Between Here and the Yellow Sea

by Nic Pizzolatto

  Kenneth rose and pulled out his wife’s chair. “Maybe you’ll have some ideas, Carmen. But we’ve got to get back now. Keep me updated, Thomas.” The two said their good-byes and left the room, followed by their servants.

  A window flanked Thomas and Carmen, laying a spire of light across the table, and they moved to the window.

  “How are you?” he asked.

  “May I call you Thomas?”

  “Yes.”

  Her hair was crimped and bound into red-blond wavelets above her ears. Crystal hung from her earlobes. Her dress was diaphanous, ruffled at the calves, and now she slid into a brown fur coat.

  “What are you thinking it will be?”

  “The window?”

  “Yes.” Shadow nestled at her cheeks.

  “I was thinking, something about the land, but I’m still not sure.”

  “Oh, something pastoral? Bucolic?”

  “Sure.” He didn’t recognize her last word.

  “Nothing religious, I hope?”

  “No.”

  Thin eyebrows raised and she bit her bottom lip. “It’s so boring, isn’t it?”

  Uncertain of his task, he stared determinedly out the window. When he hadn’t said anything, she asked, “Do you have time to take a walk? I’m positive Kenneth won’t mind.”

  “I’m supervising the studio they’re building—”

  “Please? Kenneth said I could have you all day if I wanted. Maybe you could tell me what some of these trees are. These men are building a castle here and they don’t even know the plants on their own land.” Her green eyes, lime, tinged with brass, again traversed his face. Her big eyes could flare, they could appear generous and encouraging.

  On the way out, workers loading and hammering glared at him, Jack Alden among them, raising stones for a staircase. Alden whispered to the man next to him.

  Leaves were vibrant, burning colors that crunched underfoot. He pointed out silver maples, white ash, post oak, and black oak. She kept asking questions.

  They followed a creek beside which she walked with long, pointed steps on river stone, like a dancer. “Tell me about where you come from,” she said. He told her about Linn Creek, its rock formations and the confluence of the Niangua and Osage rivers, his schooling, and father.

  She reached in back of her head, unfastened her hair and shook it behind her. Every time his talk slowed, she prodded him with questions. Her nature appeared extravagant, but part of something concealed.

  “What about England?”

  “It’s gray.” A few umber and scarlet leaves spun down. “We lost an entire generation.” She had slender hands, white fingers that tapped her hip. Kenneth said I could have you all day.

  Bluestem and Indian grass flourished in open forest of pine and blackjack. Carmen said that her mother was Elizabeth’s older sister. Her father owned a factory that manufactured bridles and yokes. She mentioned his art collection.

  “He has a Rembrandt. Do you know who Cézanne is?”

  “No.”

  She rubbed an oak leaf between her fingers. “He’s marvelous. He paints with light in his brush.”

  This excited him and he smiled, hearing her for the first time.

  She placed a piece of blue sage behind her ear and brushed her hair off. “Bright, singing light.” She took his arm on the walk back.

  They parted by the greenhouses. Volta, now working alone, stood on a ladder next to a roof.

  Thomas waved to him. “How’s it coming?”

  Volta squinted. “S’fine enough. But how do I get your job?”

  To find his composition, he felt he had to rise above his everyday state, his sense of scale. But he didn’t know if that meant thinking bigger or smaller. A simple landscape lacked the originality needed, and the closest he’d come was sketching an eruption of birds, but even that felt false, like he was forcing shapes to suit the colors he wanted.

  He stayed at the studio, drawing, and missed dinner. Astra came for him after. “You missed lunch too.”

  “The McRyders wanted me to eat with them.” He looked for traces of who she’d been in the cave, but her face was the familiar blank, a well-shaped void that only permitted the most cursory investigation.

  She led him up an arched bluff, her form fluid, compact, and she built a fire. He watched her, muscles in her legs, remembering them. She’d brought a bearskin.

  He moved into her.

  She stopped him. “Not now.” Her knees drew to her chin.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. I just want to sit here.”

  His hands moved, aroused by her refusal.

  “Stop it, I said. Quit. Please.”

  “All right.” Shame still lingered from the way he’d handled Alden, the persistent taste of cowardice, but what riled him became the overpowering feeling that everyone here was playing some game without his consent. He was tired of hidden intentions and things not said.

  “Then why did you bring me up here?”

  “Because it’s nice. I wanted us to stay the night out here. Stop, please.”

  He threw his hands up. “I don’t know what you mean. I never do. Why were you like that last night?”

  She seemed to clench, betraying a kind of embarrassment. It made him want more.

  “Well? Do you do that a lot? Take men out in the woods like that?”

  “Be quiet,” she said, nearly whispering as she watched the fire.

  “You don’t make any sense to me.”

  She stirred the fire and it leapt in her moist eyes.

  “Say something. Who are you?”

  She turned to him with an injured face, as if she’d been slapped. Her nose was short and flat on the tip, pert below black, wet eyes, and part of her hair always fell between her eyes. “That was something I did with you. I don’t know why I do things.”

  He could see her reeling. The sudden control enervated him, her facades cracking. “How many men have you done that with?”

  “Stop,” she said, looking back to the fire. “Stop talking like that.”

  “Then say something.”

  “I just wanted you to sleep out here with me tonight.”

  He stood. “I’m sorry. I have important work to do. They’ve built me a studio, see?” He pointed down the bluff. “I need to get back to work.”

  “Nobody else is working.”

  “Nobody else can do what I can.” As he said this, he realized he believed it, and figured that must be because it was true. Yes, he thought, what he was doing supplanted them all: Astra, Carmen, Alden, the McRyders, and whatever conspiracies shifted around him. It had always been true, he remembered. As a child, he’d learned to convince himself that he was alone due to an essential superiority. This was an extension of that rationale. He needn’t be concerned about anything but the work, and that comforted him.

  He wasn’t even angry anymore, just felt large, appropriately brutal, flexing with ambition and talent.

  “I’ll see you later, sometime. Good night.”

  He started down the hill, forcing himself to think of the window he would make. Near the bottom he heard her call his name.

  Had she even used his name before?

  He looked up and saw her backlit by the fire. She motioned for him to return, an exhausted wave of her hand. He didn’t move, but watched her, feeling more powerful the longer he made her wait.

  He marched up the rise and when he reached her he became forceful. Her face turned away, grunts escaping rhythmically beside the crackling fire, and in the circle of warmth he felt his will had found itself. Everything here, people and land, seemed to need him.

  He felt ecstatic in her, like a cruel king, above judgment. When he rolled off, he was already nursing a vague remorse. He stared into the fire, groggy, and let it carry him to sleep.

  *

  A dense fog clotted the air in the morning, and he woke alone. The campfire smoldered. Rising sun shined at his back and he rose, still satisfied with his sen
se of power. At the lip of the bluff he looked out on the valley and saw a shadow drawn impossibly tall, suspended in midair over the chasm. When he raised his arm and moved to the side, the giant shadow in the air moved with him. It was him: a mammoth gray spirit facing back from that void.

  It was, in fact, the phenomenon scientists term the Brocken Specter—brilliant light projected onto a thick mist that allows for several dimensions of shadow to overlap, occurring only at certain heights. To Thomas, though, it seemed like a miracle of his own doing: this manifestation of the land might as well have been a reality he’d willed. He turned and remembered Astra was gone, wondered for a moment if she’d left for work, but he didn’t think about her long. He moved with the incredible shadow for some time, until the sun shifted and the specter disintegrated.

  Firebrick stacked seven feet high and the furnace was four feet wide. A large, accordionlike billow grew out its side, and an iron clamp attached at the furnace door. From a bulky copper drum, a gas line entered the burner block at its top. The window was to be fifteen feet by four and a half, tapering up to a sword point.

  He looked at his sketch: a single branching tree, meant to be a bare oak, formed the base of the composition. From that stage a fragmentation of color as birds ascended. Many birds: a falcon, a red-shouldered hawk, an owl, grackles, jays, and one woodpecker. A waterfall created the left-side border. Castle walls formed the right. Between those frames stood a pyramid of sun and a darkening shadow, shaped like a man, encompassing it all. Like a tune, its layers repeated in his mind, grains of sand cohering, becoming more solid and real with each refrain. The large masses of green would stabilize the throbbing reds, which bled into dull yellows, the yellows and golds embraced by subtle gradations of blue and brown, coupled with the soft shapes he’d use for the largest panes, the way those shapes dissipated to smaller and smaller fragments and shards, to greater color variation, the window should have the effect of a long, visual exhalation, an optical sigh.

  Glass poured between his fingers, only dust. He debated ratios while plunging hands into the sacks of minerals. Sand 56, soda ash 20.3, feldspar 13.6, lime 9.2, zinc oxide 7, borax 5.5. If he increased the soda and reduced the feldspar, it would result in a cleaner finish. But didn’t the subject necessitate a few bubbles and rough ridges in order to portray a more naturalistic climate? It should be more detailed the closer one got, but at a distance of even a few feet appear whole, each color existing for every other color with the precise divisions between them too subtle to locate. Two days later he moved his cot to the studio and began.

  New black iron tools lay before him, beside silvery asbestos gloves. New paddles and sheet trays for flattening the glass. The firebrick was yet clean gray, but after today it would be properly scorched and soot-blackened. Tin pots of chromium, cobalt, copper, zinc, antimony, cadmium. Magic names. Thomas turned the valve and opened the gas line. He lit a kerosene-soaked rag wrapped around his shovel and stuck it into the furnace where air ignited with a growl and the fire roiled and twisted in a sinewy coil, disembodied and curling back on itself in the furnace. The furnace took all day to heat, and he had to constantly open and close the gas line, work the billow.

  The burner port popped and sizzled and the edges of the firebrick turned a cherry color, then all the furnace walls were red inside and glowing. He shut the door and set the gas down by half. When the burner stopped popping he waited for a steady, continuous roar. By mid-afternoon, an inch of blue flame flickered outside the door frame and he didn’t hear the lunch bell when it rang.

  The McRyders walked nearby with Carmen. From a distance they watched Thomas work the shovel and move back and forth to his sand. His skin shined, shirtless and sootstreaked, his gloves glowed, hair knotted into a frizzy yellow nest. After a moment, they walked on without speaking to him. Some of the men who built his furnace meandered around the studio, pausing to watch. He didn’t notice.

  Days passed like that, and he did not see Astra.

  The studio had a wooden bench where Thomas would sit to monitor the furnace and unlace his boots. His first batch was in the crucible. Glass was not a solid, he liked to inform people. Glass was a very cold liquid, inorganic compounds that on cooling form a random pattern rather than the set crystalline structure of a solid. He faced the castle and imagined its eighty-seven windows returned to their primal state, turning to liquid and streaming down the walls as if the structure wept.

  Shortly before dinner Carmen approached the studio. She wore dark blue today, a white pelt across her shoulders. He stood up, filthy, unembarrassed.

  “Did you skip lunch?”

  He nodded, feeling himself to be radiating.

  She looked bewildered. “Are you eating dinner?”

  “I might.”

  She followed his materials strewn about the tent. “Will you come for lunch tomorrow?” He didn’t answer and she turned back. “Kenneth was going to ask you the other day, but you looked busy. He told me to ask you.”

  “I’ll try to clean up before then,” he said.

  Carmen blushed along her throat, started to say something, but departed.

  By dark he sat on the bench, sipped from a bucket of water and watched the furnace in orange light. It rumbled and hissed, edges of the door sparked. Pulsing heat tightened his skin. In this place of purpose and security, he had time to think about Astra. She had stopped working in the kitchen, and he hadn’t seen her. He remembered running behind her in the woods. What had he felt that split them the night on the bluff? In his memory of that night, she seemed sadder than he’d thought. The image of her at the top of the rise, having to wait for him, now created an aching sympathy, a protective sorrow underlined by the knowledge that he had failed her, had known he was failing her even as she stood above him. Why had he wanted to fail her? One day he’d acknowledge the part of his own confusion, a trapped sensation that caused him to act destructively, without specific intentions. At midnight his first batch was in the homogenous liquid phase.

  Blue was first and he added cobalt to the melt. Colorants were tricky and governed by elusive rules. He no longer focused on rules like he had as an apprentice. He knew some colors depended on impurities in the mix and in that regard it was largely guesswork and instinct, at which he excelled. He hoisted the crucible from the fire and doused it in a stone tank filled with water. Steam erupted into the studio, spreading hot gray fog over him.

  When the melt cooled he reheated it to produce a uniform temperature distribution, then removed it and poured the glass into large pans set on a marver. With the paddles he pressed the glass down, smoothed it like a mason with his trowel. He set down the heavy iron lids that would flatten the sheets and perfect their texture.

  A few hours before sunrise he fell asleep, a half-formed wish for Astra sparking at the edges of his mind. At morning he bathed in a cold creek, scrubbing the cooked glaze off his body.

  The group ate lunch at the McRyder’s cabins. There were six cabins, long, made from polished logs. A small stable held four quarter horses. Two automobiles parked in a dirt semicircle in front of the homes. He paused beside them and admired their smooth metal, the precision lettering on their dials and gauges. Kenneth’s wife, Elizabeth, showed him around. Antiques and kerosene lamps decorated the cabin, an old loom, plaid tapestries; a ten-point stag head stared above the fireplace. “It’s not home, but we’ve tried to make it comfortable.”

  They ate steak with corn bisque. Carmen sat beside him. Unexpectedly, she reached out and brushed hair from his eyes.

  “It’s getting long, isn’t it?”

  It was. He hadn’t trimmed it since July and it curled around his cheeks.

  “Been working hard?” Kenneth asked, cutting his steak.

  “I have. I’d like to discuss a couple changes in the design.”

  “I’m sure it’s fine.” Kenneth went back to his soup. He frequently engaged Thomas with questions, and always seemed oblivious to their answers.

  Elizabeth pai
d more attention. She asked Thomas specific things about his education, family, and plans, and she would sometimes speak discreetly to her niece in front of other people. While watching Thomas and Carmen across the table, she pleasantly said, “Kenneth, why don’t we see about getting Thomas his own room. I know there are extras in these cabins.”

  Kenneth chewed and nodded. “Good idea. You don’t want to stay in that bunkhouse. I was told one of the men had been giving you trouble.”

  “It’s nothing. I’ve been sleeping in the studio anyway.”

  “Well,” Kenneth sipped his wine. “It’s going to be too cold for that soon.”

  “The furnace keeps it warm.”

  When there was no reply, Thomas looked up from his plate and saw they were all staring at him with slightly confounded faces.

  Then Carmen pushed his bangs behind his ear. “We must cut that hair. Do you use a treatment, Thomas? ‘Murray’s Hair Oil’ I remember—”

  Decisively, Elizabeth McRyder cleared her throat and glanced at Carmen, who quickly added, “I remember several boys used it, that’s all. They carried it in their pockets with combs. That’s all.” She turned to Kenneth, as if in defense. “Lots of boys used it.”

  “You can cut it if you like,” Thomas said.

  She ran a hand over his head. “I will, I will. It’s so thick!”

  Kenneth and Elizabeth smiled at him, appreciative. Elizabeth whispered something and Kenneth dabbed his mouth with a napkin. “That’s right. I nearly forgot. We’re having a costume party. One week after Halloween, an anticlimax, but the ballroom isn’t going to be ready till then. We’d love to have you.”

  Carmen remarked, “It’s strange to have after Halloween, though.”

  “Well,” said Elizabeth, “I don’t think there’s any point in having a castle with a ballroom if you don’t throw a party.”

  “Thank you,” Thomas stooped. “I don’t know, though. I don’t have a costume or anything. I mean, the type of folks—”

  “Oh, stop it,” Elizabeth said. “I’m sure we can come up with a costume. You’re coming. You’re invited.” She spoke with closure and the conversation ceased, supplanted by the slow, congenial smiles between its participants. Everyone instinctively turned to Carmen. She was staring at her bisque and didn’t notice.