Red Earth White Earth

by Will Weaver

  Behind the main building, in a parallel row, were fourteen airplane hangar–sized buildings made of galvanized steel. The steel buildings had doors that slid open full width; dump trucks and skid-steer loaders and a few tiny men came and went in and out of the dark mouths of the hangar-buildings.

  Guy looked at his notes. “11:35. South side of main building, slot C, Visitors’ Parking (in front of the cafeteria windows). Slot C only!” Mary Ann’s exclamation point.

  He drove slowly toward the main building, then circled behind as Mary Ann had said. He gave way to a long dump truck pyramided with potatoes. Some of the potatoes reflected sunlight off the wetness of their broken skins; others were shriveled and black. As the truck passed, Guy squinted and pulled his face away from the smell. Brown juice dripped from the rear of the dump truck and led in a thin trail backward to the aluminum buildings.

  Potato warehouses. Spring clean-out.

  Guy remembered doing the same for his grandmother, carrying up from her basement a dripping bag of potatoes, some of which had pushed long, white sprout fingers through the weave of the burlap while others had melted to slime. After her death, when he lived alone, Helmer’s potato supply always came out even. He ate the last winter potato the day before new potatoes were ready.

  Guy checked his watch: 11:34. He turned into slot C. On the concrete walls of the factory a narrow band of windows looked onto the parking lot. Behind the glass, people in white smocks and kerchiefs moved about carrying bag lunches and cans of Mountain Dew and Pepsi. Several women stared out the window as if they were waiting for someone. For an instant Guy remembered an old-age home near his factory in California: how the old people watched out their windows like pale watercolors framed and under glass.

  Mary Ann, smockless and wearing a broad, flowered dress and a blue kerchief tied up like rabbit ears, waved at Guy from the window closest to the door.

  Guy stepped inside. The women at the tables and by the red Pepsi machine fell silent and turned to stare. Guy nodded. A woman even fatter than Mary Ann grinned at Guy with dark teeth.

  “Come on,” Mary Ann said, taking Guy by the arm and pulling him toward a large steel door. “If the fatties don’t eat they’ll be bitchy all afternoon.”

  Several women hooted at Mary Ann but nonetheless moved again to find chairs and dig into their lunch boxes and sacks with a clatter and rustle. From a wall of steel lockers beside the door Mary Ann hunched over her lock, spun the combination, then reached inside for a white hard hat and a set of earplugs for Guy.

  “Put on the hat but save the plugs,” she said to Guy. “We’ll start across the road where the potatoes come in.” She talked very loudly. So did all the women at the table, who fell silent again as Mary Ann guided Guy back out the door.

  They crossed the parking lot. Mary Ann walked them past the Mercedes and paused to run her hand over the fender and roof. She put a finger into one of the shotgun-pellet dents. “Somebody shot your car!” she said, puzzled. “Indians, I suppose.”

  Guy didn’t speak.

  “Anyway,” Mary Ann said, bringing Guy to the mouth of the nearest potato warehouse, “here’s where the truckers bring in the spuds.”

  The building had strong breath, a warm exhalation of rotted potatoes and black dirt and stone dust and tractor exhaust.

  “They’re nearly empty now, ’cept for seed potatoes,” Mary Ann said. She jerked her head back to the factory. “Line shifts get cut back in the spring when there ain’t as many potatoes going through. People with least seniority gotta help in the warehouses and with planting. People been here a long time—like me—get to stay in the plant. Course there’s two sides to that,” she said. “In the spring it’s cold and dirty in the warehouses and in the fields, but it’s warm in the plant. But in the spring in the plant you get a lot more rotten potatoes and so there’s more strippin’ to be done, more stink. Me? I done enough field work down in Georgia so I don’t mind the stink long as I get to stay inside.”

  Guy nodded. He blinked as his eyes adjusted to the dim light. Deeper inside the warehouse two lines of women came into view. They wore coveralls and hard hats, worked with long rakes. They looked like coal miners. The women dislodged potatoes from the sides of the walls, then raked the potatoes in even lines toward a central grate. The women talked to each other without looking as they swung their rakes. To one side a male foreman worked on a broken rake handle.

  The potatoes rolled ahead of the women’s rakes and dropped through the grate. Guy heard faint splashing below.

  “The spuds go in water through an underground pipe to the plant,” Mary Ann explained, “a potato flume. The pumps are over here.” She pulled him away from the women rakers and through wide swinging doors.

  “Wear your plugs if you want,” she called.

  Inside was a great spaghetti of white pipes as large in diameter as Mary Ann. A squat turbine pump with a German name whined like an orchestra tuning at low C. The noise made Guy’s ears pop. Below the floor a water-wheel full of potatoes turned and sloshed, turned and sloshed as the potatoes were sucked into the flume. Beneath the wheel, water coursed black and heavy with dirt. A small chain link conveyer turned through the black water and brought up stones. The glinting stones, some sharp-edged, most round like potatoes, traveled up to floor level, where they dropped with a clatter into a wheelbarrow. A woman with a wide face, wearing a black stocking cap pulled low across her forehead, stood between the handles of the barrow; she drew on a cigarette while she waited for the barrow to fill.

  “Shitwork,” Mary Ann called to Guy. “I know, I did it for a year.” Outside the warehouse a man sat leaned back in the cage of a skid-steer loader. Its engine idled. He was waiting for another wheelbarrow of stones to make a full bucket.

  “Funny the stuff that comes in on the potatoes,” Mary Ann said. She pointed to the wall. Hung between nails on a piece of plywood were dozens of stone hammer heads and spear points and smaller, pale white arrowheads.

  Mary Ann swung open the main factory door to a wave of noise and humid potato air. “Be careful, the floors are slippery,” she shouted.

  A faint sheen of cooking oil and humidity coated the gray-painted concrete floor. Mary Ann walked forward splay-footed, like she was on thin ice. Narrow stairs made of open grating crisscrossed up to several dump-truck-size bins. Guy carefully followed her upward.

  At the top they looked down at the potatoes, now on a black, wet conveyer belt. The belt dumped the potatoes onto moving grates. Small potatoes fell away; big ones moved forward.

  “The big ones turn into french fries, the little ones to hash browns, and those tiny ones go to hog farms,” she called.

  Beyond the sizing bins was a bank of gauges, a bird’s nest of leg-thick piping that led to a large drum, similar in size to a ready-mix concrete truck. The mouth of the drum opened for a long swallow of potatoes, then closed. Black needles quivered and jumped in the white eyes of their gauges.

  “Steam peeler,” Mary Ann shouted. “It’s just like a pressure cooker—three hundred and fifty degrees for a minute or so. The peelings get rolled off, then drop below. They end up cattle feed. The peeled potatoes get another washing.”

  “What’s that?” Guy called, pointing to three bathtub-size, plastic-lined hoppers nearly full of a creamy white glue.

  “Starch,” she shouted. “It’s trucked off somewhere and made into cornstarch to be used on babies’ asses.”

  She waved for Guy to follow her back down the stairs. There she paused to wait for Guy, then pointed ahead to where a dozen women sat on tall stools along the conveyor belt. The women wore white hard hats, white smocks with the sleeves rolled up. Their arms were white. The black, wet conveyor belt came through plastic curtains carrying white, wet naked potatoes. The largest, roundest potatoes looked like slippery newborn babies.

  “Strippers,” Mary Ann call
ed, nodding toward the women. “That’s what I do.” They walked forward. Halfway to the women Mary Ann stopped. “It’s slipperier here than anywhere—you better hang on to my arm.”

  Guy looped his arm through hers. If anything, the floor seemed drier.

  Mary Ann brought him to the head of the stripping line.

  “Hey!” Mary Ann called to the women, who looked up first at Mary Ann, then to Guy. They let their eyes run up and down Guy.

  “This is Guy Pehrsson—from California,” she called, still holding on to his arm.

  The women grinned at Guy, their hands all the while snatching up potatoes from the conveyor. The women hardly looked down. Their fingernails were eyes on the end of their hands. With a small, hooked paring knife they struck at any color other than white. Brown and black fell away. White moved on.

  “What are you, blind?” Mary Ann shouted, pointing to the belt.

  “Saving some for you, honey,” one of the stripper women shouted, flipping a rotten slice toward Mary Ann while still watching Guy.

  Mary Ann tugged Guy away.

  The women grinned. Their hands speared at the stream of white potatoes. As Guy walked away he felt their eyes moving on the dark back of his jacket.

  Just ahead of the stripper tables, the potatoes funneled into a pipe that narrowed quickly to the diameter of a single potato. French fries spilled onto a conveyor belt.

  “An air compressor accelerates ’em down the pipe through the blades,” Mary Ann called. “It’s like somebody come speeding around a corner on a motorcycle and suddenly running through a bunch of razor blades.” She glanced at her watch, then pulled him along, quicker now.

  They passed through a great room that shuddered. The floor shuddered. The walls shuddered. The ceiling shuddered as the french fries vibrated along shaking grates. Small fries fell away; larger fries continued. At the end of the shakers the fries accumulated in weigh-scale hoppers, then fell through pipes to the next floor below. Over the railing Guy watched women bag the fries, sew them shut with power stitchers, then let the bags fall onto a conveyor belt.

  Mary Ann hurried Guy along. It was 11:51.

  Back in the employees’ canteen, the women sat at tables eating their lunch and drinking from cans of pop. Most of the women still wore their white smocks and hard hats, some their earplugs. All turned to stare at Guy, then at Mary Ann, who still held his arm.

  Guy nodded to the women. They grinned. Guy looked at the wall clock. “Aren’t you going to eat?” he said to Mary Ann.

  “Do I look like I need it?” she said. She took off her hard hat and fluffed up her blond hair. “Come on, we ain’t gonna hang around here. Let’s sit in your car until the whistle blows.”

  Outside, Guy opened the door of the Mercedes. Some of the women came to the window to stare.

  Mary Ann sat silently, looking at the women through the windshield of the Mercedes. She touched the dashboard with her right hand. Behind the car two long refrigerated trucks rumbled toward the shipping doors.

  “Where do the french fries go from here?” Guy asked.

  Mary Ann shrugged. “McDonald’s. Burger King. Hardee’s. Denny’s. All the chains, I guess.”

  “So in California I could eat a french fry that you made,” Guy said.

  Mary Ann grinned briefly. “S’pose so.” She looked back at the women framed in the window. “The big shots from the burger companies fly in here to Flatwater in their little pissant jets and tell us how to make their fries,” Mary Ann said, her mouth turning down. “They want every fry just so long, so thick, so crisp. They even taste them. It’s funny to see, these tanned guys in their suits and ties sitting down to a package of fries and chewing on them like it was their last supper.”

  She stared for a moment.

  “But the women,” Mary Ann continued, “they’re even funnier to watch. Whenever the strippers and packers hear there’s taster-men coming they get all dolled up. They get permanents. They just happen to forget to have on their hard hats when the guys in ties walk by.”

  She looked back to the women in the windows. “They think someday one of those rich guys is going to notice them. They think he’s going to say, ‘Hey, what are you doin’ in this goddamn oil pit? You’re too pretty for this. I’m takin’ you out of here.’ And she doesn’t even punch her time card that day because she knows she’s never coming back and she don’t need the money no more. She’s gettin’ on that little jet and she tells the pilot to fly low and fast over the plant and she gives everybody who’s lookin’ up the bird even though she knows they can’t see her ’cause she’s so small by then. She’s on her way to New York or Denver or California.” Her voice had softened to a near-whisper. “That’s what all those dumb broads dream about,” Mary Ann finished.

  “And you?” Guy asked.

  “I’m as dumb as they come around here,” she said. She looked up at Guy. “I thought when you came back to Minnesota—that maybe you came back to see me.”

  Guy touched her hair. “I’ve got a girlfriend,” he said softly.

  “I figured that,” she said.

  They were both silent for long moments. She looked down at her hands.

  “Besides, we’re too different, anyway,” she said.

  Guy stroked her hair.

  She glanced at her watch again. Suddenly she turned to him and blurted, “But I told the women that you was my boyfriend—that you’d come all the way from California to see me.”

  “I guessed that,” Guy said.

  “You did?” she said quickly.

  Guy nodded. “But I didn’t mind,” he said.

  “You didn’t?”

  “Why should I? You once were my girlfriend. Kind of.”

  Mary Ann grinned. Her cheeks colored slightly. “I gotta go, Guy,” she said. “We got to be on the line when the whistle blows.” She leaned over and kissed his cheek. “Thanks.”

  “For what?” Guy said.

  “For not tellin’ on me.”

  “They don’t need to know,” Guy said.

  Mary Ann grinned. She got out of the car. So did Guy. He came around and took her in his arms and kissed her. He kissed her a long time, kissed her as her big breasts pushed against him, kissed her until the whistle blew. Mary Ann’s kiss was by far not the worst kiss he’d ever had. When he and Mary Ann looked up the cafeteria windows were filled with women who watched.

  36

  In the night the wind switched. Toward morning Guy awoke sweating in his blankets. Upstairs in Helmer’s house he reached up to touch the ceiling that sloped behind his head. The boards were warm.

  Hot, dry weather rolled up from South Dakota and hunkered over White Earth like a great brooder hen spreading her wings over a nest. The reservation greened. In the next two days Madeline’s tulips shot blue-green spikes around the foundation of Martin’s house and Tom’s house too. Oats blushed chartreuse on the cheeks of some fields. Other new seeding, planted a day or two later, remained soberly brown. Yet even the brown fields, if Guy turned his head and looked from the corner of his eye, fuzzed pale yellow. And yellow was another hue of green because it could not become otherwise. Looking for color in new seedlings was like looking at faraway stars at night. Stare straight on and you saw nothing. But tilt your head . . . look to one side . . .

  Guy planted oats for Martin, who was hard to find. He was always leaving. His Ford pickup jolted down the driveway, then sped north or south. His contrail of dust drifted, thinned across the fields. Another Defense League meeting. So Guy drilled oats for him, up and back, up and back the field, and left his own dusty trails.

  He pulled the grain drill with Helmer’s little tractor. The orange Allis was easier to turn, left no heavy tire tracks, and Guy could more easily stay wheel mark on wheel mark. He had only to look straight below him at the unwinding earth.
Each pass of the grain drill left a sweep of tiny lines, as if he were pulling a wide comb straight down the field. As he planted he remembered the year Martin, drunk and angry, had seeded grain. The seedlings came through in wobbling green lanes. Some oats, double planted, grew brighter green. Other rows, paler, looped and curved back on themselves. Some parts of the field remained dark, had no oats at all. It was a field of paisley, green on brown.

  Helmer said nothing to Martin about the planting. But daily he drove along the field and stared. Once, to Guy, Helmer said that the field was a lesson. That was all. A lesson. Late one night in June, Guy had awakened to tractor sounds in the dark. His father was disking under the oats. By then it was too late to replant, but the next day everyone seemed happier, and after that, nothing more was said.

  As Guy planted, Helmer watched from his wheelchair by the gate. At noon the two of them ate sandwiches together at field-side. The sandwiches were baloney and mayo or cold fried eggs with a swirl of catsup between white bread. They drank smoking black coffee from the thermos, then cooler water from the vinegar jug. The heat surrounded them like bathwater.

  “Some stones out there,” Helmer rumbled, staring far out in the field. “Have to get them stones off or you’ll break a sickle come swathing time.”

  Come swathing time. Helmer assumed Guy would be here for swathing—and harvesttime too. Guy turned to Helmer. He must speak quickly, tell Helmer he would be leaving again. But his words, like divers turning upside down and backward in midair, transformed themselves even as they left his lips. He heard himself say, “We’ll get the stones, Gramps. Don’t worry.”

  “Should do it today,” Helmer said, “before they settle. While they’re sitting up.”

  “I can get them later with the big tractor and loader.”

  Helmer shook his head. “The John Deere’s too heavy. Leaves ruts. Should use the Allis and the stone boat.”

  The stone boat. Guy had forgotten the stone boat. It was Helmer’s invention, a long DeSoto car hood with a great, jutting nose. Helmer had turned it upside down, welded some curved steel cross-ribs to make it stronger, and added a hitch on the prow. Then, with the orange Allis and a chain, they pulled the car hood about the field. Guy or Martin had always ridden the stone boat, jumping on and off to load stones.