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Robinson Jeffers - Thurso’s Landing
Work rating: Low

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I
The coast-road was being straightened and repaired again,
A group of men labored at the steep curve
Where it falls from the north to Mill Creek. They scattered and hid
Behind cut banks, except one blond young man
Who stooped over the rock and strolled away smiling
As if he shared a secret joke with the dynamite;
It waited until he had passed back of a boulder,
Then split its rock cage; a yellowish torrent
Of fragments rose up the air and the echoes bumped
From mountain to mountain. The men returned slowly
And took up their dropped tools, while a banner of dust
Waved over the gorge on the northwest wind, very high
Above the heads of the forest.
                                               Some distance west of the road,
On the promontory above the triangle
Of glittering ocean that fills the gorge-mouth,
A woman and a lame man from the farm below
Had been watching, and turned to go down the hill. The young
woman looked back,
Widening her violet eyes under the shade of her hand. "I think
they`ll blast again in a minute."
And the man: "I wish they`d let the poor old road be. I don`t
like improvements." "Why not?" "They bring in the world;
We`re well without it." His lameness gave him some look of age
but he was young too; tall and thin-faced,
With a high wavering nose. "Isn`t he amusing," she said, "that
boy Rick Armstrong, the dynamite man,
How slowly he walks away after he lights the fuse. He loves to
show off. Reave likes him, too,"
She added; and they clambered down the path in the rock-face,
little dark specks
Between the great headland rock and the bright blue sea.

II
The road-workers had made their camp
North of this headland, where the sea-cliff was broken down and
sloped to a cove. The violet-eyed woman`s husband,
Reave Thurso, rode down the slope to the camp in the gorgeous
autumn sundown, his hired man Johnny Luna
Riding behind him. The road-men had just quit work and four
or five were bathing in the purple surf-edge,
The others talked by the tents; blue smoke fragrant with food
and oak-wood drifted from the cabin stove-pipe
And slowly went fainting up the vast hill.
                                                                 Thurso drew rein by
a group of men at a tent door
And frowned at them without speaking, square-shouldered and
heavy-jawed, too heavy with strength for so young a man,
He chose one of the men with his eyes. "You`re Danny Woodruff,
aren`t you, that drives the tractor?" Who smiled
And answered "Maybe. What then?" "Why, nothing, except you
broke my fence and you`ve got to fix it." "You don`t say,"
He said laughing. "Did somebody break your fence? Well, that`s
too bad." "My man here saw you do it.
He warned you out of the field." "Oh, was I warned?" He turned
to Luna: "What did I say to you, cowboy?"
"You say, you say," Luna`s dark face flushed black, "you say
`Go to hell.`
" Woodruff gravely, to Thurso:
"That`s what I say." The farmer had a whip in his hand, a hotter
man might have struck, but he carefully
Hung it on the saddle-horn by the thong at the butt, dismounted,
and said, "You`ll fix it though." He was somewhat
Short-coupled, but so broad in the chest and throat, and obviously
all oak, that Woodruff recoiled a step,
Saying "If you`ve got a claim for damages, take it to the county."
"I`m taking it nearer hand.
You`ll fix the fence." Woodruffs companions
Began to come in between, and one said "Wait for him
Until he fixes it, your cows will be down the road."
Thurso shook his head slightly and bored forward
Toward his one object; who felt the persecuting
Pale eyes under dark brows dazzle resistance.
He was glad the bathers came up the shore, to ask
What the dispute was, their presence released his mind
A moment from the obstinate eyes. The blithe young firer
Of dynamite blasts, Rick Armstrong, came in foremost,
Naked and very beautiful, all his blond body
Gleaming from the sea; he`d been one or two evenings
A guest at the farmhouse, and now took Thurso`s part
So gracefully that the tractor-driver, already
Unnerved by that leaden doggedness, was glad to yield.
He`d mend the fence in the morning: Oh, sure, he wanted
To do the right thing: but Thurso`s manner
Had put him off.
                            The group dissolved apart, having made for
a moment its unconscious beauty
In the vast landscape above the ocean in the colored evening;
the naked bodies of the young bathers
Polished with light, against the brown and blue denim core of
the rest; and the ponies, one brown, one piebald,
Compacted into the group, the Spanish-Indian horseman dark
bronze above them, under broad red
Heavens leaning to the lonely mountain.

III
In the moonlight two hours before Sunday dawn
Rick Armstrong went on foot over the hill
Toward the farmhouse in the deep gorge, where it was dark,
And he smelled the stream. Thurso had invited him
To go deer-hunting with them, seeing lights in the house
He hurried down, not to make his friends wait.
He passed under a lonely noise in the sky
And wondered at it, and remembered the great cable
That spanned the gorge from the hill, with a rusted iron skip
Hanging from it like a stuck black moon; relics,
With other engines on the headland, of ancient lime-kilns
High up the canyon, from which they shot the lime
To the promontory along the airy cable-way
To be shipped by sea. The works had failed; the iron skip
Stuck on its rusted pulleys would never move again
Until it fell, but to make a desolate creaking
In the mountain east-wind that poured down the gorge
Every clear night. He looked for it and could not find it
Against the white sky, but stumbled over a root
And hurried down to the house.
                                                  There were layered smells of
horses and leather
About the porch; the door stood half open, in the yellow slot
Of lamplight appeared two faces, Johnny Luna`s dark hollow
Egyptian profile and Helen Thurso`s
Very white beyond, her wide-parted violet eyes looked black
and her lips moved. Her husband`s wide chest
Eclipsed the doorway. "Here you are. I was afraid you wouldn`t
wake up. Come in," Thurso said,
"Coffee and bacon, it will be long to lunch." A fourth in the
room was the lame man, Reave Thurso`s brother,
Who said at parting, "Take care of Helen, won`t you, Reave,
Don`t tire her out." He was not of the party but had risen to see
them off. She answered from the porch, laughing,
The light from the door gilding her cheek, "I`ll not be the tired
one, Mark, by evening. Pity the others."
"Let the men do the shooting, Helen, spare yourself. Killing`s
against your nature, it would hurt with unhappy thought
Some later time." "Ah," she answered, "not so gentle as you
think. Good-bye, brother."
They mounted the drooping horses and rode up canyon
Between black trees, under that lonely creaking in the sky, and
turned southward
Along the coast-road to enter a darker canyon.
The horses jerked at the bridle-hands,
Nosing out a way for the stammering hooves
Along the rocks of a ribbed creek-bed; thence a path upward
To the height of a ridge; in that clear the red moonset
Appeared between murky hills, like a burning ship
On the world`s verge.
                                  Thurso and Luna stealthily dismounted.
They stole two ways down the starry-glimmering slope like
assassins, above the black fur of forest, and vanished
In the shifty gray. The two others remained, Armstrong looked
wistfully
Toward his companion through the high reddish gloom, and
saw the swell of her breast and droop of her throat
Darkling against the low moon-scarred west. She whispered and
said, "The poor thing may drive up hill toward us:
And I`ll not fire, do you want to trade rifles with me? The old
one that Reave has lent you is little use."
He answered, "I guess one gun`s as good as another, you can`t
see the bead, you can`t see the notch." "Oh: well.
The light will grow." They were silent a time, sitting and holding
the horses, the red moon on the sea-line
Suddenly foundered; still the east had nothing.
                                                         "We`d better take ourselves
Out of the sky, and tie up the horses." She began to move, down
the way lately climbed, the cowboy`s
Pony trailing behind her, Armstrong led Reave`s. He saw her
white shirt below him gleam in the starlight
Like bare shoulders above the shadow. They unbridled the horses
and tethered them to buckthorn bushes, and went back
Into the sky; but lay close against the ridge to be hidden, for a
cloud whitened. Orion and Sirius
Stood southward in the mid heaven, and Armstrong said,
"They`re strange at dawn, see, they`re not autumn stars,
They belong to last March." "Maybe next March," she answered
Without looking. "Tell me how you`ve charmed Reave
To make him love you? He never has cared for a friend before,
Cold and lonely by nature. He seems to love you."
"Why: nothing. If he lacks friends perhaps it`s only
Because this country has been too vacant for him
To make choices from." "No," she answered, "he`s cold,
And all alone in himself. Well. His goodness is strength.
He`s never set his mind on anything yet
But got it with a strong hand. His brother, you met this morning,
Is very different, a weak man of course,
But kindly and full of pity toward every creature, but really at heart
As cold as Reave. I never loved hunting, and he`s
Persuaded me to hate it. Let him persuade
Reave if he could!" Armstrong said, "Why did you come then?"
"Ah? To watch things be killed."

                                                     They heard the wind
Flustering below, and felt the sallow increase of clearness
On grass-blades, and the girl`s face, and the far sea,
A light of visions, faint and a virgin. One rifle-shot
Snapped the still dawn; Armstrong cradled his gun
But nothing came up the hill. The cloud-line eastward
Suddenly flushed with rose-color flame, and standing
Rays of transparent purple shadow appeared
Behind the fired fleece. Helen Thurso sighed and stood up,
"Let`s see if we can`t lead one of the horses down,
Now light has come, to bring up the corpse." "The . . . for
what?"
"The meat," she said impatiently, "the killed thing. It`s a hard
climb."
"You think they got it?" "Couldn`t fail; but other years
They`ve taken two in that trap." Nearly straight down,
At the edge of the wood, in the pool of blue shade in the cleft
hill,
The two men were seen, one burdened, like mites in a bowl; and
Helen with a kind of triumph: "Look down there:
What size Reave Thurso is really: one of those little dirty black
ants that come to dead things could carry him
With the deer added."

                                      They drove a horse down the headlong
pitch; the sun came up like a man shouting
While they climbed back, then Helen halted for breath. Thurso
tightened the lashings under the saddle,
That held his booty on the pony`s back, and said to Armstrong,
"That tree that stands alone on the spur,
It looks like a match: its trunk`s twenty feet through. The biggest
redwoods left on the coast are there,
The lumbermen couldn`t reach them."
                                                            Johnny Luna, when they
reached the ridge,
Was sent home leading his horse, with the buck mounted. The
others rode east, the two men ahead, and Helen
Regarding their heads and shoulders against the sharp sky or
the sides of hills; they left the redwood canyons
And rode a long while among interminable gray ranges bushed
on the north with oak and lupin;
Farther they wandered among flayed bison-shaped hills, and rode
at noon under sparse bull-pines,
And so returned, having seen no life at all
Except high up the sun the black vultures,
Some hawks hunting the gorges, and a far coyote.
In the afternoon, nearing toward home, it was Helen
Who saw five deer strung on a ridge. "Oh. Look.
So I`ve betrayed them," she said bitterly. Reave said to Armstrong,
"Your shot: the buck to the north," and while he spoke fired, but
the other
Had raised his cheek from the rifle-stock to look
At Helen angrily laughing, her face brilliant
In the hard sunlight, with lakes of deep shade
Under the brows and the chin; when he looked back
The ridge was cleared. "Why didn`t you let him have it?
You`d such an easy shot," Thurso said,
"Against the cloud, mine was among the bushes,
I saw him fall and roll over." "Be very happy,"
Helen said. "He was hard hit, for he ran down hill.
That makes you shine."
                                      They labored across the gorge
And climbed up to the ridge. A spongy scarlet thing
Was found at the foot of a green oak-bush and Helen
Came and saw it. "He was hit in the lung," Reave said,
"Coughed up a froth of blood and ran down hill.
I have to get him." "It looks like a red toadstool:
Red scum on rotten wood. Does it make you sick?
Not a bit: it makes you happy." "Why do you come hunting, Helen,
If you hate hunting? Keep still at least. As for being happy:
Look where I have to go down." He showed her the foamy spots
of blood, on the earth and the small leaves,
Going down a steep thicket that seemed impassable. She answered,
"Let the poor thing die in peace." "It would seem a pity,"
He answered, "to let him suffer; besides the waste." Armstrong
looked down and said, "He`ll be in the creek-bed.
I`ll go down there and work up the gulch, if you go down here."
"You`d never find him without the blood-trail,"
Reave answered. Then Helen suddenly went back and touched
the foam of blood on the ground, dipping four fingers,
And returned and said, "I was afraid to do it, so I did it. Now
I`m no better than you. Don`t go down.
Please, Reave. Let`s hurry and go home. I`m tired." Reave said
to Armstrong, "That would be best, if you`d take her home.
It`s only a mile and a half, help her with the horses, won`t you?
Take mine too. I`ll hang the buck in a tree
Near where I find him, and come fetch him to-morrow." "If you
want," Armstrong said. Helen clenched
Her blood-tipped fingers and felt them stick to the palm. "All
right. I`ll do
What you`ve chosen," she said with smoothed lips. "Mark wins,
he said I`d be tired. But he was wrong,"
Opening her hand, regarding the red-lined nails,
"To think me all milk and kindness." Thurso went down
The thicket; and Helen: "Nothing could turn him back.
He`s never set his mind on anything yet
But snuffled like a bloodhound to the bitter end." They heard
the branches
Breaking below, and returned by the open slope
To the horses across the creek.
                                                They rode softly
Down the canyon; Helen said, "I`m not tired.
Do you ever think about death? I`ve seen you play with it,
Strolling away while the fuse fizzed in the rock."
"Hell no, that was all settled when they made the hills."
"Did you notice how high he held his bright head
And the branched horns, keen with happiness?
Nothing told him
That all would break in a moment and the blood choke his throat.
I hope that poor stag
Had many loves in his life." He looked curiously,
A little moved, at her face; too pale, like a white flame
That has form but no brilliance in the light of day;
The wide violet eyes hollowed with points of craving darkness
Under the long dark lashes; and the charcoal mark
Across her slightly hollowed cheek, where a twig had crossed it
When they rode the burnt hillside. He said: "I ought
ToVe gone with Reave, it doesn`t seem fair to let him
Sweat alone in that jungle." "He enjoys toil.
You don`t know him yet. Give him a blood-trail to follow,
That`s all he wants for Christmas. What he`s got`s nothing to him,
His game`s the getting. But slow, slow: be hours yet.
From here we can choose ways, and though it`s a good deal longer,
There`s daylight left, we`ll go by the head of the hill: up there
you can see the whole coast
And a thousand hills. Look," she said laughing,
"What the crooked bushes have done," showing her light shirt
Torn at the breast, and a long red scratch
Under the bright smooth breast. He felt in his mind
A moving dizziness, and shifted his body backward
From the saddle-horn.

                                   A curl of sea-cloud stood on the head of the hill
Like a wave breaking against the wind; but when they reached
it, windows of clearness in it were passing
From the northwest, through which the mountain sea-wall looked
abrupt as dreams, from Lobos like a hand on the sea
To the offshore giant at Point Sur southward. Straight down
through the coursing mists like a crack in the mountain sea-root,
Mill Creek Canyon, like a crack in the naked root of a dead pine
when the bark peels off. The bottom
Of the fissure was black with redwood, and lower
Green with alders; between the black and the green the painted
roof of the farmhouse, like a dropped seed,
Thurso`s house, like a grain of corn in the crack of a plank, where
the hens can`t reach it.

                                     Cloud steered between;
Helen Thurso said "What if the rut is a rock canyon,
Look how Fm stuck in a rut: do I have to live there?
And Reave`s old mother`s like a white-headed hawk.
Your job here`s nearly finished, where will you go?"
"I haven`t thought: all places are like each other:
Maybe Nevada in the spring.
There`s work all over." "I," she said, trembling; "it seems cold
up here.
I hate the sea-fog. Now let`s look east." They had tied
The horses to the highest bushes on the north slope,
And walked on the open dome of the hill, they crossed it
And the east was clear; the beautiful desolate inhuman range
beyond range of summits all seen at once,
Dry bright and quiet and their huge blue shadows. Helen said
faintly,
"He`s down there somewhere. It`s that deer`s blood.
It made me drunk, it was too red I thought.
Life is so tiny little, and if it shoots
Into the darkness without ever once flashing?"
They turned back to the dome-top under the cloud.
"You`re tired, Helen." "I`ll not let the days of my life
Hang like a string of naughts between two nothings.
Wear a necklace of round zeros for pearls;
I`m not made that way. Think what you please. Shall we go down
now?"
"The cloud has come all around us," he answered, seeing the distilled
drops of the cloud like seed-pearls
Hung in her hair and on the dark lashes. He turned to go down
to the horses, she said "I have seen dawn with you,
The red moonset and white dawn,
And starlight on the mountain, and noon on burnt hills where
there was no shadow but a vulture`s, and that stag`s blood:
I`ve lived with you
A long day like a lifetime, at last I`ve drawn something
In the string of blanks." She lifted her face against his shoulder
and said "Good-bye." He said "I`m Reave`s friend,"
And kissed her good-bye seeing she desired it, her breasts burrowed
against him and friendship forgot his mind,
With such brief wooing they stirred the deep wells of pleasure.

                                  She lay but half quieted, still hotly longing,
Her eyes morbidly shuttered like the sleep of fever showed
threads of the white and faint arcs of the crystalline
Violet irises, barred across by the strong dark lashes; the night
of the lids covered the pupils,
Behind them, and under the thick brown hair and under the
cunning sutures of the hollow bone the nerve-cells
With locking fibrils made their own world and light, the multitude
of small rayed animals of one descent.
That make one mind, imagined a mountain
Higher than the scope of nature, predominant over all these edges
of the earth, on its head a sacrifice
Half naked, all flaming, her hair blown like a fire through the
level skies; for she had to believe this passion
Not the wild heat of nature, but the superstitiously worshipped
spirit of love, that is thought to burn
All its acts righteous.
                              While Helen adorned the deed with the
dream it needed, her lover meanwhile
Explored with hands and eyes the moulded smoothness through
the open clothing, reviving his spent desire
Until they were joined in longer-lasting delight; her nerve-cells
intermitted their human dream;
The happy automatism of life, inhuman as the sucking heart of
the whirlwind, usurped the whole person,
Aping pain, crying out and writhing like torture.

                                                                           They rose and
went down to the horses;
The light had changed in the sea-cloud, the sun must be near
setting. When they were halfway down the mountain
The whole cloud began to glow with color like a huge rose, a
forest of transparent pale crimson petals
Blowing all about them; slowly the glory
Flared up the slope and faded in the high air.

IV
                                                                              They rode
through pale twilight
And whispered at the farmhouse door inarticulate leave-takings.
Helen went in; Armstrong unsaddled the horses
Ahd walked heavily up canyon and crossed the hill.
Helen said, "Reave went after a wounded deer
And sent me home. He hasn`t come home yet?"
Reave`s mother said "We`ve not seen him," steadily watching her
Across the lamplight with eyes like an old hawk`s,
Red-brown and indomitable, and tired. But if she was hawk-like
As Helen fancied, it was not in the snatching look
But the alienation and tamelessness and sullied splendor
Of a crippled hawk in a cage. She was worn at fifty
To thin old age; the attritions of time and toil and arthritis
That wear old women to likeness had whetted this one
To difference, as if they had bitten on a bronze hawk
Under the eroded flesh.
                                       Helen avoided her eyes
And said to the other in the room, "Ah, Mark, you guessed right.
I`m tired to death, must creep up to bed now." The old woman:
"So you came home alone? That young Armstrong
Stayed with Reave." Helen faltered an instant and said,
"No, for Reave sent him with me, wishing his horse
To be taken home. Mr. Armstrong stopped
By the corral, he was unsaddling the horses I think,
But I was too tired to help him. My rifle, Mark,
Is clean: I minded your words."

                                                    An hour later the heavy tread
of a man was heard on the steps
And the fall of a fleshy bulk by the door, crossed by the click of
hooves or antlers, and Reave came in,
His shirt blood-stained on the breast and shoulders. "I got him,"
he said. "It seemed for awhile I`d be out all night.
By luck I found him, at twilight in a buckeye bush. Where`s
Helen, gone to bed?" "She seemed flurried with thoughts,"
His mother answered, and going to the door that led to the
kitchen she called, "Olvidia,"
Bring in the supper." "Well, yes," Reave said. "I must first hang
up the carcass and wash my hands." "Olvidia,"
His mother called to the kitchen, "will you tell Johnny: is Johnny
there? Tell him to fetch the meat
From the door-step and hang it up with the other." Mark said,
"How far, Reave, did you carry it?" "Two miles or so.
Rough country at first; I held it in front of me to butt the brush
with." "Why, what does it weigh?" "Oh," he said, "a young
buck.
About Helen`s weight." "You are strong," his mother said, "that`s
good: but a fool." "Well, mother, I might have hung it
In a tree and gone up with a horse to-morrow; I shouldered it 
to save time."
            
                       Mark, enviously:
"You`ve seen many green canyons and the clouds on a hundred
hills.
My mind has better mountains than these in it,
And bloodless ones." The dark Spanish-Indian woman
Olvidia took Reave`s empty plate and the dish,
And Mrs. Thurso said, "Reave, you`ve big arms,
And ribs like a rain-barrel, what do they amount to
If the mind inside is a baby? Our white-face bull`s
Bigger and wiser." "What have I done?" "I`ll never say
Your young Helen`s worth keeping, but while you have her
Don`t turn her out to pasture on the mountain
With the yellow-haired young man. Those heavy blue eyes
Came home all enriched." Reave laughed and Mark said bitterly,
"Mother, that`s mean.
You know her too well for that. Helen is as clear as the crystal
sky, don`t breathe on her." "You," she answered fondly.
Reave smiled, "I trust Rick Armstrong as I do my own hand."
"It shames my time of life,"
She answered, "to have milky-new sons. What has he done for you
To be your angel?" "Why," he said, "I like him." "That`s generous,
And rare in you. How old is he?" "My age. Twenty-four."
"Oh, that`s a better reason to trust him." "Hm?" "You`re the
same age."
"That`s no reason." "No," she answered.

V
                                                              Toward noon the next day
Helen was ironing linen by the kitchen stove,
A gun-shot was heard quite near the house, she dropped the iron
And ran outdoors and met Mark. "What was that shot?" "Don`t
go up there, Helen." "Why not, why not," she stammered,
"Why not," the flush of the stove-heat graying on her cheek.
"Reave has put poor old Bones out of pain." "Oh, that!"
Laughing and trembling, "Your funeral face. I thought something
had happened to someone. Let the old dog sleep."
She went up hill to the screen of seawind-stunted laurel and oak,
where Reave was already spading
Dust into the gape of a small grave. "You`ve done for poor old
Bones, have you? You knew I loved him,
So you took him off." "A pity you came just now, Helen. He
died in a moment. If we`d used this mercy
Two or three months ago we`d have saved pain." She answered,
quivering with anger, "You do it on the sly
And call it mercy. Ah, killing`s your pleasure, your secret vice."
"I`ll wish you sunnier pleasures: and a little
Sense in your head: he was made of miseries: you`ve seen him plead
To be helped, and wonder at us when the pain stayed.
I`ve helped him now." "Will you do as much for yourself
When life dirties and darkens? Your father did."
"No, I will not," he said, shovelling the dust.
"What`s that said for? For spite?" "No, Reave.
I was wondering. For I think it`s reasonable.
When the flower and fruit are gone, nothing but sour rind,
Why suck the shell? I think your father was right."
"Drop a little silence on him," Reave answered.
"We may help out the beasts, but a man mustn`t be beaten.
That was a little too easy, to pop himself off because he went broke.
I was ten years old, I tried not to despise the soft stuff
That ran away to the dark from a touch of trouble:
Because the lime-kilns failed and the lumber mill
Ran out of redwood.
My mother took up his ruins and made a farm;
She wouldn`t run away, to death or charity. Mark and I helped.
We lost most of the land but we saved enough."
"Think of one man owning so many canyons:
Sovranes, Granite," she counted on her fingers, "Garapatas, Palo
Colorado,
Rocky Creek, and this Mill Creek." "Oh, that was nothing, the
land was worth nothing
In those days, only for lime and redwood." She answered,
"You needn`t despise him, Reave. My dad never owned anything.
While I worked in a laundry and while I crated fruit
He ate my wages and lived as long as he could
And died crying." "We`re proud of our fathers, hm?
Well, he was sick a long time," Reave said, patting
The back of the spade on the filled grave; "but courage might live
While the lungs rot. I think it might. You never
Saw him again, did you?" "How saw him?" "We used to see mine
Often in the evenings." "What do you mean, Reave?"
"Why: in the evenings.
Coming back to stare at his unfinished things.
Mother still often sees him." Helen`s face brightening
With happy interest, "Oh where?" she said. "On the paths;
Looking up at that thing, with his mouth open."
Reave waved his hand toward the great brown iron skip
Hanging on its cable in the canyon sky,
That used to carry the lime from the hill, but now
Stuck on dead pulleys in the sky. "It ought to be taken down
Before it falls. I’ll do it when we`ve done the plowing."
Helen said, "Does he ever speak?" "Too ashamed of himself.
I spoke to him once:
I was carrying firewood into the house, my arms were full. He
worked a smile on his face and pointed
At the trolley up there." "Do you really believe," she said, "that
your father`s ghost?" "Certainly not. Some stain
Stagnates here in the hollow canyon air, or sticks in our minds.
How could too weak to live
Show after it died?" "I knew," she answered, blanching again
with capricious anger, "you`d no mercy in you,
But only sudden judgment for any weak thing;
And neither loving nor passionate; dull, cold and scornful. I used
to keep a gay heart in my worst days
And laugh a little: how can I live
Where nothing except poor Mark is even half human, you like
a stone, hard and joyless, dark inside,
And your mother like an old hawk, and even dirty Olvidia and
Johnny Luna, dark and hollow
As the hearts of jugs. The dog here in the ground Oh but how
carefully you scrape the blood-lake
Had loving brown eyes: so you killed him: he was sometimes
joyful: it wouldn`t do. You killed him for that." He answered,
Staring, "Were you born a fool? What`s the matter, Helen?"
"If I had to stay here
I`d turn stone too: cold and dark: I`d give a dollar
For a mirror now, and show you that square face of yours
Taken to pieces with amazement: you never guessed
Helen`s a shrew. Oh, what do you want her for?
Let her go." She left him; and when he came in at noon
Spoke meekly, she seemed to have wept.

VI
                                                             In the evening, in
Helen`s presence,
Reave`s mother said, "Did that sand-haired young man
Find you, Reave, when he came this afternoon?
He didn`t come to the house." "Who?" "That road-worker,
Arnfield." "Rick Armstrong?" "Most likely: the one I warned you
Not to pasture your heifer with." "He was here?" "No,
Not here. I saw him come down the hill, and Helen
Went out to meet him." Mark Thurso looked up
From the book he`d been reading, and watched his mother
As a pigeon on a rock watches a falcon quartering
The field beyond the next fence; but Helen suddenly:
"Now listen, Mark. I`m to be framed, ah?
I think so. I never liked her." The old woman said,
"Did you say something?" "Not yet," she answered. Reave made
a mocking
Noise in his throat and said, "Let them alone.
No peace between women.
This morning I sent Luna over the hill
With one of the bucks we killed, no doubt my friend came over
At quitting-time to say thank-you: why he didn`t find me`s
Less clear, but watch the women build it between them
To a big darkness." "Not I," Helen said,
And dipped her needle two or three careful stitches
In the cloth she was mending, then looked up suddenly
To see who watched her. "If I`d seen him," she said, "I`d have
spoken to him.
I am not sick with jealousy of your new friend. But he was
probably not here; the old eyes that make
A dead man`s phantom can imagine a live one`s." The old woman:
"When you saw him you ran to meet him; I sent Olvidia
To see if the speckled hen had stolen a nest in the willows. She
walked down there, what she saw amazed her.
I`ve not allowed her to tell me though she bubbles with it. Your
business, Reave: ask her. Not mine: I`m only
The slow man`s mother." Helen stood up, trembling a little and
smiling, she held the needle and the spool
And folded the cloth, saying "Your mother, Reave,
Loves you well: too well: you and I honor her for that. She has
hated me from the day she heard of me,
But that was jealousy, the shadow that shows love`s real: nothing
to resent. But now you seem very friendly
With that young man too: she can`t bear to yield you again, it
cracks the string of her mind. No one can fancy
What she`s plotted with the kitchen woman . . ." Mark Thurso
said with lips that suddenly whitened: "7 met Armstrong.
I told him you`d ridden up the high pasture, for so I believed.
He asked me to thank you warmly
For the buck you sent: I forgot to tell you. I was with him while
he was here, and when he went back I hobbled
Some ways up hill." The old woman moved her lips but said
nothing; but Reave: "Here: what`s the matter,
Brother? You were with me constantly all afternoon." "But an
hour," Mark said. "Hm? Five minutes." Then Helen,
Looking from the one to the other: "If I am hated, I think I am
loved too. I`d something to say . . .
Oh: yes: will you promise, Reave, promise Olvidia
You`ll give her, for telling the perfect truth, whatever your
mother has promised her for telling lies: then I`m safe.
Call her and ask her." He answered, "She`ll sleep in hell first.
Here`s enough stories
Without hers in the egg-basket. Do you think it was Armstrong
you saw, mother? I trust Rick Armstrong
From the bright point to the handle." Helen said, "Ah, Mark,
You`d never imagine I`d be satisfied with that.
I have to be satisfied with that." "Why not?" Reave said.
And she: "If it was nothing worse than killing to fear
I`d confess. All kinds of lies. I fear you so much
I`d confess ... all kinds of lies ... to get it over with,"
She said, making a clicking noise in her throat
Like one who has drunk too much and hiccoughs, "only
To get it over with: only, I haven`t done anything.
This terror, Mark, has no reason,
Reave never struck nor threatened me, yet well I know
That while I`ve lived here I`ve always been sick with fear
As that woman is with jealousy. Deep in me, a black lake
His eyes drill to, it spurts. Sometime he`ll drill to my heart
And that`s the nut of courage hidden in the lake.
Then we`ll see. I don`t mean anything bad, you know: I`m very
innocent,
And wish to think high, like Mark. Olvidia of course is a hollow
liar. May I go now? I`m trembling-tired:
If you`ll allow me to go up to bed? But indeed I dare not
While you sit judging." She looked at Mark and slightly
Reached both her hands toward him, smiled and went out.
But in the little dark hallway under the stair,
When she hastened through it in the sudden darkness,
The door being neither open nor shut passed edgewise
Between her two groping hands, her cheek and brow
Struck hard on the edge.

                                        Her moan was heard in the room of
lamplight;
Where they had been sitting silent while she went out,
An4 when she had gone Mark Thurso had said, "Mother:
You`ve done an infamous thing." "They might play Jack and queen
All they please," she answered, "but not my son
For the fool card in the deck," the shock of struck wood was heard,
And Helen`s hushed groan: Mark, dragging his lameness, reeled
Swiftly across the room saying "What has she done?"
He groped in the passage and spoke tenderly, then Reave
Went and brought Helen to the lamplight; a little blood
Ran through her left eye to her lips from the cut eyebrow.
The implacable old woman said "She`s not hurt.
Will you make a fuss?" Helen said, "The wood of your house
Is like your mother, Reave, hits in the dark.
This will wash off." She went to the kitchen and met
Olvidia who`d been listening against the door,
Then Helen, moaning "I`m ringed with my enemies," turned
To flee, and turned back. "I will take it now. My husband, Olvidia,
Is ready to kill me, you see. I have been kind to you
Two or three times. Have you seen any unusual
Or wicked meeting to-day?" The Indian woman,
Dreading Reave`s anger and seeing the blood, but hardly
Understanding the words, blanked her dark face
And wagged her head. "Don`t know. What you mean, wicked?
I better keep out of this." "A dish of water, Olvidia.
Be near me, Mark. Reave: will you ask her now?"
He said "Wash and be quiet." Helen said, "Oh Olvidia,
Someone has made him angry at you and me.
Look in my eyes. Tell no bad stories . . . lies, that is ...
Did you see anything when you looked for eggs
In the willows along the creek?" Olvidia folded
Her lips together and stepped backward, then Helen
Sighed, dabbling her cheek with water. "It hurts. I think
It will turn black." Reave suddenly shouted "Answer."
Olvidia, retreating farther: "What you want of me?
I find no eggs." Mark said, "Come, Helen, Oh come. I`ve watched
innocence tormented
And can no more. Go up and sleep if you can, I`ll speak for you,
to-morrow all this black cloud of wrong
Will be melted quite away in the morning." Reave said, "Don`t
fawn on her, you make me mad. Women will do it.
But why praise `em for it?" Helen, meekly: "I am very tired and
helpless and driven to the edge. Think kindly of me,
Mark, I believe I shall be much hated. Your mother . . .
This is all. Light me a candle." At the foot of the stair
She closed the door, and silently tip-toed through
The passage and the other room to the door of the house,
There pinched the wick, and praying for no wind
To make a stir in the house, carefully opened
The outer door and latched it behind her.

                                                                She traversed the hill,
And at the road-men`s camp, plucking at the fly
Of a lit tent, thought momently it was curious
She stood among so many unrestrained men
Without fear, yet feared Reave. "I must see Rick Armstrong
This moment: which tent?" They laid their hands of cards
Carefully face down on the packing-box.
"Why, ma`am, I can`t say exactly," but she had run off
To another lamp of shining canvas and found him.
"Let me stand into the light." She showed her cut brow
A little bleeding again with hurry in the dark,
And the purpling bruise. "What Reave did. Your friend Reave.
His mother spied and told on us. What will you do?"
"By God!" "Oh," she said, "that`s no good.
How could you keep me here? Borrow a car,
There are cars here." He said "I`ll take care of you." She
shuddered,
Beating her fists together, breathed long and said:
"If you choose to stand here and talk among the men listening
It is not my fault. I say if you and these men could stop him when
he comes
You can`tto-night, to-night, in an hour nothing can stop him:
he`d call the sheriff to-morrow and have me
Like a stolen cow, nothing but ridiculous, a mark for children to
hoot at, crying in my hair, probably
Led on a rope. Don`t you know him? I do. Oh my lover
Take me to the worst hut at the world`s end and kill me there,
but take me from here before Reave comes.
I`d go so gladly. And how could you bear to face him, he thought
you his faithful friend, for shame even?
Oh hurry, hurry!"

VII
                             In the desert at the foot of sun-rotted hills
A row of wooden cabins flanks a gaunt building
Squatted on marbly terraces of its own excrement,
Digested rock from which the metal has been sucked,
Drying in the rage of the sun. Reave Thurso stopped
At the first cabin, a woman came out and pointed;
He went to the farthest cabin, knocked, and went in.
"Well, Helen. You found a real sunny place." Opening the door
She`d been a violet-eyed girl, a little slatternly
But rich with life; she stood back from the door
Sallow, with pinched nostrils and dwindled eyes,
As if she had lost a fountain of blood, and faintly
Whispering "I knew you." Reave looked about him like one
Attentively learning the place, and Helen said
"I never hoped that you wouldn`t come at last,
It seemed a kind of blood-trail for you to follow.
And then I knew you were tardy and cold of course and at last
You`d come at last, you never give up anything,
How did you track us at last?" "Oh," he laughed, "Time and I.
He`s at work?" "Yes." "If you wanted to hide
You`d have got him to change his name." "I begged him to," she
answered,
Suddenly weeping, "so many times." "Don`t cry, don`t cry.
You know that I`ll never hurt you. Mark loves you too, he`s been
very lonely. He wanted me to let you go,
But that was nonsense. He`s been sick since you went away. Do
you remember the rose-bush you made me buy
That time in Salinas? Mark`s watered it for you, sick or well,
Every day, limping around the house with a pail of water spilling
on his poor ankle-joint,
He`ll be glad to see you again. Well, pack your things." She gathered
Her blanked face to some show of life. "Look around at this
country. Oh Reave. Reave. Look. I let him
Take me here at last. And he hasn`t been always perfectly kind:
but since I’ve been living with him I love him . . .
My heart would break if I tried to tell you how much. I`m not
ashamed. There was something in me that didn`t
Know about love until I was living with him. I kissed him, when
he went back to work this noon.
I didn`t know you were corning; forgot you were coming sometime.
See how it is. No: I understand:
You won`t take me." He, astonished: "Not take you? After hunting
you a whole year? You dream too much, Helen.
It makes you lovely in a way, but it clouds your mind. You must
distinguish. All this misfortune of yours
Probably . . ." "Oh God," she said, shuddering,
"Will you preach too? First listen to me: I tell you all the other
joys I’ve ever known in my life
Were dust to this . . . misfortune; the desert sun out there is a
crow`s wing against the brightness of this . . .
Misfortune: Oh I didn`t mean, dear,
To make you angry." She was suddenly kneeling to him and
pressed her face
On his hard thigh: "I know Pve been wicked, Reave.
You must leave me in the dirt for a bad woman: the women here
See the marks of it, look sidelings at me.
I`ll still believe you used to love me a little,
But now of course
You wouldn`t want for a wife ... a handkerchief
You lost and another man picked me up and
Wiped his mouth. Oh there may have been many
Other men. In a year: you can`t tell.
Your mother is strong and always rightly despised me.
She`d spit on me if she saw me now. So now
You`ll simply cast me off; you`re strong, like your mother,
And when you see that a thing`s perfectly worthless
You can pick it out of your thoughts. Don`t forgive me. I only
Pray you to hate me. Say `She`s no good. To hell with her!
That`s the mercy I pray you for." He said hastily, "Get up,
This is no theater. I intend to take you back, Helen,
I never was very angry at you, remembering
That a. woman`s more like a child, besides you were muddled
With imaginations and foolish reading. So we`ll shut this bad year
In a box of silence and drown it out of our minds." She stood
away from him toward the farther wall
With a sharp white face, like a knife-blade worn thin and hollow
with too much whetting, and said, turning her face
Toward the window, "How do I know that he can compel me?
He can torment us, but there`s no law
To give me to him. You can`t take me against my will. No: I
won`t go. Do you think you`re God,
And we have to do what you want?" He said, "You`ll go all
right." She, laughing, "At last you`ve struck something
Stiffer than you. Reave, that stubborn will
Is not strength but disease, I`ve always known it, like the slow
limy sickness
You hear about, that turns a man`s flesh to bone,
The willing muscles and fibers little by little
Grow hard and helpless, at last you can`t dent them, nothing will move,
He lands in a tent beside the circus, with a painting of him
Over the door and people pay ten cents
To see the petrified man: that`s your stubbornness,
Your mind sets and can`t change, you don`t go on
Because you want to but because you have to, I pity you,
But here you`re stopped." Suddenly she trembled and shrank
little again. "7f you could take me
I`d stab you in bed sleeping." "You know," he answered,
"You`re talking foolishness. I have to see Armstrong before we go,
When he quits work, I guess there`s a couple of hours, but you`d
best get ready." "Why must you see ... Rick?"
Reave made no answer, Helen covertly watched him, slowly the
metal temper failed from her face.
"I`ll go," she said faintly, "and tell him." "You`ll stay here." "Reave?
Reave. You said you weren`t angry." "Not at you. If I`d anyone
To help me, I`d send you off first. Walked around like a man,
Was a male bitch . . ." "I led him, I called him, I did it.
It`s all mine." "What?" "The blame, the blame, the blame,
I planned it, all mine, I did it, Reave." A white speck glittered
At the commissure of his lips, he licked his lips
As if he were thirsty and said difficultly, "I`ve had a
Year to think about it: have to have relief, you`re
Let off, keep still." She felt his eyes
Craftily avoiding hers, and something monstrous in him moulding
the mass of his body to a coarsened
More apelike form, that a moment appeared and then was
cramped back to human: her image-making mind beheld
Her lover go under the hammers of this coarse power, his face
running thick blood turn up at last
Like a drowning man`s, before he went down the darkness, all his
gay bravery crushed made horrible submission:
With any warning or whatever weapons he`d be like a bird in a
dog`s mouth, Reave had all the strength,
Would fight foul, with all means and no mercy: "Oh, Oh, take
me with you
If you want me, but now. Before he comes.
How could I look at him again if I`m going to leave him? You
understand
That`s too much to ask me, to stand between you
Like a cow between the brown bull and the white one.
In spite of all I`m not so ... shameless as ...
You think." He made a questioning noise, "Hm?" and she thinking
He`d failed to hear: "I`ll go and live with you
If you`ll take me now. I can`t face Rick, not wait for Rick,"
She said, weaving and parting the fingers
Of her two supplicant hands. She essayed more words,
But only the lips and no voice made them, then again
Breath filled the words, "I`ve done wickedly, I`m sorry.
I will obey you now." His eyes were hidden
While he considered, all at once he said joyfully
"Pack then." "Me, not my things: there`s nothing." "Then come."
She followed him; suddenly in the doorway she dropped
And kissed the threshold.
Thurso watched and said nothing;
She got up and walked at his side in the hot white dust by the
row of small cabins,
The wood of their doors and walls was worn to the look of seadrift
by the desert sand-scour. Suddenly Helen
Laughed like the bitter crying of a killdeer when someone walks
near the nest, "My God, Reave, have you come for me
In the old wreck of a farm-truck, will it still run?" "What else?
We haven`t got rich, we haven`t bought cars
While I`ve been away from home hunting you." "The pigs and
I," she cried shrilly. Reave nodded, and went to the door
Of the last cabin, and said to the woman to whom he had spoken
before: "I`m taking my wife home.
This woman`s my wife. When Armstrong comes, tell that bastard
We`re going west. He`s got a car." Helen cried, "Oh, cheat, cheat,
Will you tole him after you?" He said heavily. "What do you mean?
Come on," and so holding her wrist that the bones ached
Drew her to the car. She had yielded and was subject to him,
She could imagine no recourse, her mind palsied
Like the wrist-clenched hand.

VIII
                                                 After twenty miles he turned
The carbureter-connection, slyly regarding
His seat-mate, she fogged with misery observed nothing.
The engine went lame, "What`s the matter?" he said, turning
The carbureter-connection; the engine stalled.
He lifted the hood and made the motions of helplessness,
Looking up sometimes at Helen, who sat in the dust on the high
seat on the folded blanket,
Her face in her hands. "We`re stuck here," Thurso said. "Well,
we have water." She dropped her hands from her face
And stared at the road ahead; then she began to see the desert
about them, the unending incandescent
Plain of white dust, stippled with exact placing of small gray
plants, each tuft a painfully measured
Far distance from every other and so apparently forever, all
wavering under the rage of the sun,
A perfect arena for the man`s cruelty; but now she was helpless.
Still Armstrong failed to come; Helen awoke again
From blind misery, and watched Reave`s nerves
Growing brittle while the sun sailed west. He babbled childlike
About cattle and pastures, things unreal, unimaginable,
In the white anguish here; his hands quivered,
And the sun sank.

                               In the night Helen revived
Enough to make action appear possible again.
She crept stealthily away in the starry darkness
Thinking Reave slept; when he spoke she tried to run,
Her thighs and calves were like hollow water, he followed
And brought her back through the vast unnatural pallor of the night,
Rough-handed, but only saying "You`re too restless." She writhed
her hands together like bitter flames and lay down
On the spread blanket. After while she lay face upward. Those
foam-bubbles on the stale water of night
Were floating stars, what did it matter, which of two men?
Yesterday the one had been lovely and the other
Came in like ugly death, but difference had died. Rick Armstrong
must have made some ridiculous plan
For heading them off or else he`d have come. Perhaps he thought
she went willingly. Why not? "I go with you willingly,"
She said aloud, "dear, do you hear me? I`ve shot my load of
feeling, there`s nothing left in the world
Worth thinking twice. We`ll crawl home to our hole."
He answered, "I can`t believe he`s a coward: he`ll come in the
morning." "I dread death
More than your mother`s eyes," she answered. "I`m the coward
or I`d kill myself. Dear, I fear death
More than I hate this dishwater broth of life. A bowlful a day, O
God! Do the stars look
Like lonely and pretty sparkles when you look up?
They look to me like bubbles of grease on cold
Dishwater." He said, "Sleep, you’ll feel better." He heard her
sighing
And twisting her body on the sand while the night waned.
He got up and stood beside her and said anxiously,
"I was to blame too, Helen. Part of the blame
Is mine, Helen. I didn`t show enough love,
Nor do often enough
What women want. Maybe it made your life
Seem empty. It seems ... it seems to me it wouldn`t be decent
To do it just now: but I`ll remember and be
Better when we get home." She said, "O God! Fool, fool,
A spoonful a night. Your mother was lying to you.
She knows better."

                                In the morning
Thurso waited two hours from sunrise;
They had nothing to eat; Helen endured her headache, and the
shameless sun
Blared from the east. Reave greased the joints of the truck.
Source
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