Chapter Six
It was Rita Budreau, Shaherazade’s mother, who really got things moving to identify The Bones. It is important that you know about the Budreau family. They come from Biloxi, Mississippi. They were blown out of there by Hurricane Katrina. Most people have forgotten about what happened in Biloxi because of Lake Pontchartrain flooding New Orleans. The Budreaus haven’t and because of them, neither has the town of Germaine. The Catholic Church, Mary of the Immaculate Heart, put out word through the parishes in the places where people fled to after their homes were destroyed, that they wanted to host a family. Lucy Charlebois was the force behind that deal. She organized the whole town and half of the rest of Wilbur County.
Lucy is the librarian and she teaches French to some of the kids here in Immaculate Heart’s basement. It’s not taught at Old Paiute High School or Tamarack Creek, which is kindergarten through 8th grade. They teach Spanish and some German. Old Vernon makes sure they keep German in the curriculum. He’s a Dutch descendant but nobody teaches Dutch, so German is the best he can do.
When word came that a family wanted to come to Germaine, Lucy went into overdrive drumming up donations for a family of ten. Clothes, toys, kitchen supplies, food, furniture and all the other stuff that a family needs. Lucy got the Arlingtons to donate the old farmhouse that has been empty for years and then organized work crews to fix it up for the Budreaus. Even Zachary Sweet, who wouldn’t lift a finger to help his own mother cross the street, volunteered. I know because I saw him up in the second story before the sheet rock went in wiring an outlet.
The Budreaus came by airplane to the airport in Redmond and Lucy picked them up in the church van. It was November, cold, and the first snow was falling. I remember thinking how foreign this place would be to them. They would be used to having an ocean practically at their doorstep and they wouldn’t have ever known cold like this and this was only the beginning, it wasn’t even Winter, yet. I had no idea how different Germaine would be for the Budreaus and it wouldn’t have so much to do with the weather. The Budreau family is black, African American. Germaine is pretty damn white. There are a whole lot of people like me, latino, but lots of Germainers don’t really think of the migrant population as part of the town even though most latinos living here are really third and fourth generation.
There are also a few Indians, like Willie Walkingstick, but he is Cherokee and that tribe is not local by any stretch of the imagination. There is also a group of newagers who like to call themselves Cherokee and have created this place they call the Cherokee Nation of Wilbur County. That drives Willie nuts.
In any case, not any, not one African American in the whole County. In fact you’d have to go to Deschutes County and into Bend. Or into the territory of my mind.
Part of the problem is that Wilbur County is pretty isolated. The nearest hospital is 50 miles over a narrow two-lane highway. The nearest doctor, until recently, was 30 miles away. It was logging country and cowboy country almost exclusively for a hundred years after the white people took it from the Paiutes and Nez Perce. Wilbur County is not on any through road. It’s on a road that connects up Highway 26 with Highway 20 and those are highways between somewhere and nowhere themselves that run across the mid-section of the state passing through such memorable places as Millican and Riley. The point is people don’t come to Germaine unless it is to visit people they know or during hunting season if by chance they run out of beer or get lost on their way to Hell’s Canyon. Until lately, anyway.
And there’s a history here in these remote Eastern Oregon hills and valleys. A history of Klan. Lucy Charlebois told me about the Klan. She said there wasn’t a regular Klavern in Germaine so far as she has been able to find out, but some of the men in the old families used to go to Drewsy. She won’t say who donated the box of books to the library, which had the Klan meeting notes in it that she found. She asked me not to tell anyone about it. I don’t know why she thought I could keep the secret. She wouldn’t tell me whose names were in that book, either. She just said there were a lot of families in Germaine who had white-sheeted skeletons in their closet.
That history is something else they don’t teach at Old Paiute High or Tamarack Creek Elementary. It isn’t just Klan, though that is what helped keep this part of the country so lilly-white—excepting migrant farmworkers, like I said before. What’s taught is that white people belong here and the land belongs to them. Even though it’s not in the books and not something anyone says it seems like most of the people here believe that the Nez Perce and Paiute deserved to disappear into the soil, the air, the water, as if they were shadows. I think it is the way nobody talks about it at all that makes me think people just accept what happened as if it had to happen that way.
Still there aren’t very many people here who think of themselves as bigoted. There are lots of people who think just the opposite of themselves and most try to be decent, reasonable people. They’ve pretty much never had to test that belief in their lifetimes. Except for generally ignoring the people who plant, nurture, and harvest the honeydew. They don’t often cross social paths with the field workers even though their children go to the same schools.
The ghosts of the Klan wandering through our community stick more or less to dusty corners deep in the darkness. The good citizens of Germaine have done right by the Budreaus in spite of the fact they had no real personal experience with African Americans. After all it is the 21st Century. People travel and they watch television and they get exposed to all sorts of different worlds and cultures. Hugo Budreau, the father of the family, went to work right away. He’s got all kinds of skills from computer programming to carpentry. There is plenty in Germaine to keep him busy. Rita had her hands full with the smaller Budreau children, but not so much that she couldn’t find time to volunteer to help out in the school. She is a real whiz at teaching children to read.
Cynthea McCoy