Although he hadn't attended Iona's real funeral, one of the four sheet-holders i' was George Deeson, her rodeo-queen mentor, another was Ed Gentry from the First National Bank. There was Tad Morrison from Pay-and- Tote grocery, and George Howell from Tru-Value Hardware.
At Gina's graveside, an old blind man in Levi's and cowboy boots had offered a long series of interminable Papago prayers that, out of deference to Diana, the only Anglo in attendance, were translated into English by someone else. This was true in her dream as well, except instead of a blind man in cowboy boots, the main speaker was a priest praying in what seemed to be Latin. After that, they moved on to the feast.
Like the rest, this, too, was a strangely muddled mixture of Topawa and Joseph, of near past and far past, of Anglo and Indian. Instead of traditional Indian fare, the food was like the food at the Chief Joseph Days barbecue, with grilled steaks and corn on the cob, homemade rolls and fresh-fruit pies. People were dressed in their Chief Joseph Days finery, including Diana in her rhinestone boots and her coronation Stetson with its rhinestone tiara.
Diana was visiting with someone, an old lady, when her father came striding over to her, grabbed her hat, and held it just out of reach while she tried desperately to reclaim it.
'Couldn't you find something better than this to wear? he sneered down at her, shaking the hat but still holding it well beyond her fingertips. 'Did you have to come to your mother's funeral all tarted out in your hussy clothes?'
'I'm not,' she said. 'I'm not a hussy. I'm the queen. I get to wear these clothes. You can't stop me.'
'You're not the queen,' he leered back at her. 'Not really. You cheated. You cheated. You cheated.'
Diana woke up drenched in sweat with the hateful words still ringing in her ears. Her father had shouted those words at her in real life and left them echoing forever in her memory, but not then, not at her mother's funeral. When was it? When had it been?
'It would sure as hell be nice if I had a little help with the chores around here of a Saturday morning,' Max Cooper had grumbled. 'I'm sick and goddamned tired of you getting all tarted up and taking off every goddamned weekend.'
'Dad,' she said, 'I'm the queen, remember. I have to go. I signed an agreement saying that I'd represent Joseph in all the rodeo parades around here.'
'I'm the queen,' he mocked, imitating her. 'My aching ass you're the queen! Like hell you are! You're no more the queen than I am. You cheated.'
'Max,' Iona cautioned.
'Don't you 'Max' me. How long are you going to go on letting her believe she's Little Miss Highness, God's gift to everyone? How long?'
'Max.'
He turned on her then. Diana knew he wouldn't hit her.
Not anymore. He'd only really come after her once after George Deeson-that 'goddamned coffee-drinking Jack Mormon,' as Max called him-appeared on the scene.
It happened early on in the course of Waldo and Diana's training.
George was just coming up the outside steps that led to the kitchen to collect his morning coffee and biscuits when all hell broke loose.
Diana never remembered what that particular fight was about and it didn't matter really. She said something to her father, and Max hit her hard across the mouth with the back of his hand, sending her spinning into the corner of the kitchen. She waited, head down, expecting the next blow, which never came. When she finally dared look, George Deeson had a choke hold around her father's collar, holding him at arm's length with a knot of fist twisted into her father's protruding Adam's apple.
'Don't you ever do that again, Max Cooper, or so help me God, I'll kill you!' George was old enough to be Max's father, and he didn't raise his voice when he said it, but Max went stomping out of the house like a whipped dog, while George calmly sat down to butter his biscuits and drink his coffee.
Evidently, Max Cooper took George at his word. He never struck Diana again, not once. Not ever, although he tried the night she came home with her clothes torn to pieces.
Later, much later, in the hospital in La Grande when her mother was dying, Diana had asked Iona about it. Why had her father called her a cheater?
'Because of George,' Iona said.
'George? What did he do?'
'He bought two hundred dollars' worth of rodeo tickets the last day of the contest,' Iona said. 'He gave them away to a bunch of poor kids here in La Grande who couldn't have gone otherwise.'
'He didn't buy them from me,' Diana said. She had sold tickets until she was blue in the face, but she didn't remember selling more than one to George Deeson.
'I gave him the tickets and took the money, but they were from your ticket allocation. Even though you didn't sell them yourself, that batch of tickets put you over the top.
Remember, there was only a quarter of a point difference between you and Charlene Davis.'
'So Dad was right,' Diana said, feeling her one moment of triumph, her rodeo-queen victory, slip through her fingers in retrospect. 'I did cheat after all.'
'No, Diana,' Iona had said firmly, squeezing her daughter's hand despite the pain it caused her. 'You've earned every damn thing you've ever gotten.'
It was the only time Diana ever remembered hearing her mother use the word damn. As years went by, she was beginning to understand it a little. Her name, not Charlene's, had been the name on the scholarship at the registrar's office at the university in Eugene. Her name.
Diana's name, was what it said on the two degrees, one from the University of Oregon and now a master's
