by Will Weaver
Though it was only nine o’clock in the morning, Martin ate a roast-beef sandwich and a piece of mincemeat pie. Still hungry, he dug into the second day’s layer and ate its pie. He was thirsty after that. Though Helmer had sent along a vinegar jug of well water, Martin pulled into a truck stop and cafe.
The waitress had short, blond pin-curled hair. Martin lingered over his cola and watched her. He watched her stretch up for the plates the cook shoved through the little window. Watched her write out orders with the pink tip of her tongue clenched between her teeth. After an hour he finally paid for his cola. He had the dime in his pocket, but he slowly unbuttoned the flap over the combine money, peeled off a ten, and then left the waitress a whole dollar tip.
On the highway not a mile from the cafe, Martin’s foot suddenly jerked on the accelerator and his heart began to pound. If the blond waitress had seen the roll of combine money, so had the men sitting near the till. He did not remember their faces, but at least one of them was dark-haired and another had a beard. He checked the rearview mirror. The highway behind was empty, but he felt under the seat for the tire iron. His heart continued to pound. Rather than wait to be caught—he could outrun nobody in Helmer’s old Ford—he pulled off the road and parked behind a grove of spruce trees. He waited there out of sight. He lay on his belly and watched from beneath the spruce boughs for a half hour. No one passed but farm wives and occasional logging trucks. Finally he drove on. The men at the truck stop must not have wanted to tangle with him, Martin Pehrsson, no matter how much money he had. He brought the truck up to fifty-five to make up for lost time.
That night Martin slept in the truck out of sight from the highway just beyond Thief River Falls. The combine money was stashed in the left front hubcap of the pickup. Martin lay curled on the front seat under the blanket Etta had sent along.
He dreamed of the blond waitress. He was straight-combining a long field of wheat and the waitress was somewhere ahead of him in the field. Naked in the field. Her skin and hair were the same color of the wheat, so he could never see her. Neither could he slow the combine, because at field-side stood Helmer, waving him on. Keep going, had to finish by sundown, rain tomorrow, Helmer said. The sickle sang back and forth. He kept looking for the girl who was somewhere out there in front of his knives.
In the morning Martin ate the rest of the roast-beef sandwiches and all the pie. The remaining egg and chicken sandwiches he threw in the swampy ditch along the road. He watched the white bread crumble and melt away in the green water.
Late that afternoon Martin reached St. Anne’s, Manitoba. St. Anne’s lay strung along a tree-lined river, the Seine. He slowed at the city limits to stare at a brightly bannered jumble of tall green tents and white wooden halls. It looked like a county fair, if the Canucks called them that.
He parked. He checked the button on the money pocket. Then he walked toward the crowd. It was nearly sundown. Orange light glowed in the tent tops whose long ropes stretched from sunlight above to shadow below. The ground was littered with crushed tobacco tins and the grass was tramped into a green mud. To the right some cattlemen were loading a bull into a trailer. Ahead was a long, low wooden hall with yellow-lit windows. Martin could hear fiddle music and clapping from inside. He touched the combine money once again, paid his quarter at the door, and walked inside.
In the yellow haze of the hall, on a wooden stage at the center, was a fiddler and his band. The fiddler was a stout bear of a fellow with thick black eyebrows that grew together above his nose. His fiddling arm whirled the bow across the strings as fast as a pitman arm turned a mower’s sickle. Dancers whirled in a large, galloping circle around the stage. To the right side stood a line of men with empty beer mugs. Their line stretched forward to a long wooden table that supported several barrels of beer. Martin grinned.
The beer was black and strong. Martin squinted his eyes at first sip, but after that it didn’t taste bad, kind of like the juice at the bottom of a jar of canned mincemeat. Only stronger. Martin tapped his foot and watched the dancers. Those Canucks sure knew how to have a good time.
He let his eyes travel past the dancers toward the stage. There his gaze halted. On a girl. She had long black hair that waved forward from a comb above each ear. She had dark eyebrows, brown eyes, skin and teeth as white as piano keys. She stood looking up at the fiddler, who had her same dark eyebrows and small nose. Her eyes moved back and forth from the fiddler, who was certainly her father, to the musicians behind him.
The song ended to great clapping and shouts of “More!” The fiddler bowed deeply, grinned. He reached back for a new bow, then a puff of white smoke leaped from the fiddle strings as he began a new, even faster song. The dancers began to whoop and throw their partners. The fiddler, too, began to dance as he played, a jig of some sort. But Martin was not watching the fiddler. He moved through the crowd so he could see the girl better. Soon the fiddler’s feet were eye level in the side of Martin’s vision.
The fiddler’s feet were like the black hooves of a trotting horse that never seemed to touch the ground.
The girl began to wave frantically at the musicians and point to the fiddler. But the banjo player and the drummer did not see her. They were grinning and trying to keep up with the fiddler. The girl started to climb onstage. Just then the fiddle music wailed to a stop, like the electricity had failed. Martin looked up. The fiddler tottered, then fell. Martin leaped forward to catch him. They both crashed to the floor. In a moment the girl was alongside Martin, leaning over him to hold a small bottle of something—a whiff of ammonia brought instant tears to Martin’s eyes—under her father’s nose.
The fiddler coughed. His eyes rolled white, then turned up brown pupils. “What . . . what happened?” he said weakly.
“What do you think happened?” the daughter said. Her voice carried the scolding edge of a mother’s. “Look where you are at this moment.”
The fiddler sat up and blinked. He looked down at the board floor, then at Martin, who still lay pinned beneath him.
“He caught you,” the girl said, nodding to Martin. For the first time, their eyes met. The fiddler rolled free of Martin. Still sitting, he extended a large, sweaty hand. “Bernard LeCouerbrise, rightly named, I’m afraid, ‘The Fiddling Fool of St. Anne’s.’”
“Martin Pehrsson.”
“He always does this,” the girl murmured, still staring at Martin. “Usually he falls backwards and the banjo player catches him.” Her voice softened at the end, as if she had planned to say more but didn’t.
“This is, of course, my daughter, Madeline, same last name though a more worrisome temperament. May I buy you a beer, Mr. Pehrsson, for your trouble?” Bernard LeCouerbrise said.
“You bet,” Martin said softly, still looking into the brown eyes of this girl named Madeline.
For the next two weeks, without writing home, Martin remained in St. Anne’s. He stayed as a guest of the LeCouerbrise family. He told them he usually stayed at a good hotel on business trips, but, if they insisted, he would stay with them. Twice he drove into Winnipeg to look at combines. On neither occasion did he sign any papers or spend any of the money. That is, what was left of it.
In the evenings he entertained the LeCouerbrises. He took them to the best restaurants in Winnipeg. They ate seafood and steak and drank champagne, all compliments of Martin’s expense account, as he called it. He met more and more LeCouerbrises. Aunts. Uncles. Cousins. Second cousins. All were black-haired, brown-eyed, and all of them Martin treated to dining and dancing.
During these nights out Martin did not explain much about himself because the LeCouerbrise family, excepting Madeline, were the talkers. They spoke in English that flowed into French and then back to English as easily as the water splashed this way and that along the rocks of the little Seine River, where he often walked alone with Madeline. With her, as with her relatives, Martin discovered the va
lue of silence. His closed mouth, or at best his vague comments about land holdings and cattle and wheat, only made the LeCouerbrise relatives talk faster and nod and grin more often at him and Madeline. And his silence with Madeline on their long walks beside the river only drew her closer to his side. He figured that she had grown up around talkers. He guessed that she was ready for a man who held his peace.
And he was right. At the end of two weeks Martin began the trip back to Minnesota. He took with him forty dollars, no combine, and a wife.
On the drive south to Minnesota, Madeline sat close to Martin and talked excitedly. But as they drove farther into Minnesota, as they neared Helmer’s farm, she grew silent. Finally she said, “It’s so flat here. I thought it would be different than Manitoba. But it’s the same. You never told me.”
“You never asked,” Martin said.
12
The rest of that summer Guy worked at the implement dealership and saved his money, for what he was not sure. College maybe. He promised his mother he would visit some colleges during his senior year. But sometimes he thought he was saving the money for her.
One hot July night Guy came home and found Madeline in the dark yard sitting motionless on his old swing. Behind her, in the house, Martin’s shadow passed back and forth through the yellow squares of the windows. Occasionally his voice penetrated the window screens. Or rather, voices. Martin spoke in dialogue, a high voice for himself, a low voice for Helmer. Sometimes, in a third voice, Martin swore at the other two. The third voice sounded like a director of a play cursing his actors. Martin kept walking, living room to kitchen to living room. Guy thought of a small brown bear he had once seen at a roadside zoo. How it lived on Pepsi. How it barked. How its feet had worn a circular path in the square concrete floor of its pen.
“Don’t go in for a while,” Madeline said. “He needs some time. I hid his bottle, made him some coffee. He was arguing with Helmer,” she explained. “He’ll be okay in a half hour or so.”
Guy nodded. It was very late. He had been to Detroit Lakes, to the dance pavilion there. “Maybe I’ll go up to the hayloft,” he said.
“You shouldn’t have to do that,” Madeline said. Her voice caught.
“I don’t mind,” Guy said. He put his arm around her. Her shoulders began to jerk in slow rhythm.
“Hey now,” Guy said. As she cried he began to push the swing, at first only a foot or so just to get her moving.
“Don’t,” she said, still snuffling.
“Sorry, the Pehrsson House of Thrills never closes,” he said, making his voice loudspeaker-tinny, pushing her again.
She laughed once and grabbed the ropes tighter.
He swung her in longer loops upward.
“Guy—stop,” she called.
“Ramone—the swing—it’s jammed—we can’t slow it down!” Guy called. He pushed her higher.
Madeline shrieked with fear and laughter.
“Ramone—where are you—you’re the only one who knows the swing—it’s gone mad!” Guy called.
“Guy, please—”
“Ramone, you must mean.”
“Ramone, please, stop! I’m scared,” she cried.
Guy made scraping, braking noises with his mouth, then gradually slowed his mother’s flight. Laughing, he caught her in his arms as she jumped to the ground. As he held her, behind them he saw the scarecrow outline of Martin framed in the yellow light of the screen door.
“What the hell’s the matter out there?” Martin called.
“Nothing,” Guy called.
“Nothing,” Madeline said.
Martin stared. “Get in the house then,” he called.
Madeline pulled away from Guy. “I’ll be okay,” she said.
Guy was silent for a moment. He looked past her to his father. “He ever hits you, you tell me.”
Madeline stared for a moment. “Okay, Ramone,” she said. Then she turned and walked toward the house.
Summer ended and the school year began, Guy’s last. Alone, he drove his Chevy to school. Once it needed a new coil wire and refused to budge from the farmyard until he got one. For one day, then, Guy rode the school bus.
Number 33 still carried its load of farm kids and Indians. The Indian kids in the rear, however, had not aged. It was as if the light or air or seats or graffiti in the back of the bus combined to form a growth retardant. Like a corn herbicide that killed weeds but left the corn, something in Bus #33 stunted Indians but passed over whites. The bus carried no Indian seniors. One or two juniors. Only a few sophomores. Mostly the Indian kids were ninth-, eighth-, or seventh-graders. Guy realized Tom LittleWolf would have been the only Indian senior in his class.
Arriving at school on the Indian bus without Tom and Mary Ann, Guy again walked the sidewalk gauntlet. Felt the old fear. But the absence of Tom LittleWolf was still a form of his presence, and the Flatwater thugs left him alone. He made sure, however, to buy the coil wire on his noon hour.
He played basketball again that year, but without Tom, and with Arnold Granland back at guard, the ball did not come much to him. The team lost more games than it won. To make the best of a bad season, Guy concentrated on personal moves, percentages; in that way, like a runner or a swimmer, he played mainly against himself.
He took more English classes. In one literature class the teacher was a younger man, Mr. Anderson, a newcomer to Flatwater who rode a bicycle and smoked a curved pipe at the same time. After an essay exam Mr. Anderson summoned Guy to the front, then walked him into the hall. “I want you out of this class,” he said.
Guy stared wide-eyed down at the man.
“You should be in Advanced Lit.,” Mr. Anderson said. “I’ll see to it.”
Advanced American Literature contained all Honor Society and Student Council kids. They stared skeptically at Guy as he joined them mid-class. He took a seat in the rear.
The advanced class was much smaller than any he’d had. The teacher, Mr. Richeland, chatted with the students, told off-color stories about writers’ lives, explored allusions to literature that most everyone in the class except Guy seemed to have read. He sat silently as students spoke up without raising their hands. Mr. Richeland nodded thoughtfully at their comments and often said, “You’re onto something there. Say more.”
For the first few weeks Guy felt like he was in a school within a school. This English class compared to other classes was like the teachers’ eating room inside the larger cafeteria. There Guy always suspected the food was better and now he knew for sure.
Guy’s first essay was entitled “Faulkner’s ‘The Bear’ and Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’: Why the Boy Doesn’t Shoot.” In it he showed how Faulkner linked the end of his story to Keats’s poem. Guy’s main point was that if the boy shot the bear, there would be nothing left to hunt, just like if the man on Keats’s Grecian urn caught the girl he was chasing, the fun would be over. Sort of.
Mr. Richeland read the paper aloud and laughed heartily at “sort of.” The class laughed politely. Several girls turned down the corners of their mouths and doodled dark flowers through the rest of the paper.
“Brilliant—absolutely brilliant,” Mr. Richeland finished. “Mr. Pehrsson, my compliments!”
Guy blushed scarlet and looked down. From then on no one in the class spoke much to Guy again. Which was fine by him.
Later in the term Mr. Richeland sent that and another of his essays, “Pointy Heads and Loincloths: Indians in Little House on the Prairie,” to a former professor at the University of Minnesota. The professor wrote back inviting Guy for a visit.
“I’ll think about it,” Guy murmured to Mr. Richeland.
What he often thought of his senior year was flax. He carried the seeds in a little bottle in the glove box of the Chevy. They rattled like dried peas in a glass. Once in an art his
tory class he came across Monet’s painting “The Water Lilies.” The field of flax he had seen in Canada was the same color as the water in the painting. The water in the painting was really the color of the sky—in the painting—which couldn’t be seen. That’s because Monet wanted the viewer to see the sky by looking down at the water lilies on their little round pond. Guy liked the painting but he liked the field of flax better. It pulled your eyes up and out in a straight line forever.
Saturdays Guy worked at the implement dealership, with its soot-blackened ceiling and frost-rounded corners. It was 1972. The Russians were buying wheat. Never had there been more tractors on order for spring. He tuned tractors and saved his money. With part of it he bought a rebuilt engine for his mother’s 1965 Cutlass. She had not been driving much. When Guy happened to borrow the Cutlass and heard the engine, he knew why. The motor sounded like a polishing drum with a dozen new agates turning inside. On a quiet Sunday afternoon he warmed up the farm shop with the barrel stove and switched the engines.
“You should have told me sooner,” he said as he finished.
“I didn’t want Martin to know,” Madeline said. She sat perched on a chair next to the barrel stove reading a paperback called The Feminine Mystique.
“Don’t worry about him,” Guy said. “Tell me first.”
“Okay, Ramone,” she said.
“I’m serious,” Guy said, standing up and wiping his hands on the cleanest oil rag.
“I just didn’t want to be a burden to him. Or to you.”
“Hey,” Guy said, “did you or did you not carry me around nine months inside and two years outside?”
His mother smiled.
***
In March the University of Minnesota wrote a letter inviting Guy down for an April tour of the campus. His first thought was of Madeline. By March in Minnesota, houses, like barns and schools, had shrunken. Their late-winter size depended on how well the inhabitants got along. In the waist-deep snow, his parents’ house was hardly bigger than a dollhouse. The Minneapolis trip, any trip, would be good for her.