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.
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.”