Night Soil

by Dale Peck

  “Mom!” I yelled as I ran out the back door.

  The brown cracked across her eyelids. They opened halfway, weighted down by mud.

  “Stay back,” she whispered as I ran toward her; then: “Judas!” she gasped as I slipped sternum-deep into the muck. The cold shocked me immobile, but after a moment I continued trudging forward. “Stop!” my mother said, and if it had been a command I would have ignored her. But it was a plea, to providence as much as to me, a mother’s desperate wish for her child to survive, and it cut through my own panic long enough to make me realize that if I continued to wade forward I would only end up as trapped as her. The whole pit seemed to have collapsed. It was nothing but quicksand, a mere six feet deep, but that was still three inches taller than me and four taller than my mother, and there was no treading this ooze. I couldn’t have been two feet away from solid ground but it seemed to take an hour to backpedal my way there and drag myself onto the reeds, and even longer before I could summon the energy to stand again. My sodden freezing clothes hung off me like iron chains. They seemed to weigh a thousand pounds as I ran back into the house and grabbed one of the phragmites ropes my mother had braided two years ago, ran back outside and tossed it to her. My aim was true. The rope landed right on her arm, which bulged beneath the mud like a waterlogged tree branch. But her arm didn’t move.

  “Mom! Grab the rope!”

  Only then did I see that her eyes had closed. They opened again, less than before. Her face was expressionless, too cold to move and too covered by mud to reveal if it did, but something gleamed in her eyes. I want to call it pride, though it could have just been mirth.

  “What is that shit all over your face?” she said, and laughed a little wet laugh.

  I shook the mud off my left hand and brought it to my face. It came away smeared brown—brown and purple—and I remembered the makeup Reed had painted me with yesterday afternoon. This can’t be the last thing my mother sees before she leaves this world, I thought. This can’t be the last thing I show her.

  “It’s not shit,” I said, and my mother stared at me skeptically, as if I was the type of boy who might in fact smear shit on his face, and then gave me the tiniest of nods. The movement seemed to knock her mud-caked eyelids closed. They didn’t open again.

  “Mom, please,” I begged in a hoarse whisper. “Please. Grab the rope.”

  There was nothing for a long moment. Then her eyelids parted and her lips twitched into a smile.

  “I was only waiting for you,” she said, and then she let go of whatever she was holding on to, and slipped beneath the surface.

  The cause of death was ruled hypothermia. The coroner estimated that she’d been in 55-degree water for more than thirty-six hours. Her hands and feet died before the rest of her did; they’d have started to rot by the time I found her if the cold that killed her hadn’t also staved off the start of decay. A half dozen people found the need to tell me it was a miracle she was still alive when I showed up. At the time I didn’t think “miracle” was quite the right word, but now: who knows? Dixie Stammers’s entire life was a case of mind over matter, so why not her death too?

  When the mud dried I excavated the pit and found that a narrow zigzagging path of solider earth had held together as the rest of the pit collapsed into the holes my mother had dug over the course of three years. She’d managed to walk this tightrope, no doubt from memory, to the middle of the pit before it gave way beneath her weight. The shovel that she’d brought to dig clay had fallen only a few feet from her reach; her cubit-sized crate is what had enabled her to keep her head above water. Dried, the silt that had washed in with the flood brushed away like sand from a swimmer’s skin, leaving behind the compacted night soil and the outlines of my mother’s trenches like the ruins of an ancient city unearthed by archaelogists. Claw marks were scored clearly into the wall where she slipped in. Whatever led her to try to harvest clay that day, she hadn’t abandoned herself to her fate. Not at the beginning anyway. She had tried to get out—a fact that mattered mostly to me and to the insurance adjusters, who ruled it a case of death by misadventure rather than suicide. Which is to say: her annuities were paid in full.

  Not that it changed anything. When the second batch of pots began to fall apart their buyers demanded their money back. It’s a betrayal of everything my mother stood for—every lesson she learned from Marcus Stammers and every value she passed on to me—to say that her pots only existed because she believed in them, and when she no longer existed to perceive them, they simply ceased to be. And yet I held them in my hands as they crumbled. Pots that, a day earlier, had held just over three liters of water now dissolved like dried sand beneath the tap; that had pinged their perfect C-sharp now, at the flick of a fingernail, sighed into dust. Sometimes all you had to do was look at one in its softly lit case and it collapsed beneath the weight of your stare like a wallflower desperate for attention, yet even more afraid of it, and the odor of hydrogen sulfide that seeped into the room after each self-immolation smelled like nothing so much as shame. When the existence of the shattered pots on the second floor came out, the courts ruled that my mother had knowingly sold a defective product and I would have to return their buyers’ money. By then dozens of the pots had been resold at auction, many for two or three times what had originally been paid for them, and the claims far outstripped what had been taken in. It turned out the same corporate entity Marcus had set up a hundred years ago to fund the Academy and the conservancy also handled the sale of all the pots, whose money had kept the Academy going for the past half decade. Consequently both were seized and sold, to a mining company that had long before concluded that the most efficient way to extract the coal underneath them was through three spiraled pits each of which will eventually rival the largest open mines in the world. The novices were placed in foster care in cities as far away as Houston and Atlanta and Detroit and Spokane. The drilling started immediately. Within a month the White Woman had stopped flowing again.

  Long before we moved to the Field my mother spoke rhapsodically about a vast cavern in the middle of the earth where the creek’s waters collected after they deadended against Inverna’s base. Depending on her mood (or who knows, maybe mine), this cistern was the source of the world’s oceans or—rainbow covenant be damned—waiting to explode in a second planet-consuming flood. She stopped telling me these stories when I was ten or eleven and began assaulting her with half-understood citations from books I encountered in Master Darkholme-Smith’s natural history lectures, but I have to confess that of all her romanticized explanations for natural phenomena, this one never quite relinquished its hold on me. Because, I mean, where did the water come from? Where did it go? It surged from the ground all year round with tidal force. In spring the Lake’s shores never rose by more than two or three inches, no matter how severe the flooding was further upstream. The water simply returned to the earth as inexorably as it sprang forth. Even in winter, when an ice cap as thick as Marcus’s paving cubits lidded the spring and novices skated on the Lake seventeen miles away, the water continued to flow beneath its frozen surface, which groaned whale song against the seething current yet never cracked. And unlike life, which forms from nothing and disappears just as absolutely, matter can’t just cease to be. The water has to be somewhere. And so I watch for its return on the 216 acres that remain to me thanks to the bequest of an uncle and a father I never met—a proof that there’s a world out there, beyond my conception of it, beyond the Stammerses’s and the Academy’s. I walk out my back door like Marcus did all those years ago, I stare for hours at the dark gash zigzagging through blackened, withered reeds. I’d like to pass off my watching as an act of hope, but the truth is I don’t think I could conceive of a life that wasn’t built around watching. Waiting. I’m just not sure it’s the water I’m waiting for.

  II

  Parable of the Man

  Lost in the Snow

  The “Parable of
the Man Lost in the Snow” always begins the same way: a group of novices asks a master to tell them the story. Strict guidelines regulate their interaction: the novices can only ask questions; the master must not extend, guide, or otherwise volunteer information about which the novices do not specifically inquire. Thus the parable’s first lesson is almost always to illustrate the difference between a request, whose goal is the performance of an action (i.e., telling a story) and an interrogative, whose object is the revelation of information (i.e., the contents of that story):

  Q:Do you know the “Parable of the Man Lost in the Snow”?

  A:Yes.

  And then again:

  Q:Will you tell me the “Parable of the Man Lost in the Snow”?

  A:Yes.

  Many an ambitious fourth- or fifth-former has dashed his boat against the rocks of frustration in an attempt to convince a taciturn master that his (increasingly plaintive) queries, which call for nothing more than confirmation or denial, are in fact appeals for the master to disclose what he knows. Since the master can respond only to what was put to him, the novice will be stymied by the same “Yes” until he arrives at the correct formula:

  Q:What is the “Parable of the Man Lost in the Snow”?

  A:A man lost in the snow came upon a set of footprints, which he followed in the belief that they would lead him to safety. But the trail the man had found was in fact his own, and as such could only lead him in a circle. The man trod this circle over and over, wearing a deep trench in the snow. By the time he discovered his error he was trapped. And so he had to choose: continue walking, or surrender to the snow?

  Because the interrogatory process can be quite attenuated, there are, by custom if not actual rule, at least three and at most seven novices in any session in which the parable is told. Although novices can request to hear the parable at any time during their tenure at the Academy, most wait until fifth form, by which point they will have completed basic instruction in logic and rhetoric, which teaches them to start from what is known—i.e., the “Parable of the Man Lost in the Snow”—and build upon that information, rather than hypothesizing one or a dozen premises or conclusions in an attempt to leapfrog directly to the choice indicated by the parable’s final line. When a hound is given a scent, or an investigator is shown a body in a vacant lot, they do not set off randomly in the blind hope that they will pick up the trail. Rather, they walk in a slowly widening circle until they find a sign of the person or thing they hunt. To wit:

  Q:What was the man doing at the time he became lost?

  A:The man was taking shelter from a snowstorm.

  Q:What was the nature of the man’s shelter?

  A:The man erected a conical frame of spruce branches over which the snow fell, forming an insulating layer.

  Q:How much snow fell?

  A:The snow fell in variegated drifts, most of which were significantly taller than the man’s head.

  And so information accrues, neither linearly nor quickly, but here and there, in bits and pieces, and with much wasted effort. But eventually a situation takes shape:

  The man had been tracking a herd of caribou for much of a day when he noted dark clouds on the horizon. Although it was early in the season, he was far enough from his tribe’s encampment that even a mild snowfall could prove fatal if he did not prepare. He used his axe (stone wedged into a wooden haft) to sever branches from a spruce, and, after clearing a small area of what little snow was already on the ground, lashed the branches together to create a lean-to whose inner cavity was about as tall as he was. He piled a thick layer of needled boughs over this frame, weaving the outermost branches together to add strength to the structure; he left only a small opening at the top to release the smoke from the fire he would build, and a shallow entrance positioned to the lee of what he could now see was going to be a substantial snowstorm. He lined the floor with such stones as he could find and pry loose from the frozen ground, covering them with thick branches cushioned with soft twigs and repeatedly stepping or laying his full weight on this platform to make sure it could support him. Normally he would have excavated a trench beneath the entrance to act as an air sink, but the ground was too hard and he had neither the time nor tools to work it, so a raised platform was necessary to protect the man from the frigid drafts that would settle at the base of his shelter. Once the snow began to fall—or, rather, once it began to fall in earnest, for a few flakes were already whirling out of the sky, batted about by gusts of wind that presaged a major gale—it would coat the spruce framework, forming a thick shell, and the heat from even a tiny fire would be enough to keep him warm. But not even a raging fire would raise the temperature of the floor of a shelter erected on the surface of the land, and, despite the fact that the low platform was only as high as the top of the man’s boots, it made his chances of surviving the storm much greater.

  The man left a small hollow in the platform’s center in which to build a fire, lining it with the largest stones he could find, both to protect his platform from the flames and to project as much heat as possible. While he had been procuring live boughs for his shelter, he had also gathered dry wood as fuel, and he brought as much of this into his shelter as possible, piling the rest outside the entrance and covering it with needled branches to shield it from the worst of the snow. The wind was steady and the snow fell in sharp diagonals, stinging his forehead and cheeks. He would have liked to gather more fuel, but he had exhausted the nearby supply and visibility was falling rapidly; he was unsure he would be able to find his way back if he wandered farther afield. He retreated into his lean-to, sparking a fire and fueling it with logs from outside the entrance, saving the wood inside for later, when the opening might be blocked with snow. Wind whistled through the shelter’s walls, which, though thick enough to obscure the last of the light, did little to impede the stiff gale bearing the storm ever nearer. The lean-to shook when the wind gusted, and several times the man ventured out to tighten the lattice that held it together, until eventually the snow had formed a layer on the windward side that both blocked the wind and weighted his shelter down.

  After that there was nothing to do but maintain the fire and make sure the smoke hole in the roof did not close. The man used the longest of his arrows for this task, standing on the platform and swirling the darted end inside the narrow shaft. The shelter warmed quickly, and the man removed his anorak (the master is quick to point out that this is his word, and not necessarily the man’s) and, as the temperature rose higher, his trousers as well. He left his boots on, and tied the sleeves of his anorak around his waist so that the body of the coat protected his buttocks when he sat down, but other than that he was naked, his skin glistening with sweat in the firelight. He slept sometimes, or sucked on a piece of seal blubber, or chewed a bit of snow to relieve his thirst. He stoked his fire with wood he pulled from outside for as long as he could continue to pass through the entrance, and then, after it became filled with snow, from the store inside; he poked and swirled his arrow around the smoke hole. When morning came he pulled a few branches from the frame of his shelter in order to make a pair of snowshoes. By that point there was little danger of his shelter collapsing. The innermost layer of snow had melted and refrozen several times as it interacted with the heat of the fire and the coldness of the open air, forming a layer of ice that supported much of the weight of the snow atop it. From the most pliable branches the man shaved strips of bark. Then, selecting a branch about as thick as his thumb, he bent it into an arched frame and wove the strips of bark across the open space, forming a lattice. The snowshoe was about three times as wide as his foot and twice as long, and, owing to the materials from which it was constructed, would probably not last a day. But it might make the difference between survival and death, and after he made the first snowshoe he made a second, and reinforced both with extra lengths of bark.

  His firewood ran low. If he used it all before the storm
was over he would have to leave his shelter. He attempted to burn branches from the frame, but the green wood threatened to put his fire out; and when it did catch flame it produced such copious amounts of smoke that the man thought he might suffocate, especially as his smoke hole had narrowed to an ice-edged tube longer than his arm and hardly as wide. The wind had lessened by the time he was down to his last piece of firewood, though the snow was still falling. He put the final log on the fire, donned his anorak and trousers, lashed his snowshoes to his boots with more strips of bark. He sucked on a piece of blubber, cleared his smoke hole one final time. When the fire was nothing more than a few dim coals, he began to dig out. More snow had fallen than the man had realized, and he had not only to excavate the entrance, but also to pack the snow into a ramp that would allow him to ascend to its surface. It took a long time to do this, owing to the depth of the snow and the near darkness in which he worked, as well as the fact that the fresh snowflakes were brittle as chips of stone, and similarly devoid of adhesiveness. But eventually he broke through to blinding morning light, and soon after that he stood on his snowshoes atop the powder. He looked down the angled chute and saw that the snow was significantly taller than he was. Since the entrance was located on the shelter’s lee side, it was unlikely that this was merely drift; more probable, in fact, that the accumulated snow was shallower here than elsewhere, as his shelter would have acted as a windbreak.