Where the Sea Used to Be (14 page)

He traveled to town, tense at first, but loosening as the snow kept coming down. He said Susan's name out loud once and felt better for it. He watched the dark spruce woods all around him receiving their snow, and yet in the same moment he recalled sitting with Susan on the porch in the hill country in the yellow summer twilight, watching bats flitter over the thin-trickling creek and feeling the reflected heat of the pink-polished granite boulders all around them finally beginning to cool slightly—and it was strange, like having some kind of double vision, or a mild schizophrenia, to be carrying two such disparate images at once within him: reality, and yet, just as strongly, the echo of reality.

The snow was so soft and deep that even on his skis he sank into it up past his ankles. It was mesmerizing to watch it pile up around him like surf as he plowed through it, encountering no more resistance than as if in a dream.

Out on the main road, which was a tunnel of untouched white beneath the giant trees—a road to nowhere, he thought—he turned toward town as if it were his home.

Along the way he passed deer standing beneath the great tamaracks, feeding on the mosses still attached to fallen branches. Wallis stopped and watched for a while, resting—hot as a firebrick amid that falling snow—and as he watched, he saw how the heavy snow accumulated on the moss-covered branches, causing them to snap; and while he stood there, several branches broke free from high up and came floating slowly down—falling not much faster than the curtain of snow. The branches' descents were buoyed by the long airy trellises and streamers of the black moss, and though the branches fell soundlessly, the deer would look up and wait for them, would watch them fall, and then would converge wherever the branch landed and begin pawing at it, tearing and chewing. From time to time they would look up with long black beards hanging from their mouths, so that it looked as if they were wearing costume mustaches: a comedy made more poignant by the fact that they were standing belly-deep in snow and soon on their way to starving to death.

The bucks still had their heavy antlers—antlers that were easily twice the size of any Wallis had seen before—though when one group of them turned and ran, made uneasy by his staring, a buck's antler fell off, tumbled from his head like a man having his hat knocked off, and Wallis knew all the antlers would be falling off in the next several days, like brown leaves in the autumn, or like the mossy branches that were falling and drifting down from the trees.

Wallis watched as the bucks floundered, thrashing through powder, stumbling and lunging—up past their shoulders in show sometimes. Seen from a distance, they appeared like swimmers navigating a turbulent ocean, though the waves were frozen, and it was only the deer that were moving, not the waves.

 

In town, Wallis was greeted like a long-lost resident—like some hermit who had not been seen in years—and the afternoon's gathering at the bar fell upon him with great hunger and friendliness. He saw Danny, and black-bearded Charlie, and Artie, the bartender; but there were others, too, their faces as unfamiliar to him as the words of a foreign language, and Wallis felt awkward, not just as if unknowledge-able about the local customs of this place, but worse: as if he were incapable, and even undesirous, of learning. As if he had been asleep for twenty years.

“You look a little shaggier than when you got here,” Danny said, grinning, and Artie handed him a bourbon, which was the color of dark honey. Wallis wondered what would happen if the bar ran out of whiskey: if there was, one year, not enough to make it through the winter.

“What've you been up to?” Artie asked. “Is Mel teaching you anything?”

Wallis smiled and said, “She hasn't wanted to have much to do with me lately,” and Danny and Artie laughed, seeming relieved.

“Finding any oil?” Charlie asked.

Wallis grimaced, shrugged. “How?” he asked, waving out at the dim blue portals of window light. The whiskey was hot. He felt as if he had traveled farther than seven miles.

The men laughed. “Welcome to the winter, buddy,” Danny said, clapping a hand on his shoulder. “Welcome to the winter.”

A woman and her child sat at one of the tables, the woman drinking beer steadily from a mug, and the child, a boy, staring off at some distant but intriguing nothingness. The boy looked to be about twelve or thirteen; the woman, a few years on either side of forty, though not in any way that reminded Wallis of Mel. This woman looked if not used up, then close to it. She looked cautious; as if, in addition to having all of her chores set out before her, she knew also precisely how much energy she had remaining to accomplish those tasks, and that the tasks and the energy required were rarely to either the debit or excess of one another; that she had to be prudent and frugal, even cunning, to get things done each day and still be upright, come day's end.

It was not at all the way Mel did things, Wallis thought. She planned nothing, calculated nothing, gave nothing her forbearance. She simply pinned her ears back and went.

Now Wallis saw that the woman was older: forty-five, perhaps. He knew he had no basis for such imagining, but it seemed to him that she had run out of steam only recently. Even watching her, he could feel his own energy draining.

“That's Amy,” Danny said, “and her boy, Colter. Her husband, Zeke, died last spring. He went through the ice,” Danny said. “He was a trapper. You can still see him down there,” he said, and at first Wallis thought Danny meant you could see Zeke's likeness in the face of the boy. “He's only about twenty feet down,” Danny said, speaking quietly beneath the noise of the bar. “The water is as clear as gin, cold as hell. Everything's still the same on him, same as it was the day he went in. He's got his arms raised up like this”—Danny demonstrated, as if signaling a touchdown—“and his hair is still waving in the current, black as his over there”—he pointed to Colter—“only longer. It kept growing after he died.”

Artie got up and brought more drinks for the two men. It was amazing, Wallis thought, sipping his second, how one drink, one fire in the stove, one story, could keep the whole awful weight of winter at bay. He felt badly for not having come down to the bar earlier: a hermit, even in a valley of hermits; an island, even among islands.

“He should have known better,” Danny said. “He should have crossed on thicker ice, or farther upstream, where there wasn't any ice, but where he could have waded. It must have been late, right at dark. He must have been in a hurry to get home to his family. His traps must have weighed him down.”

“We guess he's still down there,” Artie said. “Least he was a couple of weeks ago, before the river started to freeze up. We won't know til spring, now. But he was still there, last we saw of him.”

“Why didn't they pull him out and bury him in the ground?” Wallis asked.

Artie shrugged. He had a loud, clear voice, as if unaware of its timbre. “Said she liked to still be able to see him now and again. Said she didn't want her or the boy to forget what he looked like.”

“They've built a kind of a cairn down there,” Danny said. “They've put it at the edge of the river, with stones and skulls and antlers and feathers and things—but there's one in the river, too. They toss in rocks and antlers to pile up next to him. His old traps. Stuff like that. A lot of time the river sweeps those things away, but he's still there. Or was. Got his boot tangled in the crotch of a sunken cottonwood limb.”

“You can see the white marks on the bark, where he tried to cut free with his knife,” Artie said.

“He ran out of time,” Danny said.

They went over to sit with Amy and Colter, and to introduce Wallis. Amy was not drunk, nor was she drinking as if in sorrow; but nonetheless, she was putting the beer away, despite not being very large. Artie went to get her another pitcher, and Wallis saw that it was more like a meal for her than grieving. She wanted to be around people, and that was what one did in a bar: drank.

He saw too that the boy, Colter, had some interior shine—saw it perhaps the way Old Dudley had seen it in Wallis. Wallis and Colter stared at each other for a moment after being introduced, and Wallis saw the hunger in Colter's eyes then, saw the boy's loneliness at being trapped, stranded, unable to get to his father.

“You're living with Mel,” Amy said.

“I'm staying in her cabin,” Wallis said.

“Did you used to go to a church, down in Texas?” Amy asked. She had a small, quiet, kind voice, and Wallis had trouble picturing her as a trapper's wife; though he was not sure, either, what he would have imagined.

Wallis thought for a moment. “My parents did,” he said, “a long time ago. But they died—Mom first, and then my father. He stopped going when I was still young.”

Wallis paused, perilously close to the old debris of story that was of no use to him anymore: moving in with Susan and her old grandfather. A new love, a new life back then—like climbing up out of some horrible pit.

“Amy used to want to get a church going up here,” Danny explained.

“Were you a missionary?” Wallis asked.

“No,” Amy said, twisting her beer mug. “I just wanted a church.”

“It didn't work out,” Artie said. “No one would come. Everyone was always out hunting, or cutting wood, or gardening, or something.”

“Do you mind my asking,” Wallis said, “what—”

“I tan hides,” Amy said. “The hides Mel uses for her maps.” She looked under the table, nodded at the moccasins Danny was wearing, and at some of the jackets hanging on hooks by the door. “Those shoes, those shirts—when people kill a deer or elk, I tan and sew the hides for them.” Her voice, despite the beer, was clear and calm. As if it were she who was passing across ice of unknown or suspect thickness. “He looks for antlers,” she said, nodding to Colter. “We box them up and ship them to stores. We get by,” she said, “just as good as we did when he was still living.”

“You're a tailor,” Wallis said.

“Yes,” Amy said, after thinking for a moment, “that's a nice word. I hadn't thought of it that way.”

A third bourbon for Wallis. The winter fell back further. He saw Helen come in, heard the rouse and chorus of greetings.

“I used to be in the choir, in Pennsylvania,” Amy was saying. “We sang on Sundays. We practiced three times a week.”

“You can't bring that with you,” Artie counseled. “You can't bring anything with you. Everything's new, up here. You've go to start all over.”

Amy nodded. Wallis felt winter creep in a few feet closer in the silence.

Another bourbon. “How long have you been up here?” Wallis asked.

“Twenty-five years,” Amy said. “Sometimes it seems like yesterday; other days, like another lifetime.” She reached over and touched her son's face. “I'm glad he's getting a chance to grow up here,” she said. “He's everything,” she said, “everything, now.”

Charlie was cooking more venison on the stove: they could smell it. A strange somber blue wave seemed to have passed through the bar while Amy had been speaking, and for a little while the bar was hushed, as if waiting for the wave to pass over; but now with the scent of venison people's spirits surged again, and they began wandering over to the stove to pick tidbits from the iron skillet, the meat disappearing quickly in this manner, all mouths chewing, and when Wallis asked Danny how much of his deer was left, Danny said that was almost the last of it.

Wallis took a drink over to the wall of photos and looked at them again, in closer detail. The photos were mostly of Matthew-this and Matthew-that—Matthew around seventeen or eighteen, he guessed, holding a giant sturgeon from the river, the fish longer than Matthew was tall; and an even younger picture—sixteen?—holding up three enormous swans—and another of Matthew younger yet: thirteen or fourteen, working on that rock wall, wrestling squarish ice-cracked boulders into place like a prisoner on work detail.

Wallis studied these pictures briefly, then moved on to others: dusty, grainy photos of the whole valley carrying stones up and down the road, and of men shirtless in overalls with straw hats to block the sun, busting boulders with chisel and sledge to make them fit just right.

A photo of the bar itself, looking no different then than now. In that photo, a recently killed bull elk hung from the porch rafters, and snow was falling. The men had mustaches, and though it was a black and white photo, they appeared to have that tone or color of hazel eyes that is rarely seen anymore. Someone's dog—thirty years gone, now—sat young and proud, staring expectantly at the camera.

And where were the photos of the photographer, Wallis wondered—of Matthew's father? There were none. You would have to look at Matthew to catch a glimpse of him, in certain lights and at certain times. That was all that was left. Wallis thought back to his own father—liver cirrhosis when Wallis was fourteen—and to his mother, whose heart stopped, stopping like a clock that one day does not get wound, when he was eight—a child's memories of her, instead of a man's—and Wallis wondered how he would have been different if he'd grown up in this part of the world.

Wallis wondered if he would have participated just as deeply in the seasonal hunting and gathering—the killing, the taking—as well as in the fragmenting of stone. The men (and there were some women in the photos; women hauling stones, women pushing wheelbarrows full of stones) seeming—in those photographs, at least—to possess a peace and steadiness, which, like those strange hazel eyes, was not seen much anymore.

How much of a man, or a woman, was shaped by his blood, and how much by a place: the blood forming the infant but then the land beginning its own carving at child's birth?

And how much do we carve at and upon each other? Certainly Old Dudley had, in only twenty years, very nearly finished what could almost be considered a clone of his awful self, from the raw material of Matthew: seizing upon the similarities and chiseling away all differences . . .