|
BY JOHN MORRISON 4 Milltown's reputation as a centre of new-age nonsense is not as recent as most people might imagine. Back in 1925, when domestic lighting was not as effective as it is today, spiritualism and table-turning were popular pastimes. So when a tall, striking Indian, with a good tan and an aquiline nose, turned up at the front door of Alice Sumner, one of Milltown's foremost mediums, the locals were naturally a little curious. The statuesque stranger wasn't, however, from Bombay or Calcutta; he was a Red Indian (a Native American, as we'd call him today). What Alice saw, as she opened her door, was a man arrayed in the full costume - war-paint, feathered head-dress, the works - of a chieftain from the Pawnee tribe of plains Indians. While fluent in the gutteral grunts of the Pawnee patois, the stranger was unable to speak a word of English. Alice extended a traditional South Pennine welcome - a cup of tea and a toasted breadcake - then caused Milltown tongues to wag by taking the stranger into her home. Revealing a knowledge of the Pawnee language, of which her neighbours had hitherto been unaware, Alice was able to translate her lodger's more portentious pronouncements. With the prescience of a true medium, she seemed to know what he wanted to say even before he had said it. His name, it transpired, was Brown Feather, and Alice was able to reassure her more timid neighbours that, despite his warlike appearance, his stated mission was to bring harmony to a troubled, war-torn world. With the map of Europe being redrawn on an annual basis, and storm clouds continuing to gather over the Rhone and the Rhine, seldom had a message of peace been more necessary. Alice asked little in return for her hospitality (all he had to offer, in any case, was wampum and beads): merely that Brown Feather should should his face at her weekly seances. He was an immediate sucess with Alice's clients. And why not? They were already convinced that a deluded fantasist could conjure up ecloplasm and communicate with the spirits of the departed. So they accepted a Pawnee Indian's sudden appearance in town without a murmur of doubt or complaint. They were fascinated, too, by his bafflingly oblique aphorisms. "Kiss a duck and change your luck." "See a pin and pick it up, and all day long you'll have a pin." "Wherever I hang my hat, that's my hat." Milltown folk had never heard this kind of thing before. "Never judge a man until you've walked a mile in his shoes. You'll be a mile further on, and you'll have his shoes." Wise words indeed. Brown Feather sent smoke signals and performed elaborate rain dances (a procedure never before seen - or, indeed, needed - in a small, damp South Pennine town). His spirit left his body on numerous occasions, usually when the conversation flagged. He could enter a trance-like state, though, as a number of more sceptical Milltown folk pointed out, how would anyone know the difference? Brown Feather seemed to belong to a long line of idiots savants from a Native American background. "I am the forests, I am the rivers, I am the mountains", he said, via the mouthpiece of an unemployable fruitcake. Unfortunately, he also admitted to Alice, in a moment of candour, that he was the Staten Island Ferry and the state of Nebraska. Yes, it looked like Alice Sumner had teamed up with the only stupid Indian working the epigrammic wisdom circuit. It was Dunces with Wolves'. Worse, he wasn't even called Brown Feather. There were rumours that the relationship between Alice and the Indian had strayed beyond what was decorous for two unmarried people living under the same roof. Then as now, unsubstantiated rumours were an unavoidable aspect of life in a small town. While a lot of people had harboured reservations about the tall, good-looking stranger, everyone in town was gobsmacked when he was unmasked as an out-and-out fraud: real name Brian Trubshaw, a borough surveyor from Cleckheaton with an ugly wife, five kids, a large overdraft and an imagination that knew no bounds. He disappeared soon after being unmasked, taking with him the accumulated wisdom of the plains Indian and all the money that Alice had been saving in a jar on behalf of the Psychics' and Soothsayers' Christmas Club. |
