stop dancing. As she lurched from bush to bush, pulling herself back from the thorns that reached out of the dark to cut her arms, her searing pitch-blackened face, she didn’t stop. She followed the direction Sun went. Even when her feet told her she had entered the burned-out rocks, she kept going. The stony spines tore at her feet. If she were not blinded by the darkness, she would see the red blood filling the scrapes, trickling from the gashes. But she did not quit.
Now there were no voices. They were left behind, back in the light of the village. She could see in her mind’s eye how the women would have followed her out to the edge of the night, scolding her, saying her dancing had only started. Then they would have stopped their crying out, made silent by the blackness that lay around them. Even her aunt, who danced with her that night, would have been too afraid of what waited there to go with her. They would have turned away from the dangers and followed one another back toward the fires, saying that she was a bad one, not to be led, always doing what she pleased.
Still she danced on -- as they had said she should -- groping with her feet for a level place to step, afraid to stop again. The scratcher swung in rhythm from its thong round her neck. The buck-brush wrist-bands and headband dug into her flesh.
At last -- she did not know how long it took for it to happen -- she felt the ground give way beneath her, felt herself thrown into the gully. She grasped at the rocks to break her fall, then lay there, feeling the hotness in her head, the stone in her belly, afraid to look up into the sky or call out, afraid of what she might see there, what or who might answer.
She closed her eyes for just a moment, and there, inside her eyelids, she saw the bright man riding on Kai, jack-rabbit, toward her; heard the loon, neighing. The bright man behind her eyelids, like the one yesterday, over where the Bostons camped, over where she gathered the wood for this night’s fire.
Drop the wood, he had told her, and come with him. He had something to show her. He did. And his hair was golden. And his body… hiding hers, from Sun…thrusting.
Afterward, as she scrambled to pick up the wood again, his laughter hit her right in her back, forcing her upward, stopping her. What was there she dared tell them now, the women? Her mother? There was nothing. Nothing ever.
And this night, when she picked herself up from among the rocks, she could see, off to the east, low on the star-track, just stepped off of the earth-rim, Isis, morning-star, the one whom Sun would follow.
#65
Oliver Applegate watched his uncle squat and wrestle the lava fieldstone into an upright position, then lever it onto his knees. As the old man wrapped his arms around the rock and staggered away with it, Oliver saw again, with fascination, the vein bulging down across the man’s forehead and over to the corner of his eye. Was it his deeply held-in anger threatening to break loose or just the exertion of rearranging the surface of the earth? He knew his uncle to be prodigiously capable in both regards.
“Don’t just stand there,” Jesse sputtered back over his shoulder. “There’s enough here for both of us!”
There was. As far as Oliver could see, the land sloping down to Clear Lake was strewn with the dark grey lava boulders. Sand and desert scrub flowed around them. Likely, his uncle intended to move every stone and uproot every bush, sooner or later, to encourage the bunch grass. It fatigued him to think how the old man’s will had shrunk itself down to this stone-like thing he was witnessing, with no waste about it, nothing in excess, just what he intended to use. Maybe his body had been as strong once as Oliver’s own, but by now that was over. It didn’t seem to matter, however, for the muscles had been pre-empted by this other thing, and now Jesse didn’t seem to need them: the will alone could move his mountains.
Oliver took his turn at struggling to lift the stone from the earth, then staggered to where his uncle stood catching his breath at the end of the fence. Jesse pointed to where he wanted Oliver to drop the rock he was carrying. This fence was just for practice, Oliver reckoned; a little undertaking to enclose the spring that fed water down to what would be the ranch headquarters. A fence here to keep the cattle out, keep the water fresh for the buckaroos who would be coming. The next fence would be quite another proposition, though, and so would be the ones after that. It fatigued him to think of what his uncle had sketched out in rough and shown them: some ideas, he had said, he thought Carr would want to think about.
If someone else came up with ideas like this, Oliver would think they were tetched; but where Jesse Applegate was involved, things happened. Blazing the road through in ‘46 no doubt left him with the idea that he could go around the landscape rearranging. He had done that as a strapping, young man; and now here he was like some patriarch, all right, driven out to this desert, to wrestle the very earth.
The next fence would run due north from the lakeshore practically up to the California-Oregon state line, three and a half miles. Then there would be another one off the south-eastern toe of the lake more or less due east, four miles, then northward. Up as far as where there was the canyon. Then across it. And there would be others besides.
Oliver had listened silently, as had his father and brothers, half fearing that Jesse was serious. Today, as he trudged back to lay hands on the next rock, he was more than ever afraid Jesse meant it. This Carr fellow and his uncle had known each other half-a-dozen years, more or less, when Carr ran a mail service along the old road, but it hadn’t occurred to anyone that the friendship would grow into a whole family proposition.
Yet it had done so, or was growing. And maybe it would turn out to be a good thing. He had to admit, the vision beat anything even his brother E.L. had come up with, trying to devise the family’s fortune. He recalled the letter from E.L. that Ivan had shown him, written a good ten years ago, when O.C. was still a boy. It laid out in aching detail the scheme whereby their pooled family assets of a mere seventy-nine hundred dollars could be parlayed to ninety thousand in just a few years. An empire would be theirs. Perseverance, E.L. counseled. Energy. Diligence. And of course, most important of all, E.L.’s favorite: the exercise of thinking powers. Mind was the means to success.
But E.L.’s optimism had grown more cautious. Not so Uncle Jesse’s. He still went on propping things up, wrestling the future out of the land, trying to out-think it. And O.C. couldn’t fault him for that.
These two old prophets got together, Jesse Carr with his Mexican ideas about ranchos, Jesse Applegate with his need to get his assets out of Oregon and down into California, both with gold-fever in their eyes. This rocky land was the gold, leagues of it, just like the old Spanish land-grants Carr had come to covet down by San Francisco. Covet and aspire to.
Oliver could hear Carr now, assuring his uncle that they could buy up this parcel, homestead that, claim the vast meadow was swamp and get it from the government just for the draining of it. They could fence it. Lord yes! Run cattle. Divide it, if need be, and sell it. Get rich off the people who were coming.
Put the rancho’s legal title in Jesse Carr’s name, but with him staying sort of a silent partner, for reasons he wouldn’t explain. The place would be Jesse Applegate’s to run, his and his sons. The Applegate Ranch they could call it. Carr didn’t care about a name. Call it what you want to. What mattered was to lay claim to it, now. While the getting was good. Before it all got grabbed up.
“Swamp land?” his father had asked, after Jesse Applegate explained it. “What swamp land?”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Lindsay!” Jesse said, disgusted. “Use the imagination God gave you!”
Oliver
