Every one of them made the trip. There was not a woman in the desert who had not left the animal pens, truck garden patch and particular gully of the home to sit all day in the sun, to breathe the air of ancient lying in and love. For hours, under a never swaying skirt, a bare ankle remained chocked against brake iron or plank. The desert gave them up and they advanced; they might have died of thirst. But open-jawed and black, with matted and twisted cuts of hair, they crowded wagons taken from the farm.
They drew near, and Luke for the first time saw women’s faces. Once again on the sod hut, a thin scout in the sunlight, a bent marker limp though standing, his own face worked, pursed and dripping as he watched. Bonnets, ribbons but no curls, skull-blackened and thirsty they stared back above the slick fronts of horses plodding low, stepping singly, flat and without wind away from wheels that were nearly locked. Instead of three wagon loads he would have liked to have seen just one face cleansed of the sun and that had not been formed and set long ago to the sudden bloody impression of a coffin bone. A few could not hear the meek but steady notes of their sisters’ hymns and pushed their ears with hands that had been raised trembling three days and nights. “I want to see one,” he searched among the tucked and tired wives, “before she’s learned to keep shut. And outlive a man.”
He did not wave.
“Smile,” said Ma, “when you’re welcoming.” The sounds of iron pleased her. She would rise and accommodate them too when they actually arrived, not sooner. But once she paused, “Go get her,” Ma hissed, “bring her here.”
Higher than the sod hut or cabin, outnumbering the buildings of the ranch, they broke down in the Lampson yard. They drove across and settled on the ground where Luke had shaved. With spikes and nails working out of the wood, reared loosely above dead wheels, they hid the cabin from corral, cut off the roost. Only two front animals found room to emerge and hang toward the south and open plains on the other side. All those women and a dozen horses mauled in the first enclosure they had found since setting forth. Luke climbed and stepped among them. Little spars, a few carrying flimsy woven heads of sage, balanced with the slack, tipped and dug into the ground. The air was filled, below voices and slowly slobbering bits, with the steady descending sounds of rope and shroud, skirt and ringlet.
Ma, too late, suddenly cried out: “Don’t get down!” Carrying the satchel with both hands, smiling, snapping her eyes, she darted from wagon to wagon. “Keep your seats!”
Luke hid among the horses; he unbuckled them. Bits slipped in and all the way out of crooked mouths, away from square, flat, slanted teeth. Breast collars were hung loose and low and the weight of wagons dragged against forelegs instead of chests. Tight cruppers wrenched the raw high ends of tails, bristling and gray, pink and choked, straight above the mounded rumps and to one side.
“They must have last had this gear on cows.”
A few big ears were pinned back against manes under headbands that had ridden up, and as they stood like burned men dumbly waiting for cindered clothes to fall away, the harness slipped aside from cuts and abrasions. Steam rags had been ironed to their sides and stripped off. Large hoofs, one before the other as if to step, were planted — unpared blocks of chalk — on loose ends of leather that had dragged the miles of the journey. Blister beetles sat on the brass terrets or suddenly still, fell dryly to the ground.
“Ma,” he caught her arm while she continued to hasten, to urge and push them up again, “we can’t reach Clare today.”