Authors: David Vann
Dirt (19 page)
T
he 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 at 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 wasâa rake, maybeâand 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.
He dug his hands under her body, working along the cool earth, leaned forward, embracing her, and pulled to turn her over as gently as he could.
Her legs and hips facing upward now, and he scooted higher, worked his arms fully around until he could ease her onto her back and was holding her close. He lay his face against her breast. He would rest here a moment. Mom, he said.
His breath tightened and shook and the sobbing rocked his chest. He had never wanted his mother to die. She was all he had.
Mom, he said, and the grief was more than he'd expected. He needed to remember that she wasn't real, that she was only an illusion, manifested here to teach him. His final attachment. There was no longer anything to hold him to this world, and that was right. That was good and necessary.
She was still warm, her breast still warm. I love you, he said. Thank you for coming in to my life. I honor you. Mother. He let there be a ceremonial pause and then said it again. Mother.
He held her as tightly as he could in his arms, and he imagined he could hear a heartbeat, but he knew it was only his own blood and breath.
Mom, he said, and he let himself cry, let himself sob and weep, didn't try to hold back anymore, pressed close against her, and now he thought he really did hear a heartbeat, and he sat up quickly.
He sat still and listened, as if he might hear it again through the air, and then he stood and got out of that grave quick and grabbed the shovel and tossed a load of dirt onto her, but a shovelful was not enough. This was not fast enough.
Galen lunged at the biggest pile on his hands and knees. A mountain range that he needed to move. He braced his feet against a tractor wheel to push with his chest and both arms, turning himself into a plow, filling the grave. Her face and upper body gone now, the dirt already deep, and he shifted to the side, braced against the other wheel, collapsed the next mountain. He was a giant, forming the earth, deciding what the world would be. Origins. Coming closer to origins, another gift of the dirt. A cataclysm of earth, centuries high, spilling down over her stomach and hips and legs and feet, and even after she was gone, he kept pushing, inhaled the good breath of dirt, felt it caked in his eyes and mouth, taste of time, of the accumulation of time and its release, and felt his hands like claws.
I
'd like to thank the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the University of San Francisco for generous support during the writing of this novel, and Colm TóibÃn, Janet Burroway, and David Kirby for recommending me.
I'd also like to thank everyone at Harper, especially Gail Winston, Jonathan Burnham, Jane Beirn, and Maya Ziv, and everyone at Inkwell, especially Kim Witherspoon, David Forrer, Lyndsey Blessing, Patricia Burke, and Alexis Hurley.
And I must of course thank Galen Palmer, my best friend in high school, whose name I've borrowed here. Early on, he was the one who helped turn my life around.
D
avid Vann
is the author of
Legend of a Suicide
, which has won
ten prizes, including the Prix Médicis étranger in France and the Premi
Llibreter in Spain. Translated into eighteen languages,
Legend of a Suicide
is an international bestseller, has been on
forty Best Books of the Year lists worldwide, was selected by
The
New Yorker
Book Club and the
Times
Book Club, was read in full on North German radio, and will be
made into a film. His novel
Caribou Island
is an
international bestseller, was a finalist for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel
Prize, and was read on the BBC. It will also be made into a film. He is the
author of the bestselling memoir
A Mile Down
:
The True Story of a Disastrous Career at Sea
and
Last Day on Earth
:
A
Portrait of the NIU School Shooter
, winner of the AWP Nonfiction
Prize. A current Guggenheim fellow and former Wallace Stegner fellow and
National Endowment for the Arts fellow, he is a professor at the University of
San Francisco and has written for
The Atlantic
,
Esquire
,
Outside
,
Men's Health
,
Men's
Journal
, the
Sunday Times
, the
Observer
, the
Guardian
,
the
Sunday Telegraph
, the
Financial Times
,
Elle UK
,
Esquire UK
,
Esquire
Russia
,
National Geographic Adventure
,
Writer's Digest
,
McSweeney's
, and other magazines and has appeared in documentaries
for the BBC, NOVA, National Geographic, CNN, and E! Entertainment.
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