by John Sayles
Leia has a set of ring pliers to pry their mouths open and caliper the cusps of their molars, the best way to verify age.
“I’ll do that,” she says, a bit put out that Sheriff Will didn’t stop to investigate, “and send you the dentist bill.”
“BLACK HILLS GOLD,” SAYS Jolene facing the class, just barely loud enough for Francine to hear her in the rear. Public speaking is a skill no longer taught separately at the high school, but one she considers important enough to impose on her students.
“The Black Hills of South Dakota were originally the hunting ground of the Native American, principally those who used to be called the Sioux.”
It is a constant effort keeping up with tribal nomenclature, as the Chippewa become the Ojibway become the Anishinaabe (and even then some bands in Canada are still using the old terms). Francine is not old enough to remember when colored people stopped being Negroes and became black, but was around when they started morphing into ‘people of color,’ an inclusive but sometimes confusing category. There aren’t enough of them here in Yellow Earth to pose much of an issue, though, and the few Native people she knows well are likely to use ‘Indians’ a lot, as in ‘they got some real crazy Indians down on Standing Rock.’
“The Treaty of Laramie, in 1868,” continues Jolene, “between the United States and those Sioux who submitted to negotiations, gave them the legal right to the Territory in perpetuity. But white Americans persisted in sneaking into the area to search for gold. In 1875, in Deadwood Gulch, they found it.”
The assignment was structured like a debate– Resolved: Fracking Is Both Necessary and Beneficial– but the students were told to write out their arguments first. There are some success stories in the school, two of her fourth period students bound for out-of-state colleges with no student loan hassle thanks to oil-lease royalties flowing in. Fifty thousand dollars a month was one figure she’s heard in the faculty lounge. Most of the others have not been affected so dramatically, and have chosen the direct approach to Francine’s challenge, quoting their parents or articles about what’s happening in town in the Sky News. But Jolene has written a cautionary tale.
“Thousands of miners flocked to the new town of Deadwood, Dakota Territory, to seek their fortunes, not knowing or caring that they were trespassing on somebody else’s land.”
You don’t expect original research at this level, or even much original thinking. But something is revealed, some cogitation experienced in what they choose to lift from Wikipedia, by how they shape or try to rephrase it. Antonia Kjarstad, the oldest member of the faculty, says it used to be the Encyclopedia Britannica, available in the library and possessed, in all its bulky authority, by some of the more well-to-do families.
“The spearhead of the invasion was led by General George Armstrong Custer, who guided over a thousand soldiers, scientists and fortune seekers onto the Sioux land under the pretense of exploration and scientific inquiry. By 1876 miners had claimed land beside all the streams and creeks, practicing a form of mineral exploitation called ‘placer mining,’ in which the power of the rushing water is used to move and separate heavier gold flakes and pebbles from bottom gravel. We now know how damaging this is to the environment, as the sluicing diverts natural flow patterns and dumps huge deposits of sediment downstream, putting tremendous stress on both invertebrate and fish populations.”
Francine loves the fervor of the few true tree-huggers in her classes, their indignation at the crimes against the planet committed by their parents and everybody else who came before them. They are a minority here, surrounded by job-starved Middle Americans, which only adds to the romance of their position. She even has two vegans in her third-period class this year, in a state where beef is a religion.
“More geologically sophisticated miners searched for the sources of this washed-down placer gold, eventually discovering the hard rock deposits near what is now the town of Lead. The first of these bonanza mines, called the Homestake, supplied over a tenth of the gold in the world for the next century.”
She hopes that ‘geographically sophisticated’ comes straight from Jolene and not some Wiki contributor. She is a quiet girl, never volunteers in class, but does her reading and aces the tests. One of the few Native kids in the school, one of the ones you hope gets away and doesn’t come back.
“But as the gold was now ore-bound in solid rock, crushing mills had to be built to separate and concentrate the valuable metal, a process called ‘free milling,’ and then the concentrate was treated with mercury to further purify it. The discarded rock, or tailings, were often dumped carelessly near to the rivers and streams that supplied the power to run the mill, leaching mercury and arsenic, devastatingly toxic to human, animal, and plant life, into the water system.”
The boom has been a godsend for Tucker, of course, and not just the paycheck. He was sleeping later and later after the diner failed and he had to sell out, then the layoff from the highway department–
‘Hi– I’m Francine’s anchor,’ he’d introduce himself to new people, only half kidding.
He still grumbles some about the long hours, about his sore muscles, even about the ‘bar time’ he feels he has to spend at night to remain one of the team, but always with an undercurrent of pride, a man out in the world doing a tough job.
“But what of the original owners of the land? Their efforts to resist the encroachment of these destructive profiteers led to a series of armed conflicts, with the only major victory for the Native Americans being, ironically, the defeat and annihilation of General Custer and his Seventh Cavalry troop at the Battle of the Little Big Horn.”
Most of the students have their glazed, receiving-distant-channels look on– Dylan Foster has his head down in his arms, sleeping or stoned as usual– but a few of the boys, including Kent Buckley, who is up next, are stiff and scowling at this interpretation of events. Francine assigned no sides in the debate, just posed the resolution, hoping for some democracy-in-action fireworks. Jolene plows on in her near-monotone, eager to be off the stage.
“Chlorination and smelting, two even more resource-intensive techniques, were brought to bear in the 1890s, and a pervasive culture of lawlessness, perhaps brought on by the numerical imbalance between male and female participants in the gold rush, characterized the era. Stagecoach robberies, lynchings, senseless murders, rapes, and prostitution went hand in hand with the get-rich-quick hopes of the boomtown immigrants, a legacy of blood and misery that perhaps outweighed the tons of shining gold that were eventually ripped from the bowels of the earth. I’m told there is a popular television series currently running that documents these events”– and here Jolene looks to her teacher apologetically– “but we don’t get HBO.”
How much misery, thinks Francine, stepping forward to smile at the girl, outweighs a ton?
“That was excellent, Jolene. We have to think about the similarities between our present situation and previous sudden-wealth scenarios. Kent, could you share your thoughts with us?”
Kent, wearing his camo vest and army-green cargo pants for the occasion, jumps up and takes his place at the front of the class, nearly hip-checking Jolene as they pass. Kent is one of the influx of new kids, generally a really interesting bunch, and one of the few whose father is actually on the rigs, as a toolpusher. Mr. Buckley has rapidly gotten himself on the Board of Education, a constant decrier of government waste and curricular subversion.
“Okay,” says Kent, not looking at his paper, “let’s start with this– a single NASCAR entrant who finishes all five hundred laps is going to need at least a hundred gallons of gas for the race. What’s the MPG on that, Dexter?”
Dexter, who the kids call Intel, doesn’t look up from the Desert Storm tank he’s been drawing.
“Five miles per gallon,” he says. “A lot less than a Prius.”
Most of the students wake up enough to laugh.
“So then figure an F-16 jet fighter that flies from San Diego to Houston like that”– h
e snaps his fingers– “gets less than one mile per gallon.”
Jolene is sitting with her head lowered now, having had her say with no interest in a fight.
“We’re not gonna run those babies on switchgrass.”
IT IS HARD TO find a gap in the traffic even at night. Leia totters across the highway with the last of the bulky cages, four p-dogs crouching silently within it, a pipe-hauler honking as it catches her in the headlights, then makes her way across the stubble on the far side to where she left her flashlight as a beacon. She’s breathing hard as she lays the cage on the ground next to the others, tossing a handful of oat clusters in through the wire. She hopes the livetraps are coyote-proof, as the coterie will be out here all night at the edge of Poker Flats, at least able to smell and hear each other. Jerry said the earthmover will come at sunrise to plow over the colony ground, and the animals left there, dead or dying, will be buried.
The wind has died down some, and Leia pulls her hood down and sits by Odysseus, in with Nike and Medea and one of the female juveniles. The sky is clear and jet black, the stars especially bright. Trucks rumble past and there is scuffling from the cage as Odysseus and Medea, ghostly white in the moonlight, kiss and cuddle. Leia shivers, staring at the river of lights on the highway, as alone in the world as she’s ever felt.
THORA AND BOB DON’T come up from St. Paul that often, so Rick has to make an appearance with the family. When his father was still with them there was a rule– no politics at the table. That was for out by the shed, like smoking. Ma never obeyed it, of course, but at least there was somebody to call a timeout, somebody to change the subject.
Thora is pregnant again, and Ma gets Thora’s two and his two busy trying to lasso the lawn furniture out back, whooping heard whenever there is a successful toss. Ma says she had to rope horses and calves before she went off to Carleton and got radicalized. Her father, who was council chairman for a while, ran cattle before and after the dam was bullied in, and in all the old photos looks like a cowboy with a sunburn.
“I suppose any money is better than none,” says Bob, who is seriously white and sells Minnesota lakeside properties to people with second homes, and insisted his boys, Caleb and Isaac, go to something called a ‘progressive’ school, where they get evaluations instead of grades, “but all this truck traffic has got to wear on your nerves.”
“They take whatever they can turn into money,” says Ma, grinding pepper into the stew, “and leave behind the poison.”
It would be easiest to just let her go unchallenged, let her chant the old refrains that have gotten the People nowhere.
“Truck exhaust,” says Bob. His parents were Bible thumpers of some stripe, Church of Holiness, maybe, and though Bob has ‘transcended all that,’ he dresses like a Christian missionary out ringing doorbells.
“Truck exhaust, frack water, oil spills, flare-off gas, venereal disease,” says Ma. It doesn’t look like there will be anything to dip in the stew gravy, Ma’s revelation about the insidious Fry Bread Plot, the white devils’ sly campaign of genocide-by-carbohydrate coming to her just before last Thanksgiving. And cornbread is out till the Super Valu carries something other than Indian Head meal.
“That’s a new one on me,” Rick ventures. “I wasn’t aware that drill pipe carried venereal disease.”
“The men who bring it here do. I talked to Angeline who works for the Health Service? She says there’s been a spike in the incidence.”
It was the first sex talk he ever received, Ma on the warpath about old-time fur trappers giving the Ree women syphilis and babies being born blind. Put him off the idea of copulation for nearly a week.
“Teenage pregnancy?” asks Thora, who miscarried when she was sixteen, leaving her free to finish high school, get a scholarship, and meet Bob.
“Don’t think those numbers can get any worse.”
Ma doesn’t care about marriage, as she is eager to tell you, just good relationships and responsible parents, both of them. When Thora was done mourning– she was only four months gone with the pregnancy when she lost it– Ma gave her the lecture about being ready to bring a life into the world, and she took it to heart. Ma’s talks on the subject with Ricky were more like feminist cautionary lectures, with the only positive result a supply of several packets of condoms in the eleventh grade, great for display with the guys though they never saw action.
“Is this like a traditional recipe?” ventures Bob.
“My mother made it, if that’s what you mean. Probably got it from Betty Crocker.” Ma can deadpan white people better than anybody he knows, keep them guessing, and it used to be something he liked about her. She did go through a Native Cooking phase, hitting on the hunters for whatever their wives refused to skin and gut, but it went unappreciated. His father liked hot dogs, chili, macaroni and cheese, what he called Real American Food. He’d go on about how the People had always eaten what was most available, what was in season.
And hot dogs are never out of season.’
Hard to say if him putting ketchup on everything Ma cooked was truly just a matter of taste or an act of aggression, but Rick and Thora would meet eyes when he’d whack the Heinz bottle with the heel of his hand, Ma freezing still in her seat, face blank, till he laid it aside, as if psychically absenting herself from the scene of the sacrilege. But it was his non-activism that really split them apart.
‘Bunch of born-again Indians acting out,’ he’d say. ‘Only going to bring the damn federal government down on our heads again.’
He made a distinction between the federal government and the Marines, his stories conveying a grudging kind of pride at having survived all the chickenshit of Basic and the soul-killing Asian war that followed. How he and Ma, who’d proudly been arrested at least three times for protesting what he was up to over there, ever got past hello was never explained in detail.
‘The reservation is like a greasy spoon diner,’ he’d wink. ‘Not too many choices on the menu.’
He’d say it to tease Ma, but it was pretty much true, and when Thora got over not being a teen mother she took a good look around at the possibilities and was soon in a freshman dorm three states away.
“Some people must have hit the jackpot though,” she says now, laying out forks and knives. “The ones with clear title to their land.”
“The Hansens, the Micklejohns,” says Ma, tossing the salad. “Grover Drags Wolf. They’ll be cash-rich till they burn through it. Dusty and Ray Wyatt have picked up and moved to California.”
“It’s the Wheel of Fortune!” Rick intones in an announcer’s voice.
Ma doesn’t look at him, ladling stew into bowls. “Who wants to sell out their neighbors, their People? When you make money that way, it isn’t real.”
“Funny,” says Rick, “the stores around here all seem to accept it.”
“Call the kids in,” Ma tells Charlotte, who as usual has been keeping her head low and her opinions to herself. “We’re ready to eat.”
Isaac comes in with a rope around Caleb, then his own girls, wired to see their older, off-the-rez cousins, and they sit at the table. Bob mutters some New Age kind of grace thing, not so transcended as he thinks.
“I baked some five-grain bread,” says Ma, indicating a tan brick on the table. “Ricky can slice it if you want some.”
With a chainsaw, he thinks, remembering the last encounter with Ma’s healthful baking efforts. Bob is staring warily at the bowl of stew in front of him.
“Mrs. Crow’s Ghost,” he asks, “does this have elk in it?”
“That’s the meat. Fresh killed.”
“But the wasting disease–”
“Colorado, maybe, but not up here. And it’s most likely to be found in the brain, spinal cord, eyes, spleen, tonsils, lymph nodes.”
The cousins make retching noises till Thora tells them to stop. She and Bob don’t let them eat processed sugar. At home they have a juicer that reduces carrots, apples, celery, whatever, into an almost-drinkable pulp,
making a sound like a drilling rig in labor. Bob holds a chunk of the elk on the end of his fork, hesitating to do the wild thing.
“Really, Bob,” Ma reassures him. “I talk to the fish-and-game people all the time, I buy organic when it’s available, I’ve even had the tap water here checked twice.”
Their father would smack the ketchup bottle even when the stuff poured out freely on the first tilt.
“There’s been no problem with the water,” says Rick, an edge in his voice. “Not here, not in Yellow Earth, not anywhere in the formation. The shale is too deep here, and we never had coal mining shafts crossing underground at all levels like in Pennsylvania.”
“When we drove in last night the flare-offs were blazing all around us. It was pretty if you didn’t– you know– think about it too much.” Thora always tried to be the peacemaker, though Rick knew their father already had one foot out the door.
Rick remembers using the construction site for the casino like a jungle gym, trying to hurdle the yellow caution tape and cracking up laughing when one of the guys would tangle in it and go down, remembers never quite succeeding in their mission impossible to steal a nail gun when nobody was looking. Kids are indestructible, he thinks, because they know so little.
There wasn’t a big fight or an official divorce announcement, just their father packing to leave for the logistics base in Barstow and Ma staying in the house till the car was gone.
“You’ll hear from me when you least expect it,” he winked, which was true enough, until even expectation died. Rick laid a lot of blame on Ma for a while, at that age where whatever your parents do is purposely designed to ruin your life, but she was never easy to put on the defensive.
‘Just concentrate on what kind of man you’re going to be,’ she’d tell him in the middle of one of his sullen accusations. ‘Think about what you can do for the People.’
Ma is like the nagging conscience of the Three Nations, and tends to make people, enrolled members especially, feel like they haven’t done enough. ‘Your mom is a real powerhouse,’ people used to say, kindly leaving out the ‘how can you stand it?’ part.