University of Northern Iowa

MuseumAuthor(s): Raymond AbbottSource: The North American Review, Vol. 273, No. 3 (Sep., 1988), pp. 60-63Published by: University of Northern IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25125008 .

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FAMILIAR MATTERS

Museum RAYMOND ABBOTT

The outside of the Schmidt home stead didn't tell me much, but I hadn't thought it would. It looked about like any small Dakota ranch or

farm, for it was, I soon discovered, both a ranch and a farm. The Schmidts ran cattle for a few years and at the same time had crops like

winter wheat.

There was the usual clutter on the

outside of the place, perhaps a little bit more than the average amount.

Farm equipment mostly, and some of it not used in a long time. And there

was an old wagon missing a wheel and an ancient Packard. I am old enough to remember what a Packard looks like. There were chickens every

where and a large barking dog as big as a German Shepherd but not a

shepherd. I had come to know the Schmidts

because of a book I wrote, a novella, about the Sioux Indians who lived

nearby on a reservation. It was a con

temporary story that appeared and I am afraid disappeared without much notice from anyone. There were

almost no reviews, and so when many

months went by and I began to get letters about the book, and book

orders accompanying these letters?

sometimes for as many as ten hard

cover books at one time from a place called the Schmidt Library?natu rally I was curious who were the Schmidts and where in the middle of nowhere was their library? Soon I was

corresponding with them, and at first I admit to a certain unease with their letters for they were full of contempt and anger and, I suppose, hate for their Indian neighbors, the Sioux. I realized the Schmidts saw the Indi ans as overly pampered wards of the state. Too protected by a benevolent federal government and recipients of a misplaced sympathy by a naive

white populace east of the Mis

sissippi River. My very realistic story about reservation life, the Schmidts told me, was how it really was, and

they were giving friends and rela

tives, some away from the region,

copies of my book. "This is how it

really is out here," they told the peo

ple. "This man's got it right." That kind of report didn't

especially agree with me in the

beginning; then I thought about it some and decided to permit them to find what truth they wanted in what I wrote. I knew they would anyway. I didn't write the book to put down

Indians, I knew that much. I was

simply telling a story with as much

honesty as I could muster. It was not the entire Indian story, and I had

never said it was.

Shortly after my arrival, Richard Schmidt said, "You know, it looks like rain and we sure do need it in the

worst way. It is mighty dry out here. Course if it rains some the roads will

muddy up pretty bad and be all but

impassable for a few days." Was he having fun with me? I

wondered. Did he know that staying for a few days at the old homestead

simply wasn't what I looked forward to? As it was, it was quite enough to think in terms of one night in the

place, and I knew because it was so late I would stay the night.

As I had expected, the first floor of the house was primitive, but I just knew that where I would be asked to

sleep would be much rougher some how. It isn't that living crudely with out amenities bothers me. It doesn't, or it didn't once. Twenty years earlier I had lived not forty miles from this

spot and I lived then without water or

plumbing, although I did have elec

tricity. What I was seeing now wasn't so

different from those days. But in those earlier years I had more control over my living space and by that I mean I had a lot to say about the extent of the clutter in my life, and the first thing that struck me upon entering this farmhouse was the incredible amount of junk they lived

with. There were literally paths, crawl spaces almost, between the

boxes and papers and paper bags they kept. And I had no good reason to

think things would improve on the second floor. Clearly there wasn't any

place for me on the first, so it had to be the upstairs, I figured. It was a

powder-dry year. There had been a

drought on for months and this place was a fire waiting to happen.

Dinner was in the kitchen?on a small corner of a metal table that had been cleared of still more junk to

make room for my plate. I think I had ham and eggs, and Richard and Eleanor didn't eat. Instead, they talked of what was going on on the reservation. It was, as I said, Indians and the reservation and the life out there that had brought us together.

That plus my curiosity to see their

library, for I knew not just anybody would have a library out here in the middle of nowhere, and I was right about that. The Schmidts weren't

just anybody. They had a love of books and they collected books on western themes and housed them in a small shed. And years before, Rich ard told me when we were alone,

they published at their own expense a history of the two neighboring counties. Richard said how Eleanor did most of the writing and they shared the research job, but he

arranged for the book to be printed. And he told me how difficult it had been to pay back the bank loans he had taken out to cover the costs of the

printing. But not only did they buy and

collect books, and even write a cou

ple together, they read them to each other at night and they were the first

people I'd met in my life who read to each other except, I suppose, for par ents who read to their children. Once

reading aloud was commonplace, but I guess with TV it is a mostly forgotten practice. Richard read mostly to

Eleanor, for her eyesight wasn't at all

good. She has diabetes and it is not that well controlled.

A good story couldn't be im

proved upon, he said, telling me fic tion was their favorite. Frederick

Manfred was one of their favorite

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writers. He also told me my short novel was basically a good story but he found a flaw or two. For one thing he said I didn't have the characters

stop to eat or relieve themselves in more than 24 hours of sustained action. I hadn't thought of that

before, and he was right, I said. He smiled approvingly when I told him this. He liked being told he was right.

The museum is not my name for the room in which I was to sleep that

night. It was one of two upstairs rooms, each padlocked?for what

reason, I don't know. I didn't get to see the inside of the second room, but I assume it was full of storage junk from a lifetime of collecting. To

get upstairs, as I did about 8 p.m. (farm couples, even retired farm cou

ples, go to bed early), required climb

ing a narrow but short stairway made

narrower by empty egg cartons piled along the steps. Richard sold eggs to a

nearby elementary school. There was

barely room for one person to put one foot in front of the other, let alone turn around. Richard went ahead of

me. Because of her crippling arthri

tis, which like most arthritis was bet ter one day than the next, I doubted that Eleanor had been above the first

floor in years.

At the top I stood and took in the scene. Richard was already moving

more boxes out of the way and paper bags, too, and telling me to step care

fully. I feared there might be a hole in the floor the way he picked his way around that space. There wasn't,

however. If anything, there were more boxes and tools and farm imple ments up there than were on the first

floor, and I had thought that quite impossible until I saw for myself.

And everything looked burnable and I was glad my wife Mary wasn't with

me. She was a smoker and could

never have stayed there the entire

night without a cigarette, and if I feared one thing at that moment it

was fire and being trapped. I could see the newspaper: Man Trapped in

Museum Fire. The museum had the lock off the

door, but nothing more that I could determine had been done to ready the space. There was an inch of dust on everything and the bed no less

dusty. The mattress sagged until it

nearly touched the floor. And before Richard left he handed me a coffee can and explained what it was for: if I had to urinate in the night I should use this can rather than trying to find

my way down the stairs (he did give me a flashlight) and deal with a dog who had already seemed not

especially happy I was staying the

night. The animal, I was thankful, wasn't allowed inside. I would use

the coffee can, I knew, because there

wasn't any way that I would risk pass ing that large dog for any purpose

unless there was an emergency, and

the emergency I could imagine was a

fire and then that dog would see noth

ing but a blur as I passed by on my way out of that fire trap.

Richard had cranked up, es

pecially for me, he said, a gasoline powered generator outside and behind the house. He said it would

give me a good two hours of light from which I could read in case I couldn't go to sleep right away. I was

tired, but to sleep in this room and in this house and at 8 p.m.? There was no way, I knew.

Reading was exactly what I wanted to do. I had a book with me in

my suitcase and Richard had given me a couple more, including one

large one by Frederick Manfred. It was a gift, he said, and a gift I have

yet and still am unable to get inter ested in it. It is slow going. It didn't

matter because I found I couldn't concentrate. Not on reading anyway. I felt as if I were sitting on top of a

haystack and that at any time some

body below might strike a match and

poof, that would be the end. Frankly, I think a hot fart might have set that

place ablaze. So I spent the first half hour in the room mapping out an

escape route. There was a window

behind the bed but the glass was

cloudy as if it might have been smoked from an earlier fire, although I knew that had to be quite impossi ble. There had been no little fires in this place. It would be all or nothing in here, I was certain. Probably it was

dirt or soot on the glass. Anyway, the

view out was obscured and the win

dow itself didn't open. I didn't force

it, for I could see that a good push would cause the entire window, cas

ing and all, to fall onto the roof that

gently slanted toward the ground. Thankfully it wasn't far to the ground below. I could see that much at least.

The museum was quite another mat

ter. Here was a roorn literally packed with Indian crafts going back many years. Some of the pieces had to be

forty or fifty years old. There were

examples of beadwork and quillwork (made from porcupine quills), and

deerskin vests brightly colored with beaded designs, and moccasins of all sizes and shapes, and tomahawks and

peace pipes, some made from pipe stone (the newer ones) and some of rock. A showcase of Indian art work

was what it was, and there was more

under the bed and in the closet. "How did you come by all of

this?" I asked Richard before he left me to read and go to sleep. I didn't think to ask why he had accumulated so much. Later I would understand

why. If I hadn't known otherwise, I

might have suspected it was all stolen

merchandise, and I suppose because of the way it was accumulated some

people might call it stolen. I might have said that myself once a long time

ago. Now I am much less quick to

pass judgment. Richard's answer wasn't direct.

He laughed and said, a bit nervously, I thought, as if he wasn't used to such

queries, "Well, I will tell you we didn't exactly plan it this way, I can

guarantee you that. It began much smaller than what you see here, and

we never dreamed it would get so

big." He explained how until his last

heart attack two years before he and Eleanor had run their cattle opera tion, including leasing Indian lands, just like their neighbors did. Leasing Indian land was common in these

parts, necessary for survival since

most of the land was reservation land. "The Indians don't use their

land; most of them don't anyway," he said, not seeming to pass any par

ticular judgment on the Indians in

saying this. "So ranchers around

these parts lease the Indian land and run cattle. That gives the Indian some income for land they aren't

using anyway, and the cattlemen, men like me, they have more land to

graze their stock. Sounds good, don't

it?" He smiled again. "Only it don't

work that good. What happens is that the cattleman has to pay in advance for a lease. The tribe and the bia land office require this. The money we

pay goes to the family owning the land. Sometimes several families

own the same land and so what hap pens is the money gets parceled out and soon it is spent, sometimes

weeks after we lease the land, and then the Indians start coming around

looking for an advance on the next lease payment. That's right, an

advance. It don't matter none that

the lease is paid up for three years or

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five years and no payment is due for months or even years. It don't matter

at all to them. They want some

money right away for the land they own, and that we are using.

"Now, legally speaking we ain't

required to pay them varmits any

thing, not one cent, but not too many

operators dare refuse them time after time. Maybe a few times, but not all the time, for an Indian is like an ele

phant; he's got a long memory, and the next time that good piece of land comes up for lease renewal you gonna

find your neighbor down the road has

got the new lease, and what you've done for improvements to the land, like I put up a dam once and lost the

lease, well, that don't count for noth

ing. You don't get paid back for

improvements you make and the next operator, he don't have to pay

you either. So it is in our own best

interest, I suppose, to try and get along with them natives. In the old

days it wasn't such a problem, for unless the land was real special nobody else wanted the land anyway.

Then the natives, they had to lease to us or not get any money from the

land, and there isn't one of them that doesn't want the money they can get for doing nothing but owning the land.

"So what do we do? We give them natives money some of the time

when they come around asking, and

they come around plenty. If we can talk them out of it, we do, but if we can't and they are drunk and getting ugly, we give them what we can

afford. After a while we decided to try to get something back for what we

give out, 'cause in truth that money

don't often get taken off the next lease payment. It should but it don't. It gets forgotten. We pay it to keep the relationship good, but sometimes

we ask for something for our money.

Something they got of value, or they think is of value. Sometimes it ain't

worth much, but we've been blessed in that the people whose land we leased had some pretty good craft

workers in their families, so we took in crafts in exchange for the cash. It

was usually understood that the

money we gave for the crafts was in

the form of a loan and they could come back anytime they wanted and

get back their stuff. But they didn't come back, as you can see. I can't

remember one of them natives that

came back in all the years we been

doing this. What you see here must be thirty years of buying. Paying is

maybe the better word." The bitter ness was obvious now.

"We've not sold much over the

years. We planned to in the begin ning, and there was a need, but I

guess we figured it would be just our luck for the natives to start coming

back looking for what we sold off and then we would have a real problem.

Then it got so we liked our crafts. It is

attractive, isn't it?"

I nodded my head that it was. It wasn't just attractive, it was superb, and very valuable, I bet. Probably

worth ten thousand dollars if a penny. Who could say? That kind of quality material was disappearing fast and had gone up astronomically since I lived on the reservation in the Six ties.

"Course not all of it was for advances or loans," he went on.

"Some of it we bought outright if we liked the piece and it came cheap enough. It's all mixed together now. Sometimes we just bought things to

get some drunk out of our kitchen.

Nobody around here, I can tell you, likes having a drunk native in his

house." He chuckled. "Besides, you never knew what they might do next.

They are damn unpredictable people when they get to drinking."

A dry, almost hot, wind howled all that night. I was sure it had started to rain and I almost prayed that that dry

wind didn't mean rain, much as I knew they needed moisture. Rain the next day, once I was out of there,

would be fine. When I was on the main road headed for the state capital I wouldn't mind a little rain, but not now. Not this night. I knew what it would do to the roads.

For a long time I sat up listening to the wind. The light had been good for two hours as Richard said it would and it didn't just go out; it faded out,

getting dimmer until there was no

light at all aside from iridescent paint ings hanging on the walls. I hadn't

noticed them in the beginning, not until the light faded and my eyes searched for light in the room and the

paintings glowed. There was not much light from the window, but even if the glass hadn't been ob scured there would be almost no light coming in from the outside, for there

were no street lights out there and no moon that night. In fact, it looked as

if it might storm and rain a plenty as Richard hoped it would, and I sat almost praying it wouldn't.

If anything, those paintings?

about a half dozen?made an already eerie room spookier, and except for

wind blowing outside there was no

sound, but I would almost swear I could feel the energy of the people

who produced that craft work. I bet it was an entire generation. People with names like Eagle Feather and Fast

Pony and Blue Thunder and Kills-in Water and many many more. I knew

a lot of them were dead too. I didn't know this from first hand information or even from hearing someone say they were dead. Still, I know that

many were gone, if not most of them, in spite of the lack of hard evidence.

The odds said they were dead, for of the many people I knew when I lived

on the reservation, an unusually large number were now dead, maybe half,

perhaps two-thirds. It made me sad to think about it; some were only children and few died from natural

causes, I knew. Most succumbed to alcohol related abuses. God-awful

multiple car crashes, knife fights, gunshot wounds, fires, all brought about by drinking. It is no exaggera tion to say that booze has killed far

more Indians than the settlers or sol

diers of the last century who drove the Indian off his land.

Somehow it seemed wrong for this energy and life and color to be held captive in virtual darkness, tucked away in an upstairs room in the house of a white ranch family who at best were neutral about how they felt about Indians, and at worst much less than neutral. I knew I was being ridiculous, but there was no one to

see the beauty or recognize the qual

ity of the craftmanship?a quality that was disappearing as the old mas ters died out. The young Indians

were not interested for whatever rea

sons in learning to do this work well. Who can blame them? There isn't a

living to be made doing beadwork. That isn't to say, in all fairness to

Richard and Eleanor, that there wasn't an effort to display the crafts in the room with dignity, with respect, or in a tasteful way. There was?or

had been once, but they were over

whelmed. There was too much of it for one room to hold. It was clear

Richard and Eleanor had given up, and the consequence was that fes

tively decorated tomahawks, for

example, were piled in a box under the bed to be seen by no one except the explorer, a curious visitor like

myself who was nosey enough to look under the bed.

#

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The night was a long one, as all such

nights must be when you are waiting for morning, lying in a bed of sand

wondering what in the world you're doing there. The mattress almost reached the floor, and I knew that to

move around much meant to risk another cloud of dust in the air.

I tried getting undressed but the

grit was so unpleasant I quickly gave that up as a bad idea. So except for shoes I lay there fully dressed, listen

ing to the wind howl and trying to determine whether rain had started. For a while I was sure it was raining, but then I decided I just didn't know. If I were home in Kentucky and the

wind were blowing like this, surely there would be rain with it, but this

country wasn't anything like Ken

tucky. In fact the prairie was like few other places in the world. Some of the most frightening weather I've experi enced in my life was on the plains of the Dakotas, and that was a late

March blizzard that kept me inside for nearly three days, such was the

ferocity of storm outside. I sat in the dark trying to see the

Indian paintings and thinking how there had been considerable harshness and cruelty in the life of the plains Indian, a life I knew the

white man and Indian liked to roman ticize to a ridiculous extent. And there was a coldness about the paint

ings, too, a great distance, as if the artists were far removed from what

they were doing, and indeed this was

possible. They might well have been drunk when they did these, I knew. One painter friend from my time on the reservation frequently produced pictures nearly falling down drunk and then sold them to tourists to get

more money to get drunker. This art

ist often copied pictures from history books of plains Indians. The critics who saw them liked to say it wasn't art at all and, strictly speaking, they

were right, except when this fellow

copied these pictures he seldom got them exactly as they were. He made

small changes, sometimes ever so

slight changes, but always changes. And that of course changed the pic ture. At least I wanted to believe this

was true. In those days I wanted des

perately to believe something of value was in those copies, something that wasn't there before, if only the cold fierce energy or hatred I saw in the pictures hanging in the museum inches away from where I lay.

And some critics liked to tell local

artists, "You ought to paint what you

see around you, the life as it is being lived today, the people, the places, the houses. Never mind the last cen

tury."

Seldom, though, did local paint ers take the advice. I don't know

why. Maybe it was because what they saw around them they viewed as too common and not interesting to any

one, or maybe it was that it was too

painful to look around and see the

squalor and the death and hope lessness of reservation life as it is lived today.

The feelings that room stirred in me didn't make sleep a good bet even

if the mattress had been comfortable and not full of sand and God knows

what else. I suppose, too, I imagined one of those warriors jumping down from the canvas and selecting a color

ful tomahawk from the many there and conking me on my head in my

sleep?retribution for the wrongs the white man had done the natives, I

suppose.

With morning the wind had lessened

considerably, but by no means had it

stopped, and it hadn't rained, not one

drop, and I thought of suggesting to Richard and Eleanor that maybe they ought to consider making some

arrangements for the disposal of their museum when they were gone. I

didn't get very far in this endeavor, however, for immediately I was

being shown still other things they collected: rocks and can openers, even corn huskers. I realized then that the Schmidts had a passion for

collecting and as a coin collector

myself I knew something of the col lector's mind: Someday I am going to sell for a profit, except someday never comes.

I did ask, "What happens to all of this when you're gone?"

Eleanor didn't answer me, as if to

say, "That is none of your business, mister," but I knew she didn't mean that. She let Richard do all the talk

ing when she could. He shrugged his shoulders and said, "I don't think about that too much." It was much

too good a day to be talking about

dying, he was saying, and it was a

good day even though it didn't look much like rain.

If I hadn't known how they felt about the nearby reservation and

especially the Indian leaders who controlled everything, I might have braved suggesting the crafts be left to a reservation museum I had visited once or twice, but I was sure they

knew about the museum on the res

ervation. The materials could be

kept together, I pictured myself say

ing, and there would be a plaque tell

ing who it was that donated all these wonderful things. I didn't offer this

suggestion either, and it wasn't until I was on the road to the state capital that I thought I might have at least

suggested they be in contact with the curator of the state museum and

make tentative arrangements for the State someday to acquire this unusual collection.

And if I hadn't promised them to

keep to myself what I had seen in their home, I might have sought out the museum curator myself and told him what I knew was hidden away and urged him to investigate and try to persuade the Schmidts to donate the wonderful crafts to the State's

museum of history. I felt sure the

man, if he were worth anything as a

curator, would feel compelled to fol low up such a lead. But I didn't go to see him, if indeed it is a he. I don't even know that much.

Richard died a couple of months af ter my visit to his homestead. Eleanor is out there alone now, alone and like a

true pioneer says she is going to stay put?but with winter coming on I wonder how wise this decision is. I have to believe she would be far bet ter off, and certainly safer and more

comfortable, too, in nearby Big River

Junction where she has family and friends. But this obviously isn't for

me to decide; she is a determined, even stubborn, woman. For now, she

is where she is and, as she wrote me

recently, alone except for her Bible. And what of the museum? It is

still there, too. Covered with a new

layer of dust by now, I am certain. In time I suppose relatives will remember about what has been collected and

piece by piece each will get what he or she wants. But if Eleanor must move to town soon, and if this decision is sud

den, as with the onset of a life-threat

ening illness, and if the place is left

empty for any time at all, then van

dals will attack as vandals everywhere do. The rural setting won't make a

difference. They will carry off the museum. Maybe they will come back several times to get it all, and maybe the vandals will be Indians who see

the effort as a rescue mission. And where will the beautiful things go? Nobody can say, but surely back into the light of day, that much is certain, and such a development couldn't be all bad. D

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