Dirt

by David Vann

  But memory was only distraction. He needed to wipe his mind free of memory, needed to focus on the swing of metal through air and into wood. Crunch of wood, and the plank vibrated, connected only at its middle, where it was nailed into a crossbeam. Galen moved on to its mate, smashed and smashed again until the two of them hung there quivering, the pick still hanging.

  The problem with memory was that it told us whatever we wanted to hear. It had no shape of its own.

  Galen dropped the sledgehammer, heavy thud and a rising of dust in the still air. He didn’t know why there was no wind this summer. There had been wind other summers, but this one they were meant to rebreathe their own air, a gradual loss of oxygen and thought. Nothing to do this summer but lose your mind.

  I need a saw, Galen said. He could saw the crossbeam through the narrow gaps between planks and cut these two planks free. But he missed the sledgehammer already, liked the feel of its power, so he picked it up again, even though there was no chance of breaking through the beam behind the planks.

  Galen swung hard and the impact blasted his hands, too solid and unforgiving. He dropped the sledgehammer and had to breathe fast until the sharp pain in his mangled hand became only a throb again. Dust in his nostrils.

  He stepped out of the toolshed and looked at all the tools spread across the ground. As if the earth were offering the tools directly, grown from soil. The tools the color of soil, worn brown wood and faded iron.

  He selected a pruning saw with jagged teeth. Short thick handle like an antique pistol, Galen a conquistador, stepping back almost five hundred years. He was supposed to use a regular handsaw, he knew, the kind for cutting firewood, but he liked the look and feel of this one. It would catch and snag, and that seemed right. He wanted it to be difficult to get into the shed.

  He slid the blade between planks and brought it down against the beam, pulled back to cut the first groove. Pushed forward and the blade stuck, wouldn’t move at all. So he lifted and set it in place again and pulled back to form a deeper groove, the sawdust a light yellow, and pushed forward again and stuck. Yet another sign. Like gravity, like the failure of progression. Pulling back always easy, moving forward always blocked.

  Galen’s energy for battle was waning. He dropped the pruning saw and went outside for a regular handsaw with a wide blade and small teeth, the saw he should have begun with originally. And this one worked much more easily. Push and pull, light at first, then digging in, sawdust so fine he was breathing it.

  He was through that beam in no time, and it collapsed onto the saw blade, some force of the shed falling inward, so he had to yank the saw free.

  On to the next gap, the other side of his two hanging planks, and he moved quickly, ripping the wood, and suddenly was through and the two planks fell away from him into the shed, banged against the tractor.

  He realized now what he had done. The wall was down. The shed no longer a cage.

  Mom?

  Darker in the shed, most of it in shadow, and his eyes in a panic, looking everywhere, but nothing moved. He wanted there to be movement. He wanted his mother to be alive.

  The green tractor, the stacks of walnut racks, the dirt floor. But no movement, and no sound except his own blood in his ears. Mom?

  He wanted her to be alive. He hadn’t expected that. He hadn’t expected that at all. He was afraid to step through the gap.

  Galen felt like he was standing at the edge of the world, that if he took one step forward he would fall off. He was swaying in place, dizzy with vertigo, and he wanted to step back, away from the edge, and get down low on the ground.

  But he stepped forward, into the shed, and the ground did not fall away. It held his feet and he was in here with his mother now and he didn’t know where she was. Mom?

  He was afraid to look around. His eyes would look down at the floor, along a wall, searching for her, but then up at the ceiling, all too fast to register anything. He didn’t want to see.

  The shed larger inside than he had remembered, and it seemed to be growing, the walls receding.

  He stepped around the front of the tractor, his left hand on its snout for balance. He could be sucked away in a vacuum at any moment.

  Dread. A physical presence to it. He did not want the moment of finding her. Looking down and then looking away, shadows everywhere, each of them his mother for a moment and then nothing.

  He stayed close to the tractor, didn’t want to venture farther into the shed. The broken racks waiting behind the tractor, some of them waiting decades now, unmoved. He picked one up, dusty wood and an old metal screen, torn in the center, and carried it to the empty space in front of the tractor. Then he picked up another and carried it to the same place, began a new stack.

  The route from old stack to new stack, held together by the tractor. Galen focused on the screens, the wood he had expected to be cool to the touch, but it was warm. The shed no real shelter at all. The air felt as hot as outside. He didn’t know how that could be. A place of shade, but perhaps the roof and walls baked and became an oven, heating the trapped air.

  Smell of walnut, old husks. Acidic and sharp, a green and black smell, and the smell of dust. The sound of heating, of the roof expanding.

  Galen carried the screens, dozens of them, until the space behind the tractor was bare dirt, old dirt unexposed since his mother’s childhood. Older dirt smelled more like rock. He would dig here.

  He stepped outside through the toolshed for the shovel, emerged in the bright light, squinting. Found a shovel with a good tip and stepped back inside.

  Galen set the shovel and pushed hard with his foot, and the shovel buried partway in. But when he pulled up, there was not much on the blade. This could take a very long time.

  He went for the pick, pulled it free of its board leaning against the tractor. He swung at the earth with the larger blade end, and the impact was too hard, too much resistance, so he tried the other end, a long curved spike, the one that had punctured the board, and this dug deep and easily, without stunning his hands. He lifted up on the handle and walked forward to rip the spike through the earth, loosening the dirt.

  Dirt was inescapable. Always a return to dirt. Galen stabbed again and again, breaking the surface in an oval six feet long and two feet wide. It didn’t need to be deep. He’d be putting the wooden screens back over the top.

  Broken earth, old work, heaving iron. Who he was no longer mattered. A question from an earlier time. Grave digger. Mother grave digger.

  Each time the pick hit, the buried smell of the earth was released, the smell of decades past, of the earlier shed and his mother playing here as a girl. The work of his grandfather and whoever else had come before.

  Galen shaped an oval as lovely as a stained-glass window. An oval of ruptures. And then he dropped the pick and raised the shovel. He buried the blade carefully, scooped the loose clods and grains and set them aside in a neat pile graveside.

  Shovelful and shovelful. Sound of it. Drips of his sweat mixing in. All labor took longer than we thought. A small oval, small window, and yet it was more than it seemed, and the pile already becoming larger than he expected, even for this shallow first level, this bare beginning.

  Chapter 31

  The digging its own eternity, a place where time collapsed. The dirt knew what it was making room for.

  Scraping with the shovel, gathering the last of what he had loosened, and then swinging the pick again, hearing the tap against rock, soil impregnated with rock. Soil not meant for planting.

  Caving away beneath him. Deepest cave, digging the grave of one’s own mother. This was why the world rushed away on all sides. Without the mother, the container of the world no longer held.

  His thoughts in a panic, no still point anywhere. Rushing like the earth and the air. Wanting to look behind him, wanting to find her, needing to see whether she was still alive, but unable to move from this one point, struggling to stand on safe ground.

  The pick large, the handle like
bone, expanded, hollow inside, difficult to hold on to. Darker soil now, older soil. He was passing beyond the time of his family, crossing into an earlier time.

  The meaning of dirt was this, perhaps. The shovel removing time. The eons it took to form the dirt from rock. The water and air that had to work through millions or even billions of years to free it, and then its travel and settling and waiting, layer upon layer. His life now such a brief flash. Any attachment was absurdity. This was what the dirt taught. If he could remain focused on geologic time, human time could never reach him.

  The shovel willing, always willing. And the dirt itself. Waiting for so long, yet no resistance to being moved. All order upset, the arrangement of grains, but no resistance and therefore no suffering.

  The pile along one side of the grave, spilling right to its edge. The dirt became larger once it was removed. A dark mountain range forming. Another layer scraped and cleared, and he wondered whether she could hear this sound. He didn’t like not knowing whether she could hear. He kept glancing behind him, kept expecting to see her standing there, walking toward him.

  He worked as quickly as he could. He did not want to continue into night.

  The ground became harder still, rockier and bound together. A large stone shuddering through his hands when the pick hit, and he had to shovel around it, clear away a few inches on every side, gray face and white scar from the pick, then get down in the grave on his hands and knees and pull at it, clawing through the gloves, trying to get a grip, until he was able to hug it onto his lap. Heavy stone, and he could use it to mark her grave. He’d leave it at one end, with that mark from the pick, his mark, and no one else would know, but this would work as a headstone.

  Galen shuffled on his knees with the rock held in his lap, scooted to the head of the grave, and rolled the stone up to ground level. Smooth stone, smooth face, old river stone somehow arrived here, so far from water.

  Galen stood inside the grave, as deep as his knees now. He swung the pick from here. It doesn’t need to be deep, he told himself, but he imagined it not deep enough and having to reach down to pull her from the grave, having to lift her in his arms.

  So he kept swinging the pick, bit deep into another layer, and the day was an inferno but the ground was cooler down low, had its own breath. Cutting through layers, this labor like cutting through the illusion of self to find there was no core, only the layers.

  Rockier, the pick shuddering and deflecting. Sparks. A miner.

  He stepped to the other end, soft and chewed earth now, his feet sinking, and he swung at where he had stood before. He would step back and forth, two sides of a mirror, lowering slowly down.

  The dirt almost moist. Darker and heavier and not quite damp but almost. He’d thrown off his shirt and was covered in dirt, restored. Lifting shovelful after shovelful, the pile so enormous he had to start using the other side.

  And he could have gone on forever, perhaps, digging down and down, because that was better than facing what had to be done next, but eventually he had to admit to himself this was deep enough. Deeper than his waist, and he didn’t need more than that. The afternoon moving on, and he was not willing to be here after dark.

  So he rose out of the grave and took a few steps into the rest of the shed and then stopped. Unreliable ground. He took a few more steps to the edge of a row of racks, and he knew that if he walked from here to the eastern wall he would find her. That was where he’d found the checkbook, and that would be where she had lain down. He felt sure of that. His eyes fully adjusted after all this time digging, so he would not be saved by any shadows.

  Three rows of racks he’d have to pass, and she could be anywhere.

  Beyond the first row was nothing but ground. Everything accelerating away from him, a void without sign, his mind emptied.

  And beyond the second row, he again saw nothing. He felt he would topple. The dread overwhelming now, a funneling down toward fate with only one row left and no choice to be made, ever.

  He stepped past the final row of racks. His mother, lying on the ground, facedown in the dirt. Almost peaceful, her head resting on an arm that was outstretched, hand loose. She was wearing an apron over her skirt and blouse. He hadn’t remembered that. The day she’d gone into the shed seemed so long ago, an eternity, a time when they both were different people, irrecoverable now. An apron with flower faces on the front, an apron from his earliest memories.

  Galen was aware that he should feel something. He stood in place, his arms awkward, hanging at his sides. He could feel himself tilting. Impossible to believe it was his mother lying there. And he didn’t know that she was dead. He just couldn’t see any movement.

  He needed to carry her to the grave. He needed to get out of here as quickly as possible. But all he could do was kneel down. He couldn’t reach in close enough to pull her up. He didn’t want her on his shoulder or against his chest.

  Mom?

  Galen hadn’t made any plan for this moment. He had somehow managed to believe this moment was not coming.

  He crawled closer to her and kept expecting her to move. He would call an ambulance if she moved. It was up to her. Mom?

  She looked smaller than he remembered.

  He was dizzy, even on his hands and knees, so he lay down, just for a moment, lay down on his side facing her. His breath was tight, but he tried to calm. It’ll be okay, he said.

  He closed his eyes. He was vaulting end over end through his chest, falling away to some distant point. A pull as each end flipped past the other. Where he was falling, he didn’t want to go. Dark cavern, pressure walls, his own ribs compacting as they grew. Walls of blood and bone inflated, his body swelling, and he was falling through the center, shrinking.

  But he couldn’t afford to lie here. If someone came and found him now, the grave dug, lying beside his dead mother.

  Galen opened his eyes and sat up. He shook his head. Move, he said. Get moving.

  He grabbed her ankles, tried not to think of this body as his mother, just pulled and dragged, and her skirt rode up, her underwear exposed, and this was not what he wanted to see, so he dropped her legs, walked around to her head, grabbed her arms, pulled them free until he had her wrists, small wrists, her body more limp than it should have been, no rigor mortis, the flesh not cold, and he panicked. She might still be alive.

  He dropped her arms, stood there breathing hard, looking for movement. But there was no movement. It was just hot in this shed. That’s why she wasn’t cold. And that’s why she wasn’t stiff. Just the heat of this shed.

  He should check for breath, but he didn’t want to kneel down and put his ear to her mouth. So he picked up her wrists again and dragged her limp body toward the pit. He dragged as fast as he could. She was heavy.

  He dragged and looked behind him at the ground. He would not look at her. Passing the rows of racks.

  His hands on her wrists, and he kept imagining a pulse, tried to focus instead on the ground. The weight of her, like his own body grown, an enormous distended belly dragging over the earth. A creature doomed to walk forever backward, legs weak and struggling, narrow spine straining, lungs too small. A thing that would never rest. Dragging half dead across this dirt and farther still, perhaps, into the furrows and orchard, dry grass, black rock, volcanic. Dragging this load on and on as the crust opened and filled itself and grew. Just like in my dreams, he said.

  But he kept pulling, and when he came to the pit, he dragged her along the side with less dirt and she tilted along that loose dark mound and rolled and fell down in unintended and he had to let go. Damn it, he said.

  Galen didn’t know how he had intended to place her in the grave, but not like this, rolling out of control and bunched up in a heap at the bottom, facedown.

  He needed to straighten her out and get her faceup, but he did not want to get down there in the grave with her.

  The shovel was all he could think of. He stood in the loose dirt at the edge and leaned over and tried to pull a
t her legs with the shovel, but there was nothing to hook on to. The shovel slipping along her thighs.

  He needed something that could grab. Something for reaching into trees to get walnuts or fruit, some picker. He walked out into the late-afternoon sun, bright still, and shielded his eyes, scanning the dirt for some long tool with a hook. He imagined a lever or a string or something, some grabber.

  But such a tool did not exist. He was squinting and blinking and stumbling around in the dirt, and he did not have what he needed. Then he saw a hoe, a solid blade, and another hoe with four tines and space between. Like the pitchfork, but bent at ninety degrees. He could grab with that.

  Back inside, his eyes were no longer adjusted. The grave was dark, his mother hidden in shadow. He knelt down in the pile of dirt and used the hoe or rake or whatever it was—a rake, maybe—and tried to catch one of her knees. If he could catch a knee, he could straighten out that leg.

  He was in danger of falling in, though, off-balance, and that would be a nightmare, so he got up off his knees and straddled the grave, one foot on each side. That was better. He was at one end, the end for her feet, and was able to reach down with the rake and troll for her legs.

  Galen caught a knee and carefully straightened, wondering again about rigor mortis and why that wasn’t happening, and then he caught the edge of the other thigh and pulled up, but that leg was trapped. She was bunched up with her butt in the air and her arms under her, and the whole thing was just a mess.

  His feet were buried in the loose piles of dirt, the grains settling in the tops of his sneakers, and he felt claustrophobic, everything closing in around him. He stepped down into the grave, knelt on either side of her legs, and the entire world was collapsing in toward him, grains coming down over the edges of the grave, and he needed to hurry before he was buried along with her.