Looks like down over here. Come on.” Wheaton walked back six yards on the gravel road. He knelt down, pointing with his right hand. “You can still see the blood. I think they must have stopped here to take a piss, and this guy got stabbed. The last time these ditches were mowed was last month some time. See how the grass is rolled down?”
“Maybe they just shoved him outta the car.”
“Maybe.”
“How’d he end up in the field then?”
“Guess they carried him.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who is it?”
“Don’t know for sure. No ID on him. He had a Red Lake baseball program folded up in his back pocket. The feds said they were heading back north to talk to some folks up there. But them Red Lake folks keep to themselves. Doubt anyone will talk to them. The feds being white and all.” Wheaton looked at her. “Not like they would talk to one of their own anyways.”
Cash kicked a clump of dirt and smashed down another one, feeling the hard ball of dirt smush to silken silt. “Tell me more about this guy here. Can I go look?” she asked, already cutting down through the ditch and across the field to where the man lay. She walked in the dirt between the rows of corn stubble, not wanting to get her ankles scratched up, her shoes making soft impressions in the dirt. When she got to the body, she saw the other men’s footprints, including three sets that weren’t Wheaton’s cowboy boots or the suits’ black dress shoes.
The footprints were working men’s shoes.
The dead man wore yellow leather work boots, blue jeans and a blue wool plaid shirt. She knelt down where she could see the cut that had gone through his woolen shirt and into his chest. There were two stab wounds. One on the right, one on the left.
“He was probably stabbed on the right from behind and then again there on the left, whoever was doing it, aiming for the heart.”
“Where’s the knife?”
“That’s what we wondered too. No knife that we’ve found. Other than that, not much to tell. Dead Indian. Looked like he was working. Didn’t smell any alcohol. Fact is, if I had to say anything 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
