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 Chihuahua as places to claim they were from if asked by the bartender.
There were other Indians who stayed in town. They roomed above the bars in makeshift hotels, where bar owners cashed the checks for room and drinks. Cash looked at the man lying facedown in the cornfield. He had probably roomed in town, although some of the richer farmers actually had bunkhouses for the late-season field workers.
She walked back to Wheaton’s car with him. He had his hand on the door handle but she could tell he still had more to say to her.
He took his hat off and ran his hand over his buzz cut. He put his hat back on and raised an eyebrow. “What brought you out this way this morning? Thought you were working this week for old man Swenson?”
Cash shrugged. “You know how it is. Sometimes I just get a feeling and I follow it. I got up early and heard it on the news so I drove out this way as fast as I could. When I passed Standard Oil in town” —she pointed with her lips to the east—“and looked over this way, I saw your cruiser and thought I’d come by and see what you were doing. You know.” She shrugged again, her eyes asking if he understood. “Now I see you were probably wanting me to come this way anyways,” she said. They both chuckled. It had happened many times before when Wheaton had thought about Cash and she had shown up moments later. Or the other way around.
“The thought did cross my mind,” he said. “Listen, I’m done here for the day. I imagine that if you pulled your truck up there in the Oye’s driveway, up there by the migrant shacks, no one would bother you. Maybe stay around here for awhile and see what you think. Those guys are headed up towards Red Lake. They won’t be back for awhile.”
“You don’t want to go up there yourself?”
“Can’t. Just like my badge doesn’t do me any good over there on the North Dakota side,” Wheaton said, pointing across the river, “us county law folks don’t have any jurisdiction on Red Lake. Made it a law in ‘53. Red Lake’s the only reservation in the state we can’t go on anymore. I’m gonna drive into town and tell the county doc to come pick up this guy. Take him into the hospital and see if he can tell us anything else. You take it easy, Cash.”
He got into his car and made a U-turn on the gravel road, the stones rattling against each other. Cash watched the cloud of road dust billow behind him as he drove away. When the dust settled, she walked slowly back towards where the body lay. There wasn’t much blood to see, just the flattened stubble like a cow or deer had lain down in the field. She squatted down and put her hand where the man’s beating heart had been and felt the sadness from the earth crawl up her arm.
Chilled, with a shiver running up her left side, Cash stood and walked back to her Ranchero. She got in, slid the heat switch over to let warm air blow out the vents and then drove about 800 feet to the old driveway that led into the abandoned Oye’s farmstead. Memory is what told her where the driveway was as grass had grown up and over the gravel. Two strips of shorter grass indicated where cars and farm equipment had entered the farmstead years ago. The family had moved out to Montana. County gossip said that old man Oye had bought a ranch and had a thousand head of cattle.
Cash remembered back to when she was a child. Old man Oye would stop by to visit her mom, coming back from hunting trips out to Montana. Never any game in his truck but a pocketful of silver dollars that he would toss and spin in the air and hand out to whichever kids—white, Indian or Mexican—happened to be standing around waiting to be entertained. Older now, Cash figured the Montana trips were more about gambling than hunting.
When she was warm enough, she got out and climbed into the back of her truck. She pulled an old quilt out from under a couple of two-by-fours, rolled up her jean jacket and laid down on her back, hands folded under her head. The sun was bright and she shut her eyes. She put her hand over her eyes. Red sunlight filtered first through her fingers and then through the skin of her eyelids.
She could hear crickets and frogs down by the river. The leaves of the cottonwood trees lining the river bank created music in the wind that stilled her. Soon she was lost in time, her body floating up and out of the truck bed and following the trail of a soul gone northeast to say good-bye to loved ones. She saw a gravel road with a stand, almost like a food stand where one would sell berries, but this one had a basket of pinecones on it. Birchbark baskets were filled with pinecones. Children, five or six of them, crowded ’round the stand. The oldest was barely a teen. The youngest held on to the teen’s scrawny hip. She looked around to memorize the place in her mind, searching for landmarks—the stand, the pine trees, a hunting trail heading north a bit down the road.
Was this the road where the children had come from? It ran east to west.
Just then Cash heard the dry crackle of leaves and smelled a faint odor of decay. It brought
