Dirt

Chapter 21

This meditation became the longest of Galen’s life, the most sustained, the most beautiful. The shovel into the earth, the swing, the dirt suspended in air and then falling, filling the gap between wood and untilled ground, the gap between human and earth, between past and present, self and truth. The old planks above becoming all that was transitory, pitted and weathering, meeting all that was permanent below, and the new dirt bridging the gap, dissolving distinctions.

His mother a constant sound, an accompaniment, an honoring of the movement. Her fingers in the gap, enforcing distinctions, trying to divide the world, then buried again, a constant progression through opposites. The clearing of the gap and then the filling, the vanishing.

Galen could feel his hands tearing, the hot blisters forming and then breaking and leaking and the raw pain in flashes but then it would fade again, and he remained far away, watched all of it, watched his breath. The heat become a dense layer around him, radiating from his skull especially, and he threw off his shirt, lost no more than a stroke or two and was back in the swing of the shovel, the movement. His skin bare to the sun now, and he could feel each individual ray like a dart through space and time, arrived from the origin of the world, the light not only of our sun but of all suns, finding his back now and piercing his skin, the heat and light-headedness and piercing a gift, not a distraction. They only increased his focus.

He wanted something to drink, but that would wait. That was only samsara, distraction, and what he was riding here was his final meditation. He would ride this one all the way out, all the way past this incarnation, past unnumbered incarnations, past all that would hold him back, if only he could hold on.

But that was pride. He needed to not think of the meditation as accomplishment. He needed to stop evaluating. He needed to remain focused on the dirt, each grain. The surface, whiter on top where it had been bleached by sun, darker beneath, the odd, broken shapes, rough faces. Each grain and clod and rock as the shovelful hung in the air, to see the position of each in relation to every other, to see the grid, the pattern, and then watch the collapse.

His soul had done this through many centuries already, watched entire lifetimes form and fade, watched other mothers come and go. How many lifetimes? It was more likely he went back millennia, not just centuries. He might have been there when the caves were painted almost twenty thousand years ago, might have painted many of the horses and bulls himself. The cave cool and damp, somewhere in France, the cave dark, a place others were afraid to go, and each day he visited with his torch, brought charcoal from the campfire for his art. And there was a young woman in the camp who noticed this, who looked up from berry-picking when he passed, and who eventually followed him into the cave.

Damn it, he said. This was supposed to be a meditation, not a porn show.

What? his mother said.

I’m not talking to you.

You’re calling this a porn show? You’re burying your mother and calling it a porn show?

Galen slammed the wall with the shovel. Shut the fuck up! he yelled. I’m not talking to you. You have no idea. You don’t know a single fucking thing that’s going through my head.

You said porn show.

Galen slammed the shovel against the wood over and over. The air around him on fire, and he was dizzy and drenched and seeing sunspots. His hands torn up. His shoulders so weak he dropped the shovel and stumbled around to the shade of the fig.

He sat in the cast-iron chair and slumped forward onto the table. He was breathing hard. The air had no oxygen in it.

You’ve called me crazy, she said, but let’s think about this. It sounded like she was close against the back wall, only a few feet from him. Her voice was rough, hoarse from the yelling. You’ve locked your mother in a shed, and you’re trying to kill her.

I’m not trying to kill you.

You’re mounding up dirt all along the wall, some weird kind of burial, and you don’t listen when she screams. And then you start talking about porn.

Who is she?

What?

You said I don’t listen when she screams.

She is me.

Exactly. And who’s crazy?

We could find you help.

I thought you wanted to send me to prison.

They have prisons that are also mental health facilities.

I can’t listen to you, Galen said. I can’t listen to you ever again. He walked away with his hands over his ears and went into the house, looked through the kitchen drawers for earplugs. She had some wax earplugs somewhere. All the old silver, real silver, an insanity right here in the kitchen. Everything about their lives was insanity. And what he was doing was cutting through that. He was the antidote. He would return to his meditation and not be distracted by her.

Every small thing from the last century had been saved in these drawers. Ancient rubber bands, metal thumbtacks, a wooden ruler, buttons and scraps of twine, nothing ever thrown away, everything saved just in case. Galen removed a drawer, releasing the catch at the back, and took it out to the lawn, dumped a small pile of things brown or metallic, things that hadn’t seen the sun in many decades.

Then he went for another drawer, and another, and he dumped them all. He took the drawers not only from the kitchen but also from the pantry, hallway, and dining room. He left everything heavy, all dishes and silverware, but took every drawer full of random little shit and dumped it. No sign of earplugs, but this project had become something else anyway, a purging, a burning back into sanity, a burning away of the old and useless.

Here’s your past, he said.

What? Her voice muffled. The shed not a great facilitator of conversation.

Here’s your past, he said more loudly, and then he had an inspiration. Your photos, he said.

What are you doing to my photos?

Nothing yet, but I think they’re about to join this pile. Everything can burn.

No. You leave my stuff alone, Galen.

You’re welcome to come stop me whenever you’d like.

Galen!

He entered her room and just stood there and looked around. This was the last time he would see all her things, the last time her room would be her room, and that seemed worth taking a moment. He would try to remember what this had looked like.

Mom, he said. Mom. He was trying out the sound of that, the accumulation of all that made the illusion. This room was part of it, this room that pretended a past, that stretched all the way back through her childhood. It was all illusion but had a convincing weight. Everything from the time period: the old wooden toys, the clothing, even her childhood drawings on the walls, of a house and family, the four of them holding hands under an enormous sun. That distorted sun should have been the clue.

Her bookshelf had the photo albums. He grabbed two of the older ones, the white covers like faded linoleum, and walked out to the lawn.

Got a couple albums, he said. Memory lane.

Leave those alone.

Goats, he said. A lot of goats, right out here in the orchard, and you in your sundress.

I don’t have copies of any of those, Galen.

The goats were looking at the camera, posing along with Galen’s mother and aunt. His aunt older, much taller, and with no bow in her hair. She already looked unhappy. His mother smiling her cutest smile, performing, her head tilted a little to the side. You were kind of like Shirley Temple, he said.

Put those away, Galen.

Is that who you were trying to be? Is that who you’re being now when you’re all fake and weird?

Galen waited, but his mother didn’t respond. Never mind, Galen said. I know you don’t answer when it’s anything real. The cute moments are a sacred thing that can’t be talked about. He yanked the page out of the album and crinkled it, the layers of card stock and photo and thin plastic film.

No! she yelled. You stop that right now.

This is kind of fun. I like the shed. I can do whatever I like. I hope you have an eyeball stuck to one of the gaps between the planks so you can see all this. I’d hate for you to miss out.

You’re worse than anything I could imagine, worse than anything I can say. I don’t even have a name for you.

Try son. The word son might be a possibility. Here’s a photo of the walnuts. The fucking walnuts, and all the drying racks laid out.

Put that away.

Grandma and Grandpa aren’t that old here. I can almost imagine them having real lives, being people who weren’t just born old.

Their lives were real.

I don’t know, he said, but it does seem possible in this photo. The problem is that there are no answers to anything. Why did he beat her? Why did he work all the time? How did she lose her memory?

You’re talking about entire lives. No one can explain an entire life.

Wow. You’re talking with me about your parents, sort of. This is new.

I’ve always talked about them.

No you haven’t. You’ve never said anything real about anything important.

Galen.

It’s true. Why did he beat her?

He didn’t beat her.

See?

None of it was the way you think it was.

Well then enlighten me.

We were a family.

No. That’s one thing you were not. Because the word family means something special to you, and your family has never fit that word. You know what’s odd about this photo with the walnut racks?

No answer from his mother. What’s odd, he continued, is that they’re still working. They don’t stop for the photo. They just kind of look up for a moment. But they’re still bent over the racks. And the racks go on forever. That’s what your father’s life was like. Just work that stretched forever in all directions, work for work’s sake, and nothing else. No family.

I was there, so I’m the one who knows. We were a family, and we didn’t just work. Dad played the accordion, and Mom played the piano, and we’d sing songs together.

Grandma plays piano?

Yeah. Almost everything is something you don’t know.

Okay. So let’s say I want to believe in that family. I still have to get everything to fit. So why did he beat her?

Damn you. He didn’t beat her.

Galen ripped the photo from the album and crinkled it up.

Stop! Her voice broke, ragged and spent.

Save your voice, he said. The photo’s no loss. None of this happened, after all. He didn’t beat her, and there was no family, and there were no drying racks, no walnuts.

Galen could hear his mother sobbing now, but he didn’t care. He looked at the other photos and ripped them out, a page at a time.

Here you are with a new bicycle, he said, and he ripped out that page. Here you are with a dog. What was that dog’s name again?

Schatze, she said, and this made her sob harder.

Just a dog, he said, and not much of a dog. Those legs are about three inches high. What kind of dog is that again?

A dachshund.

Yeah, that’s right. What a mistake of a dog.

I loved Schatze.

What’s the name mean again?

Mein Schatz is my treasure or dear one or my love.

Galen ripped the page out. Well there are a lot of photos of my love, but not after today.

I hate you.

Yeah, I know. We’ve already covered that. Time to move on to something new.

I’m your mother.

Covered that point, too.

You have to let me out.

And again the familiar ground. I had hoped to get through these albums before going for the earplugs, but I may have to get them sooner.

You’re a monster.

Yeah yeah.

You’re not my son.

Uh-huh. He looked at another photo of Schatze, by the Christmas tree. His mother in a holiday dress that looked thick, like it was made of velvet, maybe. And the tree huge, out in the main room that was two stories high. Tinsel and hundreds of ornaments and a star on top. A blanket of felt underneath, and all the presents, piles of presents. Schatze with his paws up on her, straining to lick her face, and she had both arms around him, was laughing and trying to get her face away from his tongue. It almost looked like what she said. He could almost imagine the family she was claiming. And maybe they had good times. Maybe the good times stretched on and became most of the time. Maybe the beatings and favoritism and fakery were only occasional, the exceptions to how their lives were. But he would never know. His mother couldn’t be trusted, because she was trying too hard to protect and deny. His aunt couldn’t be trusted because she was trying too hard to destroy. And his grandmother couldn’t remember. These photos were too brief, only moments. They couldn’t describe what a day felt like, how all the hours of even one day moved along. And this was all a distraction anyway, the deepest form of samsara, the belief in belonging, the belief in being tied to a family and a place and time. The final attachment, the one that was the foundation for the illusion of self.