Platte River

by Rick Bass

  Joe became extraordinarily protective of his home garden. Before, he had let the Arctic hares — their white pelage falling away, shedding to mottled summer brown — sit and warm themselves in the March light of his garden for a few minutes each day, nibbling on carrot tops like hungry sinners, before he sent Lily out to chase them away. Black bears, thin from the winter, sometimes moved in, digging in the garden for roots, and Joe would shoot them, and the elk and deer too, for the meat, but he knew this time that he would not need the meat, and he felt uneasy for the first time about killing, about taking lives too soon, too early.

  Instead, Joe ran the moose and bears out of his garden with his chain saw. He kept it on the porch, and would crank it up and run out with it, revving it wildly whenever he saw anything near his vegetables, even the timid rabbits. Joe shot one black bear, a yearling, and hung it on a pole in the garden like a scarecrow, put a baseball cap on it and let it stand in the sun. Like a dark warm shadow, the black fur glistened at first but then fell away, as the winds carried most of the smell farther down the valley and up the river. Ravens flew in from the woods and rested on the bear’s shoulders, leaning forward and picking at his fur as if leaning in to tell him a secret.

  ·

  In April, Mahatma Joe’s soil was no longer good enough for him. He had already managed to raise some beans and a few hardy tomatoes by covering them with blankets at night and by building small warming fires up and down the garden. And by midsummer, as ever, he’d probably be able to eke out enough produce to make his modest shipments to Africa again; but by the end of April, Joe was discouraged. What had been good enough for him in the past was no longer adequate, not since his visions of the larger, better gardens along the river. Joe cut the bear down from his pole, tilled up his garden in a rage, and burned the remains. There would be other good gardens in that very spot, but they would not be his, he knew.

  Joe and Lily ordered more seeds from the catalogue and waited for the full moon. They bought another pair of skates at the thrift store for Mahatma Joe. Lily took him to the pond at night, under a moonless sky with stars glittering above like a throw-net cast over them, and on the thinning shield of ice she taught him to skate, for no other reason than that it was something he had never done before. She also taught him her tribe’s songs, which he had once known but had long forgotten.

  A full moon appeared. Joe and Lily prepared as if they were going to war, strapping shovels and spades across their backs like rifles, and though the center of the river had thawed and was running fast and cold down the middle, the shorelines were still frozen and packed hard. They laced up their skates, stepped out on the ice, and pushed off, began to glide.

  The racing water beside them drowned out the sound of their blades. Lily skated ahead of Joe, being younger and faster, and she leaped small logs that had fallen into the river and were frozen in the ice, leaping like the skaters they had seen in Seattle. Joe tried hard to keep up with her, to stay close to her, and he felt young, felt as quick as the dark river. He watched the moon on her back. He could not wait to get to the valley and sink the first bite of hoe into the centuries-old soil. He wanted to sprinkle the seeds on the dark upturned earth and let the moon’s light touch them with its magic before he covered them up. He wanted to sing the songs of a sinner, in order to do good work. To do anything — any kind of work. To keep from disappearing.

  ·

  She watched them from her tent. Sam’s whines had awakened her the first night they came. Leena had thought they were bears until she heard their voices, almost like children’s voices, over the strong night rush of the river.

  Leena peered at their dark shapes moving along the river, the man and the woman discussing something, then separating, and beginning to swing scythes. The valley bottom was washed in moonlight, a light so bright it seemed brighter than daylight, though the slopes of the mountains and the trees were still in shadow, darker than ever.

  But out by the river, in the tall spring grass, everything was silver, and she watched, a little frightened, as they moved through the grass with their scythes, cutting great sweeps of it down.

  Renewed with every swing, Joe felt as if he were getting back at something, or as if he were earning something — felling sinners for the Lord, each blade of grass a dirty heathen. He was greedy with the scythe, and went at the grass as if it were an enemy or a threat. He delighted in the smooth ease with which it fell. Perhaps he was even saving souls.

  Lily was enthusiastic as well. Forty-five years she had lived, and she’d never been in the midst of such tall, green, growing grass. She’d never used a scythe, never walked through waist-high grass, and the smell it made as it was ripped by the scythe almost brought water to her eyes. Her sweeps were smooth, wide, and rhythmic. Lily wanted to take her clothes off and lie down with old Joe in the deep grass under all that light, but knew they were on a mission, that there was only a certain amount of time left, and so she only thought about it, as she cut the grass, and it made her swings easier, gave them a better motion, until after a while she could almost believe that that was what she was doing, lying under the moon in the sea of grass with old Joe, rolling across the pasture in sweeping motions, and it made Lily’s swings come easier still. She hummed to herself as she mowed the grass down.

  Leena was frightened to see them in what she had come to think of as her field, and was frightened by the speed and force with which the moon-washed grass was disappearing. The man and the woman were working their way up the slope from the river, coming toward her tent, so that it almost looked as if they were searching for her, hunting for her in the tall grass — that that was the reason they were cutting it all down, bushwhacking it. But she had Sam with her, for protection, and she wanted to get closer, wanted to hear what they were saying to each other, and wanted to hear more closely the tune the woman was humming.

  Leena thought that she might even want to help: it looked like it would feel good to cut that grass.

  As she watched them, she was suddenly reminded of all the things she had been trying not to think about — California, and the last man, or the one before that. She had wanted to think only of herself. But in watching the grass fall, she was reminded of something else.

  Leena crept out of the tent, one hand on Sam’s collar, and began to crawl down through the grass toward the voices. She stopped when she had gotten close enough to make out their words and she lay flat, whispering to Sam to lie down beside her.

  There was the sound of the river and of a breeze moving through the trees and the grass. The woman was sometimes humming, sometimes singing, using words that Leena had never heard before — such a song as might be used to put a child to sleep, or to keep a child from waking up; it was the kind of song that would mix in with the child’s dreams, get tangled up in them. It made Leena want to sleep.

  The man was calling out the names of vegetables as he worked. He was swinging hard, swinging the way Leena knew she would swing, though she admired more the grace of the woman’s swings.

  “Beans! Tomatoes! Kumquats!” snapped the old man, swinging as if his life were riding on it. “Beans! Tomatoes! Kumquats!” He kept repeating his chant as he moved up the hill, until he’d mown down an area sufficient to plant the crops he’d listed. Then he moved over and started a new section, imagining, Leena thought, what lay before him only a little ways into the future. He called out the crops with a strange sort of doubt, as if trying to force them into existence through sheer bravado.

  “Corn! Okra! Taters!” he sang, swinging hard with the big scythe, but Leena could tell that he was getting winded, and that his fury, or fear, was doing him no good.

  “Corn! Okra! Taters!” he wheezed in a hoarse voice as he drew closer. Leena had to lie down as flat as she could, clutching Sam to her side. They lay there as the scythe ripped the grass all around them, passing right over their heads, so close that she could have reached out and untied the old man’s shoelaces. And then he was moving farther up the hil
l. He was silent now, but the sound of softly falling grass, like feathers, was all around them, and Leena shivered, delighted with her luck at not being discovered. She lay there like that until daylight, when Mahatma Joe and Lily stopped working and put their skates over their shoulders and walked out to the road toward home.

  Leena watched them go and then stood up to shake the grass from her robe and out of her hair. It was a cold morning. The sun was not yet up over the mountains. No one in town was stirring. Leena walked down to the river, pulled her robe and boots off, left them on a rock, then dived into the center of the current, ripping the cold water with her body.

  She floated down the river on her back, as she always did, reveling in the sting of the cold water, the way it assured her she was still alive, very alive, even if no one knew it. She thought about how what Mahatma Joe and Lily were doing seemed right, seemed good in a way that she could not define.

  When the sun’s crescent showed over the treetops, a gold corona promising the day to come, Leena pulled out of the current, turned over on her stomach, and swam back upstream to the rock, got out and dressed, her blood chilled to the center, but feeling strong, and she walked up the hill to her tent.

  Fresh grass cuttings gathered on her boots and around her ankles as she walked. The morning smelled good. She wondered if men in this valley were different. She wondered if the women were different. She knew that everything else was — the weather, the seasons, the land. Perhaps other things were different as well.

  ·

  The mercantile had a tall, steep roof, with old high windows through which dusty sunlight spilled, thin and dry, sunlight tasting of summer, even though it was only April and the river had still not completely broken up. Some days Leena might sell only an apple, or a tank of gas. There was a bell over the door that tinkled when it opened, but most days were silent. The loggers who lived throughout the valley couldn’t get into the woods because of the frost breakup and the muddy roads; it would be another month before the logging trucks moved in and out of the valley, and with them the stumpy, bearded men with their heavy boots, their dirty hands, the orange suspenders holding up thick wool pants. The men wore hard metal hats. They left flecks of sawdust everywhere they went, so that Leena would have to sweep up after them whenever they came into the store to buy a candy bar, a piece of cheese and crackers, a soda pop.

  Leena sat on the bench on the porch and worked at making a crude scythe out of scrap metal she had found, lashing it with wire to a sturdy green branch she’d broken off a tree. After her shift was up, she’d go into the woods looking for antlers. She wanted deer and elk antlers to use as a rake and pitchfork, and moose antlers to use as a shovel. Mahatma Joe and Lily had been coming every night, skating down the river along the rim of ice that grew smaller every day. They were planting now in the rich black river-bottom earth.

  Some nights, as the moon grew darker, Leena would approach the edge of where they were working and sit, not afraid if they saw her or not, and half hoping they would, so that perhaps they would invite her to help. She had found some good elk antlers, and had made a strong rake.

  But Joe and Lily never saw her in the tall night-waving grass. Mahatma Joe would walk down the furrowed rows, dropping the seeds in, still chanting each time a scatter of seeds fell — “Pumpkin! Pumpkin! Pumpkin!” — until Leena felt nearly crazy with the sameness of all of it. Lily would crawl behind Joe on her hands and knees, smoothing and patting the soil down tightly over the seeds in a careful, promising way that made Leena want to get to know Lily and be her friend.

  Leena was delighted at the control that Lily and Joe had over the field: how they had cleared and planted it, and were now going to bring it to life and nurture it, controlling when things happened, when things were harvested. It seemed wonderful and simple, and she sat back in the darkness with her tools and waited to be asked to join them.

  ·

  They were there every night, despite the waning moon. They napped during the day and let their house chores go to pot — dust accumulating, and weeds growing up around the cabin. Mahatma Joe had all but abandoned his Bible studies. He had been annoyed anyway at how he kept forgetting parts of it, parts he used to know well. They would wake up around four in the afternoon, when the shadows were beginning to grow longer, and with the light growing softer, shorter. They would open a can of soup or a tin of potted meat and eat it cold. They’d each drink a can of beer, because they felt it helped them skate better. The lane of ice running alongside the river was getting narrower each day, and they weren’t sure what they were going to do when it all melted. There was only a thin strip left in places. Even in the shade of deep fir forests, bends in the river that never saw sunlight, there were young ovals of dark water beginning to appear in the middle of the ice sheet, dark patches of water that they skated around, ovals that were growing larger every night. The nights were growing darker, too, as the moon waned, and Joe and Lily had begun skating with flashlights, scanning the ice ahead of them for those deep holes, but still skating fast, skating hard.

  Mahatma Joe didn’t know what they’d do when all the ice was gone. He didn’t own a horse. He did have an old birch-bark canoe, but he thought that would be too heavy to carry up the road each morning — four miles, and uphill. He considered Christ’s uphill walk with the crucifix, and he wondered if maybe he could heft that canoe, if it was for a good cause — the garden — and was the last chance he had at, if not immortality, then at least salvation. Joe thought that he could, especially with Lily’s help. Christ, after all, had had to carry his load all by himself; but he, Mahatma Joe, was luckier. Mahatma Joe had Lily to help him.

  Joe would drink two beers, sometimes three, getting ready for the skating, and as the ice lane grew thinner and smaller, Joe began to believe more and more in the canoe.

  After the third beer, Mahatma Joe didn’t feel frail or old; he felt young, strong, the way he had felt twenty years ago, when he had first come into the valley looking for souls. He would let the current carry him and Lily down into Grass Valley where they would do their work in the garden, and then he would shoulder the canoe, balance it over his head and shoulders like a young man, a young man after souls, and start up the road. He had done it in Alaska, and he would do it farther south, in the Grass Valley. Grass Valley was no different. Joe was no different.

  ·

  The garden grew. The bean plants were up first, ankle-high in the good soil. On their way down each night, Mahatma Joe and Lily now spent as much time jumping the black holes of river water as they did skating. They were in the air, it seemed, every fourth leg-stroke — skate, skate, skate, and then leap, up over a log or over a wide patch of water, and then skate, skate, skate, and then it was time to leap again. It was exhausting, but the beer, and the darkness of night, the black holes appearing right in front of them at the last second, made it exciting.

  As the garden grew, Joe and Lily could not wait to get to it, and skated toward it eagerly each night, as if toward their children, to see what changes each day had brought. They felt light-headed, invincible, and it was not from the beers but from the thought of the garden, the strength of its growth, and the sureness that it was only going to get larger and larger.

  “Beets! Carrots! Spinach!” Mahatma Joe would sing, preparing for each jump, calling out a vegetable for each stroke of the skates. He was becoming quite good at it, and was less afraid to jump than Lily, who was heavier than he was and who sometimes made the ice splinter when she landed.

  It didn’t seem right, Lily thought, that she should be carrying so many of the tools when she was heavier than Joe to begin with. It made Lily nervous, so she did not sing anymore, but concentrated, scanning with her flashlight as she tried to skate around the black holes when she could. But sometimes there was no choice, it was too late, and Lily had to leap. She would bite her lips and pretend she was like the people they’d seen in Seattle so long ago, the ones dressed up in glitter and sequins, skating under bright, s
wirling spotlights, leaping with abandon every time they got the chance. Everyone had applauded, including Joe and Lily.

  It had reminded Lily of a dance they had done in her village when she was young, back before the old people had stopped dancing. She didn’t remember much about it, didn’t know why they did it, knew only that like all the dances, it was done to change something — either to force something to go away, or to force another thing into existence.

  All the men in the village would put on feather costumes, wearing any kind of feathers they could; and all the women would form a circle around them and beat drums while the men hopped and danced and pretended to fly around.

  It had been a long time ago. Lily knew that the men and women had worn beautiful ceremonial dresses, soft caribou hide, and necklaces made of caribou teeth that rattled when they danced. But she had been gone so long that her memory was beginning to erode. She was taking on an imaginary memory, one such as Joe might remember, where none of the women wore anything, and the men wore only their feathers and loincloths. In Lily’s new, confused memory, that was how it was — the dancers had been stripped of all protection, all security, even all humanity, and were returning to the wild and to freedom. Lily remembered that it had been some sort of fertility rite, but whether for crops, or people, or fertility in general, she couldn’t remember.

  The dance had been held in a great wide pasture in the spring, she remembered, because the snow was leaving, and the nights were warm. She remembered being in the circle of women, watching the strange half-man, half-bird dance, the firelight flickering over them. She remembered being excited at the sound of the drumbeats and chants carrying off into the night, as if trying to change something, or perhaps trying to preserve something. She had never told Joe about it, because she knew he would disapprove of the dancing; and it was not something her village did anymore, anyway.

  Lily thought about the children she’d never had. She thought about the life she had never lived, back in her old village. She thought about how it would have been different — neither better nor worse, but different — had she stayed. For a long time it had been enough just to share Joe’s vision, just to be near it, but now Lily sometimes woke in the night convinced that she could not breathe. She believed what Joe told her about the next life, but there had been so little in this one that she felt almost ashamed of herself. Skating hard, Lily imagined that she could hear drumbeats that echoed her thinking. She imagined that she was wearing feathers; believed that Joe was chasing her, not just following her. For the first time in her life she wanted to get away from him, and she began to skate harder.