The Lives of Rocks (10 page)

He moved to the tree and eased the spinning blade into the dead flesh—white chips flew like rice at a wedding—and cut a notch, which he slid out of the tree expertly, and then he went around to the other side and made the back
cut. And as if following the bidding of some master anti-architect, in which there was as much grace in the laying down as in the building up, the tree eased itself gracefully down the hill, falling slowly through the swirling snow in such a manner as to disorient all three of them.

The tree bounced when it hit, and the dry branches snapped and popped and went flying in all directions; and even before the sifting clouds of snow stirred up by its impact had drifted away, Shayna had risen and was moving alongside the fallen tree, gathering those small branches in her arms, gathering a double armful, as many as she could carry, and taking them to the porch, some fifty yards distant, trudging through snow that was now over her knees.

Jyl watched and tried to remember her own childhood, and wondered if childhood felt to Shayna as it once had to her, when she had been so small—as if sometimes the world was filling with snow and trying to bury her.

Stephan was moving quickly along the fallen tree, bucking it up, severing more limbs, and Jyl went out to help him, began gathering her own armfuls of limbs and branches, and started carrying them back to her porch, following the initial trail that Shayna had blazed in the snow.

They smiled at each other in passing, Shayna returning with arms empty for another load, and Jyl struggling, with hers full; and now Stephan had the log completely delimbed and was cutting it into firewood, spacing his quick and neat cuts in metronomic sixteen-inch spacings that seemed as precise as the mechanical bobbings of a water ouzel perched on a streamside boulder, crouching and dipping ceaselessly: always the same distance, always the same motion, like a wind-up toy.

It was not a very big tree, and they had it entirely
dismembered, split and hauled and stacked, within a half-hour: a porch full of bright, gleaming new-cut firewood, and a fresh-lumber scent dense upon them, like the odor of new beginnings, and possibility.

They went inside to dust off for a moment, to wash the scent of oil smoke from their faces and to pour a glass of water. The darkness was coming quickly.

“We'll be back tomorrow to get some more,” Stephan said. “Or as soon as we can. And to do other things.”

“Listen,” said Jyl, “I know how busy you all are. I know how much you all have to do at home. This is more than enough. I'll be fine, really. It's so kind of you to do even this. I'll be fine. Thank you. Tell your mother thank you.”

“We can't keep a regular schedule,” Stephan said. “There's too much to do at home. We can just come when we get our chores done.”

“I'm here in the evenings,” Jyl said. “Mornings, I'm almost always sleeping. After lunch, I go get my treatment. But I'm here at night.”

“When do you sail the boats?” Shayna asked, her voice little more than a whisper, like the stirring of a bird back in the brush. More of a fluttering than a voice.

“Afternoons,” Jyl said, “when I get back from the hospital, and just before I go in to nap.”

“We usually get them right before suppertime,” she said.

“I'll send one tomorrow,” Jyl said. “I'll send two, a big boat and a little boat, each with the same message, so that if one gets hung up the other one might still make it through.”

“Oh, no,” Shayna said quickly, surprising Jyl with her assertiveness. “If you send two you can write different messages, because we'll find them both. We'll go upstream looking for them. We'll find them.”

“Is that what you've been doing with these?” Jyl asked. “If one doesn't come by your house, you go upstream, searching for it?”

Shayna nodded. “He takes one side and I take the other. It's fun. We go after chores, and after supper. Sometimes we go at night, and use lanterns.”

“Do you ever worry that one gets past you—that you never see it?”

The children looked at each other. “We all keep a pretty good eye out for them, most of the day,” Stephan said. He paused. “Some of the kids wanted to put a fishnet across the creek, and check it regular, but Shayna and I didn't want to do it that way.”

“It's okay if there's days you can't send one,” Shayna said. “We know you're busy, and that there's days you have to rest.”

Jyl smiled. “I'm getting better,” she said. “I can't make any promises, but it's good to know the ships are getting through.”

The snow was still falling hard, and although such a heavy snowfall so early in the year assured them of a long winter, it also meant a reduced fire season, next summer; knowing this, they accepted both the hardship and the blessing of it with neither praise nor complaint, and instead only watched it, as animals might.

“Do you need another flashlight?” Jyl asked. “Or do you want to stay here for the night?”

The children looked horrified at the latter suggestion. “We've got to be up early,” Stephan explained.

“How early?”

“Four,” he said.

It was almost dusk. Jyl could smell the chain saw odor on them and wondered if they would bathe when they got home
or simply crawl into their sleeping bags in the warm loft, surrounded by the breathing sounds of their sleeping siblings and the occasional stove creak of one of their parents adding wood to the fire downstairs, and the compressed hush of the snow falling on the roof, just inches away from their faces as they slept warm in that loft.

“Thank you,” she told them as they set off into the gloom, with Stephan breaking trail for his sister.

After their light had disappeared, she put on her heavy coat and gloves and got her father's rifle and went into the woods a short distance, and sat down beneath the embrace of a big spruce tree, and waited a few moments to settle in—to adjust her heart, pounding from even that small exertion, to the space and silence around her. She took off her gloves and blew through cupped hands.

She put her gloves back on, lifted her rifle, and waited, then, listening to the falling snow. It was right at the edge of being too dark to shoot. She could hear the creek riffling behind her, and she listened to that for a while, lulled. Her cabin, not a hundred yards distant, beckoned, as did her warm bed—for a moment her mind strayed ahead to the relief, the dull harbor, she found in sleep each night—and she began to feel ridiculous, tucked in so invisible against the world, as if in a burrow; as if she were hiding in the one place where no one could ever find her, the one place where she was least likely to find her quarry.

She was settling into a reverie, had already given up the notion of hunting and was instead merely dreaming, when there came slowly into her consciousness a sound that was unlike the other sounds and silences that had been surrounding her: a jarring, clumsy sound of eagerness, hoofs slipping on wet rocks, a clattering and splashing, then silence again.
She sat up and peered through her lattice of branches. She heard the sound of quiet steps approaching, but then the steps ceased. She waited for five minutes, ears and eyes straining—she tried to catch the scent of the animal but could smell nothing, only wet falling snow—and then she heard the animal crossing back over the creek, going away; and when she rose stiffly from her crouch, her warren beneath the tree, and went to examine the tracks, they were already filled in with new snow, and it was as if the thing had never existed.

When she got back to her cabin and its warmth and yellow light, she was surprised by how late it was—by how she had confused the soft blue luminous light cast by the snow with the fading light of dusk. It was nearly seven o'clock, and she was cold, wet, and shivering.

She was still stimulated by the hunt, and by the children's visit, and would have liked to have stayed up late, or even until a normal hour—taking a leisurely hot bath and curling up in bed afterward, and reading until midnight, as she had once done in the freedom of her health.

But she had extended herself too far, that day, and in the end she simply sat by the wood stove, shivering, and feeding it more wood. One of the propane lanterns in that corner of the cabin sputtered and coughed into darkness, leaving only one remaining lamp hissing over on the far side of the cabin; and though the silence was still lonelier, in the subdued lighting, she took a short fragment of firewood from the wood box and got out her pocketknife and tried to begin carving a new toy ship.

She had not carved more than three minutes, however, before fatigue overtook her—not so much physical
exhaustion or the brutishness of fear, but instead the cumulative fatigue of loneliness combining with all those other exhaustions—
five percent chance of survival,
the doctors had told her,
five percent, five percent
—and yet somehow, frugal and efficient to her core, she managed to rouse and walk the ten paces over to the other side of the cabin and turn off the lone remaining lamp.

She was chilled immediately, however, away from the stove, and so she pulled a quilt off her bed and went back over to the fire, stoked it up again, and, too tired to even change out of her damp clothes, curled up against the stove's base, wrapped herself tightly in the quilt, and fell asleep there on the floor, with no padding, no comfort, no thoughts, no anything, only falling; and with the pocketknife still open beside her, and the block of wood with less than a handful of shavings carved off beside it: not even enough shavings to kindle the smallest of fires.

Despite the depth of her fatigue, she dreamed: as if the mind or spirit requires no energy, or, rather, feeds from some source other than the body, flowing almost continuously.

She dreamed of traveling her mountain again: of traversing it that night, at times following the same trail the children had made going home, and other times making her own. In the dream, it was still snowing, and the snow was over her knees, as it was in the real life just outside her door; and there was something about the dream, some synchronized in-the-moment aspect to it, that made it seem extraordinarily real, vibrant, and refreshing. It was almost as if her spirit was trying to heal or repair itself, even where her body could not or had not yet; almost as if so severe was the damage to one, the body or vessel of her, that that other
current, sometimes separate and other times twined, was becoming also abraded. And as if it would do whatever was necessary, for the healing.

She moved with strength and steadiness up the trail. It was not easy going, but the labor felt good. The snow was falling on her face, and though she was wearing a heavy coat and gloves and gaiters, her head was bare, and at times she would stop and shake the snow from her hair.

She ascended steadily. Even though she was only walking, time seemed to pass more quickly than it ever had—as if an hour were now only a second—and in no time at all she was back on the ledge that ran along the high cliff of the mountain's west face.

And looking down through the slanting snow, and down through the snow-shrouded canopy of the dense forest so far below, she could see lights moving like fireflies, a handful of lanterns scattered through the forest and along the river, some coming and others going.

The lights looked like the flares from torches, or drifting sparks from a campfire, or scattered little wildfires seen on distant mountains at night in the autumn; but the slow carriage of them was distinctly that of humans, on foot.

At first Jyl thought the lantern carriers were searching for something; but, pausing to watch the course and pacing of their lights, she understood quickly that they were engaged in some sort of labor, and, as she stood there a while longer, with the snow piling up on her back and shoulders, the picture became even clearer for her, and she understood that it was the children, passing back and forth through the woods, carrying buckets of water for the family's baths, the family's cooking, and the family's drinking.

The loaded-bucket travelers moved slowly, on their way back from the river to the cabin, the lights of which were not visible—perhaps extinguished for economy at that hour. The empty-bucket travelers, going from the cabin back down to the river, moved faster while passing through those same woods, and when one of the going-away lanterns passed one of the coming-up lanterns, there was no pause—each kept traveling in its own direction—and though Jyl had no real way of knowing, it seemed to her that in such weather and amid such weariness, and at so late an hour, no words were passed between the travelers.

Jyl remained standing, watching, as if turned to a statue. The snow kept piling up on and around her, and after a while—long hours, perhaps, though in the dream it seemed like only moments—the procession ceased, the water tanks had all been filled.

The lanterns all assembled in one place on the front porch, and then one by one they blinked out, until only two were remaining.

These two did not blink out, but instead turned and moved slowly back into the forest, again barely visible through the falling snow—disappearing, at times, beneath its burden, as if having been submerged briefly before reappearing a little farther into the forest.

The river, though not visible, was identifiable as a wandering line between darkness and light, an imaginary border in the forest, at which all the lanterns had previously paused at the end of their bucket-filling marches.

Jyl watched now as one of the lanterns went slightly farther than any of the others had—the traveler, either Shayna or Stephan, crossing snow-covered mossy stones to stay dry.

Both lights turned then and began following the invisible trace of the river upstream, the banks and borders defined and limned by that wavering, snow-blinking campfire light, as if the river were embedded in ice and it was the lanterns' path that was cutting it free of the ice, releasing it and allowing it to flow again.

And it was a helpless feeling for Jyl, being up there on the mountain, on the cliff, knowing she had not sent out a vessel that day, or a message, a missive, no little painting or inscription.