Where the Sea Used to Be (36 page)

 

Wallis stared at the youthful script for a long time. He looked up at the other crates and was almost afraid to read further, but he did—pulling down a volume from September 1919, and was relieved to find long pages of commentary on the weather—a drought year—and Dudley's surmisings on the effects this had had on vegetation, noting that native plants back in the woods had fared far better than the domesticated crops of man.

There was mention made of how much harder it was to work the larger field, now that old Pap had taken over his neighbor Jones's property, and was employing Jones's family to sharecrop the land they had previously owned.

But then in the November volume of the same year, Wallis read with sinking heart of how Dudley had landed in “the Home.”

 

No sooner had I finished putting the final shovelful of dirt over the matted head of a Mister P. than did a figure appear from the gloom across the far side of the field, riding hard on horseback. We felt the percussions of his horse's hoofs drumming before we could spy him in that dimness. At first I thought it was P. himself somehow not yet dead and protesting his final resting place, but we saw then that it was P.'s brother, and that he had us sighted. It was June and there was a comet in the twilight sky and old Pap had been sitting there hunkered graveside like one of the Great Apes, resting from the ordeal and labors and contemplating, I suppose, the place to which he had sent the disrespecting Mr. P.

Pap had rolled and was smoking a cigarette and when we saw P.'s brother approaching hard, Pap ran and hid behind a tree as a child will do, but then realized the futility of that, and came back out into the field and with matches lit the dry standing cornstalks. They caught quickly on tongues of flame, but P.'s brother rode hard through them, scattering us in two directions. I went downstream and Pap upstream. P.'s brother turned his horse after Pap. I heard much splashing upstream and then silence. I lay down and hid in the water. Watched fireflies drifting along the stream edges and took note how they preferred not to cross the water proper. Luminescence around me on either side save for the winding ribbon of darkness ahead of me that was the river. After much time had passed I climbed out and went home, wondering what to tell Ma. Was surprised by the sight of a thoroughly drenched and bedraggled Pap sitting on front porch in darkness attempting to light a cigarette. How old he looked! Ma asleep in the house. Pap said he had escaped the wrath of P.'s brother by running back into the flames where the horse would not follow but that now the sheriff would be arriving any moment.

His gnarled hand on my shoulder. Said he had but a few bitter years left in the world but that all my time was still before me like green wood; that they would hang him, but would only send me to Reformatory until I came of age, at which point we could be reunited; I could be released back to the custody of my loving parents.

Car headlights appearing over the hill. Pap said, Tell them it was self-defense. I said, What about the bruises? Pap said, Tell them he fought hard, real hard. I'll tell 'em I tried to stop you. I'll tell 'em you were out of your mind
—
uncontrollable.

All those car headlights surrounding us. Swirling dust. Guns drawn. They took us out that night to dig him up. The cornfield was still smoldering in coals and stubbleflame and then the earth still loose upon him when we dug him up and pulled him back free of the soil.

That's him, Pap said, that's the one that hit my boy.
Holy Mother of God,
another of them said,
he is still alive, but only barely.

They bathed him off in the creek and loaded him into the car and took him to the hospital in Smithville but he did not survive the journey, and our secret was safe.

Ma died several months later, believing I was guilty, and Pap passed two weeks before I got out on my eighteenth birthday.

The road ahead seemed long.

 

From there, it seemed, Dudley fell as if down a cleft in the earth. Surrounded by cretins and thugs he would have nothing to do with. He was kept chained to his bed at night—a twenty-foot length of chain around one wrist that would allow him, if he avoided tangling it, to reach the toilet, but no farther. The descent into dreamland deepened. Long hours in the library. Longer hours in solitude. Finally, with his good behavior, he was allowed to go back outside, though still shackled and manacled, and still within the fenced yard of the Home.

 

The Unstable Land

Phenomena and Causes of Earthquakes

When men feel the earth beneath their feet growing unstable, the most paralyzing sense of insecurity seizes them. The ground supports everything; and when it fails him, his dismay is complete.

Yet the solid earth has not only been shaken by throes which have engulfed cities and populations and mountains, but there is scarcely a moment when its movements or its tremblings may not be felt by the delicate means of modern science. The stability of the solid earth is instability masked.

The destructive shock lasts but a few minutes, or even seconds. The successive vibrations which devastated Calabria in 1783 were felt during barely two minutes. On the occasion of the destruction of the city of
Lisbon, in 1755 and the loss of sixty thousand lives, it was the first shock, lasting five or six seconds, which caused the greatest damage.

The motions which constitute an earthquake are various. Sometimes they are vertical. More commonly they are horizontal. The rate of transmission varies with the intensity of the shock and the nature of the rock materials. When mines of powder were exploded near Holyhead, in Wales, the waves of disturbance were propagated through wet sand at the rate of 951 feet a second; through friable granite 1,283 feet Per second.

It is not supposable that the actual center of an earthquake disturbance is at the surface. It must exist at some considerable depth beneath the surface. According to Mr. Mallet, the center of disturbance of the Calabrian earthquake of 1857 was seven to eight miles below sea level. All perturbation lies at depth.

Sounds often accompany earthquakes. Sometimes they resemble explosions as of distant artillery; more frequently it is a rumbling sound as of heavy vehicles moving over a city pavement. I have myself experienced but one noteworthy earthquake, and that occurred only shortly after my arrival at the Home. I was not yet sunk into morosity, and was napping in the sun with my hands behind my head, iron manacles notwithstanding, feeling the warmth of midday sun on my closed eyelids, when the ground beneath me—limestone cap rock along the Balcones Escarpment
—
began to tremble, so that I dreamed I was falling, sliding down some abyss: that the earth herself was trying to shed herself of me, in due imitation of the pattern recently set forth by my parents, and mocking my loyalties.

It lasted about ten seconds. The bedrock on which I rested was very perceptibly vibrated, and a rumbling sound was audible, like that of a train of cars, with the beats quite rhythmical, as if, in those few moments, anyone who cared to listen could be made privy to some constant logic or rhythm always present beneath us, but never suspected, never even intimated—and yet one which powers everything.

Allow me to discuss the magnitude of this force.

Among the effects of earthquakes, though of a secondary character to the immediate destruction and turmoil, are the drying up of springs, or the sudden increase of their volume. Sometimes the occasion is signalized by the escape of mud, water, gas, or flames. Occasionally, as in the Andalusian earthquakes of 1884, the ground is rent open for considerable distances.

During the frightful disturbances of Calabria in 1783, the phenomena of ground ruptures ranked among the grandest and most fearful effects of the catastrophe. Whole mountainsides slid down in mass and tumbled into the plains below. Cliffs fell down and rocks opened, swallowing the houses which stood upon them. Entire villages of man were subsumed.

In one remarkable instance in the country of Cutch, the Great Runn sank down over an extent of some thousands of square miles, so that during a part of the year, it remained inundated by the sea, and during another part was a desert without water.

Earthquakes are found to occur most frequently at new and full moon; also, more frequently at perigee than at apogee; also, more frequently when the moon is on the meridian than when in the horizon; also, more frequently in winter than in summer; and finally, more frequently at night than during the day.

In subsequent days to the Balcones tremblings at the Home, I would conduct experiments upon the transmission of sound waves, both horizontal and vertical, through the strata. With a classmate I would take a hammer and would line him out at some great distance between us (as much as was permitted by the encircling of concertina wire), and would crouch with one ear to the ground and then signal him at his far and measured remove to strike the earth once with the hammer. I would make a visual note of the downward swing of his arm and then with stopwatch mark the first wave of sound, which would arrive slightly ahead of all others, traveling faster through the conduit of the rock; and then I would mark the second approach of sound”—what we think of as ‘true' sound, carried diffusely on the winds aloft, but in actuality slower and more sluggish than earth-sound—so that it was for me as if hearing two voices saying the same thing, not quite simultaneously. As if the sounds above were but wind-wavered, distorted echoes of the true stories being told below.

From my measurements of time and distance I could calculate the velocities of transmission for different mediums. The variability in these ratios would then illuminate for me the different porosities within each formation, and the ability then of each formation to retain within those porosities various fluids such as fresh water, salt water, oil, or even gas.

With the meager allowance given to me by the state for my labors—stripping the foil liners from the interior of cigarette packages—I subscribed to the Beaumont newspaper, which, though nearly three hun
dred miles from the Home, was but a short distance south of our farm; and in that manner I was able to keep up with the news of each week's subterranean developments: the dry holes and gushers, their depths and locations, and the individuals involved in this titan play.

I learned intimately all the surface outcrops on the ten acres encircled by the Home's perimeter. As my chains would permit me, I crawled over every ledge, rill, gully and wash—handled every stone a hundred times; as I similarly traveled, in my mind, to and fro in the great imagined oil fields of Spindletop, to the south.

In the evenings I would stay out as late as was permitted and would not participate in the organized games, but would instead sit upon the highest point and stare across the river to the distant stone building, two miles away, that was the Home for girls. I would try to catch their scent on the breezes: scent of garments, scent of hair, scent of underarms, scent of anything.

So went my sixteenth and seventeenth years.

 

Wallis put the journal up and was trying to decide whether to pull down another.

He had no idea what time it was, and was startled to hear the thumping of Mel's snowshoes against the porch.

The sound of the cabin door opening—an electric stillness, a tension he could feel even in the basement—and then the sight of her face at the top of the cellar door.

She watched him for a moment before speaking. “How much did you read?” she asked.

“Don't worry,” Wallis said. “I won't tell. I have no reason to tell. There is no one to tell it to.” He gestured to the earthen walls. “It's all over,” he said. “It's almost all gone.”

Mel sat down at the opening to the basement, framed in light. “It'll be over after he's gone,” she said. “Or rather, after you and I are gone.”

“Does Matthew know?”

Mel shook her head.

The light from Wallis's lantern was fizzing, sputtering low on fuel. To Mel, it looked as if he were disappearing. “Here,” she said, reaching a hand down, “come on up.”

 

A
T SCHOOL, SHE TAUGHT THE STUDENTS EACH DAY IN HER
allotted thirty minutes about wolves and deer, and then from that—as if those stories were the base out of which could grow all other stories—she would inform them about other miracles of the woods. She told them of bulbs that lie dormant for decades, awaiting the breath of a forest fire that warms the soil in just a certain manner. She told them how the seeds of another plant might lie dormant for a thousand years, requiring precise factors before germinating. The seeds of such plants might then discover, upon blossoming, that their requisite pollinators—an insect, or even a bird or mammal—had gone extinct as the seed slept, so that those plants were also destined to fall into extinction, like an echo of the pollinator, and they would exist only a bit longer in the present, and seemed somehow less beautiful, not more, in that desperate isolation . . .

She told them about the sentences that the plants and animals wrote upon the land, and their invisible script in the sky—the way the ravens followed the wolves who followed the deer who followed the first edges of green growth at snow's edge in spring; and of the way the transcription was then reversed, in a blood tide pulled gently by star-and moon-spin: of how the wolves got the seeds tangled in their fur, as did the bears that came to eat in these green places, and to eat too upon the skeletons of the deer—dead deer lying along the edges of the wolf trails like salmon carcasses along a beach—and of how then the seeds were dispersed by the comings and goings of bears, wolves, and ravens, like some graceful net or ordered plan cast across a ragged surface of confusion.