All the Land to Hold Us Read Free Page B

chemistry, might sculpt them: the world shaping them like a potter spinning clay, or a woodworker tending a lathe.
    Like a magician, he would sketch the imagined creatures in a notepad—gone-away beings that were fantastically ornamented, bold, and multiantennaed—and then, a few nights later, and several feet farther down into the crevice, they would find those very forms.
    The impression such discoveries gave both of them was that the world was infinitely varied, and that the ground upon which they walked was studded with a colossus of change below, vertical columns of magnificent fluted architectures and symphonies that no man or woman had ever seen or heard, dreamed or imagined.
    Clarissa’s father, in addition to working in oilfield wireline services, was a Baptist preacher who felt that Clarissa’s beauty was more a curse than a blessing, and who would have been appalled at her wanton engagement with evolution: prowling the reefs and cliffs with the tusks of cephalopods and bivalves and the ribbed shells of trilobites kept safely in a pouch between her breasts, and Clarissa believing more and more deeply, with each swing of the hammer, in some story larger and grander than the same but simpler version on which he had raised her.
    Their work was dirty, climbing among the slot canyons and brushy draws and smashing apart the old lime reefs that were sometimes so riddled with fossils as to seem like the honeycomb of bees. Their bodies would be covered with grit and dust and chalk—newly cracked, freshly broken Cretaceous odors that had not been in the world for several hundred million years—and their arms would be latticed with scratches from where they had reached down into the stony crevices to extract their treasures, as if dissecting the tiniest and most integral gear-works of some huge and calcified machine that had once been the grandest thing on earth.
    They camped down along the river, and would swim back across it—Clarissa was not as strong a swimmer, and used a life jacket—and they would bathe in the eddies. They would ride inner tubes through the rapids, making the long run in the horse-drowning current and then walking back up along the shoreline, picking their way around the salt-encrusted skulls of the last century’s horses.
    Sometimes under the cover of so much darkness it would feel to both of them as if all the sky above had already been transformed into the strata of time—that they were already sealed beneath such a sky, as if below so many trillions of tons of stone—and that at any moment their movements would cease forever and they would be stranded there with the horses’ heads, caught ankle- or knee-deep in the mire. Like the children they had been not long ago, they would ride the inner tubes down the moon-bright current, the river bright as magma, again and again, until they were both clean and exhausted, or as clean as they could get, bathing in a salt river.
    They would sleep beside the crossing on air mattresses, lulled by the sound of the river. On clear nights, they could hear (and sometimes feel trembling within the earth) the ceaseless throb and clatter of the faraway rigs, as the drillers sought to reach ever deeper, focused on only one thing, and chasing that one thing, the shape of it like the outline of a fleeing animal, hounding it, as if believing like blind converts that that one thing had more significance than any other, and that there was nothing else of comparable worth in the world; or, most blindly of all, that there might truly one day be an end to their searching, and a stanching of their hunger.
    Clarissa rarely slept, there on the air mattress. She would lie awake watching the stars while Richard slept, and she would wait. When she swam she kept her hair up in a bun, to keep the salt in the river from damaging it, and only the hair at the nape of her neck would get damp.
    On the riverbank, she would lie very still, conscious