Red Earth White Earth

by Will Weaver

  “Flax? For here? For the old pasture?”

  “That’s right,” Guy said. “Flax.”

  “Jesus, you must be out of your goddamn mind—nobody ever—”

  Guy carefully hung up the receiver. “Fuck you,” he murmured.

  “I beg your pardon?” one of the school secretaries said.

  Saturday he planted. The slippery brown flax seed flowed easily through the hopper of the grain drill. He was finished and in Martin’s house for the ten o’clock news and weather.

  May 6. Fifty-five degrees and sunny. Flax seed fat. Some with sprouts. None through.

  May 13. Warm front stopped over North Dakota and central Minnesota. Seventy-four degrees, sunny. All seeds sprouted and heading to daylight. Need a rain, though.

  May 16. Raining and fifty-four degrees.

  May 18. Flax up! Green needles, a billion of them.

  May 24. Two inches of rain last night. Sunny today and warming fast. Flax finger-high. Black field shading green.

  May 28. High School Graduation. Hot robes, boring speaker. Standard grab-for-all-gusto, education-sets-you-free speech. Drove home fast to look at flax.

  May 30. Seventy-seven degrees and sunny. Flax long-hand-high. One hundred bright green acres. Martin says oats would have been knee-high by now. Fuck him.

  June 13. The third day of ninety degrees, southwest wind at more than twenty mph. Flax stems rolling, whitening at the edge. Need rain. Now.

  June 14. Wind switching to northwest. Cold front moving down. Keep coming!

  June 15. Raining like hell and fifty-eight degrees. Raining in Becker County and little elsewhere. Beginner’s luck.

  And so Guy’s notes on his calendar and his luck continued. When his flax needed rain the skies gradually bunched with clouds and water fell. When his flax needed heat the weather moved on and the sun shone.

  By the end of June the field of flax, as if there were a great magnet buried under its green surface, began to slow the pickups of passing farmers and pull many to a halt. The farmers got out of their trucks. They walked along the hedge end of the field. They knelt and sighted across the grain. They pulled up stems of the flax and rolled them through their fingers. They chose one green shoot for their mouths and then slowly chewed it as they watched the flax move in long rippling sheets in the summer breeze.

  Every evening Helmer gave Guy the flax report: how many farmers stopped. The aphid count per square foot. Rust. For Helmer spent much of every day walking along or within the field. Guy began to believe that Helmer’s presence had something to do with his good luck. That his grandfather was some sort of guardian angel of the field.

  Or maybe his good luck came from Madeline. She, too, took daily walks around the field. Often she walked into the grain to pull up a bull thistle or a stalk of black nightshade. Guy could tell it was her; she left a fainter path in the grain than did Helmer.

  Sometimes in the evenings, after chores, Guy walked with her. When they had completed the two-mile circuit they often sat together on the rock pile by the gate. They watched the sun set on the field. Madeline talked of Canada, of home. They watched the green flax turn orange, then blue.

  On July 20, however, Guy’s luck began to run out. The temperature and humidity were matched at ninety-five. A cold front had bulged down from Canada and would meet the warm air somewhere close to Becker County. Guy alternated between watching the TV’s weather radar and the west sky over the flax.

  By 7:00 that evening the TV weatherwoman was predicting high winds “. . . and damaging hail,” Martin finished for her. He said to Guy, “You see, that’s the trouble with flax. Hail catch it coming close to bloom and it’s dead. But I don’t imagine you thought about that. Now take corn or oats, they almost always . . .”

  Guy left the house. Outside, he stood among the flax and watched the oncoming weather. Now waist-high and blooming blue on the higher swells of the field, the flax’s uncertain colors matched the sky. Southwest were the high, shining cumulus towers. “Holy-card clouds,” Mary LittleWolf called such clouds. White heat lightning flashed underneath them.

  From the northwest came the lower, darker, faster-moving clouds of the cold front. Guy for a half hour watched the two fronts collide. Their clouds in slow motion churned and tumbled and rolled upward dark and bulbous. Supported now by yellow spider legs of lightning, the two fronts were no longer clouds but great spiders struggling for control of the reservation sky.

  Cold air suddenly washed over Guy’s face. Rain shimmered across the flax toward him. Behind the rain, whitish and racing, came the hail. Guy cursed and ran for the machine shed. The rain overtook him and he was instantly wet through. Under the eaves of the shed he turned to witness the destruction of his field.

  But even as he watched, the hail veered sharply south. It churned through Jim Hanson’s oats, then raced from sight. It was then Guy saw his grandfather. Helmer stood on the front steps of his house. His arms hung straight down, his palms faced out, his brown face and white hair streamed with water. His eyes were closed. His mouth was open. His lips moved as if he were speaking or drinking in the cold rain.

  After the storm and two days of sunlight, the flax eased into bloom. First a broad, milky blue, the field drew color from the sky. In full bloom, the flax’s color surpassed the sky, gave back a deeper blue to the high summer air. Past full bloom, the field shaded daily to yellow, then brown. The flower petals dropped away. Seed pods formed.

  July 18. Etta Bornholdt Pehrsson: April 1897–July 18, 1972. Gramps all alone now. Except us. And his flax.

  By July 20 the flax seeds, each clutched in their tiny five-leaved cups, were the size of garden peas. That same week a frost burned most of Manitoba’s flax fields black. Within two days flax futures began to trade up their daily limit. Cash price for a bushel of flax climbed to an all-time high of $25 a bushel.

  The Flatwater Quill ran an article about Guy and his flax entitled “Gambling and Farming May Pay Off.” The article estimated Guy’s flax yield at sixty bushels to the acre.

  “That’s $150,000, Gramps,” Guy blurted as Helmer’s eyes moved slowly across the page.

  But Helmer did not reply or look up until he was finished reading. Then he carefully folded shut the paper and turned it facedown on the table. He stared through the west living-room window.

  “Best not to think too far ahead,” he murmured. “It’s not in the bin yet.”

  Guy nodded. He wished the newspaper had not started figuring bushels and dollars. Now the money was all he could think of. The money ran through his mind like a continuous movie that showed all the things he could buy. For his grandfather he would buy a new furnace and a tank of fuel oil as big as a silo. He would buy his mother a new car and a microwave oven. He would buy Martin a barn cleaner, a silage unloader, and a full-time hired man. Then he, Guy, would never touch a cow again.

  “No,” Madeline said. It was sundown and she and Guy were sitting on the rock pile beside the field. The rocks held the day’s heat. Guy was talking about the money. “No—nothing for me!” she said angrily. “Save the money—save it all. Then take it somewhere. College, a business. But don’t buy land, that’s all I ask.”

  Guy was silent.

  Her voice flattened as she looked across the field. “The land hooks people, especially farm boys like yourself—not that you’re like all the rest. You take a tractor and plow to it, turn a green field black and then make it green again, you start to feel powerful. I can see it in the way men talk. They talk like they control it, like it’s their slave.” She paused. “But that’s not true at all. The land controls you. It controls everything. Farmers get hooked. They think the land is all there is. That the land is enough. Well, it’s not.”

  Guy did not understand all of what she said. The land was a lot, that he knew. Rather than talk more, he put his arm around her.
At first, still angry, Madeline sat stiffly. But slowly her shoulders loosened and she leaned against him. They sat that way for a long time and watched the flax pull down the sun.

  “Well, well—what a cozy couple,” Martin’s voice said behind them. Martin. He had walked up on them. They hadn’t been watching, thinking of him at all. He had caught them off guard.

  Guy jerked away his arm. His father stood squinting down at them, his feet planted a telltale two inches wider apart than normal. “Arm in arm. I thought that was my job.” His voice slurred.

  Madeline jumped to her feet. The sunlight burned orange in her face. “You bastard,” she said to Martin.

  That was the first time Guy ever heard his mother swear.

  By August 8 the flax was nearly ripe. The seeds were hard enough to hold a fingernail dent. Guy made final harvesting arrangements with Jim Hanson, whose big John Deere would combine the grain. “No problem,” Hanson said, staring straight at Guy. “After that hail, I don’t have much of my own grain to worry about now, do I?”

  To cut and windrow the flax, Guy bought on credit a new John Deere swather from the dealership where he worked. The swather cost $18,000 and all Guy had to do was sign two papers—one for the dealership, the other for the banker, Lyle Price.

  “Hearing good things about you,” Price said with a quick smile as he watched Guy sign.

  The sales manager at the dealership smiled and said, “With a crop like that coming in, I’d sell you a swather for every day of the week.”

  The weather held hot and dry. On August 12, a Friday, with a clear, blue sky and the next weather far off in the Rockies, Guy cut.

  The flax folded golden over the sickle of the swather. With Helmer watching from the rock pile, Guy swathed until sundown. Then the flax began to draw moisture from the cooling air, and the sickle began to pound in complaint. Guy pulled away from the grain with only ten acres left to cut.

  “Hail can’t hurt me now,” he called to Helmer as he drove the swather through the gate. From the roar of the engine he did not hear his grandfather’s reply.

  On Saturday he finished cutting. The field lay ribboned with waist-high, yellow windrows. Sunday dawned cool but clear. Monday came sunny and eighty degrees, which cured the top several inches of the windrows. Guy could chafe the flax hulls between his palms and watch the shiny brown seeds drop into his lap. Now at $26.50 a bushel, he wondered what each seed was worth.

  Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday were days that grain men dreamed of. The sky was cloudless, unendingly blue. The temperature was ninety degrees with a steady, dry wind from the southwest. In the yellow oven of the field the windrows baked and shimmered away their moisture. At the touch the flax stems crackled and broke. At field-side, Guy lined up a parade of grain wagons.

  Friday morning at 11:00, an hour later than agreed, Jim Hanson’s green combine came rumbling down the road. Guy ran to meet him at the driveway. Hanson swung down from the cab. He wore several days of beard stubble along with a pair of oil-spotted coveralls. He farmed several hundred acres, and Guy often saw him at the parts counter at the John Deere dealership.

  Hanson strode up to the first windrow, ran his hand underneath. He pulled free some stalks, smelled them, bit into them. He looked at the sky. “Won’t go until two o’clock,” he said.

  Helmer, who had already checked the flax windrows in the same fashion, nodded. Hanson climbed back into the green-tinted cab of his combine and slumped backward in immediate sleep.

  Helmer walked closer to the combine. He stared intently at the tires, the grease fittings, the pickup reel. He reached out to one of the spring teeth; the tooth rattled loosely at his touch. With the small pliers he always carried, Helmer knelt and tightened the nut. Hanson did not wake up.

  While Hanson slept and Helmer walked along the flax windrows, Guy went to the house to listen to the weather report on the radio. Rain in Omaha, Idaho Falls, Bozeman, Kalispell.

  At 2:30 PM Hanson suddenly sat up in the cab of the combine. He turned the key and the combine’s engine coughed alive. He brought up the rpms until the combine’s green sides shuddered, then wheeled its mouth toward the first windrow. The pickup reel began to turn, the thin forks pulled the grain forward. And like a great green beetle, the combine headed downfield swallowing the flax as it went and spitting a spray of straw behind. Guy ran alongside. In the roar of the engine, the shuddering clatter of the sieves, with grit in his mouth and eyes, Guy watched the little Plexiglas window of the grain hopper. Flax seed inched up its sides like an hourglass filling with sand. Or gold.

  But suddenly there was a massive thud. Then a clanking sound, as if the earth beneath the combine had given way. The combine heaved to a stop. Hanson leaped down from the cab, threw his cap onto the ground, and began to stomp on it.

  ***

  Guy drove Hanson home. Hanson stared straight ahead with his jaw clenched. “Fucking flax, I shoulda known better,” he muttered.

  Repairs would take at least three days. Guy knew what a new gearbox cost and so did not speak of it.

  “Windrows that big, you need the big custom equipment.”

  “Like who?” Guy said quietly. There was no combine he knew of in Becker County bigger than Hanson’s John Deere.

  Hanson scratched the beard on his throat. “There’s a small crew I know that ought to be near Fargo about now. Probably headed for South Dakota. Flaherty, a red-haired Irishman, runs some big Allis gleaners. Maybe he’d detour around this way and clean up your flax.”

  “I can pay,” Guy said quickly. He would go to Lyle Price again. There would be plenty of money when the flax was in the bin.

  At six o’clock that evening, with two hundred dusty new miles on the Chevy, Guy located Flaherty’s crew. Sixty miles west of Fargo, his four combines were running a staggered front against the last half of a long wheat field. Guy’s heart pumped with excitement. Flaherty’s Allis-Chalmers gleaners looked as large and as sturdy as Sherman tanks.

  He drove the Chevy up to the motor home and the trailers. At the edge of the field stood a man, hatless, with coppery hair, with binoculars to his eyes. He watched his combines.

  Guy walked up to Flaherty. His heart thudded before he spoke.

  “Flax, huh?” Flaherty said, again lifting the binoculars to his eyes. “Don’t see much flax around here. But I dunno. A hundred acres isn’t much for a day’s detour. I’m supposed to be down in Sioux Falls by Monday.”

  “I can make it worth your while,” Guy said.

  Flaherty lowered his glasses. A slow grin grew in the sunburned creases around his mouth. “Oh you can, can you?”

  “Yessir,” Guy said. He realized Flaherty was probably about the same age as his own father.

  “This must be quite a field, then.”

  “Sixty bushels,” Guy said.

  Flaherty laughed and raised the binoculars again. “Son, I been shakin’ grain for twenty years and I’ve never seen flax run even fifty.”

  Guy suddenly remembered the newspaper article, which, not wanting to look at, he had stashed under the seat of his car. He retrieved the paper and handed it to Flaherty. Flaherty fished reading glasses from his pocket, blew away their dust, and began to read.

  “Hell,” he said finally. “I’ve never yet met a reporter who could figure bushels. But the picture looks good, yes it does.” He brought the newspaper closer to his face. Then he looked sideways at Guy. “And you’re this gambler fellow they’re writing about?”

  “Yessir,” Guy said.

  “And you want to gamble on Flaherty?”

  “Yessir.” Guy grinned.

  By three o’clock Saturday afternoon, Guy thought he had gambled wrong. Flaherty’s combines had not come. He wondered if Flaherty had had trouble. Had gotten lost. Had lied to him.

  Helmer sat at his kitchen table so he could s
ee out the window and down the road west. “He’ll come,” Helmer said. “If the man said he would come, he’ll come.”

  But the combines did not come Saturday afternoon, nor Sunday by the time Helmer had driven in his pickup off to church. Guy paced the silent living room of Helmer’s house. He listened to the transistor radio upstairs; he had to hold it close to the open window, where there was less static.

  Rain in Sioux Falls. Rain in Billings. Rain in Bismarck and Valley City. He cursed the radio. In the same moment he heard trucks. From the southwest, like a caravan of circus elephants appearing out of the dust, came Flaherty’s combines.

  Guy thundered down the stairs and ran into the yard. He waved and the trucks turned into Helmer’s yard. Flaherty stepped down from his motor home. His eyes were as red as his beard stubble. His hands were stained dark with oil. He shook his head. “On that last forty acres, whatever could go wrong, went.”

  He looked at the flax even as he spoke. Without waiting for Guy, he strode into the field. He ran one arm underneath the grain and hefted it.

  “Be damned,” he said, a tired grin spreading outward from his eyes. “I’m in the wrong business. Ought to be growing this stuff instead of shakin’ it.” He turned to his men. “Unload those ornery critters,” he called. “We got a real field here.”

  Guy started to speak, but Flaherty turned away to direct his men. Guy looked back to Helmer’s house. Its two porch windows were eyes, its door a mouth. He walked up to Flaherty again, but this time a combine’s engine roared alive, then another and another. Guy’s voice was lost in the noise.

  Flaherty’s men unleashed the combines’ tether chains, then lowered the ramps of their trailers. The drivers began to ease the combines down the ramps to the ground, where they then formed a convoy pointed at the field of flax.

  As the last combine touched ground Guy saw from the corner of his eye Helmer’s small pickup turn into the yard. It came slowly toward the field. Helmer got out. In his dark Sunday suit Helmer walked up to Guy. He looked at the combines, then back to Guy. For long moments, as the combines began to move toward the field, Guy met his grandfather’s gaze. Then he broke away. He ran in front of the lead combine, driven by Flaherty himself, and blocked its path.