Aida, my wife, is Yakima Indian. She grew up far from the Flathead, and sometimes that makes me feel distant from her, as if something is missing between us. Aida can live here the rest of her life, speak pretty much the same language, but her home place is different from mine. I hold no remembrance of the people and places of my wife’s past. Louise, on the other hand, has always been a part of everything I have known and loved. She is a part of me.

When I was a young man my uncle asked me a favor. His back was weak, and he had a chore for me. I didn’t know until we pulled up to the Magpie place that I was being asked to perform a task I wasn’t quite up to. Annie White Elk had passed away. Pneumonia. She had gone to look for her husband, thinking he was out hunting. He wasn’t. He was shacking up with Loretta Old Horn. Annie was gone for three days, and the rain was so heavy it poured in a thousand silver streams from the low sky without letup. Then it turned warm, that spring of ’36. The bees were out everywhere, hovering around the porch and buzzing in the barn-board rafters. It was the cold rain and sudden heat, they say, that took Annie White Elk at twenty-nine years of age. She left her daughters, Louise and Florence, to the care of her mother. I had to carry her body down the stairs to the kitchen where Grandma Magpie was waiting to dress her daughter for burial. They had made a table for the body out of rough planks laid over sawhorses.

It was about the time I started noticing things a person should never notice. I walked into their house that afternoon and was surprised at how the sunlight lit the kitchen, a warm yellow light glowing in a sad room. I didn’t know much then. I thought all the Indians were poor, because we seemed to be, but we were not poor compared to the White Elks. My father worked in the lumber mill in Dixon. We slept in the same room but we had beds and bed frames. They had flour sacks filled with cattails sewn together, no frames. They slept on the floor, the cold seeping through cracks, chinks of light poked through walls without plaster. Wallpaper was old catalog cutouts. They didn’t have sheets, only rough wool blankets that had belonged in better days to horses. I tried not to stare.