Mark Spragg - Bone Fire

He dug a while longer and then sat in the chair to rest and eat a plum, waking sometime later with his chin on his chest. He wasn’t sure how long he’d slept and squinted at the sky until he found where it brightened, satisfied that he still had most of the afternoon.

He remembered the two weeks they’d spent trenching out a new leach field for Mitch’s septic tank. Griffin had been a boy then, just nine or ten, and they could have had old Dan Hanson over with his backhoe and finished the job in an afternoon, but Einar wanted to give his son a bone-wearying chore and let him own the satisfaction of having completed it.

When he was down deep enough that it was just a little bit of a struggle to climb out, he stopped and threw the bar and shovel back toward the tree, then took his hat off and lay down with his heels against one end and his head just short of the other with his arms folded across his chest. His hat was turned up on his stomach. He felt relaxed, comfortable, but got worried that if he died right then and there it might look like a suicide, so he climbed out, pleased with the extravagance of the hole. He could have dug something smaller, but what he intended was in fact a kind of burial, and beyond that he’d wanted to see what it was like lying down in the cool, dry ground. So he’d have an idea of what was coming next.

He dragged the garbage bag to the soft mound of earth he’d shoveled up out of the hole, working his butt back into the loose soil and lifting the bag by its bottom. He gave it a shake and it emptied in an instant: all the letters he’d written Ella from Korea, most of the family photographs, wedding rings, birth and death certificates, marriage licenses, everything he could put his hands on that authenticated his eighty years of using up a body. Now it all lay three feet down in the earth and hadn’t made more of a sound than a curtain lifting in the breeze. He dropped the bag on top and rummaged through the backpack for the can of lighter fluid and the box of matches.

He stood listening to the crackle of it burning, and when there was just the faint odor of smoke he shoveled the hole full and sat in the chair. The day had gone exactly as he’d planned.

He’d kept back a cigar box of mementos for Griff, to provide some offering, because he doesn’t imagine she’ll understand what he’s done. He expects her to be pissed off.

He kept a single wedding picture of Griffin and Jean, so she could always know what her young parents looked like, as well as one of himself and Ella. Two photographs of Mitch: one taken when he was twenty, wearing his Army uniform, the other of him middle-aged and riding a dappled gray gelding they called Ford. The first trophy buckle her dad won on a saddle bronc at a little show in Greybull. A brooch of Ella’s she’s long favored and the Silver Star he never felt he deserved, but it’s how he wants to be held in her heart, as a man who performed his life’s duties with at least some gallantry. And the Norsk Bibel, which he thinks of as a poorly rendered novel, but he hadn’t burned his other books either. He sat up straighter in the chair, reviewing his decisions.

He’s dug the hole and made the fire because when he dies he doesn’t want her to have to deal with anything but the disposal of his body. That’s fair, he thinks. There’s no getting around a dead body, and he’s already spoken to Sid Farnsworth, the undertaker down in Sheridan, about the arrangements. He’s already paid. She’ll have to dial 911, and that’s it, maybe drive a box or two of his clothes in to the Goodwill, and they agreed a year ago that the Nature Conservancy gets the land just as soon as there isn’t a Gilkyson to care for it. So she’ll have the ranch without it going to taxes, and if she has a kid it’ll have a place to live. He wants her to move forward, and wants it to be easy for her. He doesn’t want her history to limit her, as he believes his history has limited him. And if Marin’s here he wants it to be easy for her too.

“I’m not crazy,” he said, remembering how he’d searched her room for an hour, finding her diary, her school pictures and some papers, almost packing it all up here with the rest. But he hadn’t. He’d caught himself in time, and that was getting harder to do. No, he’d put her things aside, sitting there with his eyes closed and waiting until he was able to distinguish what was reasonable and what wasn’t, and the fact that he’d succeeded was reassuring. He didn’t think a crazy man could have.

“A crazy man would have burned it all,” he said aloud, then he napped again, and when he woke the heat was gone from the day. He gathered up the tools and the backpack and started back down to the house to eat his cold supper.

THE BISQUE KILN was still warmer than her body, but just barely, and Griff was leaning over into its barrel with a small whiskbroom, sweeping the powdery grit from the last firing into the slightly flattened mouth of a tomato-sauce can. In spite of her cotton mask the dust made her sneeze, and when she swallowed her mouth tasted of baked alkali. She pinched the mask away, sliding it up over her forehead, whispering, “A rose is a rose is a rose” because she liked the velvety resonance of the phrase against the coarse firebrick lining the interior.

He’d been waiting for her when she returned home from Paul’s this morning. He was sitting at the kitchen table in the same clothes he’d worn the day before, his sweat-stiffened hair standing in tufts, his dirty hands worrying the corner of a laminated placemat. He smelled of smoke.

She asked if there’d been an accident and he slammed the flat of a hand on the tabletop, knocking the saltshaker over.

“This is my goddamn house,” he shouted. Her diary and a dozen photographs were stacked by his arm, and now fanned toward the table’s edge.

“Why don’t I fix us some breakfast?” she said, and he smacked the table again, but this time recoiling from the sound as though he’d just regained his hearing.

She’d seen him like this once before, in the garden this summer, pawing at the soft earth and pushing her away when she tried to help him to his feet, his eyes gone wild and blind to her.

He slumped in the chair. “I believe I’ve had all the breakfast I’ll ever want.” His mouth gaped, his jaw quivering.

When she turned her head as though she might be looking at her diary, he opened his hands and reached toward her as if he meant to accept some object she was handing to him.

“I didn’t read it,” he said, folding his arms on the table, resting his forehead against them, weeping with the abandon of a child. When he was able to sit up again, he choked out through the sobs what he’d done, what he’d burned. He offered to walk her up the hill and show her the newly mounded grave he’d made of his life.

Now the afternoon seemed hollow and she turned on the radio so the jazz on NPR would keep her company. She settled on a stool at the work island in the middle of the room.

Arced across the table before her was a ceramic spinal column, its ribs arranged alongside by length and, nearest to her, a pelvis that appeared to have belonged to a woman or a small bear. Each piece was a chalky white, the surfaces pitted, in places roughened.

Behind her was a bank of windows, the panes small and unwashed, and below them the tiered plywood shelving where she’s racked the raw-fired pieces and arranged her shaping tools, the buffed-steel rods and dowels she uses for her assemblages, the colored bottles of glaze, the spools of copper wire. Her slab roller was pushed up tightly in a corner, and next to it the big trough where she reconstituted the dried clay. It was the clay that possessed her, the feel of it, from the very first time. When she’s kneeling at the trough, up to her elbows in the wet and slick and seemingly torsional muck, it is as though she has reached down the shaft of a muddied well and gripped the body of some ancient creature-a feeling at once horrible and intimate and thrilling.