Red Earth White Earth. Will Weaver

pointed timbers left over from the Abrahamson barn.

      Guy watched her walk. She did not hold on to anything.

      “Throw down that square, you’re not making a goddamn church,” Jewell Hartmeir called to one of his sons. The biggest of the boys, the one with the thickest, reddest arms, slowly stood up. He threw the carpenter’s square. It came turning and whistling across the corral toward the fence. Martin jerked Guy behind him. The flat metal square kicked up a cloud of dust a foot from Jewell Hartmeir’s boots. Hartmeir had not moved.

      “You want to hit me you got to aim better than that,” Jewell Hartmeir called back. He spit again.

      Martin glanced down at Guy, then back to the barn. He stared at the rafters. “What sort of pitch you got on that roof?”

      “Just enough slope to run water,” Hartmeir said. “That’s all you need on a roof.”

      Martin was silent. Then he said, “Looks kind of flat for this country. We get a lot of snow up here in the winter.”

      Hartmeir glanced across to Martin. His blue eyes widened for a moment, then squinted narrow again. “Snow’s light,” he said. He looked back to his boys.

      “Except sometimes two feet of snow comes all at once,” Martin said.

      “Light as a snowflake is what people say, don’t they?” Hartmeir said. “Snow’s like cotton, I’d guess. I worked in cotton, I kin work in snow. Bub—what you sittin’ down for, you think it’s suppertime or something!” he shouted.

      “I’m empty on nails,” Bub said. He spit a brown streamer over the edge.

      “So go down and get yerself some for Christ’s sakes,” Hartmeir said.

      “It’s near two o’clock,” Bub said.

      “Two o’clock?” the other three brothers said at the same time. They stood up and let their hammers fall through the rafters to the ground.

      “Two o’clock! Julia!” Mary Ann shrieked. She began to walk quickly—too quickly—along the narrow rim to the ladder. She slipped, pitched forward, but caught a rafter tail as she fell over the side. Martin sucked in his breath. Mary Ann slowly pulled herself up and walked on to the ladder as quickly as before.

      “Tough little woman,” Hartmeir said, grinning. “She’s smarter than all them big boys put together.”

      Mary Ann raced across the yard toward the trailer. The boys followed her, walking faster and faster as they neared the door, four big geese pulled along by a fluttering mallard. “Their goddamn TV show,” Jewell said, checking his pocket watch. “If I wouldn’t let ’em watch it, they wouldn’t turn a lick of work around here.”

      Martin was silent for a moment. Mary Ann disappeared into the trailer. “Your girl,” he said. “She’s paid us a couple of visits.”

      “That won’t happen again,” Hartmeir said quickly. “We don’t bother nobody and don’t like to be bothered in return.”

      Martin nodded. He glanced back to the barn, to the rafters and the rim from which Mary Ann had slipped.

      “That wasn’t what I meant,” Guy’s father said. “I was thinking that she’s almost big enough to work out. My wife says she’d take some work, like canning and garden and housework, from the girl in return for some beef and milk.”

      Guy stared at his father. His mother had never said anything like that.

      Jewell Hartmeir stared across at the empty shell of the barn and spit again. “Doesn’t sound bad. But I’d have to think about it,” he said. He checked his watch and again looked toward the trailer.

      The next morning Mary Ann Hartmeir knocked on the door at 5:00 AM. She was wearing gloves and a scarf tied low over her head. “I’m here to work,” she said.

      “We don’t start until eight o’clock,” Madeline said, tying her bath robe. “Until then you lie here on the couch.” She pulled off Mary Ann’s gloves and scarf, pressed her down, and covered her with an afghan blanket.

      “And you get back to bed, too, Guy,” she said.

      When Guy woke up at six-thirty, Mary Ann was still sleeping. She was at the breakfast table when he came in from chores at eight. Later in the morning Tom rode into the yard on his bike. Mary Ann and Guy and Tom played together all that day and every day for the rest of the week.

      On Friday afternoon Madeline and Tom and Guy drove Mary Ann home. Madeline delivered to Jewell Hartmeir a gallon of milk, some packages of frozen beef from the freezer, plus a sack of fresh tomatoes and string beans from the garden.

      Jewell Hartmeir looked into the box and then at Mary Ann. He squinted. “She work that much?” he said.

      “Could hardly have gotten along without her,” Madeline said softly. “Like to have her again next week.”

      “We’ll see,” Hartmeir said, reaching for the box of food.

      Next week Mary Ann came again, and every week for the rest of the summer. She and Guy and Tom played together. They showed her the hayloft, the attic of the granary, all their forts. By the end of August and the approach of school, it was like she had always been there.

      4

      That September the teachers in Flatwater put Mary Ann in first grade. Her first day she beat up three smaller boys who laughed at her size, then bit the wrist of the teacher, who dragged her off to the principal’s office.

      “Wasn’t my goddamn fault they put me in the wrong class,” she said. She and Guy and Tom sat together on the school bus. She spoke with her teeth clenched together and moved only her lips. “Dumb fuckers. I know how to do things they never heard of.”

      “What happens tomorrow?” Guy asked.

      She shrugged.

      Guy saw a folded note in her hand.

      “What’s that?” Tom said.

      She looked down at the note. She wadded it in her palm. “From the principal. Supposed to give it to my daddy.” She stood up and began to open the bus window.

      “Wait,” Guy cried. He grabbed her arm.

      She struggled to throw the note out the window.

      Tom grabbed it and leaned away to read it.

      “It says . . . you can’t read,” he said. He and Guy turned to stare at Mary Ann, who looked down. “Shit, that’s why they put you in first grade. You can’t read.”

      Two older girls in the next seat, fifth-graders, glanced around at Mary Ann, then began to giggle. In an instant Mary Ann had one girl’s ponytail pulled back and her arm around the girl’s white throat. The girl’s eyes bulged and she gasped for air; her friend flailed at Mary Ann with a notebook. The bus driver was slowing onto the shoulder of the highway before Guy and Tom separated the three girls. With the driver still glaring at them in the overhead mirror, the bus slowly picked up speed again.

      “What the hell’s the matter with you?” Tom hissed at Mary Ann. “You can’t go around beating up on people every minute of your life.”

      “Why not? My daddy taught me how to fight back.”

      She glared at the two bigger girls in the next seat.

      Guy stared at Tom and shook his head. “You don’t always have to punch somebody,” Guy said.

      “Why not?” she said stubbornly. “My daddy says you turn the other cheek you just get your head knocked off.”

      “Because you’re going to stay in first grade the rest of your life, that’s why. You’ll be the only full-grown person in first grade,” Guy said.

      “You’ll get full-grown and your desk will stick on you,” Tom added. “You’ll have to walk around the