We know his life will be taken seriously. “Here is pure attention,” says William Bevis in Ten Tough Trips (1990:121), “by some speaker who is clearly sensitive and articulate, to living, in Montana, near Malta. He wiped his forehead with the pale green handkerchief. Teresa didn’t say anything so he leaped out of the hole, a little too quickly. It went down a bit more, enough to look respectable. Lame Bull lowered himself into the grave and jumped up and down on the high end. Teresa wanted us to take it out because she was sure the head was lower than the feet. One end went down easily enough, but the other stuck against the wall. The hole was too short, but we didn’t discover this until we had the coffin halfway down. It was silk with a picture of two mallards flying over a stand of cattails. The necktie, which I had loosened, had also belonged to my father. The collar and cuffs itched in the noonday heat, but the pant legs were wide enough so that if I stood just right I didn’t touch them, except for my knee which was swollen up. It was made out of cream-colored wool with brown threads running through it. I hadn’t known it existed until an hour before the funeral. I was wearing a suit that had belonged to my father. He smelled of Wildroot and after-shave lotion. His shirt, tie, handkerchief and belt were various shades of green and red to match the suit. His fancy boots with the walking heels peeked out from beneath the new cuffs. Teresa had shortened the legs that morning, a makeshift job, having only had the time to tack the original cuffs up inside the pant legs. Although his crotch hung a little low, the pants were the latest style. The buttons on his shiny green suit looked like they were made of wood. I had to admit that Lame Bull looked pretty good. I hadn’t told them about Ferdinand Horn and his wife, but they wouldn’t show up anyway. So there were the four of us-Teresa, Lame Bull, me and my grandmother. The priest from Harlem, of course, couldn’t make it. It’s the West turned in on itself-the Indians in suits and the priest in some other place. The seasoned reader of adventure-story westerns can find a place here, standing around the town’s people at a dusty Old West funeral, but this is the contemporary West, and the few people around a coffin are Indians. Up along the Montana Highline, the northern country so seldom seen from anything but airplane windows, the unnamed narrator watches his old grandmother be buried. In the epilogue to his first novel, Winter in the Blood (1974), James Welch concludes the story of his narrator in an episode that is funny, heartbreaking, and wonderfully styled. Texts by and about Natives: Commentary 12.
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