The Mighty Red

by Louise Erdrich

Hills of bones, mountains of blind skulls, loaded onto railroad cars and shipped back east to process sugar. So it was, every teaspoon of sugar that was stirred into a cup or baked into a pudding was haunted by the slave trade and the slaughter of the buffalo.

Crystal put a pot of water on to boil and peeled some carrots. She’d boil the carrots in salt water, mash them up with fried garlic and onions, add some basil, oregano, a can of tomatoes, a few spoonfuls of tomato paste, red pepper flakes, a dash of cinnamon. Voilà. Sauce. They almost never ate meat because meat, even misery meat, cost more than carrots. Nobody else made this sauce, and Kismet loved it so much that she put her face in her hands and began to weep, for real.

‘What’s going on there?’ she asked, pointing at the disheveled grass and flower field. ‘It looks wild.’ ‘Maybe someday, but to get it back to wild takes work. I mean, we started this a while ago. It’s prairie planted but you have to weed out the invasive stuff forever to get prairie reestablished. I think it almost broke Mom. But you should see it in spring when the prairie lilies come out. Every single plant has its own pollinator so you have to coax those in too. Like, well, it’s not for the faint of heart.’

Sometimes he woke at 3 a.m., sweating, having absorbed, say, a new study about the link between the herbicide paraquat and Parkinson’s disease. Glyphosate and depression. Insecticides and schizophrenia. The plunge in insect life was disturbing. The velocity of loss was exponential.