by Rick Bass
In this manner, every day that Wallis survived in the valley was to Wallis’s advantage—strengthening him one day further—and it also allowed Mel, incrementally, to consider accepting him.
Not falling in love with him—not while still in the echo of Matthew—but not pushing him away at arm’s length, either.
Back when she’d lived in the city, she had listened to the radio stations while driving, and she remembered how she had listened to the sappy, insipid love songs of both the pop and rock stations—the breathy vows of eternal love, the proclamations of gotta-have-it-now incandescent desires—and then as she grew older, she would hear the same songs and marvel at their brittleness and falsity. Clearly the songs themselves had not changed, only her own attitudes toward love, so that for a long time she had questioned her passion. Love was supposed to hit like a hurricane, according to the songs, but for her, desire—when she felt it, on occasion—when she surfaced from the peace of her life—was like a light rain falling.
It had been more than fifteen years since she and a man had lived together for longer than two weeks. Matthew still came out on his various seasonal trips, but again, there could be no denying that though his body was real, as was hers, when they lay together warm and bare beneath the blankets and hides—as real as anything on this earth—they were nonetheless living on an echo, rather than the thing itself.
Sometimes the other kind of desire would surface or awaken—for a few hours at a time, or even a few days; and she would feel volatile, tormented—that old wonderful, intoxicating incandescence, where nothing in the world mattered, nothing in the world made sense beyond the desire for another—but just as surely those brief bouts, like fevers, would carry with them, like a hangover, the accompanying chill or near-frigidity—the carelessness for such things—that followed.
Best of all was when she was in neither of those yaws or pulls (which did not come often anyway, and seemed always beyond her control), but was instead drawn or summoned by the valley—following a thing, submissive to it, rather than trying to dominate and consume it. Gliding across the landscape in any season—on foot, or snowshoes, or skis—she would feel as steady and calm and full of peace as the waters of a deep lake far back in the woods.
No more scrambling, no more of the frantic erraticness that she feared was her true nature, her blood identity; instead, there was only the steadiness of the valley—its cycles and regularities as dependable as the tides, or gravity—and from that regularity, a great power and calmness.
She went out into the woods each day as if going to a meal. Some days Mel wondered if the wolves were not but an excuse to be drawn out across the landscape—to cast herself across it like a net, mapping its surface not so much with pen and paper as with her body, trying to stretch thin and taut across it, trying to embrace all of it—trying, even, in some strange way to consume it, or to consume the knowledge present in it.
She followed the tracks backward almost dreamily—almost as if consuming the wolves too, or the signs and proof of them—though she was cautious to avoid stepping in their tracks. The snow covered her, as if to erase even her. She remembered again what it had been like to be in love. She remembered what it had been like to be owned by love. The years mounting. That was its own kind of isolation, the love becoming habit more than thought—an isolation more severe in some ways than the one in which she now was immersed.
Mel remembered how—back then—she had had to love as well as be loved. It had been like a pulse, like a coming and going; it had had its own power.
Pushing forty years! Where had that old power gone—that youthful ardor? Was it spread thin across the landscape now, like scent scattered by the wind? She did not think that even in the midst of such peace she could sleep forever, and forever keep love at arm’s distance, but certainly in no way could she imagine loving such a tame and odd specimen as Wallis.
She accidentally stepped on, and erased, a line of tracks, and cursed her awkwardness. She sat down to rest, and to clear her mind. She ate her lunch: an orange, a piece of cheese, frozen and crumbly, but warming in her mouth, releasing its taste, and two old biscuits with honey inside them, also frozen—crunchy and brittle—but they too melted in her mouth, and slowly released their flavors.
It was still snowing. She sat a while longer, letting it cover her, but worrying too that it would obscure the tracks of last night. After a while she stood up and skied on.
She traveled across the dens of sleeping bears. Sometimes she found their portholes, vapor-vents where the slow warm breath of their exhalations rose from their sleeping mounds below. When she encountered such a vent, she would lie down on top of the mound and put her ear to the vent and try to see if she could hear the faint sounds of the sleeping bear: the low hum, like the buzz of bees.
She continued on. She skied across their backs. She continued to use up her days like sticks of firewood, of which she had only so many, tossed on some fire that was providing light for no one other than herself, and keeping no one warm but herself.
A feeling, sometimes, as if she too, like the bears, might as well have been sleeping. Would Matthew never come back? He had told her that he wouldn’t: not ever. She was about to believe him.
Mel wasn’t sure that her calendar was accurate. She knew she was probably correct within a day or two, but stopped by the mercantile to check with Helen how many days until Christmas. Helen wasn’t in, but clouds of blue cigarette smoke still hung in the high rafters of the old mere. Mel followed Helen’s smoky scent trail outside and across the street to the little cemetery set back in the woods, where Helen was putting antlers on her husband’s grave, and before approaching, Mel stopped and watched. He’d been gone forty years—longer than Mel had been alive. It seemed like a long time to be dead in the ground—bone dust down there, if even that—but did not seem like that long to be alive.
Mel certainly didn’t feel old: not half as old as Helen looked, kneeling there in the snow, arranging antlers as a substitute for flowers. Helen was wearing a charcoal-colored coat, and the snow was still coming down hard.
Mel stepped forward, startling Helen. Mel apologized for frightening her, and after a moment, asked the date.
“The twenty-third,” Helen said. “This is the day he died,” she said. “We buried him Christmas afternoon.”
Mel looked at the headstone and noticed for the first time that the stone had only the years of his birth and death, not the months or dates.
“It was too sad,” Helen explained.
This bothered Mel—the lack of precise record-keeping—but she said nothing.
“So they might be here tomorrow,” Mel said. “Christmas Eve.”
Helen rose stiffly. Snow fell from her back. Mel could tell by the imprints of her kneeling that she’d been there a long time. Mel tried to imagine loving Matthew deeply after he’d been dead or gone for forty years.
“Do you think they’ve left Houston yet?” Mel asked. “Does it feel to you like they’re on their way?”
Helen stared up at the falling snow. She lit a new cigarette and coughed. An owl answered. Dusk.
“I think so,” Helen said, after a long time. “I can’t feel it like I usually do—it’s not as strong—but I think I can still feel it, a little. I think they’re headed this way. I don’t know,” she said, looking down at her arms—her palms outstretched. “My blood’s getting old and sluggish. I can feel the fizz going out of it, and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. It’s just the way things are turning out.”
“I can still feel my fizz,” Mel said. She held her arms out, as if to catch radio signals, or simply more snow: as if each snowflake, if examined closely enough, would have locked within it the message of their coming, and of all else. Mel did not say what she suspected: that perhaps it was Matthew’s blood, as much as Helen’s, that was getting sluggish, and no longer able to be ascertained or felt, reflected among the stars.
The two women stood in the falling snow, feelin
g the peace and silence of the cemetery. After it had grown dark, Mel said, “I think I can feel them now—I think they’re coming. I’m certain of it.” Helen began to cough harder as the night settled into her lungs. They headed back to the mercantile.
“Do you need help getting a Christmas tree?” Mel asked, and Helen coughed again, shook her head no, and said she would get one tomorrow.
“Nonsense,” said Mel. “You go sit down by the stove and fix a pot of tea and rest. I’ll run down into the woods and get one. You just pull a hide up over you and rest.”
Helen didn’t argue, and seemed pleased by the attention. “Get a good one,” she said. “Get one that Matthew will like.”
Mel took a lantern and went down through the woods toward the river, amazed and a little irritated at where time went: how any free time inevitably filled in with duties, like sand pouring down a funnel. She was anxious to get home and begin decorating her own cabin—now that she could feel them coming for sure—but it was unthinkable that Helen not have a tree.
The snow made hisses of steam as it landed on her lantern. Steam followed her through the snowy woods. She found a beautiful little spruce—her favorite—but knew that Helen disliked the prickliness of them. She searched longer for a fir that the deer and moose had not winter-browsed, found one, cut it with the hatchet, and began dragging it back up to Helen’s, relaxing again into the rhythm, the ritual, of the act. She stopped by a grove of big cedars and pulled down several boughs with which to make wreaths.
When she got back to the mercantile, Helen was asleep, her mouth wide open, snoring—her cup of tea only half finished. The cigarette had fallen from her hand and ignited the fur of the elk hide, which was burning in a small blazon when Mel walked in. Mel went over and put the flames out, and wrinkled her nose at the odor of burning hair. In her sleep, Helen did not notice.
For the next several hours Mel wove and hung the wreaths, popped corn, and strung it with needle and thread to hang around the tree. She put the tree up and decorated it. Then she turned out the lamps, put another hide over Helen, another log on the fire, and skied home, thinking of her own decorations. She did not get home until after midnight—Wallis was asleep—and, unable to sleep, she started to go back out into the woods to search for her own tree.
She thought how it would feel to Wallis when he woke up and saw the tree that he had missed out on gathering, and of how that might make him feel more like a guest than ever, and so she went in and woke him up and asked if he’d like to go with her. “Yes,” he said, and dressed quickly.
They snowshoed a long way, looking for a perfect tree. They traveled for a couple of hours through curtains of snow, sheets and weaves of snow, until they came to the right one—a little large, but they could cut it off at the base—and Mel chopped for a while, her hair swinging wild, and snow sliding from the branches above and covering them both—and then Wallis finished chopping. The tree tilted crooked against the sky as it leaned and then fell. They tied a rope around it and hauled it home as if dragging an enormous animal. It was hard work, heating their muscles to a temperature that felt good. They could smell the tree as they dragged it.
“I think this is the best one ever,” Mel said. She had her ski cap off to keep from overheating in the labor of hauling the big tree, and from time to time individual strands of her hair would continue to catch and snag on the branches she passed beneath—gossamer filaments leaving the thinnest trails behind her.
Her tiny trails across the surface of the landscape were as thin and imperceptible as the smoke trails of shooting stars that scorch nothing but air: the story of her life, her hermitage, a strand of her long white blond hair. What list, what chart, could show her accomplishments, or how she had changed or influenced anything significant in the world? Freedom was something she could nearly taste.
More popcorn, and the ornaments from her box in the attic: tiny antlers, feathers dangling from threads, freshwater pearls, a faded gold star that had been her mother’s. She wept, trying to remember decorating the tree with her mother each year, but was able to remember only a love so unconditional as to be taken for granted. Of the kind of woman her mother might have been in the eyes of another adult, Mel could remember or guess nothing. Mel’s gaze—her child’s awareness—had been elsewhere, studying with wonder other sights of the world each day. Her mother had not been rare to her. There had never been any cause to believe she would not always be there.
Wallis tried to comfort her. Mel shook her head, her face in her hands: both hands wet with her tears. “You don’t understand,” she said. “Every image I have of her—everything I believe about her, and every memory—is suspect. I don’t know what’s real about her, and what’s simply a thing I’ve imagined. And I’ll never know.”
Wallis was quiet for a while; he just held her, let her wind down; felt the tension drawing from her.
“Don’t you know what I mean?” she said later. “You lost both of your parents pretty early on. Helen told me you talked of it in the bar. Wouldn’t you like to be able to—I don’t know, look at them now, or study them, to get kind of an idea about what works and what doesn’t?”
“You mean like a model,” Wallis said, and Mel shrugged.
“Not even so much a model,” she said, “but just—oh hell, I don’t know. Don’t you miss them? Don’t you sometimes feel like half of you’s missing, and that you can’t ever be as fully alive?”
Wallis nodded—thinking of his parents first, but then of Susan. Halving a half made a quarter. What would be next: an eighth? And then did one disappear, beyond that—did one become loose soil, for the next generations to arise out of?
“They say it’s worse with divorce,” he said.
“I don’t know,” Mel said, dry-eyed now. A year’s worth, or more, of not-crying gone from her now: as cleansed as if she’d bathed in the river. “I can’t believe she married my father. Was she at all like me? How could she have married such a person?”
Wallis laughed. “Maybe he was better then.”
Mel’s face darkened. “Oh no,” she said—as if Wallis were her brother, and had forgotten, rather than having never known. How much to tell him? “He was worse then,” she said carefully.
She watched him intently: waited for him to ask how much worse. Part of her wanted him to ask, and part of her wanted him to never get near the subject.
He saw this in her eyes and drew back, and the question fell away between them.
“The tree is beautiful,” Wallis said.
“My mother’s trees were beautiful,” Mel said. “I can remember that. I guess we’re the same, she and I, that way, at least.”
They fell asleep on the couch in each other’s arms. For Wallis, it felt strangely—before he fell asleep—as if he had captured her: as if for all his life she had been moving away from him, but that now she had grown weaker or had stumbled and he was with her; and he could feel that weakness within her so tangibly that night, that hollowness, that it could as well have been his own, as he rested with her.
But he could feel also her recovery: the strength she was getting just from the physical act of lying with, and touching, another human being.
Mel felt nothing. She fell almost forty years that night; but in the morning, before awakening, she climbed all the years back to the surface: confident, for once, and able to make that journey securely, while Wallis anchored her above.
They were awakened at dawn by Colter’s raps on the window and sat up to see his face staring at them through frosted glass. They had both slept deeply, and the fire had gone out. They got up, untangling themselves from each other as if they had fallen from some height and landed that way, and let him in, then began building a new fire.
“I’m off to look for antlers,” he said. “I wanted to look for the one you said you saw fall off that deer yesterday. If you weren’t planning on looking for it,” he conceded. He paused. “I can go show you where my father is buried.” A trade.
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��Go on,” Mel said to Wallis. “It’ll be good for you. You’ll learn some things. I’m going to stay here today and cook and decorate, and do some paperwork, and wait for the guys.”
“You really think they’re coming?” Wallis asked.
“They always come,” Mel said. “They’ll come for me, and this year, they’ll come for you, too.”
“Come on,” Colter said.
Wallis pulled on Matthew’s coveralls, cut off a slab of bread, and went out onto the porch with Colter. Colter had a burlap bag in which there were already several antlers, and he showed them to Wallis as if they were fish he had caught. “I just keep the big ones. I leave the little ones for the squirrels and porcupines, and for the soil. The little ones aren’t worth much anyway,” he said, and shrugged. He could have been a farmer talking about his crop, Wallis thought, with the whole valley his farm: though acres of it he would never even be able to see in his lifetime.
“How much is this one worth?” Wallis asked, picking up the largest antler: a thick palmate antler with twelve points on one side. Colter had looked hard but hadn’t been able to find its mate: he would have to return to the same area in the spring and look harder when the snow was gone.
“By itself like that, only about seventy-five, maybe a hundred bucks,” he said. “But if I can find its match, a lot more.” He studied the antler closer. “Maybe twelve hundred—maybe fifteen hundred. Maybe more.” He pointed to his stash. “Was the one you saw fall off as big as any of these?”
Wallis wasn’t sure. “Borderline,” he said. “Maybe. It was a pretty long way off.”
Colter’s face fell. “This isn’t a wild goose chase, is it?” he asked, and Wallis laughed at the boy’s intensity. They set off on skis. As much snow seemed to be falling from the sky as was already resting on the ground, so that it sometimes felt as if they were swimming: as if the ground had been taken out from beneath them, ground inverted to sky, and as if there were nothing in the world but snow.
