Mr. Lampley had come to town as a stranger twenty years before, and a stranger he had always been since coming there. Nothing was known of his past life or origins. He was a small and hideously battered figure of a man, as compact and solid as a bullock, and with a deadly stillness and toneless quietness about all his words and movements that suggested a controlled but savagely illimitable vitality. His small, red face, which had the choleric and flaring color of the Irishman, had been so horribly drawn and twisted on one side by a hideous cut, inflicted, it was said, by another butcher with a meat cleaver in a fight long before he came to town, that it was one livid and puckered seam from throat to forehead, and even the corners of his hard lips were drawn and puckered by the scar. Moreover, the man never seemed to bat his eyelids, and his small black eyes—as hard, as black, as steady as any which ever looked out upon the light of day—glared at the world so unflinchingly, with such a formidable and deadly gaze that no man could stand their stare for long, that one’s words trembled, stammered, and faltered foolishly away as one tried to utter them, and all attempts at friendliness or intimacy were blasted and withered in a second before those two unwinking eyes. Therefore no one knew him, no one sought his friendship twice: in all the years he had lived in the town he had made, beyond his family, not one intimate or friendly connection.
But if Mr. Lampley was formidable in his own toneless and unwinking way, his wife was no less formidable in quite another. He had married a woman native to that section, and she was one of those creatures of an epic animality and good nature whose proportions transcend the descriptive powers of language, and who can be measured by no scale of law or judgment. Of her, it could only be said that she was as innocent as nature, as merciful as a river in flood, as moral as the earth. Full of good nature and a huge, choking scream of laughter that swelled boundlessly from her mighty breast, she could in an instant have battered the brains out of anyone who crossed her or roused the witless passion of her nature; and she would never have felt a moment’s pity or regret for doing so, even if she had paid the penalty with her life.
She was one of a large family of country people, all built on the same tremendous physical proportions, the daughter of an epic brute who had also been a butcher.
Physically, Mrs. Lampley was the biggest woman George had ever seen. She was well over six feet tall, and must have weighed more than two hundred pounds, and yet she was not fat. Her hands were ham-like in their size and shape, her arms and legs great swelling haunches of limitless power and strength, her breast immense and almost depthless in its fullness. She had a great mass of thick, dark red hair; eyes as clear, grey, and depthless as a cat’s; a wide, thin, rather loose, and cruel mouth; and a skin which, while clear and healthy-looking, had somehow a murky, glutinous quality—the quality of her smile and her huge, choking laugh—as if all the ropy and spermatic fluids of the earth were packed into her.
There was nothing to measure her by, no law by which to judge her: the woman burst out beyond the limit of all human valuations, and for this reason she smote terror to George’s heart. She could tell stories so savage in their quality that the heart was sickened at them, and at the same time throw back her great throat and scream with laughter as she told them—and her laughter was terrible, not because it was cruel, but because the substance of which cruelty is made was utterly lacking in her nature.
Thus she would describe incidents out of the life of her father, the butcher, in a strangely soft, countrified tone of voice, which always held in it, however, a suggestion of limitless power, and the burble of huge, choking laughter that would presently burst from her:
“There used to be a cat down there at the market,” she drawled, “who was always prowlin’ and snoopin’ around to get at his meat, you know,” she went on confidentially in a quiet, ropy tone, and with a faint smile about her mouth. “Well,” she said, with a little heaving chuckle of her mighty breasts, “the old man was gittin’ madder an’ madder all the time, an’ one day when he found the cat had been at his meat again, he says to me—you know, I used to keep his books fer him—the old man turns to me, an’ says, ‘If I ketch that son-of-a-bitch in here again I’m goin’ to cut his head off—’” Here she paused to chuckle, her great throat swelling with its burble of laughter and her mighty bosom swelling. “I could see he was gittin’ mad, you know,” she said in that almost unctuous drawl, “and I knew that cat was goin’ to git in trouble if he didn’t mind!…Well, sir,” she said, beginning to gasp a little, “it wasn’t ten minutes afore the old man looked up an’ saw the cat over yonder on the chopping block fixin’ to git at a great big side of beef the old man had put there!…Well, when the old man sees that cat he lets out a yell you could hear from here across the Square! ‘You son-of-a-bitch!’ he says, ‘I told you I’d kill you if I caught you here again!’—and he picks up a cleaver,” she gasped, “and throws it at that cat as hard as he could let fly, and—har!—har!—har!—har!”—she screamed suddenly, her great throat swelling like a bull’s, and a wave of limitless laughter bursting from her and ending in a scream—“he ketches that damn cat as perty as anything you ever saw, an’ cuts him plumb in two—har!—har!—har!—har—!”—And this, time her huge laughter seemed too immense even for her mighty frame to hold, and the tears ran down her cheeks as she sank back gasping in her chair. “Lord! Lord!” she gasped. “That was the pertiest thing I ever see! I liked to laffed myself to death,” she panted, and then, still trembling, began to wipe at her streaming eyes with the back of one huge hand.