All the Land to Hold Us (47 page)

Warm grit and sediment stirred beneath his probing, and once, it seemed to him that the mass upon which he rested stirred, as if coming back to life, or as if it had never left the living, but had been only resting and waiting—waiting, perhaps, the release that could be granted or vested only by the arrival of one such as himself.

He turned and looked up at the wall of bones and skulls that towered above him: and whether he had been outcast, or had stumbled in through the palace gates, he could not be sure; though again, he was surprised to not feel sadness, and to feel instead a kind of happiness spreading through him—or if not happiness, then peace, and—again—a dulling, a waning, to his hunger.

The river's hunger was enough. In its presence, his own hunger was puny, so insignificant as to be nonexistent; and in that vanishing, he knew an even larger and more secure peace—one which he did not think could be taken from him now, not even by Marie's departure.

It pleased him to think of her bright flags and ribbons, and of the traveling troupe of weavers, the crews of color she would be joining. So much vibrancy that even years after it had passed on, it would leave the echo of that color like a wash upon the sand, and in the minds of those who had seen it, and who had seen it made.

He looked now at the tapestry of bones all around him, and at those on the other side of the river. He read those closest to him with more leisure now, with his fingers and with his eyes. Some he recognized, while others were not known to him—the bones of creatures come and gone long before the likes of Herbert Mix had ever crawled up out of the sea. He could only examine them and marvel at his place now among them.

In the tidy stratification of time and gravity, the cataloging of bones appeared to be resting in abacus-like arrangement of column and row. There appeared to be order and assemblage, even in the falling-apart and storing-away—it seemed surely that there was even reassembly going on—and down at eye level with the beast of the river, it seemed wider to him than it had from above.

And still, God help him, he wanted to live; and still, God help him, the bones on the farther shore looked more interesting and desirable than those over which he had just passed, and among which he was now stranded.

Is it this way
, he wondered,
can this be true
? He wanted, in his enlightenment, to believe otherwise, and to accept the bounty before him. But he could not be sure.

Once more, he groped the substrate, the submerged promontory on which he knelt, but could divine no history. Each clue that was revealed to him seemed to lead in a different direction; and again, it seemed to him that the object upon which he rested was beginning to move.

He felt a wave of vertigo, and imagined that he was about to sink farther; that his sanctuary was brief, and that it, too, now, was about to fail him. That perhaps it had even lured him to this point, in order to be able then to deliver him to the river.

And to that farther shore!

He had not swum in many years, and never since losing his leg; but he pushed off from his resting spot and entered the current, not riding on his back with his foot pointed downstream as he should have, but instead breaststroking, trying to traverse the current.

He swam like a fish or a snake, breaststroking, but with his leg undulating rather than kicking; and as he found his rhythm, he became more comfortable in the current, more attuned to its runs and eddies, and he began to glide through it as would a fish or a snake: though still he could not breach the current's turbulent center line, to gain the other shore.

He traveled for a long time, ascending and descending, swimming and writhing sometimes completely beneath the surface, before rising again, blowing a spume of air and spray of mist; and he rolled over on his back and floated, back-paddling, and watched the cliffside bluffs scroll past with their litany of exposed skulls, and he wished again that he was a young man, so that he could explore all that he was seeing—a man so young and strong that whatever his eye beheld was his dominion—but those days were so far gone as to barely even be worth remembering, and he drifted on, growing tired, the waterlogged weight of his clothes wanting to pull him down now. And riding lower in the water, and feeling the fatigue settling into his limbs, he began to look for a place, a nice sandy beach, where he could make his landfall.

He had no idea where he was, on the river; he had swum and then drifted into territory where he had never been before.

Little fish began to bump against him, skittering into him from various directions, as if in confused flight from the shadow of his passage. Something large dashed against him, like a bullet, and then a larger something, hard-shelled, like a turtle, drifted up against him from below, then pushed away: and he was certain that in its pushing away, he had felt claws.

He began to imagine, and then sense, that his one remaining leg was vulnerable—that to certain things, he looked helpless, and
was
helpless.

He imagined snakes, fish, frogs, desiring his flesh, and as he continued to be buffeted by the whirlwind of smaller fish, he began to feel certain that some single larger creature—a great fish—was chasing them, and following him.

He knew it was panic. He knew such fish no longer existed. He had found pieces of their platey skulls in his excavations, their reptilian armor and their dagger teeth, but they no longer existed, they were all gone.

And yet in his weakness and his fear, they returned—or one of them did—and he could feel it following him, nosing him from behind, bumping and prodding him as if into position for just the right bite. He could feel the swirls of water behind him as it opened its fierce mouth for a bite or perhaps to swallow him whole, and he rolled over onto his side, flapped his arms behind him and attempted to veer wildly, trying to throw the fish off course; trying to buy himself one more moment of life, and one more, and one more.

It was exhausting work, causing him to ride lower in the river, and summoned more energy than he had left. He knew he should abandon the centerline, where the current was quickest, and give up on his efforts to reach the other shore.

He was still witnessing the flashing-by cobble of the past, and if anything, his side of the river appeared as alluring now as had that farther shore—and as the current quickened still further, he began to smell a different odor upon the river, the frothy muddiness of increasingly agitated water, complemented by the underground clacking of large rocks: and rather than considering the possibility of what might lie ahead of him in the form of even more turbulent water, and rapids, Herbert Mix continued to concern himself with the danger behind him.

Logs and branches, seized by the unruly current, rose from the bottom and scratched against him as the spiny monster prepared him for its feast, positioning him just so with the shapings and urgings of its caudal and dorsal fins.

He could feel the fish's entire presence now, dense as gravity—and once or twice, out of the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of one of the fins breaking the water.

He could smell the vile creature itself, even from beneath the water, and he began to tremble, and did something he had never done before, and gave up; he stopped paddling, and began to call out for help. He knew that he was an old man, too old, and that as the river prepared him for its feast, it had every right to do so—that it was finally his turn to join the wall of skulls—but still he fiercely wanted it to be otherwise.

He was struck by a rare and sudden vision of the future, his mind casting forward in a way that it had rarely done before, and he imagined himself a day beyond the moment: a single day into the void.

No one will even know what became of me
, he lamented,
I will be encased within the jewels and armor of the fish, my bones will be encircled by his bones, and taken into his bones, and someday someone will catch that fish and open it up, but there will be no trace of me, they will never even know I existed
.

Or the fish will go uncaught, will die instead a distant death, and take its place in the wall of bones. Perhaps some further traveler will dig it up, will rap on its calcified bones with hammer and pickax, and will think it is merely a fish, and not the echo of a man, not the echo of myself. Perhaps
...

He shot through the river-slot of center current, between the two boulders guarding the entrance to the rapids like a gate, and was bounced into the air, upended, like a salmon ascending a waterfall, or a beach ball flipped skyward by the nose of a trained seal.

He did not wave his arms and legs wildly, seeking balance as if running in place, but instead remained perfectly still, scarcely daring to believe his luck, and unsure as to whether he had been saved, summoned by some benevolent force, or had indeed been shoved violently into the air by the snout of the leviathan that pursued him.

It seemed to him in the half second in which he was above the waves that he could see farther than he had ever seen: that he could see the entire length of the river, beyond the rapids and beyond even the deltaic sand beaches that lay hundreds of miles downstream. It seemed to him he could see the calm flat gray water of the sea; but when he fell back into the waves, the fish was upon him in a roar, attacking him as if with a dozen baseball bats, bruising and clubbing and stoning him, and as he reeled along through the turmoil, he thought strangely of the rise-and-fall action of the looms, and of the clack and clatter of those wooden bars, the movements so like those of a great bird preparing to take flight.

His old heart was in tatters, shot through with adrenaline and riddled by strain. He could go no farther, yet fish and river continued to carry him along, and he imagined, at the end, that he was a sheet of silk, still being lifted and stretched by the pulleys and crossbars of the looms—that his billowing colors, brilliant in the desert sun, filled the entire tent, casting ripples of color over all who fell beneath the shadows of his furl.

He perceived crimson, he perceived flashes of gold, and he paused and stiffened and stared upward with wonder and fascination at the brilliance above, and hoped that Marie would somehow be able to see these colors, to know that about him; and he continued to gaze upward, waiting for them to descend and fill him, as he had always waited and wanted to be filled.

 

It took them a long time to find him, that next day; he had traveled a long way, beyond the reach of roads: past high cliffs and bluffs and pinnacles, as if passing beneath the walls of civilizations in which the searchers were not welcome—civilizations from which they themselves might have been exiled, as had perhaps Herbert Mix himself, but to which he had returned.

They found his jeep and, fearing and then expecting the worst, found the telltale scrabble marks of where he had clawed his way down the steep bank and into the river. Both Richard and Ruth had driven out searching, as had two other men from town, and Marie had insisted on joining them also.

They spent much of the morning searching up and down the river in that general area, trying to find a sign of where he might have worked his way back to shore and managed to climb out, or perhaps might still be holding on, gripping valiantly to a rock ledge or root-wad, exhausted and current-shuddered, but still with them.

They cast out into the desert too, searching the pristine dunes, which were smoothed over from the day-before's winds, for the stippled or slithering evidence of his escape. They were dressed in brightly colored shirts, so that they could each see where the other was, even across the distance.

Marie wanted to cry, and felt a pulling apart in her old chest—an ache at both the loneliness and familiarity of it—but she felt a fear, also, at what she perceived as the inescapability of it; and in that fear, and that closing-in feeling of constriction, she knew anger, too, and resolved not to let her heart, fragile and ancient though it was, be pulled any further apart. She tensed, tried to protect and harden her old heart, and continued the search.

It was Richard who found him, so many miles down the river, the body as brilliant as the white belly of a beached whale, visible from a distance on the ivory-colored sand beach onto which he had managed to crawl, half-washed there by the rapids and half-arrived there under his own final labors.

And across the expanse of sand behind him, Richard signaled to the others to come join him, that he had found him; and from all directions and distances, they converged, and climbed carefully down a rubbly slot canyon to the white sand beach below, where the old man, so clearly identifiable even from a distance as Herbert Mix, lay stretched out on his back, staring skyward.

Had his eyes still been sighted, he would have seen them appear over the bluff, would surely have welcomed the appearance of their bright shirts moving toward him, their wavering figures conjoining then separating again.

Through the heat and the miracle of mirage, they might have appeared, in that shimmering curtain of sunlight, like some apparition from the past: a runaway stagecoach, or a band of Kiowa pursuing a caravan of Mexican salt traders.

Instead, he saw nothing, his hungry eyes finally as sightless as a skull's, and his breath finally stilled. The wind stirred his silvery hair. The images converged into the present, including among them a woman and a man who had loved him; and in the present, they hurried toward him, carrying their grief now as if burdened by heavy bags of gold.

 

The funeral was held on a Sunday, a raw and windy day in Mormon Springs in which the new scarves flapped and swirled in all directions. There was a community potluck that evening, held at the school—Marie was in the midst of packing, preparing to depart with the weavers, or it would have been held at her house—and the next day, the townspeople helped the silk weavers fold their tents and carefully disassembled the looms, storing each in its proper place in their trunks and crates and steamer chests.