Red Earth White Earth

by Will Weaver

  “Guy, get over here and help your daddy.”

  Guy came cautiously from behind the tree. Martin had fallen to his hands and knees. He began to cry, long heaving sobs. Mary Ann and Guy helped him up, then walked him back to bed. Mary Ann waited beside Martin’s bed until he was asleep.

  Afterward, on the front steps, Guy said, “Thanks.”

  Mary Ann shrugged.

  They both grinned, then looked across the yard.

  “Your poor damn Mercedes,” Mary Ann said, “it’s been goin’ downhill ever since you came back.”

  In the moonlight the Mercedes sat with a vacant, punched-in stare. Shards of window glass lay on the hood and roof like snowflakes. Guy shrugged. “What the hell, it’s only a car, right?”

  Mary Ann grinned.

  Guy walked her across the yard toward her car. He stopped by the two empty chairs on the lawn and the litter of spent shotgun shells. Beneath one of the chairs was a glass and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

  He turned to Mary Ann. “You in any hurry?”

  “Not me,” Mary Ann said. “I ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

  So they sat in the two chairs on the lawn between the two houses. They talked some, but after a while they fell silent. For a long time they sipped whiskey and watched stars fall.

  In the morning Guy milked the cows, then came in and made breakfast. Martin stumbled from his bedroom at nine o’clock. He squinted at Guy. Then he winced and held his right shoulder. Suddenly he looked up again; his eyes widened. He weaved across the living room to the window. He stared across at Helmer’s house. At the Mercedes.

  “Shit,” Martin said.

  “Come eat,” Guy said. He poured two cups of coffee.

  They ate the eggs and toast in silence.

  “About the Mercedes . . . ,” Martin began.

  “What Mercedes? You mean that shot-up junker in the yard?” Guy said immediately, when he had planned not to.

  Martin was silent. He ate another bite of egg, then got up to look out the window again. He stared for a long time. “Bad part of it is,” he said, “she looks kinda like an Indian car now.”

  Guy choked on his coffee. Then he began to laugh. He laughed until he had to go outside to catch his breath.

  40

  After Helmer’s funeral there was lunch at Martin’s house. Mary Ann had cleaned and cooked. Laid out on the kitchen table, which Guy had shored up with two-by-fours, was the food.

  Hot dishes bubbled and popped in their glass dishes like steam pots in Yellowstone Park. Tuna-noodle casserole. Hamburger-tomato. Hamburger-pea-potato. Scalloped potatoes and ham. Wild-rice-green-bean-hamburger, and two other hot dishes not immediately identifiable.

  Then the breads. White bread. Dark bread. Wheat bread. Rye bread. Yellow buns with sliced ham. White buns with sliced turkey.

  Pickles. Dill pickles. Sweet pickles. Beet pickles. Carrot pickles. Chutney. Relishes.

  Salads. Three-bean salad. Cold macaroni salad. Fruit salad, a mixture of chopped apples and walnuts and raisins, fruit cocktail and whipped cream.

  Jell-Os. Strawberry-banana. Raspberry-banana. Black raspberry–pineapple. Lime with grated carrots. Lemon-lime with raisins. Orange Jell-O, cubed, in whipped cream. Cherry Jell-O with mandarin oranges.

  At the far end of the table were the desserts, mostly bars and pies. Raisin-coconut bars. Zucchini bars. Carrot bars. Brownies with walnuts. Plain brownies. And then the pies, mincemeat, apple, cherry, raisin, and a peach pie with a woven, crisscross crust.

  Martin stood at the head of the table and shook hands. Guy had bought him a dark blue suit, white shirt, and striped tie. Martin’s pale, thin hair was washed and fluffy and combed straight back. His teeth were brushed.

  His gums bled pink on his teeth. Guy remembered photographs he had once seen in a magazine, photos of New York City bums made over with fifty-dollar haircuts and five-hundred-dollar suits, “before” and “after” photos. But change the clothes, change the hair, the eyes remained the same. His father’s eyes, small and blue and flecked with red, flickered about the room in pride and fear.

  More car doors slammed in the yard. Feet thumped on the porch. People came inside without knocking. Farmers took off their caps. Their round faces were white above, brown below, cap lines their equator. Their eyes moved quickly to the food.

  Mary Ann and Madeline served. Men with chapped cheeks and razor-burned necks passed down the line. Silverware was small in their brown fingers. Wives followed husbands. The farm women wore patterned dresses, long-sleeved sweaters, and bright brooches on the left side of their breast. At each hot dish the wives murmured, “Oh—that’s a great plenty.”

  Conversations began with Helmer, turned to the weather, then fell silent. If someone else spoke, people turned to listen. But soon the house was crowded, and voices wove themselves into layers of talk and laughter. Voices swirled into the clink of silverware, the clack of serving forks on dishware, the sharp clatter of spoons swirling cream in coffee cups, then tap-tapping the rim of the cup. Soon there was noise enough that Guy no longer had to talk. Once he looked for Martin but could not spot him in the crowd.

  The house warmed. The smells of food and coffee and people washed over Guy. Dime-store perfume. Baked beans. Mennen Skin Bracer. Tuna casserole. Cows. Dill pickles. Old manure on boots. Hydraulic oil. Cherry pie. Go-Jo hand cleaner. Soap. After-shave. Perfume. Coffee.

  Guy closed his eyes to draw in the smells. He turned his head to take in fully the broad hum of voices and of people eating. He breathed in deeply. He listened for a long time. When he opened his eyes again, he was crying.

  He went outside and sat on the steps. After several minutes in the fresh air he felt better. He felt hungry. He should eat. Eating would help. He took a deep breath and stood to go back inside. Then he saw his father.

  Across the lawn, Martin stood braced against the side of Helmer’s house. His face was pressed against the rough boards. His arms were outstretched. His fingers gripped the jagged holes of the shotgun blasts. He was trying to lift his father’s house, or, if he could not lift it, take it all into his arms.

  The last car had gone and Guy was walking to the barn when someone hissed at him from behind the granary. Guy whirled. “Tom—Jesus!”

  “Red man sneak up on white farmer.” Tom grinned.

  Guy looked down at his coveralls. He shrugged. “Chores. A night off is the least I can do for Martin.”

  “That’s why I came,” Tom said seriously. “I’m sorry about Naenimo. Your grandfather.”

  “Naenimo,” Guy repeated. He smiled. He had forgotten that word. Zhingwaak called all the old farmers Naenimo. He-Who-Saves-Something-for-Later.

  “How’s your father doing?”

  “He’s in the house,” Guy said, “you could ask him.”

  Tom pretended to consider that for a moment, then grinned. “Indian not that brave.”

  Guy did the chores while Tom waited out of sight in the hayloft. When Guy was finished he climbed the loft ladder halfway. He called out Tom’s name. In the dim light the loft was quiet but for a brief scuttle of pigeons overhead. He found Tom in their old hay house, stretched out asleep on the iron cot, a pen and some notes of paper on the floor where they had fallen from his hand.

  Guy came alongside Tom and ran a fingernail across Tom’s throat. Tom jumped awake. Guy stood grinning at him.

  “White man sneak up on Indian,” Tom said, blinking rapidly to wake up.

  “White man sneak up on Indian who steals white man’s mother,” Guy added.

  Tom touched his neck. “But white man not cut Indian’s throat,” he said.

  Guy grinned and shook his head no.

  At sundown Guy drove on the roads around No Medicine Town. Tom rode and talked.

  “You see, Tex, I’ve got these plans
for jobs on the reservation,” Tom said. He was energized from his short nap, talked with moving hands and flashing eyes. “Wild rice,” he said. “Paddy rice, but still wild. At the south end of the lake, where Doc’s Tavern is, we divert water and create the paddies. Like they do in California,” Tom said. “I’ve been reading all about it.”

  “What about Doc’s?”

  Tom grinned. “Doc always wanted to retire.”

  Guy shook his head at Tom.

  “I’m serious, Tex. Wild rice paddies. Ten acres of paddies would create fifty jobs. Fifty!”

  Guy let the car coast to a stop on the edge of No Medicine Town. Tom talked on. Through the open car window behind Tom, a van with a stepladder tied on top and an empty trailer behind sat by an Indian house. Two white men wearing yellow hard hats crouched at the base of a shiny white satellite TV antenna. An Indian woman and four small children watched the men work.

  Guy’s eyes fell back to Tom.

  “. . . then limited commercial fishing on No Medicine Lake,” Tom continued, sorting through the notes of paper he had spread over the seat. “People don’t eat as much meat anymore—chicken and fish, right? We’ll raise the poultry, we’ll raise the fish. Fresh walleyed pike—we could sell—”

  “What about the white resorters, their fishermen?” Guy said.

  “Once we get back the land the resorters can be relocated,” Tom said quickly. “Not just thrown off, but a five-year plan. Give them enough time to find someplace else. There’s plenty of lakes nearby—off the reservation.”

  Guy was silent. The men in hard hats stood up. One of them turned a crank at the base of the dish. The parabola turned. The second man said something to the Indians, then pointed into the sky. The Indian family looked up and turned their faces to follow the path of his arm.

  “After the rice and fish operations, maybe a small wood manufacturing plant,” Tom continued. “Small toys. Some furniture. Toothpicks. Chopsticks. You know how many people in the world use chopsticks?” Tom said, his eyes flashing. “Guess—”

  Guy held up his hands.

  “One billion!” Tom said. “Aspen and birch make the best chopsticks, and we’ve got both kinds of tree. We need more wood, we plant the fields to trees. Aspen has only a twenty-year growing cycle. Everything is here. Once we get the land, we’ve got everything we need, Tex.”

  “What about the farmers?” Guy said softly.

  “Same as the resorters,” Tom said, his eyes bright. “Instead of buying out the Indians, Stanbrook buys out the farmers. The farmers buy other farms—off the reservation. The land—”

  “It’s not gonna happen, goddammit!” Guy said, slamming his fist on the dashboard. “Look, for chrissakes—open your damn eyes for once!” he said. He grabbed Tom by the shoulders and turned him to look out the window.

  Tom stared at the Indian shack and the TV dish. The TV men slammed the doors to their van. The smallest and last Indian kid into the house let the screen door clack shut behind him. The van pulled away. Inside the house someone pulled a shade. Outside, the white eye of the TV dish stared blankly into the purple sky.

  Tom turned away and looked through the windshield toward No Medicine Town.

  “Turd, you’ve got to be realistic,” Guy began.

  “Why?” Tom said softly. “Why should I be realistic when this is reality?” He jerked his hand toward the Indian shack and its TV dish, toward the empty streets of No Medicine Town.

  “Because dreamers have a longer way to fall than other people. They hit harder,” Guy said.

  Tom was silent.

  “People worry about you is what I’m saying,” Guy said. “Madeline. Me. We worry, goddammit.”

  “Tex, oh Tex,” Tom said. Suddenly he laughed. “You and your mother. You know what? You hung around Indians too long and now you’ve got Indian hearts.”

  “So whose fault is that?” Guy said.

  “Mine,” Tom said. He reached out his brown hand to touch Guy’s cheek. “All mine. And stop worrying, Tex. Nothing ever happens to me when you’re around.”

  Tom slid out of the car.

  Guy watched him walk away, moving quickly through the dusk toward the somber, staring totem at the Humphrey Center.

  41

  The next morning before the heat rose, Guy took Martin and the Mercedes to Flatwater. Martin drove the Ford pickup. The Mercedes followed at the end of a chain. One of Martin’s shotgun blasts had blown away half the battery, its cables, and a good part of the ignition system. Guy steered the dead Mercedes. Once an Indian car passed them. The Indians slowed to look, and grinned.

  In Flatwater, Guy left the Mercedes at the body shop. The owner took one look at the Mercedes and shook his head. His son, a wide-faced teenager in a black Bardahl cap, came out of the back room and ran his hand over the roof and down the trunk lid. “Engine good?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Guy said immediately.

  The boy nodded and traced a greasy fingernail from the driver’s door to the back. “She’d make a good pickup,” he said.

  “Don’t do anything until my insurance man calls you,” Guy said. “Nothing—no welding, no torches—nothing, okay?”

  The owner and his son shrugged.

  Afterward Guy brought Martin uptown.

  “What’s the deal here?” Martin said suspiciously as they walked into the lawyer’s office.

  “Something we’ve got to take care of,” Guy said.

  The lawyer, Ken Peterson, who had written the codicil to Helmer’s will, was a small, pale man who sat in a tall-backed chair; his desk was an enormous, dark hulk of battered oak with a hand-high rail around its top that suggested the building tilted on occasion and the rail kept pencils and papers from sliding off the edge. Guy explained Helmer’s will, the codicil, what he wanted to do.

  “You mean you’re giving the farm back to me!” Martin said immediately.

  “What do I need with a farm here when I live in California?” Guy said.

  “I’ll be damned,” Martin murmured. He scratched his head.

  “I don’t know,” the lawyer said. He frowned as he looked over the codicil. “An estate, an inheritance is one thing, but an outright gift is another. There’ll be a substantial gift tax. The Minnesota State Legislature—”

  “I don’t care about that,” Guy said. “Just do it.”

  The lawyer shrugged, then paged through a file for the right form. As he typed Martin leaned back in his chair. He grinned. At length Martin said to the lawyer, “You see, my boy Guy here has got his own company out in California.”

  “I see,” Peterson said, not looking up.

  Afterward, as they climbed in the Ford, Martin said, “I suppose this means you’ll be leaving soon.”

  Guy nodded.

  Martin was silent for a while, then spit briefly out the window. He turned to Guy and said, “Shit, you just got here!”

  Guy smiled as he turned the key. The starter clicked once and was silent. Dead battery.

  “Goddamn this truck,” Martin shouted, and kicked the dash.

  They got out and tightened the cables, without success. Guy stepped back to survey the rusty Ford. He slowly looked up Main Street to the body shop. Then back to Martin. “Come on,” he said suddenly to his father.

  At the body shop the round-faced son and his father were sitting in the Mercedes. The son leaned forward through the vacant windshield and broke into a yellow-toothed grin. “It’d be a snap,” he called to Guy. He pulled himself out through the windshield and crouched on the hood. He produced a grease pencil from somewhere inside his coveralls. Like a surgeon he rapidly began to draw black lines across the roof and the trunk lid and down the body of the car. “You cut the corner posts here and here. You fold down the roof and cut in a rear window—Plexiglas is plenty good,” the boy said. �
��Then you cut off the trunk lid, you bolt down a couple of sheets of treated plywood for the rear bed, and there you have it!”

  Guy covered his eyes.

  When he opened them again, Martin and the body shop owner and his son all stared at him expectantly. Guy had a sudden vision of his father, air-conditioned to sixty degrees, blasted by fifty stereophonic watts of Tom T. Hall as he hummed toward Flatwater at 110 miles per hour, a thirty-thousand-dollar pickup hauling a hundred-dollar load of oats and corn for grinding. But what the hell. If Martin had a Mercedes pickup, at least the cows would not go hungry.

  Guy grinned and tossed his father the keys.

  That afternoon tractor tires spun in dry dirt. With the front loader Guy scooped away even lines of black dirt from a spot west of the grove and out of sight from the road. When the bucket scraped on wood, he parked the tractor. With a shovel he dug until he found the four corners of the underground garage that housed his old Chevy. Then with the tractor he began to dig again.

  He passed through moist, reddish gravel to dry, white sand.

  In two hours he had dug himself eye level to grade, then deeper still. Once he looked up and saw boots. Martin stood above him. “Was wondering when you’d dig up the old dinosaur,” he called down to Guy.

  A half hour later the tractor’s scoop clunked on plank. Guy got down and dug with the shovel. He threw dirt into the tractor’s bucket, and was about to climb on and dump it when Martin started up the tractor.

  Guy straightened up to stare.

  Martin backed the tractor out of the hole, dumped the sand, and then returned. Guy kept shoveling. When the tractor’s bucket filled, Martin emptied it.

  Once Martin called out to Guy, “Your Chevy’s gonna be one big rust ball—you wait and see!”

  Guy smiled. He wiped sweat from his eyes and watched Martin drive the tractor. He and his father had a machine between them. Each had something to hold on to—Martin the steering wheel, Guy the shovel. An engine was running. Hearing was difficult. When they did speak it was half sentences, brief commands, broken English, jerky hand signals. But it was a language of their own.