Dirt

Chapter 29

Galen worked on the furrow in darkness, no moon. Felt his way along the walls with the shovel. The air shallow, an ebb time. Sound magnified.

He was using the flat-faced shovel, jamming its squared end down along the boards into the loose dirt he had piled, then pulling toward him. The dirt heavy and invisible and loud. The scuff of the face as he dragged each load a few feet, spreading the soil. Making a bed for a new garden, planting his footsteps.

It could seem at times that his mother wasn’t really in there. Or that she could vanish on her own. It could seem there were no other people in the world. And whenever he got this sense, he tried to hold on to it, because he liked being the last person on earth. He found that idea enormously comforting.

Galen liked labor. He liked pulling the dirt away from this wall, clearing and smoothing, and he wished that when he’d finished he could start over and find dirt newly piled where he had begun. What was difficult, always, was the transition, moving on to the next thing and settling in. He liked repetition. This was what religion was made of. Repeating the same words over and over, or prostrations, or sitting and focusing on breath after breath. What terrified us was the void, not knowing what would happen next or what we should do or who we should be. Repetition was a focal point, a shelter.

Galen waited in darkness for the rise of that moon. He drove the shovel down, pulled and walked backward and spread the soil, but all the while he was waiting. And when it did finally come, its face was impossibly large, warped by being too close to the earth. A lesson there, the distortion from proximity. The moon would not know its real shape until it hung on its own.

Engorged now with light, fat on the horizon, heavy. The small man kneeling in prayer, magnified so large Galen could see and feel the space above the man’s head, the lofting emptiness between the man and the snake’s open mouth. Galen let the shovel fall and held his arms out and gazed at the moon, honoring the fullness knowing it was shrinking in every moment, cooling into its harder shape, more distant, going white as bone, the color leaching. Brother moon, he said. Each of us alone on our path.

Galen lowered his arms and looked at the orchard transformed, the trees emerged into the second day, moon’s day. The walnuts responsible. Standing here all these years, they’d had some influence over the shape of things. They couldn’t deny that.

Galen picked up the shovel and returned to his labor. Finishing the orchard-facing wall, southern wall. The shed placed perfectly to meet the four directions, and that couldn’t have been accidental, but Galen didn’t know what sense to make of it. Their house to the north, the fig tree and afternoon tea to the north, and the lawn and the large oak with its love seat beneath. All civilization. So perhaps that meant something. The road to the west. The orchard waiting to the south and extending to the east, and Galen realized only now that he had never walked all the way to that eastern edge, to the source. That seemed significant, but it could also mean nothing. Systems of thought, the chains of the mind. Easy to get lost. He needed to focus on his shoveling.

Good scrape of dirt. That was what he could rely on. In the moonlight, he could watch now as the dirt fanned out to either side of the shovel. He could shape the edges. Patterns that might be read.

The work was a good thing, good to have a distraction. He finished this wall and moved to the eastern wall where the furrow had never been finished, where he’d hit the untilled earth and stopped.

She had never tried to dig her way out. Pointless furrow, and pointless now to remove it. Who would care if some dirt were piled along part of a shed wall? But what he was really trying to do, he knew, was pass time. And so he slotted the shovel in along the wall, moved his good hand lower on the handle, then pulled slowly and walked backward, spread the earth. Looked at the edges like a wake in water, ran the shovel lightly along each side to smooth. He didn’t want to see her, didn’t want to find her. He wanted to put that off as long as possible.

But the furrow ended. Before long, there was no furrow left to remove, and it was still night, the moon higher now, small and distant and sliding away. Well, Galen said. There was no more work to do on the shed, except removing the lock, and that would have to come later. So he went to the pile on the lawn.

He had meant to burn this, but that would draw too much attention. He would bring the drawers out here, one at a time, fill them with crap, and slide them back in place. No one would ever know the difference.

So he did that. Labor. Walk out with a drawer, kneel on the grass, scoop piles of clips and rubber bands and old knobs and buttons, the family, pieces of family and time, and let them fall into the drawer. Reordered now, confused and moved, items returned to different locations, a disruption of pattern, but had there ever been any pattern? Disruption or fate. It was never clear. We did what we did, and wondered, and that was it. Blind movements in a void.

The crumpled photos would not fit into the drawers. And they wouldn’t go back into the albums, obviously. So he wasn’t sure what to do. He knelt in the grass and looked at them in moonlight. They were his now, no longer hers, and so he needed to preserve. He tried to flatten them, but once photo paper was bent, it was bent, the creases white. Schatze a darker shape, a kind of bullet among the photos, an intruder, gone before Galen was born.

He gathered the photos, black-and-white blooms, and cradled them in his arms, walked upstairs to his room and let them fall into his closet. Then he closed the door and they were gone. As simple as that.

What was left was her room. Clothing everywhere on the floor. Hangers loose, and he rehung her dresses, coats, shirts. Arranged them neatly in order, from longest to shortest. Felt the fabrics, smooth and cool to the touch. The colors bright. Turquoise and pink. This room would become a kind of museum, and he would visit to remember her, so it was important to put everything away carefully now.

A life could be contained in such a small space. Forty-six years in one room. Sacred room. When the floor was clean and everything hung, Galen bundled her blanket and sheets into a ball, walked out to the lawn and shook them in moonlight to remove the dirt, felt like a criminal. While everyone else slept, he was out here whipping sheets in the air, removing all sign of what had happened. Not as if he’d had a choice, though. The thing about a path was that it always led somewhere, and we could never pause on any path. We were always moving.

Galen carried the sheets and blanket to the pantry, to the washing machine. Watched the water fill, poured in detergent, and closed the lid.

It was the middle of the night, but Galen decided to fix lemonade, with real lemons, the way his mother had. He walked out to the small lemon trees along the hedge. The giant fig tree dwarfing all else, casting shadows as the moon went down, large leaves like paw prints against the side of the shed, some mythic beast passing without sound.

Galen felt hunted, exposed, unsafe. He grabbed an armful of lemons and hurried back into the house, focused on his task and tried to think of nothing else. Cut the lemons in half and ground them down against the juicer, poured each time it was full. Added water, added sugar, stirred with the long glass handle and bulb.

He poured himself a glass and sat at the table. On display for anything that might look in from outside, and he would not hear the approach because of the sound of the washer. He tried to enjoy the lemonade, but soon enough he was flicking off the light. He couldn’t return to the table. He held his glass and stepped back into a dark corner from which he could look out. Nothing could come from behind.

The chugging of the washer obscenely loud. A suck and slosh. Galen stood in the darkness and watched and waited.

The house impossibly large. Nowhere to hide within it. Too many windows and doors. A hundred things could be waiting in here and he’d never know. Too risky, even, to try to get to the stairs. Galen wanted daylight. Darkness connected all places at once and magnified the vacuum in his ears and the thumping of his heart.

The house did not feel inanimate. It had played a role in all that had happened here. And Galen wished he could see ahead. If he brought his grandmother home, that might appease the house. Wood could return to wood.

Galen set his glass quietly on the floor and moved slowly along the wall toward the stairs. The washer a thing insane, bucking and chugging, calling too much attention to this place, drawing everything from any quieter place outside.

Galen ran. He ran around the corner and up the stairs into his mother’s room, closed the door and locked it, then panicked that something was in here with him. He batted at the wall for the light switch but didn’t find it, felt something behind him and could hardly breathe, then hit the switch and turned and crouched and saw nothing.

The room bright, her bare mattress, uncovered bed, and everything placed neatly in her closet and on the shelves. Her room the way it had always been, and he didn’t know how he could have been so jumpy. Fear of the dark was the opposite of transcendence. The exact opposite. The worst direction possible. Cavemen cowering near the fire, looking over a shoulder, listening for the snap of wood. Fear of the dark was full belief in the world, full enslavement, and it meant there had been no progression. Somehow, all that he had learned was not accumulating. Instead of approaching a goal, he was appearing in flashes and then vanishing again, with no control over where he might appear next.

Galen slowed his breath and walked over to his mother’s bed and lay down. He would keep the light on, he knew. That helpless against himself, that ruled by nothing.