Authors: Wallace Stegner
In the next one, Buck is smiling broadly, a movie cowboy. He and Nola sit their horses in front of a cross-bedded sandstone cliff on which someone has marked with chalk, for greater visibility, the pecked outlines of petroglyphs—deer with exaggerated antlers, mountain sheep with curled horns. The teeth of brother and sister are white in their dark faces. They sit their horses with the easy weight of sacked grain. Their thighs, pressed against the saddles on the side toward the camera, swell against the cloth, his against tight Levi’s, hers against the
tailored twill of her breeches. Riding breeches are the only kind of pants he ever saw her in. In those years women did not wear pants, even Levi’s, and even on ranches.
Now here are Nola Gordon and Bruce Mason on the top bar of a corral, a picture taken by Buck just before they started back, presumably to Salt Lake. Her eyes are slanted sideward, and she is laughing. Bruce leans back, pretending to be toppling off. His face is the face of one who trusts his life. Both look clean, open, happy, and incredibly young.
Did Nola return these snapshots to remind him of something? Did she regret what she had done to him, or what they had done to each other? If so, her gesture was as futile as a telephone ringing in an empty house. Probably she was simply clearing her life of whatever trash he had left behind. He remembered her carrying that box up Joe Mulder’s steps, wearing the implacable expression that had been on her face when she looked Eddie Forsberg out her door and on his way.
But then why this last picture, Nola barefooted and bare-legged, lifting her skirts high to clear the water of the ditch in which she is wading? To remind him of her body? Or of an occasion and a ceremony and a promise? The light is early, the shadows are flat and long. Above the waist she is wearing only a brassiere, and on her face is a look of laughing dismay that is not dismay at all, but excitement. In this snapshot her face is as vivid as Holly’s.
If it was meant as a reminder, it was the right one. It would have reminded Bruce Mason on that bleak sunstruck day of his father’s funeral, and it reminds him now: morning in Eden. Just after he ambushed her with the camera, he splashed after her and caught her in person, and in the middle of the knee-deep water, in his new exultance of possession, laid his hand on her bare midriff and his mouth on her mouth.
Mason squeezed his eyes shut, easing the strained muscles. It must be one-thirty. Enough of all this. He put the photographs back into their envelope and the envelope and letters back into the box, and set the box down on the floor. The sweater weighed on his feet, and he kicked it off. He turned off the past with the light.
With his eyes open, he watched how the blackness of the room
turned imperceptibly to modulations of gray, itself like a faded photograph—vague bureau, shadowy desk and chair, ghostly doorways leading to bathroom and closet. He could not feel himself in any specific time or place. This was not the Utah Hotel in Salt Lake City at the end of May 1977, but some place that was typical without being defined. He had slept in this bed all over the world. A late car passing in the street might have been passing under the windows of a room in London or Washington or Cairo, Tehran or Beirut or Amman, anywhere along the confused unedited newsreel of his life.
The wheels rolled backward, images flowed and dissolved. He was asleep, but he might as well have been awake, for the pictures were the same, sleeping or waking—little movies in which he was both actor and camera. He took a trip he had taken before, he attended two weddings, one sanctified in shirt-sleeve piety, the other consummated in awe. Dreaming, he continued the pilgrimage that he had begun when he rounded the corner of the Oquirrhs and saw shining against its mountains the city of his youth. Sleeping, he was troubled by the same feelings of nostalgia and loss and rueful wonder that had attended him all day.
That this boy should be himself. That what he had done and felt in his naïveté and egotism and innocence should persist so long and so unchanged. That he should understand it and be cured of it but still contain it. That calf love, like childhood unhappiness and boyhood self-mistrust, like mother love and father hate, like everything else that had got fed into his computer in those impressionable years, should be so helplessly a thing that lasts.
He is flying, not at all surprised at being able to fly, with the Atman guide Khamis ibn Rimthan. His name means Thursday, and he cannot get lost. In his head is a gyroscopic compass. Set him in the middle of an unknown waste and ask the direction and distance of any landmark—anything as far as Mecca or as near as the flint desert called the Abu Bahr, the Father of the Sea—and he will point and tell you, “Till tomorrow evening in your truck,” or “Six hard days by
dhalul.
” He has crossed the Rub‘ al Khali north-south and east-west, he has guided the King
through the red Dhana sands, he has led Aramco’s geologists clear to the plain of Muttia, where the al-Murrah tribesmen drink camel’s milk because all the wells are salt. They say of him that he could bury a rupee in a traveling dune and come back five years later and find it.
It seems that Khamis is taking him to his native region, and that in some confusing way he must have gone this route before, for he recognizes things. The water that spreads to the horizon, rounding its brilliant turquoise into a glittering salt plain, is surely Great Salt Lake. And yet as they swoop over the saltworks toward Saltair, the buildings and the long dikes of salt blur into a cluster of
barastis
on the flats, the domed pavilion dead ahead might be some just-not-quite-recognized mosque, the Saltair causeway becomes an arrowy fish trap projecting into the Persian Gulf, and Arabs are washing ticks off their camels on the flat shore.
Now all that falls behind. They are flying against a stiff wind in a country of cliffs. Their robes flatten against them—like Khamis, he is wearing the
agal
—and he can distinctly hear the edges of the cloth pop and flutter as they speed along. But it cannot be cloth he hears. It is the noise of his old Model A, laboring along a desert track, in immense highlands, up a slope that steepens and steepens toward the vertical. In alarm he looks at Khamis, but Khamis nods and smiles and motions him on. His hands are frozen to the wheel. What was terrifyingly steep is near vertical, past vertical. The earth curls backward like an enormous river wave, the Ford goes on pulling this impossible grade, they curve smoothly up and over in a loop that is never completed. Gravity is in abeyance, panic locks his guts. Are they flying again? No, far under him, or above him, are the trestles of the Saltair roller coaster, and the thunder that he hears is from wheels, and the whistle of air past his ears is remembered from his first ride on this coaster, soon after they arrived in Salt Lake from Montana. Weightless, drunk with space, terrified, he soars up and over, endlessly over, looping the loop, wheeling with the universe.
They they are still. Somehow they have surmounted or escaped it. They stand on a terrific rim in a wind that blows silently out of time, silently but so strongly that they stoop and
cling to avoid being blown off the earth. All around the edges of the world, concentric lines of cliffs rise rim beyond rim. Their colors are red-gold, rust, chocolate, sulphur yellow, coppery blue-green; their profiles are familiar and evasive. The rock they stand on, he sees, is a cameo butte, all that is left at the center of an eroded dome as long and wide and high as a mountain range. He is uneasy, as in a game where he doesn’t know the rules, and he asks Khamis, “Where are we? Circle Cliffs? Tuwaiq Escarpment?”
Instead of answering, Khamis points down. Down there a half mile, a mile, sunk in the sunny stone, glows a tiny green spot, a Memling miniature landscape. He sees it with the eye of an eagle or buzzard, uncannily sharp and precise, clearly lighted: green meadows, buildings and roofs, a double loop of creek, the angular sculpture of corrals, even tiny animals of a remarkable verisimilitude. Recognition and gladness come together. It is the remembered place of his boyhood, the sunken river bottoms of the Whitemud, in Saskatchewan.
He says something to Khamis, and finds that Khamis is slyly smiling. With the changefulness of water flawed by wind, his face alters and softens, his hawk’s beak gentles. He puts up a hand and removes the
ghutra
and reveals under it long red hair in a braid. His smile is complex; he looks at Mason with his mother’s blue eyes. The wind, blowing against him, outlines under his robe the breasts and hips of a woman.
“Ah!” Mason cries in love and relief. “They told me you were dead!”
Displeased, she frowns. The wind presses her robes against her and shows the flatness where her left breast should be. Her brows are dark, level, and severe; her hair is not red, but brown and shining. Her eyes come closer, growing larger until they fill his whole vision. As if he were an insoluble puzzle, they search, probe, question, wonder. They are waveringly steady; the light in them darkens and changes but the insistent gaze is not withdrawn. Softly, in a voice of husky sweetness, she begins to sing. The tune he knows but cannot name. The words he recognizes: “I have kissed thy mouth, Iokanaan, I have kissed thy mouth!”
As smoothly as an elevator they are sinking down. From below, deep in its protected pocket, the Memling landscape rises
toward them, growing swiftly larger, and as it rises it changes through a series of recognitions. The enclosing walls are the bench hills above the valley of the Whitemud, then they are the cliffs behind the ranch house in Castle Valley, and almost at once they rise grandly in the red, white-capped wave of the Capitol Reef. The green core rushing upward burns an ever more intense green. It rushes toward him, or he toward it—safety, illusion, lost Paradise, whatever it is. He is filled with anticipation and dread.
The screen breaks up in shapes of flame. Everything is a red flickering. He is in a movie theater, and in the projection booth the film has caught fire. Aware of the cold, he looks around him and sees that he is alone in the theater.
Groggily he gropes and finds the edge of the blanket and pulls it up. The pillow is wet from his mouth, and he rolls over. Almost admitted, not wanted, the hollow hotel room hums and recedes. The dream, if it is really a dream and not unsleeping memory, comes back as documentary.
Like a curious dog, the camera comes hunting along the welted bank of a ditch. It is in no hurry. Moving close to the ground, it inspects close-to-the-ground details. It dwells on the slow, spinning surface of tea-colored water, it notes the dimpling tracks of skaters in the eddies, and the wakes that V down from rocks and clumps of half-drowned grass. It is not above spending a few seconds on a darning needle that sits on air for a moment and darts away a few feet to sit on other air. It wonders that a jimson weed is able to extract such rich dark foliage and such creamy trumpets of flowers from arid sand. It ruminates without comment on an old boot, curled and mummified, beside the path.
Now it arrives at a pole bridge, and above it a weir and the headworks of a branch ditch. The upper plank of the weir is raised, and water falls in a smooth curve over the lower one. The pool above is solid with watercress. Into the visual dream, stirred by some foot that the camera never discloses, and perceived by a nose for which there is no assignable body, rises the smell of mint.
The camera lifts its glance, and sees that all along the left is a cliff of cross-bedded sandstone, frozen dunes in whose base the wind has eroded caves. Men have improved them by building
corrals around them, trapping for the use of stock shallow areas of shelter. Two corral-caves are open and empty. In a third, a mare stands hipshot above her sprawled sleeping colt. In a fourth, three calves lie chewing the cud. With the same unlocated nose that detected the mint, we know the smell of those caves: horse and cow dung both dry and fresh, the sun-dried reek of urine, dust, some residual odor of sage and juniper. The sun falls straight down; the band of shade in the caves is only eight or ten feet wide. Half buried in the pinkish sand is an Orange Crush bottle.
Poking along the cliff beyond the caves, the camera comes to a place where the face is vertical and stained with desert varnish. In this dark glazed surface primitive men have pecked the outlines of deer and bighorn sheep, which modern hands have reinforced with chalk. Below the chalked petroglyphs is a band of handprints in red ocher. A sun-steeped richness of life pervades these noon corrals, this quiet ditch, this billboard cliff. The fingers (though there are no fingers) feel how tepid-cool the water would be if one stooped to dip a hand in it.
The camera pans along the cliff, up it to its rounding rim, and with a gust as sudden as a wind that blows an umbrella inside out, we are looking high upward, away upward, to the rim of a level, lava-capped, spruce-spiked plateau. From a mile up, it looks down over this fertile desert. The interdependence is obvious without a caption. Up there is snow shed, summer range, a subalpine climate, recreation, coolness, relief. Up there is the source of this ditch that makes the desert live.
Withdrawing, the camera inspects the sod-roofed stable, two long haystacks, and the pole corrals that lie below the main ditch, with the branch ditch flowing past them. Beyond is an alfalfa field, intensely green. Out in the open valley, whitefaces are gleaning a stubble field, perhaps winter wheat, that ends at a barbed-wire fence. On the other side of the fence, a car tows a horizontal funnel of dust along a road, and beyond the road, another line of cliffs holds the valley in on the south. This is not rounded and domed and monolithic like the cliff on the north. It has been eroded into a line of gargoyles and hoodoos, all leaning southward.
The camera reasons that these are remnants of the outer shell
of an enormous dome which wind and water have dissected to its salmon-pink heart, leaving the shell like a broken wall around the wilderness of stone inside. In there, the distance is hazed with transparent blue. It trembles with familiarity. Its cliffs and cameo buttes have been seen only moments ago. The mind gropes for identification, and finds it: The San Rafael Reef, leaning inward toward the waste of the San Rafael Swell. Robbers’ Roost, Butch Cassidy’s country. The camera surveys it with respect, withdraws to the safe ditch bank marked with the tracks of men and horses, and moves on until it is stopped by a fence made of slabs of ripple-marked sandstone set on end.