“Don’t forget your antacid tablets,” Ruth said.
16
Work on the cross-marsh canal began in mid-August. On low tide, vehicles with huge, wide rubber tires marked the late summer greenness, pushing swatches of marsh grass down into the underlying black mud. Lumbering, tall, awkward-looking drag lines mounted on barges began to dig. The line of the canal avoided the open water, since the engineers preferred to anchor the canal to the most solid of the marsh areas. Thus the forward progress of the diggers and the big-wheeled vehicles took a three-hundred-yard bite out of the healthiest of the tall, swaying grass.
Once George had jokingly remarked that assuming that plants felt pain, what mass agony would ensue when a reaper crossed a wheat field. Actually, she knew, he was not altogether wrong. When ripe wheat is harvested, the old, brown stalk are almost vacated. The life force has been concentrated in the seeds. Thus, the mutilation of the stalks is almost painless and the wheat seeds are tough and hardly feel the operation. Of course, there is some pain, for some seeds are crushed. But the real tragedy of a wheat field comes when the seeds, the harvested wheat, are utilized.
She understood all of it now. Since the clearing operation had been completed, bringing a temporary lull in the mass pain, she’d had time to stand in the edge of the shallow water and communicate. She was more and more a part of it. She was able to submerge herself in it and know the true peace. But when the canal digging began she screamed aloud, the sound piercing the unpeopled woodlands and startling birds and a curious squirrel.
She watched them from the island. They were far across the marsh. There was no way to reach them and inflict pain in return. There was only suffering. And suffering could be momentarily eased in only one way. She drove down the island to the pier, saw some of her former friends, and issued invitations: It began again and, her soul hungering for the release, bloomed quickly into what ordinary people would have considered a bull market in promiscuity. However, she was no ordinary person. To her had been revealed a Utopia, a heaven of coexistence. That communication was mostly one-way was a problem. She could not explain. And, unable to explain, she soon lost the conviction of her own knowledge and shared the incomprehension. It was incredible that such pain could be doled out in such mass quantities. Yet it continued. In the healthy marsh, where the black mud was covered at high tide and kept eternally wet, the grass grew to a thickness of about ten individuals per square inch. One bite of a drag line killed a square yard or more. And with the grass, numbering quickly into the millions, went thousands of snails and periwinkles. Gleaming white angel wings were ripped from the deep mud, along with razor clams, quahogs, oysters near the edges of the small, watery runs, other varieties.
Truly it was the Planet of Death.
In many ways it was worse than the clearing of the trees, for there death had been an incisive blade or a massive rending. Here it often was a slow, lingering death, smothered, crushed under tons of mud, jostling along in the carriers to the spill area, interment under one’s fellows and an absence of sun, and air. Death did not cease to hurt suddenly, but ached like a sore tooth and the multiplication of death was enough to disturb the very air, itself, make it heavy with sorrow, rancid with decaying vegetation, acrid with soundless screams. And she felt it all and tried, encouraging the ripe, swollen feeling, to drown it permanently in flesh. But eager as they were, those young boys and young men who came often to the point, numerous as they were, it was impossible to fill twenty-four hours with the anesthesia of carnality. And as the digging approached the island, the screams grew louder.
George was concerned. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but there was something wrong. She was dreaming again, not sleeping well. Many times he’d awake, missing the soft heat of her in his bed, and find her walking the room, or staring out the window, or merely sitting wide awake in a bedroom chair, her cigarette glowing in the dark. It was not the same old problem, he knew that. Never again would he be concerned with his wife’s lack of sensuality. In fact, the change in that respect was gratifyingly spectacular. He teased her about having to call in outside help, but he bore up manfully under her demands and, in fact, loved it.
But there were dark shadows under her eyes. She was not eating properly. She was losing weight. Her waist was flat and thin and her breasts were smaller, but tighter. She was, he told her often, one sexy-looking broad, but why didn’t she go to a doctor or something and find out why she wasn’t sleeping? He bought non-prescription sleep aids and forced them on her. Then he called Doc Braws and got, without an office call, a mild sleeping pill which worked equally as ineffectively as the non-prescription drugs.
His life, on the whole, was a dreamy, pleasant one. Semi-retired, working only because he enjoyed it, owning his own large acres, a nice house, and a private swimming pond which he used often, a beautiful, sexy wife who was his friend as well as his lover, he had no complaints, save for his worry about her health. However, she continued to paint a bit, kept the house clean and orderly, and cooked great meals with an emphasis on the things George liked, meats and seafoods. If he noticed the lack of fresh vegetables on the table he pretended not to, because he wasn’t fond of fresh vegetables anyhow. There were always enough canned foods in the house to provide a balance, and he took his morning vitamin pill without fail.
They managed to extract only one life in return. It was a happy accident, at that. Jack Flores, pleased with the progress of the canal-marsh crossing, was looking over the site. He borrowed a marsh buggy, a vehicle without a top which almost floated on high, wide rubber wheels, and drove the length of the surveyed route. The dredges had moved in behind him, following in the wake of the drag lines which were stripping the vegetation and top mud away, getting down to pulpy stuff which could be sucked up and pumped away through the long dredge pipes extending across the waterway to the two-mile-long spill basin. He had crossed the waterway in a small plastic boat and had noted that the operation was muddying the waters, but a vast amount of tidal flow swept down the waterway and would, according to his engineers, carry the silt away without silting up the waterway itself to a great degree. If it did, well, he had the dredges to dig it out again. He watched the operation for a while and chuckled as a group of small boys in boats yelped and played as they, too, watched man alter nature. Then he got into the marsh buggy and drove out toward the island into marsh which hadn’t yet been spoiled by the digging. There were tracks to follow. It was tricky driving a marsh buggy, because the marsh was cut by numerous guts, and near the guts the mud was bottomless. It wouldn’t look good for the boss to get a buggy stuck and have to call for help, so he was careful to stay on solid ground.
The little vehicle chugged along at a smooth pace and flushed out what the locals called marsh hens, long-legged black birds of the rail family which flew awkwardly. When a marsh hen came up, its stubby wings beat against the tips of the grass for long moments before it freed itself to struggle a few yards downwind. Flores had hunted the erratic, wild Mexican quail of the Southwest, and he disdained the slow, awkward flight of the hens, wondering how anyone could find sport in shooting anything so easy to hit. But it was sort of funny the way they squawked as they were flushed out, wings fighting the air, long necks outthrust.
He was nearing the sandy cut on the island, with only a few yards of marsh between him and solid ground. He was feeling good. The job was on schedule, all the problems had not been solved, but were at least under control. He could almost see in his mind the print in his contract which guaranteed him one hell of a bonus when he brought the canal in on time. Then a big marsh hen came up right under his wheels and for a moment, Flores was a kid. He jerked the wheel of the buggy and followed the bird, the hood of the vehicle almost touching its long legs. He held no malice toward the terrified bird. It was only a game. He was just horsing around. There was good solid marsh under the wheels, and he juiced the vehicle as the bird started to draw away, steering to stay with it. “Fly, you mother,” he yelled gleefully, pleased with the bird, which was staying in the air much longer than they usually did. He was so intent on staying with the bird that he didn’t notice the change in color to a deeper green, which indicated that there was a small gut ahead in the grass. The vehicle’s front wheels hit, sank, stopped the forward motion. The gut was a tiny one, so narrow that the grass almost closed over the top of it. Flores flew through the air. He hadn’t bothered to strap himself in. The gut was a curving, snaky one and he flew over a bend and landed in a foot of water on living oysters. The shells dug in, cut, ripped. He landed with one arm under him, and he heard it snap. He lay there, dazed, the pain held back by the initial shock. He was just a few yards from the solid earth of the island. He looked down and saw that he was cut. He couldn’t tell how badly, but his blood was staining the water which lay, black and muddy, in the bottom of the gut.