The Liberating Visions (and Futile Flight) of Melanie Little Crow 0 comments

Melanie Rae Thon

VIRGIN MARY VISITS RESERVATION

ON APRIL 11, 1998, the Virgin Mary was seen and photographed on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana. Aforty-year-old woman, Melanie Little Crow, who is a native Montanan but not a Native American—and who has taken the name “Little Crow” falsely and with permission of no one—claims she spotted Sweet Mary Mother of God sometime before eleven that morning. She had witnessed other signs earlier that day: snow, rain, and hail—black clouds so low they touched the treetops. As she drove south, the clouds began to break, and soon the sky turned almost clear and miraculously blue as Mary’s garment. Little Crow was able to snap one photograph before the Virgin vanished. The snow also vanished, but more slowly. Little Crow reports that the encounter left her with “a feeling of absolute peace and enveloping protection.” After the sighting, Little Crow (who also claims to be a virgin), continued on her merry way to Wild Horse Hot Springs, where (for five dollars, probably stolen) she immersed herself in the healing waters of the mineral baths for a full hour. Against advisement, she also swallowed a fair amount of the water, but claims the Virgin spared her any serious side effects. Little Crow said, “I experienced an inner cleansing, which I suppose I badly needed.”

LITTLE CROW ARRESTED

MELANIE LITTLE CROW—who claims to have seen a vision of the Virgin Mary last April and who now insists she met Jesus Christ her Personal Savior on the banks of the Flathead River—has been arrested by Flathead County Sheriff’s Deputies for vagrancy and trespassing. Little Crow was found sleeping in an overturned dumpster near the gravel pit just over the bridge off Highway 35. No Trespassing signs are clearly posted, and Little Crow says, Yes, thank you very much, she can read, but that she had received permission of a higher order. “Jesus said his house is my house,” Little Crow reportedly told Deputies Weylin Van Hoose and Sheldon Cross as they took her into custody. “And remember what Our Father says about trespassers,” she added. She said she knew it was really Jesus “because he wore a red robe and a crown of thorns. He was very clean, but I noticed his head was bleeding.”

Little Crow herself—whose true name, if she even has one, is still unknown—wore a yellow parka and huddled inside a blue sleeping bag. “Both were filthy,” Van Hoose told this reporter, “but we are investigating the possibility that these items were once new and lovely and may have been stolen from a mobile home parked at the River Rest Trailer Park for three weeks last February.”

Little Crow told authorities she did not feel obligated to obey any white man’s law “unless his name is Jesus.” She originally claimed Sans Arc, Absarokee, and Nez Perce ancestry, but later admitted, “Okay, maybe I’m just a Kalispel Indian like the rest of you.” The matron at Flathead County Jail who prefers to remain anonymous but who is well known to most of you anyway, who sprayed Little Crow down and saw her “I swear, naked as a baby,” maintains now and forever and to her dying day that Little Crow is “white, bright white, fishbelly white, and a damn liar.”

Little Crow is being held on $500 bond at the county jail. The Unnamed Matron is free to go when her shift ends at eleven tonight, “But,” she says, “I’ll probably stay on. Most people sleep through the night shift, which is fine by me and I wouldn’t be one to complain or even mention it under ordinary circumstances, but I don’t trust a woman that twitchy who says she’s seen both Jesus and his holy mother. Somebody’s got to stay awake and watch her. Might as well be me—nobody’s home waiting, and I’m not that tired anyway.”

LITTLE CROW CONFESSES

MELANIE LITTLE CROW, who still refuses to take her father’s name, either in vain or for legal purposes, now claims she is responsible for over a hundred crimes in the Flathead Valley—some dating back as far as the early seventies.

She told the matron on duty, “my keeper, my captor, my sister,” that she gutted a cabin one winter, burned it flat “during the month of the snowblind, when the drifts were so deep they covered the windows. I was cold,” she said. “It was an accident.” She liberated three llamas “one warm day in the month of the melting moon, after the winter when the grizzly woke too early.” She said the llamas just wanted to go home. “That’s what they told me. Then they headed south, toward their own country.”

She thinks she may have borrowed a car and camera the day she saw the Virgin Mary. “Maybe a man took a nap on his porch. Maybe his keys fell out of his pocket.”

The blue sleeping bag and yellow parka Little Crow had in her possession when she was apprehended were indeed stolen from the River Rest Trailer Park in February, but Little Crow believes these items were gifts gladly given. “I needed them. The nice woman who left them on the bed in the trailer in plain sight must have wanted me to have them. I saw them through the window, and breaking the glass with a rock she’d left underneath the steps was easy.”

Lois Hopper, who once owned the sleeping bag and parka, but who no longer wants them, said, “I got home late that night—okay, early that morning—but it was still dark as dirt and let me tell you I was terrified when I saw the busted window. Glass all over the floor, and that smell—well, maybe your deputies can describe it.”

Little Crow prefers to sleep in boats and has done this every summer as long as she can remember: “Bitterroot, Swan, Flathead, Whitefish—even Lake Koocanusa, which is the greenest of all and still my favorite. But most times I’m not choosy. Boat is just another word for cradle,” she said, “and the cradle’s the grave when it stops rocking. I sleep wherever I can, but it’s nice to have a place on the water in July and August.”

District Judge Wanda Harp cautioned reporters not to take Little Crow’s confessions too seriously. “Some people get dangerously comfortable in jail. Dry beds, regular meals. They’d stay forever if we let them. We want her to take responsibility for the crimes she did commit, but we don’t encourage any of our prisoners to take credit for ones they didn’t.”

Little Crow, 5’ 4” tall and 92 pounds, confirmed that she is often hungry. “Wet too,” she said, “especially in March and April.” She learned to love fasting while living with the nuns at Our Lady of Perpetual Mercy in Walla Walla, Washington. “But,” she said, “now that I’m forty, I’m less enamored of my suffering. Even Jesus stopped at thirty-three, which was always my intention. I slept in the snow. I lay on the train tracks. I fell out of trees. I jumped off of bridges. Funny thing is, the more I lose of my body, the more I love it. I’m a walking miracle,” she said, “proof of something.”

She also confided that “a hair shirt grows smooth as silk if you wear it as long as I have.” This was a lie, of course. She was wearing a man’s flannel shirt, green plaid, when deputies hauled her out of the dumpster. “Another gift from a kind stranger—I cross my heart by your candles. The man who owned it before me was dead when I met him. We made a trade: he offered me his shirt and jeans, and in exchange, I washed him.”

After her confessions to the matron, Little Crow asked to see a priest and lay on the floor of her cell until Father Ray McKinnick—despite badly swollen feet and too many nips of holy wine—graciously agreed to visit. This confession was private, of course, so one can only imagine. “There are sins of commission and sins of omission,” Father Ray reminds us. “The former are easily named and numbered. The latter too often denied, or too long forgotten.”

Our matron, who is full of revelations but who still wishes more than anything and for all time to remain anonymous, whispered, “off the record,” that she overheard some of Little Crow’s words. “And since I did, I consider them mine to tell you.”

The prisoner neglected to visit her mother. “I knew she was sick, but never expected a woman that mean to go so quickly.” She deserted her brother. “He crashed into a tree, and I flew into the high grass, but he was trapped there.” She told Father Ray, “I was three, he was twenty. But that’s no excuse. I already knew what Jesus expected. I should have gone back to the car and prayed with my Willie until the gas tank exploded.”

Little Crow abandoned her babies. “Even before they were born, they wouldn’t stop crying. Every time I moved into a house I heard them caught in the walls like birds and squirrels. I heard them like rats living under the floorboards. That’s why I like to live outside. That’s why I became a virgin.”

The matron said Little Crow talked in her sleep. “No words, just mumbo, like those people who go to church in tents, who all claim they’re talking to God in some secret language. She was going on like that, and I had to slap her, but she just turned the other cheek as if my smack hardly touched her. Later on, she cried and sweated. She threw herself against the walls, which is how she got those bruises. I had to put her in restraints for her own protection; and once I got her down, I figured it made good sense just to sedate her.”

The matron, unnamed but known well, dark as an Indian herself, squat and solid, with a wide, flat face and a heart like an awl, is now on her third shift, going on twenty-four hours and still, she insists, not a bit tired. She doesn’t want to go home. “How could I sleep,” she said, “after all that talk about rats and squirrels?”

LITTLE CROW MOVES CAMP

MELANIE MOVES CAMP, who first identified herself as Melanie Little Crow, apparently moved camp, debunked, disappeared, departed from her cell at the Flathead County Jail sometime before dawn this Sunday.

Sheriff Ripley Jessup says that to the best of his knowledge Moves Camp is neither armed nor dangerous, but he advised citizens to keep their distance and call his office if they encountered any dirty strangers, little dogs, or oddly shaped shadows. “You never know with these people.” When asked what he meant by “these people,” Jessup feigned momentary loss of hearing, so we’ll never know if these people are vagrants, Indians, twitchy women without husbands, or just unwashed people in general. He did say that the name Moves Camp implies that Little Crow might be Lakota, “maybe Sans Arc like she said, maybe Brulé, but most likely Oglala and therefore crazy as a wild horse, and most certainly not to be trusted.”

Althea D’Arcy, the matron on duty when Little Crow moved camp, who wished to keep her identity secret, but who has lost all rights to privacy due to her negligence, said, “To my way of thinking you can’t trust a Sioux of any feather.” When she said, “Sioux,” she drew a line across her throat then wriggled her arm like a snake. She whispered, “Custer’s the one they killed, but they were everybody’s enemies.”

Sheriff Jessup declined to comment on the rumor that Matron D’Arcy may have assisted the prisoner in her escape while the good citizens of Kalispell, other residents of the jail, and yes, even the damn crows were sleeping. He did admit, “Well, we’ve got a bit of a mystery, don’t we?” When he took this reporter on a tour of the eight by eight cell, he locked the door to make his point about security. “Moves Camp may be narrow in the shoulders,” Jessup said, “but she’s a full grown woman.” He pointed to the window near the ceiling. “She’s got a head, doesn’t she? Human head won’t fit between those bars. Ask Althea, she’ll show you.”

STRANGE TWIST IN LITTLE CROW DISAPPEARANCE

SHERIFF RIPLEY JESSUP has confirmed that Althea D’Arcy, former matron at the Flathead County Jail, is now wanted for questioning as a possible accomplice in Melanie Little Crow’s escape last Sunday. “Unfortunately,” he said, “Ms. D’Arcy is also missing.”

Deputies talked to D’Arcy two days ago, Jessup reported. “Nothing official, you understand, just trying to get straight on details.” The matron, suspended without pay, was home at last but still not sleeping. When asked if she’d had any hint of Little Crow’s intentions, D’Arcy said, “Not a breath. She liked her cell. She was perfectly happy.”

When pressed to reveal her last conversation with Little Crow—which took place late Saturday night just hours before the prisoner moved camp—D’Arcy confessed, “All right, in retrospect, I can see maybe she dropped a clue, but I swear, nothing definite. First of all, she forgave me, which I didn’t particularly appreciate. Nothing worse than being forgiven when you’re not guilty of any wrongdoing. But she didn’t act all high and mighty about it. She was kind of humble—you might even say she seemed ashamed of what she was doing—and I thought, Well, somewhere along the line I must have done something bad and missed out on a pardon. So I figured I might as well take her forgiveness now; and I have to say that when I did, I felt a whole lot better.

“Later on I heard her whimpering, and I asked why, and she said she loved me. I said, ‘That’s okay,’ and she said, ‘No it isn’t,’ and I said, ‘Why not,’ and she said, ‘Because I have to leave you.’

“Well, I didn’t take it serious. I mean, everybody leaves jail sooner or later. Ladies get out, or get shipped to Billings. When she was gone, I figured her love for me wouldn’t be a burden to either one of us.

“Maybe it was three o’clock when she asked me if I was still awake, and I said, ‘Who can sleep with you jabbering?’ Then we both had a good laugh because really she’d been pretty quiet all night, and completely silent for the past hour.

“‘Jesus is outside,’ she said. ‘He wants me to go with him. I told him I’d rather stay with you, that I was warm at last, and almost happy. He said it wasn’t really my decision, though I know he was trying to be nice about it. He promised the wilderness is not that far and not that dark, and if I get cold, I can wear his red robe, and he’ll go naked.’

“I didn’t much like that,” D’Arcy said. “In fact, we argued. I told Little Crow I didn’t want to hear any more of her nasty talk about the good Lord going naked. She turned mean then—well, maybe not mean, exactly, but sarcastic. Suggested that next time I was in church I should take a look at Jesus on the cross and think about what he was wearing.

“So you can understand,” D’Arcy said, “why we stopped talking. And no, I didn’t sleep, even then, but maybe I covered my ears with my sweatshirt, maybe I turned out the light, maybe I rested my head on the table—but I swear not long enough for her to trick me.”

Now Sheriff Jessup suspects he and his deputies are the ones who have been duped. “No way out of that cell except to unlock it,” he said. “Maybe it was mostly an accident, and maybe it was kind of on purpose. Maybe D’Arcy put her keys on the table just where Little Crow could reach them. I honestly can’t think of any other human explanation. We’d like to question her again, but unfortunately for us, D’Arcy, like Little Crow, has vanished.”

Belle and Svee Okken, who have lived next door to Althea D’Arcy for twenty-two years, who are not husband and wife, but sister and brother, and who keep to themselves mostly for the obvious reason, couldn’t help noticing the former matron packing her car late Monday night. “Heading north,” Svee said, “that’s my guess. Took a lot of food, took a lot of blankets.”

Jessup is cautious but admits he has his suspicions. “Could be Little Crow and D’Arcy are in cahoots,” he said. “I’ve seen it happen. Guards start to identify with the ones they’re keeping. It’s dangerous, of course, and goes against all our training.” He professes he never had reason to suspect that our matron, now named, might be susceptible to this or any other weakness. “She was a professional,” he said. “I admired her. Until last week, I’d never seen Althea D’Arcy display even the faintest glimmer of compassion.”

FUGITIVE RECAPTURED

MELANIE LITTLE CROW, trespasser, thief, liar, fomenter, arsonist, liberator, imposter, and possible seductress of a matron thought to be absolutely and forever invulnerable to any tender emotion, was captured last night just south of the Port of Del Bonita on the Blackfeet Reservation. The fugitive has been in flight nine days and asks us to believe she walked from Kalispell to Browning, ninety-nine miles, before a good Samaritan offered a ride and brought her here to Del Bonita, where she camped within sight of the Canadian border.

Several Indian women tried to shield her from the authorities, insisting she was on tribal land and therefore under Blackfeet jurisdiction. Sheriff’s Deputies Weylin Van Hoose and Sheldon Cross told the women to please observe that they were not wearing uniforms and not driving a cruiser, and that they acted, truth be told, as private citizens, bounty hunters, and were therefore under no obligation whatsoever to abide by the laws of this or any other nation. “Crow, Blackfeet, Cheyenne, Flathead, United States of America—makes no difference,” Van Hoose said. “Tuesday morning we’ll be back at work, wearing the man’s outfits. Till then, nobody can touch us.”

Apparently, Mr. Van Hoose is quite correct in his assertion about the rights of private citizens, especially in Montana. Sheriff Rip Jessup contends that although he does not approve of his deputies’ escapade, he’s pleased with the outcome. He denied rumors that his officers used anything more than justifiable force. “They cuffed her right away, as they should have, but didn’t cinch the ropes hog-style until she bit poor Sheldon. Yes, her face is swollen, but we have no proof—save the testimony of five squaws—that either of my boys whacked, punched, or even slapped her.”

As the private citizens sped away with their bounty, the Blackfeet women chanted, “We have hunters of our own. They come like owls. You’ll never hear them.”

Van Hoose swears he’s not a man afraid of dancing women, either at home or on the reservation. “Only completely desperate people resort to magical thinking. My wife Violet makes the same kind of crazy threats every time she loses an argument.”

Sheldon Cross is just grateful that the bite on his hand is not infected. “Only thing that troubles me is the fact that any one of those women could have been Althea D’Arcy in disguise. Looking back at them, I thought I saw Althea D’Arcy multiplied.”

Little Crow alleges she is genuinely astonished by the suggestion that she might have been making camp with Althea. “They were Blackfeet. I wasn’t one of them,” she said, “and they knew it. Our great-great-grandfathers all tried to scalp each other at one time or another. But we were women with many enemies, some much closer than our ancestors. The women were very kind to me and let me make my own camp at the edge of their village.”

When asked why she hadn’t crossed the border and escaped into Canada like so many before her, Little Crow said, “I was weary; I was waiting.”

Sheriff Jessup was convinced that she who loves to confess finally meant to reveal exactly when she thought D’Arcy might be coming. The prisoner vowed she had no expectations. “If she’s on her way, she’s lost,” Little Crow said. “But it’s nice to think that after all these years, my sister, dear Althea, might try at last to save me.”

LETTER FROM THE WOMEN’S CORRECTIONAL FACILITY:
                              BILLINGS, MONTANA

Dear Althea,

Sister or no sister, they say you have saved yourself from humiliation or possible indictment as my accomplice. You are in flight forever.

Trust me.

I told them seven times you did nothing.

Once, after walking in the Absaroka Mountains four days and three nights without food or water, I saw Jesus drowned in a glacial pool. Then he said my name, my real name, and I saw he was alive in the air above me. The Jesus deep in the lake rose to the surface, a reflection only.

Things are not as they appear, he said. Have mercy.

The night I escaped I was like him, thin as water. Althea, you are not to blame. In the dark, you did not see me trickle past you.

They have given me thirty years because I would not stop confessing. Thirty years, imagine. Does this mean I will live to be seventy? A miracle. I take it gladly.

I am waiting.

They say you face no charges. They say nobody wants you.

Althea, I want you.

Come back. When you return, I will be your prisoner. You will be my keeper. We will trade places. We will be drowned. And saved. And reflected.

Your sister,
in blood and water,
Melanie