The two rough and ready hand puppets, presents to my brother and me, became our curious new voices as veterans of the First World War. The two puppets, in the care of my brother, first told stories of our coax and cover as veterans in the Bonus Expeditionary Force that summer at Capitol Hill in Washington.
By Now Beaulieu rode Treaty, a native farm horse, from Bad Boy Lake to the Exhibition of Blue Ravens at the Ogema Train Station. Treaty, once the wagon horse at the Leecy Hotel, slowly clopped along the platform. She pitched her head near the abstract watercolor scenes. The mongrels moaned in the presence of a horse but were not shied. By Now had served as an army nurse and was ready to march with us and other bonus veterans at Capitol Hill. Walter Waters, the inspired leader of the overnight Bonus Army, and thousands of veterans from around the country were on their way to demand a bonus payment from the United States Congress.
The Ice Woman, or Mikwan Ekwe, was an elusive winter menace, a native enchanter of quietus. She lurked around the woodsy lakes on cold and clear nights, a wispy shadow, and with erotic whispers lured lonesome native hunters to rest in the pure snow, a serene death with the sound of lusty moans, but since the fur trade, the waves of deadly diseases, shamanic deceit, wars, extreme economic depressions, poverty, and hunger, and with the scarcity of totems and game the old icy stories were reimagined without winter and told in every season of the year. The urgent croak of ravens in the paper birch and that native dream song of “summer in the spring” became our new stories to outlive the treacherous tease of winter and poverty.
Miss Heady, our language teacher at the government school, taught us the word “quietus,” and she used that word in precise conversations. Quietus was the absence of nature, never the scenes of bear walks or kill-deer deception, but she never became a government teacher to wrangle with wild creatures, furred or feathered, or to treasure the noise of the seasons. Naturally, she had never been enticed by the stories of the Ice Woman. Aloysius, my brother, actually painted a great blue raven named Quietus, the blue shadows of bloody broken wings over the heaves and mounds of snow.
Heady confirmed in every sentence that she was a creature of bloodline clarity, the quietus of eastern culture and manners, and concealed two eastern cats, fussy shorthairs, at her federal apartment. Domestic cats had never earned the character of mongrels, and not many natives nurtured indoor cats on the reservation, only lonesome widows who had returned from cities to federal musters, covenants of service, and treachery in the ruins of the white pine and liberty.
Dummy teased my brother and me with silent beams, tics, and puckers, and the gestures of the two puppets were wild, bouncy, and generous. The Ice Woman cocked her head, raised a spiky wooden finger, trembled, and then moved closer and caressed my shoulder. My entire body shivered with the pose of that icy touch.
The Niinag Trickster bumped my brother on the chest and cheek with his giant wooden penis. The touch of the icy puppet was an ominous scene, and the punch of a wooden penis was quirky and comical, but not an easy story to relate with friends. These were the presents of the short, stout, and shrewd mute maestro of native puppetry.
Dummy handed over the two weathered puppets with a noticeable hesitation, and the uncertainty may have been second thoughts or a secret sense of native custody. Rightly, that gift of puppets was a waver in a world of chance, but never a slight. Pussy Beaulieu, her great aunt, had carved the two puppet heads from fallen paper birch, and the crude clothes were fashioned with remnants of mission vestments and school uniforms. The Ice Woman wore a silvery smock with crocheted hearts on the sleeves, and the huge wooden brow of the puppet was painted white, nicked and stained with age. The Niinag Trickster wore leather chaps, a bisected breechclout, and a green fedora with a curved brim. Black fedoras were the fashion of native men at the time. The trickster carried a medicine pouch and a wide black sash decorated with blue beaded flowers. Trickster characters were imagined scenes of sexual conversions in some truth stories, bold, cocky, chancy, and capricious, and at the same time the brazen puppet feigned vulnerability in hand gestures and jerky motions.
Dummy guided my hand under the silvery smock of the risky Ice Woman, and with the steady frown of a shaman she slowly aimed my fingers into the hollow head, sleeves, and blunt hands. The fingers were gnarled willow twigs. The puppet came alive in my hand and waved at the priest and station agent on the platform, and then pointed at each abstract painting in the Blue Ravens Exhibition mounted at the Ogema Train Station.
The Ice Woman was once an incredible creature of the winter nights, and at the train station that afternoon the puppet inspired memories of winter in the spring with the slightest hand motions, a hasty bow, jerky turns, a wave of the head, and teases with an erotic shimmy. No one escaped the mighty gestures and enticement of the Ice Woman.
Dummy backed away from my hand gestures.
The Ice Woman raised a wintery hand, waved a stick finger, and asked the mission priest if he had ever dreamed about a rest in the snow, an eternal slumber in the paradise of winter. My first voice as an icy puppet should have been more enticing, elusive, at least a lusty tease, but instead the words were taut, an uneasy parody of vaudeville. The priest excused the caricature and leaned closer to the puppet in my hand. “Yes, once or twice near the mission, enchanted by the whispers in winter trees, and the heavy waves of snow over the graves,” he confessed, in that new game of puppets at the station. The Ice Woman pretended to be demure in my hand as the priest reached out to favor the wind checked birch head of the creature.
The Ice Woman turned away.
The Jesuit priest was an unusual missioner with a sense of chance, of humor, and he seemed to appreciate the native decoys of nature and nurture in spite of my clumsy puppet parody. He was short, wore a biretta and cassock, a more distinctive costume than the stern and steady Benedictine priests who ruled Saint Benedict’s Mission on the White Earth Reservation. The Benedictines banished the puppets and strained to favor the abstract images of blue ravens, and a priest once urged my brother to more accurately represent the carrion crow as black, black, black, not blue. Most of the priests were truly wounded by credence, burdened by the culture of sacrifice and churchy colors, scared by the bold swagger and steady throaty croak of ravens at the mission cemetery. The priests were forever separated from creative scenes, the eternal natural motion of the seasons, and blue ravens in the sudden glance of morning sunlight.
Salo, the stout station agent, was a raven crony who shared his lunch with ravens and practiced the mighty croaks, but he was anxious around priests, and he was doubly shied by the strange gestures of puppets. He worried that puppets were shadows and souls of the dead, and ruled the world with jerky motions and satire. He knew my brother and me as war veterans, of course, and some twenty years earlier as the native boys who hawked the Tomahawk newspaper at the very same Ogema Train Station.
Salo turned away that afternoon to avoid the priest and our puppets, and pretended to examine the art more closely. He studied the shadows over the stadiums of war, fractured faces of soldiers and animals in bold colors, the double faces of the fur trade crusade with bright broken brows, cracks, creases, and distorted gestures of native soldiers as abstract blue ravens at the platform exhibition.
Aloysius, who could not escape the nickname Blue Raven, changed the style and form of his earlier ravens, the once great abstract blue wings with traces of rouge were revived with bold colors and broken portrayals, the natural motion of expressionism, the visionary sublime, or original totemic fauvism. My brother read newspaper stories and art magazines about modern art, abstract expressionism, the cubist teases, and together we visited museums and galleries in Paris at the end of the First World War.
Blue Raven was inspired by the dreamy traces and scenes of Henri Rousseau, the marvelous