All the Land to Hold Us Read Free

returns to the scene in the night, unearths one of the locked strongboxes, smashes it down on a boulder, and a shower of gold and silver coins cascades onto the ground.
    He scoops up a few, caches the strongbox, and heads north, where he is captured, charged with murder, and taken to prison. After seven years of saying he knows where the treasure is, he returns with his jailers, traveling all the way down from Ohio, to show them the cache in exchange for his freedom. When they arrive, however, the cache is gone; and rooting in the dust and gravel, all he is able to produce are a few individual coins, entirely unsatisfactory to his captors, and he is returned to jail.
    Or the survivor is a one-hundred-year-old woman who had been but a child on the runaway priests’ expedition, the Catholic Cross Cache. In the 1870s, near the end of the old woman’s life, she returns by burro to Castle Gap with her two great-grandchildren, one of whom is ten-year-old Susie, who in the 1900s will go on to become Cat-House Susie, an ex-madam servicing oilfield patrons in the region.
    According to Cat-House Susie, her great-grandmother left her and her sister playing in camp and rode the burro up to the summit, and then returned, assuring her great-granddaughters that the treasure was still there, that it had not been disturbed.
    Or an old barfly, for the price of a drink, will produce a gold nugget and a tattered map, and the story of having been privy to the deathbed conversation of an outlaw or a priest; and the next day, when the treasure seeker goes out to the mountain (sweat already streaming down his back, not so much from the warmth of sunrise as from the heated palpitations within), he will find a veritable minefield of previously dug holes and cairns and freshly blazed trees, and false graves in which, upon being excavated, no bones are to be found—though no treasure either.
    The seeker will wander the mountain for a day or two or three, digging in the sun and resting in the heat of noonday in the shamble of the adobe hut at the base of the mountain, the hut that once served as a rest station for the stage.
    (It seemed to Richard, when he came to the landscape, that this hut was the only place on the mountain that had not been disturbed by the shovels and pickaxes of man; and if he were going to look for any of the treasure, or treasures, that is where he would have looked. But he didn’t. He had come looking for other treasures, other things.)
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    There was one woman in particular with whom he spent time, during the period that he was developing the oilfields in the region. Her name was Clarissa, and she had grown up in Odessa, and hated the oil business—hated the familiarity and sameness of it, as well as the landscape—and though she and Richard were only together for about four months, they were good months, and seemed timeless to the lovers.
    Clarissa’s hair was as black as a Comanche’s, and her eyes were a pale green. She had thick arching eyebrows that could give one who did not know her the impression of perpetual surprise, and flawless, pale skin. Unlike the other girls she had grown up with (whose skin, by the time they were eighteen, already looked like that of forty-year-olds), Clarissa did not endeavor to spend her every sunlit moment in pursuit of bronzing her skin, but labored to keep it the color it was.
    She hated the desert, and loved to soak in water for long stretches—in the bathtub, in the salty rivers, even in warm stock tanks—and she and Richard spent many nights just sitting in the shallows, after having loved; and it seemed to him that her pale body, almost luminous when wet, was a phenomenon in such a harsh country—exceedingly rare, and daily imperiled.
    Clarissa had no goal other than getting out: away from West Texas and away from the oil business, which meant away from any and all of Texas. When Richard met her she was working in Odessa as a receptionist