All the Land to Hold Us (15 page)

By adjusting slightly the depth and slant of the southeastern shoreline, near his base of operations, and setting up a system of rock floodgates, Omo was able to lay out flat sheets of iron onto which the salt would be precipitated each day, so that every evening before he went to bed he would be able to empty his sheets of iron into barrels.

In this manner, he was able to harvest nearly two thousand pounds a day.

Omo was not a big man when he first came to the lake, but moving such prodigious quantities of iron and salt developed him into a caricature of labor, knotted and swollen with muscles whose contorted proportions seemed all the more odd in that they were little used for anything but the act of pulling in the iron sleds and leaning them against his barrels, and shoveling the salt into the barrels.

He had tiny little bird-calves, but ponderous thighs; no chest, but preposterous biceps and forearms. No triceps to speak of, but a neck like a bull's. His back was as wide as that of two men, so that he looked like some kind of experiment of nature, and a mistaken one at that.

He dug water wells too, finding the brackish water, in those days, at a depth of only twenty feet. He and Marie hardly drank any water at all, but kept buried in their hot sand cellar, which was lined with more sheets of iron, dozens of cases of white wine from Germany. (When they were first married, they had received as a wedding present from Max's uncle, a vintner in Germany, a hundred cases of cheap white wine, along with the promise that their lives would be blessed for as long as they had any of the wine remaining.) This was almost all they ever drank, except for a pot of salt-coffee each morning, and it was mostly the children who were subjected to the tepid taste of the brine water. The children were always thirsty, as a result, but one of the side effects of their diet, so high in minerals, was that they grew quickly, so that by the time they were seven and nine years old, they were already the size of adolescents, and able to do nearly the work of a full-grown man.

The richer the Omos became, gathering the salt, the poorer Marie's heart grew; and rapidly she passed from being a beautiful and vivacious young woman into a weather-beaten, dour hag. When the townspeople saw her coming into the town of Odessa for supplies, or to bring the boys to the Lutheran church, they would avoid her, where once they had sought her out.

The smell of sour wine was on her breath and somehow always on her clothes, even in the mornings, and, as well, the sulfurous odor of the lake itself, and the scent of dried mutton, which along with the eggs from a few parched chickens was all the Omos ever ate.

For the longest time, Marie had sympathized with the creatures that the coyotes herded out onto the salt, where they would become mired—the remaining sheep, usually, but also the deer, and even sometimes an individual from the fast-dwindling herds of antelope—
Had the buffalo ever been caught in such a trap
? she wondered. And as the years passed, and Omo's bounty increased (he could never sell nor even transport as much as he produced, so that there were mountains of salt, inland from the lee basin, up against the dunes), and as with the jettisoned or wagon-broke loads that lay scattered along the
caminos
, wild animals of every sort came all night long to paw and suck at the ever-increasing and miraculous salt mountain of Max Omo.

Deer and rabbits came, as did mice, coyotes, foxes, pack rats, antelope, wild boar, feral horses, bobcats, and once, down from the cool pine mountains and forests of New Mexico and the Big Bend country, a black bear, looking so uncannily like a human that at first neither Marie nor the children could be convinced that it was not merely a man dressed up in a fur coat, a man gone mad, clawing and gnawing at the salt, unable to control his desire.

After several years of living in the oven, however, and seeing her babies sprint past babyhood, launching almost immediately into grotesque musclebound imitations of their father, Marie found, at first to her horror but then to her slow-building pleasure, that she enjoyed seeing the parade of animals that the coyotes were able to haze out into the quicksand of the salt.

She began to view them as a kind of crop, something the land produced for her, even if she could not utilize it; and she would arise early each morning and move eagerly to the window, to see if the coyotes had sent anything new out onto the flats.

And then, still later into her unhappy career as mistress of the lake, it got to where she came to view the trapped and struggling, writhing animals with even greater pleasure, reserving a place in her heart for them as if they were guests who had arrived to keep her company out in the wasteland.

She would lie awake in the night listening for them, straining to hear if the sound of the wind carried with it the joyous cries of the coyotes, bringing her more visitors.

Her husband beside her, reeking of salt; the brute children above her, in the torturously hot loft.

Marie could hear the sand pitting against the iron walls and tin roof of her house. The old-timers who had told them that a house or other structure, if large enough, would anchor the dune, had for the most part been correct; though in the early autumn, when the heat abated slightly and the winds began to quarter, no longer driving relentless from the deserts to the west but easing down from out of the north, slipping through tall grass and then whistling and moaning through the canyons of Palo Duro and other time-cut slots in the earth, even the largest dunes would begin to shift.

And once or twice every few years, the dune above their house would envelop them completely: not with any final, thunderous collapse, but in a steady sifting, a stream-like pouring that was so sibilant, the sound of it barely entered their dreams.

Like badgers, Omo and his boys would burrow upward through the dune, pulling Marie on a rope behind them, sweating and sand-clad; and after about six feet of such digging, they would break back into the free and clear white sunlight, and their happiness at seeing it again might have raised a troubling question: why was a life of such hardship and misery so desired, even cherished?

Marie among them was happiest to see the salt earth again, and waded down off the dune and fell upon the crusty whitened hardpan ground, weeping and kissing it, while Max and the boys went out to the toolshed, which had been only partially covered, and began shoveling their house back out, working neatly and methodically in their labors as might a line of red ants whose path was temporarily blocked by some catastrophe.

They would have the house unearthed by dusk, and after exhuming it, they went out to their salt traps and gathered them in, and shook into their drums the salt, which sparkled in the light of the full moon.

For protection, they threw up a few more sheets of heavy iron, each time planting them vertically into the dune just above the roof of their cabin, to act as a kind of hood or shield; and each time, Marie refused to go back into the cabin that first night, so they would drag their mattresses up onto the hot roof to sleep.

That first such night, the boys fell asleep immediately, and Max Omo soon thereafter, leaving only Marie awake among them. She sat up and looked out at the shining lake, sparkling and glinting with every color of the rainbow, and appearing as a frozen pond in winter, upon which children might skate and play, or upon which young couples, new in love, might after winter's thaw canoe and picnic. She was awake for a long time, listening to the breeze, and hearing, or imagining, the rustlings of the sand flowing against the flimsy tin.

She drifted off to sleep just before daylight, though her dreams were terrible, and it was a relief when the stirrings of Omo and the boys awakened her a short time later. They dragged their mattresses down off the roof, and Marie went out to the iron cookhouse, built some distance away to avoid overheating the cabin, and lit a fire in the woodstove to heat a pot of the cloudy, salty water for coffee.

She cracked eggs into the skillet and laid strips of dried mutton alongside the eggs. She mopped the sweat from her brow. She poured half a glass of wine and felt the day's first trickle of sweat running down the groove of her back, bringing a strange chill and shudder.

She stopped and listened to a clanging sound out by the toolshed; Omo and the boys wanting to get a little work in before breakfast.

Later in the day, they all rode into town to buy a twenty-foot length of stovepipe, to install on their front porch as a crude sort of breathing apparatus, should the dune ever bury their house again. Omo joked, “If we wake up one morning and see sand pouring through it, we'll know to buy thirty feet next time.”

As Marie shopped, she visited with some of the ladies with whom she had an acquaintance. When they asked how she had been, she informed them nonchalantly—no quiver in her voice at all—foolish pride!—that their house had been buried beneath a sand dune for a while, but that they had dug out and were all right now. And as she shopped, going from store to store, she pretended not to be able to hear the whispers behind her: as if the whisperers believed she lived in some other world, in which the normal physics of sound and conversation did not apply to her, or as if she were from a land so foreign that she could not understand the language.

“What do you suppose they do with all that money? They surely don't know how to spend it on clothes.”

“Don't those boys look
feral
?”

“I feel sorry for the husband—married to such a cold fish.”

For his part, Omo gave himself over to the landscape as might a lover made desperate. The movement of his days—the script of his routes and his activities—remained as constant as the meter of a metronome ticking for so long that its movements are no longer heard or noticed. But beneath the dull muscularity of his physical life, he was falling, falling without a rope; in love with the savage deprivation of the landscape.

And whenever he encountered excess in that land of deprivation—be it salt, or the heat, almost igneous in nature, that wrung all but the last of the water from his body and sent it in sheets down his chest and back—he fell even harder in love, without even realizing that was what it was; falling into the clefts between the abundance of one thing and the deprivation of another, falling through an incandescent pluming kaleidoscope of colors that belied completely the physical constraints of his salt-colored life and his methodical movements above.

As he fell, such was his lust for the act of falling itself, that in his gluttony he made no grasp for the heart or embrace of another with whom to share these wondrous flashing-past sights, as if the entire past as well as future of his life seemed to unscroll before him in each day's dreaming: as if no possibilities had ever been compromised or extinguished, but instead still existed, fully formed, below.

Marie stood next to him in the daytime, and lay next to him at night, and gradually came to know as if through some sixth sense his enthusiastic and selfish, silent leave-takings.

And in his dreaminess, he began to cobble together strange inventions, fantastic contraptions designed to summon even more salt from the landscape. And if there had been any spark of love or hope left in Marie's belly for him, some tiny spark that was somehow still alive, despite the inhospitality of the landscape, that spark was snuffed out as she came to realize fully the selfishness of those unshared imaginative travelings, recognizing that such imaginings were not merely escape from the barren landscape, but from herself as well.

There were a few tolerable years before her indifference grew to resentment; and in that graywater period, she would watch him go out to work each day with the boys, and held on to the thought or hope of him returning at the end of the day with a kind word, a pleasant touch, or (and as the years went past, she hated herself for even having imagined such a specific thing) some desert wildflower, or interesting small crystal, or the wing of a butterfly, of which thousands gathered at the lake in early spring and summer, sipping at the puddles along the shoreline and craving the salt—entire sections of shoreline alive, some mornings, with the feathered, arrhythmic stirrings and exhalations of their watering: as if the entire shoreline were breaking apart, and iridescent color was emerging from the salt plain, after millennia of sameness and whiteness.

In such large gatherings of others of their kind, the butterflies were not discomforted by the approach of potential predators, and on many occasions, drawn to the plenitude of color—the pumpkin and russet of fritillaries and monarchs, the corn hues of sulphurs, the periwinkles and azures of spring beauties—Marie had walked down to the lake and crouched hunkered next to the great massed gathering, to watch them feed and water at the lake as if they were the livestock of some finer, better shepherd.

But after the butterflies moved on in their migrations, and the damp shores were littered with the bright husks of those who had died or been left behind (even the most aged of them living for only a few weeks), it was Marie who had to wander the spongy salt-whitened quicksand of the beach, picking up the more interesting specimens that had been left behind, gathering them as she might pick up shells at the oceanside. She brought them back to place in a small bowl at their dining table, not as if some offering of a strange or ritual meal, but merely a tiny presentation of beauty.

Not once did Omo or the boys ever stop to pick up even a single butterfly to bring home to share with her; and she hated herself for wanting them to, and then again—later into her term—she hated them for not doing it.

The landscape lying as heavy upon all of them as a giant mound of stones or sand; and they made no effort to climb out by pushing up higher through all the rubble. Instead, their feeble attempts at escape came in the form of burrowing and diving deeper, as was the habit of most of the other desert creatures who were not free to migrate, but who had instead been selected to remain in one place for the rest of their lives, and beyond: until they and their kind went extinct.