enlist still rode the wild horses for the empty stands at the reserve corral, though there was no one to watch or coach them but the old women and tired young mothers whose men were so far away they could no longer imagine their faces.
Dennis sat with his hands behind his head and watched as I tossed chicken pieces in flour and fried them in the big cast-iron spider pan. His watching made me conscious of how my skirt pulled across my bottom, how my breasts shifted under my blouse. He made me think of my own body and I didn’t know what to make of that.
“Chicken again tonight?” said Dennis. “That was good chicken we had last night, eh, Billy?”
I looked up and he winked at me.
“(Shit) I took some of them (fuck) chicken quills home for (shit) Granny’s moccasins,” said Billy.
Dennis stood up and leaned against the cupboard beside me.
“You going to be my girlfriend?” he said.
I looked past him, past the screen door, out to the barn.
“He’s still in the field checking the corn,” said Dennis.
I went back to the business of frying chicken.
“How come you’re not going to be my girlfriend?” he said.
I gave him a mean look.
“No, really,” he said. “You could be my girlfriend.”
“You got hands like sandpaper,” I said.
Filthy Billy wheezed out a laugh that, for the moment, overpowered the swearing. Unlike Dennis or Dan or any farmhand we’d ever had working for us, Billy cleaned his nails and shaved daily. He wasn’t as Indian as Dennis was. He had fairer skin and odd blue-brown eyes. He and Dennis shared Bertha Moses as a grandmother, but Billy’s mother was a German woman who’d married Billy’s father, Henry Moses, during the Great War. When the German woman came back with Henry to the reserve as a war bride, she panicked at the squalor and their marriage quickly fell apart. She’d worked as a cleaning woman in town until she’d raised the money to leave on a train, but not before she gave birth to Billy. She left him with his father, Henry Moses, on a cold day before Christmas when Billy wasn’t a year old. But just as hisfather had, Henry Moses took his own life, on purpose or by accident. He got drunk on beet wine and fell onto a broken wine bottle and died from lack of blood or too much cold. The Swede found Henry’s body in the snow-covered pasture across Turtle Creek, where we grew our timothy hay. Johansson had followed a trail of beet wine spilled in the snow, thinking it was blood and thinking it might be from a deer shot but not dead, or from something else he could cook for supper. He followed the beet wine to the body of Billy’s father and to the deeper stains in the snow that were blood, true blood.
“I thought some animal had come eat him,” the Swede said when he pulled out this story. “Blood all over and there were coyote tracks all around the body, great circles of tracks. I must have chased the coyotes off with my coming. Off in the bush I could hear them, snuffing and yipping around. Then one howls, and you know how they are. One coyote howling sounds like a bunch of them howling, like a chorus of them.”
After the Swede found the body, Bertha Moses raised her grandson, Billy, along with the other casualties of domestic war on the reserve. Billy got the name Filthy because he didn’t own his voice. It made him say words no one liked, and the best Filthy Billy could do was make the renegade words come out in a whisper. He ate with us, but rarely said a word during the meal, and when he was done eating, he ran out the door and all the way to the cabin, yelling the words he’d been holding back.
This night he had to hold in those words while my father and brother took off their boots and cleaned their hands in the tub on the bench by the door, while my mother went into the bedroom and changed her sour milk clothes for a clean blue skirt and white blouse, while she brushed her long hair and wound it into a fresh bun, while my brother harassed me,
Brenna Ehrlich, Andrea Bartz