Red Earth White Earth Read online

  Red Earth, White Earth

  Red Earth,

  White Earth

  WILL WEAVER

  Borealis Books is an imprint of the Minnesota Historical Society Press.

  www.borealisbooks.org

  Copyright © 1986 by Will Weaver. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, write to Borealis Books, 345 Kellogg Blvd. W., St. Paul, MN 55102-1906.

  The Minnesota Historical Society Press is a member of the Association of American University Presses.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1984.

  International Standard Book Numbers

  10-digit: 0-87351-555-2 (paper)

  13-digit: 978-0-87351-555-9 (paper)

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Weaver, Will.

  Red earth, white earth / Will Weaver.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-87351-555-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  ISBN-10: 0-87351-555-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  1. Indians of North America—Fiction.

  2. Land tenure—Fiction.

  3. Minnesota—Fiction.

  I. Title.

  Ebook ISBN: 978-0-87351-693-8

  PS3573.E192R4 2006

  813’.54—dc22

  2006014945

  To Rosalie Nonnemacher Weaver

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I wish to thank the following individuals and institutions for their help: Bemidji State University, for crucial writing time; Jonathon and Wendy Lazear, for believing in books; my sister, Judy Weaver Post, for her typing, proofreading, and general advice; the Minnesota State Arts Board and the McKnight Foundation, for their generous financial support; Stanford University’s John L’Heureux and Nancy Packer, for showing me the short story; my editor, Patricia B. Soliman, and Susan Kamil, for their early and unflagging belief in Red Earth, White Earth; and thanks, finally, to my parents, who always had time.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Zhingwaak’s stories are traditional Ojibwe legends. In some cases I have slightly altered their content and language. Special thanks go to Earl Nyholm, Indian man and maker of books, berry pies, and birch bark canoes, for his help with matters of Ojibwe culture and language.

  Red Earth, White Earth

  Prologue

  The letter came to his office. Its writing, in pencil, wobbled diagonally across the envelope, fell over the edge, came back on a new track. No return address but the postmark was from Minnesota.

  March 15, 1984

  Guy—

  Trouble here. Come home when you can.

  Sincerely,

  Your grandfather, Helmer Pehrsson

  Guy Pehrsson, thirty, tall, fair-haired, with wide, bony shoulders, turned off his phone. He swung around in his chair to look out the high window of his office. His view was east. Across the blue end of San Francisco Bay were the inland foothills. It was March in California. The air was rain-scrubbed and clear. The hills rose up rounded and green. A thin blanket of gray clouds drifted just above their summits. Beyond the hills two thousand miles were Minnesota and the farm Guy had grown up on.

  Guy looked again at the letter. He was surprised his grandfather could write. Twelve years ago Helmer’s stroke had left him as stiff as a garden hose left outside in December. But some parts of him must have thawed.

  Trouble.

  Guy had left Minnesota because of trouble. Trouble with Martin, his father.

  Trouble with the farm, with the bank, with Helmer.

  No trouble with Madeline, his mother. But in the twelve years Guy had been gone she seldom wrote. The first year in California he waited for his mother’s letters. When they did come he was always angry at their brevity. Her notes told of early killing frosts. Of Guy’s classmates killed in farming or trucking accidents. Of the need for rain.

  Guy wrote equally short notes in reply. After a year he stopped writing at all. Madeline’s notes continued to come, usually around Christmas, his birthday, Easter, and other holidays, but Guy did not bother a reply. He had his own life now. A new life. He had nothing to say to his family.

  He left his office early and drove home. His house sat in the foothills above Palo Alto. It was a square, steep-roofed house made of redwood with a glass front. As Guy pulled into his garage, inside the house Kennedy began to bark. Kennedy was his dachshund.

  He fixed Kennedy a bowl of food and poured a glass of cold Chablis for himself. He stood with the wine, reading the letter again. Afterward, he looked out his picture window. The sun shone. Three houses down the hill, alongside the blue kidney bean of her swimming pool, the red-haired lady sunbathed topless while two Mexican men mowed her lawn. She always sunbathed when the gardeners were there.

  Farther down, cars moved silently on Highway 280 toward Sunnyvale and San Jose. Down there beneath the flat lid of city haze was Guy’s company, a white, supermarket-size building. Inside, a hundred men and women rolled carts of green and copper printed circuit boards from station to station. Outside, pink Toyota speedy-delivery trucks came and went like tropical ants as they shuttled Guy’s circuit boards to the receiving doors of the big computer companies in the Bay Area. Doors and mouths. His company spit out circuit boards as fast as it could make them. The large electronic factories of Silicon Valley swallowed them up in great, endless gulps.

  Guy was glad he could not see his company from his house. He did not like to think about it when he was not there. He paid people to do that. Paid them well. Well enough that they took care of everything. Guy usually worked a half day, then drove up to the library at Stanford to read, or else up to the city, San Francisco, to the art galleries or to concerts. California had been good to him.

  He unfolded his grandfather’s letter again. The writing was as faint as sparrow tracks in sand. He ran his fingers across the words. Below on the page was a faint baby’s foot of oil from the side of Helmer’s hand. Guy held the smudged page up to his nose. When he closed his eyes he smelled straw, old wool, cows.

  Come home.

  He looked about his house. He was home. On one wall were his books, the rolling oak library ladder that reached the top shelves.

  On another wall were his paintings. Centered was a wide oil entitled “A Thousand Cows.” The cows were black and white Holsteins, the cow lot was walnut-brown mud with a chartreuse June hillside behind, and every cow had turned its head to look out of the canvas into the room; when he first saw the painting in a gallery, Guy imagined that someone near the cows had fired a gun. Beside the big oil was a print of Friedensreich Hundertwasser’s Der Traum des toten Indianers; its Indian lay dreaming at the bottom of a city.

  On an opposite wall were stereo gear and shelves of records. Alongside the turntable were two albums, B. B. King and Strauss. He put on the Strauss. Some waltzes. Strauss was music to think by.

  He sipped his wine, which outlasted the waltzes by a full hour. When he swallowed the last drop he stood up, called for Kennedy, and began to pack.

  He would not stay long, two weeks at most. He took jeans, sweaters—there would still be snow in Minnesota—heavy socks. Leather gloves. Boots. A down jacket. More.

  Music f
or the trip. He paged through his cassette tapes, picked out Strauss. Haydn. Gershwin. Brubeck. B. B. King. Duane Allman. Boz Scaggs. Lynyrd Skynyrd. The Who. Bob Dylan. Leo Kottke. Emmylou Harris. Buffy Sainte-Marie.

  He took his briefcase. Inside were miscellaneous company papers. From his coffee table he added a couple of books, plus the latest issue of Rose Grower’s Monthly.

  He called Karen, his secretary. He called Mrs. Cadillo, his housekeeper. He called Susan, a dark-eyed, black-haired Ph.D. candidate in literature whom he had met not long ago in the Stanford stacks. He told them he would be gone on business for two weeks.

  He talked longest with Susan. They had dated enough times to sense that each saw large flaws in the other, but flaws not so large as to prevent them from sleeping together when either of them wanted to. Dating a grad student was like making hurried-up popcorn: lots of butter, high heat, instant noise. He thought briefly of seeing her before he left, but the faint puzzlement in her voice told him she was studying. She would finish her degree in the spring. There would be more time. They would see what developed then.

  Last, he inspected his plants on his deck. The knobby jade plant he moved a bit more to shade. His tubs of roses he pushed farther into sunlight. The Simon Bolivar was past prime, and he cut away one of its orange-red blooms and two suckers. His Flaming Peace was only now opening, blood red inside with gold reverses. It would be in full bloom when he returned.

  Fifty hours, a quarter gram of cocaine, and three speeding tickets later—one in Reno, a second near Idaho Falls, the third somewhere in dark North Dakota—Guy drove across the bridge in Fargo and entered Minnesota.

  It was just after midnight. He held his gray Mercedes sedan carefully at ten miles over the speed limit. The oncoming headlights in Moorhead burned behind his eyes. Without slowing, he tipped back his head for more eyedrops, then blinked into the mirror. Oncoming headlights gathered in his white-blond hair, then slid down the long thin slightly bent line of his nose. Closer, the headlights revealed his eyes, small and blue in daylight, squinted and dark tonight. In their eclipse, the headlights illuminated his sharply Nordic features.

  He blinked and rolled his eyes to see if they still worked. For a moment in the dark glass of the mirror he saw his father’s face. He looked away and concentrated on the road.

  On the outskirts of Moorhead he drove beyond the last streetlight. He thought of the Robert Frost poem “Acquainted with the Night,” of the line about outwalking “the furthest city light.”

  His mother had read him that poem once when he was young. Guy did not understand it, but the poem felt lonely. Madeline began to talk about the poem, but then Martin, his father, came in from the barn. She put the book away.

  Beyond Moorhead the darker landscape and the eyedrops soothed his vision. But then the ache behind his eyes slid to his belly. He had not eaten since Salt Lake City. Yet there were only sixty miles left to drive. Then the farm. He could eat there.

  The Strauss tape ended. He had forgotten it was playing. He replaced it with a Buffy Sainte-Marie tape. For a few miles he listened to her high, wailing songs, the Indian drums behind. It was good night music, full of bonfires and torches and dancing, music to stay awake by. But soon he turned that off too. There was always a point on a long trip when one drove beyond music or talk or even sleep. It was the point at which he drove from the present into the past.

  I

  1

  The summer he was five, Guy saw an Indian woman with four feet.

  It was June. The ground was finally dry enough to play ball outside. Guy was in the yard pitching his leather softball against the side of the granary, for in that way he could play catch with himself. A car came from the south on the gravel road. Guy stopped to watch. He watched every car that passed the farm. The car, an old, rusted, blue, four-door Pontiac, slowed at the farm driveway and turned in. The car stopped far away from the house and turned around so that its nose faced the road.

  For a moment nothing happened. In the flat yard, in the bright sunlight, far away a crow cawed. Then the rider’s door of the Pontiac swung open with a squeak. An Indian woman got out. Guy picked up his ball and held it. When he looked again the Indian woman was crossing the yard. She was short but straight and walked on four feet. Guy’s mouth fell open. Beneath the hem of her long skirt were certainly four feet. The feet moved her across the gravel and onto the grass like some weird insect on the ground beneath the yard lamp only on the hottest, most humid evenings of the summer.

  An Indian Bug Woman.

  The Bug Woman came toward Guy. Two of her feet wore shoes like the ones Guy’s mother wore. The other pair was smaller, and wore moccasins. As the Bug Woman came closer, Guy watched the smaller feet. He thought of the little safety wheels on some of the farm machinery; if the big wheels went flat or gave way, the little wheels grabbed and kept things from tipping. Guy blinked against the bright sunlight.

  “Eggs,” the Indian woman said to Guy.

  Eggs. Guy stared. He turned and pointed to the chicken coop beside the barn. There his mother’s flock of Leghorns bobbed within the square, chicken-wire yard.

  “You have extra to sell?” the Indian woman asked.

  Guy nodded and pointed to his mother’s house. There were two houses on the farm. The big, white one was his grandparents’, the smaller, brown one his parents’. The Indian woman nodded. Her eyes were as shiny brown as pocket-polished buckeyes and for a moment they gleamed wider and shinier. Then her bug feet propelled her forward.

  Guy stared for a moment, then let his ball drop and followed the Bug Woman. He circled to one side of her. He saw something more. Not only did the woman have four feet, she had four eyes. Two smaller brown eyes peeped from around her skirt. The lower set of brown eyes could have been woven into the pattern of her skirt, but polka dots did not have black eyebrows. Polka dots did not peep out, then disappear, then peep out again. Guy thought of a chipmunk on a tree. No matter which way Guy or the Indian woman turned, the small brown eyes stayed on the far, safe side of her trunk.

  Guy’s mother brought the eggs out to the front steps. Without speaking, the Indian woman opened the cartons. She ran her short brown fingers across the white crowns of the eggs to inspect them for broken shells. Then she paid two dimes for two dozen, nodded to Madeline, and left. Her extra eyes and extra feet followed her across the yard to the Pontiac where an Indian man waited behind the wheel. Before the Bug Woman was halfway to the car, the Pontiac’s engine started up. The door squeaked and slammed. Then the Pontiac’s wheels crunched on gravel. Guy watched the car head south, then turn west. It continued across the flat plane of the fields and finally disappeared into the hazy green hills of the inner reservation.

  In two weeks the Indian car came again. So did the Bug Woman’s extra eyes and feet. This time Guy spotted on her a crow’s wing of black hair connected to the smaller eyes. Then a brown ear. On each visit Guy saw more parts—a hand, an elbow—of the brown jigsaw puzzle he knew to be some sort of kid.

  Once, toward midsummer, Guy was tossing his ball against the granary when the Indians’ Pontiac came into the yard again. The Indian woman crossed the yard. As Guy leaned low to look for the kid beside her, he took his eye off the bounce of his ball. The ball rolled past him across the lawn toward the road. But the ball did not reach the ditch. The jigsaw puzzle of kid parts leaped away from the woman and formed itself into an Indian boy about Guy’s age. The boy caught up with the ball. Like a red-tailed hawk slamming onto a stray chicken, he nailed it to the ground. Then he whirled and threw the ball to Guy so hard that Guy’s hands stung.

  Guy returned the favor. For a short while they threw the ball at each other as hard as they could fling it. But soon their throws began to arch into higher, softer lofts. The leather of the ball warmed their hands. Each throw, each catch, became a handshake.

  The next day, and for the rest of the summer, Gu
y kept track of how many eggs his mother used. He marked down the eggs she fried for breakfast, the eggs she swirled into cake batter, the eggs she broke over flour to make cookie dough. When he was out for chores he made his mother list any eggs she used. For Guy guessed that the Indian family ate about the same number of eggs as did his own family. In this way he could calculate when the rusty blue Pontiac and the boy named Tom LittleWolf would come again.

  Every other Saturday, Tom came. Those Saturday mornings Guy rushed through his chores. “What’s the hurry?” his father said. “Indians don’t get up before noon.”

  But as soon as he fed the calves and rinsed their pails, Guy raced up to the attic of the granary, to its small window that looked west. There he waited for the tiny cocoon of dust to appear down the road, for the blue beetle to emerge from the center of the dust and grow into a real car. When he was sure it was the Pontiac, Guy raced down the ladder and hid himself in the yard. The Pontiac turned slowly into the driveway. Though there was good shade beneath the red oak tree near to the house, the Pontiac parked as always on the hot gravel by the machine shed. But its blue door squeaked open before its wheels stopped crackling on the gravel, and Tom LittleWolf’s moccasins hit the ground running. Guy broke from his hiding place and their play was on.

  Their games took them through the full measure of a farm’s potential for fun. In the hayloft they hid and sought each other in the green city of bales. On ropes they swung back and forth across the wide loft like trapeze artists beneath the crown of a circus tent. Or they left the hayloft and crept back into the granary. There they crouched behind the grain fanning mill with slingshots loaded, their rubbers stretched and trembling the length of their arms as they waited for mice to peek from their holes in the corners of the bins. Sometimes they left the granary alone all morning and let it flock with sparrows. Later, with a baseball bat, they crept up the narrow stairs to the attic and burst in on the sparrows. In the long, narrow attic with its small windows at either end, the startled sparrows forgot their way down the open stairwell. They fluttered window to window, thudded against the glass. Guy and Tom took turns with the bat. The batter stood in the center alley of the attic. The pitcher used a stick to keep the sparrows flying down the batting lane into the strike zone. When the sparrows had all been belted for home-runs, fouled off, or hidden themselves in the cracks of the rafters, Tom and Guy turned to outside play.