by Rick Bass
The adults sat mutely, watching the toddlers engage in such clashing play. Sometimes I could feel an anger building in them, but it seemed to have no source or reason, and instead simply burned in them, rising and falling.
I had come to the house seeking the lease many times, courting Velma for over a year, traveling up the hill two, sometimes three times a month. I would not say the Carters looked forward to my visits, but I got the impression they listened to me. There was something in the stillness of their torpor, and the monologue of my entreaties about why Velma should lease, that came to remind me of sermons. They would have leased to me for the right price—an exorbitant amount—but the decision wasn’t theirs to make.
In the beginning, I had addressed Velma with great earnestness, believing she was able to perceive more than they gave her credit for. Who was the prisoner, I wondered: she, with her dependence upon them for her every daily need now—her food and water, the warmth in her stove, the quilt they drew over her at night, the changing of her nightgown—or were the rest of them prisoners to her descent? It seemed to me they were all prisoners.
One thing was certain, according to her grandson Dexter: back in the time of her cognizance, Velma had not wanted to lease, not under any conditions. Dexter had a long greasy black mullet and was wearing, each time I saw him, the same dirty white wifebeater, which showed off a prison tattoo of barbed wire encircling his biceps, a tattoo that seemed a paradox of the sag and flab into which he was sinking, having been out of the pen and away from its weight room for a good two years.
He told me Velma had long ago said she didn’t want to put up with all the noise, and that she thought drilling for oil was an abomination; that it would ruin their water well and make all the food in their garden taste like oil. He laughed his prison laugh, a hoarse know-it-all laugh, when he told me this, as if such an idea were absurd. I did not correct him.
Velma could no longer walk, and there was not money for a wheelchair. Her family had relegated her to a small pallet on the ground floor next to the windowsill, where she had reclined for years, thinking who knows what thoughts. A visitor to their ramshackle house would likely not have even noticed her shrunken body, there in a tangle of sheets. Her skin was so dry and papery as to appear almost translucent, so that sunlight piercing through the dingy south-facing window seemed to pass over and through her in such a way as to create brief prisms of color that shifted whenever she stirred.
It was not a brilliant light, but I saw it, now and again, and I wondered if she did, too, and what it felt like to her.
I had assumed I might be able to buy Dexter out for a few coins and was surprised by his noncommittal attitude. I couldn’t charm him, couldn’t persuade him, and he never picked up on the intimations I made about how I might be able to line his and his clan’s pockets with some bonus money, in exchange for their assistance in securing his grandmother’s signature.
I came to understand that they were all using Velma to live there, but this only puzzled me further. Why wouldn’t they try to talk her into accepting the lease money, if only so they could then take it from her?
I wondered if they were afraid of her—if they knew her to be a witch.
For all of our tranquility together, from time to time Genevieve and I had flare-ups and disagreements. She smoked a lot of pot—every day, sometimes twice a day—and rather than becoming mellow, she could sometimes be cranky. Her amplitudes were bright zest followed often by a distant, moody funk. There were times she wanted me to be close, and times she wanted me further away than I already was. She could be ice-cold, for no reason I understood. The separations seldom lasted more than a day or two, though, and she was always glad to see me again.
Of my drives out of the hills of north Alabama back down into the bayou country of Mississippi, I don’t remember much, just a shuttering of vignettes flashing across the windshield, as if I were viewing a movie rather than inhabiting those places. I passed through the dappled light but never stopped.
A roadside bait shop, its hand-painted sign advertising crickets, worms, minnows. A barbecue shack, the blue haze of the hickory smoke billowing from the outdoor grill, and the scent of it as I hurried past. An old white woman wearing gardening gloves, pruning roses in a front yard enclosed by a wrought-iron fence rusted to the color of old copper coins. The road was so familiar to me that I traveled it by rote, and dreamed instead of a land millions of years gone.
Then, the crunch of gravel in Genevieve’s driveway as I pulled up under the full moon. The scent of marijuana smoke coming from her open window. The lone yellow glow of her bedroom as she lay awake, reading. The scent of bayou, the freshly turned fields. The lowing of cattle, the drift of fireflies. What heaven was this I had fallen into?
I would leave my clothes on the porch and walk in naked, stiff and ready, pale as marble, the screen door closing behind me. She would have heard the car on the gravel and would welcome me. So much of it was sex, but there was more.
In the mornings we lay in the hammock on the porch and would read in that sweet wedge of the day before it vanished into heat: waves and shimmers rising from the rich black soil, as if it covered still-burning coals. That cotton, or anything else, could grow in such heat amazed me. But it grew well.
We lay coiled like great cats lounging, having feasted, or considering the next feast. She had a huge garden, lettuce and tomatoes and snow peas. They grew in that soil as I had never seen any other vegetables grow. She would go out into the garden midmorning and eat a late breakfast of peas and strawberries.
I don’t know where the afternoons went. It is as though they never existed. We must have napped on the antique bed in her darkened bedroom, the shades drawn and the lone air-conditioner window unit rattling and humming. Or perhaps those were the days I drove to the office in Jackson, ascended to the eleventh floor, and went through my paces like a trained tiger, assembling manila folders of titles and division orders.
I do remember the dusks, in her kitchen, boiling shrimp for gumbo and shelling peas. A bottle of wine. Crickets, as the first shade of night fell.
I remember the evenings, when the heat of the day fell away.
Some nights we rode our bicycles. The road leading to her house was rarely traveled: farm country, forgotten or never known other than by the few who leased and worked it in various seasons. I remember the animal feel of the wind over our bodies—down her road, across the Big Black River, and out onto the black-ribbon lane of the Natchez Trace, with no cars out that time of night. Flying.
We’d get back around one or two in the morning, perspiring from the humidity and the leafy green moisture of the growing things around us. We’d go into the darkened bedroom, where we might sleep until nine or ten in the morning, then walk into the kitchen, with its streaming sunlight. The scent of drip coffee from Hawaii, her one indulgence. The clatter of her old Monte Carlo starting up, before we drove the fifteen miles into town to get a thin newspaper, or a single Coke.
The fields scrolling by, endless.
Each time I left, she fixed a cup of coffee for me, packed a sandwich, then watched me drive off as if regretful but also relieved to have the day to herself; though some rare days, I got the sense she might have wanted to take another step closer.
My days were divided into fractions: ten-year leases, paying out only an eighth royalty, or, when I was less successful, five-year terms, with the more ponderous three-sixteenths obligation. Time was slowly splitting me into wedges and slivers, but it did not feel like diminishment. I could live two lives, even three, with the same ease as one. I loved matching the vigor of my youth against the eighty-hour workweek, spending forty or more hours each week in Homer’s office, down in Mississippi, in the metropolis of Jackson, returning to the sterile cave of my apartment only to shower and nap, and just as many hours on the road, back up to the hills of north Alabama, to attend to the wells and to pursue the leases.
In Alabama, I’d stay at the Brown Motel, a little place ju
st off the town square. Brown bedsheets, brown curtains, brown lampshade. It was a room for sleeping, nothing more. I wasn’t just burning the candle at both ends—I had tossed the whole candle in the fire.
And there were the dark woods at the edge of the rich plowed fields, with their velvet earthen furrows, where Genevieve lived. I went there as often as I could. I simply did not sleep. Or perhaps it was all sleep. Perhaps it was all a drifting dream, a dream of burning.
I saw Penny coming out of church one day. She was radiant, squinting in the sunlight, and was helping an old woman down the steps. She noticed me driving past, and lifted her hand to wave at me, as if to gesture, Come here, come on over, the water’s fine, come on in.
It continued to surprise me, how so many of Brother Janssen’s teachings stayed with me. The church elders had never allowed Brother Janssen a pulpit, but he did teach small classes and seminars in basements and windowless rooms. He did so with the energy of a man who had been rescued from a deep well and given a second chance. He told stories of the old days, when everyone was smiting or being smitten. Tales of hair-trigger accountability, of great hardship and paucity. Tales of reckoning, in which choices mattered. He loved parables: David and Goliath; Samson and Delilah; Jason and the Golden Fleece. Not all were from the Bible or the Book of Mormon; some felt made-up: a man who was gone a long time at war—like a precursor to Odysseus—or a woman in the desert, a weaver, who worked without pause in order to keep the earth turning.
When he spoke, his eyes burned like ingots—though, in a cruel irony for one so pure, he resembled, in his whippet-thin visage, a weasel, an unfortunate and unfair likeness. As if the fires within him consumed all fat.
Brother Janssen was a bachelor, and didn’t socialize much. The assumption was that he was solitary because he was too obsessive and intense, too off-kilter for a partner. He spent his days studying ancient scripture. Candles filled his windowsills, the curtains scorched from countless windy mishaps. He could be inattentive to the most obvious things—traffic, the mood of a conversation, social niceties—and yet he also seemed to know, with just a glance, exactly what you were thinking.
For that reason, Brother Janssen might have had a better shot at getting Velma Carter’s lease than I did. The two of them might not have been so dissimilar, once upon a time. Perhaps he would have told her strange and even fantastic parables until he earned her trust with his luminous passion. He might have shared with her one of his favorite beliefs: that for every mysterious curve of the land, there is a similar shape in the human heart; and because of this, no one ever needed to feel he was alone.
“What’s Mississippi like?” Penny asked me, once. She could as easily have said Mars.
I didn’t answer right away. She wants to ride back there with me, I thought.
There was no way I could tell her what it was like. No way I could tell her about Genevieve’s garden, and that life of lust. “Hot,” I said.
What I also didn’t tell her was how far away it always seemed when I was in north Alabama; how the three hours felt half a lifetime away. How the land changed quickly, coming down out of the hills: flat hardwood swamp bottoms, and then out into the dazzle of red-clay Delta, cotton. Narrow roads, workers’ sunstruck hoes flashing in semaphore. A kettle of vultures. A shack up on cinder blocks. And then, back into the swellings of Jackson’s little hills, and my apartment, where I rarely even stopped, but continued on, another hour westward, toward the bayou that conjoined with the Mississippi itself. A land of Spanish moss, antebellum plantations, black soil, and Genevieve.
For a few months, outside of Tupelo, there had been a young black bear, little more than a cub, in a rough-welded cage of steel bars right by the side of the road, meant to draw onlookers who would then become customers, but the bear looked instead much more like a penitent being shamed; and there, too, I never stopped, only rushed past, and one day the cage and bear were gone.
There was a phrase in my profession describing circumstances where material wealth could be taken from an individual: non compos mentis. Unable to compose one’s mind. Back then it was an easy process to have someone declared such. A doctor’s signature could seal the deal, and often did. There was no standardized test to declare whether one’s mind was still functionally intact. It took only a triumvirate of family members to make the decision. Or at least that’s all it took in north Alabama.
It was not a much-utilized procedure. Even the least ethical of land men viewed the application of such a process as an admission of failure: a statement that indicted forever not only the sanity of the person designated non compos mentis, but likewise the ability of the land man to secure the lease by traditional means. To use it was the hallmark of bumblers and losers. If we can’t get the old man or old lady to sign, we’ll just find a crooked doctor, or three pissed-off family members, and we’ll wrap this thing up. Move the rig in and begin drilling. Bring forth the tongues of fire.
Velma Carter sat on top of the Antioch structure—We could not go forward without Velma Carter—but in the meantime, we continued securing the flanks, and for those other leases, I had the luxury of dealing hard—not negotiating, but making simple take-it-or-leave-it offers. The hill folk had little choice; it was free money and they took it. And as we drilled more wells in the basin, they came to learn enough about the process to gather around the rigs whenever total depth was neared so they might be present for the testing, in the manner in which they might seek to be near the birthing of a foal or calf.
They were hungry for anything but salt water. The old Paleozoic ocean—the gurgle of it charging back up the pipe, and the salty smell of waves and surf no human had ever scented—was the one thing no one wanted to come rushing up the borehole. They wanted oil, but were happy even with the waste gas, for the spectacle of the flares, and for the hope of oil that might lie below.
Every time I walked into the courthouse with a new sheaf of signed leases, Penny was made happy by the sight of me. Had she been watching for me, hoping, even believing, that in some way her waiting might summon me?
We never so much as shared a meal. The closest we ever came to doing anything together was one day when I came into the courthouse at noon. The bell in the town square was ringing and she was locking up for lunch. She was about to walk over to her house and water her flowers, she said, but asked if I wanted her to open the courthouse back up. I told her it was fine, I could wait.
I surprised myself by asking if I could see her garden. I was in love with another, or if not quite fully in love, at least involved; but it made me feel good to see how happy Penny was made by my presence. It was such a simple thing.
We walked around the side of the courthouse and through the gate that went into her backyard. I understood why she liked me. I was a clean-cut young man. No blemishes were visible. I knew that she herself was a churchgoer. There was joy in her heart. All I wanted to do was look at the flowers in her garden. If that made her happy, so what?
She picked up her gardening clippers and a straw hat. The flowers—azaleas, camellias, strong-scented gardenias—were in partial sun. Her gloves and rubber boots sat on a table. She slid her sandals off but then paused and decided, in that little hitch, not to put the boots on.
She walked into the garden barefoot on the gravel trail leading through it. No pets, no boyfriend, nothing: just the courthouse, ledgering those transfers of title.
Did my heart catch, watching her walk down that bright trail, nipping the withered blossoms and casting them out of the garden as if hurling favors at a wedding? Of course it did. I was human, I was young. But it wasn’t a dangerous catch; it wasn’t a must-have, must-take moment. It was merely an observation of beauty.
After she had trimmed and plucked the blossoms, she watered the plants, careful to run all the sun-warmed water out of the hose first before diverting the cold trickle onto each thirsty plant. I walked behind her, lulled. At one point she turned toward me and laughed, told me to take my shoes and socks off, a
nd I did.
As if conditioned by her appearance, sparrows swerved to her garden around the water, sipping at puddles. A pollen-dusted bumblebee nestled in one of the camellia blossoms, stirring vigorously. The flowers, wet now, gleamed.
I turned away. The sun was already drying the water on the tops of my feet and I felt I had to decide whether to follow her one step farther into the garden, or back out.
I chose the latter.
Why I turned back from following Penny farther in, I don’t know. I don’t know. It wasn’t because of Genevieve. We hadn’t laid claim to each other in that way. It seems silly now. What might have been different, if I had continued on? Everything?
You can’t know the paths not taken. You can only look back at the ones you’ve chosen and say Here, this was good, and here, this was a mistake. You can’t even prune. The Garden of Eden was not pastoral, but a seething wilderness of possibility, of bounty, given to us. A test, I think now, to see how we would handle it.
I sat down in one of the chairs in the sun and wiggled my toes and watched her finish watering the plants. She looked back with surprise and understood what had happened. Something held me back, and whether it was the last of a purity that was in me then, seeking to protect her, or the first of a corruption, becoming more comfortable with squander, I still cannot say. Not all things turn on or off as if with a switch. Some things echo before dying.
Each day that I went into the courthouse—its marble floors worn smooth as the interior of a nautilus—the beating of my heart slowed, and I felt that the roar of the world above could not find me, and I was free to operate entirely without judgment.