by Will Weaver
Guy looked back to the farm buildings. “Martin’s gone,” he said, “but I could get the bigger ones myself.”
“Need two men,” Helmer said.
They were silent. A bumblebee droned past.
“I’ll ride the boat. You drive the Allis,” Helmer said.
Guy turned to his grandfather.
“Won’t hurt me,” Helmer said. “I got one good arm. Bring around the boat and set me in it.”
The stone boat lay rusty in the weeds by the fence. Guy dragged it free of the grass. Pale sprouts of grass grew underneath. A grass confetti ball of a mouse’s nest tore open and spilled pink mice onto the dry dirt. The mice twisted in the sunlight like live shrimp. Guy stared for a moment, then kicked grass over them.
Behind the tractor, Guy lifted Helmer from his wheelchair and set him cross-legged in the stone boat.
“Okay?” Guy said.
Helmer nodded. “Let her go.”
Guy climbed onto the Allis, looked back, and slowly let out the clutch. The chain tightened and the car hood scraped forward. Helmer sat straight upright, a Viking on the deck of his ship. As the stone boat rode the dry earth, Helmer’s white hair flapped behind his cap, and he swiveled his head slowly side to side, squinting across the field for surface breaks, swells. Guy steered the tractor toward a squat melon of gray granite. He slowed the tractor, brought the stone alongside Helmer’s right side. Helmer leaned over, rolled the stone on board. Guy drove on.
In this way they loaded stones. Helmer’s boat left curving, looping trails across the field. Guy helped load the occasional big stones, basketball size or larger. The smaller ones Helmer pulled on board and stacked by himself. He arranged the stones in circles about him. He built layer on layer. As the stones rose in the boat, Helmer’s legs were covered. Then he was sunk in stones up to his waist. Then to mid-chest.
“Dump?” Guy shouted, turning toward the fence.
“No,” Helmer called back, and waved him on.
In one more half circle across the field, Helmer looked like a head poking out of a stone fireplace. Guy turned toward the washout without Helmer’s wave. He stopped the tractor alongside the whitish mounds of old fieldstone and jumped down to check on his grandfather.
“Don’t want to bury you,” Guy said, grinning.
Helmer was silent for a moment. He looked down at the stones that covered him. “It don’t feel that bad,” he said.
Guy began to toss Helmer’s rocks onto the larger pile beside them.
“Feels kind of cold. Heavy.” Helmer fell silent. “Maybe that’s what it’s like.”
Guy looked up. He halted a stone in mid-toss. Then he began to pitch away the stones as fast as he could clatter them onto the pile beside them.
Toward midafternoon, when they had dumped the last stones and drunk a jar of water, Helmer said, “Some farmers hate stones. Hate looking at them. Hate picking them. Martin. Martin hates stones,” Helmer said. “But I never minded them.” He spoke softer now, dreamier. “One thing, you can depend on stones. Pick them off the field in the spring, they come back the next spring. Stones move around underground. They come up just like seeds or roots. No difference really. Stones always come back.” Helmer turned to Guy. “Like you, Guy-boy.”
Guy swallowed and stared.
Helmer reached out his good arm.
Guy sank into it like he was five years old.
Late in the afternoon, Helmer dozed in his wheelchair. Guy finished the seeding, drawing closer to the north fence with each round. Across the road on Hank Schroeder’s farm the potato irrigator, under injunction, stood motionless. Its silver pipe bisected the 160-acre field like a table knife left in pie. The field itself, planted in machine-hilled rows, lay corrugated and flat and brown, a dull tongue-and-groove floor to the great blue room of the sky.
Twice that afternoon dusty white pickups with yellow potatoes painted on the doors stopped alongside the field. Men got out, walked into the field, knelt among the rows, did something with their hands, stood up to stare for a long time, then drove on. Later that afternoon, when Guy was on the last outside round of seeding, he stopped the tractor, ducked under the fence, and crossed the road to look at the potatoes.
Tiny potato leaves poked through the tops of the rows. The leaves were like green fingers, thousands of them reaching up from the ground into the light. The green leaves formed wobbly lines that straightened downfield. No other green—no quack grass, no wild oats, no volunteer corn—broke the surface of the soil.
Guy knelt beside one potato plant. The soil around the leaves was chalky dry. He dug with his fingers. Below, the soil was moist. But the wetness came from the rotting seed potato. The sharp hilling-up of the rows left more soil exposed to sunlight and heat, and therefore caused faster growth. But the hilling-up also left more soil exposed to the wind, to moisture loss. Two of five green leaves had curled under at their edges. Guy felt of one. Brittle, the leaf broke in half.
As he knelt a cool waft of air came up from the fresh dirt. He squinted. He scooped up another handful and held it closer to his nose. It smelled metallic. Smelled like the wood slats on the floor of the electroplating room of his company where acids were poured and rinsed, poured and rinsed. He stared closely at the dirt. It was as fine and black as potting soil. He clapped its dust from his hands and stood up.
Across the road he knelt and lifted a handful of Helmer’s soil to his nose. Helmer’s dirt smelled like rotted fence posts and leaves. Smelled like earthworms at the bottom of their can. He let the dirt sift through his fingers. When it was gone a whiskery skein of roots remained on his fingers. He raked them to the center of his hand, rubbed them with his thumb. The roots turned to slick, sweet mud. He looked across the dusty, reddening air of the field. Helmer waited in his wheelchair, a dark door in the wall of light.
That evening the sun went down scarlet. As tired from seeding oats as from a day at the beach, Guy fell asleep about the same time. Much later he woke to piss. In the darkness car lights flashed far out in Hank Schroeder’s field, then went out. Guy watched at the window for a few moments, then returned to bed.
In the morning Guy was harrowing smooth the oats when he realized rain had fallen in the night—but only on the potatoes. Across the road the irrigator stood at a different angle, and the potato field was black with wetness. Overspray had wet the road and left a crescent shadow across the dusty edge of Helmer’s oats field. As Guy stared, a car came slowly along. It stopped where the road was wet. Two Indians got out. One took out a camera. The other held up the front page of a newspaper while the first Indian positioned himself to get a picture of the newspaper, the wet road, and the irrigator in the background. Then the Indians drove north to the next field, the next irrigator.
That afternoon Guy called Cassandra. Her recorded voice spoke first and asked him to leave his name and number at the tone.
“Where are you? I want to see you,” he said.
He called later but got the recording again. He left another message, the same as before.
That evening Guy drove to the Lumberjack Hotel, but Cassandra was not in her room. Mrs. Smythe, at the desk, said Cassandra came in late and left early. Always seemed to be in a hurry. “She’s hardly ever here, why does she even pay for the room?” Mrs. Smythe grumbled.
He started driving back to the farm at sundown. A Losano Farms pickup passed him. A carload of Indians followed the pickup. When the pickup slowed, the Indians slowed. When the pickup turned, the Indian car turned the same way. The pickup slowed by the irrigator, then stopped. The Indians parked a few feet behind the pickup. For several minutes nothing happened. Suddenly the pickup lurched backward. Its heavy bumper slammed against the Indian car, which jerked from the impact. Guy heard the crunch and tinkle of glass. The Indian car backed up fast. It retreated a full quarter mile to the corner. There it st
opped again.
Guy returned to the farm and parked the Mercedes. Then he walked in the blue twilight back toward Hank Schroeder’s field. The Indian car still waited at the corner. The white pickup now sat in the center of the field beside the pump and generator. Darkness fell. The heat hung on. A few mosquitoes whined weakly in the dry grass. A tiny white eye of a satellite curved toward the big dipper. A yellow half-moon rose. But nothing else stirred.
Finally Guy turned back home. He had walked only a few yards when he heard a faint swish-swish, like bird wings, like an owl dropping from a tree into flight. He turned to look. Behind him, across the road, water began to sweep and swing above the irrigator pipe. The water slung itself forward and forward like surf at night. On its electric wheels, the irrigator began to crawl forward. The only sound was the hiss, chut-chut, hiss of the sweep of its night rain.
The Indian car’s engine came on. Its wheels crunched on gravel, then receded toward No Medicine Town. The white pickup remained at the center of the field, a white smudge in the dark. Guy stood and watched for a few minutes more. Above the irrigator, sheets of water flapped like a line of swans flying single file low across the night field. The end nozzle gradually chut-chutted water onto the road, then onto Helmer’s fence posts. Guy turned and went home to bed.
Much later in the night gunshots jerked him from sleep. He stumbled to the window. Car lights bounced and swung in Hank Schroeder’s field. He pulled on his clothes and boots and ran outside to the pickup. There were faint shouts. A horn honked. Martin came running from his house with the shotgun. “Indian trouble—let’s go,” he called to Guy.
Guy paused. He looked down at the gun. “We don’t need that,” he said.
But Martin climbed inside with the gun.
Guy did not turn the ignition.
“What the hell you waitin’ for?” Martin said.
Guy stared at the gun. “We’ve got to talk.”
“About what?”
“About that,” Guy said, nodding at the gun.
“What about it?”
“This Defense League stuff. You’re always carrying a gun. You’re never home. Or if you are, you invite all the local thugs over to drink your whiskey and smoke cigars.”
“Thugs, eh!” Martin said rapidly. “Maybe you forget. Those thugs are the people you grew up with. Those thugs are your neighbors.”
“You act different when you’re around them,” Guy said quietly.
“Thugs, you call them,” Martin said angrily, not listening. “Well, maybe I’m a thug, too, a thug trying to watch out for myself, like the other thugs. These are tough times. The goddamn Indians, the banks. Everybody’s up against the wall.”
“Not us,” Guy said.
“What’s that?” Martin said suspiciously.
“You and me is what I mean. We made some progress there for a few days. You know, after we had that fight. Things were pretty good between us. We had some jokes. I sprayed water on you. We even chased each other across the lawn.” Guy’s voice tightened. He stopped.
Martin did not come to his aid. He looked away out his window at the darkness.
Guy went on. He spoke softly. “When you hang out with those Defense League people, you’re someone different. You’re not yourself. That’s not you, the point man on patrol with a cigar and twelve-gauge. You’re not John Wayne.”
“So you are maybe, is that it?”
“No,” Guy said immediately. “That’s not it. That’s exactly not it. I’m only saying that we have to be who we are. That’s the only important thing. The land, the Indians, none of that matters in the end. You and me, that’s what matters.”
They were both silent.
“Come on, goddammit,” Martin said, wrenching over the ignition and starting the truck forward with a lurch. “Let’s git after ’em.”
But the Indians were gone. In Hank Schroeder’s field the headlights of the Losano pickup shone on steel. Irrigator pipe lay on the ground. A geyser of water sprayed straight into the air like a single, tall plume of savannah grass. Two spans of the irrigator lay upside down, their wheels slowly grinding like a spent clock. Beyond the twisted pipe, toward the well, other spans remained upright, and their wheels strained to pull forward. But the irrigator’s back was broken. It lay heaving slowly in place.
Two Losano men ran from the darkness into the headlights of the truck. One of them carried a rifle. “Sonsabitches—look what they did!” one of them shouted to Guy and Martin.
Guy squinted, then walked forward. In the track of the irrigator’s big wheel was a grave-deep hole. The wheel had dropped into the hole. Downfield, beside the next span’s wheel, was a crude wooden ramp. “The old high-low,” Guy murmured. Like the Maxi-Burger, only bigger. As the irrigator had wound its way forward, one wheel had crawled up the ramp; just as it reached the top, the other wheel had dropped into the hole.
“Did you hit any of ’em?” Martin called, jacking a shell into the shotgun’s chamber.
“I don’t know,” one of them said. “We thought we heard ’em. Took a few sound shots. What the hell can you do? They must have sneaked down the rows. Shit, we were right here!” The man’s voice ended in a whine, as if he were explaining himself to Ricardo Losano.
“Let’s go back,” the other called, “we gotta turn it off, anyway.”
“Then what?” the other man muttered, throwing the gun with a clatter into the pickup bed. The irrigator sprayed on in a growing lake of water.
“Then we got to radio in, that’s what,” the second man said.
Suddenly they turned their heads to listen. North, on the next field, car doors slammed. An engine accelerated. There was gunfire, then shouting.
“Shit,” the two men said at once.
“Let’s go!” Martin shouted to Guy.
Guy threw the truck keys to Martin and walked home alone.
The next morning, early, Guy met Tom at his house. Madeline was in her bathrobe. Tom’s eyes were puffy and green-mooned.
“Seven irrigators,” Guy said from the doorway. “They looked like crashed U-2s.”
Tom shrugged. He drew deeply on his cigarette.
“You shouldn’t have done it,” Guy said.
“Why not? I’m tired of waiting,” Tom said in a rush of smoke. He scattered a sheaf of papers into the air. “Tired of the runaround. Yesterday I went into Flatwater to talk with the sheriff but he wouldn’t even see me. I waited an hour. Too busy, his secretary said. Well, goddammit, I’m tired of that shit. Now they got something to be real busy about.”
Guy shook his head. “You’re close, closer than you’ve ever been. But you blew it last night.”
“No—they blew it!” Tom said angrily. “They were the ones using our water when they were under injunction. They were the ones breaking the law. All we did was enforce it.”
“They won’t see it that way.”
Tom paused. He brought his dark eyes to bear squarely on Guy’s blue ones. “What way do you see it?”
“Both ways,” Guy said.
“That’s not good enough,” Tom said.
“What do you mean, ‘not good enough’? It’s the only way,” Guy answered. “Especially for you. One way gets you somewhere. But one way doesn’t get you back. You’ve got time, you’ve got the law—slow down, for Christ’s sakes.”
Tom stared. “I’d expect to hear that from Cassandra Silver, maybe, but not you, Tex.”
“Don’t get weird on me,” Guy said. “Don’t try to start some argument so you can write me off as just another paleface, because it ain’t gonna work. So forget it,” Guy said, his voice rising.
“Boys—boys,” Madeline said.
Tom and Guy turned to stare.
“I meant . . . ,” Madeline said. She blushed crimson.
“
Besides, I’ll tell my mom,” Guy said.
Tom’s lips split into a grin that widened tooth by white tooth. Guy grinned. A moment later all three of them were laughing.
By midmorning of that same day, heat shimmered and bent the fields like the landscape was a reflection in an old mirror. Madeline pulled all the window shades in Tom’s house, then made cold tea with lemon slices and plenty of ice cubes. Tom was at the Humphrey Center, working.
Toward noon Madeline wiped her brow and said, “I’ve got an idea. Let’s pick up Tom, have a picnic lunch, and go for a swim. He needs a break,” she said. “Plus nobody will know where he is for a couple of hours.”
Guy helped make sandwiches.
The three of them spread their blanket on pine needles in dry sand. They were half shaded by a tall Norway pine. High above in the branches a red squirrel tsk-tsk-tsked at them. At the shoreline the water of No Medicine Lake pulsed slowly against the fine sand without break or splash. There were no boats. No gulls. No voices. A flat, shimmering heat.
They ate tuna-lettuce sandwiches and crunchy, cool wild rice with iced tea to wash it all down. Afterward Tom leaned back with his arms behind his head. In a minute his eyelids drifted together and his mouth went slack. Madeline stared down at Tom. She waved a fly away from his face. Guy chewed on a piece of grass. Madeline rubbed her eyes. She yawned, then smiled apologetically. “We didn’t get much sleep last night.”
“You were out in the potato fields with Tom?” Guy said, frowning.
“No. But I always wait up.”
Guy was silent. He plucked up another spear of grass.
Madeline lay back with her head against Tom’s arm. “Oh, Guy, what must you think of me?” she murmured sleepily.
Guy smiled. He shifted the shoot of grass to the other corner of his mouth, then looked far out across the lake. When he looked back Madeline’s eyes were closed too.
