Galen carried the screens, dozens of them, until the space behind the tractor was bare dirt, old dirt unexposed since his mother’s childhood. Older dirt smelled more like rock. He would dig here.
He stepped outside through the toolshed for the shovel, emerged in the bright light, squinting. Found a shovel with a good tip and stepped back inside.
Galen set the shovel and pushed hard with his foot, and the shovel buried partway in. But when he pulled up, there was not much on the blade. This could take a very long time.
He went for the pick, pulled it free of its board leaning against the tractor. He swung at the earth with the larger blade end, and the impact was too hard, too much resistance, so he tried the other end, a long curved spike, the one that had punctured the board, and this dug deep and easily, without stunning his hands. He lifted up on the handle and walked forward to rip the spike through the earth, loosening the dirt.
Dirt was inescapable. Always a return to dirt. Galen stabbed again and again, breaking the surface in an oval six feet long and two feet wide. It didn’t need to be deep. He’d be putting the wooden screens back over the top.
Broken earth, old work, heaving iron. Who he was no longer mattered. A question from an earlier time. Grave digger. Mother grave digger.
Each time the pick hit, the buried smell of the earth was released, the smell of decades past, of the earlier shed and his mother playing here as a girl. The work of his grandfather and whoever else had come before.
Galen shaped an oval as lovely as a stained-glass window. An oval of ruptures. And then he dropped the pick and raised the shovel. He buried the blade carefully, scooped the loose clods and grains and set them aside in a neat pile graveside.
Shovelful and shovelful. Sound of it. Drips of his sweat mixing in. All labor took longer than we thought. A small oval, small window, and yet it was more than it seemed, and the pile already becoming larger than he expected, even for this shallow first level, this bare beginning.
Chapter 31
The digging its own eternity, a place where time collapsed. The dirt knew what it was making room for.
Scraping with the shovel, gathering the last of what he had loosened, and then swinging the pick again, hearing the tap against rock, soil impregnated with rock. Soil not meant for planting.
Caving away beneath him. Deepest cave, digging the grave of one’s own mother. This was why the world rushed away on all sides. Without the mother, the container of the world no longer held.
His thoughts in a panic, no still point anywhere. Rushing like the earth and the air. Wanting to look behind him, wanting to find her, needing to see whether she was still alive, but unable to move from this one point, struggling to stand on safe ground.
The pick large, the handle like bone, expanded, hollow inside, difficult to hold on to. Darker soil now, older soil. He was passing beyond the time of his family, crossing into an earlier time.
The meaning of dirt was this, perhaps. The shovel removing time. The eons it took to form the dirt from rock. The water and air that had to work through millions or even billions of years to free it, and then its travel and settling and waiting, layer upon layer. His life now such a brief flash. Any attachment was absurdity. This was what the dirt taught. If he could remain focused on geologic time, human time could never reach him.
The shovel willing, always willing. And the dirt itself. Waiting for so long, yet no resistance to being moved. All order upset, the arrangement of grains, but no resistance and therefore no suffering.
The pile along one side of the grave, spilling right to its edge. The dirt became larger once it was removed. A dark mountain range forming. Another layer scraped and cleared, and he wondered whether she could hear this sound. He didn’t like not knowing whether she could hear. He kept glancing behind him, kept expecting to see her standing there, walking toward him.
He worked as quickly as he could. He did not want to continue into night.
The ground became harder still, rockier and bound together. A large stone shuddering through his hands when the pick hit, and he had to shovel around it, clear away a few inches on every side, gray face and white scar from the pick, then get down in the grave on his hands and knees and pull at it, clawing through the gloves, trying to get a grip, until he was able to hug it onto his lap. Heavy stone, and he could use it to mark her grave. He’d leave it at one end, with that mark from the pick, his mark, and no one else would know, but this would work as a headstone.
Galen shuffled on his knees with the rock held in his lap, scooted to the head of the grave, and rolled the stone up to ground level. Smooth stone, smooth face, old river stone somehow arrived here, so far from water.
Galen stood inside the grave, as deep as his knees now. He swung the pick from here. It doesn’t need to be deep, he told himself, but he imagined it not deep enough and having to reach down to pull her from the grave, having to lift her in his arms.
So he kept swinging the pick, bit deep into another layer, and the day was an inferno but the ground was cooler down low, had its own breath. Cutting through layers, this labor like cutting through the illusion of self to find there was no core, only the layers.
Rockier, the pick shuddering and deflecting. Sparks. A miner.
He stepped to the other end, soft and chewed earth now, his feet sinking, and he swung at where he had stood before. He would step back and forth, two sides of a mirror, lowering slowly down.
The dirt almost moist. Darker and heavier and not quite damp but almost. He’d thrown off his shirt and was covered in dirt, restored. Lifting shovelful after shovelful, the pile so enormous he had to start using the other side.
And he could have gone on forever, perhaps, digging down and down, because that was better than facing what had to be done next, but eventually he had to admit to himself this was deep enough. Deeper than his waist, and he didn’t need more than that. The afternoon moving on, and he was not willing to be here after dark.
So he rose out of the grave and took a few steps into the rest of the shed and then stopped. Unreliable ground. He took a few more steps to the edge of a row of racks, and he knew that if he walked from here to the eastern wall he would find her. That was where he’d found the checkbook, and that would be where she had lain down. He felt sure of that. His eyes fully adjusted after all this time digging, so he would not be saved by any shadows.
Three rows of racks he’d have to pass, and she could be anywhere.
Beyond the first row was nothing but ground. Everything accelerating away from him, a void without sign, his mind emptied.
And beyond the second row, he again saw nothing. He felt he would topple. The dread overwhelming now, a funneling down toward fate with only one row left and no choice to be made, ever.
He stepped past the final row of racks. His mother, lying on the ground, facedown in the dirt. Almost peaceful, her head resting on an arm that was outstretched, hand loose. She was wearing an apron over her skirt and blouse. He hadn’t remembered that. The day she’d gone into the shed seemed so long ago, an eternity, a time when they both were different people, irrecoverable now. An apron with flower faces on the front, an apron from his earliest memories.
Galen was aware that he should feel something. He stood in place, his arms awkward, hanging at his sides. He could feel himself tilting. Impossible to believe it was his mother lying there. And he didn’t know that she was dead. He just couldn’t see any movement.
He needed to carry her to the grave. He needed to get out of here as quickly as possible. But all he could do was kneel down. He couldn’t reach in close enough to pull her up. He didn’t want her on his shoulder or against his chest.