The stench of rot and decay and animal waste hit before the sight of it.
But whenever the Flats came into view—after that bend just past town, after the buildings give way once again to the pines—the smell made sense. Because it isn’t just the dump itself but the years of that putrid smell that clung to shack walls, if you call corrugated cardboard or tin (with tar paper stapled to it) walls. That gag-inducing odor steeped deep into old sofas and sunk down into chewed-through mattresses.
This is how and where Mick and the rest of the Maliseet lived. This is where our town had relegated them. But the proud Maliseet tried not to focus on the trash and the ugly; instead they set their eyes on the surrounding beauty. After all, here the rolling brook hugged the country road and sparkled as it ran over rocks and rapids. High white birch and tall pines peppered the landscape across and behind the dump. In fact, in many ways the mound of trash itself blended in. Were it not for the shacks, the rectangles of gray—the soiled mattresses that the Maliseet slept on under open sky—the stray, jutting bits of broken chairs, and piles of tin cans and cereal boxes that the people of Watsonville drove out and piled onto the heap every Saturday, one could be hard-pressed to distinguish this hill from the other ones that rolled their way out of town.
Mr. Pop had taught me to stay vigilant for the dangers that lurked along this inviting gravel-covered road: moose, deer, and bear could wander out at any moment. But as I drove out this day, the words of Second Baptist’s braggin’ sign reminded me of another danger Mr. Pop often warned me of. “Be careful,” he would say, “when people fail to treat one another with dignity.”
I hadn’t always understood when he said this, but as I parked the truck at the base of the dump, a chill ran through me, suddenly understanding. I’d always figured the black bears that sniffed and poked around through the trash were the greatest danger here. Perhaps I was wrong.
“Hey! Hurry up!”
I jumped at the knock at the truck window. Mick.
“Come on. Before everyone’s up.” Mick jimmied the handle and opened the door for me, grabbing my hand as I stepped out. “Over here.”
He looked around and pulled me toward a pair of smoke-streaked yellow cellar doors.
“Old Man Stringer dropped ’em off yesterday,” Mick said. “He was too drunk to haul them up all the way. But wanted us to have ’em. ‘They sure don’t work for my shack, so I thought maybe they’d work for yours,’ Old Man told me.”
“So what are you going to do with them?” I asked, smiling and trying to resist reaching up to touch Mick’s face. He didn’t tower over me but had a good three or four inches on me. Mick’s deep tanned skin and shiny-black, shoulder-length hair made me weak in the knees. His eyes almost squinted shut when he smiled at me, and his perfect creamy-white teeth usually made people take a second look. He was wearing the same red plaid shirt I’d seen him wear a hundred times, but it never seemed old.
“I’ll show you. Help me move one.” Mick smiled back at me and reached out to touch my face, running his finger over my smiling lips. “You must be the only person in town who smiles at the dump, you know that?”
“It’s not the dump that makes me smile.”
“Aw, shucks,” Mick teased. “Come on. Grab one. Let’s go.”
I dragged my door until Mick scolded me. “You’re making a racket. You’ll wake everybody up. Pick it up.”
“I’m supposed to be waking everybody up,” I said.
“And we will, in a minute. Trust me. Here.”
Mick shifted his door under a trio of snuggled-tight pines, then took mine from me, kicking and tugging the doors into place.
“There,” he said, wiping his hands on his jeans. “With the charred-side out, they can’t see. Now, come here.”
I followed him under the trees, ducking low to keep too many pine needles from dripping down into my shirt. Mick patted the brown ground and I sat beside him.
“Someday, we won’t have to hide like this. We can have a real home. But for now. At least we have a place to be alone. Together.”
Together. Someday. I breathed deep. Here, the smell of pine and sap tried to drown out the wretched odor that lurked behind it.
Mick wrapped an arm around me, snuck a kiss on my cheek. “Someday,” he whispered. We sat for a moment, staring out into the forest.
“However,” Mick said, suddenly antsy, “until someday, we’ve got to go wake everybody up. We can meet here again tomorrow. Come a little earlier.”
“One minute,” I said. “This is nice.” I put my hand to his cheek, ran it back through his black-as-any-bear hair and kissed him right on the lips. This wasn’t our first kiss—that had been last harvest. While everyone sat around on the porch and in the grass and dove into their peanut butter and jelly or cheese sandwiches, Mick and I stole behind the old shed and we snuck the first of many secret and dangerous kisses.
Mother had told me the stories of her and Mr. Pop—sneaking their own kisses when they were about my age. Later Mother caused a scandal of her own by skipping college and the future a girl of her “station” was entitled to so she could marry my dad.
“He’s a good man, a good worker, and a good Christian, Geneva,” my grandfather had told her before she married my dad at sixteen. “But he’s a farmer’s son. He can’t give you the life I’ve given you.”
I stared back into the trees, wondering what my own father would say now. Knowing, actually.
“Hey,” Mick said, nudging me with his elbow. “Let’s go get everybody.”
I left first, and Mick met me in front of his shack. I had walked back around to where my truck sat, climbed the dump from that angle. Less suspicious—as always. Although as I passed the Indian women—sitting in their half circles, facing the road below and weaving ash wood into the potato baskets they would sell to local farmers along with the occasional tourist—their eyes followed my steps. They knew why I came. But I could never shake the sense they knew something else.
I smiled and offered my best “tan kahk,” the Maliseet greeting. Mick heard me and jerked his head. Though I’d heard it all my life, this was the first time I said it. Well, except for in front of my bedroom mirror, where I practiced it and the other Maliseet phrases Mick’d taught me. I caught him in a small smile, before turning back to talk to his brother.
“Mercy,” one of the women called out. I stepped toward the semicircle. It was Mick’s mother. She leaned forward to stir the can of beans resting in the fire.
“Good morning, Miss Louise.”
“Thank your father for the extra ash splints.”
“No need. Mr. Pop says ash trees belong to God and the Maliseet.”
Miss Louise smiled at me. “Yes, I know. He tells Ansley that. What I mean is, thank your father for cutting the ash. I had sent Joseph to do it. But—”
I glanced over to the shack where Mick and his younger brother Joseph now leaned. Mick’s sixteen-year-old hand looked huge as it rested on Joe’s thirteen-year-old and much-too-young-to-be-heaving chest. Bear and rusted spikes and people treated without dignity weren’t the only dangers of living in this dump. Respiratory illnesses like Joseph’s and the high incidence of diabetes ran rampant through this place. Once I’d heard Mr. Pop saying he wondered how much longer Joseph had. At the time, I didn’t understand. As I watched Mick with his brother and saw Miss Louise’s eyes tear, I knew. Even healthy Maliseet men typically lived only into their midforties.
“I’ll tell him.”
Miss Louise looked back at her work, without saying anything else. She pulled and tucked the strands of ash, weaving as if it were nothing, as if creating those intricate patterns for the colorful baskets were the only worry in her world.
By the time I got to Mick’s shack, Mick had roused those ready to work and had pressed on to the next shacks. Joseph followed him—begging to be included, knowing he’d be refused. The work was too hard for a sickly thirteen-year-old, certainly one struggling even to breathe. Joseph tapped the maple trees in the spring, a much less strenuous job, and by the time harvest rolled around, he felt bored and invincible even if he wasn’t.
I trotted over by Mick to help bang on doors, pushing them open if we had to, and call loudly, “There’s work on the Millar farm. Truck leaves in five minutes. Mr. Millar’s got work today. Get up and get going.”
The men rambled out of doors, pulling up trousers, tucking in shirts—meaning we didn’t need to go into any of the shacks. Always a relief.
Mick counted them off. “Looks like seven, plus me and Pop.”
“And me,” Joseph said with a deep breath, fingering the beaded Maliseet cap on his head. Ansley had given it to him during one of his lengthier respiratory episodes in the hospital.
“Sorry, kid.” Mick gave Joseph a pat. “But one of these days, ’k?”
Joseph kicked a rock and rambled back over to the circle of women. His mother pointed at a pile of ash splints and he reluctantly sat down to weave like the women were doing.
“He can’t wait till sugaring season—so he can be off by himself, among the maples, instead of sitting there with all those women,” Mick said. “He thinks it’s not manly.”
“He could always come, you know, feed the pigs and chickens,” I said. “Ellery’d find something for him to do.”
“He’d just take up space. They need to work. He doesn’t. Just the way it is.”
I stepped carefully over bits of rubbish, ears tuned for the growl of a bear as we headed back down the heap. After waking them up, I never said much to the men. We all just walked in silence—even me and Mick. Especially me and Mick, actually.
Mr. Ansley broke the silence with “In the back. Now,” just as he said every day we reached the truck. A few of them reached out for another helping of beans and bacon from the women who’d met us at the truck. And as Ansley said this once again, so did the men follow—jumping over the back gate, their worn waffle stompers kicking up dust and grime as they landed. The same as they did every morning. At least, every morning I came to get them.
I used to wonder why Ansley needed to repeat these orders. Surely, the men knew they were to ride in back. But lately, his words were meant for only one: Mick in the back too. Actually the words were meant for two. For Mick. And me.
Picking rocks was worse than picking potatoes. After all, picking potatoes offered reward beyond the pay. It was true: eating those potatoes was sometimes pay enough. I loved those early golf-ball-sized cobblers with their white, mealy flesh soaked in butter, or with peas and cream added. Although, the Kennebec and Katahdin potatoes filled the bulk of harvest picking. It didn’t matter. You could give me either variety baked and slathered with butter and sour cream, and I’d forget about the backbreaking work that got them to my table.
Rock picking—and its routine drudgery—offered little extra incentive. You came away with bruised knees, skinned knuckles, and sore backs. And they didn’t make the supper table any better. But picking rock is what held the promise, Mr. Pop always said.
Maybe this was why we still worked so hard with those rocks—hope and promise aren’t anything to sneeze at. So when I’d steal breaks—to stretch my back or legs—I’d scan the field for the other workers. Mick, Mr. Ansley, and the other Maliseet bent and crawled right alongside Mr. Pop, Bud, and Mr. Ellery. Right beside me. I’d wonder if this picture—of us all working together—wasn’t part of that promise itself. Mr. Pop talked as if it were: men and women, boys and girls, Indians and white folks, Catholic and Protestant, rich and poor, all working together. All glorifying God together is what Mr. Pop would call it. It’s what he’d said after reading about the U.S. Supreme Court’s “good and godly” decision regarding Brown vs. Board of Education the month before.
“Back to work now, Mercy.” I’d been caught. Mr. Pop had a keen sense of when my body started to slack and my mind started to wander. He said it sternly, but I caught his slight smile.
I smiled back. “Sorry, Mr. Pop. Just stretching.”
I dusted my knees, took a step forward, and crouched back down on the rich, loamy soil. Such fertile soil, but winter frost forces the rocks to the surface every season. The colder the winter, the more rock picking in the summer. I resumed tossing rocks into my wagon. Mr. Pop had been doing this same work for nearly forty years. The way he tells it, his parents had him out picking rocks on this very farm by the age of ten. He let me know to understand just what a grace I’d been given by not starting till I was twelve.
Though he’d laugh when he’d tell me that, Mr. Pop’s childhood hadn’t been funny. He and his twelve siblings had been born on this farm. Only five of them lived to leave it. His father died of tuberculosis when Mr. Pop was ten, leaving his mother, him, his brother, and three sisters to run the farm and try to keep food on the table any way they could. Only Mr. Pop and his brother stayed in Maine. Their sisters, long tired of the hardscrabble life that Maine offered them, scattered. My aunts wrote occasionally. But I had cousins I’d never met.
But Mr. Pop’s upbringing made him who he was. He knew what it was to be hungry, to be poor. He knew the humiliation and blessing of living off the kindness of neighbors, churchgoers, and strangers. He knew loss and desperation. He knew heartbreak. But he also knew second chances, hard work, and a good God, he would say.
“And,” he’d tell me, “I know what I’ve got to do with what I know.”
His friends tried to talk him out of this all the time. God couldn’t really expect this from him. If God did, would He have made the Maliseet so different? Most people in town assumed God had meant Maliseet to be with Maliseet. The white folks to be with white folks. And French-Canadians to stick with French-Canadians. But Mr. Pop wouldn’t accept that. At least, not on his fields.
So even now—I watched Old Man Stringer weave through the rock pickers and stagger up to Mr. Pop, eager for any work that would get him invited to our porch where we’d eat our sandwiches and have our fill of Mr. Pop’s ice cold well water. And for any who forgot lunch, Mother always had a morsel or two ready. Mr. Stringer was counting on it. In less than an hour, I knew Mr. Pop would oblige him. After all, what others called “drunk,” Mr. Pop called “wrestling demons.” And that, he said, doesn’t make you less of a man or less worthy of lunch.
Mr. Pop, Ellery, Bud, and I headed in to the bountiful table Mother set every dinnertime. A time to rest our bodies and replenish them, that’s what farmhands needed at midday. A twinge of guilt passed through me as I eyed the beef roast, green beans that were canned from last harvest, and the pickled beets. Homemade bread capped off a dinner fit for royalty. Farm life was simple but abundant, at least last growing season was.
“Mercy, men, better be headin’ out again,” Mr. Pop said. “Lots to do before we knock off this afternoon. Need to finish the side field and start pickin’ rocks down back.” We followed his lead as Mr. Pop shoved his chair back from the dining table.
“How’s your boy Glenn liking work at the mill?” Old Man Stringer asked. Maliseet conversation froze. Mick’s eyes lifted across the room to meet mine. We’d built a friendship and started a romance based on our ability to read expressions undetectable to others. But I couldn’t read this look.
Newell Socoby cleared his throat and brought the napkin to his mouth, preparing to answer.
Mr. Pop chimed in. “Nelson tells me Glenn’s doing real well over there. Like he was born for mill work.”
“Yes, sir. Glenn’s doing well.”
“Not just well,” Mr. Pop said. “He got a promotion, I hear. We’re real proud of him. Though we miss him here.”
“We miss him too,” Newell said. “Doesn’t get home as much as we’d like. He’s staying busy in Millinocket.”
I smiled at Mr. Socoby and at Mr. Pop, then tried to catch Mick’s eye. His head stayed bent. “Just hope Mick doesn’t follow his footsteps,” Mr. Pop said. “Would hate to lose another of my brightest young workers. Unless it’s to a university, of course. Then I’ll be happy to lose him.”
Mick smiled and nodded at Mr. Pop. But this time I understood the expression I could read in Mick’s eyes as they drifted, then landed on mine. It was something like horror.
He stopped just shy of the truck and turned to me. I kicked my steps into a run to catch up to him before the others got there. Mick glanced to the wash bins. The men stood laughing and drying their hands and faces on rags Mother handed out with a smile. We had only seconds.
“We’ll talk tomorrow,” Mick said, turning back to the truck. “Come early. Meet me back at our spot.”
I was relieved to hear the “our,” but my heart beat faster as he jumped up into the truck bed.
“What’s going on?”
Without glancing back, just knowing his father and uncle, Bud, Ellery, and my own father were just steps away, Mick said, “Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow, indeed!” Mr. Pop slapped Mick on the back as he walked toward the truck. “One last field to clear so we can get these seeds planted. Let’s just keep our eye on that promise.”
The rest of the men jumped back into the bed. Old Man Stringer tripped toward the cab and gave the door a hard yank. Mother stepped beside him with her basketful of rags and tugged it for him. She offered her hand as he stepped up.
“You okay, there?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Old Man said. “Thank you. Another delicious lunch.”
“Any time, Mr. Stringer.”
Mother cleared his sleeve from the door’s path and slammed it, tapping the door below the window to give Ellery the all clear. Then Mother waved me back around.
I couldn’t move. I knew I had to get the other basket of rags, bring it around back to the shed. I knew they had to be scrubbed on the washboard, hung to dry on the line before I went in to wash up myself and help with dinner cleanup.
But as the truck rumbled away, fluffing up dust in its wake, I could only watch and wonder. As Mother passed by, placing her hand on the small of my back, I wondered if she could feel the small tremors that shook inside.