Platte River

by Rick Bass

  Lily turned her flashlight off to confuse him, and began skating all-out, as hard as she could. The river flowed north, into the Fishhead; Lily imagined that the Fishhead might still be frozen too, and that she could skate upriver on it, up through Canada and back into Alaska. She felt as if Joe had taken something of hers, had hidden it, and that she had no power, no manner of getting it back.

  Lily could hear Joe’s faint, surprised cries behind her. The slush and snow and sheet of floating ice cracked and splintered as she leaned forward and dug in, her dark eyes growing quickly accustomed to the night. She could hear the terror in old Joe’s voice, the terror of being abandoned that all men and women knew. Smiling suddenly, Lily knew what the dance back in her village had been about: the men wanted to leave, but the women did not want them to. Those who could fly would be allowed to leave. But Lily did not remember seeing any of them take flight. She thought how Joe would look at the dance, how he would think it was mostly pathetic little half hops and jumps. She laughed, then, at what Joe would surely think was a silly backwoods idea, that any of them could control anything, whether it was the weather, or a crop, or even each other.

  Almost surely, such a thought was nonsense.

  Mahatma Joe was skating hard, gaining on her, and he heard her laughter, but that was all. If there had been a splash, it had not been distinguishable from the sounds of the river as it hurtled past, carrying cakes and rafts of melting ice along with it, tiny icebergs, pieces of winter, the last to change.

  Joe coasted to a stop, turned his flashlight off, and sat down on the ice and cried. He cried as he stretched himself out over the ice. He cried with guilt. He felt the ice crack beneath him, felt the water racing just beneath it, water running in the wrong direction, to the north, against the flow of nature.

  After he was through crying — and it did not take that long — he crawled carefully to the shore and took his skates off, hiked out to the road, and walked the rest of the way to the garden, listening to sounds in the night: birds, and the wind.

  He walked hurriedly, hoping, in a sort of delirium of sadness, that he might find her in the garden when he got there, a kind of a miracle, her hoeing, having started without him. Had her laughter really been so quickly cut off?

  Joe stopped on the rise above town and looked at his dark garden, at the still cabins that were spaced along the river, each with smoke rising from its chimney, and at the river itself, running through the little valley. Even from the ridge he could hear the sound of the rapids.

  Joe watched the river, the light brighter over the valley than it had been back in the woods, and when he saw the pale, naked body come floating through the rapids, clearly alive, swimming upstream, and climbing out on the rock by the garden, Joe grew so excited that he fainted. But he was soon up and running across the field, arms outstretched, tripping but not quite falling, saved by love.

  Joe ran down the hill with such speed that he imagined he could lift off and fly if he wanted to, though he did not make the attempt. Just knowing that he could, if he wanted to, was enough.

  ·

  Sam rushed out barking, hackles raised, when Joe drew near the river. Leena, who was standing on the rock drying herself, did not know who it was at first, but then saw the skates hanging over his shoulder, and recognized the shape of his shoulders, his old head. Leena told Sam to stop barking, then asked the man where the other one was, the one who sang while she worked.

  “She is gone,” said Mahatma Joe. “I thought you were her. She is gone, and she took all her tools with her.”

  ·

  They worked until daylight, shoveling with the moose antlers, weeding with the hoe Leena had made out of the jaw of a moose. The elk antlers scratched good, deep furrows in the earth, like fingernails down her lover’s back, Leena remembered, and then she remembered the way Lily had moved through the tall grass with the scythe, sweeping smoothly, sweeping hard, and Leena tried to do the same with her furrowing, her weeding.

  The garden was knee-high in places. Joe had not asked her to put her shorts and shirt back on, and Leena had not wanted to; there seemed no need. The plants rubbed against her as she walked through them.

  Once the sun’s first rim of blaze came over the tallest line of mountains, she went to the river and bathed, and then got out and dressed.

  They walked home quickly, Sam running in front of them. Leena carried her tent and clothes in her backpack. They left the antler tools hidden in the garden.

  “We will bring a bucket next time,” Joe said. “We need to water the plants.”

  “I don’t know how to skate,” said Leena.

  “That’s okay,” said Mahatma Joe.

  ·

  Leena sat in the bow, and Sam in the middle. Mahatma Joe sat in the stern, watching them, and leaned back and trailed his hands in the cold ice-melt river. They had a lantern mounted on the bow, and as they pitched and slid over the little waves, curling up and over, sometimes splashing through the little haystack standing waves, the spray drenched Leena, blew back on Sam, and some of it even misted against old Joe; and the canoe’s crazy slides and bounces pitched the lantern’s light all over the woods, illuminating one side of the river and then the other, but it rarely showed them what lay directly ahead. Sometimes they would bounce into rocks, hitting them square on, throwing Joe and Leena out of their seats and making Leena drop her paddle. The boat would spin around, sliding down the little tongue of rapids backwards, and without a paddle, Leena would panic and begin to shout, clutching the sides of the boat, trying to will it to turn back around and point in the right direction — but they never capsized, they stayed low in the boat, and eventually they slid through the rapids, through the pitching waves and cool spray, and finally came back out into calmer water.

  They would catch up with the paddle Leena had dropped; sometimes she would dive overboard and swim out to get it, in the still waters, and Sam, not wanting to be left alone in the boat with Mahatma Joe, would join her.

  The ice along the shoreline was only the thinnest, most intricate paper crust; it was like lace, and Leena wondered how they could have stayed up on it. The nights were getting ever warmer, but the river was still as cold as it had been in winter. Leena had never felt water so cold, and swimming in it excited her.

  It took her breath away and tried to numb her muscles and pin her arms at her sides; it tried to make her legs stop kicking and sink, unable to respond to her wishes; but Leena would hold her breath and fight against the cold, would keep swimming. The colder it was, the better she liked it. It was more of a challenge. It was more like being alive.

  She would climb back into the canoe when she had the paddle, sliding over the gunwales like some river creature shining in the moonlight. Her teeth would be chattering as she sat back up in the bow. Leena would wring water from her hair to dry in the thin mountain air, slip on her dress, and rub her toes with her hands while Joe took the paddle and navigated, using the flat blade of the paddle as a rudder, looking around the shivering Leena and up ahead, trying to judge where the rocks were, trying to see beyond the lantern’s dim glow.

  Mayflies followed them down the river; moths swarmed around the lantern. Great brown trout leapt from the water, passing through the air in front of them, gulping moths attracted to the lantern light. The fish followed the canoe downriver, making Sam bark and lunge at them the whole way, almost upsetting the boat.

  ·

  The moon had come back, and was full again. Leena would climb out of the canoe first, and then pull it farther up on shore so that Mahatma Joe could get out. Then she would begin carrying buckets of water up from the river. Each bucket held eight gallons; each full bucket weighed sixty-four pounds. Leena wore leather gloves but still developed red stinging blisters that made her want to cry, want to stop, but she knew that she couldn’t, that Joe was not strong enough to carry the water, a big sloshing plastic bucket in each hand, and that if she did not do it, it would not get done.

  Her arm
s felt strained, elongated even, as she hauled the full buckets up to the garden. By the time she got there, the cords in her neck felt stretched out as well. She had to walk pigeon-toed going up the small hill to get the power she needed, but the sound the soil made, drinking up the good water as she poured it, cold and loud, into the furrows, made the trips worth it, always worth it, no matter how much her neck and shoulders ached, no matter how red and tender the palms of her hands were becoming. Her hands would develop calluses soon enough, she knew.

  Sam trotted along behind her on each trip to and from the river. The moon shone down on them. Elk and deer tried to approach during the night and nibble at the fresh growth. Mahatma Joe would move toward them through the waist-high beans like a predator, crouched down with one of the antler rakes. He would stalk the deer, then try to run up and attack them with the rake, though they always saw or smelled him coming, and with snorts and whistles they would bound away, white tails flagging, disappearing into the darkness. Joe would settle back down into the beans and wait for the next ambush as Leena emptied the river bucket by bucket, bringing what the garden needed, bringing the very water that perhaps had helped to drown Lily, that had filled, and then left, her lungs.

  “Zucchini,” Mahatma Joe would mutter to himself, crouched down in the garden. “Asparagus.”

  He thought of Africa, of dying dust babies, stomachs swollen from malnutrition, reaching their hands out for yams. He would get to heaven yet. He was doing a great thing.

  Sometimes Joe would lie down on his side and nap, while all through the night Leena carried water, pouring it into the furrows, not ever having any idea what the garden was for, or why she was doing it — only that it was green and growing. She knew that it was responding to her touch, and she liked that. It made her feel a way that she had forgotten.

  Leena vaguely realized that she was working for Joe, and that she was doing his work too, and for free, but she could not help it. She was amazed at the change. What once was meadow was now a cultivated garden, ordered and perfect. She’d quit working in the mercantile, had abandoned her hopes of buying the barn. There was room in Joe’s cabin.

  The soil splashed to mud as she poured the water; it splashed up around her ankles and got on her shorts, her shirt. Her hair was damp and scraggly from her exhaustion, and each time she went down to the river she wanted to set the buckets down and dive in, clean off, and float down the rapids. But each time, with the water so close, she could not resist making one more trip with the buckets instead, and one more after that, on into morning, until it was too late to swim, until the townspeople were up and moving around, starting the day. People had seen the garden, of course, but had no idea who the gardeners were; but now Joe and Leena were discovered. It did not matter; it was Joe’s all-or-nothing garden, his gamble, and nothing mattered.

  No one would bother his garden. He had created it, he had worked for it, and it was his. They would respect that.

  ·

  Joe lay under the broad shade of a giant sunflower plant in the daytime and dozed. The days were dry and warm, the high mountain air thin. Leena would work on until midmorning, until she could carry no more water, and then, not caring whether anyone was looking, she would go over to her rock, strip, and dive in, feeling the dried mud and dust leave her body almost instantly as she plunged deep, her hair flowing around her, diving deep to the bottom, where there was moss and weeds that leaned downstream in the current and tickled her as she swam through it. At the bottom, she would grasp a handful of the weeds and hold on while the cold river pushed against her, cleaning her. She’d hold the air in her lungs and turn colder and colder until she could barely hold her breath any longer — the sun a bright glow above her, seeming closer than it ever seemed — and she’d release her grip then and swim for the top, up toward the brightness, and would break through the surface, gasping, the warm air a shock on her face, and she’d float on farther down with the current.

  The men in the Red Dog saloon, loggers mostly, some of them having coffee, were still waiting for spring breakup. Some of them would be drinking beer already, at nine in the morning. They’d taken to sitting out on the porch to watch Leena, immensely grateful for her performance. Each time she went down, the loggers would make bets on how long she would stay under. She became a valley celebrity as she stood on the rock and toweled off, dry and clean again, and put her clothes back on. April turned into May.

  She reminded the men of other times, long-ago times, of Naked Days, and of how their valley used to be clean, unchanged. The men who had been thirty-five and forty back then were almost sixty now, and everything had gone by, nothing would ever be the same, and yet nothing had happened.

  There was nothing to do but wait for spring breakup, for the warm south winds to melt all the snow in the woods and to dry the roads. Then the men would go out into those woods and erase them, cut as many trees as they could, going back in time — they’d kill the old trees, and plant seedlings that would take ninety, a hundred, sometimes a hundred and fifty years to mature.

  They watched Joe and Leena shoulder the birch-bark canoe and start up the road, carrying it like a crucifix. Once Joe and Leena had carried the canoe up around the bend in the road and were out of sight of the other men, Joe would set his end down, saying that his leg was hurting him, and Leena had to carry it herself the rest of the way.

  Her back grew wide like a man’s, and her arms grew large and tight. Leena would do what he told her to. She did not know why, only that she did.

  They napped in the daytime in separate rooms: Leena on the couch, curled up with Sam, and Mahatma Joe in his room, clutching the pillow as if it were Lily. When dusk fell, they would take the canoe back to the river and begin their journey all over again. They liked working at night because it was not as hot, and they floated down the river toward their garden, dragging a net in the water behind them, lanterns mounted on both ends of the canoe. The net would be full of trout by the time they got there, and it was Leena’s job to pull the heavy net up onto shore. Sam would bark and rush in, snapping at the net, alarmed by this writhing, gill-flapping pile. Joe had Leena carry the fish in buckets up to the garden — and he made her bury them alive, for fertilizer.

  Leena moved as if in a trance. Her shoulders were now larger than a man’s; her legs were thick and sturdy from carrying the canoe up the road every day. Her neck had nearly doubled in size. The night was hers. She no longer felt the need to bathe, and with her added muscle, found it harder to stay afloat anyway. The plants in the garden were chest-high, bearing fruit, and greedily, old Joe went from bush to bush, picking okra, lima beans, snap beans, and tomatoes, filling the plastic buckets with them and taking them to the canoe for Leena to carry home, where he would put them in jars and send them to other countries, remnants of his land, another country, different, but changing — souvenirs from a valley of men.

  The loggers went back into the woods in late May. The last of the ice that had trapped Lily melted in June. Passing over that spot one night in the canoe, Joe and Leena looked down and saw her, perfectly preserved in the frigid waters, lying on the bottom, looking the same as she ever had, looking up at them through twelve feet of water as if nothing had ever happened, as if no days had ever gone by.

  FIELD EVENTS

  But the young one, the man, as if he were the son of a neck and a nun: taut and powerfully filled with muscles and innocence.

  — RILKE, “The Fifth Elegy”

  It was summer, and the two brothers had been down on a gravel bar washing their car and sponges when the big man came around the bend, swimming upstream, doing the butterfly stroke. He was pulling a canoe behind him, and it was loaded with darkened cast-iron statues. The brothers, John and Jerry, had hidden behind a rock and watched as the big man leapt free of the water with each sweep of his arms, arching into the air like a fish and then crashing back down into the rapids, lunging his way up the river, with the canoe following him.

  The brothers thought t
hey’d hidden before the big man had spotted them — how could he have known they were there? — but he altered his course slightly as he drew closer, until he was swimming straight for the big rock they were hiding behind. When it became apparent he was heading for them, they stepped out from behind the rock, a bit embarrassed at having hidden. It was the Sacandaga River, which ran past the brothers’ town, Glens Falls, in northeastern New York.

  The brothers were strength men themselves, discus throwers and shot-putters, but even so, they were unprepared for the size of the man as he emerged from the water, dripping and completely naked save for the rope around his waist, which the canoe was tied to.

  Jerry, the younger — eighteen that summer — said, “Lose your briefs in the rapids?”

  The big man smiled, looked down, and quivered like a dog, shaking the water free one leg at a time, one arm at a time. The brothers had seen big men in the gym before, but they’d never seen anyone like this.

  With the canoe still tied around his waist, and the rope still tight as the current tried to sweep the ironladen canoe downstream, the big man crouched and with a stick drew a map in the sand of where he lived in Vermont, about fifteen miles upstream. The rapids surged against the stationary canoe, crashed water over the bow as it bobbed in place, and the brothers saw the big man tensing against the pull of the river, saw him lean forward to keep from being drawn back in. Scratching in the sand with that stick. Two miles over the state line. An old farmhouse.