Red Earth White Earth

by Will Weaver

  “Not so fast,” one of the men said, angling to block their way. He was thin-faced, unshaven for several days; his lower teeth were dotted black at the gums with chewing tobacco. He held out the pages of a letter to Tom. “How’s about you explaining this?”

  Tom glanced at the letter but did not take it. “The letter suggests that there likely is a problem with the title to your farm,” Tom said quietly.

  “Title. Like in land title,” the man said.

  “That’s right.”

  Three more of the men got off their barstools and gathered around Guy and Tom.

  “You’re saying here, then, that I don’t own my own farm. That none of us own our own land.” The man nodded to the men behind him.

  “In a sense,” Tom began.

  “Don’t play word games with me, Geronimo,” the man said. “I didn’t ride into this country on a load of pumpkins. What you’re trying to do is get us whites the hell off our own land—that’s clear enough. And I’ll tell you about mistakes. The only mistake you made”—he swung from below and caught Tom with a sucker punch to the belly—”was coming in here today!”

  Guy hit the man hard across his cheek and nose, felt his nose crunch. But then he took several punches to his neck and gut. He struggled to keep his breath and kicked and flailed. Tom scrambled into a center’s crouch, then took out three of the men with a lunge forward. Guy took another hit to his face, felt pinwheels rise, and saw them flare in the sky. But he also kicked someone hard in the crotch and felt his fist strike teeth on another. “Guy—let’s go,” Tom was calling. Guy ducked and ran. Tom held the door.

  Outside, they scrambled into the Mercedes. Guy fumbled with the key, then the tires were spinning and they were sliding onto the highway. Behind them Doc’s shotgun crashed.

  “Just like the old days!” Guy shouted.

  Tom was looking back. “Not quite,” he shouted. “Get down!” At that moment the gun crashed again and the Mercedes’ rearview mirror on the driver’s side blew away in a shower of glass and chrome.

  “Jesus!” Guy called. He glanced behind. One of the men in a seed-corn cap was pumping another round into his shotgun. Guy ducked low and concentrated on driving. He swerved the Mercedes violently until they were safely around the bend of No Medicine Lake and into the timber.

  At Tom’s house Madeline’s eyes widened as she saw their faces and clothes, the blood.

  “Oh God, I knew it,” she said.

  Guy’s right eye was closing fast. Tom’s nosebleed had dried in a Hitler mustache above his lip.

  “Tom—you sit over here—Guy you sit here!” she commanded, sliding two chairs to opposite sides of the kitchen. Guy and Tom stared at her, then at each other. They began to laugh, long deep hoots of laughter that hurt their lips and their bellies and everywhere else they had been punched. They couldn’t stop laughing, and soon Madeline joined them.

  Guy stayed with Tom and Madeline that night. First Guy, then Tom, took a hot bath. Madeline dressed their cuts with iodine and cotton. Later it was time for bed. There were two bedrooms. Madeline took one, Tom the other, and Guy slept on the couch.

  He fell asleep immediately. Later he awoke, half in a dream, and heard wooden floorboards squeak and quiet voices talking. He slept again. Much later he started awake unsure of where he was.

  He remembered.

  His bladder hurt from the kick of somebody’s boot, so he eased off the couch and felt his way down the dark hallway to the bathroom door. He quietly turned the knob and opened the door. But the room was not the bathroom. Faint moonlight came through the curtains, threw shades of gray across the room. In the bed were Tom and Madeline, under the covers, curled against each other, asleep.

  26

  Zhingwaak’s story “The Boy Who Turned into a Magpie.”

  A long time ago in an Indian village by a lake, there was an Indian woman who had a baby boy. The woman’s husband was often away hunting, as hunters are. When the husband was gone the woman often left the wigwam too. She left the little boy alone tied in his hammock.

  The little boy always cried whenever his mother left. “Stay home, stay home, stay home,” he cried. But the mother never listened.

  One day as the mother prepared to leave, the little boy said, “I wish I could be something else. Something that is not a little boy.”

  Quickly his mother said, “Never say that!” But still she prepared to go.

  “Stay home, stay home, stay home,” the little boy cried. But the mother went from the wigwam anyway.

  When she returned the little boy’s hammock was empty. She cried out. She rushed about the wigwam looking for him. She looked in the blankets. She looked in the baskets. But the little boy was nowhere to be found. The mother began to wail and pull her hair. Then she heard a rustling noise above her. She looked up. Above her in the crossbeams of the wigwam she saw a half-bird and half-boy. Her son had changed into a magpie, half-black and half-white.

  The magpie began to croak:

  Abin, abin, abin,

  Stay home, stay home, stay home;

  Animise, animise, animise

  He flies away, away, away.

  With that the magpie fluttered up through the smoke hole of the wigwam and was gone.

  From the Mercedes Guy watched a magpie flap black and white across the field. It was dawn. He was stopped on the road to his father’s house. Guy could not sleep anymore at Tom and Madeline’s place. He had left before either awoke.

  He watched the magpie fly along the barbed-wire fence. Magpies seldom came farther east than North Dakota. The bird alit on a fence post, then flapped on to another, then another and another, as if none was quite right. Red sunlight burned orange on the white part of its feathers. Then the magpie crossed the wires and flew toward the shadow of the timber. It flashed white once or twice in the trees, then disappeared.

  Guy did not drive on. He watched the sun rise. Watched its back broaden with red. He put in a tape, the Strauss waltzes. His face and neck and belly hurt from the fighting last night. After a while he ejected the Strauss music, tried Haydn, then Gershwin. He did not have the right tape. But he did have the rest of Madeline’s letters.

  More than her words, Madeline’s handwriting told her story. Her early letters were written in her careful Palmer style; you could see nuns in the circles and gowns of the letters. Each T and L were miniature carpenter’s squares. Each O was a full moon. Each i wore its dot like a skullcap. Each S curved exactly back on itself. Short sentences.

  By 1975 her words began to lean. They tipped, slightly, toward the right margin, as if the paper were a garden and her words were flowers before a westerly breeze. As angled. Ls slanted. Os elongated. The words had sharper points, had begun to grow teeth.

  By 1978 her words leaned forward like bicycle racers crouched over their handlebars, silhouettes bent forward for speed.

  By 1980 her writing would have been illegible to anyone who had not followed its decline. The words rushed across the page like racing children in a crazy game of touch tag. Sometimes a long letter was without punctuation, stopping only when the words ran off the end of the paper.

  She wrote about giving birth. About menstruation. About watching her father make love to her mother; once at a family picnic she had discovered them in the pantry, her mother on her hands and knees with her skirt up over her head like a veil. But when the skirt was lowered it was not her mother but her Aunt Annabelle. She wrote about the ten different sounds the wind made in the leaves of ten different trees. White pine needles made the wind lonely, aspen leaves made the wind nervous . . .

  About Martin. About the worst of his drinking. About shooting to death a cow that stepped on his hand. About her beginning to carry a knife when he was drinking hard.

  About herself again, about waking up in the Cutlass in towns with b
uildings she did not recognize.

  March 6, 1982

  Dear Guy,

  I stayed at Tom’s house again last night—he said he wouldn’t take me home anymore. He made me drink coffee and take a bath. Then he put me to bed. He slept on the couch. Late that night I woke up and didn’t know where I was. I walked around, found Tom sleeping on the couch. He was dreaming, I heard him crying, “Mama, Mama, Mama.” So I lay down beside him and put my arms around him. He didn’t wake up, and I fell asleep too. In the morning when I woke up he was shouting at me—he was so angry I had slept there with him. I told him he was having a bad dream. He said he always has that dream.

  After he left for work I cleaned up and baked him some bread. When I look out the window I can’t see any land, only trees. I feel safe here.

  Love, Madeline

  March 20, 1982

  Dear Guy,

  Someday you’ll read this, and I hope it doesn’t sound insane. I’ve been staying at Tom’s house and going through the Tribal Counseling and Detox Program. Your mom, the drunk. Anyway, Tom let me stay here. Last night, like every night, I heard him moaning in his sleep. He’s told me about his dream. There’s a wall of light, and people on the other side keep calling to him but there’s no door. Their voices get louder and louder but there’s never any way for him to break through. Anyway, he was shouting in his sleep worse than I’d ever heard. So I went to his room and lay down with him and put my arms around him. It was cold, so I slid under the blankets with him. He didn’t wake up. Later he started to moan again, and I put my arms around him really tight. He woke up, but just lay there. He’d been crying in his sleep. I just held him. Toward morning sometime, it happened. It was like neither of us did anything; neither of us moved. It just happened. We made love is what I am saying. We made love, Tom and I. It’s been a long time for me, maybe for Tom too.

  Afterwards Tom cried and said how sorry he was. I said I wasn’t sorry at all. I said if he wanted me to leave, I’d leave, but I wasn’t going to feel guilty about what we did. It felt good for me last night. And if I didn’t think about anything or anybody else, it still felt good for me this morning. And that was enough.

  This is not crazy. Maybe I am, but this letter is not.

  Love, Madeline

  Guy put down the letter, her last. The sun was now fully round above the fields. He thought about the last line of her last letter. She was right. Things—paper, ink—were not, could never be, crazy. Only people could be crazy.

  He looked across the fields. The thing that was the least crazy in the world was the sun coming up on the land. Everything worked out right in nature. Nature was dependable, logical. But nature was dangerous if you came to depend on it too much, because nature didn’t care about anything except itself. That he knew also.

  Yet people were always crazier and more dangerous than the land. Without Helmer, Martin would not have gone crazy. Without Martin, Madeline would not have gone crazy.

  Guy never had any trouble with craziness. But that was because he stayed apart from people so their craziness would not touch him. His heart slowly began to beat louder in his chest. His hay house. The woods and fields. Tractors and farming always far from the buildings or the road. Always he had used these things to distance himself from people. Most farmers did that. Farmers and their sons. That’s why they farmed. They chose land over people.

  He watched the light crawl yellow across the fields. Farmers chose land but the land wore you down. It wore you down just like it wore down and broke the strongest parts of the tractors and implements. Bolt on four new, steel plow lays, each of them thumb-thick and arm-long, pull them underground for one hundred acres, and when you levered up the plow again, the lays were as thin and shrunken as polio legs. To know about land you had only to dig through the scrap-iron pile beside Helmer’s machine shed for the twisted harrow teeth, the bent axles and shafts. They were twisted and bent the same as the men he saw at the feed mill and in the hardware stores of Flatwater. The farmers with limps. With corn-picker hands hooked and hard like driftwood.

  Later he’d moved closer to machines. His ’57 Chevy. Cars in general. Cars, and perhaps trains, had always been the next logical step up from the land. Once he began to take cars apart, he’d understood something he’d always known—that some cars were more than just themselves. The best cars touched art. His Mercedes, for example. The finely oiled dance line of pistons and their choreographer the camshaft, the silhouette of the Mercedes in relation to the flat earth it sat upon—all lifted the car toward art. People collected old Mercedeses, Porsches, Corvettes and put them in galleries. But the worst cars, like Chevy Vegas and Ford Pintos, were less than themselves. If the best of technology touched art, the worst of it touched the land. Vegas and Pintos turned earthward. They rusted. They settled. They sank. When he was sixteen he could not afford a car that was art, so he settled on the next best combination, his black ’57 with a red interior. And it was on the tape deck of his Chevy that he first listened seriously to music.

  Good music, like land and machines, had no people in sight. He liked it for that reason. Music also did not wear people down or wear itself out. Music was not dangerous and it was not crazy. It was the best of people without people themselves.

  He understood, now, that there were only four things in the world. There was the land. There were machines. There was art. And there were people.

  Helmer was land. Land coming into winter.

  Martin was a machine, a Chevy Vega badly rusted, running on empty.

  Cassandra Silver was technology who thought she was art—but she was probably just good-looking technology. Probably.

  Madeline had moved up from land, passed through technology, was entering art.

  Tom was art, always had been.

  Guy thought again of Tom and Madeline in their bed. Against the gray blankets they had looked like a black and white painting. He thought of the boy and the girl on Keats’s Grecian urn; they were safe because they were art. But Tom and Madeline and Martin and Helmer were real people. Maybe a little crazy, but real. In California when people got crazy you did not see them anymore. He could disappear too. Right now he could drive away. Things would be much simpler. Sunup was always a good time for leaving.

  He rolled down the window. The fields were quiet and empty but for a single meadowlark calling far down the fence posts. He listened to the bird for a long time. He came to understand that if he left now, he would be no better than the silent fields around him.

  27

  Guy drove past the singing meadowlark on his way home. He would take some aspirin, eat, sleep, then see what he could do for Martin.

  He drove into the yard. A newer tin-gray Chevrolet sat by the barn. As he got out, stiffly, Guy heard Martin’s voice through the barn walls. He walked across the yard, swung open the barn door to investigate.

  “Help!” someone called immediately to Guy. A short man with thinning, sandy-colored hair and wearing a gray suit was standing in the gutter. He held a manure fork. Alongside him was the old manure spreader hitched to Helmer’s little orange Allis-Chalmers. Martin sat atop the tractor’s seat with a shotgun in his arms.

  “Help me—he’ll kill me!” the man pleaded. His pants were brown-cuffed to the knees with manure and cow piss. His shoes squished. The big Holsteins stood chewing with their heads turned behind to stare at the man in the suit. Suddenly Guy recognized him. It was the man from the State Bank who, twelve years ago, had come to take his Chevy. The young man who had wanted to look old. Now he looked scared enough and old enough to be his own father. And in the dim barn light, on the tractor seat, Martin was Helmer.

  “Morning,” Guy said evenly to the banker and to Martin. The sunlight through the barn door was at his back. As Guy stepped inside and closed the door the banker started to speak—then his mouth dropped open. He squinted at the bruises, the s
crapes on Guy’s face, then closer still into his eyes.

  “Hello again,” Guy said to the banker.

  “Aaaaagh!” the banker shouted hoarsely. Then he threw up into the gutter. Guy looked up to Martin. Martin stared briefly at Guy, then back to the banker. Guy could see the brass rim of a shell on the bottom side of Martin’s twelve-gauge pump. Martin’s hands curled tight around the stock and slide; white moons rode the red fields of his fingernails. His eyelids were red-rimmed, his nose blazed with Jack Daniel’s.

  “Barn cleaner break down?” Guy said to Martin. He spoke slowly, did not make any sudden moves.

  “Barn cleaner works fine,” Martin said.

  “New hired man, then?”

  Martin’s lips parted in the beginning of a grin. Then his face re-formed in a snarl. “Keep shoveling, you bastard,” he shouted to the banker, who was wiping his mouth with his tie. The banker quickly bent forward with the fork. “You’re gonna stay here till you finish this goddamn gutter—then you’ll know what it’s like,” Martin said.

  Guy leaned on the wheel of the manure spreader to watch the banker and think.

  The banker struggled with a great, dripping forkful.

  “Faster, you sonofabitch,” Martin said. “You want this farm, then by God you’d better know how it works.”

  The banker was more than half finished with the gutter. Guy couldn’t see any reason to stop him now. Martin wouldn’t have any more counts against him with an empty gutter than with one half full. Guy picked up a clean stalk of alfalfa and chewed on it. The only sounds in the barn were the cows’ sea-rhythm chewing, the banker’s panting, and the scraping of fork tines on concrete.

  When the banker finished they all walked toward the house. Martin brought up the rear with the shotgun. Helmer watched from his window. In the middle of the yard the banker suddenly started to jump up and down and wave frantically at Helmer and point to Martin’s gun and to make telephoning gestures. Helmer watched the banker dance. “He’s paralyzed,” Martin said, pushing the banker along. “No telephone, anyway.” The banker made squeaking noises.