She died young. Deformities around the mouth and unraveling lines in face and hands were hardly honored by those who peered some hundred miles to the sunset and who said: “She looks to be about the same, I guess.” Except for the Slide, hers was the first Gov City death and, catastrophe or not, was the first natural death among them. Many were as old as she in frame and flesh, were just as keen and liable to the same youthful, pretended sleep. But they were allowed to attend her death and stared long, now and then, at the sleeveless gown and shoes hooked on her at the end.
Hattie Lampson had not been snatched away. Man or woman, perhaps they expected the sudden disappearance, the fault in the shell of earth and death between shifts. They had clamored once, found nothing to do, hardly anything to see. Wreaths, if available, could never be dropped from a safe spot into mud. Cries and an excuse for history came by accident without an hour of sorrow or memorable handling of the dead.
The completion of the grave was the first event, accomplished more rapidly than planned with the easy removal of the lumps of earth. Arrivals appeared slowly. Climbing the bluff, they paused for breath and, having been told where they would find her, face up and sleeping as fixedly as stone — there was no chance to lose her — they looked heavenward and speculated on the cloudburst. Without alarm, more reticent than ever, had they decided on or even wished for the construction of a coffin, it might have taken forty days to ready, working on weekends and in the evening. As it was, the earth was excavated, tools already cleaned and out of sight, and nothing remained but to take their time and study her, discuss it, seal her in and loosen on their heads the hail that waited in abeyance.
Perhaps a slight wind should have hummed across the miles of black land, bearing the faint lowing of faraway cattle or the sound of wheels grinding on Luke’s wagon. But there was only air enough for each and no sign of her living son until he actually carried her hand-chest into their midst, seesawing heavily on his shoulder. Ma and the Mandan stayed behind him.
“Sit down, Luke. There’s no rush.”
They pointed to his mother on the ground. They used no nails. Hers was a fair embroidery and the expression on the closed, depressed face — wise at the small curves of the mouth, a few scattered inclinations on the brow — was the same that settled on or pinched her when her boys had not come home.
Luke sent her out of the cabin to the tableland when she died. He sent her into the charge of friends who, while he cleared her things, expressed to herself, not him, their sanction and willingness to help. He left open the door and windows when he set out with the chest and the two women who, including himself, Hattie Lampson in the end firmly claimed to be her family.
Not many wanted anything from the trunk. Her last deposit, it was divided into one pile they could choose from and one to discard. She herself had once pulled the travois that carried it. Now it was lightened and, as hinges noiselessly crumpled, was relieved of the furniture of the dead. They took without asking and gave no thanks to a process that bestowed upon them only cloth and clay.
Each man present looked at her, not having to breathe the heat, loosely covered, and some noticed that she no longer wore her spectacles and that the lids appeared white and tired: “But not her face in general, mind you. Don’t reckon that’s changed at all.”
And each man recognized to speak with a friend or two and, if silent, looked long at strangers as if they also had touched her and taken up some trinket from a dusty pocket, an object slowly appropriated from the crocheted shroud. A few left empty handed. But, while on the bluff, jaws set and without moving a pace, they stalked in the sand the pleated, stitched ninety pounds of the dead.