From the Hilltop

Looking for Boll Weevil

At six in the morning, forty miles south of the Twin Cities, I jerked awake in the cold and dark of the bus our school group was sharing with a bunch of touring senior citizens. I was a long way from home,and the air felt different than West Texas air. It was thicker, more humid, and it smelled different, too, like pine trees, maybe, even through the mix of teenager and old people smells circulating around the bus. My niece slept beside me,her face scrunched into a sleepy frown,thin hands clutching the blanket up under her chin. Two days ago, my sister Diane had called from St. Paul. It was four in the afternoon, a bright April day, the unseasonable sun blanching the cotton fields, searing the manzanitas in the canyon.My niece Sandra’s fifth grade class was heading out on a bus for the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. My sister, a trip sponsor, had been promoted at her job. She was now too important to ride a bus to South Dakota. I was Looking for Boll Weevil Looking for Boll Weevil 148 unemployed, and I never had been that important. Still, it was cold in South Dakota sometimes in April. Still, I didn’t necessarily want to do Diane any favors. We are métis, Roubideaux, from near the Blood Reserve in Alberta, and Sandra’s father Pete is Blackfoot. I didn’t see why Sandra had to get on a bus and go all the way to South Dakota to see some Indians. Look,Diane said,they’ve been sponsoring Grandma Claw since first grade. I didn’t know we had a grandmother named Claw, I said. Neat. It’s a school trip,Diane said,graduation into middle school, a rite of passage. I sighed into the phone. I’ll buy your plane ticket here, Diane said. I sighed again, louder this time, but Diane already was talking over me, explaining the rest fast—how the children were part of this Sponsor an Elder program, how they gave Grandma Claw food and yarn to make blankets or rugs or something, how then they went on a big celebration trip and met their elder. I opened my mouth to continue the arguing, but Diane was holding out the phone,and I could hear Sandra crying.Before long,I had my instructions: how I was to bring sleeping bags and pillows, pack sandwiches and fresh fruit but no cigarettes, no booze. Diane said that last part twice, hands clicking double-time against the receiver. The bus lurched and shrugged down the highway,and a silverhaired woman stumbled in the aisle up front. With her wild hair and hunched shoulders, she looked a little like Bobby Looking for Boll Weevil 149 Jo, my landlady back in West Texas. In exchange for cheap rent and a house on 500 acres at the top of Blanco Canyon, I watered cottonwood and fruit-bearing trees,peach and apple, and pear, mostly pear, row on row of pear, stretching out under the hot West Texas sun. What are you going to do with all those pears? I had asked Bobby Jo the first time I visited the place. We, she said.What are we going to do with all those pears. It was unnatural,all those trees out there on the high plains, all the watering. It was almost as bad as Indians riding a bus 400 miles to gawk at other Indians. But I had seen the way Bobby Jo looked at the trees.Every Sunday she drove out from Lubbock and moved her aging body tree to tree, row to row, checking the water hoses and sprinklers,her hands open,her voice rising in what could be construed as prayer. It was the boll weevils she found unnatural,and,technically, she was right. The cotton-destroying snout beetle was native only to Mexico and Central America and wasn’t introduced into West Texas until 1892, shortly after the Comanche were introduced to small pox, cholera, and General Mackenzie. They’ve done so much damage in such a short time,Bobby Jo said. Yes, I said. They have. But it was only April, and the boll weevils were still in diapause, I hoped, were sleeping the spring away, waiting for the lasting heat of July. In the spring, I watered the trees and checked the boll weevil...