This Land

by Dan Barry

  Mr. Maxmean was raised from the age of 3 by a nurse at the Rhode Island Veterans Home who fostered several children. Although he attended a special needs school in Bristol, his true education came from the many trips and cruises taken with his foster mother. He has been to every state but Hawaii, which remains in his sights.

  But Mr. Maxmean had what he calls “behavioral problems,” among other issues. After spending time in and out of various hospitals and institutions, he wound up in a heavily supervised group home in Smithfield, where a van took him every morning to the workshop, and to Ms. Sousa.

  “She’s beautiful, she’s smart,” Mr. Maxmean says. “Of all the women that I used to date, which we’re not getting into, I finally found the right one.”

  A BIT OF PANIC

  An anxious Mr. Maxmean is talking to the silvery door of a rising elevator. “Open up, open up, open up,” he says, sounding very much like a man getting married in a half-hour.

  The door finally obeys. He sprints toward the apartment he moved into four years ago, only to stop short when his cellphone rings. The guest who has the soda for the reception is lost in Providence, and she is shouting, “Oh, my God!” over and over.

  “It’s O.K., it’s O.K.,” he says, pacing now. “You’re gonna go under the bridge and take a left…”

  Mr. Maxmean resumes his run to the small apartment, chaotic with children, relatives and a bride-to-be still being powdered and beautified.

  “She looks different,” a young nephew says.

  “Where’s your veil?” someone asks.

  “Here you go,” Mr. Maxmean says, veil in hand.

  Dressed in a white tuxedo with a royal blue vest, Mr. Maxmean does a quick dance in his rented white shoes before hurrying to the bathroom to shave. By now, the family friend is packing up her cosmetics.

  “Does she look beautiful or what?” she says. “I’m going downstairs to have a smoke.” But Ms. Sousa’s gauzy white veil cannot mask her look of panic. “Sit down for a minute, honey,” Mr. Maxmean says. “Sit down.”

  Ms. Sousa regains her composure and rises to leave, but those shoes are just killing her. Then someone points out that the wedding is already 15 minutes behind schedule.

  Mr. Maxmean just shrugs, and says something about life not always being on time.

  DISRUPTION, THEN PLACEMENT

  One morning early last year, as Ms. Sousa sat at Training Thru Placement’s reception desk, armed federal law enforcement agents came through the front door. A Justice Department investigation into civil rights abuses was underway.

  Everything changed. Some staff members disappeared, the piecework ended, and a nonprofit organization called Fedcap was hired to help find rewarding employment—outside the building—for as many of the 88 clients as possible.

  But many parents pushed back. They argued that the workshop’s established routine had provided their children with a safe place to be, among friends. How will you protect my son from being bullied again? How will you make sure that my daughter isn’t ridiculed again?

  The abrupt redirection infuriated a mother named Lori DiDonato. After many disappointments, she and her husband had finally found a place that their young adult son, Louis, enjoyed, and now some outsiders were taking that place apart. Her central question: “Who the hell are you?”

  But Christine McMahon, Fedcap’s president, challenged Ms. DiDonato with a question: How would she feel if she did the same job, with the same people, at the same place, for the same inadequate pay and with no advancement, for her entire career?

  In that moment, Ms. DiDonato says, she began to understand the government’s motivation. But when Ms. McMahon promised to find Mr. DiDonato a rewarding job in six months, she says, “I laughed in her face.”

  Within six months, Louis DiDonato III, 23, was putting on a tie and driving himself to his clerical job, recalls Ms. DiDonato. “And I became a believer.”

  Mr. DiDonato was among the “rock stars,” as Serena Powell, the senior vice president for Fedcap’s New England offices, puts it: the first 20 or so clients who easily found enjoyable, fulfilling jobs. The next 20 also did well, she says, although they needed “more hand-holding.” Finding jobs for the rest will be “challenging but doable,” she says.

  Mr. Maxmean, who is considered a rock star, quickly got a $15-an-hour custodial job at the state psychiatric hospital in Cranston. Although he has had some difficulty adapting to the requirements of a full-time job, he is a hard, focused worker. Kellie Capobianco, the hospital’s acting administrator of environmental care, has not forgotten the day she saw her new employee cleaning under the loading dock.

  “He’s doing well,” Ms. Capobianco says.

  Mr. Maxmean initially took a 10-mile bus ride to his job, adding hours to his workday and uncertainty to his weekends, when buses run sporadically. On some weekends, though, Jim Manni, a Training Thru Placement job coach, would drive 25 miles, on his own time, to deliver Mr. Maxmean to work, all the while imparting advice about expectations beyond the workshop.

  You’ve worked too hard to get where you are….One of the things that is NOT a disability is laziness…. Winners never quit—and you’re becoming a winner.

  Then Mr. Maxmean passed his driver’s test. He put $800 down and drove off in a $5,000 Sonata with nine years and 156,000 miles on it. The thought of shopping for food without having to lug bags onto a bus was so exciting that when he and Ms. Sousa loaded groceries into the car trunk for the first time, they took photographs.

  Now, if he has the gas money, Mr. Maxmean drives anywhere he wants: to his job, to the store, to the grave of his foster mother, who died two years ago. “If I had met you a couple of years ago and you said, ‘Someday you’ll have a car,’ I’d say you were nuts,” he says. “It’s a blessing.”

  Mr. Maxmean often drove Ms. Sousa to her $8-an-hour job at the Hampton Inn in Warwick, which followed a brief employment at a Panera Bread. But she struggled with the expectation of cleaning a room in less than 30 minutes. After skipping two successive Sunday shifts, she was told not to come back.

  This isn’t unexpected, Ms. Powell says. Some people just take longer to find their niche.

  Ms. Sousa is back in the job market, looking for something in food services. But right now her most pressing appointment is with a justice of the peace.

  GETTING IT TOGETHER

  Mr. Maxmean suddenly realizes that the marriage license is in his car and his car keys are in the apartment he has just left. Back up, back down and out the door he goes, a white-tuxedoed blur.

  With the wedding nearly a half-hour late, and the hum of anticipation emanating from the common room, Mr. Maxmean presents the license to Dennis Revens, the black-robed justice of the peace, who says: “My fee. I need that. The payment before we start.”

  “Before you start,” Mr. Maxmean repeats.

  “Sure,” Mr. Revens says. “Otherwise, things get busy.”

  At this moment, Mr. Maxmean does not have that $200. Even though he has greatly modified his once-grand wedding plans, canceling the church-hall rental and the catered meal, he is still learning to budget. The wedding dress, the tuxedo rental, the cake and the shoes, among other expenses, have left him short.

  Upon seeing his bride

  “I’ve spent everything else on the wedding,” he mutters, while a few neighbors in the lobby sit, listen and watch.

  Mr. Maxmean asks a friend to check a white gift box, on prominent display in the reception hall, but there’s no cash in it yet. So a couple of relatives cover the $200, including Mr. Maxmean’s birth mother, who tells him not to forget that he owes her $95.

  The justice of the peace counts out the $20 bills like a winner at the track. It’s all there. “Ladies and gentlemen,” intones the disc jockey, and guests rise to their feet in a room normally reserved for card games and bingo nights. Here are relatives, and co-workers, and people from the workshop, including Mr. Maxmean’s job coach, a smiling Mr. Manni.

  Mr. Maxmean walks sl
owly down the white-paper runner he unrolled hours earlier. He hits his mark and turns to see Ms. Sousa, resplendent in white and smiling through the pain of those shoes.

  Later, Mr. Maxmean will hear the $200 justice of the peace flub the vows by referring to Lori as Lisa. Later, he will call in an order for four pizzas to supplement the lasagna. Later, he and his bride will retire to their “honeymoon suite” upstairs.

  But right now, the eyes of the man in the white tuxedo are wet, as the makeshift reception hall fills with a stringed version of that song by Journey.

  EPILOGUE

  Peter and Lori Maxmean continue to live in East Providence. At last report, Lori was doing prep work at a Texas Roadhouse, and Peter was a delivery driver for Papa Gino’s. Both have been honored in their respective places of employment as “Employee of the Month.”

  PART EIGHT

  The Ever-Present Past

  Shine little glow-worm, glimmer, glimmer

  Restoring Dignity to Sitting Bull, Wherever He Is

  STANDING ROCK RESERVATION, S.D.—JANUARY 28, 2007

  Here, on a snow-dusted bluff overlooking the Missouri River, rests Sitting Bull. Or so it is said.

  Stand before the monument and see the pocks left in the granite by bullets. Notice where the nose was replaced after vandals with chains and a truck yanked the bust from its pedestal. Spot where the headdress feather was mended after being shot off. And wonder, along with the rest of the Dakotas:

  Is Sitting Bull here?

  The 12-foot monument rises where Sitting Bull is supposedly buried and where he certainly once felt at home; where the steel-blue clouds of winter press down upon the hills of dormant grass; where nothing moves but a solitary bird in flight, and the whinnies of a distant horse sound almost like an old man’s rueful laughter.

  It all seems fitting, even the vandalism, given how this world-famous American Indian has never received the respect in death that was often denied him in life. Now two men are trying to pay that respect, in late but earnest installments.

  As one of them, Rhett Albers, collects another beer bottle discarded near the base of the monument, the other, Bryan Defender, gazes up at the bust of Sitting Bull. As always, the face of stone gives away nothing.

  Maybe in the end it does not matter where the holy man actually rests, says Mr. Defender, who is Hunkpapa Sioux. Like the man whose history he honors.

  Sitting Bull. Distinguished as a warrior against rival tribes and American soldiers. Served as spiritual leader for the Indian victory at Little Bighorn. Refused to accept white encroachment. Surrendered. Was imprisoned. Toured briefly with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Then, at age 59, was killed during a botched arrest in 1890, an arrest rooted in the belief that he supported a growing movement of resistance among the Sioux.

  The government buried him in Fort Yates, on the North Dakota side of this sprawling reservation that straddles the Dakotas. There, in what was then a predominantly white military community, his grave site became little more than a weedy lot.

  Then, in 1953, some Chamber of Commerce types from the small South Dakota city of Mobridge executed a startling plan. With the blessing of a few of Sitting Bull’s descendants, they crossed into North Dakota after midnight and exhumed what they believed were Sitting Bull’s remains. One photograph from that strange night depicts a Mobridge mortician supervising the exhumation; he holds a cigarette in one hand and a human femur in the other.

  The men raced back 55 miles to bury the remains on this bluff, across the river from Mobridge. They scoffed at North Dakota’s contention that they had taken the wrong bones, and justified their actions by saying that Sitting Bull had been born near here and that the sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski would soon create a more fitting monument to him. And would having Sitting Bull’s remains help tourism in Mobridge? Well, of course.

  Up in Fort Yates, the state eventually unveiled a plaque that left vague the whereabouts of Sitting Bull’s remains (“He was buried here but his grave has been vandalized many times”), while on this bluff across from Mobridge, the area around the monument became a place to dump used tires, to have a beer party, to shoot off a gun—sometimes into the granite.

  “People would say, ‘Party at Sitting Bull!’” Mr. Albers recalls. “It was a joke.”

  The site’s poor condition vexed Mr. Albers, 45, an environmental consultant, and Mr. Defender, 35, who runs the reservation’s solid-waste-removal operation. That irritation turned to embarrassment when a visiting foreign-exchange student asked Mr. Albers to see the monument dedicated to the famous Sitting Bull.

  So, two years ago, the men bought the monument and its 40-acre parcel from a private owner for $55,000. They mowed the grass, trucked away 50 cubic yards of debris and established a nonprofit corporation with plans to recoup their expenses and establish a cultural and educational center.

  They also came up against the still-emotional question of where the great Indian leader truly rests. Not long ago, someone scrawled a message across the granite pedestal: “Sitting Bull is not buried here!”

  A drive through the reservation, from Mobridge to Fort Yates, is a drive through an undulant moonscape of stillness, disturbed only by the dance of an occasional horse. Here, unemployment among the 11,000 people is nearly 80 percent, and the challenge of restoring a sense of self-identity cannot be addressed alone by revenue from the two modest casinos.

  In an office in Fort Yates sits Ron His Horse Is Thunder, the chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and a great-great-great grandson of Sitting Bull. A lawyer by training, tall and lean, he expresses support for the Mobridge effort to honor his ancestor in a manner befitting the man. But when asked whether he believes Sitting Bull is buried on that bluff, he slowly shakes his head no.

  Then where is Sitting Bull?

  LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, a tribal historian and storyteller who is overseeing improvements to the Fort Yates grave site, tries to explain. “A person like Sitting Bull was never meant to just die and disappear,” she says.

  Yes, but where is he?

  Smiling patiently, the woman opens her arms and spreads her hands.

  Between Kentucky and Ohio, Hard Feelings over a Rock’s Place

  PORTSMOUTH, OHIO—FEBRUARY 11, 2008

  An eight-ton rock rested for generations at the bottom of the Ohio River, minding its own business as time and currents passed. It favored neither Ohio to the north nor Kentucky to the south. It just—was.

  Occasionally, when water levels dropped, the boulder would break the surface long enough to receive the chiseled tattoos of mildly daring people seeking remembrance. But it stopped playing peek-a-boo nearly a century ago, leaving only ephemera in its wake, including a sepia photograph of a well-dressed woman in a frilly hat, standing in the middle of the Ohio, on this rock.

  Now, because of one man’s obsessive good intention, the fabled rock sits on old tires in the municipal garage of this river city, awaiting the outcome of a border dispute that goes something like this:

  Some Ohioans say the rock is an important piece of Portsmouth history and should be put on display. Some Kentuckians say the rock is an important piece of Kentucky, period, and should be returned. And some in both states say: I’ve been distracted by war, recession and a presidential campaign, so forgive me. But are we fighting over a rock?

  Last month the Kentucky House of Representatives passed a resolution demanding the rock’s return to its watery bed, with one of its members suggesting that a raiding party to Portsmouth might be in order. Not to be outdone, the Ohio House of Representatives is considering a resolution that asserts the rock’s significance to Ohio, and its speaker has said he is ready to guard the boulder with his muzzle-loading shotgun.

  All this has stunned Steve Shaffer, 51, the earnest local historian who rediscovered the rock, raised the rock and anticipated a more enthusiastic celebration of the rock. But at least the rock is happy, he said. “It loves to be the center of controversy.”

  The boulder sa
t almost certainly on the Kentucky side of the river, where the shoreline remains mostly undeveloped. This is why the rock became lodged deeper in the collective consciousness of the city on the other shore: Portsmouth, now another hurting Rust Belt city, but once a center of commerce, forging steel, making shoes.

  In Portsmouth and beyond, the boulder became known as Indian Head Rock, because its bottom half bore a crude etching of a round head, with two dots for eyes, another dot for a nose, and a dash for a mouth; a kind of early Charlie Brown.

  The face spawned many theories of origin. An American Indian petroglyph. A river bandit’s carving to mark where loot was stored. A boatman’s crude measure to gauge fluctuating water levels. Or, as a 1908 newspaper article has it, the 1830s handiwork of a Portsmouth boy named John Book, who then grew up to fall at the Battle of Shiloh.

  Whenever the rock emerged from the water, people would boat or swim out to read the names and initials engraved on its sandstone hide, and maybe add their own to this honor roll of stone. H.W.H. Oct. 50, and E.D.C. Sep 1856, and Luther, and F. Kinney, and D. Ford. Several of these surnames remain familiar in Portsmouth today.

  But dam work in the early 20th century raised the water level several feet, and the celebrated boulder—often featured in newspapers and on postcards—vanished from view. And Portsmouth soon forgot its pet rock.

  In the late 1960s, though, an Ohio Valley schoolboy read of the Indian Head Rock in a musty book of local history, and he never forgot it. That was Steve Shaffer. He grew up, studied historical interpretation at Ohio University, developed an interest in prehistoric rock carvings, and quietly resolved to find the rock.

  He and some divers began the hunt in 2000, using clues in old newspaper accounts about the rock’s location. He remained in the boat, though; he had lost 70 percent of his hearing to Meniere’s disease, and diving could cause further damage. But when the expeditions of 2000 and 2001 found only abandoned cars and dumped refrigerators, Mr. Shaffer earned his diver’s certification and joined the search—at great risk to his hearing.