Shell Collector

by Anthony Doerr

  He lays the tarp over the beach, anchors the hand winch to a crossbar at the head of the bed of the truck and hooks the bow-shackle through the grommets on the corners of the tarp. With great difficulty he rolls the heart onto the plastic; then it is merely a matter of winching the entire gory bundle into the bed. He turns the crank, the gears ratcheting loudly; the winch tackle growls; the corners of the tarp come up. The heart inches toward him, plowing through the sand, and soon the truck takes its weight.

  The first pale streaks of light show in the sky as he parks the pickup beside the hole he has made above the property. He lowers the tailgate and lays the tarp flat. The heart, stuck all over with sand, lies in the bed like a slain beast. Joseph wedges his body between it and the cab, and pushes. It rolls out easily enough, sliding heavily over the slick tarp, and bounces into the hole with a wet, heavy thump.

  He kicks out the extra pieces of flesh and muscle and gore still in the flatbed and drives slowly, in a daze, down the hill and back onto the beach where the other four whales lie in various stages of decomposition.

  Three men stand over the dregs of a campfire, soaked in gore, drinking coffee from Styrofoam cups. The heads of two of the whales are missing; all the teeth from the remaining heads have been taken away. Sand fleas jump from the carcasses. There is a sixth whale lying in the sand, Joseph sees, a near-term fetus hauled from the body of its mother. He gets out, steps over the yellow tape and walks to them.

  “I’ll take the hearts,” he says. “If you’re done with them.”

  They stare. He takes the tree saw from the back of the truck bed and goes to the first whale, lifting the flap of skin and stepping inside the great tree of its ribs.

  A man seizes Joseph’s arm. “We’re supposed to burn them. Save what we can and burn the rest.”

  “I’ll bury the hearts.” He does not look at the man but keeps his eyes away, on the horizon. “It will be less work for you.”

  “You can’t . . .” But he has released Joseph, who is already back in the whale, sawing at tissue. With the tree saw as his flensing knife he hacks through three ribs, then a thick, dense tube that could be an artery. Blood spurts onto his hands: congealed and black and slightly warm. The cavern inside the whale smells, already, like rot, and twice Joseph has to step back and breathe deeply, the saw hanging from his fist, his forearms matted with blood, the front of his coveralls soaked from mucus and blubber and seawater.

  He had told himself it would be like cleaning a fish, but it is completely different—it’s more like eviscerating a giant. The plumbing of the whale is on a massive scale; housecats could gallop through its veins. He parts a final layer of blubber and lays a hand on what he decides must be the heart. It is still a bit damp, and warm, and very dark. He thinks: I did not make the hole large enough for five of these.

  It takes ten minutes to saw through three remaining veins; when he does the heart comes loose easily enough, sliding toward him and settling muscularly against his ankles and knees. He has to tug his feet free. A man appears, thrusts a syringe into the heart and draws up some matter. “Okay,” the man says. “Take it.”

  Joseph tows it into the truck. He does this all morning and all afternoon, hacking out the hearts and depositing them in the hole on the hill. None of the hearts were as big as the first whale’s but they are huge, the size of the range in Twyman’s kitchen or the engine in the truck. Even the fetus’s heart is extraordinary; as big as a man’s torso, and as heavy. He cannot hold it in his arms.

  By the time Joseph is pushing the last heart into the hole on the hill, his body has begun to fail him. Purple halos spin at the fringes of his vision; his back and arms are rigid and he has to walk slightly bent over. He fills the hole, and as he leaves it, a mound of earth and muscle, stark amid a thicket of salmonberry with the trunks of spruce falling back all around it, high above the property in the late evening, he feels removed from himself, as though his body were a clumsy tool needed only a little longer. He parks in the yard and falls into bed, gore-soaked and unwashed, the door to the apartment open, the hearts of all six whales wrapped in earth, slowly cooling. He thinks: I have never been so tired. He thinks: at least I have buried something.

  During the following days he does not have the energy or will to climb out of bed. He tortures himself with questions: Why doesn’t he feel any better, any more healed? What is revenge? Redemption? The hearts are still there, sitting just beneath the earth, waiting. What good does burying something really do? In nightmares it always manages to dig itself out. Here was a word from his mother’s dictionary: Inconsolable: not to be consoled, spiritless, hopeless, brokenhearted.

  An ocean between himself and Liberia and still he will not be saved. The wind brings curtains of yellow-black smoke over the trees and past his windows. It smells of oil, like bad meat frying. He buries his face in the pillow to avoid inhaling it.

  Winter. Sleet sings through the branches. The ground freezes, thaws, freezes again into something like sludge, immovably thick. Joseph has never seen snow; he turns his face to the sky and lets it fall on his glasses. He watches the flakes melt, their spiked struts and delicate vaulting, the crystals softening to water like a thousand microscopic lights blinking out.

  He forgets his job. From the window he notices he has left the mower in the yard but the will to return it to the garage does not come. He knows he ought to flush the pipes in the main house, sweep the deck, install storm windows, switch on the cables to melt ice from the shingles. But he does not do any of it. He tells himself he is exhausted from burying the whale hearts and not from a greater fatigue, from the weight of memory all around him.

  Some mornings, when the air feels warmer, he determines to go out; he throws off the covers and pulls on his trousers. Walking the muddy lane down from the main house, cresting the dunes, the sea laid out under the sky like molten silver, the low forested islands and gulls wheeling above them, a cold rain slashing through the trees, the sight of the world—the utter terror of being out in it—is too much for him, and he feels something splitting apart, a wedge falling through the center of him. He clenches his temples and turns, and has to go sit in the toolshed, among the axes and shovels, in the dark, trying to find his breath, waiting for the fear to pass.

  Twyman had said the coast didn’t get much snow but now the snow comes heavily. It falls for ten days straight and because Joseph does not switch on the de-icing cables, the weight of it collapses a section of the roof. In the master bedroom warped sheets of plywood and insulation sag onto the bed like ramps to the heavens. Joseph splays on the floor and watches the big clusters of flakes fall through the gap and gather on his body. The snow melts, runs down his sides, freezes again on the floor in smooth, clear sheets.

  He finds jars of preserves in the basement and eats them with his fingers at the huge dining room table. He cuts a hole in a wool blanket, pulls it over his head and wears it like a cloak. Fevers come and go like wildfires; they force him to his knees and he must wait, wrapped in the blanket, until the shivers pass.

  In a sprawling marble bathroom he studies his reflection. His body has thinned considerably; tendons stand out along his forearms; the slats of his ribs make drastic arcs across his sides. A yellow like the color of chicken broth floats in his eyes. He runs his hand over his hair, feels the hard surface of skull just beneath the scalp. Somewhere, he thinks, there is a piece of ground waiting for me.

  He sleeps, and sleeps, and dreams of whales inside the earth, swimming through soil like they would through water, the tremors of their passage quaking the leaves. They breach up through the grass, turning over in a spray of roots and pebbles, then fall back, disappearing through the ground which stitches itself over them, whole again.

  Warblers in the fog, ladybugs traversing the windows, fiddleheads nosing their way up through the forest floor—spring. He crosses the yard with the blanket over his shoulders and examines the first pale sleeves of crocuses rising from the lawn. Swatches of dirty slush lie
melting in the shade. A memory rises unbidden: every April in his home, in the hills outside Monrovia, a wind blew down from the Sahara and piled red dust inches deep against the walls of the house. Dust in his ears, dust on his tongue. His mother fought back with brooms and whisks, enlisted him in the defense. Why? he would ask. Why sweep the steps when tomorrow they’ll be covered again? She would look at him, fierce and disappointed, and say nothing.

  He thinks of the dust, blowing now through the gaps in the shutters, piling up against the walls. It hurts him to imagine it: their house, empty, soundless, dust on the chairs and tables, the garden plundered and grown over. Stolen goods still stacked in the cellar. He hopes someone has crammed the place with explosives and bombed it into splinters; he hopes the dust will close over the roof and bury the house forever.

  Soon—who is to say how many days had passed?—there is the sound of a truck grinding up the drive. It is Twyman; Joseph is discovered. He retreats to the apartment, crouches behind the windowsill and his neatly stacked rows of pebbles. He takes one, rolls it in his palm. There is shouting in the main house. He watches Twyman stride across the lawn.

  Cowboy boots thud upon the stairs. Already Twyman is bellowing.

  “The roof! The floors are flooded! The walls are buckling! The mower’s rusted to hell!”

  Joseph wipes his glasses with his fingers. “I know,” he says. “It is not good.”

  “Not good?! Damn! Damn! Damn! Damn!” Twyman’s throat is turning red; the words clog on their way out. “My God!” he manages to spit. “You fucker!”

  “It is okay. I understand.”

  Twyman turns, studies the pebbles along the sills. “Fucker! Fucker!”

  Twyman’s wife drives him north in a sleek, silent truck, the wipers slipping smoothly over the windshield. She keeps one hand in her purse, clenched around what Joseph guesses to be Mace or perhaps a gun. She thinks I am an idiot, thinks Joseph. To her I am a barbarian from Africa who knows nothing about work, nothing about caretaking. I am disrespectful, I am a nigger.

  They stop at a red light in Bandon and Joseph says, “I will get out here.”

  “Here?” Mrs. Twyman glances around as if seeing the town for the first time. Joseph climbs out. She keeps her hand in the purse. “Duty,” she says. “It’s an issue of duty.” Her voice tremors; inside, he can see, she is raging. “I told him not to hire you. I told him what good is it hiring someone who runs from his country at the first sign of trouble? He won’t know duty, responsibility. He won’t be able to understand it. And now look.”

  Joseph stands, his hand on the door. “I never want to see you again,” she says. “Close the fucking door.”

  For three days he lies on a bench in a laundromat. He studies cracks in the ceiling tiles; he watches colors drift across the under-sides of his eyelids. Clothes turn loops behind portholes in the dryers. Duty: behavior required by moral obligation. Twyman’s wife was right; what does he understand about that? He thinks of the hearts lumped into the earth, ground bacteria chewing microscopic labyrinths through their centers. Hadn’t burying those hearts been the right thing, the decent thing to do? Save yourself, they said. Save yourself. There were things he had been learning at Ocean Meadows, things yet unfinished.

  Hungry but not conscious of his hunger, he walks south down the road, loping through the sogged, muddy grass on the shoulder. All around him the trees stir. When he hears a car or truck approaching, tires hissing over the wet pavement, he retreats into the woods, draws his blanket around him and waits for it to pass.

  Before dawn he is back on Twyman’s property, high above the main house, hiking through dense growth. The rain has stopped, and the sky has brightened, and Joseph’s limbs feel light. He climbs to the small clearing between the trunks where he buried the whale hearts and lays down armfuls of dead spruce boughs for a bed and lies among them on top of the buried hearts, half buried himself, and watches the stars wheel overhead.

  I will become invisible, he thinks. I will work only at night. I will be so careful they will never suspect me; I will be like the swallows on their gutter, the insects in their lawn, concealed, a scavenger, part of the scenery. When the trees shift in the wind, so I will shift, and when rain falls I will fall too. It will be a kind of disappearing.

  This is my home now, he thinks, looking around him. This is what things have come to.

  In the morning he parts the brambles and peers down at the house where two vans are on the lawn, ladders propped against the siding, the small figure of a man kneeling on the roof. Other men cart boxes or planking into the house. There is the industrious sound of banging.

  On the shady hillside below his plot of ground Joseph finds mushrooms standing among the leaves. They taste like silt and make his stomach hurt but he swallows them all, forcing them down.

  He waits until dusk, squatting, watching a slow fog collect in the trees. When it is finally night he goes down the hill to the tool-shed beside the garage and takes a hoe from the wall and fumbles in the shadows around the seed box. In a paper pouch he can feel seeds—this he tucks into the pocket of his trousers and retreats, back through the clubfoot and fern, onto the wet, needled floor of the forest, to the ring of trunks and his small plot. In the dim, silvery light he opens the packet. There are maybe two palmfuls of seeds, some thin and black like thistle, some wide and white, some fat and tan. He stows them in his pocket. Then he stands, lifts the hoe, and drives it into the earth. A smell comes up: sweet, wealthy.

  All through the smallest hours he turns earth. There is no sign of whale hearts; the soil is black and airy. Earthworms come up flailing, shining in the night. By dawn he is asleep again. Mosquitoes whine around his neck. He does not dream.

  The next night he uses his index finger to make rows of tiny holes, and drops one seed like a tiny bomb into each hole. He is so weak from hunger that he must stop often to rest; if he stands quickly his vision floods away and the sky rushes into the horizon, and for a moment it feels like he will dissolve. He eats several of the seeds and imagines them sprouting in his gut, vines pushing up his throat, roots twisting from the soles of his shoes. Blood drips from one of his nostrils; it tastes like copper.

  In the ruins of a cranberry press he finds a rusted five-gallon drum. There is a small, vigorous brook that threads between boulders by the beach and he fills the drum with the water and carts it, sloshing and spilling, up the hill to his garden.

  He eats kelp, salmonberries, hazelnuts, ghost shrimp, a dead sculpin washed up by the tide. He tears mussels from rocks and boils them in the salvaged drum. One midnight he creeps down to the lawn and gathers dandelions. They taste bitter; his stomach cramps.

  The workmen finish rebuilding the roof. The tide of people builds. Mrs. Twyman arrives one afternoon with a flourish of activity; she whirls across the deck in a business suit, a young man at her heels taking notes in a pad. Her daughter takes long, lonesome hikes across the dunes. The evening parties begin, paper lanterns hung from the eaves, a swing band blowing horns in the gazebo, laughter drifting on the wind.

  With the hoe and several hours of persistence Joseph manages to knock a chickadee from a low bough and kill it. In the dead of night he roasts it over a tiny fire; he cannot believe how little meat there is on it; it is all bone and feather. It tastes of nothing. Now, he thinks, I really am a savage, killing tiny birds and tearing the tendons from their bones with my teeth. If Mrs. Twyman saw me she would not be surprised.

  Besides daily carting water up the hill and splashing it over the rows of seeds, there is little to do but sit. The scents of the forest run like rivers between the trunks: growing, rotting. Questions come in bevies: Is the soil warm enough? Didn’t his mother start plants in small pots before setting them in the ground? How much sun do seeds need? And how much water? What if these seeds were wrapped in paper because they were sterile, or old? He worries the rust from his watering drum will foul the garden; he scrapes it as clean as he can with a wedge of slate.

  Mem
ories, too, volunteer themselves up: three charred corpses in the smoking wreck of a Mercedes, a black beetle crossing the back of a broken hand. The head of a boy kicked open and lying in red dust, Joseph’s own mother pushing a barrow of compost, the muscles in her legs straining as she crosses the yard. For thirty-five years Joseph had envisioned a quiet, safe thread running through his life—a thread made for him, incontrovertible, assured. Trips to the market, trips to work, rice with cayenne for lunch, trim columns of numbers in his ledger: these were life, as regular and probable as the sun’s rising. But in the end that thread turned out to be illusion—there was no rope, no guide, no truth to bind Joseph’s life. He was a criminal; his mother was a gardener. Both of them turned out to be as mortal as anything else, the roses in her garden, whales in the sea.

  Now, finally, he is remaking an order, a structure to his hours. It feels good, tending the soil, hauling water. It feels healthy.

  In June the first green noses of his seedlings begin to show above the soil. When he wakes in the evening and sees them in the paling light, he feels his heart might burst. Within days the entire plot of ground, an unbroken black a week ago, is populated with small dashes of green. It is the greatest of miracles. He becomes convinced that some of the shoots—a dozen or so proud thumbs pointed at the sky—are zucchini plants. On his hands and knees he examines them through the scratched lenses of his glasses: the stalks are already separating into distinct blades, tiny platters of leaves poised to unfold. Are there zucchinis in there? Big shining vegetables carried somehow in the shoots? It doesn’t seem possible.

  He agonizes over what to do next. Should he water more, or less? Should he prune, mulch, heel in, make cuttings? Should he limb the surrounding trees, clear some of the bramble away to provide more light? He tries to remember what his mother had done, the mechanics of her gardening, but can only recall the way she stood, a fistful of weeds trailing from her fist, looking down at her plants as if they were children, gathered at her feet.