Where the Sea Used to Be (53 page)

Later, further into darkness, they might sit on the porch—surprised by the night's coldness—to look at one of the comets that seemed to always be circling overhead, and to listen to the trilling of the frogs.

They would visit the cemetery; would lean against the wrought-iron fence, resting their hands on the stone wall, and would stare at the graves—some old, some new—and would feel the gulf of knowledge that lay between them and this place: all those buried lives of which they would never know anything; and so much peace overhead, like the weight of night itself. The hooting of owls; the river's roar. The howls of the wolves.

They might step back into the bar for one more nightcap, but then they would walk up the road to their tent, where they would build a new fire and sit by it, watching the stars and talking quietly about the future.

Later in the night, chilled, they would crawl into their sleeping bags and hold each other, more certain than ever that the fit of one to the other was nothing less than a miracle, and they would fall asleep to the lull of the river's steady thunder.

They might stay another day or two, taking short walks up and down the river, and going back to the bar each evening for drinks. They would buy a few items from Helen's store—lingering, as if stunned by the peace of things, the lack of confusion they felt, which was so prevalent wherever they had come from. In the bar, they were impeccably polite—aware somehow, strangely, of an inner softness; they were now acutely conscious of it, being in the company of those so hardened and integral to a place.

With their subdued, respectful manners and their quiet absorption with each other, they were no bother, really. Sometimes they stared a bit too much, but beyond that, they altered nothing, interrupted little. They usually came on weekends, so that it was possible for the shyer hermits to avoid coming to town then.

The pilgrims came with respect. The land lured it out of them, from the first moment they crossed over the summit and stared down at the green valley below.

 

Joshua was working on Helen's coffin, working on it diligently and with her blessing. She and Mel hiked over there one afternoon. Helen had tired after only the first ridge, so that Mel had had to carry her in her arms the rest of the way—amazed at how light Helen had grown—and when they came over the last ridge, they could hear the hammering and sawing and drilling and sanding. As they drew closer they could see Joshua standing at the side of his creation with fresh-cut wood shavings piled around his feet, bright in the sunlight.

Helen wanted a bird. She had vacillated between a golden eagle and a raven, believing the former to be more beautiful, but the latter wiser, and had finally chosen the raven: not so much for its wisdom, but for all the various voices it possessed. She still believed that Matthew might be returning to the valley someday, and the way she imagined it, if she chose to be buried in a raven, then every time that he heard a raven caw, croak, or purr, he would be reminded of her, and might remember how she had loved him, and how she would always love him.

The women admired the craftsmanship. They ran their hands over it. For eyes, the bird would use two black river stones. It was still rough-cut, unfinished—not yet recognizable as a raven—but the wood was beautiful, and they ran their hands over it again and again, and breathed in its scent.

“It may take me all summer,” Joshua cautioned.

“Oh, I'm good for it,” Helen said. “No way I'm leaving til Matthew comes back.” But even as she spoke, another vessel pulled loose in her throat, and once more bright blood leapt from her mouth—a clenching in her lungs—and Joshua and Mel waited as she turned away and dabbed at her chin with a handkerchief. They stared at the spatter of it on the ground. Helen turned back to face them, embarrassed.

“Dry, this year,” Joshua said. “Could be fires, by August.”

“I don't have a spot picked out yet,” Helen said. “Maybe Matthew can help me pick one out when he comes back. Some place close to town, along the river.”

She turned to watch it flowing past Joshua's house. His black stallion was standing in the shade of a tree at water's edge. Helen was struck hard and sudden by the eerie thought that there was something she had forgotten to do.

“I'd better get back to work,” Joshua said. “If I'm going to finish.”

Mel and Helen stepped back into the shade and watched Joshua work for a while; then Mel picked Helen up and carried her back up the ridge and through the woods.

“What do you want?” Helen asked, as they passed the cemetery.

“I haven't thought about it yet,” Mel said.

 

By mid-June, when all the flowers were blooming, it was impossible to measure anyone's happiness. People laughed out loud at any moment. The sound of Amy's singing carried through the woods at all hours—hymns, mostly—and in her garden, Mel found herself humming. She wanted Wallis to stay, but had decided that even if he left, she was going to stay happy this time—in this new, second life. That she would chase nothing.

She could not work in the garden long enough. Because no rain fell now, the garden needed watering in the mornings as well as evenings, and she and Wallis hauled bucket after bucket of cold creek water. The days kept expanding as the solstice approached, so that it seemed there could be very little darkness in the world anywhere. They enjoyed making love in the garden, in the evenings, in the black soil before any plants came up, and anyplace else where they found intense patches of sunlight: the simple light so sensual, so arousing, after so much deprivation, that it was as if they could not help themselves, nor did they wish to.

The stones in the rock wall absorbed the day's heat and held it far into the evening, so that sometimes after loving, they would not dress but would move in closer to the rock wall and press themselves against it as if against a warm stove, while the rest of the forest cooled slowly and the wind stirred in the treetops. Wallis wondered if there was something about the valley, the landscape of it, that summoned the physical act of love.

 

On the solstice they went camping. They hiked into the high country, into a stony basin, and camped below a cirque by the edge of a small lake. The twin humps of Roderick Buttes descended from the skyline above them like steps in a staircase, and that night they watched as the sun settled slowly toward the horizon, following the silhouette of the mountain, perfectly tracing the outline of Roderick Buttes with a corona of fiery gold light—refusing to set, skimming the earth perfectly—and it was impossible to watch its passage without believing that, through the millennia, the sun had cut and etched as if with a laser that outline against the sky: that those humps against the sky were the pattern of the sun's desire.

Finally the sun reached the end of the buttes and now it descended below the earth, and the alpenglow cooled slowly from the high country, though they could still feel the sun's warmth below them.

The lake was still frozen with milky ice. A pair of ducks whistled overhead, flying fast and hard into the gathering stars. The country smelled different up high: sprucier, colder. Mel ran her hands over the smooth white limestone on which they were sitting. She rubbed her finger on the embedded fossils of crinoids and brachiopods. A band of mountain goats, white as cotton, had been standing motionless on the icy ridge above them, and now, as darkness fell, they began walking across a stretch of stony cliff.

“It's lonely up here,” Mel said. “I like it better down along the river. But I wanted you to see this.”

A star melted from the sky; it fell as slowly as a tear. It fizzed, then disappeared. The sun had set so far west as to be almost north. “Can you imagine what Colter's seeing?” Mel said.

Later, with each of them wrapped up in their sleeping bags, Mel said, “It's as if there are all these different layers: like the same world exists beneath this one. It's as if were you to scrape away the crust, you'd find a whole new world just below, but it would be almost just like this one.”

But Wallis was already asleep, dreaming of nothing, hearing nothing—only resting atop a fast-cooling slab of rock, and she was alone, much as she had always been. She was just learning what Colter might take twenty or thirty years to learn—that pure beauty held no company, no companionship.

 

In the morning on the hike out, they veered toward the sky language of ravens and came across a fresh-killed deer, a big doe, with wolf tracks splattering the mud, and bloody wolf prints drying on the stones.

They walked around the edge of the disemboweled carcass, then continued down the mountain, hearing the ravens behind them settle back onto the kill; and they knew that the wolves would be slipping back to the kill also, emerging from hiding. Mel was glad she didn't feel the compulsion, the obsession, to take notes and gather data. To let it all be forgotten.

Closer to home, they stopped and gathered wildflowers for a bouquet to put on the kitchen table.

The ascendancy was already over—it was all downhill now, until December's dark solstice, and yet spring had not even fully occurred in places, or was only just now on the verge of occurring. What power could be achieved by such compression—fitting so much growth into such a small amount of time and space?

 

Unbidden, the villagers began coming to Wallis, asking him to withdraw or withhold his map from Old Dudley: first Artie, then Charlie, and even Joshua, as well as others he did not know. Word had gotten out that he believed deeply in his map; that this map was different, and that it would open up a valuable new world below them: one in which they would share little if any part.

They were hard-pressed to say what precise thing accounted for their change of heart, unless it was the simple brute proximity of the thing: the understanding that whereas the previous explorations had been speculative, cushioned by the possibility of failure, this one was different. Like Wallis, they could feel the certainty of this one, and so one by one they trudged up the trail to his and Mel's cabin, past where Mel was working in the garden—nodding hello and commenting on how lovely the sun felt—but then they would continue to the porch and would tap lightly at the open door, and peer inside to where Wallis would be sitting shirtless at the desk with the map spread before him, windows open and curtains billowing, studying the map so as to memorize every bump and fold below, or rereading Old Dudley's journals, or working up reserve calculations of just how much oil and gas might be recovered, based on all the different variables.

After the second or third visitor, he had come to expect them, and he would push his chair back from the desk when they came, and they would visit quietly, explaining to him what their fears were, and the reasons they had changed their mind: and that they did not necessarily want him to go away, but that neither did they want him to drill, now that they understood—now that they believed with great faith—that he was going to find oil.

Artie came closest to being able to explain it. “It was like a game, before,” he said. “It was kind of fun, watching Old Dudley and Matthew root around for it. But it's not that way, with you,” he said. “It seems too final.”

Many of them had been having dreams about it, they said—dreams of the future, in which their valley was altered savagely, irreparably.

At first Wallis countered with the defense that if he didn't find it, somebody else would. That they could not stop progress. But this explanation held no sway over them. His success, his certainty, had become like a strange creature in the valley—one which they were increasingly realizing did not fit. Wallis didn't know how to answer them, beyond that; he felt betrayed by their changes of heart. He felt alone, stranded, like a dinosaur, continuing to believe in a thing steadfastly, while all around him other things dissolved, altered, shifted.

He and Mel talked about it in the evenings.

“I can feel it too,” Mel said. “How close it is. It scares me, too.”

“You've changed your mind also,” Wallis said, looking out at the lingering dusk. Adrift: as alone as he had been when Susan had died. He had gotten nowhere; had traveled no distance, in all that time.

“Yes,” said Mel, “I guess I have. I'm not going to ask you to turn away—I'm not going to try to change you—but yes, I've changed my mind, too. I don't want you to drill the well.”

 

The World Without a Backbone

Here were banks of polyp corals
—
each little creature planted in his cup and expanding his petal-like tentacles in the life-giving sunlight. Over this slope of animated stone crawled lazy sea snails grazing on the tentacled growths then beginning a work of coral building which the Florida reefs still witness.

The cycles of Cambrian and Silurian time swept on and came to an end. The history of life showed no departure from the fundamental types with which that history was inaugurated. There were new species, new genera, some new families, sometimes a new order or class. The changes were so slow that the world seemed finished for these happy creatures that held possession of it. Yet an occasional visitor from another world would have noted changes. The Cordilleran Land had sunken step by step, and was even now reduced to an archipelago. These lands were the empire of silence and desolation. Populous as were the waters, here was no motion or sound of animated creature. Sparse tree growths fringed
the bleak horizon, but flower and fruit, grass and herb, were yet unknown. The sea, always jealous of the conquests made from his domain, continued to growl around the borders of the land, and pursued industriously the work of reclamation of his ancient slime. The wandering winds finding no fertile isle to fan or sail to waft, confederated with the destroying waves to wreak their anger on the crumbling shores and howled sullenly through the vistas of the sparsely wooded plain.