“Tomorrow, in the morning, we will go to work. We will do what is most urgent right away and continue working until we are back on our feet. We have a big task ahead, and we will do it.”
White Elk retreated to a side room to sit down. Petah followed him.
“Old man, you do not look well. How are you feeling?”
“Oh, my Petah, I’m just old and aching. I need to sit down for a bit. You do not need to worry about me.”
“Of course I worry about you. Mother worries about you. You look like you need a hot bath and a good meal. And you need eight hours of sleep in a warm bed with a soft pillow.”
White Elk managed a little smile at the child of Sinopa, the one person he considered the most indispensible of all on the entire Blackfoot reservation.
“Petah, can I trust you with something?”
“Trust me? Trust me with what?”
“You heard me say that my mother predicted this terrible day would come. Did you hear that?”
“Yes, Benjamin, I heard you.”
“She actually did say those things. Do you believe me?”
Petah nodded her head.
“Well, she said she was given the information ahead of time. She simply passed along the information to me.”
“Did she say who it was that told her?”
“Yes, she did. She told me the name. I can’t tell everyone this. But I thought I could tell you, Petah, so you could tell your mother when she arrives. Can I trust you with the name?”
The young woman studied the old man’s eyes. “You know you can put your faith in me, just as you do my mother.”
“Very well then, Petah. My old mother told me that my namesake came to her window at the nursing home in Livingstone. It spoke to her. The white ponoká told her, the white elk, Petah. The white elk.”
Chapter Forty-Nine
Sitting high in the cab of his John Deere tractor, Harland Sven squinted as the sun made its first appearance. In the early morning hours, Harland watched solar particles buff a silver mirror shine across the atmosphere at the table-flat eastern horizon. Now the red rim of the sun burned through a tree windrow a mile away. The ruby rays danced along the green paint on the tractor’s cowling and lit like flame the headhouse superstructure of the far distant grain elevator silos of Sweetly Growers Cooperative.
The farmer stopped his rig. He emerged from the heated cab into the crisp cool of the first day of May and dropped onto the prairie and scrambled onto an automatic planter. The machine could accurately dispense corn seed at ten-inch intervals, eight rows at a time. All the farmer had to do was load a central hopper atop the device with seventy bushels of bagged seed. He checked the hopper load to see if he could stretch another hour out of the unit before returning to the homestead for more seed.
The waltz of the seeding would go on all day and into the evening, a fifteen-hour day. Corn today, corn tomorrow and corn the day after that. Soybeans would follow later. All week the seeder would precisely meter out individual seeds, never missing a space, never doubling up. Bushel after bushel of American Midwest fecundity would be inserted into the Minnesota River Valley soil, some of the most productive land anywhere on the planet.
If all the hundreds of machine parts did their job, the day would be uneventful. Sitting in an enclosed air-conditioned cab and listening to country music and farm commodity bulletins, Harland had only to steer the tractor, drink coffee from his thermos cup, chew on a sandwich and daydream. Even the relentless rays of the sun burning into the earth all day were tempered by the cab’s polarized glass.
Throughout the morning, the farmer brooded. Last year’s prices had been brutal, and only a near-record harvest off the farm had buffered the worst of the financial pressures. With spring planting underway, grain reserves around the Midwest were well above average. If the U.S. didn’t pick up some heavy export contracts soon, another good harvest would only mean abysmal prices once again come fall.
But the day dawned splendid over the Minnesota River floodplain. At the noon hour, the temperature hovered in the low seventies and there was no humidity to speak of. The long-range forecast called for many bright days of clear high pressure over South Dakota. Perfect planting weather, certainly.
Harland hummed along with a country trash tune, “You’re In The Back Seat Of My Heart,” by a new C&W phenom with the stage name Will Cheater when the roar of military ordnance shook the John Deere. The initial report sent a shock through his body and he jumped involuntarily in his seat.
“Good lord, what was that?” Harland yelled inside the cab. As soon as the words left his mouth, a second volley of piercing sound crashed through the cab windows. He stopped the tractor, opened the cab door and stood on the door threshold. He hurriedly scanned 360 degrees to see if he could spot military aircraft in the vicinity. There was nothing to be seen. As he shifted his eyes along the points of the compass, several more thunderous concussions buffeted his ears, loud enough to make him recoil. Once the noise faded, the spring day embraced him as before. He shrugged his shoulders and seated himself back in the John Deere, closed the door and geared up to complete the planting.
At 6:35 pm, the farmer made the tight swing around for one more pass to the west before calling it quits for the evening. As he brought the tractor around, he noticed the late afternoon sun was little more than a bloody, hazy smudge above the western horizon, swaddled in a flat gray blanket. The sky darkened as the tractor rolled. The sun vanished. A wedge of drab weather swept in over the plains country.
Harland stopped his tractor and opened the cab door once again. He sniffed the air. It smelled clean and spring earth new. There was no real heat to it, no moisture. There was no tornado danger then, he knew. Still, the sky to the west appeared troubled and ugly while directly above him the dome of the atmosphere was crystal blue.
“That don’t look right,” Harland mumbled to himself.
The line of weather arched high overhead and the land fell under a dense colorless shadow. Harland peered westward again. It was breaking up. A sheet of dull fog was cutting furrows in the horizon and blotting it out. It appeared as if a line storm, a fast moving thunderstorm, was on its way in. But it couldn’t be. It just didn’t feel or smell of rain and there was no wind before the approaching front.
The farmer climbed down off his machine and took a few strides to the west to size up the building weather. After five decades in the fields, he had never seen a front behave in such a way. What was coming looked like a snow squall but it wasn’t white and everything around him was a still and quiet as the good black earth itself.
A flake appeared, falling straight down before him. Then another. The air quickly filled with dull crystals. He reached out a hand. One landed on his denim sleeve. He touched it, and it smudged to gray dust.
“Now what in the world is that?” he whispered to the empty field.
More fell on his jacket and head. It was not snow. It looked like fireplace ash, but there was no smell of wood smoke in the air, no sign of a fire anywhere.
Within minutes, Harland was engulfed in a steady fall of gray duff. Millions of flakes of the stuff murmured as they landed on earth and machine. On the edge of hearing, the New World Swede’s brain registered the sound of an automobile horn. He turned over his right shoulder to see a set of headlights charging along the northern margin of the field. He glared at the lights.