Where the Sea Used to Be (10 page)

“Matthew got him on Halloween afternoon, up on Boyd Mountain,” Mel said. She reached out to the elk's bare muscle, the frozen slab of it, and rested her hand on it as she would a horse. “Boy, that was a happy day.”

“Matthew was here—that recently?” Wallis asked. He tried to think back to Halloween. If Matthew had come up here, he hadn't mentioned where he had gone.

“Just for a day and a half.” Mel tucked her free hand in against her chest once more, warming it. “He always comes and gets my year's meat,” she said. “He's always done that.” She brightened, remembering the day. “We built a sled and skidded it to a cliff—lowered it down to the Bull River—built a raft, and rode, and swam with it, out to an old logging road. Loaded it into the jeep and drove home.”

They walked over to the other of Matthew's bounty: a giant mule deer, not yet skinned, also hanging parallel to, but above the ground, like a ghost ship. “Matthew got him that next day, at daylight, just before he left, on the mountain behind the house,” Mel said, remembering the details with what seemed like the intensity of hunger. “I went out with him. There'd been a light snow that night. The deer was browsing kinnikinnick leaves. He had one stuck between his teeth and was standing there with his head pointed straight up, trying to dislodge it with his teeth. The sun was behind us. You could hear snow melting all over the mountain. When Matthew shot, this old boy went down like his legs were knocked out from beneath him.

“He was dreaming the sleep of angels even before the sound of the shot reached him,” Mel said. “While we were cleaning him, a grizzly came over the top of the ridge and sat and watched us. They're starting to learn that when they hear a rifle in the fall, it usually means a gut pile to feed on. Sometimes they run the hunters off and eat the whole deer. Sometimes the wolves and ravens and coyotes and other creatures also come to the sound of the shot. But this day there was just that one big bear, and he didn't bother us. We had blood up to our elbows, but he just sat there and watched us. We left the heart and liver for him. A big boar grizzly.

“He could have gotten us if he'd wanted. What a day,” she said.

They toured the rest of the smokehouse. All three of the valley's species of grouse—ruffed, spruce, and blue—hung with heads and wings folded, feet dangling. Some were plucked; others still had their feathers. It was like being in a delicatessen, and Wallis hoped he would get a chance to eat them. He wondered what they tasted like. They were the size of small chickens, but as beautiful as pheasants: some rust and russet, gray and black, others dusky blue, with tiger bars across their tails, and short, sturdy beaks.

“Is Matthew a good shot?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Mel.

There were fish hanging, too, skillet-sized trout and whitefish, belly-swooped from the gorging of summer, and the fish had absorbed the smokehouse's odors, apple and cherry wood, and some alder. Wallis sniffed the side of one trout, a two-pounder—“Go ahead,” Mel said, “take a bite”—and he did. It was delicious.

“Do you ever use mesquite?” he asked. “Do you ever have Matthew or your father send it up from Texas?”

Mel shook her head. “No,” she said. “I don't ask for it, if it's not from the valley. I try not to bring in anything alien, anything foreign,” she said. “If Matthew sends it, I'll use it—but I don't ask.” She looked to the back of the smokehouse, to her stack of wood, as if Texas, and mesquite, were in that direction.

“Apples and cherries grow up here?” he asked.

Mel smiled. “Yes,” she said. “At the school, and behind Helen's house, behind the mercantile, down low, along the river. Helen's trees don't blossom, and they don't bear fruit, but they grow,” she said. “They're real big, and real old.” She shrugged. “Maybe one year they will.”

“How old are they?” Wallis asked.

“Helen planted them when she was a little girl. Seventy, eighty years ago. I don't know.”

“And they
never
blossomed?” Wallis asked.

Mel shook her head. “They just grow,” she said, a little defensively.

There were more fish, pickled in jars, and other fish packed in last spring's ice in cedar crates, resting on sawdust. They gleamed before the light of the lantern, as Mel showed them to him, case after case, like a proud grocer.

She lifted the lantern, and now he saw that there were iron bars in front of the windows, and his first thought was that she truly believed these creatures of the woods might still somehow by desire alone make it back into the woods, and that she was trying to prevent their escape.

“The bears try to come in sometimes,” she said. “And wolverines. There are old tooth marks and claw marks all over this building,” she said, “beginning from when Matthew's parents first built and homesteaded this place, on up to this year.” Mel laughed. “Sometimes in the spring, before they've had their greens—when their gums are still weak—they'll bite at the sides of the building, and their teeth will come out and get stuck in the wood. The wolverines are the worst; they won't run from you. They'll sit up on the roof for two or three days, trying to come down the chimney, and just snarl at you. I've thrown snowballs at them, shot the rifle over their head,
everything,
but they won't run off. Ravens and coyotes try to get in, and eagles, too. Some mornings in the fall there'll be a pair of golden eagles sitting on the roof.

“My father used to hunt with eagles,” she said quietly. “He went over to Russia and bought one of those big Asian golden eagles. He spent a month over there using it to hunt deer, wolves, and even bears. They used to use them in battle, to hunt men.” She was speaking calmly, with no trace of revulsion or wonder—just a quietness, as if she were unsure of even her own family's past. As if even events of the past could not be trusted if the tracks or other proof of them were not before her, lying somewhere out into the future.

“It was before I was born,” she said. “I've heard him talk about it. The authorities wouldn't let him keep the eagle.”

Mel was silent then, thinking of how Matthew and Old Dudley had twined together—of the way she could no longer think of one without the other, so that it was as if she had had them both taken from her—and she stepped in next to Wallis and tucked her head down. Her weight was hard and dense against him, though he could tell, too, that she was holding something in reserve: that always, she would be doing that, with anyone. He would never have guessed she was lonely. She had too much to do, it seemed, and the days were too short. Never in a million years would he have guessed that.

The light cast a glow around their frozen feet and steam rose from their boots. All the animals hung silent, motionless, as if respecting Mel's sadness; mouths gaping, hearts cut out, and eyes blue-blind, but still seeing, and feeling: all pointing skyward and rising, but with part of them lingering too, communicating with her—speaking some intermediary language that rested between man and the stars.

Mel and Wallis stood there like horses in a stable, their ankles steaming from the lantern heat, for a long while, just listening to the snow fall, and to the hiss of the lantern. When the lantern spent its fuel and died with a sputter, the smoke drew back into a genie's bottle, and as the light went away it drew with it the final, fading images of the mooneyed elk, the giant-racked deer, and the sleepy grouse, their heads hung, and the brilliant brook trout, the ascending silver rainbow trout and the blood-bright cutthroats.

In the last wisp of gold light, Wallis saw a dark pile of potatoes in one corner, the pile assuming the shape of a bear as the light fled, and in the gathered darkness the fish and ascending game were turned into silhouetted angels.

Now there was just the sound of the snow burying Wallis and Mel. Wallis put his arms around Mel and held on as if they were going down together.

Mel steadied and took a step back. She said nothing of the moment. Wallis thought how to her it must have seemed as natural as holding a hand up for help, had she slipped and gone down on the ice; and because it was cold, so cold now that it hurt their lungs to breathe, and because they were shivering, they left the smokehouse.

When they stepped outside into the night, the sound was fresher.

The light from their cabin was gone—either burned out, or, more likely, obscured by the blizzard. Mel stood shoulder to shoulder with him, pausing for only a moment after she had shut and barred the smokehouse door behind her. She looked up the hill in the direction where her instinct and memory told her the cabin was.

If the cabin's lantern were out, and if she veered off her heart's course by a degree or two in the beginning, they would never reach the cabin. They might miss it, in their errant arc, by twenty yards, or by a few inches—their groping hands catching only feathery, falling snow.

And that is how they would die—two strangers, only beginning to know anything about each other. They would travel past their home, would feel the jungle brushing against their faces, and know they'd overshot the tiny sanctuary of the cabin.

“Hold onto me,” Mel said, looking up the hill with resolve, almost anger—as if the cabin were hiding from her—and she started up the hill, wading through the deep snow fast, without a trace of hesitation or caution.

It seemed to Wallis that they walked for a long time, and then he was certain that they had walked for a long time, and still they had not yet come to the cabin.

He held onto Mel's coat as he would the tail of a horse. She stopped when it seemed sure that they had gone too far. He moved in close, heard her grunt a curse, but he did not hear fear in her voice. Was it too late, he wondered, to hunker down—to burrow into the snow like a bear or a grouse; to let it cover them until it was warm as a blanket, and then to come back out when it stopped snowing, if it ever stopped?

Mel turned and began moving hard to the right—almost a lunge—and Wallis nearly lost his grasp on her. She traveled another ten steps and then stopped again. They stood there in the blizzard like ghosts.

Mel was looking hard in one direction, her stare fixed at nothing. Wallis watched too. It was as if she were listening to something, though all of the senses were gone, rendered unintelligible, meaningless. There was only the weight and pull of gravity beneath their feet.

Her tenseness eased. Her breathing steadied. She continued to watch in the one direction, as a hunter watches a meadow. Wallis could see it, then—or thought he could see it. A paleness in the storm disappeared when he looked at it, but when he tried to look away, it came back again: not a glow, by any stretch of the imagination—not the thing they were looking for—but a lessening, a gauziness, which was inviting. It tempted them to step through it.

Wallis wanted to move toward it immediately. Pants cuffs frozen solid. Shaking and rattling, shivering like a sack of bones. Mel held her ground: watched that different patch of storm as if challenging it.

It began to storm harder, and the patch, the place of nothing they were looking at, disappeared. Mel took a full step toward it, and then another, and then she began moving toward it quickly. It reappeared, and now it had the faintest yellow color to it, and then more, until it was a glow, and it was exactly the opposite of how the light had gone back into the lantern.

Inside, the boards beneath their feet. The familiar objects on her shelves, when they stepped inside: feathers, stones, shells, and the sprawl of closed, silent books—each one of them swimming with millions of hieroglyphics that were designed, upon being scanned, to ignite into light and knowledge, into images and scents and sounds.

The pine planking of her floor. The dishes from their meal, the cold stone fireplace, and the cold air in the cabin, the lantern's bright light, and the snow not yet melting from their boots, for already the cabin had grown so cold. Only a degree or two—the tiniest bit of correction to the angle of their arc, in the beginning—separated them from all the snow beyond, and so much cold—too much cold, even for Mel.

They knew better than to talk about it, or to joke about it.

Wallis got the fire going again. Mel crouched next to him and warmed her hands before the flames. When she had feeling in them once more, she stood and walked once around the inside of her cabin, examining things—handling this river stone, or that piece of obsidian—and when she went past her desk, she paused and looked at her notes spread out there. She tapped the open notebook once, as if trying to remember all that lay beneath that open page, and she completed her lap by coming back to the fireplace, where Wallis was still adding kindling.

It was a cold fire. That was one of the things that amazed him most about the valley: how sometimes it would be so frigid that he could see a fire's flames, could smell them, could hear the wood snapping, but could still feel no warmth. He could pass his bare hands right through the flames and be shivering all the while.

Wallis slept on the floor in front of the fire, wrapped in elk hides again. Mel touched his arm, then went down the hallway to her bedroom. The flames threw light all around the cabin, but gradually grew lower as Wallis dreamed his way toward darkness. When the fire had gone completely out, he woke once and got it lit again, then went back to sleep. It was so cold that his head hurt. He wondered if the trees felt pain, or sensed it, before they cracked open in the night. He could hear them splitting.

He dreamed about the subterranean lands he would endeavor to enter in the summer or fall, and of the distant lands he had entered elsewhere, and broken apart. He dreamed of the mineralization that binds sand grains together—sometimes calcareous, other times friable and porous, easily crushed. It was hard for him to imagine the specific processes that had given rise to those individual cementings below: hard to imagine the specific processes that had held an ancient land in place; but that night, in his dreams, he imagined that perhaps those old lands were held in place by a quietness and enduringness—a smoothness of fit. The way rain falls, the way snow falls. The way birds sleep. The way lichens grow in red and blue mosaics across damp boulders and old stone walls. The way a log rots.