Her son, who never had listened to her, lay below. She was on top, shaded by followers, clasped in a small rigorous attitude beside a grave that did not gape nor call attention to itself. Those mutterings that were not speech, but which she unconditionally declaimed and seemed to have meaning to herself, were done. The peppered, flat sealed nose, the small sloping top of the skull wherein once lay the secret of preserving health in the dry heat of the afternoon and of remaining lazy, this aboriginal shape of hers was done with chores and elevated to extreme old age. Not having died in some drinkless caravan blown under the sand, not even strong enough for a trip to her son’s grave mile in final days of life, it could at least be said that she would remain intact as long as any in earth or burial cave. They readied beads to drop beside her. The volunteer, who undertook to fulfill her own last wish and make of her a landmark, to dispose of her, to make and break a final contact between the live and dead, squinted toward the plain, then at the halted sky, and shook his head. He lifted her.
Face down, eyes in the dirt, she peered through the sandy side toward her son below, where he too lay, more awkward than she, feet up and head in the center of the earth.
Graupel fell thickly from the dark cloud. Freak pellets rained on them. Drawn in a group to the edge of the bluff in the direction which she had pointed, they saw nothing of dam, hills or river bed. But they heard through the sudden storm the clank of machinery and the shifting voices of banks of men, the sounds of chain and engine and at times the thick coughing of boots in the mud.
Old and widowed, Ma picked up her divining rod from its hiding place.
She had walked far and now was tired. Knowing as well as she did the dried wagon tracks, the empty contours of the land that slipped into darkness, it had still taken hours to cross at her slow pace the silent fields and cracked grill slabs of earth. She stole through the box cabins, the small reservation of Mistletoe and heard nothing of the card game or the welder picking his guitar. She reached the edge of the bluff.
Her divining rod was hidden near Hattie Lampson’s grave. She shuffled, leaned forward, spread picked over foliage and scratched for it. She was inclined to sit down and rest, to catch her breath, slip the bandage properly over her sore again, to ruminate on his mother’s grave. Ma’s day was long — she knew how far away the horizon — and she could not sleep. For all the hours and all that could be said about the one woman whose death she had seen and knew first hand, there was no time for the smaller grave. Ma had not thought highly of her.
She picked up the forked branches of the rod. A sigh issued from sorrowful lips and cracked with the sparks that ruffled the dragging skirt and apron. She stepped from the bluff to the dam, crossed the town line to her husband’s grave and the stick twitched, jerking her in sudden palsy across clods of sacred ground. She hung to the twin arms of the branch, and suddenly, on the crest of the dam between lake and plain, looking backward into a darkness that bespoke no city, she called:
“Oh, Mulge. Where are you, Mulge?”
And she cried no more. She searched across a few acres of the mountain — cliffless, rounded, without danger — as though planting spiked leaf or weathering flowers before a reasonable headstone. She sanctified an immane body of land and depended on the divining rod. Old herself, distracted, now and then her mind snapped back to his mother who visibly had spoken, tottered, folded wings and died. On one side swelled the artificial sea over cabin, gulch, and bedstead, washing against the dam and nests of barometric instruments hidden in cut rocks by the engineers. Below her the rows of boxed fowl stretched from dry bank to bank and the birds, now crying and fighting in the night, dropped feathers through chicken wire and filled the river bed with a crowded, sleepless scuffling.
Ma turned to the voice of the dead. It sounded once against the bottom of her feet and trailed out of range. Slipping from the peak of the unfinished road, she dropped from sight, descended to the shadows of the southward slope and, driving the branch into open furrows, labored after it with concentration she herself might spend in dying. Ma stopped, pulled garments tight, squinted and hurried on. She lifted herself to the persistent tugging, the call of the husband dead by accident, and upgrade and down she circled the shadow of his remains. She knew, she understood these signs of the young shoots crushed in the darkness, the sudden appearance and whirl of insects.