Read Online Blue Ravens: Historical Novel by Gerald Vizenor - Free Book Online

understood native stories, animal totems, or the dream songs of native liberty.
    Jack London would not survive on the reservation.
    The card catalogue listed every book in the library. Aloysius looked through the cards in the drawer for his name and found a book about Aloysius Bertrand, a French symbolist poet, and Saint Aloysius Gonzaga. Beaulieu was listed many times, a winery in California, and as a reference to a place in France, Beaulieu-sur-Mer, a commune near Nice and Monaco.
    The Manabozho Curiosa , that ancient Benedictine manuscript about monks, sex, and animals was not listed in the card catalogue. Naturally, we avoided the word “sex” when we asked the librarian about the Manabozho Curiosa . She had never heard of the manuscript but thought a copy might be found in the Rare Book collection at the University of Minnesota Library.
    Aloysius opened several art books on a huge oak reference table and together we brushed the images with our fingers, touched the painted bodies of soldiers, women poised near windows in soft natural light, darker scenes of animals and hunters, and distorted images of humans and houses. Most of the old images portrayed a civilization of pathetic poses and contrition, and the great shadows and slants of divine light by master painters.
    The ancient blues were muted.
    Yes, the bright flowers, pristine fruit on a table, and exotic birds, seemed at the time to be more authentic than our actual memories and experience of the natural world. The reds, yellows, and greens were bright, the blues faint. The images of exotic birds were realistic studies, an obsession of godly perfection in bright plumage. The painted birds were steady pictures, similar to the portraits of warriors and politicians.
    The best of nature, and our sense of nature, was forever in motion by the favor of the seasons. The overnight bruises, creases, crucial flaws caused by the weather, and every wave, ruffle, gesture, and flight were wholesome. The ordinary teases, blush, and blemish of character, were a natural presence,and yet the birds, painted flowers, and fruit that we touched in the giant art books were bright, perfect, ironic, and unsavory.
    Ravens would never peck at a pastel peach.
    Aloysius slowly backed away from the reference table, looked around the library, and then he painted three blue ravens with massive claws over the modern art images in the books. The wings of the ravens were painted wide and shrouded the table and chairs with feathers.
    A young librarian waved a finger and cautioned us not to touch the books. She praised the blue ravens that my brother had painted, and then explained that painting was not permitted in the library. Yes, we pretended to understand the unstated caution, that only the bookable and bankable arts were favored and secured, not the original blue ravens and native totems.
    Aloysius painted with two soft brushes and a thick, blunt cedar stick that was roughened on the end. One brush was round, soft, and pointed. The other was a wide watercolor shadow brush. His saliva, and sometimes mine, was used to moisten the blue paste.
    Aloysius had made his own paintbrushes. He carved the wooden handles from birch, molded the ferrule sleeve from copper, and the tufts were bundles of squirrel hair for several of his brushes. He used sable hair for the brushes with a fine point.
    The new images were much richer and the hues of blue more evocative on the professional art paper. The blue ravens on the newsprint were strong, abstract, and the lines and shadows were in natural motion, never distinct as portraiture, but the ravens were enlivened on the new paper. My brother had created a book of paintings on our first visit to the city.
    My first creative impressions were short descriptive scenes, only a few words, more precise than abstract. Every spontaneous scene was more obvious in my memory than in my written words. My original scenes were composed in short distinct sentences, only