Red Earth White Earth

by Will Weaver

The father was both sad and happy. He was sad because now he would have no son. He was happy to be the hunter again.

  The son prepared his canoe. Like the son himself, the canoe was the best and most beautiful canoe that anyone had ever seen. Its birch bark was whiter than sunlight on snow. Polished clam shells decorated its sides. The shells shone like rainbows.

  The father walked his son to the shore and watched as he paddled into the distance. Then he turned back to his wigwam.

  Inside the wigwam he heard his wife singing. She sang, “Now I have no son, now I have no son. Who will bring the meat? Who will bring the meat?”

  The hunter was very angry. He took up his bow and arrow and ran to the shore of the lake. He drew back his bow and shot an arrow as far as he could. The arrow flew from sight.

  The next day some other hunters found the rainbow canoe. It had overturned in fast water. In the canoe they found an Indian girl dressed in her best fawn-skin robe. The father’s arrow had pierced her heart. The son was not found. In the canoe where he had sat was only a spot of blood on the birch bark.

  Guy was awakened by rustling paper. Cassandra was speaking to him. He opened his eyes. She had pulled a chair close beside the bed. She was fully dressed in tan slacks and a red pullover sweater and new, pale pink lipstick. “Okay, here’s what’s happening,” she began, spreading some papers over his belly.

  ***

  They sat in the Caboose Cafe. Guy had refused to listen or talk to her until he, too, had dressed and had drunk at least one cup of Caboose coffee.

  “I’ve never seen a woman like you,” Guy muttered into his mug. “You’ve got an off-on switch like a circuit breaker.”

  Her cheeks colored. “Don’t be coarse. And don’t press your luck.”

  “Luck? That a half hour ago was luck?” Guy said, setting down his mug so hard that coffee spilled onto the tabletop.

  “Shhh,” she hissed, looking about the cafe. Two men in seed-corn caps looked over at them.

  “My luck or yours? Answer me that?” Guy demanded.

  “Our luck. My luck. What does it matter?”

  “It matters,” Guy muttered.

  Guy read the pages of the letter, return heading, the White Earth Anishinabe Legal Services Tribal Council.

  “Dear Landowner.”

  It was the same letter that had come for Helmer, he guessed. First came the long legal description of some reservation farmland. Then came the punch line, the same phrase he had seen on the flier at Whittaker’s sale: “. . . sufficient ambiguities of land title as to encumber the land heretofore described in favor of the legal heirs of the White Earth Chippewa/Anishinabe People.”

  “You’ve seen this?” Cassandra asked.

  “Sort of.”

  “You realize what this letter is doing?”

  Guy waited.

  “Yesterday two large real estate deals fell through on the reservation. One was a dairy farm, the other a resort. Both the buyers were from out-of-state. One of them lost several thousand dollars of earnest money but felt lucky. You want to know why he felt lucky?”

  “Tell me.”

  “Because he escaped buying land with a bad title.”

  “So who cares.”

  “Your family—you—should, like every other white on the reservation.” Cassandra paused for a moment. “Remember at Whittaker’s lakeshore sale when Lyle Price said, ‘If you can’t sell something, then it’s not worth anything?’”

  Guy nodded.

  “Well, the same thing goes for farmland as for lakeshore.”

  “So?” Guy said. “If you’re not trying to sell the farm, why worry about it?”

  “Unfortunately it’s not that simple,” she answered. “Think of it this way. Farmers take out loans against the value of their land, right?”

  “Right.”

  “We’re talking here about regular old mortgages. My land is worth x amount per acre, therefore I want to borrow x amount of money against it.”

  Guy nodded.

  “Their loan collateral is their land.”

  “For Christ’s sakes, yes.” Guy’s head still ached. He thought of Cassandra’s clothes falling in the sunlight.

  “So what does farmland around here sell for these days?” she asked.

  Guy thought a moment. “It depends,” he said.

  “You bet it does,” Cassandra answered. Her fingernails drummed a sharp staccato on the Formica tabletop. “It depends where the land is located. Good farmland off the reservation sells right now for about five hundred dollars per acre. Good farmland on the reservation sells right now for nothing. Don’t you see what Tom LittleWolf has done with this letter? Before the letter, people thought this Indian land-claims thing would go away. Some bad blood, but business fairly much as usual. Before, he’d just scared the farmers and resorters. Now he’s frightened the bankers and lawyers. They don’t want anything to do with White Earth.”

  Guy began to speak but Cassandra interrupted him. “Who cares, you might say, right?”

  Guy was silent.

  “Lyle Price cares,” she answered. “He cares a lot.”

  Guy grinned.

  “Not funny,” she said. “Put yourself behind Price’s desk. He’s holding all these farm loans. One day he’s fat and happy. The next day—when Mr. Ma’iingaan’s letters hit the mail—his loan portfolio nose-dives to nothing.”

  Guy laughed until his ribs hurt and he had to wipe his eyes to see.

  “What the hell is so funny?” Cassandra demanded.

  “Crime and punishment. God, after all, may be just.”

  “It’s not God who’s punishing Lyle Price and all of the white landowners on the reservation—it’s your buddy, Tom.”

  “So why are you so worried about poor old Lyle Price?”

  “I’m worried about him, but only peripherally,” she said. “I’m more worried about Senator Howard Stanbrook. And Cassandra Silver.” She paused. “Guy—you’ve got to slow down Tom LittleWolf,” she said. “You’re the only one who can.”

  29

  Martin was in jail in Detroit Lakes. He had tried to outrun a highway patrol, was clocked at 130. The Mercedes had gone into the ditch at somewhere just under 100, planed over the ramp of a driveway, traveled 272 feet in the air, splashed down in a bed of cattails. The car appeared undamaged but for several hundred pounds of mud wedged in the undercarriage.

  “Jesus, those Krauts are something,” Martin said as Guy posted bail. “I was pulling away—that highway patrol looked like a pinball machine at a half mile. Then this goddamn old fart in a pickup comes drifting out of his driveway—I had to go for the cattails.”

  Guy nodded. This hadn’t really happened. It was a bad dream. In California right now he could be driving down Palm Drive along the half mile of roses to pick up Cassandra at Stanford; they would eat a seafood salad and drink a bottle of cold Riesling, then head up to the city for the evening. In the Mercedes. Susan, he meant. Not Cassandra, Susan.

  He walked with Martin outside to the courthouse parking lot. The Mercedes hung from the rear of a tow truck like a dirty gray horse in a veterinarian’s sling. Cattail fuzz bearded to the muddy flanks of the car and gave it a receding, melting look.

  Guy groaned.

  “What else could I do?” Martin said.

  Guy counted to 130 by tens. “You did the right thing,” he said.

  “I did?” Martin said, turning to Guy. He looked back to the car, then grinned. “I did, didn’t I?” He nodded. “Those Krauts, Jesus. When I left the ground I thought I was a goddamn jetliner and the wheels were gonna tuck up underneath and I was gonna fly away right up over the trees and clear out of sight. But then the nose started to drop.”

  Guy winced. “Come on,” he said, steering Martin toward Cassandra’s
Chevy. “Let’s go home.”

  Carless the next day while mechanics cleaned the Mercedes, Guy stayed home. He called Mary Ann Hartmeir, told her to take the day off; she said she could use the time because Jewell’s stumps needed trimming. Extra loudly over the telephone, Mary Ann said she once read where a man had everything amputated below his belly button—needed a plastic bag to hold in his guts—all because he didn’t keep himself clean. From the background Jewell Hartmeir shouted something at her.

  First, Guy gave his grandfather a haircut. He combed out the lank, long hair, then used scissors. White leaves of hair fell over Helmer’s shoulders and down the trunk of his body. His grandfather’s scalp smelled like oiled saddle leather. He clipped and told Helmer about California.

  How rose bushes grew into trees of flowers.

  How the redwoods along the coast took their moisture not from the ground but from the fog.

  About the fields of artichokes along the coast by Half Moon Bay, how artichokes were really big thistles but people ate them anyway; Helmer nodded at that and the left side of his face grinned.

  As Guy clipped hair he soaked Helmer’s feet in two pans of warm water. One foot in each pan, the hooks of his toenails were like yellow roots of coral stretching toward deeper water.

  He told his grandfather about the red fields of tomatoes. About the harvest race to the canning companies when the trucks, pyramided with the red fruit, drove no slower than eighty, and how the last tomatoes loaded jiggled and floated and finally blew off, then exploded on the highway and on the windshields of cars that followed them too closely.

  About the great rice paddies northeast of Sacramento, the great, balloon-tired combines.

  About the orange checkerboards of apricots drying on wooden racks along the freeways south of San Jose.

  How farmers grew strawberries using acre-size sheets of black plastic and how Mexican workers lay on their stomachs on special wagons that allowed them, like ducks feeding along shore, to pluck up the berries as the tractor pulled them along.

  He turned to Helmer’s feet. He sat them on his lap on a towel and dried them. Fine blue veins ran like tiny rivers on two white maps. His toes were river deltas spread from the main, their alluvial deposits soft at the edges, hard at the center. Toenail shards spun away. A nail clipper broke. He needed his rose-bush shears but worked instead with his grandmother’s sewing scissors and a rat-tail file. He told more about California.

  About the ivy that covered the freeway medians.

  About the sweet hum of the exhaust fans of the canning companies—Libby, Dole, others—that for weeks at a time scented whole neighborhoods with the sweet smell of peach syrup.

  He did not tell his grandfather other things about California.

  He did not tell him how the gray air in summer burned your eyes and throat like tractor exhaust trapped in a machine shed.

  How in June, July, and August the green hills turned yellow, then brown, and the grass crackled and broke underfoot like glass; how the freeways buckled from the heat; how then mad blacks and Chicanos and poor whites from their sweltering bell-jar trailers and shack homes in San Jose and the east side of Highway 101 drove up into the hills and set fire to the brush to burn out the big homes of the rich.

  How earthquakes sometimes thudded in the night like giant, Hephaestian hammers swung up from below to strike square on the floor of the house or whatever building you happened to be in; how in the days of aftershocks people slept uneasily if at all; how liquor stores and night-watchmen companies and emergency wards in the hospitals put on extra staff and were busy.

  How once on his way with Susan on a winding, wooded road toward the beach they were stopped by a roadblock and red lights; how the policemen struggled up the hill onto the road carrying a blanketed stretcher; how when the policemen stumbled, a gray arm, cleanly severed at mid-forearm, dropped from the stretcher onto the road, was retrieved by a policeman and replaced beneath its plastic blanket; how the roadblock was cleared, the cars waved on.

  How at night everywhere when it cooled, slugs came out from beneath the ivy and fruit-tree leaves like packs of tiny legless dogs from the forest; how they left foamy, webbed trails across the warm concrete as they hunted fresh greens.

  When he was finished with the haircut and pedicure, he turned to Helmer’s hands. He talked more. When he finally finished it was sundown, and Helmer rumbled, “You have much land there?”

  “No. Only a house, a yard.”

  “You could buy land there?”

  “I suppose so.”

  Helmer was silent for a while. “A man should have land,” he said.

  “Some men don’t,” Guy began. But he stopped.

  “What would a man do without land?”

  Guy was silent.

  With great effort, Helmer turned to look at Guy. With his haircut he looked younger. The late sunlight lay orange across his lap. “You have no land in California, but you know so much about it,” he said.

  Guy was silent.

  “You go to it,” Helmer said. “You watch the farmers.”

  Guy nodded yes.

  The next morning, at ten minutes past ten, spring came to northern Minnesota. Guy was walking from the house to the mailbox when he noticed for the first time real heat in the sun. He stopped. In the yard and fields the snow was all gone, had slipped away. The ground had thawed similarly, absorbing the melting snow and ice without gurgle or splash. In the cow lot the Holsteins stood sideways to the sunlight. Guy, too, turned his face up to the sun, felt its heat on his throat. For a long moment he imagined every person and animal on the reservation standing outside face up to the sun, breathing in the heat, warming. When he opened his eyes he saw his grandfather through the kitchen window. Watching. In shadow. Guy stared for a moment, then turned his eyes to the steep front steps, the open yard below. He walked on.

  In the mailbox, along with a Flatwater Quill, were two letters, both addressed to Martin Helmer Pehrsson. No “and/or.” No hyphen. The first letter was from the State Bank of Flatwater.

  Dear Mr. Pehrsson,

  As you are no doubt aware from a recent letter issued by the White Earth Tribal Council, a certain Indian attorney and his staff have called into question ownership of land by whites on the reservation.

  This investigation has dramatically reduced the value of land on the reservation, if not called into question the entire future of farming and resorting in this region.

  Because you have loans outstanding with our bank, loans based on land equity figures that are no longer valid, I would like to discuss with you at your earliest convenience your loan balance with our lending institution.

  With every good wish,

  Lyle Price, President, Flatwater State Bank

  “What’s that slippery sonofabitch trying to pull now?” Martin said as he handed the letter back to Guy.

  “The rug,” Guy said.

  The second letter was from the White Earth Tribal Council.

  Dear Mr. Pehrsson,

  Since your farm lies within the original boundaries of the White Earth Anishinabe Nation, and since you are actively engaged in use of the land through farming, and since the lands of White Earth must be protected from pollution and degradation—for example, the seepage of herbicides, pesticides, and chemical fertilizers into our groundwater endangers the sacred gift mahnomen (wild rice) from the Great Spirit—for the well-being of future generations of Anishinabe, the Tribal Council has passed a Natural Resources Preservation Ordinance.

  Main points of the Ordinance include: (1) restriction of the use of agricultural chemicals such as commercial fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides; (2) restriction of agricultural irrigation; (3) restriction of fall plowing to prevent wind erosion; and (4) restriction of further clearing of timber land for agricultural use.

&nbs
p; White Earth tribal members will make periodic inspections of tribal lands to ensure compliance.

  Meegwetch! Ma’iingaans, Tribal Chairman

  “And what the hell’s this all about?” Martin said, pouring whiskey into his coffee. “Great Spirit, wild rice, herbicides, fertilizers, pesticides.” His eyes scanned the letter.

  Guy waited.

  “Shit,” Martin said suddenly, tipping over his coffee. “This is a goddamn list of rules and regulations on how we farm!” Martin’s eyes skipped to the bottom! “‘. . . tribal members will make periodic inspections of tribal lands to ensure compliance.’” As he read aloud, two farm pickups drove fast past the farm, heading south to Flatwater.

  “This says the goddamn Indians will be coming to tell us how to farm!” Martin said, looking up at Guy.

  Guy took the letter from Martin. He read it again. He could feel Tom in the writing. The long, rambling sentences. Their rough stitching of commas and dashes and parentheses and exclamation points. It was Tom riding a feathered pony at night around and around the fenceless corral of the white page. He was herding the words together like they were camp ponies, jostling them back to the center just when they seemed likely to break out and stampede through the night trampling everything in their path. So far he was holding them in. But for every sentence he reined back, another tried to break free.

  Outside, a third pickup jolted fast toward town.

  “Goddamn, what’s the old man gonna say to this shit?” Martin muttered, pouring whiskey without coffee.

  Guy took the letters and let them drop into the garbage sack. “Nothing,” he said.

  That afternoon Guy worked with two stout, black-haired brothers as they built a wooden ramp over the steep and crumbling front steps of Helmer’s house. The brothers logged in winter when the frozen ground supported their skidders, carpentered May through October. “Round trees in winter, square ones in summer,” the brothers’ newspaper ad read. Helmer watched them work from his window.

  By late afternoon the ramp was finished. Then, using strips of plywood and two-by-four stakes, the brothers formed a wide sidewalk from the house to the barn door. The Redi-Mix truck, its beehive mixer grumbling, came up the road from the south, turned into the driveway, lowered its chute, and backed up.