By Air Mail Ch.04

It ran all around the world. There wasn't a single place on Earth that you could go to hide from it. I'm sure that World War I did nothing but make it worse.

My father treated a few people for it and I don't think that any of his patients died. He was relieved about them getting better, my mother told me once, but at the same time, he knew that there were a lot more victims of it dying every day, and out where they were, he didn't feel like he was doing all the good that he could to help. So he volunteered with the American Red Cross.

They sent him to Fort Riley where he spent the rest of the year and onward. By then, it was late spring of 1918 and the flu had died down some, so things looked to be getting better. My father told my mother in his letters to her that he guessed that if it kept on that way, he'd be coming back to her soon.

They were very much in love and my mother missed him very much. So she shut up the house and went to Fort Riley and rented a flat in a building not far away. They saw each other a lot and of course, they did what people do. By the beginning of August, my mother knew that she was pregnant.

But by the end of August, a new strain of that damned influenza had come out - and this one was worse and even more deadly. My father didn't come home to her one day and the next morning, she went to ask and found out that he'd gone from a headache the afternoon before to being violently ill in hours. He was worse by that morning and they refused to let her see him.

He was dead the following afternoon.

My mother was grief-stricken as you might imagine," Quinton said, "but she knew enough from being a doctor's wife to know that she didn't want to die there like him. She wrote out her wishes for the way that he'd be seen to and left town as fast as she could go, praying that she hadn't already been exposed to it."

He looked over and Emmy was sitting with her mouth open in shock. "But didn't she want to stay to go to his funeral?"

He shook his head, "Emmy, my mother's giving them her instructions was all just because she was struggling in grief and not thinking. My father had told her so often that at it's worst, they were just opening up the ground with bulldozers and filling the holes with bodies. She only remembered that later.

My mother wasn't from a fancy, rich family like he was. She was from the backwoods of Idaho and she just packed up real light and bought herself the best horse and rifle that she could find, and she rode hell for leather back west, usually avoiding the bigger roads if she could and riding cross-country if she had to.

She didn't stop until she got to the Snake River Plain in Idaho, but winter was fixing to overtake her and she holed up in an abandoned house in a ghost town called Webb Springs at Big Southern Butte. There's a town called Arco not more than a few miles off. It was farther at one point - at the place where two stagecoach lines met years before. The stage lines were moved to Webb Springs, and so the whole town moved there too. But when the railroad came through later in a different place, the town moved again to be near that, and that's where it still is to this day.

My mother didn't want to live near people until the flu was finally gone, so she lived in a ghost town all alone for a while and I was born on the first day in May..."

He looked at his instruments for a moment and then checked his charts. After that, he looked out of the windshield for a few seconds.

"Big Southern Butte is a strange place," he said. "It's the remains of a pair of lava domes that grew together out of a volcano and partially collapsed a long time ago. It's a crater about four miles across and even though that was like a million years ago, there's still a lot of warmth under the ground there, though it's all forest and grassland inside. In that little place, it's not quite so cold and the ground isn't as deeply covered in snow. My mother liked to hunt there, though it's pretty open so you have to be really good at stalking your game. That's where Mother was hunting when I decided to show up and she had me there in the sunshine by a grove of trees. As far as I know, I'm the only person ever born there.

We stayed there until well into the late spring when the ground had firmed up from the spring melt. Then we went to Warren, Idaho, where she's from. But Warren was a miner's town and it was already in decline by the time that my mother herself was born. My mother's parents had gone the year before to Cascade, a ways farther west.

We stayed there for a couple of years though, and I can just barely remember being fussed over by an old Chinese lady named Polly. She was really old even then, but she thought I was some kind of gift to my mother. It was about ten years later that they standardized the price of gold in 1932, I think. That finally killed off Warren and it's a ghost town now too. I have been back once, and I found old Polly's grave."

Quinton looked a little lost for a few moments and said nothing more until Emmy prompted him. He smiled and apologized. After another check of his charts, he began to speak again.

"Mother moved us to Cascade and I got to know my family some, from my mother's side. My grandmother fell for me on sight and could have loved me to death if she got the chance, but my grandfather began to really raise me.

They had a store, pretty much started out as a café out on Main Street. It's still there - at least it is as far as I know by Mother's letters, though my grandparents have both passed on. Grampa died when his horse threw him while he was out hunting. We'd planned that trip for a while, but I didn't take into account the length of the school year that well, and I had to stay for another two weeks, so Grampa went without me for the first time in a few years. I was eight then. Grammy died some years later, but I don't know what it was that took her for sure. I was away by then.

Mom kept running the store, but she had a hard time getting ahead until she took up with Deke Potter. They were together before Grampa died. Deke's a man's man in a lot of ways and he just took up where Grampa left off with raising me. Deke had about only a half-dozen jobs here and there going on at the same time. He worked for the Idaho National Forest, him and his brother. They also ran cattle all along the Snake River Plain, besides them both being bush pilots, so whenever I could and when either one needed the help," he smiled over at Emmy, "I was a cowboy.

Of course, at first, I was more of a cowBOY who needed watching about as much as the cattle we were herding, But I guess that I sort of grew into it.

Both Deke and his brother Harry are pilots like I said, so I had something to dream about even then. I was flying a bushplane when I was fourteen, but I had to wait until I was sixteen to take my solo flight - in the same old bushplane, but they'd taken the floats off and had it back on wheels for that.

Deke and Harry wanted to help Momma with her store, so they added to it and it became something of a variety store as well as being a café and diner. It... well, if everything's gone right, it'll fit with the secret business of mine that you keep on about.

Both men also had some pretty amazing friends. It was nothing for me to walk up to one or the other or both standing there out in the street just jawin' with another man or two. I was a bit older before they'd actually introduce me then. I guess that I'd gotten to a point where they felt a little safe that no childish stuff would come out of my mouth. One time I walked over and they just introduced me and when they introduced the other men, I found out that one was the state representative in Congress and the other was the governor!

Anyway, it was things like that, them knowing who they did that earned me at least a look by the Army Air Force as a pilot candidate. Deke warned me really sternly that all that I'd been given was a chance. Whether I was accepted was up to me and whoever made those decisions. Then he wished me luck and walked off to get a haircut because we were outside of the barbershop and he'd noticed that there was a chair open."

Quinton fell silent again, but this time, he sat with a slightly expectant air about him.

When at last she prodded him to continue, Quinton shook his head slowly and just said, "Your turn."

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Emmy didn't really know where to begin but once she did, she was brutally honest and forthright about everything. "I think that my mother loved me, at least sometimes. She never said it though, not even once that I can remember.

I got a lot of my looks from my father, though it's never helped me none. A lot of the people and kids where I was didn't want to have any truck with an Indian kid, even though it was never how I saw myself then. So none of it ever exactly made me feel wanted or even liked by anyone.

I grew up pretty much because I had to. I didn't have anyone to look up to. My mother was just my mother. If I took something away from that, most often it was me resolving what not to be and how not to be toward other people. I saw what it got my mother. In my book, she often - if not usually - made things harder for us instead of easier.

Until I was about twelve, I didn't know my father at all. I'd never met him and my mother never said a word about him other than that he was an Indian. If I asked her what he was like, she just told me that it didn't matter. The only reason that I got to know him at all was because my mother got thrown in jail for getting into a big fight.

I woke up one day and she wasn't home. That wasn't all that unusual. So I got up and went to school like every other day. But the cops came to school and pulled me out to take me someplace and I ended up in a courtroom.

I didn't know what it was all about, but the judge fined my mother a whole pile of money and she just stuck her jaw out and told him that she didn't have any money to pay the fine. Sometimes I wonder if she could have gotten off a little lighter by just acting like she was sorry. But that was something that she just never had any of inside of her. I know that now.

Well, it hadn't been the first time that she'd had to stand in front of that judge and he sentenced her to a year and some. It was only because of me that he didn't send her to prison. They took her away and she never even looked at me.

They didn't have anywhere to put me and they couldn't leave me all alone for a year, so they put me into the women's cells at the courthouse and not the jail. I had a cell of my own and I hadn't done a thing to anybody. They just didn't have anything else. At least I got to eat a little better.

See, if I only looked a little... whiter, they could have put me in with the other poor kids like me. But on account of how I looked, they didn't want me and told the cops that there were places for people like me, they said. I don't think that I'll ever forget hearing it said that way about me - while I was right there to hear it. The two cops said that I wouldn't know how to live where they were talking about but it didn't change anything.

See, the cops there that day, they were in my part of town every day, since it was their beat and they knew me and a little about me, I guess. Three days later, there was somebody there to see me and when I walked outside, I suddenly knew that I wasn't in jail anymore.

There was a truck out by the curb and I saw a man standing next to it looking at me. I think now that I even knew who he was before he'd said a word. His skin was the same as mine - even darker because he spent so much time outdoors. I could see a lot of myself in his face and to me; he was a very handsome man. As confused and unsure of everything as I was then, I remember being glad only to meet him and I couldn't tear my eyes off him for very long.

I'd always wondered what he looked like - and it was always a mystery to me how my mother had even let him get close to her, the way that she was whenever she talked about Indian people. But I learned more about my mother later, and I think that what happened was that he was good for her and treated here as well as he could. I never once saw him being even slightly discourteous to anyone ever. But I guess that she couldn't see that or something. My mother could screw up the Lord's prayer and just out of being in a nasty mood, since it happened more than any other mood that I ever saw her in.

I'm miles away now and I hope I never set eyes on her again for the way that she treated me, not even listening as I tried to tell her my side. My own mother treated me just like the rest of them. So I can say this - she was a foul-tempered, mean, low-down bitch, if you'll pardon my saying it. It was just my father's bad luck to think that it might have been something for him to love her. It might not have been the first thing to come to his mind, but I know that he's have tried to do well for her."

Emmy smiled then and it turned into a grin, "Lucky for me, I guess. But I only needed one look at him to know the answer to my mystery. Sure he was a poor man, but he was proud in his own way and unless he knew that doing it would get him trouble, he had no fear of anyone and I saw that a lot of people had trouble when they found him trying to look them in the eye. He meant nothing by it, he was just honest.

That's when I knew that he was my father for sure because I'm the same way. I try to learn what I can from people when I talk to them and a lot of people won't hold my gaze. I just never knew why before that day.

He told me who he was and that he'd been trying to get to see me for years, but my mother wouldn't let him. He packed me up in that truck with him and drove me out to the reservation. Out there, I wasn't somebody to ignore or look down on. All the same, I knew that I didn't really fit in there either. But I was with my father and he tried to make us a home.

I remember that nothing was ever a huge problem to him. He might not have the perfect answer, but most often, he had an answer all the same. I wasn't there three days and I got my first period. I didn't know anybody else, so I told him. He nodded and took me to a woman who gave me washed, clean and dried moss and taught me how to get some for myself. She taught me how to chew a certain bark for the cramps or how to make a kind of tea out of it for later and it worked.

Dad took me to places where it grew and we also collected some moss and prepared it together. There wasn't anything unpleasant about it to him. It was what women were and have always been. That was just what they did when that happened.

He taught me how to be what I was. Mostly, that meant that I was his daughter and that in his way, he loved me - or he was trying really hard to learn how to love me. The easy part was that he just did. The hard part was that I was useless to start with because I didn't know a thing. I failed at everything - the simplest things. But he always told me that it wasn't my fault.

He lived on the reservation when it suited him to. He worked at any job that he could find. But from the time that he'd discovered that working got him money; he also learned that the money could get him drunk. He stopped drinking once he knew about me he said, and that helped him. Now he wanted to help me.

That was how he'd met my mother, back when he'd been drinking. After finding out that there wasn't a single person in the world who could live with her, she ran him off and he stayed gone and drank more.

But one day, he learned that he had a daughter and then he'd try to come to see me, but my mother wouldn't allow it. Through her stupid actions, he was finally getting his chance.

So he taught me... not how to be a girl among those people - I was already too old to begin to learn that, plus I had no patience to learn to bead or do women things other than prepare food. I didn't even have any women like that in my family. I just had my father.

I had a chance to look around and I was a little worried over the way that the women there seemed to tend to look. This wasn't all John Smith and lovely Pocahontas. They tended to look a little... different to me somehow, but I remembered that I was from a different place and I was seeing things in that way. I learned some of the language too.

The people there are Osage and once they were bitter enemies of the Kiowa and many others, but that was then. What I got out of it was that I can almost fumble my way through two languages.

I don't know if my blood had anything to do with it, but I found that I could pick it up after a while. But I never learned enough to do much more than carry on a simple conversation - well, not without the other person looking at me like they thought I was a little touched or something, but I got enough to get by, I guess. I made a couple of kinda friends among the other girls my age, but we didn't have much in common. A couple of them did try, though, so it was alright. But I never liked the way that a lot of the boys looked at me and it just told me that even there, I was from the outside. None of the women there had any familial ties to me, so few of them taught me anything.

So I stuck with my father and he taught me things that he knew about, like how to work, to ride a horse, how to fish, how to run a trapline and how to shoot a rifle and hunt. And most of all, what to do with the things that I got from that.

We talked a lot and he told me the way that it is for us, meaning him and me. I could be accepted into that band, but he wasn't from that band. He was just there. He told me that I could live there, but that it was a different kind of life and a lot of Indian people have trouble living like that, because no matter how you live and try to live up to the old ways, you stay mostly poor and hungry. Only so much land to hunt and fish on, and you can't just go do that somewhere else if you don't like the crummy white people food they hand out at the agency office. I can say that because I grew up on better stuff than I saw there.

I'd have trouble living like that and he knew that about me. I was poor where I was, but I didn't have to live right off the land like they did. He didn't want that either, because that isn't being free, not if you stay on the reservation. I don't know, maybe it wasn't as hard for the people who came from the more foresty places. For the plains people - any of them, I'd guess, it's probably like the difference between fencing in a dog and a wolf. A dog will sit there and wait a long time for you to come back, sometimes even if he doesn't really know you, before he tries to find a way out.

A wolf will need to get out as soon as he hears the gate clang shut because he needs to be out. He wasn't made to be in there and he knows that.

But if you leave that place, then you have to live in another world, and in that world, the other people see you as nothing, just something else to have to step around on the street. He told me that if he had learned that lesson when he was younger, he'd have left the reservation and never come back. But by then, he was stuck kind of in-between.

It ain't much, but if you stay on the reservation in a tribal band, you can get a monthly allotment of food and a little money from the agency there, but it's not what you can live on right or even well. My father, he found that even though a lot of white people didn't like him or trust him much - so the work could be hard to find - well, he could do a lot better just working off the reservation. Plus, then he felt as free as anybody. He told me that it was a trade that he could live with but he knew that a lot of others couldn't. It's harder to keep to the old ways there, since you leave a lot of what you grew up with behind you.