by Will Weaver
Guy drove his Chevy. The highway south cut narrow and gray through the winter fields. Now April, still with a thin coat of snow, the white of the fields and the sky was broken only by occasional groves of green pines and red oaks. Once Guy saw far out in a field the red dot of a sleeping fox. In some fields south of Little Falls, the snow had melted on the higher crowns of the fields and left great black eyes on the landscape.
They drove and talked and listened to music and the news on the radio. Nixon had sent troops and planes into Cambodia. “It can’t go on much longer,” Madeline said.
Madeline had packed lunch but they stopped in St. Cloud and had ice cream and strawberry pie. They played the little jukebox in their booth. Guy chose songs by Santana, Madeline picked Kenny Rogers and Judy Collins. An hour later they were in Minneapolis.
Guy remembered the way to the university. But several blocks from the campus a line of helmeted policemen blocked the street. They wore their visors down. The nearest policeman pointed for Guy to turn left. Guy rolled down his window. “I’m trying to get to”—he glanced down at the little map the university had sent—“Morrill Hall.”
“Just turn. Now,” the policeman said. He pointed with his black stick. Guy could not see the man’s face through his gray visor. Beside him the line of policemen looked like a welders’ class turned into a chorus line.
“Okay, okay,” Guy said. He turned left. On the next street they began to see people heading toward the center of the campus. Many of them carried placards:
“Out of Cambodia.”
“Nixon—Killer!”
“Peace Now.”
“Mothers for Peace.”
“Strike for Peace!”
“So,” Guy said to Madeline with a grin, “here we are.”
His mother’s brown eyes were round and alive. “What great luck,” she said, “a demonstration!”
They parked on a side street and joined the crowd heading along University Avenue. Rock ’n’ roll blared from the windows of the fraternity houses, whose members sat in their windowsills, legs dangling. Most held a stein of beer in one hand and an American flag in the other. Some waved the steins instead of the flags. Some just stared. Others shouted:
“Eat shit, you fucking peaceniks!”
“When the Commies hit San Francisco, then what . . . ?”
One short-haired boy sat perched atop a stone lion in the yard and screamed repeatedly, “My brother died for you fucking bastards, my brother died for you fucking bastards!”
Someone from the crowd called out, “So some people are smarter than others!”
The short-haired boy leaped from his perch and ran, swinging, at the crowd. People fell. The frat-house boys leaped from their windows and, shouting, dragged their member back into the yard where they held him.
Guy pulled his mother away from the crowd. Following the map, they wound their way alongside the backs of several large buildings toward Morrill Hall. By accident they entered the rear of the building. Soon they found their way to the admissions tour office on the second floor. There a thin, erect woman with blue-gray hair, a rose-colored spring coat with a cantaloupe-size maroon and gold “Gopher Booster!” button on the right lapel, was introducing herself to a group of students and their parents. The students wore letter jackets. The fathers wore tight sport coats and out-of-style narrow ties. The mothers wore their hair short and newly curled.
“. . . proud to be a Minnesota alumna,” the blue-haired woman was saying. “My name is Mrs. Knutson and I’m honored to guide you this afternoon through our beautiful campus. After today, you, too, will feel like a Minnesota Gopher.” She beamed. “Our first stop, the university mall and the famous Walter Library, where no doubt you’ll be spending a lot of your time—and therefore very little of your parents’ money.” Mrs. Knutson paused for effect.
The parents laughed nervously.
Then they all followed Mrs. Knutson through the front door. “The mall,” she said, with a sweep of her umbrella.
“Jesus Christ,” Guy murmured. The mall looked like a Super Bowl playing field immediately postgame. The great, colonnaded buildings along the sides were like bleachers emptied of fans, all of whom had surged onto the field. To the right, on the wide steps of Northrup Hall, a pony-tailed man screamed through a bullhorn and the crowd chanted with him.
“One, two, three, four—we don’t want your fucking war!”
“Notice the words etched in stone,” Mrs. Knutson called to them. Her eyes skipped the protesters entirely as she pointed above them to the top of Northrup Hall. “Dedicated . . . honor, pride . . .” Guy couldn’t hear.
“Five, six, seven, eight—fucking Nixon we all hate!”
“And justice,” she shouted. “Without those truths no university can survive. Follow me.” She forged through the crowd. With her umbrella point, she cleared a narrow path and looked neither left nor right.
A muscular woman with a red kerchief tied low over her forehead handed Guy’s mother something mimeographed. “Off our backs, on our feet—fight male dominance,” the woman droned. Madeline took the brochure and murmured, “Thank you.”
Guy could smell smoke. Looking over the crowd, down the mall he saw a house-high barricade of wood and cardboard blocking the next street. Smoke wicked up from the rubbish. The smoldering barrier divided black-suited, helmeted policemen on one side and protesters on the other. Occasionally a protester hurled something burning over the top toward the policemen.
“Walter Library was built in 1897 and named after somebody Walter,” Mrs. Knutson began. From the shouting around them Mrs. Knutson’s voice came on and off like a record player with faulty wiring. The students and parents stared beyond her. “If I may have your attention . . . ,” Mrs. Knutson called.
Guy looked back to the plaza at Northrup Hall. To the left side of the crowd he saw a red Vietcong flag. Beside it was another flag that carried a black thunderbird on red. A sign below read, “Native Americans—Amerika’s Vietcong.” Below was a tight cluster of Indians in tribal dress, sunglasses, and long hair. One of the Indians was shorter, stockier than the rest. Guy’s heart began to pound. The shorter Indian’s hair was not long enough to braid and so fell in a black hood over his shoulders. He wore sunglasses and a red and black Flatwater Indians jacket from which all letters had been torn.
“Tom!” Guy shouted. Tom’s head jerked around. He searched the crowd. Guy grabbed his mother and pulled her away from the tour. He pushed closer through the crowd. People cursed him.
“Tom!” he shouted again. For an instant, still separated by the breadth of twenty bodies, their eyes met. Tom’s mouth came open. At that moment, however, people began to scream and run. Up and out of the red flag beside Tom, like a wasp rising from a rose, a helicopter chut-chut-chutted toward them. Low. Guy thought the helicopter was a crop duster that had lost its way. But the tumbling gray spray from its long pipe was not herbicide.
The fog rolled onto them. The crowd broke and ran. Holding onto Madeline, sometimes stepping on people underneath, Guy lost sight of Tom. Then he forgot about him entirely as he and Madeline choked and cried and stumbled away from the tear gas. They ran north, which took them to University Avenue. There they clutched a tree as they coughed and wiped their eyes.
As Guy’s vision cleared he saw more lines of the black-suited, visored policemen. The policemen marched straight down University Avenue, thrusting their long batons with each step like clumsy fencers. The protesters retreated, walking backward, spitting at the policemen. Suddenly a short policeman rushed forward to swing at a student. The police line broke, the protesters screamed and ran. Some fell. The policemen hacked at them with their sticks, then leaped over the writhing bodies to chase the runners.
“Stop it!” Madeline screamed. She ran into the street. A policeman turned toward her with club upraised. Guy sprinted fo
rward and grabbed his mother on the run and slung her over his shoulder. He smashed through the crowd of spectators who watched from the sidewalk. He looked behind once. The policeman, having lost Guy and Madeline, swung at someone else. Guy saw an arm swing up in defense of a face, saw the club strike the upraised forearm. The arm flopped at its new joint. People screamed. Still carrying Madeline, Guy ran until there were no more people on the streets. Afterward they found the Chevy and then he drove north until there were no buildings or people but only fields.
13
“Two thirds, one third. And no Sunday farming.”
“Deal,” Guy replied to his grandfather. At the same moment they reached out to shake hands. His grandfather’s hand was wide and thick and cool, as if the earth they stood upon was reaching up through the old man to touch Guy. They stood beside the barbed-wire fence of the hundred-acre pasture, which had lain in sod for ten years or more. But now it was late April of 1972. Guy was eighteen. In less than a month he would graduate from Flatwater High. But before then Guy would plow up the old sod and plant a crop, his first. His own.
Guy had a sudden urge to throw his arms around his grandfather, but their handshake locked them an arm’s length apart. Anyway, Pehrsson men were not huggers. Not huggers, but holders. Guy continued to grin and to grip Helmer’s great palm as long as his grandfather held on.
The rest of Helmer was as big as the hand that closed around Guy’s. Helmer’s broad face was perfectly square, his chin as wide as his forehead. His pale blue eyes were not deep-set and so were hardly creased at their corners. Still straight-backed at age seventy-eight, Helmer was taller even than Guy. As square as a shirt pinned on a clothesline, Helmer’s shoulders were the straight, broad beam of a plow to which everything else hung bolted. Helmer’s arms, in shirt sleeves buttoned at the cuffs, ended with the big cups of his hands, then the flat, thick fingers. His legs were posts. He wore long underwear, wool in winter, cotton in summer, every day of the year. His big feet wore soft leather high-top boots tightly laced and double-knotted around his ankles.
Helmer’s only weakness was his heart, for which he took little white pills. “Keeps the oil thin,” he said. Though he did not work as much as he used to, Helmer was still usually there—in the barn, in the machine shed, at field-side—to watch Martin and Guy work.
Helmer left the farm only for a daily visit with Etta, who had been in the hospital in Flatwater most of the winter. During his absence Martin often came in the house and napped. If he did not sleep, he sat and drank coffee royales and looked through brightly colored sales brochures of electric barn cleaners and vacuum-sealed, bottom-unloading silos.
It was also his grandmother’s illness that had made Guy speak to Helmer about renting the hundred-acre pasture.
“He’s got other things than the farm to think about,” Madeline said after Guy told her about his idea for flax. Her eyes sparkled when he talked about Manitoba. “He’s got to let loose of this place someday, and why not now? Ask him. Try the flax—what can you lose?” she said.
The rental arrangement between Guy and his grandfather, except for the no-Sunday-farming part, was common. Guy would bear all the expenses, provide all the labor. For that he would receive two thirds of the crop. His grandfather, as landowner, would get the remaining third, payable at harvesttime.
Guy expected the quiet-Sunday clause. Helmer never farmed on Sundays. He believed Sunday was a day of rest for both the farmer and his land. But Guy could get by without Sunday farming. He would log more tractor hours the other six days. Sunday would not be a problem.
“So what are you going to plant?” Helmer asked, looking across the field.
“Not sure,” Guy lied.
“Raise a good crop of corn. Oats for sure.”
“Have to get it plowed first,” Guy said, “see how it looks.”
His grandfather nodded at that.
And Guy was thinking of flax. He did not speak about it now, however. He did not want to worry Helmer. He did not want to argue endlessly with Martin about the dangers of a new crop. Right now, Guy needed all his time for school and work and sleep.
That winter, with Helmer alone in the big house, Guy slept upstairs in his grandfather’s house. There his alarm rang at 5:00 AM, when he went to the barn to help his father milk. By 7:00 he was showered and was driving his Chevy to school. At 3:00 PM he left school and went to the implement dealership, where he worked three hours. At 6:00 PM he punched out, drove home in time to help his father and Helmer finish milking. Supper was in Madeline’s kitchen at 7:30. Afterward he walked with Helmer back to the big house.
Evenings in Helmer’s house, Guy spread his homework across on the bare oaken kitchen table. He sat bent over the table reading lit and history texts. His grandfather sat in a straight-backed chair reading his black Bible. In the house without television or radio, the only sound was the whispering slide of their pages and faint kissing noise of his grandfather’s moving lips as he read. Guy liked the silence. School he had always found noisy. The clang of lockers, the radios in the narrow hallways. Work was louder still. The thudding air compressor, the eardrum bite of hammers hitting steel. In Helmer’s house no one pounded, no one argued. Things there were straight and square and silent, like a library.
At nine o’clock he usually got them both a bowl of ice cream. They ate together. Then bed.
Upstairs, under the slope of the roof, Guy read more and listened on his little transistor radio, turned low, to WLS out of Chicago. He listened to Journey, Santana, Led Zeppelin, Aretha Franklin, Janis Joplin thump in his pillow. Sometime later in the night he would awaken and turn off the radio.
Guy did not plan to stay at home forever. Or even for another year. He would go to college at some point, but first there was the field of flax. The flax would be money. Money would be possibility. If at first the flax forced him to stay on the farm, later it would allow him to leave. In style. But that was thinking too far ahead. First there was the summer to get through.
By helping his father with the Holsteins Guy worked out the use of his father’s tractor and plow. This arrangement Martin had figured closely. “Money between relatives is like sand between the sheets,” he had said. By keeping close accounts, everyone slept fine. Without room and board to pay, Guy was able to save his mechanic’s money, $89.96 per week.
On a small calendar tacked to the sloped ceiling above his bed Guy had figured his summer’s farming expenses. With his summer savings and his weekly checks, he would have the flax seed paid for by the end of April. May was marked for plow parts. June and July were checked off for diesel oil and fuel. August was labeled for harvest expenses—custom combining and trucking. September, however, was unmarked. There would be no September for Guy at the implement dealership. With his flax crop sold, he could jam his grease rag into the mouth of the time clock and walk away. He would have money to start his own life.
***
By April 19 the snow, except for slouched, weeping banks on the north sides of the farm buildings, had vanished. A week of sunshine and fifty-degree weather followed. By April 22 Guy could drive a shovel eight inches into the pasture sod. Along the road to Flatwater, tractors and plows began to emerge from their sheds and sit centered in the yards. On April 25, a Wednesday, as if by common signal, tractors entered the reservation fields and began to turn strips of the gray land black.
Guy cursed because he was not among them, plowing. But he had promised his mother he would not skip school.
Saturday finally came. At sunup, with only a cup of coffee for breakfast, Guy turned the tractor into the field. He let the plow settle onto the ground, then brought up the RPMs and headed downfield. The coulter disks cut six slices into the pasture sod. The moldboards lifted and turned the soil, left six gleaming waves behind. Stopping only for diesel fuel and a sandwich at midday, Guy plowed until sundown, and then, later, by the tracto
r’s yellow running lights.
At 11:30 that night the field was an airport. The black strips of plowing were runways. The tractor, with its blue and green dash lights and its yellow headlamps outside, was a jumbo jet. With each taxi around the field Guy came closer and closer to lifting off the ground, to rumbling over the fence up into the black night.
Abruptly he stopped the tractor mid-field. He opened the door of the cab. The cold air slapped him awake. He got down to piss. He surveyed the field. There were only ten or so acres left to plow. He could finish that tomorrow. But then he cursed. Tomorrow was Sunday.
He looked across the field to Helmer’s house. Tiny yellow boxes shone from the living room. Helmer was waiting up.
What the hell. He would keep going, finish tonight. But then he cursed again, involuntarily including Helmer this time. There were at least two hours of plowing left. In less than one hour, it would be Sunday. And a deal was a deal.
Guy slept most of Sunday. He finished the plowing Monday evening after school. In the dark he hooked onto the field disk and rumbled by headlights in slow circles about the field until 3:00 AM. Tuesday, he stumbled through chores, school, work, and chores. He disked again Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning. The week became a slow-turning kaleidoscope of tractor lights, welder’s sparks, white lines on blackboards, and falling stars.
On Friday, Martin called him at school.
“There’s some guy here from Manitoba with four hundred bushels of flax seed,” Martin said. “I told him he was in the wrong county if not the wrong country. But he showed me your name on an order sheet. And it looks like your handwriting.”
“It’s my writing,” Guy said. His heart thumped. He imagined the face of the truck driver, the brown burlap bags of seed.
