David Vann - Goat Mountain

My father crawled to the ankles and pulled them to ground, yanked out the hooks. The dead man free now, and I waited for him to run, but my father rose and picked up the ankles with their bloodless holes and dragged him toward the truck. The man’s arms outstretched and knuckles curled, risen off the ground, locked into that shape, reaching for everything, no neck, orangutan Jesus pale and rotting and waiting. He would not go into any grave easily. I knew that.

Well I guess it’s back to bed, my grandfather said, yawning and scratching his sides. We come close, and then we just go on. Dig your hole and try not to think about anything.

Fuck off, my father said.

Yeah, my grandfather said. He turned and picked his way carefully over the needles and cones, barefooted, unsteady, and sat down at the table. Breakfast first, then I’ll fuck off and catch a bit of shut-eye.

Tom tossed his firebrand back into the pit and returned to the griddle. Fine, he said. Aren’t you going to ask any important questions, though? Why eat an egg? What is an egg? What does the egg have to do with the bacon? Is there any rule that says we have to eat the bacon before the egg? What if the bacon is the egg? Is there any consequence to an egg?

Help me lift him, my father said. He was talking to me, waiting at the back of the pickup.

I stood, but I didn’t want to touch the dead man. I couldn’t just reach down and hold those hands.

Right now, my father said. Hurry the fuck up.

My father in shadow, the truck blocking the fire. I held my rifle in both hands as I came closer and was hidden also. Cold and not yet morning.

Now, he said.

The dead man a pale bluish shadow against the darker ground. Those hands suspended and curled midair, warning us, trying to describe the enormity of something but frozen midwarning, without blood or sound or time.

Put down your rifle and grab his hands.

I was frozen, locked as solidly as the dead man.

Fuck me, my father said. He dropped the ankles and circled the dead man in only three quick strides, grabbed my arm and hauled me around to the feet. Grab his ankles then, he said.

The dead man reaching for me. Unclear where the ground was or which way we hung in gravity. It looked like he was standing above with those arms reaching high, which meant I was lying on the ground, the world rocked ninety degrees, but there was only air behind my back. I was held against nothing, and the dead man bearing down. His head ducked low because he was about to spring.

Grab his ankles. My father’s voice loud.

The removal of Jesus from the cross. His burial. The problem is that he’s going to rise, and there’s some premonition of that, and the premonition binds you in place. You can’t move or breathe.

Goddammit, my father said. Are you completely fucking retarded?

Your son knows, my grandfather said from the table. He knows the man’s death means something. He knows there’s going to be consequence. He knows more than you do.

How about you dig a hole, my father shouted back. How about you dig a big hole and get down in it and when we get back we’ll throw the dirt over. I’d be happy to do that. No hesitation at all.

You can’t bury everything, my grandfather said. Some things won’t be buried.

Spare me.

What will this burial do? Will it mean your son didn’t kill the man? Will it mean the man’s not dead?

Did the bacon come from the egg? Tom asked. Did the bacon ever have wings? Is the bacon a pterodactyl?

My father knelt down in darkness at the man’s side and cradled him, lifted him in a drooping slab, arms and legs not quite rigid, and turned to swing the feet in first over the tailgate, but they weren’t high enough, even with the tailgate down. They were caught.

Aaah! my father yelled, and he dipped and swung the body to get those feet to clear, then pushed the dead man into the bed with all my grandfather’s pinecones, sliding him along metal ruts. The body pale and rubbery and flexing, a different luminescence. Hands hanging midair still, over the edge, but my father swung the tailgate up and slammed them.

Get in the truck, he said.

Bravo, my grandfather said. You’re halfway to nothing.

My father grim. I climbed in the cab and he was hunched forward over the wheel. You have done this, he said. This is all because of you. So you’re going to drag that body all the way to the upper glade and give him a proper burial.

The upper glade?

That’s right. My father turned the ignition then and the engine was surprisingly loud, rough and pulsing, racing against the cold. Grab the shovel, he said. Unless you want to dig a grave with your bare hands.

I walked to the fire pit, my grandfather and Tom both watching, and grabbed our camp shovel, hinged and small, army surplus. It would take forever to dig a grave with that.

But I climbed into the cab, and my father turned the truck around and swung onto the road, except there was no road to see and he did not turn on the lights. He drove in darkness. We left the fire and its light almost instantly, and there was no other light to steer by, the moon down now and only a dim scatter in one end of the sky.

The sound of the truck isolated us from the rest of the world. Held together in this cab waiting for what would happen. And yet sound is all my father could possibly have used to navigate. The scree along one side to know he was at an edge, the snapping of small branches under the tires and then drifting back into smoother sound of dirt and small rocks and pinecones crushing, soft small grenades going off. Or perhaps he drove from memory, the shape of this road become a part of him.

A dark form beside me, a form I didn’t know. I couldn’t see him, and it seemed it had always been this way. My grandfather had erased him.

Falling through darkness, compression in the engine winding up high and my hand braced on the dash, and I couldn’t see what was below. The dead man behind falling toward us, his arms outstretched.

What I know of my father is that he was moral. He wanted all to be made right. He would have remade us all, melted us down and recast us in a different mold. And this was why he had no chance. This was why he was erased and I can never remember him now as anything more than a shadow beside me, some reminder of who I perhaps should have been but could never possibly have been. You can’t undo your own nature, and the moral are always left helpless in the face of who we are.

JESUS HAD A PAGAN BURIAL. A CHAMBER WITH ROOM FOR the afterlife, closed off by a great stone. A desert burial, used for thousands of years before him. Not the beginning of any story. All the others rose from the dead also, to drink from their golden cups and drive chariots and parade around with jewelry and servants. Death a busy place. The only difference was that Jesus moved the stone.

Jesus broke the law, broke the separation between living and dead. A collision of our two worlds, and it could only be catastrophic. Jesus released the dead into our lives, set all the dead wandering the earth, freed the wraiths and demons we fear now, invaded the world of the living with all the figures of the afterlife, all the figures of hell, freed from the pagan demonland of Hades. No river and boatman to separate us, and now when night falls we can feel them everywhere, their lungless breath.

God wanted this. He sent his only son as an invasion of the otherworld into ours. This is the story of Jesus. After thousands of years of separate worlds, we finally had to admit that the demonland was inside us, and so we told this story of Jesus moving that stone, opening the gate, flooding our lives with all that we are, sent by god, who is only our own will. Jesus is our recognition of the demon inside us, a recognition of the animal inside us, the beast. A recognition we wanted and needed.