56
PARTISAN REVIEW
hog, his head
h~avier
than the rest of his body. After him a
broad gaunt girl with a satchel from the end of which a red
underthing stuck.
The three men were around the tractor. Mule grabbed his
monkey wrench with a snort and buried himself in his tractor.
But at sharp
12
the men tramped in for grub.
The. boss was in the kitchen giving a hand, giving her the
old line about her being boss. She limped around, her yellow
hair flat down as a pieplate, cheeks hollow and pale. She smiled
anxiously, showing big strong teeth white as skinned butternuts.
She stood still while the men lowered their heads to the plates.
She hurried over to pick up surly Mule's fork. They batted
heads. The blow brought tears to her eyes. "Excuse me,
Mister."
Murf winked. "Another skirt leaving her mark on Mule."
The scar across Mule's forehead filled with blood.
The boss clapped his hands, his own roar of laughter
softened him more. ''Take a load off your legs, girl."
Elsa rubbed her head. "Ain't used to sitting when you
been a waitress."
After dinner old Murf and Steve cidered themselves up
around the keg on the kitchen porch. But Mule couldn't even
drink. "Hell with her, Dane or Swede woman or the hell she
come from. We been doing our best to run the place right.
And that plug-headed boss-hell! I told him a woman'll always
throw her monkey in the engine."
Mule, that great sergeant of a man with an old-fashioned
epaulet of a moustache, was off women since that fierce battle in
the backroom of the Phrenologist place where the gypsy fortune
teller chattered hoglatin. She would empty a man for as low as
2
bits behind the sign which faced the street: a picture of a man's
head with the skull chopped open to show the brain like a green
helmet, and the notice that "The face is the mirror of the soul."
A drunken state trooper scratched the "s" into an "h" one
night. Mule hawed out it was a roaring insult. The trooper
split Mule's head with his gun. The three were arrested, the
place locked up. Esmeralda screeched curses at Mule and her·
self for not having dosed him up and sent him to keep his sick
brother Slim company in the lunatic asylum. It was after this
that Mule and Steve went to work for the halfpint justice
of
the peace for next to nothing.
The boss hurried out to the porch. He said in a business-
