Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2. Annie Proulx

Чтение книги онлайн.

      Georgina had seen Charlie loading the generator into the truck and, when he said he had to go to town, immediately guessed its purpose. She telephoned Decker Mell.

      “He’s takin the generator down to town. Bet you he is goin a clean up all the dust in that building for her. She come home yesterday some mess a dirt.”

      “That seems kind a sensible,” said Decker. “What’s the problem?”

      “Oh, no problem yet, but he didn’t say nothin about it to me. You’d think he’d a mentioned it. He babies that girl too much.”

      But that night at dinner Charlie remarked in his offhand way that he had cleaned up the dust for Linny and that she was ripping through the old papers with a sense of determination that amazed him.

      “She’s a good kid,” he said, and the parent and daughter smiled at each other.

      “You ought a told me she was doin this job,” he said in an offhand way to Georgina, who did not reply but cut savagely at the meat on her plate.

      Linny opened another of Gay G. Brawls’ boxes. Inside she found a sheaf of letters, many from someone who signed himself “Bill,” and at the bottom of the box, half a dozen cans of film marked with Roman numerals. What, she wondered, was the appeal of Roman numerals to those old dead lawyers? She read several letters, one dated October 1913 from “Wounded Knee Battlefield.” The writer, whose name she could not make out, had a spiky black hand, and addressed lawyer Brawls as “Gay.”

      We left Chicago 13 days ago and are here to reproduce the battle of Wounded Knee for the moving picture machine. It is Col. Cody’s big project and he has high hopes that it will relieve him of debt. I am a little concerned about this as Messers. Bonfils and Tammen are backing the affair which will be filmed and produced by Essanay—the Chicago film company—and the Colonel seems only to fall behind in these partnerships. We must hope for the best. He will do other battles—Summit Springs, the Mission, last stand of the Cheyennes, etc. We are surrounded by Indians and their teepees and the soldiers of the 7th Cav. from Fort Robinson. The Indians are always here with an interpreter powwowing about the rations they are to get or the acting pay or something or other. It’s been really cold.

      Another letter, in the same handwriting:

      General Miles, who is the advisor, is very fussy about accuracy, insisted that as there were 11,000 U.S. troops under his command back then, that many must be shown. It was amusing that while Col. Cody agreed to this, the same 300 troops marched around and around until 11,000 were shown! The moving picture machine had no film in it!

      There was a yellowed newspaper clipping, so dry and weak the edges crumbled when she touched it. She laid it on a chair and read the remaining portions of a rave review headlined: “Great Audience Held in Tense Wonder by Indian War Pictures.”

      The reviewer wrote that the pictures were “very wonderful in their realism. It is quite impossible to describe them. They are something we can never see again.” On and on the review went, conjuring flying snow, the barking of the machine guns, dying Indians, drifting smoke. Finally, wrote the deeply moved reporter,

      … we were recalled to the fact that we were sitting in the Tabor Opera house looking at the moving picture reproduction of the last fight of the Indians of North America against the army of the United States. Hillsides, the plains, the moving troops, the dying Indians, the coughing Hotchkiss were no more. Instead there were the lights of the theatre and the white screen and a thousand people awaking to the realization of having witnessed the most wonderful spectacle ever produced since moving pictures were invented…. Nothing like this has ever been done before. Nothing to equal it will perhaps, ever be done again.

      Linny sighed and carefully laid the fragile paper in a folder. She picked up one of the film canisters. “War Bonnet #II,” read the faded label. Roman numerals again. “Rebellion/Reel No. I” was another. There were five Rebellion canisters. But what rebellion? She had only a hazy idea of the Indian wars. Perhaps she would go to the library. She knew better than to open any film canisters.

      That evening, watching the news, when Georgina left the room to go to the bathroom, she said to Charlie Parrott, “I found somethin today might be interestin.” “What?”

      “Cans a film. Letters from Buffalo Bill. Seems like he was makin a movie of the Indians and the U.S. Army fights. I guess maybe that’s the film in those cans.”

      “Yeah? First I heard about a movie like that.”

      “It was way back in 1913 he made it. I got a check it out at the library, see what I can find out. Might be valuable.”

      “The letters probly worth somethin. What’d they say?” He turned the television sound off.

      “Just legal stuff, stuff about debts and payments and some letters about the film, about them being in some place called Wounded Knee. Weird name. In South Dakota?”

      Charlie Parrott snapped his head up. “Wounded Knee! My God, did that old fraud have anything to do with Wounded Knee?”

      “I guess so. What about it? What was Wounded Knee, anyway?”

      But Georgina came into the room and made a face at their conversation, turned the television sound back on.

      “I’ll tell you tomorrow. It’s a long story.”

      “What’s a long story?” asked Georgina.

      “Indian history,” said Charlie Parrott. “A long, sad story that makes you want a puke.”

      Charlie spent the next day sorting out the neighboring ranch’s cattle that had found a weak section of fence and breached it. When he got back at dusk, dirty and tired, Linny and Georgina had eaten and cleared the table. There was a place for him set in the kitchen.

      “Georgina said keep your supper warm,” said Doreen. “But it ain’t the kind a supper that keeps good. Kind a dried out,” she said, taking a plate of steak and baked potato out of the oven. The potato had the feel of a deflated football, though smaller. The steak had curled up on the edges and showed the reticulate grain of an osprey’s leg.

      Doreen talked on. “And Georgina went up to some polo meetin in Sheridan. Said she might stay over. Said she would call you around ten.” He nodded. He preferred she stay over than drive at night, when all the raging drunks were on the highway looking for something to hit.

      “Anyway,” СКАЧАТЬ