by David Vann
He was very tired, so he closed his eyes. The smell of this plant a strong medicine, overpowering, and he stretched and traveled in that smell, elongated like the furrows, and he dreamed nothing he would remember, was lost in blackness and forgetting and the void we all return to, surfaced and was lost and surfaced again and finally he heard the water.
The air hot now. The water trickling in the furrows. He knew he should feel panic, should check to see his mother hadn’t escaped, but he didn’t feel any panic at all. He leaned closer to the irrigation tubing and put his lips to it, sucked in cool water. Amazing, water. Feeling it on his lips, in his mouth, was a kind of peace. A relaxing of the body, a relaxing of need, of desperation. This was what his mother needed. Something so simple, so basic, and how long could we go without it? Galen didn’t know, but it couldn’t be long. We needed air more desperately. We couldn’t do without that for more than two or three minutes, but water was next. Water was not a luxury.
He should want to bring water to his mother. That should be as basic a need in him as this need to drink or the need to breathe. And yet it was missing. He felt nothing. And that was worth exploring. How could he feel nothing?
Galen sucked at the tubing, suckled at a kind of tit, closing his eyes and humming as he felt the water. Philosophy was meant to do this. Philosophy was meant to make it possible to not bring your own mother a drink of water as she was dying of thirst. And religion was meant to make you believe that what you’d done or not done was good, and right, so it was even more powerful. But what Galen was feeling, or not feeling, was something beyond philosophy or religion, because those were still systems of attachment. What he was feeling was peace, simply peace, and that was the effect of detachment. You could never feel or see detachment itself but only its sign, this flood of peace. Or maybe flood was too active a thought. The important thing was the knowledge, or awareness, that there was no such thing as his mother to be attached to. Then there was no one to bring water to. This was truth.
Galen rose and felt ready to complete the task of nailing the boards. He looked at his injured hand, dirty and dark now, red-brown, and he thought maybe he’d never clean it. He’d let it just be whatever it was going to be. It still hurt, but not as sharply as before. It felt stiff.
He strode over to the pile for a new piece of wood, the sun pressing down, and was squinting so much in the glare his eyes were hardly open. The ground burning his feet. The feet were a problem. He didn’t know how he’d get through the day with bare feet. He tried to just ignore the pain, tried to make his feet not a part of him.
He was dizzy, too, from lack of food, but he liked this dizziness. He could use it to get past everything else. He dragged a six-foot board over to the shed wall and aligned it, tapped a nail carefully, drove it in and raised the other end, tapped and drove another nail.
I have a new plan, his mother said.
I don’t want to hear your plan.
This is a good one. You’ll like this one. Her voice was only a whisper from somewhere in the darkness of the shed.
Galen needed to drive a nail into every vertical plank, so that they were all connected. Each horizontal board a seat belt with a dozen nails. It would take some time.
I have a different checkbook, she said. One as executor of the trust.
I’m not interested.
It doesn’t have any limit for amount.
Please shut up.
Galen, you could have a million dollars, more than a million. You could withdraw it all, or maybe leave me just a little bit, and then you could go away, and when you’re safely away, you could call the police or fire department and have them come rescue me.
Galen tried to focus on the hammering. The sun merciless, a fire on his back, and his feet damaged. Damn it, he said. I can’t focus. Why the fuck didn’t we use some of that money? I can’t believe you.
I didn’t want you to go.
What?
I didn’t want you to leave me. I didn’t want you to go to college. That was all. I wasn’t trying to keep the money to myself. I just didn’t want to lose you, Galen.
You’re sick.
I love you, Galen.
You’re crazy. Stop talking to me.
I only wanted the best for you, Galen. I’ve always loved you.
Shut up.
And you can take everything now. You can have whatever life you want.
Galen hated all of this. And his feet were burning. He couldn’t just stand here. So he hopped around to the shaded side. Ow, he said, and he sat in the dirt and touched one foot with his good hand and could feel how hot and tender the skin had become.
You’ll have so much money you can do whatever you want, she whispered. She had followed him to this side. You’ll never have to work. You can buy a house somewhere.
Shut up! he screamed. His throat blown out, head dizzy, lost again. She had kept him from living his life. She had done the same to Helen and Jennifer. She had lied to everyone for years. He wanted to take the hammer to her head.
You could go to Mexico.
Damn it! he yelled. Shut the fuck up! You’re trying to destroy me.
I’m trying to live. I’m trying to not die in here.
Galen struggled to recover that sense of peace he had felt lying next to the irrigation, drinking the water. How could that leave so quickly? He was like a Ping-Pong ball, bouncing back and forth.
He needed shoes. He wasn’t going to be able to focus and get the boards done without shoes. So he hopped into the orchard, trying to keep his feet from touching the burning dirt, and found his shoes in a furrow alongside his shorts. He sat and tied the shoes as quickly as possible, the tender skin of his butt burning.
Okay, he said, standing up. I’m ready. No more distraction. The bottoms of his feet still hurt inside the shoes. The soles really had burned, damaged. It was amazing to him that humans had survived at all. We needed tougher feet, and more hair, or even hard shells, some sort of covering.
He dragged another board, squinting in the glare, and raised and hammered it against the shed as the sun roasted his back. The sweat appearing almost instantly everywhere, the air a coffin, close and thick and unbreathable. He pulled another piece of wood, and another, and found a nice rhythm, finally. The nails hot in his fingers, his mangled hand alive in pain.
He was so dizzy with hunger, he didn’t try to find the meditation. He tried only to hang on and remain upright. Just lifting each board and setting the nail and tapping in carefully, then driving. Whenever the burning on his back and shoulders and neck seemed desperate, he reached into the fresh dirt loose from his shoveling and covered himself with it, the sweat making a kind of mud paste that would protect him.
His mother destroying him and claiming to love him, same as Helen with Jennifer. Though Helen actually fought for Jennifer. He could believe Helen. She seemed possible. His mother did not seem possible.
Galen made good progress. The sun high overhead, no shadows or shade anywhere, his eyes burned, the world gone white, and finally he walked around to the spigot near the fig tree and opened it wide, drank deeply in desperate gulps, the water hot at first but then cool, and he knelt down in front of the blast, dipped and rolled in the grass before it and let it cool and clean him, this aerated stream the color of glass, the color of light itself, with the power to stop the burning. He was alert again, revived, and he lay there only a few feet from the shed on his belly with the water cascading on his back and his hand stinging, thinking of his mother who could not reach the water. All this water so close to her. He let it run and run, closed his eyes and thought about just taking a nap, right here, under the water, but he was fully in the sun, and he knew he was burning far worse now, even though he couldn’t feel it.
So he rose to his feet, turned off the spigot, and walked back to the closest furrows, the loose dirt, to lift great handfuls over his head and shower in the dirt while he was still wet, while it all would stick and cover and protect.
Wat
er, he heard his mother whisper. She was close to him, only a few feet away behind the wall. Looking at him from between the slats, probably, but he couldn’t see her.
No water, he said. No water. Do you think Helen really beats Jennifer? Do you think she actually punches her or kicks her or anything?
She would never do that.
Never mind. I forgot who I was talking with, the denier of all. Nothing ever happened.
My sister would never beat her daughter.
Yeah yeah, he said. Your voice sounds a little dry. He tromped away, around to the other side for his hammer and a new board. He would finish this task. He was so hungry he felt folded in half, even his ribs and spine aching for it, but food could be put off for a long time. He knew that from experience. His own form of denial. Food wasn’t necessary at all. He could go weeks without it if he wanted. Only the first couple days were hard. The hunger was not real. It was a false sign.
Galen didn’t know why he had first stopped eating. He didn’t understand how it had begun. A decision whether or not to drink orange juice. It may have begun there. But who could say the beginning of anything, because it all had started earlier, in previous lives. Not eating was a way of punching through this existence.
The piano, his mother whispered from behind the wall.
Galen pinned a new board and tapped in a nail.
The piano, she whispered again.
He hammered the nail hard, bent it, swore, and placed another, tapped it carefully. His bad hand felt twice as large as a normal hand. Almost impossible to use it to grip something as small as a nail. This was one of the difficult things about a physical existence. The body kept growing and shrinking, always outrageous, and there was no controlling it.
The piano, she whispered.
What? This is so damn annoying. What about the piano?
The checkbook is in the piano.
What the hell? Who were you hiding it from? I didn’t even know it existed.
Bring it now. I won’t be able to speak soon. I need to sign now.
No. I’m busy. He hammered and kept placing nails. Roasting and sweating and pain everywhere, in his hand, in his gut, the bottoms of his feet, the skin on his back and neck, the dizziness in his head. Everything about this existence related to pain. He was sick of it.
Galen dropped his hammer in the dirt and walked away, across the lawn and into the house. He had been thinking he might never come in here again, had been thinking perhaps he’d just live in the orchard, but here he was already. No resolution lasted.
The inside of the house too comforting, cool and dark and speaking of sleep. He was very tired. He wanted to lie down and forget everything. That was the power of the house, that was how it was dangerous. The house had to be resisted.
He walked to the piano and stood there waiting for his eyes to adjust. The edges floating and shifting, the outline of the wood going white when he blinked. Only a dark shape in shadow, but gradually he could begin to see color, the deep reds and grains in the dark wood, and the piano took up its place, stopped shifting and swimming.
His grandmother playing this piano. Why did he have no memory of that? If they had really sung songs together as a family, if she had played this piano, then why did she stop? Why did everything about that life end before he had memory? If he was supposed to connect to that time, then why had the connection been withheld?
He lifted the top of the piano, a large flat polished piece of wood on a hinge, and he somehow knew to raise the piece of wood inside as a stand. He didn’t know how he knew that, some physical imprint without a corollary memory. Perhaps most our memories were like that, no longer accessible but still there somehow, and perhaps that was how we felt our previous lives, also. Their shadows, and their instruction, but no longer anything we could see. They waited and gathered and exerted their presence in some other way, so that every choice we made had already been made, and each random action guided, and the self was not an illusory thing at all, but something that could never die.
Chapter 25
The checkbook so small, so simple. The idea that it held more than a million dollars seemed impossible. He had wanted a Walkman for years. A Walkman cost about sixty dollars. He had wanted to go to college, and that might have cost ten thousand dollars per year. He had wanted to have a year abroad, and he didn’t know what that would have cost, but not much more than a year of college, probably. Everything had been possible, right here, but his mother had said no.
He didn’t understand anything about his mother, not one thing. Wanting to keep him here like some replacement husband. He had no idea who she was or how she could make any sense.
He walked out to the lawn to grab a pen from the pile of crap. He needed to burn all of this today. All his tasks piling up. He still had to finish nailing the boards, also, and finish the furrow of dirt the rest of the way around the shed, and it was already afternoon.
He sat under the fig tree, in its good shade, sat at the iron table and looked at the checks.
You have the checkbook, his mother rasped.
Yeah.
Let me sign.
Okay. He knelt at the wall and slipped the checkbook under the wood, in the gap between earth and shed, then slipped the pen under.
I’ll leave the amount blank. You can fill in whatever you want.
Sign all of them. But fill some of them out completely. Start with a check for $4,300.
Why $4,300?
Because that’s an easy amount. It’s nothing.
Okay.
And then let’s go for $47,500. Galen wanted to climb into the fig tree to wait, but he couldn’t with his bad hand, so he sat in a cast-iron chair at the table and looked at the part of the property he never visited. Behind the house and lawn was a jungle of other trees and bushes, a piece never claimed for the orchard.
Why doesn’t the orchard extend all the way? he asked.
What?
The mess on the other side of the lawn. It’s a big piece of the property, and nothing was done with it. No walnut trees. Why not?
That was Mom’s piece. She was supposed to get a garden, but there was never time.
How come I never heard about that?
I can’t speak. I really can’t. I need water.
No water.
Then you don’t get the checks.
Fine. I don’t give a shit. I need to get back to work on the boards anyway. He walked around the shed to the hottest side, near the toolshed, exposed to the full afternoon sun. He wanted the full heat, wanted to get as dizzy as possible. Dragged a splintery board that had been ripped and banged up and removed from something, and held it against the wall.
He tapped a nail and hammered and heard his mother screech, a raw voice he hadn’t heard before, a final screech, the end of a voice. It sounded like her throat ripping. And he was fine with that. He didn’t fucking care. I didn’t hear you, he yelled. What was that you were saying?
No answer, of course. He hammered at the hot nails and decided he didn’t need one going into every vertical plank. That was too many. They’d be held in by the seat belt without each needing their own nail.
He dragged another misbegotten piece from the pile, and another, the work becoming a routine, and gradually the glare from the bleached earth was reduced. Shadows forming in the clods and lengthening, and he was belting a new side of the shed, along the sliding bay door, the sun angling to his left, the time passing, a mercy.
The sun itself felt like a witness, always watching. He could see why the Aztecs or Mayans or whatever worshipped the sun. After it baked and burned you all day, the falling could seem like a gift. You could worship what had almost destroyed you. And if you were alone, the sun might even be a companion, moving along steadily, always there.
Galen heard a sound that he hadn’t heard in years. He recognized it immediately. The hand crank on the tractor. His mother turning the crank, trying to start the engine.
No, he said. He stood there with the ham
mer and didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t get inside, and if he couldn’t get inside, he couldn’t stop her. She’d start the tractor and come crashing through the wall. The tractor was easily strong enough for that.
Stop, he said. She was slow on the crank, but she might get it to turn over anyway. He was up against the sliding door now, pressed against it, trying to peer in through a crack, but the gaps weren’t big enough, and it was too dark in there, too bright out here.
He ran around to the toolshed and tossed all the tools into the dirt: shovels and picks and rakes, clippers, hoes. He needed to clear a space along the wall next to the tractor. He’d be able to see in from there. The crank turning, and she was going faster now.
Wait, he said. Let’s talk about this.
No answer. He pressed against the wood, put his hands up to either side to block the light, and he could just see the larger shadow of the tractor, shifting around in his vision. But he still couldn’t do anything to keep her from cranking. She would come tearing through the wall into the orchard, and there was a high gear that could go fast, a gear for driving on the road.
Galen left the wall and looked at all the tools he had tossed into the dirt. He needed something like a spear. Something he could throw. That would be his only chance. The pitchfork. That would do it. It wasn’t a large one, four spikes six inches long and with a spread of six inches total. He hefted that in his good hand, got the balance, and hurled it toward the walnut trees. It went about thirty feet, falling short of what he’d imagined, but it flew straight, so maybe that was good enough.
But what was he thinking here? That he’d spear his own mother with a pitchfork? That wasn’t possible. That was not something he could do.
Galen stood in the sun and closed his eyes and tried to find some guidance. Prison was all he could think of. Dragged away and locked in a cell, and he’d never see the day again. Never see trees, never see dirt, never watch the moon. Never run freely. Never see Jennifer, never go to Europe, never lie down in a furrow and sleep. Never see the mountains again, or the cabin, never listen to Kitaro or read Siddhartha. He would be put in a box and the box sealed and placed on a shelf somewhere to wait. And he might simply be forgotten.
