Where the Sea Used to Be

by Rick Bass

They walked home in a procession, steam rising from the untested, powerful flanks and haunches of the draft horses, horses’ heavy hoofs shuffling through the deep powder. The lantern light shining on the horses made them look as if they were sculpted bright from ice. There was among them a feeling as if Wallis had already been rescued, or had chosen a new path. It was only a truck, they remembered.

  Colter slept hard, like something sunken into the great depths of a place. Amy stayed awake through the night and watched him sleep, as she had when he was a baby. She felt utter serenity for his safety, if not his peace, in the coming world. He was strong and supple, and could manage whatever the Lord lay ahead of him. Zeke had been that way, but had not had luck or grace. Amy could feel that Colter had an excess of grace and luck, possessing both his own innate quantity plus the reservoir of another’s; and for this, she thanked Zeke silently. She prayed through the night, though in the morning her chin tipped to her chest, and her thoughts drifted not toward God, but to the falconer.

  It was the same night that Mel took Wallis inside her, and held him there at their cabin, on the bed of hides by the fire. That was the night that the past fell away, like gouts of bankside mud sloughing into fast waters.

  She went to school the next morning feeling more like herself than she could remember feeling since she had been a much younger woman, or even a girl. The feeling of falling, or leaping, was similar—doubtless identical—for everyone, though she knew this love would play out differently, as all did: the specificity of each love unique, beneath the shield of the general, the familiar.

  She stopped at an icy creek on her way to school, even though she knew she’d be late. The creek ran to the river, where it disappeared beneath ice, still feeding the dark river that ran so fast and far away. She pawed beneath the snow, found a dried strawberry blossom from the previous summer. She tossed it onto the creek, watched the little current whisk it. It had started snowing again, and was colder, too. In a day or so the new river ice would heal the gash where the woodcutters had plunged through.

  She thought of how it had been, holding the rope. She remembered watching Wallis on the end of the rope by lampglow and firelight. She dwelt on the memories of the night before, back at the cabin.

  Unavoidably, however, her thoughts turned to Matthew. If this year were like all others, he would be returning in a couple of weeks, coming back to be tended to, and to recover from his annual winter sickness. Her legs and heart felt quivery at the thought. She stood and said Wallis’s name once, to the creek, then hurried on to school, feeling like a schoolteacher.

  She tried to hold back. She had hoped to make it to April—to resolve things with Matthew in mid-March, and then move on, in one direction or another—but she found now that she had fallen several weeks shy of that goal, like the deer who did not carry quite enough reserves to take them across that last white expanse. She saw them every year by the hundreds: deer that were whittled down to next-to-nothing—brown tufts of hide stretched taut across knobby bones—deer that had plowed through five months of snow only to lie down at the edge of the end of snow, starving—lying with heads outstretched, no longer able to break through the shell of ice covering the world they’d known—only to have the bare brown ground begin opening up, revealing itself days after their death: bare earth, and then green shoots appearing right in front of the deer’s unseeing, unmoving eyes.

  Every year it was this way—as if spring could not occur without it; as if this falling just short were a pattern for most of the world: as if it took exceptional grace or strength or cunning to cross that last bridge.

  Mel wondered what love would be like this time—if it would last long—longer even than the last—or if it would fizzle out in a matter of months, like tufts of hay tossed on a fire.

  There was at first a bottomlessness to it, as well as an imbalance. They had been without each other’s bodies for so long that now it was all they thought about. They stopped cooking, and nearly stopped eating. Their couplings traversed all rooms and corners of the cabin, at all hours of the day and night, as if they were in their lovemaking laying claim to new territory, or redefining old—and their hands and mouths and eyes on each other were a mapping, and a knowing.

  One night during their passions the bed of snow that blanketed the roof of the cabin released, sending rafts of ice down the pitch of the roof and onto the snow below, where the slabs of ice shattered like crystal, a thunderous sound that surprised both of them; and under that new lightness they burrowed deeper into the hides, sleeping only occasionally, awakening often to further explore each other’s bodies.

  They were not thus engaged when Helen came over one night to tell them of Danny’s most recent downturn, but the cabin nonetheless was dank and rich with the odor of their sex, and the air in the cabin was still charged with the electricity of its passage earlier in the day, so that Helen understood instantly what had been lost. She knew that when her son returned to the valley it would seem to him as if there had been a sudden shearing—as if a branch had snapped—and that he would be blind to how gradual it had been.

  Helen wondered if Matthew would feel pain, or numbness. She could not decide which she would choose for him, were the choice hers to make.

  For long moments she and Mel stared at each other—Mel’s face pale with fear, and then blushing, as if with the shame of betrayal. Helen’s face was hurt and puzzled, even grieving—but Mel regained her composure, and then, more slowly, so did Helen.

  The news she had for them was that Danny had tried to hang himself; that he had hung himself, but that they had cut him down in time to save him.

  There had only been a handful of them in the bar—Artie, Amy, Helen, and a couple of others—when they had noticed one of the rafters jiggling slightly. A bouquet of dried lupine hanging from the rafter had fallen to the counter, and they had all watched the rafter trembling for a while, and had believed it to be the echo of a faint earth tremor—but then Helen noticed that all the other rafters were motionless, and she’d jumped up and run into the back room, where she found Danny, blue-faced, kicking and gagging and clawing at his throat, looking for all the world as if he had changed his mind. He was all duded up in his rodeo clothes—boots, belt with trophy-buckle, crisp new jeans, pearl-buttoned shirt—though in the struggle, his hat had fallen off, and his feet were dancing light as a pair of mayflies three inches above the ground, seeking purchase but finding none.

  In the furor no one had been able to find a knife with which to cut him down, so that finally Artie had had to climb up and use his cigarette lighter, snapping it repeatedly at the thick hemp rope, charring the fibers slowly as his friend’s face blackened and his tongue protruded swollen and the gagging stopped, the kicking stopped, and a puddle of urine appeared below his boots, and Danny’s eyes rolled back like the whites of boiled eggs.

  Finally the rope burned thin enough that the deadweight of him snapped the remaining strands, and Danny fell to the floor. They got him going again, somehow—some half-assed version of CPR, Helen said—and he was in bed resting now, though he now complained of a continuous heat in his chest that felt, he said, like a waffle iron. He no longer had any feelings in his feet, either; but on the bright side, Helen said, his depression was gone.

  “Who’s with him now?” Wallis asked.

  “Artie right now,” Helen said. “But Amy’s been sitting with him, reading him Bible verses.”

  “Shit,” Mel said, and Wallis didn’t know if she was more upset by the news of Danny hanging himself or by the fact that Amy was preaching to him, and Danny unable to escape.

  “It’s not so bad,” Helen said. “He’s listening to it, and it’s doing him some good. He doesn’t have long left. He’s not even really Danny anymore.”

  Helen put her coat back on and was preparing to leave.

  “You can stay tonight, if you’d like,” Mel said. “Don’t ski all the way home tonight. You can get up early in the morning.”

  “I’d lik
e to,” Helen said. “I’d like a little break from it.” She glanced at Wallis. “But no, thank you. I’d better go check on Danny.”

  She went out and closed the door behind her. She fastened on her ancient wooden skis; felt the stiffness, the swelling, in her knees and back. She looked at the lit windows of her son’s cabin and tried to feel anger at Mel, but couldn’t summon it. She was sadder that Matthew would now have less incentive than ever to return than at the fact that he had lost Mel. Helen knew now that Matthew had probably lost her ten, maybe fifteen years ago. The news just traveled slower for some than others.

  She looked up at the stars, then started off toward town, already making plans for Danny’s funeral. She lamented that it was still too early for even the blossoms of the serviceberry, so called because they were the first flower to appear in the spring, and thus attended the spring burial services of those who had died in winter’s depths and were kept stored in barns in coffins until the ground thawed and the earth’s icy crust unlocked, and a true burial could finally be conducted.

  She thought of her own dark cabin—the empty store, with the fire in the stove surely burned out. She thought of how tightly Danny would grip her wrist when she returned to check on him, and of how she would not turn away, but would sit there with him for as long as he wanted—for however long he had left—and of how, when she finally went back across the street to her mercantile for a brief nap before daylight, she would want more than almost anything in the world—even more, almost, than a visit from Matthew—a long hot bath; but how she would be too tired to haul and then heat that much water, and how instead she would curl up sore and aching beneath cold blankets and slip into her sleep that came easier and easier.

  Her skis cut the snow like blades across the moonlight. Her muscles warmed and loosened yet again, as they had for the thirty thousand days before this one. She didn’t resent Mel’s choice, Mel’s reaching out. She was happy for her. She was happy for both of them. She just missed her boy.

  Mel and Wallis went by to see Danny before school. It was as Helen had said: he was living, but was already gone. Artie was sitting with him, reading a paperback detective novel from forty years ago.

  Danny looked older than Helen. He wore a purple bandanna to cover the bruises and rope burn. His eyes looked lidded, like an old lizard’s. He raised two pale fingers in greeting and then held them there, as if he had died in that position; only his eyes moved now. Mel leaned down against him and hugged him. She thought how if nothing else he should shave himself—his graying stubble made him look even older—and she said so.

  With those same two fingers Danny gestured toward the bathroom, where Mel saw a bowl, a straight razor, and a shaving brush. She heated some water slowly on the stove. Then she poured it into the wash basin, “put some shaving cream on the brush, and covered his cheeks and chin and upper lip with it, then wet the blade in the warm water and began stroking and scraping. Danny shut his eyes. The smell of steam from the hot water and the soap filled the little bedroom and pushed aside the odor of sickness and sorrow. The razor made a rasping sound not unlike the sound of skis across ice. When she was done, there were no nicks, only a clean-shaven face and throat. She had been heating a towel in the steaming water and she squeezed it out and wrapped it around his face and neck, scrubbed the soap and iron-colored flecks of whiskers away, and then left the steaming towel wrapped around his neck, and he smiled at her and then slept, and Mel hurried off to school, late again.

  By early afternoon he was dead, dying in the space between Artie’s and Helen’s shifts of duty. He had started to scratch out a note to his children, but had not gotten beyond the salutation, “Dear,” and their names. Helen came by the school to tell Mel and the others after class was out, and that night, everyone gathered at the bar for a wake. The bar had passed on to Artie, who was not only pouring drinks but tossing them down himself, and there was much wailing and keening, stories and testimonials, and in the woods, the coyotes and then the wolves began to answer the howls of the wake-goers; and in his cabin so far back in the woods, two ridges over, Joshua heard the cries—believing it at first to be the distant honking of geese returning to the valley a few weeks early, but then understanding, when the noise did not change locations, where it was coming from and what it was. He rose from bed and went out and unchained the black stallion, then took him down to the river and chopped a hole in the ice so that the horse could water. Then he put the coffin he’d made for Danny—at Danny’s request, but which Danny had never seen—on a wooden sled and tugged it down to the ice.

  Made of thin yellow pine and still smelling sweetly of fresh-cut wood, even beneath the glossy layers of paint, the coffin had been fashioned into the shape of a gleaming black saddle bronc with slanted red eyes and plumes of fire leaping from its mouth and nostrils. Its teeth were not the squared enamel of earthly horses, but fangs of varying lengths. The wooden horse had no tail—flames were painted across its rump—and its ears were folded back on themselves like a bat’s. Gold streaks of lightning zagged across the horse’s body in all directions. Barbed wire was coiled across the tiny bronc saddle, and there hung on the horse’s flank a small deerskin saddlebag, into which some of Danny’s possessions could be placed.

  There was a panel, a hatch, in the horse’s neck, through which Danny could be lowered. The horse was rearing up on its hind legs—purple stars and more gold lightning bolts decorated its belly—so that they would have to slide Danny in feet-first; and once inside, it would be as if he were leaning in tight against the big horse’s neck with both arms wrapped around it—perhaps not the most glamorous riding style for an ex-rodeo star, but at least the horse was reared up and ascending, rather than plunging.

  Joshua skidded his creation down to the river and pushed it onto the ice. The wooden stallion was half again as large as his black stallion. The days had warmed sufficiently to melt the crust of snow to water atop the ice, which froze at night, so that the entire river was now a glassine ribbon, black and shiny as obsidian and flecked with the reflection of each star above. Joshua wondered if there was a corresponding river, or echo, or memory of river, somehow working its path in similar fashion through the stars above.

  He hitched the wooden horse to the stallion, then climbed on the stallion and clicked him forward. The big horse loved to run in the cold air, and soon he was trotting, with the larger horse sledding along behind, always at the same distance. The ice boomed and squeaked and creaked under the percussion of the stallion’s steel hooves, and the waves of sound vibrated through the ice and traveled up the river as if along a quivering tuning fork. Anyone in town, miles ahead, who might have been near the river at that time, could easily have placed their ear against the ice and heard clearly the sound of their approach. Joshua nudged the stallion to a gallop now, exhilarated by the blur of stars hurtling past his cold-tearing eyes—frozen tears tumbled down his cheeks, and a shooting star melted from the sky just ahead of them, so that it appeared to have tumbled into the river just around the bend. The ice shuddered with each landing of the stallion’s hooves, and the pinewood horse skimmed along behind, sending up a starlit spray of ice shavings. Joshua thought of all the fish sleeping beneath the river’s ice: wondered if he was startling every fish in the river for a hundred miles in either direction. The sound of their passage reaching on up deep into Canada. Would the fish believe that spring had come early—that the river ice was breaking up a few weeks early, even when their bodies told them No, it is still too early . . . What would they think? That the rules had changed?

  Joshua slowed the stallion to a canter, rounding a bend, to keep him from slipping on the ice. He was chilled from the wind of their speed and leaned in close against the horse for warmth, and wondered if indeed it was Danny for whom he had been hearing the sounds of mourning. In a strange way that he knew he would never be able to acknowledge to anybody—and stranger still for the lack of shame he felt, in thinking it—he hoped that it had been Danny, and not anot
her, so that his trip would not have been wasted; and he wondered how it would make Danny feel, if it were indeed not Danny, but another who had passed, to see Danny’s dark flame-breathing carriage come cantering up for him nonetheless.

  The stallion slowed to a crisp walk now. White foam covered his mouth and nostrils, and he was lathered with sweat, steaming. A band of four coyotes trotted down the ice behind them. A lion crouched in the brush on the riverbank and watched, curled its tail slowly.

  Closer to town the sounds of grieving, and laughter, grew louder, and the dull glow of lights from the village became visible over the trees. Joshua stopped and let the stallion rest. With his hatchet he chopped a hole in the river ice so that the stallion could drink again. After a great length the stallion lifted its head—water dripping from its lips—and then stared over its shoulder at the silhouette of the fire horse; watched it for a long time.

  Joshua waited until the stallion had finally stopped steaming before brushing and currying him so that he would look his best. The coyotes stood motionless at a distance, curious.

  Joshua walked back to his creation and examined it. It was still tight and intact, ready for use. He climbed up on it, opened the hatch, and slid down in it, then propped the hatch open so that he could see the stars.

  He curled up inside the fire horse, smelling the odor of fresh-sawn pine, and gave the stallion the order to continue. They started forward again. Joshua watched the stars scroll past overhead and listened to the spray of ice against the belly of the coffin. Down in the horse’s belly he could hear no mourning, but the stallion knew where he was going and stopped when he saw the lights of town clearly through the trees. Joshua climbed out, led the stallion up to shore, tied him to a tree—the fire horse remained hidden back in the woods—and went up the hill toward the sound of the wake.