The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness

by Rick Bass

  The way he learned to sing was by imitating the songbirds: their warbles and whistles, their scolds. Before his stroke he’d been able to imitate certain notes and melodies of their calls, but never whole songs.

  I was sitting under the umbrella with him, in early March—March second, the day the Texas Declaration of Independence had been signed, when Grandfather began to sing. A black-and-white warbler had flown in right in front of us and was sitting on a cedar limb, singing—relieved, I think, that we weren’t owls. Cedar waxwings moved through the brush behind it, pausing to wipe the bug juice from their bills by rubbing their beaks against branches (like men dabbing their mouths with napkins after getting up from the table). Towhees were hopping all around us, scratching through the cedar duff for pill bugs, pecking, pecking, pecking, and still the vireo stayed right there on that branch, turning its head sideways at us and singing, and Grandfather made one deep sound in his throat—like a stone being rolled away—and then he began to sing back to the bird, not just imitating the warbler’s call, but singing a whole warbler song, making up warbler sentences, warbler declarations.

  Other warblers came in from out of the brush and surrounded us, and still Grandfather kept whistling and trilling. More birds flew in. Grandfather sang to them, too. With high little sounds in his throat, he called in the mourning doves and the little Inca doves that were starting to move into this country, from the south, and whose call I liked very much, a slightly younger, faster call that seemed to complement the eternity-becking coo of the mourning dove.

  Grandfather sang until dark, until the birds stopped answering his songs and instead went back into the brush to go to roost, and the fireflies began to drift out of the bushes like sparks and the coyotes began to howl and yip. Grandfather had long ago finished all the tea, sipping it between birdsongs to keep his voice fresh, and now he was tired, too tired to even fold the umbrella. As I helped him walk back to the truck, he held the umbrella aloft, as if to keep the stars off of him. Fireflies surrounded us. Grandfather held his deer-antler cane in one hand and the umbrella in the other. I gripped his elbow and helped steady him over the loose rocks. I tried to imagine myself needing assistance over these ridges, across this hardscrabble, this heart’s hard country, but couldn’t.

  I helped Grandfather up into the truck. Although he was as lean as ever—“still a flatbelly,” I’d say, every time I came home, patting him there—he nonetheless seemed to be getting heavier, denser, with time, unlike so many other old men and women. It was as if he were leaden, and I wondered how he could even lift his feet.

  I imagined all the minerals from all the river water he’d drunk in his life crystallizing in his veins and arteries. Glittering silicates and coppers and golds, all the rare gems and heavy minerals of the land returning to his body, claiming his body—clamoring for it, as he approached his ninetieth year away from the soil—too long! too long!—and I pictured the cool blue phosphorescence of his bones surrounding those slowly crystallizing veins, until I imagined (driving home in the dark that night) that if he were to open his mouth wide I might catch a glimpse of a diamond glittering in the moonlight behind his teeth.

  Bullbats leapt and whirled before us, chasing the moths drawn to our headlights as we drove slowly home. It seemed that the bullbats were flying right at us, trying to summon us—to enlist us in their world of the night. I missed Chubb as I would miss any other part of the world in which I’d grown up in—as if the world’s rules had changed, and we would no longer get our light or heat from the sun, or as if there would no longer be such a thing as rivers.

  We drove up toward the house, going slowly past his stone cabin. We had left the light burning inside, and already the trumpet vine (to which the hummingbirds were addicted) had crept down over the windows and doors, was in the process of sealing the door shut forever with its clinging roots; but still the light bulb burned inside...

  I was afraid that with the miracle of birdsong, it was Grandfather’s last night on earth—that the stars and the birds and the forest had granted him one last gift—and so 1 drove slowly, wanting to remember the taste, smell, and feel of all of it, and to never forget it. But when 1 stopped the truck he seemed rested, and was in a hurry to get out and go join Father, who was sitting on the porch in the dark listening to one of the spring-training baseball games on the radio. I got out to help him out, but he was already hurrying across the lawn, looking ghostly in the white linen suit he was wearing that day, and he sat down in his chair next to my father without mentioning a word of his birdsong, and I sat down in the grass in front of them and listened to the drone of the game, the sound that was not a sound, and looked up at the stars, at the constellations, at the quarter moon... Omar was in his room studying, and after a while we saw the window-cast of his light turn off, and he came out on the porch too and listened to the end of the game with us, a spring training game, a game that did not matter...

  ***

  Driving back to college early every Monday morning, up before daylight to make my eight o’clock class. Deer moving through the hill country fog, the familiar white-tailed deer and, increasingly, the larger, more aggressive, herdforming axis deer, imported from Africa to place on exotic game ranches for the fat boys from the cities to come shoot. The Bankers. Big horns, little penises, I always say. The axis deer slipping through the game ranches’ fences, spreading into the countryside. Sometimes I imagine I can feel the earth pause in its rotation, can feel it pause and look at us as if wondering, Just who the hell do you think you are?

  It occurred to me that if I ever lived to be as old as Grandfather (or even Father), white-tailed deer might be gone from the hill country—an unimaginable thought at first, for there are hundreds of thousands of them, perhaps millions.

  In any event, it would not be a thing I wanted to see.

  I’d park the truck and run up the steep steps to class. Sit by the window. Chemistry, geology, biology, physics, zoology: I took the classes, read the books, listened to the lectures like Grandfather sipping that tea—drinking it all in, thirsty and drinking it all, until I imagined that my own insides were sparkling with it, all those different stories and that knowledge, which led only further and further into delicious mystery.

  ***

  The next time I was home was in the middle of March—the golden-cheeked warblers had been back a week—and Grandfather had taught himself to speak again: had been keeping it a secret from everyone, waiting for me to return.

  The way he had to do it—speak—was by imitating birds’ songs—that is, his words had to follow the climbing-and-then-descending pattern of the birds, so that everything he said, he had to sing, sometimes punctuating midsentence with an ah-ah as he drew more air, or cast in his mind for the continued melody—but they were words once again, and full sentences, human sentences, and he was back in the world of man again, fully, for better or worse, and the more he practiced, the better he got.

  We were picnicking at Mother’s grave, Grandfather and I, when a goshawk whistled past us, out and over the cliff, like a thought one has and then forgets immediately.

  Grandfather looked up, cleared his throat, and sang, quavering, his first real words in seven years: “The natural history of Texas is still being sacrificed upon the altar of generalization. Pay attention,” he said-sang, and took a swallow of tea, and then another bite of sandwich, as if no time had ever gone by.

  Even now, so many days and years later, I remember things that I thought I had forgotten, that I thought were gone forever. I’ll call Omar in Philadelphia and tell him. The job is never done—reminding him of his heritage—for it is only us, here on this one piece of land; everything else is being washed away or changing. We are bedrock, however; she wants us to be bedrock, and that requires memory, and storytelling, to those who will someday be the new bedrock...

  When she was sick—when she was very sick, near the edge—Father caught a four-pound bass, which thrilled her, made her so proud. The excitement—the j
olt of that day, the utter pure goodness of it—I’d forgotten it all.

  We cooked the big fish’s fillets over mesquite. It was a great meal, early autumn, down there by the river, with all of us still alive... a perfect day. I’d forgotten that. It must have been hidden in the shadows of grief.

  ***

  Mother taught me to never complain, to never talk about one’s troubles. It was not a lesson she ever spoke to me out loud—in the way that I never told Omar she was with us, when I took him to the edges of places, back when we were children. It was just the way she lived that taught me to never complain about my troubles. To never even mention them.

  ***

  I had three boyfriends in college. The first two were trifling and insignificant, only about sex, which wasn’t very good anyway—time spent I wish I had back. The third one mattered. He had some of my father’s quiet nobility—his single-minded, singularly focused kind of loyalty—and he had my grandfather’s wildness, too: that stored passion, and tension—and an opinion, a judgment, on everything he looked at, everything he smelled, tasted, heard, saw, or touched.

  He was a big man studying small bugs; his name was Fred Whitehead. I was taking ornithology classes, of course, and that was how we met: he was in one of my bird classes, wanting to know more about the feathered devils that ate his beloved insects.

  “Right of capture,” I teased him, remembering the Catfish Man’s foolish excuse for draining all that clear water, so long ago. But before it was over, what got captured was me. We were both twenty-one, but he was so much smarter—more learned—than I was. He said it was from studying insects (he got angry when I called them bugs). He said that the secrets of life, the mysteries of the universe can be found by those willing to get down on their hands and knees. Even now, I don’t know if he was talking about sex. He had an incredible passion for it, just as he did for his... insects. I don’t know. He had a flaming energy for everything; he seemed to be drawing some energy from the core of the earth, so that he only got stronger in situations that would ultimately wear the rest of us down.

  I never saw him yawn; never saw him less than enthusiastic about anything. In the way that I imagined Grandfather’s veins and arteries to be filled with gold, copper, and silver, glittering and crystalline, I imagined that Fred seethed with magma: that it flowed through him, around and around, always recirculating. When he came inside me, I thought perhaps it might burn, might alter me, but I wanted it to. When he touched me, I imagined I might be scalded.

  Of course I had to show him the ranch.

  In the next year that followed, he became like family—it seemed that we were back up to five. Omar thought Fred was like some new smart insect-loving brother. Father was pleased with Fred because I was happy, and probably, too, because Fred had a real passion in life, a cause and a belief, despite his youth, that went beyond our romance. It was part of our romance. It wasn’t all physical.

  Grandfather kept his distance, but he liked Fred, I could tell. He saw Fred’s energy. He saw Fred’s wild heart. I think Grandfather felt a little conflict within, that Fred had so much of it, while his, Grandfather’s, was finally, slowly fading.

  We were finishing our undergrad degrees and would be going on to A&M in the next year for graduate work. I wasn’t going to specialize... was just going to keep taking classes, getting broader and broader. I wanted to take in as much as I could hold. Specialized research for me meant netting and banding birds, and I didn’t want any part of that.

  But still, I wanted to know secrets.

  What can I say? He enriched our lives. We spent a large portion of our time that summer on our hands and knees, as yet another new world opened up for me, and for my family. Around the dinner table (slabs of venison roast falling away from the knife; Father carving it, and steam rising from the knife), Fred would tell us stories about insects; about bombardier beetles that mix defensive chemicals in their glands to spray their enemies with a liquid whose temperature is 212 degrees Fahrenheit: boiling.

  He was just a boy, but he was fast on his way to becoming a man. He smoked a pipe! After dinner we would go out on the back porch and watch the dusk, would listen to the crickets. Whenever Grandfather spoke—often to ask a question of Fred, for even in his ninetieth year Grandfather was still interested in learning—birds would swarm us, attracted by the melody of Grandfather’s sentences. Fred would pretend to wince when the bats came out, flitting and swooping after all the insects we couldn’t even see.

  “Go back to Transylvania,” he’d cry out, but I knew he was teasing—he was studying specifically the predator-prey relationships between bats and moths—between the Myoxis bat and the Catocala moth—and I knew he couldn’t love one and not the other. It would be like loving the earth and not the sky; it would be like loving warmth and heat, but not coolness.

  Fred told us that the fossil record indicated there was an evolutionary trend toward increasing brain sizes, and that it was probably because of their highly evolved hunting strategies: what he called the rawest, most immediate, demanding challenge of intelligence. I remember how Grandfather hooted and laughed when Fred said that, clapping his hands on his legs, and I think it hurt Fred’s feelings, but I could tell Father liked what Fred had said and was thinking about it, and I suspected that Grandfather was, too...

  Another night, Fred told us that there was some indication that insects in the tropics practice “self-medication”—searching out and ingesting and absorbing secondary compounds that aid in the treatment of insect diseases and injuries, and even cancers, and at the mention of that word we grew quiet, though it was a calm kind of quiet, and I think we all pictured the insects in the night, hurting, creeping through the tropics and searching among the ferns and the rotting logs for their salvation, under the holiness of the stars...

  When Fred stood up, he blocked out some of the stars. He was a big man: six feet five inches tall. But just a boy. A pipe-smoking boy.

  Fred and I would walk down to the creek after dark. The smell of his pipe smoke was like a trail that any predator could follow, but there was only us. We were solitary. We bathed in the river. The moonlight welded us to the river in silver. Fred said that some insect copulations lasted up to 136 hours—pushing me through the water, laughing.

  We’d wake up on the bank at sunrise some mornings, with great blue herons wading through the mist, spearing frogs. The sunrise red over the summer-velvet hills.

  I was afraid he didn’t love me enough.

  ***

  The things I put up with for love! I was confused but fascinated by the small changes I found myself making. We’d go out into the woods and test his different hypotheses. Fred believed that avian predators have learned to hunt caterpillars by searching for the slightly chewed edges of a leaf. (He also believed that caterpillars were evolving to move rapidly away from a feeding site, because of this.)

  He’d take fingernail clippers and trim up the edges of different plants. We’d hide in camouflage and watch. A bird would pass over, then pause, fluttering—hovering, like the angel of death, before passing on, mystified that there was no caterpillar.

  That seemed to me no different from Grandfather calling the birds in for a closer look: just a momentary deception, with a kind of innocence to it.

  But Fred was harder. He had that magma. By midsummer we were netting some of the birds, trying to learn what they ate, when they ate it, and how much. He never killed a bird, not even a sparrow, as did some other researchers, but still, he touched them. I understand now that the reason I let him touch the birds on Prade Ranch was the reason I let him touch me; and that there was no difference. I should have asked the birds about it, but I didn’t. I was in love, and had all the grace of an ox running through a cornfield. I wondered if this was how it had been for Mother.

  It was delicious. I wanted nothing to do with it, in the classroom, but out in the field, with Fred, it was delicious. I grew stronger; I knitted, healed, mended.

  We would
fit the larger nestlings, such as those of the cliff-nesting hawks and ravens, with a neck collar, which allowed the nestling to breathe, but not swallow. A few hours later we’d climb up to the nest and turn the bird upside down and shake out all of the food that the nestling had been unable to swallow—a writhing mass of beetles, wasps, desiccated minnows, berries...

  We were barbaric, but so close to both mystery and knowledge, and our senses so inflamed with the scent of these things, that we forgot about reverence. We were just hungry—starved.

  We were always making love. I think that it was abnormal. I hope that it was.

  ***

  We picked through the pellets and fecal material of owls and turkeys, the birds that roosted in the same place every night and could be counted on to leave us a sample to discover each morning. Using tweezers, we could find fly wings, beetle legs, and ant abdomens. Fred could often identify the ravaged gut-passed remains all the way down to genus and sometimes even species level.

  It’s so rare to pass near or next to someone so aflame, much less to connect with them: though not impossible. The best fits in nature are achieved of course over long periods of time, through much settling and eroding and uplifting, repositioning... but with Fred, the old cliché of falling in love, or swimming in it, was true. To know so much, he loved to listen. I do not think it was my imagination that wherever he touched me, or I touched him, my skin against his and his against mine, was a fit. Not forever, but in that moment, it was always a fit. We were both growing like crazy; growing stronger and feeling the world more deeply each day, and it was like nothing but falling. Our mouths on each other’s skin, after swimming. Me listening to him, for a while, and then him listening to me. We could almost hear ourselves growing.

  Birds: always we followed birds. He knew so much.

  But I taught him things, too; it wasn’t all learning, on my part. The brown cowbirds that were taking over the country—the way they’d act as parasites, with a female laying her eggs in a golden-cheeked warbler’s nest and then abandoning them: the mother warbler warming and hatching those dull eggs in addition to her own. And when the eggs hatched, because the large cowbirds were more boisterous, they got all the food. The delicate beautiful warbler chicks—an endangered species—languished, then starved to death in their own nest, or were pushed out, or crushed by the clumsy brown cowbird nestlings; and even the mother warbler succumbed then, exhausted by the demands of the gangling cowbird nestlings, just about the time they were ready to take flight.