Galen didn’t know why he had first stopped eating. He didn’t understand how it had begun. A decision whether or not to drink orange juice. It may have begun there. But who could say the beginning of anything, because it all had started earlier, in previous lives. Not eating was a way of punching through this existence.
The piano, his mother whispered from behind the wall.
Galen pinned a new board and tapped in a nail.
The piano, she whispered again.
He hammered the nail hard, bent it, swore, and placed another, tapped it carefully. His bad hand felt twice as large as a normal hand. Almost impossible to use it to grip something as small as a nail. This was one of the difficult things about a physical existence. The body kept growing and shrinking, always outrageous, and there was no controlling it.
The piano, she whispered.
What? This is so damn annoying. What about the piano?
The checkbook is in the piano.
What the hell? Who were you hiding it from? I didn’t even know it existed.
Bring it now. I won’t be able to speak soon. I need to sign now.
No. I’m busy. He hammered and kept placing nails. Roasting and sweating and pain everywhere, in his hand, in his gut, the bottoms of his feet, the skin on his back and neck, the dizziness in his head. Everything about this existence related to pain. He was sick of it.
Galen dropped his hammer in the dirt and walked away, across the lawn and into the house. He had been thinking he might never come in here again, had been thinking perhaps he’d just live in the orchard, but here he was already. No resolution lasted.
The inside of the house too comforting, cool and dark and speaking of sleep. He was very tired. He wanted to lie down and forget everything. That was the power of the house, that was how it was dangerous. The house had to be resisted.
He walked to the piano and stood there waiting for his eyes to adjust. The edges floating and shifting, the outline of the wood going white when he blinked. Only a dark shape in shadow, but gradually he could begin to see color, the deep reds and grains in the dark wood, and the piano took up its place, stopped shifting and swimming.
His grandmother playing this piano. Why did he have no memory of that? If they had really sung songs together as a family, if she had played this piano, then why did she stop? Why did everything about that life end before he had memory? If he was supposed to connect to that time, then why had the connection been withheld?
He lifted the top of the piano, a large flat polished piece of wood on a hinge, and he somehow knew to raise the piece of wood inside as a stand. He didn’t know how he knew that, some physical imprint without a corollary memory. Perhaps most our memories were like that, no longer accessible but still there somehow, and perhaps that was how we felt our previous lives, also. Their shadows, and their instruction, but no longer anything we could see. They waited and gathered and exerted their presence in some other way, so that every choice we made had already been made, and each random action guided, and the self was not an illusory thing at all, but something that could never die.
Chapter 25
The checkbook so small, so simple. The idea that it held more than a million dollars seemed impossible. He had wanted a Walkman for years. A Walkman cost about sixty dollars. He had wanted to go to college, and that might have cost ten thousand dollars per year. He had wanted to have a year abroad, and he didn’t know what that would have cost, but not much more than a year of college, probably. Everything had been possible, right here, but his mother had said no.
He didn’t understand anything about his mother, not one thing. Wanting to keep him here like some replacement husband. He had no idea who she was or how she could make any sense.
He walked out to the lawn to grab a pen from the pile of crap. He needed to burn all of this today. All his tasks piling up. He still had to finish nailing the boards, also, and finish the furrow of dirt the rest of the way around the shed, and it was already afternoon.
He sat under the fig tree, in its good shade, sat at the iron table and looked at the checks.
You have the checkbook, his mother rasped.
Yeah.
Let me sign.
Okay. He knelt at the wall and slipped the checkbook under the wood, in the gap between earth and shed, then slipped the pen under.
I’ll leave the amount blank. You can fill in whatever you want.
Sign all of them. But fill some of them out completely. Start with a check for $4,300.
Why $4,300?
Because that’s an easy amount. It’s nothing.
Okay.
And then let’s go for $47,500. Galen wanted to climb into the fig tree to wait, but he couldn’t with his bad hand, so he sat in a cast-iron chair at the table and looked at the part of the property he never visited. Behind the house and lawn was a jungle of other trees and bushes, a piece never claimed for the orchard.
Why doesn’t the orchard extend all the way? he asked.
What?
The mess on the other side of the lawn. It’s a big piece of the property, and nothing was done with it. No walnut trees. Why not?
That was Mom’s piece. She was supposed to get a garden, but there was never time.
How come I never heard about that?
I can’t speak. I really can’t. I need water.
No water.
Then you don’t get the checks.
Fine. I don’t give a shit. I need to get back to work on the boards anyway. He walked around the shed to the hottest side, near the toolshed, exposed to the full afternoon sun. He wanted the full heat, wanted to get as dizzy as possible. Dragged a splintery board that had been ripped and banged up and removed from something, and held it against the wall.
He tapped a nail and hammered and heard his mother screech, a raw voice he hadn’t heard before, a final screech, the end of a voice. It sounded like her throat ripping. And he was fine with that. He didn’t fucking care. I didn’t hear you, he yelled. What was that you were saying?
No answer, of course. He hammered at the hot nails and decided he didn’t need one going into every vertical plank. That was too many. They’d be held in by the seat belt without each needing their own nail.
He dragged another misbegotten piece from the pile, and another, the work becoming a routine, and gradually the glare from the bleached earth was reduced. Shadows forming in the clods and lengthening, and he was belting a new side of the shed, along the sliding bay door, the sun angling to his left, the time passing, a mercy.
The sun itself felt like a witness, always watching. He could see why the Aztecs or Mayans or whatever worshipped the sun. After it baked and burned you all day, the falling could seem like a gift. You could worship what had almost destroyed you. And if you were alone, the sun might even be a companion, moving along steadily, always there.
Galen heard a sound that he hadn’t heard in years. He recognized it immediately. The hand crank on the tractor. His mother turning the crank, trying to start the engine.
No, he said. He stood there with the hammer and didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t get inside, and if he couldn’t get inside, he couldn’t stop her. She’d start the tractor and come crashing through the wall. The tractor was easily strong enough for that.
Stop, he said. She was slow on the crank, but she might get it to turn over anyway. He was up against the sliding door now, pressed against it, trying to peer in through a crack, but the gaps weren’t big enough, and it was too dark in there, too bright out here.