Red Earth White Earth Read online

  “Tell him . . . we’re okay. We’re doing fine,” Guy said.

  “His address was Minneapolis,” she said.

  “I’ll write,” Guy said, “let me get the street and number.”

  “Just Minneapolis. That was all.”

  Guy was silent.

  “I’m sorry, Guy,” she said.

  Guy thanked her. He turned away.

  “Don’t worry,” she called to him. “That’s what he said.”

  Guy paused. He nodded, then he got into the Chevy. As he turned onto the road, in his mirror he saw Mary LittleWolf standing dark and motionless, framed by the white front of the house.

  School ended. Planting began. Guy worked days and some nights planting oats and corn. Martin tended the cows—the milking, the breeding, the barn cleaning—while Guy plowed and disked and harrowed and planted. Helmer decided those things. It was, after all, his farm.

  Once in the barn Guy overheard his father bring up, again, the subject of an electric gutter cleaner. Every morning and night Helmer drove the little Allis-Chalmers and a manure spreader into the barn, then down the cow’s alley. Guy or Martin, sometimes both, pitched the wagon full of manure. Helmer then drove the dripping spreader directly to a field and let the beaters flail the manure directly onto the earth. In that way nothing was lost.

  “We should be thinking about a barn cleaner,” Martin said. “Guy won’t be around forever. You can’t pitch manure now. A barn cleaner is what we need.”

  From his tractor seat above Martin, Helmer said, “We’d have to go to the bank.”

  “That’s what banks are for,” Martin muttered, pitching another forkful into the spreader.

  “Banks,” Helmer said. “I’ll tell you about banks.”

  “I know, I know, for chrissakes,” Martin whispered under his breath.

  Helmer had lost six hundred dollars and nearly the farm in the 1930s, but he did not tell that story again. Rather he said, “Bankers are parasites. They feed off people who work. Then they try to take what you’ve worked for. They give out money because they want the land. Once you take money from them, then they have you. We don’t want that here. Maybe on other farms. But not on this one.”

  Martin drove his fork hard at the gutter and its tines sparked on the concrete.

  “Besides,” Helmer added. “Manure work is good work for its own sake.”

  “You should get away,” Madeline said to Guy. “Now that planting’s done there’s time. I wrote up to Winnipeg. They haven’t seen you for years. You’ve got the Chevy—go.”

  Guy went. Hank Schroeder took his chores. And Guy left for a two-week trip into Canada.

  He visited Madeline’s family, the LeCouerbrises, near Winnipeg. He visited two aunts, three uncles, several cousins. Then he drove farther north. After the million questions from the LeCouerbrises he enjoyed the silence of the open fields. He drove and listened to Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash on the Nashville Skyline album; on one cut they screwed up the lyrics and sang different words. But it didn’t matter because it was music he could listen to over and over.

  Maybe that’s when music became art. If so, he knew of a few songs that went beyond music. The Beatles’ “Hey, Jude,” particularly the chorus. Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman.” Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” The Bobby Whitlock piano solo on Clapton’s “Layla.” Some of Carlos Santana’s Abraxas album. It happened, too, in classical music like Strauss waltzes. Handel’s “Water Music,” especially the part with the French horns. Much of the Brandenburg Concertos.

  Music that transcended itself and became art was like a merry-go-round. A merry-go-round that you didn’t get to ride—musicians were the riders—but rather that turned around you. It pulled you into the center of it. Once you were inside you forgot where it began and where it ended but you didn’t care and you never got bored. You never got bored because the chorus or the theme kept coming back again and again like a merry-go-round whose horses were freshly painted every time they passed.

  If he had two lives, he would give one over to music. But he didn’t. So he drove and listened to his music and watched the land.

  Once at sundown he came upon a great field of grain in brilliant, blue bloom. The field was so long its far end flowed into the sky. The blue grain matched the color of the air. He could not tell where the grain ended and where the sky began.

  He stopped the Chevy and got out. He walked into the edge of the field, held a spear of the flowering grain in his hand.

  A passing farmer stopped.

  “Flax,” he answered, glancing at the plates on Guy’s Chevy.

  Guy sat on the hood of his car and listened to the “Water Music” and watched the long blue field until the sun set. Before he drove on he dug up a sheaf of the grain in its Canadian soil. He put it in the trunk. The next day he turned back south toward Minnesota.

  When he returned from his trip his mother rushed into the yard to meet him. “Guess what,” she said even before she asked about her family.

  Guy had an interview the next day at the Flatwater John Deere dealership. For a real summer job, his mother said. Business at the dealership was best ever. The mechanics were overworked and needed another helper, farm boys only need apply.

  “How did you hear about that?” Guy asked. He spoke softly because Martin approached from the right, from the barn.

  “I’ve been looking around,” she said. She smiled briefly.

  Guy paused.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have . . . ,” she began.

  “No—I don’t mind,” Guy said. He had thought about working away from the farm. But if town kids worked at the grocery stores and gas stations of Flatwater, farm kids worked summers at home. There was the hay, the grain, the corn, the cattle. Guy thought about Martin and Helmer.

  “Let them hire someone,” she said in a rapid, near-whisper. “They’re going to have to learn to get along without you soon enough. When you’re gone to college—”

  But then Martin was there. It was ten o’clock in the morning and Guy could smell liquor on him. “So how were the Canucks?” he said. Madeline turned away.

  The Flatwater John Deere dealership had shiny new tractors in the front showroom and greasy half-tractors in the rear shop. There Guy punched in at 7:00 each morning along with a half dozen other mechanics’ helpers. All were farm boys. All knew machinery. All wanted to farm. Some, like Guy, were seventeen. Others were twenty-five or more. Some already rented fields and farmed them at night by tractor light. Others worked for their father or an uncle, and waited for land of their own.

  At lunch break the night-farmer boys slept. They slept sprawled across the wooden benches, slept curled in the closed cabs of tractors under repair, or, weather permitting, slept arms-out on the dry lawn behind the shop with clean grease rags over their faces to keep away flies.

  At lunch break the boys who waited to farm sat and talked.

  “So how old’s your old man again?”

  “Fifty-one.”

  “Shit,” one of them said. They shook their heads.

  “Yours?”

  “Fifty-five.”

  “So what are you shittin’ me for?”

  “How ’bout you?”

  “Sixty-eight.”

  “Lucky fucker!”

  They turned to Guy. The new man.

  “Forty-eight,” Guy said.

  “Jesus—I thought I had it bad!” one of them said, and spit.

  “He’s got a grandfather too,” another said.

  “Shit and double shit.” All the boys shook their heads sadly at Guy.

  Guy shrugged.

  “Any health trouble?” one of the older boys asked Guy. “Arthritis? High blood pressure?”

  Guy shook his head no.

  “Old wa
r wounds, machinery accidents?”

  “Nope,” Guy said.

  They thought in silence.

  “Boozer?” someone suddenly asked.

  Guy stared at him in silence. All the others turned to Guy.

  “Hey, that’s something, anyway,” another of the boys said brightly. The rest of the farm boys who waited nodded at Guy with new respect.

  During the noon hour Guy read. He sat in the sunlit front seat of the Chevy listening to Bob Dylan, the Byrds, the Beatles, Strauss, and Handel on the tape deck, and read the Minneapolis Tribune, Time magazine, Sports Illustrated, Argosy, or Field & Stream from the dealership waiting room. Often he drove downtown to the old brick Carnegie Library and ate his lunch on the lawn and read there. He took out novels by Jack London, Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck. One sunny July afternoon The Grapes of Wrath cost him a twelve-dollar speeding ticket on his way back to work and eight dollars in docked pay when he arrived there at 2:30, two hours late.

  Sometimes on his lunch hour he drove down to the swimming beach and sat in the cool shade of the stone changing house and watched the girls. He chewed on clover and thought about them. He missed Mary Ann’s hand jobs. But then he didn’t suppose Kurt Fenske would appreciate him dropping by for a quick one.

  He thought about marriage. He didn’t see where his parents had ever had much fun being married. So why get married?

  About school. There was one year left and it was too late to find another friend like Tom so he would not try. Maybe a girlfriend. He would hold out for someone like Ursula Andress.

  About college. Everyone said go to college. So he wouldn’t, at least for a while.

  About the Vietnam War. It was crazy. He would never go. Helmer had been a conscientious objector during World War I, had put on the uniform but would not carry a gun, and so had spent the war sorting potatoes in a dim army warehouse in Chicago. Helmer was Big Olaf in e. e. cummings’s poem. Guy was always proud of that. But Helmer’s first mistake was in putting on the uniform.

  About rock ’n’ roll. If Elvis was King, Roy Orbison and Eric Clapton and Jim Morrison were Crown Princes; Janis Joplin and Aretha Franklin, Princesses.

  About books and writers. Hemingway left background stuff out of his writing. Faulkner put everything in, and more. If Hemingway sometimes left too much out of his sentences, Faulkner put too much in. So nobody was perfect. He liked them equally. Hemingway made you think. Faulkner made you read.

  About his grandmother, Etta. She was dying of nothing in particular. Time. That was her illness.

  About his grandfather. Helmer would never die. He was bigger than death.

  About death. He imagined it as a falling feeling, like swinging on the big rope across the hayloft and then letting go.

  About flax. Whenever he put new books in the trunk of his Chevy he saw the dried sheaf of flax, its brown Canadian soil. He thought of the long blue field. He wondered if the flowered grain would grow in Becker County. His father and grandfather never grew anything but corn, oats, and alfalfa. Oats sold for $1.60 a bushel, corn for $2.50, alfalfa for ninety cents a bale. Flax, however, sold for $12.00 a bushel. Guy stopped by the Ag. Extension Office in the courthouse. He asked the agent if anyone had grown flax in Becker County. The man said no. He said flax took a certain type of soil which this area did not have, plus cows wouldn’t eat flax anyway. Guy thanked him, and the next day sent a cup of the Canadian dirt and an equal portion of his grandfather’s loam to the University of Minnesota Soil Testing Service. The results came back in a week. The soils were nearly identical. The rest of the summer Guy thought often about the long blue field that ran like a river into the lake of sky.

  About himself. Sometimes, daydreaming over the noon hour, he saw himself from outside his own body. Saw himself from high above looking down on the flat gray square of dealership and the rows of toy green and yellow tractors out front. He saw the tinny and shiny black roof, the chrome fins of his ’57 Chevy. Saw inside the car a long, skinny, blond-haired kid with his hands behind his head staring off into the pale blue crown of the sky. One time, not daydreaming but reading, he turned the page and his eyes fixed not on the words but on the fingers that held the paper. They were scrape-knuckled, oil-stained, the nails chipped from wrenches slipping from greasy nuts. For a moment he thought the fingers belonged to a character in the story. They could not be his own real fingers because this was not his real life.

  About his family. When he was small he never thought much about his parents. They were just there. He had no others for comparison. Being born was somewhat like being thrust into a room already furnished. In that room one’s parents were the floor and ceiling. Occasionally, like Jewell Hartmeir, parents were walls—walls without doors or windows. Friends were the windows; through friends you saw the world. But parents most often were floors and ceiling, vaguely above and beneath one’s life. No one paid them much attention unless they became cracked, or leaked, or were of particular beauty.

  Whenever Guy’s mother came to town for groceries she stopped to see him at work. Sometimes she surprised him, and he saw her for a moment as a person—a woman—and not as his mother. Madeline was short, an inch or so over five feet, and a few pounds overweight, mainly in her legs. She had thick, walnut-brown hair, cut short, and eyebrows the same full, shiny color. Her brown eyes were bright and quick. Always they were on the move, tiny flickering glances cast to the side or beyond. Talking with her, Guy often got the sensation that just moments before she had misplaced something. She wore plain, pastel clothes from Sears and Ward’s, sensible shoes. On Main Street and in the stores she looked like the other women. Close-up, however, the constant movement of her eyes said she was not from this town or any farm nearby. Her full name was Madeline Anne LeCouerbrise and she was born in 1925 in the river town of St. Anne’s, Manitoba.

  Twice a week, usually on Tuesdays and Fridays, Madeline came at the noon hour and brought Guy lunch. Then they drove out to the A&W Drive-In for cold root beer to drink with the chicken sandwiches, dill pickles, and pie. They ate and talked. They always talked more when they were away from the farm, from Martin and Helmer. Sometimes they ate quickly, then went to the greenhouse across the highway from the root-beer stand. There, inside the luminous plastic Quonset, they walked in the close, humid air along the rows of plants and flowers. They pointed out this one and that. Guy’s favorites were rose bushes; Madeline’s, dahlias. They laughed at odd plants, praised others for their grace or beauty. Often Guy walked with his hand loosely on his mother’s shoulder. When he had to return to the shop she always asked what time he would be home, though she knew.

  Once they went to the city park and had a picnic on the grass. She was particularly quiet that day. Guy waited and finally she began to talk, for the first time, about Martin. About how they met. How they had come to be married. The whole story. As she spoke, Guy imagined things his father must have said or done or thought back then.

  ***

  In June of 1942, Martin Pehrsson was twenty. He was an inch under six feet tall, blue-eyed, thin, sandy-haired, with whisker stubble only on his chin. He had one thousand dollars, in tens, buttoned in the chest pocket of his bib overalls and he was driving fast toward Canada. The money and the black Ford pickup belonged to Helmer. Martin was on his way to Winnipeg to buy a combine.

  Not that Minnesota had no combines. The sky was full of them, fluffy round cumulus clouds moving in a slow sweep across the blue field of the sky. However, the steel for real combines had all gone into tanks and planes and battleships for World War II. But war or no war, Helmer believed the best combines were Canadian. For three winters Helmer had studied a pile of combine manuals. He went over each one, marking small penciled notes here and there. He stared through a magnifying glass at the exploded drawings of augers, sieves, pickup reels, and gearboxes. He drew up lists and columns. He wrote down the number of grease fittings, the thickness o
f axles and shafts, the dimensions of the bolts that held down the power takeoff box, the gauge of steel, and, finally, the color of the combine’s metal skin.

  In the end Helmer threw away all the manuals except for the red and yellow combine made in Winnipeg.

  For the first twenty miles of his trip Martin drove the Ford carefully. Helmer’s eyes followed in the dust behind. But once Martin reached the blacktop of the main highway north he brought the Ford up to forty, which Helmer said was about the right speed. Then to forty-five. Then fifty. Checking the button on his money pocket, Martin rolled down the truck windows, threw off his cap, and let the June air splash through the cab.

  No chores. No damn chores for three days. Hank Schroeder was to milk and clean the gutter. Helmer would feed the cows. Martin was free. His first trip out of Minnesota. A business trip. Yes, that’s what it was. He was to buy the red and yellow combine and a trailer to haul it back. Once he returned with the combine, he would pull that old gray dinosaur of a threshing machine down the road to the big hill above No Medicine Lake and let that bastard roll. No more shocking oats. No more pitching bundles. No more crawling inside to cut away wet straw. That was over. And with the new combine they could farm more land. Martin would be the combine operator. For that he would need sunglasses. Yes. The drivers of the big combines out West all wore sunglasses and white dust scarves around their necks. Martin would be combining so much of the day he would have no time for the cows. They could hire someone for that. Anybody could pitch manure and pull tits. But not everybody could operate a combine.

  Of course with the new combine and the additional land, they would soon need another combine. Martin would again make the trip to Winnipeg. They would remember him there. Martin Pehrsson. That young guy from down in Minnesota with all the land. Thousands of acres, they’d say, and he runs the whole show.

  Beside Martin on the seat of the pickup was the wooden egg crate his mother had packed with lunch. Four layers of lunch for the four days. Each layer contained six double sandwiches: two fried-egg sandwiches for breakfast; two chicken sandwiches for dinner; two roast-beef sandwiches for supper, plus an apple and a piece of mincemeat pie. At the bottom of the crate was a block of ice wrapped in an old wool quilt.