The Lives of Rocks

by Rick Bass

  But I was ready. I had waited thirty-three years already. Waiting’s fine up to a point. I was ready. I was pretty sure I was ready.

  The tops of trees were blowing through the sky. The forest was being rent apart, tunnels of wind snapping their way through the great forever larch trees, breaking them off up high, where the winds were gustier: seventy, eighty, ninety miles an hour.

  Ash was rushing everywhere.

  I loaded the chain saw, extra gas and oil, and wrenches into the back of the truck; loaded up an overshirt and my heavy leather gloves. It would be okay to show up at the hospital with just a little bit of gasoline and wood chips on me. It was Elizabeth who was going to get tested—ultra-sounded—not me. I was just going to stand there and hold her hand, and watch the screen.

  Deer and moose were running through the woods, not knowing, as we did, that the fire was still fifteen miles away, that it was still safe, just smoky.

  And windy.

  I had to stop and cut a tree about every hundred yards or so in the first mile. But that was okay. It was exciting—all those branches and boughs floating past, some of them caught in dust-devil swirls high over our heads. It was midday, but growing so dark from the ash and smoke that we had our headlights on—almost as dark as night, but in that strange green way. Sometimes the vague light would grow so suddenly dim that it was as if someone were dimming it on purpose, the glow fading almost away and the blackness coming on, night in the middle of the day. But then it would turn green again, the dullest light, and I would make two neat cuts in each tree and roll the log off to the side of the road and pass through, on to the next tree.

  “We have to be careful,” Elizabeth shouted as the trees fell all around us.

  “Do you want to go back?” I asked once.

  “No,” she said.

  We watched ahead of us, and to the side, to be careful not to be pinned by any falling trees. The wind was so strong and indecisive that you couldn’t tell which way the trees were going to fall until they snapped. Sometimes we’d see them fall in the woods; other times we’d see them fall across the road just in front of us and farther on up the road. The trees were falling behind us, too, closing off our return, but that didn’t matter.

  It was twelve miles out to the main road, and after that I hoped it would get better. The road was a little wider out there, and maybe someone with a chain saw would have already gone through ahead of us.

  I moved slowly but steadily. There wasn’t any rush. I liked cutting the fallen trees and moving them to one side. Carrying my wife and child—child—through the storm. I didn’t think of the trees as being dangerous or my enemy. I had to be careful and look up when I was cutting because I couldn’t hear the snap and crack and splinter when the saw was running. Elizabeth, in the truck, had to look up and all around and make sure nothing fell on top of the truck while she was in it. I tried to park it next to ridges or high banks so that a falling tree would land against the road bank rather than crashing all the way down onto the truck.

  I had not wanted to know, and had not wanted to know, but then I suddenly wanted to know. It was just a windy day. Maybe a little too windy. But it is so hard to turn back. Some of the trees were so big. Gold-needled larch boughs carpeted the narrow road, branches upturned like torn arms. The woods smelled heavily of smoke but also of fresh sap. It was a crisp, heady smell that made me want to keep cutting all the way to Libby, more than forty miles away. Which was where we were going. We hadn’t yet realized there would be even more trees down across the main road.

  We got to the main road about an hour before dark. We’d long since missed our appointment. But I didn’t care, I was revved up, had long ago fallen into the mood of the crashing forest—cut cut roll, drive on, cut cut roll, drive on. Treetops were still hurtling past us as if in a hurricane, and that dense green smoky light was pulsing and darkening, dimming and glimmering, and giving way to true dark.

  “Let’s go back,” Elizabeth said finally. We still had nearly forty miles to go. “We can try again tomorrow,” she said.

  I didn’t want to go back. It seemed an impossibility for me to go back. We had cut our way out to the main road. I still had the saw in my hands and plenty of gas left. It was dark. But I still had that saw in my hands.

  “Okay,” I said.

  Though if it was a girl, in sixteen years the two of us would be riding horses through these very woods, leaping some of the rotting logs that had fallen this day, riding through sweet fir-scented woods in the autumn on fine muscular horses whose bellies creaked and who farted wildly with each jump, each lift and gather over the fallen logs; and if it was a boy, in sixteen years we would be pulling logs out of the woods, fastening cables to them and pulling them through the woods with those very same horses, in that same autumn, to repair the buck-and-rail fence that another wind had disrupted.

  I still had the saw in my hands.

  “Okay,” I said, branches and limbs floating and drifting through the thick ashy air like streamers and kites, pieces of trees rising and falling on all the hot, smoky, crazy currents, trees swaying from side to side, popping and snapping, and Elizabeth and me guarding what we had, what we were taking with us, out of the woods and into the future, watching all around us for those devil falling snags, those crashing trees; and me with the saw, inching our way through the wreckage, the fresh sweet smell of sap and crushed boughs, cutting our thin lane straight through the forest to the light.

  Goats

  It would be easy to say that he lured me into the fields of disrepair like Pan, calling out with his flute to come join in on the secret chaos of the world: but I already had my own disrepair within, and my own hungers, and I needed no flute call, no urging. I’ve read recently that scientists have measured the brains of adolescent boys and have determined that there is a period of transformation in which the ridges of the brain swell and then flatten out, becoming smoother, like mere rolling hills, rather than the deep ravines and canyons of the highly intelligent, and that during this physiological metamorphosis it is for the boys as if they have received some debilitating injury, some blow to the head, so that, neurologically speaking, they glide, or perhaps stumble, through the world as if in a borderline coma during that time.

  Simple commands, much less reason and rules of consequence, are beyond their ken, and if heard at all sound perhaps like the clinking of oars or paddles against the side of a boat heard by one underwater, or like hard rain drumming on a tin roof, as if the boys are wearing a helmet of iron against which the world, for a while, cannot, and will not, intrude.

  In this regard, Moxley and I were no different. We heard no flute calls. Indeed, we heard nothing. But we could sense the world’s seams of weaknesses—or believed we could—and we moved toward them.

  Moxley wanted to be a cattle baron. It wasn’t about the money—we both knew we’d go on to college, Moxley to Texas A&M and me to the University of Texas, and that we’d float along in something or another. He wanted to become a veterinarian, too, in addition to a cattle baron—back then, excess did not seem incompatible with the future—and I thought I might like to study geography. But that was all eons away, and in the meantime the simple math of cattle ranching—one mother cow yielding a baby, which yielded a baby, which yielded a baby—appealed to us. All we had to do was let them eat grass. We had no expenses: we were living at home, and we just needed to find some cheap calves. The money would begin pouring in from the cattle, like coins and bills from their mouths. With each sale we planned to buy still more calves—four more from the sale of the fatted first one, then sixteen from the sale of those four, and so on.

  I lived in the suburbs of Houston with both my parents (my father was a geologist, my mother a schoolteacher), neither of whom had a clue about my secret life with cattle (nor was there any trace of ranching in our family’s history), while Moxley lived with his grandfather, Old Ben, on forty acres of grassland about ten miles north of what were then the Houston city limits.
/>
  Old Ben’s pasture was rolling hill country, gently swelling, punctuated by brush and thorns—land that possessed only a single stock tank, a single aging tractor, and a sagging, rusting barbed-wire fence good for retaining nothing, with rotting fence posts.

  Weeds grew chest high in the abandoned fields. Old Ben had fought in the first World War as a horse soldier and had been injured repeatedly, and was often in and out of the V.A. clinic, having various pieces of shrapnel removed, which he kept in a bloodstained gruesome collection, first on the windowsills of their little house but then, as the collection grew, on the back porch, scattered in clutter, like the collections of interesting rocks that sometimes accrue in people’s yards over the course of a lifetime.

  Old Ben had lost most of his hearing in the war, and some of his nerves as well, so that even on the days when he was home, he was not always fully present, and Moxley was free to navigate the rapids of adolescence largely unregulated.

  We began to haunt the auction barns on Wednesdays and Thursdays, even before we had our driver’s licenses—skipping school and walking there, or riding our bikes—and we began to scrimp and save, to buy at those auctions the cheapest cattle available: young calves, newly weaned, little multicolored lightweights of uncertain pedigree, costing seventy or eighty dollars each.

  We watched the sleek velvety gray Brahma calves, so clearly superior, pass on to other bidders for $125, or $150, and longed for such an animal; but why spend that money on one animal when for the same amount we could get two?

  After parting with our money we would go claim our prize. Sometimes another rancher offered to put our calf in the back of his truck or trailer and ferry it home for us, though other times we hobbled the calf with ropes and chains and led it, wild and bucking, down the side of the highway, with the deadweight of a log or creosote-soaked railroad tie attached behind it like an anchor to keep the animal—far stronger, already, than the two of us combined—from breaking loose and galloping away unowned and now unclaimed, disappearing into the countryside, our investment now no more than a kite snatched by the wind.

  We gripped the calf’s leash tightly and dug in our heels, and were half hauled home by the calf itself. In the creature’s terror it would be spraying and jetting algae-green plumes of excrement in all directions, which we would have to dodge, and were anyone to seek to follow us—to counsel us, perhaps, to turn away from our chosen path, still experimental at this point—the follower would have been able to track us easily, by the scuffed-up heel marks and divots of where we had resisted the animal’s pull, and by the violent fans of green-drying-to-brown diarrhea: the latter an inauspicious sign for an animal whose existence was predicated on how much weight it would be able to gain, and quite often the reason these marginal calves had been sent to the auction in the first place.

  Arriving finally at Moxley’s grandfather’s farm, bruised and scratched, and with the calf in worse condition, we would turn it loose into the wilderness of weeds and brambles circumscribed by the sagging fence.

  We had attempted, in typical adolescent half-assed fashion, to shore up the fence with loose coils of scrap wire, lacking expertise with the fence stretcher, and in some places where we had run out of wire we had used the orange nylon twine gathered from bales of hay, and lengths of odd-sorted rope, to weave a kind of cat’s cradle, a spider web of thin restraint, should the calf decide to try and leave our woolly, brushy, brittle pasture.

  We had woven the fence with vertical stays also, limbs and branches sawed or snapped to a height of about four feet, in the hopes that these might help to provide a visual deterrent, so that the curving, staggering, collapsing fence looked more like the boundaries of some cunning trap or funnel hastily constructed by Paleolithics in an attempt to veer some driven game toward slaughter.

  We had money only for cattle or fence, but not both. Impulsive, eager, and impatient, we chose cattle, and the cattle slipped through our ramshackle fence like the wind itself—sometimes belly-wriggling beneath it, other times vaulting it like kangaroos.

  Other times the calves simply went straight through the weakened fence, popping loose the rusted fence staples and shattering the rotted, leaning fence posts and crude branches stacked and piled as barricades. Sometimes the calves, fresh from the terror and trauma of their drive from auction, never slowed when first released through the gate at Old Ben’s farm, but kept running, galloping with their heads lowered all the way down the hill, building more and more speed, and they would hit the fence square on.

  Sometimes they would sail right on through it, like a football player charging through the paper stretched between goalposts before a football game, though other times they would bounce back in an awkward cartwheel before scrambling to their feet and running laterally some distance until they found a weaker seam and slipped through it not like anything of this world of flesh and bone, but like magicians, vanishing.

  When that happened, we would have to leap on the old red tractor, starting it with a belch and clatter that inevitably frightened the calf into even wilder flight; and with Moxley driving the old tractor flat-out in high gear, and me standing upright with a boot planted wobbily on each of the sweeping wide rear fenders, riding the tractor like a surfer and swinging a lariat (about which I knew nothing), we would go racing down the hill after the calf, out onto the highway, the tractor roaring and the calf running as if from some demon of hell that had been designed solely to pursue that one calf, and which would never relent.

  We never caught the calves, and only on the rarest of occasions were we ever even able to draw near enough to one—wearing it down with our relentlessness—to even attempt a throw of the lariat, which was never successful.

  Usually the animal would feint and weave at the last instant, as the tractor and whizzing gold lariat bore down on it, and would shoot or crash through another fence, or cross a ditch and vault a fence strung so tightly that as the calf’s rear hoofs clipped the fence going over, the vibration would emit a high taut hum, which we could hear even over the sound of the tractor.

  It was like the sound of a fishing line snapping, and by the time we found an unlocked gate to that pasture the calf would have escaped to yet another field, or might be down in some creek bottom, reverting to instincts more feral and cunning than those of even the deer and turkeys that frequented those creeks; and we would scour the surrounding hills for all the rest of that day—sometimes mistakenly pursuing, for a short distance, a calf that might look like ours, until that calf’s owner would come charging out on his own tractor, shouting and cursing, angling to intercept us like a jouster.

  Old Ben fell too ill to drive and then began to become a problem while Moxley was in school; he had begun to wander out into the same fields in which the rogue calves had been released, and was similarly trying to escape his lifelong home, though he was too feeble to bash or batter his way through the patchwork fence and instead endeavored to climb over it.

  Even on the instances when he made good his escape, he snagged his shirt or pants on a barb and left behind flag-size scraps of bright fabric fluttering in the breeze, and we were able to track him that way, driving the roads in his old station wagon, searching for him.

  Sometimes Old Ben lay down in a ditch, trembling and exhausted from his travels, and pulled a piece of cardboard over him like a tent to shield him from the heat, and we would pass on by him, so that it might be a day or two before we or a neighbor could find him.

  Other times, however, Old Ben would become so entangled in his own fence that he would be unable to pull free, and when we came home from school we would see him down there, sometimes waving and struggling though other times motionless, quickly spent, with his arms and legs akimbo, and his torn jacket and jeans looking like the husk from some chrysalis or other emerging insect; and we’d go pluck him from those wires, and Moxley mended his torn jacket with the crude loops of his own self-taught sewing: but again and again Old Ben sought to flow through those fences.
/>   There were other times though when Old Ben was fine, fit as a fiddle; times when the disintegrating fabric of his old war-torn mind, frayed by mustard gas and by the general juices of war’s horror, shifted like tiny tectonic movements, reassembling into the puzzle-piece grace his mind had possessed earlier in life—the grandfather Moxley had known and loved, and who loved him, and who had raised him. On those occasions it felt as if we had taken a step back in time. It was confusing to feel this, for it was pleasant; and yet, being young, we were eager to press on. We knew we should be enjoying the time with Old Ben—that he was not long for the world, and that our time with him, particularly Moxley’s, was precious and rare, more valuable than any gold, or certainly any rogue cattle.

  On the nights when the past reassembled itself in Old Ben and he was healthy again, even if only for a while, the three of us ate dinner together. We sat on the back porch feeling the Gulf breezes coming from more than a hundred miles to the southeast, watching the tall ungrazed grass before us bend in oceanic waves, with strange little gusts and accelerations stirring the grass in streaks and ribbons, looking briefly like the braids of a rushing river, or as if animals in hiding were running along those paths, just beneath the surface and unseen.

  We would grill steaks on the barbecue, roast golden ears of corn, and drink fresh-squeezed lemonade, to which Ben was addicted. “Are these steaks from your cattle?” he would ask us, cutting into his meat and examining each bite as if there might be some indication of ownership within; and when we lied and told him yes, he seemed pleased, as if we had amounted to something in the world, and as if we were no longer children. He would savor each bite, then, as if he could taste some intangible yet exceptional quality.

  We kept patching and then repatching the ragged-ass fence, lacing it back together with twine and scraps of rope, with ancient twists of baling wire, and with coat hangers; propping splintered shipping pallets against the gaps, stacking them and leaning them here and there in an attempt to plug the many holes. (The calves ended up merely using these pallets as ladders and springboards.)