Debra Magpie Earling: Born of Place

Debra Magpie Earling was commissioned by Hugo House to write a new story on the theme of Born in the U.S.A. as part of the final event of the 2010-2011 Hugo Literary Series. Debra premiered her story, "Born in the U.S.A." at Hugo House on March 18, 2011, alongside authorVictor LaValle, poet Alan Chong Lau and rapper Khingz.

Born of Place

Before my mother’s childhood home was lost to a field fire in 2007, I would often stop beside Highway 200 and brave the snake-laced fields to visit the house that had been abandoned years ago. I would hitch through the windowless frame and enter my mother’s old life. No human belonged there anymore. Earwig-tattered linoleum had bucked up in clumps. Mud nests of birds scabbed the rafters and swallows skittered at the ceiling then swooped down on me before they flitted out windows screened only by sky. When a faint breeze wrangled beneath the crawl space of the iron-blue weathered house the angry-sour smell of wolverine piss tinged the air.

My mother spoke of rattlers coiled on their porch, rattlers ticking beneath the thin floor slabs ticking whenever they walked. My great-grandmother Cecille, my mother and her three sisters would sleep together on the floor on a cattail mattress bound by flour sacks.  Even in good times my mother’s family faced poverty so dire the hissing wind snaked through the cracks of their home, and in the winter they would wake to snow powdering the army-issue horse blankets that covered their bed.

I possess a file of letters written by both my aunt Louise and my great-grandmother begging the Indian agent for a few dollars so Louise could have underwear for school and Cecille could feed the grandchildren left to her care. They lived on mice-infested flour and beans and were grateful for the rare container of boll-weeviled oatmeal. My mother spoke of a relentless hunger, long winters drinking bitter-black juniper tea to appease their growling stomachs.  

Hobos would jump from the train and cross Highway 200 to beg for food or shelter and Cecille offered them both if they chopped a little wood. One hobo named Jack became a regular visitor, a friend to my great-grandmother, and she always looked forward to his return but one cold frost-railed morning in early March he slipped beneath the grinding wheels of the Northern Pacific while Cecille stood waiting. My mother remembered the day, when at the age of ten, she walked with her grandmother and sisters searching for Jack, gathering what was left of his body. My mother helped her grandmother carry Jack’s remains back to the house, wept and prayed over the pitiful gunnysack that held the man who had become beloved to them.  

There is a litany of sorrowful events that mark my great-grandmother’s allotment. In 1927, Cecille’s youngest daughter Rosalie was beaten to death at the age of 21. In 1934, my grandmother Annie died from pneumonia at the age of 29 and my mother’s baby brother died the same year.  

When Louise was sixteen she scrawled her name in pencil on one of the window frames of Cecille’s house. And in 1947, Louise would die too at the age of 23 in a car accident and rest beneath that window for three days before her burial. I would often trace her name with my fingertips, attempt to call back the days of her living—her name inscribed over and over again—a loopy teenage epigraph that remained for fifty years—Louise, Louise, Louise was once here.  

But though my mother’s family faced government policies that did not recognize Indians as human beings, let alone citizens of the United States, though my great-grandmother did not receive the right to vote until 1924 when she was 37-years-old, Cecille Charlo Vanderburg displayed a giant American flag over her porch every 4th of July and seldom travelers would stop to wonder at the sight of my Indian grandmother in her braids and moccasins sitting proudly before it.  

My mother recalled one dumbfounded white man standing beside the highway and calling out to my great-grandmother, “What’s Indians got to be proud of the flag for?”   

“Everything,” Cecille shouted back, “The flag is the land.” My great-grandmother was a fierce citizen who walked twenty-four miles one way to St. Ignatius to vote. She never, not once, missed a chance to cast her vote.

I tried to imagine my mother living on this plot of land with her grandmother and her sisters, no one around for miles, the only neighbor, no neighbor at all, but a sour hermit, a white man who scope-sited all as trespassers. Vollman lived back behind my great-grandmother’s allotment. His two-story house secreted from the highway by a blind hill rise that hid his dark deeds. He had built the house as a young man and as he reached middle-aged he began to pine for someone to tend to his house and bore him cheap labor to work his fields. Vollman could well hide his home but the fact that he had sent away for a mail-order bride was no secret from the postmistress and consequently everyone else who lived in Perma. The postmistress had a reputation for steaming open letters and spilling their contents to anyone who would listen, including the addressee. Vollman was awaiting a bride from the old country and everyone imagined she’d be a suitable partner for Vollman, a dim, clunky woman with red-knuckled hands, a workhorse of a woman, broad hipped and bent on labor.

His bride came in on the afternoon train one summer day when the sky had not yet dimmed. Luck did not attend her. She arrived without welcome at the end of a workday that was far from over. The sun wouldn’t set for hours so work wouldn’t break until the black fields flushed the rattlers to the highway. Red sunlight rimmed the tracks, sizzled every pockmarked rock. Thirsty roots of cottonwoods sponged the Flathead River and hissed overhead offering little shade.

Nothing was pretty or settling about Perma in the early 1920’s, not then, or now.  Indians, unlucky enough to own allotments in Perma starved while their strange white neighbors hacked at the land and built more fences. The woman who would become Mrs. Vollman would be as unwelcome as the whites and Indians who struggled to survive on the dry, alkali soil. No one would kindly greet her when she came into town, least of all, Vollman. Heat writhed in waves like a living thing and snakes seethed in the rattling weeds ready to coil.

Only a small group of people glimpsed her as she stepped from the train, but everyone gasped to behold her. Men took off their hats at the sight of her. Women elbowed their husbands to stop their staring, but no one could take their eyes off Vollman’s bride.  They had never seen a woman as beautiful as she—she lit up the dusty platform like an angel, a searing light, a dazzling blue-eyed beauty. Her hair was platinum and fell past her shoulders, and she smiled shyly at all of them as Vollman grabbed her bags and motioned her into his buckboard wagon.   

Vollman, by contrast, was mean-headed with a bullish forehead that all but hid his speckled carrot-blue eyes. He was a wealthy man made wealthier by his miserly ways. He never bathed, never took the time. He smelled like mildewed onions and turpentine, a desperate stew of misspent adrenaline and filth. His pants and the cuffs and collars of his shirts were so stiff with grime they shimmered. As soon as the two were married he squirreled her away.  

On a hot August day when grasshoppers clicked in the fields and the high sun scoured the sleeping Flathead River my grandmother paid her new neighbor a visit. She wrapped some fry bread in a kerchief and made her way up the dusty grade to welcome Mrs. Vollman. She saw the house first rising up from the scrub brush and sage but no sign of the newlywed anywhere. All the blinds were drawn and the house seemed uneasy, a little too quiet, as if no one was home or had been in a long while, but Cecille decided she’d check anyway. She’d been looking forward to having some time to acquaint herself with Mrs. Vollman and knew that Vollman would be out working his fields until dark. She knocked on the door.

She noticed the house was unchanged. There was no sign of a woman’s touch—empty soup cans cluttered the porch humming with hornets. No one had swept the steps.  Cecille knocked again, harder this time, and then waited. The day was a fever.  

She was planning on sitting on the front porch to cool off a bit before she returned home when she heard a tinny clink of metal, then silence. She listened intently but heard only the sound of wind on the high ridge, a riffle of dry grass and the incessant grasshoppers’ rasping.    

She sat down. Not long. A woman screamed, then screamed again. My great-grandmother raced toward the voice convinced Mrs. Vollman had taken a fall or had been injured in some way. She heard heart-rattling sobs coming from the trees outback just beyond a scrub brush field. She spotted a thin woman squatting beneath a thick-trunked pine a short distance from the house. Mrs. Vollman’s white-blonde hair was knotted in snarls, half-wild. She was still in her nightdress—a nightdress that was soiled up to her knees.  Cecille saw a worn path around the tree, a large bowl toppled on its side. “Mrs. Vollman? she called.  “Mrs. Vollman?”  My great-grandmother couldn’t understand what was wrong with Mrs. Vollman—or perhaps she couldn’t believe that Mrs. Vollman—a white woman—had been shackled and chained to a tree.

Cecille walked the thirteen miles into town to report Vollman to the Indian Agent.  The agent smirked at her. “Even if I believed you, which I don’t,” he said, “It’s none of your business.” Cecille frantically made her way back to Mrs. Vollman and pounded at the double-chains that bound the woman, but her axe was useless. Cecille couldn’t free Vollman’s bride. Finally, my great-grandmother sat down beside Mrs. Vollman and the two wept together. My grandmother begged Vollman to release his wife and he told her without flinching or shame, as if it was a perfectly reasonable explanation, he couldn’t unchain his wife because he was afraid she would run off with another man.

“I’m protecting what’s mine,” he said.

Mrs. Vollman was chained to the tree through the seasons of a year, with a bed of straw and cooking fire in winter, a make-shift canopy in spring and summer, blankets, water—her own private hell with provisions. When Mrs. Vollman gave birth to a son, Vollman at last unleashed her. But it was too late. Mrs. Vollman had lost her mind.  

 
Her oldest son Joseph would suffer at his father’s hand too, and he would seek refuge at my great-grandmother’s house, huddling in the upstairs room while Cecille lied to his father. But Vollman finally figured out where his son was hiding.  

On an early spring evening, Joey pitched into the house frantic and trembling, his clothing rain-soaked, his eyes blackened. “Help me,” he said to Cecille. His nose was swelling like a fist and his left cheek was bleeding. From the window they could see Vollman chuffing after him, running across the field toward their house, his face red with fury.  “Hide,” my grandmother told Joseph. He was so afraid he scrambled beneath the small kitchen table. Vollman thumped at the door and my mother and her sisters cowered beside Joseph to hide him, but Cecille was fearless and opened the door to Vollman as if he was any guest.  His face was crazy with rage.  

“You have my son,” he said. My great-grandmother nodded her head. He tried to bully through the doorway, but Cecille pressed her hand to his chest and blocked his path.  She patted him like a spooked horse. “Ok, ok,” she said.

“Wait a minute here,” and Vollman appeared taken aback by her civility. He stood at the door as Cecille had asked. “He’s here,” she said, “Now you just wait.” She rustled around in her closet for a moment and then hefted her shotgun to her shoulder and raised aim at Vollman. “You won’t be hurting nobody anymore,” she said, and Vollman bolted before she fired.  
Several years later, Joseph Vollman ran away from home and joined the service and never returned to Perma.  He died in the war.

On late summer nights when the moon was full and the valley lit with pale light they would start to Mrs. Vollman’s voice, Mrs. Vollman’s stark, haunted face pressed to the screen door, her frazzled white hair electric in the moonlight. “Mrs. Vanderburg,” she would whisper. “Mrs. Vanderburg, is Joey here?  Is my Joey here?”

And my great-grandmother would rise from her cattail bed and open the door to Mrs. Vollman. Cecille would heat up a pot of coffee on the cookstove. “My Joey, I don’t know where he is,” she would say rocking herself back and forth and then Cecille would tell her once more that Joey was safe now. Mrs. Vollman would drop her head to her chest and weep. After she had her coffee, my great-grandmother would walk Mrs. Vollman back up the hill to her house. “The vole vurld is crazy,” Mrs. Vollman would say shaking with grief.  “The vole vurld.”

The last time I stood in Perma, I traveled with my mother on her final journey home. She wanted to revisit her homeland and the Flathead Reservation and as my mother stood in the dense heat of that afternoon white moths haunted the field grass. She pointed out the places that were memorable to her, the outline where her home had once stood, the hidden springs at the base of the hill. “My dad buried my brother up here,” she said, “Just below the old house. I was always afraid he’d spook us.”  

She walked me up the hill and lifted her arm. “Vollman’s old house is gone now too,” she said, “And old lady Vollman. Even after all she went through, she made a place for herself.” I recognized that Mrs. Vollman born in a far-away country, a foreigner, a voiceless and powerless woman who had no claim here, had consecrated the land we stood on and would always remain here. My mother clicked her tongue, “Just think of all the people gone now,” she said, “Grandma, my mother, Louise, old Mrs. Vollman—all those people who were once here.” She raised her slim hands up over her eyes and looked off in the distance.  

“I’ll be gone soon too,” she said, and then paused and patted her chest. I felt the weight of knowing my mother would pass from the earth, but in particular this spot of earth, a place that had always claimed her. The land itself seemed hushed in my mother’s presence, reverent. “Can you feel that?” my mother said. “Listen.”

She smiled as if she was smiling at someone I could not see. There was a low humming sound circling the bottomland. “Can you hear that?” my mother said, tapping my arm.  

I looked across the field and saw the warm flush of early evening, the sky rounding clear toward twilight. Bullfrogs began calling. Day was settling and I felt the spirits of the dead then, their ghosts returning to meet us. The rusty grass of mid-summer rustled without wind and every small thing, the powdered dust beneath our feet, the plush of cattails, the tufts of grass sprouting through the old broken highway, everything around us, everything was etched in light.

“I leave this place to you now,” my mother said.