by Will Weaver
Two miles farther and Guy turned the Mercedes onto gravel. One mile later, he was home.
Helmer’s farm, too, was more brightly lighted. Before, one yellow bulb shone above the garage. Now two security lamps lit the yard. One of the lights hung high up on the side of a new, blue, vacuum-sealed silo. Top-of-the-line silo. Guy wondered what it cost. Below the silo, beside the barn, was a new John Deere tractor, a four-wheel-drive. But the tractor tilted sideways from two flat tires, and did not appear to have been driven for a long time.
Other than the new silo and tractor, all else was the same. In the far corner of the square farmstead stood the white dairy barn. Next to the barn were the two galvanized grain bins, two-thousand-bushel canisters. Beside the metal grain bins was the small wooden granary and its tiny wooden doors that had been built around Helmer’s scoop shovel. Farther left, moving toward the road, was the long machine shed and shop. Then, closest to the road, were the houses.
Helmer’s house was gray and weathered. It seemed smaller, but that was because the spruce trees beside had reached out to nearly touch its foundation. Eighty steps southeast was Guy’s parents’ house. In the summer, when the sun set far to the northwest, the pointed shadow of Helmer’s roof crept at sundown across the lawn toward Guy’s house. Its dull point walked its way up the front steps. And for two or three days each summer, when the door of Guy’s house was open, as it had to be from the heat, the shadow cut squarely through the living room. Guy did not remember if his mother stayed home those days or not.
Tonight both houses were dark. Guy let the Mercedes coast up to the oak tree. He killed the engine and got out. A tatter of his old swing rope hung down and disappeared from sight in the black branches above. Guy tugged on the rope. It broke and coiled down over his arm. He felt the rope, then let it drop.
The front door of his house was unlocked. He eased inside the porch, then into the kitchen. His father’s snore growled from the bedroom. Guy walked to the bedroom door. He could not see his parents, only lumpy shadows. He quietly shut their door, then turned to the refrigerator.
The refrigerator bulb threw light on two oranges, bearded green with mold. A half can of Spam, its lid torn open by a knife or a pliers. A half bag of store bread, it, too, dusty with mold. And three twelve packs of Hamm’s.
No chicken in cold gravy. No dill pickles. No pickled beets. No foil-wrapped turkey slices. No jar of milk, no smaller pint of cream.
In the metal vegetable drawer he found four apples shrunken to the size of plums. He leaned farther into the refrigerator—but then behind him came the metallic hiccup of a rifle shell sliding into its chamber. He slowly backed away from the refrigerator and turned.
Martin, naked, gaunt, his pubic hair steel-gray and chest hair now entirely white, lowered the .30-.30. “Lucky you got blond hair, boy,” he said. He turned back to the bedroom.
Guy flipped on the light. The lime-green linoleum. The bits of straw on the rug by the door. Martin’s boots. The white enamel range. The varnished pine table—it was all the same.
But no plants. No geraniums wintering in the corner away from the light. No ivy hanging in front of the east window. No furry-leaved violets carpeting a card table by the west living-room window.
And no small, oak, claw-footed writing desk, the one Madeline had brought from Canada when she married Martin. No bookcase. No books. No best of Robert Browning or Whitman or Frost. Not even a Sears catalog.
Guy stepped to the bedroom door. Martin sat on the bed buttoning his shirt.
“Where’s mother?” Guy said, keeping his voice steady.
Martin buttoned his cuffs, ran his hand through his hair.
“She don’t live here no more,” he finally said.
Guy waited.
“Oh, sometimes she shows up here. Washes some clothes. Cooks a meal for me. Then she goes again.”
“Where?”
“Where?” Martin repeated. He turned. Green half-moons held up his eyes. His nose, long like Guy’s, was shot through with tiny red veins. His teeth were stained brown from tobacco. “With the Indians, that’s where.”
Martin walked past Guy to the kitchen. Thinner and more stooped, he had shrunken. His eyes barely came up to Guy’s chin. From the cupboard he pulled a jar of Sanka, poured some into a cup, and filled it with warm tap water. He reached into the cupboard again and topped off the Sanka with a long gurgle of Jack Daniel’s.
“How long has she been gone?”
Martin took a long drink. “On and off now for two years.”
“Her letters. She never said.”
“And I doubt that you asked, now, either, did you?” Martin said quickly, glaring over his cup at Guy. “I don’t remember you giving us the time of day after you walked away from this place.”
“I was eighteen. There was no room for me here, you know that.”
“You could have waited.”
“How long? As long as you?”
Martin stared at Guy, then looked down. He pursed his lips and stared at the table.
Guy put away the Jack Daniel’s. “It’s too goddamn early for this. You better eat something.”
“Not hungry.”
Guy cut mold from the bread and made toast. He found a half jar of peanut butter and made sandwiches. “Eat,” he said to his father.
Martin chewed slowly, still staring at a pine knot in the wood of the table. Finally he said, “Maybe running off is the thing to do. I shoulda done it twenty years ago. Say to hell with everything. The old man. His cows. Lyle Price and his goddamn bank.” He looked up. “Just walk down the road. Shit,” he said, turning to Guy, “I’m the only one in the house who hasn’t tried it.”
After the sandwiches, Martin went out for chores. It was blue, 5:00 AM. Guy brought Kennedy into the house and fed him from a sack of California dog food. Then he lay on the couch and covered himself with a wool blanket. The blanket smelled of cows.
He lay looking about the near-empty living room. On the wall was the faint star pattern of a missing clock. The small china lamp with its rose-petal shade was gone too. He remembered Martin once holding the lamp high in the air, threatening to smash it. But the lamp was gone now . . . safe.
He dreamed of broken things. Dishes. All the dishes broken against the side of the house. Tiny spears . . . shards of pottery. Broken cups with their finger rings intact on the grass . . . odd hailstones from an angry sky. That night no mention of the broken dishes. Madeline gone. Martin serving potatoes and gravy in great splashes on the bare pine table. Bread dams. Bread dams keeping the gravy from leaking away. Bread dams holding it all together.
He dreamed of hiding. Martin after him . . . but never catching him, not with all his secret places, forts, and houses. Could live for days sneaking milk from the bulk tank, carrots from the garden . . . but voices calling, calling. Safe, here, in the attic of the granary, the tunnels of straw. Playhouses. He had lots of playhouses . . . but then a new voice calling. Tom. Tom’s voice. Tom on their side? Never . . . never . . . climbing into daylight for Tom’s voice. Then Mother running toward him, arms out, catching him, falling to the ground, not letting go, holding on . . . but then Martin’s face staring down like a thundercloud in blue sky, staring, staring, then suddenly gone . . . screen door slamming . . . slamming.
“Daylight in the swamp,” Martin called. Cold air and the smell of fresh manure washed over Guy where he lay on the couch. He jerked awake. There was pink sunlight in the east window. Martin was in from chores. “Hurry,” Martin said, checking his watch. “It’s nearly eight o’clock. It’s time to check on the old man.”
Guy followed his father on the shallow, frozen path to Helmer’s house. The house was in decline. On the roof, shingles were missing. Tar paper showed here and there like teeth gone from a mouth. A broken chimney brick clung to the lip of the eave; the first hard rain would bring it d
own. Underfoot, the porch steps sagged as if melted by heat. Or time. By the steps sat a rusted black ’62 Galaxie.
“Day help,” Martin said of the car. “She comes in every day for three hours in the morning. Gets him up, washes him, cooks some. Then I take over later on.”
Guy was silent.
“I mean, hell,” Martin said, “I’ve got forty cows and myself to feed.”
Guy stepped into the kitchen, which smelled of old linoleum and fresh milk. A squat woman with blond hair tied in a pink kerchief stood with her back to them washing dishes and watching a little black and white TV on the counter. Two of her kids sat perched close to the TV. On the screen Wile E. Coyote was shrinking in size on a long fall into a canyon.
The woman turned. It was Mary Ann.
“Guy!” Her face had rounded with flesh that closed in about her eyes like a dough doll’s. Her upper arms in their sleeveless blouse were as big as legs. But her grin was the same. She held out her dripping hands and Guy gave her a hug.
“Boys,” she said to her kids. “Boys—this is Guy Pehrsson. I’ve told you about him,” she said. But neither of the two would look away from the TV. “Kids,” she said, and shrugged. Then she frowned, looked down at her apron and water-spotted blouse. “If I’d a known you was comin’ . . .”
“You look great. As is. As always,” Guy said.
She blushed briefly.
“So . . . ,” they both said at once.
“So what brings you back?” she asked.
Beyond her, in the living room, Guy could hear a whirring, clicking noise. “Helmer?” he said. She nodded and pointed through the doorway.
He stepped into the dim living room. His grandfather sat in an electric wheelchair with his back to Guy. His white hair, thick still, curled onto the collar of his dark wool shirt. His great back and shoulders dwarfed the chair.
Helmer sat before a table. His Bible was propped open and upright at eye level. The Bible was clamped on a metal rack. A cord ran from the rack to an electrical outlet below. As Guy watched, the rack whirred, and a part of it moved. A pencil-sized metal arm snaked out. At the end of the arm a rubber roller wheeled across the page. Then a thinner metal finger dropped down, swung left, and turned the page.
“Mary Ann plugs him in mornings, I unplug him at night,” Martin said. Then, louder, he called, “Dad, visitor.”
Helmer’s head twitched. Batteries beneath him whirred and his chair slowly swung around. His right eye widened and drew light from the dim windows.
“Guy-boy—you’re home.” Helmer’s words came out drawled but clear. They came from the right side of his mouth even as the left side tried to hold them back. His right hand rose from his lap. Guy took it. Though softened from disuse, Helmer’s fingers were still thick and strong—so strong Guy could not pull away.
“Guy—you’ve come home.”
“For a while,” Guy began. But as he spoke the page turner buzzed and clicked through his words. Helmer dropped Guy’s hand and wheeled around to face the Bible again. After a long minute he swung back.
“Trouble here, Guy. With the farm. With your parents. Your father is weak.”
Martin did not blink.
“Your mother . . .” Helmer fell silent. Behind him the page turner clicked again, but this time he did not turn around. “Your mother,” he finally said, his voice slowing to a rumble, “she should be stoned.”
17
Trouble.
Madeline had left Martin and now lived with an Indian man. Martin, a week after Helmer’s stroke, had appointed himself legal guardian of Helmer and, by extension, of the farm purse. Within two weeks he had bought an electric barn cleaner, a pipeline milker, a new tractor, a vacuum-sealed, self-loading silo. The farm was now a hundred thousand dollars in debt to Lyle Price’s State Bank, a year behind in payments, and Price wanted title to the farm—within sixty days.
Helmer spent his days poring over crime and punishment in the Old Testament, preparing himself for the apocalypse. And Mary Ann’s Galaxie wouldn’t start.
First things first. At noon Guy drove Mary Ann and her kids and her TV home. Home for Mary Ann was Jewell Hartmeir’s battered pink and purple wheel house. She had left Kurt Fenske and taken the four children. Now she cared for them and for her father, Jewell, who had eventually lost both legs just above the knees from the tractor accident. He stood to lose more if he didn’t keep his stumps clean, which was now Mary Ann’s job. Her brothers were all gone. Bub dead, Billy killed near Khe Sanh, Chuck and Bob sharecropping in Georgia.
All this Mary Ann told Guy in one mile of gravel road as she ran her hands over the leather seats, the walnut console of the Mercedes.
“So what about you?” she asked, smiling.
“A long story,” Guy said, smiling back.
“Hey, Ma—tell him to speed up, we’re gonna miss Masters of the Universe!” one of the boys said.
“Dry up,” Mary Ann said automatically. She waited for Guy’s reply.
“I’ll be around for a while. I’ll tell you everything,” Guy said as he pulled into the Hartmeir yard. Beside the pink and purple trailer was a shiny, white TV dish antenna.
“What’s your wife like?” Mary Ann said suddenly as he stopped the car. “That’s one thing I always wondered about. What Guy’s wife would be like.”
“I’m not married,” Guy said.
“Really?” she said. She made no move to get out. Color came into her cheeks. Then she looked down for the door handle. “Well . . . thanks for the lift.”
“I’ll see you, we’ll talk,” Guy said, and smiled.
She got out, then walked beside his car as he backed up. “First time I ever rode in a foreign car,” she said.
“Anytime,” Guy said. He turned toward the road.
“Come up and watch TV some night,” she called as he pulled away. “We get two hundred channels.”
He stopped at the Hartmeir driveway and looked across the reservation. Low, gray clouds moved quickly across the flat land. The sun dumped light onto the frozen fields, then pulled it back. Guy turned right and slowly began to drive. He wondered where his mother was.
White Earth Reservation was broad and generally square, thirty miles or more to a side. Its boundaries held about a hundred square miles, or over 600,000 acres. Most of the reservation land was owned by whites like his family. It was the timber that had drawn whites onto the reservation. When the timber was cut down, the open land, not rich but flat and rockless, brought farmers. Most of the white families on White Earth were now second- and third-generation farmers. Their land formed a fenceless, geographical corral about the hilly pine and lake country at the center of White Earth. There the Indians lived on the land that could not be farmed. The main village was No Medicine Town.
As Guy drove, a battered red Pontiac came toward him. He gave it plenty of room. At the moment before their eclipse, the Pontiac swerved toward him. But Guy held his ground. He had grown up with this game. The Pontiac cut back into its own lane. In the car was a crush of young Indians who gave him various obscene high signs.
He kept driving. He thought of Madeline.
Two miles north of the Hartmeir place he let the Mercedes coast to a stop. Across the road, on the next quarter section, was an irrigation rig. That was new here. He stepped from the car and crossed the ditch filled with black topsoil blown from the field. The northwest winds. Helmer permitted no fall plowing on his land. His ditches remained empty, and in the spring ran water.
Guy walked underneath the irrigator pipe. Bright aluminum and leg-thick, the pipe stood higher overhead than he could reach. Supported by aluminum stilts on rubber wheels, the pipe stretched back to the center of the field to its pivot, the deep well.
As his eyes followed the irrigator’s pipe, far across the field he saw a brown sedan moving slowl
y on the next mile’s road. He watched its progress for a moment, then looked closer at the irrigator. Lodged in the rubber tread of a big tire were a dozen small potatoes.
Guy kicked one free. He held the frozen potato in his palm. They were new here. Here and there in the frozen furrows he could see potato vines. When he stood the brown sedan turned on the road that would bring it past the Mercedes, so he walked back to his car and drove on. At the next corner he looked down the field and saw another and another irrigator. They looked like giant praying mantises walking the fields.
Suddenly the brown sedan, with a red light flashing, was close behind.
Guy pulled over and looked in the rearview mirror. Backward letters read, “Deputy Sheriff, Becker County.” The deputy, in mirrored sunglasses and a brown fur hat with a gold star on it, walked forward. Guy turned to get out and found himself staring into the black eye of a pistol barrel.
“Out and spread,” the deputy said.
Guy eased open his door and got out.
“I’ll be damned,” the deputy said, “It’s Pehrsson. Guy Pehrsson.”
Guy stared down at the man’s brass nameplate. Wicks. Bradley Wicks. Wicks had been two or three years ahead of Guy in high school.
“Brad.” Guy nodded. They did not shake hands. Wicks holstered the pistol and took off his sunglasses. He had the same small gray eyes, the dark beard shadow. But his jaw. His nose. His cheekbones. There was something different about his face.
Guy glanced down at the pistol butt. “Pretty big stick you’re carrying there,” he said. The pistol was either a .44 or a .357 Magnum.
“Indians got thick skin,” Wicks said, rapping the pistol butt with his knuckles. He grinned. He had new, perfectly straight teeth. Suddenly Guy understood that Wicks must have suffered some great injury, that his face had been rebuilt. “Joke, right?” Wicks added.
“Right,” Guy said.
“So what are you doing around these parts?” Wicks asked, his grin thinning.
“Visiting,” Guy answered, turning his head south toward Helmer’s farm.