“His first mistake was just sitting there.”
“He isn’t going to hear…”
“Well then,” above the scuffling, “he’s not so mighty. In the house or out he was the same, like he was petting something inside his shirt.”
“He didn’t love animals, I could see that.”
“He didn’t love anything if he didn’t build, not an ark or bridge or landing. All I need is a sandbag and some warning…”
“You ain’t going to be buried, Finn, you hear? You’re going to drown. That ain’t a warning either.”
“But Ma tells how Hattie used to speak of holding him, used to rock him behind the house. She could hardly talk, trying to show her head around the baby propped against her shoulder. He stared back across the prairie all day long.”
Once out of earshot of women, they baited the ghost. Only a quarter mile west of Mistletoe with its kerosene shades and dotted pokes, the six men suddenly became true to the whips inside their arms, shook the fat on weathered legs. Had they a jug they would have drunk then sloshed playfully, horses prancing after water. The sand slid from under their feet and to the bottom of the lake; and to that corner of the grassland field there fell now a knee, now a hand. Their clothes rustled with the sound of dry rattles stuck by insect mucilage to the bare skin of their calfs.
Bohn took off his vest covered with ashes, then his shirt. “Come on,” he said, looking at all of them, wiping his weak chest and flexing a tattooed tombstone on a strong arm. But the Finn jiggled out of his way.
The laughter stopped.