-to-the-lake, she surfaces again.  We learn that she and Fool’s Crow’s little brother, Running Fisher, have been screwing each other.  Striped Face, Wife Number Two, finds out and tells Rides-at-the-door.  Both understand that this is not a trivial matter.  If a man is cuckolded, he loses face.  If he is cuckolded by his son, he might as well crawl under a rock.  Rides-at-the-door is a respected man in the community; he has a lot to lose.  As he says, Honor is all we have, that and the blackhorns.  Take one away and we have nothing.  One feeds us and the other nourishes us.  And so I must do this thing for honor.  It is not a good thing but it must be done. 

To address the problem, Rides-at-the-door meets alone with the son and the young wife.  He reminds Kills-close-to-the-lake that he could kill her or cut her nose off, but that he will not do that.  Instead, he will send her back to her father with four horses and instructions to never tell anyone, ever, what happened.  He tells Running Fisher that he will send him to distant relatives who live north of the Canadian border.  He should tell only the healer in the band what happened, and give him three horses to ask for good medicine.  He should beg kindness of the rest of the relatives and look for an opportunity to redeem himself.  Rides-at-the-door reflects that it was his mistake to take on a trophy wife, and that he did not treat her well.  He thinks that Running Fisher might have turned out badly because he, Rides-at-the-door, spent too much parental capital on Fools Crow.  After the audience is over, he reflects that he should keep the remaining two wives away from White Grass Woman, the camp gossip, to keep rumors from spreading.

Rides-at-the-door is a mensch.  His actions are firm, decisive, fair, and as kind as they can be in the circumstances.

J.B., the soon-to-be ex maintenance guy at my park in central New York, could learn a thing or two from Rides-at-the-door.  He faced a similar crisis a few years ago.  He did not rise to the occasion. 

Shortly after J.B. started working at the park, he told me that he had nine kids.  Holy shit, I said.  And you’re a young man.  He was thirty-seven.

-That’s including stepkids, he said.

-But still.

The stepkids belonged to his wife, Michelle.  Michelle was heavily tattooed, with ink on her wrists, hands, calves, forearms and neck.  She was skinny, with pale skin, a long, graceful neck, straight brown hair and thick, coke-bottle bottom glasses.  She and J.B. kissed each other deeply and said, “I love you” when one had to run off to Home Depot or the grocery store.

J.B.’s second-oldest son, Jeb, was seventeen.  I took an interest in Jeb because he was the same age as my oldest son.  Same birthday, same time of day he first saw the sun.  After a year or so, he moved in with J.B.  Then, he got a girl in trouble.  Then, I let him and the girl have a home on the other end of the park.  Call it a dowry, I told J.B.  And he can keep an eye on that end of the park.

The child was born, a girl.  The police started showing up at their home on domestic violence calls.  The mother moved out, with the baby.  Jeb moved back in with J.B. and Michelle.

While this was going on, I would tell my son, You’re a member of the lucky sperm club.  He would roll his eyes.  Thanks, Dad.

A month or so after Jeb moved back, J.B. called me, in tears.  I’m not living in the park now, he said.

-Why not?

-I’m getting a divorce.

That was a surprise.  He and Michelle had seemed lovey-dovey.

-You want to know why?  She did things.

-Huh?

-Michelle did things.  With Jeb.  Unforgivable things.

What do you say to that?

-I am sorry to hear that, I said.  Try to hold it together.

-I’ll move back once she’s gone.

Later that day, my phone rang.  It was Jeb, telling me that his father stole from me, made out fake Lowes invoices on the park credit card, defamed me, and had no intention of getting the GED that he needed to become water operator licensed.  He was burning bridges.

Then, everyone moved out and J.B. moved back in.  But three months later, I was in the park and I saw Jeb standing near a home that J.B. was rehabbing for me.  I asked, “Where’s your father?”, and he pointed in the direction of the work-site.

What the fuck?, I asked J.B.  He’s blood, he said.  I had to take him back.

And then, three months after that, J.B. asked me if Michelle and her kids could move into a home that had recently become vacant.  What the fuck? I asked.  If she doesn’t live here, he said, I can never see the kids.  I’m not their father and we’re not married any more.  It’s the only way I can see them.  So – he took them both back.  She moved in with her new boyfriend, but J.B. still helps her out with errands and work around her home.  Jeb lives with J.B., his new girlfriend and their baby girl in a camper behind J.B.’s place.  I suspect that neighbors snicker when they see J.B now.  If that bothers him, he does not let on.  He is not half the man the old Indian was.