Where the Sea Used to Be (41 page)

The river ice made feathery, whispering sounds—the faintest sounds of stretching, if not cracking. Not yet thawing, but beginning to consider it. A sound, to those who sat there and listened to it closely, like that of a bird wing brushing against snow.

 

The wolves had stopped howling. It was the time when they were digging a den—either excavating an old one or searching for a place in which to build a new one—and Mel would not have been out in the woods following them during this time, anyway—she would have been giving them space and privacy—and so the full weight of her letting go did not weigh quite so heavily upon her.

Wallis was torn between his dread of Matthew's March arrival and his eagerness to show him his latest map and its revisions. The specificity of each contour—all of it from his imagination. Four pounds of brainpan trapping, he hoped, upwards of 250 million barrels of oil.

There was a strange thing that happened, a kind of a leap or transformation, Wallis knew, when you tapped into that much power. Already, in the past year, he had found a few such fields down on the Gulf Coast, and he'd felt a cleaving inside him when this happened: an incandescence in which every fiber of him became part of something larger and heretofore buried.

In the days before Matthew's approach, Mel watched the moon's waxing, knowing that he would come shortly after its full crest. She began to suffer nausea and migraines. They were silent migraines at first, in which the vision in one and then both eyes blurred—but then the migraines would burst into true pain, expanding into her temples and the sides of her skull and behind her eyes as if taking root: and she would have the thought that she would be happy, would know complete peace, if only the headaches would go away; but she knew also that she was having the headaches precisely
because
she did not know peace or happiness. It was as if she'd allowed herself to fall or be shoved into a downward-spiraling funnel trap, like the doodlebug stumbling into the ant lion's lair.

She held close to Wallis on the nights when the migraines subsided. Who would ever have believed, setting out so long ago, that peace could be so difficult to obtain? They continued to love, in all different places, manners, positions, combinations, as if crafting the boundaries of some physical structure.

He asked her about conceiving—about how to avoid it. She told him that she didn't think it could happen—that if it was going to, it probably already would have.

“We used to try and avoid it,” she said—speaking of her time with Matthew—“but sometimes we would make mistakes. At first we thought it was just good luck that I never got pregnant, but then we figured out that it wasn't going to happen anyway.” She touched a hand to her bare stomach. “It's funny,” she said. “Old Dudley's seed is bad—I'm the only thing that ever came out of him, and me just barely—I only weighed about three pounds when I was born—and now here I am, with my eggs no good.”

“Sometimes I would miss a period or two,” she said. “But I don't think I was ever really pregnant. I think it was just like a kind of a pause. I think my body took whatever Matthew and I made together and kind of absorbed it,” she said. “
Consumed
it.” She laughed dryly. “I'm sure it was me, not him. I'm Dudley's daughter. His flaws are mine, his blood is mine. Some of them, anyway. Most of them.” She sat up and put her arms around Wallis. “It's a way the world has of keeping itself safe,” she said. “What if I had a boy, and the cycle of Old Dudley started all over again?” She shook her head. “It's me. I'm the end of it, the last of it. And thank goodness. We don't need him procreating any further. It's something the world's done to protect itself.”

She lay back down, her head on Wallis's chest. She remembered the first time she and Matthew had thought she might be pregnant, so long ago. The ambiguity of their response—the fear and joy both. That child would have been eighteen, now—a man, or a woman, on his or her own.

The moon was silver and swollen, just a day shy of full; in its irregularity, it seemed larger than full. They watched it through the window and lay in its light, bathing in the stream of it—as if it were not impersonal but had instead sought them out.

They heard a savage growling and thumping outside, and went to the window, and saw the humped, heavily furred silhouette of a wolverine on top of the smokehouse, tearing at the shingles. The moon was behind him, lighting the fine tips of his long fur so that they glowed like filaments, creating an aura of light that hovered around each of his movements.

The wolverine felt them watching him and turned to glare at them. He had a shingle in his mouth from where he had pulled it loose, and he chewed it up as if cracking the leg bone of an elk, then spat out the fragments and began clawing and ripping at the roof again. The sight of it made Wallis glad that the wolverine was trying to get into the smokehouse rather than the cabin.

“Don't worry,” Mel said, “he can't get through. I've got it reinforced with steel plates and iron bars. He'll give up once he reaches those.”

They went back to bed and lay there, drifting back down into sleep, arms around one another loosely, with the sounds of the wolverine outside falling over them in sheets and layers, sheathing around them as would the murmurs of some forever-trickling creek.

 

Solidified Sunlight

Coal and Coal Beds

I sit by my genial grate this pinching winter evening and watch the play of the flames leap from the coal and play with the draughts of air passing up the chimney. Here is comfort
—
here is peace. How the fierce wind howls about the windows while I enjoy this life-sustaining warmth. The other kids—the inmates
—
yonder at the Christmas play. The femmes—none to be found. Curious is this coal—this combustible rock, wonderful, and abounding in suggestions. This warmth is yielded by combustion. This rock bums. That which bums up is essentially carbon, or a hydrocarbon. It is so with petroleum; it is so with gas; it is so with coal. The source of uncombined carbon is in vegetation. Our carbonates, like limestone, contain carbon; but it is combined with oxygen; it is already appropriated, not free—not in a condition to be burned.

The coal must be composed of free carbon, to a large extent
—
mingled, probably with some hydrocarbon. Carbon, as we see in charcoal, bums without any brilliant flame, and without smoke. Hydrocarbon, as we see in kerosene and illuminating gas, bums with a bright flame. It is a mass of carbon saturated with some liquid or gaseous, or perhaps, bituminous, hydrocarbon. In any event, we are induced to trace its carbon to a vegetable origin.

Now, if we look over a pile of coal we shall probably detect some indications of vegetable tissue. In some of the shale attached to pieces of coal, or mingled with the coal, are some impressions like fem fronds. If we go to the mines, we even discover stems of moderate sized trees imbedded in the shales above the coal and occasionally in the coal itself. All these circumstances conspire to convince us that the coal is of vegetable origin. If we were to search further we should find traces of vegetation resembling our Horsetails and Ground Pines. So we may regard ourselves quite justified in concluding that the coal which blazes and cheers on the grate, was once in the condition of a flowerless tree, rooted in an ancient soil, spreading its green fronds to the sunlight, decomposing the carbonic acid of the atmosphere, fixing the carbon in its own tissues, and setting oxygen free.

So the sun was shining in the heavens a long time ago. The plans of vegetable structure were in existence, and the forces of vegetable growth. How long have those plans endured! How imperishable are the thoughts embodied in those plans! The tree stood upright in the soil; it
drank in water by its roots and bathed its foliage in the primeval air. It built its stems and fronds with fibers and cells like the modern fern. The sun stimulated it into action. The sun's warmth imparted strength to discharge its functions. The sun's emanations of light and heat became transformed into stem and frond and tissue.

Whatever vicissitudes that growth may since have undergone, the same eliminated carbon is there; it is the same transformed sunlight that it was millions of years ago. It is ancient sunlight that has been locked up like a treasure and buried in the earth for ages. Here, in this flame, the tissue-substance goes back in its primeval condition—it becomes again carbonic acid, and mingles again in the atmosphere from which it was selected. Here, in this flame, the old warmth reappears; it is the warmth of the sun which shone in the Carboniferous Age. Here, in this flame, the old sunlight is regenerated; this is the very sunlight which became latent in vegetable cells so long ago. It is locked-up sunlight set free after a long imprisonment. It is the wasting sunlight of an age when its blessings were not appreciated, packed away and preserved to an age when man should dwell on the earth to appreciate its uses and make it an agent of exquisite comfort and high civilization.

There are several varieties of coal; let us look them over. Perhaps you will smile when I tell you that the plumbago of your pencil is essentially carbon. So it is. All your pencilings are strictly
“charcoal sketches.”

How long it takes, then—millennia!
—
to produce one good drawing by the hand of Man. Mountains rise and fall a thousand times to make one plumbago pencil, one pencil, the one in my hand. Why has the world been created but for us to eat it?

 

T
HE STONE WALL WAS BEGINNING TO EMERGE, IT WAS A
treat to see the rocks again—to see anything of the earth, other than snow. Sometimes people would go down to the wall just to look at it, and if the sun was out they might stop and sit and stare at the beauty of the rocks—gray and red and yellow, and
rock,
by God, not snow—and they would watch as trickles of sun-water began to seep slowly from all the snow resting atop the wall. The wall would glitter. The seeps would freeze at night, casting the exposed rock in a thin glaze, but the next day if the sun was out, the wall would be glistening again, as if weeping, though to the townspeople in that bright March light it would seem as if surely the wall was crying for joy; and they would find themselves yearning for the time when the snow would go away so that they could resume work on the wall: patching the low places where frost-heaves, or the simple stretching and ripping of the earth's skin, had tipped it over.

The wall had long since stopped being for them the symbol or manifestation of any territorial urges. It set no boundaries, laid no claims. It was only an assemblage of order, a crafted thing of durability. A homage to the beauty just beyond and above the wall—the mountains themselves—and they found themselves barely able to wait for the opportunity to throw themselves at it, body and soul, one more season, one more year.

Though it had only been a little over thirty years since Matthew had first started fooling with it, the wall had now been worked on by three generations of families in the valley, and would, soon enough, be worked by a fourth, and then a fifth: for as long as people in the valley had eyes and hands and strong backs. One year, not so long ago, there had even been an old woman, older then than Helen was now, who had been blind in her last years but who had nonetheless participated.

She had enjoyed sitting on the porch of the saloon in the midday light, drinking a cold beer and listening to the sounds of the town, and to the summer swallows nesting in the eaves above her. A few trucks and jeeps passing by, and the taste, the scent, of road dust, afterward—and she would listen to the clacking sounds of the other townspeople wrestling with the rocks—the slam of tailgates being dropped, the grunting and clattering of slabs and wedges of rock—and she would wander across the street and through the woods toward wherever that sound was coming from.

They would see her coming, and would give her a pair of worn gloves to protect her arthritic hands and paper-dry skin, and would let her work amongst them, groping in the back of the truck for a squarish stone of proper size, one she could fit both arms around and give heft to; and then she would haul it toward the sound of the other rocks being stacked, wobbling as she walked, taking tiny steps.

When she reached the end of the line, she would set her stone down to rest—panting and scratched from hauling the stone—and then with her gloved hands she would feel the set-up before her—the types and shapes and densities of the stones already set in place, each resting bound not by any cement but by its own gravity and relation to the others—and after what seemed to the others a random examination, even a confused groping, she would pick up her rock again. Using her hips as a fulcrum, she would shove it into the place where she wanted it, and it was always a precise fit, supporting not just its own weight, but the rocks around it, and the other stoneworkers would always marvel at how she could find such a fit—not having had the seeming advantage, as they did, of knowing in advance what space was available.

One or two stones was all it took to please the old woman, and afterward she would go down to the river to bathe at some distance from the others, and then would head back up to the bar (her scraped arms stinging, but clean) for another beer. The sun would be lower and not as warm now, but she would wait until its last warmth had faded and the stoneworkers came back into the bar for their evening's drinking. That and the sound of the wolves howling, and other sounds and silences, other compressions, told her it was evening. She would listen to those sounds for a while and then walk home in darkness, bone-weary from hauling the big stones, but filled with something new and whole inside, and she would remember making the same walk down the same road as a child, also in the evening, running and skipping.