Previous History

Abstract

Previous History Lea Page (bio) It's not that I can't say thank you—I can and do. And it's not that I don't trust words—well, truthfully, I don't—but thank you is so easy, so impersonal. I like to be clear. Pot roast is clear. When I hear trucks turning into our driveway, I close the door to the oven, wipe my hands on a dish towel, and step outside in bare feet. Our friend Sidney and his son had some legal business to attend to in town with my husband Ray, and now they're here for dinner. In 2018, Ray, along with a slew of political newcomers, threw his hat into the election ring, running for the position of District Judge serving three rural counties in Montana, including the one made up in large part by the Crow Reservation. Based on Ray's previous years as a tireless advocate, Sidney, a Crow Tribal Commissioner, offered his support. During the campaign, the phone would often ring in the very early hours of the morning. It was Sidney, whose check-ins would begin with a long, cheerful salutation in the Crow language, which he then translated so that we—I could hear him well enough, lying beside Ray in bed—would know just how much of the morning, the day, the world, all of it, he had called upon and gathered together into his voice. In the end, Ray lost the election—politics. We still get the early morning calls, just not as often. ________ Sidney's son is talking with Ray, both their heads bent together in appreciative contemplation of the various pieces of diesel equipment that litter—or grace, depending on your point of view—our driveway. While they are waylaid by the machinery, Sidney comes up to the step and gives me a big hug. When he lets go, he looks over me—he is very tall—taking in the vegetable garden where a front yard would normally go and the rolling fields beyond. Bound only by the Absaroka Mountains just miles to the south, we are surrounded by hundreds of acres of pasture, seemingly empty as far as the eye can see but for an abandoned barn and the collapsing remains of two log cabins. "Do the bears disturb the garden?" Sidney wants to know. "Not yet," I say, and then he asks about deer, and in an exaggerated gesture, [End Page 96] eyes wide-open for emphasis, I draw my finger across my throat to indicate that we will not conjure the presence of deer and their potential garden predation by speaking their names. We have a fence, but still. Sidney throws his head back and laughs. Then he asks, "How did you find this place?" "Most of it isn't ours," I say, aware that all the land we are standing on and looking at was recently populated by the Crow people, the transfer of which was based on all manner of cheating, stealing and worse, but I don't suppose he means that. Our piece—the one we claim as ours, anyway, because our names are recorded on the deed at the courthouse in town—is a few oddly shaped acres. "A neighbor bought everything around us at a foreclosure sale," I tell Sidney, "but this lot wasn't included because it was the original homestead." I pause at the irony of telling him this. He holds his expression still, only missing one blink of his eyes. The area is known for its winds, the road notorious for getting drifted in with snow. The leftover lot itself was too small to farm, with no obvious place to build. "It was cheap," I say, "so we jumped on it." Also, I explain, we had a previous history with the place, a history involving cow shit. Sidney raises his eyebrows. This is unexpected. ________ When we first moved to Montana in 1997, we bought a twenty-acre lot that sits only a mile away from us as the crow flies, although around here it is more often a raven. Ray and I, fresh off of signing the bill of...