by Rick Bass
It took a full day of bonfire to thaw enough ice and earth to create a place soft enough to dig, and then another two days of shoveling and pick-axing, working in shifts, to carve a hole deep enough for the fire horse. As the town worked, they tried to remember how many of Joshua’s animals were already down there—five, they calculated, now six—a salmon, a bear, a bobcat, a goose, and an elk—and they commented on how they would soon have to expand the cemetery, and of how the occupants had to be spaced farther apart, like the giant trees in old-growth forest, with so much space between them. It wouldn’t do to crowd big things together.
They finally had made the hole deep enough for the horse, but went deeper—and at dusk the next day they lowered the great horse into the hole and began filling in the loose soil, until it was up to the horse’s back, at which point they slid Danny into the horse’s neck. He had stiffened considerably, but they finally got him in, and knew that in the earth’s warmth he would loosen soon to the desired fit.
They finished covering the hole, tamped the earth flat, piled flat stones over the spot to discourage the coyotes and wolves from digging, and retired to the bar to say their last good-byes. It snowed hard that night, so that the next day the signs of their recent labors were hidden.
In bed, Mel asked Wallis not to enter her, but to only hold her. She said that she felt weak and hollow inside, carved out, and frightened. Wallis asked if she wanted to go back to the wolves, but Mel said no, that she was just empty-feeling and frightened, was all—as if crossing a shaky rope bridge high above a gorge.
“When was the last time you were frightened?” she asked him.
The profiteers came a week later, on a Saturday. They came in a pack, half a dozen of them on snowmobiles straining to pull small trailers, and people in the valley heard the bee-buzz of their engines coming over the summit one morning and knew that they were back, and hurried toward town to be there when they arrived. Even before the profiteers got there, the townspeople could see the dense blue ribbons of smoke above the trees, ribbons of smoke glowing luminous in the sun and moving closer, as if a train were chugging through the woods, and they could smell the smoke long before the snow machines arrived, and when they came into town the sound seemed to saw winter in half in a way that was neither pleasing nor respectful.
The profiteers knew from past experience not to set up their trailers right away, but to settle in—to come into the bar and have a cup of coffee and maybe a shot of rum; to say hello, after a year’s absence—to scope out new faces and take note of who was absent. Danny had always been one of their best customers, and they kept waiting for him to appear, before the silence of his absence finally sunk in on them. Artie explained that he would be taking care of the bar now.
The profiteers told how they had not been able to make it all the way in to the valley in a single day; how they had gotten only halfway the first day and had to set up a big wall tent on the summit and build a fire.
The profiteers were from Helena. One year there had been a woman among them, but this year they were all men. Coming down off the mountain like that, clad in their huge insulated snowsuits and bespectacled with goggles and helmets, they had appeared as an alien species; but now as they sat at the bar and chatted, with their helmets off and their snowsuits hung on the wall, they appeared human again, and benign, even friendly. They understood that their greatest asset was their rarity: that it was at first a simple enough pleasure for the townspeople merely to feast their eyes on the sight of someone new. In years past, depending on the winter, people had come up to them and had touched them as they spoke—strangers resting a hand on their backs or shoulders as if they had known them for a long time, or, more disturbingly, as they would rest a hand on the neck or flank of a domestic animal.
Typically, the profiteers stayed all day and then left at first darkness—wanting to take full advantage of that last diminishing wedge of snowy dusk, when they pulled in 75 percent of their business from the people who had had their eye on something all day but who had been unable to commit until night fell and the profiteers began loading their trailers, ready to disappear . . .
It was funny and touching, what sometimes happened in that last hour of light. One year a woman showed up wanting to buy a ride out of the valley—forever away from the valley. She was leaving her husband, and whether she left on foot or on the back of a snow machine, she was going that night. The one that gave her the ride out had ended up marrying her.
The profiteers had contracted with the postal service to bring in the last few months’ mail, and now, as was their custom, they spread it out on the bar and let the villagers sift and paw through it: ancient, fermented fruitcakes from relatives back east; news of births and deaths, weddings and divorces; checks and bills; junk mail; catalogs; and long letters from old friends. Some of the mail was devoured right there in the bar, though most of it was stored away to take home to be read in privacy, and savored.
Sometimes it took half an hour to sort all the mail, and afterward, there was throughout the bar a tapering off of excitement, and a kind of crystalline silence that would creep in—there was never enough mail—and after the pile of leftover mail had been double- and triplechecked (old newspapers held upside down and shaken for any stray postcards that might have been hidden)—a loneliness would settle, and the townspeople would feel colder, and unfulfilled, whereas the day before they might have been feeling just fine: durable, rugged, sturdy—square to the world, possessing neither hope nor despair.
Into this vacancy, this new loneliness, the profiteers moved. They began setting up their trailers, pitching awnings or tents over their wares if it was snowing or displaying them in the bright spring sunlight on nice days. The street became a small bazaar, and the townspeople strolled around each trailer, handling everything: touching things, sniffing them, consuming them with their eyes.
Old sports magazines. Fresh bacon, fresh lemons, fresh-cut flowers, fresh coffee beans. New books, spines uncracked, crisp as coins. Bathing suits, umbrellas, watermelons, pencils, necklaces, sugar, honey, salt, black pepper, red pepper, limes, oranges, apples, Bibles, records, cassettes, batteries. It always astounded the townspeople how much the profiteers could fit into their trailers, and how sharply even the most insipid junk spoke to their hearts. Teddy bears made in China by child slaves, toy dump trucks, brightly colored throw rugs, picture frames, potato chips, hot-pad holders, walkie-talkies, skillets, gloves, baseball caps, shirts, axes, saws.
They didn’t need a damn bit of it, and they bought it all; and in the buying, they felt momentarily sated, though always, immediately afterward—and in the days that followed—they felt somehow weakened, hung-over and confused: as if they had blacked out, during the drinking of too much alcohol, and had, as they lay unconscious, been severely beaten.
Near dusk, Wallis and Mel walked with one of the profiteers down to the frozen river to look at the sunset’s last red rays reflecting off the ice. It was going to be a cold night for snowmobiling, but that was how they did it; they had to be in and out that first night, before the next day dawned and people came back to them wanting refunds or exchanges, no longer pleased with the purchases and decisions they had made.
The man who went to the river with Wallis and Mel had worked on a couple of Dudley’s and Matthew’s wells. He asked when the next well would be drilled. Wallis allowed that he had finished a new map, and that he thought they might be ready as early as mid-summer. Mel said nothing, only watched the glimmering river of ice. She looked to the sky. Venus, above the trees.
The man nodded toward the sea of dark timber across the river—the velvet folds of it rising up to the edges of the mountains.
“You can bet we, or someone else, will be back for all that,” he said, talking about the timber: speaking not maliciously, but instead with awe. “We won’t forget this is here.” He said it in almost a friendly way, like a kind of warning. “We, or someone else, will be back for that. The whole shittaree.”
Turning, they watched the beams of headlights ascending through the forest, climbing slowly toward the distant summit. Long after the sound was only a low buzz, and then nothing at all, they sat there, waiting for their hearts to calm.
Later in the night, the owls began to hoot. Mel and Wallis sat closer together, for warmth, and then closer still, for solace.
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.