by Rick Bass
The buck stepped out of his trance once more and reentered the world. He turned away from Jyl now and began walking along the trough made in the snow where Stephan and Shayna had felled their second tree. He stepped carefully over and among the tangle of branches Stephan had limbed from the tree, then lowered his head to browse on the lichen that clung to those branches; and each time he did so, Jyl felt a moment of disorientation when the crown of antlers lowered—as if a large bush was attached to the deer’s head and was beginning to move in animal fashion.
She was so amazed by the elegance of the old deer’s movements—his careful steps through and over the latticework of torn and sawn limbs—that she forgot she was hunting him. She watched as he lifted his head occasionally to glance around and then lowered it to the snow and sniffed like a hound at the children’s tracks.
Several times the deer stared off in the direction of her cabin, and Jyl had the feeling the deer believed he was safe, that he was secure in the faith that Jyl was still in her cabin, asleep. She could easily raise her rifle and drop him where he stood, while he stared as if transfixed at the yellow squares of her cabin—and yet something within her, some place of warmth, dissuaded her from making the shot. Instead she watched him watch her cabin.
After a while, he lowered his head to browse again, and drifted on farther into the woods, and though she wanted a deer, she was glad she had not taken this one, even though she knew she might not get another chance.
She had only one more week left of treatment. Millions of patients had been through it before—they would all call it the most physically grueling and spiritual thing they’d ever done, and spoke of the hidden blessing of the cancer, of the way it awakened in them incredible awareness of even the simplest pleasures. But such testimonials irked Jyl, for she did not feel she had taken those little moments for granted in the first place. On the contrary, she had always been acutely aware of them, even worshipful of them. It wasn’t fair.
The treatment had been calibrated to reach its toxic peak during its last week, but she felt in every way she had already turned the corner, that the worst week was just behind her, and that despite the increasing radioactive and chemical bombardment, her body was growing stronger again. And when she told the doctors this, they shrugged and said that it was possible, that different patients responded in different ways.
She sent forth another boat, relating her saga of having seen the big deer, and inviting the children to return when they could. She told them she looked forward to it, and that she would bake a cake, that she had gotten rice and pineapple at the store. She told them she wished the current would flow both ways, like a tide, so they could send her messages.
Now the treatment hit her like a dump truck. The previous exhaustion had been nothing compared to this final wave. She was more chilled than ever, and wore her ski cap over her bald head continuously, and kept the fire roaring. She had already nearly depleted the second load of firewood and was beginning to look out the window at the forest, searching for the tree she would cut next. Her body felt as if her blood had been filled with lead. She was certain the doctors had made some mistake, had doubled or tripled her dose, or prescribed her a treatment for a three-hundred-pound football player, but she finished the treatment later that week and was free to return home to do nothing but shit and puke and sleep and cry.
She avoided her mirror—the blackened eyes, the astonishing weight loss, and the otherworldly fatigue—and settled in to wait. There were days when she did not get out of bed except to use the bathroom and empty her bedpan, and she felt certain she was dying, felt each day as if she had only one more day left. The doctors had gone too far, she was certain: had overcompensated for the challenge of the enemy.
She dreamed often that Shayna and Stephan came looking for her, that they could not find her and were disappointed. She dreamed they were sending her notes in the river, or attempting to, but the ships were all being carried away farther downstream, and ending up beached beside other people’s cabins, or never found.
She dreamed they came wandering through the woods, searching for her—that they found her cabin, but, unable to rouse her, left notes tacked to her door, and to the outside of the cabin walls—and then she dreamed they no longer cared for her, were no longer interested in her.
She fell further into her dreams. The feeling she was going to die soon left her. She began to imagine she might survive for weeks, then months, and then even years.
They came over the mountain as they had said they would, with their arms and packs filled with sacks of food: loaves of bread, and servings of deer, elk, moose, and grouse, as well as a remnant of turkey carcass, and even some antelope, left over from a hunt their family had made to the eastern side of the state earlier in the fall.
They stepped up onto the porch, calling her name, arms too burdened with bounty to knock on the door, and when Jyl opened the door to greet them she saw they were covered with snow, and they handed Jyl their bags one by one, and then knelt and unbuckled their snowshoes and slid off their heavy packs.
They had brought two jugs of apple cider, two gallons of their own honey, jars of jam made from wild huckleberries, plums and strawberries they’d gathered from the valley, and jars of smoked trout and whitefish taken from the same creek on which she sailed her ships to them daily.
They had bags of dried mushrooms as well, morels and chanterelles, which represented but one of the hundreds of ways they made a living, and Jyl was touched not just by the dollar value of such gathered goods withdrawn from their hand-to-mouth seasonal income, but by the amount of labor that had gone into the gathering and then preparation of those foods.
The degree of their devotion to Jyl was evident on their faces—as if it were one of the great pleasures of their lives to be able to bring her these gifts.
The children stepped inside and put some food in the stove to warm—though the children had eaten a big midday meal with their family, they were famished again from their afternoon chores as well as the long hike over the mountain—and as the odors of warming food began to fill the cabin, the children sat at Jyl’s feet on either side of her and helped her sketch the next ship, the design of which was the grandest yet, with their ambitions and imaginations having grown larger in the long absence of ships.
As Jyl drew, the children pointed to her sketch and suggested additions and alterations: intricate carvings along the gunwales, a howling wolf on the bow. A keel made of a deer’s rib, and the ivory from cow elk teeth and the incisors of deer decorating the deck like a mosaic of bright tile. Dollhouse furniture—a chest of drawers—fastened to the bow, so the sketches and notes and stories could be stored in the tiny drawers.
“Write a story with three chapters,” Shayna urged her. “The first chapter can go in the top drawer, and the second chapter in the middle drawer, and the last chapter in the bottom drawer.”
The food was warm again—they could detect its odors stirring—and they brought it to the table, and, after Stephan and Shayna said a prayer, the three of them ate with wordless focus, the children moving through their meal with startling intensity. They ate for an hour, attacking the meal in the manner with which they attacked any of their labors—working hard, yet deriving great pleasure from it, as well—and when they were too full to eat any more (and yet, bounty still remained), they cleared their plates and dishes, and they and Jyl began carving that evening’s ship, whittling it from one of the same lengths of pine the children had cut for her firewood on their last visit.
The flakes of wood fell from her knife like petals of light or slivers of flame, and over the course of only about an hour the boat began to emerge, like a living thing working its way free of an egg or even a womb; and in the hour after that, they took turns sanding and polishing it. And though there were differences between the way they had sketched it on paper and the way it was turning out in real life, it was still a beautiful craft, and reflected well the care and attention they were giving it.
And more than ever, as she watched the children work, Jyl had the thought that it was as if the children were hers—and not because she had made them hers with her love and attention, but vice versa: they had claimed her. And she dreaded already the day when she would be released.
Soon enough—too soon, Jyl thought—the little boat was ready to go, and, delighted, the children put it up on the mantel, proud of their work but excited, also, at the messages it would bring, over and over again.
The evening was still young, and everyone was relaxed from the big meal. The children were lying on the floor next to each other at right angles, their heads on pillows, absently fingering and twirling each other’s hair rather than their own—as if despite the differences across the years they were somehow twins, or so like each other as to be the same, one self indistinguishable from the other.
Jyl took down from her windowsills several of the more alluring minerals she had found on her field trips, in the retracing and backtracking of her father’s steps. Elbaite, also known as tourmaline; azurite, with malachite embedded. Hemimorphite, from Leadville, Colorado. A diamond from Canada. Obsidian, from the Yellowstone country.
She let the children sort through them and handle them as she began another geology lecture. She told the children there are only about four thousand known minerals on the planet: that of all the elements trapped on the earth, there were only a finite number of arrangements or possibilities of composition available.
“Almost any mineral will form crystals,” she told them. “A crystal is nothing more than an orderly, repeating atomic structure.” She looked at Shayna and backed up for a moment, and told her about atoms—how they were the tiniest bricks in the world; that atoms in a rock were like atoms in a human being, or any other living creature.
She took her time lecturing, and watched the children examining the crystals before them. They did not want to set the minerals down but kept holding them, handling them.
“They start forming underground,” she said, “when a few similar atoms cluster together, usually in water or lava, to form crystal seeds,” she said. “As more and more atoms lock on to the seeds, they keep repeating that initial atomic arrangement, so the little seed crystal just keeps getting bigger and bigger, like a kind of blossoming.”
Shayna raised her hand, and for the strangest moment Jyl had the feeling she was going to ask her some question about God, or about her own beliefs, her chances of salvation. Instead Shayna asked, “Can an entire mountain be made of a crystal?” She was holding a piece of amethyst, peering through it at the lantern, and Jyl smiled, imagining what she was seeing, and said, “Absolutely. Most of those kinds of mountains are way underground. It’s when they get exposed to the surface that they start getting broken apart and crumbling, and being washed away.” She nodded toward the amethyst. “The atomic structures of different minerals are what determine the mineral’s shape, and its hardness—the way it responds to the world, and the way it reacts to the world’s light, giving each mineral its own unique color, its brilliance, its fire.”
Stephan raised his free hand. In his other hand he held a lumpen, uncut ruby, as dark as a deer’s heart.
“How long did it take to make this one?” he asked. Imagining some organic gestation involving perhaps months, or maybe even years.
Jyl smiled. “Probably a million years,” she said.
She had thought they would be pleased by such a revelation, treasuring their crystals even more, and was surprised at first by the dismay that crossed their faces, until she remembered that theirs was still a world in which miracles unfolded literally like the leaves on trees in the passing seasons, or as the blossoms of flowers emerged, or as ice melted, or snow fell, or as one simple match ignited one large fire.
She laughed, wanting to remind them that even a million years was not so long, but then said nothing, and instead let them simply hold the rocks, let the weight of their mass, and their beautiful, inescapable density, speak the rocks’ own truths to the children’s hands.
They carved another ship later that night, a much smaller, simpler one requiring only about thirty minutes of work, and then, with Jyl fading quickly, suddenly—she lay down on the couch for a quick nap—the children went out into the snow to find another tree, to bring her more wood.
Again they felled and limbed it, then sawed and split it and hauled it to the porch, wearing a new path through the snow.
This time Jyl heard them thumping around on the porch—it was almost midnight—and she sat up and went out to praise them as they finished stacking enough wood for her to stay warm for another week.
They came inside to gather their bags and packs and empty dishes, and she loaded them down with several of the larger and more attractive gemstones, including a small diamond and an emerald. And though they protested at first, she could tell they were overjoyed with the gifts, and they promised to take good care of them forever; and it pleased her, watching them set off into the night, their one flashlight beam cutting a lane through the swirling flakes, to see that their packs were heavier, leaving, than they had been upon their arrival.
Another dream: the children’s labors were hardening them, threatening to turn them to statues, even as Jyl’s loneliness—the fiery rawness of it—was keeping her alive. Consuming her, but in that burning giving life. The children were on a ship, they were leaving, being drawn away, years were passing in a single blink, a single thought, the children being pulled away by some current that hardened them and consumed her, until in the end none of them would remain as he or she had been, or even remain at all—only memory and stone, and yearning, like wind.
She sat up with a shout, then got out of bed and accidentally kicked several of the rocks they had left on the floor, sending them skittering and clattering across the room.
With shaking hands she found her matches and lit a lantern, and began gathering the rocks. They were still holy to her, talismans, not only in that her father had discovered and claimed them, had deemed them worthy of preservation, but also because she determined now to give all of them to the children, whichever ones they desired; and after building a fire in her stove, using more of her precious supply of firewood, she began carving new ships.
And because she was still chilled at first, her hands slipped once so that she cut her finger, causing the boat’s bow to be smeared with her blood; and rather than sand it clean, she applied a symmetrical smear on the other side, so that it seemed like a painted pattern.
When she was finished, she put a note, a story, and a crystal into the ship, walked down in the darkness to the even darker river, and turned the boat loose.
It was a yellow boat, and for a moment it looked like a spark, a live coal, in the river. Had her father ever dreamed or imagined, she wondered, that of the gems he brought back from the mountains any might ever undertake such paths and journeys? Such motion, and bringing such joy: almost as if they had had the breath of life breathed into them, and had become inspirited.
She continued to carve and send boats all during the next week, and then into December. Deer season had ended and a new silence fell upon the mountains, one that was welcome. Jyl did not mind that she had not gotten a deer. She had seen the giant king once, and that had been enough.
She continued to send messages, stories, and drawings, as well as gems and crystals and fossils—sending several out in the same day, staggered over different departure times—and in some of her drawings, as her loneliness grew, she would make little watercolor sketches of the three of them sitting around a table loaded with food, as they had at Thanksgiving, with gleaming candelabra casting a shining light upon a roast turkey, a wild goose, and all other manner of game upon their plates; and in the tiny rolled-up paintings there would be wreaths hanging on the walls, images indicating the future, Christmas, rather than the past, Thanksgiving.
She never came right out and said, I am lonely, please come back, but as December moved forward and still her visitors, her friends, her li
ttle children, had not returned, she went even further with her pleadings and sketched a picture of her diminished woodpile.
She had been unable to get the saw to start once more, and though she still had some wood left on her porch, she had taken to wandering the forest around her house, pulling down dead limbs and branches and carrying them back to the house.
She was beginning to consider for the first time that the children might not be coming back.
They have grown up already, she feared. They no longer care for me.
The days grew ever shorter, plunging toward the solstice.
She tried not to panic. After all she had been through, this was still the worst.
She found herself standing at the window some days, watching for them, and staring at her woodpile—trying to conserve what she had, even though it made no sense, as this was the coldest time of year, and the children had not cut the wood for her to hoard, but rather to spend. But it disappeared so fast.
This newer, deeper, down-cutting loneliness was worse than the fears she had known before her diagnosis—those strange weeks when each traverse of the mountain had been more and more difficult—and worse than the first weeks after the diagnosis. This deeper loneliness was worse than the physical agony of the treatments, and worse than the captivity of the hospital room.
She moved around in her cabin, pacing, the walls lit with the wavering light cast by one of her lanterns as it sputtered low on propane. She was crying, pacing, crying, and when the lantern finally blinked out she was too upset to connect it to a new bottle of propane but instead kept pacing, from darkness to light, light to darkness.
Soon the limitations of her frailty overtook her, so that she was exhausted and could pace no more. She collapsed onto her bed as if accepting her grave, and yet the loneliness continued—though finally she sank into a state of merciful catatonia, staring at the ceiling until daylight, and then beyond.
