The Lives of Rocks

by Rick Bass

  “Listen,” said Jyl, “I know how busy you all are. I know how much you all have to do at home. This is more than enough. I’ll be fine, really. It’s so kind of you to do even this. I’ll be fine. Thank you. Tell your mother thank you.”

  “We can’t keep a regular schedule,” Stephan said. “There’s too much to do at home. We can just come when we get our chores done.”

  “I’m here in the evenings,” Jyl said. “Mornings, I’m almost always sleeping. After lunch, I go get my treatment. But I’m here at night.”

  “When do you sail the boats?” Shayna asked, her voice little more than a whisper, like the stirring of a bird back in the brush. More of a fluttering than a voice.

  “Afternoons,” Jyl said, “when I get back from the hospital, and just before I go in to nap.”

  “We usually get them right before suppertime,” she said.

  “I’ll send one tomorrow,” Jyl said. “I’ll send two, a big boat and a little boat, each with the same message, so that if one gets hung up the other one might still make it through.”

  “Oh, no,” Shayna said quickly, surprising Jyl with her assertiveness. “If you send two you can write different messages, because we’ll find them both. We’ll go upstream looking for them. We’ll find them.”

  “Is that what you’ve been doing with these?” Jyl asked. “If one doesn’t come by your house, you go upstream, searching for it?”

  Shayna nodded. “He takes one side and I take the other. It’s fun. We go after chores, and after supper. Sometimes we go at night, and use lanterns.”

  “Do you ever worry that one gets past you—that you never see it?”

  The children looked at each other. “We all keep a pretty good eye out for them, most of the day,” Stephan said. He paused. “Some of the kids wanted to put a fishnet across the creek, and check it regular, but Shayna and I didn’t want to do it that way.”

  “It’s okay if there’s days you can’t send one,” Shayna said. “We know you’re busy, and that there’s days you have to rest.”

  Jyl smiled. “I’m getting better,” she said. “I can’t make any promises, but it’s good to know the ships are getting through.”

  The snow was still falling hard, and although such a heavy snowfall so early in the year assured them of a long winter, it also meant a reduced fire season, next summer; knowing this, they accepted both the hardship and the blessing of it with neither praise nor complaint, and instead only watched it, as animals might.

  “Do you need another flashlight?” Jyl asked. “Or do you want to stay here for the night?”

  The children looked horrified at the latter suggestion. “We’ve got to be up early,” Stephan explained.

  “How early?”

  “Four,” he said.

  It was almost dusk. Jyl could smell the chain saw odor on them and wondered if they would bathe when they got home or simply crawl into their sleeping bags in the warm loft, surrounded by the breathing sounds of their sleeping siblings and the occasional stove creak of one of their parents adding wood to the fire downstairs, and the compressed hush of the snow falling on the roof, just inches away from their faces as they slept warm in that loft.

  “Thank you,” she told them as they set off into the gloom, with Stephan breaking trail for his sister.

  After their light had disappeared, she put on her heavy coat and gloves and got her father’s rifle and went into the woods a short distance, and sat down beneath the embrace of a big spruce tree, and waited a few moments to settle in—to adjust her heart, pounding from even that small exertion, to the space and silence around her. She took off her gloves and blew through cupped hands.

  She put her gloves back on, lifted her rifle, and waited, then, listening to the falling snow. It was right at the edge of being too dark to shoot. She could hear the creek riffling behind her, and she listened to that for a while, lulled. Her cabin, not a hundred yards distant, beckoned, as did her warm bed—for a moment her mind strayed ahead to the relief, the dull harbor, she found in sleep each night—and she began to feel ridiculous, tucked in so invisible against the world, as if in a burrow; as if she were hiding in the one place where no one could ever find her, the one place where she was least likely to find her quarry.

  She was settling into a reverie, had already given up the notion of hunting and was instead merely dreaming, when there came slowly into her consciousness a sound that was unlike the other sounds and silences that had been surrounding her: a jarring, clumsy sound of eagerness, hoofs slipping on wet rocks, a clattering and splashing, then silence again. She sat up and peered through her lattice of branches. She heard the sound of quiet steps approaching, but then the steps ceased. She waited for five minutes, ears and eyes straining—she tried to catch the scent of the animal but could smell nothing, only wet falling snow—and then she heard the animal crossing back over the creek, going away; and when she rose stiffly from her crouch, her warren beneath the tree, and went to examine the tracks, they were already filled in with new snow, and it was as if the thing had never existed.

  When she got back to her cabin and its warmth and yellow light, she was surprised by how late it was—by how she had confused the soft blue luminous light cast by the snow with the fading light of dusk. It was nearly seven o’clock, and she was cold, wet, and shivering.

  She was still stimulated by the hunt, and by the children’s visit, and would have liked to have stayed up late, or even until a normal hour—taking a leisurely hot bath and curling up in bed afterward, and reading until midnight, as she had once done in the freedom of her health.

  But she had extended herself too far, that day, and in the end she simply sat by the wood stove, shivering, and feeding it more wood. One of the propane lanterns in that corner of the cabin sputtered and coughed into darkness, leaving only one remaining lamp hissing over on the far side of the cabin; and though the silence was still lonelier, in the subdued lighting, she took a short fragment of firewood from the wood box and got out her pocketknife and tried to begin carving a new toy ship.

  She had not carved more than three minutes, however, before fatigue overtook her—not so much physical exhaustion or the brutishness of fear, but instead the cumulative fatigue of loneliness combining with all those other exhaustions—five percent chance of survival, the doctors had told her, five percent, five percent—and yet somehow, frugal and efficient to her core, she managed to rouse and walk the ten paces over to the other side of the cabin and turn off the lone remaining lamp.

  She was chilled immediately, however, away from the stove, and so she pulled a quilt off her bed and went back over to the fire, stoked it up again, and, too tired to even change out of her damp clothes, curled up against the stove’s base, wrapped herself tightly in the quilt, and fell asleep there on the floor, with no padding, no comfort, no thoughts, no anything, only falling; and with the pocketknife still open beside her, and the block of wood with less than a handful of shavings carved off beside it: not even enough shavings to kindle the smallest of fires.

  Despite the depth of her fatigue, she dreamed: as if the mind or spirit requires no energy, or, rather, feeds from some source other than the body, flowing almost continuously.

  She dreamed of traveling her mountain again: of traversing it that night, at times following the same trail the children had made going home, and other times making her own. In the dream, it was still snowing, and the snow was over her knees, as it was in the real life just outside her door; and there was something about the dream, some synchronized in-the-moment aspect to it, that made it seem extraordinarily real, vibrant, and refreshing. It was almost as if her spirit was trying to heal or repair itself, even where her body could not or had not yet; almost as if so severe was the damage to one, the body or vessel of her, that that other current, sometimes separate and other times twined, was becoming also abraded. And as if it would do whatever was necessary, for the healing.

  She moved with strength and steadiness up the trail. It
was not easy going, but the labor felt good. The snow was falling on her face, and though she was wearing a heavy coat and gloves and gaiters, her head was bare, and at times she would stop and shake the snow from her hair.

  She ascended steadily. Even though she was only walking, time seemed to pass more quickly than it ever had—as if an hour were now only a second—and in no time at all she was back on the ledge that ran along the high cliff of the mountain’s west face.

  And looking down through the slanting snow, and down through the snow-shrouded canopy of the dense forest so far below, she could see lights moving like fireflies, a handful of lanterns scattered through the forest and along the river, some coming and others going.

  The lights looked like the flares from torches, or drifting sparks from a campfire, or scattered little wildfires seen on distant mountains at night in the autumn; but the slow carriage of them was distinctly that of humans, on foot.

  At first Jyl thought the lantern carriers were searching for something; but, pausing to watch the course and pacing of their lights, she understood quickly that they were engaged in some sort of labor, and, as she stood there a while longer, with the snow piling up on her back and shoulders, the picture became even clearer for her, and she understood that it was the children, passing back and forth through the woods, carrying buckets of water for the family’s baths, the family’s cooking, and the family’s drinking.

  The loaded-bucket travelers moved slowly, on their way back from the river to the cabin, the lights of which were not visible—perhaps extinguished for economy at that hour. The empty-bucket travelers, going from the cabin back down to the river, moved faster while passing through those same woods, and when one of the going-away lanterns passed one of the coming-up lanterns, there was no pause—each kept traveling in its own direction—and though Jyl had no real way of knowing, it seemed to her that in such weather and amid such weariness, and at so late an hour, no words were passed between the travelers.

  Jyl remained standing, watching, as if turned to a statue. The snow kept piling up on and around her, and after a while—long hours, perhaps, though in the dream it seemed like only moments—the procession ceased, the water tanks had all been filled.

  The lanterns all assembled in one place on the front porch, and then one by one they blinked out, until only two were remaining.

  These two did not blink out, but instead turned and moved slowly back into the forest, again barely visible through the falling snow—disappearing, at times, beneath its burden, as if having been submerged briefly before reappearing a little farther into the forest.

  The river, though not visible, was identifiable as a wandering line between darkness and light, an imaginary border in the forest, at which all the lanterns had previously paused at the end of their bucket-filling marches.

  Jyl watched now as one of the lanterns went slightly farther than any of the others had—the traveler, either Shayna or Stephan, crossing snow-covered mossy stones to stay dry.

  Both lights turned then and began following the invisible trace of the river upstream, the banks and borders defined and limned by that wavering, snow-blinking campfire light, as if the river were embedded in ice and it was the lanterns’ path that was cutting it free of the ice, releasing it and allowing it to flow again.

  And it was a helpless feeling for Jyl, being up there on the mountain, on the cliff, knowing she had not sent out a vessel that day, or a message, a missive, no little painting or inscription.

  She tried her best to call down to the searchers, but the words seemed lost even before she uttered them, as if all the world was snow and as if speech were a phenomenon that could not exist in this dream-world—and so she tried to will the children to turn around and give up, not to waste their time; though still they came on, moving slowly, one on either side of the river, stopping and starting, and searching: lifting up fallen logs, she supposed, and peering carefully into riffles and eddies, hoping and searching.

  And in the dream, it was too sad to watch, and Jyl was eager to be moving again, eager to be on her mountain again, having had her strength and energy restored to her, even if only for the evening; and so, reluctantly, the statue of her melted, turned from its frozen position, shedding that thick mantling of snow, and hurried on farther up the mountain to the top, pushing on through the knee-deep and then thigh-deep snow like a plow horse, on past the faint and lost-looking smatterings of light so far below and on up to the mountaintop where she had been so many times before—a place she had previously taken for granted, but which she did not that evening, in the dream.

  Instead, she lay spread-eagled on its top, face upturned to the whirling, sifting snow, and, in its embrace, she slept: just for a little while, just long enough to grow warm, just long enough to remember, and savor, what it had been like to be healthy.

  And in the dream she did not have to descend, did not have to pass back by the searchers, but instead woke at daylight by her cold extinguished wood stove, her breath frosty in her own cabin.

  She poured a glass of water for breakfast. She ate two crackers, which was two more than she had the stomach for. She built the fire back up and sat beside it and resumed whittling, falling asleep sometimes with the knife still in her hand, and her head leaning against the cabin wall, only to jerk awake again, having returned in her nap to the mountaintop, and with too much snow atop her now—having slept too long.

  What story to tell them, in the little bottles? Was her own childhood of any importance to them, or was it better to help them create their own?

  Should she tell them, for instance, that her father, a bush pilot, had invented a system for mechanically retrieving rock samples from the sides of mountains by using a dangling claw hook, like a backhoe’s digging bucket, which trailed below the plane like a kite tail and snatched at the side of the mountain, gouging and clawing at it, as he flew past—jarring the plane terribly, but managing to grab, in that manner, a bucketful of stone, in country that might otherwise have taken weeks to get to on foot? Or similarly dredging the bottom of an alluvial riverbed?

  Should she tell them that he helped pioneer a methodology of analyzing the tops of trees—isolating and identifying by chemical analysis the minerals present in the green needles and leaves—and from those assays he fashioned then a map of the mineral content of the subsurface formations below, as if the spires of the trees were but extensions of those rocks, those minerals—still fixed in place, but born now into towering life?

  He would fly over vast stretches of forest, lowering his claw-bucket sample-chopper, and would snatch up one tree-top after another, would reel it up like a fishing line, flying the plane with one hand and running the crank with his other; and in this manner he covered thousands of square miles more effectively than entire squadrons of geologists could have done, achieving in a single field season that which might have taken less daring or driven geologists a lifetime to accomplish.

  Should she tell them that many days she considered being—desired to be—a mother?

  Or should she tell them fairy tales—stories of princes and princesses of extraordinary power and purity, powerful beings unhindered by flaw or imperfection—durable, enduring, even immortal? Myths and tales toward which the children could move, as if sighting a light, a lantern lit in the night, not too far ahead of them?

  Still frightened of the past, she chose the latter. She kept her father’s stories within her ill-wracked body, and even her own stories, and instead worked on a story about a prince and princess.

  In the story, the ruler of the boy and girl’s country, a kind and wise king, is washed over a waterfall while trying to save a small girl in distress, a girl caught out in the rapids; though the child is saved, the great king is swept over the falls and broken into pieces below, with his parts carried downstream for miles.

  Over the years, the great king’s parts—head, arms, legs, feet, hands, back, chest—wash up on shore from time to time and become hardened into stone, or drift
wood; and walking along the river, the prince and princess occasionally come across his remnants, and they gather them up to take back home.

  Slowly, over the years, they collect enough pieces to begin reassembling the great king, and one day they come to understand, or believe, that if they can fully reassemble him he will come back to life, in all his previous goodness and fullness and glory and power.

  But the boy and girl are growing up now, and soon it will be time for them to assume the responsibility of becoming the leaders of their country; and as they find more and more body parts of the old king—a finger, a foot, a nose, an ear—they are hesitant to finish putting him back together, hesitant to bring him back to life.

  Still, they cannot stop searching. Each day they walk along the river, looking, and they search at night, too, with lanterns: for sometimes there are parts of the old king that emerge from the depths, from beneath the gravel and silt, under the pull of the moon. Sometimes a muscled driftwood arm will float in the night in the dark waters, glinting beneath that moonlight, only to sink again at dawn; and the children, nearly grown now, continue searching, but cannot decide whether to complete their search or to finally turn away from it and travel on into the future, leaving the broken parts behind.

  The tedium of her days, the tedium of her new life: for a long time it had been getting harder and harder for her to summon the strength to get in the truck and haul herself to town for the treatments. She thought she might be getting better, though, when the fatigue began to give way to boredom. It wasn’t a regular boredom, but was instead so overbearing as to masquerade at first as continued fatigue. Slowly, however, she came to realize the subtle difference—the subtle improvement. The cancer was gone, and her normal cells, with their normal mandates, were returning slowly, whirling and dancing and executing their ancient motions of electrolysis, glycogen transfer, oxygenation, and tissue repair—and even as the darkness of winter fell over the land, she could feel faintly the dynamics of light returning cautiously to the fragile, fire-bombed husk of her body.