Montana 1948 Read Online Free PDF Page A

were capable of scorching sarcasm. I saw no reason to risk receiving any more of it.
    My father was already on the phone, giving the operator my uncle’s home phone number. “Glo?” he said into the receiver. “This is Wes. Is the doctor home yet?” Gloria, my uncle’s wife, was the prettiest woman I had ever seen. (Prettier even than my mother—a significant admission for a boy to make.) Aunt Gloria was barely five feet tall, and she had silver-blond hair. She and Frank had been married five or six years but had no children. I once overheard my grandfather say to my uncle: “Is she too small to have kids? Is that it, Frank? Is the chute too tight?”
    In the too-loud voice he always used on the telephone, my father said, “We’ve got a sick Indian girl over here, Frank. Gail wants to know if you can stop by.”
    After a pause, my father said to my mother, “Frank wants to know what her symptoms are.”
    â€œA high temperature. Chills. Coughing.”
    My father repeated my mother’s words. Then he added, “I might as well tell you, Frank. She doesn’t want to see you. Says she doesn’t need a doctor.”
    Another short pause and my father said, “She didn’t say why. My guess is she’s never been to anyone but the tribal medicine man.”

    I couldn’t tell if my father was serious or making a joke.
    He laughed and hung up the phone. “Frank said maybe he’d do a little dance around the bed. And if that doesn’t work he’ll try beating some drums.”
    My mother didn’t laugh. “I’ll go back in with Marie.”

    As soon as Uncle Frank arrived, his tie loosened and his sleeves rolled up, I felt sorry for my father. It was the way I always felt when the two of them were together. Brothers naturally invite comparison, and when comparisons were made between those two, my father was bound to suffer. And my father was, in many respects, an impressive man. He was tall, broad-shouldered, and pleasant-looking. But Frank was all this and more. He was handsome—dark, wavy hair, a jaw chiseled on such precise angles it seemed to conform to some geometric law, and he was as tall and well built as my father, but with an athletic grace my father lacked. He had been a star athlete in high school and college, and he was a genuine war hero, complete with decorations and commendations. He had been stationed at an Army field hospital on a Pacific island, and during a battle in which Allied forces were incurring a great many losses, Uncle Frank left the hospital to assist in treating and evacuating casualties. Under heavy enemy fire he carried—carried, just like in the movies—three wounded soldiers from the battlefield to safety. The story made the wire services, and somehow my grandfather got ahold of clippings from close to twenty different newspapers. (After
reading one of the clippings, my father muttered, “I wonder if he was supposed to stay at the hospital.”)
    Frank was witty, charming, at smiling ease with his life and everything in it. Alongside his brother my father soon seemed somewhat prosaic. Oh, stolid, surely, and steady and dependable. But inevitably, inescapably dull. Nothing glittered in my father’s wake the way it did in Uncle Frank’s.
    Soon after the end of the war the town held a picnic to celebrate his homecoming. (Ostensibly the occasion was to honor all returning veterans, but really it was for Uncle Frank.) The park was jammed that day (I’m sure no event has ever gathered as many of the county’s residents in one place), and the amount and variety of food, all donated, was amazing: a roast pig, a barbecued side of beef, pots of beans, brimming bowls of coleslaw and potato salad, an array of garden vegetables, freshly baked pies and cakes, and pitchers of lemonade, urns of coffee, and barrels of beer. Once people had eaten and drunk their fill, my grandfather