David Vann - Dirt

He looked around for another axe. All these tools flung across the dirt, and no second axe. The cabin had an assortment, but only one here.

Then he saw the pick. A miner’s pick, something left over from the gold rush.

Galen stood before the wall in a wide stance, his right hand far down the handle to support that heavy end, and he swung with all his might into the wall. Aah, he yelled, and the narrow sharpened point of the pick went right through the wall, buried instantly to the shank, and he rapped his knuckles of both hands against wood.

Galen howled in pain, his left hand on fire. He staggered around in the furrows flapping the hand in its gauze and sucking at his breath, another dance in the orchard, a puppet on strings. He had no skills in this world.

The trees had no comment. Dulling in the sun, shrinking and hardening.

He danced until the searing faded enough that he could regain his mind and breath and walk back to the shed, to that wall. Two long handles hanging now, the axe at an angle and the pick straight down.

Nice, he said. The other end of the pick, sticking out, was a blade about three inches wide. So he had used the wrong end.

He looked around at the other tools, shovels and rakes. A few saws of different sizes and types, short thick handsaws for pruning, larger blades for cutting firewood, all useless because the gaps between boards were not wide enough to insert a saw crossways.

But there was a sledgehammer. A big fist of metal at the end of a stick, and that seemed right. That was perfect for how he felt. He’d tear down this patch of wall and then maybe just keep going.

His left hand did not want to grip a handle, but he made it grip, and he swung that metal high and hard as any lunatic Viking and heard wood crunch and the axe came loose, the blade twisting toward him, and he jumped to the side and watched it fall. Then he swung the sledgehammer again and broke through one of the boards, ancient shed buckling now, and the hammer caught and he had to step close to lift and pull it free.

Galen was breathing hard. Heavy hammer, and the air heating. Shattered plank, and he swung now at its neighbor, felt the lob of iron through space, felt the unstoppable force as it crunched through wood. Momentum. A hammer was a sign. It was fate and doom. It was exactly like the momentum of our lives. Impossible to stop a hammer once it was flung. All you could do was hold on and feel the impact.

The top of two boards broken, and he swung low now, to bash them at their roots. A croquet mallet. On the back lawn, in his childhood, they’d played on Sunday afternoons, bright red and blue balls and stakes, and his grandparents sitting at the white iron table beneath the fig tree. Something he hadn’t remembered in so long. His mother in a sun hat that tied under her chin. Strange hat, from another time, as if his childhood had happened fifty years back or even a hundred years.

But memory was only distraction. He needed to wipe his mind free of memory, needed to focus on the swing of metal through air and into wood. Crunch of wood, and the plank vibrated, connected only at its middle, where it was nailed into a crossbeam. Galen moved on to its mate, smashed and smashed again until the two of them hung there quivering, the pick still hanging.

The problem with memory was that it told us whatever we wanted to hear. It had no shape of its own.

Galen dropped the sledgehammer, heavy thud and a rising of dust in the still air. He didn’t know why there was no wind this summer. There had been wind other summers, but this one they were meant to rebreathe their own air, a gradual loss of oxygen and thought. Nothing to do this summer but lose your mind.

I need a saw, Galen said. He could saw the crossbeam through the narrow gaps between planks and cut these two planks free. But he missed the sledgehammer already, liked the feel of its power, so he picked it up again, even though there was no chance of breaking through the beam behind the planks.

Galen swung hard and the impact blasted his hands, too solid and unforgiving. He dropped the sledgehammer and had to breathe fast until the sharp pain in his mangled hand became only a throb again. Dust in his nostrils.

He stepped out of the toolshed and looked at all the tools spread across the ground. As if the earth were offering the tools directly, grown from soil. The tools the color of soil, worn brown wood and faded iron.

He selected a pruning saw with jagged teeth. Short thick handle like an antique pistol, Galen a conquistador, stepping back almost five hundred years. He was supposed to use a regular handsaw, he knew, the kind for cutting firewood, but he liked the look and feel of this one. It would catch and snag, and that seemed right. He wanted it to be difficult to get into the shed.

He slid the blade between planks and brought it down against the beam, pulled back to cut the first groove. Pushed forward and the blade stuck, wouldn’t move at all. So he lifted and set it in place again and pulled back to form a deeper groove, the sawdust a light yellow, and pushed forward again and stuck. Yet another sign. Like gravity, like the failure of progression. Pulling back always easy, moving forward always blocked.

Galen’s energy for battle was waning. He dropped the pruning saw and went outside for a regular handsaw with a wide blade and small teeth, the saw he should have begun with originally. And this one worked much more easily. Push and pull, light at first, then digging in, sawdust so fine he was breathing it.

He was through that beam in no time, and it collapsed onto the saw blade, some force of the shed falling inward, so he had to yank the saw free.

On to the next gap, the other side of his two hanging planks, and he moved quickly, ripping the wood, and suddenly was through and the two planks fell away from him into the shed, banged against the tractor.

He realized now what he had done. The wall was down. The shed no longer a cage.

Mom?

Darker in the shed, most of it in shadow, and his eyes in a panic, looking everywhere, but nothing moved. He wanted there to be movement. He wanted his mother to be alive.

The green tractor, the stacks of walnut racks, the dirt floor. But no movement, and no sound except his own blood in his ears. Mom?

He wanted her to be alive. He hadn’t expected that. He hadn’t expected that at all. He was afraid to step through the gap.

Galen felt like he was standing at the edge of the world, that if he took one step forward he would fall off. He was swaying in place, dizzy with vertigo, and he wanted to step back, away from the edge, and get down low on the ground.

But he stepped forward, into the shed, and the ground did not fall away. It held his feet and he was in here with his mother now and he didn’t know where she was. Mom?

He was afraid to look around. His eyes would look down at the floor, along a wall, searching for her, but then up at the ceiling, all too fast to register anything. He didn’t want to see.

The shed larger inside than he had remembered, and it seemed to be growing, the walls receding.

He stepped around the front of the tractor, his left hand on its snout for balance. He could be sucked away in a vacuum at any moment.

Dread. A physical presence to it. He did not want the moment of finding her. Looking down and then looking away, shadows everywhere, each of them his mother for a moment and then nothing.

He stayed close to the tractor, didn’t want to venture farther into the shed. The broken racks waiting behind the tractor, some of them waiting decades now, unmoved. He picked one up, dusty wood and an old metal screen, torn in the center, and carried it to the empty space in front of the tractor. Then he picked up another and carried it to the same place, began a new stack.