by Rick Bass
Other mornings, the voices from the salt would sound as if they were being uttered in some foreign language, and she would grow madder still.
“She is a goner,” Max Omo told the boys, and advised them to say their goodbyes to her while she still recognized them, and they, her.
And as if his pronouncement had made it so, a week later, as the big dune behind their house began to make its autumnal shift (she had been lying awake for three nights in a row, listening for it), she finally broke: unable to escape the growling that seemed to emanate from the barrel tube even when the motor was silent and the barrel was motionless.
Waiting, listening for the sand, she heard the first snaky slitherings, felt the first heaving deadweight of dune come leaning across their roof, up and over the barricade of iron: sand falling lighter than rain, and flowing around either side of their stalwart little cabin.
This time, so keenly prepared, she had them all up and awakened and out the door and onto the roof with shovels and brooms, fighting the rippling shift of the earth, the rearrangement of topography. But they might as well have been trying to sweep back the advance of the ocean’s tide; and the sand came sweeping steadily in, up to their ankles, ten shovelfuls sliding back in for each one they tossed aside, and then the sand was up to their knees, and then to their waists, so that they were working only to save and extricate one another—handing the long end of the shovel to whomever was stuck and pulling, while the others burrowed quickly around the imprisoned human pillar; and once they were free, they abandoned their hopes of holding back the dune and instead leapt from its edge, went sliding down its slopes and ran toward the lake as if pursued.
By morning the dune had repositioned itself and lay sleeping atop their house as comfortably as an animal that might have gotten up from its bed and turned in the night; and Max Omo and the boys began digging out, working with great force in the rising heat merely to get back to where they had been the day before: and in their labors, they did not notice that Marie, still wearing only her nightgown and the tall rubber boots that they all wore when mucking around the lake, had disappeared.
It was midmorning before they thought of her at all—wondering where their breakfast was—and at noon, when they took a brief break, the three of them sharing one of the bottles of wine (which was tasting more vinegary every year), they were hungry enough to think to go look for her in the cookhouse.
They didn’t find her there, and wandered briefly around the outbuildings, calling her name. Max Omo checked the privy, for he had noticed she had been secluding herself in there for increasingly longer periods—napping, he assumed, in the shade and darkness—and it was one of the boys who found where her tracks had gone down to the shore and out into the lake; and when they gathered there, they did not recognize her at first, out among all the other skeletons, sitting down in the salt with her back turned to them, the breeze flapping her nightgown.
She had lost weight all through the summer, shedding pound after pound until she was but a skeleton herself, her organs held within by only the envelope of her brown papery skin—even Max Omo had noticed it, but had told himself she would put the weight back on when cooler weather returned—and with a groaned curse, Omo had the boys put on their salt-bog paddle-shoes, and he put on his, and together they went out onto the lake toward her with their shovels and ropes and chains. She was kneeling in the salt, the lake up to her waist, her head tipped forward so that her chin rested on her sunken collarbone, and was whimpering, the tracks of tears dried to salt courses on her leathery face. Max Omo was nonetheless rude and impatient, half-believing that he too was stranded in some sort of beastly purgatory, in which all movements and patterns strove to repeat themselves; and that finally, what had once been a source of great comfort to him—the predictability of mechanical repetition, the flawless lift and rise of piston and cylinder, the safety and accountability of foreknown routine—was at long last becoming a curse and an anchor.
He fastened the chains and ropes around his kneeling wife and gave the boys the order to pull; and leaning in to the task, they dragged her back out of the salt’s embrace, with Marie riding on her back looking up at the sky, offering no resistance to her rescuers, both hands clutching the chain wrapped around her chest as if it were simply a too-tight necklace, one that threatened to choke her.
Back on shore, the boys unwrapped the chains from her and sat hunkered by her, confused, and patted her salt-crusted hair and peered with dim wonder and curiosity at the new lightlessness in her eyes.
Max Omo went and got her old tattered parasol—festive, in early days—and leaned it crookedly against her shoulder to protect her from the sun—believing that her mental dishevelment had as its source but a single day’s overexertion. He poured her a glass of wine, set it in the sand beside her, patted her back, and then he and the boys went back to their labors upon the house.
It was far into the deep end of the afternoon before they had all the sand moved, and their cabin (looking somehow slightly brighter and cleaner; scoured by the sand’s tight embrace) revealed once more; and it was only after they had finished their task that they thought to check on Marie, and when they did, they discovered that she was gone again.
Once more, Max Omo groaned and cursed the purgatory of his existence—in his fury, a thought flashed like fire across his mind, which was to simply leave her out in the lake this time—and still cursing, he walked with the boys past the abandoned parasol and the untouched glass of wine (in which spun delirious sandflies) to the edge of the lake, where they again cupped their hands to their eyes and stared out across the distance, trying to pick out her motionless figure from among all the others.
And when they could not find her out there, the thought again leapt through Max Omo’s mind that she had already gone under—that she had reentered the old loosened tracks of the morning’s passage and gone straight to the bottom. Certainly, there had been enough time for it. He glanced back at the cookhouse, to see if any smoke might be rising from the chimney—there was none—and at the door of the privy, which was ajar.
He felt in that moment a dizzying combination of elation and remorse. “Boys,” he began quietly, but was interrupted by the youngest, who like a bloodhound had found and begun following the fresh tracks of his mother, which coursed in seeming wandering stupefaction along the contours at the edge of the lake before veering off into the sand when they reached the point where the elephant, earlier in the summer, had also left the lake.
Now it was Max Omo’s turn to fall to his knees in the sand—he too felt like weeping—but instead he only cursed more profanely, and pounded his fists in the sand while his boys stood by and wondered what he was so upset about, though such eccentricities had become familiar to them. The boys stood, waiting for him to tire himself out against the sand, as he pounded and cursed, and then he rose and bellowed her name out across the dunes.
It seemed that they could see the sound waves of his shouts travel a short distance in the heat and aridity before falling in pieces to the sand.
They set out after her, the boys mildly concerned but also partly entertained by the prospects of another chase, but with Max Omo so enraged at being drawn still farther from his work by what he perceived to be but a foolish and feminine indulgence that he was resolved to cuff her, when he caught up with her.
They trotted, not knowing how many hours’ lead she had on them, but understanding that she would be headed for the river, and that she would enter into it at that same spot. And again Max Omo felt the confusion of two feelings, as he hurried behind: hoping to catch her, if only because she was running, and yet hoping to get there too late, even if only a little too late, and in that manner have his life returned to him.
After only a short distance, they found her nightgown, discarded as if she had disappeared—though still the tracks continued—and farther on, they found her rubber boots.
There was nothing else then but her trail, with her feet bare now, narrower, so
that it resembled more the passage of some animal with cloven hoofs, a deer or a goat. The stride lengthened, which Max Omo knew meant she was running now, probably because of the sand’s heat. He knelt and felt it with his work-hardened hands and found it barely tolerable. He took it to be a good sign that she was at least conscious enough to still feel discomfort—though the newly lengthened gait of her tracks made the trail seem even more like that of a wild animal, traveling across the shifting sands in leaps and bounds; and Max Omo and the boys hurried on, feeling that they might be losing ground.
They caught sight of her once, in the last wedge of day’s light, the evening’s cooling purple tide settling back down in over the desert and the last radials of red sun flowing across the sand, the setting sun perfectly level with their eyes. They could see her going up and over the distant ridge, appearing as a wild animal, moving with the grace of a deer, her nude body pale against the strange sunlit hues of the sand.
She disappeared over the back side of the dune. Max and the boys staggered down theirs, huffing and dead-legged, and when they came to the next rise and gazed west, the dunes contained no life, possessing only the varying shades of sunset’s orange and gold hues, and beyond that, the first evening stars—and when they came to the next ridge after that, even the painted light was gone from the dunes, and they squinted into the dimness, hoping to see the pale object that was still moving steadily away from them.
They could see nothing; and on the next ridge, they found nothing but true darkness, and even their own hands held before them were barely visible.
They navigated by the stars, sometimes following her tracks and other times striking in the straightest tack toward the river; and after a couple of hours, Max Omo noticed that the gait of her tracks was shortening again, as the night chilled. He knelt and felt the sand, which was now as cool as that of a day-old dead animal—colder, somehow, in having had the warmth drain away from it, than if the warmth had never been there—and he noticed in her tracks where she had sometimes stopped and turned around to look back in the direction of her pursuers.
They found her resting in a sand hollow she had carved with her hands, trying to scrape down far enough beneath the surface to find some remnant pulse of heat, within sight and sound of the river.
She had found some residual heat about two feet down, though still she was shivering when they came upon her, and they could see where she had already excavated several small pits in the area, milking the last of the fast-vanishing warmth from each one before moving on to the next; and when they approached, she hunkered down tighter into her sand-bowl, but made no further attempt to escape.
Max Omo took off his salt-crusted work shirt and laid it over her, fastened it around her with a couple of buttons at the top; and the boys, who had recently started smoking, gathered driftwood twigs and branches, and made a small fire beside her nest.
As the flames danced and leapt, the four of them squatted by the fire for warmth.
It seemed to Max Omo and the boys that in that shifting, wavering firelight, the dunes were moving again, flowing all around them, covering everything but them—while to Marie, with the last of her resistance having crumbled like ancient parchment beneath a heavy touch, it seemed that they were being buried.
She was still shuddering, trying through the simple side-to-side rocking of her body to burrow down deeper into the sand—desiring to be up to her knees in the sand’s buried warmth, up to her thighs, her waist; up to her armpits, to her chin, and then submerging, like a swimmer—and it seemed to her that the dunes were aflame, in that reflected light, and that the sound of the river was fire, and that the stars above were glowing coals and embers, and yet still she could feel no warmth.
Max Omo sat close to her, his arm hooked clumsily around her to provide warmth, but it was too little too late, and she stared at the fire feeling nothing, and unable to travel any farther.
On the other side of the campfire, the boys kept smoking their cigarettes and getting up to add sticks and branches to the fire. They appeared disinterested, unconcerned with their mother’s dilemma, their family’s dilemma, or the strangeness of the evening, and from time to time looked around idly for the elephant, as if believing that because he had been in these environs once, he might be again.
Eventually Marie’s fatigue carried her down into sleep. She leaned in against Max Omo and fell asleep with her head in his lap, both her arms stretched around his waist as if they were still newlyweds—and Max Omo instructed the boys to pile sand over the form of her sleeping body, to act as a blanket, which they did, covering everything but her head and arms, as if they were children playing sandcastle games on a beach.
They all slept until shortly before dawn, when Marie alone among them was awakened by the yaps of a pack of coyotes that had been running along the river and had stopped to investigate, and to bark at the smoke and ash of the dying fire.
When she awoke, Marie perceived again the coals before her to be the stars, and believed that for whatever judgment had been passed against her, she had been buried up to her neck in sand for all time—that she had not died, but worse yet had been assigned to the limbo of purgatory, neither living nor dead, forever; and that, worst of all, in the afterlife, she would forever be accompanied by the captors she had finally sought to escape.
She did not wail or offer any other protest—only a renewed shuddering—and further curious, the coyotes edged in closer, their little eyes shining red in the coal-light. Still shivering, Marie lay her head back down and went to sleep, and when she awakened again a short while later to the stirring of Max Omo and the boys, and the new-washed gray sky of dawn, the coyotes were gone, though in her fractured state she imagined that Max Omo and the boys, who were brushing the sand from her, were the coyotes metamorphosed: and whether they were trying to dig her back up or bury her even deeper, she had no idea, and no longer cared.
She wished for an ocean to come sweeping in again, quickly.
They rose and left the little fire burning and went down to the river to sip its salty waters. The boys were down to their last two cigarettes, which they shared among the four of them. They turned then and went back into the sand.
The night’s breezes had for the most part obscured their passage from the evening before, so that they had to cut the grooves anew; though in other places their trail was still visible. They could see the bowl of sky that rested above their lake, the gathering of a few clouds like a small school of fish, far in the distance, and were able to navigate in that manner, trudging toward the spawning ground of those clouds.
They arrived parched and blistered shortly before noon. They fell upon the wine and splashed buckets of well water upon themselves to cool their cracking, scaling skin. Marie would not go back inside the cabin, even though it had been swept spotless of sand, and so Max Omo dragged an old iron bed frame from out of the barn, chipped off the flakes of sheep dung, made a crude pallet upon it, and built a little tin awning above it, and then with padlocks fastened one end of a chain to the iron bed and the other firm around Marie’s bird ankle.
He left her with one of the last bottles of wine—he noted with a small sadness that there were only four left, and remembered the prophecy that had been made when his uncle had first gifted them with the hundred cases—and provided her also with a battered metal pail of the warm salt water, as he would for a goat or a cow.
Then he returned to his chores, and though Marie tried to escape again, she could not travel far, dragging the iron bed and chain with her, and leaving behind the unavoidable sand-furrows of trail.
She howled all night, arguing and singing with the unquiet growling she imagined she could still hear coming from the mechanical salt-sorter, and she was so strident that none of the others could sleep. Finally Omo and the boys went out into the night, and as if in self-fulfilling prophecy started up the barrel tube: and because they could not sleep, they set to work, dragging in trawl lines of salt by desert moonlight, and feedin
g the sparkling sludge into the barrels and funnels, carrying on their important work of feeding salt to the world.
They hurled themselves against that work as if believing that through some extra energy expended by them in the service of the implacable world, they might reverse the inequity between the mortal and the immortal; and while they worked, slaving at the trawl lines, Marie continued to howl, cautioning them to come back, that they were going too far out into the lake: warning them to turn around and head back in the other direction, wailing at them to come back and tend to her, and to be tender, not hard.
The next morning they bathed her as they would a soiled horse and took her to town—not to a doctor for any treatment, nor to her old Lutheran church, but to the Baptist church, for adoption, or incarceration, or whatever other mitigative procedure might be arranged—and though she was cleaned up and had stopped groaning and was able to answer politely the most general questions, the church’s volunteers could see with clarity how her pale blue eyes had looked too far into the future, and how she had traveled too far into the past, and how something had been broken during that journey. And whether she would heal or not was anyone’s guess, and would depend, they said, on God’s will, God’s mercy.
The church workers put her in a loft apartment they owned, which was used by unwed mothers from other towns and cities around the country—theirs was but one in a network of reciprocating agreements where young women vanished for a time to visit aunts and uncles, before returning a year or two later with the infant cousin or niece or nephew with whom they had suddenly been entrusted, and neither the specificity nor lameness of the excuses ever mattered, only the veneer of the code of manners at the surface that would allow other pretenses to proceed unperturbed.
