Dirt (16 page)

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

T
he 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.

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

H
is 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.

The spear an ancient weapon, from the first dance. The long jointed arm a thrower, formed for this. The first man shaking his spear, raging at the wilderness, at the void, claiming the world. Galen tried to dance back in time, tried to reconnect. Tried to make himself that first man, stamping at the earth, fueled by breath, a fire all around him, and he crushed hard enough to break furrow and crust, felt the spear's power, and then he lunged. He lunged into the wall, lunged through the air headfirst with a scream and drove that spear into the wall, into the spirit fortress, and it hit hard and bounced and he flew and banged into the wall with his shoulder and head and fell to the ground and rose again. Aaaah! he yelled. Aaah! His hand a living thing, a hive of pain.

He grabbed his spear and stepped back into place to stamp again. The same piece of earth, his blow felt all through the crust, reaching downward, sending shock waves. He built again, step and rock and the low grunts, feeling his source, the energy coming from deep within him. He would use everything to break through the spirit wall. He would circle back and come from another time.

Galen turned in a circle as he rocked and shook his spear. The shadows long, walnut trees like sentinels, casting their truer selves across furrows. They had been waiting for this, waiting through lifetimes, waiting for him, for his coming. They would rise up out of their shadows in the earth, and that would be their shape. Not the shape of a tree, of what we imagined, but a deeper form. Galen screamed and shook his spear, triumphant. He had seen into the spirit world. This was his first true seeing, to see the trees would form up out of their shadows, that they were made of earth, not of wood. He might even be the first man to have seen this, the first to know the trees. Ho! he yelled, acknowledging the gift. He circled and crushed and looked sideways at the dark long shadows all around him, and he understood now that the stamping of his feet was what would free the spirit selves of the trees. He was the unlocker, the one to break through. He plunged his spear into the earth, rocked the handle as he danced to loosen all that would hold them back.

They were growing as the light fell, and they would rise impossibly tall, great dark earth presences reaching into the sky. They would stride miles at every step, cross continents. They would carry him, loft him, and fling him.

Half waking, Galen lived in the double world, seeing the presences and also still chained to appearances. He had to not look too long at any shadow, because if he did, it became only shadow, and the dirt became only dirt. He had to keep his vision moving, had to keep circling and spinning. Engulfed in fire, unable to breathe, his body failing but spirit gathering.

Galen realized he was singing, a low, guttural song, a song of becoming. Gathering his previous lives around him, he saw that they were time itself. He was summoning time and being in his final burst of becoming.

Galen began to feel afraid of what was happening here. The shamanic was different from the meditative. Shoveling dirt, he had focused on the fling and fall and the nothing. It was a dissipation. But this was a gathering now, something entirely different, something frightening because it might be exactly the wrong path, a trick. How could becoming be the goal? Detachment was supposed to be the goal, and detachment was not the same as becoming.

Galen spun and stamped but he was exhausted and confused. He didn't understand how it all fit together, and his confusion had made the spirit world recede. He was hot and tired and wet and muddy and the shadows of the trees were only shadows, and all had fallen so quickly and so terribly. He could feel the bones in his thin legs, the muscles locked and stiff. Empty, all his movements now.

Galen stopped dancing, stood in place dizzy and hungry and thirsty. He was alone. The air still, no wind. The endless hum of the air conditioners all along the high wall. He realized there was no cranking. That sound had stopped. He wondered how long ago. He had been dancing for a long time.

He dropped the pitchfork. The sun no longer burning, much of the orchard in shadow, and he lay down in a furrow, in the radiating earth, decided he would just lie here until he understood, but he was starving and parched and couldn't focus at all. His head and shoulder hurt from lunging into the shed. So he rose on cramped legs and walked slowly to the house.

That pile on the lawn still waiting to be burned. The grass still waiting to be cut. The house always waiting, through lifetimes. Impossibly large and ornate and white. A solidity that was untrue. The great chimney at the center, and the giant trees. A house that promised peace and reasonable people but had held only crazies. A house that was a way to hide.

Galen walked into the kitchen and went for a glass of water, gulped it down, and then gulped another. And still he felt thirsty.

He didn't know what to eat. Always a problem. He held the refrigerator open and stared blankly at too many items that made no sense. Pickle relish. Not easy to make a meal out of pickle relish. Sauerkraut. He could maybe eat that. In a dish covered with Saran Wrap. He brought it to the kitchen table, took a fork from a drawer. Real silver, unpolished.

It seemed that sauerkraut should go with something. He looked in the pantry, in the canned goods, and found French-cut string beans, took them to the counter, the electric can opener.

He sat and forked the green beans from the can, cold and salty and without other taste. He chewed and swallowed and it felt like the inside of his stomach had collapsed and the food was having to push the folds back open. He forked sauerkraut and liked the vinegar. Vinegar was right.

The house dimmed as he ate. The sky outside turning a darker blue. He finished the green beans and most of the sauerkraut, then drank another glass of water and went to the sink, where his mother usually stood, looked out at the shed and orchard and sky. Everything farther away as the light dimmed, all distance increased.

He thought he might stay at the sink for a while, but found himself rising up the stairs to his mother's bedroom, stood in the doorway and swayed in place, thinking nothing, then went to her bed. The house not hot like outside, the high ceilings and drapes a sanctuary.

He lay on her bed and closed his eyes and could feel the inside of him spinning and tilting, everything caving. The dirt on his skin his blanket, his hand throbbing in a dull and reassuring way, and all was so peaceful. His mother resting now, too, in that place of her memories, in her own sanctuary. The land all around them breathing easily, the orchard at rest, the hedges, the fig tree, the oak. All resting, finally, and the heat fading away. She had wanted to keep him here, and here he was.