For a Little While

by Rick Bass

  From time to time their lower backs would cramp and they would have to lie down on the ground, all three of them, looking up at the sky and spreading their arms out wide as if on a crucifix, and would listen to, and feel with pleasure, the popping and realigning of their vertebrae, and would stare up at that blue sky and listen to the cries of the feeding birds, and feel intensely their richness at possessing now so much meat, clean meat, and at simply being alive, with the blood from their labor drying to a light crust on their hands and arms. They were like children, in those moments, and they might easily have napped.

  They finished late that afternoon, and sawed the antlers off for Jyl to take home with her. Being old-school, the brothers dragged what was left of the carcass back into the woods, returning it to the forest, returning the skeleton to the very place where the elk had been bedded down when Jyl had first crept up on it—as if she had only borrowed it from the forest for a little while—and then they drove back down to their ranch house and hung the ham and shoulder quarters on meat hooks to age in the barn, and draped the backstraps likewise from hooks, where they would leave them for at least a week.

  They ran the loose scraps, nearly a hundred pounds’ worth, through a hand-cranked grinder, mixed in with a little beef fat to make hamburger, and while Ralph and Jyl processed and wrapped that in two-pound packages, Bruce cooked some of the butt steak in an iron skillet, seasoned with garlic and onions and butter and salt and pepper, mixed with a few of the previous spring’s dried morels, reconstituted—and he brought out small plates of that meal, thinly sliced, to eat as they continued working, the three of them grinding and wrapping, and the mountain of meat growing on the table beside them. They each had a tumbler of whiskey to sip as they worked, and when they finally finished it was nearly midnight.

  The brothers offered their couch to Jyl and she accepted; they let her shower first, and built a fire for her in the wood stove next to the couch. After Bruce and then Ralph had showered, they sat up visiting, each with another small glass of whiskey, Ralph and Bruce telling her their ancient histories until none of them could stay awake—their eyes kept closing, and their heads kept drooping—and with the fire burning down, Ralph and Bruce roused from their chairs and made their way each to his bedroom, and Jyl pulled the old elk hides over her for warmth and fell asleep immediately, falling as if through some layering of time, and with her hunting season already over, that year. That elk would not be coming back, and her father would not be coming back. She was the only one remaining with those things safe and secure in her now. For a while.

  She killed more elk, and deer, too, in seasons after that, learning more about them, year by year, in the killing, than she could ever learn otherwise. Ralph died of a heart attack several years later and was buried in the yard outside the ranch house, and Bruce died of pneumonia the next year, overwhelmed by the rigors of twice the amount of work, and he, too, was buried in the yard, next to Ralph, in an aspen grove, through which passed on some nights wandering herds of deer and elk, the elk direct descendants of the big bull Jyl had shot, and which the brothers had dismembered and shared with her, the three of them eating on it for well over a year. The elk sometimes pausing to gnaw at the back of those aspen with roots that reached now for the chests of the buried old men.

  Remembering these things, a grown woman now woven of losses and gains, Jyl sometimes looks down at her body and considers the mix of things: the elk becoming her, as she ate it, and becoming Ralph and Bruce, as they ate it (did this make them somehow, distantly, like brothers and sister, or uncles and niece, if not fathers and daughter?)—and the two old men becoming the soil then, in their burial, as had her father, becoming as still and silent as stone, except for the worms that writhed now in their chests, and her own tenuous memories of them. And her own gone-away father, worm food, elk food: but how he had loved it.

  Mountains in her heart now, and antlers, and mountain lions and sunrises and huge forests of pine and spruce and tamarack, and elk, all uncontrollable. She likes to think now that each day she moves farther away from him, she is also moving closer to him.

  As if within her, beneath the span of her own days, there are other hunts going on continuously, giant elk in flight from the pursuit of hunters other than herself, and the birth of other mountains being plotted and planned—other mountains rising, then, and still more mountains vanishing into distant seas—and that even more improbable than her encountering that one giant elk, on her first hunt, was the path, the wandering line, that brought her to her father in the first place, delivered her to him and made him hers and she his—the improbability and yet the certainty that would place the two of them in each other’s lives, tiny against the backdrop of the world, and tinier still against the mountains of time.

  But belonging to each other, as much in death as in life. Inescapably, and forever. The hunt showing her that.

  Titan

  The summer that I witnessed, breathed, lived the jubilee, I was twelve years old. My brother, Otto, who is four years older, was already on what he was calling the “fast track” to success, which he defined, and still does, as becoming rich. He is an investment banker, and I suppose it is fair to say that he has never known a moment’s hardship. Even he refers to himself as blessed. I myself was never quite as comfortable in the presence of excessive bounty as he was.

  Our parents were born in the heart of the Depression, grew up under its shadow, cowed and spooked I think by the fear and memory of it. Otto reacted by turning away from the cautious austerity of our parents, away from such fiscal and, some would say, emotional timidity, and struck out as soon as possible in the opposite direction, swimming hard and strong and eager for the profligate.

  Our parents had worked hard establishing their own business as geologists—but it must have rankled Otto, as soon as he was old enough to notice such things: the way our parents held on to, and conserved, and reinvested their savings, setting aside safe and prudent amounts of it, as if against the coming storms of the world—storms that never came.

  There was wealth almost everywhere in Texas in those days, and the fact that I have not participated in it since then, or rather, have chosen other kinds of wealth, does not mean the moneyed type was unavailable to me. I simply was pulled in another direction. Even then, I had my own hungers, and still do.

  They say that traits in a family, or even in a nation, are prone to sometimes skip generations, rising and falling in crests and troughs like waves far out beyond the Gulf. And although Otto was only four years older, I often felt as if I were an only child, that he was from the generation before me, and that my parents were from the generation before that generation, so that I was able to witness, and live between, the two ways of being in the world. And I do not mean to judge Otto—but whenever my parents would attempt to have a cautionary discussion with him about his hungry, consumptive ways, he would brush them off.

  There was nothing that he did not see as a commodity, able to be bought or sold or traded, and leveraged or even stolen from the future. He was then and still is simply a taker, and it is the only way he is comfortable in the world: and though one day I suppose the world will run out of things to take and to trade—or rather, will run out of worthwhile things to take and trade—that is not quite yet the case, and I’d have to say that all in all he’s continuing to live a fairly comfortable and satisfied life, and that he’s more or less content, even in the continued savagery of his hunger. I think that he has found his own balance.

  Though it did not occur to me when I was twelve, I came to realize later that our elderly parents—they would have been in their midfifties then—might have been a little awed by Otto; by the unquestioning force of his desire, the crisp efficiency of his gluttony, and by the power of his steadfast commitment, almost as if to a religious philosophy, to seek out anything rare and valuable, and purchase it, and count it, and market it: to acquire and consume.

  Listening to him talk about such things—stocks and bond
s, gold and silver, treasury notes and soybeans, cattle and poultry, coal and oil—was like watching a great predator gaze unblinkingly, its jaws parted, at a herd of unknowing grazing creatures. My parents weren’t frightened of their oldest son, but they were awed. And who were they, besides his elders, to speak to him, to tell him he was wrong, when they themselves had known a similar hunger but had simply grown up in a time when it seemed there was nothing available to acquire, and no means for the acquisition?

  My own hunger was for a closeness and a connection—a reduction in the vast and irreducible space I perceived to exist between all people, even within a family. It would have been fine with me if every morning the four of us had taken our breakfast together, and if the four of us had then gone out into the day to labor in the bright fields together, in some wholesome and ancient way, plowing and tilling, or harvesting and gathering, and to eat all our meals together, and to end the day with a family reading, an hour or more of dramatic monologue, or a chautauqua.

  Instead, we all sort of went our own ways, day after day. The closest we came to conventional or traditional or mythical unity was every summer when we went on vacation to a place in south Alabama, on the coast, called Point Clear. The hotel and resort where we stayed—the Grand Hotel—was elegant, even if the coast itself was hot and windy and muggy. In the evenings we would eat delicious seafood in the formal candlelit dining room, surrounded by diners possessing far greater wealth than my parents’: men and women who were no less than corporate titans. And each night, while I would sit there quietly, reflectively, dreaming a child’s dreams, Otto would be looking all around, paying far more attention to the titans—to their mannerisms and overheard conversations—than he did to the meal itself. And, even then, I would sometimes be aware of the manner in which my parents beheld both of us, and of their unspoken thoughts, as they wondered, How can two brothers, or two of anything, turn out so different? And I could see also that they were perturbed by this difference, this distance. As if we were all moving away from one another: as if our desire for space was the greatest gluttony.

  At the hotel, each night was attended by endless opulence. We would all dress up, titans and nontitans, and enter that grand formal dining hall and be waited on, hand and foot, with one delicacy after another being brought to us, treats and treasures to be had merely for the asking, while a band played music at the other end of the hall. And the next day, after a breakfast of bright fruit and fresh juice, Otto and my parents would go off to play tennis or golf, while I would be on my own, free to wander the well-kept grounds, free to inhabit the reckless lands of my imagination. There was so much space.

  I prowled the cattails in the water hazards along the golf courses, catching fish and minnows and snakes and turtles and frogs—particularly the sleek and elegant spotted leopard frogs, which are already nearly extinct. They were everywhere back then, and no one could ever have imagined they would simply, or not so simply, vanish. What other bright phenomena will vanish in our lifetimes, becoming one day merely memory and story, tale and legacy, and then fragments of story and legacy, and then nothing, only wind?

  I spent the middle of the afternoons sitting in the air-conditioned lobby, playing chess with and against myself, bare-chested in my damp swimsuit, sitting on a leather sofa with sand grains crumbling from between my toes onto the cool tile floor. I ordered root beer and grilled cheese sandwiches from the pool, charging them to our room, and in my concentration on the game I would spill potato chips into the folds of the leather furniture. I failed to notice the icy looks that must have been coming from the desk clerks.

  There are so many different types of gluttony. Even now, just as when I was a child and without responsibility, I can lie on my back in the tall grass in autumn and stare at the clouds, an adult with not a thought in my head; and when I stand up, hours later, I will still be ravenous for the sight of those clouds, and for the whispering of that grass, and when I go to bed that night I will still be hungry for the memory of the warmth of that late-season sun, even as, in the moment, I am enjoying the scent and embrace of the darkness, and the cooling night.

  At Point Clear, we’d meet up again for dinner—Otto and my parents tanned from the extravagances of their own day, and relaxed, appearing not quite sated—never that—but almost. Even then I felt acutely that I was between two lands. I wanted to take but I also wanted to give: though what, I wasn’t sure.

  Were there others like me? I had no idea. It was entirely possible I was alone in this regard: that even amid bounty, too much space surrounded me.

  The jubilee was a phenomenon that usually happened only once every few summers in south Alabama, following afternoon thunderstorms in the upland part of the state. The storms would drop several inches of rain into all the creeks and streams and rivers in a short period of time. That surge of fresh cold rainwater would then come rushing down toward the Gulf, gaining speed and potency, doubling at every confluence, until finally, a few hours later—almost always in the middle of the night—the wall of fresh water would come rolling into the Gulf.

  The moon was involved with the jubilee, too, though I don’t know exactly how. Perhaps the moon had to be full, and pulling out a big rip tide just when all the extra fresh water came gushing out—or maybe it was the other way around, and the moon had to be bringing a high tide of seawater upriver—but anyway, the bottom line, or so said the brochure I had read at the front desk, was that when the jubilee hit, the flush of fresh water would stun or kill all the saltwater fish in the vicinity, and the fresh water would also carry out on its plume a swirling mix of freshwater creatures—catfish, gar, crawdads, bullfrogs—that would also be salt-stunned.

  It was a rare thing, almost a once-in-a-lifetime thing, to see it. I made sure our family’s name was on the list for the wake-up call. The first year I signed us up, I was seven years old. I’d lie there in our cottage every night, watching the moon through the window, waiting for the phone to ring. The woman at the front desk told me that whenever you answered the phone and heard the one word—“Jubilee!”—it meant the thing was on.

  I would lie awake wondering if it had rained in the uplands that day. I would strain my ears to see if I could hear the shouts of “Jubilee!” drifting across the golf course, and up and down the beach.

  Summer after summer passed in this manner, with me wandering solitary along the edges of the bright and well-kept lawns and gardens of wealth in the daytime, and lying there in the cottage each night, trying to stay awake for as long as I could, awaiting the call.

  I imagined the jubilee was an event of such significance the hotel staff kept someone down at the beach each night on permanent lookout, like a lifeguard perched high in a chair, waiting to report its arrival.

  In the summer when I was eleven, finally, the call did come, but I was asleep, and didn’t find out about it until weeks later, when we were back home. The phone had rung at two a.m., and when my father leaned over and picked up the phone, a woman’s voice cried “Jubilee!” and then hung up. Neither my father nor my mother had a clue what a jubilee was, much less that I had signed us up for one.

  The year that I was twelve—the year I finally saw the jubilee—I slept by the phone. It was very rare to have two jubilees in two years—and this time I got to the phone, and got to hear the woman say it.

  She uttered just that one word and then hung up. I hurried outside, and could see people moving down toward the beach in the moonlight—some in bathrobes, others in shorts and sandals. Some had flashlights, though the moon was so bright you didn’t really need one.

  I went back inside and got my family up. At first they didn’t want to go, but I kept haranguing them, and finally they awakened.

  By the time we made it down to the water, people were already wading out into the ocean. The first thing that hit me—beyond the beauty of the moonlight on the water—was the scent of fresh fish.

  It wasn’t quite as I had pictured it would be. I had imagined there might be a t
housand people, or even ten thousand; but instead there were only about forty of us, moving slowly through the waves, our heads down, searching for the stunned fish floating belly-up. I had thought people would hear about it on the radio stations, and through word of mouth, and that there would be cars parked all up and down the beach—that people would have come all the way from Mobile and Pensacola, and even farther: Biloxi, Hattiesburg, and the uplands—Selma, Columbus, and Tallahassee. But instead it was just us: the resort-goers.

  I had thought you would be able to see the jubilee, too—that the plume of fresh water would be darker, like spilled ink, and you would be able to discern precisely where it entered and mixed with the bay, being diluted and spread laterally by the longshore currents. But it wasn’t that way at all. I couldn’t tell any difference between salt water and fresh. The waters looked just as they always had. Every now and then I could catch the faintest whiff of something fresh and dark—organic, like black dirt, forest, nutmeat, rotting bark—but always, just as soon as I became aware of that dark little thread of scent, it would disappear, absorbed by the mass of the ocean.

  I had thought there would be more fish, too. I had thought there would be millions. Instead, there were only thousands. Some of the smaller ones appeared dead, but the larger ones were just stunned, swimming sideways or upside down, gasping and confused. They were out there for as far as I could see—white bellies shining in the moonlight—and other fish were careening as if drunk against my legs—fish panicked, fish drowning, is what it looked and felt like—and people carried pillowcases and plastic bags over their shoulders, filling them as if they were gathering squash or potatoes from a garden.

  Everyone participated. Class distinctions fell away, and Otto and my mother and father and I loaded our pillowcases right alongside the rich and the superrich, as well as alongside the hotel workers, filling our sacks with our catches: crabs, catfish, red snapper, flounder, shrimp, bullfrogs, sheepshead, angelfish.… We didn’t have to worry about sharks, because they wouldn’t come in to where the fresh water was mixing. It was all ours. For that one night—or those few hours—it was all ours. Father and Mother were very happy, as were all of the people out on the beach, and it felt to me as if I had been drawn already into some other, older world—the land of adults—without having quite yet petitioned for or even desired such entrance, still pleased as I was by childhood.