Heart of the Beast: A Novel - Hardcover

Weatherford, Joyce

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743211790 ISBN 13: 9780743211796

Publisher: Scribner, 2001

Synopsis

After inheriting the family ranch, Iris finds herself being sued by the modern Nez Perce Indian tribe, who believe that her land is rightfully theirs, and as she digs deeply into generations of familiy history to discover who really owns the land, she makes some startling discoveries, in a powerful debut novel about one women's quest to find love, absolution, and destiny. 20,000 first prinitng.

About this title

About the Author

Joyce Weatherford's family landed in Oregon via the Oregon Trail in 1851, and Joyce grew up as a fifth-generation farmer working on her family's wheat and cattle ranch. She now lives in California with her husband and son.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

The harvest was complete in the morning, and that evening my mother died. I went to bed late that night, full of the raw ending of crop and life, and dreamed about the Nez Perce children, their shiny black hair cut short and falling smoothly to the side. They ran to my house screaming, chanting; but it wasn't for money, kitchway, like my mother described. I walked outside and saw the bodies of the children's parents cut into pieces, bound oddly back together. A wide-eyed head coupled with a foot, a hand joined a stomach, red and messy; it was a bloody totem. No matter how carved up they were, I could still see it was their mothers and fathers. I knew then, I could have killed my parents for what they had done.

I didn't grow up where my mother did. Elise Steele flourished in the cattle country of the Wallowa Mountains of Oregon, on the ranch Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce called Heart of the Beast. I was my father's daughter, born twenty-eight years ago at his homestead alongside the Columbia River. I was what occurred two centuries after Lewis and Clark sailed down our river eating dogs and writing history.

On that last day of harvest, the full moon passed. My pioneer family had always farmed by the cycles of the moon, and I was no different, cultivating the way my father taught me. The waning period, when the pull of the moon releases, is the time to reap, to plant, and to dig. It is when the ground lies vulnerable, carvable, and pliant. Ike Steele was my father, and he told me how things would go in the end. Life pours out from the downward horns of the moon.

Only twenty acres remained of the bright-colored wheat, a half day's cutting. As I walked out to my combine, all around me unfolded the darker auburn of harvested stubble, tinted by the minerals of the soil. My mother was so sick now, I could barely stand to leave her in the house alone. But a farmer had to finish reaping. It was as simple as that.

I fired up the combine, and waited while the engine smoothed out. That Indian summer morning, a soft breeze blew across my ear like the whisper of a beloved. I inched forward past the truck parked next to me, and made my way out to the last land. The sickle zigzagged into the standing grain, mowing the rustling carpet of bounty. The combine eased into the endless pattern of tracks that lay down platinum against the burnished spent stalks, the nourishment gone to seed.

Even after two months of harvest, I fell under its spell, watching the waving awns shake as the glinting bat of the header laid them over the blades. I sliced them forever still. The smell of wheat filled the cab as the cutting began, and sometime later gold grain rushed into the bin the way a mother's milk comes in a while after a baby is born.

The sun warmed the earth quickly, hardening the wheat. Most mornings went slowly because dew made the stalks cut and thresh poorly. It was my father who taught me how to cut grain, and how to seed land. My mother taught me never to let go of it.

With the thirty-foot header, I worked the long rectangular piece down and down, trimming away its edges and shortening the ends. Finally, all that remained were the small triangular patches where I made my corners. I cut up one side, completed them on the return; and I was finished. The end of harvest was the termination of the land's and my twelve months of labor, simultaneously the birth of the seed and the death of the crop. I loved and feared that time -- loved it because the cycle of guessing, hoping, and shepherding the stand was finally over. I feared it because a person could never tell what would come next. Fire, floods, disease, drought. These were the things that could get in the way.

For a moment, I turned the combine loose, not bothering to drive anywhere while the wheat threshed completely out. Unloading at the truck, I slipped the machine into fourth gear for the sprint home. In the past, there was a tradition of pulling the headers up and racing them back to the ranch. The run home wasn't as exciting now that I was the only one there. But still, charging over the completely cut fields from twenty feet above was the best part of the year.

It was the course of things to wash the machines afterward, to blow the awns of wheat from the pulleys, flush the last bits of grain from steeled and twirling augers. But instead I left it by the compressor and steam cleaner, and started into the house to see how my mother was doing. I took off my bandanna, shaking the dust from my hair. I hadn't washed it for days, but it still glowed white blond, the color of flax. By now, my hair had lost the green tint that came in the spring. After the long chill of winter was over, I always felt the sun in my feet and the urge to swim in the emerald Columbia. Every spring, the water turned my hair the lightest shade of green, the color of newly sprouted wheat.

My mother's sickness was why I had stopped reaping three days before, an unconscionable act for a farmer. I was compelled to take her to the mineral baths one last time. In May, the doctors at Hanford Regional Health Center in Richland had told me she had advanced brain cancer.

"Your mother probably doesn't have more than a couple months, Iris," said Dr. Groves, the oncologist. "We see a lot of this lately," he added, placing his hand on my back. His fingers were drawn together like a feeding sea anemone.

I imagined he was reading my bones, deciphering a braille X ray.

"Lefort was the first to study the head," he whispered, as if he were sharing a great secret. "Before any of them. Such humble beginnings," he said, making soft clicking noises with his tongue.

I drew away. I resented his authoritarian manner. "I've never heard of Lefort," I told him.

"He took guillotined heads of the French Revolution and smashed them," he said, staring down the hospital hall.

"Smashed them how?" I asked nervously.

Groves shrugged. "With boards. Cracked them with rocks. Dropped them on the ground. He wanted to see how the breakdown happened."

I nodded. There was an uncomfortable silence. I thought it was odd what doctors thought about when faced with death.

"It's brilliant the way Lefort discovered how things fall apart in the head," he said finally. "Don't you think?"

At home, my mother sat during the day in the green parlor room filled with her sister's art -- the busts of the family Hanna had done long ago. At eight o'clock every night, she went to bed. I stayed up later, long enough to help her when she called because she had wet her sheets. She was always cold and had a permanent chill in those bones that I had once come from. They stuck out now and were barely covered by her skin of wet tissue paper. Her snow-colored hair floated around her as the tide pulls and sways in ocean forests. My mother had always been stunning, but when she was dying, she was as beautiful as anyone I had ever seen. She had the violet eyes of fate, and the loss of weight made the bones in her face stand out like I imagined Helen of Troy's -- the beautiful destroyer of two worlds.

Before the end of harvest, my mother had told me she wanted to go to the mineral baths. She loved Carson Springs; and like her parents and grandparents before her, she went to the waters with religious regularity. Mother worshiped her family, especially her father, the horse trader, who successfully bargained the Nez Perce out of their best Appaloosas. They were some of the finest horses in the world, so tough they were exported for the military campaigns in North Africa and the Bosphorus.

When my mother's family first came to the state of Oregon, my great-grandparents went to sit in the caves along the Columbia River. They placed satchels of camphor around their necks to ward off disease, drank fossil water, and twined copper bracelets around their wrists, curing themselves

Edition details

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0743211790
• ISBN 13: 9780743211796
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384