David Vann - Goat Mountain

At times it seemed I would not stay on my feet, the world tilted so steeply. But each time it corrected, and each new position of shadow solidified and held and then slipped again. Like riding the card on a gigantic compass, caught somewhere near an edge, never in the center.

The afternoon darkened, the meadow burning at a lower pitch, all the sky still bright but deepened in color, all the white gone from the yellow and blue and replaced by gold and black, and each tree around me gained in presence, bark etched and hardened but grown.

Figures visible in the patterns of the bark, carvings on the pillars but not anything I could read. Waiting for the priest to rise again, and he rose first. Shifting sideways on his mattress, digging at an ear, deep exhale and then he rolled and sat on the edge, looked at me.

You’ll need to always be like that, he said.

He was only a man, my grandfather. I could see that at moments like this, when he first woke. His mouth open in a yawn of dental nightmare, dirty fingernails scratching at his white belly, leaving pink tracks, pulling on his boots and then his brown hunting shirt and that jacket he always wore, shrinking in his clothing, his fringe of hair bent, digging a finger again into an ear. Only a man. But these moments never lasted.

He heaved forward and swung back into the mattress, springs squeaking, and heaved forward again and ended up somehow on top of his feet and legs. Paused for a moment, peered curiously around, eyes blinking, some kind of bird too fat to fly. Same thoughts as any bird, thoughts of nothing, no mind. Icy soul of anything made too long ago, bird or reptile or rock. And then he tottered off toward the outhouse.

Old and frail, shape-shifter. Trick of the devil. But my own blood. Walking unsteadily beneath the trees, disappearing behind the dark plywood sheets. Outrageous sounds then, as if he were a great bellows flattened. I expected to see him emerge reduced in size, but he came out the same rounded shape still, tottering back toward me and, as always, not looking anywhere. Eyes that had never seen.

You can’t stay awake forever, he said.

I backed away, preferring the company of the dead man. Even with his tricks, he was safer. I retreated to that stream and ferns and hanging body, and my grandfather passed before me to the table for a second round of lunch. Made himself a sandwich with his hunting knife, licked the blade and stabbed it into the wood.

My father risen now also, no longer armed, nothing to gather, no gun and shells. Pissing next to his bedroll and then Tom rising and doing the same and the two of them wandering camp. I turned away and pissed into the stream, leaving no trace, no scent to be tracked, rifle tucked in the crook of my arm. My head turned to look over my shoulder, not taking my eyes off my grandfather.

The dead man did not smell good. We hung the meat of bucks to tenderize them, let them break down a bit for at least two days. But no buck smelled like this after only a day. The dead man making himself a nuisance, not properly gutted and no hide to remove. Bits of lung and heart and intestine, entrails, balls intact. Everything that we stripped from a buck. When I’d finished pissing, I moved farther away.

The afternoon had become hot. I could feel it at my back from the meadow, invading the cooler air. All pieces of memory that I tell myself over and over now, the most important few days of my life, days I want to remember in every smallest detail, but how did I tell them to myself then? I have no access to that mind. Grim dream in stops and starts filled with outrageous shapes.

My grandfather rose from the table and walked like a toddler to his bed to grab his rifle. Held it barrel to the sky and checked there was no shell in the chamber, or did he let the bolt slide back an inch farther and load a shell? No way to tell from twenty-five yards away. I held my rifle in both hands, ready to push down on the bale to lever a round. The rifle heavy from standing with it for hours, my shoulders stretched and hung.

I sidestepped and put the truck between us, a shield, and waited until my grandfather heaved himself into the cab, and Tom after him, and then my father came around to my side, looking at me like he had never seen me before, and then I climbed into the back.

Riding in this truck as if we shared a common destiny, as if we could be brought together. Rolling slowly out of those trees onto open dirt road, letting the earth turn beneath us. Passing the dead land of the imaginary buck, crossing into wide views and gentle slope that curved all the way up to the high ridges, rockfall and talus slopes. Afternoon still, and hot, but the time of shadows, each tree up that slope standing individually and marking itself against the ground. Every small plant and fallen branch and stone making itself known, until a hillside was more than could be seen. A texture only. The creation too much.

My father driving slowly now. This would be a hunt. Low whine of the four-wheel drive, the feel of the truck held back in gear. End of day the time when deer would come out of the brush to feed in the open and under trees.

We passed the turnoff to the switchbacks and bear wallow, continued on to the next wide ridge that sloped downward into white pines, both sugar and gray. Big Bertha coming into view, second-largest white pine in the state, a trunk ten feet thick and tapering only gradually until the very top, where it gnarled and kinked and crested in a wide flat plane of branches and needles that had always looked foreign to me, something from Africa or imagined lands, not from this place. Standing leagues above any other tree, a kind of signal, a living monument. Its bark almost pink in this light. Centuries made visible and real, a recognition of time that we could touch.

We always stopped here, always walked up to that ancient trunk and touched it with a hand, even if briefly. It had to be done, looking up into that enormity.

But my father passed without stopping, and I was still gazing back at the tree. A refusal of scale, a rupturing of normal form into this giant, an indication of what was always there lurking behind all that we believe. Any part of our world capable of this at any moment.

My father driving us farther down into the lower glades. I knew now that was where he was headed. Two wide meadows that fell hundreds of yards down a hillside, one above the other with a strip of brush between. The most open land of the ranch, rimmed by sugar pines.

The smell of sugar pines, sweeter like their name. And the enormous cones, two feet long and half a foot thick, wide petals of something not wood or flower but a substance all its own, curving outward together and darker at their tips. My father stopped in the final stand of trees before we’d enter the glades, stopped where he always had, and Tom was out to make room for my grandfather, who appeared without his rifle because he cared more for these cones than he ever had for deer.

My grandfather a collector but only of these cones. Something I never understood. I hopped down and followed at a safe distance under the trees. Cool in here, the breeze that came at the end of every day, and the pines looked silky, the pale green arranged everywhere above us in brushed arcs, a kind of sanctuary, the trees very tall, taller here than any other stand of sugar pine I’d seen.

My grandfather taking his first steps, leaning too far forward, a child in an enchanted garden. His tongue on his lower lip, mouth open and breathing hard. His hands forward, fingers open. Small hard bird’s eyes hunting for seeds. He reached down for a large cone and the weight of him seemed impossibly off-center, tiny legs behind and struggling now to catch up as he lurched forward and rose up and somehow he did not fall and he was holding a cone like a golden egg, peering at it up close, giant cone that perhaps was yet another way of reaching back in time. A pinecone nearly as large as his head, and he held it as he would a child or a lover.