The Lives of Rocks (12 page)

“Is it on your breath?” she asked. “Do you think we could try to smell it?”

Jyl covered her mouth involuntarily and turned away. “No,” she said. “I don't want you to smell it.”

They were quiet for a while, after that. Finally Stephan
said, “We really can't smell anything. But if you think the deer can, maybe you should try and mask it. Maybe you should have a piece of peppermint or licorice before you go out next time. Maybe they'll be curious and come a little closer. Maybe they'll think it's another animal.”

She had restocked her pantry, hoping that the children would come again—had bought far too much food, beyond her budget, and not knowing what they liked and did not like, had guessed—some sugary cereals, a kind of frozen Popsicle treat, some TV dinners of mashed potatoes and cod; apples, oranges, bananas; some frozen salmon filets, Canadian bacon, a frozen pizza, and a frozen strawberry cheesecake—and when she asked what they wanted for supper they told her they usually had rice and pineapple, and that was about all they liked—rice and pineapple, and venison and elk.

She felt a despair, a failure that she had not known since the hardest days of her treatment. She was surprised by the tears that leapt to her eyes, and she turned quickly to where they could not see them. When she had composed herself, she asked, “Would you eat a cheesecake?”

They nodded solemnly, as if it were a trick question, and Stephan said, “We'll eat anything—it's just that we only like rice and pineapple and elk and venison.” They were surprised, then, she could tell—almost spooked—by her wild laughter.

She set about preparing the salmon, thawing it out in warm water. She cut the cheesecake into little wedges and served it to them first, and put a couple of the TV dinners in the stove as well, in the hopes they might find something to pick at. She needn't have worried, for soon they were asking
for more of the cheesecake, and she even had a piece, and then had to put the rest out on the porch or they might have eaten it all.

“It'll refreeze,” she said cunningly. “You can have the rest of it the next time you come.”

She put the salmon in the oven with the TV dinners, braised it with butter and garlic and lemon and orange, then sat down by the stove and took the bolt from her rifle and began cleaning and oiling it, while they sat at the table next to her and ate the cheesecake and drank hot chocolate. When she was done she put the rifle back together and hung it up in the snow room, and changed into dry clothes.

She could tell that although the children were still cold and weary, they were uncomfortable simply relaxing, and were anxious to be leaving. She sought to detain them with stories and knowledge. She walked over to a bookshelf and pulled down one of her father's old texts,
Ancient Sedimentary Environments,
published in 1940. Dust motes rose from it as she opened its covers; and from across the room, still eating the cheesecake, both Stephan and Shayna sniffed the air, and Stephan said, “I can smell that.”

“It's got pictures,” Jyl said, bringing it over to the table She thumbed through the pages, and her eyes blurred as she read for the first time some of the markings he had underlined in pencil a lifetime ago.

“The consensus of geological opinion is that there are a finite number of sedimentary facies which occur repeatedly in rocks of different ages all over the world. Therefore, no two similar sedimentary facies are ever identical, and gradational transitions are common.

“One of the main problems of determining the origin of ancient sediments is that, though essentially reflecting
depositional environments, they also inherit features of earlier environment. The infilled sediment reflects the nature of the source rocks and the hydraulic of the current, while the rolled bones and wood and other fossiliferous inclusions are derived from non-depositional environments that lie for the most part beyond the stream's usual reach. No rock is ever finished, all stones are continually being remade, until they vanish from the face of the earth. And yet, even then, once reduced to windblown dust, they are reforming.”

The children had stopped eating, their forks in midair, and were listening, though Stephan was slowly raising his hand in what was unmistakably mild protest. Jyl could tell also that they were suspicious, as if they understood somehow that their fundamentalist faith might be challenged by such language. Still, she read on:

“A classic example of this fallacy can be found in a profile of the Bu Hasa Rudist boundstones, which pass basin-ward into skeletal wackestones, with fragments of rudists and large benthonic Orbitoline forams. These wackestones pass basinward into lime mudstones. The rudist boundstone passes south towards the Arabian shield into faccal pellet muds, with miliolid foraminifera. Locally however the basinward crest of the rudist boundstone is replaced by a detrital rudist grainstone.”

There was a look very close to despair on Stephan's face—Shayna showed no such distress and was instead only staring at Jyl with utter wonder—but Jyl could see that Stephan wasn't going to give up or back away; and with his brows furrowed, he reached for a pencil and paper on the table and asked carefully, slowly, “What's rudist?”

She couldn't hold back her laughter, then—it spilled from her again, clean and clear, with a feeling of release that she
could not remember knowing before, and she said, “I don't know.”

Stephan took the book from her and looked through it, at all the many such passages underlined in long-ago pencil. “But he knew all this stuff, right?” he asked. “Your father knew all this?”

Jyl nodded, her eyes stinging with pride.

“I'd like to read this book,” Stephan said. “I know it means a lot to you, and I wouldn't ask to take it with me—I wouldn't want to get it banged up—but I'd like to read it, and make notes from it, while I'm over here.”

Jyl smiled. “All right. But let's start over. Let's start at the beginning.” She took down a roll of butcher paper, spread it across the table, and began with the basics, explaining the different ways rocks can be formed from the ash and guts and detritus of the earth: the igneous rocks arising straight from the cooling fire of subterranean cauldrons, the sedimentary rocks the cumulative residue of dust and grit and silt being deposited with the earnestness of a mason, the sediments not settling by fiery will, but obedient instead only to the inescapable mandates of gravity; and the metamorphic rocks, her favorites: stones so substantially altered from their original igneous or sedimentary form by the world's and time's terrible pressures, smoothed now into graceful curves and folded into fantastic swirls and reversals, so that the geologist examining them could sometimes not tell at first in which direction the past ran and in which, the future...

As she talked, she illustrated her lecture with watercolors, sketching mountains and oceans, rivers and storms, showing how the simple forces of weather—morning sunrise,
wind, frost, snow and rain—in conjunction with the earth's own subtle movements, its faint stretches and belches and yawns, conspire across the arc of time to wear even the largest and most jagged mountains down to desert plains, and how even the oceans fall back to reveal their gleaming, glittering mud, which is then lifted miles into the sky, creeping upward a thousandth of an inch per year, but leaping nonetheless, and carrying in that hardened crypt many of the fossils that had once lived far beneath the sea, and which would now be spending eons so much closer to the sun, suspended atop mountains, exposed to wind and rain and snow, the hoofs of mountain goats, and the curious eyes of man, and all the glittering green world shining below...

With her sketches, she detailed the creation of alluvial fans, longshore point bars, tectonic plates, and unconformities. The world-beneath-the-world, the stone world on the back of which rested the living world, was born for the children that night, and they began to understand that it, too, was living, though at a different pace, and that although such knowledge might trouble their parents' beliefs, they were riding on the earth's back, and that beneath the stone world there was even another, third world, on the back of which the stone world rode, and that that third and even lower world was the river or current of time...

Jyl had started painting the cross sections of geological time for them, starting at the surface and intending to work all the way down, through the dinosauric creations and into the world-flooded Devonian and Silurian, into the stone-cold Cambrian, and then farther, into the colder, utterly lifeless time of Precambrian, but Shayna reminded her of the salmon and the TV dinners in the oven, and Jyl looked up in
total surprise, having been so immersed in the teaching, and so unaccustomed to cooking, that she only vaguely remembered having put the food in the oven; and setting her paintbrush down and hurrying over to the stove, she found that the big salmon was perfect, though the TV dinners were a little crispy.

They suspended their geology lecture for the evening and sat around the fireplace and ate their dinners. Jyl told them about her time in Alaska, and about a pilot she had known there, a young man who had flown her around in a floatplane to much of the same backcountry where her father had worked: visiting the same lakes and walking along the same beaches, looking at the same mountains. It was this same pilot who had sent her the salmon they were eating, and she told them that when she got better she had it in her mind to go back up there and visit him.

“Will you marry him?” Shayna asked. A fairy tale.

Jyl laughed. “No,” she said, “he's just a friend. Just a bush pilot. But I like his company.”

“We were in Alaska,” Stephan said. “Just before she was born.”

“Where?” Jyl said. “Doing what?”

“Missionary stuff. We were in Seward, but Pa would fly into the villages a lot. I'm pretty sure it was missionary stuff.”

“How long were you there?”

Stephan shrugged. “Just a couple of years. Mama didn't like it. Nobody liked it. It was beautiful, but nobody liked it.”

They were all quiet for a while, before Shayna finally said, quietly—as if in Jyl's defense, or defense of Jyl's father—“I would have liked it.”

Jyl smiled. “So y'all like it here?”

Stephan shrugged. “I think so,” he said. “Sometimes it's a little hard—the work—but I think so.”

“I do,” said Shayna. “I love it.”

It was past nine o'clock—the latest Jyl had stayed up since before the illness. She took down some old elk hides from her closet and prepared twin pallets for the children next to the wood stove, and then, feeling her weariness returning like the break of a towering wave, she barely had time and energy to clean the dishes before collapsing into her own bed. She was asleep even before the children were, even as the children were still visiting with her quietly, talking between themselves and asking her occasional questions: and when they realized she was asleep, Stephan got up and wrote his questions down on the butcher paper with its illustrations so that he would not forget them. Questions about different minerals, and different kinds of salmon; about the floatplane, and about her father.

Then he turned out the lantern, and he and Shayna, though restless in the new surroundings, tried to get to sleep as quickly as possible, knowing that they would need to conserve their strength for the trip home and the coming day. The unfamiliar stove burned its wood differently, made different sounds, and through the glass plate in its door they could see the sparks and embers swirling and glowing, and they stared at it as if viewing the maw of a tiny volcano.

The children slept until two, when they awakened to a fire that was nearly out—quietly, Stephan built it back up—and they dressed warmly and went out into the night to fell another tree for Jyl before leaving.

The storm had passed, leaving a crystalline glaze over the world as the temperatures fell, and the snowflakes, quick
frozen now, tinkled like glass scales as they passed through them. Their breath rose in jets of fog when they spoke, and when they came to the next dead pine, Stephan started the saw, felled the tree and bucked it as fast as possible, not wanting to awaken Jyl, and then shut the saw off and let the huge silence of the stars sweep back in over them.

Because the snow was deep, it took them more than an hour to split and carry that wood to the porch, stacking it as quietly as possible; and by the time they had the saw and maul and gas and oil cans stored, and the bark and snow swept from the porch, they were later getting away than they had intended, so that they had to run, galloping through the snow like draft horses, and steaming from their effort.

They made it back to their cabin—exhausted, but arrived—and quietly there, too, set about their labors in preparation for the day.

 

Jyl dreamed again that she was running, though with difficulty this time rather than in the effortless glide of the previous dream. And there was a pain in her gut as her glycogen-depleted organs cramped and sought to metabolize her muscle and bone, and even themselves—metabolizing anything for just a bit more available energy, in order to keep going, to keep struggling up the hill.

It was a sensation she recognized from her earlier days of strength, when she had been able to run seemingly without ceasing; and in the dream, though it was painful, she welcomed it, glad as she was to be back on the mountain.

Finally, though, the pain awakened her, and she sat up, trying to be as quiet as possible to avoid waking the children. When she went to get a glass of water, she saw that they were
gone; lighting a lantern to see if they had left a note, she found none, though she did see the questions Stephan had written down on the butcher paper in the middle of the night. And the sense of loss she knew was sharper than any stitch in her side, far deeper than any absence of glycogen.

Unable to get back to sleep, she built the fire up again and fixed a cup of tea, and set about answering their questions, writing the answers in the tiniest of script so that she could scroll them up into some of the larger message bottles and place them in one of the larger crafts, to set sail later that afternoon. Her answers would be a departure, a break, from the saga of the broken king, but one she welcomed; and as she worked on her notes—feeling as she had in college, laboring over an exam in which the correct answers were of utmost importance—she had the feeling also of being lured up from out of the depths and the darkness, and out into the bright light of some open and verdant spring meadow: as if she, and not her father, was the broken king, but that she was daring now, or at least desiring, to be reassembled.