He didn’t keep track of years by numbers, but it was the same year President Harding died and Calvin Coolidge took his place in the White House. Sometime in the early ’20s, probably. He remembered Coolidge because in a certain way the man was like the Ojibwe. He didn’t speak much, but when he did he was worth listening to.
That day Henry watched the farmer’s son coming across the field of low corn. Under the brim of a straw hat, the kid’s face was dark with shadow. He was taller than Henry and, at seventeen, older by two years. He looked like the farmer, right down to the mean little eyes.
It was late June, hot in South Dakota, and Henry worked in overalls without a shirt. His shoes, supplied by the government boarding school in Flandreau, were falling apart. Although he’d tried to line the shoes with straw to block the holes, dirt and pebbles still found their way inside. Periodically, he stopped his work to remove the shoes and dump them clean. He was sitting at the edge of a dry irrigation ditch with his left shoe off when he spotted the farmer’s son approaching.
“My old man don’t pay you to sit on your ass,” the kid said when he got to Henry.
“Your old man doesn’t pay me at all,” Henry pointed out. He put on his left shoe and began to remove the other.
“You eat his food, sleep under his roof,” the kid threw back.
Henry could have pointed out that this choice was not his. The Flandreau school had a policy called “outing” that placed the Indian students in jobs during the summer months. The girls typically became domestics, the boys farmhands. The school superintendent spoke of the program proudly, claiming it taught skills that the students would use to better themselves, that would help them assimilate. But Henry Meloux had no use for farmwork. In the Northwoods of Minnesota, where his people lived, there was little farmland. He knew the truth of the outing program; usually a placement simply provided cheap labor for a local family.
Henry took his time with his second shoe while the other kid stood above him, arms crossed over his chest, watching with that disdain common to the whites in the communities around the Flandreau school.
“Ain’t you one ungrateful son of a bitch,” the farmer’s son said.
Henry finished with his shoes and stood up. “You walked a long way out here just to tell me that.”
“How come you never look at me?” the kid said.
“I look.”
“You never look me in the eye.”
“I have work to do,” Henry told him. He picked up the shovel that he’d laid in the dirt, ready to return to the irrigation ditch he’d been cleaning.
“Look me in the eye,” the kid demanded.
Henry paused, half turned away.
“You heard what I said. Look me in the eye.”
The prairie sun pressed on Henry like a hot iron. He felt the crawl of sweat down his chest and back and sides, the sting of it dripping into his eyes. He gripped the handle of the shovel with his strong, calloused hands and gauged the heft, the easy swing.
“You deaf all of a sudden?”
Henry turned slowly. He lifted his dark eyes and stared at the other boy.
The farmer’s son grinned with stupid satisfaction. “You got a letter up to the house. My old man says to come get it.”
Henry pulled his shirt-long sleeved and white, made of thin cotton-from the branch of the bush next to the ditch where he’d hung it when he’d begun his work. He carried it with him as he followed the long rows between the knee-high corn plants, dirt sifting into his shoes at every step. At the farmhouse, he let the kid go inside first while he took a few minutes to dump his shoes clean again and to wash himself off at the water pump in the yard. He put on his shirt, buttoned it carefully all the way up to his throat, and went into the house through the back door.
The kitchen still smelled of dinner, the noon meal, which was two hours gone. It had been generous portions of boiled ham, baked chicken, fried potatoes, corn casserole, waxed beans, heavy brown bread, and rhubarb pie. The farmer’s wife was a fine cook and a decent woman. When Henry had first come to the place, three weeks earlier, she’d stood firm that he should eat as well as any of the family because he worked his share. Mealtime, she put his plate together and brought it to the barn where he ate in his small quarters, which was an old tack room, no longer used for that purpose because the farmer, a prosperous man, had a Ford tractor now.
The farmer sat at the kitchen table drinking from a glass full of cloudy liquid. He was a tense, willowy man with a German name and a head as bald as a rock. Over his glass, his small, mean eyes took in Henry.
“Lemonade, Henry?” said the wife. She stood at the gaping oven door, her face red from the heat. She was small and plump. Her eyes were a sad blue.
“Thank you.” Henry stood politely, just inside the door.
She filled the glass and took it to him, looking as if she were about to speak something comforting, but her husband cut in.
“A letter come for you. From the boarding school. Took the liberty of reading it since I wasn’t sure you could.”
“I can read,” Henry said.
“The upshot of it is that your father’s dead, boy. Logging accident. I understand it’s dangerous work.”
“Karl,” the woman said. “Give the boy the letter and the decency of reading it on his own.”
“You snap at me like that again, Emma, I’ll take the strap to you. Don’t think I won’t.”
“Yah, you lay me up and who’s going to feed you, huh? Give the boy the letter.”
The farmer reached into the shirt beneath his overalls and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. “Come on,” he said holding it out. “Take it, boy.”
“For heaven’s sake.” The woman plucked the letter from her husband’s hand and brought it to Henry. “I’m so sorry. You take that lemonade and letter and you find you some shade. Take all the time you need, Henry.”
He sat under a crab-apple tree near the vegetable garden he helped the woman hoe. The writing was neat, the letters precisely made.
Dear Nephew,
It is sad news I tell you your father my brother die in that logging camp he works a white man drive here to tell me your father killed by log rolling over him he bring the body for me to bury and I have done beside your mother’s grave this news is heavy on me and I know will be for you great sorrow.
Woodrow Meloux
There was no date on the letter, no way of knowing when the death had occurred. It didn’t matter; it was done. His mother had died of tuberculosis three years before. His father worked as a logger and was away most of the time and could not care for his children. Henry had been sent to the Indian boarding school in Flandreau, South Dakota. His two younger sisters had gone to a boarding school in Wisconsin.
Henry read the letter again, folded it, and put it in his pocket.
Even in the shade the air felt thick, hot, heavy. He sat for a long time without drinking from the glass of lemonade the farmer’s wife had given him. He listened to the bawling of cattle in the pen beyond the barn. He stared across the cultivated fields and his dark eyes followed the flat line of the horizon that circled and imprisoned him.