Red Earth White Earth Read online

  A half hour later Madeline returned in the dusty family Cutlass. She came across the yard toward the combine carrying the yellow and orange blouse by its belt. Her face was red, her eyes angry. “Martin, you’d better get up to visit the Hartmeirs first chance you get,” she said. “They’ll be needing some help.”

  “Nope, don’t need no hep,” Jewell Hartmeir said. He was a short, lean man whose bib overalls and red shirt hung on him like scarecrow clothes. His gray engineer’s cap was pulled low across his eyes and had soaked itself full of oil from his forehead and black hair. He spit a long brown spurt of tobacco juice into the dust. His face was tanned leathery brown. Squinted half shut, his small blue eyes were double-lidded like the eyes of the black bull snake Guy and Tom had once killed by the chicken coop. Guy stayed on the far, safe side of his father.

  Martin and Jewell Hartmeir stood leaning against the corral fence. In the Hartmeirs’ yard there was a battered pink and purple trailer house. A flatbed truck. An old Massey-Ferguson tractor whose red paint had peeled mostly to gray metal. A large, bright yellow pile of lumber that shimmered away a pitchy smell in the sunlight. In the background were the burned wrecks of the old Abrahamson buildings. Jewell Hartmeir and Martin watched the four Hartmeir boys put up the rafters of the new barn. Mary Ann, too, was high up on the barn, walking barefooted along the rim. Below her was a pile of charred, pointed timbers left over from the Abrahamson barn.

  Guy watched her walk. She did not hold on to anything.

  “Throw down that square, you’re not making a goddamn church,” Jewell Hartmeir called to one of his sons. The biggest of the boys, the one with the thickest, reddest arms, slowly stood up. He threw the carpenter’s square. It came turning and whistling across the corral toward the fence. Martin jerked Guy behind him. The flat metal square kicked up a cloud of dust a foot from Jewell Hartmeir’s boots. Hartmeir had not moved.

  “You want to hit me you got to aim better than that,” Jewell Hartmeir called back. He spit again.

  Martin glanced down at Guy, then back to the barn. He stared at the rafters. “What sort of pitch you got on that roof?”

  “Just enough slope to run water,” Hartmeir said. “That’s all you need on a roof.”

  Martin was silent. Then he said, “Looks kind of flat for this country. We get a lot of snow up here in the winter.”

  Hartmeir glanced across to Martin. His blue eyes widened for a moment, then squinted narrow again. “Snow’s light,” he said. He looked back to his boys.

  “Except sometimes two feet of snow comes all at once,” Martin said.

  “Light as a snowflake is what people say, don’t they?” Hartmeir said. “Snow’s like cotton, I’d guess. I worked in cotton, I kin work in snow. Bub—what you sittin’ down for, you think it’s suppertime or something!” he shouted.

  “I’m empty on nails,” Bub said. He spit a brown streamer over the edge.

  “So go down and get yerself some for Christ’s sakes,” Hartmeir said.

  “It’s near two o’clock,” Bub said.

  “Two o’clock?” the other three brothers said at the same time. They stood up and let their hammers fall through the rafters to the ground.

  “Two o’clock! Julia!” Mary Ann shrieked. She began to walk quickly—too quickly—along the narrow rim to the ladder. She slipped, pitched forward, but caught a rafter tail as she fell over the side. Martin sucked in his breath. Mary Ann slowly pulled herself up and walked on to the ladder as quickly as before.

  “Tough little woman,” Hartmeir said, grinning. “She’s smarter than all them big boys put together.”

  Mary Ann raced across the yard toward the trailer. The boys followed her, walking faster and faster as they neared the door, four big geese pulled along by a fluttering mallard. “Their goddamn TV show,” Jewell said, checking his pocket watch. “If I wouldn’t let ’em watch it, they wouldn’t turn a lick of work around here.”

  Martin was silent for a moment. Mary Ann disappeared into the trailer. “Your girl,” he said. “She’s paid us a couple of visits.”

  “That won’t happen again,” Hartmeir said quickly. “We don’t bother nobody and don’t like to be bothered in return.”

  Martin nodded. He glanced back to the barn, to the rafters and the rim from which Mary Ann had slipped.

  “That wasn’t what I meant,” Guy’s father said. “I was thinking that she’s almost big enough to work out. My wife says she’d take some work, like canning and garden and housework, from the girl in return for some beef and milk.”

  Guy stared at his father. His mother had never said anything like that.

  Jewell Hartmeir stared across at the empty shell of the barn and spit again. “Doesn’t sound bad. But I’d have to think about it,” he said. He checked his watch and again looked toward the trailer.

  The next morning Mary Ann Hartmeir knocked on the door at 5:00 AM. She was wearing gloves and a scarf tied low over her head. “I’m here to work,” she said.

  “We don’t start until eight o’clock,” Madeline said, tying her bath robe. “Until then you lie here on the couch.” She pulled off Mary Ann’s gloves and scarf, pressed her down, and covered her with an afghan blanket.

  “And you get back to bed, too, Guy,” she said.

  When Guy woke up at six-thirty, Mary Ann was still sleeping. She was at the breakfast table when he came in from chores at eight. Later in the morning Tom rode into the yard on his bike. Mary Ann and Guy and Tom played together all that day and every day for the rest of the week.

  On Friday afternoon Madeline and Tom and Guy drove Mary Ann home. Madeline delivered to Jewell Hartmeir a gallon of milk, some packages of frozen beef from the freezer, plus a sack of fresh tomatoes and string beans from the garden.

  Jewell Hartmeir looked into the box and then at Mary Ann. He squinted. “She work that much?” he said.

  “Could hardly have gotten along without her,” Madeline said softly. “Like to have her again next week.”

  “We’ll see,” Hartmeir said, reaching for the box of food.

  Next week Mary Ann came again, and every week for the rest of the summer. She and Guy and Tom played together. They showed her the hayloft, the attic of the granary, all their forts. By the end of August and the approach of school, it was like she had always been there.

  4

  That September the teachers in Flatwater put Mary Ann in first grade. Her first day she beat up three smaller boys who laughed at her size, then bit the wrist of the teacher, who dragged her off to the principal’s office.

  “Wasn’t my goddamn fault they put me in the wrong class,” she said. She and Guy and Tom sat together on the school bus. She spoke with her teeth clenched together and moved only her lips. “Dumb fuckers. I know how to do things they never heard of.”

  “What happens tomorrow?” Guy asked.

  She shrugged.

  Guy saw a folded note in her hand.

  “What’s that?” Tom said.

  She looked down at the note. She wadded it in her palm. “From the principal. Supposed to give it to my daddy.” She stood up and began to open the bus window.

  “Wait,” Guy cried. He grabbed her arm.

  She struggled to throw the note out the window.

  Tom grabbed it and leaned away to read it.

  “It says . . . you can’t read,” he said. He and Guy turned to stare at Mary Ann, who looked down. “Shit, that’s why they put you in first grade. You can’t read.”

  Two older girls in the next seat, fifth-graders, glanced around at Mary Ann, then began to giggle. In an instant Mary Ann had one girl’s ponytail pulled back and her arm around the girl’s white throat. The girl’s eyes bulged and she gasped for air; her friend flailed at Mary Ann with a notebook. The bus driver was slowing onto the shoulder of the highway before Guy and Tom s
eparated the three girls. With the driver still glaring at them in the overhead mirror, the bus slowly picked up speed again.

  “What the hell’s the matter with you?” Tom hissed at Mary Ann. “You can’t go around beating up on people every minute of your life.”

  “Why not? My daddy taught me how to fight back.”

  She glared at the two bigger girls in the next seat.

  Guy stared at Tom and shook his head. “You don’t always have to punch somebody,” Guy said.

  “Why not?” she said stubbornly. “My daddy says you turn the other cheek you just get your head knocked off.”

  “Because you’re going to stay in first grade the rest of your life, that’s why. You’ll be the only full-grown person in first grade,” Guy said.

  “You’ll get full-grown and your desk will stick on you,” Tom added. “You’ll have to walk around the rest of your life with this little desk that looks like it’s sticking out your ass.”

  “Shit,” she said. She grinned, but then stopped and turned to look out the window. Several telephone poles passed. Finally she said, “If I stop punching kids, I still can’t read.” When she turned back the late-afternoon sunlight gleamed in her eyes. Guy saw her blink back tears.

  He and Tom stared at each other. “Shit, anybody can read,” Tom said.

  “We’ll teach you,” Guy said.

  “Cinch,” Tom said. “Two weeks, max.”

  The next Saturday Mary Ann came to school in the hayloft. Tiny shafts of sunlight fell from the barn’s roof and made yellow eyes on the hay-bales-and-boards school desks. Guy and Tom had also made a plank-walk across a deep hole in the layers of bales.

  “Any punching, spitting, shitting, pissing, or nose-picking during class, you walk the plank over the alligator pond, is that clear, class?” Tom called out as Mary Ann climbed the bales toward the classroom.

  “One problem, teach,” Guy said. “We’ve got an alligator plank but nothing to read.”

  “Shit,” Tom said. He scratched his head.

  “I brought some magazines,” Mary Ann said. She emptied a sack of them onto the desk.

  “Jesus!” Tom said.

  “Holy smokes,” Guy said.

  “They’re Bub’s,” she explained. “They was the only magazines in the house.”

  Guy stared. The magazines gleamed in the sunlight. On the covers were women bent over being fucked or women with their eyes closed and men’s cocks in their mouths.

  “There’s words later on,” she said. “I know because Bub reads them to himself sometimes.”

  “Whoee!” Tom shouted.

  “Shhh!” Guy hissed, stepping over to look down the ladder to the barn below. No one below but cows. He began to page through the magazines. He paused to stare at a black man who had a cock as big as a horse’s and had it halfway inside a skinny, blond-haired woman who had her face all scrunched up. White pussy.

  “Listen to this,” Tom whispered. “Harry slid the tip of his throbbing, bulb-bulb . . .”

  Guy looked where Tom’s finger had stopped. “Bulbous. That means shaped like a light bulb.”

  “Bulbous banana into the hungry red mouth of her cherrypot as its waiting lips eng . . .”

  “Engulfed,” Guy said. “Must mean gulp. Like in don’t gulp your food.”

  “Engulfed its spurting white . . .”

  “J. Is. M.,” Guy said slowly. The word was new to him.

  “Hey—you said you could read!” Mary Ann said suddenly.

  “We can,” Tom said quickly.

  “Sometimes you run across a word you never seen before,” Guy said. “It just takes a second to figure it out. Jis. M. Jism. Jism,” he said. “You see, that’s how you read. You sound out the letters.”

  “I’m tired, I want to go home,” Mary Ann said. The up-and-down shafts of sunlight now slanted across the loft.

  “Three more sentences,” Guy said.

  “Five,” Tom said. They sat bent over the magazine with Mary Ann pressed between them.

  “Okay, four,” Guy said.

  Mary Ann sighed and began again. “The tick . . .”

  “Th sound,” Tom said impatiently.

  “The thick, wit . . .”

  “Silent e,” Guy said.

  “White,” she murmured.

  “Good, keep going,” Guy said.

  “The thick, white rod of his coke . . .”

  “I don’t see no silent e,” Tom said.

  “. . . of his cock slid . . .”

  “Great,” Guy said. Mary Ann smiled and leaned closer to the words.

  “Into her wet muffin.”

  “Not muffin,” Guy and Tom both shouted. “There’s no f ’s in that word.”

  Mary Ann frowned. She stared down. “Pussy,” she said.

  “You’re guessing,” Guy said.

  “I’ll never get it,” Mary said, pushing away the magazine.

  “Hey—get this sentence right and we’ll let you go home!” Guy said.

  “Miss it, the alligator plank,” Tom said.

  Mary Ann glanced behind her at the bales. The hole was in shadow. She stared again at the sentence and scrunched up her forehead. “The thick white rod of his cock slid into her waiting . . . mouth!” she finished. “Mouth!”

  “Yea, hooray,” Guy and Tom shouted. “You were reading! That was reading!”

  “Really?” Mary Ann said. Her eyes were more open and shining than Guy had ever seen them.

  5

  Two days before Christmas came the first real snow. It snowed all day. All night. Until noon the next day. Thick, wet snow that, in three claps between mittens, made solid snowballs. When their arms hurt from throwing, Guy and Tom and Mary Ann rolled up bigger white balls for snowmen. The weight of the larger balls drew up grass and leaves from the lawn and left a map of brown trails across the white yard. On the farm buildings the snow dulled the ridges of the rooflines, lay drooped over their eaves like bread dough left rising too long in a bowl.

  That afternoon Guy’s father paid Jewell Hartmeir a visit. He brought with him the long-handled, aluminum snow rake.

  “Maybe one of the boys can try that out tomorrow,” Jewell Hartmeir said, leaning the snow rake against the barn.

  Martin looked up at the Hartmeir barn roof. “I wouldn’t wait,” Martin said.

  “I would,” Jewell Hartmeir said. He glanced up briefly, then spit brown on the snow.

  “Get in the damn truck,” Martin said suddenly to Guy. Guy obeyed. On the way home Martin swore again, then said, “At least nobody can blame me.”

  That afternoon, on his way to the barn for chores, Guy heard on the faint north wind cattle bawling. They didn’t stop.

  Martin and Helmer and three neighbor men worked with chain saws and a pistol. Cattle bawled and voices screamed from underneath the twisted tin and broken lumber of the Hartmeir barn. With the chain saws the men cut through metal and wood. Behind the men and saws, Guy and Tom threw aside the wreckage. Whenever a chain saw stopped, the pistol whumped as Martin shot another cow.

  The men found Jewell Hartmeir pinned, cursing, in the gutter. He was okay but for a long scrape down his face. Martin cut him free and he stood up dripping manure and shouting for his boys.

  Billy and Bob they found trapped alongside a big, dead Holstein whose broken back supported a rafter. Martin cut a jagged door for them and they scrambled free. Chuck, the youngest, they pulled crying from beneath some timbers. The foot on his right leg was turned backward.

  “Bub—Bub! Where’s Bub? Bub and Mary Ann!” Jewell shouted.

  There was silence.

  “Bub, answer me, goddamn you!” his father shouted.

  “That was him screamin’ earlier,” Chuck blubbered, his chest heaving. �
��Bub was further on but he ain’t screamin’ no more. Mary Ann neither.”

  Toward the middle, flattest part of the barn, the chain saw blades dulled from the tin and nails and did not cut as much as smoke. The men threw the saws aside into the snow, where they hissed and sank from sight. Then the men worked forward with axes and handsaws and hydraulic jacks.

  “Need somebody small,” Martin shouted back, out of sight beneath the tin and boards. “And a flashlight.”

  Jewell Hartmeir looked at his boys, then to Guy and Tom.

  “I’ll go,” they both said at the same time.

  “Git them a light,” Jewell shouted.

  Guy crawled forward to his father. Tom was right behind. “What are you doing in here?” Martin said.

  “We’re smallest,” Guy said.

  His father stared. Then he said, “Okay. Long as I can see you both, and you come out when I say.”

  Guy and Tom nodded. They crawled forward. In the darkness and dim beam of the light, cattle still bawled and groaned. The wood and metal around Guy thudded and quivered from their kicking.

  “Mary Ann—Mary Ann!” first Guy and then Tom called. There was no answer.

  Guy worked his way forward on his belly until his flashlight shone on boots. Two sideways soles of boots. A cow’s head lay alongside the boots and its eyes reflected green. As the flashlight struck its eyes the cow flailed its head and struggled to get free. Every time the cow kicked, the boots jerked.

  “Pistol, we need the pistol,” Guy called.

  “Pistol,” Tom called back to Martin.

  Then Guy felt the pistol butt tap on his boot. He took the heavy gun in his right hand, steadied it with his left, then aimed it down the beam of his light to a spot between the green eyes of the cow. He closed his eyes and squeezed the trigger. In the small space around him the pistol’s noise crashed like a giant fist on all sides of his head. Afterward he felt the rapid death kick of the cow. In a minute the kicking slowed. When Guy’s hearing returned, the cow’s slow kicking sounded like cows’ hooves running through mud. Blood bubbles popped from the cow’s nose. When the cow finally lay still Guy crawled over its neck and shone the light forward. Bub lay pinned with his head against the cow’s hooves. His face had been kicked until it looked like some small animal run over again and again by cars on the highway until you couldn’t tell what it was. “Jesus,” Tom whispered from beside him.