All the Land to Hold Us

by Rick Bass

  The house was invaded daily by scorpions, centipedes, tarantulas, rattlesnakes, and vinegarroons. The spiders and wasps she crushed with a blacksmith’s shoeing hammer, sledging them into matted oblivion with gusto. Her forearms were overdeveloped from this practice, veinous and bulging, and the snakes she severed into multiple pieces with a hoe that she sharpened regularly.

  She took to wearing her long dark hair in a bun. It was too hot to do anything else. Even before the boys reached adolescence and forgot her entirely, she had reached a state of despondency, perilously approaching insanity, in which her most pleasant moments were spent catatonic in the incredible heat of the privy, where she found herself, across the years, content to just sit in the darkness and let the world pass by.

  For hours she would sit there, dress hiked up over her waist, purging herself, with the heat and her salty diet baking her feces into diarrhetic soup; but the darkness was soothing, and she would just sit there, praying quietly that the world would bring her no more disappointment.

  Like a mason laying stones, she would build up around her an armament of numbness, as if fortifying herself for protection against ever-coming heat and brilliance.

  Now it seemed but a short step until the end, and in both her dreaming and her waking, she could smell, taste, feel, and hear a different quality to the air rising from the abyss before her, though still she could not see it.

  She stood so close before it now that almost anything could take her there. As she lay awake at night listening for the coyotes, the gentle sifting of a few grains of sand onto the metal roof above was enough to raise every hair on her body, and though she managed to lie still, she would find herself breaking into a sweat, more excessive than even the usual lake-dampness in which they all spent their nights perspiring.

  Marie sometimes found in such instances that she would be growling quietly to herself, as she listened to the sand skate across the top of the roof, though other times she would be unaware that the sound was coming from her, and would lie there in terror, listening, even as the sound from her throat grew louder.

  Omo and the boys slept on, three sets of snoring mixed with the sound of her growls.

  She imagined that at any moment the growling would stop, and that Max Omo would stir in his sleep, possibly awakening, and would reach over and take her face in his hands, and begin murmuring kind things to her.

  Little violet-and-green swallows had begun to nest in the stovepipe of their breathing apparatus, and these night sounds too would awaken her and unleash the panting terror that was sutured tight in her chest: the scrabbling sound of their little lizard claws as they shifted in their nests, jockeying for position and rearranging themselves ceaselessly in the night; and then once their eggs were hatched, the endless cheeping of the nestlings clamoring for food.

  Sometimes one of the flightless young birds would tumble all the way down the pipe and out onto the floor by their bed and spin there, clawing and scuttling, and Marie would have to get up and open the door and fling it into the night, where the coyotes would come and find it.

  She would try to get back to sleep, with the pillow over her head while the other birds in the pipe chirped and chattered with even greater agitation; and she could not be sure if she dreamed of the coyotes’ laughter out in the yard, or if it was real.

  A strange and powerful landscape summons strange and powerful happenings, just as beauty seems to summon beauty, or harshness beckons to harshness. One night Marie was awakened from her sleep (if her alternating bouts of terror and stupor could be called that) not to the sound of sand or bird or coyote, but to what seemed at first to be a complete absence of sound: as if the entire world around her had paused in order to listen to something so wonderful and unusual that it caught for a few moments even the world’s uncaring attention.

  Gradually, as her senses readjusted to the different pace of the silence, Marie realized that it was not a complete soundlessness she was hearing, but rather, the distilled purity of one sound: a gigantic and strangely rhythmic thrashing, out in the lake, huffings and suckhole gaspings, spews and sputters: enormous, lonely splashings unattended by any other sound.

  Marie rose from her bed and went out onto the porch, damp in her nightgown. It was October, and there was enough of a breeze from the north to cool her. She wrapped her arms around herself; and in the night, and the just-awakened grogginess of things, she forgot for a moment who and what she had become, and believed herself to be a young girl again.

  The moon was bright upon the lake. She listened harder as the sound separated itself from the nonsound, and as her sleep separated from waking.

  There was an enormous hump-shaped animal, writhing and lunging out in the lake, powering its way through the moon-bright floating bog of salt. Marie gripped a front porch post for support—trying in that grip to pull herself up from the well of sleep and fully into the land of waking, so that the monstrous image might disappear—but the sight would not go away.

  Disbelieving, she walked out barefoot into the salt-packed hardpan yard, the surface of it cool and smooth and worn beneath her feet, and dared to look closer, and saw that her initial dream had been correct: that there was an elephant in the lake, with immense flapping ears, and long shining tusks like scimitars, and a wild-waving trunk.

  The exertions of the animal were sending shallow waves splashing up onto the shore.

  Marie imagined instantly, in that first moment of knowing for certain what the creature was, that she could see, even across the distance, that one bright wet shining eye of the animal, filled with both terror and resolve, as well as a bottomless loneliness; and that the eye of the elephant was fixed upon her, even in the midst of the animal’s terrific struggles: and in that moment, amidst such a surreal vision, Marie felt more grounded, sane, and hopeful than she had in years.

  Like a sleepwalker, she walked down to the lakeshore to offer silent encouragement to the lunging animal, being careful not to break contact with what she perceived to be the desperate creature’s drowning, thrashing gaze held fixedly upon her own.

  At the lake, she crouched on her haunches and watched, unblinking and hypnotized, and silently urged the elephant on.

  Behind the elephant lay a wake of furrowed salt, a wandering path as jagged as if sawed through chunks of ice. The elephant had already cut a great furrow across the lake, and Marie wondered what might have led it to enter the lake in the first place.

  Strangely, she did not wonder where the elephant had come from. Already, it seemed to fit.

  There was no telling how long it had been floundering, nor for how long the sound of its labors had entered into Marie’s restless sleep.

  From time to time the elephant would, despite its panicked frenzy, pause and rest, gathering its breath and energy, though during such cessations it would begin to sink slowly, drawn down into the summoning mire. When this happened, the elephant leaned over on one side to keep from sinking farther, and the great trunk would wag and loll plaintively, as if the animal was giving up; and it would be all that Marie could do to keep from rolling up her nightgown and wading out into the lake herself, to try to somehow help the creature.

  “Hold on,” she whispered into the great silence. “Hold on.”

  And soon enough, as if heeding her pleas, the elephant would roll back over—his eye fixed once more upon hers, she was certain of it—and would labor on, as if in harness, and pulling the whole of the world behind him.

  Marie sat hunkered there for two hours, watching the struggle—the elephant’s rests growing longer and longer, and—did she imagine it?—a shine seemed to be leaving the eye; but finally the creature dragged itself up onto the farther shore, crawling out on bent knees, and only then uttering, for the first time all evening, one weak and spent trumpeting: not a call of victory, but more a feeble, tentative inquiry as to the possibility of others of the elephant’s kind, who might be hiding out in the dunes, or cached just a short distance farther into the darkness.
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br />   Marie had expected the elephant to take advantage of the firmer ground by rolling over on his side and resting once more; and if he had, she was prepared to go to him, to haul buckets of water and bathe the crust of glittering salt from his hide—at the far end of the lake, standing beneath the bright moon, he looked bejeweled—but she was surprised to see that he wasted no time upon his emergence.

  He paused only briefly, having given his lone trumpet, and then strode off toward the dunes, lake water still trailing from his thick legs in sheets.

  Every now and again he would punch through the crust of the shoreline and stumble and sink to a knee; but each time, he pulled free and continued on his way, traveling in such a straight line that Marie had no doubt he knew precisely where he was going, even if he never had been here before; and for this, too, she found that she loved him.

  Still in her nightgown, she followed him for nearly a mile, walking along the lakeshore until she came to the intersection of where he had crawled out and gone off into the dunes.

  She followed him into the dunes, tracking his cratered prints, which were spaced so far apart that it took three of her steps to travel the same distance. She hurried along his trail, the sand still wet from his passage and caking to her bare feet.

  With each dune she climbed, it seemed to her he might be just on the other side, big as a barn and striding magnificently, head held high, tusks shining bright; or that he might even be holed up in a trough, resting, so that, descending that final dune, she would be free to walk up to him and put her hand on his leathery hide: to hold her hand out to his snuffling trunk for him to take her scent; to perhaps even climb the trunk, as she had seen children do in pictures—passing between the long ivory swords that would act like bars, protecting her from anything below—and to ride upon his hairy back then, on through the dunes and out of the desert.

  Riding for a while, seeing all the sights from a newer, slightly higher perspective, as when she was up on the roof of her cabin, and then napping, in the heat of the day, taking her gown off and ripping it to fashion into a crude and flapping tent beneath which she could seek shelter from the sun, while the fanning of his enormous ears sent a slight cooling breeze her way, and as he kept traveling, leaving the lake, and the desert, and eventually all of Texas, so far behind.

  Each dune scaled, however, brought her nothing. The sand in his tracks was still wet, and the scent of the lake upon him was still rank and strong, but when she got to the top of the dune and looked down, he was not in the trough below, nor was she able to see him anywhere in the distance; and she would stand there atop the dune, breathing hard, her thighs and calves burning, watching in the dimming moonlight (dawn not too distant now) the crests beyond her, and hoping that on one of those distant sand ridges she would see the dark shape of the elephant climbing his own dune and then disappearing over the back side, so that she would know the distance required to catch up with him.

  It was an awful feeling, like being lost—hoping that he was merely in one of the troughs while she was on a crest, and vice versa—her chase of him becoming in that manner like the notes of a song; a teasing, carnival-like melody.

  In the waiting there was rest, but there was also the taunting knowledge that the elephant might already be just over the horizon, and that rather than her gaining on him and closing the distance, he was moving even farther away; and after a while, and a few more staggering dunes, she realized her hopelessness. After a while longer, she gave up and turned around and walked back home, following her own tracks, and the elephant’s.

  Back at the cabin, she used a damp washcloth and leftover bucket of brine to wash her feet and ankles, and under her arms and between her legs. Then she got back into bed, trying to hold grief at bay. She slept for nearly an hour, dreaming the first dreams of hope she had dreamed in many years, and awakened slowly, unwilling to leave the dreams—waking as she always did to the ticking sound of the light heating already the tin roof, and Omo and the boys stirring, then pulling on their sour boots and splashing water on their sunburnt faces.

  Omo, hawking phlegm and making animal-like morning sounds, and the three of them as anxious for work as stock animals for their morning feed.

  She dressed and went over to the cookhouse to begin breakfast: kindled a fire in the rusting old stove. While the stove heated, she went outside into the rising brilliance to see if the elephant might have returned, even as she knew that it never would. She shaded her eyes with her hands against the glare and studied more clearly the churned-up path of the elephant’s passage; noted how it had traveled past several of the skeleton sentinels, passing so near to some of them that had they still been living—had there not been a fifty-year gap between moments—they might have been able to reach out and touch its hide as it passed by; might even have been able to grab hold of the tail and be pulled free in that manner, and dragged to safety.

  She saw Omo and the boys standing down at the shore and staring out at the jagged salt-rift and conversing among themselves—earthquake? buried caverns collapsing below?—and went down to tell them what she had seen, disappointed and discouraged that she would not be able to keep it a secret.

  At first they did not believe her, but after she showed them the tracks, both hers and the elephant’s, they did believe; and Omo shot her a puzzled look, as he saw the tracks leading off into the dunes—“How far did you say you followed this creature?” he asked, and when she answered, “A good ways,” he frowned and said, “That could have been dangerous.” He glanced at her again, largely uncomprehending but with some hint or wisp of dull understanding, an acknowledgment or the beginning of an acknowledgment of—what? the fact that she, like him, was falling, and that unlike him, she was not enjoying the plummet?—but then the mask came back over him, and he scowled and said again, “That could have been dangerous.”

  The boys were in favor of following the elephant, of tracking it down and somehow capturing it and bringing it back to the lake and keeping it in a corral made of welded oilfield pipes, and training it to use its brute strength to help them pull in the sleds each evening, and to load the buckets and barrels of salt into the back of the truck to take to market each week. But Omo stared into the distance, in the direction the tracks had disappeared, and said that it was a foolish idea, and that he did not want to have to rely upon the capriciousness of a living creature for his livelihood, preferring instead the reliability of machines.

  They went back to the cabin and waited on Marie to finish making breakfast, and then went down to the lake and launched themselves into work as if no miracle had passed by or even been discussed.

  Around ten o’clock in the morning they saw a shimmering mirage approaching them through the wavering heat: a wall, a phalanx, of a thousand soldiers, all girded in silver and gold and bearing lances and maces and leading before them immense lions and tigers and snuffling bears, leopards and wolves and what appeared to be a saber-toothed tiger on thick chains: the animals, like the warriors, clad in jeweled armament of silver and gold, and the animals lunging, pulling the soldiers along in their ferocious wake.

  Behind them was the strangest and perhaps most horrifying sight of all, a battalion of tanks towering over the soldiers, glinting in the sun, soundless across the distance.

  The approachers still seemed to be several miles away, though that could not have been possible, because the lions and tigers were so large. A hundred yards? A thousand? Through the magnifying glass of the bright and bulging swell of light that separated them from Max Omo and his family, the animals surged, and sometimes the thick chains restraining them disappeared for a while—another terrifying image—before reappearing, as if summoned back into existence by the Omos’ fear alone.

  Likewise, sometimes a section of the wall of advancers would stumble, as if being fired upon by unseen armies, and there would appear for a moment a ragged break in silver and gold; but then the light would readjust itself, so that the gap was quickly filled back in: as if there re
mained always behind the main wave of soldiers another wall of them; that no matter how many breaks appeared in the wall, there would always be replacements, and that they would step in quickly.

  The Omos stood motionless, with some place inside each of them terrified and disbelieving, and yet another place in them not only believing in the inevitability of the vision, but accepting it, so that they remained there staring at the approach; and in their paralysis, the Omos would have seemed indistinguishable from the skeletons out in the salt bog, who appeared also to be giving the approach of the war party their slightly curious attention, as if they had somehow been waiting for such a sight, and whether it was a war party or rescue party did not seem to matter much.

  The breeze stirred the tattered coattails and scraps of cloth, adding to the notion that the bones were eager to join the army, and that the army had come searching for them.

  The pantheon was now close enough that the Omos could hear a rapturous singing, a pure ringing, like the choir of a thousand angels—a song of both desire and unrestrained praise—and before such a beautiful and all-encompassing sound, the Omos’ hearts relaxed a little from their previous terror; and now they could hear a metallic, fearsome, syncopated drumming.

  And yet even as the wall of soldiers drew closer, they were becoming smaller, shrinking and banding together, so that although their sounds were becoming louder and the warbled features plainer—the soldiers’ faces, and the animals’ teeth, and ears, and legs—it seemed that the great army was receding, pulling back away into the distance: that some journey, begun thousands of years ago, had nearly been completed, but just shy of its destination, the army was retreating, as if somehow frightened or unwilling yet to participate in the final engagement.