This Tender Land Read online

  At the dormitory, Albert cleaned the welts on my back, and Volz gingerly applied the witch hazel he kept on hand for just such occasions. I washed up, then we headed toward the dining hall. In the stone above the entrance was still chiseled MESS HALL from the old days when soldiers had been fed there. Under the stern command of Mrs. Peterson, who was responsible for feeding all the kids, nothing could have been further from the truth. The floor of the great hall, though terribly scuffed, was always swept clean of every crumb. After each meal, the rows of tables were wiped down with water and a bit of bleach. The kitchen and bakery were run with a rigid hand. I’d heard that Mrs. Peterson complained there was never enough money to buy proper food, but she managed to stretch whatever she had. True, the soups contained more water than solids and often tasted like something ladled from a ditch, and the breads were hard and heavy enough that they could have been used to break rock (she claimed yeast was too expensive), and the meat, when there was some, was mostly gristle, but every child ate three meals a day.

  When we stepped inside the dining hall, Herman Volz said, “I have bad news for you, Odie. But also some good. First, the bad. You have been assigned to work in Bledsoe’s hayfields today.”

  I looked at Albert and saw it was true. Bad news, indeed. It almost made me wish I was back in the quiet room.

  “And also, you have missed breakfast. But you already know this.”

  Breakfast was served promptly at seven. Volz hadn’t sprung me from the stockade until eight. Not his fault, but Mrs. Brickman’s doing. One last punishment. No breakfast that day.

  This in advance of one of the hardest work assignments a kid at Lincoln School could draw. I wondered what the good news was.

  Almost immediately, I understood. Donna High Hawk appeared from the kitchen, wearing a white apron and a white headwrap, and carrying a chipped, white bowl filled with Cream of Wheat. Donna High Hawk, like me, was twelve years old. She was a member of the Winnebago tribe from Nebraska. When she’d come to Lincoln School, two years earlier, she’d been scrawny and quiet, her hair long and worn in two braids. They’d cut the braids and run a nit comb through what hair was left to her. As they did with so many of the new kids, they’d stripped off her shabby clothing and washed her all over with kerosene and put her in the uniform dress of the school. She hadn’t spoken much English then and had hardly ever smiled. In my years at Lincoln, I’d come to understand that this was not unusual for kids straight off the reservation.

  But now she did smile, shyly, as she set the bowl on a table for me, then brought out a spoon.

  “Thanks, Donna,” I said.

  “Thank Mr. Volz,” she said. “He argued with Mrs. Peterson. Told her it was a crime to make you work without food in your belly.”

  Volz laughed. “I had to promise to make her a new rolling pin in my carpentry shop.”

  “Mrs. Brickman won’t like this,” I said.

  “What Mrs. Brickman don’t know won’t hurt her. Eat,” Volz said. “Then I take you out to Bledsoe.”

  “Donna?” It was a woman’s voice calling from the kitchen. “No dawdling.”

  “You better go,” Volz advised.

  The girl shot me one last enigmatic look, then vanished into the kitchen.

  Volz said, “You eat, Odie. I’ll go make nice with Mrs. Peterson.”

  When we were alone, Albert said, “What the hell were you thinking? A snake?”

  I began to eat my hot cereal. “I didn’t do it.”

  “Right,” he said. “It’s never you. Christ, Odie, you just took a step closer to leaving Lincoln.”

  “And wouldn’t that be terrible.”

  “You think reformatory would be better?”

  “Couldn’t be any worse.”

  He gave me a steely-eyed glare. “Where’d you get the snake?”

  “I told you, it wasn’t me.”

  “You can tell me the truth, Odie. I’m not Mrs. Brickman.”

  “Only her servant.”

  That one got to him and I thought he was going to slug me. Instead he said, “She takes her singing seriously.”

  “She’s the only one who does.” I smiled, remembering her wild dance when the snake had slithered over her foot. It was a black racer, harmless. If it had been a prank, it would have been a bold one because of the beating that would surely result. Even I would have thought twice about it. I suspected the creature had simply found its way in from outside the dining hall by accident. “I bet she wet her bloomers. Everybody thought it was funny.”

  “But you’re the one who got the strapping and spent the night with Faria. And now you’ll be working Bledsoe’s fields today.”

  “The look on her face was worth it.” That wasn’t exactly true. I knew that by sundown I’d regret being blamed for the snake. The welts on my back from the beating DiMarco had given me were still tender, and the hay dust and the salt from my own sweat would make the wounds hurt even worse. But I didn’t want Albert, that smug know-it-all, to see me worry.

  My brother was sixteen then. He’d grown tall and lanky at Lincoln School. He had dull red hair that was plagued by a perpetual cowlick in back, and like most redheaded people, he freckled easily. In summer, his face was a rash of splotches. He was self-conscious about his appearance and thought of himself as odd-looking. He tried to make up for it with his intellect. Albert was the smartest kid I knew, the smartest kid anybody at Lincoln School knew. He wasn’t particularly athletic, but he was respected for his brains. And he was honorable to a fault. It wasn’t something in his genes, because me, I didn’t give a crap about what Albert called ethics, and our father had been a bit of a con man. But my brother was stone hard when it came to doing the right thing. Or what he saw as the right thing. I didn’t always agree with him on that point.

  “Where are you working today?” I asked between spoonfuls of cereal.

  “Helping Conrad with some machinery.”

  That was another thing about Albert. He was handy. He possessed a mind that could wrap itself around a technical problem that had others scratching their heads. His work assignment was often with Bud Conrad, who was in charge of facility maintenance at Lincoln School. As a result, Albert knew about boilers and pumps and motors. I figured he’d grow up to be an engineer or something. I didn’t know what I wanted to be yet. I just knew whatever it was it would be far away from Lincoln School.

  I’d almost finished my meal when I heard a child’s voice call out, “Odie! Albert!”

  Little Emmy Frost ran toward us across the dining hall, followed by her mother. Cora Frost taught homemaking skills—cooking, sewing, ironing, decorating, cleaning—to the girls at the school, as well as teaching reading to all of us. She was plain and slender. Her hair was reddish blond, but to this day, I can’t recall clearly the color of her eyes. Her nose was long, bent at the end. I always wondered if it had been broken when she was younger and badly set. She was kind, compassionate, and although not what most guys would have called a looker, to me she was as lovely as any angel. I’ve always thought of her in the way I think of a precious gem: The beauty isn’t in the jewel itself, but in the way the light shines through it.

  Emmy, on the other hand, was a cutie, with a thick mop of curls just like Little Orphan Annie in the funny papers, and we all loved her.

  “I’m happy they’ve fed you,” Mrs. Frost said. “You have a very busy day ahead.”

  I reached out to tickle Emmy. She stepped back, giggling. I looked up at her mother and shook my head sadly. “Mr. Volz told me. I’m working Bledsoe’s hayfields.”

  “You were going to work for Mr. Bledsoe. I’ve managed to get your assignment changed. You’ll be working for me today. You and Albert and Moses. My garden and orchard need seeing to. Mr. Brickman just gave me approval to use all three of you. Finish your breakfast and we’ll be off.”

  I gulped down what was left and took my bowl to the kitchen, where I explained to Mr. Volz what was up. He followed me back to the table.

 
“You got Brickman to change his mind?” the German said, clearly impressed.

  “A little flutter of the eyelashes, Mr. Volz, and that man melts like butter on a griddle.”

  Which might have been true if she’d been a beauty. I suspected it was the goodness of her heart that had won him over.

  Volz said, “Odie, that don’t mean you don’t work hard today.”

  “I’ll work extra hard,” I promised.

  Albert said, “I’ll see to that.”

  At mealtime, the children entered the dining hall through different doors, the girls from the east, the boys from the west. That morning, Mrs. Frost led us out through the boys’ entrance, which could not be seen from the administration building. I figured this was because she didn’t want Thelma Brickman to spot us and maybe countermand her husband’s decision. Everyone knew that although Mr. Brickman wore the pants, it was his wife who had the balls.

  * * *

  MRS. FROST DROVE her dusty Model T pickup down the road that followed the Gilead River into the town of Lincoln, half a mile east of the school. Emmy sat up front with her. Albert and I sat on the open flatbed. We passed the square where the Fremont County courthouse stood, along with the band shell and two cannons that had been fired by the First Minnesota Volunteer Infantry Regiment in the Civil War. A number of automobiles were parked around the square, but this was 1932 and not every farmer could afford a vehicle, so there were a few wagons with horse teams tied to hitching posts. We passed Hartman’s Bakery, and I could smell warm bread, the kind with yeast, so it didn’t break your teeth when you bit into it. Even though I’d already had cereal, the aroma made me hungry again. We passed the city police station, where an officer on the sidewalk tipped his hat to Mrs. Frost. He eyed Albert and me, and his hard look brought to my mind Mrs. Brickman’s threat of the reformatory, which I’d pretended to shrug off, but which in truth scared me a lot.

  Beyond Lincoln, all the land had been turned with plows. The dirt road we followed ran between fields where green corn sprouted in straight rows out of the black earth. I’d read in a book that this had all been prairie once, the grass higher than a man’s head, and that the rich, black soil went fifty feet deep. To the west rose Buffalo Ridge, a long stretch of low, untillable hills, and beyond that lay South Dakota. East, where we were headed, the land was flat, and long before we reached them, I could see the big hayfields that belonged to Hector Bledsoe.

  At the Lincoln Indian Training School, boys were fair game for Bledsoe, or most any other farmer in the area who wanted free labor. It was justified as the “training” part of the school. We didn’t learn anything except that we’d rather be dead than farmers. It was always grueling, dirty work—mucking out cattle yards or slopping hogs or detasseling corn or cutting out jimsonweed, all of it under an unrelenting sun—but haying for Bledsoe was the absolute worst. You spent the whole day bucking those big bales, sweating bullets, covered in hay dust that made you itch like you were being chewed on by a million fleas. You got no break except for lunch, which was usually a dry sandwich and water warmed by the sun. The kids assigned to Bledsoe were the bigger, older ones or, like me, those who’d created a problem for the staff at Lincoln School. Because I wasn’t as strong as the older boys, it wasn’t just Bledsoe giving me crap. It was also the other kids, who complained that I didn’t pull my weight. When Albert was there, he stood between me and trouble, but Albert was a favorite of the Black Witch and seldom worked for Bledsoe.

  Mrs. Frost drove into the field where the alfalfa, cut and dried, lay in rows that seemed to stretch to the horizon. Bledsoe was on his tractor, pulling the baler. Some of the boys were throwing hay into the machine with pitchforks; others followed behind, lifting the bales from the ground and loading them onto a flatbed truck driven by Bledsoe’s son, a big kid named Ralph, every bit as mean as his old man. Mrs. Frost parked ahead of the tractor and waited for Bledsoe to reach her. He cut the engine and climbed down from the seat. I glanced at the guys from the school, shirts off, sweating like pack mules, black hair turned gold from all that hay dust. On their faces, I saw a look I understood—partly relief that they could rest for a few minutes, and partly hatred because Albert and I weren’t suffering along with them.

  “Good morning, Hector,” Mrs. Frost said cheerfully. “Is the work going well?”

  “Was,” Bledsoe said. He didn’t take his big straw hat off in the woman’s presence, which most men did. “You want something?”

  “One of your young men. Mr. Brickman promised him to me.”

  “Whoever it is, Brickman promised him to me first.”

  “And then changed his mind,” she said.

  “Never called me to say so.”

  “And how would he have reached you out here in your fields?”

  “Could’ve called the missus.”

  “Would you like to take a nice long break, and we’ll go to your farmhouse and ask Rosalind?”

  Which would have eaten up a good half hour. I saw the Lincoln kids, slumped against the baler, looking hopeful at that prospect.

  “Or would you be willing to accept my word as a lady?”

  I could see Bledsoe’s brain going over the rough ground of the question. Unless he was willing to call her a liar, he had to give in. Everything in his black, shriveled, little heart was dead set against it, but he couldn’t challenge the word of this woman, this schoolteacher, this widow. It was easy to see how much he hated her for that.

  “Who is it?” he demanded.

  “Moses Washington.”

  “Son of a bitch!” Now he took off his straw hat and threw it to the ground in utter disgust. “Hell, he’s the best of the lot.”

  “And now he’s part of my lot, Hector.” She looked to a kid who’d been standing on the baler, feeding it hay. “Moses,” she called to him. “Put your shirt on and come with me.”

  Mose grabbed his shirt and jumped nimbly from the machinery. He trotted to the Model T, easily hopped aboard the flatbed, and joined Albert and me where we sat with our backs against the cab. He signed, Hello, and I signed back, Lucky you, Mose. He responded with Lucky us, and drew a circle in the air that indicated me and Albert and him.

  Mrs. Frost said, “Well then, I guess I have what I came for.”

  “Guess you have,” Bledsoe said and leaned down to retrieve his hat.

  “Oh, and if you’d like, here’s the note of permission Mr. Brickman wrote for me.” She held out the paper to Bledsoe.

  “You could’ve given me that at the beginning.”

  “Just as easily as you could have accepted my word. Good day.”

  We drove from the field and watched as Bledsoe remounted his tractor and began again moving down the long row of dried alfalfa while the boys from Lincoln School bent again to their miserable labor.

  Beside me, Mose made a grand gesture of gratitude toward the morning sun and signed again, Lucky us.

  CHAPTER THREE

  CORA FROST’S PROPERTY lay two miles east of Lincoln, on the south bank of the Gilead River. There was an old farmhouse, a small apple orchard, an enormous garden, a barn and some outbuildings. When her husband had been alive, they’d planted a good acreage in corn. She and Andrew Frost had both worked at Lincoln School, Mr. Frost as our sports coach. We’d all liked Mr. Frost. He was half Sioux and half Scotch-Irish and was a terrific athlete. He’d been sent to the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania and knew Jim Thorpe personally. When he was eleven, he’d been in the stands the day that sports great had helped his team of Indian kids shock the hell out of the world by beating Harvard’s football elite. Mr. Frost had been killed in a farming accident. He’d been sitting atop his disc harrow with little Emmy in his lap, guiding Big George, the Frosts’ enormous draft horse, across the plowed field, breaking up the newly turned clods of black soil. As he approached the end of the field and turned the horse, Big George disturbed a nest of hornets in the grass along the fence line. The horse reared and took off in a panicked gallop. Little Emmy was b
ounced from her father’s lap and thrown clear of the machinery. Andrew Frost, reaching for her as she flew, fell from his seat into the path of the sharp, eighteen-inch blades of the harrow, which sliced right through him. In her fall, Emmy hit her head on a fence post and was in a coma for two days.

  By the summer of 1932, Andrew Frost had been dead a year. His widow had mustered on. She’d leased the arable land to another farmer, but there was still the orchard to see to and the garden. The old farmhouse was always in need of repair, as were the barn and outbuildings. Sometimes Mose and Albert and I were asked to help with that, which I didn’t mind. I figured it couldn’t be easy raising Emmy alone, trying to see to the farm chores while continuing her work at Lincoln School. Although Mrs. Frost was a kind woman, she always seemed under the shadow of a great cloud, and her smile seemed less bright than it had once been.

  When we arrived at her place, we piled off the back of the truck, and she put us to work immediately. She hadn’t freed me and Mose from Bledsoe’s hayfields just out of the goodness of her heart. She gave Mose a scythe and instructed him to cut the grass that had grown high between the trees of her orchard. She set Albert and me to building a rabbit fence around her garden. Because the pay she received at Lincoln School was barely enough to live on, the garden and orchard were important to her. To supplement her diet and Emmy’s during the long winter, she canned the vegetables and preserved the fruit. While we worked, she and Emmy hoed the garden.

  “You’re lucky you got your harmonica back,” Albert said.

  We’d just finished digging a hole, and I was holding up the fence post we’d put in while Albert backfilled around it and tamped the dirt down firmly.