Her parents had argued about school. Alice Antone, who sometimes worked for the sisters at Topawa, maintained that education was important. Joseph Antone disagreed, taking the more traditional view that all his daughter really needed to know was how to cook beans and make tortillas, how to carry water and make baskets- skills she would learn at home with her mother and grandmother and not at the boarding school in Phoenix.
But when Big Eddie’s horse plodded into Ban Thak, Joseph Antone was miles away working in the floodplain fields. Big Eddie came over to the open fire where Alice stirred beans in a handmade pottery crock.
He wiped the sweat from his face. “It sure is hot,” he said. “Where is your husband?”
“Will he be home soon?” Big Eddie asked.
“No,” she answered. “Not soon.”
“I have come for the children,” Big Eddie announced. “To take them to Chuk Shon to catch the train.”
Dancing Quail had been to Tucson once with her mother and had found the town noisy and frightening. They had gone to sell her grandmother’s
Quietly now, Dancing Quail attempted to slip away, but Alice stopped her.
The huge policeman looked down at Dancing Quail with considerable empathy. He, too, had been frightened the first time he left home for school. Dancing Quail was one of those children who would have to be watched closely for fear she might run away before they could put her on the train. It would be better if Dancing Quail weren’t the first child he loaded into the wagon.
“Give her something to eat,” Big Eddie said. “I will go get the others. It won’t be so bad if she’s not the only one.”
He climbed back into the wagon and urged the waiting horse forward. Alice turned to her daughter, who still hadn’t moved. “Go now,” she said. “Roll your other dress in your blanket.”
Alice stopped her with a stubborn shake of her head. “The sisters say you should go. You will go.”
Dejectedly, but without further argument, Dancing Quail did as she’d been told.
Her grandmother, Oks Amichuda, which means Understanding Woman, had lived a full, busy life before coming to live, in her old age, with her son and daughter-in-law. No longer able to work and cook, Understanding Woman, like other old women, had taken to sitting, either in the shade or the sun, depending upon the weather, and making pottery and baskets, which Alice was able to sell or trade.
From her pottery-making place, Understanding Woman had seen and heard all that was said. Oks Amichuda sided with her son on the subject of Dancing Quail’s education, but an old woman who lives under her daughter-in- law’s roof must be circumspect. She got up and hobbled after her grandchild. In the shadowy adobe house, she went to the storage basket in which she kept her few treasures. Understanding Woman extracted something and brought it to where Dancing Quail was rolling her dress into the blanket.
Dancing Quail looked up. Her grandmother was holding out a small, tightly woven medicine basket.
The child’s eyes grew large.
“Yes,” Understanding Woman insisted, “to keep your spirit safe.”
So the medicine basket went into the bundle. When Dancing Quail emerged from the house, Alice handed her a rolled tortilla filled with beans. Soon Big Eddie returned, bringing with him five other children from the village. Bravely, Dancing Quail climbed into the wagon behind him. She didn’t look back. She didn’t want her mother to see that she was crying.
Brandon Walker found the noisy silence in the car disturbing. His mother, Louella, who had never suffered an introspective moment in her whole life, spoke at tedious length about anything and everything. Women who didn’t talk made the detective nervous.
What was Diana Ladd thinking about as she sat there wordlessly on the far side of the car with the wind whipping long tendrils of auburn hair around her face? She seemed oblivious to it and made no effort to brush it away.
Finally, he could stand it no longer. “When did you quit teaching on the reservation?” he asked.
She didn’t answer, and he glanced in her direction, thinking she had drifted off to sleep, but no, her eyes were open. He tried again, almost shouting to be heard above the rushing wind.
This time Diana turned toward him in acknowledgment. “I didn’t quit,” she replied. “What made you think that?”
“You’re living in Tucson,” he returned. “I thought you had free housing with the district as long as you taught out there.”
“I wanted a house of my own,” she said, and turned her face away from him, effectively cutting off all further conversation.
In 1943, long before the era of sanitary landfills, garbage dumps were still called garbage dumps and bums still scrounged through the accumulated trash, living on whatever crumbs they could scavenge. It was then that the moderately progressive town fathers of Joseph, Oregon, bought the old Stevens place down by the creek to use as the town dump. Through a fluke, the ramshackle old house came with the deal. Initially, the intention was to tear the house down, bulldoze it into the ground, but then someone came up with a better idea.
Everyone in town knew that Iona Anne Dade had made a terrible mistake in marrying Max Cooper-everyone, that is, except perhaps Iona herself, who by then was already alarmingly pregnant with her daughter, Diana. In those days, when good Catholic girls made matrimonial mistakes, they had no choice but to stand pat and make the best of a bad bargain.
So when Max Cooper-an indifferent, sometime logger-was offered the position of garbage-dump caretaker in Joseph, Oregon, it was more as a humanitarian gesture toward his pregnant young wife than it was a vote of confidence about Max’s own dubious job skills or work ethic. And when the Stevens house, such as it was, got thrown into the bargain, it was out of deference to Iona’s daddy, the late Wayne Dade, who had spent many years loyally serving on the town council.
The ladies of Joseph in a rare show of true Christian charity, for once put aside their differences in creed, rolled up their sleeves, and went to work on the place. Baptists did most of the scrubbing and cleaning, Methodists painted, and Catholics sewed curtains. Even stand-offish Mormons signed on to braid rag rugs for the bare linoleum floors.
From the time Max and Iona Cooper moved into their newly refurbished quarters, Max was known in the town of Joseph as the Garbage Man. In the winter when it was too cold to work in the woods and in the summer when it was too hot, or when he wasn’t down at the tavern too drunk to walk, Max Cooper minded the gate, collected the dump fees, and kept the riffraff out. The rest of the time his wife handled it.
Iona Cooper did her housework or gardening, all the while listening for the bell over her kitchen sink that announced someone’s arrival at the garbage dump’s locked gate. Rain or shine, summer heat or bitter winter’s cold, she would drop what she was doing and hurry across the field.
People knew that she was the person who usually opened the gate, who collected the fees, and who returned the change, but no one ever thought of Iona Cooper as the Garbage Woman. She was always Iona Dade Cooper, Wayne’s daughter, the lady who sold milk and eggs, who pickled tomatoes and canned peaches, and who always could find some little something in her pantry for the hungry bums who invariably turned up on her doorstep. She baked wedding cakes for hire and sewed matching bridesmaid dresses. And everybody respected her for what she did, because if you were married to a worthless oaf like Max Cooper, that’s what it took to keep a roof over your head.
Nobody ever once mentioned the word
