The Beet Queen

Mary recounts how she came to take the boxcar to Argus: Her father has died, and after the crash of 1929 and the subsequent Depression, her mother Adelaide can barely take care of her two children. When Mr. Ober—Adelaide’s frequent visitor—dies along with his wife in an accident, Adelaide is distraught. She reveals that Mr. Ober is Karl’s father, and likely Mary’s too, and that their house was in his name. They have lost everything except their car, which Adelaide sells to support them for a time. They move to the twin cities in Minnesota so Adelaide can make a living working in a department store. However, jobs are hard to come by in the Depression, and once Adelaide realizes she is pregnant yet again, she is essentially unemployable.

She steals some silverware from their landlady, who then gives the family a month to vacate the premises. In the meantime, Adelaide delivers the baby, another son; she gives only minimal care to the baby, refusing even to name him. Mary steps into the caretaker role.

Once evicted, the family heads out to look for lodging and perhaps work, but the local fair is the only prospect. Karl begs Adelaide to let them go, and she gives in. Though her relationship with Mary is strained, Adelaide adores her son. At the fair, a pilot calling himself The Great Omar performs aerial feats for the crowd. When he lands and leaps from the plane, he asks if any brave volunteer will go up in his plane with him. Adelaide volunteers immediately, leaving her children behind. She does not return, and Mary has no way to feed the baby. A seemingly kind young man approaches Mary and offers to have his wife feed him; she too has recently given birth. Mary refuses at first but eventually gives in to the baby’s increasingly distressed cries and hands him over. The man takes the baby and does not return. Mary and Karl return to their room to retrieve what few belongings they can carry, and Mary decides they will go to Aunt Fritzie’s.

Mary decides to imagine that her mother has died in a plane crash. After she and Karl are separated, she continues on to the butcher shop, leaving Karl behind. The Kozkas take her in, and Mary decides to make herself invaluable to them—she will not be cast out or abandoned again. Despite forming a bond with Aunt Fritzie, Mary has trouble getting along with her cousin Sita, who is a year older than Mary. Sita, for her part, appears to be jealous of the attention Mary gets; she is furious about Mary taking up half of her bedroom and wearing her clothes. Mary tells the family that she has brought her mother’s jewelry with her. This should help pay for her keep. But when she opens the blue box where Adelaide kept her diamond ring and garnet necklace, there is only a pawn ticket describing the items.

After Karl returns to the boxcar, he spends a cold and hungry day buried in the hay stored there. He finally notices another man in the car, Giles Saint Ambrose, who takes pity on the boy, believing him to be a girl, and gives him some food. Karl has brought the branch from the tree in town back to the car with him, and when the man suggests Karl give it to him in return for the food, Karl breaks down “crying until the fury of his grief was exhausted” (24). Saint Ambrose relents, claiming it was just a joke. The two sleep together and, in the night, engage in sex. Karl immediately tells the man he loves him. When Saint Ambrose rebuffs him, Karl fantasizes about hurting him and then decides to jump out of the boxcar as it moves down the tracks.

Sita narrates her side of the story of Mary’s arrival in Argus: Sita is resentful, especially of the kindness shown to Mary by her father, Pete, who usually dotes on Sita. Sita once asked her father for his “cow’s diamond” (29)—actually the lens of a cow’s eye, which resembles an opal. Her father stunned her by refusing to give up the treasured object, which he keeps as a good luck charm. A couple of days after Mary’s arrival, Sita’s father gave her the cow’s diamond, recognizing that the abandoned girl needs both luck and comfort more than he does. Sita does not understand why her father would give his prized possession to Mary and not to her, and this incident plants a seed of resentment that will continue to grow for many years.

When Sita perceives Mary as stealing her best friend, Celestine James, her enmity toward Mary becomes all-consuming. Celestine is the daughter of an Ojibwe woman from the nearby reservation. She has two half-brothers, Russell and Eli Kashpaw. While Celestine, Sita, and Mary bake cookies together, Celestine and Mary bond over their shared lack of parents. Sita is furious when Mary implies—not quite truthfully—that her parents are dead like Celestine’s. Sita is so angry and so at a loss for what to do that she asks Celestine to come outside to the graveyard where the two of them often played together, and once there, she exposes her breasts to her friend, thinking “they were something Mary didn’t have” (35). Celestine quickly walks back inside.

Mary, meanwhile, has been watching from the window, wondering at her cousin’s wild actions. Sita leaves on the bicycle, forcing Mary to walk home in the rain. When school starts up, Mary finds that her status as the new girl makes her popular. However, as she puts it, “I had eyes only for Celestine” (37). As her newness wears off, she and Celestine become closer. However, Mary’s popularity soars yet again when she performs what the nuns and priest at the school think is a miracle: After an ice storm, Mary slides down the outdoor railing beside the steps. She hits the ice face first, and the impression left behind is thought to resemble the face of Christ. Mary, for her part, thinks it looks just like her brother, Karl. She is injured but will recover, forced to think again about her brother.

Sent to Sister Hugo’s office to report on the miracle, Celestine describes how Sita reacted by falling onto the merry-go-round and calling for help. The event will make it into newspapers and Catholic-school textbooks alike. Celestine notes that Mary seemed “very annoyed” to have seen Karl’s face in the impression and that she herself saw nothing resembling a face at all (43).

A young man, Martin Miller, brings a baby boy to his wife, Catherine, in Minneapolis. She names him Jude. Her infant has died, and she decides to raise this one as her own. She saves the article asking for information about the missing baby from the fair, along with the cap he was wearing and the blanket, but resolves to say nothing about who the baby is.

After Karl jumps from the boxcar, he is severely injured and cannot walk. Stuck outside in the cold, he catches pneumonia. He assumes someone will come along to save him. Fleur Pillager, an Indigenous woman who travels the railway in a makeshift cart to sell her wares, picks him up and nurses him back to health. While Karl is recuperating, he thinks of his mother: First, he despises her, but then he convinces himself that “she hadn’t really abandoned [him]” (53) and fantasizes about rescuing her.

Fleur finally makes her way back to the reservation and leaves Karl at a church. He has decided that allowing others to take care of him is the best way to get what he needs. So, he goes along with the nuns’ desire to send him back to an orphanage in Minneapolis once he has fully healed, and after a year, he enters the seminary, where he will seek out sexual encounters with the “thin hard hobos” who travel the country in search of work and shelter (55).

Aunt Fritzie invites Mary into her office and shows her a postcard that has been sent by her mother, Adelaide. Fritzie tells Mary that it is her decision whether to reply. “I washed my hands of Adelaide when you walked in the door,” she says (57). Mary insists that Aunt Fritzie has been more of a mother to her than her own mother ever was; she will not go back to her. Instead, she buys a postcard entitled “Aerial View of Argus, North Dakota” and writes back, “All three of your children starved dead” (58).

The postcard is intercepted by Omar after being delayed for quite some time. He and Adelaide have been in a plane accident, and she is recuperating in the hospital. He is also injured—and his injuries will turn out to be more lasting—but she appears to be in terrible shape. When she starts talking about sending Mary a sewing machine, Omar becomes jealous. Before this, she has never discussed her former life or thought of her children. So, once it is clear she will recover from her injuries, he makes sure that she will never see the postcard Mary has sent.