The Lives of Rocks

by Rick Bass

  Stephan raised his free hand In his other hand he held a lumpen, uncut ruby, as dark as a deer’s heart.

  “How long did it take to make this one?” he asked. Imagining some organic gestation involving perhaps months, or maybe even years.

  Jyl smiled. “Probably a million years,” she said.

  She had thought they would be pleased by such a revelation, treasuring their crystals even more, and was surprised at first by the dismay that crossed their faces, until she understood or remembered that theirs was still a world in which miracles unfolded literally like the leaves on trees in the passing seasons, or as the blossoms of flowers emerged, or as ice melted, or snow fell, or as one simple match ignited one large fire.

  She laughed, wanting to remind them that even a million years was not so long, but then remembered their fundamentalist upbringing and said nothing, and instead let them simply hold the rocks, let the weight of their mass, and their beautiful, inescapable density, speak the rocks’ own truths to the children’s hands.

  They carved another ship later that night, a much smaller, simpler one requiring only about thirty minutes of work, and then, with Jyl fading quickly, suddenly—she lay down on the couch for a quick nap—the children went out into the snow to find yet another tree, to bring her more wood.

  And again they felled and limbed it, then sawed and split it and hauled it to the porch, wearing a new path through the snow.

  This time Jyl heard them thumping around on the porch—it was almost midnight—and she sat up and went out to praise them as they finished stacking enough wood for her to stay warm for another week.

  They came inside to gather their bags and packs and empty dishes, and she loaded them down with several of the larger and more attractive gemstones, including a small diamond and an emerald. And though they protested at first, she could tell they were overjoyed with the gifts, and they promised to take good care of them forever; and it pleased her, watching them set off into the night, their one flashlight beam cutting a lane through the swirling flakes, to see that their packs were heavier, leaving, than they had been upon their arrival.

  Another dream: the children’s labors were hardening them, threatening to turn them to statues, even as Jyl’s loneliness—the fiery, aching rawness of it—was keeping her alive. Consuming her, but in that burning giving life. The children were on a ship, they were leaving, being drawn away, years were passing in a single blink, a single thought, being pulled away by some current that hardened them and consumed her, until in the end none of them would remain as he or she had been, or even remain at all—only memory and stone, and yearning, like the wind.

  She sat up with a shout, then got out of bed and accidentally kicked several of the rocks they had left on the floor, sent them skittering and clattering across the room.

  With shaking hands she found her matches and lit a lantern, and began gathering the rocks. They were still holy to her, talismans, not only in that her father had discovered and claimed them, had deemed them worthy of preservation, but also because she determined now to give all of them to the children, whichever ones they desired; and after building a fire in her stove, using a little more of her precious supply of firewood, she began carving new ships. And because she was still chilled at first, her hands slipped once so that she cut her finger, causing the boat’s bow to be smeared with her blood; and rather than sand it clean, she applied a symmetrical smear on the other side so that it seemed like a painted pattern.

  When she was finished, she put a note, a story, and a crystal into the ship, walked down in the darkness to the even darker river, and turned the boat loose.

  It was a yellow boat, and for a moment it looked like a spark, a live coal, in the river. Had her father ever dreamed or imagined, she wondered, that of the gems he brought back from the mountains any might ever undertake such paths and journeys? Such motion, and bringing such joy: almost as if they had had the breath of life breathed into them, and had become inspirited.

  She continued to carve and send boats all during the next week, and then into December. Deer season had ended and a new silence fell upon the mountains, one that was welcome: Jyl did not mind that she had not gotten a deer. She had seen the giant king once, and that had been enough.

  She continued to send messages, stories, and drawings, as well as gems and crystals and fossils—sending several out in the same day, staggered over different departure times—and in some of her drawings, as her loneliness grew, she would make little watercolor sketches of the three of them sitting around a table loaded with food, as they had at Thanksgiving, with gleaming candelabras casting a shining light upon a roast turkey, a wild goose, and all other manners of game upon their plates; and in the tiny rolled-up paintings there would be wreaths hanging on the walls, imges indicating the future, Christmas, rather than the past, Thanksgiving.

  She never came right out and said, I am lonely, please come back, but as December moved forward and still her visitors, her friends, her little children, had not returned, she went even further with her pleadings and sketched a picture of her diminished woodpile.

  She had been unable to get the saw to start once more, and though she still had a little wood left on her porch, she had taken to wandering the woods around her house, pulling down dead limbs and branches and ferrying them back to the house.

  She was beginning to consider for the first time that the children might not be coming back.

  They have grown up already, she feared. They no longer care for me.

  The days grew ever shorter, plunging toward the solstice.

  She tried not to panic. After all she had been through, this was still the worst.

  She found herself standing at the window some days, watching for them, and staring at her woodpile—trying to conserve what she had, even though it made no sense, as this was the coldest time of year, and the children had not cut the wood for her to hoard, but rather to spend.

  This newer, deeper, down-cutting loneliness was worse than the fears she had known before her diagnosis—those strange weeks when each traverse of the mountain had been more and more difficult—and worse than the first weeks after the diagnosis, the confirmation. This deeper loneliness was worse than the physical agony of the treatments, and worse than the captivity of the hospital room.

  She moved around in her cabin, pacing, the walls lit with the wavering light cast by one of her lanterns as it sputtered out of propane. She was crying, pacing, crying, and when the one lantern finally blinked out she was too upset to connect it to a new bottle of propane but instead simply kept pacing, from darkness to light, darkness to light.

  Soon the limitations of her physical frailty overtook her, so that she was exhausted and could pace no more. She collapsed onto her bed as if accepting her grave, and yet the loneliness continued—though finally she sank into a state of merciful catatonia, in which she stared unblinkingly at the ceiling until daylight, and then beyond.

  The fire in her wood stove went out and still she did not move, but lay feeling the glaze of ice settle over her heart, feeling the salt residue of her tears dried to a taut mask across her face. And whereas most of her adult life she had felt as if she were always only a step or two or three behind her father, it seemed to her now that as she drew nearer to entering the place where he might be resting, he was paradoxically moving away from her again: an irony, now that she was so close.

  She lay there, stunned, while the temperature in her cabin grew colder and colder and her fingertips grew numb and her face blue, and then she was shivering, her body having no fat to burn, no anything to burn, only spirit and bone; and then she was warm again, and her breathing was steadier, and, slowly, she felt the deep loneliness draining away, though still she was frightened.

  She blinked and found herself focusing on one faint sound: as if she had traveled all that way, descending so far, to come into the presence of that one sound.

  It was a tiny groaning sound, all around her: a sound of contraction, o
f pulling in. Every now and again it would make a single tick, as if living, or striving to live—sometimes two or three quick ticks in a row—before subsuming again into a slow, dull groan.

  She listened to the sound, so near to her, for more than an hour before her chilled mind could make sense and clarity of it; and even then, the knowledge came to her like a kind of intuition, or memory.

  It was the sound of her water pipes freezing. She was aware of the great cold outside her cabin, the weight of it pressing down like a blanket, or like shovelfuls of loose dirt being tossed over the cabin—but in the final comfort of her numbness, she was surprised by the water’s protest.

  She lay there longer, listening and thinking. She could hear music; was this the sound her father heard now? Perhaps it was coming from her father’s blood, the part of him which remained in her.

  Surely he could hear what she was hearing now.

  The pipes groaned louder and she blinked, then gasped, as another moment’s clarity intruded: the duty and habit of living. She lay there for another half-hour, determining to get up and build a fire, if not to save the shred of her life, then to keep the pipes from freezing.

  And in that time, she thought of nothing else but the goal of rising one more time. She lay there, trying to find the strength somewhere, like a pauper digging through empty pockets, searching again and again for the possibility of one more overlooked coin caught between the linty seams.

  She imagined Stephan and Shayna finding her bed-bound, blue, should they ever return, and the useless guilt they would shoulder, and she forced herself to find and feel a second surge of warmth.

  Despite her numbed hands and legs, she slid out of bed, and with the smoothness of habit, the instruction of countless repetitions, she walked as if gliding, as if drawn, over to the cold stove, and crouched before it as if in prayer, then opened the door—a breath of cold air blew out, a breath like ice—and she crumpled some newspaper into it, and stacked a few toy sticks of kindling atop it—there was so little left now—and then lit a match.

  The roar of the paper and kindling was deafening, and she stared at the dancing fire, amazed at how something so silent a moment ago could make so much noise only an instant later.

  Slowly she added more sticks to the fire and leaned in against the stove while it warmed, as one might rest against a sturdy horse; and when it grew too warm for comfort, she backed away and listened to the caterwauling of her pipes as the metal, and slushy ice within, creaked and groaned and stretched and contracted but did not break. Beginning again, and yet different this time.

  She wouldn’t do any more lost king stories in her boats to the children. She had found him. She had gone into his icebound room, and he had been sleeping. It had been dark in there, so she had never seen him, but she had been close, had heard him breathing.

  He had sounded at peace. And she had left a part of herself in there with him. Or perhaps a part of her had always been with him, had remained with him forever: a part he had held all his life, and beyond, like a pebble, or a gem.

  She waited until there was but a week left before Christmas, and then one more day—inside of a week—before determining that she had to humble herself and go over the mountain to find them, if they would not come to her. She could not imagine traveling so far, through such deep snow, even on snowshoes, but there was no choice—she had to see them. She worried that an ice jam might have breached the river, so that none of her ships were getting through, and lamented yet again that the family had no mailing address, and that once winter came, there was no way of getting in and out of their little valley save on foot or horseback, or by snowmobile.

  It still astounded her to realize that as recently as a year ago she had been capable of running up and over the mountain, and then back, in a single day, a single afternoon.

  She packed a lunch and sleeping bag, in case she had to stop and rest, and left before daylight, in a light falling snow. She had carved and painted presents for the children, little miniature toy rocking horses, but other than that, her pack was light.

  The first hour was the hardest, as it contained the steepest ascent, and in the bulky snowshoes, she could travel only ten or twenty paces before having to stop and pant, not just to catch her breath but to still the quivering, the revolt of weakness, in her once-powerful legs, her thighs burning now as if aflame.

  Gradually, however, she gained the elevation to the mountain pass and was able to walk along the level contour that led from her valley into theirs; and, thrilled by the knowledge that soon she would be seeing them, she took no notice of the time, and instead only leaned into the slanting snow, with the canyon below—carved long ago by the river’s down-cutting—completely obscured by cloud and snow.

  She knew the trail well, even in the almost sightless conditions—she knew it almost by touch, and by the pull of gravity—and she knew without even being able to see it when she had crossed the pass and come into their valley. She knew to descend, knew where the path was that led to the valley floor. It was the path of her life as well as of her dreams, and she could have gotten there blindfolded.

  With her hair and eyebrows caked with snow and her face numb, Jyl reached the plowed and level field of their little garden—the autumn-turned furrows resting already beneath two feet of snow—and made her way into their yard, listening for any signs of activity, and then, as the shadowy shapes of the outbuildings and the cabin itself came into view, looking for a glow of light through the curtain of snow.

  She was surprised by the absence of sound, and the absence of animals—the corral was open, and no barking dogs greeted her arrival, no chickens clucked or called from the henhouse. Their truck was gone, with no tracks in the snow to indicate it had been driven out recently, and when she came closer to the cabin, she saw with an emotion very close to panic and despair that no smoke was rising from the chimney.

  They are asleep, she thought wildly, even though it was at least noon. They worked so hard the day before that they are still asleep.

  When she drew even closer, she saw that the doors and windows were boarded up, and again, the drifts of snow against the door- and window-jambs indicated that they had been that way possibly for weeks: perhaps since the day after Thanksgiving.

  She sat down on the steps in a daze, her mental and physical reserves equally devastated now.

  Had they known they were leaving? she wondered: surely not. And yet she could not help but feel wounded: as if the children had somehow become frightened of her increasing need, her upwelling of loneliness, and had fled from that weight, that extra burden in their already burdened lives.

  She knew it was not that way, that surely their itinerant parents had insisted they leave, for some unknown reason, perhaps economic, perhaps evangelical—leaving, summoned, in the midst of an evening meal, perhaps—but it was how she felt, that they had somehow become frightened of her.

  Only the little boats remained, stacked up beneath one window. Out in the garden, gaunt deer pawed through the snow. The cabin was shut down yet preserved, protected, as if one day the travelers might return, though not for a long, long time—years, doubtless—and with the children by that time all grown up.

  She sat down on the steps and began to cry. She cried for a long time, and when she had finished, she looked up—as if in her despair she might somehow have summoned them—and then wandered around and around the cabin, and out to the various barns and sheds. They had taken nearly every tool but had left an old short-handled shovel and a rusty hammer with one of its twin claws broken; and with these discards, she was able to pry away the boards over one of the windows and crawl into the cabin.

  It was dark inside, with a strange still bluish light, as if she had entered a cave that had been closed off for centuries. They could not have been gone for more than two or three weeks, yet there was no residue whatsoever of their existence. The floor was swept and the walls were scrubbed, and all the furniture was gone, as was every other item—every s
poon and fork, every dish and towel and article of clothing, every stick of firewood, every piece of kindling. Only a few more of the little ships remained, stacked neatly on the windowsills.

  The gemstones that had been within the ships were gone, as were the drawings and stories. The boats sharpened her despair, for when, she asked herself, could she possibly ever use them again?

  She ransacked the tiny drawers, all empty. Write to me, think of me, speak to me, she implored them, calling out to wherever they were.

  Again and again, she searched through the cabin—examining every shelf, every cabinet, every drawer. She was a child. Had her father ever called out this way to her, after he had gone? If so, she had never heard him, and she feared the children could not hear her.

  She crawled back out of the frigid, lonely cabin, and out into the great snowy silent whiteness of late December. She boarded the window back up tightly. She sat down on the steps and cried again, and it began to snow, as if her tears were somehow a catalyst for those flakes to form. As if the shapes and processes of all things followed from but an initial act, an initial law or pattern, like crystals repeating themselves. She sat very still, almost completely motionless, as the snow continued to cover everything, even the silent cabin. She concentrated on the tiny seed of fire housed in her chest. She sat very still, as if believing that, were she to move, even the slightest breeze would blow it out.

  Fiber

  I.

  When we came into this country, runaways, renegades, we were like birds that had to sing. It was only ten years ago, but it feels like a hundred, or maybe a thousand. No person can know what a thousand years feels like, though in the first part of my life I was a geologist and was comfortable holding a footlong core of earth and examining such time—a thousand years per inch.