Blue Ravens: Historical Novel

Blue Ravens: Historical Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

Book: Blue Ravens: Historical Novel Read Online Free PDF
Author: Gerald Vizenor
Tags: Fiction, Historical, War & Military
would become the crucial totems and portraits of our future service in the First World War.
    The Leecy, Hiawatha, and Headquarters were the only hotels on the reservation, and there was a summer boarding house in the community of Beaulieu. Louis Brisbois, the proprietor of the Hotel Headquarters, rented clean rooms, according to the newspaper advertisements, and the “tables are always provided with fish, game and vegetables in their season.” Aloysius sold Brisbois a blue raven perched on the peak of the hotel, and he invited us to work in the kitchen for food and money. The invitation was very tempting, the food and pay, but we were more interested in horses at the time, and naturally we were loyal to our uncle and to John Leecy.
    The Pioneer Store, established by Robert Fairbanks, and many other merchants and traders in groceries, lumber, and sundries, advertised in every issue of the Tomahawk . The Motion Picture Theater, the first and only theater on the reservation, was promoted on the back page of the newspaper. Movies were shown twice a week. The tickets cost ten cents on Tuesday and twenty cents on Saturday.
    Augustus treated us to our first movie, short scenes about trains and cowboys, but the tiny theater was musty, crowded, and the actors were crude and dopey. The cost of a single movie ticket was about the total income for a day of newspaper sales at the station, so we saved our money to travel on the Soo Line Railroad to Winnipeg, Minneapolis, or Montreal.
    I started to write scenes and stories that summer, and imitated the newspaper style of the patent insides. Later, the government teachers corrected my style, and they would not believe the sources of my literary inspiration. My first written scenes were tightly packed with descriptive, imitative, derivative images and analogies. Most of my scenes were not yet original expressions or even creative enough to be considered unintended irony or mockery.
    Aloysius painted blue ravens posed as the engineer of the train, as haughty passengers, and enormous ravens seated in the caboose, perched on the water tower, and blue ravens waiting at the station. Later he painted ravens with blue bluchers, blue women with raven beaks, and the station agent with blue wings. I wanted to write in the same way that he painted.
    Together we sold an average of ten copies of the Tomahawk two or three times a week at the Ogema Station. We earned a total of about thirty centsa week, and after three months of hawking the newspaper that summer at the station we had earned less than two dollars each. Not enough to buy two train tickets to Winnipeg or Minneapolis.
    The Feast of Good Cheer was our deliverance.
    Aloysius sold several portrayals of blue ravens on newsprint but together we sold only four copies of the Tomahawk to relatives at the fortieth anniversary of the treaty settlement of the White Earth Reservation on May 25, 1908. Naturally there were pony races and music by the native White Earth Band. Augustus raised his whiskey bottle and praised our success as hawkers of his newspaper. We smoked a peace pipe for the first time that summer at the reservation anniversary, and we ate with the adults at the Feast of Good Cheer.
    Soo Line Railroad tickets were more expensive than the cost of travel on the old Red River Oxcart Trail that ran four hundred miles from Winnipeg or the Selkirk Settlement through the reservation near the trading post at Beaulieu and White Earth to Detroit Lakes and the final destination in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
    The deep ruts of the oxcart wheels were evident on the entire route north to south across the reservation. Aloysius was always ready for an adventure. We were eight years old the first time we walked several miles in the old wagon ruts on our way to another world. The weather turned out to be the adventure, however, not the route of the oxcarts. A severe thunderstorm, lightning, thunder, and heavy rain, changed the rutted course of our adventure
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