The Beetle Leg

four men stood at the roadside. They were led by one who seemed to know the country and who, as they paused, scanned it with the scarred and suspicious eyes of an old strong man. They had left the Buckhouse quickly but still were far from the waters behind the dam. Only now, out of breath and brought to a rustling stop by the pain in the largest’s legs, did they begin to talk and touch shoulder to shoulder, bumping in the darkness.

“How are you, Bohn?”

“I’m ahead of you, Lampson,” pulling the fat but beardless chin, “because you boys don’t have to try so hard.”

“Camper,” interrupted the perspiring fisherman, “remember that name?”

“He heard you,” murmured Luke.

“I knew his brother,” persisted Camper to the old buck, nodding at Luke, “by sight, anyway.”

Harry Bohn bit the tobacco plug, three inches long, round as a broom handle, then swung himself away and faced the north. The hair on the sides and back of his head was a tinted silver, black at the ends in the darkness.

“Harry, he can’t think of anything else, is all,” said Luke.

“I can’t either,” said the Finn, twisting and hopping, “and I’m going to get back to town, Bohn, where I can do something about it.”

“You stand right there. With me.”

In the broad and gray cat face the quick eyes shut and opened, and Bohn’s small lips, thin and stunted from a touch of the wailing forceps, yawned over a little cavity and trembled. “We’ll go on together, both of us.” He lowered his head, clenched one hand into a fist, grunted, and with the other gently rubbed his burning heart. “He ain’t open to the public,” feeling his trousers with the calmness of age as he spoke, back still turned to Camper, “no matter how much they crane. Get as old as me and you know that.”

Harry Bohn, by miracle born of a dead mother and thereafter in his youth — he looked quickly over his shoulder lest he be caught thinking of it — drawn to the expressionless genitals of animals as the Sheriff was in a later day, doted upon the stomach kept distended with effort, and lest they be torn to pieces, slept with his hands drawn in from the edges of the bed. “You’re lucky,” the doctor told the boy before he fled, “you wasn’t buried with her right then and there. Now be good.” And in the darkness of the night, with muscle of the athlete pitted against the hermit’s birthmark, he briefly stepped aside for the passing of water — as another might turn his head to cough — and swallowed a black and spongy pill picked from a matchbox. Then Bohn burst with feebleness and fought, with laughter and pains of senility, a past in which life moved deep within the woman’s body though her hands were cold.

“I’m still ahold of myself, Lampson. At least I ain’t out looking around like these boys here.”

“We’re just walking, Harry.”

“I know,” attempting to make his bass voice crack, “looking around for sweet tooth.”

“We’re out to fish,” said Camper and tapped the dismantled rod.

“I got shirts to wash, lighting wires to put across the floor, Bohn, with half my fence down, a window lead to hang and plenty of time except you use it all!”

“Finn, you ain’t nearly home yet.”

Except for Bohn each might have run his way, ducked his head to escape the dark and empty road, the still plain from which, even at night, the buffalo could be seen to creep. All but Camper, who might have wandered to his death. The spare men — they had hands that were of one piece and put to purpose like the head of a hammer, bodies that appeared to have come first through the mist of nettles, skin which over a period of time ejected splinters, were obviously men by the hanging of hat brims and the constant sound of their breathing — shook the dust from their clothes and rubbed their shins as if they had stumbled on the way. Camper urged them forward, the Finn back. As they talked, picking at each other’s sleeves, they looked up, listened for the faint jumping of the fish or cry of the wolf. It was not only Camper who, unto himself, licked his mouth for a taste of the imaginary spawn of game and feared through the night the footfall of the hunted. The great natural wilds lay around them without dens or lairs.

“I got to go back, Bohn. I got to rope my cabin down. My place isn’t going to be swept away!”

“What do you worry for,” said Luke, “when Harry’s with you? My mother worried about the same thing. She said it after Mulge fell in the dam. But One Hundred Acres Grassland ain’t going to turn to dust.”

Camper quietly stepped back and waited.

“All right. Shake them canes on out of here. If you want to.”

Luke no longer heard them. The fisherman, the cripple, and the old pink-cheeked man were bent aside by the wideness of the sky and in a moment, with hard lines at the corners of his mouth and crow-feet white at the points of his eyes, he returned to the image of his mother and heard her chair rocking on the gravel. Rarely he thought of her, but if so, if it came upon him as he plowed across the dam, he checked his horses and held them to a standstill until she passed. He saw her now, sitting uncovered in the sun a few yards from the cabin. She talked to strangers, pointed with crackling fingers toward the fowl she could hardly see. Even after the Slide and word of the death that brought her own, her voice would suddenly begin beyond the silent house. “That one there that lays,” he heard her, smiling at someone come to mourn, “I like her, and the one next by it I had since a child, and the one that’s blind and chokes when it crows, and that one with the comb who can’t crow, I like him too. And that other, that’s the last, she’s a good bird.” He could hear the visitor take off his hat. His mother scraped her rocking chair in the sand. And it was at such moments that, receiving a passerby, she talked as a young girl and coyly rolled her eyes. But, by a trick of age, the pupils disappeared and only the whites remained in the posed head above the smile.

“Look,” said Camper, “fish won’t bite after four o’clock.”

“What good will they do you?” The Finn danced on the metal beneath his heels. “You’d better be out taking pictures — you got a flash? — or buying some mosquito dope if you aim to stay.”

“Harry,” Luke shook himself and touched the black-winged arm, “shall we show them a thing or two?”

Slowly they started up the road.

Properly, absorbed in care, they prepared to bury Luke Lampson’s mother on the bluff. The body, not changed the least five hours after death, strong as ever in constitution, had spent no time in the Lampson cabin but waited for interment helplessly by the side of the grave. That morning she had predicted hail. Luke spoke for them all: “We better cart her over before it starts.”

But a calm settled on them when the spot was reached, firm sight of the trench fixed narrowly in the ground determining each to take his time. They made allowance for the storm. Deliberate movements and dry throats, long faces and speculation lengthened the afternoon and suspended the effects of sun and cloud. Her last word done — Luke sent a message with the body — no argument was given in the presence of his mother and not a memory nor bitter sentiment invoked. Each suggestion, and members of the party wished to express no more, was wrapped in several minutes’ contemplation and answered in silence by those immediate to the dead.

Hattie Lampson wanted to cause no trouble. After her prediction, coming at the time it did and despite the morning sun, was taken as more than a warning and caused Luke to walk far in the empty lots for horses, she forced quiet even upon herself and attempted to appear asleep. But the eye of a woman who felled eagles with a rifle and downed them to bounce in the dust with heads smashed by a single dum-dum bullet, fluttered and refused to flatten permanently until she spoke:

“Don’t leave me about this house. Just put me over Mulge, just lie me so as I can look down on him.”

Her surviving son’s old friends, receiving the actual remains among them and charged with picking the location, repeated the message to each other several times until they straightened her on the ground they thought she meant and dug beside her. They sighted along shovels and determined that she hover where she wished.

“Do you think she might find it better down aways?”

“She can’t be fooled. There’s just one proper view of him. She knowed that, even when she ain’t been up this way for months.”

They nodded and neatly tamped the sides of the grave. The distance between the words that came from her own mouth and the choice they finally made, by disturbing the earth, was great. But once at work, cutting a thin cube and shoveling a place that would be ringed round with visitors ever after — since she was specifically located and he was not and few wanted to traipse a whole mile and perhaps not even find him — they felt her satisfied and spoke no more about it. They were the artisans, even less concerned with her long life than the lawfully compassioned who gathered as quickly as they could and stayed until the burial, when ended, brought a hasty darkness following on the edge of the storm.

She died young. Deformities around the mouth and unraveling lines in face and hands were hardly honored by those who peered some hundred miles to the sunset and who said: “She looks to be about the same, I guess.” Except for the Slide, hers was the first Gov City death and, catastrophe or not, was the first natural death among them. Many were as old as she in frame and flesh, were just as keen and liable to the same youthful, pretended sleep. But they were allowed to attend her death and stared long, now and then, at the sleeveless gown and shoes hooked on her at the end.

Hattie Lampson had not been snatched away. Man or woman, perhaps they expected the sudden disappearance, the fault in the shell of earth and death between shifts. They had clamored once, found nothing to do, hardly anything to see. Wreaths, if available, could never be dropped from a safe spot into mud. Cries and an excuse for history came by accident without an hour of sorrow or memorable handling of the dead.

The completion of the grave was the first event, accomplished more rapidly than planned with the easy removal of the lumps of earth. Arrivals appeared slowly. Climbing the bluff, they paused for breath and, having been told where they would find her, face up and sleeping as fixedly as stone — there was no chance to lose her — they looked heavenward and speculated on the cloudburst. Without alarm, more reticent than ever, had they decided on or even wished for the construction of a coffin, it might have taken forty days to ready, working on weekends and in the evening. As it was, the earth was excavated, tools already cleaned and out of sight, and nothing remained but to take their time and study her, discuss it, seal her in and loosen on their heads the hail that waited in abeyance.

Perhaps a slight wind should have hummed across the miles of black land, bearing the faint lowing of faraway cattle or the sound of wheels grinding on Luke’s wagon. But there was only air enough for each and no sign of her living son until he actually carried her hand-chest into their midst, seesawing heavily on his shoulder. Ma and the Mandan stayed behind him.

“Sit down, Luke. There’s no rush.”

They pointed to his mother on the ground. They used no nails. Hers was a fair embroidery and the expression on the closed, depressed face — wise at the small curves of the mouth, a few scattered inclinations on the brow — was the same that settled on or pinched her when her boys had not come home.

Luke sent her out of the cabin to the tableland when she died. He sent her into the charge of friends who, while he cleared her things, expressed to herself, not him, their sanction and willingness to help. He left open the door and windows when he set out with the chest and the two women who, including himself, Hattie Lampson in the end firmly claimed to be her family.

Not many wanted anything from the trunk. Her last deposit, it was divided into one pile they could choose from and one to discard. She herself had once pulled the travois that carried it. Now it was lightened and, as hinges noiselessly crumpled, was relieved of the furniture of the dead. They took without asking and gave no thanks to a process that bestowed upon them only cloth and clay.

Each man present looked at her, not having to breathe the heat, loosely covered, and some noticed that she no longer wore her spectacles and that the lids appeared white and tired: “But not her face in general, mind you. Don’t reckon that’s changed at all.”

And each man recognized to speak with a friend or two and, if silent, looked long at strangers as if they also had touched her and taken up some trinket from a dusty pocket, an object slowly appropriated from the crocheted shroud. A few left empty handed. But, while on the bluff, jaws set and without moving a pace, they stalked in the sand the pleated, stitched ninety pounds of the dead.

Her son, who never had listened to her, lay below. She was on top, shaded by followers, clasped in a small rigorous attitude beside a grave that did not gape nor call attention to itself. Those mutterings that were not speech, but which she unconditionally declaimed and seemed to have meaning to herself, were done. The peppered, flat sealed nose, the small sloping top of the skull wherein once lay the secret of preserving health in the dry heat of the afternoon and of remaining lazy, this aboriginal shape of hers was done with chores and elevated to extreme old age. Not having died in some drinkless caravan blown under the sand, not even strong enough for a trip to her son’s grave mile in final days of life, it could at least be said that she would remain intact as long as any in earth or burial cave. They readied beads to drop beside her. The volunteer, who undertook to fulfill her own last wish and make of her a landmark, to dispose of her, to make and break a final contact between the live and dead, squinted toward the plain, then at the halted sky, and shook his head. He lifted her.

Face down, eyes in the dirt, she peered through the sandy side toward her son below, where he too lay, more awkward than she, feet up and head in the center of the earth.

Graupel fell thickly from the dark cloud. Freak pellets rained on them. Drawn in a group to the edge of the bluff in the direction which she had pointed, they saw nothing of dam, hills or river bed. But they heard through the sudden storm the clank of machinery and the shifting voices of banks of men, the sounds of chain and engine and at times the thick coughing of boots in the mud.

Old and widowed, Ma picked up her divining rod from its hiding place.

She had walked far and now was tired. Knowing as well as she did the dried wagon tracks, the empty contours of the land that slipped into darkness, it had still taken hours to cross at her slow pace the silent fields and cracked grill slabs of earth. She stole through the box cabins, the small reservation of Mistletoe and heard nothing of the card game or the welder picking his guitar. She reached the edge of the bluff.

Her divining rod was hidden near Hattie Lampson’s grave. She shuffled, leaned forward, spread picked over foliage and scratched for it. She was inclined to sit down and rest, to catch her breath, slip the bandage properly over her sore again, to ruminate on his mother’s grave. Ma’s day was long — she knew how far away the horizon — and she could not sleep. For all the hours and all that could be said about the one woman whose death she had seen and knew first hand, there was no time for the smaller grave. Ma had not thought highly of her.

She picked up the forked branches of the rod. A sigh issued from sorrowful lips and cracked with the sparks that ruffled the dragging skirt and apron. She stepped from the bluff to the dam, crossed the town line to her husband’s grave and the stick twitched, jerking her in sudden palsy across clods of sacred ground. She hung to the twin arms of the branch, and suddenly, on the crest of the dam between lake and plain, looking backward into a darkness that bespoke no city, she called:

“Oh, Mulge. Where are you, Mulge?”

And she cried no more. She searched across a few acres of the mountain — cliffless, rounded, without danger — as though planting spiked leaf or weathering flowers before a reasonable headstone. She sanctified an immane body of land and depended on the divining rod. Old herself, distracted, now and then her mind snapped back to his mother who visibly had spoken, tottered, folded wings and died. On one side swelled the artificial sea over cabin, gulch, and bedstead, washing against the dam and nests of barometric instruments hidden in cut rocks by the engineers. Below her the rows of boxed fowl stretched from dry bank to bank and the birds, now crying and fighting in the night, dropped feathers through chicken wire and filled the river bed with a crowded, sleepless scuffling.

Ma turned to the voice of the dead. It sounded once against the bottom of her feet and trailed out of range. Slipping from the peak of the unfinished road, she dropped from sight, descended to the shadows of the southward slope and, driving the branch into open furrows, labored after it with concentration she herself might spend in dying. Ma stopped, pulled garments tight, squinted and hurried on. She lifted herself to the persistent tugging, the call of the husband dead by accident, and upgrade and down she circled the shadow of his remains. She knew, she understood these signs of the young shoots crushed in the darkness, the sudden appearance and whirl of insects.

Had he jaundiced and died, lay sickening in the cabin in open shirt and socks hanging over his shoes, he might have pulled Ma with him, down with grief to the grave, or she might have grown immune as death revealed him. But now, spared the slackening of strings and nurse watch through the night, having lost him without doubt midway in the growth of a mountain, she firmly sought to find the slow and unbreathing, blackly preserved, whole and substantial being of the dead man.

She spoke of him infrequently. But the squeaks, rustling of feelers and roots in the night stilled her ladle in the iron pot and made her glance with suspicion at the warm sleepers. She came to him on foot.

Her clothes pulled loose again and she stopped. The shafts of wood leaned against her and the invisible team, which drew her onward to unseal the earth, slackened in night harness. She worried, heard bits of falling clay approach and fade, she shook the white train of mules into a quick gait.

“Mulge? Hold in there, Mulge,” and the divining rod plowed at his heels. Ma opened up the grave — each widow has her mile of road, the dark ridge of her adopted name — and she revealed signs of her striking loss in the furls of the earth. The whole town had roused at his death, but it was Ma, drawing closer to an unmarked entrance through the years, tuning herself to cries that were still in the air, who grew thin, brittle, until of hardly any flesh at all, only an obligatory grief, her age and heavy shoes weighted her to the ever settling soil. And Ma, more than the others, actively pined away and opened many graves to find one full.

In the night and on the dam, Mistletoe’s dead man was hers, one who could walk but not breathe, who, without recollection and face obscured, still whistled as he had before when Ma cooked and Luke was never allowed to stretch out on his brother’s bunk. Ma drew near. But the steps, the dragging shovel, everything that pained and pleased her, retreated and slipped further into the darkness.

“Luke ain’t been no comfort. He ain’t given me one kind word and no provision. Oh, Mulge, I can’t go on this way.”

Ma’s was not a replenished vessel but an iron pot, not oil but scavenged vegetables, and the creditor had come leaving her few words thrown out, downcast lines in the face, the short, forlorn speech of the lonely woman. Hands figuratively outstretched after death — now clutched thinly to her person and which, thrust into the coals, did not burn — these she crossed on her breast and at night while standing up, these scratched against the cloth of her shirt for comfort. She struck at the air, received only impaired sensations from the long gone and heat rising from awkward waves of earth. She drove at her interminable circling, picking bitterly and with thin strength at the gates of the tomb. The white mules of the widow sway easily round her secret mile, ears straight forward to the sounds ahead.

Even now she heard the silence of the crowd as it stopped and the earth closed. And for all those who had watched, Ma only shook her head; for those who had moaned once, she shut her eyes. She never spoke to Thegna. In the rumor of friend and enemy she was robbed, before death and after, so she staved off other women and worked apart from men. Her eye was weathered in the wildness of the dam, her mouth in pain — open to the hard air — when she called him.

Ten years of death and the year of married life were shaken loose, dissipated in the gyrations of the divining rod. Dead leaves unfurled at the tip. She tramped in the field scaled to hold back the waters; she walked on dry seeds that were picked up and blown by the lightest warm wind and, left to the family in the cabin but hardened against it, Ma raked steadily a ground of iron, scratched the spine of the desert. But she could not touch him, could not lay hands on the black sleeve.

Ma had made that clothing, or at least fastened it together with thick welts of thread, allowing no rips or tears to be forgotten, embossing them in painfully raised stars across lapel and knee, arm and elbow. She clothed him as she fixed herself, in black summer or winter, buttons bound so no claw, fist or wire could pull them loose, pocket flaps and cuffs, hem and frill removed, saved, fastened at last across the frayed place of wear or fresh hole. Death took every stitch, clothes fell from her back. And stumbling where Luke drove the horses, smoked, and plowed, Ma saw the jacket of the dead — blacker than the earth itself — that made her breathing hard and caused white animals to veer noiselessly and pick up their trot.

“I deserve him back like this,” she said. But he was gone. The dead whistle in summer through fixed teeth, stones are gently raised on riverless cracked banks, and in the mildness of the small town, roped in from the desert, spectators, with boots on teetering rails, stare up and down empty, flickering streets. Whole families wander the surrounding country, hands in pockets, kicking sticks of shale and overturning rare bits of wood.

Ma perspired in the darkness. Ahead she saw Luke’s lister drill, squat, unhitched, tilted against the slope of the dam, seeds mildewing in its coffin box, burned out and black like a piece of armor on a battle hillside. Drawn to equipment, to a wagon loose in a field, to the numberless, lopsided wheelknives of a harrow abandoned by the trickling stream, she touched the rusting metal.

Ma climbed to the worn crosstree — bolt and chain clinked beneath her — and holding to the locked brake handle settled herself to rest on the driver’s seat. Her feet dangled, heels thudded against the hollow wood. She leaned forward, chin in scarred hands, and breathed faintly the odor of horses long since unharnessed from the burden. Miles from the Lampson place, seated quietly in the middle of acres which only Luke dared tread upon in daylight, Ma moaned and nodded as if she had lost him only the day before.

“I’ve let him pass me by tonight.”

But, eyes staring at the flat of her apron, face buried in stiff fingers, she could not hear the quiet footfall, the close deliberate opening of the earth, the parting of the weeds.

She could not see behind her.