Where the Sea Used to Be (31 page)

“You drink now,” Wallis noted—as if Artie were perhaps not aware of it—and Artie smiled.

“Yeah, I drink a
lot.
But I drink because I'm happy,” he said. “Not because I'm sad or angry, or because I have to. I could quit at any time.”

There was a silence after that, in which they could all hear the ragged chorus of snores, dog and human, coming from near the stove. The fire shifted, collapsed on itself within, then flamed anew, nourished by the stir of oxygen.

“I didn't know you had any children,” Mel said.

“It was a long time ago,” Artie said. “I haven't seen them since last I heard they were living in Kansas. Their mama moved back to Georgia to be with her folks. Shit, I guess she's getting pretty close to being an old woman now. Her old mama and daddy might not even be alive anymore.”

“How old are your children?” Mel asked.

Artie looked up at the ceiling and tried to do the math. “Twenty-five? No, close to thirty, I guess. Still kids, anyway,” he said.

“What about you, Charlie?” Wallis asked. The big man had been sitting quietly, his pale, hammy arms crossed over his chest, listening.

He shrugged. “It was different for me,” he said. “I just came. But it was like Artie says: the minute I saw the valley, I felt something different. It was like something stopped inside me and got real still.” And that was all he had to say on it.

Party favors—tinsel hats, noisemakers, confetti—lay scattered on the floor. Mel had had her one beer early in the evening, but then had allowed herself a glass of champagne, which rested before her half-full, though void of fizz.

Amy had been knitting all evening—sitting quietly during the music and dancing, knitting ceaselessly on a baby blanket, though no babies were known to be expected or imminent—but now she said to Mel, “He says that he is going to join the church—that he wants to join my church.”

At first Mel did not know who Amy was talking about—she thought perhaps she meant Charlie—but then she understood.

“Oh, Amy,” she said, “I don't think so.” She almost reached out to pat Amy's hand. “Sometimes he just says things like that. Mother wanted him to go to church when I was growing up, and he never would. He—” Mel paused. “I don't think I'd count on it.”

Amy picked up her knitting again. “I'm going to hold him to it,” she said calmly.

“What lies to the north?” Colter asked Mel. He had fallen asleep during the adults' discussions, but was awake now. He asked it like a riddle. “What's over the mountains?” he asked her. “How far north and west would you have to go to see salmon again?”

Mel considered this, much as Artie had tried to recall the ages of his children. “Several hundred miles,” she said. “Five, maybe six hundred. Are you thinking of taking a trip?”

“I want to see salmon,” Colter said. “They were here when my father was my age. I'd like to see them.”

Time versus distance, Mel thought. Did thirty years equal five hundred miles?

“Swans, too,” Colter said. “The tundra swans. I want to see them.”

She started to tell him he should be grateful for what was still here—the wolves and grizzlies, eagles and wolverines. The caribou and owls.

“I know it's nice here,” Colter said, “but it's too tame. I want to see a place that's like what this place was like when my father was my age.”

“It hasn't changed much,” Helen said. “It's probably changed less than any other place in the States.”

“The swans and salmon are gone,” Colter said.

Helen shrugged. “They're not everything.”

“I want to see them,” Colter said. “I want to see what kind of country they live in.”

“You'd have to go north and west to catch up with them now,” Mel said. “Way on up into Canada, and almost to the ocean—to the Pacific.”

“Do you think I could do it on foot?” Colter asked.

“Yes,” said Mel, after some hesitation, and a glance at Amy, who kept knitting.

“The Lord be with you,” Amy said.

“That's my goal,” Colter said.

Wallis thought of a glacier, receding—warming, shrinking, leaving polished piles of rubble at its ever-diminishing perimeters. He imagined Colter clambering over those boulder fields: down into one valley, up and over the mountains, then down into the next, and so on—traveling across them as if crossing sluggish waves at sea.

“When?” Wallis asked.

“This year,” Colter said. “As soon as the snow's gone.”

“Will you come back?” Mel asked. Another glance at Amy.

“Well, sure,” said Colter. “I mean, I think so.”

Amy kept knitting: didn't miss a stitch. “Zeke was that way,” she said, and seemed comforted by this statement.

It was two in the morning. Snow was falling again. Helen, fatigued by the hour, had a strange, momentary impulse of recognition that this was a conversation like one from long ago—when Matthew was a little boy—but when she looked around the room, she saw that none of the principals from that time were present, and so it could not have been.

She kept waiting for someone to ask how she had arrived here, but knew that the question would not be forthcoming. Everyone understood that she had been born here—had had no choice in the matter; and that night she had the curious loneliness known only to those who fall in love with their invaders, or who find that their culture has been sanded down and assimilated by a thing, which, if no longer bold and unique and fitted to a place, is at least more comfortable and ultimately familiar.

Colter made plans to go out antler hunting with Wallis again the next afternoon. Everyone rose and said their good nights, wished each other a happy new year. Danny was asleep on the counter, laid out like a corpse. Artie placed a blanket over him, but saw no need to lift him down from the counter.

They each went their separate ways then, skiing deeper into the falling snow. To Wallis it seemed that he was already descending, even by standing still.

As ever, they bathed to rid themselves of the scent of the bar: the beer, and Helen's cigarettes, and the human company. They told each other good night and went to their separate rooms, as if to caves beneath the snow.

 

They were going through the supplies three times as fast as planned, for Wallis ate twice as much as she did. It was hard to judge whether the meat would hold out, but there was a lot of it. Of the firewood, there was less bounty, and he was burning it all day long, while Mel was out in the woods, and then all night as they slept. It was all Matthew's, and Wallis consumed it without a shred of guilt. It was fuel for his dream, fuel for the imagination of his map which surely this time would rotate into place like lock and key. He wore Matthew's baggy clothes, like the husks of a man who was no longer living. As Wallis dived deeper into his maps, he grew bolder and more confident. It was like feeding a monster. Whatever the cost, it would be worth it.

Emboldened in appetite, he ate more, and burned more wood, raised the temperature of the cabin five degrees above its usual chill. The scar of the absence of Susan lingered, but even that was hardening beneath his new life. It all seemed to be fuel for this one map, and he hadn't yet seen a single inch of the valley beneath its blankets of snow: but by now he understood that he did not have to.

He descended, as ecstatic as an opium diver. He grew even fonder of his and Mel's lazy time together in the evenings.

They would eat supper together—the grain of wild meat from the forest entering their bodies as they ate in silence. By now Wallis knew the story of how each of the animals had been taken, as they ate on it. Then they would visit for a little while—fifteen, twenty, sometimes even thirty minutes—talking about their childhoods usually, but then, once the bonds of intimacy strengthened, venturing further, moving closer to the present by talking about their lives as adults: moving perilously close to the present.

Mel was always the one who would break it off. She would rise to go work on her map—to enter in that day's data, scoring still deeper her understanding of what was the wolves' central territory at different times of the year. And willingly, Wallis would take a cup of tea into the middle room and work on his own map.

He continued to work in ecstasy. Sometimes it would occur to him that they were somehow working together: she, in the next room, contouring the same movements and flows of patterns of the wolves through the years on a horizontal plane, while he, with far less precision, more recklessness, mapped vertical cross sections, all imagined, but also based on the repetition of patterns—one initial contour influencing forever all those contours that would follow—and, as they worked, there would be a density of silence in the cabin that made it seem to him as if they were creating something almost tangible, like two weavers on a loom; and later into the night, nearing fatigue, he would imagine that there might be no difference—that they were drawing the same lines, and that his hand was hers.

 

He would work all morning, not daring to believe that what he was envisioning was anything less than accurate this time. Then he would read Dudley's old journals in the early afternoon, and would split and haul wood from the woodshed up to the front porch. After that, he would go by the school yard to wait for Colter, and then the two of them would go into the woods looking for antlers.

One evening their searching took them over one of the ridges south of town—following one of Matthew's old antler paths, with the racks occasionally visible up in the snowy forks of trees—and, as they often did, they stayed out until dusk. “Come on,” Colter said, “I'll show you something.”

Wallis could smell wood smoke. They descended the ridge, passing by immense larch trees in the blue snowlight. The antlers rattled on their backs. Wallis saw at the bottom of the ridge a small unlit cabin—though smoke curled from the chimney—and behind the cabin, next to the river, a large barn, well lit by yellow lanterns. A canoe rested by the shore, tethered to a tree limb. There was no road. A huge black horse stood motionless beneath one of the old larch trees, waiting for spring.

“This is a guy you've probably never met before,” Colter whispered. “He builds coffins.”

Now they could hear, over the murmur of the river, the quiet, steady sounds of the sawing, and then, after a silence, hammering. More silence, and then a sound like sanding. They stepped in closer to peer through the window. The horse observed them but remained still.

There were fantastic, brightly painted, animal-shaped coffins stacked on sawhorses throughout the barn. The man, who was working in a heavy coat but bare-handed, had moved over to the little pot-bellied stove in the barn's center to warm himself: he stood draped over it like a vulture spreading its wings to dry in the morning sun, but could not seem to get warm; he shivered, and his breath came in white bursts, as if he were talking to himself.

There was a stack of wood by his feet, and he loaded more into the stove, then crouched before it, holding his hands almost directly in the dancing flames. The snow on the barn's roof was melting due to the escaping heat, dripping like spring rain. A cake of ice lost its clutch on the barn's roof and slid like a raft out over the edge and crashed to the ground in thousands of small explosions, and the horse, whom the slabs had narrowly missed, tried to dance away, but it was hobbled with chains and could only make short lunging hops. The sound of the prisoner's chains rattling had an oddly musical quality to it.

Wallis turned his attention to the coffins. He saw now that some hung suspended by heavy ropes in the loft, in the likeness of giant birds—golden eagles, bald eagles, and ravens, all with wings outstretched—and that their colors gleamed lifelike above the glow of the lanterns.

Down below were coffins both painted and unpainted, some rough and others sanded. Loose boards lay everywhere—Wallis could smell the delicious odor of fresh-worked wood—and there were fuselages, wings, and all manners of huge carved and painted pieces—the ears of bears, the feet of wolves, the beaks of herons—waiting to be assembled onto various boxes, though neither Wallis nor Colter could imagine how the builder kept each part straight in his mind.

“Come on in,” Colter said. “Let's go see him and warm up. He's okay. He's a nice guy. He doesn't like to come into town, but he's nice. Sometimes I give him antlers to put on his coffins.”

They rapped at the window, then went around to the door. The man—Joshua—let them in without a word, as if he had been awaiting their arrival.

The floor was heel-deep in sawdust and the bright yellow curlings of shavings. Joshua gathered up a handful and tossed them in the open door of the stove: they bloomed into fierce light and brief heat, and for a moment they felt the pleasure of that warmth. “Come on,” Joshua said, “it's too cold to work anymore. Let's go inside.”

He put on another coat, a ski hat, and gloves, then went out, unhobbled the horse, and led the horse into the barn. The horse, a stallion, was muscular, black as obsidian, and accepted the barn's warmth with relief—he nickered with gratitude. The horse moved next to the stove and stood near it. His hooves shone bright as the ice around them melted. There were coffins in the forms of elk and moose, as well as bear, and the horse stood among them looking like one of Joshua's creations, who, having come to life, was now unwilling to leave the shop.

“It's a lot warmer with him in here,” Joshua said, petting the horse, “but I can't work with him watching over my shoulder.”

He carried the lantern out with him and shut the barn door, sealing the horse behind into blackness, save for the pinprickings of stars through the windows, the dull orange glow of the stove's steel, and the tiny whispers of light creaking and flickering through the stove's door seams.