The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness

by Rick Bass

  I was interested in all the wild things—the bobcats and mountain lions, the flowers and the trees, the rocks and the river—but the year that I was nine and my mother was zero, the year that my brother Omar was four, my father forty-four, and my mother’s father seventy-two, what I became most interested in was birds: all of them. If it flew, I loved it. If it sang, I loved it.

  I crawled through the thickets and old-growth oak and juniper forests of that magical land, out at the edge of West Texas, north of Uvalde, and at the edge of the hill country, where the water ran year round in the deep limestone river. You could see Mexico eighty miles off to the south. We lived on a ten-thousand-acre oasis of forest and woodland, with mountains full of blooming mountain laurel and cliffs bearing petroglyphs from five hundred years ago—rock etchings of Spaniards with guns and swords and iron helmets, horses and banners—but civilization passed through like only a thin breeze. Grandfather and father and Grandfather’s old friend, Chubb, felt badly for me, all that time I was growing up, and the way they took care of me was, I knew, a testimony to how much they must have loved Mother. And of course I had eight years with her to remember—she didn’t all go away. A lot of her is still here. Perhaps all. I still don’t know entirely which part of her is her, and which of her is me. Sometimes I’ll see or hear something with a strange kind of resonance and can only assume it is a thing, a scent or sound or sight, similar or maybe even identical to one which once touched her deeply, and I will pause, pondering the meaning of this response...

  I’d crawl through the thickets and the woods and walk up along the ridgelines with Omar, being kind and sweet to him the way Grandfather and Chubb and Father were to me, trying to show him more than the three years he had with her.

  I might as well not be coy about it. I’m forty-four years old now, and I still see and hear her in so many movements across the land here, every gust of breeze, every tumbling leaf. I still hear her more clearly, it seems, than I do myself. Are we always, all of us, a mystery to ourselves, in this manner? I may be mistaken, but I don’t think any of us stand alone. Hawk-soar, and butterflies—water trickling, and especially the night sounds: owls, and fish splashing in the creek, the invisible sound of bats over the water, and the howls of the coyotes, the silence of the stars, the sound of the wind, the cool wind: both howling blue northers in the winter, and cool southerly prairie-scented night breezes coming up from Mexico in the summer, cooling the land and bathing us in blossom scents—huisache, agarita. Fireflies, drawing light it seemed (and blinking it through their bodies) as if fueled by the presence of joy, or happiness, somewhere in the world, and that energy has, and still is, on Prade Ranch...

  I hear her more than ever, on Prade Ranch. I hear my own blood, too, and the slight variations from her within it—my own self, scribed by the land beyond what my family’s blood has scribed into me—and I am glad that I do not feel the need to fight or be uncomfortable with who I am and where I have come from.

  I hear her speak to me in the night, in the special places—looking at the Nueces, or walking over the moonlit caliche roads. I do not mean to say that I hear her in the language of humans—or rather, in the English language—it’s more like the echo of sound that I hear rather than sound itself; like the moment right after a word is spoken, or a door is closed. It is like the sound you hear in real life that wakes you from your dream, at the same time managing to incorporate itself into your dream.

  Late at night I would take Omar with me, when all he wanted to do was play games in the library, or listen to the faraway staticky crackle of baseball games on the radio: one lone antenna rising a hundred feet into the air, up out of the river canyon, up above the great trees around our house. The antenna strived toward the stars, trying to pick up those mysterious night waves that would bring the games into the den every night, and Father and Omar would sit in the den with only one lamp on, as if in a trance, listening to the drone and murmur of the game; the steadiness of its slow progression punctuated infrequently by the wooden crack of a bat or the smack of ball-to-leather mitt, and the crowd’s roar right after those sounds, and the announcer’s excited outcry, and Father and Omar seemed to draw a kind of strength from the games, night after night.

  Grandfather and I would sit on the back porch, the flat clay tiles hauled up from Mexico more than a hundred years ago, in wagon after wagon. Chubb would already be down at his cabin, drinking, or perhaps already asleep; he did not like the darkness, and retired to his cabin every day at dusk, and drank occasionally, and never ventured out before dawn.

  So Grandfather and I would sit there in our own darkness and listen to the indistinguishable low sounds of the baseball game, and to the steady echo of the stars above us, and those cool breezes. The longer we sat out there, with our backs to the light, the brighter the stars got. Grandfather knew them all. Andromeda. Cassiopeia. The Pleiades. Cygnus.

  We’d listen to the coyotes, to the Mormon crickets, and to the screech owls. We had an old mercury vapor lamp down on the river, below the high cliffs, to provide light for the cookouts we used to have, but did not have so often, later. There was an ancient stone gazebo down on the river, and we could see it below us, through the tops of the trees, looking strange and empty with no one sitting around it. The light brought insects to it at night, some swarming just over the water, and we could hear fish jumping at them.

  We’d sit and listen to the night—would listen to it in the darkness. Fireflies drifting through the woods just beyond us, as if asking us to follow them. The giant ghostlike luna moths would fly in from out of the woods and hover at the windows, fluttering like small hawks, trying to get in to where Omar and Father were listening to baseball. The moths were a luminescent, feathery pale green with sweeping forked tails that made them look like angels in long robes. Some people said that, as with the lightning bugs, luna moths spent their days flying around the earth at high altitudes, descending only after the sun had set, but Grandfather and I knew that they lived under old logs back in the dark cedar thickets, because we’d found them in there. They didn’t come from above, but emerged from the earth below. I want there to be a heaven, an afterlife, but wonder why we look to the stars so often when thinking of it. It would be just like one of nature’s ironies for us to inhabit the earth, the muddy, rocky soil, in our afterlife—under logs with luna moths and lightning bugs, sleeping all day and coming out only after dark.

  Already by the time I was ten I knew most of what there was to know about the night: the names of things. Occasionally Grandfather would say something I could not understand, and after a few tries he would have to write down on a notepad what he was trying to say, what he was trying to show me.

  Grandfather thought it was important to know the names of things—that once the names could be spoken, knowledge would follow. He thought it was a fierce obligation of humanity to understand the names of the land as one would know the names of one’s own family; brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, mother and father. Chubb snorted at this kind of talk and said Grandfather was like an Indian that way, and Grandfather would get angry then, and would shake. And back before Mother died, back when his voice was still clear, Grandfather would shake his fist and thunder at Chubb (who loved upsetting him): “The natural history of Texas is being sacrificed upon the altar of generalization! You must pay attention! You must know the names, before they’re lost!”

  Chubb didn’t really know what Grandfather was railing about, “the altar of generalization,” but he liked to hear Grandfather say it. The way a thing is of a place—of one place, rather than all places, or no place, is what he meant, I think.

  ***

  After the baseball game ended—nine-thirty or ten-thirty for the games in the East or in faraway Houston, but even later for West Coast games—Father would come out onto the porch and tell us good night, and Omar would, too. And if it was a school night, I’d let Omar go on to sleep. But if it was a weekend, or in the summer, I’d grab Omar before he could go
off to bed, and make him come with me. I’d hug Father good night, and Grandfather, too. Grandfather would go in with Father, then—sometimes they’d talk in slow quiet voices, but more often they just sat in the near-darkness, with only a single lamp on—sitting in the darkness and just thinking, but doing it together.

  Omar and I would run, then, hand in hand, through the junipers, the cedars, and out to the ghostly white of the caliche road. For a long time as I was growing up I wondered why they let us be so free. I wondered why, after such a great loss, they ever let us out of their sight. Later I realized that it was their way of fighting that loss, sitting there in the darkness and feeling, vicariously, our hearts running through the night, and through the woods—a way of speaking to the sorrow, and to Mother, too—a way of saying that all had not been for naught, that her children’s lives and joy would be irrepressible, because they had come out of her.

  But it would take more loss, and more years, before I saw that. All I did then was run, holding Omar’s hand.

  I tried to make him feel Mother, but I couldn’t do it by talking about it: and in fact the only chance there was of him feeling and hearing her the way I did was by not talking about it. It was my job (like a frontier scout, like a mapmaker) to seek out and find those edges, those vaporous places where she was each day and each night: and to stand at those edges, and listen.

  I never dared talk: never opened my mouth to attempt the garbled words that would do her no good in this new life, the star life, the rock and soil lite. Even then, I knew that my being alive, and running hard and fast across the earth, was the way to speak to her, and was the thing she wanted to see, wanted to hear. And I wanted Omar to see what it was about: all of it. The altar of specificity, not abstraction. The altar of the senses.

  I ran with him through the dark sweet-smelling cedars to the stripe of white road, and paused, panting, letting him soak up the light of the moon, letting him inflate with the excitement I felt at being alive.

  We’d run past the ancient headstone of someone named Father Maloney, who (said Grandfather) had been killed horribly by the Comanche, who liked to torture their enemies by pulling strips of flesh from the captive and then eating it before the victim’s horrified eyes. We’d always pause at Father Maloney’s old grave and wonder if, a hundred and fifty years ago, he had died that way. The woods all around his grave were silent and serene, and gave us no clue. (Sometimes at the supper table Omar and I would pretend we were Comanche; Omar would get a wild look on his face, stare across the table at me, grip the deer rib he was eating, or the chicken wing, point to me to indicate that I was to be Father Maloney, and then he would begin chewing savagely at the rib or wing, peeling back long strips of flesh and growling like a wild dog while I pretended to be in anguish, rolling my eyes and whispering No, no, while Omar growled and shook the rib or wing in his mouth like a dog, until Father told him to behave...)

  We’d break our reverie at Father Maloney’s marker then, and grip hands again and run. The fireflies would be moving across the meadow below, down toward the river, at the edge of the trees; we’d catch our breath and then we’d run across the moon-meadow, right through the middle of the fireflies—like running through outer space—and back into the woods, running down toward the mercury vapor lamp, and to Old Chubb’s cabin.

  Old Chubb always slept with his lights on. He’d come out to work on Prade Ranch even before Mother met Father: back when Mother was in high school. He’d come across from Mexico, an illegal alien, I suppose, but he’d outlasted eleven presidents and thirteen governors, and finally the governor gave him amnesty—that word! Like he was some kind of outlaw!—in 1976.

  Amnesty. He always fit this country. Except for his fear of darkness, he fit this country like stamen and pistil, like the night-blooming cirrus. He dug postholes under that hard sun out in the blaze-white of the caliche flats, running fence lines all his life, not to keep cattle in, it seemed, but to keep the faraway neighbors’ livestock out: working in the bright sun and the backbreaking heat with Grandfather day after day, year after year. Grandfather referred to all livestock as either “large, hoofed, chomping, stomping, shitting creatures” or “the artifacts of man.” Wild pigs and sheep were the worst. We couldn’t keep the pigs out—feral European wild boars—they’d go right under the fence, and no one could afford to fence ten thousand acres with the hog wire that would keep them out. So for a long time Grandfather and Chubb shot the wild pigs whenever they saw them, and chased them with hounds at night, too—but then Grandfather and Chubb got too old, and in the manner of Chubb outlasting the laws of Texas, the pigs outlasted Grandfather and Chubb. Neither Father nor Omar nor myself ever had the necessary fierceness required to kill them and so now, even though they did not evolve with the land, the pigs have assumed a place on it—a savage place, rutting up the riverbanks and destroying birds’ nests, turkey and quail eggs, and other fragile things. I simply cannot bring myself to kill them, despite my love for the land. It’s their sociability that always prevented me from hunting them. I knew killing them would please Grandfather, but the pigs always moved through the woods as a family, several generations of them living together sometimes. I’d throw rocks at them, or snap off a long dead cedar limb (like a javelin) and run at them, shrieking like a hawk or a lion (their only true enemies, besides Grandfather and Old Chubb), but I could never assume the responsibility for destroying a family unit. It was hard enough to shoot quail, or catch fish, or the terrible time that I shot the deer.

  But the pigs harmed the land, while Chubb protected it. Doing his own kind of rooting, both he and Grandfather, slamming the heavy steel posthole diggers down into the limestone: not really battling the earth, but engaging themselves with it. The blows of the posthole digger sending shudders through the men’s bodies, until they became one with the rhythm of the earth below, like riding a horse, or making love—for I have dug postholes in that country, too.

  And then the guilty part, the part that to me never felt right, but which I knew was necessary, and which I could tell Grandfather and Old Chubb thought was the best part: stringing the wire fence from post to post, hammering the fence staples into the cedar posts and stretching the barbed wire until it was singing, the men’s backs wet and the bright steel wire glittering in the sun. I knew it was necessary to protect our land, to keep it wild, and to keep the ravages of domesticity out, but the paradox of it bothered me even then: trying to put borders on a thing, in order to protect it. I wish it were all wild. I wish the wild could come and go as it pleased. I don’t know why these pure wild things always seem to attract the artifacts of man, which always damage or at least dilute those clean things.

  When they didn’t have fence-stretchers, they would loop one end of the wire around the saddle horn and stretch it by one of them clicking the horse slowly backward (more power in the huge hind legs of those little ponies) while the other man hammered in the staples to pin the singing wire snug against the new-driven post, the green cedar accepting almost gratefully the sharp steel points of the staples. The wind then passed across the new-stretched wires, making a slightly different sound now, still inaudible to us but surely audible to the angels, and to the cardinal on her nest, to the coyotes and skunks, the lions, the beetles, the kit foxes...

  ***

  Omar and I would crouch at the window and watch Old Chubb sleep. The stone walls inside his small cabin were covered with maps of places he’d been, old maps of Texas, and of the Mexican states of Sonora, Chihuahua, Durango, and Zacatecas. On these rough maps Chubb had penciled in the names of unusual sights he’d seen, and the dates the birds, or other phenomena, had been sighted. It was a treasure chest of natural history—old, barely legible pencil drawings showing Mexican wolf dens in Durango and Zacatecas, and a big wallowed-out area, a bear rub, with the words “oso grande”—almost certainly one of the last Mexican grizzlies—marked “9-4-41”...The common but beautiful creatures, too—the flycatchers, nuthatches, finches, jays, and vireos—
they were all there, their times and places in history marked all over Chubb’s gas station highway maps, curled and yellowing at the edges. When he filled up one map he left it hanging and simply taped up another one and began all over, until most of the beautiful stone wall (pre-Cambrian iron-rich) of rust red sandstone was obscured by the dry ancient parchment...

  He had county maps on his wall, too, old maps of our own Real County. (It’s pronounced like the Spanish—Ree-yowl. I like that it’s pronounced that way instead of the other way, the domestic way.)

  We would stare through the thin glass windows (the panes gas-bubbled and thin, distorted with age) and watch Chubb snore, sleeping like a loyal old hound, still dressed in whatever he’d been wearing that day, as if he’d never believed the day was going to end, and had been surprised by sleep... sleeping there still all dressed up, with only his shoes kicked off, as if trusting that one day simply rolled into the next, and that he was never going to die.

  His many pairs of binoculars, hanging from wooden pegs all through his small cabin. Rusting traps hanging on the wall; he pulled them up as he found them on his walks, carried them home like a thief to a place where they could do no harm, disengaged them, and kept them with him in his sandstone tomb...

  We were cruel, but we were only children. His cabin door was always locked—he was terrified of the dark—but to see him jump, we’d sometimes toss small pebbles at the windowpane.

  We could see Old Chubb stiffen at the sound. We’d toss another small pebble at the glass. We could feel his terror. A long pause, and then another pebble, and he’d begin to quiver, again like an old dog. Slowly, he’d reach up and pull his wool blanket up over his head, and we’d toss another pebble, just to watch the form under the blanket shake. If we had called his name in a low mournful voice, I am certain that we could have turned his graying old hair shock white in an instant.