Where the Sea Used to Be (32 page)

Inside, Joshua fixed them hot tea. His cabin was tiny, cramped with the three of them. The bones of various animals were fastened to the cabin walls in all their proper assemblages and articulations: the skeletons of deer, moose, and bear prowling the cabin's walls and the rigid pale bones of eagles, owls, and herons hanging from the rafters above them: the structures around which Joshua would model his work.

“The giant birds he can hang from a big tree,” Colter explained, and Wallis understood that he meant with the customer inside, like some ride at an amusement park—a county fair, perhaps. “Or he'll bury them, or put them way up in the mountains, in caves, or just resting out in the open.”

“The ones in the open, sometimes the animals tip over and crack open like walnuts, to get at the meat inside,” Joshua said. “I hate to see that. They really mess up the work. But I guess that's part of it.”

“Or he can turn them into boats,” Colter said, “and send them down the river. Swans, usually.”

“Do many people—” Wallis searched for the word—“purchase these?” he asked.

“They're not for sale,” Joshua answered. “They're just for people here in the valley.”

“Which one would you choose?” Colter asked.

“Mmm,” said Wallis, “they're all so amazing . . .”

“Let me know,” Colter said. “Then if something happens to you, you'll be taken care of.”

“Most people up here are shy,” said Joshua. “Most of them go underground, when it's over.”

“It's better if you pick,” Colter said, “rather than someone picking for you.”

“I'll be glad when spring gets here,” Joshua said. He flexed his old hands before the fire, tool-curled and scarred from a thousand slips of the knife. A trapper's hands, Wallis thought. Trapping things right up until the very end, and then beyond. “It's hard to work out in the barn, once it gets too far below zero, and I can't do any painting, either, til the temperature warms up. The paint freezes before it dries.” He shook his head. “I love working with the wood, but in the winter I start dreaming about color, and can't wait for March and April to come, and then summer, when I can start painting.”

“Which one do you want?” Colter asked the old man.

“Oh, the swan,” he said, laughing. “A nice long boat ride in the belly of the swan.”

Colter and Wallis finished their tea. The evening was still young, though the darkness had already settled profoundly. They said goodbye and thanked Joshua, then stepped out into the night. Joshua stood in the doorway of his little cabin briefly, framed by light, waving goodbye to them, but then quickly shut the door, before too much heat could escape.

Colter and Wallis trudged up the hill, snowshoes squeaking on the crisp snow, burlap sacks on their backs. Stars melted, fell from the sky before them in sizzling streaks, and they stopped at the top of the ridge to watch the shower of them.

 

Imagine! To heat the world with the unending fires from below! Not simply by the geothermal phenomena of hotsprings and geysers limited to those drifting fissures of earth where one formation slides so rudely
upon another, truncating past processes and interrupting logic—venting foul gases to the surface like some awful dinner guest
—
but to heat the world via the ignition of the natural gas, the gaseous sunlight, trapped below like lakes and rivers.

How to get to this explosiveness, this life-giving-ness? The forms of the earth above conspire to deceive—they strive to lure us to purposes of no account. All seeks to be erased into a stubborn silence. Notice how symmetrically the contour of summits sweeps from the upper to the lower stretches, seeking to conceal all secrets below. How gracefully these mountain swellings dissolve in the green ground of the landscape beneath.

Look at our feet. The naked rock lies cracked by the frosts of unnumbered winters. The chips of the mountain strew the valley below. There the mountain firs, shrinking from the weather, begin to appear, but only as prostrate, crawling, and stunted shrubs. These rocks are Cenozoic. How hard and crystalline and stubborn they look. These black crystals are
pyroxene;
the dark, dusky ones are a species of feldspar called
labradorite.
The mixture forms a rock known as
Norite.

It is not an easy matter to travel down the slope of this summit. There is too much rock-rubbish, too dense an undergrowth. But the geologist must ascertain by some means. How arduous are the labors by which the investigator works out the geology of a wild region.

While men labor brute to warm themselves with chunks of coal and grovel like low lemmings for scraps of wood, a few such as myself possess the knowledge to feed them, to deliver them from bondage: to give birth to, to sire, a new world, as if we are the loins of man.

I dream the dream of the crystalline-marble woman, twelve feet tall, green-stained with intermingled serpentine. I alone find her, and consort with her, in the dream. I combine my seed with her to give birth to the future.

 

Mel would do small things to keep Wallis from drifting too far from her—would perform small acts of kindness and warmth, if not reckless passion, to try to keep, with some degree of tautness or tension, the promise of a thing-beyond-friendship alive between them, like some little fire of tended sparks. Candles at dinner one night, for no apparent reason. A touch of her hand to his before going off to map the wolves. She tried to keep him from sinking too deep (though neither would she allow herself to be pulled down with him if he did descend to the bottom); she kept flexible the possibility of a future with him, as she considered Matthew's further disintegration.

Sometimes she watched Wallis map and would be struck by the fear that he, this one, would find oil where the others—even her father—had been unable to.

 

The wood in her woodshed was larch. Even after it had been sawed and stacked in the shed—rendered from the forest depths into neat stackings of sixteen-inch lengths—the bright orange wood still possessed a presence, as if it was not done living.

Wallis loved the weight, the density of it. He loved the sound it made when he split it with a single blow of the maul: iron cleaving tight wood, separating it cleanly down the grain. He learned to read the grains so that he knew beforehand how each piece was going to split. He loved the color of the wood when the sunlight was strafing bright upon it, the color of it when the snow was falling heavy upon it. And though the swinging of the sledge was easy—the wood desiring to be split, it seemed, when struck in the right place—he nonetheless would, after an hour or two, work up a sweat in the ferrying back and forth of the wheelbarrow from shed to porch, wearing a deep path of packed ice.

Taking one round log and splitting it in half, and then again to quarters, and then into eighths. Into sixteenths, after that, for kindling. The days falling away, uncounted, unmeasured, in like fashion.

A couple of hours of work would place a day and a night's worth of wood on the porch. He started to calculate the crude inefficiency of it, but then stopped, understanding that it was irrelevant, that he liked the work.

 

T
HE VALLEY WENT OUT TO SEE A COMET ONE NIGHT. IT WAS
supposed to be the last significant comet visible in the century, and the last anyone would see of this particular comet for another two thousand years. They left the bar at midnight on a night when the temperature was falling like a stone dropped from a great height: fifteen below at sunset, with not a cloud or wisp of fog anywhere. By midnight it was thirty below, and before daylight it would fall to forty. Children were awakened by their parents (or stayed up late, so that they would better remember the evening), and they all met at the bar and then rode in horse-drawn sleighs across the frozen crust up one of the old narrow paths to the top of Hensley Mountain, where Dudley and Matthew had long ago drilled one of their dry holes. Brush and saplings crowded in from either side, and they traveled up the mountain in single file. It was so cold that despite their labors the horses did not sweat. There were three sleighs: a dozen adults, and half as many children. They carried stove-warmed rocks wrapped in hides in their laps and on the floorboard of the carriage. From time to time they could see the comet through the trees, but it was not until they reached the top of the mountain that it was in clearest evidence, lying not far over the horizon, due north.

They climbed out from beneath their hides and stood among the horses and watched the beauty of it. At that temperature, the snow was more like the color of mercury. It was so cold that the snow up top had not crusted but was as loose as sand; they stood knee-deep in it, picked it up with their gloved hands and tossed it into the sky toward the comet, and followed its glittering columns back to earth.

The comet's tail was clearly visible—it looked out of place amongst the star-multitude, blurry and restless, like a flashlight shining through a patch of fog—and it seemed that they could even see the slow fizz and sputter of sparks from its tail.

“Where did Dudley drill?” a woman asked Mel, and Mel looked around but could not place the exact spot. It made her uneasy knowing there was a hole in the ground somewhere just beneath her, only eight inches in diameter but almost twenty thousand feet deep. To seal it, they had pumped in a few sacks of cement, then welded a steel plate over the top, nothing more.

“Why did he drill on the top of a mountain?” someone asked.

“Because he's a numbnuts, is why,” answered Colter.

“Colter!” Amy cried.

“Excuse me,” he said, “but it's true.”

“Apologize,” said Amy.

“I'm sorry.”

They moved in closer to the horses, pressing against them, shivering. There were no lights down in the valley, and the cold possessed such a weight that it seemed it might crack them all—as if they were each crystalline things of no substance or strength. It was frightening, being up high like that—up close to the comet.

“I can still smell the oil,” Colter said. Mel knew what he meant; fifteen years later, it still lingered, faintly, emanating from the bark of the trees. Not any oil Dudley had discovered, but the rankness of diesel from the engines that had been running the search. That oil must be soaked into the ground all around them, too, and Mel wondered if Colter could be smelling it beneath the snow.

It was already time to leave; they could bear the cold no longer. “Look once more,” the parents told their children. “Are you sure you see it?”

They all did; the children had seen it immediately, had easily picked it out from amidst all the other seeming star-sameness. Some of them even imagined they could see a grinning face and eyes on the head of the comet.

Mel marveled at how clearly the children could see it, and at how excited they were by it. She had thought they would consider it to be small and insignificant—a little blurrier than a true star, and not much larger—tiny against the whole sky—but they were carrying on as if it were one of the most exciting things they'd ever seen—like junior astronomers, every one of them. She felt deeper the suspicion that she was becoming jaded to life—that even out here, in the blood-and-guts middle of it, her crust was hardening. She felt wonder, and peace, even awe—but she could not summon the utter, reckless joy of the children.

Helen had come with them—piled beneath such a burden of coats and hides that she could barely stand—and she had begun to hack and cough; at one point she leaned over and ejected a launch of sputum that, when it landed against the snow, looked suspiciously dark, like blood.

They bundled back into their sleighs and settled in amongst one another for warmth. Though the rocks still retained some of their warmth, they could not feel any of it, and there never could be as many hides as they needed to stay warm. There was hay in the bottom of the sleighs for them to shove their feet into, and inside the sleighs they lit lanterns and took turns passing the hissing lanterns around, holding them up to their bare faces to warm frozen cheeks—each face illuminated orange gold for a moment, with shrouds of frost-breath puffing from colorless lips—and then the chattering of someone else's teeth would bear request for the lantern to be passed on. The horses made good time, heading down the mountain, plowing through their previous trail, so that there was only the sound of the sleigh skimming across the snow, and the jingle of the horses' harness bells, and the freezing trees exploding around them like cannons, while above, the silent comet was moving fast.

 

The snows returned two days later. The wolves were courting now—Mel had found blood in the urine of the alpha female, and had found the fresh tracks showing where the alpha male and alpha female had paired off—and she had known she was close to them, within hours. She'd looked into the curtain of swirling snow and had felt a deep loneliness, an exclusion that was almost bitter in its depth, as if the world were passing her by: a self-pitying bleakness made all the more bitter by the fact that she knew the passing-by to be false, but still, the emotion was in her, as she stared in the direction the wolves had gone . . .

By the time the snows stopped, a week later, the comet was gone, and for several days afterward, many people felt similarly passed by—all for different reasons specific to each of their lives, but all in the same manner—confused, abandoned, bereft—as if some potential had been unfulfilled.

“I don't remember seeing any when I was a kid,” Artie said. “But now it seems like they're coming fast and furious—like there's one almost every year.”

“Well, they say this is the last one for a long while,” Danny said.