Where the Sea Used to Be (44 page)

The northern lights swam silently above, rolling in sheets and waves across the sky—pulses of electric green and blood light reflected in the ice.

 

More wolves were now only days away from being born. Mel wondered how she would be able to resist going back into the woods to track the weave of their stories. She might just as well take her data from all the years previous and toss it over a cliff.

During the thirty minutes she taught each day, she sometimes took the students outside, and they went down to the river and listened to the faint crackings, and placed their hands on the thinning ice. They felt the tremblings of the river beneath.

With binoculars, they identified the birds coming into the valley now—the birds following the edges of the river, and filtering through the woods—crossbills, nuthatches, thrushes, kinglets—and she placed blindfolds over the students and taught them to identify birds by their music—taught sound as a kind of sight.

The ice continued to change colors. She cautioned them to stay off of it, and to keep their families off of it, no matter how badly they needed firewood.

They walked around the melting puddles and caught frogs and salamanders. They stood in the sunlight and examined them, learned their names and habits. Belle and Ann found that the students' increased knowledge of how things worked in their valley gave the students an increased confidence in the world, and a hunger, and that for the rest of the day they were better able to learn other lessons.

The geese kept arriving—noisy as trains, and in numbers so great that it gave the impression that all the land to the south was just as wild as the valley itself. As if the geese were sewing together places of similarity.

The children wanted to know when Matthew would awaken. They had never known him as anything other than someone their parents told stories about. They welcomed him each spring not as a native but as an odd visitor. They could see that Wallis was sweet on Mel now—many mornings he accompanied her to school and kissed her lightly before she went in the building—and they were not bothered by this shift in allegiance, not having the history against which to measure such a change in loyalty. They viewed it as no more spectacular or unusual than any other seasonal passing.

In the swamps and ponds the ice thinned and grew transparent. The sunlight passed through those opaque layers and became trapped beneath the ice, as if in a greenhouse, warming the waters so that in the muck and mire things were beginning to grow, and yet without oxygen, so that fetid, powerful gases strained against those ice caps; and whenever and wherever the sun's warmth could pierce a small hole in the ice, those gases would vent, sour and sulfuric—odors so dense it seemed they possessed colors—greens and golds, like the songbirds that would soon be returning from South America—and no one minded the powerful odors, but felt instead invigorated by them. The waters in the ponds and lakes and swamps began to turn over, recycling their layers of nutrients—bottom layers of water rising heat-stirred to the top, and upper ice-cooled layers sinking—and it was possible, in that growing sunlight, to believe that one could be similarly strengthened, just from breathing that air.

“This is water howellia,” Mel said, holding a plant in her hands in the classroom—five minutes of her time left, before she had to lapse into silence. “It's not found anywhere else in the world. This valley created it.” A glance at the clock. “Here's a sedge,” she said, pulling another specimen from her bag. “This is what the grizzlies graze on in the spring to help purge their systems after the long winter's sleep. It helps clean out the toxins,” she said.

“There are about twenty-five or thirty grizzlies living in this valley. Five wolves, though in a week, we might have ten or twelve. Maybe thirty or forty people,” she said. “If we lost the wolves and grizzlies, this valley won't be worth a damn. Excuse my language.”

“Lost them?” the students wanted to know. “How?”

The slowing days attenuated. The new light stirred the sludge in their blood. Colter chewing on a piece of sedge, sitting in the back of the classroom: pretending to listen, but the words not linking up and connecting in his mind. Adrift; one part of him drawn farther north, like needle and thread, while only a part of him remained anchored.

 

The Cemeteries of the Bad Lands

In Another Life, I Would Have Had No Love

The wait for the Malachite Woman is interminable. I sit on the hill above the Home with my back to the fence for as long as they will allow me. My ankles are hobbled with iron shackles, as are my wrists. Even the once simple act of sketching in a notebook has now altered itself into a disagreeable task, so that the radial and brachial muscles of my arms and shoulders are swollen with muscle, as if I have been shoeing horses, rather than making these notes and guiding the reader through lands known only to me. From the ankle hobbles runs a span of chain a hundred feet long, welded to a stake driven deep into the caprock, around which my perambulations carry me like a badger defending his den; but of an evening, when day's work is done, I am content to sit on the hill and stare across the veld and forest-leafing below, to the Home for Girls, and contemplate the Malachite Woman, whom I know more surely than anything is there. I have never seen any of the girls from the Home—occasionally, after dusk, I can catch fragments of their songs,
and know again for certain that the Malachite Woman moves among them, as a deer moves among trees in the forest. Her movements and manners are inscribed perfectly in my mind, bounded and circumscribed by the places where I have
not
seen her.

I am too late in the hole, too firm in the trap; even were I to confess Old Pap as the sole participant, they would not let me out of here until my time is up, and would surely execute him.

Fireflies, like luminous spirits from the century before, at peace and immersed in beauty, prowl the riverbottom across the way, blinking serenely as if looking with lanterns for some lost something. The more desirable the Malachite Woman becomes to me
—
the more firmly I know and understand her—the more aware she becomes of my presence, and she disappears. Sometimes I fear she will vanish for two or three hundred years, such is the force of my desire: that though she would find me pleasing in every way, there is some rule of this upper universe not yet understood by me, which would require her to dissipate as if tatters of fog before the sun's rays, were I to draw too near her, with too much force.

Restraint is my only hope, and I have none.

I hold in my hand before me a pale stone gleaned from beneath another stone, here—tapped free of its chalky tomb with blows from my hammer (at the ringing sound of which, I am certain, the Malachite Woman turned her head and listened for some time, knowing it was me—me whom she has never seen)—imbedded in which lies the skeleton of no fish ever viewed alive by man, or even by the likes of man. It is like a useless puzzle piece, one which many would discard, not understanding that whatever story can be pieced together for it must also be applicable for us.

As the Malachite Woman stands there listening to the ringing of the hammer, not quite understanding what about the sound draws her interest, sparks emitted from the friction of steel against stone ignite briefly and tumble to the barren ground like melted or fallen fireflies. In breaking the rock open to discover the fossil trapped within, I smell the dust from civilizations that presided over life's beginnings. This fish, not man—not you or I
—
presided at the right hand of God, for the longest time.

The amphibian, the fish, the bird, the serpent, the mastodon are but a stage in the transformation of matter into mankind.

This dead stonefish could be but the lost soul of one of your great
aunts, or even one of the Malachite Woman's progenitors. I grip the stone in both hands and sniff deeply, as if burrowing my face up into the clefts of the Malachite Woman herself. Which distance is greater
—
two miles, or two hundred and fifty million years?

This stonefish—this great-aunt, who did not quite reach the glory of you or I—died and floated down into the midst of a sleeping, dreamy Golgotha—descended into the dead past. How old are these graves, locked in stone? Through how many winter storms have these silent skeletons slept here? How they rise, story above story. These bottom tiers lay down to their long repose while the great lake flapped its waves above. Its fishes swam over cemeteries. Other mute remains came in, layer by layer, to the house of silence, and the hand of Nature carefully envaulted them. The receptacle was filled; the lake vanished; the continent was here.

Life once thrilled through all these torpid frames. These were conscious creatures. They were joyous creatures walking on the green earth. They were beings which inhaled the vital air and basked in the life-giving sunlight, and enjoyed each other's society. They fed on the productions of the forest and the glade. They slaked their thirst at the border of the wide lake; they cooled themselves in its waters, and sported with its waves. Death came to them, as to their thousands of predecessors—as it comes to us. They were mired in a slough; they were hunted in a jungle; they lay down in the shade of a friendly tree. Some force of nature bore them to their burial. The lake was their tomb, and the lake preserved its trust. It was a later vicissitude which opened their cemetery and exposed these testimonies of a vanished age to the curious and irreverent scrutiny of science.

I am nearer to this stonefish than to her, and, some days, anyone.

The clang of the iron triangle summoning me to the bunkhouse. I hide the stonefish in the bushes and trudge down the hill toward the Home, chain music around my ankles, where the lackey will unhinge me and allow me to prepare for my own nightly descent.

 

The longest Matthew had ever slept after one of his collapses had been five days and nights; and when the fifth night passed that year, and still he slept, Mel, as well as everyone else, was worried.

The children came to visit him. They brought presents—antlers, stones, drawings—and went into his room one by one and observed him sleeping, and left their gifts in a pile on the floor, where they would be the first thing he would see upon awakening. One girl, bolder than the rest, touched his hair. Mel had told them about him—how he became worn down at the end of each winter and never quite had the strength left to carry on over into spring—and they had wanted to come see what such a phenomenon looked like. There was almost nothing she knew that she did not find herself wanting to teach them. As one rope unraveled, another was being woven.

Helen came over to see him too, that fifth night, as she had every night. The river had finally begun to break up—great chunks of ice splitting and cleaving mid-river, shearing free with snaps of torque and cannon boom, which sounded like a sporadic, ongoing war—except that rather than strife, the valley was filled with excitement, as the river was free now to surge beneath the sun unhindered. It was joy in a language unknown to man, and all through the valley, the pleasure of that release could be felt, and the river broke off slabs of ice larger than buildings and tossed them to the side—raced them down river's center, then shoved them rudely onto the shores, where they ripped out limbs and even whole trees, plowing and scouring along the banks for hundreds of yards, like ten million years of glacial passage in a few moments. The rubble of ice, the strewn shards and edges, glinted in the sun like diamonds; and from a distance the sounds of the river flowing again was like a stirring in one's own blood—as if in this valley there could be no separation, no disconnection; that one thing could not move without the other feeling that movement intimately.

Each time a new ice floe snapped, the geese nesting on the river's islands and oxbows would begin shouting and honking, as if connected even more intimately—as if something in them had been tugged—and the people in the valley would feel their blood leap and surge yet again. And each of them marveled at how Matthew could keep sleeping through it. It was not the sound so much that should have awakened him, they supposed, as those leaps within the blood.

“He knows it's over between you and him,” Helen said to Mel. “His body can smell the change. He doesn't want to wake up to that fact, is why he's sleeping so long this year.”

The three of them were sitting on the porch watching the day's end and listening to the river's distant rush. Wallis tried not to think of old springtimes with Susan down in the green hill country. A snipe was making its wavery wing-song overhead, rising into the dusk and then plummeting—staking out its territory with a thing ephemeral, invisible, the song of wind rushing over its wings.

Wallis found himself once again daydreaming of his map: believing in it fully, despite the fact that he had never seen nor touched any of it. He held onto it as if to an anchor. It had to be right.

“Maybe,” said Mel, talking about Helen's theory. “It could also be that Pop's taken the last bit of him there was left to take.”

 

Mel washed Matthew's hair that night. He had turned over in his sleep shortly after dusk, and the elk hides were off him. She set a bowl of soapy water beside him, and another of warm rinse water, and by lantern light massaged his scalp. Wallis sat next to her, expecting him to wake up, and wanting to see the spectacle of it. She scratched his scalp and rinsed his hair, rubbing it with a damp towel, scrubbing the old week's worth of sleep away, but still he slumbered.