Where the Sea Used to Be (40 page)

There was a panel, a hatch, in the horse's neck, through which Danny could be lowered. The horse was rearing up on its hind legs—purple stars and more gold lightning bolts decorated its belly—so that they would have to slide Danny in feet-first; and once inside, it would be as if he were leaning in tight against the big horse's neck with both arms wrapped around it—perhaps not the most glamorous riding style for an ex-rodeo star, but at least the horse was reared up and ascending, rather than plunging.

Joshua skidded his creation down to the river and pushed it onto the ice. The wooden stallion was half again as large as his black stallion. The days had warmed sufficiently to melt the crust of snow to water atop the ice, which froze at night, so that the entire river was now a glassine ribbon, black and shiny as obsidian and flecked with the reflection of each star above. Joshua wondered if there was a corresponding river, or echo, or memory of river, somehow working its path in similar fashion through the stars above.

He hitched the wooden horse to the stallion, then climbed on the stallion and clicked him forward. The big horse loved to run in the cold air, and soon he was trotting, with the larger horse sledding along behind, always at the same distance. The ice boomed and squeaked and creaked under the percussion of the stallion's steel hooves, and the waves of sound vibrated through the ice and traveled up the river as if along a quivering tuning fork. Anyone in town, miles ahead, who might have been near the river at that time, could easily have placed their ear against the ice and heard clearly the sound of their approach. Joshua nudged the stallion to a gallop now, exhilarated by the blur of stars hurtling past his cold-tearing eyes—frozen tears tumbled down his cheeks, and a shooting star melted from the sky just ahead of them, so that it appeared to have tumbled into the river just around the bend. The ice shuddered with each landing of the stallion's hooves, and the pinewood horse skimmed along behind, sending up a starlit spray of ice shavings. Joshua thought of all the fish sleeping beneath the river's ice: wondered if he was startling every fish in the river for a hundred miles in either direction. The sound of their passage reaching on up deep into Canada. Would the fish believe that spring had come early—that the river ice was breaking up a few weeks early, even when their bodies told them
No, it is still too early
. . . What would they think? That the rules had changed?

Joshua slowed the stallion to a canter, rounding a bend, to keep him from slipping on the ice. He was chilled from the wind of their speed and leaned in close against the horse for warmth, and wondered if indeed it was Danny for whom he had been hearing the sounds of mourning. In a strange way that he knew he would never be able to acknowledge to anybody—and stranger still for the lack of shame he felt, in thinking it—he hoped that it had been Danny, and not another, so that his trip would not have been wasted; and he wondered how it would make Danny feel, if it were indeed not Danny, but another who had passed, to see Danny's dark flame-breathing carriage come cantering up for him nonetheless.

The stallion slowed to a crisp walk now. White foam covered his mouth and nostrils, and he was lathered with sweat, steaming. A band of four coyotes trotted down the ice behind them. A lion crouched in the brush on the riverbank and watched, curled its tail slowly.

Closer to town the sounds of grieving, and laughter, grew louder, and the dull glow of lights from the village became visible over the trees. Joshua stopped and let the stallion rest. With his hatchet he chopped a hole in the river ice so that the stallion could drink again. After a great length the stallion lifted its head—water dripping from its lips—and then stared over its shoulder at the silhouette of the fire horse; watched it for a long time.

Joshua waited until the stallion had finally stopped steaming before brushing and currying him so that he would look his best. The coyotes stood motionless at a distance, curious.

Joshua walked back to his creation and examined it. It was still tight and intact, ready for use. He climbed up on it, opened the hatch, and slid down in it, then propped the hatch open so that he could see the stars.

He curled up inside the fire horse, smelling the odor of fresh-sawn pine, and gave the stallion the order to continue. They started forward again. Joshua watched the stars scroll past overhead and listened to the spray of ice against the belly of the coffin. Down in the horse's belly he could hear no mourning, but the stallion knew where he was going and stopped when he saw the lights of town clearly through the trees. Joshua climbed out, led the stallion up to shore, tied him to a tree—the fire horse remained hidden back in the woods—and went up the hill toward the sound of the wake.

 

It took a full day of bonfire to thaw enough ice and earth to create a place soft enough to dig, and then another two days of shoveling and pick-axing, working in shifts, to carve a hole deep enough for the fire horse. As the town worked, they tried to remember how many of Joshua's animals were already down there—five, they calculated, now six—a salmon, a bear, a bobcat, a goose, and an elk—and they commented on how they would soon have to expand the cemetery, and of how the occupants had to be spaced farther apart, like the giant trees in old-growth forest, with so much space between them. It wouldn't do to crowd big things together.

They finally had made the hole deep enough for the horse, but went deeper—and at dusk the next day they lowered the great horse into the hole and began filling in the loose soil, until it was up to the horse's back, at which point they slid Danny into the horse's neck. He had stiffened considerably, but they finally got him in, and knew that in the earth's warmth he would loosen soon to the desired fit.

They finished covering the hole, tamped the earth flat, piled flat stones over the spot to discourage the coyotes and wolves from digging, and retired to the bar to say their last good-byes. It snowed hard that night, so that the next day the signs of their recent labors were hidden.

 

In bed, Mel asked Wallis not to enter her, but to only hold her. She said that she felt weak and hollow inside, carved out, and frightened. Wallis asked if she wanted to go back to the wolves, but Mel said no, that she was just empty-feeling and frightened, was all—as if crossing a shaky rope bridge high above a gorge.

“When was the last time you were frightened?” she asked him.

 

The profiteers came a week later, on a Saturday. They came in a pack, half a dozen of them on snowmobiles straining to pull small trailers, and people in the valley heard the bee-buzz of their engines coming over the summit one morning and knew that they were back, and hurried toward town to be there when they arrived. Even before the profiteers got there, the townspeople could see the dense blue ribbons of smoke above the trees, ribbons of smoke glowing luminous in the sun and moving closer, as if a train were chugging through the woods, and they could smell the smoke long before the snow machines arrived, and when they came into town the sound seemed to saw winter in half in a way that was neither pleasing nor respectful.

The profiteers knew from past experience not to set up their trailers right away, but to settle in—to come into the bar and have a cup of coffee and maybe a shot of rum; to say hello, after a year's absence—to scope out new faces and take note of who was absent. Danny had always been one of their best customers, and they kept waiting for him to appear, before the silence of his absence finally sunk in on them. Artie explained that he would be taking care of the bar now.

The profiteers told how they had not been able to make it all the way in to the valley in a single day; how they had gotten only halfway the first day and had to set up a big wall tent on the summit and build a fire.

The profiteers were from Helena. One year there had been a woman among them, but this year they were all men. Coming down off the mountain like that, clad in their huge insulated snowsuits and bespectacled with goggles and helmets, they had appeared as an alien species; but now as they sat at the bar and chatted, with their helmets off and their snowsuits hung on the wall, they appeared human again, and benign, even friendly. They understood that their greatest asset was their rarity: that it was at first a simple enough pleasure for the townspeople merely to feast their eyes on the sight of someone new. In years past, depending on the winter, people had come up to them and had touched them as they spoke—strangers resting a hand on their backs or shoulders as if they had known them for a long time, or, more disturbingly, as they would rest a hand on the neck or flank of a domestic animal.

Typically, the profiteers stayed all day and then left at first darkness—wanting to take full advantage of that last diminishing wedge of snowy dusk, when they pulled in 75 percent of their business from the people who had had their eye on something all day but who had been unable to commit until night fell and the profiteers began loading their trailers, ready to disappear . . .

It was funny and touching, what sometimes happened in that last hour of light. One year a woman showed up wanting to buy a ride out of the valley—forever away from the valley. She was leaving her husband, and whether she left on foot or on the back of a snow machine, she was going that night. The one that gave her the ride out had ended up marrying her.

The profiteers had contracted with the postal service to bring in the last few months' mail, and now, as was their custom, they spread it out on the bar and let the villagers sift and paw through it: ancient, fermented fruitcakes from relatives back east; news of births and deaths, weddings and divorces; checks and bills; junk mail; catalogs; and long letters from old friends. Some of the mail was devoured right there in the bar, though most of it was stored away to take home to be read in privacy, and savored.

Sometimes it took half an hour to sort all the mail, and afterward, there was throughout the bar a tapering off of excitement, and a kind of crystalline silence that would creep in—there was never enough mail—and after the pile of leftover mail had been double- and triplechecked (old newspapers held upside down and shaken for any stray postcards that might have been hidden)—a loneliness would settle, and the townspeople would feel colder, and unfulfilled, whereas the day before they might have been feeling just fine: durable, rugged, sturdy—square to the world, possessing neither hope nor despair.

Into this vacancy, this new loneliness, the profiteers moved. They began setting up their trailers, pitching awnings or tents over their wares if it was snowing or displaying them in the bright spring sunlight on nice days. The street became a small bazaar, and the townspeople strolled around each trailer, handling everything: touching things, sniffing them, consuming them with their eyes.

Old sports magazines. Fresh bacon, fresh lemons, fresh-cut flowers, fresh coffee beans. New books, spines uncracked, crisp as coins. Bathing suits, umbrellas, watermelons, pencils, necklaces, sugar, honey, salt, black pepper, red pepper, limes, oranges, apples, Bibles, records, cassettes, batteries. It always astounded the townspeople how much the profiteers could fit into their trailers, and how sharply even the most insipid junk spoke to their hearts. Teddy bears made in China by child slaves, toy dump trucks, brightly colored throw rugs, picture frames, potato chips, hot-pad holders, walkie-talkies, skillets, gloves, baseball caps, shirts, axes, saws.

They didn't need a damn bit of it, and they bought it all; and in the buying, they felt momentarily sated, though always, immediately afterward—and in the days that followed—they felt somehow weakened, hung-over and confused: as if they had blacked out, during the drinking of too much alcohol, and had, as they lay unconscious, been severely beaten.

Near dusk, Wallis and Mel walked with one of the profiteers down to the frozen river to look at the sunset's last red rays reflecting off the ice. It was going to be a cold night for snowmobiling, but that was how they did it; they had to be in and out that first night, before the next day dawned and people came back to them wanting refunds or exchanges, no longer pleased with the purchases and decisions they had made.

The man who went to the river with Wallis and Mel had worked on a couple of Dudley's and Matthew's wells. He asked when the next well would be drilled. Wallis allowed that he had finished a new map, and that he thought they might be ready as early as mid-summer. Mel said nothing, only watched the glimmering river of ice. She looked to the sky. Venus, above the trees.

The man nodded toward the sea of dark timber across the river—the velvet folds of it rising up to the edges of the mountains.

“You can bet we, or someone else, will be back for all that,” he said, talking about the timber: speaking not maliciously, but instead with awe. “We won't forget this is here.” He said it in almost a friendly way, like a kind of warning. “We, or someone else, will be back for that. The whole shittaree.”

He turned and walked back up to the market by himself, ready for the last hour—the frantic hour. Mel and Wallis stayed by the river. They sat on a fallen tree and watched night swallow the valley, watched the stars appear. They listened to the dull voices above them as the profiteers weighed and measured antlers and hides the villagers had brought to trade—the profiteers paying them only a dime on the dollar, but in hard cash—and then with that new cash there was one more flurry of purchasing, and then the snowmobilers were packed up and heading out, their trailers filled on the outbound trip not with plastic and aluminum, but bone and hide. Mel and Wallis listened to the snarling cacophony of motor shrill as the profiteers left town.

Turning, they watched the beams of headlights ascending through the forest, climbing slowly toward the distant summit. Long after the sound was only a low buzz, and then nothing at all, they sat there, waiting for their hearts to calm.

Later in the night, the owls began to hoot. Mel and Wallis sat closer together, for warmth, and then closer still, for solace.