He walked around to the toolshed, feeling too clean, too unconnected. He was no longer a part of this place. He looked around for a hammer and then realized a crowbar might be faster. His grandfather had three of them leaning in a corner. Old metal, unpainted, wiped in oil, rough at the edges. Galen picked up the slimmest, shortest one, and even that was heavy. Tool users. It was possible to have an entirely different view of humans. No souls, no transcendence, no past lives, only animals that had learned better tricks. Everything pointless.
Galen used his opposable thumbs, gripped the crowbar and slotted its thin face between board and wall. Levered and popped the end of that board free, worked along until it fell to the earth, undone. Moved along to the next board, worked the hungry thin teeth of the crowbar.
The sun on the back of his neck. His body a slick, the T-shirt draping close. He felt dizzy, and that was fine. He tried to lose himself in the work and not think. The furrow along the wall annoying because it kept him from stepping as close as he would have liked. He had to lean in, and his back was cramping up.
Removing the boards was so much faster than nailing them. Galen was on the second side in no time, along the wall with the bay door, his back to the trees. The old lock still hanging there. He didn’t know what he would do about that. He still didn’t have the key, and it seemed too big to break with a crowbar.
For now he would focus only on removing the boards. One task at a time. They fell off like scabs, rough and uneven, discarded wood, lying in the dirt with their nails sticking up. Galen had the idea of dismantling the entire shed. He could remove one plank at a time and drag them all into the orchard. The shed dispersed, planks lying along every furrow. The tractor and the walnut drying screens in their stacks would be exposed to the sun and moon. He liked that idea. Just undo everything and wait in the orchard until the wood decayed and became earth again and there would be no sign that the shed had ever existed. He would be old by then, and his final project would be to undo the house. He would take it apart board by board, just as he had done to the shed, and in the end, only the piano would remain, and maybe that cool wooden floor, exposed now to the sun.
If only Galen could live long enough to watch boards decay into dust. To stand here in the orchard and watch the high wall and housing developments crumble, and watch the land return to desert, with no water and no sign of civilization, and then watch the rains come and plants grow and wind and storms and water increase until he stood in a jungle with palm fronds and ferns and vines and the air filled with water. Galen wanted that. He wanted no part of human society. He wanted to join geologic time. But first he had to get through this one day, and even that seemed as long as the transformation of desert to jungle.
Galen took a break from the crowbar, grabbed a board in his good hand, and dragged it toward the pile along the hedge. Leaving a thin track in the dirt, the only sign remaining, and he could rake that out. The pile reduced to almost nothing, a few scraps, but it would grow again now. Galen took his time walking back for the next board. He didn’t really believe anyone would visit. A year from now, Jennifer would need her first check for college. But before that, no one. Removing the boards was another form of going through the motions, another performance for no audience.
He picked up another, dragged it, and listened to the hollow sound that came through the wood. Something faint in addition to the dragging, something transmitted through the length of the board, always more to hear and see. We could never be awake enough. He flopped the board onto the pile, then bent over with his hands on his knees and felt lost, the inside of him a vacuum. He had to breathe, just focus on his breath, and then he stood up again and walked back for another board.
He dragged the boards one at a time, and the sun was lower. It was very slow, but it was lower. He picked up the crowbar again and pried along the eastern wall in shadow. Concealed from the sun. Hidden from all except perhaps his mother. He wondered whether she could still see and hear him, outlined through the slats against the sky. Easiest along the west wall, where he would leave a shadow, much more difficult to find along this wall. A peaceful way to go, not having water. A light-headedness and quiet that would fade eventually into nothing, a meditation on light and sound and air.
Chapter 29
Galen worked on the furrow in darkness, no moon. Felt his way along the walls with the shovel. The air shallow, an ebb time. Sound magnified.
He was using the flat-faced shovel, jamming its squared end down along the boards into the loose dirt he had piled, then pulling toward him. The dirt heavy and invisible and loud. The scuff of the face as he dragged each load a few feet, spreading the soil. Making a bed for a new garden, planting his footsteps.
It could seem at times that his mother wasn’t really in there. Or that she could vanish on her own. It could seem there were no other people in the world. And whenever he got this sense, he tried to hold on to it, because he liked being the last person on earth. He found that idea enormously comforting.
Galen liked labor. He liked pulling the dirt away from this wall, clearing and smoothing, and he wished that when he’d finished he could start over and find dirt newly piled where he had begun. What was difficult, always, was the transition, moving on to the next thing and settling in. He liked repetition. This was what religion was made of. Repeating the same words over and over, or prostrations, or sitting and focusing on breath after breath. What terrified us was the void, not knowing what would happen next or what we should do or who we should be. Repetition was a focal point, a shelter.
Galen waited in darkness for the rise of that moon. He drove the shovel down, pulled and walked backward and spread the soil, but all the while he was waiting. And when it did finally come, its face was impossibly large, warped by being too close to the earth. A lesson there, the distortion from proximity. The moon would not know its real shape until it hung on its own.
Engorged now with light, fat on the horizon, heavy. The small man kneeling in prayer, magnified so large Galen could see and feel the space above the man’s head, the lofting emptiness between the man and the snake’s open mouth. Galen let the shovel fall and held his arms out and gazed at the moon, honoring the fullness knowing it was shrinking in every moment, cooling into its harder shape, more distant, going white as bone, the color leaching. Brother moon, he said. Each of us alone on our path.
Galen lowered his arms and looked at the orchard transformed, the trees emerged into the second day, moon’s day. The walnuts responsible. Standing here all these years, they’d had some influence over the shape of things. They couldn’t deny that.
Galen picked up the shovel and returned to his labor. Finishing the orchard-facing wall, southern wall. The shed placed perfectly to meet the four directions, and that couldn’t have been accidental, but Galen didn’t know what sense to make of it. Their house to the north, the fig tree and afternoon tea to the north, and the lawn and the large oak with its love seat beneath. All civilization. So perhaps that meant something. The road to the west. The orchard waiting to the south and extending to the east, and Galen realized only now that he had never walked all the way to that eastern edge, to the source. That seemed significant, but it could also mean nothing. Systems of thought, the chains of the mind. Easy to get lost. He needed to focus on his shoveling.
Good scrape of dirt. That was what he could rely on. In the moonlight, he could watch now as the dirt fanned out to either side of the shovel. He could shape the edges. Patterns that might be read.