The Beetle Leg (10 page)

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.

 

o
n impulse, throwing off his coat, Cap Leech, in the days when he could shave a cow’s heart thin as glass and determine with one look beneath the sheets the life span of the stricken, dared to extract the secret of a dead woman; on a wintry morning, having arrived according to law too late, he attended the birth of Harry Bohn. The mother, dead but a moment; gave up the still live child in an operation which, hurried and unexpected, was more abortive than life saving and, when the doctor drew back, lapsed into her first faintly rigorous position. The son, fished none too soon from the dark hollow, swayed coldly to and fro between his fingers. Leech left his scalpel stuck midway down the unbleeding thigh, buried the wailing forceps in his shiny bag, stepped outdoors with the infant and disappeared, thereafter, through all his career, barred from the most fruitful of emergencies.

But attendance at the surrounded bedside was not his special pleasure, he was not keen to treat night after night the umbilical cord like a burnt cork. He did not care for the sight of a swelling that decreased and felt no duty to bring relief to a woman lying in a shaft
of sunlight. Her only discoloration was for a purpose, and Cap Leech believed in the non-usefulness of burst organs; no good could come of it.

In the days following his clandestine operation upon the corpse, days of smooth cheeks and high collar, he teetered between the whiteness of a hall and the spotted robe tied behind the sufferer’s back. His training had begun with a set of wired bones in a dry box—he had clicked the teeth—and ended with poppy leaves smoldering in a pharmaceutical brass dish. Unguentine on the tip of his finger, reference to the tight page of a textbook, a limb swaddled in lay wrappings of bandage, the count of clear blood cells like constellations; with spectacles and shaved temples he took to searching coal bins for the wounded.

Cap Leech was no more a midwife. A family of one son and one unborn had been abandoned for earaches and faeces smuggled in milk bottles when he set out with a few sticks and powders for thirty years practice among those without chance of recovery, doomed, he felt, to submit. With him went the child whose features he had touched off by a slight grazing of the tongs.

He wandered the fields and lifted, dropped arms. At times, appearing starved and old, he answered questions and advised upon the description of a sore or at sight of a smoking specimen. He cauterized, poked, and painted those abrasions and distempers which, when healed, were forgotten or which, at their worst and sure to enlarge, brought a final shrinking to nameless lips.

The box grew brown with age. Once, in the empty frenzy of a cold night, he flung the bones across a whitened plain. But, always in time, he discovered the marble counter, the revolving fan, and jugs of pills. He crawled jerkily across the gumwood floor, stethoscope
pressed upon the shell of a beetle sweeping hurriedly its wire legs. He mixed a foamy soda draught in paper cups, dust in water.

An old obstetrical wizard who now brought forth no young, losing year after year the small lock-jawed instruments of his kit, chalking black prescriptions on the leaves of a calendar, he was reduced to making the little circuits of malignant junctions, in conversation only now and then with a crafty druggist. His skills became an obsessive pastime and he looked even at the hobbling animal with a heavy eye. Warts appeared on the medicine man’s hands.

“He’s in there.”

“We’ll run him out.”

“With the Sheriff. The two of them.”

The wagon was burning brightly. Red light danced on the wheel tops, curled from beneath it and flitted up and down the steps which appeared to be driven into the serrated earth. The onlookers, Wade at the head of them, watched, spoke in gentler tones before the untied horse and leprous, flaking chimney.

“He’s got a girl with him,” one accused from behind. They stirred uncomfortably, huddled at the caving rear of the jail.

“If he has, he’ll make known of it. But none’s been brought this way as yet.”

Wade shook his head, in a whisper promised, “Better than that. He’s a man with knives. Wait and see.”

They could hear the muffled windy sound of a choked voice, the righteous tune of one who continued to talk even when closeted with the Missouri madman. “Old Sheriff ain’t going to be stabbed,” grinned Wade from side to side. More soft now came the Sheriff’s muddled sermon through drifting leaves, as something, a dream, slowly stopped his mouth.

“You, Wade, you been in there?”

“Ain’t anybody going to put Wade in that wagon, are they, Wade? Maybe he couldn’t take care of himself like the Sheriff.”

The horse sniffed the milling of the men. The head waved, hard of sight, feeling in the darkness for the hand with a rope. He was roman nosed, carried at the tip of his skull a broad sloping pad of fuzz and moleskin that had been cuffed when he refused to ford a river or rise in the morning to the traces. He was one that would stand when gimp-legged farmers came out to ask for help. The slack pockets in the nose closed in winter; in summer he snorted, the long ears lay flat. The tail switched, swept between the shaggy legs, rolled briskly into the black pear rump of an animal a fraction blooded with the mule. He turned his head away. From the desert other signs—a missing sheep, a carcass—now awakened the linings of his nerves. One foot moved, returned.

“When’s the show come on? When’s this fellow going to bring out that girl?”

“Or a two head calf.”

“Or a baby in a mason jar.”

The door opened an inch, a crack of fire, and was sloughed shut again by a helping shoulder. It opened, swung to, was pushed like a shutter from the nest of flames, and Cap Leech, careful not to smash his hands, stepping backwards, lifted the drowsy Sheriff into sight. They stood on the narrow platform of the top step from which Cap Leech, who now held the Sheriff’s faintly reeling body with one thin straight arm, had squinted at an early and voiceless dawn, scratching his face. With the other hand he picked at the lawkeeper’s hidden shirt front and the tip of a long white sheet was tossed back into the fire.

The Sheriff continued to swing his head, mumbled through
misfit jaws, “The Range and Prairie Almanac never lies, the Moon don’t stand still. You bide by what I tell you.” Leech propped the Sheriff, took quick small steps to make of himself a ramrod. “If you don’t listen,” said the Sheriff, “I’ll fall.” Odors of disinfecting floor wash and spirits of ammonia drifted from the red door.

“Boys,” Wade tried to free his arms, “they’re dancing!”

Leech had heard enough about the almighty moon, pituitary of the wheat field and cow in foal; down one step he went and, catching the Sheriff around his waist, set him on the ground. He was light, round with talking gas. Cap Leech pushed back the head and folded the numb fingers in the pinched cup of the lap. He turned and for a few moments walked a circle some way apart, hands in long pockets, pausing now and then to stare for twenty miles through the darkness where rose one discolored furrow, a rib of earth that wormed for half an inch above the rest, as if it had been plowed up and left to dry, a spot on the horizon, the dam. Out there not a living creature, no wrist to count or old flank needing salve—he had lain his touch on animals also, in a stockyard razed by fire, had peeled the white fat glue from under bellies or driven his knife through an open eye to the brain—and he returned to the doped figure of the Sheriff. He rocked back and forth on his heels.

The Sheriff looked up, tenderly felt his temples, tried to speak, and stomach doubling in noiseless spasms at the same time, swayed as if someone boxed the sides of his head. “Quackery,” he said, awakening, “quackery,” and searched for the bars of the jail. His mouth was full of aspirin and the taste of steel.

Cap Leech unpocketed one slender hand, drew out the squeaking tongs carried in his trousers like a small key, and pushed the Sheriff down again to the step. He aimed and held the fat man with the ball point of the instrument, gently tapped the softened breastbone.
The Sheriff wriggled at the end of it, ogled upward with drugged eyes.

“Now,” said Cap Leech, “I’ll talk.”

“Wade there will clear my head.”

“What you been doing to the Sheriff?”

As the law officer tried his legs and wobbled in the dark fernless yard behind the jail and Wade bounced after him, Cap Leech climbed to the top of the splintered steps, sat quietly and watched them. His mouth cracked a line to see the Sheriff sternly sway, nearly topple, an aged guinea hen with shattered cerebellum and aimless walk.

“What did you do with his revolver?”

Leech, the goat who sat in the hunched position of a man, shrugged, stroked the two long forks of hair at the end of his chin. He picked the back of his hand blotched with the corrosive action of cheap chemicals. He watched the Sheriff feel himself with wet fingers while the moon-faced friend, calling in a hurt voice now and then, attempted to learn what he had tampered with. It was a warm night and Cap Leech had cut again as he wished into a foreign town, a soft head. Sight of the Sheriff still on his feet gave him as much pleasure as those whom long before he had left helpless on a bed of white.

Wade and the Sheriff rolled from the shadow on stiff, rubber tires, a topheavy tin pickup truck. They swung it silently in a half circle on the edge of the light from the nearby wagon, stepped back and admired it. The Sheriff, suddenly stooped to spit forth a long dark string, motioned Wade to attend the truck and tottering, amazed at the slime, felt a bird body hot from his intestines lodge in his throat.

A bunched comforter covered the front of the truck—the frail engine, the flapping fenders, the hole of the radiator—and dragged on the ground. Wade tore it off, a matador sweep of dirty cotton. He began to crank but the narrow engine, so worn and without gaskets, still made no sound, turned over with no resistance, loosely. It was a truck that carried both man and animal, rear floorboards chopped from the toes of pigs, a truck to be seen at night with a woman’s knees down to the running boards and in winter left frozen in a field.

Cap Leech’s horse poked his overhanging nose toward the truck, sucked his tail tighter and returned to gazing at the plains. Cap Leech whistled softly through his teeth to see if it would start.

There was a cow in the back of the truck. The sheer and luminous udder swayed lightly through the slatted planks and, as Wade cranked, the red calf gently bounced, tossing the velvet ball. It was a youthful cream head of cheese, a nodding pendant, and the teats protruded only faintly, the knobs of new horns. The Sheriff walked slowly to the side of the truck, reached through and stroked it. The little hoof stamped, the immature red color, pink and brown, quivered in his hand. A smell of new milk and oil, manure, and brake drum fluid filled the yard. Between the red wagon and the truck and backed against the last adobe wall of the jail lay the fresh row of motorcycles, already entwined with corn stalks, webs of dust. Flies and sac-tailed insects moved in columns across the broken spokes. An accumulated late night buzzing came from the heap of confiscated machines, a warm and smoldering pile of metallic fodder.

“Is she gassed up, Wade?”

With weak step, still sick, the Sheriff returned from the jail weapons chest and carried under his arm the hunting shotguns.
Sighing, clutching the truck door, he stacked them, blue bored canes, behind the feather and sawdust seat. He climbed in and wiped a clear spot on the windshield.

“You better come with us in the truck here,” called the Sheriff.

“I’ll follow,” answered Cap Leech, “you can’t drive faster than the wagon.”

Wade brought the cannisters of shotgun shells, sank behind the wheel. And Cap Leech flew in his wagon, pointed the horse in chase, running neither in trot nor canter after the red back light of the truck which, without splashboard and no vehicle to lust, sped toward Mistletoe.

He kept no hold on the mad horse but gripped the edge of the springing seat, spoke to the deviled ears now and then, a rootless spectator to the burning of the twenty miles. The horse, having never flattened himself along this course before, was guided by the Sheriff’s lamp; Cap Leech, having stumbled upon the rotting stones and stories of his family grave, rode willing to take one look, no more. The deodorizer of the homestead watched for the first sign of blackened wood and a narrow door cut with an air hole of a quarter moon. Ahead he saw the young cow hold her bush up uselessly for love or rain.

As if they had been lying on their stomachs in the flat sand, four muffled men jumped from the side of the road, ran hobbling and with yells to wait toward the slowing truck, climbed on, pulled up the last, and crowded the cat backed calf against the planks. The men clung to the red neck.

“Ain’t room for us and her too,” Harry Bohn boomed into the wind, “I better come up front!”

“Stay where you are,” answered the Sheriff. Seven skirted Mistletoe, raced for the lake.

In the wagon Cap Leech trailed behind the suspicious travelers, hearing their wordless clutter in the darkness. He had the power to put them all to sleep, to look at their women if he wished, to mark their children. Tie strings streaming, eyelids fluttering in the wind, he pulled from his vest pocket a roll of powdered lifesavers, began to chew.