The Beetle Leg

no one wants to hear what I got to say,” said Ma.

Day or night could not be measured by what she did or the way she dressed. Her bedding on the floor was always open and roughed as if she had just climbed wearily from it or was about to lay herself down again for a moment’s uneasy rest. She napped all through the night. The sun might be breaking or clouding over as she stood at the stove changing her dressing, reaching for the roll of bandage between the red bottle and pepper tin, peering at her forearm sore by the light of the coals. She stood on a little patch of carpet before the stove summer or winter, in the early evening or the long middle breath of the night, and wore her stocking cap and slippers, daytime dress and high socks.

“My sore’s been ailing me again,” she said.

Ma had been outlying Gov City for ten remembered years, her cooking chimney seen always smoking, a Lampson marketing for her and talking about her every week, but no one knew when or how the sore had sprung upon her arm. Because of the vermin in the chicken wings, or some recurrent bone breath in the victuals, or some flowering growth cropped up in the slough of the river bed, it never healed but gave her trouble when she stirred or rolled over. She tended it with the same frown and preoccupation as possessed the cowboy when he lanced or cauterized the discolored wound of a pit viper.

“You give it to me,” and she half turned to the Mandan to let her see. The girl sat reading a catalogue with breasts lunged against the table, oil gleaming on her black hair and spotting the red wool sweater. She licked her fingers and slowly turned the page to another smeared picture of an accordion.

“Mulge never would have let me be this way,” said Ma.

The mile long knoll of his grave mound was an incomplete mountain, a pile of new earth erupted between the bluffs, a patch, a lighter hue of brown, across the river road. It was a shoveler’s mission, the largest heap of dirt and the longest tomb of any channel impediment from the trickling source of the trouble to its mouth on the distant gulf. They had stripped the topsoil of the basin, picked at the surface and weeds, uncovered the shifting red clay for acres and finally, in the last stages of the project, been stopped at the yellow peakless rise itself. Not that they had been able to move the mountain into place and rear it foot by foot, but rather they had been unable to tear it down and had merely left it, defaced of former cliffs and ridges, and without a name. It took Luke’s seeding badly; it remained undisguised and visitors looked vainly for the excavations from which it must have come.

A few tool sheds remained below the dam. Rust-colored, barely overgrown cuts still lay along the lower banks, but the enormous center of the channel, from which the mountain had been pumped and drawn, had resumed one night its listless flat shape. It shifted as before when under water, but in currents and directions that could be recorded only on the seismograph by magnetic flux and by the wary, almost invisible nestings and flights of insects from one drift of remaining dead water to the next.

It was a sarcophagus of mud. It filled the gap between two lesser hills and prevented, by raising spit and shoals to sight, the flag flying traffic of river boats where a few had glittered in the night and crawled before. The dam caused to be beached the homemade leaking skiffs of ranchers whose land backed up to the mud colored misty fathoms trailing seaward. Where once bleak needles and spines had popped crookedly from the banks and a few flowers increasingly withered into the plain and disappeared, only the dust from the southward slope, swirling into the air, and a few animal bones and tin cans from a still deeper generation, survived. One small city of the plain lasted to welcome the tourist trade and issue reports on the depth of the almost foreign, dark pan of water. And yet, from the construction yard diggings, from the bits of wire in the sand and a beer bottle that might be found instead of a wreath, inscription, or shredded flag on the graded fresh slope of earth, from the drippings that seethed out of its dark insides and were measured, it seemed that the luck of gamblers, engineers and women had appeared, and from the bare mound indistinguishable from the bluffs at dusk, the highways, planned townsites and rock formations pushing west had stopped, fossilized and emerged.

It moved. The needles, cylinder and ink lines blurring on the heat smeared graph in the slight shade of evening, tended by the old watchman in the power house, detected a creeping, downstream motion in the dam. Leaned against by the weight of water, it was pushing southward on a calendar of branding, brushfires and centuries to come, toward the gulf. Visitors hung their mouths and would not believe, and yet the hill eased down the rotting shale a beetle’s leg each several anniversaries, the pride of the men of Gov City who would have to move fast to keep up with it. But if this same machine, teletyping the journey into town, was turned upon the fields, the dry range, the badlands themselves, the same trembling and worry would perhaps be seen in the point of the hapless needle, the same discouraging pulse encountered, the flux, the same activity. It might measure the extinction of the snake or a dry finger widening in erosion.

They smoothed it with a shovel. They thrived in the shadow of the dam but kept to the bottom of the mound. Only the cowboy trod upon its sweltering slope above his kin, only small parties of electricians dragged their wires on its baking crest. Few took the top road. They could see it from their horseshoe windows but rarely climbed it, unlike the tourists who arrived each week in season, labored over the trackless dirt, not steep but long, gauging upon it little prints that would evaporate by dusk, to stand panting for a moment, cover their heads with handkerchiefs and say: “I had an uncle had a farm out there. Used to graze under them miles of water.”

If the employment of dredge and suction pump had done little toward changing the contour and imperfections of an already dry south, it had done nothing to the land northward but submerged it— havoc was hardly tossed upon a natural sea bottom. The outriders on a Sunday fished over the old barn. The current swelled upon pasture, receded from field, sinking or skirting raised sandstone islands or covered dunes with a virgin darkness. And it barely washed the sand and granite sea side of the dam. It held. They told the visitors that it would.

They spoke of it as dry land. But the land they chose to walk upon had never been scooped out by caterpillar nor been flung showering, fine as grain, from spades. Shapeless in the darkness, they never watched it when in their cars parked on roadless, adjoining bluffs, and more certainly, never watched the moon from blankets spread across the crest. But of its own accord and from its own weight fissures appeared and deceptively closed, trapping wrestling mice and young lizards. By them the whole ten years of work must someday crack apart one dry season, and sift away like earth pitched against a screen.

No one saw the Gov City man shoveled under. He died at the drop of a lash, was noticeably absent only after a count of heads. The lip of new pumped clay melted with the downward breath of an elevator through its shaft, left the end of the trestle and the steam engine atop it swaying loosely and cataclysmic for a moment, vertical beams dripping small pebbles and slime. Then, as the structure snapped with a minimum of screeching timber, it carried the catafalque, its joints of wood and forward-most portions of the bridge of skill, into the hollow hand and to the bottom. Two weeks of scaffold were rebuilt and another donkey engine ordered from the yards. Advancing slowly, testing each step with a gentle, forward foot — but the sound was gone, the earth firm again — they reached, one by one, the crest of disaster, a wide settled trough of mud barely higher than the freshly, nakedly drained original bed. And though they searched and tried to remember, the incalculable loss of small tools could not be reckoned. They were called back to solid ground by an engineer’s whistle blowing from the bluff, and the sound of low lapping water followed them from the scene of such toil, from the miasmal landscape.

Tent after tent in Mistletoe collapsed, canvas sides sprawled in the sand, ridge poles cracked and, as shock clouds passed dryly over the rope-marked streets, rumors rose, subsided, and the town got drunk. Though the lid of the portmanteau had dropped and no one knew what was lain away, packed just under the eye of the town, though there was nothing to do but pump, shovel, raise up the earth and grade, “Squashed, that’s what he was,” said many and disorder grew. “By now, he’s slid into China,” and coolies cried above the dam, rolling it with boulders, while a country that was thought to go no further than the sea, went down.

Thegna cried the loudest. She caught the spirit of the Slide in sawed-off gum boots, canvas gloves and apron. She worked. From the hour when the full-swing diggings were evacuated and the entire project quit in midstream to the day when they crept once more to the grizzled flat, as the dam seethed, settled and worked the body to the least disturbing depths, she stood alone in the cook tent and perspired. She fried her entire store of beans and hacked open cans of beef to last three days; she barred them from the tent and boiled coffee. They were sobered by her taking on and listened as she runted from the piece of iron on the ground before the stove to the plank tables, setting out tinware, blowing into the apron.

“It doesn’t do much good to say he’s buried in there,” she heard Bohn talking softly in the sun outside and wiped her eyes, “why, it’s just like saying, ‘I’ve got a brother buried in the. Rocky Mountains’.”

Quickly she put the food in plain sight, untied the entrance flaps, slipped under the tent wall in the rear. With line, basket and rusty hook, she made her way to the tidewater and darkness under the one wooden bridge in the country, fixed her gear and sat down to fish for eels.

It was only one of many eyesores, one hump in a chain of knolls, adding nothing but an artificial lake, obscuring nothing but two hoof beaten points on opposite banks where cattle used to swim across and land. Whatever went into the making or whatever had fallen short of the great pile, it hardened in the sun, swelled at the base and now grew suddenly higher if watched in the pink light of noon. They were finishing it off. But despite the metal lampposts ready to light the crestway when switches were installed, despite the orange half-finished steel tower, bodies could still have slept full length in the crevices or been swimming blindly through the dark muck of the center. The wooden bridge downstream was gone, the cuts were dry, the old campfires gone out in Dynamite, old trails blown away and the sides of the dam left untraveled. Still, it drew spectators from the corn-land and at least one old woman back to its mountainous pathways, to accidental crags and ravines.

Ma fixed on her bonnet with mosquito netting and took up her basket. She left her skewing sticks and skimmer, wooden paddle spoon, file knives, tin cup and a heap of seasoned hot handle rags strewn across the stove and around the skillet. The netting with its black stocking patches was drawn over her head, all the way down her shirt front and tucked in the apron, two sides finally tied beneath her arms. She sat on the bunk with the covered basket beside her.

“There’s other things of his I’d like to have,” she said and pulled on a pair of shoes that had once belonged to the older brother. Ma, if she could have her way, or could get Luke to do it, would rob the barber shop of its museum, steal antiquities from the glass shelf in the window, hide his chary remnants from the passing eyes of strangers and men getting a shampoo. “There’s things have feeling,” she said, “and a use around the house.”

His razor was spread open before the shaving mug on a square of Christmas paper, marked by a little card tied to it with yellow string. A nick had been cracked in the bone handle and there was scrollwork on the blade like that etched upon a naval sword. A bottle of tonic and septic pencil stood on either side. “There’s more ways to skin a cat,” the barber said, “than bury him,” and for fifty cents the relics could be touched, a hooked shadow here, a bristling object on its back, gilt flowers of porcelain. On holiday nights he left a light in the window and on hot afternoons when the shop was empty he honed the razor, drawing it back and forth, achieving a Sunday morning shine. “No, sir,” he would say, “those things are not for sale, not them.” Smoothing white across the face or clipping halfway up the head of hair, he would add, “But there’s postcards of them at Estrellita’s.”

Ma had all the photographs of his effects. It was the best she could do. She wrote on the backs of them:

“I remember this one, remember it well.”

“Bought in Clare for twenty-five cents. I didn’t take to the color. Right off.”

“Cut 1 lb. fish fresh as it buys to four pieces…”

The trails beyond the cabin called her, the scurrilous running of velvet pads was in her ears, there was a yapping in the air and the whole range to cover. She could go, the skillet was smoking properly.

“Now you put the idea out of your head. You ain’t buying one of them concertinas. I couldn’t stand it to be playing at me all the time.” The Mandan put her short brown finger under the type and read along line by line until she reached the price.

The clamor of caged fowl drifted up, as seagulls used to cry before, over the dam.

Thegna loved Harry Bohn. She cut their letters into the bridge, as fishpole dangled and she slumped against the timber, and cut them into the yellow drying boards around her sink. Two boot trails appeared and gently sank in the mud; man and woman stooped together over hooks snagged in buried rushes. Behind them bubbled their heavy tracks. Hers were deeper. Never tucked in, hanging to the outside of rubber boots, her skirts fell heavily in the mud and dried stiffly in the sunshine when she climbed, Norwegian braids trembling against a sunburnt neck, to one of her sporting places. When the cook and man dragged across the river bed, if they paused, if he spoke or looked at her, she covered her face with red hands and shook, ploughing under little fingers of fish and churning the mud.

When his back was turned she freed herself and, cheeks blotched with the rash of laughter, swelled and cold, she stared at him through drawn eyes and rooted, as between fiords, toward the fishing ground. One had promised to marry Thegna, had married Ma instead, and then, in wedding suit and cut lip, hatless and with socks hanging below his ankles, had returned to honeymoon with the cook in Mistletoe. But he was faithless, black and cold. And she had never loved him as she now loved Bohn in the shadow of the dam and as long as it stood to hold back the changing waters.

She fried her catch behind abandoned pipes and gazed tenderly at the mountain, sticking thin bones into the sand one by one and slitting dead silver tissue with a jackknife blade. She cracked fire from stones. She wore her apron into the fields, through the destroyed paperboard houses of Dynamite. In her own day she had slept in every cabin now under water. No one knew how she came to be there — whose pure width stood welcomed among men, who wrestled heavily with the shade of laughter — but she shrieked when the first crew went to work, heaped broken sounds of affection on the black dam. She was clothed in sweaters from the warehouse, trampled among gangs, and beat a triangular gong of railroad track. As long as she lived, the wall would cleave back the earth, roads and river, allowing the bold to swarm across the bottom of the world and discover nests at night in abandoned town sites. As long as the mud dam needed tending, she would love Bohn, toolsheds and a dress dry-white with flour.

“I don’t care to marry Mr. Bohn,” she told the dormitory maids and no traveling justice of the peace tracked her, nor cursed her, nor made her cry — and carrying timbers one moment she could weep the next — no traveling teacher broke light upon her, no lover knocked her down nor left her, for he was dead. So she blushed at the least confusion and smacked her sides, as black shadows, wings and smoke yawned from every step she took and followed her. She smiled. She had not been away since the Great Slide.

Camper’s wife took up her purse.

Coins, which at first she picked and counted behind shielding hands, laid one by one on the pile, mounted numberless and like lead across the table and quarters became dimes, nickels stone. But the disappointed women paused. They matched and bettered each card she turned with the same wry twistings of the jaw, they won by suffering and in silence; not clever, chinks missing from their spines, haltered by forebears and, large as they were, the prey of a few fork-tongued men, they won as they had been taught in sessions Biblical through hailing nights. They ate her money, it disappeared round the table and into the gullets of four usurers whose gold would never show, who hesitated to reach or even raise an arm before her face.

“That ain’t my hand.”

“You won it,” Lou spilled the coins, shot them with the flat of her palm, “take it.”

They sat as if still standing and their uneasy country gait knocked together legs ill-fitting under the table. Their thumbs were permanently scratched in ten years’ testing for the sharpness of a blade and they had lost no blood. These four met on the seat of a wagon, survived Ma’s wedding trip, thereafter packed away bonnets and allowed the barn to fall, fast friends.

Lou licked her diamonds. She moistened the ring finger first with the tip of a handkerchief touched to her lips, gently turned the band. Then she raised knuckles, bone, the thin stick to her mouth, gnawed as upon a hive, and one stone, another, ceased to roll and glittered in the center of the table.

With barely a whisper Thegna shut the door.

She had tacked no rawhide sheets across the windows, no smoke heavy on eyeshades filled the room. There were no watch chains on embroidered waistcoats, no weapons concealed in the finery, the feathered fronts of silken shirts. Black cigars, gold teeth, long wallets next to hot and scented breasts, these were buried under the young willow limbs of wing dams on the river.

“I ain’t sat with a reckless player. Before now.”

“Somebody give them to her.”

“There’s people wear such things.”

And Thegna: “Don’t touch them. Loan her, for awhile.”

The cards were blank, warped as if they had been shuffled under water. The women held them at arm’s length and to one side — to catch the light from a barn lantern shadowed by the faces of those with whom they boarded, shade lifted crankily to the lighting of a pipe.

“Don’t you know Pa’s game?” asked one.

“They play it even out to Clare.”

“Let the lady study it,” said the cook. “She don’t know brag as well as you.”

“I told him,” pressing the cards face down against the table, “this place hasn’t even a road to reach it. And, my God,” leaning over them, “it’s not Nevada!”

But the sternwheeler rocked upstream. Camper’s wife heard the signal of the bells. The crystal glass palace, wide of beam, candles bursting in the darkness, plowed over snag and bar in the shadow of the dam. Smoke, and the music of an instrument strummed on the lower deck, filled the salon. From carboned chandeliers light fell on dirty cards and amidst the singing and dancing forward, the gentlemen, ordered not to wear boots to bed, with lace undone around their throats and black eyes flashing to the count of chips, created, among amateur and blackleg, a cold solemnity and harsh silence that would last the night. Wheels paddled sternward, only a few inches of night water separated the golden purse from the changing, uneven spine of the river bed.

“Sit down,” said the cook, “he played!”

Again Lou Camper heard the ringing on the river, smelled tobacco and glass tumblers of brandy. They moved slowly at the speed of the lagging current, showering sparks on the black water, peopling with shadow and linen revelers an enormous liquid dead land far from shore. Feet splashed, shoulders scraped warm peeling wood and suddenly, from the deck below, against the constant lull of gamblers, a voice called up clearly between cupped hands, laughing through low fog and unaware of danger.

“Oh, Lou, Lou, where’s he at now?”