All the Land to Hold Us

by Rick Bass

  The two men stepped out of the jeep and Red Watkins handed Richard the watch taken from the great fish’s belly and then did a rare thing for the old man, and embraced him. He wished him good luck. “You’re going back because of a woman, aren’t you?” Red asked, and Richard nodded and said that he was, and that if it worked out, and Red ever wanted to look him up, he would be in a place called Odessa.

  He watched the younger man for a moment and tried to remember what it had been like to still be between the past and the future, and with the luxurious buffer between the two: able to go back and look for the lost pieces of a life, if one desired, or able to forge on ahead into the future, hungry and eager and unafraid, and unweary.

  “Good luck,” he said again, and watched as the younger man turned and walked across the bridge, back into the country of his youth, and with so much treasure abandoned behind.

  Behind him, Richard heard Red Watkins laugh out loud. It was not a mean or sarcastic laugh, but a laugh of plain happiness. Richard heard it clearly, but did not turn back around and look. It was dark on the bridge and the stars above were bright. The river glinted silver, far below, and he felt a brief wave of vertigo, but there would be no more dreams of falling. He gripped the watch in his pocket and in that darkness felt the thud of each second, each coil-spring tremor, ticking within its case.

  9

  1976

  THE YOUNG GIRL who was Richard’s daughter, Annie, and whom he had no idea even existed, was living with the aging, faltering Marie, who, in the last several years, had been visited increasingly by Mr. Herbert Mix. (Whenever Mix addressed these visits to anyone, he acknowledged that he was “calling on” Marie. The farther Marie fell toward physical ruin—her long years at the salt mines overtaking her—the more she seemed to be an object of interest to Herbert Mix, who, to his credit, was drawn not just to the physical spectacle of her mortal flesh—her skin growing thinner and thinner, her frail old-woman’s bones becoming nearly as pronounced as some of those in the skeletons he had spent his life collecting—but attracted also to her calm and endearing nature, her steadfastness.)

  He admired the way she had taken on the task of raising the orphan girl in a swelter of Bible-belting fundamentalism, despite her not being an enthusiast of that sect, and of her commitment to be as good a mother as she could to the young girl, despite her advancing age and limitations.

  In his later years, Herbert Mix, no Holy Roller himself, had taken to perusing the Bible, as fascinated by some of the sagas of wealth and apocalypse in Revelations as might be a young boy with a stack of action comics; and he had come to think of both the old woman and the young girl as being Ruthian, capable of, and even prone to, eloquent declarations of devotion. As if the two had been shaped for each other from the beginning. It was not that way at all; but in their isolation, they found themselves crafted into the closest of partners.

  Together, the three of them were not so much like a family as a band or clan that gathered occasionally, reassembling in need or opportunity—but the two of them, Marie and Annie, had become like a family over the years, knit more closely than anything Annie would ever have known with her mother, the flight-driven Clarissa, and closer than anything Marie had ever known out at Juan Cordona Lake, or even among the peach orchards of her own childhood.

  Marie and Annie had moved into a house on the outskirts of town, and had stopped going to the church the previous year, when Annie was eight, for a reason that seemed incomprehensible to Odessa’s leaders at the time, stating that she, Marie, as well as Annie, who was a precocious child, had already read the Bible all the way through, twice—that they already knew it all, knew how it all turned out, and preferred to spend their Sunday mornings quietly, at home, cooking and reading and working in the garden, which they were able to always somehow keep protected against the heated winds that rippled through the days.

  It was an avocation for which Annie had a surprising aptitude, and she loved to awaken at first light and go out into the garden—melons, corn, berries, peas, lettuce, okra, cucumbers, zucchini, half a dozen varieties of tomatoes—and Marie would join her there, watering and weeding in the early hours of the day.

  The work reminded Marie dimly of her own childhood among the orchards, though she sensed that here her life seemed freer than it must have been for her father, who had been so bound to one crop, peaches and only peaches. Here, too, there were challenges—cutworms, webworms, weevils, borers, blight, gophers, stinkbugs, rabbits, coons, skunks, drought, heat, and wind—but when one crop failed or faltered, there were others that were less affected; and the size of Marie and Annie’s garden was manageable, and far less ambitious than the acres of her father’s orchard, which had ended up subsuming his life in a brutal and, to Marie’s way of thinking, unsatisfactory, trade: his life, for x-numbered bushels of peaches.

  A thousand, a few thousand—a hundred thousand? What of it? A man should be more than a peach, she mused, and a man should be more than a pile or pillar of salt, or a hole in the ground.

  After watering and weeding each morning, they would raise gauze sheets around the garden’s perimeter, the gauze flapping in the wind and hooked with curtain rings to a series of bamboo and willow poles that Herbert Mix helped them erect. They would raise the billowing sheets a couple of feet midmorning, just enough for the softest part of the morning sun to make it over the top and down into the garden, and then would go back out and raise the sheets another few feet at noon, and then higher still, all the way up, midafternoon, before lowering the sheets back to the halfway point shortly before dusk, and all the way down at night.

  To Annie it seemed precisely like raising the sails on the oceangoing ships she had read about in her adventure books. The crops might have been her dreams, with the soil her imagination, or the crops might have been some lost civilization over which she was the queen. She felt keenly the pleasure of wanting to take care of something, and it likewise pleased Marie, who, in raising and lowering the sails each day, was reminded of how she had cared for Annie from the very first day she had arrived; of how she had draped sheets around Annie’s baby bed as she slept, to keep the afternoon sun off her.

  As a baby, Annie had been extraordinarily pale, but was tan now from her garden work; even with her black hair, no one would ever recognize her as her mother’s child. Her eyes were not that light wolfish green, but darker green, like river stones, with a mosaic of black-flecking, shiny as opal, appearing at times as if they had clear water running in fast sheets across them.

  As Marie grew older and less robust, Annie stepped up and performed more and more of their little household’s tasks. She was not yet caring for Marie as she might for a child, but that transition was already in progress, the ship was leaving its harbor. And it did not displease either for this to be the case.

  They lived on the east end of town, out past where even the football players ran, in an area that had previously had no name, but which was now known as Mormon Springs, named for the schoolteacher who lived out there, a young woman, Ruth, who had always wanted to teach in a one-room schoolhouse, and who had gotten her wish, though not quite in the manner she had envisioned.

  A Mormon in a sea of all-else Protestants, Ruth had begun her career teaching at the middle school in Odessa straight out of college. She loved the children, was an excellent listener and motivator, volunteered for and coordinated numerous clubs and projects, and by her third year had been voted Texas’s Teacher of the Year, the youngest ever to receive that honor, and won it again her fourth year, when never before had an educator been awarded the prize twice.

  Her faith and heritage, however, had proved to be her undoing, as the town, increasingly uncomfortable with her influence over the children, became concerned that she might corrupt them with her outlandish ideas about religion. The townspeople were approving of her values (twice a month, she got up early on a Sunday and made the long drive to San Angelo, to attend the church in the small town where she had grown up), but th
ey were alarmed by the claims of her church that the Latter-day Saints’ religion was one born of this country, rather than olden Israel.

  They were troubled most of all not by the fact that Ruth kept a Book of Mormon in her house, on her bookshelf, where any visiting child might see it, as well as possessing what seemed to those who had investigated the situation an extravagant number of other Mormon tracts, with mysterious, occult-like titles such as The Pearl of Great Price, but that she was writing and publishing occasional essays about what her faith meant to her, and what life had been like for her growing up Mormon.

  It wasn’t as if the essays were red-flagged in the Odessa paper; instead, they appeared in places like her church’s newsletter, and a couple of church magazines published in Utah, including the alumni magazine of Brigham Young University, where she had attended college. But as the Texas press began to pay more attention to her teaching methods and her own persona, curious about her success—numerous accounts reported on her calming and radiant “aura”—her essays were eventually rounded up, republished, excerpted, and analyzed, and she was, in the words of some of the patrons at the daily diner, “outed.”

  They clucked and tsked when the next school board election—essentially a referendum on whether she should leave or stay—went to a candidate who ran on an anti-Mormon platform. The vote was close, a handful either way would have changed it, but in the end, fear had won out over courage, and at the next board meeting, she was asked to leave.

  It would have been easy for her to return to the town where she had grown up, or to go to work in the well-financed school district of some larger city, or even to take a high-paying job at an endowed private school, where surely she would have been just as revered and loved by the students as she had been by her desert children.

  But there was a feistiness running through her, a strength that was sometimes overlooked, like the sheen of red that burnished her otherwise brown hair in angles of sunlight. She withdrew from the middle school, but spent hundreds of hours studying the complicated legal strictures of tax codes and apportionment systems, filed the necessary forms, and opened a new school on the outskirts of town, building it with her own hands, using her own tools and funds, along with the help of some of her ex-students and their parents.

  She had befriended many of the other school’s teachers, who were not envious of the success of her awards—Ruth had always been gracious in deferring her attention to the entire faculty, and to the nature of the children themselves—and, wishing her well, the football coaches from the high school had donated the services of the team’s labors, to help her pour the foundation she had dug, and to then frame and truss and roof the one-room structure, which was the schoolhouse of her dreams all along.

  It was quintessential small-town craziness, the sweetly supportive abiding side by side with the maliciously venomous. There could be no reckoning that might present dualities itself on any given day, nor was Ruth interested any longer in guessing. It was much better to simply stay away from it.

  When Ruth opened her doors the fifth year of her teaching career, there were only four elementary students whose parents were brave enough to send them to the alternative school, though slowly over the next several years, that number had doubled, and then increased again, so that by the time Annie entered the third grade, there were thirteen students in the school.

  It was an ideal system, Ruth thought, in which the younger students could learn at their own speed—Annie, for instance, was sitting in with the eighth-graders as they made their way through The Odyssey, creating costumes and dressing up for dramatic readings each day—and the older students could help instruct the younger students.

  In the beginning, Annie had not attended the Mormon Springs school, but had been going to the main school in town. It was before Marie had completely written off as malicious and heartless the church folk and townspeople who had offered her a hand up, and who had also given her, even if indirectly, the great gift of her life, the child herself, as loving and attentive as her own two sons had been numb-spirited.

  Annie was advanced, and initially it was Marie’s belief that the larger school would be able to offer a greater array of teachers and services. But it was Annie’s very precociousness that challenged the lesser teachers at the school, leading them to dislike the child, who, unaware of diplomacy, sometimes corrected her instructors. By the time she was in the second grade, it grieved Annie to hear her teacher say “acrost” instead of “across,” and there were children in the larger school who, in addition to resenting the ease with which Annie skimmed through her lessons unchallenged, looked down on her for the fact that she was orphaned, and possessed so ancient a caretaker as Marie, an old washed-up, gone-by granny woman.

  There were mothers of the children, too, who were discomforted by Annie’s odd brilliance. One, in particular, encouraged her child to spread lies about Annie, not just amongst the other schoolchildren, but to Annie’s teacher as well. The mother conspired to get her son to tell another girl in the class that Annie had said she thought the teacher, Mrs. Blaronski, was dumber than a box of rocks and that she was “a fucking idiot.”

  Weeks later, after the accusations had in their small-town way finally wound their way from accuser to accused, Marie heard about the rumor, and scheduled a meeting with Mrs. Blaronski to set things straight: to let her know that never in her life had she heard Annie utter those two words, although she had to admit, she had heard the boy’s mother use such language. “If she had called you an ‘imbecilic termagant,’” Marie said, trying for lightness, and shaking her head, “I might be able to believe there was some substance to the allegations. But ‘fucking idiot’ . . .” She shook her head again.

  Marie thought the matter was over then, and went on to a discussion of Annie’s special needs—she did not use the phrase “stultifying boredom”—and she believed the issue had been resolved, until, two weeks later, she heard that the teacher had been down at the local diner lamenting to all and any in earshot the blow-by-blow specifics of her and Annie’s cross-wayedness, complaining about the child’s character and absent-mindedness.

  As the evening went on, Mrs. Blaronski’s lamentations degenerated into weeping, so that clearly she was the wronged party, and the child, the wrongdoer; and the diner patrons tsked again at the malice of a child who could reduce a grown woman to tears.

  It was a month later, at the town Halloween party, before Marie heard indirectly of the teacher’s betrayal; one of the men who’d been in the diner during the performance came up to Marie and asked what the heck was going on, and filled Marie in on what he had seen and heard; and by the end of that week, Annie had calmly been instructed by Marie to gather her pens and pencils and notepads, her scissors and crayons and glue, for she would now be attending the school at Mormon Springs, which was but a short bike ride from their house: and although Annie regretted leaving her classmates, she was intrigued by the adventure of starting anew.

  Ruth was thrilled to have another student, and particularly one as bright as Annie. Annie fit right into the system, adjusting day by day to all the richnesses, the crannies and alcoves and crevices of wonder, afforded by the school at Mormon Springs, and afforded by Ruth as a teacher.

  The old charlatan Herbert Mix came into Ruth’s class once a year to display his wares, and to take the students on a field trip into the dunes to search for treasure. (Having grown more tender in his old age, each year he salted away a few prizes in the desert, to be sure that the children each discovered something.) A Mormon congressman from Utah came and visited the class each year, while another of the faith, the chief executive of a telecommunications company, paid to have the class travel annually to Washington, D.C., to visit the House and Senate chambers, and to learn about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and see all the judicial and legislative warrens.

  A sports star, also a devout Mormon, came to class once a year and played basketball with the children out on the gravel half-court, w
ith Ruth leading the opposing team; and because she had captained her high school team her senior year, she always managed to sink a few perimeter shots over her famous visitor, a feat that awed the students more than anything else she had done or said.

  Ruth had secured a grant for a five-week artist-in-residency, during which time Ruth and the children, with the young visiting artist, constructed giant puppets and wrote their own play, culminating in a parade down Main Street, the children and their teacher costumed in the giant-headed cloaks of brightly painted creations: a multipartite thirty-foot-long Red Dragon, breathing real fire from a portable gas grill converted to a flamethrower, and a twenty-foot-tall Comanche warrior, a herd of buffalo, and a giant oil derrick.

  The town was totally unprepared for the shenanigans of the parade. Conceived in secrecy and constructed in privacy and anonymity by the outcasts of Mormon Springs, the giant puppets merely appeared in town one day, beating on tin-can drums and sawing wildly on screeching violins and shaking handmade, brightly painted gourd pea-rattles, looming and canting and teetering sideways past the front windows and doorways of shopkeepers, pivoting their enormously oversized and grinning heads from side to side to take in and, it seemed, evaluate the town through which they were passing.

  In addition to the sacrilege of the parade not having been previously advertised or even authorized by the town fathers and mothers, there was further scandal in that the play had the audacity in one scene to project a future that was no longer based on oil and gas, but alternative energy, including an array of little bright blue solar panels attached to the dragon, drinking in the desert sun and glittering like scales.

  Still, what could the town do? They had already fired Ruth.

  The children had constructed a giant papier-mâché prickly pear cactus, and an equally oversized scrubby-looking range cow, which they pulled along behind them on a flatcar not unlike the wagon the football players used. Near the end of the parade, the dragon (operated by Ruth, in the head) turned and looked back at the lime-green cactus, and at the ribby cow (its skeleton beneath the cardboard not fisted-up wads of newspaper, but the real thing, bones gleaned from the desert and reassembled in anatomical correctness, including even the great horned skull); and tilting its sloe-eyed visage sideways, stretched its long neck closer, articulated like an accordion, then let loose a blast of flame that ignited and quickly incinerated first the cactus and then, more horrifically, the scrubby range cow: again, a blasphemy and a mockery to the old ranchers who witnessed the spectacle.