Tell me the tales that to me were so dear
Long, long ago, long, long ago
Sing me the songs I delighted to hear
Long, long ago, long ago.
Queena waved her ears and puckered to moan the refrain “long, long,” and then muted a melodic bark of the single word “ago” in the song. Her spirit and voice were gentle, sentimental, an operatic mood that was characteristic of some reservation mongrels. The tones were cozy, and with heavy whispers, a natural repose of the basset hounds. Queena was the great diva voice of the hand puppets, and once or twice a week she rehearsed the repertoire of puppet shows and songs on the shores of Spirit Lake.
Queena was a direct descendant of a celebrated mission hound at Saint Columba’s Episcopal Church on the White Earth Reservation. The Episcopal vicar erected a cattle fence but could not contain with wire or any churchy favors the spirited basset hound, and the consequences a decade later were houndy mongrels, the natural union of untold golden retrievers, spaniels, terriers, pointers, beagles, bulldogs, and showy empire chow chows. That communion of particular brands, breeds, and native couriers created a truly marvelous natural selection of clever mongrels, and most majestic was the hand puppet singer. The godly missions were obviously more memorable and enlightened with the reservation match and breed of hounds and mongrels than with overnight conversions, salvation, and the stale bait of monotheism and bloodline assimilation of natives.
Dummy listened to recorded opera and popular music on a Silvertone hand crank record player that she ordered from Sears, Roebuck and Company. She was the only native on the reservation who recognized the names of great operas and distinctive sopranos. Every day she cranked the old phonograph to hear recorded music. Hand cranked because electricity was never connected to the Manidoo Mansion on the southwest shore of Spirit Lake. She heated the shack with wood fires, cooked on a cast iron stove, lighted a corner with kerosene, and listened to great sopranos in the steady glow of a single flat wick Aladdin Mantel Lamp.
Miinan and Queena, the diva mongrels, watched and remembered the hand gestures of the puppets and the puffy cheeks of the maestro, and practiced the sounds of the songs in front of the phonograph. Alma Gluck and Geraldine Farrar recorded hundreds of arias and popular songs on Victrola records by the Victor Talking Machine Company. The mongrels were captivated several times a week with the voices of great recorded operas, but the complexities of the music, coloratura sopranos, lyrical timbre, trills, tease and pitch, were beyond the range of the mongrels and the two divas of puppetry, such as the heady sopranos in Madama Butterfly by Giacomo Puccini, Carmen by Georges Bizet, La Traviata by Giuseppe Verdi, and, of course, The Marriage of Figaro by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Snatch nosed the soprano voices in the air but never whimpered or sang for meals. The divas were teased with treats, the same tasty deer joints and knuckles that the other mongrels were given after a special service. Native hunters once teased the retriever mongrels with treats, the very same practices of tricksters, truth storiers, and shamans.
The five mongrels heard the voices of Gluck, Farrar, Ninon Vallin, Mary Lewis, Lucrezia Bori, and Marion Talley, and at least once a night the unwound phonograph slowed the sound of the opera music and the mongrels mocked the weary and dreary recorded soprano voices with moans and poky bays.
Dummy was a shaman of the puppets.
Silvertone radios soon replaced the old phonographs, and the new machines cost about thirty dollars at the time from Sears, Roebuck and Company. Spirit Lake remained a hand crank culture without electrical power, and the radio broadcast of the long count fight of Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney at Soldier Field in Chicago, and the coverage of Charles Lindbergh’s flight from Long Island to France in the Spirit of Saint Louis were never heard by the silent puppeteer and five mongrels in the ruins of the white pine. The once recorded operas were soon broadcast on weekends across the country, but the magic of radios would never overcome the marvelously direct sound of music on the trusty hand crank phonographs.
The Metropolitan Opera broadcast the first radio opera, Hänsel und Gretel by Engelbert Humperdinck, on Christmas Day 1931. The opera could be heard on shortwave transmission, the Red and Blue Networks of the National Broadcasting Company, and on radio stations around the country. That first broadcast became a series of matinee operas on radio every Saturday.
Dummy was determined to hear the matinee opera on radio and persuaded John Leecy, with diva puppet hand gestures, to sponsor the first radio opera broadcast in the dining room of the Leecy Hotel. He owned one of the best radios, and the deserted hotel was the perfect place on the reservation to stage the first broadcast of the grand opera.
Messy Fairbanks, once the chef de cuisine at the hotel, was summoned from her home at Pine Point to prepare and serve dinner at the end of the radio opera. She had retired when the hotel closed but returned to prepare a sumptuous dinner, lapin aux pruneaux en cocotte, or rabbit stew with a marinade of fruity red wine, carrots, and onions, baked in casseroles with prunes, chicken broth, crushed cloves, and decorated with parsley.
The Jesuit missioner discreetly provided the red altar wine for the marinade, and the tasty, tender rabbit was served in carved wooden bowls. Dark beer, a secret home brew from a disguised brewery in the abandoned Motion Picture Theater, was served despite the obvious double prohibitions of the Eighteenth Amendment and the White Earth Reservation.
John Leecy and Messy had honored the native veterans of the First World War with the Banquet Français. The Leecy Hotel was fully booked at the end of the war, and the French cookery was known by hundreds of visitors who had arrived by train, many staying overnight for the delicious meals prepared by Messy. The stories of that great dinner at the end of the war, more than a decade ago, have become more spirited with recounting, and on that occasion we were two worried veterans, tormented with night terrors of combat, and at the same time we were teased and put right by the best healers on the reservation.
Odysseus, the trader, Augustus Hudon Beaulieu, publisher of the Tomahawk, Catherine Heady, the precise government schoolteacher, Damon Mendor, the only medical doctor at the White Earth Hospital, and the Benedictine mission priest, Aloysius Hermanutz, kindly diverted my brother, my cousin Lawrence, our close friend Patch Zhimaaganish, and me with praise and glory stories.
Misaabe and his tender mongrel healers Mona Lisa, Nosey, and Ghost Moth, transmuted the night terrors into the natural motion of dreams and visual memories, and restored the natural rift and fault of sounds. Memories of the Banquet Français, French wine, absinthe, and stories of war, literature, blue ravens, and the mighty mongrel healers, were resumed with the radio broadcast of Hänsel und Gretel that afternoon at the Leecy Hotel.
The Niinag Trickster was an erotic healer.
The matinee radio event was held in the hotel dining room with chairs placed in two curved rows. Some visitors had arrived from Pine Point, Callaway, and Naytahwaush, and the local guests gathered around the Silvertone radio console with the government teachers, the federal agent, the priest, and a vicar. John Leecy turned the gold dial, and tuned the green eye to the station.
Milton Cross introduced the story of the opera in a clear and evocative tone of voice. He praised the sopranos, and then actually escorted the radio audience, and our good company at the hotel, into the theater, describing the hush as the lights were dimmed, and the slow rise of the great gold curtains. We heard the soprano Queena Mario as Gretel and Editha Fleischer as Hänsel in the glorious matinee broadcast of the opera. Dorothea Flexer sang the fairy tale scenes of the Sandman, and the gorgeous soprano Pearl Besuner was the Dew Fairy.
The radio sound was clear but not as vital or perfectly pitched as the phonograph records of the opera sopranos. The transmission waves distorted the sounds, the sopranos wavered, but the static on records was steady. Miinan and Queena, the diva mongrels, were allowed to sit at the side of the dining room during the broadcast, and