All the Land to Hold Us (38 page)

“I had a happy childhood,” she said, laughing—as candid with the stranger, Richard, as if, by virtue of his having made it out into the desert, he was one of them, rather than an outsider—as if she had worked with him, too, for all the long hours of each of those five weeks, as she had with the children and their parents. “I had a great family, no neuroses or anything, but I don't know, I just was really into making up all these weird worlds, and surrounding myself with all of these really weird creatures.”

Her eyes were gleaming in the push-and-pull light of the fire, she was still riding the ecstasy of the post-performance high, as were the children and the parents and townsfolk who had witnessed the spectacle; and her thralldom in a place of otherworldness so reminded Richard of his own comfort and joy found in exploring other worlds that he was both attracted to her and yet somehow unsettled, for how could one dare or even desire to draw too near to one so like one's self?

Still, he found himself thinking,
How you would love to know of the ammonites, the giant horned cephalopods lying up in the hills, just beyond this fire
—and he marveled for the thousandth time at the confluence of fate that had led him to the place and time of loving Clarissa, rather than any other, rather than all others. She, who had cared almost nothing for such things, or even, it seemed, for the world itself. But almost: he could not shake the feeling that he had
almost
convinced her to love the world; to dare to love the world.

He should have noticed Annie then, should have caught a glimpse of her and had his head turned by a shock of recognition, or invisible current—she even looked like he had looked, at that age—but he had not thought about what he looked like as a child in a long time, nor was he even now a devotee of mirrors, so that even if she had been his twin, it might have meant nothing to him—though still somehow, standing so close to her, he should have known; should have come up from the lower world enough to take the fuller measure of things.

Instead, he turned to meet Marie—Herbert Mix was introducing him—and then the teacher, Ruth. He was put off by Ruth's guardedness, her defensiveness, and its implicit assumption that because he was a stranger, he might end up being like one of the townspeople who had judged and then turned against her—that he might be one of those who would get in the way of her life's passion, of teaching, and of making a difference in young lives.

Then he was being introduced to the other parents and their children, with old Herbert Mix continuing the introductions; and the others accepted him immediately, for that reason. Richard saw how Herbert Mix had outlasted his eccentricity, had ridden it like a mount to some far enough point where it had become a form of respectability—that the old treasure hunter had become like a geological fixture, and had altered the community around him, forcing them to respect him simply by virtue of his endurance, having prevailed over those who had once ridiculed him.

Only one of the parents asked Richard what he was doing there, and when Herbert Mix interjected that he was a geologist, that was all the answer that was needed, though it seemed to him that there might have been a thing like pity in the polite smile that followed.
Oh, yes, a geologist. We know about the indefatigable and insatiable hearts of geologists
.

He stared at Herbert Mix and Marie for a moment, the old gentleman's arm resting lightly around her waist in a way that was both bold and shy, then looked over at the schoolteacher again, caught just a glimpse of her looking quickly away.

Of course she was wary of him, she was right to assume he might have come to interrupt her life somehow, or to take something away: she was listening to her instincts, and her instincts told her to beware; that he had about him the residue, the aura, of taking.

It bothered him that she perceived him so, and he wondered how he might convince her otherwise.

Perhaps I can work with the children
, he thought,
perhaps I can come up to the school and teach them about geology, and the place where they live
.

Beth had detached herself from the parents and had called the children to her, crouched amidst them as if they were all football players in a huddle. A couple of the smaller ones appeared near tears, and the older ones were somber, as Beth explained how the puppet-burning was to proceed.

“It's supposed to be a celebration,” she said. She was herself but a few years older than the oldest among them, and diminutive, lean as a boy; with her short curly hair, from a distance, she might have been mistaken for an elfin boy.

“I'll light each puppet,” she explained, and then turned to address Zachary, the kindergartner, and raised a finger—“Never play with matches. And then once they're all burning, I'll give a signal, and we'll each use a stick to push our puppets into the Great Pit of Everlasting Purge and Rejuvenation, where they will be purified and preserved forever as memories in our hearts.

“You will always remember this,” she said, speaking to all of them now. “It's human nature to want to hold on to something you've worked so hard on, and created”—she glanced over at Herbert Mix and then at Richard, and smiled—“but the spirits of our puppets have fulfilled their human obligations, they've brought us joy and happiness, and now it's time to seal them in our hearts so that those feelings will remain in us forever.”

She looked around at each of the children, and at the pit that had been dug for the ritual. “If we try to hold on to them, they'll just end up in attics and basements, in lofts and garages, all dusty and cobwebbed, dull and cracked and heat-stricken,” she said. “Their power and beauty will leave them. We have to resurrect their power to thrill us one more time,” she said. “We have to have a finale.”

The children nodded, not understanding, and perhaps not even believing such things: but they trusted her. Richard saw that Ruth was smiling, and that he might have misjudged her: she was not all hard, she possessed some softness. He saw the quiet, serious girl, Annie, tucked in tight against her, the teacher's arm folded over her chest pulling her in closer, and he thought,
Oh, her daughter
.

“All right,” Beth said, “remember this,” and she led them over to the trucks parked next to the abyss and pulled out their puppets, each to his and her own. The children brought the creations over to the pit and arranged them around its edges, buffalo and demon and alien and Kiowa, Comanche and heron and raven and hawk, each puppet towering like a stone megalith, realistic in silhouette.

A stillness fell over the little audience as the play of light from the bonfire wavered back and forth across the artworks in a way that brought them to life, seemed to be propelling them forward now into the world under their own desires and momentums. As if now they must be destroyed, in order for the memory of them to be owned: in order to prevent the puppets from becoming their own things—mortal, and, as Beth had explained, prone, then, to disintegration.

The children did not understand, but trusted her.

The puppets needed no gasoline in order to burn. Each child made a little setting of twigs and crumpled newspaper at the base of their puppet. Beth gave a brief invocation—“Thank you for the pleasure you have brought us,” she told the puppets, and then, turning to the makers, “Thank you for what you have created, and brought to our hearts”—and then she knelt and lit one of her own puppets, the divine and gigantic King Kong, and the other puppetmakers did the same.

On the other side of King Kong, Herbert Mix and Marie were igniting the buffalo, and all else around the pit, the mammoth puppets were becoming quickly shrouded in flame.

It seemed to them that the puppets were stepping, of their own volition, into chambers of flame, and it was a surprise to all who witnessed it, for if such yearning existed in the puppets, then did it not also exist in the hearts of their makers?

All around the pit, puppets plumed in wreaths of bright flame burned in hues of magenta, cerulean, and chartreuse as the paint cracked and flaked and then vaporized. It was a rainbow of fire, a kaleidoscope of fire—Richard looked over at Beth and saw that she was watching as if hypnotized, her face fire-rimmed with an expression of Technicolored rapture—and then, just as Beth had hoped, the puppets began to ascend.

It was a phenomenon that occurred only infrequently, in the puppet-burnings. The conditions had to be near-perfect: a calm, cooling night, stable barometric pressure, and low humidity, so that the puppets burned hot and quickly—and when it worked, the flaming puppets were lifted a short distance above the ground, like hot-air balloons, as their hollow husks filled with the combustible gases, and as the heat of their self-made flames rose all around them, in the same manner in which smoke and heat swirl into the updrafts of a chimney.

One by one, all around the pit, the puppets began to hop and tilt and lift in a syncopated dance. Some of them floated several feet into the air and appeared to hover, stricken or perhaps exalted, seized, even if only briefly, by the current of life, before settling back down upon the ground, where, their gases spent, they began to crumple and shrink to blackening char.

Other puppets ascended only to fall over on their backs as they settled back down. Still others—the majority—were drawn toward the pit, canting and tipping toward it as if pulled there by some unavoidable summons; and encountering the cooler, denser air above the pit, they hovered longest of all, before toppling in.

They fell upon one another, a cascade of burning puppets, sailfish upon rhinoceros upon hawk upon Comanche, with the burning outlines of these apparitions alarming, surely, to any rigworkers who might be staring off into the desert in their direction.

The heat from the burning paper and cardboard was terrific, as was the roar of the flames. The heat singed the hair of the onlookers, curled the hair on the backs of the men's hands, and melted the tips of the eyebrows of any who did not step away quickly enough.

With rakes and shovels, the onlookers shoved those fallen puppets which had not yet made it into the pit down into the bed of fire, with rafts of spark and ember showering upward in brilliant fountains each time a new body part was added to the brew: the wing of a raven, the head of an antelope. Herbert Mix himself shoveled in the leg of a miner, wobbly on his own good leg.

The cremation was so intense that it fused the sand into a giant, iridescent, swirl-streaked glassine bowl, which would, in coming years, hold water, with bushes and then small trees growing up around it to provide shade and prevent evaporation; and the children would come and swim there on hot days, and would remember their earlier childhood.

That was all to come later. That night, as the puppets burned, and the old and glorious past fell away, the onlookers watched, fascinated by Beth's wizardry, as the glowing pit below, a caldera of heat and color and noise, flashed and flamed and roared. The fire burned hot for a long time, a single giant glowing ingot, burning far longer than any of them would have guessed.

It continued to send up a single heated breath, like some collective final exhalation; but as it finally wavered, the onlookers were able to edge closer and peer back down into the glowing bowl of their making, and in the wormy traces and ruins they were sometimes able to make out the shadows and outlines, framed by the ashen lines of the cardboard's corrugations, of certain of their creations: and they stared into this strange amalgam as if into a wishing-well mirror.

And in that viewing, they felt banded and bonded closer together—less the outcasts of Mormon Springs, and more than ever like community, family, clan—and although they all felt special, it was the children who felt this most keenly of all; and they felt assured and confident when they considered the future, now that they understood it could hold such marvels for them as Beth and her puppets.

It was a little lonely, after the last of the flames died down to glowing coals. The onlookers stood closer together, not for warmth but in affection—husbands and wives, parents and children, and the two lovers, Herbert Mix and Marie—and Beth herself felt the bittersweetness of it deepest of all. It was a feeling as if some good part of all of them was draining away back down into the sand. It was not the best part of them, however, and the emptiness they felt would be refilled and recharged—they each knew it—as if the going-away helped make space for the new and better part to come in.

Their bonfire had burned down. They gathered their shovels and rakes, their aluminum lawn chairs and ice chests, and loaded them into their trucks. Beth was leaving soon—the eastbound to Houston came through just before midnight; the next morning, at sunrise, she would transfer to New Orleans, then north, back to Philadelphia—and she told the children that she hated goodbyes, that she would come back and see them, and that she wanted to tell them goodbye here in the desert, that she did not want a big farewell at the train station.

She felt her own heart detaching, even as they clung to her and pleaded with her to stay just one more day. She felt herself ascending, burning, toppling, as she stepped into the chamber of belief that it was better to leave immediately, and to remember their time sweetly, even as she knew she would likely never return to Odessa.

She gave each of them fierce hugs, then stepped away, though still they followed her as if in a parade, and hugged her again and again. The smaller ones, Zachary and a girl named Sarah, made a game of wrapping their arms around her thin ankles, each of them a Lilliputian attaching to Gulliver, and she felt herself having to detach even further than she had intended: and though not in a panic, not too close to sadness or sorrow yet, she nonetheless felt herself tensing, and twisted in the children's grasp to find Herbert Mix, who had volunteered his truck.

It had been decided, agreed, Richard would drive her out to the station—there would be no grief, no attachment, there; a perfect stranger, a chauffeur—and now she found Richard's eyes and pleaded for help and understanding, and he went and got her two small duffel bags (one of personal articles, clothing and an extra pair of high-topped tennis shoes, the other a larger, heavier bag of puppet gear: coiled ziplines, PA-28 staplers, X-Acto blades, paintbrushes) and transferred them to Herbert Mix's truck. Mix would ride home with Marie and Annie, would stay out at their house that evening.