by Will Hobbs
The drumming grew even louder as the packrats drew near. Any moment now they’d be on me. Before they even appeared I turned and ran all the way back out and into the open. What chance was there, really, that they had the flute? I didn’t want to know badly enough to fight them for the opportunity to find out.
When we returned to the Seed Farm it was still dark, but it was apparent that a change was in the air. A slight breeze first, then a stronger breeze and a rustling in the corn. Dusty, too, was sniffing the air, thick with the promise of moisture.
Very faintly on the warm, moist air came the sound of a very pure instrument, so clean and beautiful it could have been the music of the stars. It was faint yet unmistakable. A flute, that’s what it was.
Dusty wasn’t perking up her ears. It seemed only I was hearing these notes. I guessed I was only imagining the music of the flute I should have been brave enough to try to recover.
12
The sunrise that morning was the finest I’d ever seen at the Seed Farm, the finest I may ever see again. I walked down from the rimrock and joined my parents as they watched from the cabin step, hugging each other. A cloud bearing all the colors of the rainbow was advancing on our valley. Out of that cloud, broad shafts of light spoking from the sun lit our world with color from horizon to horizon. My parents reached out and hugged me too, and Dusty made four.
We could hear whooping and hollering from Big Pink, even though it was a quarter mile up the road. They’d never seen the equal of this morning either.
The breeze was out of the south, and it felt all different from the air we were used to, the skin-cracking dry air of New Mexico.
My parents and I were just looking at each other, looking back to the sunrise, feeling about as good as we’d ever felt or were ever going to in this life, I guess. We didn’t even try to find words. When a tear left my father’s eye, my mother and I couldn’t help it either, and then all three of us were sniffling and laughing and shaking our heads. There was more to it than anticipating our crops getting a good soaking, much more than words can tell. I guess rain on its way will do that to you if you’re dry-farming in dry country, but this one wrung out our hearts but good.
On the spot, I came within a whisker of telling my secret. I didn’t know how much longer I could keep carrying it. Instead I asked, “Did you hear something during the night that sounded like someone playing a flute?”
They shook their heads. “What a lovely thing for you to hear, Tep,” my mother said. “I wish I had.”
“Oh, probably I was just dreaming.”
The moment passed as the looping flight of a magpie caught our attention, winging our way on that tropical breeze. Usually magpies look black and white, but the way the light was glowing this morning, it revealed the blues and purples in the feathers that usually look black.
The bird cocked its head as it flew by, and it cried “Tepary! Tepary! Tepary!”
“Maggie!” I called back, but she flew away.
A chorus of ravens brought our attention back around to the south, to the advancing clouds. Cawing and croaking and cronking, quite a number of ravens were harassing a figure walking up the road, a dark man from the look of him, leaning on a stick—a hunchback, perhaps. Or was he bent into that shape under the bag he was carrying on his back?
“Looking for work, I bet,” my father remarked. “Perfect timing—we have some last-minute seed to put into the ground today.”
It seems like every summer we’d had at least one illegal alien who came through looking for work. We could never afford to pay them cash to send home to their families in Mexico or Central America, so they usually didn’t stay very long. But there was always plenty to eat here if you didn’t mind vegetables, and my mother baked extra heavy when the illegals were with us. They’d work for a few days until they got strong enough to continue on. Towns out here are twenty or thirty miles apart, and these men would walk the roads between them without even attempting to hitchhike.
This man, it became apparent as he got closer, was poorer than any we’d met yet. He didn’t even have shoes on his feet. He wore baggy trousers and a coarse cotton shirt, obviously homemade, and an ancient straw hat that may have been run over on the road.
As he drew close I was struck by his dark eyes, crackling with intelligence like the eyes of a raven, with maybe a hint of the raven’s mischief. It was an Indian face I guess, though he didn’t look like he was a Navajo or one of the pueblo people either. From head to toe he was lean as his stick. His skin had the quality of wood, swirling with deeply grooved lines like a burl on a tree, or earth perhaps, dark and cracked by the sun. It was hard to get a fix on his age. Most likely he was very old, but when I looked again, something made me imagine for a moment that he was actually much younger and just looked so old from being out in the weather.
As he eased his sack of possessions from his back to the ground, my eyes went back to his feet, as gnarled as the roots of an old juniper.
“You brought the rain,” my father said in greeting.
The man looked behind him at the gathering clouds, and he smiled. His teeth were bad. I wondered if he spoke English.
“You are the Seed Farm?” the traveler asked, with English that sounded like Spanish. His eyes took in all three of us as he said it, not looking at any of us long but acknowledging each of us.
“That’s us,” my mother said cheerfully. “Art, Lynn, and Tepary Jones.”
“Tep-a-ry?”
“That’s me,” I said. I wondered if he had any idea what my name meant.
To my mother and me, my father said, “Somebody from last summer must have told him about us.” And to the old man he said, “We have some seed to plant today.”
“That’s good.”
Dusty was taking a long sniff at the stranger’s hand. As she nuzzled it, her eyes rolled up and took in the man’s face unguardedly, as if she trusted him at once. It was unusual for her to be so affectionate with strangers.
“What’s your name?” my mother asked.
“My name is … Cricket.”
Now that I look back on it, he never asked for work.
13
My job was to get Cricket all lined out while my father was rounding up seed and college students. The clouds were gathering and darkening, and we wanted to get the last late seeds planted before the rain broke.
I grabbed a couple of rakes and stopped to show Cricket the Silver Bullet, where he would stay. As he set his gunnysack inside, I thought I heard beans sliding against each other. That would be a smart food for a poor person to carry, I thought. As my father always said, you could live on beans if you had to. I noticed that Cricket wore something under his shirt. It was suspended from his neck by a cotton string, but I couldn’t tell what it was.
The illegals usually recognized a few of our crops from back home. I wondered if Cricket would. “We’re going to plant some tepary beans,” I told him as we walked into the field. “I was named after them.”
“That’s good,” he said. It was the habit of these men to agree with everything you said. It was their way of getting along in the world.
“We don’t have to worry very much about keeping the beans from crossing with each other, because they pollinate themselves.”
I was trying to guess if he understood, but his eyes gave no clue. I kept explaining anyway. “With corn we either stagger the plantings or keep the varieties far away from each other—they’re pollinated by the wind. The ones that are hardest to keep from cross-pollinating are the melons and squash and other plants that are pollinated by bees. We plant tall plants like corn and amaranth in between the varieties, to block the bees. It makes the bees stick in one patch at a time pretty much.”
I was still trying to guess if he was following me. One moment I’d think yes, the next I’d think no.
“That’s good,” the old man agreed, squinting and looking all around. He appreciated the scope of our gardens, that much was certain. Fifteen acres and f
our hundred varieties is quite a sight. “What kind of tepary beans you grow?” he asked.
I knew them so well, I could rattle them off. “In the last week or so we’ve planted black, brown speckled, golden, Morelos white, Hopi white, Kickapoo white, Mayo white, O’odham brown, Paiute white, Paiute yellow, Pima beige, Pima brown, Pinacate…. all these kinds like to get started when it’s full summer with long, hot days. The only ones I’ve got left to plant are the blue speckleds and the Cocopah whites. All it takes now is some rain, and it sure looks like it’s coming.”
“You like those tepary beans, eh? Because of your name?”
“Not just that. They don’t take very much water, and that’s a good thing. A lot of the world doesn’t have water to irrigate crops with, and they have a lot of people to feed. With this bean, if you water it very much, it’ll make more leaves but fewer beans.”
I started working my rake, preparing a bed for the blue speckleds I was going to start with. The man called Cricket watched me work for a while, and then, I noticed, he bent down and got a little bit of the soil I had prepared, and … ate it.
The other rake was lying right there, right beside him, but the old man didn’t seem inclined to pick it up and start working. He sat down cross-legged and watched intently as I worked the soil into a finer and finer consistency. I thought this was a good opportunity to show him just how to prepare the soil, so I did an extra nice job. Watching my father work, I’d come to think of a rake as a violin bow. My dad is beautiful to watch as he improvises from hundreds of strokes and shakes of strokes, just like he’s making music.
When I was ready I began punching holes in the loam with my finger, planting teparies, patting the soil down on them. “An inch deep and four inches apart,” I instructed him. Cricket nodded. It was difficult to tell how much he really understood of what we were doing here. “Some of these varieties,” I explained, “were from the last batch that anyone grew anywhere. Once people stop growing them, they’re gone forever. Seventy-five percent of the food crops that people were growing when Columbus came to America are gone, extinct.”
Cricket made a sign across his neck, like he was cutting his throat. I took that to mean he understood, but he could have been agreeing just to be agreeable. He smiled helpfully. It felt a little foolish explaining all this to an Indian, but just because he was an Indian didn’t necessarily mean he knew that the old food crops were disappearing from fields all the way from Peru to New Mexico.
He took another little mouthful of soil. It was the strangest thing.
Cricket and I were a good match: I liked to talk, and he liked to listen. “Potatoes came from South America,” I continued, really warming up. “When people think of potatoes they think of Ireland, but really potatoes came from the Andes Mountains in South America. Ireland’s famous for having a potato famine back in the 1800s. What happened was, there were hundreds of different kinds of potatoes, but they grew only a few. And then a potato fungus got ’em. A million people starved to death. Some of those other kinds of potatoes would’ve been naturally resistant to that potato fungus.”
“Not enough different kinds,” Cricket said agreeably.
“The big food companies grow just a few kinds of corn,” I said. “Just a few kinds of wheat, a few kinds of everything … my father says it’s scary. It took thousands of years, millions, for all these different plants to come along, and we think all we need’s a few. You can’t bring all the others back once they’re gone.”
“The more the better,” Cricket agreed.
“That’s right—the more kinds the better. Like with beans. Beans all over the world were having a big problem with a little bug called the Mexican bean weevil. For five years a botanist in South America searched for a kind of bean the weevils wouldn’t eat. He couldn’t find one. Finally somebody sent him an envelope of ugly little wild beans from Mexico—they weren’t even round and smooth like beans. They say he laughed when he saw them. But when he set them in front of the weevils, it was like those beans had some kind of magic armor. It turned out they had a protein that the weevils couldn’t stand. The botanists were able to transfer the protein to other beans, including the ones in Africa where people were starving.”
“Gotta have enough kinds,” Cricket said. “The people who built the pyramids, they didn’t have enough kinds.”
“The Egyptians?” I wondered.
“The people in the land of always summer.”
“Where’s that?”
“What you call it—Yucatan, Mexico.”
“The Maya people?” I asked.
“Not enough kinds of corn.”
“I never heard that before,” I said. “That’s a good theory.”
Cricket picked up one of our Seed Farm packets with the drawing of a Kokopelli petroglyph on the front, playing his flute of course, and looked at it thoughtfully. “You take a few seeds and make a lot more,” he said. “Then people grow them, eh? Do people really do that?”
“Oh, yes, they’re growing them all over the place!”
“All kinds of people?”
“Sure! A lot of Indian people are starting to grow them again, plus all kinds of other people. We even got an order from Pakistan this week!”
“That’s good,” Cricket said softly. “That’s very good.”
“These seeds aren’t going to die out,” I said. “We’re not going to let ’em.”
“That’s good, Tepary.”
A black-and-white flutter caught my eye, a magpie heading our way. It proceeded to land right on Cricket’s shoulder. “What’s to eat?” Maggie squawked. “What’s to eat? Pass the salsa!”
I never saw Maggie land on anybody’s shoulder before, not even mine. “I’ll be,” I said.
“You’ll be what?” wondered Cricket.
“It’s just an expression,” I explained.
I marked the blue speckled patch and started raking out another for the Cocopah whites. Cricket got up, bent over, and started planting with his stick, which wasn’t a walking stick at all. I’d never seen this before, but I’d heard my father talk about the way the old Indians planted seed. The tool was made of some sort of dense wood, and it had a sharpened point. It was a planting stick.
Now it was time for me to lean on my rake and watch Cricket work. He knelt on one knee as he worked the stick and planted the seed. Maggie was jumping from his shoulder to the ground and trying to get at his seeds, but Cricket’s fingers were swift, and he made a game of covering them just before she’d get them.
I looked up, and there at the edge of the field watching the game, with yellow eyes and bushy tail hanging low, was a coyote. The more we get into the summer, the more visits we get from coyotes—they’ll eat just about anything. “It’s Mister Coyote,” I said to Cricket. “I’ve never seen one come this close while we were working out here. Usually they’ll sneak around at night.”
Cricket whistled sharply through his teeth and yelled to the coyote, “You call yourself a hunter! Ha! That is a joke! Where is your tail today? Did you lose it, eh?”
The coyote’s head turned, and his eyes seemed to take a glance at his tail. I laughed, and so did Cricket.
“Coy-o-te,” he said disparagingly, shaking his head. The coyote trotted off. I told myself to remember that a coyote was making the rounds. Coyotes do like the night, and he’d be back.
The clouds were turning ever darker. The air was stirring thick and heavy, and I could feel the closeness of the rain. I ran back to the house to get my fruitcake tin and my ancient corn from Picture House.
When I got back to the field I showed it to Cricket. “Special corn,” I said.
He took a little in his palm, looked at it up close, smelled it. “Haven’t seen this kind for a long time,” he said.
“No wonder,” I said with a laugh. “It’s a thousand years old.”
I spotted my father hustling by on his own seed run, and I flagged him over. “This is the corn from the seed jar the pothunters dug up,”
I said. “If these sprout, what are you going to do?”
He had a huge grin on his face. “Turn the Seed Farm over to you!”
“Really?”
“You’d be the master gardener!”
“For how long?”
For a second he hedged, pretending to be considering the possibility of losing. “The rest of this season!”
“I’d be the boss, and you’d do anything I say?”
“You got it!”
“What would you make him do?” Cricket wondered.
“Make him the Manure Specialist.”
In mock horror at the very idea, my dad took off running with those beautiful strides of his, waving the seed packets in his hand, yelling, “Gotta plant this panic grass!”
When the rain started I was slipping the last of my Picture House corn into the earth. I planted it deep, the way the pueblo people still do. Dryland corn needs to have its roots deep where there’s always some moisture.
This rain was not a summer take-no-prisoners gullywasher, the kind that can shred crops with three inches of hail. This was a gentle soaker that looked like it might stay a while.
I pitched my tent, but of course I never stayed in it. I was lying awake all night in the body of the rat, listening to the rain on my roof of sticks and bones, wondering what would become of me. It was dry enough inside there, but I didn’t think I could bear the loneliness much longer. Before dawn, I heard the mysterious flute music again, pure, clear, and strong, filling up the whole valley. Then I forgot about feeling sorry for myself. My heart went with the music like a leaf down a stream.
The rain continued all day, falling steadily yet softly, supersaturating the ground. I kept waiting for my parents to mention the flute music; surely my mother at least had heard it this time. I began to wonder if I was the only one who was hearing it. In the afternoon I found the college students under their covered porch, watching the rain, chattering, happy to know that all their labor was going to bear fruit. I visited with them for a while until I could test them with the question I’d come to ask.
