Backed into the Wind, Clean-Limbed and Patient

When Winter in the Blood was published in 1974, James Welch was a thirty-four year old who had written some wonderful poems that not enough people knew much at all about. A few blinks later, he was more or less famous. Winter in the Blood was a “nearly flawless” novel, a “brilliant” work of art, said the big-guns in the review business. And they were right. It is a novel that was, and remains, gorgeous, heartbreaking and finally, seriously, very funny.

In 1974 a lot of us were in our twenties and still feeling our way toward the shape and pattern of our adult lives. Some of us thought we might, perhaps, become writers, that it was, perhaps, a possibility for us. Others of us—I was one—did not have much of an idea about where we were in any grand or ungrand sense, and we would not, for many more years, have a hundred pages of fiction that we could call our own. But some of us had grown up on Montana’s northern plains, as Jim did, and now lived in Missoula, where he did, and were lucky enough to know him as a friend.

When you knew Jim apart from his work, you saw that he functioned—in his person, in his being—as living proof that brilliance has virtually nothing to do with talking about it, that success has virtually nothing to do with talking about it.

Aspiring writers who do not have a Jim Welch in their lives can easily get the message that reputations are made and preserved by jostling loudly for advantage: putting yourself out there, flattering the potentially helpful, dissing the no-counts or the competition, saying things you do not mean, affecting an arrogance you do not feel, creating a persona that charms or intimidates and tends to get quoted.

I had the sense that all of that to Jim was just . . . sort of funny. It was like his big dog Ned charging around a gathering to say hi and wag his long tail and steal the cheese if he could. You laugh, you grab your drink, but you certainly do not take Ned’s behavior as any sort of lesson in how anyone but a literal big dog ought to operate.

* * *

There is a word you do not hear much any more. Modesty. To be modest is to be free from ostentation, says the fourth, best definition in my dictionary. Free from it.

It means also, I think, free to savor, without explanation or apology, what might be called the day’s ordinary pleasures. Ordinary pleasures in a familiar, well-loved place. As Jim savored them. Though of course pleasures are never ordinary when you come to them knowing in your bones what their utter absence can feel like.

Jim liked to have Lois, his wife, at one end of the table and himself at the other and a bunch of talky, smart-alecky story addicts connecting the two ends. He liked the amplitude and grace of their house, and their yard, and he liked to walk with Lois back to that house at night, behind the footpads of one big dog or another over the years.

* * *

Walk back. And then—at one o’clock in the morning or thereabouts, in the dead vast and middle of the night—go to work. Until five, or thereabouts. That time on the far, far side of the waking, ordinary, detailed day. That time of the deepest quiet.

* * *

I think of him then, and I see a light behind a window, and I see also a horse in a cold wind on the night prairie, the way it stands there, backed into the wind, clean-limbed and patient, head dropped a little, seeming almost to listen.

I think there may have been times, maybe many, when Jim in those otherworldly hours just listened.

And he heard a fence humming in the sun. And Long Knife’s hair bristling against his collar.

He heard Fools Crow chant with his eyes closed, the rhythm like a...