“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.