The Lives of Rocks

by Rick Bass

  She continued to carve her ships in the waiting room, where the doctors, nurses, and other patients were amazed by them. She sanded and polished their bows and hulls of pinewood until they were as smooth as eggs. She wrote each day’s sentence in a careful script of calligraphy, water-colored each illustration, and launched the ship each afternoon upon returning home from the treatment.

  There was no way for her to visit the Workmans. They lived in the secluded little valley that was on the other side of the mountain, on an old mining homestead. They kept their truck parked out on the nearest road, it would be farther for her to walk in that way than it would be for her to cross over the ponderous mountain. They had no mail service, no phone. The ships were the only way in.

  Upon returning home from her treatments she would nap, and then rouse herself at dusk and go out into the woods with her rifle. The deer were more active now, with the rut ongoing, and with the deepening snow forcing them to travel almost constantly, searching for food, using the trails they had cut through the snow, used over and over again, becoming almost pedestrian in their regularity—but still she was not seeing any.

  Sometimes she would hear their feet crunching lightly through the snow and ice, and sometimes she would even catch a glimpse of a dull silhouette of a deer as it was already turning away, having sighted or scented her just before she noticed it. Sometimes she would even see a glint of antler; and in the leap of adrenaline, the bolt of excitement that rushed upward in her like fire at such a sight, she knew more than ever that she was getting better: but still, the deer would not let her have them.

  Her father had been gone twenty years now. Her father had never known her diminished. Were she and he like two different mountains, she wondered, slightly different kinds of stone through which the same river of time ran, or were they like two braids or forks of a river separating—running across, and cutting down into, the same one mountain, the same one face and body of stone?

  And what if we had it all backwards, she wondered. What if it is the mountain and the past that are living, while the river and the present are the unliving: merely a physical force, like wind, or electricity, but not really alive, not in the sense that blood or memory is alive?

  It was nonsense, she knew. Of course rivers were alive. Of course mountains and stones were alive. And of course the world possessed an invisible topography of spirit, with ridges, valleys, glaciers, volcanoes, tides and creeks and bays and oceans of spirit, and with as many different carriers of spirit, in that invisible world, the world of the past, as there were carriers of life in the visible, tangible, physical world: elk, bison, man, woman, child, antelope, deer, bear, tree, bird...

  Her father had collected fossils and gemstones—tourmaline, topaz, opal, jade, malachite, amethyst—and upon his death, she had carted all the various shoeboxes of minerals back to her home, where she kept them stored in the basement.

  And, believing now that her stories and illustrations were no longer sufficient to summon the children, she began putting little gems and crystals in the ships. As if laying treasures before young kings and queens.

  Whom should she serve—the future, or the past? How much time did she have left to serve? What value was any mineral, any fossil, compared to the spark of life? She felt guilty, releasing some of her father’s finer treasures, but each day she filled the boats higher and higher with glittering bounty.

  It was nearly a week before Stephan and Shayna returned. They came on the weekend before Thanksgiving.

  She was out hunting again, or if not actually hunting, then sitting with her back propped against a spruce tree, beneath the protection of its branches, watching the snow, mesmerized by the snow, and waiting for a deer to perhaps walk past.

  When she heard the children’s voices coming over the mountain, she did not understand at first that they were coming her way, coming to visit her, but that instead she was dreaming again, and was traveling to go see them, to meet them in their little valley, and that as she drew closer she was now able to hear them more clearly. And when she saw them appear from out of the woods, barely visible at first in the falling snow, her first thought was that they were wolves, or even bears. There was something about their movements that did not make her think of people.

  Even as they crossed the creek, stepping carefully from stone to stone, trying to stay dry, they did not appear through that screen of falling snow to be fully human; and when she saw that they each carried in their arms burlap sacks filled with something, still they did not remind her of her own kind; and while the drift of their voices, more audible now, was clearly the sound of children, their conversation did not seem to be connected to the two figures she saw tiptoeing across the river.

  She unchambered her rifle and rose to greet them—they were already knocking on her door, calling her name, and, not hearing a response, going into the cabin anyway—and as she moved toward them through the snow and darkness, there seemed to be little difference between how she felt now and how she had felt in her earlier dream of ascending the mountain and looking down upon their wandering lights; though she was aware, tripping and stumbling a bit, of a palpitation of her heart, and an overarching eagerness, that had not been present in the dream.

  She had been leaving one lantern burning low each night, in case they should come then—in the hopes that they would come, so that they, too, would be able to look down from the mountain through the falling snow and see her own light, visible in the storm, and home in on it, not so much as if lost but instead sighting finally the thing they had been searching for.

  As she approached her own cabin now, she saw the lantern flare more brightly—illuminating the thousands of individual snowflakes floating past the windows—and she felt safe, and as if life had not yet even called out to her, as if her life had not yet even begun.

  She saw them moving around inside the yellowing dome of light, talking to one another and looking up at the books on her shelves; and when she stomped the snow from her boots and went on inside, still wet and snowy from her vigil beneath the spruce, she was warmed by the relief on the boy’s face, and by the joy on the girl’s.

  “Did you see any deer?” Stephan asked, straight away.

  She shook her head, hugged them—they seemed glad to receive the hugs—and shook her head again. “I think they can smell my illness,” she said. “I can hear and sometimes see them coming closer, but at the last minute they turn away.”

  Stephan sniffed the air. “I can’t smell it,” he said, “and usually I can smell anything.”

  Jyl shrugged. “It’s there,” she said. “Even I can smell it.”

  “What does it smell like?” Shayna asked.

  “Metal,” Jyl said, pouring water into the cast-iron kettle and setting it on the stove, then opening the stove and stoking in some more kindling, which the dull-glowing coals accepted and ignited quickly. “I don’t know. Steel, platinum, copper, gold, silver. Some kind of cold metal,” she said. She waggled her jaws as if to rid herself of the taste of it.

  “Is it on your breath?” she asked. “Do you think we could try to smell it?”

  Jyl covered her mouth involuntarily and turned away. “No,” she said. “I don’t want you to smell it.”

  They were quiet for a while, after that. Finally Stephan said, “We really can’t smell anything. But if you think the deer can, maybe you should try and mask it. Maybe you should have a piece of peppermint or licorice before you go out next time. Maybe they’ll be curious and come a little closer. Maybe they’ll think it’s another animal.”

  She had restocked her pantry, hoping that the children would come again—had bought far too much food, beyond her budget, and not knowing what they liked and did not like, had guessed—some sugary cereals, a kind of frozen Popsicle treat, some TV dinners of mashed potatoes and cod; apples, oranges, bananas; some frozen salmon filets, Canadian bacon, a frozen pizza, and a frozen strawberry cheesecake—and when she asked what they wanted for supper they told her t
hey usually had rice and pineapple, and that was about all they liked—rice and pineapple, and venison and elk.

  She felt a despair, a failure that she had not known since the hardest days of her treatment. She was surprised by the tears that leapt to her eyes, and she turned quickly to where they could not see them. When she had composed herself, she asked, “Would you eat a cheesecake?”

  They nodded solemnly, as if it were a trick question, and Stephan said, “We’ll eat anything—it’s just that we only like rice and pineapple and elk and venison.” They were surprised, then, she could tell—almost spooked—by her wild laughter.

  She set about preparing the salmon, thawing it out in warm water. She cut the cheesecake into little wedges and served it to them first, and put a couple of the TV dinners in the stove as well, in the hopes they might find something to pick at. She needn’t have worried, for soon they were asking for more of the cheesecake, and she even had a piece, and then had to put the rest out on the porch or they might have eaten it all.

  “It’ll refreeze,” she said cunningly. “You can have the rest of it the next time you come.”

  She put the salmon in the oven with the TV dinners, braised it with butter and garlic and lemon and orange, then sat down by the stove and took the bolt from her rifle and began cleaning and oiling it, while they sat at the table next to her and ate the cheesecake and drank hot chocolate. When she was done she put the rifle back together and hung it up in the snow room, and changed into dry clothes.

  She could tell that although the children were still cold and weary, they were uncomfortable simply relaxing, and were anxious to be leaving. She sought to detain them with stories and knowledge. She walked over to a bookshelf and pulled down one of her father’s old texts, Ancient Sedimentary Environments, published in 1940. Dust motes rose from it as she opened its covers; and from across the room, still eating the cheesecake, both Stephan and Shayna sniffed the air, and Stephan said, “I can smell that.”

  “It’s got pictures,” Jyl said, bringing it over to the table She thumbed through the pages, and her eyes blurred as she read for the first time some of the markings he had underlined in pencil a lifetime ago.

  “The consensus of geological opinion is that there are a finite number of sedimentary facies which occur repeatedly in rocks of different ages all over the world. Therefore, no two similar sedimentary facies are ever identical, and gradational transitions are common.

  “One of the main problems of determining the origin of ancient sediments is that, though essentially reflecting depositional environments, they also inherit features of earlier environment. The infilled sediment reflects the nature of the source rocks and the hydraulic of the current, while the rolled bones and wood and other fossiliferous inclusions are derived from non-depositional environments that lie for the most part beyond the stream’s usual reach. No rock is ever finished, all stones are continually being remade, until they vanish from the face of the earth. And yet, even then, once reduced to windblown dust, they are reforming.”

  The children had stopped eating, their forks in midair, and were listening, though Stephan was slowly raising his hand in what was unmistakably mild protest. Jyl could tell also that they were suspicious, as if they understood somehow that their fundamentalist faith might be challenged by such language. Still, she read on:

  “A classic example of this fallacy can be found in a profile of the Bu Hasa Rudist boundstones, which pass basin-ward into skeletal wackestones, with fragments of rudists and large benthonic Orbitoline forams. These wackestones pass basinward into lime mudstones. The rudist boundstone passes south towards the Arabian shield into faccal pellet muds, with miliolid foraminifera. Locally however the basinward crest of the rudist boundstone is replaced by a detrital rudist grainstone.”

  There was a look very close to despair on Stephan’s face—Shayna showed no such distress and was instead only staring at Jyl with utter wonder—but Jyl could see that Stephan wasn’t going to give up or back away; and with his brows furrowed, he reached for a pencil and paper on the table and asked carefully, slowly, “What’s rudist?”

  She couldn’t hold back her laughter, then—it spilled from her again, clean and clear, with a feeling of release that she could not remember knowing before, and she said, “I don’t know.”

  Stephan took the book from her and looked through it, at all the many such passages underlined in long-ago pencil. “But he knew all this stuff, right?” he asked. “Your father knew all this?”

  Jyl nodded, her eyes stinging with pride.

  “I’d like to read this book,” Stephan said. “I know it means a lot to you, and I wouldn’t ask to take it with me—I wouldn’t want to get it banged up—but I’d like to read it, and make notes from it, while I’m over here.”

  Jyl smiled. “All right. But let’s start over. Let’s start at the beginning.” She took down a roll of butcher paper, spread it across the table, and began with the basics, explaining the different ways rocks can be formed from the ash and guts and detritus of the earth: the igneous rocks arising straight from the cooling fire of subterranean cauldrons, the sedimentary rocks the cumulative residue of dust and grit and silt being deposited with the earnestness of a mason, the sediments not settling by fiery will, but obedient instead only to the inescapable mandates of gravity; and the metamorphic rocks, her favorites: stones so substantially altered from their original igneous or sedimentary form by the world’s and time’s terrible pressures, smoothed now into graceful curves and folded into fantastic swirls and reversals, so that the geologist examining them could sometimes not tell at first in which direction the past ran and in which, the future...

  As she talked, she illustrated her lecture with watercolors, sketching mountains and oceans, rivers and storms, showing how the simple forces of weather—morning sunrise, wind, frost, snow and rain—in conjunction with the earth’s own subtle movements, its faint stretches and belches and yawns, conspire across the arc of time to wear even the largest and most jagged mountains down to desert plains, and how even the oceans fall back to reveal their gleaming, glittering mud, which is then lifted miles into the sky, creeping upward a thousandth of an inch per year, but leaping nonetheless, and carrying in that hardened crypt many of the fossils that had once lived far beneath the sea, and which would now be spending eons so much closer to the sun, suspended atop mountains, exposed to wind and rain and snow, the hoofs of mountain goats, and the curious eyes of man, and all the glittering green world shining below...

  With her sketches, she detailed the creation of alluvial fans, longshore point bars, tectonic plates, and unconformities. The world-beneath-the-world, the stone world on the back of which rested the living world, was born for the children that night, and they began to understand that it, too, was living, though at a different pace, and that although such knowledge might trouble their parents’ beliefs, they were riding on the earth’s back, and that beneath the stone world there was even another, third world, on the back of which the stone world rode, and that that third and even lower world was the river or current of time...

  Jyl had started painting the cross sections of geological time for them, starting at the surface and intending to work all the way down, through the dinosauric creations and into the world-flooded Devonian and Silurian, into the stone-cold Cambrian, and then farther, into the colder, utterly lifeless time of Precambrian, but Shayna reminded her of the salmon and the TV dinners in the oven, and Jyl looked up in total surprise, having been so immersed in the teaching, and so unaccustomed to cooking, that she only vaguely remembered having put the food in the oven; and setting her paintbrush down and hurrying over to the stove, she found that the big salmon was perfect, though the TV dinners were a little crispy.

  They suspended their geology lecture for the evening and sat around the fireplace and ate their dinners. Jyl told them about her time in Alaska, and about a pilot she had known there, a young man who had flown her around in a floatplane to much of the same b
ackcountry where her father had worked: visiting the same lakes and walking along the same beaches, looking at the same mountains. It was this same pilot who had sent her the salmon they were eating, and she told them that when she got better she had it in her mind to go back up there and visit him.

  “Will you marry him?” Shayna asked. A fairy tale.

  Jyl laughed. “No,” she said, “he’s just a friend. Just a bush pilot. But I like his company.”

  “We were in Alaska,” Stephan said. “Just before she was born.”

  “Where?” Jyl said. “Doing what?”

  “Missionary stuff. We were in Seward, but Pa would fly into the villages a lot. I’m pretty sure it was missionary stuff.”

  “How long were you there?”

  Stephan shrugged. “Just a couple of years. Mama didn’t like it. Nobody liked it. It was beautiful, but nobody liked it.”

  They were all quiet for a while, before Shayna finally said, quietly—as if in Jyl’s defense, or defense of Jyl’s father—“I would have liked it.”

  Jyl smiled. “So y’all like it here?”

  Stephan shrugged. “I think so,” he said. “Sometimes it’s a little hard—the work—but I think so.”

  “I do,” said Shayna. “I love it.”

  It was past nine o’clock—the latest Jyl had stayed up since before the illness. She took down some old elk hides from her closet and prepared twin pallets for the children next to the wood stove, and then, feeling her weariness returning like the break of a towering wave, she barely had time and energy to clean the dishes before collapsing into her own bed. She was asleep even before the children were, even as the children were still visiting with her quietly, talking between themselves and asking her occasional questions: and when they realized she was asleep, Stephan got up and wrote his questions down on the butcher paper with its illustrations so that he would not forget them. Questions about different minerals, and different kinds of salmon; about the floatplane, and about her father.