The Groundbreaking

The wind at Hungry Valley came straight down off the Pah Rah range with nothing between the mountains and the graded pad to slow it, and Verna stood at the edge of the new road holding her hard hat against her chest, because if she put it on the wind would take it, and watched the men line up behind the row of chrome shovels somebody had stuck upright in a mound of trucked-in dirt for the photograph. Late March, and the ground was still hard in the mornings. The sage went silver and then dark and then silver again as the gusts ran across it toward Pyramid Highway.

She had worked in the housing office of the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony for nineteen years, long enough to have stopped expecting days like this one and to be caught off guard now that it had come. Twenty-five lots. Phase one. Twelve million dollars and change, most of it grant money she had helped chase across four different agencies, and by summer there would be foundations poured out here where this morning there was only the pad and the flags on their wire stems snapping and a portable toilet leaning in the wind. Twenty-five families off the list. The list had more than twenty-five families on it. It always would. But twenty-five was not nothing, and Verna had learned to hold the two things at once, the number and the shortfall, the way you learn to carry a full pot without spilling it, by not looking straight down into it.

Her grandson Dominic stood beside her with his hands in his jacket. He was twenty-six. He had been on the list two years, ever since the rent on his place in Sparks went up the second time in one lease and he moved back in with his mother, and his lot was the fourth one down the new road, staked and flagged, a rectangle of the same sagebrush as all the rest of it and, to Verna, not the same at all.

“That one,” she said, pointing with her chin the way her mother had pointed, because a hand in this wind was a waste. “The fourth stake. That’s yours.”

“I saw the map.” But he looked anyway, a long time, at the rectangle of brush that was going to be a house.

Verna had grown up on the other colony, the first one, the twenty-eight acres down in the city, wedged against Second Street and the freeway and the smoke shop, so close to downtown that as a girl she could hear the casinos when the wind came the right way. The government had bought that ground in 1917. Twenty acres, six thousand dollars, set aside for what the papers of the time called the non-reservation and homeless Indians of Nevada, as if a people could be homeless in the middle of their own country, as if the valley they were standing in had not been Numu and Washoe ground since before there was a word for a deed. They had put the Paiutes on the north end of it and the Washoe on the south, and the two peoples had made a town of it, and Verna’s whole childhood had happened on those few acres with the city pressing in on every side and nowhere to grow.

And then, near a hundred years after they were sold the twenty acres of low ground by the river, the government had given back thirteen thousand acres of high sagebrush up here, in 2016, signed into law and handed over, land the tribe had asked for and asked for, and now the colony held something close to fifteen thousand acres between the old ground and the new. It had taken the government a century to turn twenty acres into fifteen thousand. Verna did not spend much of her feeling on the arithmetic of it anymore. What she spent it on was the twenty-five stakes.

The chairman said a few words into the wind that carried most of them off. A man from the county said his. Somebody prayed, in English and then in Numu, and Verna bowed her head and caught maybe one word in five of the Numu, because she was of the generation that had been sent to schools that beat the language out of their parents so thoroughly that her parents had, out of love, out of fear, not passed it on. The tribe ran classes now. Dominic went on Wednesday nights when he could. He knew more of the prayer than she did, and she had stood there with her head down and let her grandson’s language wash over her and had not been able to decide, in the wind, whether that was a grief or exactly the opposite of one.

They handed the shovels down the line for the photograph. When it came to Verna she was not going to take one, that was for the officials, but the chairman put it in her hands before she could wave it off and said her name and something about nineteen years, and there was nothing to do but hold it. So she stepped up to the mound of trucked-in dirt with the chrome shovel and, because the picture wanted it, she pushed the blade into the loose soft dirt and turned it over, one small load, and the wind took the top of it away in a smear before it landed.

It was a stunt. The dirt was not even from here, it was clean fill somebody had hauled in so the shovels would go in easy for the cameras. Verna knew that. And still, turning it, she felt the thing she had come up here half hoping and half refusing to feel, which was that her grandson was going to live on ground the government had spent a hundred years learning it could not keep from them, nineteen miles from the acre where she was born, and that she had chased the paper that put him there.

She handed the shovel to Dominic. He had not been asked. He took it anyway and walked past the mound and past the flags, out to the fourth stake, his own, and drove the blade into the real ground, the hard unbroken March ground that had never been anything but sage, and leaned his weight on it until it gave. It gave slow. He turned one shovelful of his own dirt over onto the brush, and then he stood there in the wind looking at the little dark wound of it, the first of his house, and Verna went out across the pad to stand with him and did not say anything, and the two of them looked at the turned dirt together while behind them the officials were already shaking hands and folding up the lectern to get out of the cold.

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