A Generous Friend

A Generous Friend Ripley Hugo James and Lois Welch were fast friends of Richard Hugo. When I married Dick, they welcomed my children and me into that friendship. We were neighbors on the same street too. Over the years my children ran down to Jim and Lois with their problems. Lois taught Melissa about sewing; Jim wrote Matt a recommendation for college. One Christmas season, Jim went with them to bring back a tree for each of our houses. Lois and Jim became our extended family, and after Dick’s death in 1982, they helped me edit Dick’s essays. I remember how calmly Jim insisted that I could learn to use a computer when I was sure I could not. He took the time to bring me his used computer, set it up, and then painstakingly show me how to work it. I had to measure up because he was not a friend I wanted to disappoint. I remember too a summer night out in our backyard under the poplar trees. A bunch of us were sitting on benches around the picnic table after supper, drinking beer and talking. Jim was across the table from me, talking with Melissa and her latest boyfriend. Some moments they were both talking to Jim at once, all three faces shining in the candlelight. Jim often nodded, listened in his intent way, and made some pithy comment. Suddenly, the young man called Jim “Governor,” and the name stuck. Whenever in the years to come Melissa addressed Jim as “Governor,” he accepted with a slight smile, as if he considered the honor his due. * * * In 1983 when Matt, only twenty-two, was hospitalized in Seattle, [End Page 27] Washington, for cancer treatments, he looked out the window at the steady rain one day and said suddenly, “Mom, I haven’t done shit.” I wanted to cry out “No!” Instead, I told him he had, that he had written good poems, that maybe he could use this time to revise them and put them together as a manuscript. He seized the idea. I brought his poems to him from our home in Montana. Every day that he could, he worked on the poems and completed his manuscript. When he thought it was good enough, he said shyly that he would send it to Jim to read. Jim read the manuscript and called back within a week. I took the phone call for Matt to say that he was in treatment that afternoon and could not come to the phone. Jim asked me to tell Matt that his poems were good, that he liked them a lot. “Tell him,” Jim said, “I think he writes like an Indian.” Matt’s spirits were lifted for the first time in months. On one visit, Lois and Jim brought a venison steak for Matt, a gift from Montana he relished. After the first of that year, Jim came to teach a semester at the University of Washington. Out of his warm concern for Matt, Jim came to talk to Matt several times a week. In those last hard months for Matt, Jim talked about the background of the novel he was writing, Fools Crow. Jim took Matt far from the hospital works in those hours. When the treatments were finished without good results, it was time to take Matt home. The morning we were to leave, I was delayed in traffic. I walked into Matt’s room to find Jim on his knees, tying Matt’s shoelaces for him, smiling and talking as he did. * * * My family had had a cabin in the South Fork of the Teton River, west of Choteau, Montana, since 1937. Lois and Jim joined us there for many good times. They came to know the people with whom my brother and I had grown up. These people were the descendants of the Métis—French/Chippewa Cree—who had emigrated from Manitoba to settle in the canyon in the 1870s and 1880s. Lois and Jim very graciously came with us to visit the Bruno family one autumn day. The Métis family felt honored to meet Jim, whom they knew as the author [End...

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