by Rick Bass
Her nearest neighbors were a fundamentalist Christian family named Workman, a name that had always made her laugh, for she had rarely seen them not working: the mother, the father, and the five children—three boys and two girls, ranging in age from fourteen to two.
The Workmans lived only a few miles away as a raven flew, though it was many miles by rutted road to drive to the head of their valley—and even then a long walk in was required. They lived without electricity or running water or indoor plumbing or refrigeration or telephone, and they often were without a car that ran. They owned five acres downstream along the creek, the same creek that Jyl lived by, in the next valley over, and they had a fluctuating menagerie of chickens, milk cows, pigs, goats, horses, ponies, and turkeys.
When they traveled to town, which was not often, difficult as it was for them to get out of their valley, they were as likely to ride single file on a procession of odd-sized and strangely colored, strangely shaped horses and ponies as they were to travel in one of their decrepit vehicles, smoke rings issuing from both the front and back ends as it chugged down the ragged road.
No family ever worked harder, and it seemed to Jyl sometimes that their God was a god of labor rather than mercy or forgiveness. When she saw them on the road, they were usually working—often pulled over in the shade of cotton-woods, dipping water from a puddle to pour into their steaming radiator, or stopped with their small remuda haltered to a grove of trees while they examined some injury to one of the horses’ or ponies’ hoofs—and even when all was well and the horses, or truck, were in motion, Jyl had noticed that they were ceaselessly working: the girls riding in the back of the truck, knitting or sewing small deer hide knick-knacks to try to sell at the People’s Market, the boys husking corn or shelling peas or cracking nuts, their fingers always moving, always working, in a way that reminded Jyl of the way that she herself had addressed the mountain before, with her long strides just as relentless.
From the Workmans’ cabin came the sounds of industry at all hours of the day: the buzz of chain saws, the crashing of timber, the splitting of wood, the jingle-trace rattling of mules in chains pulling stumps and stoneboats to carve out ever more garden space in the side of the rocky hillside, the mountain beneath which they lived. They were forever adding on this or that strange-shaped loft or closet or cubicle to accommodate their ever-expanding brood, as well as the developing needs for space and privacy among their older children, so that the steady sounds of those renovations filled their little valley, and the smoke from burning stumps and piles of slash and smoldering stubble fields, as well as from their various wood stove chimneys, rose from that cove day and night, in all seasons, as if just over the mountain there were some long and inconclusive war being waged, or as if such a battle had just finished and only the ruins remained now, still smoking—though always, the next day, the sounds resumed: the clangings and bangings, the shouts and orders and complaints, the buzzing and grinding, the hammering and sawing, backfires and outbursts...
On her hikes to the top of the mountain and back, particularly late in the autumn when the leaves had fallen from the deciduous trees, opening up greater views of the countryside, there had been a space where Jyl had been able to look down from one of the deer-trail paths that ran along the high cliffs and see into the Workmans’ little valley, and it had seemed to her that the dominant activity on that little landscape, and in that isolated little family, had been the gathering of firewood—always, there were children trundling from out of the woods, their arms filled with ricks of limbs and branches—and, if not that, the gathering of water: the children traveling back and forth to the river, ferrying double-bucketful loads with each trip, trudging slowly and carefully to avoid sloshing too much but spilling some nonetheless—the younger children having to set the buckets down frequently to stop and rest, and to massage their stretched-out arms.
And in berry-picking season, the entire slope of the mountainside seemed covered with Workmans, wearing straw hats against the bright sun and faded sun-soft overalls, dropping their berries one by one into straw baskets, and down at their home there would be smoke rising from the chimneys on even the hottest summer days, as the mother, Sarah, boiled water for sterilizing the canning jars and for boiling the berries down to make preserves and jam. Jyl would watch them as she hiked up the mountain, observing them in little glimpses through the trees, in all seasons, and she would pass on by.
She remembered a game she had played as a child, often while waiting for her father to come back from the wilderness: from the Far North, from the Andes, from China and Mongolia—from all the wildernesses of the world, all the treasured storehouses of elemental wealth.
She had constructed paper boats and then sent them downstream in the little mountain creeks, running along beside them, following them for as long as she could, hurdling logs and boulders, pretending that the toy boats were ships bound for sea, ships on which she should have been a passenger—voyages for which she had a ticket, but with the ship having embarked without her. And though she knew it was only the skewed and selective memory of childhood, it seemed to her that that was how she had spent most of her time then, chasing after those bobbing, pitching little boats of her own making.
Seeking partly to provide entertainment and even a touch of magic for the hardened lives of the Workman children living downstream from her—and seeking also some contact with the outside world—she began to craft little boats once again, while waiting at the hospital, or at home, at night, in the last few minutes before sleep, seeking to integrate something new into her life other than sleep and pain.
As if these little boats would bring her father back, where nothing else had before.
She whittled the boats out of willow and pine—catamarans, canoes, battleships, destroyers, yachts, and pleasure boats—and scrolled up little notes inside dollhouse milk bottles, dated and signed, “Your neighbor on the other side of the mountain,” and sealed them with candle wax before launching them; and as she had so long ago, she hurried alongside them through the snow and ice, as best as she could: though she had to stop quickly now, due to the breathlessness.
On the notes inside the bottles, she had penned increasingly impressionistic entries, commenting on the beauty of the season, the wonder of the landscape, and the goodness of life in general. She crafted increasingly intricate vessels, and took pleasure in doing so—though as the weeks passed and the children did not come to visit her, she had pretty much given up hope that her vessels and their messages would ever be found, and she figured that even if they were, it would be by someone so much farther downstream that the identification “Your neighbor over the mountain” would have no meaning.
And that was all right, she supposed. It was enough for her to be speaking out to the rest of the world, to the wider world—enough to be striving for some other contact, to be reaching out from within the darkness that threatened to envelop her, and to be testifying, even if to a perhaps unseeing future, about the beauties she was still witnessing, even in her fear. Perhaps someone—perhaps the Workman children themselves—would find the ships far into the future, as adults. It didn’t matter. It was enough for Jyl to be making beautiful little carvings—no matter that only the rivers and forests themselves might be all who ever saw them, like prayers not so much to a god who did not exist, but to one who simply chose not to respond.
So she was surprised when the fifteen-year-old boy and his seven-year-old sister knocked at her door one afternoon, waking her from a deep sleep.
There were still a couple of hours of daylight left, and it was snowing lightly. Snow was mantled on the backs and shoulders of the children. “Come in,” she said. “I would have thought you’d be out hunting, in this good snow.”
The boy, Stephan, looked surprised. “We’ve already got our animals,” he said, though the season had only been open a couple of weeks. He paused. “Have you?”
Jyl shook her head. “I haven’t been out yet.”
&n
bsp; A look of concern crossed the boy’s face and, to a lesser degree, the girl’s. “You’re going, aren’t you?”
Jyl smiled. “Maybe,” she said.
Stephan just stared at her, as if unable to conceive of a life in which meat, free meat, could be turned down, or not even pursued.
The girl, Shayna, took off her pack. Jyl had assumed both of their packs were loaded with extra coats and scarves and mittens—a flashlight, perhaps, and a loaf of bread—but instead there were her ships, every one of them.
“We were thinking if we brought them back you can maybe send them to us again,” Shayna said.
Stephan rattled the little glass bottles in his pocket, fished them out and held them before her, a double handful. “We liked the notes,” he said. “We’re pasting them into a scrap-book. They look real nice. I’m not sure we got the ships and messages in the right order, but they kind of tell a story anyway.” He handed her back the bottles. “Some of the smaller boats might get caught under the ice, but the middle of the creek will probably stay open all winter, and the larger ships will probably be able to still make it.”
He paused, having thought it all out “You could put the important messages in the big boats, the ones that you really wanted to get out, and the other, little, prettier messages, in the little boats, so if they got through in winter, well, all right, but if we didn’t find them till spring, then that’d be all right, too—they’d fit in anywhere, being so pretty and all.”
Jyl laughed. “All right,” she said. “It sounds like a good plan.” She invited them in, watched them stomp the snow from their boots and dust it from their arms and shoulders, helped them hang their coats and hats on the door hooks as if they were proper adults rather than children bearing adults’ ways.
The pantry was almost empty—she’d been able to drink a little fruit juice, and sometimes to gnaw on an orange for strength, or, strangely, raisins, having begun to develop an affinity for them, if not a craving—and the children wanted none of these, but she was able to find a couple of old envelopes of instant oatmeal, as well as some equally ancient packages of hot chocolate mix.
They sat at the table, where Jyl had not had company in several months. She tried to remember the last company she’d had, and could not. The memory of it, the fact of it, seemed to get tangled in the snow falling outside the window, which they sat watching.
“Mama said to ask you how you’re doing,” Stephan said. “If you need anything. If there’s anything we can do.” He peered sidelong at Jyl, evaluating, she could tell, her girth, or gauntness, to take back home to tell his mother—glancing at her and making a reading or judgment as he would in a similar glance the health of a cow or horse, or even some wild creature in the woods, one he was perhaps considering taking. “She said to ask if you’re eating yet.” Another glance, as if he’d been warned that the interviewee might not be trusted to give direct or even truthful answers. “She said to ask if you needed any propane. If you needed any firewood. If you needed any firewood split. If you needed any water hauled.”
He said this last task so flatly, so casually and indifferently, that his practiced childish nonchalance illuminated rather than hid his distaste for the job, and again Jyl smiled, almost laughed, and said, “No, I don’t need any water hauled, thank you—I’ve got a well and a pump”—and a look of pure desire crossed both children’s faces.
“But you need some wood,” Stephan said. A glance at the nearly empty wood box by the stove—only a few sticks of kindling. “Everybody always needs wood, and especially split wood.” Another evaluation of her physique—the wasted arms, the pallor. The steady fright.
“Yes,” Jyl admitted, “I could use some wood. And I’ve been wondering, too, what I’ll do if I go out hunting, and do get an animal down. Before my illness—my cancer—I could just gut it and drag it home from wherever I’d shot it. But now it would take me so many trips that the ravens and eagles and coyotes would finish it off long before I ever got it all packed out.”
Stephan nodded, as if the concern were music to his ears. “We can help with that,” he said, and she saw that already his indoctrination was complete, that work had become his religion, that it transcended escape and was instead merely its own pure thing: that from early on, he and his brothers and sisters had been poured into the vessel of it, and it would be forever after how they were comfortable in the world. “We can take care of that,” he said. “If you get an animal, you just let us know.”
“Send us a note,” Shayna said, again quiet and shy. Magic sparking in both of them like the tapping of flint against steel.
Stephan finished the rest of his hot chocolate in two gulps, then was up and headed for the door, with Shayna behind him like a shadow; and Jyl was surprised by the wrenching she felt in their sudden leave-taking.
She followed them out to the porch—they had already donned their coats and hats and were pulling on their gloves—and, slipping on her own snow gear, hurrying to keep them from waiting, she went out into the falling snow with them and down to her toolshed, where she showed them the saw, the cans of gas, the jug of bar oil. The battered wheelbarrow, unused since last summer.
“That rifle, back there on your porch,” Stephan said. “It looked like an old one. Did it belong to your father, or your grandfather?”
“Yes,” said Jyl. “My father’s. I don’t know where it came from before that—if it was his father’s, or not.”
Stephan was already sniffing the gas-and-oil mixture to see how old it was, and he looked up at Jyl as if this were the first thing she had said that had surprised him—as if he found such an admission unimaginable—and he said, “Are you a Christian?”
His expression was so earnest, his face so framed with concern, that again Jyl’s first impulse was to laugh; but then her legs felt weak and the blood rushed from her head, so that she looked around quickly for a stump, and she took a seat and braced herself against the waves of dizziness, and the nausea. The snow was coming down harder: curtains and curtains of it.
“No, I don’t guess I am,” Jyl said. “I mean, I don’t know: there’s parts I believe, and parts that touch my heart”—she raised a gloved fist to her chest—“but the whole package... I don’t know.” She looked up in the direction of the craggy mountain, invisible now in the falling snow. “I guess I find God more in the out-of-doors, and in the way we treat one another, than in any church. I’ve never cared to sit inside for anything unless I absolutely had to.”
Stephan glanced over at Shayna with a look that Jyl could not identify, then hefted the chain saw and started up the hill toward a lichen-shrouded lodgepole. “You mind if we cut that one?” he asked, and Jyl smiled, shook her head, and said, “That was the one I was going to pick myself.”
The saw had been idle for almost a year, and it took Stephan nearly ten minutes of cranking before it would even cough. During that time, Shayna and Jyl sat hunkered on their heels in the hard-falling snow, watching Stephan wrestle with the starter cord, panting and pausing to catch his wind—and from time to time he would look over at Jyl with the realization that not in a thousand years would she ever have been able to start the saw, in her weakened condition—and what would she have done then, with no wood? Driven into town and lived like a homeless person until the spring? Spent eight hours a day scrounging the snowy hills for damp twigs and branches? Attempted, in her puny shape, to gather her firewood with an ax?
The saw finally caught—went miraculously, suddenly, from a weak and faint sputter to full-throated burbling roar, complete with belch of blue smoke; and Stephan stood up straight, relief and pleasure on his face.
He moved to the tree and eased the spinning blade into the dead flesh—white chips flew like rice at a wedding—and cut a notch, which he slid out of the tree expertly, and then he went around to the other side and made the back cut. And as if following the bidding of some master anti-architect, in which there was as much grace in the laying down as in the building up, the tree ea
sed itself gracefully down the hill, falling slowly through the swirling snow in such a manner as to disorient all three of them.
The tree bounced when it hit, and the dry branches snapped and popped and went flying in all directions; and even before the sifting clouds of snow stirred up by its impact had drifted away, Shayna had risen and was moving alongside the fallen tree, gathering those small branches in her arms, gathering a double armful, as many as she could carry, and taking them to the porch, some fifty yards distant, trudging through snow that was now over her knees.
Jyl watched and tried to remember her own childhood, and wondered if childhood felt to Shayna as it once had to her, when she had been so small—as if sometimes the world was filling with snow and trying to bury her.
Stephan was moving quickly along the fallen tree, bucking it up, severing more limbs, and Jyl went out to help him, began gathering her own armfuls of limbs and branches, and started carrying them back to her porch, following the initial trail that Shayna had blazed in the snow.
They smiled at each other in passing, Shayna returning with arms empty for another load, and Jyl struggling, with hers full; and now Stephan had the log completely delimbed and was cutting it into firewood, spacing his quick and neat cuts in metronomic sixteen-inch spacings that seemed as precise as the mechanical bobbings of a water ouzel perched on a streamside boulder, crouching and dipping ceaselessly: always the same distance, always the same motion, like a wind-up toy.
It was not a very big tree, and they had it entirely dismembered, split and hauled and stacked, within a half-hour: a porch full of bright, gleaming new-cut firewood, and a fresh-lumber scent dense upon them, like the odor of new beginnings, and possibility.
They went inside to dust off for a moment, to wash the scent of oil smoke from their faces and to pour a glass of water. The darkness was coming quickly.
“We’ll be back tomorrow to get some more,” Stephan said. “Or as soon as we can. And to do other things.”