Now at nineteen, Cash worked year-round as a farm laborer. At the end of each growing season, she drove grain truck from sunup to sundown.
This morning she drove north on Highway 75 on the Minnesota side of the river. One by one, she passed through the small sleeping towns of Kragnes, Georgetown, Perley and Hendrum, nothing moving anywhere except for the occasional pickup truck.
When she got to Halstad, she turned toward the rising sun, away from the river. She parked at the Anderson farm, climbed into a Massey Ferguson grain truck and headed to the farm’s north forty. She spent the day driving back and forth alongside the combine as it poured wheat into the bed of her truck. When it was full, she drove back to the Anderson farm to unload. The truck creaked and groaned as she levered the bed to dump the grain, then stood guard, watching for overflow. The grain flowed with a thick, soft swoosh into the mouth of the auger, feeding the grain up into a steel bin. The noise from the auger motor overpowered any other sound on the farmstead.
At noon she ate lunch in the shade of the truck. She chased down a tuna sandwich with coffee from her red thermos, picking wheat chaff off the bread before taking a bite. For dessert, Anderson gave her a mason jar of homemade lemonade and a chocolate chip cookie his daughter had made for her 4-H project. And then it was back to work.
At twilight she got into her Ranchero and cruised through Halstad on her way south, revisiting the towns of the morning. Cars were parked headfirst in front of the liquor stores or bars in each town. Trucks were lined up at the grain elevators waiting to be weighed. Street lights popped on.
Cash drove on through Moorhead and crossed the river into Fargo. She ran up the stairs to her apartment, threw her work clothes into a pile on the floor and pulled on some cleaner clothes from the stack on the chair, heading back down the stairs and over to the Casbah.
The joint was full. Someone had stuffed quarters into the jukebox and a couple of drunks were Walking After Midnight with Patsy Cline. Cash ordered a couple Buds and put her quarters on the table. She played till closing time, losing track of the number of games won and bottles drunk. Some farmer dude grabbed her around the waist and slow danced while stroking her long hair, murmuring ah baby in her ear.
Jim showed up right at closing. Cash figured he had put the wife to bed, maybe taken her to a movie in Moorhead. She never asked about his wife although rumor had it she had been head cheerleader back in high school. Cash also knew he hadn’t been drafted because his older brothers were already serving. As the youngest brother, he had gotten a deferment to stay on the farm. Now Jim was at the Casbah for his Cash fix. Cash obliged and once again kicked him out in the wee hours of the morning.
Saturday Cash woke up at sunrise. Years of getting up at five to feed chickens, water dogs, milk cows and cook breakfasts was a habit more ingrained than the hangover from the alcohol she drank each night. Cash swung out of bed and pulled on the jeans she’d dropped on the floor the night before. She grabbed her shirt off the chair by the bedside and buttoned it up.
She needed coffee. She had a tin coffeepot like she had seen in the cowboy movies. She liked that she could dump in a handful of Folgers, put the whole thing on the hotplate. By the time she’d tossed water over her face and brushed her teeth in the cracked porcelain sink in the small bathroom, the coffee would be boiling. She would shut the hotplate off so the grounds would settle. The coffee could cool a bit while she brushed out her hair.
While Cash didn’t pay much attention to her looks, all the guys in the bar raved about her hair. It hung below her waist. In one foster home, they had chopped it off so that she had looked like a boy all that year. Even now she shopped in the boys’ section at JCPenny because boys’ clothes were cheaper than girls’ and the boys’ jeans fit her skinny hips better than the ones in the women’s or girls’ department. But the humiliation of having her head shaved stuck with her. Her one vanity was her long, dark brown hair.
Cash turned on the radio and sat down at the small table in her makeshift kitchen to drink her morning coffee. The window overlooked the Northern Pacific Railroad tracks. If she leaned a little forward and to the left, she supposed she could catch a glimpse of the corner of the Casbah. But her attention was caught by the radio announcer talking about a body that was found in a stubble-field thirty miles north of the FM area off Highway 75.
The announcer was saying that Sheriff Wheaton had been sent out to check on a suspicious pile of rags in the middle of the field and found a body.
Cash jumped up and pulled on the cleanest dirty socks she could find and put on her tennis shoes. She poured the remainder of the coffee into her Thermos and hooked her keys on the little finger of the hand that carried a white cup. Within five minutes she was on Highway 75 headed north, back on the Minnesota side of the Red.
Thirty minutes later Cash leaned against her mud-spattered Ranchero and watched Wheaton talk with two men. All three stared down at the flattened stubble. A body lay there, his head facing towards the river, away from Cash. Except for their black suits and Wheaton’s sheriff’s uniform, they could have been any three men discussing next year’s corn crop, the price of wheat on the Minneapolis Grain Exchange or the odds that the Sox might take the World Series.
Cash reached into the pocket of her jacket for a crumpled pack of Marlboros. She tapped one out and put it to her mouth, fished in her jeans pocket for a book of matches. With a practiced left-hand move, she lit it one-handed by bending a match over the back of the matchbook. It was a trick she’d learned from one of the vets returning from Viet Nam. In a drinking binge at the end of last summer, they had sat drinking out in a cornfield. He had shown her the one-handed match trick. You need it in the jungle, he said, so you can keep your other hand on your rifle at all times. “Of course, there are times when you are out on patrol and you just don’t light up at all ’cause the tip of a lit cigarette lets the gooks know exactly where your head is.”
Cash had practiced the one-handed trick until she got it down, suffering small black sulphur burns on her thumb before she got the hang of it. That soldier had re-upped as soon as he could. He had come into the Casbah for one last hangover before shipping out. Said he just couldn’t make it out here in the real world. He was going back until the war was over or they shipped him home in a bag. Sometimes Cash thought about him and wondered where he was, other times she just didn’t want to know.
She exhaled the smoke upward where it joined lazy fall clouds—fat like cotton candy—drifting slowly across the sunlit August sky.
The field where the men stood edged up to the Red River tree line. Cash reckoned that this close to the river it was probably feedlot corn a farmer grew, silage to feed his animals over the winter—not the cash crops of the larger acreage fields one or two miles away.
Cash put her left heel up on the Ranchero’s front bumper. She rested back on the hood, warmed by the late summer sun, wondering if the body in the field was cold or if the sun was warming him too. She couldn’t tell much of what had happened to him. She assumed it wasn’t a natural death or Wheaton wouldn’t be here and neither would the two guys dressed in suits. Around here, men only wore suits for church or if they worked at the bank.
One of the suits bent over and lifted the dead man’s left shoulder. Cash saw then the man was Indian. Wheaton glanced her way.
When she first pulled up, he had acknowledged Cash’s presence with an imperceptible nod of his head, had made a subtle hand gesture that she read as don’t come closer. She had gotten out of her truck, leaned against the front, watching.
She and Wheaton had known each other a long time. Back when she was three, her mother had rolled the car—with her three kids in it—in the big ditch north of town. All Cash remembered of that roller coaster ride was her brother and sister landing on top of her. Many times, come to think of it.
Wheaton had set Cash down on the long wooden bench in the waiting room of the jail. He went back out to the car and carried her mother in, even though her mother
had walked up out of the ditch and seemed perfectly coherent and rational when she explained to Wheaton that all she had done was swerve to miss a skunk. But then she must have passed out.
Wheaton laid her down in one of the cells without locking the barred door. Cash watched him walk farther back into the jail and return with a grey army blanket and a pillow. Talking more to himself than to the little girl on the wooden bench in his jail in the dark of night, he muttered, “You’ll have to sleep out here. I’m not putting no two-year-old in a cell, even though there’s a bed in there. You don’t need that memory haunting you. There, it’s a little hard but, hey, you have to use the bathroom or anything?”
Cash shook her head no. She thought it best she just stay put. And she didn’t tell him she was three not two.
She could hear her mom breathing. She lay down on the bench. It was hard. And the wool blanket was scratchy. But even at three, she knew it was best not to talk or complain.
Her brother and sister were at the county hospital, but the hospital wouldn’t keep Cash because nothing appeared to be wrong with her. The nurses said the two older ones wouldn’t be going to school the rest of the week and that the youngest was best kept with her mother. Wheaton had tried to argue with them. But maybe having to care for three children, two of them hurt—and a drunk mother—had made him give in to the hospital staff.
Cash had no memory of her first morning waking up in jail. And no memory of what happened to her mom. Or her brother and sister, for that matter.
After that night came a succession of white foster homes, most of which she chose not to think too much about or remember. Once she learned to drive truck, she had been working any and all farm labor jobs anyone would hire her for.
And for whatever reason, she and Wheaton had developed a bond, he the county cop and she the county’s lost child. He was the one who showed up for her track meets at school. Bought her a wool sweater each Christmas. She didn’t have the heart to tell him the wool made her skin itch, probably because it reminded her of sleeping in his jail house.
He brought a second-hand bike to one of the homes for her. She rode that bike until the tires were threadbare. When the county moved her, the family kept the bike, like they kept all good things. Anything new or worth something always stayed with the foster family. Cash left the homes with a paper bag or a small cardboard box of the shabby clothes she had arrived in. She missed that bike. She didn’t know why Wheaton looked out for her. Didn’t ask. He didn’t say. It worked for both of them.
When she first arrived at the field, there had been an exchange of words among the three men with frequent scowls her way. Whatever Wheaton told them about Cash seemed to assuage their discomfort at having a fourth—actually fifth—person present at what was clearly a crime scene.
Their conversation finished, the two men shook Wheaton’s hand and walked to their car, a black Olds. As they passed Cash, they looked at her but didn’t speak. Cash took a drag of her cigarette and blew the smoke skyward.
Wheaton came over to the truck, kicked her front tire and said, “You might wanna put some air in here.”
Cash nodded her head toward the car pulling away. “Who’s that?”
“Federal folks, they said.”
“What are they doing here?”
“The guy laying over there, I think, is from Red Lake. Federal jurisdiction.”
“How’d he die?”
“Stabbed.”
“Stabbed?”
“Yep. Looks like down over here. Come on.” Wheaton walked back six yards on the gravel road. He knelt down, pointing with his right hand. “You can still see the blood. I think they must have stopped here to take a piss, and this guy got stabbed. The last time these ditches were mowed was last month some time. See how the grass is rolled down?”
“Maybe they just shoved him outta the car.”
“Maybe.”
“How’d he end up in the field then?”
“Guess they carried him.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who is it?”
“Don’t know for sure. No ID on him. He had a Red Lake baseball program folded up in his back pocket. The feds said they were heading back north to talk to some folks up there. But them Red Lake folks keep to themselves. Doubt anyone will talk to them. The feds being white and all.” Wheaton looked at her. “Not like they would talk to one of their own anyways.”
Cash kicked a clump of dirt and smashed down another one, feeling the hard ball of dirt smush to silken silt. “Tell me more about this guy here. Can I go look?” she asked, already cutting down through the ditch and across the field to where the man lay. She walked in the dirt between the rows of corn stubble, not wanting to get her ankles scratched up, her shoes making soft impressions in the dirt. When she got to the body, she saw the other men’s footprints, including three sets that weren’t Wheaton’s cowboy boots or the suits’ black dress shoes.
The footprints were working men’s shoes.
The dead man wore yellow leather work boots, blue jeans and a blue wool plaid shirt. She knelt down where she could see the cut that had gone through his woolen shirt and into his chest. There were two stab wounds. One on the right, one on the left.
“He was probably stabbed on the right from behind and then again there on the left, whoever was doing it, aiming for the heart.”
“Where’s the knife?”
“That’s what we wondered too. No knife that we’ve found. Other than that, not much to tell. Dead Indian. Looked like he was working. Didn’t smell any alcohol. Fact is, if I had to say anything I would say he must have been driving grain truck. You know how the chaff gets into all the cracks and creases of your clothes. Big guy too. Think whoever did this must have had to surprise him to get him down.”
“I don’t recognize him. But he does look like a Red Laker. Money?”
“None on him.”
“Old man Fjelstad pays by check for folks working his fields.” She paused. “Probably cause it’s his bar in town that’ll cash ’em.”
Wheaton laughed. “Yeah, well,” was all he said.
Cash shielded her eyes from the sun and looked up at Wheaton. He was a bit over six feet tall, sturdy, like maybe in his high school years he had played football but now, at the other end of his forties, he was just sturdy. Where the other Scandinavian farmers around here sported tan lines of white skin under their farmer hats or the back of their necks that wasn’t covered by their shirt collars, Wheaton tended to overall tan. When he took his sheriff’s hat off to wipe his brow, the tan of his face almost matched the top half above his hat line and between his hairline.
He wasn’t as dark as the man lying in the field, but he wasn’t as white as the suits either. Cash often wondered about Wheaton and who his people were, but she had never worked up the courage to ask.
As long as she had known him, he had been the law. She had probably known him longer than she had known anyone in her life, but she really knew nothing about him. Only once had she been to his house. It was after a girls’ out-of-town basketball game, and the school bus had arrived back late into town because of a snowstorm. She was living in a foster home outside of Ada, the county seat where Wheaton worked. The coach had let her into the school to call her foster dad. He was angry because the bus was late, had left instead of waiting for her and wasn’t coming back into town again. Cash didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t walk home in a snowstorm, and the other kids’ parents had already left.
Standing outside, shivering in the cold, Cash didn’t know what to tell her coach who was sitting in his car, engine running, ready to drive the couple of blocks to his own house. When Cash saw Wheaton drive by the school, she was scared enough to just once ask for help. She waved at him. He rolled down his car window. Through chattering teeth, she explained the situation. He opened the passenger door and said, “Get in.”
At his house he had made her hot chocolate. He lit the pilot light of the
gas oven, opened the door and told her to sit in front of it. The heat poured out and warmed her. It was a small house with almost nothing in it. No pictures on the walls. A small stack of plates in the cupboard that she saw when he opened the door to get her a cup for the hot chocolate. There was a well-worn couch in the living room and a small black-and-white TV set on an endtable.
“You married?” she dared to ask.
“Nope. No time,” he’d answered.
She took a long time to drink the milk, not wanting to leave the warmth. She finally set the empty cup down.
“Ready?” he asked.
“I guess.”
On the drive out to the foster family, both of them were quiet. Wheaton said, “You go in and go to your room. I’m gonna have a short word with Mr. Hagen.”
Cash did as she was told. For the rest of the winter, Mr. Hagen always picked her up on time. If Wheaton happened to drive by the school, Mr. Hagen would make a sloppy hand salute and say under his breath, “Yes sir, Chief.” His wife stopped giving her desserts after supper. At the end of basketball season, the county social worker showed up and moved her to another farm in another township.
Cash shook the memories from her head, stood and dusted the dirt off her hands and knee. She looked to the river and the tree line that snaked north. It was the land, this Valley, she felt the closest to. The land had never hurt her or left her. It fed and supported her in ways that humans never had. She heard the cottonwoods sing. Felt the rain coming before the clouds showed themselves. Smelled the snow before it arrived.
The town folks made fun of the farmers who would stand around in the fields, tamping dirt clods down with their work shoes, chewing a strand of straw or ditch grass, scanning the horizon. Town folks thought they were stupid because they didn’t talk much. Cash knew—because she knew—each of them heard the land, felt the rhythm of the seasons. That tamping of dirt clods said how dry the fields were, told them when to pray in church for rain or for god to send the clouds away.
Murder on the Red River Page 2