Sins of Our Fathers (9781571319128) (18 page)

JW tried again, and this time he got a large shower of kernels to fall off into his lap. The rice was encased in purple-green, wheat-like coverings and was full of insects, rice worms and spiders. He brushed some off his lap.

“Don't worry about that,” Eagle said. “They won't bite you too much.”

“Easy for you to say.”

“Come on, get your shit together, white boy, they're putting us to shame. This is what I'm paying you for.”

JW kept at it. As the canoe began moving forward at a more rapid pace, he developed a swiping motion, swaying the sticks rhythmically side to side, and smoothly knocking stickful after stickful of rice onto his lap from both sides of the canoe.

“Now you're getting it!”

Soon his feet were sprinkled with rice and his pants were crawling with daddy longlegs and wolf spiders. He continued, sweating, as Eagle sought out the richest patches of rice, and then methodically poled the canoe back and forth through them. JW found the work straining but satisfying as the level
of kernels steadily grew, first halfway up his shoes, then over and into them, and then up his ankles. The sky was mostly clear, and the carping of waterfowl filled the air. When he disturbed a merganser hiding in the rice, the sudden rush of wings made him laugh out loud.

After another hour the sky gave way to a deep crystal blue and the enriching light of September. The leaves on the trees were just beginning to turn. The ripening rice plants filled the air with a strong grassy smell, and they brushed alongside the canoe with the dry hiss of hay packing into a baler. The two men settled into an easy rhythm.

“Why do they call you ‘Apple?'” JW asked. He pulled a daddy longlegs off his neck and threw it out onto the grasses.

“Trying to get to me,” Eagle replied nonchalantly. “See those guys? We're gonna show them up.”

JW looked over in the direction he had indicated. Two canoes were working in tandem. In the bow of one was the Indian who had made the remark about Eagle. “I'm in,” he said.

Eagle picked up the pace and JW began to swipe and knock faster and faster. A wordless competition sprang up across the lake. Soon several canoes seemed to be moving faster, matching pace with Eagle and JW, as the veteran ricers worked to put the upstart and his outsider sidekick in their place.

The sun set around six thirty, and the air began to run cool down the hillsides onto the lake. Band members finally turned their heavily laden canoes for shore. JW set his knockers down in relief and rolled his burning shoulders. He had constantly pushed the rice kernels backward in order to keep the canoe from getting bow-heavy. Eagle stood shin-deep, while JW was buried up to his seated thighs. The rice smelled like a rich meadow. JW ran his tired fingers through it as the shining waters glided by.

Eagle poled them, bow-first, up onto the muddy sand bank.

“Day of reckoning,” he said. “Hop on out.”

JW stood and purple-green kernels rained down off his jeans. He shook his legs off over the canoe one by one, still feeling many more kernels inside his shoes, then stepped out into the cool water. He stood beside the heavy canoe and pulled the bow a few more inches up onto the muddy shore.

“That's good enough,” said Eagle, bracing himself before he stepped out into knee-deep water at the stern. Both men looked around at the returning canoes. None were as low in the water as theirs.

“Don't quote me on it, but I think we beat 'em,” Eagle said.

JW knew enough about Indians to know that this kind of competitive thinking ran counter to the spirit some elders approached the rice harvest with, but Eagle seemed anxious to show them all up. JW, tired of being judged, was also tickled by the thought.

Several Indians walked past their canoe, heading to their cars to get plastic snow shovels and lawn-and-leaf bags. JW watched them expectantly, noting how each of them glanced into the canoe as they passed. They ignored JW, but one by one they glanced at Eagle and nodded. The man who had made the slur walked by without even looking. Eagle glanced at JW with a grin.

“I think that makes it official,” he said. “Come on, let's get the bags and pack up our haul.”

15

The night air was thick with insects as Eagle and JW pulled in. June bugs bumped and buzzed at the yard light high on the peak of Eagle's pole barn. Several older rez cars were already parked at odd angles on the lawn, bearing canoes that glinted in the moonlight like giant pikes.

JW got out of Eagle's black Bronco. The Indians' voices were muted. The older man whom JW had seen helping Eagle several days before was standing next to the large industrial scale by the open, lit barn. He weighed in the glistening black lawn-and-leaf bags full of wild rice, and paid the harvesters from a wad of bills he moved in and out of his pocket.

“JW, Ernie Wilkins,” Eagle said, introducing them. Ernie nodded and reached for the next bag. “And this is Supersize Me,” Eagle said, introducing him to a tall Indian with a ponytail who was carrying bags in to be weighed.

“Hey, man,” Supersize Me said cheerfully, nodding in JW's direction.

“Over there in the barn we got Dave Caulfield” Eagle said, gesturing toward a middle-aged Indian who had the clipped mannerisms and buzzed salt-and-pepper haircut of ex-military or law enforcement. He wore cargo pants and a big gold cross on a chain that hung outside his sweat-stained olive T-shirt. He nodded at JW as he dumped a weighed-in bag onto a huge tarp that had been duct-taped to the concrete
floor inside the pole barn. He took up a plastic snow shovel and spread the rice.

Trucks and cars continued to pull in, their headlights shining like miners' lamps as more harvesters came to deliver rice. JW headed out to start unloading their bags from the Bronco. The barn lights were yellow to cut down on bugs, and the open door glowed like a fireplace hearth, casting thick streaks out into the night. JW carried two heavy bags over to Ernie and the industrial scale.

“Put 'em there,” mumbled Ernie. He nodded to a spot on the concrete as he weighed in other bags. JW sensed some kind of resentment, but he just nodded in return, set the bags against the wall, and went back for more.

Eagle noted the exchange, and when the Bronco was empty he clapped JW on the shoulder. “Look,” he said, “that was a hell of a thing today. Who would have thought we could smoke them?”

JW smiled. “Good poler, I guess.”

“Good team!” Eagle glanced at Ernie, weighing in the long line of ricers. “Why don't you go ahead and call it a night. Come on over in the morning and we'll get parching.” His eyes seemed apologetic.

“Sure,” said JW with a shrug. “See you then.” He walked off toward his trailer, but turned back briefly. “Hey,” he said. “It was a good day.”

Eagle nodded with a faint smile. He waved and JW lifted a hand in return and slid out into the cool evening. The yellow barn light faded as he crossed the soft dirt road. Fingers of fog were beginning to lift off the grasses and curl around the bases of the oaks.

JW took a hot shower and came out in a towel, his hair wet and cool. From his kitchen window, he watched the
Indians continue their quiet work as he waited for the kettle to boil for a cup of tea. He could see Eagle talking with Ernie. A bluish light flickered from Jacob's window up at the house. A TV or a computer. He wondered why the boy wasn't helping.

He rolled his sore shoulders. The work was just beginning. Now that the rice season was open, Eagle had explained on the way home, band members would bring rice in from Waterfowl Lake for several more days, before expanding the harvest to dozens of other lakes, on and off the reservation. This was the world capital of Native wild rice, and while Waterfowl was the largest, many of the shallower lakes had large stands as well. The plant only grew in certain conditions, Eagle told him. The lakes had to be low in sulfates, which is why the tribes worried about copper mining. They had to be shallow as well, with a rich bottom, and the water had to be cool in the spring in order for the rice to germinate. And for this reason the band was also very concerned about climate change. It had started to affect yield as the lake temperatures rose. They were working with phenologists at the Department of Natural Resources to seed lakes farther north. The other icon of the North, the moose, had almost disappeared already.

The teapot hissed and whistled. JW poured his cup and turned off the light, then stood there in the darkness, watching the Indians as they murmured, laughed, and quietly worked into the night. When the tea was gone he turned away from the window and headed for bed.

In the morning he woke to the smell of wood smoke. He rolled out of bed and groaned. His arms and shoulders ached. He should have taken an ibuprofen. He rubbed his hair and looked out the windows. The Indians were already at it, stoking a fire in front of the pole barn.

He changed into jeans and a clean T-shirt and made the bed. After a cup of coffee and a mini-box of Frosted Flakes with milk, he put on his work boots and headed out.

“'Bout time!” said Eagle as he walked down the barn drive. “You want a coffee?”

“Just had one.”

“Then let's get you trained in!” He nodded toward a wheelbarrow standing next to the tarp covered with drying rice. “See that wheelbarrow? Load it up and bring it on out to the fire.”

JW stepped onto the tarp and took up the plastic shovel. He loaded the wheelbarrow and pushed it out to the fire, where they dumped it into a rectangular black pan the size of a small jon boat. The pan's steel wheels rolled on a pair of trolley rails so it could be moved easily in and out of the fire. The four men stood in the billowing smoke and turned the hissing rice with charred black canoe paddles, keeping it in motion so the kernels wouldn't burn on the bottom.

The work was demanding, but the Indians kept a steady slow pace that never let up. JW fell in with them. The sky was clear, the air was cool, and the leaves of the sugar maples around the barn were brilliant red. The smell of wood smoke made JW feel like a kid again. It rolled out from under the pan and swirled around and through the rice, infusing it along with his clothes. The blasts of warmth on his face, the intermittent sting in his eyes, the feeling of the charred wooden paddle running through the toasting kernels, the hissing over the snaps of the fire: JW was entranced. He watched the rice change from green to brown as the kernels fell from his paddle, as if in a rolling surf.

“You don't get the varied colors and smoky flavor unless you hand-parch it,” Eagle explained as they rolled the batch back
off the coals. “You see rice in the store that looks varied—light, dark, in-between—that's hand-parched. It's going to be much more flavorful and smoky. Plus, you can pop hand-parched wild rice. You can't pop that uniform machine-finished stuff.”

“Huh,” replied JW, taking it all in.

“It takes about ten minutes a pan, and we get fifteen dollars a pound instead of ten. That's a pretty good ROI.”

The four men picked up aluminum snow shovels and scooped the smoking parched rice into a clean metal wheelbarrow. Then they used a straw broom to sweep the last kernels onto a shovel. Ernie led the feeding of a new batch while JW followed Eagle as he wheeled the barrowful of toasted rice into the barn.

“Our thrasher's what you might call a good example of Indi'n engineering,” he said. “Supersize Me here made it.”

Supersize Me walked up, pulling on leather gloves as he came. The thrasher was made from the front end of a Ford F-150 pickup truck set on wooden timbers outside the pole barn. The wheels were gone and the headlights were painted like cat eyes. Everything behind the dashboard and front windshield had been removed except the driveshaft, which ran through a three-foot hole in the barn wall and into a barrel that lay sideways on a welded metal cradle.

“Once they're parched we thrash 'em to strip off the
mazaan
,” Eagle said as he wheeled the barrow up.

“Mazaan?” JW asked.

“Hulls. Beats 'em to a powder. Some people use it like flour, and others use it for insulation. You can make pancakes, fry bread, whatever. We mostly sell it for fireworks lining.”

Supersize Me unlatched a small door on the top of the barrel. Inside, the truck driveshaft was connected to paddles made of old tire rubber. Two steel cables ran from the truck
dash to a wooden two-by-six nailed to a couple posts near the barrel. One of them controlled the throttle and the other the clutch. Eagle ran the wheelbarrow up a small wooden ramp and dumped the parched rice into the barrel. Supersize Me clamped the door shut. He turned to JW. “You got a watch?”

JW held up his wrist.

“Cool. Tell me when we hit forty-five seconds.”

Supersize Me walked outside and approached what had been the driver's side of the F-150, which had keys hanging from the steering column. It thundered up with a throaty roar. He walked back through the exhaust into the pole barn and adjusted the throttle.

“Okay,” he said.

JW looked at his watch and nodded. Supersize Me revved the engine, then let the clutch out. The driveshaft kicked in and started spinning. The drum rocked and shook in its cradle, emitting a roaring hum. JW held up a hand at forty-five seconds and Supersize Me disengaged the clutch and powered down the throttle.