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.