He ran around to the toolshed and tossed all the tools into the dirt: shovels and picks and rakes, clippers, hoes. He needed to clear a space along the wall next to the tractor. He’d be able to see in from there. The crank turning, and she was going faster now.
Wait, he said. Let’s talk about this.
No answer. He pressed against the wood, put his hands up to either side to block the light, and he could just see the larger shadow of the tractor, shifting around in his vision. But he still couldn’t do anything to keep her from cranking. She would come tearing through the wall into the orchard, and there was a high gear that could go fast, a gear for driving on the road.
Galen left the wall and looked at all the tools he had tossed into the dirt. He needed something like a spear. Something he could throw. That would be his only chance. The pitchfork. That would do it. It wasn’t a large one, four spikes six inches long and with a spread of six inches total. He hefted that in his good hand, got the balance, and hurled it toward the walnut trees. It went about thirty feet, falling short of what he’d imagined, but it flew straight, so maybe that was good enough.
But what was he thinking here? That he’d spear his own mother with a pitchfork? That wasn’t possible. That was not something he could do.
Galen stood in the sun and closed his eyes and tried to find some guidance. Prison was all he could think of. Dragged away and locked in a cell, and he’d never see the day again. Never see trees, never see dirt, never watch the moon. Never run freely. Never see Jennifer, never go to Europe, never lie down in a furrow and sleep. Never see the mountains again, or the cabin, never listen to Kitaro or read Siddhartha. He would be put in a box and the box sealed and placed on a shelf somewhere to wait. And he might simply be forgotten.
Galen spread his arms wide and tried to follow his higher self. He tried to let his crown chakra open.
He could hear the cranking, turning over and over, and she was working hard, turning as fast as possible, but the engine wasn’t firing. He didn’t know why that was. It maybe just needed to warm up, though that was difficult to believe on a day as hot as this. It was well over a hundred degrees.
The most frightening thought was that the prison might be a psychiatric ward, a crazy farm. That was what she had threatened, and for keeping his mother locked in a shed, they might put him there. Far worse than being put in a box alone, to be put in a box with the insane. And the drugs. They’d pump him so full of drugs he wouldn’t know his own mind. Once they had him there, they could do anything they wanted, and no one in the outside world would ever know or care.
Galen shook his head and his hands and all the way down his spine, the heebie-jeebies. He would not go to the nut farm. He was not willing to go there.
He walked over to the pitchfork and picked it up. If she came through that wall, he was ready.
He stood at the corner, where he could cover two walls, and he listened to the cranking. She had to be exhausted. The cranking was tough, and she’d been doing it for some time now. She was slowing a bit.
The sun still hot on his back and neck and butt and legs. And what would someone see if they came through the hedge into the orchard? Galen doubted he could make sense to anyone. He was naked except for his shoes, burned and covered in dirt, holding a pitchfork like a spear, waiting, a guardian. Rough boards nailed around the shed in an uneven band, a furrow dug against it. All of this would look crazy, he realized. If you hadn’t been here, if you hadn’t seen each step happen, then none of it could make any sense.
For the rest of this incarnation, Galen needed to be alone. He could see that now. Other people were the problem. They were distractions and attachments. They were noise. He needed quiet. He needed to hear back across lifetimes, and that required a stillness that was not possible if any other person was near. The final incarnation was meant to be spent in a cave, and this orchard was his cave, protected from the outside world. No one knew to look here. He would be safe here, once he eliminated this final attachment in the form of his mother. He was having to hammer and dig and fight this final battle because it was the inner battle made physical in the outside world. That was the gift he was being given, an external way to stage and complete the inner journey, the final journey before repose. He was creating a fortress against all that would distract. Once she was gone, he would sit in the dirt and listen back across all the shifting forms of self and being, and though he didn’t know what was to come after, because he hadn’t been there yet, he knew this was what everything was leaning toward.
Chapter 26
His mother cranked the tractor for a longer time than he could have imagined. And so he knew this was her final act. She was not saving anything. There would be no attempt to dig her way out or to hammer the planks loose again. If she failed to start the tractor, that would be it. She’d have nothing left.
Galen listened carefully to the cranking, because he knew this was a meditation, a gift she was giving him on her way out. A strange sound and a powerful one because it connected all the way back through his childhood and through her own. It was a sound to begin his journey across lifetimes, a cable he could reach onto that was being winched back into the darkness.
Thank you, he said. I honor this.
With his pitchfork and his covering of dirt, he was being armed for a symbolic journey, and she was the opening.
The sound fainter on each upswing, then hard as she came down, and there was a cough to that sound, the compression in the engine. Galen stepped forward on the cough, stepped into a furrow with his left foot. Then he rocked back on the upswing and stepped forward again as she swung down. A dance.
Galen squatted lower, stepped harder and harder, held the spear high in his right hand. He stamped forward on that beat, shook his spear, felt the heat rise in him, his entire body wet with sweat. He had to find the right sound, the right voice, to go with the stamp, and he was afraid to try, afraid he’d have the wrong sound and wreck the moment. He was building to something here. This was his mother’s final gift to him. He didn’t know whether to go with a grunt or more of a ho. The ho more ceremonial, but the grunt more authentic. Or an aah that would be more of a yell. He tried to just let whatever would happen happen.
And what came out was a grunt, a low huh kind of grunt. And that felt good. That felt right. It was real, just a low grunt, the first sound made by any human, the early sound. He shook his spear and grunted from deep in his gut, deep in his root chakra, his base, his chi.
The grunt shaking all the spirit walls inside him, the long throat chord linking his voice to his chi, even his lung walls shaking, and the good smell of dirt, his guide, with him now, with him always, the dirt, and he reached down with his bad hand, scooped the dirt and threw it into his mouth, howled from the pain, the mangled hand coming alive, and he howled and grunted and chewed the earth and the pain rose in his head in wavy bands, his hand a pulsating mass, so he held that out front, held that to guide him into the spirit world.
We could never see it, but we journeyed through it every moment of every day. The trick was to wake up in the middle of the dream and yet still dream, and then we could battle. To wake up, we had to tear away at illusion, and his hand was good for that. The cranking of the tractor was good for that.
The crank, the whump as it went round and round, the cough and compression, his mother a kind of shaman, leading him forward, and he danced, he stamped as hard as he could, he shook everywhere inside, and he tried to dance through time. That was one way to break through the dream, to make time shift, to dance in an older orchard. Old wall, old dirt, dancing back.