by Rick Bass
As they drew nearer to the cabin they hurried, half-fearing that they would hear the cries and even screams of childbirth, and abandonment—and hearing nothing, they hurried faster, fearing trouble—but when they went up onto the porch they heard Amy call to them to come in, and they saw that the blood-drenched nightgown was hanging still damp over the porch railing, and inside she was dressed in a clean one and was holding and rocking a sleeping little girl baby who had a thatch of orange hair as bright as the rising sun.
“Close the door, you’ll let the smoke in,” Amy said, and they all stood close to her, breathing in, and worshiping, that special grace of the newborn. They all wanted to hold her, but no one asked—not yet. She was still too new. She was still all Amy’s. Mel crouched and touched the baby’s downy hair. Amy smiled.
“Was it hard?” someone asked.
“Like pushing out a piano,” Amy said.
The baby, still asleep, grasped Mel’s finger. Wallis thought ahead to the spring. March. The geese would be back. The frogs would be calling again.
Mel and Wallis gathered volunteers later that afternoon to get the pieces for Helen’s coffin. It was dusk by the time they got there, having had to detour around some small fires while walking carefully across the smoldering ashes of where others had already passed through—certain aspects of the forest looking barely recognizable, with the slopes and shape of the ground below more revealed, with its shield of vegetation scorched free—and when they got to Joshua’s cabin, he was already asleep, so that they had to awaken him.
The stallion would not go into the woods while the woods were still burning, so the mourners had to carry all of the burden themselves. Joshua helped them, and cautioned them continuously to avoid scraping any part of the coffin against a branch, which would mar the finish.
They carried the work in pieces: Wallis and Mel each carrying a glossy wing, larger than a surfboard. Others took turns ferrying the body of the coffin, while Charlie and Artie toted the fierce head. They hurried across steaming orange coals, hopping from rock to rock to avoid searing the bottoms of their boots.
“Don’t drop it,” Joshua kept saying, “please don’t drop it.”
They lifted her, light as a tissue, and placed her in the elongated body of the raven as if to sleep for the night, so that the tautening of her body wouldn’t make it more difficult to load her into it the next day. Then most of them went back across the street to drink, carrying her with them to set on the porch of the saloon so that she would not be alone.
Mel and Wallis went home to see what, if anything, remained of their cabin. They walked in silence, each feeling strange, as if they were walking three or four steps ahead of themselves: as if they had already stepped into the future.
When they got to the cabin they saw that it had not burned, though the smokehouse was partially charred and still smoldering, and they could smell the odor of fresh-cooked meat where the last of their supply had sizzled in its own juices. Runnels of fat had oozed steaming beneath the logs and ran in trickles across the yard downslope from the smokehouse, and already the wolves and coyotes had been in the yard, eating the fat-soaked dirt and clawing at the smoking timbers, driven nearly crazy by the odors so close yet unattainable.
There was no need to conserve. Mel and Wallis went straight to the best of the meat, the remaining elk backstrap, and ate some of it straight off the bone; and finding that it was cooked to perfection, they cut it down and carried it up to the house and sat on the porch and ate it with their fingers, and the smoke was still so dense in the valley that they could see no stars. The night was hot, though they could feel occasional rivers of coolness, and autumn coming on, autumn sliding southward at a rate of several miles each day, like a traveler whose mission even death will not deter.
The town buried her in the cottonwood tree the next afternoon. Wallis climbed up into the highest fork of the tree and they hoisted the box up with her in it, using ropes and pulleys. Joshua wanted to do the finishing work—the fastening of wings and beaked skull-head, with dowels and pegs and a wooden mallet—but was too old to climb the tree, and so he had to settle for calling out instructions to Wallis aloft. It felt to Wallis as if he were assembling something which, when finished, would assume life and fly away. He was sorry Helen was not around to see how handsome the thunderbird was.
The leaves of the cottonwood were beginning to blush yellow. He knew she had seen that plenty of times in her life, though surely not enough. He searched for Mel below, found her, and smiled as she signaled to him, as she mouthed the words “Be careful.”
At the bar that night the entire valley gathered for the final sendoff—the drinking, the story-telling of Helen’s life. They sat on the porch and watched the fires. The smoke was clearing and now they could see the ragged waves of orange light gnawing across and through the forest. Some crept while others raced. They seemed as ripples on the surface of previously still waters.
Mel wondered what the faces of the mountains would look like after the fires had swept across: which trees would be killed, which ones would be injured, and which ones would be strengthened. The wash of green, wave of green, that would follow in the fire’s wake in the next spring, and for so many years subsequent.
“You could never figure it all out,” Mel said, watching the blinkings of orange. “The closest you could come is to learning a small thing really well, and then hoping that big things run pretty much the same way.”
“What small thing would you learn?” Wallis asked, and Mel laughed.
“You’re right,” she said. “There’s probably nothing that small.”
THE FALCONER RETURNED WITH HIS INJURED BIRD THAT evening. Dudley and Matthew had passed the rig workers in their exodus, had ordered them to turn around and go back into the fire, but they would not; and soon the burning timbers had criss-crossed the road in such numbers that it stalled Dudley’s and Matthew’s progress yet again—as if the valley were doing all that it could to repel them—but once more they abandoned their rental car, the black limousine, and Dudley had Matthew fashion a travois out of lodgepoles, and Matthew pulled Dudley the rest of the way down into town in that manner, as if dragging a rickshaw. He pulled him under and over the flaming timbers, both men gagging and coughing on smoke, eyes watering and noses running crusty black, ashy-haired, with their skin blistering and their suits charring from the radiant heat as they passed through the more intense fire zones. Often they would stop and lie down in the creeks that crossed beneath the road, in the backwater sloughs and marshes in which stood already the panting herds of deer and elk, as well as the solitary moose. Badgers, bears, porcupines—all eyes gathered around these deep ponds, glinting red in the firelight, and observed the two men as they lay belly-down in the ashy water and cooled their blistered pink skin.
“Pussies,” Old Dudley said, speaking of the rig workers who had abandoned the valley. Matthew said nothing, only hitched up the travois when Dudley told him to and began pulling again, descending deeper into the flames. He remembered the first year that he had started working for Old Dudley. They had drilled over five hundred wells that year, and had hit on almost three hundred of them.
Flaming trees and burning snags and limbs fell toward them from all directions, falling like swords with whiffs of sound like the cutting of paper with sharp scissors. Some of the snags and timbers were immense and shattered into millions of bright coals like rubies and garnets and glowing sapphires when they hit. “Pussies,” Old Dudley said again, though with less resolve.
Finally they were through the worst of it, and had descended into a relatively green zone of calm and peace, closer to the river and town. Old Dudley’s suit coat had been charred loose from his back, and he had dipped his white dress-shirt in a creek and then wrapped it turbanlike around his balding, silvery head, so that now he was shirtless, and both his tong marks as well as the crescent welded scar across his breast pulsed pink in the hot night.
They came across a bull elk that h
ad fallen in the forest, having succumbed to smoke, and whose hide was now burning. Matthew, unable to pass up meat, built an extension to the travois, skinned and gutted the bull, rolled it over onto the sled behind Old Dudley, and continued on toward town.
They skid-dragged right past Amy’s cabin, and though a lantern was lit inside, they did not think to visit or even stop, but pushed on.
People out on the porch of the bar heard them coming from a long way off: heard the raspy scraping of the travois, then saw the dim silhouettes, like that of plowhorse and strange potentates approaching.
Mel and Wallis did not get up from the porch but others greeted them more warmly, as if the two men had come to rescue them, and were amazed that Dudley and Matthew had made it in. No one told Matthew about Helen, though they could all see him looking around for her. Finally Mel said, “I’d better go deal with that,” and she went over to meet them. Old Dudley hugged her and looked past her into the darkness and said, “Where’s that traitor boy?”
Mel and Matthew neither embraced nor even shook hands, only stood there—and the people from the bar came down behind them to gather around and examine the elk. Some of them began picking at the blackened crust of its hulk, tentatively at first, but then one of the men called out, “It’s pretty good if you just eat the part on the outside,” and soon a dozen of them were cutting at it with their knives and eating it in that manner.
“What would you say if I told you I changed my mind?” Matthew said, reaching for her hands. She pulled them free.
“I’d say you’ve always only wanted what you can’t have,” she said. “Come on, there’s something you need to see.”
She had no patience for his self-pity, when he saw the giant raven-eagle perched in the cottonwood against the spark-drifting, smoky sky—he who had ignored Helen, had ignored everything, for the last quarter-century—and she left him crying there in the grass beneath the cottonwood tree and went back to the bar. Charlie had dug another pit in the road and was building a fire in whose coals he would bury the elk up to its antlers.
Mel went to Old Dudley and told him about Helen. He was eating some of the elk and seemed preoccupied with that; he merely nodded, licked his fingers, and said, “She was old.”
“You’re old,” Mel said.
“But it’s not my time to go,” he said. “I have not given the Grim Reaper my permission.”
“You should go see Amy and the baby,” Mel said. “The baby was born.”
“Boy or girl?”
Mel started not to tell him. “Girl,” she said.
“Shit.”
“Does it bother you,” Mel asked, “that I’m free?” She looked out at the burning mountains, the burning night, and lifted her arms to it all. “Does it bother you that I escaped?”
Old Dudley shook his head, and plucked more meat from the carcass. “Nope,” he said, “you’re a girl, a woman. I let you go. If you’d been a boy, I wouldn’t have let you go.”
“Bullshit,” Mel said. “I’d have gone anyway. You couldn’t have stopped me.”
“Maybe,” said Dudley, licking his fingers again.
Matthew came walking up from out of the woods, his tearstains making charcoal runs down his face, and anyone who knew him, who had loved him, could see that there was even less of him than before: that in fact, perhaps now there was next to nothing.
The others saw only the husk, and perceived that he was all still there. As if the ancient stories would be resurrected.
Charlie began filling dirt back in over the coals of the elk’s fire: buried it up to its neck, so that it appeared that the elk was drowning in earth. Its antlers rose six feet into the air, like a gleaming double tree in the center of the road.
The townspeople began walking down the road toward Mel’s and Wallis’s cabin. Many of them had had their watches stop, they noticed, around the time that they had been burying Helen, and this unnerved them, so that they walked closer together through the burning darkness like a herd. Burning logs continued to float down the river like ghost ships. Dudley walked with his arm around Matthew’s shoulders, Dudley’s chest and back pale as marble in the night. “Cheer up, boy,” he said, “she’s probably happier now.”
The village ate far into the night. Mel fixed benches in the smokehouse, like seats of bleachers, by placing boards atop planks, and many of the villagers sat on the benches facing each other and gnawed at the grouse and trout, while others took sections of deer and elk up onto the porch. They smelled strongly of smoke, as if they themselves had been aging in the smokehouse for months, and a certain psychological duress was beginning to accrue. They all sought isolation, but under their own terms. This was more like a siege, and the continued absence of daylight—the unceasing smokiness—was as if winter had come two months early; as if they had been deprived of the most basic cycle of their lives.
Matthew and Wallis sat next to each other on the porch and ate ribs. Daylight was beginning to glow through the smoke.
“They say you really used to be something,” Wallis said, not unkindly. They had been friends once but if there was anything left within the husk of the man sitting next to him, Wallis could not feel it. It seemed strange to him that they were only months apart in age.
Matthew said nothing, just kept gnawing at the rib. He felt a vague bitterness and confusion at Wallis’s success. How strange it seemed to succeed at a thing by turning away from it rather than hurling one’s self at it.
When Old Dudley—still shirtless, his stomach distended, meat-drunk—had gorged his fill, he came limping around, looking for Matthew—and he told Matthew to hitch up, that it was time to go see the baby.
Without a word—making it clear that this was all but an inconvenience, a waking dream to endure between the drilling of one well and then the next—Matthew rose and picked up the long handles of the travois and, with Dudley settled into it, set off scraping down the trail with his head down, leaning forward, and they were soon swallowed by the smoke.
The rest of the villagers ate a while longer—ate until the meat was gone—and then they carried all the bones and carcasses off into the woods for the ravens and coyotes to help themselves to—and after that, they headed off into the smoke also, and after they were gone the smokehouse was entirely empty, four walls and a roof bereft of anything.
As the villagers disappeared like wolves into the smoke, Mel thought how even if one day the wolves were gone from the valley there would still for some short time afterward be the echo or shape of a thing like wolves.
School started the next day. Mel was sleepless that night, in a good way, thinking ahead to the future: to her child, to the hunt in the coming weeks, to the next day’s lesson plan. She knew her first impulse would be to try to tell the students everything in a day, all at once, and that she might have to work against her instincts, and instead move carefully, steadily.
She lay there awake while Wallis slept. She felt more than ever that she was two or three steps out in front of herself, for the first time in a long time, and it was not a bad feeling.
She arose near what she believed was dawn and fixed a cup of tea, being careful not to awaken Wallis. She sat there for an hour: not reading, not thinking ahead, not looking back: not doing or thinking anything. Then she dressed and went to school, walking slowly. When she got to town and went into the schoolhouse, where there was a battery-clock that worked, she saw that it was 3:00 A.M., and she laughed, fixed a fire to begin warming the room up, then lay down on the floor and napped for another couple of hours, until the world began to glow dully with daylight, and she was awakened by the laughs of children.
Old Dudley and Matthew kept waiting for the rig crew to return. Dudley stayed at Amy’s the first couple of nights, but said that the baby’s cries kept him awake at night, and so he moved over to the mercantile, where Matthew was staying.
The two men spent large amounts of time skulking around the rig, impatient to begin again; and though the well had only drilled
down through about four thousand feet of glacial dust and cobble, the two men amused themselves by wading out into the mud pit and straining out and examining the ground-up drill cuttings from that insignificant passage: studying the powdery remains intently, as if trying to fool themselves into believing that some great treasure lay right beneath their feet, rather than so many miles down.
They prowled and paced, waiting. They were deeper into the forest, closer to the fires, and sometimes they would look up from their examinations and watch a flame leap from treetop to treetop; and in the evenings, as dusk settled onto the layers of smoke below, they would watch the floating traces of sparks overhead, sparks following currents of heat as if riding along the borders of an invisible river of fire, lighting the banks of the river above them like blinking lanterns set along that shore.
Matthew rowed Dudley back and forth across the river several times each day to check on the well—as if the old man believed that the well might have resumed drilling on its own, according to his passion.
In the afternoons, Dudley often napped, and Matthew had time on his hands. He would usually spend those afternoons hanging around beneath Helen’s tree, like an old hound. On more than one occasion he climbed up into the top of the cottonwood and opened the hatch of the great thunderbird and peered in at her, and was each time afterward sorry that he had, though still, he could not keep from wanting one last look.
Other afternoons he would rise from the tall grass beneath the cottonwood, would rouse himself from his funk, and would set off down the river to search for fish, to help replenish Mel’s empty smokehouse.