Ink and Stone

I almost died in March, which is how this whole thing started, and I need to explain it from the beginning because if you found this tin and you're reading these letters out of order, none of it will make sense.

My name is Jenn. I'm thirty-three years old and I cut quarry tile out of the sandstone cliff outside Chloride, Arizona. I work alone, most days, six days a week, and I eat lunch standing up in the shade of the overhang like a horse.

Back in March a food truck showed up at the edge of the shoot location. A film crew had come to town to shoot a period Western, all of it built into the red rock, and the crew had contracted a caterer to run craft services. His name was Ike. He was thirty-nine, tall, calm, wore a canvas apron and a smile that never seemed rushed, and he made a flatbread with spiced lamb that nearly killed me.

There was almond paste in the glaze. He hadn't known it had almonds in it, the supplier hadn't labeled it, and I took one bite and my throat started closing in the space of about ninety seconds. I remember sitting down hard on a rock and thinking, well, this is embarrassing, and then thinking, no, actually, this is dying, act accordingly.

Ike found the EpiPen in my bag. I don't know how, because I barely knew where it was myself. He jammed it into my thigh before I could even finish telling him what was happening, and then he stayed with me, talked me through it, drove me himself to the clinic in Bisbee when the ambulance was going to be slow, and waited in the parking lot for two hours until they said I could go.

So that's the man. And the thing I couldn't get over, in the weeks after, was not the dying part. It was how gently he had held my arm while he did it. I kept thinking about that grip. Firm and careful at the same time, like he'd done it a hundred times and still cared about the hundred and first.

I couldn't just walk up to his truck and say thank you as anyone else would. I don't know why. Maybe because I spend all day alone with a chisel and my small talk has died of neglect. Maybe because a thank you felt too small for what he did and too big to say out loud.

So I wrote him a letter instead, and I left it in a dented metal tin I'd found wedged in a crevice of the old survey shack up on the shelf of the cliff, along with a couple dozen expired ink stamp pads from some mining company that folded in the sixties. I figured he'd find it or he wouldn't, and either way I'd have said the thing.

The letter said, more or less: You saved my life in March and I never properly thanked you because I'm bad at talking and good at carving. I work the quarry face east of your truck, alone, and I've been here six years. If you ever want to know why the rock hums when it's about to shear, ask me. And thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

I signed it Jenn and I felt like an idiot for about four hours, and then I got back to work.

Three days later the tin had a reply in it. His handwriting was loose and easy, slanted forward like a man in a hurry who had decided not to hurry. It said:

Jenn, first of all, you're welcome, and second of all, I have to say these stamp pads expired during a previous presidential administration and I'm a little worried about what our correspondence is doing to my legal standing. Also I counted. There are twenty-three pads in this tin and every single one is some shade of dried-out maroon, which feels like a metaphor but I can't pin it down.

Then he asked a real question, which is what got me. He asked about the red layers. He wanted to know why the banding runs diagonal through the cliff instead of horizontal, because he'd been staring at it from his service window all week and it was driving him crazy.

Nobody had asked me a geology question since community college. I sat on my tailgate and wrote him two pages about cross-bedding, about how this whole cliff was once dunes, migrating sand under an ancient wind, and each sweeping diagonal line is the fossilized side of a dune that rolled forward and got buried by the next one. The cliff is a stack of frozen waves, I told him. You're looking at wind that blew two hundred million years ago.

He wrote back the next day. I still have that note. It said: A stack of frozen waves. I'm going to think about that every morning for the rest of my life, so thanks for that. He also drew me a sketch on a napkin, pencil, of the cliff face with the cross-bedding penciled in as long looping curves, and he'd gotten it almost exactly right, which impressed me more than I want to admit. Under the sketch he'd written: I watch for your jeep at seven. It's the best part of my setup shift. Is that strange to admit in writing? Probably. The pads are expired, so who's going to know.

I read that last line maybe forty times.

Here's the embarrassing part, and since you're reading this I guess you get it either way. The day after that note, I actually got in my jeep to drive over to his truck. I got as far as the turnaround by the water tank. Then I sat there with the engine running like a coward, watched a couple of grips carrying cable past his window, and turned around and came back to my face of the cliff and cut tile for eight hours with my heart pounding the whole time, which is a stupid way to swing a mallet and I'm lucky I still have all my fingers.

I told him about it in my next letter, because lying in ink seemed worse than the truth. I said: Yesterday I almost walked over to your truck and then I didn't, and I'm not sure why, except that