All the Land to Hold Us (41 page)

And as the map progressed still further, he expanded his mapping sessions with the children into field trips, twice a week. It was one more trip per week than Ruth really should have budgeted for, but she loved the field trips, and the collecting and chronicling of their findings; and her pet, Annie, loved the excursions most of all, was more engaged than Ruth had ever seen her. Annie stayed with Richard, shadowing his every move, up on the mesa, and often spied the tiny traces of ancient life even before he did.

She was precise and diligent, practiced and cautious, in extracting them from their rock matrix and cleansing them, first by putting them in her mouth, and then in the bowl of dilute hydrochloric acid, brushing the sediment away with a wetted whisk; and sometimes, watching her reach for a certain fossil, up on the mesa—the shape of her hand, and the gesture of reach—the sudden current of longing, of grasping—Richard would feel disoriented, as if he had tumbled back in time not merely to the part where he and Clarissa had once been up on the bluff, but to some further time: one he had never inhabited, but which he somehow knew, and which had always been waiting for him.

Always, even in her focus, Annie kept the larger goal in mind; was always mindful of cant and slope of strata, and the thinning and thickening of beds, and what implications they held for trapping water.

She was a natural at it, so much so that Richard got the feeling she might soon be better at it than he.

The search for water often took place in the opposite conditions from those favoring the accumulation of oil and gas—searching for synclines rather than anticlines—so that for Richard the search was often one of confusing reversal, like trying to back a trailer down the road while looking in the mirror, whereas for Annie, it was all new and natural, she had no habits to overcome, no routines to step out of.

They picnicked on the mesa in the early afternoons before returning to the school. They sat on the edge of the bluff in the high dry wind, staring out at the vastness of the desert below, and at the far-flung scattered grid of pumpjacks rising and falling as if feasting eagerly on some nectar below. They used field glasses to point out familiar landmarks—the town of Odessa looking like a postage stamp—and then, farther on, the mote of Mormon Springs.

They saw the dust rising chalk-white from the slow progression of the football team, trained the binoculars on them and saw through the wavering haze of heat the tiny ant-figures pulling the wagon out past the main street and into the desert, and watched in silence, and with a feeling almost like pity or puzzlement, as they ate the sandwiches Ruth had prepared for them, and the cobbler, and poured cups of lemonade from the thermos, and felt the sun warm on their arms and on the backs of their necks.

As if the football players far below were lost, or had tumbled into the most gigantic of pits, and were circling, searching for a way out: earnest, dedicated, but clueless, and owned, ultimately, by the affections of the town's expectations and ironclad traditions.

The outcasts of Mormon Springs sat there and watched the prairie below, ate their pie and watched the red-tailed hawks and golden eagles sweep past below them on gusts and sheets of wind.

“How will we drill the wells for the water?” Ruth asked, “and how will we afford the leases?” Sitting next to Richard, still a professional, but barefoot, swinging her browned legs in the sun as if sitting on a dock. Annie next to her, chewing thoughtfully, watching the horizon, but dreaming, Ruth suspected, her vertical dreams.

Richard shrugged. “The leases shouldn't be a problem,” he said. “We'll go places where they've already drilled dry holes and have abandoned them. I can get those leases for a penny on the dollar.” Swinging his own bare legs in the sun. So much air below.

“What about the drilling?” Ruth asked. “Even a shallow well costs more than we'll ever have. I can maybe find some science grants, but it's a long shot, and I really don't have the time for it.”

“We'll figure something out,” Richard said. “I might be able to get one drilled.”

There was no need to tell her that he could drill a hundred of them, or a thousand, if he wanted. They continued watching the desert, swinging their legs. He wondered how Red Watkins was, and the others. Wondered if they had already gone on ahead to China.

Annie got up and came around and sat down on the other side of him, took a fossil out from the pouch she wore around her neck and asked him what it was, how old it was, and what it meant. Leaning into him as if he were trusted. It was not normally her way, and Ruth was surprised by the twinge of jealousy she felt, and wondered at its source: if she wanted Annie to give her her allegiance, rather than sharing it with a near-stranger—or if she, Ruth, wanted to lean in closer and ask Richard questions about such ancient things.

This won't do
, Ruth thought, shifting uncomfortably.
What's going on here, what's the problem? Do I want him to stay, or do I want him to leave
?

 

They descended a timeworn trail, a slot in the cliff, pressed smooth from the passing of countless deer and bighorn sheep, as well as the boot heels of bandits and pilgrims and wanderers. The children spilled out into the desert and began lowering themselves into the lesser of the various caverns and sump holes. Like explorers upon the face of glaciers, they dug footholds and handholds in the slumped strata, rivulets of dirt and sand pouring down the walls like seeps of water to the collapsed floor of rubble below.

They lowered themselves over the edges of the larger caverns with ropes they had brought and explored the despoliation below, finding the bones and claws and antlers of creatures that had stumbled into the caverns at night and perished. Occasionally one of these would have expired only recently, so that its carcass was still being attended to in the day by ravens, vultures, and eagles: and as the children approached any of these caverns, there might rise a feathered, flapping stagger of black-and-bronze birds like a cyclone, climbing straight into the blue sky like blackened sheets of cardboard and newspaper being lifted by the heated exhalation of the earth; and the children would hurry toward these sources, eager to see what calamity the birds might have been inspecting.

Sometimes there was no calamity, only mystery: as if the assemblage of birds had been gathered there only to cool their sun-heated black feathered bodies. Other times it was water the birds sought—puddles and seeps an inch or two deep.

Small trees and bushes grew in such sump holes, as if in little vases, so that climbing down into them was for the children like lowering themselves into a terrarium; and they would lie down in the cool grass that had leapt up there, or sit beneath the shade of those young but fast-growing trees, while the adults stood above them, peering down.

It was important to Ruth, she said, that they learn to own the world; that they come to view their outsiderness as a strength and an asset rather than a liability. They might or might not change the world, and the world might or might not change them: but it was important to her for them to know that they could make their way in it, anywhere they went.

She and Richard sat at the edge of the caverns on these field trips, as they had sat earlier on the bluff above, and watched and visited, talking about things that mattered to them. Up until this point, Richard had been more interested in the landscape than in people or their ways. He was astounded, listening to Ruth talk about children, having never met anyone who gave them—or perhaps anything—such attention.

“Does it fill you, or does it hollow you out?” he asked one day.

“It hollows me out,” she answered, without hesitation. Often her discussions with him continued to be tinged with defensiveness. But she turned to him now to be sure he understood; and even if he had not heard her words, the radiance on her face would have made her answer clear. “It hollows me out,” she said again, smiling.

The shouts and cries of the children rose from the various caverns around them like the pipings of organ chamber music, or the sound of flutes and bagpipes, swirled by gusts of wind. They climbed up and out of one series of sumps and hurried down into another, playing hide-and-seek and tag. The boys in particular, it seemed, eager to demarcate and claim territory, scratching and etching with sticks and rocks various graffiti and hieroglyphics on the walls of their pits.

They were like the Paleoliths who had come in at the end of the last ice age. The ticking of their hearts little different, surely, from only ten thousand years ago, and he felt a surge of discomfort, watching them scramble across the desert floor, disappearing into the holes and then emerging again.

He felt a wave almost like panic; he understood even more clearly that Clarissa would not be coming back—he believed, intuitively, that she
should
; he believed that all things, all natural processes, replicate in circular rather than linear fashion—and yet, if ten thousand years could hurtle by so fast, like the space between two heartbeats, then what was his obligation to that river of time, and to himself?

What were the chances, were someone to ask him,
Doesn't it hollow you out
?, for him to turn to the questioner and answer,
Yes, absolutely
, with such radiance, such fullness?

 

All of the children were pleasant, comfortable in the world, curious and loving, but it was Annie whom he found himself thinking about at different hours of the day, as if smitten or owned by her. At some point not quite known to any of them, the project, though still available and present to all the children, had become largely his and hers. He had noticed, as they worked on their map, that there was a tingling that began in his lower jaw and then spread into his teeth when she leaned in against him, working on the map, not just totally accepting of him, but more, incorporating him into her world. It was a sweetness that passed through his teeth, causing him to nearly shiver; and other times, there was a fullness like a burning in his chest, which spread to his shoulders and down the length of his arms, whenever he considered her work: and not just her potential, but who she was already.

It was hard for Ruth, watching them. Marie was pleased with this apprenticeship, made happy by the good fortune of it, and by the fact that Annie was learning a trade—that she would at least know how to make her way in the world, and Marie's work, Marie's obligation, would be done—but about this sharing, this growth and cleaving, Ruth was less sanguine, and again could not quite figure the source, nor the direction, of the currents of envy.

Annie thought the same way Richard did, seemed to understand intuitively, immediately, the logic of his work and explanations, and yet in other ways Annie was his opposite. Often, in the drafting and redrafting of their contours, sketching their maps level by level and horizon by horizon, descending through time, they would pass by little overlooked and undiscovered pockets of oil and gas, the very treasures that had once made Richard's heart leap.

Annie had no interest in such treasures, and was drawn instead to the water, only water: and when they discovered it, they celebrated, and they posted their maps on the walls and blackboards of the little schoolhouse, like field generals posting campaign maps in some far-flung war room. And though each of the children understood what the focus was, to find clean water, they understood also to keep the mission, the goal, secret; and they did.

It was their water, Richard told them, it belonged to them and was just waiting for them to find it and then to go out and get it. But if someone else found out about it first, he said, it might be taken from them. They had to keep it secret, had to work beneath the surface.

 

He bought a truck from Herbert Mix, a sandblasted wind-whipped pewter-colored old Ford with rounded fenders and goggle headlights. The back bumper was held on with baling wire. The truck gave off a distinctive squeak and rattle, one that the children could hear from a distance, their ears more attuned, like those of dogs, to the higher pitches of the world, and they would be aware of his approach several minutes before Ruth was. They were each beginning to regard him as critical and important, if not powerful and magical, and understood, far better than the adults of Odessa, the nonnegotiable nature of their need, and of the difference that existed between the taste of fouled water, and the taste of sweet.

And noting the ever-increasing attendance by him to their classes, they perceived that he had a crush on Ruth, and teased her about it, at first in his absence, but then teasing them both about it.

And as if to prove otherwise, or to at least discourage the continuance of such rumor, Ruth allowed herself to entertain the brief attentions of a young Mormon businessman from Waco, Joe, a seller of mobile homes who had served two years as a missionary in Asia, and who had clear goals about where his life was headed, and how his success would be measured. He came over to Ruth's house on a Saturday, and they cooked hamburgers on her grill in the October light, with the desert's temperature still not too distinct from that of the grill.

They sat out in her sandy backyard, Ruth barefoot and the businessman awkward in his black lace-ups, but unwilling to disrobe. He cut straight and dispassionately through the surface of the matter, the fact that both of them had a shared heritage and beliefs, their Latter-day Sainthood, and moved earnestly, doggedly, to the heart of things, which was his desire to build an empire based on the sale of preexisting modular homes.

Joe leaned forward in his lawn chair, setting his paper plate of food aside, and became more animated as he spoke, generating what almost anyone might have accepted as true passion—Ruth imagined that, indeed, it was possible that he had sold quite a few homes already—but whenever she found herself listening to the substance of his words, rather than the delivery, she could barely keep from laughing, and finally it was too much; at the tail end of a phrase expressing his longing to go back and capitalize on the overseas contacts he made during his missionary work in the hopes of “developing a joint-venture-based strategic alliance,” and of “becoming dominant in that relationship,” a snort escaped from her, and she bent forward on her seat, trying to imagine what in the world she might be able to do or say that might ever break his fixed gaze upon his ludicrous empire: and knowing that she could care less whether there was, or wasn't. An evening, nearly half a day, ruined, except for the relief of laughter.