by Rick Bass
Then he turned out the lantern, and he and Shayna, though restless in the new surroundings, tried to get to sleep as quickly as possible, knowing that they would need to conserve their strength for the trip home and the coming day. The unfamiliar stove burned its wood differently, made different sounds, and through the glass plate in its door they could see the sparks and embers swirling and glowing, and they stared at it as if viewing the maw of a tiny volcano.
The children slept until two, when they awakened to a fire that was nearly out—quietly, Stephan built it back up—and they dressed warmly and went out into the night to fell another tree for Jyl before leaving.
The storm had passed, leaving a crystalline glaze over the world as the temperatures fell, and the snowflakes, quick frozen now, tinkled like glass scales as they passed through them. Their breath rose in jets of fog when they spoke, and when they came to the next dead pine, Stephan started the saw, felled the tree and bucked it as fast as possible, not wanting to awaken Jyl, and then shut the saw off and let the huge silence of the stars sweep back in over them.
Because the snow was deep, it took them more than an hour to split and carry that wood to the porch, stacking it as quietly as possible; and by the time they had the saw and maul and gas and oil cans stored, and the bark and snow swept from the porch, they were later getting away than they had intended, so that they had to run, galloping through the snow like draft horses, and steaming from their effort.
They made it back to their cabin—exhausted, but arrived—and quietly there, too, set about their labors in preparation for the day.
Jyl dreamed again that she was running, though with difficulty this time rather than in the effortless glide of the previous dream. And there was a pain in her gut as her glycogen-depleted organs cramped and sought to metabolize her muscle and bone, and even themselves—metabolizing anything for just a bit more available energy, in order to keep going, to keep struggling up the hill.
It was a sensation she recognized from her earlier days of strength, when she had been able to run seemingly without ceasing; and in the dream, though it was painful, she welcomed it, glad as she was to be back on the mountain.
Finally, though, the pain awakened her, and she sat up, trying to be as quiet as possible to avoid waking the children. When she went to get a glass of water, she saw that they were gone; lighting a lantern to see if they had left a note, she found none, though she did see the questions Stephan had written down on the butcher paper in the middle of the night. And the sense of loss she knew was sharper than any stitch in her side, far deeper than any absence of glycogen.
Unable to get back to sleep, she built the fire up again and fixed a cup of tea, and set about answering their questions, writing the answers in the tiniest of script so that she could scroll them up into some of the larger message bottles and place them in one of the larger crafts, to set sail later that afternoon. Her answers would be a departure, a break, from the saga of the broken king, but one she welcomed; and as she worked on her notes—feeling as she had in college, laboring over an exam in which the correct answers were of utmost importance—she had the feeling also of being lured up from out of the depths and the darkness, and out into the bright light of some open and verdant spring meadow: as if she, and not her father, was the broken king, but that she was daring now, or at least desiring, to be reassembled.
It was almost dawn when she finished her answers. Though she knew she should go back to sleep, she was surprisingly restless, and the idea of going out to hunt a deer came to her so strongly that it was like a summons. She rose and began dressing warmly, and took her rifle down from its rack and loaded it, and went out into the darkness, past the scent of all the newly stacked firewood—she paused, and then, following the children’s tracks, went into the woods, to the new stump.
It was almost daylight. The tops of her ears were cold, and she snuggled in tight against another big spruce, hid herself close among its lower branches, digging a little snow hollow in which to sit, and waited.
When it was light enough to see the shapes of things, the outlines of the trees coming into focus, she squinted and listened even more intently.
From across the river there came a crashing of sticks and branches so close and severe that she did not believe the sound could be made by any animal as graceful and stealthy as a deer but instead that it was Stephan and Shayna—that they were still back in the forest, searching for more firewood—and she was tempted to call out to them.
She remained silent, however, and the crashing came once more, followed by a silence, and then a splashing.
She leaned forward, trying with all her strength to see through the gray and barely penetrable light; and, as if sensing the acuity of her attention, the deer stopped midstream, just beyond her sight, and waited, weighing the danger, the hunger the deer could feel thick and living in the birth of the morning.
And as he stood there, water riffling around his ankles (Jyl could hear the different sound in it, the variance in splashing river rhythm as it braided around and past his four planted legs), the gray light grew more diffuse beneath the coming power of the day, and she was able finally to see the shape of him: his bulk, and the rack of his antlers so startling that it seemed he must surely be carrying in the nest of them a tangled mass of branches from farther back in the forest.
Before the excitement hit her, and the trembling, she had the thought, for half a second, that he, too, like the children, was bringing her firewood: that he was delivering it to her in his antlers.
As the light grew steadily stronger and more detail was re vealed, she saw that the cluster of his antlers was all his, all hardened bone—and he stood there as motionless as a garden statue. Only his eyes showed life, and though it seemed he was looking straight at her, and had spied her hiding back in the branches, he finally moved again, emerging from whatever stony reverie he’d been in, and began walking toward her.
He reached her side of the river and stepped out, dripping.
He paused again, as if he had forgotten where he was. He seemed to enter another reverie, and as she watched him at this closer range she could see the old scars around his face from ancient battles, could see the clouds of breath coming from his nostrils, the old buck breathing hard from even such a mild exertion as the river crossing.
He appeared to be in some slightly other universe, some slightly different level or plane, suffused with grace and confidence even in his senescence. She imagined she could see doubt or anxiety trying to enter the buck’s gaze, and his suspicion that something was wrong—and for a moment Jyl was overwhelmed with a feeling of unworthiness at being so close to such a wild creature, much less to be on the verge of taking his life.
The buck stepped out of his trance once more, reentered the world. He turned away from Jyl now and began walking along the trough made in the snow where Stephan and Shayna had felled their second tree. He stepped carefully over and among the tangle of branches Stephan had limbed from the tree, then lowered his head to browse on the lichen that clung to those branches; and each time he did so, Jyl felt a moment of disorientation as the crown of antlers lowered—as if a large bush was attached to the deer’s head and beginning to move in animal fashion.
She was so amazed by the grace, the elegance, of the old deer’s movements—his careful steps through and over the latticework of torn and sawn limbs—that she forgot she was hunting him. She watched as he lifted his head occasionally to glance around, and then lowered it to the snow and sniffed like a hound at the children’s tracks.
Several times the deer stared off in the direction of her cabin, and Jyl had the feeling that the deer believed that he was safe, that he was secure in the faith that Jyl was still in her cabin, asleep. She could easily raise her rifle and drop him where he stood, while he stared as if transfixed at the yellow squares of her cabin—and yet something within her, some place of warmth, dissuaded her from making the shot, and instead she simply watched him watch her cabin.
After a while, then, he lowered his head to browse again, and drifted on farther into the woods, and though she wanted a deer, she was glad she had not taken this one, even though she knew she might not get another chance.
She had only one more week left of treatment. Millions of patients had been through it before—they would nearly all call it the most physically grueling and spiritual thing they’d ever done, and would often speak of the hidden blessing of the cancer, of the way it awakened in them incredible awareness of even the simplest pleasures. But such testimonials irked Jyl, for she did not feel she had ever taken those little moments for granted in the first place. On the contrary, she had always been acutely aware of them, even worshipful of them. It wasn’t fair.
The treatment had been calibrated to reach its toxic peak during its last week, but she felt in every way that she had already turned the corner, that the worst week was just behind her, and that despite the increasing radioactive and chemical bombardment her body was growing stronger again. And when she told the doctors this, they shrugged and said that it was possible, that different patients responded in different ways.
She sent forth another boat, relating her saga of having seen the big deer, and inviting the children to return when they could. She told them she looked forward to it, and that she would bake a cake, that she had gotten rice and pineapple at the store. She told them she wished the current would flow both ways, like a tide, so that they could send her messages.
Now the treatment hit her like a dump truck. The previous exhaustion had been nothing compared to this final wave. She was more chilled than ever: wore her ski cap over her bald head continuously for warmth, and kept the fire roaring. She had already nearly depleted the second load of firewood and was beginning to look out the window at the forest, searching for the tree she would cut next. Her body felt as if her blood had been filled with lead. She was certain the doctors had made some mistake, had doubled or tripled her dose or had prescribed her a treatment for a three-hundred-pound football player; but she finished the treatment later that week and was free to return home to do nothing but shit and puke and sleep and cry.
She avoided her mirror—the blackened eyes, the astonishing weight loss, and the otherworldly fatigue—and settled in to wait. There were days when she did not get out of bed except to use the bathroom and empty her bedpan, and she felt certain she was dying, felt each day as if she had only one more day left. The doctors had gone too far, she was certain: had overcompensated for the challenge of the enemy.
She dreamed often that Shayna and Stephan came looking for her, that they could not find her and were disappointed. She dreamed that they were sending her notes in the river, or attempting to, but that the ships were all being carried away farther downstream, and ending up beached beside other people’s cabins, or never found.
She dreamed that they came wandering through the woods, searching for her—that they found her cabin, but, unable to rouse her, left notes tacked to her door, and to the outside of the cabin walls—and then she dreamed that they no longer cared for her, were no longer interested in her.
She fell further into her dreams. The feeling that she was going to die soon left her. She began to imagine that she might survive for weeks, then months, and then even years.
They came over the mountain as they had said they would, with their arms and packs filled with sacks of food: loaves of bread, and servings of deer, elk, moose, and grouse, as well as a remnant of turkey carcass, and even some antelope, left over from a hunt their family had made to the eastern side of the state earlier in the fall.
They stepped up onto the porch, calling her name, arms too burdened with bounty to knock on the door, and when Jyl opened the door to greet them she saw that they were covered with snow, and they handed Jyl their bags one by one, and then knelt and unbuckled their snowshoes and slid off their heavy packs.
They had brought two jugs of apple cider, two gallons of their own honey, jars of jam made from wild huckleberries, plums and strawberries they’d gathered from the valley; jars of smoked trout and whitefish, taken from the same creek on which she sailed her ships to them daily.
They had bags of dried mushrooms as well, morels and chanterelles, which represented but one of the hundreds of ways they made a living, and Jyl was touched not just by the dollar value of such gathered goods withdrawn from their hand-to-mouth seasonal income, but by the amount of labor that had gone into the gathering and then preparation of those foods.
The degree of their devotion to Jyl was evident on their faces—as if it were one of the great pleasures of their lives to be able to bring her these gifts.
The children stepped inside and put some food in the stove to warm—though the children had eaten a big midday meal with their family, they were famished again from their afternoon chores as well as the long hike over the mountain—and as the odors of warming food began to fill the cabin, the children sat at Jyl’s feet on either side of her and helped her sketch the next ship, the design of which was the grandest yet, with their ambitions and imaginations having grown larger in the long absence of ships.
As Jyl drew, the children pointed to her sketch and suggested little additions and alterations: intricate carvings along the gunwales, a howling wolf on the bow. A keel made of a deer’s rib, and the ivory from cow elk teeth and the incisors of deer decorating the deck like a mosaic of bright tile. Dollhouse furniture—a chest of drawers—fastened to the bow, so that the sketches and notes and stories could be stored in the tiny drawers. “Write a story with three chapters,” Shayna urged her. “The first chapter can go in the top drawer, and the second chapter in the middle drawer, and the last chapter in the bottom drawer.”
The food was warm again—they could detect its odors stirring—and they brought it to the table, and, after Stephan and Shayna said a prayer, the three of them ate with wordless focus, the children moving through their meal with startling intensity. They ate for an hour, attacking the meal in almost the precise manner with which they attacked any of their labors—working hard and methodically, yet deriving great pleasure from it, too—and when they were too full to eat any more (and yet, bounty still remained), they cleared their plates and dishes, and they and Jyl began carving that evening’s ship, whittling it from one of the same lengths of pine that the children had cut for her firewood on their last visit.
Again the flakes of wood fell from her knife like petals of light or slivers of flame, and over the course of only about an hour the boat began to emerge, like a living thing working its way free of an egg or even a womb; and in the hour after that, they took turns sanding and polishing it. And though there were differences between the way they had sketched it on paper and the way it was turning out in real life, it was still a beautiful craft, and reflected well the care and attention they were giving it. And more than ever, as she watched the children work, Jyl had the thought that it was as if the children were hers—and not because she had made them hers with her love and attention, but vice versa: that they had claimed her. And she dreaded already the day when she would be released.
Soon enough—too soon, Jyl thought—the little boat was ready to go, and, delighted, the children put it up on the mantel, proud of their work but excited, too, at the messages it would bring, over and over again.
The evening was still relatively young, and everyone was still relaxed from the big meal. The children were lying on the floor next to each other at right angles, their heads on pillows, absently fingering and twirling each other’s hair rather than their own—as if despite the differences across the years they were somehow twins, or so like each other as to be the same, one self indistinguishable from the other.
Jyl took down from her windowsills several of the more alluring minerals she had found on her field trips, in the retracing and backtracking of her father’s steps. Elbaite, also known as tourmaline; azurite, with malachite embedded. Hemimorphite, from Leadville, Colorado. A diamond, from Canada. Obsidian, from t
he Yellowstone country.
She let the children sort through them and handle them as she began another geology lecture. She told the children that there are only about four thousand known minerals on the planet: that of the finite elements trapped on the earth, there were only a finite number of arrangements or possibilities of composition available.
“Almost any mineral will form crystals,” she told them. “A crystal is nothing more than an orderly, repeating atomic structure.” She looked at Shayna and backed up for a moment, and told her about atoms—how they were the tiniest bricks in the world: that atoms in a rock were like atoms in a human being, or any other living creature.
She took her time lecturing, and watched the children examining the crystals before them. They did not want to set the minerals down but kept holding them, handling them.
“They start forming underground,” she said, “when a few similar atoms cluster together, usually in water or lava, to form crystal seeds,” she said. “As more and more atoms lock on to the seeds, they keep repeating that initial atomic arrangement so that the little seed crystal just keeps getting bigger and bigger, like a kind of blossoming.”
Shayna raised her hand, and for the strangest moment Jyl had the feeling that she was going to ask her some question about God, or about her own beliefs, her chances of salvation. Instead Shayna asked, “Can an entire mountain be made of a crystal?” She was holding a piece of amethyst, peering through it at the lantern, and Jyl smiled, imagining what she was seeing, and said, “Absolutely. Most of those kinds of mountains are way underground. It’s when they get exposed to the surface that they start getting broken apart and start crumbling, and being washed away.” She nodded toward the amethyst. “The atomic structures of different minerals are what determine the mineral’s shape, and its hardness—the way it responds to the world, and even the way it reacts to the world’s light, giving each mineral its own unique color, its brilliance, its fire.”
