Dirt

Chapter 28

Manzanita. This was what Galen found in that wilderness. He didn’t see it coming, didn’t know it could grow here, thought it grew only on hills. And then he was standing before it, red bark thin as paper. Smooth trunks almost iridescent, the shaded sections pooling light into turquoise and the shimmer of eyes. The trunks swollen, obscene red limbs, round and full, bursting the skin where it fell away in scrolls. He reached out to pluck a scroll, left a rip that showed a lighter white-green, the flesh not red.

So little to hold in his hand, this curl. Nothing at all once it was separated from the tree, from its becoming. He dropped it and heard no sound. The leaves bright green and hard, firm teardrops no bigger than an inch across, velvety and improbable in this heat, among everything else so dry.

The manzanita seemed to have its own source of water, hoarded and secret. A dozen trunks all curved outward in a kind of basket, fending off and creating space. Galen imagined a taproot, something that reached farther down than the others would ever know, but he wasn’t sure that was true. It might be drifting shallow on the surface.

He wanted to honor the manzanita but didn’t know how. All this time, and he hadn’t known it was here. He crouched down and crawled in close but couldn’t get to the center. A kind of cage to keep him out.

Galen crawled away from the manzanita, liked moving on hand and knee, liked seeing the ground and having the dry grass rise high above him. So much better not to have blank air above. The way his body moved in a crawl, catlike, and his awareness increased. Sound and vision in close, and a sense that other things watched him. He wanted to come face-to-face with a rattlesnake, wanted to feel his heart leap.

He imagined his mother down close to the ground, lying on her side, conserving. Hidden away in the shade of the shed, near the walnut drying racks, seeking cool earth. He imagined her skin thinning like paper, like the manzanita bark, drying.

Thistle in close a kind of fortress rising in layers, broadest at the base. Waxy green and thick, with white milky veins, and the purple flower far above made of tassle, of silk. Thistle and manzanita could hold color as the others dried and went yellow and brown, but thistle the more lush, that white milk pulled from nowhere.

Galen crawled toward the base of a live oak, into greater shade, the spines writing along his back in thin cuts. Fallen leaves cutting his hands and knees. Ants everywhere, red and black, living in deadfall. Galen lay down among them and waited. Lay here as his mother lay there, sharing the same ground.

These are the true things, Galen said. My mother might be dead. Or she’s dying. And I’m not helping her. I didn’t bring her water, and I’m not helping her now. I’m lying here in dry grass and live oak, and I’m waiting for her to die. That’s what I’m really doing.

The ants all over his body, small visitors taking their impossible walks. To the moon and back was nothing for an ant. Whenever an ant returned home, it headed out again. Because an ant never had to think about what it was doing. There were no ants trying to understand their mothers.

I don’t understand much, Galen said. I’m working on it, but I still don’t understand much. I have a few ideas. I know she was trying to send her father to prison. I know she confused the two of us. I think that’s right. And because she hated her father, I think maybe she always hated me. I think maybe it was war from the very start, and either she had to die or I had to die.

He ran his good hand through the fallen live oak leaves, all the tiny spines. The dirt dry underneath. He cleared a patch and could see cracks.

He thought of the fuck-grimace on his face, his mother seeing that, hearing him moan as he came onto Jennifer. The shame he’d felt. That was the problem with mothers. Always watching, and who we became wasn’t something we wanted anyone to see. Maybe our mothers had to die. The idea that we wanted to sleep with our mothers and kill our fathers was ridiculous. We could never even find our fathers.

War from the very start. Our mothers needed to kill us too. His grandmother would never be good while Helen was alive. She’d never be able to think of herself as good. Her entire life would have to be constantly forgotten. And Helen would never be able to erase her childhood until she erased Jennifer. Jennifer an unwelcome reminder.

Helen was fighting for Jennifer, trying to save her from the favoritism and lies and money and everything else, but no one had tried to save Helen when she was young, and her rage at this was why she could be abusing Jennifer. Jennifer had said that was how they showed love. So Helen was a kind of tragedy, destroying her daughter as she tried to save her, every step of her life blind, all of her efforts undoing all her other efforts. And Galen’s own mother even more blind, keeping a son as a husband to punish a father.

This land was not meant to be lived on. There could be no belonging here. His family had come from Germany and Iceland and settled in the middle of a desert. They had put up the hedge, let developers put up the wall, separated themselves from other people. They found the one country in the world where it was possible to live entirely unconnected to anyone else. The one country where family could be reduced to only family, isolated, and his grandfather formed that family in his own image. A forging in violence and shame that had gained an unstoppable momentum. Helen had a daughter and saw herself in that daughter and punished. Galen’s mother had a son and saw her father in that son and punished. Helen and his mother doing essentially the same thing, both out of control.

Galen didn’t know how to find another path. He would wait for his mother to die, but he didn’t know what would happen after that. He might bring his grandmother home. That seemed right. But beyond that, he couldn’t see a thing.

Some of the red ants were biting him, which was annoying, so Galen crawled out from under the live oak and stood in the tall grass. Yellow-brown sea, and he was submerged to the shoulders. He waded farther into nowhere, and he felt a sadness all through him. A tired, heavy sadness. Dry stalks, no wind, the sun pressing down, and the sadness hung from each rib. This was not a meditation, only a weight. His family a weight. Better if none of them had ever been. He walked and burned and was scratched and pierced by unnumbered things as he passed, and this wandering was all that was left him, just wandering in circles until finally he was standing at the edge of the lawn again, looking down at the artificially green grass, the oasis.

The pile on the lawn would have to be cleaned up. And his mother’s room. And the boards removed from around the shed, and the furrow. The lock. Someone could come and see. He needed to erase all signs.

Looking down at his own body, the dirt covering his feet and legs and belly, he knew this was what he needed to erase first. If anyone saw him like this, they would wonder.

Galen walked into the house, up to his room, to the shower. Cold at first, shivering immediately, the incredible contrast from the oven. But then the water warmed, and he stood in place and watched rivulets of mud, the deltas forming down his legs, like veins, a patchwork of external veins, our blood outside our bodies, provided by the world. The mud clinging to him, large dark islands, wet black and the rivers between them eating away at the banks, rivers reddish from the burned skin exposed.

All of him stinging. His hand the worst, but all his burned skin, also. He turned up the temperature, wanted to see his flesh glow hot, wanted the rivers to look like embers. The mud persistent, clinging and heavy, baked onto him. Mostly gone from his arms and shoulders and chest, where the water hit, but holding still on his thighs and almost untouched on his shins. Red rivers widening slowly.

Galen didn’t know what any of it meant, but he knew dirt was his teacher. At every moment, unexpected, dirt was showing him something. Better than going to a university. He might never go, even with all the money. He might just stay right here, in this old house and orchard, and learn everything.

But it was hard to believe in a future, hard to care.

He was in so much pain he finally had to turn the temperature down. His whole body pulsing in the burn. He fumbled at the shampoo with one hand, tried to work it into his hair but there was so much dirt. The top of his head caked, so he put his head in the stream of water and just ran one hand over it for a long time. This felt right, standing with his head bowed and rubbing a hand over it, an expression of despair. He moaned a little to go with it, and that felt right. Waiting for his mother to die. Transcendence seemed far away. The big problem was that we could never see far enough ahead. How could we transcend if we kept getting ambushed?

Great smears of mud across his thighs as he scrubbed with soap. The black becoming lighter brown and then washed away. Small stones gathered at the drain, and bits of leaf and grass and thorn.

Bending down for his shins and calves, scrubbing until the last of the dirt was gone, a kind of loss. It had felt right to be covered in dirt. He was naked now.

He turned off the water. His hand did not look good. Sore and a bit puffy and red at the edges, infected. He dried carefully with a towel and looked for Neosporin. Neosporin was a belief in the future. He found it in a cabinet and applied liberally, then wrapped his hand in clean gauze, padded into his room and pulled on a clean T-shirt and shorts, clean socks and his dirty old Converse high-tops. Then he went to her room.

Everything on the floor. The bed dark with dirt. He felt tired. He didn’t want to deal with this. And the shed was more important anyway. He had to remove the boards he’d nailed around in a kind of belt. That would draw attention.

Half waking, Galen said. We are half waking, going through the motions. I hammered all those nails, and now I need to take them out.

Down the stairs and into the kitchen, where he gulped at water, always so thirsty, and he ate two pieces of bread and then drank more water.

Outside, it was late afternoon now. Time passing. That was what he wanted. He wanted the day to end, but time was so slow.

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.