All the Land to Hold Us (16 page)

Thousands of torn and ragged butterfly wings might be blowing around the shoreline, following such a migration—whirls of flashing color caught in the brief turmoil of the dust devils that swept across the prairie—so that it appeared the butterfly parts had come back to life.

Occasionally, sitting in the shade of her doorstep, waiting, just waiting, Marie would have a butterfly wing brought her way by the whim of the wind, deposited neatly at her feet by chance; and as she descended, broken, it often seemed to her that the weight of her breaking—one giant wave after another falling upon her—came not from the last-straw weight of a thing so insignificant as a single blue or red or yellow butterfly wing, but from the final crush of a thing even lighter than that: the absence of even a single shining blue or red or yellow butterfly wing.

For a while—before the pain had been lithified—she remembered a time even further back; the time of Omo's brief courtship. He had brought her flowers, and had been shy and gentle and delicate around her, and it had seemed to her then, as his attentions had gathered around her—this hardworking, quiet man, seeming unusually restrained in her presence—that she had somehow captured him: and she could scarcely believe the wonder at having done so.

And even after the boys were born, that feeling had persisted, for a while longer—that through some miracle, she had been blessed and gifted with such a man, and that she had been privileged to give birth to two fine and hungry, healthy baby boys.

It had seemed back then that good fortune had wandered into her life as might a strange animal she had been trying to coax or capture. It seemed as if the animal of luck had come wandering in from off the prairie, and had entered her corral in early evening, just before a summer thunderstorm, so that all she had to do was close the gate, sliding the poles in behind the animal, which appeared to be temporarily disoriented, lost, wandering.

Here is your home
, she would think, rising from the porch and hurrying across the front yard to close the gate.

It would be some years more before her own unfillable hunger would be revealed to her. At that point however it became for her as if she had fallen through a thin crust: as if the animals she had captured, the herd of her family, had through their dull comings and goings worn that crust dangerously thin.

No amount of hazing or imprecations could drive these animals away, they had her cornered, and then the crust wore completely through and she was falling, arms upflung, falling with both hands splayed outward in a grasp for the life unlived, but it was no use, she had made the wrong choice, had bartered for attention rather than respect, for need instead of desire, for gluttony instead of generosity; and as she fell, it seemed that she was plummeting through a cavern filled with swirling brightly colored wings, but none were for her outstretched hands, all were instead ascending.

And in her lap, in her apron skirt, was a weight as dense and nonnegotiable as a farrier's anvil, carrying her farther and faster to the bottom of the well, with the butterflies all escaping, rising in flutters up the shaft of shining light to the surface above, toward the jagged crater of light she had created in her punching-through.

The brush of their rising wings against her face, and the chaotic swirls and glimpses of color, was as close as she was going to get to the thing she so craved.

 

For his part, Omo was falling even faster; and again he embraced the anvil as he would a greedy lover. He dreamed of salt, stared at the small inland ocean of it, looked forward to digging the shaftwells into it, and loved or was at least reassured by the warbled, rattling sound the iron made when he and the boys pulled in the loaded sheets of salt each evening—a sound that was sometimes answered by the thunder and jags of lightning out on the darkened prairie beyond.

In such moments, what it felt like to Max was that the answering thunder, and its simultaneous lightning, was knocking loose old crusts and plaque in his mind—releasing him from old constraints, allowing him to work more powerfully and confidently at the one thing that he did best: the one thing he did so well, it seemed that he had been neither crafted nor shaped for it, but born ready for it, and had, by grace and luck, found his way toward it.

In retrospect, he would have said that they were the happiest days of his life.

 

Spindletop had been discovered in 1901, and in the subsequent years people had begun drilling for oil all over the state, searching in every conceivable nook, and proposing outlandish hypotheses. When Omo was thirty-eight he came up with a vision for how drilling rigs might successfully penetrate the layers of subterranean salt through which they sometimes attempted to pass. Drilling through salt had always before been problematic, because as the drill bit entered and then drilled through it, the salt, flowing like a liquid or a plastic, would surge against the drill pipe, binding the drill stem and causing the bit to stick firmly in the hole, so that the drillers could go no deeper, nor could they pull out.

The hole had to be abandoned, in such instances—the drilling platform disassembled and set up at some other distance, in a location perhaps less conducive to finding oil, for often the green-black crude lay pooled warm and waiting only beneath those treacherous shields of salt.

Omo discovered that by mixing enough salt into the drilling fluid as the pipe was rotated down into the earth, the heavier weight of that newly mixed salt water acted as a stabilizer, neutralizing the tendency of the underground salt formations to cave in upon the drilling pipe.

The benefits from his vision were incalculable. Because the weight of the drilling fluid was now heavier due to the added salt, there were less blowouts whenever the drillers' bit encountered a buried pocket of gas. In the past, there had been little time to prepare for and evacuate a rig during such an encounter. A bubbling froth would come rushing back up the hole as the gas spewed into the drilling fluid, churning to the surface like the vomitus of some buried gargoyle. The mixture of gas and water would spray into the sky, and splash down upon the steel floor of the drilling rig in rude ejaculation. The driller and rig hands would have but a few short moments to run for cover, because any stray spark—the ash from a cigarette, or the sparking of magnetos from the engine of the rig itself—would be enough to ignite that gas, which would be converted immediately into an inferno, and the flames would melt the rig quickly into a puddle of steel. The vertical torches of such explosions burned sometimes for months, unable to be quenched or capped or plugged: burning until all the gas was used up.

How many lives had Max Omo saved with his invention, his idea? Such mercies could not be calculated, nor could the millions of barrels of oil and millions of cubic feet of gas that were able to be discovered and extracted now from beneath those previously inaccessible strata of salt; nor could all the good be measured that would come from the uses of that extra oil and gas: the hospitals constructed, the journeys taken by plane and car, the synthetic fabrics manufactured—the cities, and the nation, swelling, feasting on his idea.

He increased the demand for this product; but in so doing, a fine balance was tipped and lost, for salt now became valuable enough that enterprises sprang up to refine it straight from bubbling little outcrops in the Hill Country, and from the comings and goings of the ocean and tides. Max Omo's salt was still of the highest quality for feeding livestock, and the drillers would still buy his salt if he cared to transport it to them; but for the purposes of cramming it down into a hole in the ground, never to be seen again, one brand of salt was as good as another, and the cheaper the better.

And again, the landscape seemed to snap some fragile synapse within, for with the new earnings Max Omo realized from the increased demand for his product, he poured all that money back into the purchasing of more land, radiating out in all directions from his beloved salt lake—wretched, useless land, heaps and dunes and gullies of sand: leagues of sand, unmappable and unsurveyed, as capricious as the wind.

Because of all of Omo's purchases of useless land, the Omos were just barely hanging on, drinking warm salt water, and stale wine that was at the edge of vinegar, and eating moldy dried mutton.

Still Omo kept buying up one tract after another, voraciously extending his barren kingdom to a greater distance beyond his sight, even when he stood on the tin roof of his shanty, and then farther; his ownership extending beyond the horizon even when he shinnied up the hollow breathing pipe that towered above their sand hut like the crow's nest of a tiny ship.

It was a simple equation—the more the landscape withheld from him, the more he had to have—and it was with nightmarish clarity that Marie saw the salt prairie's effect upon him.

Why had she traded her childhood for this? She had been forced to give birth to the second child alone, save for the company of his squalling brother, two years older; even then, before they had moved out of town, Max Omo had been hieing off to the salt desert, and by the time he returned, the child had been born. (Out at the salt lake, she would later lose two subsequent attempts, each early in the term; she always imagined that they were daughters, and blamed everything—the landscape, Omo, the lake, herself, the odor of salt, and the odor of the boys.)

The house was invaded daily by scorpions, centipedes, tarantulas, rattlesnakes, and vinegarroons. The spiders and wasps she crushed with a blacksmith's shoeing hammer, sledging them into matted oblivion with gusto. Her forearms were overdeveloped from this practice, veinous and bulging, and the snakes she severed into multiple pieces with a hoe that she sharpened regularly.

She took to wearing her long dark hair in a bun. It was too hot to do anything else. Even before the boys reached adolescence and forgot her entirely, she had reached a state of despondency, perilously approaching insanity, in which her most pleasant moments were spent catatonic in the incredible heat of the privy, where she found herself, across the years, content to just sit in the darkness and let the world pass by.

For hours she would sit there, dress hiked up over her waist, purging herself, with the heat and her salty diet baking her feces into diarrhetic soup; but the darkness was soothing, and she would just sit there, praying quietly that the world would bring her no more disappointment.

Like a mason laying stones, she would build up around her an armament of numbness, as if fortifying herself for protection against ever-coming heat and brilliance.

 

Now it seemed but a short step until the end, and in both her dreaming and her waking, she could smell, taste, feel, and hear a different quality to the air rising from the abyss before her, though still she could not see it.

She stood so close before it now that almost anything could take her there. As she lay awake at night listening for the coyotes, the gentle sifting of a few grains of sand onto the metal roof above was enough to raise every hair on her body, and though she managed to lie still, she would find herself breaking into a sweat, more excessive than even the usual lake-dampness in which they all spent their nights perspiring.

Marie sometimes found in such instances that she would be growling quietly to herself, as she listened to the sand skate across the top of the roof, though other times she would be unaware that the sound was coming from her, and would lie there in terror, listening, even as the sound from her throat grew louder.

Omo and the boys slept on, three sets of snoring mixed with the sound of her growls.

She imagined that at any moment the growling would stop, and that Max Omo would stir in his sleep, possibly awakening, and would reach over and take her face in his hands, and begin murmuring kind things to her.

Little violet-and-green swallows had begun to nest in the stovepipe of their breathing apparatus, and these night sounds too would awaken her and unleash the panting terror that was sutured tight in her chest: the scrabbling sound of their little lizard claws as they shifted in their nests, jockeying for position and rearranging themselves ceaselessly in the night; and then once their eggs were hatched, the endless cheeping of the nestlings clamoring for food.

Sometimes one of the flightless young birds would tumble all the way down the pipe and out onto the floor by their bed and spin there, clawing and scuttling, and Marie would have to get up and open the door and fling it into the night, where the coyotes would come and find it.

She would try to get back to sleep, with the pillow over her head while the other birds in the pipe chirped and chattered with even greater agitation; and she could not be sure if she dreamed of the coyotes' laughter out in the yard, or if it was real.

 

A strange and powerful landscape summons strange and powerful happenings, just as beauty seems to summon beauty, or harshness beckons to harshness. One night Marie was awakened from her sleep (if her alternating bouts of terror and stupor could be called that) not to the sound of sand or bird or coyote, but to what seemed at first to be a complete absence of sound: as if the entire world around her had paused in order to listen to something so wonderful and unusual that it caught for a few moments even the world's uncaring attention.

Gradually, as her senses readjusted to the different pace of the silence, Marie realized that it was not a complete soundlessness she was hearing, but rather, the distilled purity of one sound: a gigantic and strangely rhythmic thrashing, out in the lake, huffings and suckhole gaspings, spews and sputters: enormous, lonely splashings unattended by any other sound.

Marie rose from her bed and went out onto the porch, damp in her nightgown. It was October, and there was enough of a breeze from the north to cool her. She wrapped her arms around herself; and in the night, and the just-awakened grogginess of things, she forgot for a moment who and what she had become, and believed herself to be a young girl again.