The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness

by Rick Bass

  Our hearts fresh and glistening with the purity of childhood trickery, a thing like evil, but somehow not quite, we’d grasp hands again and run for the woods, farther and farther from our house. Chubb’s quaking fear would always embolden Omar, and we’d run for what seemed like forever, past the hounds’ cemetery, down the caliche road, through the cedars again, and then through the big oaks: through owl-call and cricket-chirp and frog-bellow, along the creek and running in the shallows, down the limestone shoals in the moonlight, running downstream, running as if we were flying.

  There is no other way to explain it: we’d run until Mother was alive. It was like blowing air on a fire, bringing coals to flame. We’d run until we ignited, until we blossomed, in her presence. Something was out there—something just beyond. Something moving away from us.

  And everyone else was just sleeping, back at the house, or lying there with blankets pulled over their heads.

  The water was cold on our feet, our ankles. We’d shuffle, groping with our toes for the twin ruts running down the center of the flat magic shining night river. Up until the 1930s, the east fork of the Nueces is how people in this part of the country got down to Uvalde. They’d drive their horse-drawn wagons up and down the shallow river. A hundred years of iron-rimmed wagon wheels had worn ruts in the limestone, all the way to Uvalde—ninety miles—and with our toes we’d find these narrow ruts and then walk in them, holding hands across the space between them, gaining confidence and walking through water up to our knees, then: minnows and frogs skittering ahead of us, and the night music of the river riffling against the backs of our knees.

  Old Chubb knew the birds in daytime, by sight and sound, but Grandfather’s expertise was the night birds: screech owls, elf owls, chuck-will’s-widows, bullbats, nighthawks, duck-mutterings, and heron-croaks. But he knew the daytime birds, too. He knew them all.

  We’d walk barefooted down those skinny slots, as if walking (holding hands for balance) down the never-ending steel rails of a train track, and we’d wiggle our feet in the cool algae, and would imagine all that had come before us, until it seemed that the cloppings of horses’ hooves and the iron-grinding sounds of the wagon wheels and the twisting-wood sounds of buckboard-creak were only around the next corner; and we’d keep walking, drawn by, even becoming, the river... and in the night, who could say we were not? It was a perfect mix of cold water and belly fire, and those physical dualities prepared me, even then—shaped me, as if in metamorphosis, for joy to miraculously blossom from pain, and life—my new life—from Mother’s death.

  She was gone but not absent.

  The land kept shaping me, changing me, as she would have, too; and as I would have anyway, caught up in the flow of it, though somehow seeming now to move more slowly, deeply, carefully, without her.

  Omar and I would walk until we realized the wagons were gone, and until I, and perhaps he, realized that it was our turn now—that the world’s attention was on us, not on the past, and that there was a shining kind of urgency to live a life, as those behind us had lived lives: to get out of the house and go out into the bright starry night below the limestone cliffs, and to walk, and to just live.

  All of these things were of course simply felt, rather than understood, back then. But we did them. We got out and went into the river. The night calling us to get a jump, a head start on tomorrow, the river calling us as if there were magnets in the rocks. And we listened to them, and obeyed them, though we understood nothing, then.

  The water pressing against the backs of our legs, urging us downstream.

  Raccoons along either shore, watching us pass: their delicate hands groping in the shallows for clear-water mussels, making soft chirring noises as we passed. The starlight in their eyes.

  I always took Omar to the cliff below Mother’s place. It was on the other side of the river, where the river had cut a deep curve into the high cliff, and was still a fine place to swim in the summer, cool and shady and deep...

  There were nights when we did not feel the pull of the river so strongly, when instead it was the lure of the oaks and the cedars that drew us out, but on those nights in the river we always ended up standing beneath Mother’s cliff.

  I couldn’t say any of it to Omar, not then. Couldn’t tell him how she’d loved to quail hunt, how she’d loved to fish; how she loved to read out loud to us, how she loved to take care of things—children, horses, dogs, Father, Grandfather. I couldn’t tell him any of it, when he was still so small and not yet hungry—ravenous, rather—for it. I could just stand there and hold his hand.

  I am your daughter, I wanted to shout up at the cliff, and I wanted Omar to shout, too, up at the bluff, the ghostly white limestone, the wall of rock like a drive-in movie theater screen. I wanted Omar to remember, and to never forget, how much she had loved Father, had loved me, had loved him, had even loved Old Chubb. I wanted Omar to stand there in the night, in the river, and shout I am your son: shouting so loudly that the strength of our voices carried into the rock and that the sound waves continued through the rock, caressing and then waking her sleeping bones, our shouts joining in with and becoming part of the living rock.

  The moon glittering on the waters below, the river sliding south, riffling, trickling, and sliding, millions and billions of gallons of our clear pure water being carried south, and we’d stand there in the middle of it, the water never running out...

  Omar would blink up at the moon, or if there were no moon, at the net of stars, Draco, Betelgeuse, Centauri. He’d watch the cliff until I knew that he felt her presence still in and with us, even if he did not understand it, and I’d be satisfied then, and we’d turn and start back upstream. It was always surprising—the river’s force against us, when we tried to go back upstream. Our bare feet clutched the stone bottom, searching for those wagon tracks.

  We’d leave the river when our legs began to quiver, tiring against the river’s upstream force; and feeling like moonwalkers, we’d hike along the shore: up into the forest then, angling the shortcut back to the house. Nighthawks thumped and fluttered in the moonlit meadows, and once again, the fireflies convened. There are so many creatures that we take for granted in our lives that will be gone, living only in our memory. I’m afraid that the next generation may not know of whales or sea turtles—that all of mankind’s motors and electrical transmissions are drowning out their own undersea system of communications, their love songs, and their warning systems, their foodgathering systems. And fireflies, too, will be gone by the next century: the world is no longer rare or special enough to hold a place for a creature that conquers darkness. What was once an elaborate social mechanism as well as an escape mechanism (to a predator looking up, the firefly must have gotten lost among the stars) is now a useless extravagance, lost in a world where there is no longer much true darkness—only parking lot vapor lamps burning all night, city light washing out the fireflies’ once glamorous stars, and neon outcompeting the fireflies for sheer sexual glitz...

  But we still have a few fireflies on Prade Ranch, and back then, when I was still growing so fast and being shaped and squeezed by things, and by the absences of a thing, too, we had whole fields of fireflies, fields blooming with swirling-light-like flowers, and we ran through them so that sometimes they stuck to us and then smeared in a paste against our chests, our arms and faces as we ran through the cedars again, accidentally crushing the glowing bugs against us when we tried to brush them away, or when the sweet-smelling cedar boughs whacked against us as we ran single file through those woods.

  Armadillos, like so many other intruders, had moved up into this country and flourished where the cattle grazed it down—the wizened, studious, almost scholarly armadillos out in the moonlit meadows (to escape predation by hawks and eagles, but not owls!), snuffing with their long snouts the moist bug-seething soil beneath a landscape of drying cattle dung, nosing delicately (like some old professor opening a book) the waste products of rampant domesticity, moving patiently from cow pie
to cow pie...

  Even though we had no cows, we had armadillos. They have disproportionately large ears, like those of a kit fox or a coyote, which they use to pick up insect sounds, and because of this you couldn’t really sneak right up on them (despite their myopia), because they’d hear your footfalls, even if you were tiptoeing. This was unfortunate, as we loved to catch them and paint their shells.

  I’d read, however, in a children’s book by Fred Gipson called Hound Dog Man, of a way to catch them. Omar and I would stop whenever we saw one snorting around in a meadow, and would pick up a handful of pebbles. We’d take turns tossing the pebbles near the football-shaped animal to imitate the sound of bugs jumping around in the grass. We’d toss each pebble just in front of the armadillo, keeping them just out of his reach, and in that manner lure him straight in to where we were sitting. By the time we’d lured him to within ten or fifteen feet he would have us scented, and would rear up on his hind legs and sniff and squint into the darkness. We’d stay motionless (Omar quivering, trying not to giggle), and finally the armadillo would come in close enough for one of us to snatch him up by the tail and lift him off the ground. The armadillo would twist and snort and sneeze, struggling to get free.

  Some nights we’d catch two or three this way. We’d take them back to the barn (the smell of sweet alfalfa hay, trucked in from the high plains of New Mexico, smelling of high mountain air, purple skies, rich afternoon thunderstorms cleansing the hay, which then dried quickly in the thin sun...) and with a can of phosphorus and a paintbrush, we’d paint the backs of the armadillos’ shells—blow on them to dry them—and then carry them down to the deep clear-watered pool that Grandfather and Chubb had built by making a small dam below Chubb’s cabin.

  We’d pass his still-lit cabin, both of us carrying the armadillos in an old cedar chest, like treasure. We’d go down to the picnic grounds, set the chest down at the pool’s edge, and begin dumping the glow-in-the-dark armadillos into the pool. We also painted the backs of the many large turtles that were unfortunate enough to be caught by us—painting not just designs, but also names on their backs—Chubb, Omar, Anne (me), Frank (Grandfather), Wilson (Father), Lucy (Mother)...

  Armadillos can walk underwater. We’d watch them tumble in slow motion to the depths of the pool, landing upside down on the clear limestone bottom, but always righting themselves. They’d be glowing as bright as the moon, and the turtles were, too. We didn’t give it a second thought, and in retrospect, I hope that the phosphorus (which wore off after a couple of weeks, anyway) helped strengthen both the turtles’ and the armadillos’ shells. But it didn’t matter. We were young and largely amoral and would have probably done it anyway.

  Omar and I would sit at the pool’s edge and watch as the lit up creatures moved slowly about, far below, each turtle and each armadillo going about its own business as if unaware that it, and the others around it, were seen by us from above, luminous...

  ***

  Those were the weekends, and the summers. We’d come in well past midnight—sometimes closer to two or three in the morning—and wash our hands and our faces and go to sleep then; to sleep until midmorning (the faraway sounds of Old Chubb fooling around in the barn, up at dawn, only the faintest intrusion into our sleep, and easily absorbed by our dreams...).

  Father and Grandfather would have fallen asleep upright in their chairs with the static of the gone-away radio station crackling between them, and we always turned the radio off before going down the dark hallway, leaving the two men sleeping there in silence.

  Father worked as a county agent, traveling around the county trying to talk the other ranchers out of grazing so many cattle, and trying to get them to get rid of sheep and goats entirely, though neither of these duties fell in his job description: he was supposed to be helping them maximize their gains, almost always at a strain upon the land. But despite his beliefs that this country wasn’t made for static livestock grazings, he was quicker than anyone to climb upon a neighbor’s windmill and help replace a gasket, or to look for a lost cow, to help out in any way he could; and we were as poor as any of them, with each year a struggle to pay the taxes just to continue living upon the land. We ate roast pig and venison and duck and wild turkey and fish, and Old Chubb worked the two-acre garden in the early mornings with the doves cooing, and again in the late afternoons when the doves began to mourn again, and each year, the rules of the government came close but could never quite foreclose upon our wildness: there was each year, always and barely, enough for taxes.

  Mornings were better than evenings, for Father and Grandfather. Father always made us breakfast: fresh eggs that he had traded for (he and Grandfather both despised the sound and smell of chickens, though Grandfather was not above staking one out in a field to try to lure in a hungry hawk or eagle he wanted to watch).

  Grandfather and Omar and I would sit out on the cool tiles on the back porch and watch Old Chubb out in the garden. Grandfather would ask, in his odd assemblage of sounds, where we’d gone last night—the word “where” the only one we could even remotely understand, but we knew what he was asking.

  With the end of a stick, I’d sketch in the dust a map of where we’d gone, as I told him about it: what we’d seen and what it had been like. I told him all but the unspoken part, but I think he understood that, too.

  He’d nod vigorously as I sketched each bend in the river, and individual trees, individual boulders; he’d make satisfied groans and croaking noises, and the wilder the places were that we’d visited the night before, the more excitedly he’d nod. He’d been there. He knew everything. Surely he could hear her, could see her, too.

  Father would call us to breakfast. We’d wolf the food down, and then Father would walk out into the bright sunlight, to the old car the county provided him, his soil-testing kit in the back seat (it would always tell him what he already knew: that the surrounding lands were being overgrazed and were overly saline from pumping out too much ground water), and a box of lettuce and potatoes and sweet onions in the trunk from our garden, for whoever wanted any.

  Omar and I would walk up to the county road and wait for the school bus, or if it was summer or a weekend—one of those long lazy mornings, with a late breakfast—we’d return to the cool tiles of the back porch, would lie there in the shade and watch Chubb working in the glittering green garden, wearing one of his same old two pair of denim overalls. Brown face. Straw hat. Sweat rolling down his face. The scratching sound of the tiny hoe in the big earth. We’d just lie there in the half-grogged morning sleepiness of childhood and watch him, the way the night before the raccoons had watched us make our way down the river.

  I am increasingly unsure of the division we put between the past and the present. It seems, the more time I spend wandering the land, seeing the things my parents saw, and feeling the same things, almost as if I am, at times, them—as if our biological progress has been so infinitesimal that there’s no significant difference between us—that there is no true fence, no stone wall, between the present and the past: that we construct (out of fear, or hunger for the future, gluttony, these fences behind us; that we turn our backs on who and what we really are—who and what we still are.

  It seems a form of disrespect.

  I love the past so much because I love the present. I know I have to go into the world and become shaped, altered, bent, myself—individuated—and that there will be pain and joy in the process. I am not the land itself, neither am I a clone of mv family. But the magnitude of my attachment to these things—and the stability it affords—staggers me. What strengthens or protects these things strengthens and protects me; that which harms them, harms me. There is still a connection to these things here on Prade Ranch.

  ***

  I wasn’t much of a social creature. I made average grades in school, and devoured the sciences, but I didn’t have a lot of friends in school, or growing up. Mostly it was Omar, and Father and Grandfather, and Chubb, and the woods.

  It i
s true I was too serious. But perhaps the other children, and even the teachers, were not serious enough. The spider’s silk lines of chance that can break and wash out from beneath you one or more of your cornerstones, toppling you into heartache and confusion, estrangement. Perhaps I was too aware of the tenuousness (and hence the beauty) of one’s foundations, but I often thought others around me were not enough aware.

  ***

  I love the wild things, and the birds most of all. My education began, I am sure, the moment I was pushed free of the womb by Mother, born on Prade Ranch in the back bedroom on a late afternoon in early March—the seventh of March, which is when the golden-cheeked warblers usually return to Prade Ranch after wintering down in Mexico. There would have been doves calling, as if to counter Mother’s gasps and cries, and the flylike buzz of the hummingbirds (the aggressive black-chinned ones making most of the racket) at the nectar feeders just outside the open window. There would have been a breeze stirring the lace curtains. Father in the room with the doctor, and Grandfather and Chubb on the back porch, waiting for this next new part of the world to begin. Grandfather said he knew that was going to be the day, not just because of the golden-cheeked warblers’ return, but because he’d heard a vermilion flycatcher buzzing—pit-zee, pit-zee—all the day before, and on into the night, well past midnight—the only time he’s ever heard that, before or since.

  Grandfather said that as I was being born, a broad-billed hummingbird flew up on the porch and rested on the dinner bell—Grandfather timed it—unmoving for thirty minutes, just sitting there and cocking its head occasionally, waiting, while all the other hummingbirds swarmed the feeder.