All the Land to Hold Us (46 page)

To Herbert Mix it seemed as if the strange figures were either trying to attack the winged creature, or to subdue and calm it; and yet then the desert wind would stir, the gauzed sheets of mosquito netting would billow, and it would seem that the laborers might be trying to encourage the dragon, or whatever the fallen creature was, back into flight: and as if somehow their own survival depended upon the success of that resurrection.

And in the smaller tent, also illuminated by the rising sun to create yet another stage of silhouettes, Herbert Mix could see the shadows of the thousands of swirling moths, their wings flashing and folding frantic semaphoric messages.

The sun pierced the moths, igniting every wing, turning each vein into a filament that magnified the sun's light and filled them with an electrical charge. That light shuttered as the moths continued to swarm, and the entire canvas tent filled with flashing incandescence, so that it seemed to Herbert Mix that the tent was burning; and as he watched, the sun climbed and clicked south and west another notch, and the moth-fire subsided from the tent, the image cooling before his eyes.

Despite his missing leg, he felt self-conscious in the women's presence; and although they knew a fair amount of English, he had trouble understanding them, due to their accents. Marie was better able to comprehend or intuit the women's directions and moods: and though he would have liked to have learned how to operate the looms, seating himself at one or another of the stations, he sensed that there was an immediate lowering in the level of joy on the few times that he had entered the silk weavers' tent.

He could not help but ascribe it to the notion that on some level they associated him, because he was a man, with warfare, and the weapons by which they had lost their limbs. He would have thought that because he shared that loss with them, there would be more intimacy, not less, between them, but it did not seem to be working that way, and so he retreated, left them to their private weavings and their inscrutable communications.

Marie told them about her life, about the elephant that had once passed through, and they understood, for they had each had elephants in their villages, and in their lives, at one point or another.

Other times they spoke no words, but gave themselves over to the looms, became lost in the clatter of the operation, feeding the silk into the guides, choosing not through any previous day's foredesign the color and texture of the new creation, but deciding such things only in the moment, often only at the last instant, even as one rocker-arm was rising and another falling: and in this, they were free, freer than they had ever been; and later in the day, when they began to paint their own designs and no other's onto the silk that was utterly of their making, great beauty arising and then blossoming out of the random barbarities of war, they felt each time—whether they had been weaving for only a month, or for years—that they had transcended even freedom, or the need for freedom: and in this state, they felt a strength they had never known.

Marie felt it, too. Though hers were not physical, she too had absences, caverns and abysses and long-hollow crevices, and she felt the rush of color, the blaze of the scarves, flooding into those vacancies.

Nor was it all about taking. She felt the color rushing out of her, too: flowing, as if from her fingers, her eyes, her mouth, color rushing back out onto the sand-colored landscape, and into the little town. She felt herself giving, as she had always given, but this time there was a pulse and a rhythm, a balance between the two, taking, giving, as synchronous and graceful as the gearings of the strangers' clattering looms. She had never felt fuller or stronger; and from the first day, she began to dread the silk weavers' leaving.

 

They stored the best of the apparel in tin chests decorated with scrollwork and rhinestones, and lined with strips of cedar to keep the clothes sweet smelling, and to protect them against insect damage. The slightly flawed garments they reserved for themselves and distributed also to the communities through which they passed.

They fastened the remnant scraps of silk to the rim of the basketball hoop at the school, and to the school's cedar rafters, and to the few light posts in Mormon Springs, and to the fences and gates outside people's homes, and to the lone stop sign.

Still they had scraps left over, and as the weavers' work progressed, they began sending them into Odessa: lining the streets there, too, and the buildings. Richard decorated the outer sills and ledges of his loft windows with long trellises of remnant silk, and when he took the schoolchildren out into the desert, they tied the colorful strips to the pumpjacks of oil wells and the casings of gas wellheads.

There had never been so much color in the desert, not in December or any other month, and at night, the children as well as the adults dreamed in color; and even those who had not led lives as rough as Marie or the weavers felt nonetheless fresher and stronger. That old wounds they had not even known they had or remembered were beginning to heal, and they too began to wish that the weavers would stay.

And each day, Herbert Mix stood on the outside of their tent and watched the silhouettes within, the flashing and leaping ascent and slide of the crofter and the laird.
She is happy
, he thought,
she is so happy
. And he felt his old hunger, his hollowness, returning.

 

Marie continued to work with the weavers in the tent, learning to operate the various looms. She was of great value with certain tasks, such as the threading of the silk into the looms before each shift—and she had also been spending time with the silk painters, and already had created some beautiful patterns and colors, and had sewn several suits and dresses.

She hung these blouses and skirts and scarves on the racks in the display section of the tent, next to those of the other workers, and was overjoyed by the communion she felt in doing so: not just the acceptance and approval, but the admiration.

The joy she saw on their faces when they viewed a scarf she had painted that day, bringing it up to them from the depths of her concentration and presenting its beauty; their brown hands, or stumped limbs, touching the silk for the feel of it: as if the color cobalt felt slightly different from chartreuse, and chartreuse from magenta or fuchsia. The pleasure of the dream-journey of the painting and sewing sweetened for Marie by this second joy, the joy of her ascension to these other things.

What more, she wondered, could anyone ask for in this life? The mask of her identity seemed to be dissolving into a kaleidoscope of color. New air was entering her lungs and her blood, and she felt to be no more than sixteen years old.

She tried to explain it to Annie, late at night: and although Annie could see how happy she was, she could not understand entirely how happy, nor why, but was glad for Marie, and sensed that things were far different from how they had been even a short time ago, before the silk weavers had arrived.

Each day, in the heated, sleepy middle part of the day, Herbert Mix continued to watch the silhouettes of the women working, and was mesmerized by the speed of the silk being spun, and by the rise and fall, the flapping wings of the looms, and by the fluttering of the brush strokes as the dye was applied to the finished silk.

Often he lounged by the tent, in the shade of one of his old umbrellas, and was both soothed and stimulated by the gracefulness of the movements, and by the flashing colors; yet he continued to feel the old rift opening in him, and despaired at what he perceived to be a failure, on his part, against the test of desire; for should not the beauty strengthen and fill him, too, as it did the others?

Marie was all but unattainable, in her daily and nightly schedulings with the weavers, and for once he did not want to draw closer to her—afraid that his backsliding, his sin of hollowness, might somehow be contagious.

And eventually Herbert Mix withdrew, and brooded, and plotted, and wrestled with his weakness, and despaired in his failing, before finally succumbing.

 

His old tractor had not run in years, mice and dirt daubers had built their nests in its pipes and pulleys, and the oil and grease had hardened as if to stone. He was up most of the night disassembling and reassembling the iron beast, trying to coax it to run—a couple of times, the engine nearly turned over—but in the end it would not crank, as if trying to convince him to choose a path other than the one he had fallen back onto, and at dawn the next day, he gave up on the tractor and instead loaded his old jeep—a risk, he knew, but again, he perceived no choice, had given himself over to the immensity of his hunger.

He packed a lunch, a shovel, a couple of gallons of water, a sunhat, and a tent, and set out for Castle Gap just as the disk of the sun was clearing the desert floor. The morning was cool, and as he passed the procession of the football team, driving through the just-stirring town of Odessa, he waved and they waved back.

He lifted his hand in greeting to the men and women walking out into their yards to secure the morning paper, and walking their dogs on leashes, and as he drove past the scarf-fluttering homes of Mormon Springs, a wave of sadness came over him, knowing that some of those colorful remnants were Marie's; and knowing, too, that when it was time for the silk weavers to leave, and to travel on to California, that she would be leaving with them: that no force on earth would be able to stop her, nor should it. He knew that it would be this way, knew it by the deadness of his broken heart.

And yet, farther out of town, drawn down the familiar path of all his many journeys from the years before, he felt almost good for a while, traveling freely, the promise of the day's treasures not yet revealed. He took his straw hat off and let the wind stir his silvery hair, looked back over his shoulder to be sure that he had brought his shovel, and continued on, searching for his treasure, whether bones or gold, no matter; he was on the hunt once more.

 

He decided to choose skulls over gold, this fine first day. He drove along the Pecos for a while, remembering his vitality, and got out and went down to Horsehead Crossing, where, on that bright, cool, blue-sky day, he was treated to such a sight that he laughed out loud—clear simple laughter flowing from him as if from a child, laughter that seemed like it might not end, and that seemed, for a while, to be synchronous with the river as the water rolled past, lapping and gurgling.

It was a dry year, and the river was lower. It would still have been a dangerous feat for anyone to attempt its crossing, the current still strong, but in that period of lower water he was able to get closer to it, crabbing his way down the plunging washboard-cobble of accretia and conglomerate, toward the chocolate-colored gurgling water.

What his hands found there, as he clutched and inched his way down as close as he dared, and what he saw on the other side of the river, similarly exposed, sent an explosion of pleasure through his body.

On either side of the river, there was a new strata of bones, scoured to brilliance by the ages of passing water and the scrubbing of silt and gravel—the bones as polished as pearls, as white as ivory—and disbelieving, despite the authority of touch, he ran his hands over the cobbly smooth matrix of them, the steep bed of bones upon which he rested.

And in the ancient lacunae, there blossomed beneath his hands the map of the future, and he felt the map beneath him moving, shifting as if in a quarter turn and sliding, slipping down into the water.

He tensed and held on, tried to dig in with his heel and to clutch the sidewall of skulls. His fingers found the gaping eye socket of horse or steer, he was not sure which, and tried to find purchase there, but the fragile brow crumbled at his touch, and slowly, bumpily, he rode the map down a little farther, a little closer to the rushing river, which he saw now was only masquerading as a river, but was really something else entirely, something far more immense than he had given it credit for, voracious and perhaps immortal.

He could taste the breath of it now, saw that the river was a living thing that had to be fed steadily—that it was hungering for him with an intensity far beyond that with which he himself had ever hungered for anything—and even in his old man's fright, he found this to be a thing of awe, even as he prepared to be consumed by it.

Still, he fought against it. Now and again his foot found brief and tiny purchase on the skull plate of a buffalo, or his hands were able to clutch and grasp at a momentary cleft between the ribs of some unknown creature as he slid ever so slowly down that washboard ossuary, with all the skulls grinning as they faced the bright mild morning sunlight that was illuminating them.

He thought of Marie, he thought of Mormon Springs, of Ruth and the children, of Annie, and of Richard, and the town of Odessa. He thought of his jeep up above him, and of himself as a younger man (though he had long ago already slid past that corollary strata), back when he had had both legs, the second of which would have now served him in good stead.

It was rough, sliding over all those knobs and protrusions, the time-crafted and time-carved minutiae of suture and indentation, each dimpled bone perfect for the attachment of long-ago muscles that were now so completely vanished as to no longer even exist in a single memory—every bit as gone, beneath that bright sun, as if they had never existed. His hands read it all as he slid, his old hands groping and fluttering, still cataloging all the way down, and when his booted leg splashed into the water, he was surprised at how warm it was, and not unpleasant.

He was not the first to have tumbled down this slope, drawn to this one final resting spot by the path of gravity and the contours of the surface, funneling him to the same place where it had funneled so many others; and falling no farther, he found that he was resting on top of something: a crude delta of boulder and bones.

He stood braced against the wall, the scrim of bone, and then, wobbly and trembly-legged, he sat down in the warm splashing water, the living water, and like a raccoon washing mussels in a riffling current, he felt and groped in the subaqueous nether for some clue to the identity of his benefactor.