Red Earth White Earth. Will Weaver

down at him.

      “It’s three o’clock. You got calves to feed, remember?”

      Guy scrambled up. “Yessir.” Tom stepped quickly away from Martin, went for his bike.

      “See ya,” Guy said quickly to Tom and Mary Ann. He followed his father toward the buildings. Halfway there, he realized Mary Ann Hartmeir and her silent bare feet were right behind him.

      “Poor little ragamuffin,” Guy’s grandmother, Etta, murmured. “I’ve never seen a little girl that dirty.”

      “Shoulda caught her and give her a bath,” Martin said.

      It was after supper. They were all working in the garden. Martin swung the scythe and Guy threw the sweet-corn stalks onto the wagon; from the heat the sweet-corn ears had stopped coming but the cows could eat what green leaves were left. Madeline and Etta worked among the tomato plants, clipping back the runners that carried tomatoes too small and green to ripen. Down the garden west, outlined in a gown of orange dust, Helmer worked in the potatoes. His hoe swung him side to side, plant to plant. The even marks of its blade looked like machine tracks in the dry earth. Tank tracks.

      “No, you don’t meddle with other people’s children,” Etta said. “The Bible makes that clear.” She named a chapter and verse. Guy’s grandparents read the Bible every night and all day Sunday. His parents didn’t.

      Madeline looked up. “Somebody should,” she said. “Somebody should pay that little girl’s parents a visit and see what’s going on.”

      “No, I wouldn’t do that either,” Etta said. “You don’t want to barge in on someone. That’s one thing you should never do, is interfere.”

      “If that little girl hasn’t had a bath by the next time she comes, I’m going up there,” Madeline said.

      “You missed a runner, there,” Etta said, pointing to the ground.

      Mary Ann Hartmeir came the next day, unbathed. Guy was walking in from the barn for breakfast when her short shadow fell across his. He jumped.

      “Dammit,” he shouted, “you almost made me spill this milk.”

      Mary Ann stared at the jar of milk in his hands, at the yellowish layer of cream that had begun to form at the top.

      “What’s the matter, you never seen a jar of milk before?”

      “Yes,” she said. “I seen milk before.”

      “You talk funny,” he said. She talked like she had a Jew’s harp stuck in her throat.

      “So do you,” she said.

      Guy kept walking. Mary Ann followed him. At the porch door he paused. She was still behind him. “Well, come on in then,” he said.

      During breakfast with Mary Ann, Guy’s mother opened all the windows in the kitchen. Martin squinted and leaned away from the table as he ate. During Mary Ann’s eighth pancake Madeline said, “Does your mother know you came for a visit?”

      “No. Well, maybe.” Mary Ann looked out the window and frowned briefly. “She’s dead.” She reached for another pancake.

      Martin coughed. Madeline’s eyes widened.

      “Your father, he’s . . .”

      “They’s building a barn. He and my brothers.”

      Madeline poured Mary Ann another glass of milk, which she drank empty in a series of gulps.

      “Then . . . who cooks?”

      “My brothers or me. I can make grits. I can make Jell-O. I can make milk.”

      “Make milk?” Martin asked.

      “You only needs a can opener and a jar and a quart of water,” she said. “Any damn fool can make milk.”

      Martin choked on a bite of pancake and had to take a long swallow of coffee.

      “You live on the old Abrahamson place,” Madeline said.

      “It’s ourn now,” Mary Ann said immediately. Her eyes flickered across the table to the bacon.

      Madeline passed her the plate.

      “How long have you been here?” Martin said.

      “Since Julia got attacked by the stranger and went into a coma, then she came to and got married to Dr. Les Granger. That long.”

      Guy looked to Martin and then Madeline.

      “Julia?” Madeline asked.

      “Julia. On TV. Today the stranger might come back again.”

      “One of the soap operas,” Madeline murmured.

      “My dad said the attacker was probably a nigger,” Mary Ann said. “Niggers like white pussy.”

      Madeline caught her breath. Martin spit a mouthful of coffee onto his plate. His chest began to heave. “Get out,” Madeline said quickly. “If you think this is funny, get out of the house.”

      Guy was puzzled but he began to laugh with his father. “You, too,” Madeline hissed at him. “Out. Now!”

      In the yard Martin wiped his eyes and laughed until he gasped for breath. “Niggers . . . white pussy. I never heard a kid talk like that in my life.”

      Guy grinned. White pussy. There were some calico pussies in the barn but no white ones. Anyway, he smiled at his father and listened to him laugh. It was a strange sound from his father, half magpie and half crow, a sound he seldom heard.

      He helped his father grease the combine. They crawled underneath and lay on the prickly dry grass looking up at the sickle and reel. Guy held the grease nozzle in the places where a small hand worked better than a big one. Every once in a while his father laughed again and Guy joined him.

      They were still on the ground, pumping grease into the last fitting, when they saw feet. Madeline’s brown shoes and Mary Ann’s brown ankles came toward them and stopped. Guy stared at Mary Ann’s toes. The nails were clipped short and scraped clean. He could smell soap.

      He scrambled from beneath the combine and stood up. Mary Ann was dressed in his mother’s yellow blouse. A belt around her waist made the blouse look like a dress. Her blond hair lay flat and parted in the middle. Her cheeks were rubbed reddish and chapped. Her teeth were pink with blood, and she licked them and spit.

      “I’m telling my dad,” she said to Guy’s mom. “You wait what he does to you.”

      “You go right ahead and tell him,” Madeline said. Her dress was spotted with water. She carried a paper bag that held Mary Ann’s clothes. Madeline’s brown eyes shone in the morning sunlight and her jaw was set. “Guy, get a jar of milk for Mary Ann and her family. I’m going to pay a neighborly call on the Hartmeirs.”

      A half hour later Madeline returned in the dusty family Cutlass. She came across the yard toward the combine carrying the yellow and orange blouse by its belt. Her face was red, her eyes angry. “Martin, you’d better get up to visit the Hartmeirs first chance you get,” she said. “They’ll be needing some help.”

      “Nope, don’t need no hep,” Jewell Hartmeir said. He was a short, lean man whose bib overalls and red shirt hung on him like scarecrow clothes. His gray engineer’s cap was pulled low across his eyes and had soaked itself full of oil from his forehead and black hair. He spit a long brown spurt of tobacco juice into the dust. His face was tanned leathery brown. Squinted half shut, his small blue eyes were double-lidded like the eyes of the black bull snake Guy and Tom had once killed by the chicken coop. Guy stayed on the far, safe side of his father.

      Martin and Jewell Hartmeir stood leaning against the corral fence. In the Hartmeirs’ yard there was a battered pink and purple trailer house. A flatbed truck. An old Massey-Ferguson tractor whose red paint had peeled mostly to gray metal. A large, bright yellow pile of lumber that shimmered