Where the Sea Used to Be

by Rick Bass

  “Yes,” Amy replied.

  The pig was eaten; only bright bones remained. Artie set off the grand fireworks display, flowering Roman candles and pinwheels and rockets that launched into the night with shrieks and whooshes, flowering in fountains of sparks high over their heads, but which did not explode or crackle. He had bought the silent ones for that purpose, not caring for the sound of gunfire—though downriver, the wolves saw the sky lighting up with showers of fire and smoke, and began howling anyway.

  The pig had come from Idaho, the fireworks from China, the tourists from Missoula. The wolves, frightened by the fireworks, huddled, nestled, deeper into their den. The pups wrinkled their noses, tried to learn the world in a night.

  As the heat continued to suck moisture and nutrients from the once-lush roots and grasses, the bears began to feed instead on ants, as they waited for the huckleberries to ripen. They prowled the trails with their big heads hung low, searching for a bite to eat—a mushroom, or a slow squirrel—and turned over nearly every heavy stone they passed, looking beneath for swarming ants with eggs, which they would then lick up with gusto, smacking them as if they were sugar, ignoring the tiny stings. In some ways it was as if they were farming the ants, for after the bears had upturned a stone or boulder, the surviving ants would recolonize—would shift camp a few inches to hide once more beneath the safety of the rock in its new location—and the next year, walking down the same trail, the same bear would turn the same rock over and once again lick up as many ants as possible, before continuing down the trail to the next rock.

  The bears had begun disassembling Matthew’s wall in places, too, searching for the ants that had taken refuge beneath it, flipping the flat stones over—more and more such disassemblings each summer, so that it was as if the rock wall were unraveling, and as if the glaciers were coming back through the valley again, giving slow drift to the massive rocks, spreading rubble and disorder where once grace had existed. Or rather, bringing a different kind of grace, not clearly visible at first.

  Several of the villagers began to have troubling, unspecified dreams about Old Dudley. None of them mentioned the strange dreams to anyone else, and so the braid of his appearance among them, as they slept, passed unremarked upon—though he was present in bits and pieces.

  The heat grew closer to brutal, further into July. The lichens on rocks were the first to show the stress, drying out and curling until they fragmented at the slightest touch like an old yellow newspaper. The brown leaf-litter of pine needles seemed to ache for ignition; and curiously, people found themselves tempted to light those fires: felt an inexplicable desire to hold a match to that which desired to burn, as if to aid in fulfilling some larger plan. But they resisted.

  Helen took short walks whenever she could, looking for her bear friend and searching for the right tree in which to be buried. Often Mel went with her, offering to carry her whenever she tired, but Helen preferred to walk, and when she grew too weak and tired to go any farther, she would stop and rest. Mel was curious about what it felt like, and Helen said it felt like she was old dirt—not good rich young black earth, but old gray leached-out powder dirt.

  “Dust,” Mel said.

  “Almost,” Helen said. She held out a hand to test it for steadiness. It trembled.

  “Do you have any idea how long?” Mel asked.

  Helen shook her head, pulled out a cigarette, lit it. “Soon,” she said.

  Mel was still curious, almost pushy. Less than a month? More than three months? Half a year? A week?

  Helen sucked on her cigarette. “It’s not something I’ve ever done before,” she said calmly. “I just don’t know. I don’t have anything to gauge it against.” She leaned forward, coughed up another spray of blood across the leaves. “I need to rest for a little while,” she said, and lay down with her head in Mel’s lap. “I’d sure like to see him one more time,” she said, and Mel stroked what was left of her old gray hair.

  They were eating from the garden now: mixing their meals of meat with squash, lettuce, spinach, carrots, potatoes, strawberries. As the food grew, it seemed that Mel could not spend enough time in the garden, keeping it watered and weeded: especially the weeds. They grew so much faster and more vigorously than did the crops that she had little time for anything else. Harvesting and washing the food, weeding, watering again—time for a nap, an hour or two spent with Wallis on the porch, or in the cool of the back bedroom—time to prepare supper, time to read poetry, and suddenly the day was gone, though there was always another one just like it.

  The antlers of the deer, elk, and moose were growing at the same pace as the garden, and were covered with velvet that glowed like candles when the sun hit it, though already some of the antlered creatures were rubbing their antlers against the bark of saplings, anxious to scrape away the loose tissue to reveal the hardened material below with which to conquer and claim and dominate territories.

  Of all the antlered creatures, only the caribou were outside of this cycle of antler growth. Because they occupied country that was uncontested by other ungulates, their antlers served a different purpose—scraping or shoveling away deep snow to find food in winter, rather than fighting for territory in summer. It struck Wallis as odd that the same basic instrument could be used for two such separate purposes. The caribou antlers were like a combination of elk and moose antlers, rotated sideways and lengthened slightly for leverage and balance: as fine-tuned as the whorls of a seashell, specific to one particular beach’s rhythm of tides, so that while the deer and elk and moose were growing their antlers for war, the caribou, two thousand feet above, and back in the shadowy woods, were shedding theirs.

  It pleased Wallis to consider these things—how a thing could be twisted or flexed only slightly to become totally different.

  Still no rain fell. People began to be cautious with matches.

  Mel took a day off from gardening to carry Helen back over to Joshua’s to view the progress of his work. They stopped near a marsh and watched a golden eagle, bronzed as if in armor, chase a pair of mallards around the pond fruitlessly—not diving on them from above, but flying after them, following them as a wolf might lope behind a deer: chasing them, it seemed, only for entertainment, a slow game of tag. The sun lit all the hues of gold in the eagle’s feathers, and the sight was so peaceful, so strange—the eagle flying around and around the marsh, with the ducks also flying in circles, unwilling to abandon their brood—that Helen changed her mind about what kind of bird she wanted to be buried in.

  They continued on. A black bear rose up out of a swamp, blinked owlishly, grunted at them, and moved slowly away, mud-crusted, swarmed by a cloud of swirling mosquitoes. The midday light illuminated that cloud of insects like a corona; a wavering shadow-shape that followed his rough outline wherever he went; there could be no escape from his torment. He went only a short distance before lying back down in a shallow pool of black water and covering his eyes with both paws as if to say, Have at me, I can offer no more resistance. Helen and Mel watched the bear for a while with sympathy, and Helen said, “Brother, I know how you feel.”

  They passed through columns of sun, columns of shadow. The woods were hot even in the shadows, and because Mel was not in as good shape as she’d been when she backtracked the wolves, she had to stop often and rest. The two women would sit beneath the dark green fronds of an old cedar and wave lightly at the gnats and black flies and mosquitoes, waiting for their strength to return. And after some time, as they moved closer to Joshua’s, they could hear the distant sounds of hammering and sawing, the dentistlike sound of a battery drill. The squeak of wood planks being bent and torqued, twisted to yield to a new purpose.

  When they came over the last ridge and saw Joshua at work in the clearing below, they were startled by the immensity of the project, and by the stage of its progression.

  Though there were not yet wings, the body, the undercarriage, was complete, as was the tail and, most alarmingly, the head and beak. The mas
sive coffin was up on sawhorses, and Joshua was up on a ladder with a hammer and chisel, working on the eyes. A great gray owl perched on a broad stump in the clearing not far from where Joshua was working, observing Joshua’s creation with great interest. The owl had a dead mouse clutched in each of its talons and was snacking on them, tearing alternately at one and then the other. Joshua greeted them as they came down the hill—knowing he should be more somber, not so cheery, but unable to help himself, so long had he been without company and so pleased was he with his work.

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  Helen sat down on one of the sawhorses in the shade of the great creation, breathless. Mel spoke for her.

  “You’ve worked so hard on it,” she said. “I know it means a lot to you.”

  Joshua nodded, barely hearing her: watching Helen, wanting words.

  “It’s gorgeous,” Helen said finally, when she could speak again, and when her heart had slowed from its initial leaping of panic—though by no means was it calm. “It’s absolutely beautiful,” she said, and instead of noticing the coffin, she tried to pay attention to how Joshua received her words: the warmth, the relief, in which he basked. She allowed him his pleasure for a few moments, then said, “Though I have changed my mind.”

  “About dying?” he asked, incredulous.

  “No,” she said, “about this,” and nodded toward the coffin. “I want it to be part raven and part golden eagle.” She looked at what was still left unfinished. “The wings and legs, anyway,” she said.

  Joshua stared at her, hammer and chisel still in hand. His vision blurred, so that green floaters of rage swam before him; he felt light, dizzy—tricked, manipulated: as if beauty were being wrested from him. He forced himself to say nothing—only stood there breathing hard, waiting in vain for the frantic rage to seep out of him. He remembered what it was about humans that he didn’t like—their malleability, their confusing unpredictability. He stood there blinking and fought hard to regain his composure: to bid farewell to the vision of a thing that had existed only in his mind, and would now always exist only in his mind—the pure black raven holding Helen in its belly.

  When he could speak, he did so carefully: his hands still white-knuckled on the tools. “I’ll have to make it even bigger,” he said. “To balance the wings in proportion to the body. Jesus God, Helen, it’ll be big.” He glanced out at his stallion, which was thrashing in the river, rolling on its back. “Each wing will have to be twelve, maybe fourteen feet long,” he said.

  “I’ll try and hold on,” Helen said. “I’ll try and wait. If I have to leave early, you can just put me in it and add the wings on later.”

  Joshua winced at the unprofessionalism of it. He looked ready to cry. “Okay,” he said. He looked his age, then, with curls of wood-plane shavings caught in his silver hair, and motes of yellow sawdust trapped in the hair on his arms and at the base of his throat. He looked back at the river, wanting a bath—a purging of the old vision. That night he would have to begin dreaming a new one. When he had been a boy, sixty years ago, had he dreamed he would build boxes in which to put the dead? What curve of earth had moved him toward that purpose?

  Mel and Helen thanked Joshua and left. He sat his tools down and walked slowly toward the river, undressing after they were gone. The owl had vanished.

  When he was naked, Joshua stood in the sun for a moment—chagrined by the looseness of his skin, the dried wrinklings, the sagging, shrinking muscles—and then gathered his breath and dived into the river.

  Mel carried Helen all the way home, helped put her to bed—it was still light out—and then, rather than heading home to see Wallis, she took off running in the other direction, running up the road that led out of the valley—running hard and strong for hours: running through the moonlight, carving back the years and cutting through the plaque of some awful accumulation; running late into the night, until finally panic was gone, and peace had returned, at which point she slowed to a walk—the moon upon her wet skin like silver—and she turned back, taking her time, cooling gradually, and refreshed: encouraged to know that she could still run if she had to.

  Some nights the bear did not come to Helen’s offerings. Other nights it came but did not eat what she had left on the table—the scraps of a small meal she had been unable to finish—a bowl of oatmeal, a dry biscuit—and so she found herself cooking for the bear, though the effort tired her.

  In the daytime, when she was feeling up to it, she would go into the woods searching for him—hoping to sneak up on him in the heat of the day while he napped, as he had been sneaking up on her in the night. She would find his enormous scats everywhere, and his tracks anyplace there was a little dampness; and she could smell him, too, though she couldn’t see him. She never got close enough to him to surprise him; he always heard or smelled her coming, and would slip away silently on his big padded feet, stepping from stone to stone to avoid crunching twigs.

  Sometimes Helen could take only ten or twelve steps before she ran out of breath, and she would have to sit down quickly and rest. If she breathed in too deeply, breathed as hard as she wanted, she ran the risk of starting up the bleeding again. But if she didn’t breathe deeply, she couldn’t get the air she needed, and she would pass out, which happened with increasing frequency.

  So she would sit and wait, poised as if balanced atop a high fence; and when the fluttering in her throat and the pain in her chest had passed, she would light a cigarette, and would sit there smoking it, amazed that she had lived so long—knowing that there had been a mistake somewhere, a broken cog or gear-tooth that had allowed her to make it this far.

  Occasionally she would pass out as she smoked the cigarette, the smoke robbing the oxygen from her blood and brain, and she would topple over on her side, where the cigarette would start a small fire in the dry grass and leaves. The flames would run quickly for a short distance, burning up whatever tinder-dry material they could reach, casting sometimes for ten or fifteen feet before encountering a patch of lush vegetation, which slowed the flames to a creep; and in her unconsciousness, Helen would take in the scent of the burning grass, and would relax, would know peace: and in so doing, her lungs would open and her muscles would begin carrying oxygen again.

  She would sit up and stare at the blackened, smoldering ring around her—her clothes and hair scorched—and at the bright ball of the sun above—and she would not always be convinced, in those first few moments, that she had not already passed on to another place in which time disappeared. Perhaps it is not the flesh that is mortal, she would think, but time. Perhaps time moves in cycles—is born, lives, then dies—while the physical materials are constant, like some residue of time’s passage.

  The thought would invariably make her feel small, strangely unclean, insignificant: as if she were merely the spoor of some mindless thing.

  Her breath would try to leave her again.

  In early August, Mel missed her first cycle—she, who had usually been as steady as the moon—steady and fruitless.

  She knew instantly. She could feel it as if already the presence of another person was fully in the room—a person unknown to them, but a third presence—a triangulation.

  She did not feel her old life being whisked or drawn away, like something glissading down a snow slope. She did not think to look back. Instead she turned and looked forward, as if into a breeze bringing them both a fresh scent—doing so unconsciously, so that that which was being carried away by that same breeze went unconsidered. She told Wallis, and they both felt that the change in Mel’s blood, and the new fullness in the cabin between them, was nothing but good.

  “Are you certain?” Wallis asked.

  “Pretty sure,” Mel said. “Yes.”

  “I thought you were infertile,” he said.

  “I guess something changed.”

  They went for a walk up into the woods behind the house. Everything looked slightly different: every leaf, every species of tree, every stone—sharpe
r, clearer, as if before they had not really been looking at these things, but somehow past or around them. The new view was startling.

  In those next several days, he often asked her if she had started her period yet. He examined her, then tasted her, to see if there was a difference, and he imagined that there was, though in no way that he could have described. The moon melted from its fullness back toward a diminished shape, and they felt as if they had struck out on a new long journey, one for which they had ample reserves and infinite patience.

  They agreed not to tell anyone. They decided to hold it secret between them—to treasure the solitariness.

  They walked upstream along the creek that ran past the cabin, following one of the low wandering rock walls Matthew had built. Wallis stopped by a trickling spring and picked up a damp stone, jeweled emerald with spongy moss. A tiny salamander, red with a green blaze down its back, curled into a reflexive, defensive posture. A wood frog leapt into the creek and splashed across. A thrush warbled. Wallis imagined the bulldozers treading across the back of the frogs and salamanders. He touched the tiny salamander with the tip of his little finger.

  “I won’t give him the map,” he told Mel.

  “He’ll be mad,” Mel said, and then, “Are you sure?”

  “I’m done with him,” Wallis said. “I’m done with all that. Yes, I’m sure,” he said.

  A hot breeze stirred the treetops, brought summer scents to them. “Are you sure?” Mel asked again. “You can’t change your mind, with him—you can’t betray him, then go back and apologize. Are you absolutely sure?”

  “It was nice,” Wallis said. “I liked it. But it’s all behind me now. I don’t want the well drilled here. Not in this valley.”