by Annie Proulx
In the afternoon Mernelle walked over toward the Nipples’ place. There was a field at the lower part of their farm where the old house had stood before it burned down. A few coreopsis had escaped from the flower garden and spread unchecked for thirty years until they covered three or four acres of poor land. Mrs. Nipple called it tickweed.
They were in bloom now, a billowing ocean of yellow panicles. Mernelle waded into the swashing field, a trail of bent stalks behind her. She stood nearly in the center, thinking of herself as a dot in the quivering yellow landscape, thinking of Mrs. Nipple who would never again ride past the tickweed, never again sit in the passenger seat next to Ronnie saying, ‘That’s a harndsome sight.’
Mernelle looked at the sky, a cloudless blue. She stared, and the blueness shook with purple dots. She could hear a vast, slow breathing. The sky.
‘Mrs. Nipple is an angel,’ she said. She imagined a diaphanous sparkling angel rising from Mrs. Nipple’s black underground corpse, but couldn’t hold the image, and thought instead of the body dissolving into the earth, thought of the earth crawling with invisible hungry mites that devoured rotting bits, that cleaned the bones of dead animals, sucked the fire from consumed logs and the dew from the grass, all the effluvium of plants and animals, rock and rain. Where does it go, she thought, all those rivers of menstrual blood and the blood of wounds and injuries from the beginning of the world, imagining a deep, stiff lake of coagulated blood. To be killed by nail scratches! She ran at the coreopsis, tearing at their heads. She trampled the elusive, bending stems, broke and flung them, the roots sprayed soil. The maimed plants fell silently and merged again with the swaying mass.
12
Billy
FROM A LONG WAY OFF Loyal thought of Billy, her stinging hail of kisses, her little shoes with the bows, her pointed fingernails and elbows, the knees coming up every time he tried to slide his hand down her belly to her fork, the way his cracked fingers snagged the rayon.
‘No you don’t. I’m not getting caught. I’m getting out of here and I’m going to be somebody. I’m not going to end up on your goddamn farm pouring slops to the pigs and looking a hundred years old before I’m forty with a big belly every year and kids all over the place. I’ll go just so far with you, and then, if you want what I got, you come the rest of the way with me. Loyal, there’s so much money out there you can’t believe it. The money’s just pouring down, all you have to do is stand in the right place with your hands out. And this ain’t the right place, buster.’
But for all the hard knees and elbows Billy gave off heat like a smoking griddle. The orange hair crackled with the warmth of her electricity when he smoothed it; her hands were always hot, even in winter, and when she wet her lips with her pointed tongue the slippery gleam shot straight down the chute of desire to his groin. She could have been the best in the world if she hadn’t fought so hard against it.
Before Billy he had gone with the schoolteacher, May Sparks, big and arch-pelvised, almost the same color of orangey hair as Billy, but frizzed out over each ear in muffs. There was something about the ones with that reddish hair that got to him. Everybody thought he’d marry May. Thought of her flat drooping buttocks and the wide freckled breasts like saucers of cream scattered with droplets of honey. Easy to tumble as a rocking chair in the wind. Ready to rock, never a no from that generous mouth. They’d broken the front seat of the Coach with their bouncing. And like butter around Mink and Jewell, helping out with the dinner whenever she came over, showing how handy she’d be around the place, putting her arm around Mernelle and saying, ‘What’s the capital of Nebraska?’ and Mernelle with her head down, shy about the teacher transplanted from the blackboard to the Bloods’ kitchen as if she were human with real thoughts and feelings, would say ‘Omaha,’ very softly, smelling the sweet powder on the teacher’s skin.
He met Billy in front of Ott’s house. Mink had told him to pick up Jewell after the card party. And never looked at May again, never answered the letters she sent, dodged the other way when he saw her in the village.
The wind had blown all week, sweeping the cold sunlight. The yellow and purple leaves thrashed, though few fell. On the seventh day it calmed, and by noon of the Saturday card party the air was still, the sky scumbled over with clouds like folded cheesecloth through which a pallid light strained.
In the calm of dawn the leaves began to fall, and they fell on and on, all day. Leaves struck the branches of young saplings, slid and glided down the limbs and trunks. Leaves rattled leaves and knocked them loose, heavy stems pulling them down. They stuttered as they fell against branches, hit with light leathery smacks.
The first time he saw her. The clucking, sibilant leaves falling. Driving through the slow cascade toward his uncle’s house.
‘Go pick your mother up over to Ott’s. Damn fool card party. And make it quick.’ Mink, shouting from the milk room. ‘Step on it.’
Four cars empty under the trees, their wheels cramped in against the hill’s slope. The downstairs house windows glowing, the barn still dark, but the sound of cowbells and Ott’s boys’ yoicking cries from a near pasture.
He coasted past the parked cars and drew up at the front of the line ahead of a blue Studebaker coupe. A woman leaned on the fender, smoking a cigarette, watching him come along. Even under the trees he saw everything, the pointed fox face, the smart georgette dress with the round white collar, the little jacket with puffed sleeves, a full mouth, lipstick almost black. He couldn’t see her hair twined up under the gold lame turban she wore. She had a strange glamour, like a magazine advertisement, strange and beautiful, standing there dressed all the hell up in front of Ott’s tree with its dangling tire swing, the grass spattered with duck shit. He got out.
‘I’ll be darned,’ she said. ‘I’ll be darned if it isn’t Mr. Loyal Blood himself. I’ll be darned.’
He’d never seen her before.
‘Bet you don’t remember me. Bet you don’t know who I am.’ The sharp little teeth flashed at him. She winked. ‘Think back to eighth grade picnic. At Bird in the Rock pond. The wild strawberries. A couple of us picked wild strawberries like they was goin’ out of style. The one next to you picking strawberries – Beatrice Handy, that was me. From Bonnet Corners. I had a crush on you. But now I’m named Billy. Don’t call me “Bee-triss” if you want to stay healthy. I’d recognize you anywhere. There couldn’t be two guys so good-lookin’ around here.’
He remembered the strawberries, Christ, he remembered the strawberries all right, the relief of getting away from the giggling screamers, strange kids from the other district schools, sneaking away from the picnic tables with their piles of paper plates held down by jars of mustard and piccalilli. He went into the birches just to get away, and found the field of red stars. He remembered he’d picked berries for a long time. Away from the others, thirteen years old, picking wild strawberries alone. Had he even eaten any hot dogs? He shook his head. In Ott’s parlor window now there were the outstretched arms of women putting on their coats.
Billy dragged on her cigarette, her nails gleamed.
He shook a cigarette out of his own pack, lit it. ‘You didn’t go to Cream Hill High School. I wouldn’t have forgot you.’
‘Nope. We lived over in Albany near my aunt and uncle for two years. Albany, New York. Civilization. But we come back here when I was sixteen. I dropped out of school and went to work. Been earning my own keep ever since. I worked at Horace Pitts in Barre, at Meecham’s in Montpelier, at Capitol Sundries, at Lacoste’s Corsets, salesgirl at most of them, but assistant-assistant buyer at Lacoste’s, then I worked at Bobby’s Rare Steaks back in Barre, and La Fourchette, waitress. I worked for Mr. Stovel the lawyer in Montpelier doing secretarial stuff until last spring when Mr. Stovel tried doing some secretarial stuff himself and I quit. Last spring I started doing what I’m doing now, what I wanted to do since I was ten years old. Singing. I sing at a supper club. Where I’m going now after I pick up my mother and dump her back home. I
n case you think I go around dressed up like this all the time. Club 52. You ought to come over and hear me sing. Tell me what you think. I’ll give you a hint. I’m pretty damn good and I’m going to get somewhere.’
The lights went on in Ott’s barn.
‘You married yet Loyal? Probably got a half a dozen kids, huh?’
He wanted to make it a joke, say, ‘No, I been lucky so far,’ but he couldn’t.
‘No. You?’
‘No. I almost was, but it didn’t happen. I escaped in time.’
And Jewell and Mrs. Nipple sailing down on them, waving to the knot of women on the porch, some still working their arms into coats, and calling good-by, good-by.
For some reason she had picked him.
Lying in the hospital bed he had to remember. At first he’d looked through the Indian’s book, and had not let himself think of home, but images of the farm like huge billboards along a nightmare highway came to him as he half-dozed, in and out of a painful deep, and he could not turn off the road away from them.
He was hunting partridge and a snow squall came in. He’d been following up on a bird, flushing it far out again and again, and had gotten turned around. The spruce swallowed up the light. The snow obscured landmarks, whited out the hawk cliffs. He couldn’t get his bearings, clutched the old gun with stiff hands.
At the edge of a strange swamp he made for the high ground, moving up through wild brambles, maples ten feet through and nearly dead but for the persistent top branches. The snow surged through the dead leaves. He got into a stream gully, then followed it upward toward the fading light and came against a barbwire fence, rusted and broken in places by deadfalls.
But it was Mink’s fence work, the four strands, one more than anybody else used, the familiar flat-headed staples came from the barrel in the barn. A sense of his place, his home, flooded him. It was easy enough to follow the fence line. He recognized the far corner of the woodlot when he came to it, even in the half dark, and smelled the faint applewood smoke from the kitchen range half a mile away.
In the hospital bed he stood against the unseen landscape, the ozone smell of fresh snow on his wool jacket – the last light, and the smell of snow.
His blood, urine, feces and semen, the tears, strands of hair, vomit, flakes of skin, his infant and childhood teeth, the clippings of finger and toenails, all the effluvia of his body were in that sod, part of that place. The work of his hands had changed the shape of the land, the weirs in the steep ditch beside the lane, the ditch itself, the smooth fields were echoes of himself in the landscape, for the laborer’s vision and strength persists after the labor is done. The air was charged with his exhalations. The deer he’d shot, the trapped fox, had died because of his intentions and commissions, and their absence in the landscape was his alteration.
And Billy.
The last time with Billy replayed like a cracked film jerking through a projector. An image vibrated, the trees in the woods above the field toppled endlessly in shivering light.
13
What I See
Jewell, in May, carrying the basket of wet laundry out through the kitchen, passes through the muddy entry way and into the yard. The clothesline is limp, knotted, there is the naked pole, the clothes-pin bag swinging like a wasps’ nest.
She hangs the overalls and blue shirts, glances at her rained hands, then at the worn scene, the same fields falling away, the fences, the scalloped mountains to the east, the same thing she has seen since she hung out her first wash here thirty years earlier. In the pin cherry tree birds crawl along the branches, washing themselves with the wet leaves. The rain has darkened the barn to a molasses color; some tools lean against the wall of the milk house. The window is filthy with cobwebs and chaff. Crows bray through the woods pulling fledgings from their nests. She thinks again of the elderly piano teacher in Bellows Falls who has drowned herself in a hotel bathtub after weighting her body with encyclopedias and jamming her arms into a belt around her chest.
Dub and Mink drive the cows, Dub, ragged clothes flapping, slides back the poles that fence the cowyard from the pastures, Mink switches at the dung-caked flanks with his brass curtain rod. He bends slowly, picks up the rod he has dropped in the mire, and turns back into the barn. His leg drags. Just pingling along, she thinks. A clothes-pin breaks as she forces it onto the black denim and the patches stand out like new-plowed fields.
II
14
Down in the Mary Mugg
CLIMBING THE BACK TRAIL in his automaton’s stride, Loyal rolled the mountain air through his mouth. The taste of it was a little like the ozone smell that came after a lightning strike. It flared in his lungs, started his morning cough, and he hawked up stone dust.
He heard the jingling sound of Berg’s mule up at the mine entrance. To the west the summit ridge of Copper Peak Bred with red light. The timbers of an old ore tram support reflected violet and rose. The rock blazed orange, splayed black, cut like a deck of cards.
Berg could drive up in his truck if he wanted but he rode the mule, had named it Pearlette after his oldest daughter. Every time he said ‘Pearlette’ Loyal wondered about the little daughter, imagined her as thin and sad, her reddish hair in braids, staring from an attic window onto the road that rolled away to the Mary Mugg. Did the kid mind sharing her name with a mule?
Deveaux, the shift boss, was up at the mine entrance too, squatting off to the side, making a pannikin of coffee. He could get a paper cup of coffee from the canteen, but he liked to do it this way. Showing off his gritty uranium days after the War when he wandered around the Colorado Plateau with a Geiger counter strapped to his back. He let the grounds settle, then drank it black from the pan, soot smearing his mouth, and, as he wiped it away, griming into his pasty skin and yellow beard. With his short neck and hunched shoulders there was something of the vole in Deveaux.
‘I come back to the Mary Mugg,’ he told them in his peculiar voice that was both sweet and grainy, like the meat of a pear, ‘as a relief from them red mudstone beds up on the Plateau, a relief from them headphones. I hear that click-click-click in my sleep.’ He’d returned an earth-colored man, not the miner’s wormy white. He was an old hand, had worked the Mary Mugg through the dirty thirties. When Roosevelt closed down the gold mines during the War Deveaux had gone into the Army as an explosives specialist. The mine opened again in 1948 but by then he was strapped into his Geiger counter, sleeping out uneasily with the coyotes, dreaming of the cool silences underground and the way the bed squeaked when his wife rolled over.
As compact as a jackknife, he’d been dulled by his miner’s life. ‘I spent so many years underground, Jesus Christ, off and on since I was seventeen, I felt like I was peeled down to the meat up on the Plateau. Mrs. Dawlwoody thinks I come back to do her a favor, but I swear to Christ I’d work for nothing, get out from under that sky. I seen red spots in front of my eyes all day long, squint, old eyes start to water and tear. Too bright, too hot, everything watching you. The wind never lets up, like a kid pullin’ at your sleeve all day, “Daddy, buy me some candy.” That’s what I hated about farming. I tried that five years. You set out there all day on the tractor or stringing fence and the wind throws trash in your face, whips your hair in your eyes, knocks your hat into the next county and laughs to see you run for it.’ He put his head down, murmured at his knees, ‘It’s not so bad in the mines. And I missed the old lady. Least I can go home on weekends, sleep comfortable instead of down in the dirt.’
Mrs. Dawlwoody’s maiden name had been Mary Mugg. Limp and elderly, with cold waves of white hair rolling over her ears, she came to the mine each Friday to sit in proprietorial stateliness behind the paymaster as he handed out the checks. Her husband, DeWitt Dawlwoody, was killed before the War in a car accident in Poughkeepsie, New York. He was on a money-raising visit to his cousin, the manufacturer of Kronos time-clocks. The mine needed new machinery. Mrs. Dawlwoody believed the hand of God would show the truth about new machinery. Just before
an afternoon storm she had Deveaux set out two pumps on Copper Peak, one ancient hand pump with tandem iron handles, the other a new electric C. J. Brully. Let God speak whether we get new machinery, she said. Yet lightning struck neither pump for a month. At last Deveaux nailed each pump to a post set in the rocks, and then blasted the old one with a little dynamite. Showing the need for new electric pumps. But by then Mrs. Dawlwoody knew it was a stupid game.
The Mary Mugg was a hard-rock mine. An ancient stamp mill broke the low-grade ore, and the conveyor belt dragged it into the sheds where they separated the gold from the glassy rock fragments. Much gold escaped the stamp mills. The big mines had all gone over to the new ball and rod mills. The Mary Mugg wasn’t the kind of mine where high-paid Cousin Jacks worked; those stone-headed Cornishmen were all up in South Dakota at the Homestake, talking the gold out of the rock with their white sunless mouths, bending other miners to their will, making them thrash the metal out of the stone no matter if it drew blood, or they were up in Michigan at the Anaconda, battering the copper loose with their flinty rutting. Coal for hearts, granite for fists, silver-tongued and liked to see blood. None worked at Mary Mugg. They were expensive labor.
The Mugg was a little operation that attracted outlaws and cripples; 30 percent waste, gold and men, Deveaux said. But you never could tell what they might hit, never could tell who’d end up a millionaire governor. That was the trouble, said Berg when Deveaux was out of hearing; they did know. The little Mary Mugg was a cripple herself.
Berg tied Pearlette to a pine and emptied the water bags into her pan. He looked past Loyal without speaking. There was something brutal about Berg though he treated the mule gently and hummed. He had a pale mustache, like two withered beech leaves hanging from his nostrils. The pan had done double service all summer. He used it to wash in before he went down the trail in the evening. Loyal was damned if he’d want to wash up in mule slobber, but Berg had to have his scrub-up. For a man who’d farmed he was fastidious. He claimed his freckled skin plagued him after a day in the stone. Once, on a clear February afternoon with the daylight getting longer, he’d come out at the end of the shift and built a fire on a pile of rocks, then, when the fire was down he raked the coals out and propped up his poles, covered them with a couple of canvas tarps from the mule’s lean-to. The length of his naked legs and arms suggested locomotive drive shafts. They’d watched him burst out of his jury-rigged sauna into the dusk, a luminous pillar of mule-scented steam around him. He got down and rolled in the dry snow until he was as frosted as a sugar doughnut.
