My Mother Is Now Earth

6. Dead Hippie Praying

Once we move into the farmhouse (maybe in a few weeks), my father says some things will stay the same. My mother will never have enough water to wash all the clothes. “The well’s only twenty feet deep,” he says, leaning against the new double sink in the kitchen. “We’re going to have to keep hauling water from town for a long time to come.” My mother steps around Scott and me as we sit on the floor, scraping away old linoleum. I notice her snakes, the burn scars wrapped around her legs. “That water barrel’s almost empty,” she says. “I’ve scrubbed just about every damn floor in this house. Don’t bother refilling it. I’m too worn out to be washing and hanging clothes today.” She goes into the living room to her mop and bucket. The sun is still shining through the brand-new picture window. The sun has stared through that window since this morning when we started ripping up the old kitchen floor. My mother wrings her mop one more time, then wipes dripping sweat from her face. “I need to get supper going,” she says. “We’ll go to the Laundromat in the morning,” my father says as she leaves through the back door. f6g Dead Hippie Praying 49 50 1971 Scott and I pretend to keep scraping, waiting until our father goes down to the basement to check on the sump pump. When he’s gone, we race upstairs to find Dennis and Joseph. They already moved into one of the bedrooms a few days ago. We haven’t seen the inside of their room yet, but Scott is pretty sure he knows where Joseph hides his comic books—in the bottom drawer. They found a dresser and an RCA hi-fi record player at the dump. We see their muddy rubber boots and garden gloves in the hallway outside their room. The door is open, but we don’t hear their music playing. “It’s fried,” Dennis says as he pulls out the hi-fi speaker wires. Joseph is stretched out on the bed with a comic book. “It was working fine last night,” he says. And then he looks at Scott and me. “Have you guys been messing around in here?” “No, it’s the wiring,” Dennis says. “You know people throw shit away for a reason.” He kicks the hi-fi. It crashes against the wall. “Hey!” Joseph says, reaching for an album cover on top of one of the speakers. “I hope you took off that Morrison LP.” “Who cares? The album’s a piece of shit, too,” Dennis says. He kicks it again, making sure the record player cracks in a hundred pieces. “Yeah, but it’s Dale Olson’s shitty album, not ours,” Joseph says as we watch pieces of the record twirl on the floor. “I’ll buy him a new one when I get paid from my job this summer.” “Why is it a piece of shit?” I ask. “He just talks, doesn’t sing. Thinks he’s a poet, I guess. He’s got one song, if you can call it that, where he talks about seeing some dead Indians on a highway. That’s supposed to be profound?” Dead Hippie Praying 51 I shrug my shoulders and stare at the white walls covered with magic marker. Joseph has started drawing life-size comic book heroes on the walls—Spider-Man, Captain America, and the Scarlet Witch. Joseph looks at Scott and me. “Hey, you guys. I’ll let you read the new Avengers comic if you go get the radio in the garage.” “You get it,” I say. “I’ve been pulling weeds all day. Come on.” “What do you think we’ve been doing?” Joseph holds up his new Avengers comic. “The Wasp’s boobs are bigger,” he says with a grin. Dennis laughs, reaching for the comic. “Hey, ever wonder why the Vision’s skin is red?” “It’s not skin,” Scott says. “He’s an android.” “Yeah, an Indian android,” Dennis says. “It makes complete sense. You know how he always feels inferior around the white superheroes , wishes he was human? Well, that’s the way white people make Indians feel—make them think being human is the same as being white.” “I don’t know what he’s whining about,” Joseph says, taking...