Where the Sea Used to Be (33 page)

“What's the Bible got to say about all this, Amy?” Artie joked.

Amy, who was knitting, made a little humming sound, shook her head, then said, “Well, it's not good,” and they all laughed.

Colter was practicing with his father's bow. He had set up a stuffed deer—burlap bags stitched and filled with hay—in front of the saloon, and had fastened a set of antlers to the dummy; while the adults visited, he would be out practicing, whether in the afternoon or by moonlight. He had an aptitude for it from the beginning, taking to it as naturally as some children do to a violin or fiddle, and within weeks, his aim was as close to perfect as could be imagined; he had riddled one deer's heart and had had to get Amy to sew him a new one.

He would shoot for hours, coming in only to warm his hands before going back out. He soon tired of hitting a motionless target and took an interest in shooting at moving ones. He would toss things into the air—hats, hubcaps, anything—and shoot at those. He usually missed, and when anyone stepped out of the bar there would often be the risk of arrows whizzing past like bullets—he had no concept of there being a background behind anything he shot at: he saw only the object of his intent—but at this too, his aim improved so quickly that it was clearly not an acquired talent, but instead one of those rarest ones, a thing that had been living within him nearly fully formed since birth, and which only had to be revealed, not created.

 

“What would happen if he came back to the valley to stay?” Wallis asked Mel one evening. “Would things between you two go back to how they were? Would you try to get back to that point?” Wallis had finished his new draft of the maps, another blind vision of how he believed things to be.

Mel considered pretending not to know what he was talking about. “You mean, what would happen to you and me?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Wallis.

“He's not coming back,” Mel said.

“But what if he did?”

“I would be happy to see him,” Mel said, carefully, though unsure, for the first time, if she meant it.

It went beyond fatigue. There was the awful feeling, the one worse than burnout, that she had been on the wrong path all along and was either going to have to find a new one, or just lie down and quit.

She looked at the man across the table from her. With all his wood splitting and water hauling, he was starting to fill out wider, so that more than ever he resembled Matthew. He wasn't, of course—he was as mild and cautious as Matthew was impulsive and erratic—and Mel felt disloyal and confused—not to Matthew, but to herself—for even tolerating, much less liking and being attracted to, such a force, if one could call Wallis a force.

It was like resting. She liked resting with him. She needed rest. But it didn't seem fair to Wallis. If she rested with him, what would happen then, after she had gotten enough and decided to get up and start moving again? It would be as unfair to Wallis, she thought, as what Matthew was doing—had done—to her.

She tried to explain it to Wallis.

“So you have thought about us, a little,” he said finally.

“A little,” Mel said. “More than you, probably.” She pushed her chair back from the table. “I think ahead to spring sometimes—late April, May, June. I imagine lying naked in a field of daffodils, with or without you. I think about black dirt. Pm going to take time to have a garden this year, which is a thing I've never done before. I'm slowing down. Yes, I've been thinking about it,” Mel said. “Probably too much.”

“That's a nice image,” Wallis said.

“What?”

He turned his coffee cup in his hands. “The daffodils.”

“You know Matthew comes back by himself in March, don't you?”

“No,” Wallis said, “I didn't know that.” He studied the fire. “I remember last year he got real blue, said he was depressed and was going to go to a beach somewhere. Said he needed some sunlight.”

“Beach, hell,” Mel said, “unless he means the one twenty thousand feet below. He comes up here and passes out. Helen and I have to tend to him for a week or two. We get him just recovered enough to go back to Old Dudley for one more year, and then one more after that one, and then one more . . . Anyway,” she said, “you'll just go back to him too. I don't know why we're even talking about this.”

Wallis shook his head. “It's different for me,” he said. “I don't feel that allegiance to Dudley. I don't even
like
him.”

Mel got up and began clearing the dishes, exasperated—remembering twenty years ago, when she had first found, and in that same year, first begun losing Matthew.

“That's how it starts out,” she said. “You're too close in—you can't see it. But you'll have to have a thing only he can give you. You'll need him.”

“I could quit,” Wallis said. “I could quit any day—could just draw the maps. I wouldn't have to drill the wells.”

“Bullshit,” said Mel.

She left the dishes in the sink to wash later, or for Wallis to get, and went over to her desk and unrolled her own map. It was so different from his, in that it would never be finished—would never be right or wrong, but ongoing—and she wondered if part of her irritation with him that evening was simple jealousy.

They slept that night like strangers in a boarding house. Wallis wanted to open the windows to let all the tension out. He'd pushed too soon, he thought: wanting to define things.

He tried to remember his office in Houston, the smell and feel of it. The overhead lamp, the drafting table: electric eraser, pencil sharpener, file cabinets, desk, drafting stool. The view of the bayou below, twenty floors down. The way he had been able to stand by the plate glass window on a windy day and feel the building swaying—a terrible, exhilarating sensation of vertigo. Sometimes he would lean against the window to feel it tremble from the winds outside: a quarter-inch of glass separating him from all that was below. Once Old Dudley had come into his office and had seen him standing at the window like that, arms outstretched, and had smiled, not knowing whether to be pleased or worried, but all he'd said was, “Don't jump.”

 

Mel dreamed that night of silt and mud—of brown swamps, heavy sediment moving in suspension. Water the color of chocolate milk baking sluggish in the sun—water moving so slowly that no direction of current could be discerned. Water acting lost, searching for a way out—a passage to continue toward the place it had long ago set out after, and still desired.

She tangled in her elk hides and perspired until her whole upper body was drenched with sweat, but still she did not awaken, only tossed and moaned; and in the next room, Wallis heard her, was kept awake by her, felt the air in the little cabin filling with her anguish—a thing like craziness—until finally he rose and threw open the window in his room.

He stood at the window and breathed deeply the scent of fir and pine, listened to the stillness. He stood there for a long time, until his own heart calmed, and he felt the bad air in the cabin flowing out the open window and being dispersed and broken apart by the forest and the beauty of silence. His heart calmed still further, and the sounds of Mel's moans quieted, then stopped, and after that, the cabin felt more like how it had earlier been. He imagined a single cut yellow flower.

 

The snow came down through the days and nights as if spilling uncontrolled from some wound in the sky, and further into the winter, various old buildings began collapsing beneath the weight of it. The snows were far beyond anything known or measured in the few decades that whites had lived in the valley, and every night people went to bed with the snow still falling, sometimes as much as an inch or two an hour, and wondered if their cabin would be the next to go. No residences had been crushed yet—just barns and outbuildings—but the snows kept coming, stacking and then compressing to become slabs of blue ice, dense as stone.

There was good work for Colter, and a few others, in the shoveling of roofs—though by February it had come to seem like a ceaseless work, with the shovelers spending more time on the roofs than on the ground, so that it was as if they were occupying some slightly elevated level beyond the town's strata. If people couldn't afford to pay, they bartered—meat, canned vegetables, antlers, hides, pelts, firewood—or traded services. It didn't really matter, in the end, who was holding the money at the end of the day; the same two or three hundred dollars would keep making the rounds, passing from hand to hand and becoming as thin and tattered as old brown leaves, until they were finally indistinguishable, worthless . . . The snow kept coming down, faster than anyone's ability to remove it, until most gave up and went inside, resigned to wait for spring, dependent now only upon mercy.

It looked increasingly as if the town had been bombed; so many buildings were crushed flat with nothing remaining but an erratic jumble of logs poking up out of the snow.

Wallis helped shovel, and in the evenings he would lie on his back in front of the fire and groan like a dog. He was becoming wider and even more muscular from all the labor, but the birthing pains of it were intense. He would roll over on his stomach and let Mel knead his back with her elbows and knees, trying to buffer the buildup of acid, and to keep the muscles from cramping and torquing, tugging at him in different places and intensities in such a way as to corkscrew him prematurely into some gnarled, bent-over crippled old thing. He imagined a hide stretched out on a rack to dry evenly. The heat from the fire, and the points of her elbows, quelled the rebellion in his muscles.

He would bathe, then crawl off to bed and sleep for twelve, sometimes fourteen hours. More than anything he wanted one day off. Just one day.

Mel made sure he kept eating, though he was too tired to have much of an appetite. She fed him the four basics: moose, deer, elk, grouse. He kept growing, and in his sleep, as his muscles swelled, it seemed that he would grow too large to fit in the cabin. Matthew's clothes fit Wallis perfectly now. And though he knew it was a dangerous and narrow path—slipping so easily into the groove cut by another—he would sometimes smell the old rock dust on Matthew's coats and shirts, from where Matthew had been working on the rock wall—wearing long sleeves and overalls even in summer to keep from tearing up his arms on the rough edges—and Wallis would feel the urge to use his new muscles, the great power and leverage of them. He would find himself craving to work on the wall himself—to haul and position and stack the dense blocks in their simple but unifying pattern—two on one, one on two. He found himself anxious for spring, so that maybe he could add to the rock wall.

His map was finished, or so he thought; he kept it rolled up, waiting for the master, and continued to read the master's notebooks.

“When was the last time you saw the wolves?” he asked Mel one night as they lay by the fire.

She had to look in her journal. She thumbed through it for a long time. “Two years ago last June,” she said.

“What would you do if you didn't follow the wolves?” he asked.

“I don't follow them,” she said. “I move away from them.”

“What would you do?” he asked.

“What would you do, if you didn't map?”

“I can't imagine a damn thing,” Wallis said. “I'd be lost.”

“So he's got you,” Mel said. “You're trapped.”

“Except that I don't mind it.”

“I snowshoed a long way today,” Mel said. “Will you work on my back?”

He was surprised at the strength of it. It felt stronger than his. He tried to separate the muscles with his hands, with his thumbs, but couldn't. He leaned in with his elbows, but could find no yield.

“Try and relax,” he said.

“I am relaxed,” Mel said, then added, “That's okay. It feels good. You're warm. Just lie there, please.”

He stretched out over her back, her skin warmed by the fire. He wondered if he smelled to her like Matthew, in Matthew's clothes, or like himself: or what, if any, difference there was.

After the fire burned out, and she was asleep, Wallis lifted himself from her back and lay down next to her and pulled a hide over them. She woke up once in the night and smiled at him, then went back to sleep.

 

They went out to backtrack the wolves together one day. He couldn't remember if it had been his idea, wanting to see how she spent her days, or if it had been her idea; wanting to show him.

They packed as if for a picnic. It had snowed several inches the night before, so that soon Wallis would have to get back to shoveling—it was time for him once more to shovel Helen's mercantile—but Mel said the wolves had been hunting not far from town, and that though they might not find any tracks in the new snow, it was also possible they would find some fresh ones. The wolves hadn't eaten in three days, she said, but she had seen long lines of ravens heading toward the river, and believed that the wolves were hunting again and would kill something soon.

They packed apples, oranges, boiled eggs, and venison sandwiches on thick bread. It seemed strange to Wallis that they were packing venison sandwiches in order to give them the fuel, the strength, to snowshoe into the woods to find where the wolves themselves had also killed and eaten a deer: as if the deer were a shared currency between two countries, or even a common language.

As ever, she skied too fast for him, so that often she had to stop and wait, though when going up steep hills, he would gain an advantage, so that it was she who had to work to stay up with him. She pointed out things for him to see—explained to him things it had taken her twenty years to learn, and which she was impatient for him to know.

Her mind that day was on snags, and diversity: on the different species of dead trees in a forest, and the different heights and ages and angles of them. Were they standing upright, were they leaning over at a forty-five degree angle, or were they parallel to the ground? Were they newly dead, not yet hollowed out and being used by woodpeckers, salamanders, beetles, martens, fishers, owls, brown creepers, and thrushes—or were they already rotting, being grubbed and gnawed by bears and giving sweet relief to the soil, and to the seething invertebrates that needed them?