Sibling Assignment #42: Ghosts

Beneath the Post Street Bridge, below the falls, Tony Bamonte found the gun that was most likely used to murder George Conniff.


Silver Valley Girl assigned us to write about ghosts. I'm way behind, but I'm going to get caught up. You can find InlandEmpireGirl's post here and Silver Valley Girl's post here.

I think about ghosts all the time. It's because I don't think history is a reality that is behind us. I am certain that what we call the past lives with us all the time. It's in the present. My way of understanding the ever present reality of the "past" is through ghosts.

I've just finished reading two books that I think are about ghosts, although the writers never put it this way. One is set in Spokane and the other in South Dakota.

The book set in South Dakota is entitled Buffalo for the Broken Heart. Dan O'Brien, South Dakota rancher and writer, chronicles how he slowly, but surely, decided to transform his ranch by no longer raising cattle and turning his efforts to the raising of wild buffalo.

In his book, O'Brien listens to the ghosts of the buffalo. He looks to the buffalo that are no longer on the land and thinks of their ecological relationship with the lands of South Dakota.

The ghosts teach him that as a species indigenous to the great plains of South Dakota, the buffalo has a relationship to the land that enriches the land rather than destroying it the way cattle do. The cattle are imports to South Dakota. They have not evolved to graze the land of the plains. The buffalo did evolve this way and the ghosts of the buffalo, that is, the fact that they have the same relationship to the land in the 21st century that they did in all the preceding centuries, begin to prick O'Brien's conscience.

He realizes that his cattle are costing him a lot of money because he is always having to compensate for the cattle being out of place. The cattle need more food than the land offers; the cattle cannot find water on their own; the cattle are not mobile grazers: they do not spread themselves over the land.

O'Brien loves the land of his ranch. The buffalo ghosts teach him that his land will prosper if he brings wild buffalo to his land, if he brings the animals who belong there to graze it.

O'Brien listens to the ghosts and takes a leap of faith. He goes against the South Dakota status quo. The ghosts of the buffalo were right and O'Brien observes in wonder how much easier the buffalo are on his land and he goes into the business of selling wild buffalo meat, meat that the buffalo produce by eating the natural grass of the land, not by being grain fed and meat that is harvested only in the fall, not year around.

In other words, O'Brien's buffalo produce meat that is the result of the cycles of nature, meat that comes from sweet spring and summer grass. Unlike grain fed cattle, the buffalo produce lean meat, low in fat and cholesterol, and meat whose taste holds the varieties of the land, rather than the sameness of grain.

The way I look at it, these buffalo are deeply connected in time to their ancestors; so connected, in fact, that it is as if time did not pass between the buffalo of the 1800's or the 1900's, but rather a continuum of time has passed, and the reality of those older buffalo is alive in the present in their ghosts.

The other book I just read is Timothy Egan's Breaking Blue. It tells the story of Tony Bamonte, a Gonzaga University graduate student and Pend Oreille County Sheriff, who becomes obsessed with the unsolved murder of Newport, Washington marshal, George Conniff. Conniff was killed when he checked up on a robbery in progress at the Newport Creamery. The robbers were stealing butter, a valuable commodity during the drought of 1935.

Bamonte, through meticulous research, concludes that Spokane police detective, Clyde Roston, has been the ringleader of a Spokane syndicate that has robbed creameries and profited from the sale of black market butter.

He is certain that Clyde Roston killed George Conniff.

He listens to the ghost of that murder, the ghost of George Conniff. The murder does not recede into the past. George Conniff's ghost speaks through the consciences of a variety of people who have kept secrets about this murder over the past thirty-four years. As they unburden themselves of these secrets, Bamonte listens to the ghost of George Conniff and, for all intents and purposes, solves the crime.

I can't help but think of the ghosts of the living, too. My second wife, Annette, and I bought the house I live in. I haven't seen Annette for over ten years. Few things we owned together are here. But she is. Annette's ghost hangs around; she's still here bustling around, laughing, coughing, crying, filling the house with stuff, baby talking to the five now dead cats whose ghosts wander around.

The past doesn't go away. It's here. And ghosts aren't supernatural.

They just won't go away.