“You load this bag. And fetch me Hattie Lampson.”
“Don’t listen,” answered a small, steadily nodding voice, “don’t pay none of this family heed.”
They swept back, made room and left Luke Lampson’s mother her own bright place to stand. She waited, then spoke no louder:
“You’re all welcome.” She nodded, this little woman darkly turned out of the house, this last and oldest divulged by the desert. “I’ll see you off.” She looked at her younger son, but took no step. Ma caught her arm.
“Hattie,” Ma moved her, “can you get up on that seat alone?”
They stood her by the wheel. They stepped back and the old woman shortly swayed, a stalk snapped upwards from the sand by the iron, mud colored rim, a length of wire coiled and motionless in the spokes. The great pinwheel might have ground her cleanly into the dust and she would have crawled away with skin unbruised, with dry pulmonary parts intact. She and the wheel — its tapered bars, sanded rays, were longer than her two arms fully spread — looked as if they would never move again; one, the original means of carrying them from Boonville to the bloody plow handle, the other, that which was originally carried and turned to love in the night’s wagon ring around the fire. But had it turned, and had she fallen, her kerchief caught in the spokes nearest the ground, she would have hung before her feet once more touched the settling, noisy track. And when the wheel did turn, smoke hung thinly about its tin bucket nave where wood burned against wood and miles wound in carbon around the axle.
“You ride in the one behind mine. Mulge comes last.”
The animals awoke. Amid the scraping of slowly prodded hoofs, the slight sway of warty food buckets and rope ends under the wooden bodies, Ma remained at the front of the train holding his mother.
“Put Hattie right up there. That’s it, by me.”
Luke in the second wagon and his brother in the third did not join the singing. The horses, as large as they were, crouched down to pull, their legs spraddled outwards like the flappers of young and panting dogs. Each wagon carried not only its own sounds of travel, the tug, twist and strain of the wooden windlass, but was loaded with the clatter of the other two and moved — one wagon could never make such noise — across the plains like a house athwart rollers.