Red Earth White Earth. Will Weaver

back the late-afternoon sunlight gleamed in her eyes. Guy saw her blink back tears.

      He and Tom stared at each other. “Shit, anybody can read,” Tom said.

      “We’ll teach you,” Guy said.

      “Cinch,” Tom said. “Two weeks, max.”

      The next Saturday Mary Ann came to school in the hayloft. Tiny shafts of sunlight fell from the barn’s roof and made yellow eyes on the hay-bales-and-boards school desks. Guy and Tom had also made a plank-walk across a deep hole in the layers of bales.

      “Any punching, spitting, shitting, pissing, or nose-picking during class, you walk the plank over the alligator pond, is that clear, class?” Tom called out as Mary Ann climbed the bales toward the classroom.

      “One problem, teach,” Guy said. “We’ve got an alligator plank but nothing to read.”

      “Shit,” Tom said. He scratched his head.

      “I brought some magazines,” Mary Ann said. She emptied a sack of them onto the desk.

      “Jesus!” Tom said.

      “Holy smokes,” Guy said.

      “They’re Bub’s,” she explained. “They was the only magazines in the house.”

      Guy stared. The magazines gleamed in the sunlight. On the covers were women bent over being fucked or women with their eyes closed and men’s cocks in their mouths.

      “There’s words later on,” she said. “I know because Bub reads them to himself sometimes.”

      “Whoee!” Tom shouted.

      “Shhh!” Guy hissed, stepping over to look down the ladder to the barn below. No one below but cows. He began to page through the magazines. He paused to stare at a black man who had a cock as big as a horse’s and had it halfway inside a skinny, blond-haired woman who had her face all scrunched up. White pussy.

      “Listen to this,” Tom whispered. “Harry slid the tip of his throbbing, bulb-bulb . . .”

      Guy looked where Tom’s finger had stopped. “Bulbous. That means shaped like a light bulb.”

      “Bulbous banana into the hungry red mouth of her cherrypot as its waiting lips eng . . .”

      “Engulfed,” Guy said. “Must mean gulp. Like in don’t gulp your food.”

      “Engulfed its spurting white . . .”

      “J. Is. M.,” Guy said slowly. The word was new to him.

      “Hey—you said you could read!” Mary Ann said suddenly.

      “We can,” Tom said quickly.

      “Sometimes you run across a word you never seen before,” Guy said. “It just takes a second to figure it out. Jis. M. Jism. Jism,” he said. “You see, that’s how you read. You sound out the letters.”

      “I’m tired, I want to go home,” Mary Ann said. The up-and-down shafts of sunlight now slanted across the loft.

      “Three more sentences,” Guy said.

      “Five,” Tom said. They sat bent over the magazine with Mary Ann pressed between them.

      “Okay, four,” Guy said.

      Mary Ann sighed and began again. “The tick . . .”

      “Th sound,” Tom said impatiently.

      “The thick, wit . . .”

      “Silent e,” Guy said.

      “White,” she murmured.

      “Good, keep going,” Guy said.

      “The thick, white rod of his coke . . .”

      “I don’t see no silent e,” Tom said.

      “. . . of his cock slid . . .”

      “Great,” Guy said. Mary Ann smiled and leaned closer to the words.

      “Into her wet muffin.”

      “Not muffin,” Guy and Tom both shouted. “There’s no f ’s in that word.”

      Mary Ann frowned. She stared down. “Pussy,” she said.

      “You’re guessing,” Guy said.

      “I’ll never get it,” Mary said, pushing away the magazine.

      “Hey—get this sentence right and we’ll let you go home!” Guy said.

      “Miss it, the alligator plank,” Tom said.

      Mary Ann glanced behind her at the bales. The hole was in shadow. She stared again at the sentence and scrunched up her forehead. “The thick white rod of his cock slid into her waiting . . . mouth!” she finished. “Mouth!”

      “Yea, hooray,” Guy and Tom shouted. “You were reading! That was reading!”

      “Really?” Mary Ann said. Her eyes were more open and shining than Guy had ever seen them.

      5

      Two days before Christmas came the first real snow. It snowed all day. All night. Until noon the next day. Thick, wet snow that, in three claps between mittens, made solid snowballs. When their arms hurt from throwing, Guy and Tom and Mary Ann rolled up bigger white balls for snowmen. The weight of the larger balls drew up grass and leaves from the lawn and left a map of brown trails across the white yard. On the farm buildings the snow dulled the ridges of the rooflines, lay drooped over their eaves like bread dough left rising too long in a bowl.

      That afternoon Guy’s father paid Jewell Hartmeir a visit. He brought with him the long-handled, aluminum snow rake.

      “Maybe one of the boys can try that out tomorrow,” Jewell Hartmeir said, leaning the snow rake against the barn.

      Martin looked up at the Hartmeir barn roof. “I wouldn’t wait,” Martin said.

      “I would,” Jewell Hartmeir said. He glanced up briefly, then spit brown on the snow.

      “Get in the damn truck,” Martin said suddenly to Guy. Guy obeyed. On the way home Martin swore again, then said, “At least nobody can blame me.”

      That afternoon, on his way to the barn for chores, Guy heard on the faint north wind cattle bawling. They didn’t stop.

      Martin and Helmer and three neighbor men worked with chain saws and a pistol. Cattle bawled and voices screamed from underneath the twisted tin and broken lumber of the Hartmeir barn. With the chain saws the men cut through metal and wood. Behind the men and saws, Guy and Tom threw aside the wreckage. Whenever a chain saw stopped, the pistol whumped as Martin shot another cow.

      The men found Jewell Hartmeir pinned, cursing, in the gutter. He was okay but for a long scrape down his face. Martin cut him free and he stood up dripping manure and shouting for his boys.

      Billy and Bob they found trapped alongside a big, dead Holstein whose broken back supported a rafter. Martin cut a jagged door for them and they scrambled free. Chuck, the youngest, they pulled crying from beneath some timbers. The foot on his right leg was turned backward.

      “Bub—Bub! Where’s Bub? Bub and Mary Ann!” Jewell shouted.

      There was silence.

      “Bub, answer me, goddamn you!” his father shouted.

      “That was him screamin’ earlier,” Chuck blubbered, his chest heaving. “Bub was further on but he ain’t screamin’ no more. Mary Ann neither.”

      Toward the middle, flattest part of the barn, the chain saw blades dulled from the tin and nails and did not cut as much as smoke. The men threw the saws aside into the snow, where they hissed and sank from sight. Then the men worked forward with axes and handsaws and hydraulic jacks.

      “Need somebody