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The Forgotten Ear of Corn
It wasn’t entirely uncommon to find them. Usually on the side of the road, trying to make it back to the reservation before their stomach ruptured. It was a long stretch of road, and there weren’t many people around, and even fewer people who would stop their cars for a drunken, freezing Indian. By law, we had to investigate every time we found one to see who was making the bootleg whiskey. You see, every now and then a First National, usually drunk and starving, would happen upon one of the bootleg distilleries on some of the run-down farms, and they would start eating the mash. The problem is, when the mash is outside it’s so cold that it ferments a lot slower. When they eat the mash it warms up, the fermentation increases, and their stomach’s rupture like over-blown pink balloons. And so they would fall, usually on the side of the road, usually clutching their midsection, and always with a look of agony on their face. It was an awful way to go. It was rare that we would make any arrests. No one really cared about bootleg whiskey or about drunken Indians wandering off the Nation.
This one girl I found, though, was still alive. I saw her in the headlights of my police car, stumbling along the road in the brown, frozen grass. I could see that she was trying her best to get somewhere, anywhere for help, but it’s hard to stop it once it starts. She looked like a kid’s toy wagon with two busted wheels, and just as I stopped she fell on the ground.
I radioed for an ambulance, but knew it would be probably forty minutes before they could get there. The hospital was on the other side of the mountain. She was young and very pregnant. At first I thought that maybe I had guessed wrong and that maybe she was in labor. But I could smell her breath as she lay on the frozen ground panting, crying, screaming in Sioux. I couldn’t understand her, but I didn’t need to. She couldn’t have been more than twenty. She had on jeans with an elastic waistband that came up to her big pregnant belly. She wore a long sweatshirt and her hair was black. She kept crying in their native language, and I kept trying to get her to speak English until finally I stopped. I just sat there on the frozen ground and undid her pants to give her stomach more room. I held on to her. There was nothing else I could do. I held her tight, and I could feel her heart racing and smell the alcohol on her breath. There was too much carbon dioxide built up in her to escape. She cried and screamed for twenty minutes, and I held on to her the entire time. Then she quieted down and her breathing slowed and then she died. I laid her head back on the frozen ground and walked back to my police car.
The ambulance came faster than I thought it would. The boys in the back said they thought they could save the baby but they would have to do it fast. They performed a caesarian section on the dead Indian girl right in the back of the ambulance. It was tough to watch, I turned away for part of it. The baby came out of her womb like a wet teddy bear, limp and dripping. Then it cried and the boys in the back said, “Alright we have to move! We have to get this kid to the hospital, we have to move!” I followed them with my lights going. We made good time getting to the hospital. The roads were empty. It was just the ambulance with the dead Indian girl and the baby and flashing red and blue lights racing down the dark road.
I waited at the hospital that night. I didn’t go out on my patrol. It was a slow night anyway and John Tusk said that he would patrol both areas. He said that he understood when I told him what happened and that I wanted to stay at the hospital. It was quiet in the emergency room that night, and I sat there alone and looked at my reflection in the dark sliding glass doors. It was 2 A.M. and I was tired. The doctor said the baby had been born with alcohol poisoning and they had to detoxify him. They said there might be brain damage but it was too early to tell. I thanked him and asked if they could keep me informed. It was strange. I had never seen anyone die before and I had never seen a baby born before, and now I had seen both in one night.
I felt numb. I went home and crawled in bed next to Janice. She barely moved when I laid down. I was tired but I couldn’t sleep. I just stayed awake until the sun finally began to rise. Then I finally fell asleep.
Janice couldn’t figure out why I slept so late, and I didn’t tell her any of it.
I called the hospital to check on the baby. They said he was having seizures because of the alcohol damage. The doctor said that he had a hard road ahead and even if he did survive, it would be hard to place him with adoptive parents.
“Did you know the mother at all?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “But I’ll ask around at the Nation. She must have family there.”
I brought a picture of the mother with me. Her eyes were closed, her mouth was shut, and she looked like a plastic toy. The Nation was twenty miles out of town. I drove my personal car because I wasn’t on duty. The chief said that he could put someone on it, but I told him I would do it. I told him it was the first time I had ever seen someone die and the first time I had seen someone born. It seemed important that I go.
The road that leads to the reservation is flat and straight. There are empty cornfields on both sides of the highway that are high with corn stalks in the autumn, but in the winter are just endless fields of soil. I passed the spot where I had found the Indian girl. It was nowhere in particular. Sometimes, when people die in car accidents, mourners will put flowers at the site of the crash, but here the ground was cold and hard and there was no one around to care about a dead Indian girl. It was just open space. I wondered where she had come from. There weren’t houses for miles; she must have been walking a long time that night. Some of the other officers were looking into who was bootlegging, but with so much land it was always hard to find anything. It was like she just appeared out of nowhere in my headlights. As if she had risen up out of the used soil and appeared to me on the verge of death and life. I looked at the fields to the left. She must have been walking a long time.
I knew Jim Sherman at the Nation. He was part of the tribal council and I had worked with him before. The local Mounties would go to him when they had issues with some of the First Nationals. He had a big, beefy face and was darker in complexion than most of the others. He said this was because his blood had not been tainted by European blood. He was a true native, he said.
I stopped first at the tribal council headquarters, but he wasn’t there. The girl at the desk said that he may be home, but more likely he was at the bar around the corner. I knew this place. It was more like a hollowed-out trailer with liquor bottles on a table than a bar. Jim would go there in the early afternoons and sit at the bar eating pretzels and watching his fellow tribesmen get drunk. He never drank though. He would just watch. The times that I had been there, I could tell that it made the patrons uncomfortable. It even made me uncomfortable. “I don’t drink,” he said. “I just watch them kill themselves from the inside out.”
It was only a short walk down the graveled street to the bar. I left my car at the headquarters and walked. The Nation really isn’t much, and people who pass through probably leave disappointed, expecting to see things out of textbooks, like totem poles and wigwams and feathered headdresses. Really, it just looked like a poor town on the edge of the world, a last stop. There were some small, battered houses and a couple stores packed in close together on one road. After that the land opened up and there would be small houses intermittently dotting the flat fields, and beyond those were big, white wind turbines that stood like pale apparitions floating over the landscape.
Jim Sherman was sitting at the corner of the bar drinking an orange juice and watching the television. It was quiet and there was only the pale light coming through the windows. There were a couple men and women sitting at tables having lunch and the bartender was reading a newspaper at the other end. Everyone looked up when I walked inside. Jim recognized me and stood up. We shook hands.
“What brings you down here?” he said. I took a stool next to him and had the bartender get me a beer.
“Well,” I said, “I have a problem that I was hoping you could help me with.”
“Bad news?”
“I’m afraid so.” I took a long drink from my beer and took the photo of the girl out of my pocket. In the picture her eyes were closed and her mouth was shut and her face was clean. I showed the picture to Jim. “Do you know her?”
He studied it for a minute. “Is she dead?”
“Yes. I found her out on the road the other night. She was drunk and had gotten into some mash.”
Jim shook his head. “She was pregnant,” he said.
“The baby is alive,” I said. “He’s not in good shape, but he’s alive.”
“It was a boy,” Jim said. He didn’t say it to me or to anyone else. He just said it.
“So you know who she is?”
Jim sighed. “Yes and no. She came here off the train from the States. She showed up about six months pregnant. She said she was Sioux but none of us were sure. She looked Sioux.”
“Where was she staying?”
Jim spread his arms in the air. “Everywhere,” he said. “She’d stay with whoever would take her in, though not too many people wanted her. She was a bad one, that girl.”
“How so?”
“She would drink anything she could get her hands on. She had that look in her eye that she didn’t want to be alive no more, like she had seen and done too much already and just couldn’t do it anymore. You can see that in people sometimes when they’re desperate enough.”
I nodded. I had seen something else in her eyes last night though. She was scared. She was changing in a way that she herself could not understand, going someplace that she could not comprehend. She was too young to not want to be alive anymore. When she was finally faced with it, she could do nothing but scream and cry as it finally came to her.
“Any idea who the father is?”
Jim shook his head. “No, she showed up like that. Like I said she was from down South, I think.”
“Her name?”
“Sally,” he said.
“Last name?”
Jim shook his head again. “Don’t know, that was all she ever said. We called her Moonshine Sally behind her back.”
“Moonshine Sally,” I repeated
“I can talk to some of the people that put her up,” he said. “I’ll ask and let you know if I find out anything.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I would appreciate that.”
“Hey,” he said. “What can you do, you know?”
I looked around. I was feeling tired and sad. I thought about the baby in the hospital and remembered how he looked when they took him from the womb.
“How is the baby?” Jim asked.
“He’s got the shakes all over,” I said.
Jim shook his head. “They kill themselves from the inside out.”
“Yes they do,” I said. I finished my beer and patted Jim on the shoulder and said thank you.
As I walked out the door into the overcast day I heard Jim call to the bartender, “Hey, you know that pregnant girl Sally. . . .”
I drove the long, straight road back into town. I watched the people on the sidewalks shopping and jogging, stepping in and out of restaurants, and thought for a moment about Sally and how none of them would ever know what she knew. How none of them could know where she was now. I didn’t know either. Maybe we die like we are born, our world ripped open and pulled out by some anonymous hand. Do we go as came? Wet and crying, shaking with the hate of it all?
I stopped in at the station and found the detective that was looking into Sally. I told him her name, Moonshine Sally, and I told him that Jim thought she was from the States. He said that he would look into missing persons and see if he could find something. He said it was a long shot, though; she could have been from anywhere.
“It’s like she just sprang up out of the ground,” I said.
“Yeah, or out of a distillery,” he said.
I left the station and drove to the hospital. The doctor said that the baby had settled down and would probably survive. “He’s got a hard road ahead, though,” the doctor said. “We won’t know if there was any brain damage until much later.” They still had him in a tiny bed, surrounded with plastic and electronic monitors. He was still, as still as anything I have ever seen.
“He sleeping,” the doctor said.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Yes, I’m sure.”
I stayed there for a long time, watching him. I pressed my head against the glass window that looked in on him and waited for something, anything at all, to somehow make it right.
I thought about a Sioux myth I once heard. It says that a woman was gathering corn from the fields to store for winter. When she finished she turned to leave, but heard a child’s voice crying in the stalks. Then she heard it cry again and the voice called out, “Please don’t leave, don’t leave me here alone.” The woman set down her robe, filled with ears of corn, and began to search through the stalks for the voice. When she found nothing she again turned to leave, but the voice called out, “Don’t leave me.” She searched again, this time for a long while, and finally, in a corner, at the base of a very small stalk, was a tiny ear of corn. The corn had been crying out to her. She took the tiny corn into her robe and brought it back with the others. Then its crying stopped.
Nothing is to be left behind, they say, for it displeases the Great Mystery.
Copyright © 2008 by Marc E. Fitch
