Montana 1948. Larry Watson
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you been throwing up?”
Marie whispered no.
“Do you know anyone else who is sick? Someone you might have caught this from?”
I felt so bad for Marie having to put up with this interrogation that I finally said something. “Mom. She doesn’t feel good.”
My mother turned and said sharply, “You wait in the other room. I’m trying to find out something here.”
I took a few steps back into the kitchen, but I still saw and heard what went on in Marie’s room.
My mother brought two wool blankets down from the closet shelf and spread them over Marie. “The first thing,” my mother said, “is to bring your temperature down. We should be able to sweat that out of you in no time.”
To this day many Sioux practice a kind of purification ritual in which they enclose themselves in a small tent or lodge and with the help of heated stones and water steam themselves until sweat streams from them. My mother believed in a variation of that. A fever was to be driven away by more heat, blankets piled on until your own sweat cooled you.
Marie must have agreed with the course of treatment because she made no protest.
“David will be here this afternoon if you need anything,” my mother said. “You rest. I’ll come over again around three o’clock, and if you’re not feeling better we’ll give Dr. Hayden a call.”
This remark brought Marie straight up in bed. “No! I don’t need no doctor!” With that outburst she began coughing again, this time harder than ever.
“Listen to you,” my mother said. “Listen to that cough. And you say you don’t need a doctor.”
“I don’t go to him,” said Marie. “I go to Dr. Snow.”
“Dr. Hayden is Mr. Hayden’s brother. You know that, don’t you? He’ll come to the house. And he won’t charge anything, if that’s what you’re worried about.” Marie’s frugality was legendary. She hated waste, and on more than a few occasions she claimed what we were going to throw away—food, clothing, magazines—saying she would find a use for them. Finally we caught on. Before we planned to throw anything away, we checked with Marie first. Our old issues of Collier’s probably found their way out to the reservation.
Marie closed her eyes. “I don’t need no doctor.” Her voice was no louder than a whisper.
My mother left the room, closing the door halfway. “Keep an eye on her, David,” she told me. “If she gets worse, call me.”
“Is she very sick?”
“She has a temperature. And I don’t like the sound of that cough.”
I stayed out, as my mother ordered, but I walked past Marie’s room often. Marie slept, even when she coughed. I heard her voice on one of my passings and stopped, but it soon became obvious that she was not calling me but talking in her fevered sleep. “It’s the big dog,” she said. “Yellow dog. It won’t drink.” And then a word that sounded like ratchety. And repeated, “Ratchety, ratchety.” I didn’t know if it was a word from Sioux or from fever.
Later, as I was sitting at the kitchen table, Marie shouted for me. “Davy!” I ran to her door.
I stopped. Marie was lying on her back, gazing at the doorway. “I don’t need no doctor, Davy. Tell them.”
“My mom doesn’t want you to get worse.”
“No doctor.”
“It’s just my uncle Frank. He’s okay.”
Marie’s forehead and cheeks shone with sweat. “I’m feeling better,” she said. She pulled back the blankets and sat up, but as she did she began to cough again. Soon she was gasping for breath in between coughs. This frightened me. I went to the bed and held Marie’s shoulders until the coughing subsided, something I remembered my mother doing for me. I felt Marie trembling all over, as your muscles do after great exertion.
When she was done I helped her lie down again. “Maybe I should go get my mother.”
“No doctor.”
“Okay, okay. I’ll tell her you don’t want a doctor.”
Marie’s eyes closed and she seemed to be breathing evenly again.
“Marie?”
She nodded weakly. “I’m okay.”
I backed slowly away but hesitated in the doorway. Marie’s eyes remained closed and her breathing was deep and regular. My hands were damp from gripping Marie’s shoulders. Was the sweat mine or hers?
My mother and father came home together at five o’clock. If the evening followed its usual pattern, my father would read the Mercer County Gazette, have supper, and go out again for an hour or two if the evening was peaceful. He would be gone longer if it was not.
My father dropped his hat and briefcase (another lawyer’s touch—and a gift from my mother) on the kitchen table. “David,” he said, “I hear you’re baby-sitting the baby-sitter.”
How naive I was! Until that moment I believed that we had hired Marie to care for our house, to keep it clean and prepare the meals since my mother, unlike most mothers, worked all day outside our home. We called Marie our “housekeeper,” and I thought that was her job—to keep the house. It never occurred to me that she had been hired to look after me as well.
My mother headed for Marie’s room.
“I think she’s still sleeping,” I said.
Within minutes my mother came back out. She said, “She’s burning up, Wes. You’d better call Frank.”
My father did not question my mother’s judgment in these matters. He went for the phone.
“Wait!” I called.
Both my father and mother turned to me. I did not often demand my parents’ attention because I knew I could have it whenever I wanted it. That was part of my only-child legacy.
“Marie said she didn’t want a doctor.”
“That’s superstition, David,” said my father. “Indian superstition.”
This is as good a place as any to mention something that I would just as soon forget. My father did not like Indians. No, that’s not exactly accurate, because it implies that my father disliked Indians, which wasn’t so. He simply held them in low regard. He was not a hate-filled bigot—he probably thought he was free of prejudice!—and he could treat Indians with generosity, kindness, and respect (as he could treat every human being). Nevertheless, he believed Indians, with only a few exceptions, were ignorant, lazy, superstitious, and irresponsible. I first learned of his racism when I was seven or eight. An aunt gave me a pair of moccasins for my birthday, and my father forbade me to wear them. When I made a fuss and my mother sided with me, my father said, “He wears those and soon he’ll be as flat-footed and lazy as an Indian.” My mother gave in by supposing that he was right about flat feet. (Today I put on a pair of moccasins as soon as I come home from work, an obedient son’s belated, small act of defiance.)
“She said she doesn’t need one,” I said.
“What does she need, David? A medicine man?”
I shut up. Both my parents 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