Where the Sea Used to Be (74 page)

Joshua worked fast, working day and night in the same garage in which Dudley lay in repose, withering in the great cold. Joshua warmed his hands by the little fires as he worked, and when he had the ship finished, a twenty-foot scow in the shape of the full bare body of a woman, everyone came over from the bar and helped sand it and then paint it green. The woman in whose body he rode, the Malachite Woman, had long black hair carved back from the brow, and full bared breasts that would ride just above the water line. Her green eyes were haunting, as real as anything Joshua had ever done: as if the ship yet might come to life, or as if a soul inhabited it.

On ice, Old Dudley had shrunk to half his normal size, like some desiccated salamander. They gave the green paint a full night and day to dry and on the next night carried the ship down to the freezing river with him in it.

There was a brief debate about whether to set the ship afire or not, but Mel, after considering it, said no; just send him on down with a lantern in the bow.

The lantern was lit and placed. Dudley was lying on his back staring up at the sky, with his hands folded peacefully over his chest, and a bear hide draped over him for warmth. A light snow was falling.

They shoved the boat out across the ice and slipped it into the dark fast flowing water, then stepped back wordlessly as the boat was taken quickly from them.

The town watched through the curtain of falling snow as the boat, lit by its one lantern as if up on a stage amidst all-else-darkness, bobbed in the current, hurrying south between the snowy shores. The Malachite Woman's head, immense, like that of a dragon, rose high above the water. She stared resolutely, eagerly, downstream. The ship moved quickly away, riding and pitching on the little waves. It began to snow harder. The lantern disappeared.

Mel was crying, squeezing Wallis's hand. People stared into the darkness where he had gone—where the Malachite Woman had taken him—and then started trudging up the hill through knee-deep snow, back toward the bar.

“Why are you crying?” Wallis asked. “What's the matter? He couldn't live forever.”

The snow was pressing down on them. They could barely hear the river's gurgling against the muffled silence of the snow.

“I'm so happy,” Mel said.

They headed home on snowshoes. She wanted to be sure the boat was leaving the valley, so they climbed a ridge and followed the river south for a ways, until they caught back up with the dim sight of the boat: the lantern still glowing.

There they, and only they, watched it disappear a second time. Nothing else was moving; no other animals were about. They went home to their cabin. In bed, Mel took Wallis's hands and pressed them to the warm small mound of her stomach. It would be a thousand years, she hoped, before the valley saw anyone like Old Dudley again. Ten thousand years.

They awoke in the morning to blue sky and a world of deep white silence. They fixed breakfast and then struck out on snowshoes across the smoothness of untouched snow.

I am extremely grateful to James Linville and George Plimpton of the
Paris Review,
who first expressed confidence in this story, and to Houghton Mifflin, and to the late Sam Lawrence, who asked for this book, and to Joan Williams, who first brought it to his attention. I am grateful to Harry Foster, who has helped it through various drafts, and to Camille Hykes, who has also been working closely with the story for many years. I'm grateful also to Dorothy Henderson, for extraordinarily generous editorial help, and to
The New Yorker
and
Bomb,
in which sections of this book appeared in different form.

I am grateful for the support and advice from my agent, Bob Dattila, and to my friends and family and community. I'm grateful as ever to Russell Chatham, for the cover's painting, and to Stuart Klipper, for the interior photographs; to the James Jones Society, for the support and encouragement offered by the James Jones First Novel Fellowship; to Melodie Wertelet and Michaela Sullivan for the book's design; to Donna de La Perriere and Katie Dillin for production assistance; to my typist, Angi Young; to Tom Jenks, for editorial direction; and for use, in part, of the old Chautauqua papers by Alexander Winchell: his
Walks and Talks in the Geological Field.
I am grateful to the Guggenheim Foundation for the gift of a fiction fellowship.

I cannot thank my editors enough for help with this story. Finally, I am indebted to the vanishing wild landscape of northwest Montana itself. There still exists a health and strength—a magic—in its last vital cores. Whether these cores can be protected for the future or not, I do not know; but I hope for their continued existence and am grateful for having known them.

 

R
ICK
B
ASS
's fiction has received O. Henry Awards, numerous Pushcart Prizes, awards from the Texas Institute of Letters, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others. Most recently, his memoir
Why I Came West
was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award.