by Spain, Laura
“I guess they needed a cash crop.”
“First whiskey, now Coca Cola,” he said bitterly.
Our garden looked like an entanglement in Eden, where squash vines and bean plants and Indian corn all mingled together and stretched towards the summer sun, oblivious of human hands. Somehow he was able to move through it to weed and harvest without ever stepping on anything growing. The garden swept up and sometimes over the fence that separated his land from the encircling corn.
On hot nights, when I’d sit out back smoking and drinking beer, I could almost feel the corn pressing against me, as if it wanted to squeeze the life out of us, too. It’s the same feeling I had in Afghanistan at our base at Ladamivar, when we knew somebody was coming up the valley, and we had to just sit and wait for it to happen.
“Do you know how their corn kills bugs?” he asked me.
I hadn’t given it any thought.
“It dissolves their stomachs.”
He looked at me so intently I thought he was going to explode.
“They’ve killed the earth and everything that crawls on it.”
“Who, Gary? The farmers?”
He didn’t answer, but I could tell he smelled someone’s death. I never imagined there would be so many.
“Tell me about the Prophet, Gary,” I said when he asked me to lead the tours.
He walked away.
Now what the hell? I thought, and followed him to the amphitheater.
He was sitting in the top row, looking across at the trees on the other side. It was the longest talk we ever had, but he didn’t look at me, as if he were describing the death of friend that he blamed himself for.
Tenskwatawa’s name really means “Open Door,” because he had visions from the Great Spirit and had successfully predicted a total eclipse of the sun. Unlike the Americans, who were bitterly divided by religion and race and class and politics, he taught that all Indians were of the same blood and should set aside their divisions to become one sacred people. Harrison and his other enemies denounced him as a drunkard, but Tenskwatawa had given up alcohol after his first vision and demanded total abstinence from all his followers.
He and his brother Tecumseh attracted thousands of Indians and built a city called Prophetstown at the conflux of the Tippecanoe and Wabash Rivers, where it could only be approached from the South and West. Unlike the large Shawnee settlements at Chillicothe and Wapakoneta in Ohio, where the rapacious setters were stripping away the Shawnee lands, Prophetstown was closer to the Southern and Western tribes and was better positioned to draw support from the British in the North if another war with England broke out. Paranoid, jealous, outraged that any Indian dare challenge him in the Indiana Territory, Harrison gathered 200 regular Army and about 700 militia and went on a search and destroy mission to Prophetstown.
Gary stopped there; he never could talk about the battle itself. So I read about it in the museum and the library in Lafayette. That’s where I met Karen, the assistant librarian. She was nearly my height, with natural blond hair that looked like it was waiting to be tossed by the wind in a convertible, and an eagerness to help anyone interested in what she could provide. Like so many of her classmates, she had married right out of high school and had had two boys before she realized that she couldn’t live with a man who cared more about drugs than for her and the kids.
She was surprised and flattered that I took an interest in her. When we were talking about books, she would suddenly catch herself and look down with that self depreciating look divorced women sometimes have, as if they are afraid they aren’t worth being noticed.
One hot summer day, she brought the kids out to the memorial for me to practice my talk. With a six and a four-year-old to entertain, I learned pretty quickly what the public wanted.
“What’s that?” Kevin said, pointing to the obelisk the state historical society had put up a hundred years ago to commemorate the battle.
When I tried to explain, he said, “Obelisks are Egyptian,” and ran away after his little brother to the amphitheater.
“Do they play football here?” he cried.
“They used to put on a play about the battle,” I said.
“What battle?”
So I started my spiel. After marching his army up from Vincennes along the Wabash, Harrison let Tenskwatawa jerk him around about holding a powwow until the American decided to camp for the night on the ridge and resume negotiations in the morning. We tried that a lot in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it didn’t work out so well there, either.
Like many overconfident officers, Harrison thought his position was so strong he didn’t have to dig in. He let his men build fires to keep warm, giving away their positions. Maybe it was the heat, or maybe all that motionless corn surrounding us, but Kevin and Darren were looking away. Karen smiled and shrugged. I had lost my first audience.
“Come on!” I shouted, running toward the south end of the ridge. “They’re coming!”
I dropped to one knee, fired an imaginary musket, and started to reload. The boys followed me.
“Fall back!” I cried. “They’re too many!”
Stopping only to reload, we were driven back through the camp.
“Look,” I said, pointing. “It’s General Harrison.”
They stared in awe as an imaginary general galloped around the ridge, trying to rally his men.
“Come on! We’re going to charge!” I cried.
At the north end of the ridge, we mounted our horses and followed Major Daveiss and his Kentucky dragoons down the slope until he was shot out of the saddle.
“Aaagh!” I cried.
“What happened?’ Darren said.
“They got me.”
“Count to ten and you can play again,” Kevin said.
I counted to ten, and we scrambled up the ridge in time to see Ben, a slave who had escaped from Harrison, leading a party of Shawnee into the camp to assassinate his former master. When they shot the wrong officer, Kevin counted to ten to revive him, and we joined the line that finally held the Indians. Dawn was breaking, and they were running out of ammunition. I drew an imaginary knife.
“What are you doing?” Darren asked.
“Getting a scalp,” I said, cutting a circle on an imaginary head and jerking off the scalp.
“Me, too!” Kevin cried, scalping another dead warrior.
“What are you doing?” Karen demanded.
How do you tell a woman on a first date that you are teaching her boys how to scalp their enemies?
“What do we do now?” Darren said.
“Burn the village.”
So we formed up and marched to Prophetstown and burned all the stores Tenskwatawa had laid in for the winter. The boys were getting tired, so I didn’t tell them how Harrison’s militia dug up a Shawnee graveyard and scalped the bodies, too.
“What now?” called Kevin.
“Time to go home.”
“What about the Indians?” Darren asked.
“As soon as Harrison left, they came back and rebuilt the town.”
“I thought we won,” he said, disappointed.
“Sometimes that’s just the way it works out,” I replied, looking at Karen.
That’s how I learned to move around a lot to liven things up on the tour. No matter how hard I tried, however, the same thing nearly always happened at the end. They just stared out at the corn. It’s like being stuck in a dream, while something dead moves closer.
Apparently I passed some kind of test that afternoon. When we got back to Lafayette, she made dinner. The boys were excited and tired at the same time. We stayed up after baths talking about Indians until they fell asleep. As we were leaving their room, I saw a framed picture of a dark-haired, stooped, and nearly emaciated man in his twenties beside the door.
“That’s their father,” she said.
He had that wild, intense, flushed smile druggies have when they’re on a good high.
“I’m so glad he’s gone,” she sai
d.
“So am I.”
Then Karen and I went to bed.
* * * * *
Gary was the only one I ever knew who could find his way through the corn. He would just turn sideways and glide between the stalks, while anyone else would get lost and panic after a few yards, just like the Conway kids had. They were probably out looking for marijuana like Gary, but they got turned around. If he hadn’t been looking for the same patch, they might have died. Gary tried to teach me, but I could never do it the way he did. Whenever I had to run the corn, I used my Army compass.
Around here marijuana is our second largest cash crop. You can only see the growers in the early spring, when they come in at night to plant their seedlings, and in the fall to harvest just before the farmers drive through the fields in their combines. In between they rely on locals like Gary to let them know if anyone is messing with their crop. Of course the farmers know all about it, and many a Florida vacation and new truck is paid for with marijuana money. The only real risk is that the Indiana State Police will spot it from the air and dump pesticide on it, just like they used to dump Agent Orange on the jungle to flush out the Vietcong.
If marijuana is ever legalized, I’m sure that the seed companies will have an herbicide resistant variety ready for agribusiness, and the small grower will go the way of the family farm. As it is, however, Gary’s job was to thin the seedlings in late May, then check them out every two weeks until harvest. They didn’t need to be cultivated, but there were some pests that even genetically engineered plants can’t discourage. For those he used a hunting bow. There is no better way to signal a person that he is in the wrong field than for him to hear something like a knife chopping into flesh and see an arrow has cut a corn stalk about an inch from his head.
Like so many good things, it seemed that summer would last forever. Karen even let me start keeping beer in her refrigerator, because I didn’t like her soft drinks. In August, however, we had a stretch of those overwhelming hot days when the air doesn’t move, and everything except drought-resistant corn seems to have curled up and died. That was the Saturday Karen brought the boys out to Gary’s place to see what a real Indiana farm looked like. I was telling them how the Indian women did all the farming and planted everything together, just like in our garden, when Kevin said, “What’s that?”
A raccoon stood at the edge of the plot, watching us. Suddenly it coughed and collapsed, blood pulsing from its mouth. Karen grabbed the boys’ hands and started back to the house. Gary was on the porch.
“Is it rabid?” she asked.
“The field mice are dying, too,” he said.
He looked out over the corn.
“Can you smell it?” he asked.
The smell of something like rotten eggs tinged with cat urine was seeping out of the corn.
“What is it?” Karen said.
“Motshee Monitoo.”
“What?”
“The Evil Spirit. Tom,” he said to me. “You should go now.”
Just before I started around the house with Karen and the boys for the car, I saw Gary coming out the back with his bow.
“What’s going on?” I called.
He didn’t answer.
The stench seemed to mutate from ammonia to rotten eggs to something dead. Even after we were a mile from the house and the air conditioner was on, we could still smell it.
“What’s that smell?” Kevin asked.
Karen and I pretended it wasn’t there. That evening we cooked hamburgers outside on the grill, and I gave the boys baths and put them to bed. After they were asleep, I tried to get her to go to bed with me.
“Do you know what that smell was?” she said.
I shook my head.
“That’s why their father is in prison.”
She just stood there in the hall staring through me at the memory of the other man who had slept with her.
“It’s not you,” she said, running a hand through her hair and turning away.
Gary was right about something evil creeping out of the corn. When I returned to the house, the marijuana nearly made the smell go away. Late that night, a shadow slid out of the field and merged with the silhouette of the tool shed. I found Gary wiping an arrow with kerosene. His hands and arms were covered with dirt, and he looked at me as if he were sighting over a rifle.
“Go,” he said.
I had never heard that tone in him before. Half raising my hands, I backed out of the shed and returned to the porch. He didn’t say anything when he finally went back into the house.
The next morning, a farmer found a truck with Indianapolis plates parked beside his field and called the Sheriff. They traced the license and found it was registered to a man with a record of drug arrests. The Sheriff came to the house with one of his deputies and asked Gary to help find him. Like most of the men out here, he was starting to lose his hair and developing a paunch from too much time in the car. He had served in the military and came home after the first Gulf War to try to do some good for his own people. From his look of near exhaustion, he was not getting much response.
We followed the Sheriff to the field in my car and parked alongside the abandoned truck. Gary got out and stood for a long time just staring at the ripening corn. It was as quiet and lifeless as the plastic plant section in a big box store.
The heat had lifted in the night, but the smell of death was seeping out of a broken patch in the corn. Once I thought I sensed the raw chemical odor I had smelled in our garden. Glancing at the Sheriff, I could tell he smelled it, too. Gary, though, said he couldn’t smell anything.
“I guess I’ll have to go in there myself,” the Sheriff said.
He and his deputy each got a rifle out of their car.
“You won’t need those,” Gary said.
He led them into the broken corn, and I followed. Twenty yards from the road, we found a patch that looked like it had been cleared by napalm. The corn stalks were black, and the ground was littered with half burned plastic ammonia bottles and hundreds of ripped open cold medicine packages. A blackened propane tank was stuck in the ground like an unexploded artillery shell.
“My God,” said the Sheriff. “They had an explosion.”
That is how I learned that methamphetamine production had come to Battlefield, Indiana.
“What happened to the driver?” asked the deputy.
“I guess we’ll never know,” the Sheriff said, looking at Gary.
We followed Gary back to the road. A white van that said Indiana State Police on the side had parked beside the abandoned truck. Two men in khakis were photographing the cab.
“While you’re here, can you take a look at this for us?” the Sheriff said to Gary.
One of the technicians was holding something like a damp piece of fur ripped from an animal in a plate-sized laboratory dish.
“Is that what I think it is?” the Sheriff asked him.
Gary didn’t say a word.
“It’s the first scalping in Tippecanoe County in maybe 200 years,” the technician said.
You would think someone doing that job would be hardened, but he looked like he was about to throw up.
“Anything else?” the Sheriff said.
The photographer pointed to a clay pot sitting upright on the front seat of the truck.
“The scalp was in it,” he said. “We think it’s full of blood.”
“Gary, what does it mean to give someone a pot of blood with a scalp in it?” the Sheriff said.
Gary looked back at him with the same expression that Tenskwatawa had turned on Charles Bird King when he had painted his portrait.
“Be careful,” the Sheriff said. “These guys are crazies.”
“They will destroy everything,” Gary said.
“Let us handle it,” the Sheriff said.
“I read somewhere that a scalp in a pot of blood is how the Shawnee declare war,” I said while we were driving back to the house.
That’s the only tim
e I ever saw him smile.
“You are learning,” he said.
“Does it bother you about that guy?” I asked him.
“They’ll never find him.”
“What if his friends find you first?”
“When I die, I want you to take my body to Prophetstown and bury it in the place I’ll show you.”
“Is something the matter?”
I knew he had been to the VA hospital in Danville for a check up.
“It’s all going to be gone soon,” he said.
I had thought it was gone already. After Harrison and his militia burned Prophetstown a second time and plowed it under during the War of 1812, the best archaeologists in the state had never been able to find it again. In its place was Historic Prophetstown, a model Indiana family farm for tourists, complete with a barn, cows, chickens, draft horses, and a caretaker in overalls to feed the animals and tend the garden. Except for the county roads, it was the only clearing in the corn for miles.
The next time I saw Karen, she acted like the dead thing in the corn had reached out for her again. Many people whose lives have been touched by meth are like that after they give up pretending that things can ever be the same again. By spring I was seeing her several days a week and staying with them most weekends. As the weather warmed, however, she became anxious again, as if she sensed something terrible was about to happen.
“Don’t come by again this week,” she said one beautiful evening in May, just as the farmers were drenching the ground with herbicides before planting their new crop.
I had not seen anyone so afraid since they medivaced me from Afghanistan.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Willy’s getting out of jail. I don’t want you here if he comes.”
“Karen,” I began.
“Just listen to me,” she said, shaking. “Just go.”
So I left her on the steps of her apartment, bent over and weeping like an old woman, and the summer closed in on me
When the corn was chest high, the smell of death returned. Gary found a fox that was bleeding from both ends lying at the edge of our garden. Cradling it in his arms, he brought it back to the house, but it died that evening. I called a veterinarian in Lafayette about it, and he said it was probably some sort of virus.
