Dirt

by David Vann

  Galen nearly blind as he walked. This body with the landscape shifting around it but the light constant. He could not stay out here long.

  Everything shrank in the glare. The roof of the shed maybe a foot or two lower, the boards thinner by half an inch. The fig tree more squat to the ground, not as tall as before. The furrows shallow. Galen didn’t know what that meant, that everything grew as the light faded and shrank again in the day. This was true of presence, also, that shadow and night seemed inhabited and the bright day did not. All life was emptied at midday, and yet Galen had to roam around in it for countless hours, always roaming a desert.

  The path from lawn into orchard always along the left side, this sunrise wall, east facing. Here was where his mother had hammered the planks loose. Here was where he had stood in the shape of a cross. And here now was where he found the checkbook, pushed out in the gap between human and solid earth, armored by rock, where he had not been able to dig a furrow.

  He picked it up and flipped through the pages, squinting. She had signed every check, and a dozen of them had amounts. The last one $430,000. All this money.

  He looked away at the walnut trees, whited. Looked again at the checkbook, held it in both hands, turned it over and found a note. Please, son. I love you.

  And yet she’d been willing to throw him away. She had called him an animal and wanted him to spend the rest of his days in a cage like an animal.

  Please, son. I love you. He didn’t know what to think of this, because here was the problem: he believed her. He knew that he owed her everything, that every son owes his mother everything. And he knew that she loved him, and that he loved her. But he also knew that she had been willing to throw him away. And it was not possible to get these things to fit together.

  Mom? he called.

  He could not stand here long. The sun would not allow it. Mom, he repeated.

  But there was no answer. He walked up close, put his ear at a gap between boards and tried to hear movement, a dry voice, anything.

  The landings of grasshoppers, a yellow sound, without depth. The distant, unstoppable hum of the air conditioners. A car passing on the road, much muffled by the hedges. But nothing else. Only the sound of his own blood and breath.

  He walked to the next wall, with the bay door and its old rusty lock. Mom? he tried again, but no answer. So he went to the third wall, the side with the toolshed, where he would bake through the afternoon, and he stood there squinting at old wood. I can’t make any sense of you, he said.

  She had been excited, breathless and excited at the thought of him being dragged away to prison. She had said she was afraid of him, but why? He had done nothing. She had called him an abuser and a rapist, her own son who had done nothing. What he’d shared with Jennifer was not a crime.

  You, he said. You have done this. You have forced me into this.

  She was not responding. He wanted to talk with her. He wanted to find out why.

  It’s not fair, he said, that I get one parent and she’s crazy. That’s not fair. And here I am talking to a wall, just as crazy as you. Thanks, Mom.

  There would be no peace, ever. He could see that. His mind would always be chained to thinking about her. Guilt and anger and shame and everything else that made a life smaller. She had destroyed everything. He had wanted to focus on his meditation. That was all. He had wanted to be left alone.

  He couldn’t just stand here. He went to the lock, held it in his hand, yanked at it to see whether it might open. He had no idea where the key might be. Rusty old lock, much bigger than needed, thick steel.

  Galen looked in the toolshed for the key. Along the small shelves and ledges built into the walls, added to over the years. His grandfather a kind of pack rat. And the problem was not in finding a key. The problem was that there were too many keys, dozens of them, on chains and lying individually in the dust. So he collected them all and brought them back to the bay door, set them carefully in the bottom of a furrow.

  Rusty, dirty keys and a rusty, dirty lock. Even if he found the right key, he might not know, because it wouldn’t go in easily. The lock so hot in this sun it was burning his hands, but he tried key after key, finally went for cotton gloves from the toolshed, then tried more keys.

  I haven’t decided anything, he told her. Don’t get your hopes up. I’m just seeing if I have the key.

  Then he thought of WD-40. That would help tremendously. He walked past all the crap scattered in the dirt, everything he had thrown out of the toolshed, and didn’t see a blue and yellow can. He stepped inside the toolshed and let his vision adjust, knelt and searched along the lower wall under a slanting roof and found half-used cans of paint, grease and engine oil, and finally the WD-40.

  Galen sprayed the keyhole in the lock, leaned away from the smell, sprayed the pile of keys in the dirt. He needed a rag or something to clean them, but he had only the cotton gloves. So before he tried each key, he wiped it, both sides, on the glove of his left hand, on the palm, the fingers still curled in pain, that hand turning into a club.

  A few of the keys were the right size and went partway in, but not one of them went all the way in.

  How is this possible? he asked. A million keys and one lock. How could I not have the key here? Where’s the key, Mom?

  Not one of them fit. He walked around to the lawn, to the pile of crinkled photos and crap from the drawers. He took the glove off his right hand and sifted for keys, found dozens more. It didn’t make any sense that there were so many keys, as if his family had owned all the world. What did they all unlock? What was left? All the illusions everywhere in this life, and we were left holding a pile of keys to nothing. This is perfect, Galen said. This is exactly how things are.

  He carried them all back to the lock, and he knew none would fit but he tried them anyway, one at a time, in what felt like a ritual, nothing less than sacred. I honor this, he said. If a key fits, you’ll go free.

  Light-headed from the WD-40 vaporizing. Light-headed from the sun, from living in this incinerator. A grasshopper landed on the lock and he let it stay there and watch. A husk of a body, something that could be threshed like wheat. Good bread of grasshopper, something Galen might try.

  When the last key failed, he let the lock fall back against wood and the grasshopper launched. Galen on his knees in the dirt, burning. He didn’t know what to do next.

  His mother was dying on the other side of this door. There was no point in hiding that. He hadn’t made any decision. He had never made a decision to let her die, but she was dying anyway. It was her own fault, something she had done to herself, but he was responsible too. She had made him responsible. Damn you, he said.

  Our actions controlled beyond what we could know. Galen could never have seen any of this, and yet this is what he had been given.

  He felt like he would die, too, if he remained kneeling here in the dirt and sun, so he rose, his legs stiff, and walked around to the fig tree and the spigot and opened the water wide, drank gulp after gulp. He could try to get some water to her, put the hose through a gap in the wall and let it run. He might have to do that. Or let her out. But he didn’t see how he could let her out. She had left him with no options. Thanks a lot, he said.

  Galen walked into the wilderness on the other side of the lawn, into what was supposed to be his grandmother’s garden. Thistle and dry yellow grass to his shoulders, his feet falling out of sight, rattlesnake and lizard. He didn’t care what happened. Live oak, its leaves knit up in spiny points, scratching all along his bare skin, through his shield of dirt. A thicket of them, and he pushed his way through, liked the awareness that came with all the cuts. A forest for flaying. The leaves only half alive, half green, the trunks thin and numerous and hidden in shadow. His head still exposed to the sun as he pushed between them, short trees without real shade.

  This wilderness extended, stretched on and on, thistle and grass and live oak. His thighs and stomach caught by the thistles, his feet pierced by thorn and bra
nch and rock. He held his arms out when he could, to catch more thistle and oak. A shallow dry sea he was wading through, merciless sea, his eyes stinging, the taste of salt, and he the only man to wade here.

  Chapter 28

  Manzanita. This was what Galen found in that wilderness. He didn’t see it coming, didn’t know it could grow here, thought it grew only on hills. And then he was standing before it, red bark thin as paper. Smooth trunks almost iridescent, the shaded sections pooling light into turquoise and the shimmer of eyes. The trunks swollen, obscene red limbs, round and full, bursting the skin where it fell away in scrolls. He reached out to pluck a scroll, left a rip that showed a lighter white-green, the flesh not red.

  So little to hold in his hand, this curl. Nothing at all once it was separated from the tree, from its becoming. He dropped it and heard no sound. The leaves bright green and hard, firm teardrops no bigger than an inch across, velvety and improbable in this heat, among everything else so dry.

  The manzanita seemed to have its own source of water, hoarded and secret. A dozen trunks all curved outward in a kind of basket, fending off and creating space. Galen imagined a taproot, something that reached farther down than the others would ever know, but he wasn’t sure that was true. It might be drifting shallow on the surface.

  He wanted to honor the manzanita but didn’t know how. All this time, and he hadn’t known it was here. He crouched down and crawled in close but couldn’t get to the center. A kind of cage to keep him out.

  Galen crawled away from the manzanita, liked moving on hand and knee, liked seeing the ground and having the dry grass rise high above him. So much better not to have blank air above. The way his body moved in a crawl, catlike, and his awareness increased. Sound and vision in close, and a sense that other things watched him. He wanted to come face-to-face with a rattlesnake, wanted to feel his heart leap.

  He imagined his mother down close to the ground, lying on her side, conserving. Hidden away in the shade of the shed, near the walnut drying racks, seeking cool earth. He imagined her skin thinning like paper, like the manzanita bark, drying.

  Thistle in close a kind of fortress rising in layers, broadest at the base. Waxy green and thick, with white milky veins, and the purple flower far above made of tassle, of silk. Thistle and manzanita could hold color as the others dried and went yellow and brown, but thistle the more lush, that white milk pulled from nowhere.

  Galen crawled toward the base of a live oak, into greater shade, the spines writing along his back in thin cuts. Fallen leaves cutting his hands and knees. Ants everywhere, red and black, living in deadfall. Galen lay down among them and waited. Lay here as his mother lay there, sharing the same ground.

  These are the true things, Galen said. My mother might be dead. Or she’s dying. And I’m not helping her. I didn’t bring her water, and I’m not helping her now. I’m lying here in dry grass and live oak, and I’m waiting for her to die. That’s what I’m really doing.

  The ants all over his body, small visitors taking their impossible walks. To the moon and back was nothing for an ant. Whenever an ant returned home, it headed out again. Because an ant never had to think about what it was doing. There were no ants trying to understand their mothers.

  I don’t understand much, Galen said. I’m working on it, but I still don’t understand much. I have a few ideas. I know she was trying to send her father to prison. I know she confused the two of us. I think that’s right. And because she hated her father, I think maybe she always hated me. I think maybe it was war from the very start, and either she had to die or I had to die.

  He ran his good hand through the fallen live oak leaves, all the tiny spines. The dirt dry underneath. He cleared a patch and could see cracks.

  He thought of the fuck-grimace on his face, his mother seeing that, hearing him moan as he came onto Jennifer. The shame he’d felt. That was the problem with mothers. Always watching, and who we became wasn’t something we wanted anyone to see. Maybe our mothers had to die. The idea that we wanted to sleep with our mothers and kill our fathers was ridiculous. We could never even find our fathers.

  War from the very start. Our mothers needed to kill us too. His grandmother would never be good while Helen was alive. She’d never be able to think of herself as good. Her entire life would have to be constantly forgotten. And Helen would never be able to erase her childhood until she erased Jennifer. Jennifer an unwelcome reminder.

  Helen was fighting for Jennifer, trying to save her from the favoritism and lies and money and everything else, but no one had tried to save Helen when she was young, and her rage at this was why she could be abusing Jennifer. Jennifer had said that was how they showed love. So Helen was a kind of tragedy, destroying her daughter as she tried to save her, every step of her life blind, all of her efforts undoing all her other efforts. And Galen’s own mother even more blind, keeping a son as a husband to punish a father.

  This land was not meant to be lived on. There could be no belonging here. His family had come from Germany and Iceland and settled in the middle of a desert. They had put up the hedge, let developers put up the wall, separated themselves from other people. They found the one country in the world where it was possible to live entirely unconnected to anyone else. The one country where family could be reduced to only family, isolated, and his grandfather formed that family in his own image. A forging in violence and shame that had gained an unstoppable momentum. Helen had a daughter and saw herself in that daughter and punished. Galen’s mother had a son and saw her father in that son and punished. Helen and his mother doing essentially the same thing, both out of control.

  Galen didn’t know how to find another path. He would wait for his mother to die, but he didn’t know what would happen after that. He might bring his grandmother home. That seemed right. But beyond that, he couldn’t see a thing.

  Some of the red ants were biting him, which was annoying, so Galen crawled out from under the live oak and stood in the tall grass. Yellow-brown sea, and he was submerged to the shoulders. He waded farther into nowhere, and he felt a sadness all through him. A tired, heavy sadness. Dry stalks, no wind, the sun pressing down, and the sadness hung from each rib. This was not a meditation, only a weight. His family a weight. Better if none of them had ever been. He walked and burned and was scratched and pierced by unnumbered things as he passed, and this wandering was all that was left him, just wandering in circles until finally he was standing at the edge of the lawn again, looking down at the artificially green grass, the oasis.

  The pile on the lawn would have to be cleaned up. And his mother’s room. And the boards removed from around the shed, and the furrow. The lock. Someone could come and see. He needed to erase all signs.

  Looking down at his own body, the dirt covering his feet and legs and belly, he knew this was what he needed to erase first. If anyone saw him like this, they would wonder.

  Galen walked into the house, up to his room, to the shower. Cold at first, shivering immediately, the incredible contrast from the oven. But then the water warmed, and he stood in place and watched rivulets of mud, the deltas forming down his legs, like veins, a patchwork of external veins, our blood outside our bodies, provided by the world. The mud clinging to him, large dark islands, wet black and the rivers between them eating away at the banks, rivers reddish from the burned skin exposed.

  All of him stinging. His hand the worst, but all his burned skin, also. He turned up the temperature, wanted to see his flesh glow hot, wanted the rivers to look like embers. The mud persistent, clinging and heavy, baked onto him. Mostly gone from his arms and shoulders and chest, where the water hit, but holding still on his thighs and almost untouched on his shins. Red rivers widening slowly.

  Galen didn’t know what any of it meant, but he knew dirt was his teacher. At every moment, unexpected, dirt was showing him something. Better than going to a university. He might never go, even with all the money. He might just stay right here, in this old house and orchard, and lear
n everything.

  But it was hard to believe in a future, hard to care.

  He was in so much pain he finally had to turn the temperature down. His whole body pulsing in the burn. He fumbled at the shampoo with one hand, tried to work it into his hair but there was so much dirt. The top of his head caked, so he put his head in the stream of water and just ran one hand over it for a long time. This felt right, standing with his head bowed and rubbing a hand over it, an expression of despair. He moaned a little to go with it, and that felt right. Waiting for his mother to die. Transcendence seemed far away. The big problem was that we could never see far enough ahead. How could we transcend if we kept getting ambushed?

  Great smears of mud across his thighs as he scrubbed with soap. The black becoming lighter brown and then washed away. Small stones gathered at the drain, and bits of leaf and grass and thorn.

  Bending down for his shins and calves, scrubbing until the last of the dirt was gone, a kind of loss. It had felt right to be covered in dirt. He was naked now.

  He turned off the water. His hand did not look good. Sore and a bit puffy and red at the edges, infected. He dried carefully with a towel and looked for Neosporin. Neosporin was a belief in the future. He found it in a cabinet and applied liberally, then wrapped his hand in clean gauze, padded into his room and pulled on a clean T-shirt and shorts, clean socks and his dirty old Converse high-tops. Then he went to her room.

  Everything on the floor. The bed dark with dirt. He felt tired. He didn’t want to deal with this. And the shed was more important anyway. He had to remove the boards he’d nailed around in a kind of belt. That would draw attention.

  Half waking, Galen said. We are half waking, going through the motions. I hammered all those nails, and now I need to take them out.

  Down the stairs and into the kitchen, where he gulped at water, always so thirsty, and he ate two pieces of bread and then drank more water.

  Outside, it was late afternoon now. Time passing. That was what he wanted. He wanted the day to end, but time was so slow.