Goat Mountain

20

JESUS HAD A PAGAN BURIAL. A CHAMBER WITH ROOM FOR the afterlife, closed off by a great stone. A desert burial, used for thousands of years before him. Not the beginning of any story. All the others rose from the dead also, to drink from their golden cups and drive chariots and parade around with jewelry and servants. Death a busy place. The only difference was that Jesus moved the stone.

Jesus broke the law, broke the separation between living and dead. A collision of our two worlds, and it could only be catastrophic. Jesus released the dead into our lives, set all the dead wandering the earth, freed the wraiths and demons we fear now, invaded the world of the living with all the figures of the afterlife, all the figures of hell, freed from the pagan demonland of Hades. No river and boatman to separate us, and now when night falls we can feel them everywhere, their lungless breath.

God wanted this. He sent his only son as an invasion of the otherworld into ours. This is the story of Jesus. After thousands of years of separate worlds, we finally had to admit that the demonland was inside us, and so we told this story of Jesus moving that stone, opening the gate, flooding our lives with all that we are, sent by god, who is only our own will. Jesus is our recognition of the demon inside us, a recognition of the animal inside us, the beast. A recognition we wanted and needed.

My father believed still in our goodness. He believed we could make things right and keep the demonworld at bay, and so he was destined to struggle and suffer without end. He drove us on in darkness, falling into caverns and compacting into ruts and rises, scraped along both sides, high eerie screes along the body of the truck.

I held on and didn’t know what would be. We could easily have gone off any edge and tumbled to our end. Some of the land around us nearly flat, but before the upper glades we’d be driving along drop-offs, long falls of hundreds of feet into rock and air, and I had no way of measuring where we were. I had lost all reference, same as that ancient boat trip into the lower world.

You’ll bury him, my father yelled over the engine and scraping. You’ll bury him and we’ll never mention him again.

I think I knew even at the time, even at eleven years old, that nothing buried ever is gone.

The land remained dark, even as the sky became the blue of a gun barrel, hard and nearly black, even as the stars began to fade and I could see the trees against the heavens, rough shadows in the sky forming and falling away and forming again, sudden apparitions, still without reference.

You’re going to dig down until your hands bleed, my father yelled. You’re going to pay.

I just held on as we lurched through the end of that night. It’s unclear what payment has ever done. Nothing has been undone. Every act has remained. What is it in us that makes us believe we can pay? This is a belief in some order, some accounting.

My father stayed perfectly on that road he couldn’t see, followed its every twist and turn as every shape leered from above and fell behind, outran all that would cling or follow except, of course, the dead man, who followed just behind us.

The sky bluer, less black, and in addition to the dark branches of trees passing above I could see the woolly shapes of brush to the sides, could see contour of the land, of the mountain rising to our left. The high ridge that led all the way to the top of Goat Mountain, tapering here, reachable, and somewhere just below it the upper glade, a bare patch of grass that fell steeply into pines. The highest open space, with a view out over everything. The dead man would have the million-dollar view, as the dead always have. We don’t believe in death.

The road visible now as two pale tracks with a dark hump between, and the brush and trees vanished from my side. I looked down a long fall into nothing, an edge of the world. The twilight arrived just in time. Boulders and rock faces blue apparitions faint and shifting, pulling from below. A feeling I can remember now, one that has never vanished or diminished, that deep chasm and its tug at us.

My father did not ease off the gas, and he did not hug the uphill side but simply drove on, the tires inches away from the edge, and I must have been holding my breath and willing the truck to remain on its path until we curved to the left and away from this void into trees again, darkened and again nearly blind as we arrived.

I remained in the cab, holding my rifle. I did not want to touch the dead man.

My father came around and opened my door. You’re going to do this, he said. You’re going to do this right now. And I’ll hold your rifle. You’ll need both hands.

I did not want to give up my rifle.

Get out here now.

I couldn’t move. This mountain the wrong place to be. But my father grabbed the front of my jacket and yanked me out. Held me upright in the dust and took the rifle. Tall, much taller than I was, looming over me, a giant without understanding. He did not seem weak. Made stronger without my grandfather near, each generation sapping the next.

I’ll carry the shovel, too, he said, and he pushed me and I walked to the tailgate and let it down and the dead man’s hands reached out. Enough light now in that blue dawn to see the hollow shape of him, thin and pale. With his head ducked and arms up where he could not see, he looked like a child asking for help, asking to be lifted.

Touching the dead. We’re not supposed to touch the dead. This is why we make a comfortable afterlife for them, so they will not reach out. We hope to distract them, keep them busy. Burial is a hope.

Grab his wrists and pull him out.

I can’t do that.

You killed him. So now you bury him.

I can’t touch him.

My father levered a shell into the.30-.30, a sound so loud I suddenly realized how quiet it was. A few small birds, light wings and leaves, an occasional chirp and nothing more. The sky changing from dark blue to a lighter blue did not make any sound.

My father pressed the end of the barrel into my neck. You’re my son, he said. I’m here to help you. I’m trying to figure out what the hell you are and trying to keep you from becoming that. But if you don’t grab those wrists now, I’m going to pull the trigger.

Cold metal against my neck, pressing in, and a hollow I could not feel but the bullet would travel down that hollow and rip through my neck in an instant so fast it could not be known, and I did believe my father would pull the trigger. He had been pushed too far.

So I grabbed those wrists, cold and mostly bone, and felt the dead man’s curled fingers on my forearms, his fingernails the same as any beak or claw or horn, the part of us made of something other than flesh, the part we want to deny, the reminder. I pulled and was afraid he’d separate, just rip in half, but all of him slid, and he did not complain or say anything at all, and I yanked again and he slid out until I was stepping backward quickly and he was falling, the weight of him off the end of that gate, and I could not let him fall on me, jumped back and let go as he landed hard.

The sound magnified in this bend of road, under these trees. The dead man sly still, waiting for the right moment to make his move. Different from the buck, not rooting into the earth but trickier.

Not far from here was where he had begun, a living man sitting on that rock. Dragged downhill by my father. Dragged again by my grandfather across the meadow at the edge of our camp, and dragged back by my father to be hung a second time. Our lives repetition, not only us but all who came before, and Jesus, too, dragging his cross, form of suffering, form of a human life. In all our stories, we drag and scrape a weight across this earth. Called the Passion. Jesus a story of our pity for ourselves.

Get moving, my father said, as all fathers have said, enforcers generation after generation, slaves on every road.

So I grabbed those hands, fingerclaws scraping the underside of my wrists, and pulled him, and he slid more easily than the buck but was heavier, even hollowed out. He could not return to the earth. His connection had been severed. No root to burrow down, no transformation into plant or rock. The buck elemental still, made of the same material as the stars and trees. But the dead man heavier and heavier, accumulation of weight, gravity hole.

My heels digging into that loose slope of pine needles and leaves and fallen twigs over dirt, catching on rock beneath and the next step slipping again. Dragging in heaves backward, all movement shortened, my pull at one end become only inches of progress, all of him expanding and contracting and slipping back down and I didn’t see how I would ever make it to the upper glade.

The dead man with his heels together, maintaining perfect form, swaying back and forth, a diver coming up from the depths or descending still.

Damn it, my father said, and he yanked one of the dead man’s hands from me and pulled hard up that slope.

I scrambled to keep up, pulling with my right hand and clawing at the hill with my left, bent over low and toes digging in.

The dead man pooling all his weight now, hanging back and not wanting this burial, resisting a second death. Removed from the surface of the earth and sent into darkness, mouth filled with dirt and all light extinguished. Grains compacting above, layer upon layer, and no way to swim back through this, held down and drowned for eternity and lost. After Jesus invaded the world with the dead, we’ve been trying to keep the new dead from rising, the Christian burial no longer a chamber but only a thick layer of dirt, a barrier.

The light flooding the sky now a cruelty, a reminder, false promise. The beginning always shown to us at the end. The sunrise behind this ridge. We would remain in shadow. But the stars were gone and the sky a milky blue, without distance or depth. Even this blue a lie and no longer a promise, and the blue removed from every other thing.

Brown of the pine needles, each bundle of three thin spears curving and held together by a wrapping of darker brown. My face in close. Orange tint to the underside of each spear. My mind needing to focus on something other than the weight and labor.

Scab leaves dry and loose, every light shade of brown. Bracken fern and bedstraw. Wild raspberry low and creeping along the ground, rare green. Male pinecones scattered everywhere, thin and brown and dried out, fallen from the lower parts of the trees, their yellow-green pollen shed, like used sparklers on Fourth of July.

That other world, of other people, lost and far away. Only the two of us here, and the two in camp, and no other humans. The life I inherited was this, and I had no power to change it. There was only the land, and human life no more than rumor. Two plants can graft and grow together, sharing water and nutrients, but not two people.

We hauled that body up the slope, tearing into the ground with our boots, and what I had was endless. Acorns fat and shiny, the crowns covered with yellow dusty hairs. Gold cup oak, or canyon live oak. This was all my father taught me. Not how to live with others or who to be but only how to see, and only this particular place of chaparral and oak and pine, a place lost to me now, and some days I want to shake my small apartment like a cage and break free and run back to where I belong, but I can’t do that, of course. The dead man took everything away.

We moved too quickly up that slope. We charged at everything, and never slowed down, all that would happen determined by momentum alone. We were crazy with outrunning something that could not be outrun. Wherever we ended up, we were still there. We never seemed to understand that what we had to fear was carried inside us. The Greeks understood this, twenty-five hundred years ago, but we’ve forgotten.

That mountain a living thing, and we rose over its flank into the stand of gray pines at the base of the upper glade. My throat burning and skin slick. Blood pulsing even at the backs of my eyes, legs shot. But we didn’t stop. Normally we’d stay low to the ground here, sneak quietly through trees looking for bucks on open slopes above, but this time we huffed and heaved and broke into the open pulling this weight.

The slope steep, seeming almost to overhang, outcrops of dark rock, shelves of grass and the world tilted, curled back over us. My father dragged me and the dead man up a central draw, dragged us through medusahead that looked almost like wheat but could snag in animals’ noses and ears and clung to the laces of our boots, pale barbs.

We traversed then, slipping across that open fall onto a shelf that jutted out and rose high enough to see all the way to the top of Goat Mountain. Everything else lay below, a clear view of everywhere we had been and on across the far valley to the mountains on the other side, mountains everywhere and no human habitation, only a few thin scars of roads.

My legs were trembling as I stood in place, no power left in them.

Well, my father said. This is as good a place as any. In view of where you shot him, but fuck it. I don’t care anymore whether we get caught.

I could see the stone where the poacher had sat, lower along the ridge. In shadow, and I couldn’t see blood from here, but I knew that was the stone, no more than two hundred yards away.

The flat where we stood not much bigger than what you’d need for a tent. The dead man lying on his back still, arms up, not caring where we stopped. Here was fine. He was an easy dead man most of the time, heavy as a sack of bricks but short on demands. He was in the way at the moment, though, lying right where I’d need to dig. There were a few maggots on the white-gray curve of his belly, come up through the bullet hole. Moving along but rolling to the side, a maggot always directionless, roving blind, dreaming of those eyes with their thousand mirrors, inheritance.

My legs were buckling, so I sat, but my father yanked me to my feet.

You don’t get to rest. Grab those hands and we’ll pull him upslope a bit. Then you dig.

Maggots, I said.

I know there are maggots. And maybe you should have to look at them.

My father put his boot under the man’s back and heaved him over, face gone and I realized I hadn’t taken a last look. I needed to see his face again. But all we had now was that cavern of hundreds of small white maggots crawling over each other hunting for flesh. No longer iridescent with flies, no longer beautiful, gone soundless and flat. The future we have to look forward to, learning to hear the chewing of a maggot, devoured slowly by everything that writhes, waiting for an afterlife that happened only once, when Jesus moved that stone, and isn’t coming again.