The Beetle Leg: Novel Read online

  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?”

  ma was old already when she married the dead Lampson in the dam. And the Mandan was but a child.

  She prepared herself in the morning, lasted and traveled the entire day to the wedding at dusk far south in Clare. In those days Ma had friends. They helped her, though they did not arrive until after sunrise. But, carrying her bundle out to the darkness, Ma filled her heart with the family rolled asleep behind, and knowing that wagonloads would find her, except for death or accident, thought not of friends but only of her tentative husband’s mother.

  “There’s just one thing I got to ask. That is for Hattie Lampson to come. For her to watch it.”

  Ma put her clothes by the basin, filled it, and between the house wall and the roost, plunged thin tough arms and face into the water and after rinsing raised her eyes to twenty miles of dripping clouded sand across which lay the town where weddings were announced nearly once a month. She had heard of them. The pulse beat in the hollow of her elbow.

  “It’s too late for her,” Luke’s mother said the night before, “I won’t go.”

  But Ma dashed herself with water and in the hour before dawn— she had lain awake to see a matronly night die down—she put a bounty on her own voice and expected, as if the very day could change her, to be persuasive in the ways of women. She shook out her hair. She soaked it. And the only thing she wanted she was sure of. The night before a wedding, perhaps then they spat and hard things were said against her; but on the very day of compliments, then the fires were set and the lock was on the door.

  “She’ll come around,” thought Ma.

  There were no holes from which wagons might appear, no hump to cross, no turning to bring them into sight. For miles of white land lay open and fallow on all sides of the ranch. But if they had to ride three days and nights and drive hard teams themselves, Ma would be surrounded by women married longer at her age than she could ever be. She patted her cheeks to draw up the color of the blood.

  “I guess I can have my way. This once.” Quickly Ma picked up the basin, flung it wide, and a shower of water splashed easily through the darkness.

  In the open air, squatting in the sand for half an hour before the day of marriage, the woman sorted her clothes. She bit off a piece of thread. The gray hair dripped and slightly wet her shoulders. She tried not to listen for the stirring of the brothers and their old mother and now and then, wiping her mouth carefully, she raised her head and peered over the slight curve of the earth to the south where it would happen.

  “If the sun don’t come up soon,” she thought, “I’ll damp the pillow on our first night.” And then: “I’ll make Hattie Lampson dry it.”

  On all the days of the week, Ma never saw the sunrise though she awoke as early; for her the clearness of the day was noticed late and the first heat, which killed the very cry of the chickens, only wore her down by noon. But this morning she saw it gather, roll up and melt the east. The fire of the small, perfectly round sun was suddenly stretched, banded, across the entire horizon. She saw the thin red arms actually wrenched across the back of the earth.

  “That’s a bad light. But I don’t care.”

  Luke found her hunched in a sun ray, head forward, hair laid flat on her knees.

  “You ain’t very energetic for a woman who’s almost married.” He picked up the basin. “You used the water.”

  “I’m entitled.” Ma spread the strands. “But you ain’t supposed to talk to me like this. You can’t look at me, like he was out here watching what I do himself—before it’s time.”

  “There’ll be fuss enough,” said Luke. “Just let me wash.”

  The head of hair grumbled. The cowboy took off his shirt.

  “It’s hard enough for me to keep my spirits collected without you around.” Ma turned her back and drew the flowered satchel near.

  “You aiming to carry something from the house?”

  “I’m traveling, ain’t I?”

  “Right back to here. That’s all.” Luke blew into the water. “What’s in it?”

  “You don’t watch me now! This finery ain’t for men to see— except in the dark.” She pulled wide the mouth of the bag and under spreading hair, arms deep, looked into the dust and flowers. For a moment, as the sun drew her scalp tight and turned the silver metal of her hair into powder, she slept and hands hung gently. Then, eyes closed, she straightened the layers and before tying shut the bag, stroked and settled whatever filled the bottom.

  “People gave me these things. I’ll keep it with me.” On the other side of the wood and paper wall the old mother and her elder son were quiet. Ma listened for the splash of bare feet on the floor. The heat began to rack her shoulders and she heard only the scraping of the cowboy’s fingers in the basin. He filled it again, trailing slowly down the sand and back.

  “He’s washing twice,” thought Ma. She waited, thinking suddenly that she could have had it done in the cabin with the right man driven out from town and her own friends packed into the doorway. The sun brought it to mind, but the feeling passed as she thought of entering those streets that lead to church. She knew that in a moment she would want a long space to cover, a good many miles before sundown.

  “Listen,” the water dried on the cowboy’s cheek, “you ain’t aiming to take my mother to this wedding?”

  “Yes, I’ve none to turn to.”

  Luke tilted the basin, poured, then stopped. He looked up—sky and desert shone tearless, clear, white—and rubbed hi
s eyes. He dropped the bar of soap into the water and swept out the razor. He honed it once or twice against the sun, held it to a side of dry whisker, flourished and pulled. His young face had the acid smell of skin drawn under ingressive heat rays and his fist—it could pull a horse twice round on startled hoofs—was tightly fastened on the crook of the razor. After each stroke he held it outstretched vertically between his eyes. He aimed. The bright scroll on the blade that could twist the trickle of blood, turned white against his cheek.

  Placing the razor on the wash box, careful to keep the steel edge free of the wood, he went into the cabin with shoulders hardly moving as he walked.

  Before he came back, Ma saw the Indian child, too small to be a maiden, spying around the corner of the milk hut. The fingers of one hand spread stark and wild against the sod.

  Ma colored, “You keep away from me today.”

  Luke returned with a towel. He rubbed on a fresh spot of soap. “No. She don’t think she’ll dress this morning.” His mouth was hidden by a stiff arm. “I guess she better stay behind.”

  “I guess you shouldn’t use his things! On a day like this.”

  Luke turned. He saw the hair which was fluffed out and starting to rise, the walnut ears, the fat shadow on the sand.

  “He won’t be shaving anymore. Not him.”

  Ma rose, laid aside the bag ready for loading, filled a bucket, and started for the coop.

  “Don’t wake him,” she said. “Yet.”

  That was the day Ma sang. She carried a tune on dry nostrils and the Lampson ranch, by the sound of a woman’s voice, livened in its bed of star thistle. Ma’s song was louder when she passed the cabin, she raised it to leaning walls and the hidden flower of a man culled from the desert.

  “My mother says it’s time to start. If you’re going to.”

  “I’ll take her in my wagon. You tell her not to bother herself.”

  “She says she’ll try to have a meal done when you get back.”

  “She can sit by me.”

  Three wagons rattled to the edge of the shell, as if they had been camped out of sight until the moment of noon, and slowly continued forward on salty flutes across the sand. Bravely three loads of women in gown and bonnet hymned together; Luke turned to locate the sound of women’s voices, faint, from mouths already closed. He climbed on top of the sod milk hut and under brimmed hands watched the approach of old wives in the dust.

  “I’m glad for you. They’ll get here safely.”

  Ma smiled.

  The desert filled with women. They swarmed within sideboards of beaten wagons, staring ahead for sign of well or a shade in which to dismount and shake. Three cartloads plied the desert. Banded warm members, they traveled free of the farmer and cattle driver, chopped to the roots stray outcroppings of slate colored grass. These were women who rode unwatched on the dry bottom of the lake with empty breasts and nameless horses, and even the oldest unsnapped heavy collars and soured the passing miles from the tail boards where they sat and dangled their weak legs. They nodded to the thrust, the side slapping of the wheels.

  “But I believe there’s trouble.” Again Luke climbed to his sod post and waited. Narrowly he glanced at Ma. “Yes, sir. Them women don’t have no water. Not a drop.”

  “That’s all right.” Ma passed quickly with the basket. “You don’t draw such things to my attention.”

  “Well,” Luke pulled on his hat, “I reckon they’d survive about anything.” He walked away, sat down and watched her.

  And those women were roughly able to sing songs of the skewered lamb and waters driven back by faith or oath. They were dry. The boards on which they sat, scraped of fodder, might have burst aflame if the sun were caught briefly in the eye of a watch glass. They traveled in three lifeless dories with dead oarlocks and rotted sails; they sang stiffly, managed to hold the reins. They backtracked, chewed the sand and made their way over weary, salty miles to see one woman their own age brought to bed.

  Every one of them made the trip. There was not a woman in the desert who had not left the animal pens, truck garden patch and particular gully of the home to sit all day in the sun, to breathe the air of ancient lying in and love. For hours, under a never swaying skirt, a bare ankle remained chocked against brake iron or plank. The desert gave them up and they advanced; they might have died of thirst. But open-jawed and black, with matted and twisted cuts of hair, they crowded wagons taken from the farm.

  They drew near, and Luke for the first time saw women’s faces. Once again on the sod hut, a thin scout in the sunlight, a bent marker limp though standing, his own face worked, pursed and dripping as he watched. Bonnets, ribbons but no curls, skull-blackened and thirsty they stared back above the slick fronts of horses plodding low, stepping singly, flat and without wind away from wheels that were nearly locked. Instead of three wagon loads he would have liked to have seen just one face cleansed of the sun and that had not been formed and set long ago to the sudden bloody impression of a coffin bone. A few could not hear the meek but steady notes of their sisters’ hymns and pushed their ears with hands that had been raised trembling three days and nights. “I want to see one,” he searched among the tucked and tired wives, “before she’s learned to keep shut. And outlive a man.”

  He did not wave.

  “Smile,” said Ma, “when you’re welcoming.” The sounds of iron pleased her. She would rise and accommodate them too when they actually arrived, not sooner. But once she paused, “Go get her,” Ma hissed, “bring her here.”

  Higher than the sod hut or cabin, outnumbering the buildings of the ranch, they broke down in the Lampson yard. They drove across and settled on the ground where Luke had shaved. With spikes and nails working out of the wood, reared loosely above dead wheels, they hid the cabin from corral, cut off the roost. Only two front animals found room to emerge and hang toward the south and open plains on the other side. All those women and a dozen horses mauled in the first enclosure they had found since setting forth. Luke climbed and stepped among them. Little spars, a few carrying flimsy woven heads of sage, balanced with the slack, tipped and dug into the ground. The air was filled, below voices and slowly slobbering bits, with the steady descending sounds of rope and shroud, skirt and ringlet.

  Ma, too late, suddenly cried out: “Don’t get down!” Carrying the satchel with both hands, smiling, snapping her eyes, she darted from wagon to wagon. “Keep your seats!”

  Luke hid among the horses; he unbuckled them. Bits slipped in and all the way out of crooked mouths, away from square, flat, slanted teeth. Breast collars were hung loose and low and the weight of wagons dragged against forelegs instead of chests. Tight cruppers wrenched the raw high ends of tails, bristling and gray, pink and choked, straight above the mounded rumps and to one side.

  “They must have last had this gear on cows.”

  A few big ears were pinned back against manes under headbands that had ridden up, and as they stood like burned men dumbly waiting for cindered clothes to fall away, the harness slipped aside from cuts and abrasions. Steam rags had been ironed to their sides and stripped off. Large hoofs, one before the other as if to step, were planted—unpared blocks of chalk—on loose ends of leather that had dragged the miles of the journey. Blister beetles sat on the brass terrets or suddenly still, fell dryly to the ground.

  “Ma,” he caught her arm while she continued to hasten, to urge and push them up again, “we can’t reach Clare today.”

  “You load this bag. And fetch me Hattie Lampson.”

  “Don’t listen,” answered a small, steadily nodding voice, “don’t pay none of this family heed.”

  They swept back, made room and left Luke Lampson’s mother her own bright place to stand. She waited, then spoke no louder:

  “You’re all welcome.” She nodded, this little woman darkly turned out of the house, this last and oldest divulged by the desert. “I’ll see you off.” She looked at her younger son, but took no step. Ma caught her arm.

 
“Hattie,” Ma moved her, “can you get up on that seat alone?”

  They stood her by the wheel. They stepped back and the old woman shortly swayed, a stalk snapped upwards from the sand by the iron, mud colored rim, a length of wire coiled and motionless in the spokes. The great pinwheel might have ground her cleanly into the dust and she would have crawled away with skin unbruised, with dry pulmonary parts intact. She and the wheel—its tapered bars, sanded rays, were longer than her two arms fully spread—looked as if they would never move again; one, the original means of carrying them from Boonville to the bloody plow handle, the other, that which was originally carried and turned to love in the night’s wagon ring around the fire. But had it turned, and had she fallen, her kerchief caught in the spokes nearest the ground, she would have hung before her feet once more touched the settling, noisy track. And when the wheel did turn, smoke hung thinly about its tin bucket nave where wood burned against wood and miles wound in carbon around the axle.

  “You ride in the one behind mine. Mulge comes last.”

  The animals awoke. Amid the scraping of slowly prodded hoofs, the slight sway of warty food buckets and rope ends under the wooden bodies, Ma remained at the front of the train holding his mother.

  “Put Hattie right up there. That’s it, by me.”

  Luke in the second wagon and his brother in the third did not join the singing. The horses, as large as they were, crouched down to pull, their legs spraddled outwards like the flappers of young and panting dogs. Each wagon carried not only its own sounds of travel, the tug, twist and strain of the wooden windlass, but was loaded with the clatter of the other two and moved—one wagon could never make such noise—across the plains like a house athwart rollers.

  High on the first prow, wedding bag under the backless seat and the sun softening the wool of her dress, Ma leaned in front of Hattie Lampson and spoke to the driver. The ranch, with no men left behind and guarded only by the Indian child, had disappeared down its faraway indentation in the glazed sand.