Where the Sea Used to Be (20 page)

So vegetation was appointed to do the work and to conserve the material. This explains the presence of coal-making trees upon the shores of the preceding epoch. They came by appointment, they were to fulfill a plan; they stood waiting by the border of a domain which had been promised them for a possession. All the conditions favored. This was not fortuitous; it was a preparation. Unlimited supplies of aliment pervaded the atmosphere. The marshy situation exhaled the abundant vapor in which vegetation delights!

The earth, in its comparative newness, retained the warmth to stimulate the root. So tree fern and herbaceous fern, Calamite and Sigillaria, began work. Atom by atom, they selected the poison from the atmosphere, and, returning the oxygen, fixed the carbon in their tissues. Frond, stem, and root treasured up the fuel impelled by the force of sunlight. Every pound of vegetable answered to a given amount of solar force. The world was in balance! A rough work in progress.

Generations of plants succeeding each other fell prostrate and added their substance to the growing bed of peat. Standing water protected the peat from decomposition. Now the skies again were lowering, and forebodings of change trembled through the continent. A cataclysm was at hand! The wide expanse of marshy land again went down.

Old Ocean, which had roared and frothed in rage around the borders of the territory of which he had been dispossessed, came careering back to his old haunts.

Old Ocean brought a freight of mud and sand, and he spread it over the whole vast peat bed—as if to make sure of no renewal of the usurpation—like those who sow with salt the sites of ruined cities to make the ruin a finality.

But the salt sowed by resentful Old Ocean was in truth a packing away of something destined to be saved, not forgotten. It was part of a beneficent plan, and the anger of the ocean was made an instrument for
this accomplishment. Beds of clay and sand shut out from the atmosphere the sheet of peaty matter which was to consolidate to coal.

The dominion of the ocean was temporary. Apparent regress was in truth a forward movement! Again the reeking sea bottom came up to sunlight, and another scene of bright verdure was spread where late, Old Ocean had celebrated a jubilee. It looked as if the former forest had undergone a resurrection. Here stood again
Lepidodendron
in its summer hat, and
Sigillaria
and the other established forms. But they were other species; and with them was an occasional newcomer among the vegetable types. They understood for what purpose they had been sent, and resumed the work of selecting the impurity from the air. Already, some adventurous and hardy types of air-breathers had colonized the jungle. They were sluggish and slimy creatures, with whom life passed slowly, and respiration was a matter of comparative indifference. Yet they enjoyed existence. They grazed on the humble herb; they seized the dragonfly, alighted to rest his wing; they violated the home retreats of the passive snails. They crawled out and sunned themselves on the ferny bank. There were grosser and heavier forms, mail-clad and vociferous: haunting the bayou; paddling for some eligible fishing station; bellowing like oxen, when excited in pursuit; stirring up the mire of the stagnant bay; resting their chins on the reeking bank to absorb the slanting sun-warmth of the early morning, or lolling under the noonday shade of some wide-spreading and umbrageous
Lepidodendron.

Why prolong the tale? The land continued to oscillate as long as the purification of the air was incomplete: working, slaving to make the world clean for man. Again and again the forest resumed its work, and bed after bed was stored away beneath ocean sediments, to await the end.

When the beneficent work had been accomplished, the tired forces, those which had endured with trembling and vibrations—the enormous strain that had been accumulating under the prolonged contraction of the earth's interior—yielded with a tremendous collapse that jarred the hemisphere like the finishing throes of some great rutting thing.

Huge folds of massive crust uprose and were mashed together till their crests pierced the clouds. This was the birth of both the Appalachians and the shining Stony Mountains. This event proclaimed the end of the long Paleozoic Era.

Only the stumps of those folds remain today. Though crumbling, they
stand as monuments of the mighty means through which the world was prepared for man and civilization. Lo, I come!! Me—Dudley Estes. Lo! I am here! The world was finally made ready for me!!

 

Mel was still working in the kitchen, but had been listening and smiling as she worked. When he was done reading, Wallis asked Colter what he thought about all that—if that was the way they still taught it in schools.

“I'd say that's one mixed-up lunatic nut case, is what I'd say,” Colter said, forgetting that he was talking about Mel's father.

But Mel took no offense. “He's out there all right,” she said.

“Is he crazy?” Colter asked.

Mel thought about it for a moment. “Well, he's
functional,
if that's what you mean,” she said. “He's able to get by. And he's a great geologist.”

“That's not what I mean,” Colter said.

“No,” Mel said, “he's not crazy.”

Colter wasn't convinced. “He sounds like it.” He thought for a moment and then asked, “Do you think that's what some of those people at the Bible school are like?”

Mel shook her head. “Dudley's not a churchgoer. The only god or church he believes in is the church of Himself.”

She brought them each a cup of tea. It was two o'clock. The roof and rafters were groaning and creaking, contracting in the deep cold as if being clutched by it. “Cheers,” Mel said, “Merry Christmas.” She patted Colter on the back.

They sat for a while watching the fire, and then Colter rose and said, “I changed my mind. I'm going home now.”

“Are you sure?” Mel asked. “It's so cold.”

“Yes,” Colter said, and they didn't try to talk him out of it, but felt guilty that they hadn't been able to provide him with whatever it was he was looking for. Wallis felt especially bad, believing that perhaps the passage he had read from Old Dudley's journal had upset him.

Colter wouldn't take an extra coat with him, or matches, though he did agree to take a lantern.

“I'll stay warm enough, walking,” he said. He stepped out onto the fierce crust of snow. “It'll be fun, walking across the top of it. It's like a highway.” He wished them good night and Merry Christmas, and set off toward the woods. The wolves were still howling, and Mel wondered if they were frustrated that, this evening at least, their prey could run across the top of the snow rather than floundering.

Colter's lantern disappeared, following the trail of the carolers.

Mel and Wallis went back inside. They built the fires back up: stoked them full. They sat in the den—Mel at her desk, working in her notebooks, and Wallis sitting on the floor next to the fireplace, reading further into the old journals—and the clock ticked quietly, and all was as calm as if they were an old married couple.

At midnight Mel blew out her lamp, put more wood on the fire, said, “I feel marooned,” and sat down next to Wallis.

“I do too,” said Wallis.

They slept again in each other's arms—closer, this time—and, carefully—careful because there was still no love in it, only curiosity and loneliness—he kissed her, and just as carefully, she kissed him back once, slowly, and then they slept, both of them being extraordinarily cautious to avoid thinking of the future.

 

T
HE MASTER CAME CREEPING INTO THE VALLEY AFTER
midnight, bringing with him his human captive as well as two hawks. He was anxious to check in on, and in some manner reclaim, even if invisibly, what was his: his daughter and his other geologist.

He had chilled the hawks—redtails—in the freezer at his townhouse in Houston, nearly to the point of freezing, and then had hooded them and wrapped them in newspaper for insulation and bound them with twine and duct tape before stuffing them into Matthew's duffel bag, hoping that airport security would not discover them, which they did not.

They had rented a car, a limousine used for dignitaries, in Helena, and had driven north, against Matthew's protests that no vehicle would be able to get into the valley: that they would need snowmobiles, or helicopters, or skis. Matthew had seen Old Dudley like this before—almost rut-crazed with obstinacy, so much so that it seemed as if even a small matter had become a struggle of life and death. When he got this way, it was as if there had been a slippage within Old Dudley, as if the tooth of some gear had been chipped—and Matthew, who had been stalked by lions and charged by bears, was never so chilled or frightened—the hair on his neck rising—as when one of Old Dudley's gears slipped and he fixed upon Matthew, or whomever the transgressive party happened to be, that unblinking round-eyed stare of what seemed to be nothing less than pure malevolence.

Old Dudley's tong marks would pulse and flex deeper, with a respiration of their own, as if two organisms, two beings, were inhabiting Old Dudley—one controlled by the human beatings of his heart, like any other man, and the other controlled by some awful, unknowable rhythm or pulse behind those tong marks.

And always the offender would wilt and fall back, or turn away, and Old Dudley would get his wish; and the issue in question would no longer seem so important to his opponent, who would instead carry within him or her for days the illogical but inescapable feeling that he or she was fortunate simply to be alive.

If Matthew had stood firm and argued further against the limousine, would the old man have flown at him, and tried, with his teeth, to rip his neck out? The force behind Dudley's anger was such that it seemed he would.

They had driven north in the long black car, through blinding snow, slipping and fishtailing on wind-scoured ice, then plowing through snow, while the hawks, still hooded, riding perched in the back seat, warmed back into full life, shitting and hissing, with their strength fading fast, and needing to kill soon. With each bend and slip in the road, the hawks had clutched the leather seats tighter with their talons, so that soon the upholstery was shredded.

As usual, the northern landscape began to arouse discomfort in Old Dudley: the slashing snow, the tunnel of dark towering trees through which they were speeding made it seem to him, always, as if they had gone past some point of civility, past some point where things could be relied upon to turn out all right. A place where man was not king. He missed the steamy tropics of Houston—the heat and haze and sluggish, sweaty, fungal torpor; and to allay his nerves, he drank steadily from a bottle of rum, and from time to time turned on the overhead dome light to peer at the small photographs of nude women, cut from the pages of skin magazines and glued to the backs of index cards, which he carried with him on trips away from home for the purpose of cheering himself up.

He studied one photo, his favorite, in particular.

“Man, I ever catch up with this one, I can't begin to tell you the things I'd like to do to her,” he said.

Matthew rolled down the electric window, snatched the photo from Old Dudley, and tossed it outside. Dudley wailed, causing the hawks to screech and flail about on their jesses—wings beating and drumming against the roof—and then said, “Ah, that's all right, they're not the real thing”—and he stared out at the snow spiraling past as they climbed higher into the mountains. Dudley said, “Oh, I've got to stop thinking about it, got to get it out of my mind, or I'm lost,” and he drank from the bottle and was silent then, settling down into some grim, lower place of torpor.

They drove into and then through the cold front, so that the snow was behind them and the stars burned fiercely above, so bright that the stabs and flashes of them welded and seared old memories in their minds, summoned things within them, old stories and histories they had not remembered in a long time, or had never known.

At the summit, the pass was snowed in, but the upper skin of snow was frozen so tight and polished so smooth by the wind that Old Dudley believed they could drive across it, and he forced Matthew to keep going.

They had extra clothes in their suitcases and duffel bags, but they were still wearing their black business suits and ties, and their slick-soled little black leather pointed-toe dress shoes, so that they looked like undertakers. If they got stuck, Matthew thought—if even one wheel punched through that crust, taut as stone but only a few inches thick—the car would be swallowed by snow, and they had no skis or snowshoes, nor even winter boots or sleeping bags, so that almost surely they would freeze.

Perhaps Matthew could build a few small fires with the limousine's cigarette lighter, and perhaps they could hunt a grouse or a hare with the hawks, but then one or both of the hawks would fly off and not come back. Matthew and Dudley would starve if they did not freeze first, for no one would be up in the high country to help them for months. There would perhaps be a mid-winter delivery by snow machine, but perhaps not. In any event, they would be buried beneath several feet of snow by then, and their frozen carcasses, and the car itself, would not be discovered until May or even June.

They raced across the ice shield, sliding crossways and backward sometimes, skating and spinning, with Old Dudley ranting at Matthew to “Push on, push on”; and they were in too deep, Matthew understood, to do anything but that. Sometimes in their spins the flanks of the long car grazed the trunks of trees. Matthew had no idea whether they were on the road itself. He knew they were near it, but it was also possible that in places they were driving over hundred-foot gorges filled with snow. Shooting stars tumbled from the sky like diving things taking shelter from the presence of the two men's horrid advance.