Every time I’m not able to sleep, when I’m resting on Jed’s chest and he’s been asking me the hard questions
of how much of the crank trade he should be involved in----all good questions, the hardest kind of decisions in
the world---and I can’t handle any of it any more, and there’s no chance of shaking it off, I try in my mind to
retrace the terrain maps of the Valley that I check out of the library along with my poetry books.
They are published by the Geology Service, and unfold from small plastic squares into great creased posters of
ripples and contours and swales, each in a different color and spotted with same-colored tiny “Ts” and flecks
that lie under each circle and tapered crenellation like a hillside full of crosses. The maps tell the story of this
place’s formation in the Ice Age, of why it is a place of stone and sand rather than topsoils and greenery. It is
the story of great forces underneath what you see, and which I imagine can be forces still---pulling the mind to
a deeper place than the ticks and strains and clutter that trap it up here in the blue where we live.
My father taught me to read the colors; he’d gotten the maps from government men he’d done casuals for. He
smooths them out with his long arms when he sits me down at his table, the wide white tear sheet filled with
yellow, ovoid lamplight. Where most draftsmen might only point, he taps each thing he talks about, his nails
clicking against the plastic like a minister tapping the lecturn, creating and arranging.
The colors tell the stories: “Brighter than the historian’s are the map-maker’s colors.”
The yellow patches were lakes or swamps, really the sand surrounding them, in rolled, cupped banks of ridges
and gently sloping dry strands. All through these cream and other-colored circles are triangles---drumlin, the
geographers call them---that stand for hills of different consistencies that held the sand surfaces together and
hedged the flows of ice.
Groups of green and purple rings wobble across each other and taper away like smoke or serpent’s tails. The
green trails are eskers, tiny hump backed mountains that signal like deaf man’s hands the routes of rivers that
cut under the ice, running as constant and cool as Spring streams. They were big, gushing shotgun blasts of
gravel and slush, and left behind shadows of themselves, little creeks or ditches that lie at the edge of the
once wide path.
The purple trails, more hidden, more quiet, are the end moraines where the ice stopped, a hundred years here
and a hundred years there, leaving boulder walls and quarries of egg-smooth dusted stone.
There are pink and red strokes that come up like rosy heater’s coils, but are no more than the cliffs and
sharper banks of lakes that were once twenty, forty, a hundred miles across. The rosy pinks, as bright as pink
sidewalk chalk, are limestone and sometimes shale. This is the time framework the ice left behind, the soil’s
skeleton, the bones of the land. The gray swales are soil shards, like ashes left from the roaring of the glacier’
s engines. But it is a clayey, tilting, gumbo of a soil, nothing anybody can raise anything in.
Glaciers would fall apart and separate, like any powerful, unorganized thing. The spaces between what was
once their drifting chunks are a moca, cocoa color, called kame moraines. They are scattered, crumbly and wild,
the opposite of the drumlins that look smooth and constant and clean. The kame moraines take over from end
moraines, the shallows of lavender deepening into burgundy, wine-colored crayons where the rock-filled ice
broke apart to stand still and harden.
Jed dozes off and wakes up. I can follow the patterns of it in the way his chest moves against my face.
Sometimes he’ll say my name and I know if I answer he’ll want to start the crank talk again----should I do this
and who should I believe, how much should I let myself know—and so I stay quiet, playing possum with my
hand unmoving on his belly.
Not for a minute do I stop thinking about the colors blooming up out of the black of my closed eyes. He gives
up asking. I feel the edges of his ribs. His body is like the old, cooling ball of the just-made planet, and my
deep and even breathing the waters and ferns and grasses, rising and falling in that first night on earth.
of how much of the crank trade he should be involved in----all good questions, the hardest kind of decisions in
the world---and I can’t handle any of it any more, and there’s no chance of shaking it off, I try in my mind to
retrace the terrain maps of the Valley that I check out of the library along with my poetry books.
They are published by the Geology Service, and unfold from small plastic squares into great creased posters of
ripples and contours and swales, each in a different color and spotted with same-colored tiny “Ts” and flecks
that lie under each circle and tapered crenellation like a hillside full of crosses. The maps tell the story of this
place’s formation in the Ice Age, of why it is a place of stone and sand rather than topsoils and greenery. It is
the story of great forces underneath what you see, and which I imagine can be forces still---pulling the mind to
a deeper place than the ticks and strains and clutter that trap it up here in the blue where we live.
My father taught me to read the colors; he’d gotten the maps from government men he’d done casuals for. He
smooths them out with his long arms when he sits me down at his table, the wide white tear sheet filled with
yellow, ovoid lamplight. Where most draftsmen might only point, he taps each thing he talks about, his nails
clicking against the plastic like a minister tapping the lecturn, creating and arranging.
The colors tell the stories: “Brighter than the historian’s are the map-maker’s colors.”
The yellow patches were lakes or swamps, really the sand surrounding them, in rolled, cupped banks of ridges
and gently sloping dry strands. All through these cream and other-colored circles are triangles---drumlin, the
geographers call them---that stand for hills of different consistencies that held the sand surfaces together and
hedged the flows of ice.
Groups of green and purple rings wobble across each other and taper away like smoke or serpent’s tails. The
green trails are eskers, tiny hump backed mountains that signal like deaf man’s hands the routes of rivers that
cut under the ice, running as constant and cool as Spring streams. They were big, gushing shotgun blasts of
gravel and slush, and left behind shadows of themselves, little creeks or ditches that lie at the edge of the
once wide path.
The purple trails, more hidden, more quiet, are the end moraines where the ice stopped, a hundred years here
and a hundred years there, leaving boulder walls and quarries of egg-smooth dusted stone.
There are pink and red strokes that come up like rosy heater’s coils, but are no more than the cliffs and
sharper banks of lakes that were once twenty, forty, a hundred miles across. The rosy pinks, as bright as pink
sidewalk chalk, are limestone and sometimes shale. This is the time framework the ice left behind, the soil’s
skeleton, the bones of the land. The gray swales are soil shards, like ashes left from the roaring of the glacier’
s engines. But it is a clayey, tilting, gumbo of a soil, nothing anybody can raise anything in.
Glaciers would fall apart and separate, like any powerful, unorganized thing. The spaces between what was
once their drifting chunks are a moca, cocoa color, called kame moraines. They are scattered, crumbly and wild,
the opposite of the drumlins that look smooth and constant and clean. The kame moraines take over from end
moraines, the shallows of lavender deepening into burgundy, wine-colored crayons where the rock-filled ice
broke apart to stand still and harden.
Jed dozes off and wakes up. I can follow the patterns of it in the way his chest moves against my face.
Sometimes he’ll say my name and I know if I answer he’ll want to start the crank talk again----should I do this
and who should I believe, how much should I let myself know—and so I stay quiet, playing possum with my
hand unmoving on his belly.
Not for a minute do I stop thinking about the colors blooming up out of the black of my closed eyes. He gives
up asking. I feel the edges of his ribs. His body is like the old, cooling ball of the just-made planet, and my
deep and even breathing the waters and ferns and grasses, rising and falling in that first night on earth.
chapter 10 of the devil's water by richard wirick
r.kv.r.y quarterly winter 2007 fiction
r.kv.r.y quarterly winter 2007 fiction
