Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here

by Nancy Wayson Dinan

  The mine shaft was not that kind of cave, the kind with a regular entrance. The difference between a cave and a mine is partly the degree to which man has carved it out and why. In this cave: the silver ingot, the man who had come before and never left, and the possibility of legend, of untold riches.

  No birds, no mammals, were in this cave. They’d have to come down so far, like living at the bottom of a well. Pools of water might be farther down, might have cave fish, swimming blindly in pools, or crabs or shrimp or crawfish.

  As the night wore on, the insects grew bolder: cave crickets with antennae longer than their bodies, beetles who lived on these crickets and their eggs. A scorpion that must have fallen in; scorpions prefer heat and sun. The things we call insects but are actually arthropods: centipedes and millipedes flowing like water over the walls, undisturbed when Boyd’s mother’s flashlight shone upon them. Not my favorite companions, sure, but the kind that makes you sad for what the world is losing.

  3:20 A.M.

  In a hole in the ground, Boyd dreamed. Were they dreams? Of course they were. How else to explain the cacophony of voices? How else to explain all of these people wanting to talk to her, to tell her something they needed her to know? A woman—Alice, Alice, Alice, Boyd heard—saying her sister had poisoned her, had put antifreeze in the well. Another woman, nameless, needing Boyd to tell her husband that she’d loved him and she never told him and what a regret to carry with you forever. A man, sounding desperate and feverish, demanding that Boyd contact his grown children and let them know that there was no God, no Jesus, no heaven, that it had all been a lie. Another man, older sounding, saying the opposite, that it was not too late to repent. All of these voices, and many more, a din of the underground while Boyd slept.

  Then there was the hum of other life—the trees, the grass, the spores and seeds and worms and snakes, all of it alive, and she was somehow part of it. She thought about how she’d known that another person like her was somewhere out there, someone who knew things in that inexplicable way that she did, and how Boyd knew that one day, she would find this person.

  She did not dream of Caleb’s parents, nor of their lantern, but she did dream of light and dark, of how dangerous light could be, of how safe was the dark. She dreamed of the world spinning, rabbits in their burrows, opossums dangling from trees like gray fruit. She saw her juniper grove flashing with the quick exposure of day, the turn back to night, the days and nights in such quick succession that the world seemed like an old-fashioned calliope, like the world flashing by outside H. G. Wells’s time machine. So many days and nights in the history of the world, and in her dream she had gone so far back that the grove was gone, and cattle were driven above her. A few more flashes of light and dark, and the world started to fill with water.

  What would remain if she stayed here long enough, if the clock wound back far enough? Would the water fill with plesiosaurs, would the ooze turn primordial? She was aligned, she felt, in some way with the earth, some magnetic core of her pointing true north, but she couldn’t know everything, just that she was a small part of a larger universe. The voices still chattered in her head—all of the things left unsaid in a life, all of the news about what happened after the life had been lived. All of the stories about the afterlife were contradictory; the only common thread was that it was not what people had expected. She was struck by how many voices there were and yet how they could not seem to hear one another, could only detect her presence underground and speak to her.

  How was she able to sense the earth and the thoughts of others in this way? Some accident of frequency and tuning, perhaps, but to her, it seemed so obvious. It was not even curiosity about others’ lives—though she was curious—but a certain trick of empathy, a sense that it was possible to imagine another’s life, that had developed into something more with Boyd.

  But now, soothed by the flicker of night and day, lulled to sleep by the hum of the earth, Boyd rested for a while, safe for the moment in a bed of juniper and pine, breathing as the worms crawled through her fingers and the centipedes nested in her toes.

  3:30 A.M.

  In the night, the rain stole over the hills. The lakes undefined, edges gone. Their surfaces pocked by drops, swelling. Every river in Texas broken.

  Darker, darker, darker. Later there will come a golden yellow, a blush, radiating from the east, but not yet. This side of the earth had not yet turned her face once more to the sun.

  But these few hours between deepest night and morning were not empty. The nocturnal animals were awake and going about their business: skunks, opossums, coyotes. The night world hardly ever seen by us, but there nevertheless. Through the juniper grove, the prehistoric animals trundled, massive, already at home in this new world. These hours not any less important because we don’t see them.

  But they ticked down now, the globe spinning. At the moment, everyone accounted for, nearly everyone come to rest. Only the gray-eyed girl on the move, headed now toward the juniper grove, and the two men on a ridge trying to make it home before the air runs out.

  Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here

  We All Fear the Deep Water

  Thalassophobia, it’s called, though this is technically the fear of the sea. But we all have this fear, even those of us who love to swim on the scorching-hot days of high summer. The water here in the Hill Country lakes is dark, though, and only imagine what could be down there. Some things we know about: the alligator gar, prehistoric remnant of a hundred million years ago, the fish with the long snout, the double row of teeth. The catfish, the old men of the lakes, rumored to grow to the size of VW Bugs at the feet of the dams. The houses and windmills and the churches with empty pews; only imagine how horrible to swim over these things, to have other lives in other eras playing out beneath your unprotected feet.

  But more than this: the darkness. The sense, when you pull your feet from the water, that something has just missed you, that something is closing toothed jaws around a space only just vacated. Right up the road, the next lake in the chain of Highland Lakes is Lake Travis, the deepest lake in Texas. Twenty stories deep, a whole world just out of sight. Just for a moment, imagine yourself, all five or six feet of you, skimming the surface with all of that dark underneath. Twenty stories of dark extending past your legs, busy treading water. Imagine something happening; imagine your legs stopping, your arms no longer keeping you aloft. How long would it take for a body to fall? With what slow motion would it pass through the watery light, limbs outstretched, lifted slightly from the body, hair rising from the face? Soon in the dusk of water, in the twilight zone, the water mossy with sediment, the bubbles trailing upward. Then in the darkness for so long until coming to rest on the bottom with an inaudible thud, the body surprised by a bottom, by any barrier to the fall after so long without one. What has the body passed in its long descent? What stories could this body tell were it to rise once more to daylight?

  3:35 A.M.

  Two men struggled in the dark on a path that was not clearly marked. As the battery wound down, long after anyone had expected, each slow exhale could be the last. A rise and then Kevin saw Allen’s porch light. Allen was crying again, tears soaking the front of his shirt. His hands rested on his knees and his body shook, chest trembling at a high, fevered frequency. Allen turned frightened eyes to Kevin, and a thin stream of urine trickled down Allen’s leg. He was too scared to say anything, but Kevin knew. He remembered lifeguard training from a different time and place—a lifetime ago—and he bent and scooped Allen onto his shoulder. Urine trickled down his sleeve as the man shuddered above him. Kevin carried both of them home.

  5:59 A.M.

  And now the east was pink, the long horizon lit, revealing dew on the crabgrass. As happened in that part of the world, the sun pushed the wind before it. Leaves in the pin oaks lifted, and furrows appeared in all of the standing water, caressed into being like a crumpled length of silk. In Wimberley, crews and volunteers who had worked through
the night to find the missing now ceded their posts to newcomers, fresh from a night’s sleep, cupping coffee in hands that had not yet lost the chill of rest, slow to wake up. A National Guard soldier pushed a johnboat into the river, headed out to rescue people trapped on temporary islands, stranded and alone. The soldier, a redheaded man, young, worked at H-E-B in his real life. He wondered about a girl he’d met the day before, a girl who did not now answer her phone. In the boat were cases of bottled water. Ducks on the water, indignant at the activity. Doves keeping house in the trees.

  And now the pink was yellow, the coal-blue dark thoroughly chased away, the smell different, bright and hopeful. Now flowers opened and leaves spread themselves. Now the black-capped vireos landed in the juniper grove, scolding one another from the treetops, a sharp zhrrrreee, until the sound gave way to birdsong.

  6:00 A.M.

  Next to the cliff, the ground burgeoned. Pine needles fell as Boyd sat up. She shook dust off her fingertips before she wiped the inside corners of her eyes. She blinked and felt dust in her lashes, saw the white limestone coating her forearms, giving her a pale sheen.

  She kicked her legs, shaking earth and sleep from them, seeing her knees emerge, little mountain peaks that shed tiny avalanches of debris. A breath—she had been breathing all night, but this breath was different—cold, bracing, and instead of chasing dirt from lungs and trachea and nose, the breath settled the fine particles that remained, and would remain, part of her now. She opened her mouth to breathe more deeply and realized by the movement that her lips had been slightly parted all night. For the rest of her life, she would remember the fetid, fecund smell of the underground, ripe and wet and alive, crawling with the living of things too small to be seen.

  Her knees hitched up, the soles of her feet getting their bearings. She got them under her and rose, rocking forward, and a shower of earth cascaded from her shoulders.

  Her clothes were tattered, the convertible cargo pants shredded at the ankle. The linen shirt was thin to the point of transparency, wholly intact only at wrists, placket, and collar.

  She could not say what had happened to her. The boy’s parents had been nearly upon her, then she had fallen. Then what? She had been on her back in the pine needles, unhurt, as if the earth had swallowed her. She had somehow been able to breathe. Once buried in the earth, she’d become so sleepy, and she remembered little about what had happened next. She’d dreamed—she knew this because her head was full of crazy things—but she couldn’t recall exactly what the dreams had been.

  There had been a cacophony of voices. She could not remember what those voices had said, or if they’d said anything specific. It had been a white noise, background, urgent but indistinct. Boyd felt as if she’d been asleep at a party, the conversation distant.

  As she’d risen, the earth had partially covered the pink blouse with the cat’s-head buttons and the jeans. She stepped over these, their presence only just registering in her consciousness.

  But she did dream of something, she knew, the person who she knew was out there. It seemed that if the earth somehow knew what Boyd was, then it knew what the other person was as well.

  Thinking still about this person, she turned toward what she thought was the direction of the river, the direction of Isaac. She could not sense him—his thoughts, his feelings—but she could sense him, body in a pecan tree. If she turned her left shoulder to the rising sun and walked for a couple of hours, she would come close to finding him. In between, however, was the swollen Colorado River, and, oh, what devastation lay there. She remembered the water behind her: the bridge out, the cypress tree gone, and the way the water had wrapped around her ankles like fingers. She also remembered the pine needles against her cheeks and eyelids. The earth had had her, and it had let her go.

  8:00 A.M.

  Later than she would normally have, Carla opened her eyes behind her screen in the common room upstairs. The morning light had a friendly cast, an impression aided by the unintelligible chatter coming from the rest of the room. She stretched clean legs and arms underneath clean sheets.

  When she rose, she left the big T-shirt on, but she put yesterday’s pants on underneath. Already she was thinking long term: what clothes she’d need to bring, what books. She wondered if she’d be allowed to keep this bed or if she would end up in one of the little houses on the property.

  In the bathroom, two women scrubbed the toilets, women Carla had not yet met, and she recognized the smell of purple Fabuloso. This seemed somehow out of place: she realized she’d expected homemade soap, lye from ashes. They wore yellow rubber gloves that reached almost to their elbows, and their presence—industrious and bustling—again gave Carla pause. Of course there would be dirty toilets on a commune. She just hadn’t considered who would clean them. She had imagined something different: gardening in the sunshine, maybe, or knitting sweaters in a rocking chair. Maybe she could help them with their soap situation, as soap was one of her specialties.

  She brushed her teeth with the donated toothbrush and wondered at her presumption. What made her think that they were going to invite her to live here? Sure, they’d taken her in on a rainy night when she’d been wandering the countryside in yoga slings, but that kindness did not necessarily extend to semipermanent room and board. And now she wanted to be here, but she didn’t want to clean everybody’s toilets. She remembered the warmth of the shingled house, the roast chicken on the table.

  She headed downstairs to the long hall for breakfast, and it reminded her of the Lutheran church she’d attended as a child: an open kitchen on one end, full of women with aprons, a long counter between the work space and the dining room. Almost everyone she’d seen working so far had been a woman, and while this would normally have rankled—the domestic jobs relegated to the women—she saw that it was a necessity, that the women outnumbered the men to an astounding degree. She guessed maybe thirty people lived here all told, and she had seen one adult man and one adolescent. The commune was female, she thought, and then she thought, no, Amazonian. This adjective conveyed a certain fierceness that Carla believed women, when allowed, possessed.

  Breakfast was eggs baked with vegetables, served in long pans with giant spoons. Homemade bread had been sliced, and next to it were jeweled preserves in Ball jars. She took a spoon of eggs, two slices of bread, which she spread with peach preserves, and she filled a mug with coffee. She wondered at the coffee; it could not be grown here. It felt a little like the purple Fabuloso: welcome but out of place. She sat at one of the long tables, feeling a bit like a college kid in a dorm.

  The dining room was mostly empty; after a minute, she realized that the kitchen crew was doing more cleaning than cooking. At a place like this, everybody would have been up long ago. She guessed it was around eight A.M., judging by the sunlight, and it took her a moment to realize that she hadn’t seen sun in a couple of days. The rain had stopped, at least for now. This was such a curiosity to her that she rose and went to one of the windows, coffee in hand, as if she meant to stand there for a while.

  Outside, the ground was a mess, churned into what looked like chocolate pudding. People were indeed up, all women that Carla could see, going about the business of the morning, wearing rubber boots but still slipping in the wet. Carla saw Kim speaking to two other women, and she recognized Bess as one of them, she of the knitting needles in the shingled house. Kim stopped talking and gestured, pointing to something Carla couldn’t see, though she leaned forward to look. Now all three women looked in that direction, and Carla read in their expressions a sense of alarm.

  Carla hurried out into the yard, still holding her coffee, still wearing yoga slings. She looked in the direction the women looked, and for the first time she got a sense of the geography of the place—the Colorado River wound by and on the other side was a three-hundred-foot bluff, filled with Ashe juniper and pink granite—and against this backdrop, Carla was stunned to see a soldier banking a johnboat on the glassy river and fording the flood
waters to come ashore. Carla almost dropped her coffee cup. To her, a woman steeped in counterculture, the soldier meant nothing good.

  The soldier had red hair. He stood in the shallow water in his army boots, looking ill at ease as a crowd gathered.

  Kim stepped forward, squelching through the mud, sliding once but quickly regaining her balance. She was tiny next to the soldier, and Carla realized with a start that Kim was only about five feet tall. She had seemed short, maybe, but the coiled power in her wiry frame gave her a more imposing stature.

  The redheaded soldier was tall, yes, but not unusually so. He seemed larger than he actually was because of an awkwardness, an unease in his body. When he walked out of the water toward Kim, his shoulders dropped and his palms faced forward, as if he were scooping air. The man hesitated, looking beyond Kim at the people assembling on the bank. Carla followed his gaze: to her left was a massive garden, sodden from the storm, at least an acre, sown with corn still only waist-high, rows and rows of tomatoes drooping at their stakes, peppers only a foot off the ground, a good quarter of the garden various shades of salad and leafy greens. Beyond this was a patch of cucurbits—Carla recognized the deep yellow flowers, open in the morning sun—melons and squash given free rein to spread their vines. Now she followed his gaze to her right, past the houses, to outbuildings and paddocks and goats that were white on top but brown with mud shoulder-down. Seeing these things as if through his eyes gave her an odd sensation; she considered them hers, yet they were just as new to her. Most of the few hours she’d passed here had been spent in darkness, sleeping.