Red Earth White Earth
Page 3
“We could make those,” Guy said immediately. “This winter, in old man Schroeder’s grove we’ll trap some rabbits—big ones.”
Tom was silent.
They watched some more. “What’s that, a gingerbread man?” Guy asked. On the wrist of an old woman dancer whirled a tiny doll-like man.
“How should I know?” Tom said crossly.
After a while Tom said, “Not a gingerbread man. Flying Man.”
“Why Flying Man?”
“Goddammit, I don’t know everything,” Tom said immediately. “Come on, let’s go look for bottle rockets.”
“Can’t.” Guy looked through the darkness for his mother. She should have been there by now. He wondered where she was. His father was home unloading oats by tractor light. He was always working.
They watched another minute until Tom said, “Fuck, this is more boring than school.”
Guy didn’t answer. He was staring through the dancers to the far side of the circle. He was watching the drummer, old Zhingwaak. He suddenly realized that Zhingwaak was watching them.
“Tom . . . ,” Guy whispered. Tom looked. Without missing a drumbeat, Zhingwaak lifted his hand and motioned them forward.
“He wants something,” Guy whispered. He looked around the powwow. There were only brown faces, and far beyond, the silent white houses.
“Us,” Tom said. “We better go over there.”
They approached the dancers and Zhingwaak. Guy walked behind Tom. In the flickering light and shadow of the lantern, Zhingwaak’s long face all ran into his mouth. The deep lines across his forehead and around his eyes, the deeper furrows on his cheeks, the gullies and ravines along his nose all flowed downward over his thin lips and into the dark hole of his mouth. Zhingwaak spoke.
“Young boys should dance,” he said. His voice was younger than his face. His words hummed.
Tom looked behind to Guy. Guy looked at the dancers.
“You, Ningos,” Zhingwaak said to Guy. “Your mother comes often to our school to help us. You live on the reservation and play always with Tom LittleWolf. Dance with us.”
Guy swallowed. The passing dancers began to pluck at Tom and Guy as they passed.
“I . . . don’t know how,” Guy said.
“The dancing will come to you,” Zhingwaak answered. “Because you come to us, the dancing will come to you.”
Tom and Guy stood by Zhingwaak and watched. The drumming was like the steady beat of a hay baler, only faster. Riding on the hay wagons sometimes Guy and Tom did little jigs to match the pump-pumping sound of the machinery. Tom looked at Guy, jutted his lip toward the dancers. They grinned at each other and joined the moving circle.
Following the “Forty-Nine” dancers, Guy and Tom moved within a ring of Indians who only watched. The outside Indians were in shadow. Now and again the red eye of a cigarette glowed, then arched to the ground as one of them came forward. The new dancers smelled of whiskey and cigarette smoke and perfume. They were younger than Zhingwaak and the old woman; they were Guy’s parents’ age and some younger than that. As they entered the circle they laughed and shouted to each other. Sometimes they stumbled and fell. But the older dancers pulled them to their feet, kept them moving.
Zhingwaak’s drumming quickened with an extra beat. Guy wove this new rhythm into his path of invisible, numbered footsteps on the hard-packed grass. As more dancers came forward, Guy and Tom were forced farther to the center. Guy could not see out, so he watched the new dancers. After they had danced for a while their faces began to shine.
They stopped laughing and shouting to each other. They stumbled less. Their shirts soaked through with sweat. The new dancers’ smell of tobacco and whiskey and perfume changed into a sweet-sour odor like silage. A dancer alongside Guy shrugged off his shirt and flung it over the heads of the dancers into the darkness. With it went his silage smell.
Suddenly Zhingwaak wailed. It was a thin cry that started high in the air above the dancers and then fell. The cry slid down over the Indians’ black hair and shining skin, down the rabbit bones and the old beadwork and dried feathers of the old women, all the way down to their feet on the dry grass. The lowest note of Zhingwaak’s cry flattened into a humming. For Guy the humming became a floor upon which he danced. He leaped and soared. He was the Flying Man at the end of his leather thong. Only Flying Man was bound and Guy was free. Guy planed and leaped with Tom as Zhingwaak’s wail came again.
Suddenly the darkness washed away. They were flooded with a bright light. Guy squinted away from the white beam. The dancers froze in place. Sweat glinted on and then dripped from their chins.
A voice came loud through a bullhorn. The police.
“The Flatwater Fourth of July festivities are over, as it is now the fifth of July. The Jaycees have paid the powwow dancers in full. Therefore, the powwow is over. Please disperse at this time.”
For a long moment there was silence. Then Zhingwaak’s drumstick thudded again. From the crowd something arced, shining, through the beam of the spotlight and shattered against the police car. A beer bottle. Then more bottles flying like falling stars. Crashing, tinkling. Then the harder thuds of stones.
Suddenly people were shouting and falling. Policemen pushed through the crowd, jabbing with long sticks. One of the officers grabbed away Zhingwaak’s drumstick and broke it over his knee. He kicked aside the drum. “You—let’s go!” He jerked Zhingwaak’s arm behind him. Zhingwaak stumbled and fell. The policeman began to drag him across the gravel. Another Indian leaped on the policeman from behind. A policeman swung his stick. It hit the Indian’s head with a watermelon sound, and the Indian slumped to the ground.
From nowhere Guy’s mother was pulling him away. Beside her an Indian man retreated into the shadows. Guy did not see his face.
“Come,” Madeline shouted. She ran. Guy twisted his head back to look for Tom, for Zhingwaak. But there was only the glare of lights and shouting and the glint of the polished wood as the policeman’s sticks rose and fell.
“Why . . . ,” Guy cried, “why did the policeman come? Why did they take Zhingwaak?”
In the shadow of the stone beach house his mother held him. They looked back at the fighting. “Because . . . it’s very late,” she murmured.
“It wasn’t late,” Guy said. He started to cry, burning heaves in his throat and chest. “Not for the Indians it wasn’t late.”
His mother turned his face away from the fighting. Another police car, its red lights flashing, wailed past them.
“Yes, it’s late,” she murmured. “Especially for the Indians.”
3
One day at the end of July in the summer when they were nine, Guy and Tom were digging in against a panzer attack. All around the farm, dust clouds moved up and down the reservation. The Germans were clever. They had disguised their tanks and halftracks as combines.
But Guy and Tom were not fooled. By two o’clock in the afternoon their foxhole was nearly ready. Tom was holding and Guy was nailing down the last boards when Guy realized his hammer was striking from sunlight to shadow. A shadow had crept across the yellow sand and up the plank wall so slowly that neither he nor Tom had thought about it. Guy stopped pounding. They whirled and shaded their eyes as they looked up. Above them was the dark, stubby outline of a kid. One corncob grenade could have finished them, so Guy and Tom scrambled out of the hole.
They stared at the kid. He had short, unevenly sheared blond hair that lay in flat, matted ringlets around his head. His face was melon-round and smudged with dirt. In its center were two blue eyes with black freckles of dirt in their four corners. He wore a gray T-shirt, which long ago had been white, and baggy bib overalls tied at the waist with twine and sheared off just below the knees. The frayed ends of the overalls hung down to brown feet that wore no shoes. Guy stared at the kid’s feet. They looked like
saddle leather.
“You a Nazi?” Tom asked.
The kid was silent. Tom and then Guy stepped closer. Then Guy could smell the kid. He smelled like the bottom of a calf pen where the piss settled and burned the yellow straw red and when you turned the straw over with a fork the ammonia smell made your eyes water. Guy jumped sideways, up-breeze.
“Jesus, you stink!” Tom said.
The kid struck forward low like a snake and took Tom down with an ankle tackle. Guy leaped forward and in a moment the three of them were wrestling on the dry grass. But it was like wrestling a skunk. In another moment Guy and Tom were struggling to get away from the smell. They leaped back into their foxhole and pointed their wooden submachine guns at the kid.
The kid stared down at them again. In the silence Guy looked at the kid’s curly hair, his short pants, his T-shirt.
“If you’re not a Nazi, then who are you?” he asked.
In the silence Tom whispered, “Spies can’t speak English.”
“You got no name?” Guy said.
“I gots a name,” the kid said.
“So what is it.”
“Maranhutmire,” the kid said.
“Maranhutmire, what kind of name is that?” Tom said.
The kid picked up a stone.
“What I meant was,” Tom said quickly, “is that your first name or last?”
“Could be both,” Guy whispered. “Like Paladin.”
The kid said his name again, slower this time. Maran. Hurtmire. Maryan.
“Mary Ann!” Guy said suddenly. He looked at Tom. They both stared and their mouths fell open. This was no kid. This was a girl.
Mary Ann Hartmeir was the only daughter, among four brothers, of Jewell Hartmeir. There was no Mrs. Hartmeir. She had died of leu-kemia when Mary Ann, the fourth child, was three years old. When she died, Jewell Hartmeir had moved his children from Georgia up to Minnesota because down south the niggers were taking over. If the weather was cold in Minnesota, at least he didn’t have to work with niggers.
Later Guy would hear this and more as his father and Jewell Hartmeir talked. Right now he and Tom climbed back out of the foxhole.
“So where do you live?” he asked her. He knew most of the kids on this part of the reservation.
The girl jerked her head north.
“On a farm?”
She nodded yes.
“Whose farm?”
“Ourn.”
“Whose farm did it used to be?”
She shrugged. Guy thought of the farms north from his own. There was only one possibility, the old Abrahamson place with the burned-down buildings. The barn had burned, and Abrahamson, who was older than Guy’s grandfather, had gone out west to live with his daughter. When the farm lay empty, the Indians had burned the other buildings.
“Are the buildings all wrecked and burned?”
She nodded.
“What are you going to do for a house?” Tom said.
“We gots a house,” she said. “A wheel house.”
“A wheel house,” Guy said.
Tom began to choke with laughter. “A trailer house, she means. Shit. A wheel house, can you believe it?”
Mary Ann drew back her arm. She still held the stone. Tom jumped behind Guy.
“He didn’t mean nothing,” Guy said quickly. “He’s my brother. My retarded brother.”
Mary Ann’s eyes widened. She leaned over to stare at Tom, who crossed his eyes and let spit roll down the side of his mouth. She snickered. Her teeth were yellowish-green along her gums. Tom hunched over and began to gimp about in a circle and make moaning noises and claw at the air.
She covered her mouth and began to laugh out loud. Guy, too, began to laugh, and soon all three of them were lying on the ground trying to out-retard the other.
Suddenly another shadow fell over them, a larger one this time. Guy looked up to see Martin staring down at him.
“It’s three o’clock. You got calves to feed, remember?”
Guy scrambled up. “Yessir.” Tom stepped quickly away from Martin, went for his bike.
“See ya,” Guy said quickly to Tom and Mary Ann. He followed his father toward the buildings. Halfway there, he realized Mary Ann Hartmeir and her silent bare feet were right behind him.
“Poor little ragamuffin,” Guy’s grandmother, Etta, murmured. “I’ve never seen a little girl that dirty.”
“Shoulda caught her and give her a bath,” Martin said.
It was after supper. They were all working in the garden. Martin swung the scythe and Guy threw the sweet-corn stalks onto the wagon; from the heat the sweet-corn ears had stopped coming but the cows could eat what green leaves were left. Madeline and Etta worked among the tomato plants, clipping back the runners that carried tomatoes too small and green to ripen. Down the garden west, outlined in a gown of orange dust, Helmer worked in the potatoes. His hoe swung him side to side, plant to plant. The even marks of its blade looked like machine tracks in the dry earth. Tank tracks.
“No, you don’t meddle with other people’s children,” Etta said. “The Bible makes that clear.” She named a chapter and verse. Guy’s grandparents read the Bible every night and all day Sunday. His parents didn’t.
Madeline looked up. “Somebody should,” she said. “Somebody should pay that little girl’s parents a visit and see what’s going on.”
“No, I wouldn’t do that either,” Etta said. “You don’t want to barge in on someone. That’s one thing you should never do, is interfere.”
“If that little girl hasn’t had a bath by the next time she comes, I’m going up there,” Madeline said.
“You missed a runner, there,” Etta said, pointing to the ground.
Mary Ann Hartmeir came the next day, unbathed. Guy was walking in from the barn for breakfast when her short shadow fell across his. He jumped.
“Dammit,” he shouted, “you almost made me spill this milk.”
Mary Ann stared at the jar of milk in his hands, at the yellowish layer of cream that had begun to form at the top.
“What’s the matter, you never seen a jar of milk before?”
“Yes,” she said. “I seen milk before.”
“You talk funny,” he said. She talked like she had a Jew’s harp stuck in her throat.
“So do you,” she said.
Guy kept walking. Mary Ann followed him. At the porch door he paused. She was still behind him. “Well, come on in then,” he said.
During breakfast with Mary Ann, Guy’s mother opened all the windows in the kitchen. Martin squinted and leaned away from the table as he ate. During Mary Ann’s eighth pancake Madeline said, “Does your mother know you came for a visit?”
“No. Well, maybe.” Mary Ann looked out the window and frowned briefly. “She’s dead.” She reached for another pancake.
Martin coughed. Madeline’s eyes widened.
“Your father, he’s . . .”
“They’s building a barn. He and my brothers.”
Madeline poured Mary Ann another glass of milk, which she drank empty in a series of gulps.
“Then . . . who cooks?”
“My brothers or me. I can make grits. I can make Jell-O. I can make milk.”
“Make milk?” Martin asked.
“You only needs a can opener and a jar and a quart of water,” she said. “Any damn fool can make milk.”
Martin choked on a bite of pancake and had to take a long swallow of coffee.
“You live on the old Abrahamson place,” Madeline said.
“It’s ourn now,” Mary Ann said immediately. Her eyes flickered across the table to the bacon.
Madeline passed her the plate.
“How long have you been here?” Martin said.
Guy looked to Martin and then Madeline.
“Julia?” Madeline asked.
“Julia. On TV. Today the stranger might come back again.”
“One of the soap operas,” Madeline murmured.
“My dad said the attacker was probably a nigger,” Mary Ann said. “Niggers like white pussy.”
Madeline caught her breath. Martin spit a mouthful of coffee onto his plate. His chest began to heave. “Get out,” Madeline said quickly. “If you think this is funny, get out of the house.”
Guy was puzzled but he began to laugh with his father. “You, too,” Madeline hissed at him. “Out. Now!”
In the yard Martin wiped his eyes and laughed until he gasped for breath. “Niggers . . . white pussy. I never heard a kid talk like that in my life.”
Guy grinned. White pussy. There were some calico pussies in the barn but no white ones. Anyway, he smiled at his father and listened to him laugh. It was a strange sound from his father, half magpie and half crow, a sound he seldom heard.
He helped his father grease the combine. They crawled underneath and lay on the prickly dry grass looking up at the sickle and reel. Guy held the grease nozzle in the places where a small hand worked better than a big one. Every once in a while his father laughed again and Guy joined him.
They were still on the ground, pumping grease into the last fitting, when they saw feet. Madeline’s brown shoes and Mary Ann’s brown ankles came toward them and stopped. Guy stared at Mary Ann’s toes. The nails were clipped short and scraped clean. He could smell soap.
He scrambled from beneath the combine and stood up. Mary Ann was dressed in his mother’s yellow blouse. A belt around her waist made the blouse look like a dress. Her blond hair lay flat and parted in the middle. Her cheeks were rubbed reddish and chapped. Her teeth were pink with blood, and she licked them and spit.
“I’m telling my dad,” she said to Guy’s mom. “You wait what he does to you.”
“You go right ahead and tell him,” Madeline said. Her dress was spotted with water. She carried a paper bag that held Mary Ann’s clothes. Madeline’s brown eyes shone in the morning sunlight and her jaw was set. “Guy, get a jar of milk for Mary Ann and her family. I’m going to pay a neighborly call on the Hartmeirs.”