David Vann - Legend of a Suicide

He was thinking of Roy these nights, remembering him as a child, riding the toy green tractor in Ketchikan, wearing a chef’s hat at three and standing up on a stool to reach the mixing bowl. He remembered Roy picking blueberries in his red jacket and knocking down icicles and finding the antlers Jim had thrown behind the fence. Jim had thrown them there because they were small, but Roy discovered them and treasured them as if they were artifacts of another people. They seemed mysterious and wonderful to him. Jim didn’t know how these times became the last years with Roy, didn’t understand any of the transformations, and remembering, Jim realized he was gone for years of Roy’s life, even in Ketchikan when they all still lived together, because Jim was thinking then of women, scheming, beginning to cheat. He had fallen into his secret life with other women and not known anyone or anything else. After the divorce, he still didn’t wake up, but continued after women. And so he could not say who Roy was in the end. He was missing too many of the years leading up to him.

Jim reflected on all of this more calmly now, as if he couldn’t afford the expenditure of crying when he was trying just to stay warm and survive each of these nights. It was not a time for extravagance. He would have to conserve if he was to survive until spring.

During the day, he tried to cover ground but his hiking became slower and slower. He had run out of food nearly a week before and was surviving now on seaweed and mushrooms and small crabs he caught at low tide. He drank from the occasional streams he crossed but was thirsty sometimes for days on end.

The crabs were very good, actually, and he looked forward to them. They were only three or four inches wide, but he cleaned them as he would have a larger crab, grabbing all their flexing legs from behind, underneath the shell, and then smashing the face onto a sharp rock until the top of the shell flew off. Then he broke the crab in half and shook once to get rid of the guts. He rinsed in seawater and sucked out the tender clear meat. He did this throughout the day, eating four or five crabs at a time. The only hard part, really, was when he couldn’t find enough fresh water for a few days and his lips became swollen and his throat sore. But sucking on the needles of the spruce trees in the mornings gave him some relief, and there was often rain. No snow, luckily. He was getting very lucky with the weather.

He daydreamed about the South Pacific, drinking water from large strange leaves, eating fruit that grew everywhere. Mangoes, guavas, coconuts, and wild fruits he had never seen. These new fruits he imagined to be purplish and very sweet. The sun would be out constantly, and he would bathe under waterfalls.

And then one evening he saw the edge of the sunset to the west and knew he had come around the southern tip of the island. He was on his way home now. He continued on to the point and sat in the trees watching the thin line of sunset devoured in watery gray clouds. Then he scraped up enough small stuff to make a mound, pushed his way in, and slept.

It was five more days before he reached the cabin. He arrived fairly early in the morning, had slept the night before less than a mile from it. Shit, he said. It’s right here. He stood on the beach and looked at it for a while, through the trees.

As he walked up to it, up onto the porch, he could tell that no one had come. Everything was just as he had left it. The note had streaked and faded from the rain, but that was the only change. He went around back for the hammer. The deflated boat was still there, the broken door on the shed, no changes.

Jim pulled the nails from the boards he had placed over the kitchen window, starting to smell Roy even before the first board was fully removed. When he stepped inside, the stench was a thing with weight and heft. He threw up right there on the kitchen floor, threw up his few precious crabs and mushrooms and the fresh water he had sucked yesterday from dew. It seemed a terrible waste, even though he knew he would have better food and water now.

He cleaned himself up at the sink, rinsed out his mouth. The smell was overpowering. He could see well enough in the kitchen, but the back rooms would be dark, so he lit the paraffin lamp and walked back as if against a strong wind into the smell.

Roy was not as stiff as before. The sleeping bag was on the floor now and wet and had white fuzz growing even on the outside. Jim tried to grab the end of the bag but couldn’t and stepped back again. I’m sorry, Roy, he said, weeping now for the first time in a while. And he knew he would have to bury him now. He had tried to find someone, had tried to find a way to show Roy to his mother and sister and give him a funeral, but now he would have to settle for burial on this island. There was no other choice. He couldn’t live with this smell, couldn’t let his son just rot here.

He had to go back outside first to breathe. He waited until he had stopped crying, too, then he went back inside quickly, grabbed the wet bag, and dragged it out to the window. When he hefted it through the window, the contents inside mushed together and some of Roy leaked out through the tears in the bag. Jim was making sounds, disgusted. He couldn’t believe he was having to do this.

He grabbed a shovel and dragged Roy far into the trees. He didn’t want to be close to the cabin, didn’t want Roy’s grave so near that these people might want to move it. So he went far enough into the trees that he didn’t think Roy would be found, and then he stopped and began digging. The earth was hard for the first foot, then it was loose for another foot at most before he started hitting rock and root and sand; it was very hard to dig. He labored all day at the grave, stabbing and cutting roots, digging around rocks, smashing his way through with the tip of the shovel.

He had to rest often, and each time he would walk away from the pit and the awful smell of his son rotting. He would sit in the trees a few hundred feet away and think of how he would tell all of this. He wasn’t sure the story could make any sense. Each thing had made the next thing necessary, but the things themselves did not look good. Though he couldn’t admit it completely, part of him wished he would never be found. If no one ever returned to this cabin or noticed them missing from their own, then he would not have to try to tell anyone. He felt he could live now with what had happened if he didn’t have to face anyone else. His son had killed himself and this was Jim’s fault and now he was burying his son. He could believe this. But he didn’t want anyone else to know.

He dug until late afternoon, near the end of the day, and then decided it would have to be good enough because he couldn’t do this in darkness, so he dragged Roy and the sleeping bag into the pit, not wanting to try to empty him out of the bag, and then stood there wondering how he could have a kind of funeral in just a few minutes before heaping the dirt and getting back to the cabin.

I didn’t mean to rush this, he told his son. I know this is your burial. It should be something special and your mother should be here, but I just can’t do anything about all that. I just…and here he stopped and didn’t know what to say. All he could think was I love you, you’re my son, but this bent him so that he couldn’t speak, so he wept and shoveled in the dirt and mounded it and packed it and walked back to the cabin in near darkness, not caring much anymore whether he lost his way.

The smell of Roy was still in the cabin that night and the next day and continued in traces for over a week. After that, Jim still thought he could smell it, but it had become faint enough to be indistinguishable from imagination. On cold days when it seemed to have gone, he walked around the rooms trying to remember it. Outside, too, during hikes through the forest he would sometimes smell it and stop and think of his son. He told himself that these had become the only times he would think of his son, as if only this one kind of memory were strong enough, but of course this was a lie. He was always thinking of Roy in one way or another. There was very little else to do. He had settled in for the winter, was waiting now.