Stay Away, Joe, by Dan Cushman, Viking Press, 1953. 249 pages. Price: Whatever you can find it for.
I first read “Stay Away, Joe” back in 1974. It was assigned as part of an English class at the University of Montana, a class that I think was called “Cowboys and Indians: Literature of Red and White,” or something very close to that.
I remember enjoying the book, but the details of the plot leaked away over time. Then, a year or two ago, a Montana native I know read it for the first time and said he was really impressed by the quality of the writing.
So when my wife and I had to pick the next read for our neighborhood book club, I lobbied for “Stay Away, Joe,” thinking it would be a conversation starter and a good subject for a Last Best News review. Part of my aim in doing these reviews is to mix in a few regional classics with the newer books.
It was purely a coincidence that I chose this book right after reading Jim Harrison’s “Brown Dog,” the subject of my most recent book review and also a novel about Indians written by a white Montanan.
That book made me uneasy but Harrison pulled it off by making his main character, Brown Dog, a ne’er-do-well of heroic proportions, a natural man so guileless and innocent that in the end he is the most admirable person in the book.
That is not the case with Big Joe Champlain, the hero of Dan Cushman’s book. He is also a ne’er-do-well, but he is so selfish and shiftless and such a burden to his kind old father and his long-suffering mother that it seems cruel to laugh at his antics. That was also the general feeling of the members of our book club.
I don’t believe Cushman thought he was being condescending or that he was mocking his characters. He probably considered it a fairly accurate representation of life on the Rocky Boy’s Reservation, as he knew it in his boyhood in Box Elder.
Obviously, he exaggerated in terms of plotting and in drawing his characters, but that’s generally what you do in a comic novel. What makes it offensive is that Cushman finds so much humor in alcoholism, violence, poverty and petty crime without acknowledging the damage done by any of those things.
As for the plot: Big Joe returns from Korea with a bum foot and a Chinese scalp, both of questionable provenance, just after his father, Louis Champlain, has been given 20 heifers by a congressman hoping to secure the votes of constituents concerned about the plight of landless Indians.
The rest of the book, which plays out with the pitiful inevitability of a Wile E. Coyote cartoon, traces the reduction of the herd through Joe’s countless scams, a barbecue or two and other manipulations of Louis’ bottomless gullibility.
Meanwhile, Joe is also swindling a white tavern owner while bedding his wife and stepdaughter. For good measure, he swindles car dealers, cattle traders and various friends and family members as well.
All the characters seem quite real, from Louis’ father, Grandpere, an old chief who prefers his tepee to the Champlain shack, to Joe’s sister Mary, who tries desperately to leave the reservation behind but finds herself snared by family entanglements. Joe’s poor mother, the most level-headed person in the book, is made to suffer innumerable indignities when she attempts to play host to the mother of Mary’s white fiancé.
What the reader waits for in vain is some indication that Cushman developed any sympathy for Native American culture while he was storing up the impressions he would later cram into this novel.
The closest he comes is toward the end of the book, when everyone has decamped to the county fair where the climactic horse races are to be held. Grandpere is addressing a gathering of Indians, predicting that the white man will one day blow himself up with his “big bomb.”
“Horses come back, buffalo come back, good country again,” he says. And then:
There was silence, unbroken even by the young men who had gathered around intending to laugh among themselves but instead moved uncomfortably and pulled their mackinaw jackets more tightly against the wind that blew down from Canada across the high prairies of Milk River, with the promise of winter — the strong cold, noot’ akutawin keskawin, as the old men said, feeling in it the primeval urge of their people, the struggle against a bleak land that might well go on after all the gadgets of the new order had been swept away — and just for a moment there was no such comfort in the shine of automobiles parked around as there was in the warmth of the fire.
That was good. Maybe if there had been more of it, the great Indian writer James Welch would not have vetoed the inclusion of an excerpt of Cushman’s work in the “Last Best Place” anthology of Montana literature.
As an indication of how dated this book is, the tag line on an early paperback edition read, “The lusty saga of a half-breed Romeo.” And then it was made into a movie, set in Navajo country, starring Elvis Presley. I tried watching a few clips on YouTube but it was unbearable.
That must have been how Welch felt about the book.
