Outside

by Barry Lopez

  During the weeks she stayed with me I tried to regard Empira as irresponsible and self-important; but nothing in her could long sustain such a view. I held it from self-pity, I later realized. Or envy. When she moved out I missed her company so much it unnerved me. She had dispelled an atmosphere of complacency in my house, as no other boarder ever had. She was fresh as flowers. A boy staying with me briefly began to swagger around the house in such a way you could see he assumed Empira was just smitten. One night he asked her in a smug, condescending way to go to the movies. She said, “Mr. Conway, I love going to the movies, but I’m afraid I wouldn’t enjoy them very much with you.” She could be that blunt, but Eldon Beemis was the single one of my long-term boarders glad to see her go. It gave him the table back, to run the supper conversation as he wished.

  A year after she moved out, Empira and I and Albert Garreau, who owned the mercantile, and Deborah Purchase, another widow, were sitting in the school cafeteria after a trip with the students. We’d been out to the Pearson Prehistoric Shelter, a cave above the river east of town. It was warm. We’d gotten cool drinks. With end-of-the-day weariness we were musing about how long ago the shelter had been occupied by humans—eight thousand years, too far back for us to imagine. Albert began recounting the history of Idora, which of course seemed ephemeral by comparison. I recalled a story of my grandfather’s time—he’d come to Idora in 1871 with the railroad—and that one led to another.

  My grandfather’s stories of Ohio and the Great Plains, and of his many trips to the Pacific and the Gulf, were ones I’d committed to memory. The language I used when I told them was different from my own. It had my grandfather’s precision and force. I got caught up in his stories that day. I talked until the cafeteria was so dark I couldn’t see the others’ faces clearly. Albert, whom I found appealing partly because he listened to everyone so attentively, had heard many of the stories before, one following on another like a stream of water. Deborah had too. Empira’s attention was rapt. When I stopped talking I felt slightly chagrined, having gone on so long with such enthusiasm. But telling the stories always had that effect on me. I felt them physically, even—Grandfather’s descriptions of wind-tossed oceans of grass in Nebraska, of huge trees in the valley bottoms of western Oregon, of flocks of cranes flying over. People’s desires: “. . . when Adrian tasted the wheat flour, the faint trace of nasturtiums was there. He bought every bag Edward Bonner had on the shelves.” When I spoke of these things, it was as if I were guiding a canoe through rapids and stretches of calm water, conveying my passengers on a momentous journey down a marked but unknown path. I rose to this part of my life as I did to no other.

  When Albert and then Deborah left, Empira invited me to her home for supper. I said I wasn’t able to come. I wouldn’t like eating in that small, dank, ramshackle house of hers. I was ashamed of myself, thinking so; and when she told me then how wondrous and strange and invigorating my stories were I felt worse. She said they were an homage to my grandfather’s memory; she said that I was their custodian, and that when I told the stories I was beautiful.

  My eyes filled with tears right in front of her. I couldn’t help it.

  Empira was a physically active woman and early on volunteered to coach girls’ track at the high school, though I don’t believe she knew much about it at the beginning. One Saturday morning when I was leaving for Blue River, I saw her on the cinder track behind the school and pulled over to watch her from the car. Lap after lap she ran, her cheeks red, her head bobbing, her stride too short to be graceful but relentless. I was mesmerized by her belief in herself, at the same time I questioned it.

  You couldn’t say what Empira cared about most. She was a good teacher, by all that I heard. Her concern for the children was genuine and tireless. She read voraciously and had a lot of music she listened to. She didn’t visit much, but she carried the irksome burden of a single woman in Idora with no self-consciousness I saw. Several town men, aimless strays, foisted themselves on her. When she didn’t give them what they wanted they moved on. I wondered if Empira cared at all about having a man in her life. I suspected she did, and it irritated me that she pretended it didn’t. Men new to town would hear around that she was “an eccentric, selfish bitch”—that’s what Albert Garreau told me when I asked. It took me a while to understand what they resented was her insistence on privacy and independence.

  The third year Empira was among us she discovered she was sick. She never spoke of it directly, but I remember she came by the house one day with a book for me—we often traded mysteries—and she gave me an ebony stick at the same time. She said it was a storyteller’s stick, from Ghana. The storyteller drew in the dirt with it, she said, while he spoke. I think of that as the moment she told me she was dying.

  In that last year—a long summer, then the rainiest winter I can remember, a late spring—Empira began a tapestry. I’d gotten over my feelings about her house, knowing by then what lay behind them, and when I went over for supper one night I saw the loom set up on the side porch. On it was the most astonishing piece of handwork I had ever seen. An understanding swept over me then that Empira was gifted in a way I could barely comprehend. Despite her usually good manners, Empira would deliberately annoy people on occasion if she felt they were being self-righteous—and she could be aloof. In my pettiness, I must say I enjoyed the few small barbs and comeuppances she suffered because of this. I thought they showed her limits. But when I stood in front of that tapestry my stomach dropped. I never felt the same about her again.

  When I first looked at it I thought it had to be a painting, so fine was her weave. Only with my glasses on could I distinguish the threads one from another or, more amazing, the boundaries between colors. A hundred spools of thread pegged on a board ran the spectrum from plum through saffron to ruby red, with dozens of shades of blue and green and hues of brown.

  The tapestry was but a quarter finished, only the left margin and most of the upper left corner done. It would be about five feet by three, a wilderness scene of bright sunlight over a canyon. A few words had been sewn in over the shadows of trees in the left foreground.

  “Empira,” I whispered, raising my hands in astonishment, in a kind of helplessness.

  “When I was a little girl,” she told me, “my parents took my brothers and me to the Grand Canyon. You can actually see all that space over the canyon, you know. I never forgot its breadth, how delicate the colors of the rocks and the sky and the trees were that hung in it. I wanted to fill that space up, to be inside it like a bird, graceful, rising, falling, flying long, winding spirals from the rim down to a landing far below.”

  “What are the words, here, what are they going to be?”

  “What I wrote the first morning after I was married. They are my sentences of greatest desire, the purest hope I think I ever wrote.” I waited for her to go on.

  “I don’t regret the feelings, not a word,” she said, chiding me for my presumption.

  “Empira, if you can weave this well, I mean with such skill, which is really so completely—”

  “It’s each individual thread, Marlis. Tying off each single thread. Pulling them from the spools, holding them to the light, feeling their tension, like violin strings, before they become part of the pattern.”

  “But it’s so beautiful. And, my God, so real. You’ve hidden your lamp under a bushel basket.”

  “We suspect so little of what goes on in the world, of what is happening or has happened to us. We don’t gather the threads, Marlis. We let them go and then the wind weaves them. We let go and float. We eddy up along the river somewhere, most of us, and just wait out our time.”

  By early that summer, when classes were over, we could see Empira was exhausted and we knew that she was ill. But none of us, the circle of her friends—Albert, Deborah, Ellie Randall, who was the principal, Dick Everson, who taught with her, or Grady and Maureen Sillings, who lived next door to me—none of us felt it right to bring it up. She had a pattern
to her life that was deliberate and private, and this was but the last part of it.

  That summer she visited each child she’d taught—of those that still lived nearby—giving some of them books and trinkets. When fall came she wasn’t strong enough to teach and Ellie told her not to come in. Empira visited me regularly, sometimes bringing flowers. She encouraged and then listened with such pleasure to my stories. She aged in those weeks, physically, but her temperament became more serene, and as I listened to her speak of her own past I heard no self-pity or recrimination. I knew then that I loved her. She finished the tapestry but didn’t tell me. I saw it at her house one morning, still on the loom. The completed scene was brilliant, almost luminous. The air filling the canyon was bright and depthless but it had the pale color she’d described. The words were unobtrusive. As I bent down to read them I was struck with an enormous sadness. “My holy and blooded desire . . . implausible as such a life can be . . . his hands tracing the bow of my back, his lips on the rim of my ear . . . bring my own children here, to find what I was given. . . .”

  It rained without letup that October, not the mist and unending drizzle we are used to but downpours that flooded the air and streamed over the ground, night and day. One evening, Empira came to my door and said when I opened it, “Will you walk with me this evening, Mrs. Damien?”

  I said yes, of course. We walked through the rain, down streets that led from homes on the hills to stores that fronted the highway and the park, then the river. Her stride was short, her steps firm. She spoke as we went, as her strength allowed. “You have a good memory, Marlis,” she began. “Perhaps you will do me the favor of remembering all I will try to say now.” I feared she would become philosophical, but she was specific, enumerating things in her house, saying to whom each was to go. A set of tattered place mats, a raw amethyst in its mother stone, a Steuben vase, a box of hummingbird feathers. Some of her choices, the beneficiaries, surprised me.

  We crossed the highway and walked through the park. The muddy river, visible in the faint glow of street lamps, undulated powerfully. Empira guided us to a place where it rose to the very edge of the bank. I understood her intention in the same moment that she made a gesture with her hand to sever us. I acquiesced, against all my beliefs. She dropped her coat to the ground, pulled a shawl more tightly around her, stepped out of her shoes and moved to the river’s edge. After a moment she sank down and lay over on her side. I couldn’t tell then whether she moved or whether the river surged but the water rose under her and enveloped her and she was gone. Her dress crumpled last in the grip of the current and I saw that the shawl was her tapestry turned side to.

  She was gone quickly, as if it hadn’t happened, as if I were still listening to her voice on the hilly streets.

  Two days later her body surfaced miles away in a flood eddy. I found an address for her family, a small town in eastern Pennsylvania. Her mother said there was no reason to send her back, not all that way at such expense. Could we please bury her there? she asked. We did, at the best spot Ellie and Albert and I could find at the Idora cemetery. The Reverend Arthur Thorven read an impatient service, annoyed by what he believed was a sinful act of despair, a failure of courage. It was a first funeral for most of the children. They looked on in awe, troubled, disbelieving. Some people standing there may have thought what Eldon Beemis had at breakfast that morning, opening the paper as I cleared the dishes.

  “Says here Empira had cancer. Homeliness, I expect, was the root of what got her. Why she killed herself.”

  I felt so sharply in that moment the poverty of my friendship.

  A VISUAL MEDITATION

  BARRY MOSER

  AFTERWORD

  AFTERWORD

  EARLY IN MY WRITING LIFE I discovered a remote, desolate landscape in southeastern Oregon called the Alvord Desert. I began to visit this dry lake bed regularly, a glaring expanse of white flanked by barren mountain ranges. Being there prompted new thinking for me about the relationship between physical landscapes and descriptive language, and about the way physical setting might reinforce certain themes in a fictional narrative.

  The initial story to emerge from my emotional and intellectual experience with this landscape was “Desert Notes,” which I wrote when I was about twenty-four. Other stories soon followed, generally inspired by the layered geography of the Alvord and other alkali deserts in the American West. Together, these stories, which formed a kind of mosaic about such places, came to comprise Desert Notes: Reflections in the Eye of a Raven.

  In 1974 Jim Andrews, at the time the president of Universal Press Syndicate in Kansas City, Kansas, read Desert Notes and said he wanted to publish the manuscript under his newly established imprint, Sheed, Andrews, & McMeel. (Earlier, in 1966, as an editor at Ave Maria magazine, he had published some of my first short stories.) One winter afternoon, planning to review arrangements in a contract for this book, Jim and I went for a walk in Loose Park, on the Missouri side of Kansas City. He was concerned, he told me, about my trying to make my living writing for magazines. Instead of a single-book contract for Desert Notes, therefore, he wanted to offer me an advance on a three-book contract. Go back to Oregon, he said, and decide what you want the other two books to be. Dumbfounded, I accepted his offer. He pulled from his overcoat pocket a letter of agreement that he had already prepared and a small check. We each signed a copy of the letter, on the gleaming black hood of his Buick Electra, and he handed me the check which, in that moment, loomed very large.

  A month later I wrote Jim, telling him I intended to follow up on the broad themes and general organization of Desert Notes with a book called River Notes, later subtitled The Dance of the Herons. Its stories, I told him, would be set in a temperate-zone rain forest, on the banks of a white-water river in western Oregon. In keeping with our agreement I said I was also planning the third book, to be called Animal Notes, though I would need to figure out later how its stories would dovetail with stories in the first two books, in order to form a unified trilogy.

  I had no inkling then that I would never write Animal Notes. The strong, if still vague, impulse behind such a book—a desire to probe the ways in which wild animals are woven into the fabric of human society—eventually became another book entirely, a work of nonfiction called Of Wolves and Men. In 1976, in order to fulfill the terms of our letter of agreement, I offered Jim an outline for that book, along with a set of photographs and some page layouts.

  Jim published Desert Notes in June 1976. I finished River Notes a year after Desert Notes appeared, and it came out in the fall of 1979. A year later, in September 1980, Jim died, suddenly and unexpectedly. He was forty-four and, as far as I knew, had been in excellent health. (Around the time of the book’s publication Jim had asked me, eerily, to read a particular story in River Notes, “Upriver,” at his funeral. I couldn’t manage it on the day of the funeral, but I did read the story aloud a few months later at his graveside.)

  After Jim had read the outline for Of Wolves and Men and looked at the art and layouts, he told me he didn’t have the expertise to publish the book the way he thought it should be done. He said he considered my contractual obligation to him fulfilled and urged me to take the proposal to a more capable publishing house. With his support and goodwill I submitted the book to several publishers, and in October 1978 Charles Scribner’s Sons brought out Of Wolves and Men.

  In 1980 I finished a third collection of short fiction, Winter Count. By then I was aware that certain of my short stories, isolated from the others, occasionally struck some readers as an experimental form of essay writing. I can understand why a reader might think this because of the extent to which I use factual detail and other “nonfictive” elements such as geographical setting. (My stories are rarely based on events in my own life, nor are they based on people I know. They’re often set, however, in landscapes I’ve resided in or traveled through.)

  In writing fiction, I’ve been sensitive to the peculiar authority that a presentation o
f fact has in our culture, of how detailed, plausible descriptions of remote geographies, for example, can create an aura of authenticity. I want that aura. Also, more than plot, I’m bent on the discovery of a pattern of association between a character and a particular place; and, more than establishing plot elements, I want to delineate some kind of shift in the life of a central character. I can also understand, then, that certain of my stories might be taken as autobiographical, especially because I regularly use first-person narrators. But these narrators are not me.

  Not all the stories I’ve written fit neatly inside the framework I’ve just suggested. Some are character-driven, others do have a minimal plot. What I’m primarily interested in, in short fiction, is what happens to people when something outside the self—a desert landscape, an urban neighborhood, a character the narrator encounters, weather passing through—comes into play. (On occasion I have wondered whether what I have actually been pursuing all these years, put simply, isn’t the nature of some buried set of profound ethical relationships between a person and various components of the physical landscapes in which that person finds himself or herself.)

  On that winter afternoon in Loose Park in 1975, Jim Andrews made it possible for me to follow a path that otherwise would have been much more difficult to navigate. In the 1980s and ’90s, while other books were coming along—Arctic Dreams, Crossing Open Ground, Crow and Weasel—I continued to feel an unfulfilled obligation to Jim, and to myself, to write a third book of stories that would complete the fictional trilogy we had originally agreed to.