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

was wearing old wooden snowshoes, and she clumped across the floor in them, sat down at Mel’s and Wallis’s table, and began unbuckling the leather straps, glaring first at Mel and then at Wallis in a way that told Wallis the old woman was a fan of Matthew’s.
    Mel introduced them. “Wallis, this is Helen—Matthew’s mother. Helen, this is Wallis—Old Dudley’s other geologist.”
    Wallis stood and reached out his hand to shake. Helen didn’t want to take it, but had to. “Where are you staying?” Helen asked.
    â€œIn Matthew’s cabin,” Wallis said, and she scowled.
    â€œHelen runs the mercantile across the street,” Mel said. “We couldn’t get along without her.” She patted Helen’s arm, and there was some immediate softening. She looked like she was a hundred years old. “Helen raised Matthew since he was four years old,” Mel said. “She didn’t take delivery of him til she was forty-two.”
    Wallis didn’t want the second drink, but the first one was gone. Artie came over and sat at the table with them, bringing everyone a new round, and there were still stories to be told.
    â€œBy took delivery of, she means adopted,” Helen explained. “His real mother got pneumonia. She fell through the river while she was deer hunting. Matthew’s father pulled her out and rescued her, but she got pneumonia and died. Matthew was three. She’d been pregnant again, but of course the baby didn’t get born. Matthew’s father died a year after that. He just quit living. You ever see anybody do that?” Helen asked Wallis, and he looked away, didn’t answer.
    â€œGrandma Helen,” Artie said—not a salutation or a question, simply a statement, a naming. “You raised a good boy.” Artie stared down for a moment, then turned to Wallis. “What does he
do
down there?” he asked, and for a moment Wallis thought he meant, What is it like, beneath twenty thousand feet of stone? But then he understood that Artie meant only Texas, and the Gulf Coast—and that furthermore, “down there” or “out there” could just as easily be anywhere in the world, as long as it was on the other side of these mountains.
    â€œHe’s happy,” Wallis said, a little defensively. “He loves it more than anything.” A glance at Mel to see if it hurt her, and he saw that it hadn’t.
    â€œYeah, but I mean, what does he
do?”
    â€œWell, he sits at his drafting table and makes maps,” Wallis said.
    â€œMaps
,” Artie said. He looked around the bar and seemed on the verge of a philosophy lecture, but in the end only took another drink and shook his head.
    Now the stories came rolling in like waves—Matthew this and Matthew that—and Wallis wondered if they could be talking about the same man he worked with. He was still physically strong, and in some ways reckless—though to Wallis it seemed as if the recklessness had been transformed, under Old Dudley’s guidance, into more of a gluttony—and Wallis had the strange feeling that they were talking about someone from another lifetime, even another century.
    If Matthew still had the strength—the flamboyant strength they were talking about—then Wallis had not seen it. He was a great geologist, but all that myth lore—if Matthew was still that way, it must be only underground now, in his dives.
    Wallis listened to stories of Matthew performing feats of strength—carrying propane refrigerators on his back, even as a boy—and of unbounded energy, as if in eternal adolescence, eternal growth—stripping naked in the summer and covering himself with a film of gasoline, then lighting himself on fire and leaping out of the bushes anc| into the river, into the back eddy where the swans used to rest, back when there had still been swans in the valley, thirty years ago.
    â€œI