by Rick Bass
This will be the first time the girls have gotten a tree at night—adventure!—and they rush outside to the Subaru. Wilson joins them, and as the car pushes up the long driveway into the darkness, its crooked headlamps light random patches of snow-clad forest. So many trees.
“I love this time of year,” Stephanie announces, and Wilson feels almost faint, he’s so happy.
After Thanksgiving, the county stops plowing the road at the turnoff to where Wilson is taking them. Cat hunters cruise it in their big trucks, their lion hounds kenneled in back. The ruts they leave are a little wider than the wheel track of the Subaru, and the car pitches around and planes unevenly, like a sleigh, its undercarriage brushing the fresh powder between the ruts. They travel about five miles, ascending a long ridge, the road lined with white-caped evergreens, to a grove of balsam firs Wilson has been thinning.
It’s a cloudy night but not snowing. Wilson parks and the girls get out and run ahead of him, sharing the flashlight. Wilson has brought their favorite, a self-generating wind-up light he’s had for years. Watching them point it this way and that makes him smile—it’s almost a toy, but projects a decent beam. Wilson himself would rather just let his eyes adjust. It’s surprising, really, what you can see in the darkness, once you get used to it.
The girls zig and zag, patches of bouncing light in the forest ahead of him, stopping at different trees they proclaim perfect until Wilson points out various deficiencies.
Maybe he wants the girls to become loggers after all, he thinks. He loves showing them the cross sections of trees he cuts—how to read the growth rings of each tree like a book, each year a page, mysteries revealed: where a tree grew more slowly beneath the shade of other trees; the way slow growth makes the wood stronger.
Scars, too, show up in the hidden texts. Here, a bolt of lightning or a fire, a great wound encased; the tree wrapping around the scar as if to embrace the wound. The tree survived, the scar becoming little more than a hard, glassy knot within—invisible, after long years.
They walk on, farther into the dark forest. On a hillside, the girls make snow angels. Despite telling Belinda they wouldn’t be long, Wilson stops to build a fire. They nestle beneath the boughs of a big spruce and drink the hot chocolate he’s brought, watching the fire and the glazing scallop of snow around it.
Then they resume their search. Wilson knows where the tree is. He’s leading them in circles around it, incorporating just the right amount of difficulty into the hunt. When they come to the tree, he pauses as if for breath. Glances around.
Lucy, with the light, sees it then and, too incredulous to call out, walks around it, illuminating the crown, hoping it stays perfect.
“This is it!” Stephanie cries. “We found it!”
Wilson steps back, looks up. “It’s amazing, and you girls are amazing,” he says. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
He approaches the tree as if it’s a shrine, takes his hatchet from its holster on his belt, says “Thank you,” and eases in under the dense branches. He estimates the place to cut so that the tree will be the proper height for their living room, and begins to chop, while Lucy holds the flashlight.
The tree shakes and sways as he cuts. Scented chips skitter onto his ski cap like confetti tossed at a celebration seen only by the three of them. Snow sprinkles down from the branches like sifted sugar.
For a while it seems that his efforts are having no effect. But then a hinge point is crossed and the treetop begins to lean, until at last the tree lurches and falls with a buoyancy, the faint swishing harpsichord of its needles combing the cold air. It descends like a parachute onto the snow below, and there is just as suddenly a new spaciousness where the tree had stood, and a brush of colder air, invigorating, against his face.
They take turns hauling the tree. The wandering trail of it behind them sweeps the snow like the quills of a porcupine’s dragging tail, the needles erasing their tracks. With the cloud cover, there are no stars; it’s darker than twenty thousand leagues beneath the sea, and colder, for that darkness.
They reach the road knowing they’re a little late, but delighted with their bounty. The girls help lift the tree onto the roof of the Subaru, tie it down with rope, and get in the car, which, when Wilson turns the key, doesn’t start. Won’t even click.
The one thing he neglected, in this year’s abbreviated holiday rush: to trickle-charge the battery in the old car. Damn the cost of perfection. He breathes out powerfully, as if to expunge the stress of too-high expectation. In the grand scheme of things, it’s no big deal, nothing’s ruined—it’s simply a long walk home. The mood is what matters, keeping things festive and light.
He knows it won’t help, but he unlatches the hood and gets out of the car. He examines the battery terminals and jiggles the cables, hoping for a loose connection but really just buying a minute to compose himself. A million non-Christmas thoughts are going through his head—mostly one in particular: Belinda was right. Somehow, she knew, even without knowing, that something would go wrong. That he was pushing too hard and a rivet would pop loose somehow, somewhere. Damn it, she knew.
He stands there, staring at the raggedy old engine.
“Dad, what’s wrong?” Lucy asks.
“Nothing,” he says, his voice light as helium. “I’m just looking at some things.”
But they can read his voice like a map.
Stephanie, from the back seat—bless her twelve-year-old-ness, her going-on-thirteen-ness—says, “Should have listened to Mom.” He imagines Stephanie shaking her head.
Just as quickly, Lucy—protector of the broken and damaged—defends him: “Right, like it’s Dad’s fault the battery died.”
Stephanie snorts. “The car’s a piece of crap. I’m just saying…”
Wilson blows out another long breath of steam, closes the hood with extraordinary gentleness, gets back in the car, turns the key again. Nothing, of course.
“Girls,” he says, “my mistake, okay?” He tries the key once more. “Well, damn,” he says, “shit”—a quick anger, or frustration, hot enough to melt ice—but then recovers and forces himself to think of this as something they’ll remember fondly someday, one of the little fissures that make a thing stronger. “It’ll be a good Christmas story,” he says.
“I guess we don’t need to lock it,” Stephanie says. Wilson just laughs.
Even stalwart Lucy doesn’t look too happy about this new twist, but she gathers her coat, takes the wind-up light from Wilson, and the three of them set off down the road, into the darkness; united, Wilson thinks, in their adventure.
His dream of Christmastime togetherness lasts for mere seconds. Wilson learns only now that Lucy is wearing her old black vinyl cowboy boots and did not even take the time to put on socks, believing her father when he said they would be back home soon.
“What were you thinking?” Stephanie asks her. “Lame,” she adds, just loud enough for them all to hear.
Please, Wilson thinks, calm, please.
Not only are the vinyl boots brittle against the snow, offering little more protection than a pair of plastic bags, but they have slick-bottomed soles, so each of Lucy’s steps forward yields half a sliding step backward.
“Come on,” Stephanie urges. “We don’t have all night.”
Wilson watches Lucy struggle, but doesn’t fuss at her. On the contrary, a sweetness floods him, that she should still be so trusting of the world, unaware of the way it rebels against almost all of mankind’s planning. A cowgirl, a ballerina, a fairy princess: soon she will have to grow up—as Stephanie is doing rapidly—but there’s still time.
Lucy is shivering even as she walks, and she allows Wilson to give her his jacket, leaving him in just a T-shirt. They travel a little farther, and Stephanie, lacking mittens, permits Wilson to stop and take off his socks, which she turns inside out and slides down over her hands for mittens. He pulls his boots back on over his now-bare feet, and they continue.
From time t
o time Stephanie stops and tries to see behind them, which causes Lucy to turn also and look back. Whenever Lucy winds the flashlight, it flickers, flares, like a candle guttering.
They descend a long hill to a switchback that looks down on the dark forest below, and Stephanie, a few paces ahead, stops and holds a hand up, then steps backward. “What’s that?” she says.
At first Wilson thinks she’s trying to scare Lucy—that she’s still being snarky—but he takes Lucy by the hand and moves up so the three of them are closer together than they’ve been all night. Now Wilson hears it too, something moving quietly across the snow on the hill below; not a deer, the sound of which he knows well, but something different. The hair on his neck prickles.
He takes the light from Lucy and shines it ahead but sees nothing in its beam, only sparkling snow glint. He speaks firmly into the darkness, saying, “Go on now, we’re coming through here.”
He does not say, Go on, lion, as he does not want to validate the girls’ fright. “It was probably just a deer,” he tells them, but they can hear the lie in his voice, and they draw closer to him. Lucy’s grip on his hand is that of a blacksmith’s upon the hammer, and she has begun crying quietly. She never cries.
“Don’t worry,” Stephanie says, “I won’t let anything happen to you.”
They hear the soft soundprints upon the snow again, closer, and Wilson tucks the girls in tight. He’s prepared to receive any charge. He speaks again to the darkness—“It’s just us, go on now”—and when there is no response, he’s emboldened and shouts into the night, and the girls shriek.
He thinks he can hear the lion breathing. Wilson tells the girls, “Okay, let’s get going.” He has no idea if they are moving toward the lion or away from it, no idea what will come next. Though he’s careful not to show it, his terror swells.
From the darkness, beyond the modest throw of their light, there is the jolt of a shadow; Wilson thinks he sees the lion rush toward them from out of the blackness. He yells again, and the dark shape flares against the snow—did he really see it, or was it a tunnel-vision specter? The girls shriek once more, sounding like prey, and Wilson roars yet again, to let the lion know they are not prey, but formidable.
After that, there is quiet. There is nothing.
“It’s gone away,” Wilson says. “It’s more frightened of us than we are of it.”
The necessity of little lies.
In many ways, this is the worst: hoping, wanting to believe, that the lion is behind them now, and that they are moving away from it.
No lion can resist something that’s moving away from it. Wilson does not tell the girls this.
Their eyes have adjusted to the darkness, and Wilson is pleased to see that Lucy has stopped winding the light, is secure enough to just follow the trail of the snowy road through the blue-black forest.
After a while, Stephanie begins talking about how the school play went, believing they are out of harm’s way, and he wonders how much to tell them. He wants them to learn everything, but he wants them to be protected, and assured. It also occurs to him that Stephanie may still be on edge but telling the story to help Lucy believe they are safe. And maybe to convince herself as well.
Wilson can feel the lion still following them. He can feel it in the sweat on his back, and in the way his blood will not get warm.
He reaches for their hands as if in affection. They swing their arms as they walk three abreast.
He imagines the lion remaining a calculated short distance behind them. It is possible, he knows, the lion will follow them all the way home, to the top of their driveway; but if they can make it that far, they’ll be safe. The lion won’t come down the drive, knowing that people live at the end of it and sensing it could be a trap.
It’s just a couple of miles more to their cabin now. How often has he walked those two miles in pleasure, with the time passing in but a blink? Plenty. Not this dark evening. He finds himself making prayers, and promises, to the world and to himself.
There’s a long flat stretch, and then the road pitches down toward the top of their driveway. Wilson is amazed to discover that his legs want to buckle. He feels as though his entire inner chemistry has been converted to the purity of adrenaline.
But it’s downhill all the way now. The girls walk more quickly, with Lucy still slipping in her vinyl boots. She holds on to Wilson’s arm. She stopped crying a while back, though some of the tears are still frozen in her lashes.
Wilson pulls her close, squeezes her. “I love the cold air, the frost-blushed cheeks!” he cries, parodying his usual enthusiasm. “It reminds me I am alive!” Neither girl reacts, both clearly still rattled by the unexpected turn of their evening.
They reach the top of their long driveway, and it’s all the girls can do to keep from breaking into a run.
“I’m sure the lion is gone,” he tells them. “But let’s don’t run.”
They’re coming down the homestretch. Soon the windows of their cabin will come into view, the yellow light tattered at first through the trees, but then reassembling into buttery squares. They’ll see the rope of smoke rising from the chimney.
Wilson wonders what the girls will remember. Is it possible they’ll recall only the good—the adventure—as if he had never made a mistake, had never been in any way imperfect? Or better yet: that they saw the mistakes—of course they did—but loved him anyway?
The run-in with the lion is not yet an hour behind them, and already Wilson is adapting, attempting to get back out ahead of the flow of time. After the girls are warmed up and settled, he and Belinda will go back out and jump the dead battery. Maybe she’ll be so happy to see them she won’t be cross. It could be another adventure.
They’ll have to tuck the girls in, so it’ll be just him and Belinda. They can take a couple of beers. After admiring the tree and getting the car started, they’ll kiss, there in the cold black night, and she’ll lean her head in against his shoulder. He won’t tell her everything about the lion—how close it was.
It will be late by the time they get back, but then the tree will be there on the porch the next day, ready and waiting for them. They’ll bring it inside, fragrant and perfect, and begin decorating it Christmas Eve morning, right on schedule.
He’s got time. Hell, he thinks, he’s got all the time in the world.
The girls hurry even faster, with Lucy, despite scrambling in her slippery boots, drawing alongside her sister.
The first thing that comes into view is not their cabin, but the blue tree, astounding and otherworldly in its brilliance, singular, alone in the deep darkness.
She still loves me, Wilson thinks, everything is going to be fine.
The tree is even more amazing for the fact that it is wreathed in snow, the blue lights encased in ice. The lights do not burn with individual twinklings, but instead emit a great blue glow, like a lighthouse: something they would never have imagined seeing in their own yard. The heat from each bulb has melted the snow, which has then refrozen, so that the tree is ice-clad, and shimmers and pulses with that blue glow.
The girls stop and stare at it without speaking, their hearts, like Wilson’s, beating hard. He stands there with them—three breaths rising in one cloud—and he looks at the tree.
Its blueness is perfect. Only black night surrounds it. It’s perfect.
This is all he wants. This is enough. Five seconds, six seconds, seven seconds, eight.
They stand there, catching their breath, and then Stephanie hurries on down the hill and past the tree to the cabin, and Lucy, still sliding a bit, runs along behind her.
And though Wilson knows he cannot make his memory be their memory, he lingers, staring at the glowing blue tree. But already the moment is beginning to dissolve, and in nothing else but the darkness after the long walk, with his daughters no longer beside him, the sight diminishes like a fire dying out, until it is nothing more than a pretty blue tree in the dark forest, and Wilson, too, hurries down to the cabin, and
to what remains of the moment, hoping it has not already moved on. Hoping they themselves—all four of them—are still invisible to the unseen depredations of time.
Lease Hound
In the beginning, most of our work was speculative. We chipped away with six acres here, ten acres there. We picked up a lot of twos and threes the way a child might scoop up a penny from the sidewalk. Back in those days, you could get ten-year leases for only a one-eighth royalty. The up-front money was almost nothing. Nobody in those Alabama hills thought there was oil beneath them; they hardly knew what oil was. The hill people were ancient, barely hanging on, and almost always took what we offered without argument. Their children had long ago moved to Birmingham to work in the steel mills. It was 1980, and the country was on fire with hunger.
Even as a kid, just out of Utah Mormon white-bread college, I knew there were two worlds. My time spent in Utah had been like years bathing in a vat of milk and honey. I knew my world was small and clean, but now it was time to move out into the larger, mysterious world.
My degree was in church history, but the jobs were in oil. The shah had been overthrown and we were driving big muscle cars fast. Some grads were going to Saudi Arabia, being paid two hundred dollars an hour to stuff envelopes, sweep floors, teach English to the sons and daughters of sultans. There was a fever that pulled you in.
I worked the uranium play in southern Utah for a few months, learning to do courthouse work, mostly title searches. I learned all I needed, then took a job in Mississippi, where I was assigned to map an unknown province three hours to the north, in Alabama, called the Black Warrior Basin: shallow Paleozoic sands, only half a mile down, beneath the dense forests and rumpled foothills of the Appalachians.
Underground, the Black Warrior was the bowl of an old ocean, but up above, it was red-clay woodland, stippled with hilltop farms where clodhoppers scratched at fields of stunted corn. Gaunt cattle stood clay-gripped to their hocks in ruts sun-hardened as if to bronze. When it rained it did so for days at a time, transforming the clay hills into slaughterous sheets of red, as though they were the flayed carcasses of animals.