Where the Sea Used to Be

by Rick Bass

  Let us wait here for the tide to come in. It is coming; and announces itself by its roar. The tide of the open sea is here augmented by the limits of the narrowing bay, and it swells into a terror-striking “bore.” The Deinosaurs and Labyrinthodous hear the sound, raise higher their heads in listening attitudes, and scurry away to their retreats. The tide lingers awhile, dallying with the sands, and making advance to the shore. Now, at the appointed time, it presses a dewy parting kiss upon the beach which it fondled for an hour, then retires.

  Where now, are the footprints, the tracks, of those gigantic saurians? Has the dallying tide erased them? No. It has covered them with a soft film of fine sand. They are not destroyed; they are preserved. The table is spread again with squirming viands, and the saurians recognize another call to refreshments. Again they range along the sand, and impress their tracks in the soft surface. Unconsciously, these creatures are inscribing their autographs on the pages of the world’s history. By and by the tides will cease. This bay will be uplifted beyond their reach; these sands will become a solid brown sandstone. Quarrymen will ply their avocation along the walls of mountains and read these ancient texts with their hands like blindmen.

  Stars tumble from the sky; comets swirl. The warm-blooded birds develop—now in this wonderful Mesozoic time, behold a real bird on the wing. Clothed with proper feathers and constituted a bird, it is yet reptilian. Its long and lizard-like tail, vertebrated to the extremity, is furnished with proper quills, but can not conceal its kinship with the reptiles. It comes out of the empire of reptiles and brings cellular reminiscences of the reptiles with it.

  A higher type is now standing at the threshold of being. A knell is sounding the funeral of the reptilian dynasty. The saurian hordes shrink away before the approach of a superior being. After a splendid reign, the dynasty of reptiles crumbles to the ground, and we know it only from the history written in its ruins.

  Wallis finished the chapter and watched the snow fall. The flakes were falling so thick and slow, and there were so many of them, and so large, that they obscured almost all vision. He was sick of them, and sick of the feeling that all he was doing was marking time, like a sleeping bear, until summer. He felt that he would be accomplishing more if he were hibernating—that at least he would be resting for his summer work, rather than arriving at it in such a bedraggled and confused state. He wondered for the hundredth time whether his new map had any worth whatsoever. It would be easy enough to find out—just spend a million dollars to drill yet another well, and let the question be answered. Wallis tried to imagine Dudley’s scorn, or rage, at another dry hole. It was not a pleasant image. He tried to imagine the joy and pride of a colossal discovery. The crushing disappointment Matthew would probably feel, having failed nineteen times, while he, Wallis, had gotten it right on the twentieth try. The trucks roaring in and out of the valley, hauling oil over the summit hourly. They would probably keep the road plowed and open year-round for that. He imagined Mel’s displeasure with the traffic and visitors.

  He unscrolled his map once more. He had studied it so much that he knew every contour: knew where he was going to propose the well be drilled. Matthew had been close, but had still been wrong. He’d missed it by about ten miles.

  Wallis pictured Old Dudley’s jubilation at finally being able to crack open the valley like a nutmeat. Pictured the utter jig of victory Dudley would do. The old lecher would crouch down at the wellhead and lap the hot black oil straight from a puddle like an animal drinking from a creek.

  Wallis wondered how long Old Dudley would live. He wondered if he would still be pounding away at the earth when he was a hundred; if he would be like one of those old Russian peasants who lived to be one hundred and thirty. He wondered who would take Dudley’s place, after he was gone from the earth. Not so much who would take over the running of his operations—lawyers and accountants, he imagined; it occurred to him for the first time, and with a shock, that Mel would perhaps be his sole heiress—but rather, who would fill that niche, that void, of being the relentless pounder—the one who could never be sated, who had to soil or disassemble and alter all that was within reach.

  Wallis stared at the wine stain from where it had spilled the night before. It had splashed onto one of the elk hides, and there was a puddle of it beneath one of Mel’s filing cabinets. He went and got a rag and bucket of soapy water to clean the rest of it. He moved the file cabinet aside, and when he did so, he noticed that the floor had been cut and scored to make a trap door.

  When he opened the door and peered down, he saw a full basement, without steps leading down. He could smell cooler, damper air below. He sat there on his knees for a moment, feeling foolish that he had literally been sleeping oil top of a thing, another level, and hadn’t known it existed. Then he went and got a lantern and climbed down into the basement. There was no ladder, but little toeholds had been carved into the bare earth walls. The basement was about ten feet deep.

  It had an earthen floor, packed firm from decades of foot use, with river stones placed in the ground, so that a person could move around without getting his or her feet damp.

  Old tables lined the earth-cut walls, and there were wooden crates and boxes piled on top of them. Children’s leather ice skates, looking as if from the previous century, hung from posts, and there were bleached skulls and antlers stacked on the tables, as well as the specimens of beautiful gems and minerals. A glossy white quartz crystal as large as a wheelbarrow; a smoke-colored black one as large as a football. Amethysts and sapphires caught the lantern’s glow and sparkled, sent the light skewing back in altered directions.

  Old traps hung from the rafters, as did old rusting axes and adzes, their handles worn smooth by the hands of ghosts.

  Some of the wooden crates had unknown handwriting on them—Matthew’s parents, Wallis guessed—though on other crates he recognized Mel’s handwriting. Mama’s wedding dress, in a cedar chest. Pictures, photographs. Old technical reports.

  One crate was marked Skulls; another, Feathers; still another, Rocks. Wallis opened that one, hoping and expecting to find old core samples that might be of use to him, along with data about the depths and locations from which they had been obtained, but found instead only more river stones, worn smooth and polished as if for no reason at all.

  Wallis stared at the walls around him. It was good to see dirt again.

  More of Mel’s boxes: Children’s toys, children’s books, Mama’s doll furniture. He smiled, thinking of her spartan life above, but of how she had yet been able to unburden the accumulations of her past.

  A row of boxes on the far wall, all with Old Dudley’s crude, boyscrawl markings. Notebooks, one of them read, though the others bore only numbers: 1916, 1917, 1918, 1919. The latest was 1967: as if he had grown quiet after that—or as if he had been too busy eating the world to spend time discussing the hows and whys. Wallis pulled out the front crate and pried open the dust-sealed lid; lifted out the first ancient ledger. The dried leather spine cracked as he opened the June 1918 notebook.

  The first page was torn out, as was part of the second page, but the text that remained read:

  . . . after we had finished stoning him we trussed him with heavy rope and pulled him slowly through the furrows of his own field, fertilizing that already rich soil with his own blood. He protested thinly but was in no condition to offer resistance. We dragged him face down not at a fast pace for the mule would not gallop but at a steady trawl as if plowing. We were using his own mule to do the pulling while we stalked alongside giving encouragement to the mule. There seemed to have been some rift between the mule and farmer for now the mule pulled with grim pleasure and from time to time glanced back over his shoulder as if to be sure his master was still attached, or perhaps simply to better hear the insults the sorry old sodbuster was hurling at us—and at the mule—mixed with pleas and cries for mercy—as the mule trudged steadily on; and as we traveled farther across the field, the man’s head bobbed less and less
often, like some loose rolling pumpkin hitting a bump now and again, and the rest of his body, bound tight, was like nothing but a log. Through it all I felt nothing but an increasing desire or ambition to finish the task, and as we both sensed the old farmer was fading fast—he did not raise his head now—Pap would from time to time run back and stab and hack at the old cretin who had insulted him so grossly, and for some distance Pap even rode upon him, straddling him and riding him as one would a pony, holding his face down in the black dirt, but Pap soon tired of this fun, and when we reached the far end of the field there was not sufficient life in him to warrant any further response from Pap’s ministrations and his was but a fading husk of a life. Johnny, upon awakening that dewy morn, would you have ever imagined such an adventure awaited you?

  There lay behind us in wandering fashion and against the sunset a crimson sheen to the earth almost iridescent in nature, the spoor of where we had passed, along which crows now hopped in ragged skein, pecking at the red soil, and as old Pap was exhausted from the labors of his justice, I now had to do the digging.

  We had brought no shovel so for a while I dug with my hands but it was slow going and so in due time I ran back across the soft field to the farmhouse and found a shovel in the barn. His family was off at the church social with Ma but I was still nervous and when the barn cat yowled and leapt out at me as I tried to wrestle the shovel from where it was stacked I shrieked and wet myself and did not feel sixteen . . .

  I ran back across the field in the sunset, and when I got to the far side of the field Pap was sitting on a log still holding earnest conversation with Sodbuster; though Life had left him now, and he was naught but a warm mound cooling quickly in the twilight.

  I did the digging—I wanted to set him deep—but Pap said no bother, it was all the same, and so we rolled him in and covered him back up when the trough was only three feet deep and patted the soil back in place, though it bothered me that he was only beneath the skin like that, and not deeper in soil’s embrace.

  Pap had no desire to commemorate or memorialize this day’s passing, though I felt some urge to leave a mark, and so I gathered some stones from field’s edge and made a small cairn of five or six stones which only I would recognize for a cairn, rather than mere happenstance assemblage.

  The mule was reluctant to leave, as if now regretting its participation in earlier events, and not even by smacking its platy forehead with the shovel could Pap induce it to take one step from where it stood slump-shouldered, staring down at the fresh grave of its master, so Pap dipped the long handle of the shovel into the creek and then inserted it rudely and quickly into the mule’s rectum, which got him moving briskly enough.

  We walked home in darkness. Fireflies blinked peacefully, and an owl hooted down on the river. Heat lightning shimmered to the north, and a few faint fine mists of raindrops cooled our grimy faces. We could smell the coming thunderstorm that would later that night wash away most traces of our passage, so that in the next day’s light all that would be visible would be the washed-out tracks of a man and a boy—any man, and any boy—and as we walked, Pap put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Nobody calls your father an old penny-pinching Jew, son.”

  Wallis stared at the youthful script for a long time. He looked up at the other crates and was almost afraid to read further, but he did—pulling down a volume from September 1919, and was relieved to find long pages of commentary on the weather—a drought year—and Dudley’s surmisings on the effects this had had on vegetation, noting that native plants back in the woods had fared far better than the domesticated crops of man.

  There was mention made of how much harder it was to work the larger field, now that old Pap had taken over his neighbor Jones’s property, and was employing Jones’s family to sharecrop the land they had previously owned.

  But then in the November volume of the same year, Wallis read with sinking heart of how Dudley had landed in “the Home.”

  No sooner had I finished putting the final shovelful of dirt over the matted head of a Mister P. than did a figure appear from the gloom across the far side of the field, riding hard on horseback. We felt the percussions of his horse’s hoofs drumming before we could spy him in that dimness. At first I thought it was P. himself somehow not yet dead and protesting his final resting place, but we saw then that it was P.’s brother, and that he had us sighted. It was June and there was a comet in the twilight sky and old Pap had been sitting there hunkered graveside like one of the Great Apes, resting from the ordeal and labors and contemplating, I suppose, the place to which he had sent the disrespecting Mr. P.

  Pap had rolled and was smoking a cigarette and when we saw P.’s brother approaching hard, Pap ran and hid behind a tree as a child will do, but then realized the futility of that, and came back out into the field and with matches lit the dry standing cornstalks. They caught quickly on tongues of flame, but P.’s brother rode hard through them, scattering us in two directions. I went downstream and Pap upstream. P.’s brother turned his horse after Pap. I heard much splashing upstream and then silence. I lay down and hid in the water. Watched fireflies drifting along the stream edges and took note how they preferred not to cross the water proper. Luminescence around me on either side save for the winding ribbon of darkness ahead of me that was the river. After much time had passed I climbed out and went home, wondering what to tell Ma. Was surprised by the sight of a thoroughly drenched and bedraggled Pap sitting on front porch in darkness attempting to light a cigarette. How old he looked! Ma asleep in the house. Pap said he had escaped the wrath of P.’s brother by running back into the flames where the horse would not follow but that now the sheriff would be arriving any moment.

  His gnarled hand on my shoulder. Said he had but a few bitter years left in the world but that all my time was still before me like green wood; that they would hang him, but would only send me to Reformatory until I came of age, at which point we could be reunited; I could be released back to the custody of my loving parents.

  Car headlights appearing over the hill. Pap said, Tell them it was self-defense. I said, What about the bruises? Pap said, Tell them he fought hard, real hard. I’ll tell ’em I tried to stop you. I’ll tell ’em you were out of your mind—uncontrollable.

  All those car headlights surrounding us. Swirling dust. Guns drawn. They took us out that night to dig him up. The cornfield was still smoldering in coals and stubbleflame and then the earth still loose upon him when we dug him up and pulled him back free of the soil.

  That’s him, Pap said, that’s the one that hit my boy. Holy Mother of God, another of them said, he is still alive, but only barely.

  They bathed him off in the creek and loaded him into the car and took him to the hospital in Smithville but he did not survive the journey, and our secret was safe.

  Ma died several months later, believing I was guilty, and Pap passed two weeks before I got out on my eighteenth birthday.

  The road ahead seemed long.

  From there, it seemed, Dudley fell as if down a cleft in the earth. Surrounded by cretins and thugs he would have nothing to do with. He was kept chained to his bed at night—a twenty-foot length of chain around one wrist that would allow him, if he avoided tangling it, to reach the toilet, but no farther. The descent into dreamland deepened. Long hours in the library. Longer hours in solitude. Finally, with his good behavior, he was allowed to go back outside, though still shackled and manacled, and still within the fenced yard of the Home.

  The Unstable Land

  Phenomena and Causes of Earthquakes

  When men feel the earth beneath their feet growing unstable, the most paralyzing sense of insecurity seizes them. The ground supports everything; and when it fails him, his dismay is complete.

  Yet the solid earth has not only been shaken by throes which have engulfed cities and populations and mountains, but there is scarcely a moment when its movements or its tremblings may not be felt by the delicate means of modern science. The stability of th
e solid earth is instability masked.

  The destructive shock lasts but a few minutes, or even seconds. The successive vibrations which devastated Calabria in 1783 were felt during barely two minutes. On the occasion of the destruction of the city of Lisbon, in 1755 and the loss of sixty thousand lives, it was the first shock, lasting five or six seconds, which caused the greatest damage.

  The motions which constitute an earthquake are various. Sometimes they are vertical. More commonly they are horizontal. The rate of transmission varies with the intensity of the shock and the nature of the rock materials. When mines of powder were exploded near Holyhead, in Wales, the waves of disturbance were propagated through wet sand at the rate of 951 feet a second; through friable granite 1,283 feet Per second.

  It is not supposable that the actual center of an earthquake disturbance is at the surface. It must exist at some considerable depth beneath the surface. According to Mr. Mallet, the center of disturbance of the Calabrian earthquake of 1857 was seven to eight miles below sea level. All perturbation lies at depth.

  Sounds often accompany earthquakes. Sometimes they resemble explosions as of distant artillery; more frequently it is a rumbling sound as of heavy vehicles moving over a city pavement. I have myself experienced but one noteworthy earthquake, and that occurred only shortly after my arrival at the Home. I was not yet sunk into morosity, and was napping in the sun with my hands behind my head, iron manacles notwithstanding, feeling the warmth of midday sun on my closed eyelids, when the ground beneath me—limestone cap rock along the Balcones Escarpment—began to tremble, so that I dreamed I was falling, sliding down some abyss: that the earth herself was trying to shed herself of me, in due imitation of the pattern recently set forth by my parents, and mocking my loyalties.