All the Land to Hold Us

by Rick Bass

  “How will we drill the wells for the water?” Ruth asked, “and how will we afford the leases?” Sitting next to Richard, still a professional, but barefoot, swinging her browned legs in the sun as if sitting on a dock. Annie next to her, chewing thoughtfully, watching the horizon, but dreaming, Ruth suspected, her vertical dreams.

  Richard shrugged. “The leases shouldn’t be a problem,” he said. “We’ll go places where they’ve already drilled dry holes and have abandoned them. I can get those leases for a penny on the dollar.” Swinging his own bare legs in the sun. So much air below.

  “What about the drilling?” Ruth asked. “Even a shallow well costs more than we’ll ever have. I can maybe find some science grants, but it’s a long shot, and I really don’t have the time for it.”

  “We’ll figure something out,” Richard said. “I might be able to get one drilled.”

  There was no need to tell her that he could drill a hundred of them, or a thousand, if he wanted. They continued watching the desert, swinging their legs. He wondered how Red Watkins was, and the others. Wondered if they had already gone on ahead to China.

  Annie got up and came around and sat down on the other side of him, took a fossil out from the pouch she wore around her neck and asked him what it was, how old it was, and what it meant. Leaning into him as if he were trusted. It was not normally her way, and Ruth was surprised by the twinge of jealousy she felt, and wondered at its source: if she wanted Annie to give her her allegiance, rather than sharing it with a near-stranger—or if she, Ruth, wanted to lean in closer and ask Richard questions about such ancient things.

  This won’t do, Ruth thought, shifting uncomfortably. What’s going on here, what’s the problem? Do I want him to stay, or do I want him to leave?

  They descended a timeworn trail, a slot in the cliff, pressed smooth from the passing of countless deer and bighorn sheep, as well as the boot heels of bandits and pilgrims and wanderers. The children spilled out into the desert and began lowering themselves into the lesser of the various caverns and sump holes. Like explorers upon the face of glaciers, they dug footholds and handholds in the slumped strata, rivulets of dirt and sand pouring down the walls like seeps of water to the collapsed floor of rubble below.

  They lowered themselves over the edges of the larger caverns with ropes they had brought and explored the despoliation below, finding the bones and claws and antlers of creatures that had stumbled into the caverns at night and perished. Occasionally one of these would have expired only recently, so that its carcass was still being attended to in the day by ravens, vultures, and eagles: and as the children approached any of these caverns, there might rise a feathered, flapping stagger of black-and-bronze birds like a cyclone, climbing straight into the blue sky like blackened sheets of cardboard and newspaper being lifted by the heated exhalation of the earth; and the children would hurry toward these sources, eager to see what calamity the birds might have been inspecting.

  Sometimes there was no calamity, only mystery: as if the assemblage of birds had been gathered there only to cool their sun-heated black feathered bodies. Other times it was water the birds sought—puddles and seeps an inch or two deep.

  Small trees and bushes grew in such sump holes, as if in little vases, so that climbing down into them was for the children like lowering themselves into a terrarium; and they would lie down in the cool grass that had leapt up there, or sit beneath the shade of those young but fast-growing trees, while the adults stood above them, peering down.

  It was important to Ruth, she said, that they learn to own the world; that they come to view their outsiderness as a strength and an asset rather than a liability. They might or might not change the world, and the world might or might not change them: but it was important to her for them to know that they could make their way in it, anywhere they went.

  She and Richard sat at the edge of the caverns on these field trips, as they had sat earlier on the bluff above, and watched and visited, talking about things that mattered to them. Up until this point, Richard had been more interested in the landscape than in people or their ways. He was astounded, listening to Ruth talk about children, having never met anyone who gave them—or perhaps anything—such attention.

  “Does it fill you, or does it hollow you out?” he asked one day.

  “It hollows me out,” she answered, without hesitation. Often her discussions with him continued to be tinged with defensiveness. But she turned to him now to be sure he understood; and even if he had not heard her words, the radiance on her face would have made her answer clear. “It hollows me out,” she said again, smiling.

  The shouts and cries of the children rose from the various caverns around them like the pipings of organ chamber music, or the sound of flutes and bagpipes, swirled by gusts of wind. They climbed up and out of one series of sumps and hurried down into another, playing hide-and-seek and tag. The boys in particular, it seemed, eager to demarcate and claim territory, scratching and etching with sticks and rocks various graffiti and hieroglyphics on the walls of their pits.

  They were like the Paleoliths who had come in at the end of the last ice age. The ticking of their hearts little different, surely, from only ten thousand years ago, and he felt a surge of discomfort, watching them scramble across the desert floor, disappearing into the holes and then emerging again.

  He felt a wave almost like panic; he understood even more clearly that Clarissa would not be coming back—he believed, intuitively, that she should; he believed that all things, all natural processes, replicate in circular rather than linear fashion—and yet, if ten thousand years could hurtle by so fast, like the space between two heartbeats, then what was his obligation to that river of time, and to himself?

  What were the chances, were someone to ask him, Doesn’t it hollow you out?, for him to turn to the questioner and answer, Yes, absolutely, with such radiance, such fullness?

  All of the children were pleasant, comfortable in the world, curious and loving, but it was Annie whom he found himself thinking about at different hours of the day, as if smitten or owned by her. At some point not quite known to any of them, the project, though still available and present to all the children, had become largely his and hers. He had noticed, as they worked on their map, that there was a tingling that began in his lower jaw and then spread into his teeth when she leaned in against him, working on the map, not just totally accepting of him, but more, incorporating him into her world. It was a sweetness that passed through his teeth, causing him to nearly shiver; and other times, there was a fullness like a burning in his chest, which spread to his shoulders and down the length of his arms, whenever he considered her work: and not just her potential, but who she was already.

  It was hard for Ruth, watching them. Marie was pleased with this apprenticeship, made happy by the good fortune of it, and by the fact that Annie was learning a trade—that she would at least know how to make her way in the world, and Marie’s work, Marie’s obligation, would be done—but about this sharing, this growth and cleaving, Ruth was less sanguine, and again could not quite figure the source, nor the direction, of the currents of envy.

  Annie thought the same way Richard did, seemed to understand intuitively, immediately, the logic of his work and explanations, and yet in other ways Annie was his opposite. Often, in the drafting and redrafting of their contours, sketching their maps level by level and horizon by horizon, descending through time, they would pass by little overlooked and undiscovered pockets of oil and gas, the very treasures that had once made Richard’s heart leap.

  Annie had no interest in such treasures, and was drawn instead to the water, only water: and when they discovered it, they celebrated, and they posted their maps on the walls and blackboards of the little schoolhouse, like field generals posting campaign maps in some far-flung war room. And though each of the children understood what the focus was, to find clean water, they understood also to keep the mission, the goal, secret; and they did.

  It
was their water, Richard told them, it belonged to them and was just waiting for them to find it and then to go out and get it. But if someone else found out about it first, he said, it might be taken from them. They had to keep it secret, had to work beneath the surface.

  He bought a truck from Herbert Mix, a sandblasted wind-whipped pewter-colored old Ford with rounded fenders and goggle headlights. The back bumper was held on with baling wire. The truck gave off a distinctive squeak and rattle, one that the children could hear from a distance, their ears more attuned, like those of dogs, to the higher pitches of the world, and they would be aware of his approach several minutes before Ruth was. They were each beginning to regard him as critical and important, if not powerful and magical, and understood, far better than the adults of Odessa, the nonnegotiable nature of their need, and of the difference that existed between the taste of fouled water, and the taste of sweet.

  And noting the ever-increasing attendance by him to their classes, they perceived that he had a crush on Ruth, and teased her about it, at first in his absence, but then teasing them both about it.

  And as if to prove otherwise, or to at least discourage the continuance of such rumor, Ruth allowed herself to entertain the brief attentions of a young Mormon businessman from Waco, Joe, a seller of mobile homes who had served two years as a missionary in Asia, and who had clear goals about where his life was headed, and how his success would be measured. He came over to Ruth’s house on a Saturday, and they cooked hamburgers on her grill in the October light, with the desert’s temperature still not too distinct from that of the grill.

  They sat out in her sandy backyard, Ruth barefoot and the businessman awkward in his black lace-ups, but unwilling to disrobe. He cut straight and dispassionately through the surface of the matter, the fact that both of them had a shared heritage and beliefs, their Latter-day Sainthood, and moved earnestly, doggedly, to the heart of things, which was his desire to build an empire based on the sale of preexisting modular homes.

  Joe leaned forward in his lawn chair, setting his paper plate of food aside, and became more animated as he spoke, generating what almost anyone might have accepted as true passion—Ruth imagined that, indeed, it was possible that he had sold quite a few homes already—but whenever she found herself listening to the substance of his words, rather than the delivery, she could barely keep from laughing, and finally it was too much; at the tail end of a phrase expressing his longing to go back and capitalize on the overseas contacts he made during his missionary work in the hopes of “developing a joint-venture-based strategic alliance,” and of “becoming dominant in that relationship,” a snort escaped from her, and she bent forward on her seat, trying to imagine what in the world she might be able to do or say that might ever break his fixed gaze upon his ludicrous empire: and knowing that she could care less whether there was, or wasn’t. An evening, nearly half a day, ruined, except for the relief of laughter.

  He probably knows how to love, she thought, considering Richard, and the way he was willing to follow the world, rather than trying to lead it or control it or worst of all own it. That he would as lief give something up as take it away. Damn it, he probably knows how to be in love, she thought. Now if only I was in love with him, or even desired to be. The space in her heart for that was neither dead nor vacant, not lacking as much as simply not activated. It just didn’t feel like the right time. She didn’t feel like she had the available resources to do both. There was no summons, and even if some such summons arrived, she believed she would do well to resist it. She could not bear to think of failing the children, or her own goal of launching each of them, as many as possible, strong into the world, durable against the forces that would try to marginalize and ultimately ignore them.

  Joe was looking at her with puzzlement. “What?” he said, his color rising, and she laughed again, sensing his outrage, and imagining what a feisty competitor he would be in pursuing those strategic alliances. “You don’t think I can do it?” he demanded. “You think I can’t?”

  “No, no,” she said, placing a hand on his arm, as if to stay him from rising to leave, such was his affront. “No, absolutely, I believe you can, and will.” He relaxed a bit then, and settled back into his chair.

  “I may make it sound easy,” he said, “but it’s not. These folks I’m dealing with, it’s not like they’re—” He cast about, searching for a metaphor. “It’s not like they’re children,” he said. “These are boardroom kind of people, they’re sharp customers, you’ve got to be on your toes.”

  “I’m sure it’s very taxing,” Ruth said.

  She had made a pie, a triple-berry crisp, using berries Annie had grown in her and Marie’s garden—both Annie and Ruth were wild about blackberries—and she had planned on bringing it out after dinner, served warm with vanilla ice cream melting over it, but she withheld it now, could not bring herself to reveal it, even though she was certain he had smelled it baking in the oven.

  Instead, she rose and went into the kitchen and washed and sliced a single peach, which she brought out on two dishes, and served it without explanation.

  They sat there in silence after they had finished the peach, the sand quickly cooling against Ruth’s feet as the orange sun settled below the horizon, and then abruptly she stood and thanked him for coming all this way, that it was good for the members of their church to check in on one another, but that he would have to forgive her, she needed to get back to her lesson plans.

  “I wish you well in your ventures,” she said, shaking his hand firmly; and sensing her rejection, he felt compelled to lean forward, to pursue, and asked if he could come visit her, could come call upon her, again.

  She laughed, started to say the first thing that came to her mind, an emphatic no, but instead shook her head and apologized for perhaps having misinterpreted the reason for his visit as being church-based—that she had no interest in suitors.

  Even as she was seized, while she was speaking, with the odd notion, almost like a prophesy foretold that within a month she would be Richard’s lover, entangled and frightened and in the midst of all sorts of unwelcome chaos, the responsibility of new affections; and she was both alarmed and intrigued by this sudden idea, impressed upon her almost with the force of revelation.

  “Goodbye,” she called to Joe as he went down her walkway, back to his green-and-white sedan, to face the lonely drive back to Waco. “I’m sorry my heart’s not available, forgive me,” she called out after him, making him look over his shoulder in face-scrunched disbelief; and he had not been gone three minutes before she took the pie out of the oven, and the quart of ice cream, and got in her own car and hurried over to Marie and Annie’s, where they sat on the front porch and ate it warm, watching the night descend over the desert, with Marie and Ruth shelling late-season peas from Marie’s garden then, and Annie curled up in the porch swing, reading The Pickwick Papers.

  And as if attuned to the same premonition, for no words had been spoken of Richard, nor of school, nor the water maps, Annie announced nonetheless, without looking up from her book, and with no other prefatory declarations, “I like him.” And Ruth and Marie gave no comment, but merely went on with their own discussions and work as if she had not spoken, and Annie returned to her book.

  Unbeknownst to his friend Herbert Mix, or anyone, some evenings Richard did not return to his loft apartment, but would stay out at Clarissa’s abandoned house, his old gray truck parked in the garage, the barnlike doors to that shed closed.

  The lilac bushes, unpruned, had grown larger, subsisting in the drip line all around the house, and had risen to nearly roof level, almost completely obscuring the house. Except for the small chainlink fence around the barren yard, and the weedy flagstone walkway leading up to the little copse, it might no longer have even appeared as a place of human habitation, but instead only a strange grove in the desert.

  The once-vibrant garden was a tangle of thistle and tumbleweed. Feral cats stalked mice through the concertina m
aze of it, and at night the wind flapped the tin patchings on all four corners, until it seemed that the entire house might be lifted into flight.

  There was no power, water, or phone, only husk, and some nights he went to bed early and dreamed that he was back in those old times, though other nights he lit a miner’s carbide lamp and moved from room to room, tilting his head this way and that to illuminate in the weak dull light individual objects of attention, their position unchanged in the last decade—a coffee cup and saucer, clean but still resting on the dusty kitchen table; the grocery list next to the telephone—such mundane concerns, bananas, butter, flour, and in the meantime, a life had slipped by.

  Some of the lesser fossils that they had found but been unable to sell were still on the windowsill, dust-shrouded, and the fact that none of it had changed in ten years filled Richard with alternating currents of hope and despair.

  And what of me? he wondered. He barely dared to handle any of the objects, so dense with power as to possibly possess the ability to summon her one last time, though also possibly able to sever once and for all that possibility.

  How have I changed in ten years, he thought, if at all?

  Some nights he lit a lantern and walked out into the garden, where once he and she had nurtured cilantro, rosemary, hot peppers, and basil. Tomatoes, corn, cucumbers, berries, and lettuce, in the months before the summer heat grew too intense. Now the bobcats and other unknown things scuttled from his approach, fleeing the ring of light cast by the lantern.

  He stood waist-deep in the tangle. Part of him considered setting fire to the whole structure, while another part gloried in the rot and senescence, and in his ability to hold out and hang on, hoping and believing and then hoping again: and for this part of him, the old house was more worthy to him of enshrinement than incineration, and his visits to it sacrament.