All the Land to Hold Us (25 page)

He turned the truck around and went back to pick Mufti up, and gave him a ride to East Texas, where Mufti helped him unload the walnuts and reload the pecans, and took him with him then to California, where Mufti worked with another circus, though not with another elephant, for ten more years: the next part of his life opening like the mere turning of a page in a book. As if it had all been but a story or a dream, and he had stepped simply from one life into the next.

Having lived all those years in the first, never dreaming that the next life lay full and waiting for him. As if all of the first, despite its splendor and detail, had been but an overburden that needed to be stripped slowly away, to reveal the undermost life next and further.

 

Strangely, it was Marie who reentered the rhythm of her old life most easily: or for a while, at least. While Max Omo began to spend more time standing at the lakeshore, staring out at the white haze that was once his never-ending quarry (the boys increasingly impatient with him, twitching and flexing their muscles like draft horses standing in harness on a hot day, unused and fly-plagued), Marie slipped back into her old routines as smoothly as any machine.

On her first morning back home following the adventure, she was up before dawn, starting the cookfire as she had innumerable others, preparing breakfast. If anything, for those first several days, she was almost thankful to be back in the comfort of her routine. It seemed once again to be the place she belonged in the world, and for better or worse, there was a reassurance in that.

As she worked, she admired the wooden handle of the ax she had wielded all of her married life, salt-stained with the sweat that had come ultimately from the old ocean that was now the remnant lake, being filtered through her.

She split the twisted ironwood as she had always split it, so unthinkingly as to approach some daily-murmured prayer; two pieces into four, four into eight, and the days falling away and then disappearing to near-nothingness, leaving behind nothing but the shaped and smoothed handle of a well-worn ax.

No prince was coming for her, but it did not matter, for it seemed to her that she was back where she belonged: even if the slot of that place had not been cut by her. She turned her back on the dream she had glimpsed—put Mufti almost completely out of her mind, and the elephant, too—and resumed splitting wood, and starting fires in the little iron stove.

Within only a few days the sun had melted the salt-cast trough of the elephant's passage back to its previous planar smoothness, and the wind scoured and buffed the salt back to its old iridescent sheen.

Sometimes when she glanced out at the lake and saw her husband standing there, staring into dreamland, she would mistake him at first for one of the ancient sentinels that had been claimed by the salt; the wind flapping his sleeves and coattails, too, as if the fact had already occurred.

A
STRANGE AND POWERFUL
landscape summons strange and powerful happenings. They return again and again to such a landscape, like animals drawn nightly to the same oasis. And perhaps it was in this pattern that Marie found herself unable to turn her back entirely on the dream; or as if, even in turning her back, she could not be separated fully from it, for now it followed her, even if unbidden.

A scratching, rasping sound within her, of new grooves being cut, and water trickling, flowing down those grooves; and in her dreams she began to follow those new slots and canyons, even while in the bright light of day clinging tightly to the old routines, and to the ax.

 

Men came to visit her in her dreams, in the new country. They moved close to her, and she to them, easily. In the dreams, she and he leaned their heads in against one another, rested upon each other shoulder to shoulder; and in the dreams, she was astonished to be the recipient of tenderness and affection: and not merely the crude pawings that masqueraded as caresses in the brief preliminary to sex, but tenderness and kindness of its own accord, existing for its own sake.

In the dreams, among these strange men (though sometimes there might be a boy she had known from grade school, grown up now—hardened, and of her age, and understanding too well her weariness), she felt surprised at first but then quickly confident that she was deserving of such gentleness and attention—that indeed, the cup of his hand seemed made for the fit against the side of her face, and that, as with a violin, perhaps, the point of that chin fit perfectly, was made for the calm and worn-out cleft just above her collarbone, halfway between her shoulder and neck.

The best ones were the men who came to her quietly and simply took her head against their shoulder, and leaned theirs against hers, and the two of them would just stand there, each leaning into the other like sentinels; and she enjoyed their company, listened intently to whatever it was they had to say, whether trivial or significant.

She grew more and more accustomed to the strange intimacy of these encounters, the freshness of possibility, so that she began going to bed earlier each night, and stayed in bed longer in the mornings. And even once she was up and about, she moved more sluggishly: and on the days in which there had been no dream at all, no visitor the previous night, she would be moody and irritable, so much so that even Max Omo noticed it, and though he assumed it was simply a part of the aging process, contentment or happiness disintegrating gradually, he was nonetheless concerned, as he would be were any of his machines to begin emitting a faltering sound, a skipped beat, a waning in output.

A strange land summons strange inhabitants, and shapes them all to its own desires. As if setting up a stone wall, Marie was able for the most part to keep dreams of Mufti and the elephant from pouring in, though the welcome strangers continued to drift in; and she had other dreams, too.

Though she knew nothing of the circumstances, had heard no tales or rumors of their existence, she dreamed frequently of camels. Caravans of them had been used in her country only several decades earlier, during Army Brevet Captain John T. Pope's staggering searches for water, in his years spent scouting possible routes for a transcontinental railroad. And although Pope had found very little fresh water, the camels had succeeded hugely, for a while. (Pope's failure was colossal, even by the standards of the landscape's harshness. Time and again he missed finding water by only a few miles. In his scratchings and diggings and drillings, informed by crude science and wild intuition, he often ended up drilling in the one and only place where he could
avoid
finding water. His own mental collapse, though slow in coming, culminated with his men wanting to mutiny, but still he pushed on, inflamed by the hunt. Near the end, with each new dry hole, he would become convinced that sweet water lay only a few feet deeper, and he would sometimes awaken in the night, and would attempt to steal the ash-tree ridge poles from the tents of his sleeping soldiers, hoping to attach them to the drillstring the next day, in an attempt to reach down another six feet. So spectacular was his strange failure that he missed—walked straight over the top of—the then-untapped Ogallala Reservoir, only thirty more feet below him, one of the largest freshwater aquifers in the world.)

What broke Marie, finally, however, was not the inattentions of any lover, nor the total absence of tenderness, nor even the terrifying whisper of the dunes slithering across her tin roof, but instead, the growling.

Despite his own new dreaminess, and the long sessions spent staring at the lake, Max Omo had not been able to sever his old ways entirely. In October, as the north winds returned to readjust slightly the cant and position of the dunes, he had completed construction on his latest invention, a salt-sorting machine that utilized a long steel cylinder, a barrel tube, which revolved endlessly, driven by the piercing, stinking labors of a steam engine that Omo had adapted to consume oil, coal, ironwood, sheep dung, or even the dried bones and hides of animal carcasses. Each day he and the boys fed the barrel tube as they would a penned but unruly animal.

A series of screens within the barrel tube led to various chambers that filtered the grains of salt according to all their different diameters, before pouring the salt, now sorted evenly, into gunnysacks waiting beneath the revolving tube. Omo was then able to sell the finest grade of salt, for fifteen dollars a ton, to sheep ranchers, who would place it in troughs or mix it with their feed, while the medium-grade salt went to the cattle ranchers for thirteen dollars a ton. The coarse grade was sold to individuals for twelve dollars a ton, where it was used for freezing ice cream: a delicacy that the Omo children had heard about, but never tasted.

It was not the gruntings of the steam engine, however, nor its dank and briny scent, that broke Marie, but the rattling of the dreaded salt within the barrel tube: the ceaseless grumbling as the machine ate the lake, day and night, before spitting it out into sacks, which were carried away on the backs of flatbed trucks (by now the boys, though barely twelve and ten, knew how to drive); and the tube refilling again and again, the lake replenishing its dreadful cargo always.

She began to develop tics and tremors, insuppressible tremblings within—she could barely light the fires in the cookstove each morning—and the pleasant dreams vanished entirely, as if there was something now unworthy about her, something in her that caused her to no longer be able to receive them.

This hunger and absence only aggravated the tremblings, and she dropped things often, and forgot what she was doing.

As all her other senses began to shut down, deadened by fatigue, it seemed that only her sense of hearing grew sharper, until it was unbearably acute: and against her wishes, she would find herself straining to hear the subtle intricacies of the barrel tube's sorting: the grinding of the gears constant and monotonous, though just beneath that, the faintest, occasional variations in the proportion of fine salt, whispering, and medium salt, murmuring, and coarse salt, groaning.

It became for her as if she was straining to pick out words and sentences from a conversation she could not quite understand, and made all the more maddening by her increasing belief that it was a conversation that was important and meaningful to her present circumstances, if no one else's.

Other mornings, the voices from the salt would sound as if they were being uttered in some foreign language, and she would grow madder still.

“She is a goner,” Max Omo told the boys, and advised them to say their goodbyes to her while she still recognized them, and they, her.

And as if his pronouncement had made it so, a week later, as the big dune behind their house began to make its autumnal shift (she had been lying awake for three nights in a row, listening for it), she finally broke: unable to escape the growling that seemed to emanate from the barrel tube even when the motor was silent and the barrel was motionless.

Waiting, listening for the sand, she heard the first snaky slitherings, felt the first heaving deadweight of dune come leaning across their roof, up and over the barricade of iron: sand falling lighter than rain, and flowing around either side of their stalwart little cabin.

This time, so keenly prepared, she had them all up and awakened and out the door and onto the roof with shovels and brooms, fighting the rippling shift of the earth, the rearrangement of topography. But they might as well have been trying to sweep back the advance of the ocean's tide; and the sand came sweeping steadily in, up to their ankles, ten shovelfuls sliding back in for each one they tossed aside, and then the sand was up to their knees, and then to their waists, so that they were working only to save and extricate one another—handing the long end of the shovel to whomever was stuck and pulling, while the others burrowed quickly around the imprisoned human pillar; and once they were free, they abandoned their hopes of holding back the dune and instead leapt from its edge, went sliding down its slopes and ran toward the lake as if pursued.

By morning the dune had repositioned itself and lay sleeping atop their house as comfortably as an animal that might have gotten up from its bed and turned in the night; and Max Omo and the boys began digging out, working with great force in the rising heat merely to get back to where they had been the day before: and in their labors, they did not notice that Marie, still wearing only her nightgown and the tall rubber boots that they all wore when mucking around the lake, had disappeared.

It was midmorning before they thought of her at all—wondering where their breakfast was—and at noon, when they took a brief break, the three of them sharing one of the bottles of wine (which was tasting more vinegary every year), they were hungry enough to think to go look for her in the cookhouse.

They didn't find her there, and wandered briefly around the outbuildings, calling her name. Max Omo checked the privy, for he had noticed she had been secluding herself in there for increasingly longer periods—napping, he assumed, in the shade and darkness—and it was one of the boys who found where her tracks had gone down to the shore and out into the lake; and when they gathered there, they did not recognize her at first, out among all the other skeletons, sitting down in the salt with her back turned to them, the breeze flapping her nightgown.

She had lost weight all through the summer, shedding pound after pound until she was but a skeleton herself, her organs held within by only the envelope of her brown papery skin—even Max Omo had noticed it, but had told himself she would put the weight back on when cooler weather returned—and with a groaned curse, Omo had the boys put on their salt-bog paddle-shoes, and he put on his, and together they went out onto the lake toward her with their shovels and ropes and chains. She was kneeling in the salt, the lake up to her waist, her head tipped forward so that her chin rested on her sunken collarbone, and was whimpering, the tracks of tears dried to salt courses on her leathery face. Max Omo was nonetheless rude and impatient, half-believing that he too was stranded in some sort of beastly purgatory, in which all movements and patterns strove to repeat themselves; and that finally, what had once been a source of great comfort to him—the predictability of mechanical repetition, the flawless lift and rise of piston and cylinder, the safety and accountability of foreknown routine—was at long last becoming a curse and an anchor.