“Go fetch some water,” Luke said to the girl. “Shut the door,” he called. It remained open and mosquitoes hummed in and out.
“I ain’t here the whole day long,” Luke swung his feet to the floor. “I don’t see what’s to keep you from sprawling right here on this bunk from sunup to dark. If you want.” Luke’s face, black with the sun, would fit a palm of the woman’s hand and when he rocked across the floor it caught the fire from the stove. He rolled like a child playing sailor, loosening his neckerchief.
Ma shook her head. “That’s where she sneaks off to. I couldn’t do it.” The Mandan returned with the load of water; she carried the bucket almost as lightly as the older woman, who could lug six brimming gallons the whole mile long trail as easily as two pint jars of honey. Reaching under the bunk, the Indian pulled out her dusty, high heeled, patent leather store shoes. She squeezed them onto bare feet and sat down to table. She ate from the edge of the knife, her black sides of hair falling into the bowl of food. Now and then she watched the cowboy scowling into his mug behind the hurricane lamp.
Ma never sat to any meal. She kept her back to the world and her face toward the red range, toward the cartons of matches, the row of pans and long handled forks. Sometimes she pushed the lid off the skillet and stole a bite on a long blackened prong or a sip from a wooden spoon. She refilled their plates without turning around. But the Mandan had to pour the coffee.
The deep dish skillet, as big around as a butter tub, was never off the stove and the flames were never allowed to die from under it. The fat was rarely changed and it boiled and snapped from one month to the next. Whether it was a piece of fish dropped into it or a slab of beef pulled out, it tasted of the black countryside. Tempered by the heat of wood coals, warming the room itself in winter, the skillet was slated over with layer on layer of charred mineral, encrusted with drippings, accumulating from the inside out fragments of every meal. Not a night went by but what Ma, quickly awakened in the darkness, got up to feed the fire and make sure the skillet burned. It was Ma’s pot, the iron of her life, to which came the pickings of her garden, the produce of her monthly shopping trips to Clare, the eggs she got each morning from the coop and whatever Luke might bring home at night — rhubarb, apples or a quarter head of cabbage. She kept it steaming.
Ma was not Luke Lampson’s mother. Hattie Lampson now lay buried on the bluff where once the tents were pitched. Ma had married, to the south in Clare and when the project was first conceived, Luke’s older brother, the Lampson incarcerated in the dam. Sometimes, rarely, wearing rubber boots and a shawl and carrying an egg basket, she would walk the high shoulder of mud, rock and gravel, and look down the water toward the badlands.
“You never knew nothing about it,” she told Luke, “you were out where it was dry. You never even saw the Great Slide.” She moved the skillet a little off the fire.
Luke got up from the table and looked at the Mandan. “You do those dishes for Ma. You hear?” She leaned on the boards, hid her face behind her hands and went on eating.
“She never says anything when I’m around.” Ma licked at the edge of the spoon and opened the draft a notch.
“You just don’t understand how she speaks, that’s all.” Luke undid his belt and shuffled among a pile of men and women’s clothing until he found a fresh black and white checked shirt. He pulled on his best pair of boots and polished the toes with the blanket tip.