The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness

by Rick Bass

***

  She moved in with him: they bought a cabin, on land up above the field where he used to sleep. The austere and churchgoing hillspeople bent the rules for them: Wallis was becoming a champion, and some things seemed right. When he went out to get into his plane, there were often people standing around it, a lot of children, watching, waiting: wanting to know where he was going, that day. What part of the country he was going to check.

  When he took leases and did courthouse work—the news had spread that he could find oil in places where Old Dudley had missed it—there were businessmen, undertakers, and monstrous insurance salesmen, seeds of bad earth, leeches who followed him: like puppies, like gulls over a field being furrowed, they tracked him, anticipated, and battled savagely and wretchedly for the small pieces that, like Wallis, they could afford: two acres, fifteen acres, one acre. They used him, and then sat back smiling, and waited, hopefully, for a well to be drilled on their lease. Not understanding, not knowing where the oil was: but knowing that he knew.

  He made four more wells the next month: twenty in a row. No one had ever made more than four in a row.

  ***

  Sara still wanted Wallis to drill on her land.

  “I can’t afford to take your parents’ lease,” he said, “and with that much land, it’s unfair to consider a free lease, even if they would give it. I can’t drill it, not yet, not now.” He was getting better at the lovemaking: he seemed to be growing into it. He brought her things when she was in the bathtub: a cool wet washcloth to press to her forehead; a mint; a stick of gum. He was surprised to find that he liked to watch her chew gum.

  “But there is oil under my land, right?” she asked. Pausing, washing under an arm.

  “Right,” he said. “A lot of it.”

  He wanted to touch her face, but drew back. The bathroom seemed empty: hollow. A thing was missing.

  ***

  The twenty-first well, gas, from the very borehole of a well from which Dudley had walked away, three years ago: much gas. A ring for her finger—not wedding, just friendship—but it felt good, when he held that hand. Woodpeckers hammering in the woods above their house. The scold of a blue jay. His picture was in a newspaper, then two magazines. He kissed her in the day, without once wanting to undress her.

  ***

  Old Dudley heard they were living together and was pleased. A little.

  ***

  Once, on a farm far back in the hills, farther than he had ever been before—a glint of sun, on a lake, late in the afternoon, had pulled him there: the plane peeling away, flying him there in short minutes—so far back up into the hills that perhaps it was not even his sea he was feeling—and he touched down, and got out, and walked around for the whole day, feeling something and seeing things but not knowing what was going on. And Jack, in the new money truck, saw him go down, and drove out in that direction, drove all morning, and found where his plane had landed—a gravel road, wide—and Jack went all up and down the side roads, with the satchel, leasing for pennies from people who had never even seen a drilling rig. And Wallis was unable to get even a few small leases before Jack and Old Dudley got all of them. A well was drilled, and it was dry.

  Wallis did not leave his territory anymore. He stayed on the ground he knew. And Jack decried him, told all, proud of nothing.

  “He was going to lease it, but I stepped in and took the leases before he could, and it was dry. He was going to drill a dry hole.”

  ***

  Old Dudley drove up one summer day in the limousine. The sun had suddenly come out about an hour earlier, as if turned on by a switch. Sara fixed him coffee. Old Dudley had a proposition: he wanted Wallis to come back to work for him. Wallis had to think about it overnight before saying no.

  Sara didn’t say anything. She didn’t know what was right, what was wrong. She wasn’t sure if she even wanted the well drilled anymore. Old Dudley could have done it in an instant.

  Sara’s mother came out one day and brought them chicken. Dudley the hound had dug a place out on the side of the cabin where he would curl up and lie down. Sara petted his back, scratched his ears. He played with the other dog, who was healed. The light on their coats and in their eyes was startling, up on the hill, back in the trees, coming down through the leaves. When he drove home in the truck, in the evenings, if he was going back to the courthouse, he would have supper first. Sara would listen for his plane in the afternoons. It did not make sense, but she could hear it even before the dogs could.

  ***

  Two more of Old Dudley’s old failures turned into successes for Wallis: one a small well, the other a rushing oil well. He took more leases with the money. He bought Sara a dress that looked beautiful on her.

  ***

  Old Dudley bought Jack a plane. It amused the townspeople. They started giving their leases to Wallis for free: if he would only drill on them. Old Dudley turned sixty-two. He hired a man who was fifty-five to work for him: a geologist, to do the same thing that Wallis was doing, only on larger, fancier maps: scribing his interpretations of the world below onto linen maps with fine calligraphic pens. In the fall, Wallis drilled another well. It was the thirty-fourth well that he had been involved in, but this one, finally, was all his. There was so much gas when he drilled into it that it blew the drill pipe out of the hole, caught on fire, and burned the rig down: a man was killed. Everyone came from miles around to watch the rig burn down. The glow had been visible in eight counties. The earth had trembled and shuddered as the gas blew. Old Dudley came in and leased around him and began making smaller, weaker wells. Wallis didn’t have any money again.

  Sara kissed him, the night it happened, held him with the lights off, and thought about her parents’ farm. She hadn’t ever had money before. No one in the county had. She didn’t know if money mattered or not.

  Jack flew, clumsily, nervously, and dropped flaggings out the window, randomly, trying to make it appear he knew what he was doing, remembering Harry Reeves’s wisdom. Shakily, he told Old Dudley that he thought he had it figured, that he thought he knew where they should drill. He’d seen a creek, water bubbling out of a spring: it had to be a fault. They had a rig on it the next week: it made a good little oil well. Jack bought a suit and a gold pocketwatch and watch chain. Even though Old Dudley didn’t wear one.

  When it rained, Wallis worked in the courthouse, or drove: looked at the trees, and the way they grew. But it wasn’t as clear. He couldn’t see it all at once. There was no money for a while, only leases, and he paid debts with the dollars coming in from his fractions in his good wells.

  “I don’t mind being poor,” Sara said one evening, mending a shirt. “But I don’t want to have any chickens around the house. Every family in this county has chickens, damn it, leaving feathers and bad smells underfoot, and I don’t like the sound they make, either.” She stamped her foot. There had been no talk of chickens ever before—Wallis didn’t want any chickens, either—and he was surprised. It had been five weeks since the rig burned.

  “If ever there was a sound of being poor, it’s the cackle of chickens,” she said. Her parents had always had chickens around the house, even after they were not poor anymore. She was very near tears. He got up and put his hand on her forehead, and stroked her hair.

  “No chickens,” he said, cheerfully. “All right! No chickens!”

  She had to laugh, to keep from crying. He made her laugh often. She had thought she wanted to go places.

  She didn’t ask him about her parents’ land anymore. She thought, sometimes, about the mirrors in New Orleans—everything reversed from the way it really felt.

  ***

  They played games.

  “I want to learn how to swim,” she said.

  He smiled. “When I drill again, next time, and hit, we’ll build a swimming pool inside the cabin. We’ll heat it. It’ll be right next to the kitchen, and we’ll add on a room for it.”

  “I can come straight in from grocery shopping in the winter, set the g
roceries down on the table, slip out of my clothes, walk down some steps, and dive into the water,” she said.

  “Nekkid,” said Wallis.

  “There’ll be steam coming up off the water,” she said.

  They smiled. She tried to picture him working for Old Dudley, as he had, for six years, but could not. They laughed, and joked about Jack flying the little plane. He was clumsy. He bounced the plane like a basketball, on landings. He got lost, often, and all the various towns in the area had at one time or another seen him flying a circle around their water tower, sometimes several times in the same day, trying to find out where he was.

  Old Dudley was trying to go back and re-lease all his old acreage, just as a blanket policy: to halt the embarrassment. But there was too much of it, and many people wouldn’t lease, to him or to anyone, until they had talked with Wallis: to see if he wanted the lease first, even for a lower price. They didn’t want Dudley to drill any more dry holes on their land. The money truck had lost almost all of its charm except to the absolute and very poorest, most desperate few.

  Jack wrote a lot of checks for Dudley’s leases. There was no longer a need to wear the key on a chain around his neck. But he kept it there anyway, out of habit, and for power.

  Springs were beautiful. It rained, and shimmered hot, too, in the summers. Eventually, as Wallis paid more attention to Sara, he drilled a few dry holes. Old Dudley grew aged and feeble, lost his teeth and went into a nursing home: his lawyers declared him incapable and took his business away, gave it to his children. And one day Jack crashed while he was out looking: still dropping white handkerchiefs out the window of the plane, still pretending to see. Wallis and Sara got married in the field. Mrs. Brown died, and the motel closed up, became vacant: weeds, vines. Wallis drilled; Wallis leased. He held on for dear life, to two things, not one—himself and another human being—and did not let go, and never went under zero, not for a day, not for an hour.

  Sometimes they would fly down to the coast, near Mobile, land the plane on a lonely stretch of beach, and get out and walk along the shore, in winter: no one else out. He would lean slightly forward, listening to the slow, steady lapping of waves dying into the shore. He would hold Sara’s hand. If she tried to speak while he was listening, imagining, he would raise a finger to his lips. The only reason he could have two passions rather than one was because he had never ruined the first. It hadn’t ever been sold, when asked for. She watched him watch the beach, the ocean, and considered his success.

  The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness

  “Of all these passers-through, the species that means most to me, even more than geese and cranes, is the upland plover, the drab plump grassland bird that used to remind my gentle hunting uncle of the way things once had been, as it still reminds me. It flies from the far northern prairies to the pampas of Argentina and then back again in spring, a miracle of navigation and a tremendous journey for six or eight ounces of flesh and feathers and entrails and hollow bones, fueled with bug meat. I see them sometimes in our pastures, standing still or dashing after prey in the grass, but mainly I know their presence through the mournful yet eager quavering whistles they cast down from the night sky in passing, and it always makes me think what the whistling must have been like when the American plains were virgin and their plover came through in millions.

  To grow up among tradition-minded people leads one often into backward yearnings and regrets, unprofitable feelings of which I was granted my share in youth—not having been born in time to get killed fighting Yankees, for one, or not having ridden up the cattle trails. But the only such regret that has strongly endured is not to have known the land when it was whole and sprawling and rich and fresh, and the plover that whet one’s edge every spring and every fall. In recent decades it has become customary—and right, I guess, and easy enough with hindsight—to damn the ancestral frame of mind that ravaged the world so fully and so soon. What I myself seem to damn mainly, though, is just not having seen it. Without any virtuous hindsight, I would likely have helped in the ravaging as did even most of those who loved it best. But God, to have viewed it entire, the soul and guts of what we had and gone forever now, except in books and such poignant remnants as small swift birds that journey to and from the distant Argentine and call at night in the sky.”

  —John Graves, Self-Portrait with Birds

  AT FIRST WE EXPLORED THE COUNTRY WITH CRUDE maps drawn by Grandfather on the back of paper bags, but as we got older we used blank maps that we were supposed to fill in ourselves as we went into new places, the deep wild places that Grandfather knew about. He said it was better if we went to those places without maps.

  By the time I was ten I knew the names of almost everything I saw, and much of what I could not see. Grandfather said that I was the best granddaughter anyone could ever hope for, but that he would have loved me even if I hadn’t loved the woods, and loved the birds. I was five years older than my brother Omar, whom I began to take into the woods when I was eleven. At the time, Grandfather said that I was being raised in the way my mother would have wanted, and I believed that then and still do. My mother chose to live here even after she found out she was sick. She’s buried on the bluff four hundred feet above the Nueces River. Father got the map out as she was dying and with Mother’s help drew an east-west line and then a north-south line, and in the center of our ten thousand acres was where they decided to plant her. That was the word Mother used—I was eight when it happened—and only after Mother used the word did Father become comfortable using it, too. I realize now the gift of that word—giving Father a way to think of her after she’d left her body: as a memory, a force growing out of the soil, and rock.

  We laid her under the largest oak we’d ever seen, an oak alive when Cabeza de Vaca staggered through. Mother had joked that it was fortuitous the X had landed near the edge of that bluff, as another fifty feet would have placed her at the bottom of the West Fork of the Nueces, and that thought unsettled her, as she had never learned to swim.

  We realized when we drew that map that was the same thing that the original settlers who’d taken the first ownership of the land must have done: drawn an X radiating out from that tree—a giant, even then. Nature has great coincidences, but none like those of man, and it was eerie to think of those settlers, the Prades, our ancestors, of whom sadly we have no pictures, drawing a crude map and doing the precise thing we were doing a hundred and fifty years later, though for different reasons. But back then it must have been apparent to them that they were poised at the edge of something new, something untouched by whites—homesteading land given to them by the territory of Texas, which had won it from Mexico in the War for Independence—the Mexicans having been awarded it by Spain, who had (with a few cursory words and pencil strokes on a map far away) claimed it from the Indians—the Lipan Apache, and the Tonkawa (who were trying to hold onto it before the Comanche from the north stole it from them...).

  After the map was drawn we went to look at the place, all of us, that is, except for Grandfather. It was the only time I ever saw Mother cry. She refused to lean against any of us; she preferred the support of the big tree. She drenched the ground and herself with tears, as Omar held onto one leg and I held onto the other one. Father lowered his head into Mother’s long brown hair and held onto all of us. There were soft breezes then, that spring.

  All my life up to that point seemed to fall away, as if over the cliff, and yet it was confusing, too, since I kept growing: being torn in two directions by the richness of life, is what it felt like—the richness of the past, the promise of the future—and always wondering, How much of me is really me? What pan has been sculpted by the land, and what part by blood legacy, bloodline? What mysterious assemblage is created anew from those two intersections?

  ***

  I had been interested in all the wild things, and had been exploring the country either on foot with Grandfather’s maps, or, more often, with Grandfather himself, riding bareback with him aft
er his stroke, for he could no longer walk, and could not speak well, though he could still see, hear, and smell. He would point out things and give me his garbled name for them, and then, when I failed to understand, he would pull out the guidebook and point to what the book said that creature, or flower, or smell, or sound was.

  That next spring was the year that I was nine, and the year my mother was zero, starting over again. I understood that I should see many of the things she had seen, but that I was also obligated—for myself, as well as for her—to go out and see new things. I could feel her in me. It gave me a confidence—and again, a kind of obligation, though I would not have used such a word then—to go into those wild places, where even Grandfather, on a horse, could not go.

  Each night I’d tell him, and Father, and Omar, about where I’d gone that day. “You must have been in Hell’s Half Acre,” my grandfather would say in that deep and hoarse cavernous voice, and he would remember then how thirty and forty years ago he had first gone into those places, and I would feel his spirit in me as well, and I understood how family could either fall apart, like land treated badly, or could grow ever stronger, like land treated well, like the tree Mother had leaned against that time, the tree which I sometimes sat beneath, touching it with my hand where she had last touched it, and feeling it grow. Father would look at me almost in confusion, and I knew he was seeing my mother in me, for I could feel her so strongly, too, and this curious growth and death that is a simultaneous braiding and unraveling...

  There were always flowers on her grave, and always birds singing. There were bluebonnets and paintbrushes and phlox and primrose and prairie verbena; agarita blossoms, a few prickly pears, and the immensely rare Styrax, or Texas snowball. (After I went to college I was to discover that there were only sixty-six known individuals of Styrax in the world, and that the taxonomists did not include our population of twelve plants, in the cliffs below Mother’s spot, and I did not tell them about it, then or now, though now I am a grown woman myself, without children, and someone should know: and what is family? Should I have married, should I have kept the family going? Where does it all go; back to the land? Do we only borrow it—family history, and spirit?