Where the Sea Used to Be (45 page)

The lantern sputtered out of fuel. The soap suds came to her elbows, and she kept scrubbing: lightly, gently, but thoroughly. Starlight illumined the three of them.

Mel toweled his hair dry. If Matthew had felt it or even dreamed it he did nothing to show his appreciation. She tried to comb and straighten his hair without waking him. It was a mild enough night that she could leave the window open to dry it. It made Wallis a little sad to see someone so strong clinging, hanging by such threads, to the ghost of who he once was.

 

South winds blew all night, and Mel and Wallis slept lightly but without moving, as if on a beach listening to waves. Wallis dreamed or imagined he heard the faraway cracks of thunder, though there was no rain—only warm, incessant rivers of wind. It was a sound like the plates of the earth rifting apart—the river continuing to fracture—and rather than feeling loneliness at such a sound, Wallis felt a cleanliness; and all night they slept motionless, their bodies twined and lying loosely over one another.

When they awoke in the morning they could hear the geese coming up the valley in even greater numbers, and other birds—where had they come from? Had they emerged from the snow? Had they been blown in with that wind?—singing along the creek and fluttering around by the porch.

“Bohemian waxwings,” Mel said, lying there with her eyes open, still not moving, and finally she sat up, saw Wallis looking at her, smiled, and for no reason known to her, covered herself.

They went to the window and looked out at the swirl of wings; a landscape of color. There was an insect hatch going on, mayflies with slow wings jvhirring, rising to the morning sun. The waxwings were all over them, dipping and darting, snatching them all—the world a cloud of glowing mayflies; and a cloud of waxwings equal to it. Birds swerved to avoid colliding with one another as they dived at the slow-moving, spinning, light-filled mayflies. It was an annihilation. Everywhere—on all branches, on the porch railings, and on the eaves of the cabin—waxwings were perched, gulping down the pale green mayflies; and the morning sun was behind them, illuminating the birds' flared combs and their bright eyes, and shooting light straight through their brilliant yellow tails, tails the color of sulphur. The sight of that color, the smudgings of yellow, and their furious activity after the long winter began to fill Wallis. He stared hungrily at the tails—yellow everywhere, a kaleidoscope—and felt tears welling in his eyes.

The light came in through the windows and, though it was only morning sun, warmed their bodies.

“Listen,” Mel said, and at first Wallis thought she meant the chattering birdsong, but then he heard another sound above it, the steady streamings of the geese, and then above and beyond that, and all around it, another sound.

They went out into the sunlight.

It was the sound of running water—not just trickling water, but water gushing everywhere. The creek was making music again, and every little drainage, every little draw in the woods behind them, was gushing; and it was a sound that made them smile and then laugh, and they stood there flat-footed and bare-assed in the sun and laughed. Wallis had never thought of running water as a funny sound, but it made them laugh: the sound of the water, finally running free again, exciting the water in their own bodies, and they laughed, and held out their arms to feel the south wind on them, and watched the frenzy of the birds.

From farther down the valley, along the river, came the continued sound of explosions, and as the sun rose and spread warmth into new corners, warming new things, the explosions continued, a sound like the earth splitting. With each new crash they could feel things released, and they felt strongly now that they, as well as everything else, could get on with the business of living, and the business of growing.

 

In school that day, after her brief lesson, she sat in the back of class with Colter, while all the water in the world, it seemed, released and ran past them.

She skied home, believing for certain it was the day Matthew would awaken—the day she would have to crush him—but when she got home, Wallis was sitting out on the front porch, examining his map for the thousandth time, and Matthew was still sleeping.

They sat in the sunlight together for the rest of the afternoon, and were silent: both of them edgy and anxious now.

They slept wrapped in the same elk hide that night, warm together after having loved, and Mel dreamed several times of turning around and trying to go all the way back to the start, where Matthew was still waiting for her—but in the morning she had more resolve, and rose and dressed and went off to school again.

More and more of the rock wall was emerging, as were the tops of snow-buried bushes: as if the world were being created in a week. Colter had gone down to the river the first day of breakup to see if his father was still there, but one of the huge tongues of ice had carried him away, and had scoured clean the cairns as well.

The bears were tumbling from the earth—each day their tracks laced the slushy snow again, as if a tribe or nation of beings had come back into the valley with those south winds—and several of the black bears, gaunt and sleepy-looking, black as ravens, had been seen wandering through town as if lost. No grizzlies had been spotted yet, though some of their tracks were showing up along the river.

Each day in school the students asked Mel, “Is he awake yet?” and each day she had to tell them no, and had to just keep waiting, still trapped.

Some days they could hear, through the open windows, the sounds of Amy's singing—choirsong, joyous, carrying from half a mile away. Some of the students sitting closest to the window would grow drowsy and lay their heads down on the table for a few minutes. Mel remembered her school days in Houston thirty years earlier. Almost nothing had changed. There were still wars in Africa and Israel. The recent developments with Russia were different, but in Russia's formerly mysterious place now stood China. Central America was still in turmoil. The French were starting to act like Americans. The British were still the British. She stared down at her desk and ran her fingers over the scarred initials Matthew had whittled into the wood so long ago.

 

Earth's Deepest Graves

Where We Came From

Attending carefully to the movements of
Amoebae
beneath the hand lens, we discover that these movements have an end in view. The tentacles are extended in search of food. This animal is forever hungry. It is conscious of hunger. It knows how to secure food. It has a will which sets its organs in motion. It knows how to seize a particle of food. See! Its arm is wound about a minute animalcule; it holds it, but now it does not convey it to the mouth. Where is the mouth? In truth, there is none. The arm is absorbed
—
animalcule and all. It disappears in the common mass of jelly, and the animalcule is seen within it.

So this creature feeds. It gets around its food successfully; but it simply pours itself over it. What an amazing simplicity of structure is here! Indeed, there is no structure; we have little more than a shapeless particle of jelly. Whenever the animal takes breakfast, it extemporizes an arm for seizing it. Whenever it eats, a mouth is extemporized for admission of food, and a stomach is extemporized for receiving and digesting it. From all the ailments of hands, mouth, teeth, and stomach, this animal is happily free. Exempt from headache, sore eyes, ringing ears and heart flutterings, it still exercises all the functions requisite to make it an animal.

This modern creature is the representative of
Eozoon.
But
Eozoon
could not be placed defenseless in the sea. A little lump of jelly would be swept into annihilation by the waves.
Eozoon,
however, planted, held fast to its support, and immediately secreted a strong roof over him for protection. A thousand little holes through the roof allowed threads of its gelatinous substance to be protruded. These coalesced in a common film which spread over the roof like a coating of tar. This was unprotected, and a second and higher roof was built. The structure was now two stories high.

Through the upper roof innumerable minute perforations allowed the jelly of the second story to be protruded in fine threads, and these in turn coalesced, and a third roof was secreted. Thus the process continued, and the structure became many stories high.

Meantime other individuals were planted by this, or near this, and by and by, they were so enlarged that they grew together, and grew as one animal. So hundreds and thousands of animals grew together and continued to grow and enlarge the structure during probably a thousand years.

As time passed, this organism grew old and effete. The life-time of its species was drawing to a close. It was destined to be replaced by something better suited to the improved circumstances of the world.

All the time, however, the sediments had been gathering about the bases of the rising reef mass
—
as the dust of time accumulates about the temples of the ancient cities. As they become buried and forgotten—buried thousands of feet deep—buried in sea sediments which became stone. Then the aeons of the world continued to roll by. Oh, what a varied history was enacted while the tombs of Eozoo remained silent and undiscovered!

In the Age of Mind, a marble edifice was demanded to meet some want of civilization. The primeval tomb was opened by the quarryman, and there rested the relics of the first inhabitant of our globe. It is that of which we have been speaking. We are the quarrymen.

 

O
LD DUDLEY ARRIVED LATE ONE AFTERNOON, WALKING UP
the trail on flapping ancient beechwood snowshoes and wearing a parka lined with wolf fur. He was walking with a deer-antler walking stick and singing “The Eyes of Texas” at the top of his lungs. Mel ran down the trail to greet him and to quiet him, so that Matthew could still sleep.

“It's been too long,” he said. “Has accident befallen my young man?” He patted Mel's flat belly. “Still unimpregnated, I see,” and Wallis, who had gone down the trail also to meet him, marveled at how quickly the old man could take the wind out of any joy or peace: how he appropriated it, soiled it for the beholder, and in so doing made it perversely his own.

“Little namby-pamby crybaby was a bit woozy when he left,” Dudley said. “He's not still sleeping, is he?” Mel nodded.
“Sissy,”
he hissed, and started to further enumerate Matthew's failings, but then noticed the bond between Mel and Wallis—a looseness of shoulder, a half-step closer to him on her part—a trace of odor, of comfort together—and he arched his eyebrows, was startled for a moment, but then said to Wallis, “Well, you must really be putting the wood to her. How many times a day, how many times a night, in love's first flush? Ah, but no matter, it will fade. Some day she will spurn you, twenty years hence, as she seems to have spurned my little man.” He shook his head sadly, and for a brief moment his ice-blue eyes locked with the eyes of Mel's green fire, and Wallis could almost hear Dudley's brain gears spinning as he recalculated the lay of the land.

“Pop,” Mel said, “you're the only other blood I've got left in the world, and it's good, as always, to see you, but you're going to have to cut the shit or leave. I don't have the time for it I used to. I can't shake it off like I used to. I used to be able to ignore it. But it bothers me now.”

A sharpening of interest in Dudley's eyes—a glinting of pleasure. “You're getting older,” he said.

“I've got a job,” Mel said.

“Good God, girl,” Dudley cried, “your first one! Congratulations!” He turned to evaluate Wallis anew.

Wallis took note of the old man's humped, still muscular shoulders—as if there were a young man beneath the parka, and wondered what it had been like for Dudley as a child—teased pitilessly about the tong marks, surely, and then to have to watch his father slaughter, for lack of a better word, a fellow countryman—as if he had been nothing more than meat—a hog or a cow waiting to be killed. As if in his old father's chest had beat some throwback heart, something not suitable to this civilized era but belonging more to the behavior of men from other, more savage times and places.

Wallis didn't care about any of that. It was interesting, but it was water under the bridge. He didn't care if Dudley had horns sprouting out of his head; he could find oil, and when he showed them how to draw the maps, and showed them things about the workings of the old earth below, there was such a muscular purity, a precision, to his teachings, that Wallis didn't care if it had been Dudley himself who had done the stabbing, burying, and burning: he would have listened anyway. He would have been unable to turn away. He wanted to know what lay below.

They walked up the path to the cabin. Now there were tiny patches of earth showing around the trunks of trees, and Mel and Wallis stopped at one of the larger patches to simply stare with awe at the beauty of the black dirt, and at a few sprigs of juniper and kinnikinnick. Old Dudley watched them with fascination. “Why, y'all are
cripples,
is what you are,” he said. “Your lives aren't worth a damn. You've got to add up both of y'all to even make a fraction of a normal, healthy, human being. Look at you poor fuckers, staring at dirt! You should both come back to Houston, where you can see all the dirt and grass you want. My
Lord,
children,” he said, as Mel and Wallis stood there and admired the patch of bare ground, “what is wrong with you?”

They ignored him; they stood transfixed, unblinking, feeling a strength entering them, filling the fiber of their muscles with a power as had the sunlight and sound of flowing water stirred their blood earlier.