“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.
Camper’s wife took up her purse.