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Overview
Widely acclaimed when first published in the eighties, the timeless novel Red Earth, White Earth showcases Will Weaver’s rough ease with language and storytelling, frankly depicting life’s uneven terrain and crooked paths.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780873515559 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Minnesota Historical Society Press |
| Publication date: | 11/15/2006 |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Red Earth, White Earth
By WILL WEAVER
BOREALIS BOOKS
Copyright © 1986 Will WeaverAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87351-555-9
Chapter One
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, Guy 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.
Often they played in the scrap-iron pile beside the machine shed. There they tied worn harrow teeth to sticks and made spears. The rusted iron plates of a field disk were shields. A length of old sewer pipe bolted to a rusted wheelbarrow became a cannon. Discarded grease guns made natural ray guns. From old tractor seats, sheets of tin, and a broken, treadle-powered grindstone, they constructed a space ship complete with a sparking alien death-ray beam.
But most often they played race and chase. They ran among the square buildings until their backs trickled wet with sweat and their skin glowed with heat. They tackled and tagged each other, then ran again. As the summer progressed Tom got to stay a little longer each time he came. That was because Madeline and Mary LittleWolf talked. At first the two mothers stood together for a few minutes on the front steps. Later they sat on the front steps in the shade. Once Guy saw that both of them held glasses of something cold to drink. Toward the end, the hottest part of the summer, the two women went inside the house. Tom's father sat motionless in the Pontiac.
When Tom's mother came out with the eggs, Tom immediately stopped their game and followed her in silence to the car. He never said good-bye. In the Pontiac he sat straight and did not wave as he left. Soon the car shimmered into the dust. Its blue shape wavered, shrank, then disappeared. And Guy was left alone again on the flat, dry lawn among the tall buildings.
Once after the Pontiac had gone Guy was in the house drinking his third glass of ice water. On the table were Madeline's and Mary's glasses, empty but for thin droopy ice cubes and wilty moons of lemon slices. There was a plate of gingersnaps, still warm. Guy took another. That day he was very hungry. He and Tom had played a long time. Then the porch door slammed as his father came in.
"So what have you boys been up to all afternoon?" Martin asked. His father was thin and tall and sandy-haired and stoop-shouldered from the dairy cows. Martin looked at the iced-tea glasses.
"Playing," Guy answered. He was still out of breath.
"Playing. There's work to be done on Saturdays, too, you know."
Guy was silent. He looked at Madeline. His mother was short and brown-haired, not from Minnesota. She began to clear the table.
"You better cut down on that running around," he said. His eyes were on Madeline. On the lemonade glasses. "Those Indians stay longer every time they come."
Madeline turned from the sink to look at Martin. "What do you mean, 'those Indians'?" she asked.
"The family with the black hair and brown eyes, they're Indians, I'd say," Martin said.
"LittleWolf is their name. You know that. Mary and Warren LittleWolf. And Tom."
"Warren," Martin said. "He's the one who never gets out of the car. Wonder why that is?" He laughed once.
"Likely for the same reason you stay in the barn when they're here."
Martin fell silent. A tiny muscle along his jaw began to move. "Mary, eh? Well, that's real friendly. But you better not start that. You shouldn't encourage them."
"Encourage them?"
Martin swung his arm at the plate of cookies, at the two empty glasses. "You do this, they stay longer. Just sell them the eggs. That's all they come for."
"There's nothing wrong with being neighborly," Madeline said.
"They're not neighbors," Martin said.
"I'd say they were," Madeline said immediately. "I enjoy talking to Mary."
"What can you have to talk about?"
Madeline spoke quickly; her words sliced through the air like tiny whips. "We're both women," she said.
Martin turned, slammed the screen door, and was gone.
In two Saturdays the LittleWolfs' car came again. But Guy and Tom had hardly begun their play when Guy noticed his father standing framed in the barn door. He was watching. Tom shouted but Guy missed the ball. It bounced across the driveway and rolled close to the Pontiac. Guy ran after it, then slowed to a walk as he neared the car. For the first time he saw, close-up, Tom's father. He had thick black hair that stood straight up in a long, sharp crew-cut. He had a wide face, small eyes, and his chin jutted forward like a fist. His chin looked large because he had no teeth, and his lips had shrunk back over his gums. From the car came the strong smell of peppermint.
Guy stared. But Warren LittleWolf did not see him. He was staring across the yard at Martin. Martin suddenly stepped through the barn door into daylight and stalked toward the house, where Madeline and Mary LittleWolf had gone inside. As Martin quickly crossed the yard, Tom's father tooted the Pontiac's horn once. Then again. But Martin had reached the front door by then. Guy and Tom turned to watch. From inside the house they heard loud voices. Then Tom's mother came quickly, almost stumbling, down the steps. She walked rapidly across the lawn. Tom ran to join her. This time when the Pontiac pulled away its wheels spun and snarled across the gravel.
Guy stood in the empty yard. A bumblebee droned by. In the windbreak a cicada buzzed. From inside the house he could hear his parents shouting. He heard something crash and break. He saw his father come out of the house backward, then cross the yard to the barn. Guy went to the shade of the red oak and waited. In a few minutes his mother came from the house. She carried a small suitcase, got in their car, and started the engine. She stopped the car by the driveway and the red oak. She got out and kissed him. He could smell iced tea and lemon on her breath. She had been crying too.
"Mommy will be gone for a few days," she whispered. "You can eat with Grandma, okay?"
Guy nodded.
On the sixth day Guy received a postcard from St. Anne's, Manitoba. That was where her family was. On the card was a picture of a river. On the ninth day Guy awoke in the morning to find his mother in the kitchen making scrambled eggs.
She did not speak of her absence. Guy did not ask. It was as if time, turning on the little sprockets of the clock, had jumped its chain, had slipped ahead several days, then caught again. Things went on as usual. Except for one thing.
The LittleWolfs' blue Pontiac did not come again. Every Saturday Guy watched for its blue speck to appear down the road. But only farm pickups, the milk truck, and occasional tractors pulling grain wagons came along. In the garden Guy hoed potatoes. He trimmed and hauled to the chickens the tomato vines and cabbage leaves and carrots that had run to seed. Soon he hardly looked up at the sound of a vehicle on the road. Around him there were only the endless rows of potatoes, peas, and beans.
But once when he was head-down, hacking along with his hoe, thinking of nothing at all, which was the best way to hoe potatoes, he heard a scraping noise. The sound of gravel on tin. He looked up. There, out on the road, spinning in dusty circles on an old blue bicycle, was Tom. Tom! Guy flung aside his hoe and raced from the garden.
Tom would not come into the yard, so they took turns riding and then bucking each other down the road on the bicycle. Later they played in old man Schroeder's windbreak. Among the close, even rows of pine trees, on the red prickly blanket of dead needles, they played cowboys and Indians. They hid from, stalked, and shot pinecones at each other the rest of the afternoon. And never did they speak of their parents.
Chapter Two
On the Fourth of July, an hour before sundown, the rodeo ended in a pink haze. Guy and Tom sat atop the corral fence, faces into the sun. They were eight years old. Guy was nearly a head taller than Tom, his thin neck was sunburned red, and his hair was as white as the pigeons that dipped and fluttered above the grandstand. Tom had no neck; his black hair, shaved short, ended at his shoulders, wide shoulders that promised strong arms and a deep chest.Guy and Tom sat on the edge of their plank perch like two birds near flight. They wanted to watch the cattle jockeys whip the Brahma bulls into the trailers, but they also wanted to be first at the edge of the river for the Big Blast. Already town kids were deserting the corral fence. Already behind them people were filing from the grandstand. Already in the parking lot pickups spun their tires on the gravel and threw plumes of dust into the red sunlight.
The biggest bull, a tatter of rope dragging between its legs, slammed forward into its trailer; Guy and Tom looked at each other. They leaped from their perch.
They had no bicycles, which proved they were not town kids, but they could run. They dodged through the crowd. Their shadows weaved and darted among the walkers as they sped down the crowded, unpaved street. When they reached the asphalt streets of downtown the dust of the fairgrounds fell away. At Main Street the day's heat, trapped by the brick buildings, washed over them like an oven door opening in their faces. The tar was soft underfoot. A block beyond Main Street they smelled water.
At first the river's smell was only a faint coolness in their mouths. Then it flowed thicker over their cheeks and foreheads. In another block, the water scent divided itself into sharper layers of smells. Wet willow wood. Green algae. Somewhere a rotting duck. The faint vinegar and iron smell of the municipal sewage plant downstream.
But they were not first at the edge of the river. Already town kids lined the shore of the Bekaagami River. Tom jerked his head at a big willow tree whose roots snaked into the water. He squatted and made a hand cradle. Guy took a running step, hit Tom's hands with his right foot, and went up like a pole-vaulter. He caught the lowest limb and pulled himself up. Then he reached down for Tom. White hand on brown wrist, brown hand on white, they scrambled up the loose bark to the crown of the tree until the limbs began to bend under their weight. Above the crowd, they could see everything.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Red Earth, White Earth by WILL WEAVER Copyright © 1986 by Will Weaver. Excerpted by permission of BOREALIS BOOKS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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