The Lives of Rocks

by Rick Bass

  I was against the law, though not as much as some, and I liked it; and I was only a renter, borrowing someone else’s house. If things turned sour, I could flee; I could leave like a leaf tumbling down the street, tumbling into the woods, away from the sliding houses.

  So I slept, smiling, warm and dry, with my hands behind my head, and I was a little frightened of what would happen when Vern passed on, when his liver finally stopped straining and I was responsible for his son—that thought would come at me from all directions, frightening me—but then I’d remember that Vern’s liver had not stopped straining and filtering, not yet, that he was asleep downstairs, and he would be until three or four in the afternoon, and I could go back to sleep, listening to the rain, which was coming down in a steady, soothing wash.

  I knew that the other people in the neighborhood, the ones with homes, children, and futures, had to be distressed—because when the Yazoo clay got wet, when it got loaded with water, it would start to move again, sliding down the hill, pulling the houses and driveways and foundations with it, slowly—an inch a month during the rainy seasons of winter and spring, like some inept magician’s tablecloth trick—but that was none of my worry, none at all, and it was only those people’s bad luck, or just plain bad planning, that had made them build there, and none of it had anything to do with me.

  Still, it made me feel guilty. After about eleven o’clock in the morning I couldn’t sleep anymore, and I got up and moved over to the window to see how hard it was raining, and I was surprised to see that it was raining much harder than I’d expected: a steady, straight, hard-falling rain, with no wind, a rain that was backing up the gutters and flooding the streets, and starting to lap up into the yards.

  Small children in diapers were sitting out in the middle of the street, waist deep, laughing and splashing and playing with yellow rubber ducks, as if the street were their bathtub. It made me hate Mississippi, then; I thought of how the sewage system would be stopping up, losing pressure, and would be backing its materials up into these same waters. The parents were out there with their children, wearing raincoats and rubber boots, holding umbrellas, laughing, silly, oblivious—thinking, perhaps, that this time their houses were not going to slide, and that all water was clean, all water was good, thinking that they were lucky because their street had decided to turn into a river, a river that flowed right past their houses, not understanding how dangerous any of it was. The children could be getting typhoid, salmonella, or worse. The young parents were just standing out there in the rain, ankle deep in the water, laughing.

  They should have all been feeling like outlaws—it was making my breathing fast and shallow, just to think about it. Just because these people could afford to buy big houses and clothes for their children, to send them to private schools and such, did not mean they were safe. They were like hens, all of them, just gathered out in the barnyard, pecking grain, with Thanksgiving coming on. I was so mad that Vern was dying. When he was gone there would be no one; just his sons, but it would be a long time before they became him, before they filled his place, pouring into his space like water flowing into a footprint left in the mud, flowing across it, then covering it...

  But Wejumpka’s strength! He was wearing his Indian headdress and whittling on a stick of balsa wood. He looked like an adult, even with the headdress on, sitting back up on the porch out of the rain, watching the other children play. I picked up the field glasses and focused them on the kitchen behind him, and saw Ann eating chocolate ice cream out of the carton with a spoon, watching the children, too, and watching their parents. Ann ate slowly, transfixed, I think, by the sight of young couples, of married couples, of a man and a woman, together; though it’s possible, too, that she was seeing nothing, only tasting the ice cream—or maybe standing very still, very firm, and trying to feel if the clay was beginning to slide under her house.

  A station wagon came driving up, creeping slowly through the street’s floodwaters, sending rocking muddy waves out from either side of it, washing water up into people’s yards, moving down the street like a boat, and I recognized it as Wejumpka’s carpool, though it was not a school day.

  It stopped in front of Wejumpka’s house, parking in a puddle, and children began piling out of it, more children than I ever imagined, all wearing rubber boots and raincoats, and they ran up to Wejumpka’s porch, jumping and laughing, delighted to see him, and I was amazed.

  Just a year ago he had been unpopular, had been teased unmercifully—teased about his name, teased about the way he hugged everyone, teased about his father, the drunkest man in town—but this was different, this was unexpected, and they had him up on their shoulders, then, and were carrying him, headdress and all, out into the rain, and the woman who’d driven the carpool was out with them, helping set up these sawhorses, across which she and another child placed a wide plank board that had been sticking out of the back of the station wagon.

  A little girl was there to take pictures; the carpool driver held an umbrella over her as she adjusted her camera, very seriously, very professionally, taking light readings and motioning the other children into their places.

  Wejumpka, looking not so much thrilled or even happy, but more bored than anything, shrugged his shoulders and moved where she wanted him, into his position beneath the plank, sort of squatting, bent over, with his back pressed up against the plank, then, and all the other children whooping and shouting, pulling one another’s hair and kicking, climbing up onto the plank—all of them, and I counted seven, eight, nine—and I figured that if they weighed seventy pounds each, average, that was more than six hundred pounds, and it would truly be an amazing feat, if he could do it, and I wanted to call the newspaper, the television stations, and everyone I knew.

  I was flabbergasted.

  Ann had turned away from the window before the station wagon had pulled up, had gone back into the den and was watching television, having taken the ice cream carton with her, and was still spooning the stuff into her mouth; she seemed to take no notice. I opened the window so that I could hear what was going on down in the yard. The cold rain beat against my face; it was starting to blow past in sheets. The other children in the street, the rubber duck children and their parents, had glanced over but then turned away, as if not realizing what was going on, either.

  The little school photographer had her flash attachment rigged up, and had it all ready, crouching down, and was telling Wejumpka to “Do it,” to “Do it!” I wondered why they had picked this of all days to shoot the picture; there must have been some sort of deadline. I wanted to call down to Vern to try to rouse him, but I did not want to miss a thing.

  The rain was whipping in then, harder than ever, sometimes obscuring the street, and the children out in Ann’s yard. The rubber duckers were screaming, gathering their toys and children and running for their houses, stung by the hard pellets as the rain turned to hail. I could see the flashbulb popping; the pictures were being taken, but I couldn’t see if Wejumpka was making the lift or not.

  I thought I could hear cheering and whistling, clapping, but I wasn’t sure. It could have been the wind.

  And then the wind had blown the curtains of hail past and I could see again, and Wejumpka did have the plank off the sawhorses: it was up on his back, his stout little legs braced wide apart and quivering, trembling, and his eyes squeezed shut, his face trembling and turning red, but he had them all up in the air, they were all resting on his back, and the little photographer was moving in closer, getting different angles, vertical and horizontal shots for the school paper, getting below him and shooting directly up into the hail. But no one else was out, just the one teacher and all the children: only the children seemed to know what Wejumpka was doing, what was going on.

  Vern was asleep, drunk to the world, sleeping through the last part of his life, drooling; and I looked beyond Wejumpka’s heroic tremblings, looked down into the den, and could see that Ann had taken her blouse off and was lying by the fire, smea
ring the ice cream all over herself, and that she, too, had her eyes closed. I stared, horrified, trying to read the lips as she murmured something, and I picked up the field glasses and trained them on her.

  The ice cream was melting and running all over her.

  I could read her lips. “Me, me,” she was murmuring. “Me, me, me.”

  I saw how she would never let up, not until Vern was dead, and that even then she would hate him for his betrayal, and would be bitter; and that she did not care what her hatred of him was doing to her son, that it was just too strong for her alone to handle.

  Wejumpka continued to stand out in the hailstorm, trembling, shuddering, trying to impress his new friends, while slowly his house, and the one across the street, slid swamp-ward, riding on the slick Yazoo clay.

  The Canoeists

  The two of them would go canoeing on any of the many winding creeks and rivers that braided their way through the woods and gentle hills to the north. They would drive north in Bone’s old truck and put the boat on the Brazos, or the Colorado, or White Oak Creek, or even the faster-running green waters of the Guadalupe, without a care of where they might end up, and would explore those unknown seams of water and bright August light with no maps, knowing only what lay right before them as they rounded each bend.

  They would take wine, and a picnic lunch, and fishing tackle, and a lantern. They drifted beneath high chalky bluffs, beneath old bridges, and past country yards where children playing tag on the hillsides among trees above the river stopped to watch them pass. They paddled on, Bone shirtless in the stern and Sissy straw-hatted in the bow, the in her swimsuit. When they reached sun-scrubbed bars of white sand next to deep, dark pools, around the bend from any town or road, shaded by towering oaks, they would beach the canoe and lie on blankets in the sun like basking turtles, sweating nude, glistening, drinking wine and getting up every now and again to run down to the river and dive in, to cleanse the suntan oil and grit of sand and shine of sex from their bodies.

  Hot breezes would dry their bodies quickly again, once they returned to the blankets. Their damp hair would keep them cool for a little while. They would lie perfectly still on their backs, looking up at the sun, hands clasped, and listen to the shouts, the sawing buzz, of the seventeen-year locusts going insane back in the forest, choking on the heat.

  Later, when the day had cooled slightly—when the tops of the trees were beginning to catch and block some of the sun’s direct rays—they would climb back into the green canoe and drift farther downstream, unconcerned by the notions or constraints of time and the amount of water that had passed by. If anything, they felt nourished and enriched by it.

  They would paddle on into dusk, and then into the night, falling deeper in love, and speaking even less, as night fell; paddling with the lantern lit and balanced on the bow, with moths following them—they had no idea where they were—while Bone would cast to fish, sometimes catching one slash-silver fighting and leaping just outside the glow cast by the lantern’s ring of light.

  Fireflies would line the banks, illuminating the route they should take—the fireflies would not venture over water, so the darkness of their absence was a winding lane for them— and they passed too occasionally the bright window-square blazons of farmhouses, of families tucked in for the night, also lining both edges of the shore.

  When they came to a lonely bridge or railroad trestle, they would finally relinquish the day, or that part of it, to the river, and eddy out to the bank, where Sissy would climb out with the lantern and Bone would pass her the equipment, and then he would climb out and shoulder the canoe like some shell-bound brute, and they would pick their way up the slope, clambering through brush and litter tossed from decades of the bridge’s passersby, ascending to the road and firm level ground while the river below kept running past.

  Owls would be hooting, and heat lightning, like a pulse or an echo from the day’s troubles—or like a price that must be paid for the day’s bliss—would be shuddering in distant sky-flash in all directions, though it seemed like no price or debt or accounting to Bone and Sissy, only more blessing, as the breezes from the far-off thunderstorms stirred and cooled them as they walked through cricket-song and darkness, save for those glimmers of lightning and the fireflies that dotted the meadows and swarmed around the couple as if accompanying them. They might be five miles from their truck, or they might be twenty; how to get there, they would have no idea, but neither would they be worried: Bone would not be due back at work for another twelve hours.

  They would walk down the center of the dark road, Bone toting the canoe over his head like a crucifix, or some huge umbrella, and Sissy walking beside him, feeling love for him as a human but also with the comfortable affection and unspoken communication one has with animals: a dog, a horse, a gentle bull, a cat. And she felt much the same herself— part human, but part other-animal, as well—and it was, again, the calmest she could ever remember being.

  After a while a vehicle would approach from one direction or another, almost always an old truck in that section of the country, and the driver would give them a ride. They would lash the canoe in belly-side down, as if it were still in the water, and climb up into the cab with the old farmer and ride back north into the night, though other times when there was no rope they would sit in the canoe itself, in the back, slanted skyward, gripping both the canoe’s gunwales and the side of the truck to keep it from sliding out. They would ride seated in the canoe, wind rushing past them at forty, fifty miles an hour, and would be unafraid, too deep in love to know anything beyond the beauty of the moment, their hair swirling and the rolls of lightning-wash flashing.

  Sometimes their patron, as he crossed a county line, would want to stop at the neon red of a bar—only a handful of other old trucks parked out in front—and they would climb out of the canoe to go inside with him, to share a beer, and perhaps a sandwich, or ribs. The sides of their green canoe would be smeared with the wind-crushed bodies from the swarms of fireflies they’d driven through, some of them still glowing gold but becoming dimmer, as if cooling, and it made the canoe look special, and pretty, like a float in some parade, and people in the bar would come to the doorway and stare for a moment at it thus decorated, and at Bone and Sissy—as if someone special, or important, or simply charmed had come to visit.

  They would drink a beer, would shoot a game or two of pool, and would visit in the dark bar, listening to the jukebox while the summer storm moved in and thundered across and past, like the nighttime passage of some huge herd of animals above. And afterward, when they went back out and climbed into their canoe to head on back north, with the driver searching for where they had left their truck, the air would be scrubbed clean and cooler, and steam would be rising from the dark roads, and the smears of fireflies would be washed from their canoe so that all was dark around them again.

  They would find their truck, eventually, and would thank the old driver, and shake his hand, and for the rest of his short days he would remember having given them a ride, as they would likewise remember it for the rest of their long days; and what invisible braid or fabric is formed of such connections, transitory and sprawling across time, across generations? Do they last, invisible, to form a kind of fiber or residue in the world, or are they all eventually washed away, as if cleansed and made nothing again by a summer rainstorm’s passage?

  They would drive home toward the big city with the windows rolled down, listening to the radio. They would unload the canoe when they got to Bone’s house and climb the stairs without bothering to turn on any of the lights. It might be two or three A.M. They would undress and climb into his bed, into the familiar clean sheets—warmer, upstairs—and open the windows for fresh air, and would make love again, both for the pleasure of it as well as to somehow seal or anchor their return home; and at daylight Bone would awaken and shower and dress in his suit, and head to work, leaving Sissy still asleep in his bed, their bed, swirled in white cotton sheets and asleep in a was
h of morning sunshine.

  The Lives of Rocks

  Things improved, as the doctors had promised they would. She still got winded easily, and her strength wasn’t returning (her digestion would never same, they warned her; her intestines had been scalded, cauterized as if by volcanic flow), but she was alive, and between spells of fear and crying she was able to take short walks, stopping to rest often, making her walks not on the craggy mountain where she had once hiked, but on the gentle slope behind her house that led through mature forest to a promontory above a rushing creek.

  There was a picnic table up there, and a fire ring, and sometimes she would take her blanket and a book up there, and build a fire for warmth, and nestle into a slight depression in the ground, and read, and sleep. On the way up to the picnic table she would have to stop several times to catch her breath—when she stopped and lay down in the pine needles she felt that the world was still carrying her along, although once she reached that promontory and built her little fire and settled in to her one spot, she felt fixed in the world again, as if she were a boulder in midstream, around which the current parted: and it was a spot she strove to reach, every day, though some days it took her several hours just to travel that short distance, and there were other days when she could not get there at all.

  She slept at least as much as she had when she was a baby. Some days it was all she could do to get to the hospital for her daily treatment, so that the days were broken into but two segments, the twenty hours of sleep and the four hours of treatment, including the commute to the hospital.