LITMIR.BIZ

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I would say he must have been driving grain truck. You know how the chaff gets into all the cracks and creases of your clothes. Big guy too. Think whoever did this must have had to surprise him to get him down.”

      “I don’t recognize him. But he does look like a Red Laker. Money?”

      “None on him.”

      “Old man Fjelstad pays by check for folks working his fields.” She paused. “Probably cause it’s his bar in town that’ll cash ’em.”

      Wheaton laughed. “Yeah, well,” was all he said.

      Cash shielded her eyes from the sun and looked up at Wheaton. He was a bit over six feet tall, sturdy, like maybe in his high school years he had played football but now, at the other end of his forties, he was just sturdy. Where the other Scandinavian farmers around here sported tan lines of white skin under their farmer hats or the back of their necks that wasn’t covered by their shirt collars, Wheaton tended to overall tan. When he took his sheriff’s hat off to wipe his brow, the tan of his face almost matched the top half above his hat line and between his hairline.

      He wasn’t as dark as the man lying in the field, but he wasn’t as white as the suits either. Cash often wondered about Wheaton and who his people were, but she had never worked up the courage to ask.

      As long as she had known him, he had been the law. She had probably known him longer than she had known anyone in her life, but she really knew nothing about him. Only once had she been to his house. It was after a girls’ out-of-town basketball game, and the school bus had arrived back late into town because of a snowstorm. She was living in a foster home outside of Ada, the county seat where Wheaton worked. The coach had let her into the school to call her foster dad. He was angry because the bus was late, had left instead of waiting for her and wasn’t coming back into town again. Cash didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t walk home in a snowstorm, and the other kids’ parents had already left.

      Standing outside, shivering in the cold, Cash didn’t know what to tell her coach who was sitting in his car, engine running, ready to drive the couple of blocks to his own house. When Cash saw Wheaton drive by the school, she was scared enough to just once ask for help. She waved at him. He rolled down his car window. Through chattering teeth, she explained the situation. He opened the passenger door and said, “Get in.”

      At his house he had made her hot chocolate. He lit the pilot light of the gas oven, opened the door and told her to sit in front of it. The heat poured out and warmed her. It was a small house with almost nothing in it. No pictures on the walls. A small stack of plates in the cupboard that she saw when he opened the door to get her a cup for the hot chocolate. There was a well-worn couch in the living room and a small black-and-white TV set on an endtable.

      “You married?” she dared to ask.

      “Nope. No time,” he’d answered.

      She took a long time to drink the milk, not wanting to leave the warmth. She finally set the empty cup down.

      “Ready?” he asked.

      “I guess.”

      On the drive out to the foster family, both of them were quiet. Wheaton said, “You go in and go to your room. I’m gonna have a short word with Mr. Hagen.”

      Cash did as she was told. For the rest of the winter, Mr. Hagen always picked her up on time. If Wheaton happened to drive by the school, Mr. Hagen would make a sloppy hand salute and say under his breath, “Yes sir, Chief.” His wife stopped giving her desserts after supper. At the end of basketball season, the county social worker showed up and moved her to another farm in another township.

      Cash shook the memories from her head, stood and dusted the dirt off her hands and knee. She looked to the river and the tree line that snaked north. It was the land, this Valley, she felt the closest to. The land had never hurt her or left her. It fed and supported her in ways that humans never had. She heard the cottonwoods sing. Felt the rain coming before the clouds showed themselves. Smelled the snow before it arrived.

      The town folks made fun of the farmers who would stand around in the fields, tamping dirt clods down with their work shoes, chewing a strand of straw or ditch grass, scanning the horizon. Town folks thought they were stupid because they didn’t talk much. Cash knew—because she knew—each of them heard the land, felt the rhythm of the seasons. That tamping of dirt clods said how dry the fields were, told them when to pray in church for rain or for god to send the clouds away.

      Standing in the field next to the man lying lifeless, she surveyed the land around her.

      Her home reservation, White Earth, was forty miles to the east. She knew it was where her mother had been born and raised, except for a short stint in a federal boarding school. It was one of the things she seemed to remember someone telling her about her mom. Red Lake Reservation, where Wheaton seemed to think the man in the field was from, was about 135 miles northwest as the crows fly.

      In 1968, the Valley was a draw for migrant farm workers. In the spring, migrants from Mexico came north to hoe the weeds out of the beet fields. With wives and ten to twelve children per family, they spent the wet spring and muggy summers living in shacks not even the Indians would live in. Their language was fast. And often. A singsong of eeee’s wafted across the furrowed fields from early morning until late into the summer evenings as the smell of freshly made flour tortillas and magical spices drifted from their shacks.

      Theirs was a musical language unlike the absence of language of the Swedes and Norwegians, many who still spoke with the heavy accent of their mother tongue, a deep brogue some were ashamed of and hoped their children would lose. They were a solid people who spoke mainly of rain and broken machinery or the cost of a bushel of wheat on the Grain Exchange. They listened to the farm market report each morning on the radio out of Minneapolis.

      In the late summer and early fall, after the Mexican migrants had headed back south, another shift of farm migrants arrived. When they did speak, they spoke Ojibwe to each other in voices barely heard. A nod of the head could mean come here or are you kidding me? A hand gesture might say come closer or don’t you dare. It was a body language so subtle it left some folks thinking the Indians could read each other’s minds. Which wasn’t unheard of either.

      When talking to whites, they mostly didn’t talk unless a yes or no was required. They had a different way of walking on the earth even in the Red Wing lace-up boots they wore to keep the dirt and wheat chaff off their legs. They came to drive grain trucks up and down the wheat fields, to drive the beet trucks and then wait in line at the Crystal Sugarbeet plant just north of Fargo until the wee hours of the morning to unload before heading back to the fields. They came to load and stack hay bales and to put a hundred pounds of potatoes into gunnysacks.

      Few came with family. Lone men and women off the neighboring reservations drifted into the small farm towns to work paycheck to paycheck. Some went back home on weekends, checks in their back pockets. Others drank away the money in the few bars that would serve Indians.

      Cash vaguely remembered black-haired, dark-skinned aunties who spoke enough Spanish to get into the bars that refused to serve Indians but would serve Mexican migrants. The aunties would come stay for the season, sleeping on blankets rolled out on the floor of the tiny two-room house Cash’s mom had lived in. When Cash thought about it today, she wasn’t exactly sure who the aunties belonged to or how she belonged to them. Everyone older was an auntie or uncle, grandpa or grandma. Anyone close in age was designated cousin status. The workers who came to the Valley stuck together as family regardless of bloodline.

      Cash never knew her father. She had a vague memory of her mom and the aunties talking about him coming back from the Korean War and buying the house in the Valley on his GI benefits. He had seen the world and wanted a life off the reservation. Her mom and aunties had laughed until tears ran their black mascara. Cash still didn’t know what they found so funny about that. She remembered the aunties, their dark hair in pin curls, smoking filterless cigarettes, drinking boiled coffee, laughing about going into town, rolling the eeee’s off their tongues while they practiced saying town names like Hermosillo and

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