Читать книгу Red Earth White Earth - Will Weaver - Страница 13

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One day at the end of July in the summer when they were nine, Guy and Tom were digging in against a panzer attack. All around the farm, dust clouds moved up and down the reservation. The Germans were clever. They had disguised their tanks and halftracks as combines.

But Guy and Tom were not fooled. By two o’clock in the afternoon their foxhole was nearly ready. Tom was holding and Guy was nailing down the last boards when Guy realized his hammer was striking from sunlight to shadow. A shadow had crept across the yellow sand and up the plank wall so slowly that neither he nor Tom had thought about it. Guy stopped pounding. They whirled and shaded their eyes as they looked up. Above them was the dark, stubby outline of a kid. One corncob grenade could have finished them, so Guy and Tom scrambled out of the hole.

They stared at the kid. He had short, unevenly sheared blond hair that lay in flat, matted ringlets around his head. His face was melon-round and smudged with dirt. In its center were two blue eyes with black freckles of dirt in their four corners. He wore a gray T-shirt, which long ago had been white, and baggy bib overalls tied at the waist with twine and sheared off just below the knees. The frayed ends of the overalls hung down to brown feet that wore no shoes. Guy stared at the kid’s feet. They looked like saddle leather.

“You a Nazi?” Tom asked.

The kid was silent. Tom and then Guy stepped closer. Then Guy could smell the kid. He smelled like the bottom of a calf pen where the piss settled and burned the yellow straw red and when you turned the straw over with a fork the ammonia smell made your eyes water. Guy jumped sideways, up-breeze.

“Jesus, you stink!” Tom said.

The kid struck forward low like a snake and took Tom down with an ankle tackle. Guy leaped forward and in a moment the three of them were wrestling on the dry grass. But it was like wrestling a skunk. In another moment Guy and Tom were struggling to get away from the smell. They leaped back into their foxhole and pointed their wooden submachine guns at the kid.

The kid stared down at them again. In the silence Guy looked at the kid’s curly hair, his short pants, his T-shirt.

“If you’re not a Nazi, then who are you?” he asked.

In the silence Tom whispered, “Spies can’t speak English.”

“You got no name?” Guy said.

“I gots a name,” the kid said.

“So what is it.”

“Maranhutmire,” the kid said.

“Maranhutmire, what kind of name is that?” Tom said.

The kid picked up a stone.

“What I meant was,” Tom said quickly, “is that your first name or last?”

“Could be both,” Guy whispered. “Like Paladin.”

The kid said his name again, slower this time. Maran. Hurtmire. Maryan.

“Mary Ann!” Guy said suddenly. He looked at Tom. They both stared and their mouths fell open. This was no kid. This was a girl.

Mary Ann Hartmeir was the only daughter, among four brothers, of Jewell Hartmeir. There was no Mrs. Hartmeir. She had died of leu-kemia when Mary Ann, the fourth child, was three years old. When she died, Jewell Hartmeir had moved his children from Georgia up to Minnesota because down south the niggers were taking over. If the weather was cold in Minnesota, at least he didn’t have to work with niggers.

Later Guy would hear this and more as his father and Jewell Hartmeir talked. Right now he and Tom climbed back out of the foxhole.

“So where do you live?” he asked her. He knew most of the kids on this part of the reservation.

The girl jerked her head north.

“On a farm?”

She nodded yes.

“Whose farm?”

“Ourn.”

“Whose farm did it used to be?”

She shrugged. Guy thought of the farms north from his own. There was only one possibility, the old Abrahamson place with the burned-down buildings. The barn had burned, and Abrahamson, who was older than Guy’s grandfather, had gone out west to live with his daughter. When the farm lay empty, the Indians had burned the other buildings.

“Are the buildings all wrecked and burned?”

She nodded.

“What are you going to do for a house?” Tom said.

“We gots a house,” she said. “A wheel house.”

“A wheel house,” Guy said.

Tom began to choke with laughter. “A trailer house, she means. Shit. A wheel house, can you believe it?”

Mary Ann drew back her arm. She still held the stone. Tom jumped behind Guy.

“He didn’t mean nothing,” Guy said quickly. “He’s my brother. My retarded brother.”

Mary Ann’s eyes widened. She leaned over to stare at Tom, who crossed his eyes and let spit roll down the side of his mouth. She snickered. Her teeth were yellowish-green along her gums. Tom hunched over and began to gimp about in a circle and make moaning noises and claw at the air.

She covered her mouth and began to laugh out loud. Guy, too, began to laugh, and soon all three of them were lying on the ground trying to out-retard the other.

Suddenly another shadow fell over them, a larger one this time. Guy looked up to see Martin staring down at him.

“It’s three o’clock. You got calves to feed, remember?”

Guy scrambled up. “Yessir.” Tom stepped quickly away from Martin, went for his bike.

“See ya,” Guy said quickly to Tom and Mary Ann. He followed his father toward the buildings. Halfway there, he realized Mary Ann Hartmeir and her silent bare feet were right behind him.

“Poor little ragamuffin,” Guy’s grandmother, Etta, murmured. “I’ve never seen a little girl that dirty.”

“Shoulda caught her and give her a bath,” Martin said.

It was after supper. They were all working in the garden. Martin swung the scythe and Guy threw the sweet-corn stalks onto the wagon; from the heat the sweet-corn ears had stopped coming but the cows could eat what green leaves were left. Madeline and Etta worked among the tomato plants, clipping back the runners that carried tomatoes too small and green to ripen. Down the garden west, outlined in a gown of orange dust, Helmer worked in the potatoes. His hoe swung him side to side, plant to plant. The even marks of its blade looked like machine tracks in the dry earth. Tank tracks.

“No, you don’t meddle with other people’s children,” Etta said. “The Bible makes that clear.” She named a chapter and verse. Guy’s grandparents read the Bible every night and all day Sunday. His parents didn’t.

Madeline looked up. “Somebody should,” she said. “Somebody should pay that little girl’s parents a visit and see what’s going on.”

“No, I wouldn’t do that either,” Etta said. “You don’t want to barge in on someone. That’s one thing you should never do, is interfere.”

“If that little girl hasn’t had a bath by the next time she comes, I’m going up there,” Madeline said.

“You missed a runner, there,” Etta said, pointing to the ground.

Mary Ann Hartmeir came the next day, unbathed. Guy was walking in from the barn for breakfast when her short shadow fell across his. He jumped.

“Dammit,” he shouted, “you almost made me spill this milk.”

Mary Ann stared at the jar of milk in his hands, at the yellowish layer of cream that had begun to form at the top.

“What’s the matter, you never seen a jar of milk before?”

“Yes,” she said. “I seen milk before.”

“You talk funny,” he said. She talked like she had a Jew’s harp stuck in her throat.

“So do you,” she said.

Guy kept walking. Mary Ann followed him. At the porch door he paused. She was still behind him. “Well, come on in then,” he said.

During breakfast with Mary Ann, Guy’s mother opened all the windows in the kitchen. Martin squinted and leaned away from the table as he ate. During Mary Ann’s eighth pancake Madeline said, “Does your mother know you came for a visit?”

“No. Well, maybe.” Mary Ann looked out the window and frowned briefly. “She’s dead.” She reached for another pancake.

Martin coughed. Madeline’s eyes widened.

“Your father, he’s . . .”

“They’s building a barn. He and my brothers.”

Madeline poured Mary Ann another glass of milk, which she drank empty in a series of gulps.

“Then . . . who cooks?”

“My brothers or me. I can make grits. I can make Jell-O. I can make milk.”

“Make milk?” Martin asked.

“You only needs a can opener and a jar and a quart of water,” she said. “Any damn fool can make milk.”

Martin choked on a bite of pancake and had to take a long swallow of coffee.

“You live on the old Abrahamson place,” Madeline said.

“It’s ourn now,” Mary Ann said immediately. Her eyes flickered across the table to the bacon.

Madeline passed her the plate.

“How long have you been here?” Martin said.

“Since Julia got attacked by the stranger and went into a coma, then she came to and got married to Dr. Les Granger. That long.”

Guy looked to Martin and then Madeline.

“Julia?” Madeline asked.

“Julia. On TV. Today the stranger might come back again.”

“One of the soap operas,” Madeline murmured.

“My dad said the attacker was probably a nigger,” Mary Ann said. “Niggers like white pussy.”

Madeline caught her breath. Martin spit a mouthful of coffee onto his plate. His chest began to heave. “Get out,” Madeline said quickly. “If you think this is funny, get out of the house.”

Guy was puzzled but he began to laugh with his father. “You, too,” Madeline hissed at him. “Out. Now!”

In the yard Martin wiped his eyes and laughed until he gasped for breath. “Niggers . . . white pussy. I never heard a kid talk like that in my life.”

Guy grinned. White pussy. There were some calico pussies in the barn but no white ones. Anyway, he smiled at his father and listened to him laugh. It was a strange sound from his father, half magpie and half crow, a sound he seldom heard.

He helped his father grease the combine. They crawled underneath and lay on the prickly dry grass looking up at the sickle and reel. Guy held the grease nozzle in the places where a small hand worked better than a big one. Every once in a while his father laughed again and Guy joined him.

They were still on the ground, pumping grease into the last fitting, when they saw feet. Madeline’s brown shoes and Mary Ann’s brown ankles came toward them and stopped. Guy stared at Mary Ann’s toes. The nails were clipped short and scraped clean. He could smell soap.

He scrambled from beneath the combine and stood up. Mary Ann was dressed in his mother’s yellow blouse. A belt around her waist made the blouse look like a dress. Her blond hair lay flat and parted in the middle. Her cheeks were rubbed reddish and chapped. Her teeth were pink with blood, and she licked them and spit.

“I’m telling my dad,” she said to Guy’s mom. “You wait what he does to you.”

“You go right ahead and tell him,” Madeline said. Her dress was spotted with water. She carried a paper bag that held Mary Ann’s clothes. Madeline’s brown eyes shone in the morning sunlight and her jaw was set. “Guy, get a jar of milk for Mary Ann and her family. I’m going to pay a neighborly call on the Hartmeirs.”

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.