ALL THE ENTWINED STORIES
When I was struggling to figure out what I was doing with Bob, I told the shrink that I couldn’t find my “story,” that if I could just find my story I would knew who I was and what I should do. He couldn’t understand what I meant by that and said it wasn’t helpful, that I should stop.
There were two shrinks, one named Hamilton Pierce and the other named Gelerntner. I was going to Dr. Pierce. One of them had a basset hound named for the other, but I never knew which one. Pierce was kind but patronizing and much impressed by sculptors who were famous. I managed to escape a psychiatrist named Wilder who was famous for giving electroshock to troublesome wives, though he was much admired.
Bob had made a tape of our orders for bronzes and their prices which added up to a quarter of a million dollars, which was a lot for the Sixties. The shrink didn’t know that the real list of orders was printed by hand on a long sheet of brown wrapping paper which I ruled with a yardstick and printed with a fiber marker, then stuck on a nail in the shop, up high because it was so long. A list is not a story. Money is not value.
There were too many stories, most of them more dramatic than “True Confessions” magazine. Consider the two previous wives. When Bob and I finally married, a proper ceremony with all the traditional elements, it merely tied up some loose ends that had been dangling for decades.
WIFE ONE: Alice Permilia Prestmo, daughter of a BIA carpenter. One of two blondes in town. The other one’s father would not let her date Bob Scriver but she was always Bob’s friend. She taught piano lesson and sold Navajo jewelry from a little shop. The man who finally married her was allowed to court her in his car, but only if they drove around and around the block while her father sat on the front porch and timed them so he’d know if they stopped. They were part of a Browning cohort and we always stopped to visit where they were in West Glacier.
Alice’s family was run by her mother and the two women did not get along. Her father, Gunter Prestmo was a gentle man who didn’t interfere. Bob graduated from Browning High School in 1932. He always claimed to be the Valedictorian but he was not. He never said much about his childhood buddy, James Welch II, who was the father of James Welch III, the famous writer. Ace Powell was also a classmate who remained a lifelong friend.
In high school he had a music teacher whose name I don’t know. The man went to on teach at Dickinson State Teacher’s College and where Bob enrolled and took art courses as well as band. Then he enrolled at the Vandercook School of Music, which specialized in band leaders. He also picked up certification at Northwestern University. By 1935 he was teaching in Browning.
The Prestmo family had only been in town a year when Alice was in Browning classes as a junior, born 12/22/1919. She and Bob married in Cardston on Nov. 20, 1937. Their daughter, Margaret Alice, was born June 19, 1938. She was not premature. The Glacier Reporter announced this as a happy event between accomplished people. (Alice played in the band.) Bob crossed out her name in his class roll book.
Much was happening. Harold (Bob’s brother) and his fiancée were in a wreck that put Hazel in the hospital for a month. Eddie Big Beaver married Cora Calf Looking on August 30. He was often employed as a ranger or naturalist and eventually posed for Bob’s sculpture called “No More Buffalo.” Charlie Devereaux and Victor Pepion went to art school back east. Devereaux came back to teach art and organized a drawing club. Victor Pepion painted a mural frieze around the foyer of the Museum of the Plains Indian.
Earl Heikka was already getting attention for his sculptures of hunter’s pack strings and was selling small plaster cast sculptures in the Glacier National Park big hotels. George Bird Grinnell and Frank Bird Linderman died that spring, a month apart. Winold Reiss was running his art school beside St. Mary Lake and his brother carved the “wooden Indian” that stands now at the East Glacier lodge.
On the Canadian side, Clare Sheridan, widow of an Irish gentleman, had come to visit an Irish friend who had married a Blackfoot named Tailfeathers, but she also attended the Winold Reiss art school. (Gerald Tailfeathers was the most famous artist from the school.) Clare, an author and free spirit, drove across the continent in an open car to get to the East Slope. She was secretly a spy for Winston Churchill, a cousin of his wife who was also Winston’s cousin. Some people smelled war and England wanted to know what the Irish diaspora in Alberta was thinking. Later Clare spied on Lenin, purporting to do a bust portrait of him.
My parents were from roughly the same generation as Bob Scriver but both suffered more from the Depression, my mother forced out of college and my father’s family watching their fortunes dwindle away. Nevertheless, they had the beautifully made little two-bedroom house just off Alberta and they had a new baby, myself. My father was buying wool in Eastern Oregon. My mother was pleased to have escaped Roseburg. She was the only Pinkerton girl who had escaped marrying a Hatfield as all the other Pinkerton girls had.
The story was that the patriarch, Roy Hatfield, had advised his sons to marry the Pinkerton girls because they were strong and smart. Also, he may have had a bit of a fantasy that he was stealing John Pinkerton’s daughters. He disapproved of John. My mother was the Alpha Pinkerton girl; Howard was the Alpha Hatfield boy. The two were absolutely opposed.
By 1939 the world was crashing into war. Vera, the second Pinkerton daughter was an operating room nurse in Great Falls. She enlisted and served in Oxford and Rheims, returning damaged and marrying the second Hatfield son.
Back in Browning Harold enlisted voluntarily. He was a crack shot and big game hunter, quickly drawn into the heaviest fighting. No one recognized PTSD in those days. It didn’t change his fate. Alice said if Bob also enlisted, she would divorce him He did join but divorce was delayed because Alice was pregnant with a boy. They were at Malmstrom Air Force base, quarreling and he slapped her in the face. That cinched the divorce.
Alice re-married a butcher named Skogen and had three more children, all girls. Bob had to pay child support. The new husband believed in beating that other man’s son, but he died young of a heart attack. Alice would not allow anything more than summer custody for James, the boy, who had been named for Mr. Jim Stone, who died in 1937, aged 83.
Jim Stone had married a Blackfeet woman who had an allotment at St. Marys where a cluster of white business people in Browning built summer cabins. They were on the hill looking down at the art school. Bob would slip down to watch the school, but Wessie considered them morally loose and they were, which made Bob love them more. It was where the Chewing Black Bones campground is now. Chewing Black Bones, called in the books of James Willard Schultz, Ahko Pitsu, posed for the Scriver sculpture of the old man in “Transition.” By that time he was blind, lived in a lodge, and was hard to persuade to pose. Bob won him over with the help of Keith Seele, a prominent Egyptologist and fan of James Willard Schultz, and with gifts of old-fashioned twist tobacco.
Robert and Harold had married unfortunately: Hazel was carrying hereditary Alzheimers and passed it to her daughter. Alice was carrying a precursor of colon cancer and also passed it on to her daughter. Both women had the genetics of far northern Europe. The brothers would have done better to marry healthy indigenous women under more fortunate historical circumstances.
