Read Online Where the Sea Used to Be by Rick Bass - Free Book Online

from the day before—was searing some of the meat in a skillet on the big wood stove, salting and peppering it as he cooked, and passing out samples to everyone; and the story, the moment, was alive and well on its own, beyond Wallis’s control.
    Wallis began looking at some of the old photos on the wall. There were so many of them, and yet he understood that this was almost all there was: that this valley was still so new to the world, so recently wrested free of glaciers, and inhabited marginally by humans, that this was it—there was almost nothing else beyond what was on the walls. The Indians had hunted the high valley in the autumns, but had never settled there. It had been even colder then, so close to the time of glaciers, and before the earth had begun its slow warming, like a face turning slowly toward the sun.
    Charlie threw more wood in the stove—big logs, each seeming as long as a small canoe. His face shone with sweat, and he grinned, as if he loved only those two things in the world—cooking and sweating: as if he could not get close enough to the fire. He was wearing only a T-shirt and jeans; he did not own a coat.
    There were so many photos of Matthew, and of Matthew and Mel together—so young, already so long ago. Wallis found it hard to believe this was the same man he had shared an office with: a volatile man whose sole focus was diving and striking at the oil, and who did so with eerie, overwhelming success.
    In some of the photos, he was just a boy with a rifle—a brace of grouse set before him, a dog, a picture of the boy in snow, on snowshoes—and a young clear-eyed man standing next to an elk, and in another photo, a monstrous deer.
    Photos of Matthew lounging in a hammock with Mel—eighteen, nineteen years old? (Wallis had never seen Matthew sleep before, except when he occasionally fell asleep at the drafting table late at night, and lay there with his head down for a while, as if listening to the map he had just drawn)—and photos of Mel and Matthew ice-fishing, and photos of them canoeing in summer. Mel in a straw hat. All black and white photos; all ancient, it seemed. Wallis stared, tried to remember being young with Susan. He had saved nothing from that life. He couldn’t believe Mel’s and Matthew’s youth. Twenty years had never seemed so long to him.
    There were older photos, too: from fifty, sixty, seventy years ago. He peered closer. The men and women from back then definitely looked different, as did the country, in some slight way.
    Danny came over to where Wallis was studying the photos—studying them as if for a test—and he, in his exuberance, was wrapped in the deer hide. He clapped a hand on Wallis’s shoulder, squeezed the muscles between his neck and shoulder, and called back to Mel, “With all that sweat and blood on him, except for being a little on the puny side, he even kind of looks like Matthew.”
    â€œI shape them that way,” Mel said, laughing. She had finished her drink.
    â€œOld Dudley shapes them that way,” Danny said.
    Wallis went back to sit with Mel, and to have a drink. It seemed important to have only one, or possibly two. He imagined how easy it would be, in the midst of all the snow—but secure and warm in the bar—to start drinking and not stop until the days grew bright and long again.
    He had been away from his work for a week: the longest ever. One more drink. Mel looked at him and smiled, remembering the simplicity of the day: hauling meat.
    The door opened and with it came a blast of cold air, made colder to those inside by their having become accustomed to the warmth, and in the doorway stood a tiny old woman, tottery not from the cold or the wind, but from age. She had wild thinning white hair, and there was snow on her back and shoulders—a blizzard was coming, the season’s first big storm—and someone shouted, “Close the door, Helen!”
    She