Dirt

by David Vann

  Shadow hanging off the east wall, stretching into the furrows. He put his ear to the wall, listened, tried to hear any sign of her, even the lightest breathing, but she had vanished. He didn’t know how long it took to die from no water. He didn’t want to go in too early and find her alive. Because if he found her alive, he would call an ambulance. It would be impossible not to do that. So he needed to wait.

  He walked around to the toolshed, feeling too clean, too unconnected. He was no longer a part of this place. He looked around for a hammer and then realized a crowbar might be faster. His grandfather had three of them leaning in a corner. Old metal, unpainted, wiped in oil, rough at the edges. Galen picked up the slimmest, shortest one, and even that was heavy. Tool users. It was possible to have an entirely different view of humans. No souls, no transcendence, no past lives, only animals that had learned better tricks. Everything pointless.

  Galen used his opposable thumbs, gripped the crowbar and slotted its thin face between board and wall. Levered and popped the end of that board free, worked along until it fell to the earth, undone. Moved along to the next board, worked the hungry thin teeth of the crowbar.

  The sun on the back of his neck. His body a slick, the T-shirt draping close. He felt dizzy, and that was fine. He tried to lose himself in the work and not think. The furrow along the wall annoying because it kept him from stepping as close as he would have liked. He had to lean in, and his back was cramping up.

  Removing the boards was so much faster than nailing them. Galen was on the second side in no time, along the wall with the bay door, his back to the trees. The old lock still hanging there. He didn’t know what he would do about that. He still didn’t have the key, and it seemed too big to break with a crowbar.

  For now he would focus only on removing the boards. One task at a time. They fell off like scabs, rough and uneven, discarded wood, lying in the dirt with their nails sticking up. Galen had the idea of dismantling the entire shed. He could remove one plank at a time and drag them all into the orchard. The shed dispersed, planks lying along every furrow. The tractor and the walnut drying screens in their stacks would be exposed to the sun and moon. He liked that idea. Just undo everything and wait in the orchard until the wood decayed and became earth again and there would be no sign that the shed had ever existed. He would be old by then, and his final project would be to undo the house. He would take it apart board by board, just as he had done to the shed, and in the end, only the piano would remain, and maybe that cool wooden floor, exposed now to the sun.

  If only Galen could live long enough to watch boards decay into dust. To stand here in the orchard and watch the high wall and housing developments crumble, and watch the land return to desert, with no water and no sign of civilization, and then watch the rains come and plants grow and wind and storms and water increase until he stood in a jungle with palm fronds and ferns and vines and the air filled with water. Galen wanted that. He wanted no part of human society. He wanted to join geologic time. But first he had to get through this one day, and even that seemed as long as the transformation of desert to jungle.

  Galen took a break from the crowbar, grabbed a board in his good hand, and dragged it toward the pile along the hedge. Leaving a thin track in the dirt, the only sign remaining, and he could rake that out. The pile reduced to almost nothing, a few scraps, but it would grow again now. Galen took his time walking back for the next board. He didn’t really believe anyone would visit. A year from now, Jennifer would need her first check for college. But before that, no one. Removing the boards was another form of going through the motions, another performance for no audience.

  He picked up another, dragged it, and listened to the hollow sound that came through the wood. Something faint in addition to the dragging, something transmitted through the length of the board, always more to hear and see. We could never be awake enough. He flopped the board onto the pile, then bent over with his hands on his knees and felt lost, the inside of him a vacuum. He had to breathe, just focus on his breath, and then he stood up again and walked back for another board.

  He dragged the boards one at a time, and the sun was lower. It was very slow, but it was lower. He picked up the crowbar again and pried along the eastern wall in shadow. Concealed from the sun. Hidden from all except perhaps his mother. He wondered whether she could still see and hear him, outlined through the slats against the sky. Easiest along the west wall, where he would leave a shadow, much more difficult to find along this wall. A peaceful way to go, not having water. A light-headedness and quiet that would fade eventually into nothing, a meditation on light and sound and air.

  Chapter 29

  Galen worked on the furrow in darkness, no moon. Felt his way along the walls with the shovel. The air shallow, an ebb time. Sound magnified.

  He was using the flat-faced shovel, jamming its squared end down along the boards into the loose dirt he had piled, then pulling toward him. The dirt heavy and invisible and loud. The scuff of the face as he dragged each load a few feet, spreading the soil. Making a bed for a new garden, planting his footsteps.

  It could seem at times that his mother wasn’t really in there. Or that she could vanish on her own. It could seem there were no other people in the world. And whenever he got this sense, he tried to hold on to it, because he liked being the last person on earth. He found that idea enormously comforting.

  Galen liked labor. He liked pulling the dirt away from this wall, clearing and smoothing, and he wished that when he’d finished he could start over and find dirt newly piled where he had begun. What was difficult, always, was the transition, moving on to the next thing and settling in. He liked repetition. This was what religion was made of. Repeating the same words over and over, or prostrations, or sitting and focusing on breath after breath. What terrified us was the void, not knowing what would happen next or what we should do or who we should be. Repetition was a focal point, a shelter.

  Galen waited in darkness for the rise of that moon. He drove the shovel down, pulled and walked backward and spread the soil, but all the while he was waiting. And when it did finally come, its face was impossibly large, warped by being too close to the earth. A lesson there, the distortion from proximity. The moon would not know its real shape until it hung on its own.

  Engorged now with light, fat on the horizon, heavy. The small man kneeling in prayer, magnified so large Galen could see and feel the space above the man’s head, the lofting emptiness between the man and the snake’s open mouth. Galen let the shovel fall and held his arms out and gazed at the moon, honoring the fullness knowing it was shrinking in every moment, cooling into its harder shape, more distant, going white as bone, the color leaching. Brother moon, he said. Each of us alone on our path.

  Galen lowered his arms and looked at the orchard transformed, the trees emerged into the second day, moon’s day. The walnuts responsible. Standing here all these years, they’d had some influence over the shape of things. They couldn’t deny that.

  Galen picked up the shovel and returned to his labor. Finishing the orchard-facing wall, southern wall. The shed placed perfectly to meet the four directions, and that couldn’t have been accidental, but Galen didn’t know what sense to make of it. Their house to the north, the fig tree and afternoon tea to the north, and the lawn and the large oak with its love seat beneath. All civilization. So perhaps that meant something. The road to the west. The orchard waiting to the south and extending to the east, and Galen realized only now that he had never walked all the way to that eastern edge, to the source. That seemed significant, but it could also mean nothing. Systems of thought, the chains of the mind. Easy to get lost. He needed to focus on his shoveling.

  Good scrape of dirt. That was what he could rely on. In the moonlight, he could watch now as the dirt fanned out to either side of the shovel. He could shape the edges. Patterns that might be read.

  The work was a good thing, good to have a distraction. He finished this wall and moved to the eastern wal
l where the furrow had never been finished, where he’d hit the untilled earth and stopped.

  She had never tried to dig her way out. Pointless furrow, and pointless now to remove it. Who would care if some dirt were piled along part of a shed wall? But what he was really trying to do, he knew, was pass time. And so he slotted the shovel in along the wall, moved his good hand lower on the handle, then pulled slowly and walked backward, spread the earth. Looked at the edges like a wake in water, ran the shovel lightly along each side to smooth. He didn’t want to see her, didn’t want to find her. He wanted to put that off as long as possible.

  But the furrow ended. Before long, there was no furrow left to remove, and it was still night, the moon higher now, small and distant and sliding away. Well, Galen said. There was no more work to do on the shed, except removing the lock, and that would have to come later. So he went to the pile on the lawn.

  He had meant to burn this, but that would draw too much attention. He would bring the drawers out here, one at a time, fill them with crap, and slide them back in place. No one would ever know the difference.

  So he did that. Labor. Walk out with a drawer, kneel on the grass, scoop piles of clips and rubber bands and old knobs and buttons, the family, pieces of family and time, and let them fall into the drawer. Reordered now, confused and moved, items returned to different locations, a disruption of pattern, but had there ever been any pattern? Disruption or fate. It was never clear. We did what we did, and wondered, and that was it. Blind movements in a void.

  The crumpled photos would not fit into the drawers. And they wouldn’t go back into the albums, obviously. So he wasn’t sure what to do. He knelt in the grass and looked at them in moonlight. They were his now, no longer hers, and so he needed to preserve. He tried to flatten them, but once photo paper was bent, it was bent, the creases white. Schatze a darker shape, a kind of bullet among the photos, an intruder, gone before Galen was born.

  He gathered the photos, black-and-white blooms, and cradled them in his arms, walked upstairs to his room and let them fall into his closet. Then he closed the door and they were gone. As simple as that.

  What was left was her room. Clothing everywhere on the floor. Hangers loose, and he rehung her dresses, coats, shirts. Arranged them neatly in order, from longest to shortest. Felt the fabrics, smooth and cool to the touch. The colors bright. Turquoise and pink. This room would become a kind of museum, and he would visit to remember her, so it was important to put everything away carefully now.

  A life could be contained in such a small space. Forty-six years in one room. Sacred room. When the floor was clean and everything hung, Galen bundled her blanket and sheets into a ball, walked out to the lawn and shook them in moonlight to remove the dirt, felt like a criminal. While everyone else slept, he was out here whipping sheets in the air, removing all sign of what had happened. Not as if he’d had a choice, though. The thing about a path was that it always led somewhere, and we could never pause on any path. We were always moving.

  Galen carried the sheets and blanket to the pantry, to the washing machine. Watched the water fill, poured in detergent, and closed the lid.

  It was the middle of the night, but Galen decided to fix lemonade, with real lemons, the way his mother had. He walked out to the small lemon trees along the hedge. The giant fig tree dwarfing all else, casting shadows as the moon went down, large leaves like paw prints against the side of the shed, some mythic beast passing without sound.

  Galen felt hunted, exposed, unsafe. He grabbed an armful of lemons and hurried back into the house, focused on his task and tried to think of nothing else. Cut the lemons in half and ground them down against the juicer, poured each time it was full. Added water, added sugar, stirred with the long glass handle and bulb.

  He poured himself a glass and sat at the table. On display for anything that might look in from outside, and he would not hear the approach because of the sound of the washer. He tried to enjoy the lemonade, but soon enough he was flicking off the light. He couldn’t return to the table. He held his glass and stepped back into a dark corner from which he could look out. Nothing could come from behind.

  The chugging of the washer obscenely loud. A suck and slosh. Galen stood in the darkness and watched and waited.

  The house impossibly large. Nowhere to hide within it. Too many windows and doors. A hundred things could be waiting in here and he’d never know. Too risky, even, to try to get to the stairs. Galen wanted daylight. Darkness connected all places at once and magnified the vacuum in his ears and the thumping of his heart.

  The house did not feel inanimate. It had played a role in all that had happened here. And Galen wished he could see ahead. If he brought his grandmother home, that might appease the house. Wood could return to wood.

  Galen set his glass quietly on the floor and moved slowly along the wall toward the stairs. The washer a thing insane, bucking and chugging, calling too much attention to this place, drawing everything from any quieter place outside.

  Galen ran. He ran around the corner and up the stairs into his mother’s room, closed the door and locked it, then panicked that something was in here with him. He batted at the wall for the light switch but didn’t find it, felt something behind him and could hardly breathe, then hit the switch and turned and crouched and saw nothing.

  The room bright, her bare mattress, uncovered bed, and everything placed neatly in her closet and on the shelves. Her room the way it had always been, and he didn’t know how he could have been so jumpy. Fear of the dark was the opposite of transcendence. The exact opposite. The worst direction possible. Cavemen cowering near the fire, looking over a shoulder, listening for the snap of wood. Fear of the dark was full belief in the world, full enslavement, and it meant there had been no progression. Somehow, all that he had learned was not accumulating. Instead of approaching a goal, he was appearing in flashes and then vanishing again, with no control over where he might appear next.

  Galen slowed his breath and walked over to his mother’s bed and lay down. He would keep the light on, he knew. That helpless against himself, that ruled by nothing.

  Chapter 30

  In the morning, Galen stood at the lock. He inserted a crowbar and could see that he’d be tearing down the entire shed and digging a hole in the earth before that lock would break. And a lock was not a bad thing, really, to keep people out.

  The morning the same as any other, exactly the same, the air heating, shadows knitting themselves up toward noon. The last day of his ordeal, but the external world was indifferent. He was going to finish before night came again, even if the world didn’t care.

  Galen walked around to the toolshed. This might be his way in. If he cut through this interior wall, he could still lock the toolshed and there’d be no outward sign.

  So he cleared away the last of the tools, grabbed an axe, and swung at the wood, swung high on the wall at an angle to cut across a board, and the blade sank deep and stuck. He tugged at the handle, and he could get it to seesaw back and forth a bit, but it wasn’t coming out, and it was too high on the wall for him to pull directly. Damn it, he said.

  He looked around for another axe. All these tools flung across the dirt, and no second axe. The cabin had an assortment, but only one here.

  Then he saw the pick. A miner’s pick, something left over from the gold rush.

  Galen stood before the wall in a wide stance, his right hand far down the handle to support that heavy end, and he swung with all his might into the wall. Aah, he yelled, and the narrow sharpened point of the pick went right through the wall, buried instantly to the shank, and he rapped his knuckles of both hands against wood.

  Galen howled in pain, his left hand on fire. He staggered around in the furrows flapping the hand in its gauze and sucking at his breath, another dance in the orchard, a puppet on strings. He had no skills in this world.

  The trees had no comment. Dulling in the sun, shrinking and hardening.

  He danced until the sea
ring faded enough that he could regain his mind and breath and walk back to the shed, to that wall. Two long handles hanging now, the axe at an angle and the pick straight down.

  Nice, he said. The other end of the pick, sticking out, was a blade about three inches wide. So he had used the wrong end.

  He looked around at the other tools, shovels and rakes. A few saws of different sizes and types, short thick handsaws for pruning, larger blades for cutting firewood, all useless because the gaps between boards were not wide enough to insert a saw crossways.

  But there was a sledgehammer. A big fist of metal at the end of a stick, and that seemed right. That was perfect for how he felt. He’d tear down this patch of wall and then maybe just keep going.

  His left hand did not want to grip a handle, but he made it grip, and he swung that metal high and hard as any lunatic Viking and heard wood crunch and the axe came loose, the blade twisting toward him, and he jumped to the side and watched it fall. Then he swung the sledgehammer again and broke through one of the boards, ancient shed buckling now, and the hammer caught and he had to step close to lift and pull it free.

  Galen was breathing hard. Heavy hammer, and the air heating. Shattered plank, and he swung now at its neighbor, felt the lob of iron through space, felt the unstoppable force as it crunched through wood. Momentum. A hammer was a sign. It was fate and doom. It was exactly like the momentum of our lives. Impossible to stop a hammer once it was flung. All you could do was hold on and feel the impact.

  The top of two boards broken, and he swung low now, to bash them at their roots. A croquet mallet. On the back lawn, in his childhood, they’d played on Sunday afternoons, bright red and blue balls and stakes, and his grandparents sitting at the white iron table beneath the fig tree. Something he hadn’t remembered in so long. His mother in a sun hat that tied under her chin. Strange hat, from another time, as if his childhood had happened fifty years back or even a hundred years.