Broken Fields

Cash Blackbear, a young Ojibwe woman,;is back on the case after two men are found dead on a rural farm in Minnesota in the next installment of the acclaimed;Native crime series. 1970s Minnesota. It''s spring in the Red River Valley and Cash Blackbear is hoping to make some spending money doing spring field work for local farmers while attending college--and she finds a dead man on the;kitchen floor of the property''s rented farmhouse. The only possible witness to the murder is the young daughter of a Native laborer. The girl is too terrified;to speak about what she’s witnessed, and her parents seem to have vanished.; In the wake of the murder, Cash can''t deny her intuitive abilities: she is suspicious of the dead man''s grieving widow, who offers to take in the girl temporarily. While Cash scours the county and White Earth reservation trying to find the missing mother before the girl is placed in the care of a social worker--the same woman who placed Cash in foster;care a decade earlier--another body turns up. Concerned about the girl''s fate, and with the help of local Sheriff Wheaton, Cash races against the clock to figure out the truth of what happened in the farmhouse.

Auteur

Marcie R. Rendon

Texte du rabat

Cash Blackbear, a young Ojibwe woman and occasional sleuth, is back on the case after a man is found dead on a rural Minnesota farm in the next installment of the acclaimed Native crime series.

Minnesota, 1970s: It’s spring in the Red River Valley and Cash Blackbear is doing fieldwork for a local farmer—until she finds him dead on the kitchen floor of the property’s rented farmhouse. The tenant, a Native field laborer, and his wife are nowhere to be found, but Cash discovers their young daughter, Shawnee, cowering under a bed. The girl, a possible witness to the killing, is too terrified to speak.

In the wake of the murder, Cash can’t deny her intuitive abilities: she is suspicious of the farmer’s grieving widow, who offers to take in Shawnee temporarily. While Cash is scouring White Earth Reservation for Shawnee’s missing mother—whom Cash wants to find before the girl is put in the foster system—another body turns up. Concerned by the escalating threat, Cash races against the clock to figure out the truth of what happened in the farmhouse.

Broken Fields is a compelling, atmospheric read woven with details of American Indian life in northern Minnesota, abusive farm labor practices and women’s liberation.

Échantillon de lecture
Cash stepped out of the cab of her Ranchero onto the soft, black dirt of the field she was to plow under. The sun had barely risen, casting a gentle yellow haze over the Red River Valley. It was going to be a scorcher. The early morning heat and humidity made her thin cotton T-shirt cling to her back. This close to the river, the air was always heavy and moisture-thick. At least the mosquitos weren’t out yet. To the west, cottonwoods, elm and oak created a green snake along the banks. A red hawk flew along the tree line.
     Looking into the sun, her hand shading her eyes, Cash could barely see the slight rise of the ancient meandering shoreline of what used to be Lake Agassiz thirty-five to forty-five miles away on the prairie. The flat land of the Red River Valley with its deep rich soil was created by glaciers moving north thirty thousand years before Cash’s time. As the glaciers melted, they formed a giant lake, larger than all the Great Lakes combined. When the Hudson Bay glacier melted, the waters of Lake Agassiz flowed into that bay, leaving behind the rich farmland.
     Cash scanned the wheat and sugar beet fields spread out for miles along the horizon in both directions. When she looked to the east, her eyes stopped at a small farmstead way at the other end of the section of field she was to plow. The small, white frame house, which even from this distance looked well worn, was owned by Bud Borgerud but was usually rented out to one of his field hands’ family. This morning, it had a newer car sitting in the driveway. Cash saw a faint trail of exhaust from the rear of the car.
     Cash lit a cigarette and blew the smoke softly into the air. She took a swig of coffee from her thermos. Another puff of smoke. Another drink of coffee. I better get to work, she thought. She tightened the cap back on the thermos, reached through the open window of her Ranchero and set it on the seat before walking over to the giant hunk of metal that was a Massey Ferguson tractor.
     Bud Borgerud, or one of his other field workers, had left the tractor parked at the end of the field, the key in the ignition. Cash pulled her slight five-foot-two frame up onto the tractor. Even before she sat down, she realized she had forgotten the cushion she usually used to make the daylong ride a little easier on her behind. She climbed back down, retrieved it from the Ranchero cab and threw it onto the tractor before crawling up after it.
     Once settled on the seat, she turned the key in the ignition, reached back for the lever to drop the plow into the ground and began plowing. As the tractor jounced down the field, Cash was grateful for the padded pillow cushion between her butt and the metal seat. As she neared the opposite end of the field, she noticed the parked car still running outside the white frame house. Someone is wasting gas. She turned the tractor and plow around in a wide, lazy circle and headed back the other way.
     Back and forth, all morning. As the sun rose, Cash baked in its heat. She tied her dark-brown, waist-length braid into a knot at the nape of her neck. As she rode, her body jostled by the tractor traversing hard ground, she thought back on what occurred at the end of the past winter. When the flood waters arrived, there was the crazy woman and her pastor  husband who kidnapped Native babies. Cash shuddered. The husband was dead. Cash, in sheer panic, had thrown a sharp paring knife straight into his neck. It had killed him. Cash’s mind flashed on the knife thrower who performed every year at the county fair. That person had real skill. Her own throw was pure luck. The pastor was dead and she hoped his wife was still locked up in the asylum down in Fergus Falls. As far as Cash knew, the infants were back with relatives on the reservation.
     Wheaton, the county sheriff, was always getting her into one mess or another. He had rescued her as a kid from an overturned car in a big ditch not too far from the field she was plowing for Borgerud. If she looked to the south, she could see the straight line of the gravel road where her mother had been drinking and driving and rolled the car. Cash had ended up in a series of foster homes, one nightmare family after the other until, in her late teens, Wheaton rescued her again and got her an apartment in Fargo, where she still lived.
     Cash didn’t know how or why, but she had developed sensibilities other folks didn’t seem to have. A new friend, Jonesy, who lived in the tamarack over on the White Earth reservation, called them gifts. Cash wasn’t sure about that. They seemed to come with the price of knowing too much about some other people’s trouble and hurts. She could sense things other people couldn’t. She out-of-body traveled in a near dream state at times, gathering information about crimes that weren’t evident to others. Sometimes, she dreamt things that gave her true information; like when she dreamt the address to the house where some men were holding young women hostage in Saint Paul. That had been her first trip to the Twin Cities and she had no desire to return. She liked…