All the Land to Hold Us by Rick Bass Page A

to see clearly the round bowl of incandescence from which those distant sounds were emanating—howls that again elicited in return, from all across the prairie, the savage yelps and wailing of the packs of coyotes, squalls and barks rising all around them from out of the darkness. It would seem to Clarissa and Richard in those moments that the two of them out there on the old frozen reef were the only ones not speaking the language of that excitement, and it was a lonely feeling for them to feel so voiceless, so disempowered.
    In that loneliness, Clarissa might have let her heart move in closer to Richard’s, there in the safety and distance of the darkness. She had not traveled this far into life, however, hoarding across the span of her days that one rare and delicate treasure, only to release it over the course of a single lonely or frightened evening, or even a hundred or a thousand such evenings.
    It could seem to her sometimes though, in Richard’s company—whether lonely or not, and whether in the distant-desert darkness or the full white light of day—that that tightly held cone-shaped muscle, the frozen stone-treasure of her ungiving heart, no longer rested on as secure a ledge as it once had, safe from the reach of the world, but was emplaced now on some slight slope; and that the substrate on which that stone heart rested was no longer as firm, but disintegrating, with siftings of sand grains fine as sugar being whisked from beneath it by the steady force of wind and water—forces she had once long ago, as a child, perhaps, viewed as dispassionate, but which she now perceived were hungry solely for her: hungry for the fairness of her skin, the tone of her muscles, the luster of her dark hair, the corona of her beauty.
    There were the world’s sounds, then, swirling and howling and shouting at one another, with Clarissa and Richard caught voiceless amidst that wild conversation; and there was the steady rushing of the night breezes above them, winding above them like the braids of rivers they could hear but never see; and visible before them was the mushroom-globe dome of blue-white light.
    Scattered beyond the stadium and its dying, fading lights, after the game had ended, were the little lights of the town; and beyond that, the lonely vertical towers of incandescent white light that illuminated the outline of each solitary drilling rig, the men and their machines hunting always the elusive green-black swamps and seas of buried oil, hunting the last of it; and beyond the town, in all directions, the wavering yellow lights of the gas flares of the oil wells.
    The effect of seeing all those orange fires out on the prairie below was that they might have been viewing a sprawling encampment of Kiowa or Comanche from a century before; or that they had come to the edge of some bluff from which vantage they could see a sight unintended for them—the plains of hell, or at least the gathering encampments of those waiting to be judged and sentenced.
    But up on the reef, away from it all, Clarissa and Richard were safely beyond that queue, and knew it; and like lost or clumsy but diligent miners, they kept searching on their hands and knees, with claw hammer and pry pick, the corrugated stony earth before them, with their own lone lantern hissing and casting around them a tiny umbrella of light not unlike the larger one thrown by the distant stadium, or even the wavering gas flames from those little tents set up on the outposts of hell, awaiting their final reckoning.
    Moths swarmed their one lantern as they crept through the darkness, searching with their eyes but also their hands for the finest and rarest of the fossils. Sometimes the rivers of wind above would shift direction—as if, in their ceaseless flow, they encountered some imaginary or invisible boulder and were momentarily rerouted—and in that stirring, Richard and Clarissa would be able to hear new sounds, the faint and