Where the Sea Used to Be (28 page)

“Helen must be asleep,” Mel said. “I'll fix her some coffee. Then we'll eat.”

Mel put the food back on the stove to heat again. The grouse sweated beads of fat-juice. Wallis was so hungry that if no one else had been in the room, he would have started gnawing on the bird.

Mel took a cup of coffee in to Helen.

They heard Mel knock on the door; heard her open it and ease inside. There was a long silence, and then they heard Helen hack and cough, a sound like a generator being started up—and then there were the quiet, unintelligible murmurs of the two women—an exclamation of surprise and a thank you—more hacking, as Helen came slowly back into the world—and Wallis wondered then, and marveled at, the fine line between living and dying—and at what point the process began.

Mel went to the kitchen and got the food to put on the table, and the others followed her. Wallis was a little surprised by the pleasure she took in the ceremony and ritual of tradition. She lit more candles, arranged the plates, straightened a placemat. The bone-handled knives glinted in the candlelight.

“She was sound asleep,” Mel said, in quiet wonder. “She was dozing with just her head above water, and there was a skim of ice, the littlest bit of it, forming around the edges of the tub.”

“She must really have needed to sleep,” Matthew said.

“Careful what you ask for,” Mel said.

Helen came into the room, dressed and wrapped in the elk hide, her face the blue-white color of someone who'd drowned. She stood by the fire for only a few seconds before Mel shepherded her and the others to the table. They took their seats, and Wallis thought for a moment that Mel was going to say a prayer. She bowed her head but didn't speak, and then Matthew reached across the table for a grouse.

Crumbs from the fresh-baked rolls fell to the floor; knives and forks clashed like swords. They drank wine, finished bottle after bottle until it was gone, and then Old Dudley stood up and said that they had to leave.

A look like anger crossed Mel's face but she said nothing. Helen said, “Please, no,” but Dudley gave no sign of having heard her.

They dressed warmly and Matthew hugged Helen good-bye. Helen was too tired and cold to follow them into town. She stayed in the cabin while the four of them skied off to find people to help them dig out the limousine.

They gathered several recruits from the bar—Amy among them—and went knocking door to door as well, passing from cabin to cabin, reasoning that those who had not been in the bar drinking all day might be more stout of back. It was a little after ten o'clock when the procession, with lanterns and torches, arrived at the spot where the limousine had sunk through the snow. The moon seemed to be pouring down a coldness upon the land and the skin of the snow had stretched taut enough again so that it was possible, though not probable, that they might be able to drive out again. Their old tracks had already vanished. Wallis didn't think they could do it.

They'd brought shovels and saws and chains and horses and come-alongs, and they built fires to warm their hands. Matthew began digging at the snow; soon he carved out a tunnel that went beneath the car. He disappeared beneath the ice and others handed flat rocks down to him to place beneath the wheels, rocks gotten from the disassembling of his wall. Other workers were busy cutting poles and laying them beneath the wheels.

Dudley stood wrapped in a fur robe, watching it all. They kept laying flat rocks, disassembling a section of Matthew's wall, trying to build a small road up from out of the snow pit and back up onto the frozen ice. The light from the lanterns, and from the warming fires, cast a pulsing light on Dudley, so that he seemed to somehow be a part of the flames, as the light of those fires washed across him.

Old Dudley noticed Amy on the other side of the road and crossed over to see her. She began moving away from him, and he followed. She began walking in large circles around the car, not wishing to talk to him, but still he followed, until soon she was trotting, and he was running after her. Colter had not come with her—he was back at their cabin, skinning the pelts of the martens he'd caught that day. After a while Amy slowed to a walk, tired from running, and Dudley slowed to a walk also, still following her around and around; but finally she stopped, and Dudley stopped next to her.

Amy was breathing hard, like a deer chased by hounds. Bright silver plumes of crystalline breath rose from her nostrils. He said something to her that no one could hear and she turned from him and started walking away again, almost trotting once more; and once again, he followed.

Matthew managed to get deeper beneath the car, and he finally got the jack from the car's trunk beneath one of the wheels. He began winding it up, but the car wouldn't rise high enough to crack out of its ice shell. Mel borrowed one of the chain saws and began cutting slabs of ice away from the sides. Sparks flew from the guide bar as the chain brushed metal from time to time, friction that flowered into orange light and scattered across the snow like stars spilled. The woods were dense with the smell of smoke from the chain saws, busy with the noise of the workers.

Men began hitching their horses to the bumper as Mel cleared enough space in the snow for them to do so—in his eagerness, one man stepped in too close as Mel was turning away, so that the still-revving blade of her saw caught his pants leg up around the thigh and tore a quick rip in it, exposing bare skin—“Careful!” Mel cried—and the lookers-on standing by the fires passed around a bottle and offered advice to the diggers.

The horses were hooked to their chains and ropes and turned to look back at the load they would be pulling. Only the roof of the limousine was visible. It seemed to Wallis that the horses were eyeing the burden with dispassionate confidence.

Mel was on top of the entombed car, cutting the ice and snow cakes from it with her saw. Chips of ice sprayed her and the others in a firelit shower, caked against their faces and brows. From time to time Mel would straighten up to rest her back, with the saw still idling, and would brush her hair back from her face. When she bent back down to address the ice, the tip of the blade occasionally caught the submerged roof of the car and threw brilliant glowing embers of burning metal into the sky.

Matthew emerged from beneath the ground like a snow ghost and announced that he thought it was as ready as it would ever be. Old Dudley left Amy then—“Until the spring, adieu!” he cried—and came over and stood at the edge of the crevice and looked down upon the car. Backlit by the fire and shrouded in the heavy robe like a trench coat, he looked as if he were presiding over a burial, not a birth, and yet a burial for which there was good cheer.

Old Dudley and Matthew shook hands with Wallis. “You should come with us,” Dudley said. “I've changed my mind about your staying.”

Wallis studied him for a moment, then surprised himself by saying no—and Dudley, also surprised, squinted to look into Wallis's eyes to read him—but in the dim light, he could not be sure what he saw. “You should come with us,” Dudley said again, but again Wallis said no, and Dudley smiled then and pretended that he wasn't bothered by it. He reached out and shook Wallis's hand again.

Mel shut the chain saw off, and she set it down and hugged Matthew a long time, but did not kiss him good-bye—only leaned into him—and then she held Dudley for a moment as well, circled her arms around him as if trying to cast a child's spell over him, some futile spell, to make him stop being the way he was.

She turned to Matthew again, who was still shrouded in snow. She took her gloves off and with her thumbs wiped the crust away from his eyebrows, then his cheeks and mouth, as if sculpting him back into who he was, or had been. Now finally she kissed him, leaned forward and took his face in both hands and kissed him as if releasing him forever. Matthew glanced back at Wallis one more time, and then he and Old Dudley climbed down into the snow crevice and in through the open windows, rolled the windows up, and started the car.

The limousine was still down in a hole, but the way out was now clear. Everyone gathered around and began to push, and Matthew, driving, revved the engine—the tires spun uselessly on their ice peels—but the horses, pulling from the other end, in combination with the shoves of the people, finally got the car moving. It groaned up from out of the pit and cracked free of its ice grip with a sound like a plate of glass breaking. The horses dragged it, skidding and bumping, sliding sideways, up onto the makeshift rock road that had been built, where the wheels found purchase; but still the horses kept pulling, breaking into a gallop now, in the spirit of the challenge, and the people kept pushing too, running down the road as if hurling the car from them.

They muscled the car all the way out to the main road in this manner—from time to time Matthew would gun the accelerator, but for the most part it was the pushing of the people and the pulling of the animals that kept the car going—he and Old Dudley were pitching around inside like tourists in a barrel going over some falls—and finally when the laborers had reached the main road, panting and sweating, covered with snow, they unhitched the horses. Matthew and Old Dudley drove away, drove north across the frozen snow, once more only guessing where the road lay beneath them—driving fast, slipping and sliding, knowing that they had to be out of the valley before the sun rose and softened the snow.

The crowd watched the taillights recede into the heart of winter.

Everyone trudged back in silence to where the fire had burned to low coals and was hissing in the puddling water, and where the abandoned lanterns cast melting scallop-shapes in the snow around them. The maw where the car had been looked like the gap left when a tooth is pulled. They all felt as if Dudley had somehow gotten away with something of theirs, but could not pin the feeling down with any specificity.

People gathered their lanterns and dogs, then soothed and haltered their sweating horses. They headed home quietly—sleepy and calm: holding the memory already of their night's work. They walked home together, still a community—and the woods absorbed it all, and slid back in over the people's night passage. Wallis, for one, could already feel things healing—the events of the night—almost as soon as he was aware that there had been injury, or disturbance.

Mel picked up the chain saw. She studied the wall where they had dissembled it to patch the road. In a single night, it had been worn down to ground level—twenty years of history laid flat.

She and Wallis snapped on their skis and headed home.

Now Mel would be going back to the wolves. Where else was there? She skied hard, even going uphill, kicking the tails of her skis out in her speed.

Exhausted when they arrived at the cabin, yet filthy again, Wallis hauled more water for baths. It had begun to snow lightly, and Wallis wondered what it must be like for Dudley and Matthew to be driving together through the roadless landscape, across so much snow, and with more of it coming down.

Mel bathed first. Wallis sat by the icy creek down by the smokehouse and let the snow cover him for a while. He looked back up at the cabin, and against the steamed yellow glow of the bathroom window's lantern light, he could see the silhouette of Mel drying off. The snow landed on his face and in the creek, disappearing when it landed in the water. He could feel the smokehouse's groaning cold behind him—the grouse and trout laid out in a line like soldiers, a regiment waiting to be consumed. He watched Mel dry her hair—elbows everywhere, shapeless form in the window light, floating in the woods on the side of the mountain. He saw her leave the bathroom then, and he waited for her to dress, then went up the hill with another bucket of water in each hand. Blue smoke streamed from the twin chimneys, rising to join the falling snow, and trees in the forest began to explode again, filling the night with the scent of fresh sap. Despite the beauty, he felt that he had been above ground far too long, and that it was time to dive again.

Before daylight, the icicles hanging from their roof lengthened as the escaping heat from the cabin melted them into drips, which froze again in the night. The icicles had been a foot long in November, then stretched to two feet; now they completed their descent, dripping all the way to the ground before freezing again, so that Wallis and Mel were imprisoned as if within an ice tomb.

The full moon appeared over Waper Ridge and struck their ice cage, the icicles as thick as a man's wrist, so that the ice was filled and then illuminated with that moon, as if they were in a glowing womb. Wallis and Mel, each in their separate rooms, awakened, feeling something different about the cabin, and they looked out at that blue light but felt no sense of alarm, only wonder, and in the morning, at dawn, after the moon had passed on, but with the stars still burning, they went out onto the porch and with ax and maul smashed their way through those ice bars and back into the cold winter air.

 

T
HEY FELL IN LOVE THE WAY ROUGHLY HALF THE WORLD
does: not all at once, as if through a trap door, but gradually, through the incremental doings-of-things both together and alone—fitting and reshaping, settling into a newer place; and in their caution and deliberation, it could not be argued that they did not know what they were doing. There was not the excuse of innocence. Even though they understood what was happening, they would have been—and were—the last ones to call it love. They understood that it was the direction they were heading, but they told themselves they were not even ankle-deep in it; and then only ankle-deep, and then only calf-deep. As if it were a way of being that they could step back out of at any time.

Mel continued to do what she had set out to do twenty years ago with enthusiasm: to gather and accumulate the data—the paths and trails of the wolves—and to weave that data together; or rather, to uncover the pattern that was already weaving itself. Some days it was a wonderful feeling, though other days she longed for the time when there had been more mystery—when she had been unencumbered by the knowledge of where the wolves were likely to be—what they would be hunting, and even—from a sense she could now pick up from the woods themselves—what the pack's mood might be, on a certain day.