Aspirations I

This is the first of a series of early stories of mine that never made it into print. So I'm posting them here to get them out, anyway, into cyber space.

CROWS AND INDIANS

The woods were a green wall beyond the farm, the wild edge of Carl's world. It was where the crows lived, where they roosted at night and set out from on their raids of farmers’ fields every morning. Carl knew to stay out of the woods – You'll get lost! – but he was with his father now and Oscar. His father carried his shotgun.

"Corn's comin' along," Oscar said in his lilting, resonant voice that was like the mouth organ he played.

"Yup," Carl's father said; his voice was thinner than Oscar's, quick and excited, "if the crows don't get it." He pointed his gun at the sky. "Think it's high enough yet to cultivate?"

"No-o," Oscar said. "The shovels'd bury it still."

They were crossing a field still soft from spring planting, stepping over the corn rows, the new plants so intensely green they seemed to glow against the black soil. There were tracks in the soil that Oscar pointed out, the toed prints of crows and pheasants, little hand prints of raccoons, and a line of cloven hoof prints, like a heifer’s, Carl thought. "Deer, by golly," Oscar said. "I thought they was all hunted out."

Carl looked back. The farm was a kind of island among the rolling fields. There was the circle of buildings around the yard and the metal windmill poking up, its silvery blades arrested above the shade trees around the house. He saw the cows, strung out from the barnyard, heading for pasture after the milking. It was a calm, early summer evening, still light at eight o’clock.

"Keep up!" Carl's father called. The men had walked on, and Carl ran to catch up with them.

They reached the woods. There was an absolute division here between the thick growth of trees and the open field, as if the field of young corn were a dark, weedy pond and the trees grew heavily down to the water. His father said, "Watch your eyes, Carl," and the men pushed through the curtain of leaves. Carl followed, and found himself in another world.

. It was hushed and contained, secret, like the inside of an empty building, empty and yet alive. The trees stood like columns, not crowded together as they appeared from outside but spaced, with park-like regularity, the big trunks going up and up to the spreading branches and the roof of leaves. There was a concentrated smell of damp earth and moldering vegetation.

"Say, this looks like virgin forest," his father said.

"Ya," Oscar said. " Larue, he left it be. This here was his sugar grove."

"Yeah, a lot of the French around here made maple syrup, I guess. Like back in Quebec."

"Syrup and sugar both," Oscar said. He looked down at Carl. "You ever taste real maple sugar, Carlie? It's the sweetest candy there is."

Carl tried to imagine the kind of candy could come from trees. Oscar said, "Lucien, he still tapped maples, back when I started work for'm. That pasture where the crick runs, below the Martin barn? That was all maple trees once."

"What happened?"

"Well, Lucien, he wanted his first car, you know, that old Dodge sitting out back of his corn crib now. Got the money for it by selling off his maple trees, for lumber."

"He would," his father snorted. "The quick buck!"

Carl realized, uneasily, that they were talking about his grandfather. Grandpa Martin with his cracking, smoker’s laugh and his big nose peppered with blackheads. The merriment in his eyes until Grandma scolded him for sneaking uptown to the tavern.

"Ya, well Lucien was no farmer," Oscar said. "None of the Martin boys was, not like old Charles. He owned an entire section at one time, did you know that? Give his boys each a farm when they got married, but they all pissed what they had away. Lucien, you know, got the home place."

"Yeah, and now that's pissed away," Carl's father said. "Christ. Why couldn’t I have inherited a farm? His father grinned at his hired man. "Whattaya think, Oscar? I make a farmer?"

Oscar looked carefully at Carl’s father. "Ya-a," he said. "You ain't afraida work, I’d say, and you seem to know how to manage."

Carl's father grinned once more and sniffed the air. They were deep in the woods now, walking among the quiet trees. The ground was soft with rotting leaves, crunchy with fallen twigs. Spindly seedlings brushed Carl’s face as he passed, and there were trees and fallen logs with half-circles of cork-like growth on them, like the growths on a horse’s legs – what his mother called "artist’s easel." The deer flies bit savagely at him. He kept snagging his face on invisible spider webs.

"Look here," Oscar told Carl. He showed him the moss on a tree, a smudge of dull green on the trunk. "The moss always grows on the north side," Oscar said. "You know where north is and you can find your way out of the woods."

Carl wondered how that applied – how knowing where north was could tell you which way to go.
"Hey," his father said. "Here's an old fence."

"Ya," Oscar said. "That used to be your line – Larue's old line – till he bought up this next piece to make your eighty."

Then Carl saw the rusted barbed wires draped like vines between the trees, and how they passed right through the trees as if growing from them.

"You see that, Carlie?" Oscar said. "The trees grow over wire like that, like scar tissue."

His father tugged at the wire. "When ya think that fence was put up, Oscar?"

"Oh, maybe thirty years ago," Oscar said.

"Now that was the time to go farming," said Carl's father. "Well no, I suppose the best time was back when the Martins first came here from Canada."

"It was all woods," Oscar told him. "Like this. Or brush or grass prairie that a plow couldn't turn over in those days. Not to mention the sloughs around the lakes that were only good for the wild hay you could get off'm. When my grandfolks first come here from Norway, all they did for a coupla years was clear."

"Yah, but dammit, Oscar. Goddamn it, I'd like to of been here when this country was just opening up."

"Plagues of grasshoppers," Oscar went on. "Grass fires. All kinds of sickness. People went crazy. Then too in those early days there was still the Indians to worry about."

"That's right! You ever hear Lucien's story about how, during the Sioux Uprising, I think it was, the Martins and their neighbors all packed up and made for Fort Snelling and his mother — she was a little girl then — fell out of the wagon and broke her arm? Just think." Carl's father looked happily around him. "These big old trees must've been standing here when all that happened."

"Ya," Oscar said. "A man should keep his eyes peeled. You can still find old arrowheads, things like that."

"Daddy ..."

"Well," his father said, "my granddad was a pioneer. On my mother's side. Homesteaded in Dakota Territory and ran a dray line out of Sisseton. Then he moved up to Saskatchewan, when that country was just opening up. I was born up there. Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. My dad was a CPR engineer! I barely remember him, though. He was killed in a train wreck when I was younger than Carl here."

Carl knew that story. There was an old, gilt-framed photograph of the grandfather he never knew on the wall in his folks' bedroom. His fading likeness grinned from the seat of a wagon on a flat prairie. His long-barrelled "goose gun" lay across his lap, and he held the reins of a team of horses whose heads didn’t show in the picture. He looked vaguely like Carl's father. Will Miller. He was a mighty hunter, Carl's father said, a great wing shot.

"So how'd you wind up down here?" Oscar asked.

"Come down looking for work when I was sixteen. Hell, I rode the rails like you did, Oscar!
Wound up in Minneapolis and took any job I could get. I mowed lawns, I caddied at country clubs. Pumped gas. Then I met Carl's ma and started going out to the Martin farm and I thought, hell, why not try farming? I could see Lucien was letting his place go, and I might have taken it over, but I wanted my own place. I’ll say this for old Lucien, though. He vouched for me at the Martinsville bank so I could get a loan."

"Then I come back from Kansas and now here I am working for you instead of the Martins."
"That's right! You might say I inherited you, Oscar."

"Daddy ..."

"What?"

His father was striding ahead now, jaunty, his shotgun in the crook of his arm. His black hair shone under the trees. Oscar followed, his graying, sandy hair sticking out of his cap, stooped yet still taller than Carl's father.

"Daddy ..."

"What, I said."

"There still ... Indians in here?"

The two men stopped and grinned at each other. Oscar said, "No, Carlie. The Indians're are all gone now."

"Where'd they go?"

Oscar looked at Carl's father. His father said, "They're on what they call reservations now, Carl. Those are places set aside for them where they can hunt and fish all year around, just like they used to."

"Ya, " Oscar added, "and they don't even need a license, like we do."

"How come?"

Oscar looked at Carl's father again, and his father said, "That's a long story, Carl. Maybe you'll learn about it in school."

"But how come Indians don't live here anymore?"

"Because. They had to move. They couldn't live here after people like us came here and settled."
"How come?"

"Because." His father took a breath. "The Indians lived different from us. They didn’t use the land like we do. They mostly just lived off it. Oh, they raised corn, I guess. But they didn’t clear the woods and plow up the soil and make farms and towns, like we did. You might say the Indians lived wild, and we live tame, Carl." He turned to his hired man. "Ain’t that about it, Oscar? Maybe the Indians had the right idea."

Oscar grunted. Carl thought about the Indians living wild in the woods, in these woods, and felt scared and excited.

"Daddy?"

"What."

"But can't I ever see a Indian?"

"Sure. We'll go up to Red Lake sometime, to the reservation."

"You won't have to go that far," Oscar commented. "There's plenty on Washington Avenue."

"Where's Washington Avenue?" Carl asked.

"In Minneapolis," his father said. "We'll go there, too, sometime, though the Indians in Minneapolis ain't like the Indians we're talking about."

"What kind are they?"

"The kind that hunt bottles," Oscar said.

"What?" Carl said.

"That's enough questions," his father said. "And Oscar, we better not go into that." He lowered his voice. "We better be quiet now. The crows'll be coming."

It was getting dark in the woods. Carl knelt between Oscar's knees, in the warm pocket of his smells – manly smells of sweat and tobacco and the barn – while his father crouched beside them with his shotgun. They were all crouched in the hole where a big tree had uprooted. Above, through the break where the tree had stood, was the deepening sky.

Oscar slapped a mosquito. The deer flies circled their heads and they all swatted at them.
"Bugs ain't too bad yet," said Oscar. "Wait'll July."

A bird called, sweetly trilling among the trees. Then a squirrel chattered. Carl saw it, crouched on a branch, its jerking tail, its tensed little body.

His father pushed a shell into his gun. He worked the lever on the chamber, then loaded more of the fat shells into the magazine. Then he aimed at the trees. "C'mon, crows," he said. "I'm waitin'."

"That a Browning?" Oscar asked.

"Damn right. Twelve-gauge Browning automatic. Best shotgun in the world." His father handed the gun to Oscar. "Made in Belgium. I bought that gun when I was nineteen years old. Took all my savings."

Oscar held the gun up and Carl saw its beauty. He saw the scrollwork etched into the blued metal above the trigger guard, and the walnut stock, and the rubber cushion on the butt. The gun's kick, his father said, would knock the snot out of Carl's nose. His father kept his gun in its sheath in the closet of the folks’ bedroom, and Carl was never to touch it. The sheath itself was beautiful, soft buckskin lined with rawhide.

Oscar handed the gun back to Carl's father. "Sittin' in this hole reminds me of the war," he said. The first one."

"Yeah, you were in it, weren't you, Oscar. Think we'll get in this one?"

"Ya-a."

"Well, I just hope I don't get drafted. I shouldn't. I'm thirty now and on a farm and I got a family."

"They might draft me," the hired man said dully.

"Naw. You're way too old, Oscar! How old are you, anyway?"

"I'm fifty."

"You're all right then. Anyway, another war should pull us out of the Depression. The price of milk could go up. We could make some money!"

People talked of the war now. It was like a storm, away off across the ocean somewhere, maybe heading their way.

"Daddy ..."

"Quiet now. I hear'm."

At first Carl heard nothing, just a rush of wind through the treetops and then a squeaking noise, kind of spooky. Oscar whispered, "That's the trees rubbing together, Carlie. Listen."

Carl strained to listen. It was like the creaking in an empty house or a ticking clock surrounded by silence.

"There," Carl's father said. "Hear'm?"

Carl strained to hear. Then he tried to see the crows, as he saw them most evenings from the farm, that black, undulating line of them, flapping toward the woods where Carl was now. But he only saw the sky, and the yellowing clouds, through the break in the trees.

Then: CAW! Sharp and alarmed. Then a rush of calls, CAW! CAW! CAW! CAW! and dark shapes above the trees, whistling wingbeats and wheeling flight, and his father raising his gun and BANG, a crow crashed through the leafy branches, then BANG BANG, and BANG, and another and then another crow broke through the leaves overhead and bounced when they hit the ground. His father scrambled out of the hole and aimed up through the trees. BANG, and Carl saw the smoking shell eject from the gun. Then the crows were gone. Carl's ears were ringing. And faintly, like sprinkling rain, the spent shot fell back through the leaves.

His father was jubilant. "Christ. You see me hit those last two, Oscar? It was like shooting geese!"

Carl ran to where a crow had fallen. It lay crumpled among the dead leaves with its head up, following Carl with a furious eye. Its beak was open. It was panting.

"Watch out for the beak!" Carl's father called.

Carl reached down and the crow clamped its beak over one of his fingers. "Ouch!" he said, more startled than hurt. But when he jerked his hand away, the crow hung on so that Carl lifted it from the ground. "Ouuuu!" he cried, the crow hanging from his finger. Ouuuuuuu!"

Carl's father strode up. He squeezed the crow's neck and its beak opened. Carl pulled his finger away. Then his father grasped the crow’s head, twirled its body, and the body dropped to the ground. There it jumped and flapped just like a headless chicken.

"Stop crying," his father said now. Then, softer, "Let's see your finger."

It was pinched and sore, but the skin wasn't broken. It was okay.

"That poor crow was just defending itself, Carl," his father told him. "It was being brave."

Oscar came over, swinging a crow by its legs. "Here, feel this one, Carlie. It's dead for sure."

The dead crow was floppy, still warm, in Carl's hands. All its strangeness, the black sheen of its feathers, its wicked beak, its closed, tiny eyelids – he held the wild, lifeless, now harmless thing in his hands and tried to fathom its strangeness, its mystery. Blood dripped from its open beak. You could see its pointed little tongue.

"Crows're smart, you know," Oscar said. "You catch a young one and slit its tongue, it'll learn to talk." He took the crow from Carl. "Ed, you wanna show this one to your missus?"

"Naw," Carl's father said. "Helen wouldn't appreciate it."

Then Oscar pulled a wing feather out and stuck it in Carl's hair. "Now you're like an Indian, Carlie."

But Carl's hair wasn’t long enough. The feather fell out and he picked it up. He put it in his shirt pocket.

Walking back through the dusky woods, they nearly collided with the old fence. "Watch out!" his father said. He handed his gun to Oscar. Then he lifted Carl over the fence. Finally they pushed out of the woods into the open field.

It was a relief stepping out into the open. The circle of farm buildings was like a fort across the corn field. The barn and the sheds were dark, but there were lights showing warmly in the house. That’s where Carl's mother was, and his little sisters. He’d been far, far away, it seemed, and gone a long, long time.

His father stopped and looked back at the wall of trees. "The land's fairly level in those woods," he said. We could maybe clear to Larue's old line and extend this field."

"That'd give you another eight, ten acres," Oscar said. He smiled down at Carl. "You wanna ride on my shoulders, Carlie?"

Carl looked up at Oscar, then over at his father. "No thanks," he said.

The dark woods stood behind them now. Carl thought, When we’re back at the farm they’ll still be out here. He wondered where the crows had gone. Would they ever come back?

He wished there were still Indians in the woods. He would see some, though, in Minneapolis or up at Red Lake.

He felt for the feather in his pocket. It was still there.

1983-2001