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.
“Why exactly forty-five?”
“Depends on the rice.”
“Waterfowl Lake rice, you go shorter and some hulls stay on,” Eagle said. “Longer and you start to erode the rice.”
Eagle pushed the wheelbarrow around to the other side, where there was no ramp. Supersize Me went out and killed the truck engine. “Give me a hand getting the rice into the winnower,” instructed Eagle. JW unsnapped the clips on the rough metal door and lifted it off. He pulled a lever welded to the back end of the barrel to rotate it on its pivot and poured out the wild rice along with the chaff, which had been reduced to a flour-like brown powder.
When the barrel was empty, Eagle wheeled the load over to the winnower, which sat in the barn’s center aisle, back behind the big tarp where the raw rice was laid out to dry. He switched the winnower on, and its conveyor started rattling uphill, while its massive fan blew a ticking wind through the clear plastic exhaust duct. JW shoveled the thrashed rice and chaff onto the conveyor. It rode up seven feet and dumped into a chute at the top. As it fell through the machine, the blower separated the feathery mazaan dust from the heavier rice. It blew through the exhaust duct in a sudden hiss and out the sidewall of the barn, where it was collected for later packaging. Excess flour blew away in the breeze like fine smoke. And clean multi-colored rice began to pour out of the bottom chute, into a white bag that hung from a small stand.
Eagle went to get another bag, then exchanged it midstream for the full one, before tying it off and putting it on the scale as JW finished feeding the machine. Its rattling hiss slowly dropped off to a few ticks, then just the hollow sound of the fan. JW shut it off and came up as Eagle affixed a label with the date and weight.
“This finished product is 99.9% pure,” said Eagle. “An organic foods distributor picks it up every Friday. We run these big bags through the packager and labeler to make one-pound packages whenever we have the time.”
He handed JW a clipboard with a spreadsheet showing each bag’s weight and number, logged with a date. JW was impressed by the efficiency of the operation.
“You keep doing what we’ve been doing. Keep track of the inflow and outgo, and report everything back to me. Any questions?”
“This is just so far from banking,” JW observed. “Was it your wife’s idea or something?”
Eagle shook his head. “She was into banking too,” he said. He pulled leather gloves on and headed back out to the fire. “Used to work for your boss in Minneapolis. She knew him from when he ran the bank up here. That’s how I know he’s an asshole.”
“Did I know her?” JW asked.
Eagle shook his head. “I don’t think so.” He picked up a paddle and stepped into the smoke.
* * *
JW SPENT THE rest of the week helping Ernie run the rice operation. It was mostly a silent détente. Both days, Eagle was away for hours at a time in the morning and into the early afternoon. When JW asked Ernie where Eagle might be, Ernie ignored him. When JW asked a third time, he muttered, “Meetings,” and kept working.
In the late afternoons, Jacob would get home from school and ask JW to help him with Pride. One day Eagle overheard the boy asking and barked back, “Later. We’re busy with the rice. Get your homework done and then maybe gichi-mookomaan will have time to show you a little more of his moomigo-manidoo ways.”
“What does that mean?” JW asked Eagle as they turned rice on the tarp.
“What?”
“Gichi-mookomaan.”
Eagle laughed, but he seemed uncomfortable. “Depends on the context,” he replied.
JW turned over another shovelful and spread it out. Over by the door, Ernie was weighing in another rice delivery.
“Okay…?” he pushed.
“Means butcher knife,” Ernie said as he plunked a bag down on the scale.
Eagle glanced at Ernie with a flash of irritation, then turned back to JW with a sigh of resignation. “Sometimes it means butcher knife, other times it means white man,” he said.
JW saw Ernie smiling wryly. “White man is the same word as butcher knife?”
“I didn’t make up the language,” said Eagle. JW grunted and threw himself back into turning the rice.
At night he took long, hot showers in the trailer’s tiny stall, trying to relax his muscles. Some nights he listened to Eagle and Jacob’s conversations over the bug, a towel draped around his neck and his hair damp, but they were mostly arguments about homework. Eagle wanted to see it, because he suspected Jacob just wasn’t doing it. Jacob usually said he didn’t have any, or he’d already done it all, or he had forgotten it at school. Then he would go into his room, and Eagle would catch him playing online games with his old crowd in Minneapolis, and the arguments would begin again.
Other nights JW was so tired that he forgot to listen in. After a few minutes spent reading the Big Book in bed, he would turn off the light and lie back, listening to the swaying trees and the drunken howls of coyote packs until the world fell away from him.
By Sunday he was sore up and down his back and arms. Eagle had given him the day off. He lay on his mattress and fantasized about spending the day in bed reading the Big Book. He had placed it within reach on the bottom shelf of the nightstand. Reading it would be his excuse for not moving. But he had a brunch meeting scheduled with Jorgenson. He sighed and slowly swung his feet out onto the floor, bending his neck and rolling his crackling shoulders.
JW shaved and slapped on some Old Spice, then shrugged into his suit coat and ducked down to look out the kitchen window at the Indians. Seven thirty and they were already at it. For the first time in days, he didn’t smell like wood smoke. He gently touched his injured nose with his fingertips. The magenta was fading, but it was still puffy and tender. He went back into the bathroom and replaced the white cross.
As he put on his tie in the bedroom, he watched the Indians in the open barn door, running last night’s batch through the packager. The act of tightening the tie’s knot had a powerful effect, underscoring his sense of impending return to his former world. He just wished he had his own car. He shot his cuffs and turned for the door.