From the Hilltop

At the Powwow Hotel

When the cornfield arrived, I was standing in our hotel’s kitchen,starting Lester’s birthday cake.It was raining outside, foggy, too, for the sixth day in a row, and there was flour all over my blue jeans. I was trying to figure out what the book meant by sift.Lester had been outside by the canyon all morning , inspecting bugs or digging holes or looking into the sky. But then he was in the kitchen,looking up at me,saying,Dad, it’s here, his hand on the dish towel I’d tied around my waist. Lester had only spoken about ten words since his mother died last month, so I put down the flour and followed. We live in West Texas on a three-hundred-acre cotton farm at the edge of Blanco Canyon. We own the Blanco Canyon Hotel, all twelve rooms, though everybody in town calls it the Powwow Hotel on account of Lester and me being Indians , Blackfoot, more specifically. My wife Charlene, she was Indian, too, Comanche, from around here. There had never At the Powwow Hotel At the Powwow Hotel 56 been a powwow out here to any of our knowledge, but that’s just how people are in West Texas—what they know about Indians involves the Texas Rangers, powwows, or pictures of Quanah Parker they’ve seen in bars and restaurants, way in the back by the bathrooms. We were never sure whether to ignore the joke or to capitalize on it,to change our name and market ourselves that way.We talked about it, Charlene and me, laughed over it. But there hadn’t been much laughing lately, with it being just Lester and me,with Lester not talking and getting picked on at school for it. This kid had said, Hey, Lester, I hear your mom died. I thought all you Indians were extinct already? And then, according to his teacher, most of the other boys in the class laughed.She said the kid who said it was a bully,that the other kids were afraid. But I said when I was in school, fourth grade was when kids started to get mean,that I couldn’t imagine things now being too much different. It was late fall,just before Thanksgiving,and most everybody had their cotton in, except for a few late fools who now were having to wait out the rain. Out here, where we live, it’s four miles to the nearest neighbor and nine miles in to Holcomb, the nearest town. It was a record rain year according to the papers and the blonde girls with big smiles on the tv. Lester followed the weather on the Internet,had been writing in his journal about the rain—how we were over five inches for the month, how the conditions might be right. Lester was supposed to be using the journal to write down how he felt, what with his mother being gone and his not talking much. But mostly he wrote about the weather here in Texas,and north of here,all the way up to Canada.It worried At the Powwow Hotel 57 me,this obsession,because the only jobs I knew of where you got paid to think about weather were on the tv, and they involved being smiley and blond and a girl. Lester still had a hold of the dish towel, was pulling me toward the western side of the property to the grassy area in between the canyon and the biggest cotton field. He stopped about twenty feet shy of the grass,his face turned up to mine, his eyes the size of silver dollars. At first, I thought the grass had gone crazy, what with all the rain. But then, through the thick fog,I saw something waving above my head,something tall and green but not like grass.I stepped forward,kept stepping forward though my heart stuttered and my throat went dry. I kept stepping forward until I was in the middle of it, touching its rough edges, stalks towering over me, next to me, short ones, too, some only knee-high. I was standing in the middle of it, breathing in the new smell—green and raw and still like dirt, somehow—when I felt his hand, on my arm this time. Dad, Lester said, they’re going to be here soon. And...