David Vann - Goat Mountain

This meadow the place of all my childhood play, close to camp, a small and nearly perfect meadow that should not have been used for this. One transit erasing all others, polluting memory. But my grandfather did not pause. Swept along unstoppable until the dead man had left his wake and disappeared into brush. We had lost them. Too far away for sound. Tom and I had not moved. We stood with our rifles and watched the far rim of that meadow. My father on the ground in prostration, and no sound from him either.

We waited and the entire mountain seemed to wait with us, all oriented toward where my grandfather had gone down over the horizon and waiting for his return, same as any sun but the night sped up and no darkness, no rest or new beginning, day after burning day without end, and he reappeared above those grasses and left no mark as he advanced upon us, an orbit that could not be changed, and nothing that had ever happened had left any effect on him.

He crossed the meadow and grew in size and crossed the threshold into pines, in shadow, extinguished, and crushed through ferns and the boundary of the stream back into our world, and he did not stop or notice us with our rifles held low and level, pointing at him, but walked right between Tom and me. If we fired now, and the bullets found some way of passing through him, we’d be shooting each other. But he did not look at either of us, the tremendous weight of him set in motion with his pencil legs unsteady and erratic until he reached his mattress, where he collapsed upon it face-first with his arms at his sides and legs flipping up behind. The sound of rusty mattress springs, coils jounced, and that was it. He did not adjust or move except to breathe, the rough rise and fall of mottled flesh and those tiny lungs buried somewhere beneath.

My father rose behind us with a low moan and Tom and I swiveled in unison with our rifles, guards at some gate that had not yet been built. But my father had no interest in us. His eyes were fixed on the far edge of the meadow, and he passed beneath the hooks and over the water and through fern and pine and into that bright grass following in the dead man’s wake. A figure clothed and thinner than my grandfather, a figure with legs and a stride and a human form, having to walk across the earth and suffer. A figure on which all that had happened had left a mark.

He passed step by step across that meadow beneath the sun and grew shorter at the far end as the land curved down and then was swallowed in brush. We waited, as we had waited before, but the mountain did not wait with us. It was indifferent, my father no devil or god but only human. His return over the horizon would mean nothing.

But we waited, and my grandfather settled into sleep behind us, his breath slowed and deepened and a faint whistling all through him. A giant at rest, and it was unclear for whom we stood guard. Tom wearing a camo T-shirt, dark patches of green and brown and black, and his rifle held together with tape, ill prepared for some war not yet announced. Both of us ready to fire from the hip, not raising our rifles because it was unclear where we’d aim. As if some enormity were about to descend upon us.

But my father reappeared, a shape become smaller and bent, dragging the dead man, stepping backward across the meadow. Not following the previous wake but wandering aimless through that high grass, not bothering to look behind, only dragging. His path erratic and jointed, my father pulling in tugs, and the meadow became a larger distance to cross and it seemed too long for him to reach the pines, finally, and then drag through ferns and into the creek. The dead man’s bare ankles sweeping downward a bit in the current, at play again on a sunny day, going down to the creek to cool off, a strange dead man who still had not discovered the gravity of what had happened to him.

My father pulled until the dead man lay beneath the hooks, and he dropped him with his arms flung above, relaxing, not a care in the world. He was a tricky dead man and took advantage any time we looked away.

My father loosened a rope that held a chain and hook, let them fall to the ground, and then he knelt at the man’s feet as if he’d wash them, bare feet bloodless and white, not turned dark like the rest of him, but my father took that hook and impaled an ankle, hooking the Achilles tendon, just as he did to hang a buck, and the hook went in bloodless and he impaled the other ankle also and let them fall into the dirt.

Then my father rose and pulled at that rope and wrapped it around a tree to the side and pulled and sweated the line and the dead man rose again as he had before but this time with his ankles skewered the same as any buck and his arms back in praise but his chin ducked, penitent, not so wild now, understanding something of his fate, perhaps. That dark thin belly and the double birth, and as he rose, he swung and we saw that crater again, dark and unknown as any moon, and the flies gathering again, and it seemed that we had stood here before in this same moment and would stand here again and would always be raising the dead man to hang here above us.

WHAT IF JESUS HAD BEEN HUNG THIS WAY, UPSIDE DOWN, spinning slowly, hands partly curled, like claws, and knuckles brushing dirt? Head up unnaturally, chin against his chest, straining to see the sky past his feet. Jesus the hunter, hanging the same as any beast. The pews of every church built high against the ceiling so that we could look down into his eyes. Or perhaps we’d all lie on a bare floor, no pews at all, and gaze upward, or even hang ourselves from our feet in long rows like bats and chant as the blood filled our heads.

But his knuckles are in the dirt as he twirls, and so there can be no church at all, nothing with a floor and nothing with a roof because then he can’t see the sky.

My father did not cover him. No sack to hide this Jesus, this dead man, nothing to contain him.

I stood with my rifle like a Roman guard and what could not be stopped was my attempt to read the stigmata. The human mind will always read and will never stop reading. This double birth, the entry hole of the bullet above but now hanging below where the umbilical cord has been cut, this tells us we are reborn in death. The crater behind it tells us that this mortal life was empty. This is not what these things mean at all, of course, but we can’t stop our minds. I can’t stop reading the dead man, even now, because I still want something, just as he will always have that look of wanting more.

My grandfather slept peacefully. Uneven breath that could halt at any moment but always kept going and no less peaceful for being uneven. I stood between him and the dead man, two forms in repose, and I didn’t know which direction to face. Always turning, like that slow spin. My father and Tom gone to their bedrolls but I knew they would not sleep. They would only lie in that forest looking up toward the sky, become the congregation, following his gaze.

The trees become pillars of stone, carved in a language forgotten, and the sky our dome, the mountain behind us the apse. Floor of dirt and no ceiling that can be reached. The altar brought out through the nave to the very entrance, to the border of that stream and the sunlight and meadow beyond, the world outside this sanctuary. Simplest of altars, a hook and chain. And a great slab of marble for the priest, the mattress of my grandfather. The rest of us arrayed in fear around him. Each mass a battle, the breaking of the body of Christ and drinking of his blood. The Christian mass more gruesome already than anything we could invent. Even the dead man hanging hooked by his ankles was tame, no drinking of his blood, no ingesting his flesh. We were not cannibals.

The repose of the dead man and my grandfather, the great calm, neither of them moving except from air, in the breeze or to breathe, that repose was why I couldn’t move. I stood there with my rifle for hours expecting something to happen at each moment but there was only breeze and breath and the slow growth of the shadows, the pillars turning over the ground before me, circular movement like a dial to be read, arrangement in some pattern from the very beginning.