Had he jaundiced and died, lay sickening in the cabin in open shirt and socks hanging over his shoes, he might have pulled Ma with him, down with grief to the grave, or she might have grown immune as death revealed him. But now, spared the slackening of strings and nurse watch through the night, having lost him without doubt midway in the growth of a mountain, she firmly sought to find the slow and unbreathing, blackly preserved, whole and substantial being of the dead man.
She spoke of him infrequently. But the squeaks, rustling of feelers and roots in the night stilled her ladle in the iron pot and made her glance with suspicion at the warm sleepers. She came to him on foot.
Her clothes pulled loose again and she stopped. The shafts of wood leaned against her and the invisible team, which drew her onward to unseal the earth, slackened in night harness. She worried, heard bits of falling clay approach and fade, she shook the white train of mules into a quick gait.
“Mulge? Hold in there, Mulge,” and the divining rod plowed at his heels. Ma opened up the grave — each widow has her mile of road, the dark ridge of her adopted name — and she revealed signs of her striking loss in the furls of the earth. The whole town had roused at his death, but it was Ma, drawing closer to an unmarked entrance through the years, tuning herself to cries that were still in the air, who grew thin, brittle, until of hardly any flesh at all, only an obligatory grief, her age and heavy shoes weighted her to the ever settling soil. And Ma, more than the others, actively pined away and opened many graves to find one full.
In the night and on the dam, Mistletoe’s dead man was hers, one who could walk but not breathe, who, without recollection and face obscured, still whistled as he had before when Ma cooked and Luke was never allowed to stretch out on his brother’s bunk. Ma drew near. But the steps, the dragging shovel, everything that pained and pleased her, retreated and slipped further into the darkness.
“Luke ain’t been no comfort. He ain’t given me one kind word and no provision. Oh, Mulge, I can’t go on this way.”
Ma’s was not a replenished vessel but an iron pot, not oil but scavenged vegetables, and the creditor had come leaving her few words thrown out, downcast lines in the face, the short, forlorn speech of the lonely woman. Hands figuratively outstretched after death — now clutched thinly to her person and which, thrust into the coals, did not burn — these she crossed on her breast and at night while standing up, these scratched against the cloth of her shirt for comfort. She struck at the air, received only impaired sensations from the long gone and heat rising from awkward waves of earth. She drove at her interminable circling, picking bitterly and with thin strength at the gates of the tomb. The white mules of the widow sway easily round her secret mile, ears straight forward to the sounds ahead.
Even now she heard the silence of the crowd as it stopped and the earth closed. And for all those who had watched, Ma only shook her head; for those who had moaned once, she shut her eyes. She never spoke to Thegna. In the rumor of friend and enemy she was robbed, before death and after, so she staved off other women and worked apart from men. Her eye was weathered in the wildness of the dam, her mouth in pain — open to the hard air — when she called him.
Ten years of death and the year of married life were shaken loose, dissipated in the gyrations of the divining rod. Dead leaves unfurled at the tip. She tramped in the field scaled to hold back the waters; she walked on dry seeds that were picked up and blown by the lightest warm wind and, left to the family in the cabin but hardened against it, Ma raked steadily a ground of iron, scratched the spine of the desert. But she could not touch him, could not lay hands on the black sleeve.
Ma had made that clothing, or at least fastened it together with thick welts of thread, allowing no rips or tears to be forgotten, embossing them in painfully raised stars across lapel and knee, arm and elbow. She clothed him as she fixed herself, in black summer or winter, buttons bound so no claw, fist or wire could pull them loose, pocket flaps and cuffs, hem and frill removed, saved, fastened at last across the frayed place of wear or fresh hole. Death took every stitch, clothes fell from her back. And stumbling where Luke drove the horses, smoked, and plowed, Ma saw the jacket of the dead — blacker than the earth itself — that made her breathing hard and caused white animals to veer noiselessly and pick up their trot.