The Spot: Stories

All Wondering

Let’s say the beach erodes fifty yards in at the rate of a yard a year, give or take a few. By the time the Atlantic reaches his body — by then nothing but bones, if even that — it won’t matter, Carl said. Unless his body works its way up and out, like a seed in reverse. You know, remember those old biology films showing in slow-mo stop-action the way certain seeds wiggle into the ground, taking advantage — I guess that’s the way to put it — of their natural designs in relation to the winds, wending down until they’re deep enough to root. All manipulation of form in conjunction with nature. Except, knowing Dad, his body might respond the other way, twisting up and out of the sand until some hiker comes upon a toe, or a brow. Just imagine his body emerging under a moonless sky with only the sweep of the lighthouse for company. Just imagine old Pop, old Dad, wondering where the hell he is, or at least theoretically wondering because presumably his wondering days are over. All his wondering has been relegated to some other realm, in the best of circumstances, or to the void, in the worst. Just imagine his bald pate exposed to the salt air — just about impossible to see in the sand, or a toe, already mentioned, coming up and out of the razor grass, or the brambles, and moving, depending on the freezethaw cycles, too slow for the human eye, but over time — if you could see the slowed-down action speeded up — wiggling softly in the manner of resurrected flesh, as one imagines it, Carl argued; or maybe even rising up, stiff-jointed, like a marionette in the quiet of the off-season, jerked around by invisible strings stretching up to the Holy Father. Or it’s just as easy to imagine the body doing the seed routine properly, Carl said, his voice suddenly husky and deep, caught up in a madness that came not so much from Dad’s body, it seemed, but from the lack of logic his argument was taking, gathered up into the sack of his grief, his voice barely audible. Burn the bastard. Freeze his ass. Shoot him into space. Plunge him into the center of the earth. At times, his thoughts, like perfectly out-of-phase sound waves, nullified themselves for a moment into a pure silence. Or the body might dig itself down into the soft pliancy, the liquescence of sand, yearned by gravity, twisting itself with the contraction of drying sinew and cartilage in the bright fall heat, during those clear Cape days before Thanksgiving (Carl said) when the snap of leaf mold and the scent of musket smoke hangs in the air, at least theoretically, because Miles Standish musket smoke is still up there, man, somewhere. (Carl lifted his hand and pointed vaguely in the direction of First Encounter Beach, where, almost four hundred years ago, the first hostile American shots were fired.) The corpse might spiral down (Carl said) until, with toes pointed and head haut, it drove hard to the bedrock. (He forcefully landed on each syllable, dividing the word into two.) Then, when he looked up at me with the mute, inaccessible eyes of a man sealed in the vacuum of stalemate, I saw that he was a chip off the old block. What Dad had contained, he contained. Now the original block was just solid matter, and Carl was the live chip leaning into his shovel to rest, looking out over the Atlantic while between us came a mutual agreement — unspoken — that the hole would have to go down at least fifteen feet to give the body a chance, to find a depth of equalization (as Carl later called it, groping retrospectively for the proper phrase), where the forces drawing our father up would meet on equal terms with the forces drawing him down. From that point it was all digging and digging, widening the hole against the sliding sand, working furiously, one taking a turn with the shovel while the other dug with his hands, working for several hours until we got down fifteen feet, stopping only on occasion to rest, to look out over the roar of surf — big, lazy-edged waves coming in on an angle, rolling themselves against the hook of the beach from one end to the other, each producing a shush sound from right to left while the sun, for its part, sank against the sharp horizon — invisible, over the verge behind us, paring away at whatever light remained of the day.