The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness

by Rick Bass

  I did not tell my father. And when I heard Alicia bragging later in the spring that her father killed eagles by staking a lamb out as a lure—sometimes waiting for as long as three days before an eagle came down on the sickly, strange-acting lamb—I did not tell my father that, either.

  By the school year’s end, Alicia was showing other classmates a bracelet one day, a necklace the next. I never saw her get anywhere that same punch of awareness from any of them that she got from me that one time, though I would see her chasing it until finally she gave up and returned to her solitary outpost.

  The Predator Club no longer exists. I would like to say that it is because all of its members grew older and more feeble—and that much is true—but it was gone long before that, gone shortly after I went off to college, gone because there were no more predators to kill. Rabbits moved in and overgrazed the last blades and shallow roots of grass that the cows and sheep didn’t get. Without coyotes, hawks, and eagles to cull the rabbits, the pastures disappeared, blew away to Mexico. By the time I went off to school, only the Prade Ranch had a few predators remaining, holed up in the woods I had so safely and lovingly crawled through as a girl, both with and without Omar. The rabbits cycle low to high every seven years, but without predators, the highs are higher than ever, obscenely so.

  The year I went off to school was at the high of a seven-year cycle, and when I’d drive home on weekends (I went to San Marcos my first year), there were so many rabbits on the roads at night that it was impossible to miss them. They ran out suddenly in front of the headlights and then stopped. I’d swerve the truck to miss one and would hit another one. It was like driving down a road littered with breadfruit: thump thump, thump thump, thump thump. It was impossible to miss them, and it made me angry.

  In the daytime you’d see them limping down the roads and out in the dust-pastures with great lumps on their backs and sides where tapeworm larvae had developed under the skin. I remember there were more flies around the county that year than anyone could ever remember seeing. Every rabbit carcass seethed with maggots. I watched the sky for eagles, for hawks, but there were none, just dry blue heat.

  Did I assist in the slaughter of those eagles, by not telling my father? Could he have stopped it—could he have saved them? Even now my cheeks burn to realize that, with the knowledge, maybe he could have.

  Maybe he would’ve gotten killed too, though, and he was and is my own eagle, the last one. I don’t know. I know that even by the time I was eighteen, I believed I should have shared with him what I knew.

  So when I hit all those rabbits, driving up and down the back roads—when I felt all those sick, soft thuds under the wheels of the truck—I set my jaw, and didn’t slow down, and I took my medicine: I kept going, streaking through their midst at sixty miles an hour, like some terrible angel of death streaking down from the sky. All those extra diseased rabbits were mine, and I knew what I had to do. Every thump under the tires felt as if it were me who’d been struck, not the rabbit. I was both predator and prey: I was everything. Every atom of me was Real County.

  ***

  We cooked out down by the river my first weekend home from college. It was all new, and we didn’t yet have a ceremony for it, a tradition, so we kept on with the old one and waited for a new one to develop.

  We did what we had always done. We sat on the oak benches in the old vine-covered limestone gazebo and looked at the deep still pool of water, where our long-ago family had dammed a little bend of the Nueces below Chubb’s cabin (whose light was still burning, now in his eighty-seventh year).

  Father cooked a venison ham over the low coals of the barbecue grill, spooning a putanesco sauce over the meat again and again, and splashing river water on the coals to make the mesquite smoke rise. It was early October, and the dry leaves still clung to the yellow hickories, ash, and oaks. They rattled in the breeze. The pecan trees were already bare, their leaves and leftover nutmeat rotting back into the black thin soil and helping give the river its river smell.

  The garlic and butter smells of the nutmeat deepened as dusk fell, and so did the odor of the sweet potatoes baking in the coals. I sat next to Omar on the bench facing the river with my arm around him and looked at the cliff wall right in front of us—the one we never dived off of. The mother raven’s nest was still there, left over from the spring, built in a cliff recess with heavy branches and the thigh bones of cattle. The bones in the nest shone bright in the subdued light. I felt Mother coming up the river to join us, and I tightened my arm around Omar. I tried to remember what it had been like when I was twelve.

  Father was handsome: still straight-backed, strong-shouldered. Still lean. His hair was gray, on its way to becoming as silver as Chubb’s and Grandfather’s. I looked at the two older men who were sitting together on the lower bench, the one closest to the river, watching the dimness come in through the trees. They were both wearing sweaters, though the night did not strike me as being cold. They were sitting there not saying anything, their shoulders hunched and hands wrapped around clay cups of steaming coffee, watching Mother drift upriver to join us, still young and beautiful.

  With each passing year Chubb was becoming bolder, stronger, venturing farther and farther into dusk, to stay with Grandfather longer, before hurrying back to his stone house and its familiar, all-night yellow lantern light. Even now I saw him turn and study the red sky in the west, his old eyes gauging the minutes; then he turned his head back to the river and said something to Grandfather, who grunted. Grandfather got up, leaning on the cane he used now (a deer antler for a handle), and creaked over to the gazebo and flicked on the light switch, sending a beam of high-intensity light onto the cliff wall, and the trees around us, and the river, the pool, below us.

  For Chubb, we would do this—would wash out the stars. We would push back the lovely night.

  Omar and I blinked in the bright light. Father kept cooking. Grandfather hobbled over and, leaning on his cane, touched my face with the back of his crooked old hand; held it there, smiling, then did the same to Omar. Then he went back down to sit with Chubb again.

  Look, Omar, I wanted to say, look: they’re old men. Not even ten years ago, they were younger, were digging postholes and riding horses through the woods and walking across the hills, the mountains, and now... look.

  Later in the night, as we ate the deer and drank the red wine, the screech owls began to shriek, just before going out hunting. An elf owl flew right over the pool, even under all that bright light—there was no mistaking it for an elf—and Grandfather and I jumped up, so excited we spilled our plates of food, for we’d never seen an elf owl out here, not in all our years. They weren’t supposed to be found this far east.

  “Arra-oh!” Grandfather cried, pointing. “Elf owl!”

  We waited and watched, daring to hope that the owl would return, would fly past once more, but it didn’t. We finally sat down, still exuberant, and looked at each other, grinning. It was as if we had seen Mother herself. A bold raccoon came from out of the darkness and began eating the meat Grandfather and I had spilled when we jumped up. I fixed Grandfather and myself a new plate. The big raccoon just stayed there, in the middle of our circle, eyes bright in the light, watching us watch it back, chewing on the meat it held in its delicate hands, smacking its lips and then licking its beautiful long whiskers and standing up on its hind legs, looking around for more.

  ***

  Chubb died later that fall. I was rooming with a girl from Amarillo when Father called me in my dorm room, the first and only time he was ever to call, while I was in college; he dreaded and despised telephones.

  “Chubb’s dead,” was the first thing he said. “He just didn’t wake up this morning.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked—the dumbest question of my life. That terrible drowning feeling—of no longer being able to get a thing you need—air. It felt like I was eight again. Chubb’s not dead, he’s just sleeping.

  “Can you come home?” my father asked.
His voice seemed smaller—different somehow—and he was a different man, like a snake or insect that sheds its skin, or the caterpillar that becomes a moth.

  My father had not gone to college. He was asking if I could come home as if college were some kind of prison.

  ***

  I drove with the windows down. It was the first week in November, and deer season had not yet started. The light was shimmery. I was the only one out on the road. I left San Marcos by way of the Devil’s Backbone, got up on its spine and looked out at all the blue juniper country, all the deep dark pockets and folds that were my heartland: that was me, had become me. I listened to the old tires of my truck hum smack smack smack against the worn highway. Vultures floated on the thermals rising out of the canyons. The sun was out, but it was a cool day. I thought about not going back to school. I knew only one place, one ten-thousand-acre piece of land. What about Africa, Costa Rica, Alaska, and Russia? What about Canada, Hawaii, and Tibet? What about Romania, Bolivia, and New Zealand?

  Farther west, a raven floated down the road like an escort, a companion, making sure I got home all right.

  ***

  Omar was still in junior high school. Father and Grandfather were sitting in the den, sitting in the rawhide chairs, heads down, remembering. I imagined they had been listening for me, but still had not heard me drive up, which made me realize how old they really were: Grandfather, old beyond his time, and Father, old before his time. Two old men, looking defeated. It made me angry.

  They rose when I came in the den, and we hugged, and then they wanted to sit back down and act all lost and bereaved, but I couldn’t stand to see them like that, so I made them get in the truck and go with me to find a burial spot.

  “Have you told his family?” I asked, and Grandfather shook his head and mumbled some grief sound that even I, with a knowledge of his stroke language, couldn’t interpret.

  “He says they’re almost all dead, too,” Father said. “No phone in the village. They’re almost all gone, anyway. A few great-nieces and -nephews. A younger brother and sister, I think. I’m not sure.”

  Grandfather made another sound of mourning. I didn’t understand it as words at first, and I left the road and drove down into the river, looking for the old Uvalde road, and the wagon ruts. The water was low, and we drove down the center of the river for a while, with the bright white cliffs reflecting on either side of us. The peeling bark of sycamores. I pointed to a red-tailed hawk half a mile above us. I watched the hawk to see if it was Chubb. Strange things happen in the animal world when a loved one dies, that’s a fact. They honor our passage with far more reverence than we do theirs.

  Grandfather was still making his sounds, and I realized he was trying to talk. I stopped the truck and turned it off so I could hear better. The river continued to riffle past us, a sad, cleansing sound.

  He took out his pen and notepad.

  “We talked about it,” he wrote. “He wanted to be burned, like me. He was a Catholic but he said whatever I wanted is what he wanted.”

  Burned. I had no idea how to do it. I was used to planting—but to burn—I found myself thinking of crops.

  Grandfather was scribbling in his notepad again. “Up on a scaffolding,” he wrote. “Like the Indians. You do it with cedar. Cedar burns real hot.”

  “Did he know he was going to die?” I asked, and Grandfather looked at me in surprise—his little granddaughter again.

  “He was eighty-seven,” he said in his stroke language. Grandfather studied my face carefully then, missing nothing. He watched my face the way he would have watched the cedars for a songbird he was trying to lure in with his screech owl calls. I was the young woman who would be burying him. He was trying to have it both—the afterlife and the here. His face was as curious as a young boy’s.

  “He knew that he was going to die sometime,” he said in his groaning, hesitant syllables... the speech that was so unlike the flights of birds.

  ***

  We built a scaffolding out of dead cedar. We built it ten feet high, on the banks of the river where we’d decided to set him. Omar and Father helped, while Grandfather supervised. It was good for Omar to see this, good for him to help. He was thirteen, and in some ways on his own for the first time.

  I think even then I knew Omar would be going away, would be leaving the land to explore cities and towns. But still I tried as hard as I could—it was my job—to plant a sense of the wild within him: something that calls one back into the interior, back into the shadows and safety of a place that still has reverence to it. Within every atom of it.

  ***

  We built the fire hot: piled cedar beneath the scaffolding all the way up to and over the top of the scaffolding. He hadn’t been looking so good, and in the daytime one of us had always had to sit around and stand guard to keep the vultures and eagles and ravens off of him (when it was my turn, I’d sometimes let them land on him and take a peck or two, but then I’d shoo them away. I’d watch them fly away downriver, rising into the sun with a sun-hot piece of Chubb in their bellies).

  At night, we kept kerosene lanterns burning around him.

  The body knows, as does the spirit. The leftover, cooling electricity of the body winding down; the increasing dynamo-hum of the spirit being truly born...

  Ceremony. When we’ve lost that, we’ve lost everything, and are only wandering in the dark, like chickens or lambs waiting for eagles.

  We must participate in this world that has birthed us. We must not sit around in rawhide rocking chairs with our heads sunk in grief, while the waters trickle past. We must join the waters.

  ***

  We burned him on a Saturday, burned him good, and felt his spirit rise with the smoke. While the fire was raging, we saw a small brown creature swimming upstream. I thought at first it was an otter or a beaver, but then realized it was a nutria, an animal like a muskrat that had been introduced to the Louisiana marshes in the thirties, and had since worked its way over to the Gulf Coast.

  This nutria must have worked its way up the river systems—the Guadalupe, the Pedernales, the Frio, Medina, and Nueces—traveling by some strange urge to keep swimming to where the water was clear, not muddy. It had to be the first nutria to ever hit Real County, and as the fire raged, the nutria kept motoring upstream, and I felt better about burning Chubb up here in the mountains, instead of down in Mexico. We belong with our parents, I thought, but the nutria kept going, and Chubb belonged with Grandfather, with us...

  ***

  Which ashes were his, and which were those of the cedar? Grandfather said that Chubb’s ashes would be more blue, would almost glow in the dark, due to the phosphorus in them, while the cedar ashes would be mostly white. We walked through the coals and ashes that night with metal buckets and little garden shovels, searching for those that glowed in the dark. Some of the larger cedar stumps still glowed red-hot: we wore our heavy hiking boots. Grandfather waded in the hot ashes leaning on his cane, with Father holding him by one arm, and Omar searched for the blue ashes too, sometimes shining a little flashlight at something, so that I was reminded of when we had gone searching for flounders, out in the waves so long ago.

  We put the blue ashes in an old can Chubb had always used to water his garden with. We washed and waxed his beloved ’49 Cadillac, and though the tires were rotted off, we managed to pull the car down to the river, and pushed it right up against the cliff, up on shore, under a mossy overhang. We put the top down, set the urn in the front seat.

  We stood there barefooted, ankle-deep in the cold clear water, when it was all done. Deer season had opened that weekend, and all morning we’d heard the sounds of that strange war. A kind of trespassing, where too often people hunted and killed a thing that was not a part of them, nor were they a part of it.

  We’d honored the end of his life, but as we stood there, his death seemed incomplete, unfinished, without Mother there to grieve for him. We just stood around as if not quite knowing what to do. I realized th
at even though I was eighteen and not yet as strong as I one day hoped to become, I had to step up and take charge. Everyone else was too young or too old or too male. I had to finish up Chubb, and had to finish the ceremony, much as she would have. She would have said something tender, I imagine, something from the grace of her heart, some assemblage of words.

  I had none. I stood there with my hand on Omar’s shoulder, and I made the daytime feathery sound of the screech owl—all songbirds’ mortal enemy.

  One by one, they began to scold—began filtering in from out of the woods, and surrounding us, flying all about, looking for the owl.

  Vireos, jays, buntings, warblers—the small bright birds of life fluttered all around us, scolding, as if angry that we were letting the river drift past.

  Across the river, atop that highest bluff, beneath that largest oak, I could feel Mother, young and strong and alive. I could feel the mild sunlight striking her as it shone on the side of the white limestone cliffs. I could feel the breeze moving through her.

  Now we were down to four of us.

  ***

  It was after Chubb’s death that Grandfather learned to sing. I came home almost every weekend, helped him into the truck, and took him out into the brush, where he’d sit under an umbrella to protect himself from the direct sun. He’d sip tea from a mayonnaise jar and cup his hands to his mouth and make his daytime screech owl call. As he got older, his call got more wavery, more authentic: he drew in more and more birds with it.

  His beautiful metallic silver hair had turned snow white over the course of just a few days following Chubb’s death, and in a way this made him seem younger: made him seem to fit the white caliche landscape even better, and blend in.

  His skin was turning whiter, too, even after he had been out in the sun.

  It was beautiful, watching him get old—ancient—now that I had realized he too was going to die. This time I could understand it. It was like watching some graceful diver plunge in slow motion—the slowest—from the top of an improbably high cliff, down to the cool river below.