Goat Mountain

6

ALL THE AIR GONE OUT OF THE WORLD, AND MY RIBS PINNED down, being crushed. An enormous weight, and I woke to my grandfather sitting on me. One hand on my face, pushing my head back against the ground, his other hand high in the air, holding his knife, ready to slash my throat like the throat of any sacrificial animal.

My legs moving on their own, kicking at the ground, and my left arm, free, punching into his side, but the rest of me was pinned.

He was staring down at me, that wide expanse of face featureless and the color of bone in starlight. No recognition, only a blank look into the hollowness of the world, and that knife held high, ready.

I could have cried out, could have asked my father for help, but that would have required time and sequence, one act following another, and my grandfather above me with that knife was outside of time. That moment an eternity and also an instant, and it held every other moment between the two of us.

Waterwheels here at the creek, his thick fingers holding an impossibly tiny nail in place against a thin slat of wood, tapping with a hammer, tapping lightly, careful not to split. Placing that slat between uprights in the stream, and the wheel coming to life immediately, a pulse to its revolutions, a pause between each of the two flings from water, and that pulse a reflection of our own blood.

Those hands on the pier at the edge of the lake holding a catfish in moonlight. Slick dark dream created from water, from water and mud and whatever quickens in each living thing, mouth wide and gasping, rimmed by tendrils, an ugliness and beauty that would not be believed. Hands that never hesitated, that ripped that hook from deep inside the fish even if every organ inside was attached, even if the entire stomach had to be pulled out through that mouth. The tail churning side to side through air that had no thickness, nothing to push against, and the flesh in folds, loose-skinned, invented too quickly.

The lake with its own stagnant breath always close, rotting of dead carp and birds caught in the tules, rotting of algae on the rocks, baked each day in the sun and then exhaling at night. The air thick with water and rot and these mudcats rising out of that, and my grandfather made of that also. A presence that had never begun but had always been.

I waited for that knife to come down. Nothing I could do against it, my throat exposed and the rest of me helpless. My grandfather as large and unfeeling as mountains.

I can’t help but think now of Abraham and Isaac, of course, and I wonder whether every story in the Bible comes from Cain. A riddle, all of it, testing a man and finding him worthy because he’s willing to kill? Cain as our goodness, our faith, our murderousness as our salvation? No guidance is possible from the Bible. Only confusion.

And what does it mean that this was my grandfather, not my father? How do we read our lives when the story has veered off from what we know? A grandfather reaches further back, is more a father than the father himself. For him, the sacrifice is greater, the erasure reaching further into the future, but he also feels nothing, and so is there any sacrifice at all?

My grandfather did not come from god. I’m sure of that. He came from something older, unthinking, unfeeling. He came from something as true as rock and stars, a place of no recognition, before names. And what he offered was annihilation.

But not this night. This night the knife did not come down. My grandfather rose to his feet and air entered my lungs again and he turned and walked back to his bed. A messenger with no message, sent by nothing. I lay with my heart clenching and the oxygen flooding everywhere, and I had to put my arms out not to fall off that ground.

I could smell smoke from the fire still, last smoke, and the occasional pop of a coal. I could hear water and wind rising as the blood ebbed in my temples, and I didn’t know where I could hide. All places here exposed.

I waited until my pulse and breath were as near silent as they could be, and I waited until the soft snoring of the men was enough that it might include my grandfather, and then I rose in my socks, no boots, and moved slowly toward the creek. Each foot placed in the pine needles and tested, making sure no small branches or twigs might snap. Crouched and arms wide for balance, a kind of bird alighting in the shadows. The heat falling from me, the night air cold.

I passed down through camp and made it to the truck. I was not far from the dead man. His sack white in the darkness, all color leached away, and I must have swayed in place, because he seemed to be moving. A pendulum ticking away in that night, as my grandfather had said.

I stood with my hand on the driver’s door and waited, listening for any sound of my grandfather, keeping an eye also on the dead man for whatever he might do, and when I could wait no longer, I opened that door and the cab light came on and my hand lunged in behind the seat to grab my rifle, cool stock and colder metal, and I pulled it free, the heft of it, and closed the door gently, only a click, and the light was off and I was standing in darkness again, blinded. I wouldn’t be able to see if anything came at me. I could no longer see the dead man in his sack. I stepped away backward, quickly, crouched, the rifle held before me, and half-ran backward down that road, an ape reversed, far away from camp, and lay down in the dirt with the rifle at my shoulder, ready to skylight any man or beast that might come charging.

I had only three shells in the rifle. No extra ammunition. As quietly as possible, I levered one of the shells into the chamber, ready to fire, my finger just above the trigger. Exposed on this road, forest on every side that could be hiding anything, and my ears still useless from blood.

Lying at the very bottom of this ocean of air. Clung to that. The solidity reassuring. The haze of stars so far away they were the same as not real. No longer individual but so many billions they could create a wash of light. The origin of my grandfather the same, unreachable and unimaginable, and the origin of the dead man, also, and the origin of myself. All vacuums of meaning.

TOO COLD IN THAT NIGHT to sleep exposed on the road in the dirt. I shivered and rose in a landscape transformed by the moon. The road a clear white path winding upward into forest that grew more dense and dark where we camped. This is the place we had chosen, the farthest in and most hidden.

Above us, great faces of cliff and broken ridge, long pale slides of talus. Some instinct to back up close against the rock, and if there had been a cave, inside is where our camp would have been.

Standing alone in the cold, I could feel immensity, how small I was at this moment. Wearing only socks, underwear, and a T-shirt, I didn’t know how I had lasted this long. Kept warm only by fear.

All was silent. Not a sound in that void. And without sound, the distances could have been anything. The rock faces impossible to gauge in size. All the world waiting, ridges in every direction as I turned. The still point, when the air had equalized and there was no breeze, and if the sun never rose, all would remain this way. Each night, it was possible to want that, to want the night to never end.

I let the hammer down carefully on the rifle so it would not fire. The metal of that rifle the coldest element, and I tried to touch only the wood, held it in both hands before me as I walked toward camp. Like the last remnant of some larger band advancing still.

I left the road as I neared, made my way up through trees to come at camp from higher ground. Large pines with cones scattered everywhere and fallen smaller branches, so that I had to test each step before allowing any weight. The walk of a blind man, each foot seeking ground and no momentum. Ready to stop at any moment.

In the forest, all vision reversed. On the road, under the bright moon, all substance was light, outlined in shadow, but here all substance came from darkness, and it felt as if the world could have been created this way. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. This was how it began, before the light. Not absence of matter but antimatter. A void prefiguring. The first pull that shapes us.

Walking through that forest, I had to focus on the darkness, because light was insubstantial and could only mislead. The forest grew as I walked, all voids always expanding, the distances seeming farther. From the road, I had seen the entire stand of pines between the rock above and road below, notched into the mountain, bordered and finite, but once I was in it, all borders fell away and new land emerged, small ridges and folds inventing themselves between me and camp and each step slower than the last.

The rifle was all I had, held close across my chest, and I was without scale, could have been any size, nothing around me fixed, and it was some time before I was above the camp, oriented by the water rushing into that sink and by pattern of moonlight on the roof above the table and on the cab of the pickup. More difficult to find the men where they slept, but I was careful, and I found the place where my grandfather had been ready to slit my throat with that knife, and I felt exposed and afraid and was shivering, looking constantly behind and to all sides, but I worked down closer through the trees until I could see the white of his mattress and his great bulk lying upon it.

I held that rifle with my thumb ready to pull back the hammer and considered hunting my own grandfather. He had come close to killing me, and it seemed he could still do so at any moment. I didn’t know that I could sleep and count on waking up.

I raised my rifle to my shoulder and lined up that round peep sight with the thin vertical tip on the barrel, old metal that my grandfather himself had held when he was a boy, the rifle he had used to kill his first buck, and the dark bulk of him was softened and made smaller by this deadly alignment of fin and circle, all invention colder and smaller than we expect, its power a transgression, an opening of the heavens themselves, and this eased my fear. I pulled back the hammer with my thumb and now no one in this world had any power to stop me. Whatever would be, I would decide. And the poacher had made all possible. There was no longer anything I couldn’t do.

But I lowered the hammer and then lowered the rifle. I can’t say why I didn’t pull the trigger then any more than I can say why I did pull it earlier. The decisions we make come from nowhere near our conscious minds. I stepped back carefully to my sleeping bag and carried it farther off into the trees, higher on that slope, found a hollow behind a fallen trunk, a place blocked from view, and lay down and tried to get warm, held my rifle close and hoped for sleep.