by Rick Bass
The fire in her wood stove went out and still she did not move, but lay feeling the glaze of ice settle over her heart, feeling the salt residue of her tears dried to a taut mask across her face. And whereas most of her adult life she had felt as if she were always only a step or two or three behind her father, it seemed to her now that as she drew nearer to entering the place where he might be resting, he was paradoxically moving away from her again; an irony, now that she was so close.
She lay there, stunned, while the temperature in her cabin grew colder and her fingertips grew numb and her face blue, and then she was shivering, her body having no fat to burn, no anything to burn, only spirit and bone; and then she was warm again, and her breathing was steadier, and, slowly, she felt the deep loneliness draining away, though still she was frightened.
She blinked and found herself focusing on one faint sound: as if she had traveled all that way, descending so far, to come into the presence of that one sound.
It was a tiny groaning sound, all around her: a sound of contraction, of pulling in. Every now and again it would make a single tick, as if living, or striving to live—sometimes two or three quick ticks in a row—before subsuming again into a slow, dull groan.
She listened to the sound, so near to her, for more than an hour before her chilled mind could make sense and clarity of it; and even then, the knowledge came to her like a kind of intuition, or memory.
It was the sound of her pipes freezing. She was aware of the great cold outside her cabin, the weight of it pressing down like a blanket, or like shovelfuls of loose dirt being tossed over the cabin—but in the final comfort of her numbness, she was surprised by the water’s protest.
She lay there longer, listening and thinking. She could hear music—was this the sound her father heard now? Perhaps it was coming from her father’s blood, the part of him that remained in her.
Surely he could hear what she was hearing now.
The pipes groaned louder and she blinked, then gasped, as another moment’s clarity intruded: the duty and habit of living. She lay there for another half hour, determining to get up and build a fire, if not to save the shred of her life, then to keep the pipes from freezing.
And in that time, she thought of nothing else but the goal of rising one more time. She lay there, trying to find the strength somewhere, like a pauper digging through empty pockets, searching again and again for the possibility of one more overlooked coin caught between linty seams.
She imagined Stephan and Shayna finding her bed-bound and blue, should they ever return, and the useless guilt they would shoulder, and she forced herself to find and feel a second surge of warmth.
Despite her numbed hands and legs, she slid out of bed, and with the smoothness of habit, she walked as if gliding, as if drawn, over to the cold stove, and crouched before it as if in prayer, then opened the door—a breath of cold air blew out, a breath like ice—and she crumpled some newspaper into it, and stacked a few toy sticks of kindling atop it—there was so little left now—and then lit a match.
The roar of the paper and kindling was deafening, and she stared at the dancing fire, amazed at how something so silent a moment ago could make so much noise only an instant later.
Slowly she added more sticks to the fire and leaned in against the stove while it warmed, as one might rest against a sturdy horse; and when it grew too warm for comfort, she backed away and listened to the caterwauling of her pipes as the metal, and slushy ice within, creaked and groaned and stretched and contracted but did not break. Beginning again, and yet different this time.
She wouldn’t do any more lost king stories in her boats to the children. She had found him. She had gone into his icebound room, and he had been sleeping. It had been dark in there, so she had never seen him, but she had been close, had heard him breathing.
He had sounded at peace. And she had left a part of herself in there with him. Or perhaps a part of her had always been with him, had remained with him forever: a part he had held all his life, and beyond, like a pebble, or a gem.
She waited until there was but a week left before Christmas, and then one more day—inside of a week—before determining she had to humble herself and go over the mountain to find them, if they would not come to her. She could not imagine traveling so far, through such deep snow, even on snowshoes, but there was no choice; she had to see them. She worried an ice jam might have breached the river, so that none of her ships were getting through, and lamented yet again that the family had no mailing address, and that once winter came, there was no way of getting in and out of their little valley save on foot or horseback, or by snowmobile.
It still astounded her to realize that as recently as a year ago she had been capable of running up and over the mountain, and then back, in a single day, a single afternoon.
She packed a lunch and sleeping bag, in case she had to stop and rest, and left before daylight, in a light falling snow. She had carved and painted presents for the children, little miniature toy rocking horses, but other than that, her pack was light.
The first hour was the hardest, as it contained the steepest ascent, and in the bulky snowshoes she could travel only ten or twenty paces before having to stop and pant, not just to catch her breath but to still the quivering, the revolt of weakness, in her once-powerful legs, her thighs burning now as if aflame.
Gradually, however, she gained the elevation to the mountain pass and was able to walk along the level contour that led from her valley into theirs; and thrilled by the knowledge that soon she would be seeing them, she took no notice of the time, and instead only leaned into the slanting snow, with the canyon below—carved long ago by the river’s erosion—completely obscured by cloud and snow.
She knew the trail well, even in the darkest of conditions—she knew it almost by touch and the pull of gravity—and she knew without being able to see it when she had crossed the pass and come into their valley. She knew to descend, knew where the path was that led to the valley floor. It was the path of her life as well as of her dreams. She could have gotten there blindfolded.
With her hair and eyebrows caked with snow and her face numb, Jyl reached the plowed and level field of their garden—the autumn-turned furrows resting already beneath two feet of snow—and made her way into their yard, listening for any signs of activity, and then, as the shadowy shapes of the outbuildings and the cabin itself came into view, looking for a glow of light through the curtain of snow.
She was surprised by the absence of sound, and the absence of animals—the corral was open, and no barking dogs greeted her arrival, no chickens clucked or called from the henhouse. Their truck was gone, with no tracks in the snow to indicate it had been driven out recently, and when she came closer to the cabin, she saw with an emotion very close to panic and despair that no smoke was rising from the chimney.
They are asleep, she thought wildly, even though it was at least noon. They worked so hard the day before that they are still asleep.
When she drew even closer, she saw that the doors and windows were boarded up, and again, the drifts of snow against the door- and window-jambs indicated they had been that way possibly for weeks; perhaps since the day after Thanksgiving.
She sat down on the steps in a daze, her mental and physical reserves equally devastated now.
Had they known they were leaving? she wondered. Surely not. And yet she could not help but feel wounded: as if the children had somehow become frightened of her increasing need, her upwelling of loneliness, and had fled from that weight, that extra burden in their already burdened lives.
She knew it was not that way, that surely their itinerant parents had insisted they leave, for some unknown reason, perhaps economic, perhaps evangelical—leaving, summoned, in the midst of an evening meal, perhaps—but it was how she felt, that they had somehow become frightened of her.
Only the little boats remained, stacked up beneath one window. Out in the garden, gaunt deer pawed through the snow. The cabin was s
hut down yet preserved, protected, as if one day the travelers might return, though not for a long time—years, doubtless—and with the children by that time all grown up.
She sat down on the steps and began to cry. She cried for a long time, and when she had finished, she looked up—as if in her despair she might somehow have summoned them—and then wandered around and around the cabin, and out to the various barns and sheds. They had taken nearly every tool but had left an old short-handled shovel and a rusty hammer with one of its twin claws broken; and with these discards, she was able to pry away the boards over one of the windows and crawl into the cabin.
It was dark inside, with a strange bluish light, as if she had entered a cave that had been closed off for centuries. They could not have been gone for more than two or three weeks, yet there was no residue whatsoever of their existence. The floor was swept and the walls were scrubbed, and all the furniture was gone, as was every other item—every spoon and fork, every dish and towel and article of clothing, every stick of firewood, every piece of kindling. Only a few more of the little ships remained, stacked neatly on the windowsills.
The gemstones that had been within the ships were gone, as were the drawings and stories. The boats sharpened her despair, for when, she asked herself, could she possibly ever use them again?
She ransacked the tiny drawers, all empty. Write to me, think of me, speak to me, she implored them, calling out to wherever they were.
Again and again, she searched through the cabin—examining every shelf, every cabinet, every drawer. She was a child. Had her father ever called out this way to her, after he had gone? If so, she had never heard him, and she feared the children could not hear her.
She crawled back out of the frigid, lonely cabin, and into the great snowy silent whiteness of late December. She boarded the window back up tightly. She sat down on the steps and cried again, and it began to snow, as if her tears were somehow a catalyst for those flakes to form. As if the shapes and processes of all things followed from but an initial act, an initial law or pattern, like crystals repeating themselves. She sat very still, almost completely motionless, as the snow continued to cover everything, even the silent cabin. She concentrated on the tiny seed of fire housed in her chest. She sat very still, as if believing that, were she to move, even the slightest breeze would blow it out.
New Stories
Falco told me, “I don’t know exactly what has happened. I am the same person, yet I am no longer the same.… Under the sea, everything is moral.”
—Jacques-Yves Cousteau
How She Remembers It
They left Missoula with a good bit of sun still left—what would be dusk any other time of year. The light was at their backs, and the rivers, rather than charging straight down out of the mountains, now meandered through broader valleys, which were suspended in that summer light, a sun that seemed to show no inclination of moving. Lilly’s father had only begun to lose his memory, seemed more distracted than forgetful then. He had been a drinker, too, once upon a time, though Lilly did not know that then; it had been long ago, before she was even born. A hard drinker, one who had gone all the way to rock bottom—good years wasted, her mother would later tell her—but he was better now. Though some of his memories—the already reduced or compromised roster of them, due to his years of drinking—were now leaving. Sometimes what left was the smallest thing, from the day or a week before, other times more distant memories, but nothing serious yet.
The pastures were soft and lush, the grass made emerald by May’s alternations of thunderstorms and sunlight, and the farmers had not yet begun their first cutting of hay. The rivers had cleared up and were running blue, scouring the year’s silt from the bottoms, cleaning every stone. From time to time she and her father would see a bald eagle sitting in a cottonwood snag overlooking the river. There were more deer in the fields than cattle—occasionally they’d see a few black Angus, like smudges of new charcoal amid the rainwashed green, but mostly just deer, some of them swollen-bellied with fawns that would be born any day, while others were round with lactation, their fawns already having been dropped, but not yet visible, in those tall grasses. The velvet antlers of the bucks glowed when they passed through shafts and slants of that slowly flattening light. Lilly was twelve, and her father was only fifty-two.
They rode with the windows down. The air was still warm but not superheated now, and in the brief curves of canyons they could detect a cooling that felt exquisite on their bare arms, with so much sun elsewhere, all around. It was only another four hours to the Paradise Valley, south of Livingston, where her father had friends, though he said if she wanted to stop and get a room or camp before that, they could. Lilly said she didn’t care, and she didn’t. It was enough to just be driving with the windows down, with her father, looking around and thinking about things.
Now the tinge of valley light was shifting, the gold and green becoming infused with purple and blue, and the touch of the air on their arms was more delicious yet. Mayflies were hatching out along the river, drifting columns of them rising dense as fog or smoke and bouncing off their arms like little needles. Farther on, the larger stone flies began to emerge and were soon thudding off the windshield and smearing it with a bright pastel of green and yellow and orange, which the windshield wipers turned to slurry before wiping the glass clear again.
Nearing Deer Lodge at the beginning of true dusk, just before ten, they saw the colorful lights of a tiny carnival, one of the portable setups that’s able to fit all of its equipment onto a single long flatbed tractor-trailer, with the various parts for five or six ancient rides so cloaked with grease and blackened with oil, and the hydraulic hoses so leaky and patched together with pipe clamps, that no self-respecting parent would let a child ride; and yet in the summer, when a carnival suddenly appeared on a once-vacant lot in the middle of such a small town, and knowing that in only a few days the carnival will be gone, what self-respecting parent could say no?
Passing through Deer Lodge, the highway was slightly elevated above the town, so that from their vantage they were looking slightly down on the carnival. Viewed through the canopy of summer green cottonwoods, the lights of the fair—and, in particular, the lights of the Ferris wheel, which seemed to rise up into, and then somehow rotate through, the foliage—gave the impression of slow-budding continuous fireworks going off, at their peak barely rising above the canopy. It looked like a secret, private festivity. They exited as though it had been their planned destination all along.
The carnival was so tiny that once they were on the downtown streets of Deer Lodge they couldn’t even find it at first. The streets were wide and dusty, and they could smell the waxy buds of the cottonwoods, which were just opening. Both sides of the street were lined with the white fluff of cottonwood seeds, piled like drifts of snow. Up ahead, they could hear the grinding machinery of the fair, the squeak and rattle of ancient gears, though there was no loudspeaker music, so the atmosphere was not so much one of frivolity as instead a more dutiful, even morose, labor.
Still, it was a fair, and when they rounded the last corner they could see the lights again: a weak yellow 40-watt glow coming from the popcorn stand, as well as a few lights still burning on various whirligig rides. A portable yellow iron fence surrounded the vacant lot on which the carnival had set up shop.
The Ferris wheel, along with the other rides, had stopped since they turned off the highway, and there were no other children around, despite darkness only just now descending. They parked beneath one of the big cottonwoods and got out. The sweet-scentedness of the buds and new leaves was almost overwhelming, and a strong dry wind was blowing from the west, sending cottonwood fluff sailing past them. There was no one at the well-worn turnstile, so they walked right through. They wandered around, looking at the rickety equipment, marveling at the decrepitude of the infrastructure—rides that had been manufactured in the 1940s and ’50s, with puddles of oil already staining the dust of the gravel lot and scrap
s and flanges of steel welded into patches atop the oil-darkened machinery, so fatigued now by time and the friction of innumerable revolutions that it seemed the wind itself might be sufficient to snap some of the rides off at the base.
The carnival laborers, nearly as oil-stained as the machinery, were smoking their cigarettes and beginning to disassemble the rides. The tractor-trailer on which it would all be folded and stacked and strapped down was already being revved up, rumbling and smoking—in no better shape than the rides—and as Lilly and her father went from one ride to the next, asking if any might still be open, might be cranked back up one last time, the men who were busy with wrenches and sockets shook their heads and spoke to them in Spanish, not unkindly but in a way that let them know the momentum of their world was different from the leisurely pace of Lilly and her father’s. In a perfect summer evening in the country, she and her father would have ridden in the Ferris wheel up above the canopy of the green cottonwoods, high enough to look out at the last rim of purple and orange sunlight going down behind the Pintler Mountains, their crests still snowcapped; but in the real world they were just able to buy a cotton-candy cone before walking back out to their truck and continuing on their journey.
And it was enough, was more than enough, to have the pink cotton candy, and to be driving on, and to simply imagine, rather than really remember, what it would have been like, riding the Ferris wheel around and around, with the whole carnival to themselves. It’s been so long now that in Lilly’s mind she almost remembers it that way—they were only a few minutes removed from having it happen like that—and yet in a way she can’t explain or know, it was almost better to not; better to miss, now and again, than to get everything you want, all the time, every time.