Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

She walks down the stairs and yells out to the dark house, “Daddy?” She yells it again, but he isn’t there and she goes down the hall and throws open the door to his bedroom. She flicks on the light, stands in the doorway looking. The sheets are twisted. There are clothes strewn on the floor. She sits down on the bed. She is thinking of Grandpa’s trailer aflame. She thinks, I blame you. I blame you for that. She is not sure what she means. It hadn’t felt like a farewell. It had felt like an exorcism. The end table is covered with half-empty beer bottles and cigarettes crushed into bottle caps. She holds a bottle up to the light. There are dead flies floating in it. She thinks, you think you know a thing. You know someone’s name and you think you know something about them, or they are familiar to you and so you stop looking because you think you’ve seen it before. That’s blindness, sweetpea. You keep looking carefully. You keep on like that, looking as if you didn’t know, looking to find out what it is, really. She sets the beer bottle down. Martin believed in names. They were both just fucking wrong. Both of them. She scrapes the bottles and bottle caps and the ashtray into the dustbin. She stands and pulls off the tangled sheets. The old stains like coffee stains dried to ragged outlines with their centers paled out. What reason there might be for this she does not know, perhaps the same reason tide pools leave their salt in concentric rings. Perhaps everything seeks its edge and flees its center and dies this way. The husks of bottles, of clothes strewn and ragged, of this silent bedroom, of this empty house. She drags the mattress off the bed. The beams are cobwebbed. She walks to the bookcase and levers a book out from the others, its top scummed with dust. She opens the foxed pages. Blackberries have taken root in her gut, alders, yarrow, and pig mint harrowed up from the black the way seeds can be, blackberry runners knitting through the latticework of her lungs, and if she were to open her mouth, she could disgorge the canes in a ropy tangle. A nameless wretchedness is on her. She thinks, you keep looking, sweetpea. You keep looking just that way as if you didn’t know it. She begins pulling books off the shelf. She hauls on the bookcase and it will not move. She walks down the hall and brings back the wrecking bar and drives the bar behind the bookcase and levers it forward. The fasteners draw from the plaster like taproots, the galvanized nails bending and squealing. The bookcase falls forward in a wash of books.

She walks down the hallway into the pantry and picks up the chain saw from the floor, and coming into the bedroom starts it with a single, hard pull on the cord. She touches the saw blade to the bookshelf and then goes down through the lovely dark cherrywood, the long cherry ribbons thrown past her across the tangled sheets. She cuts through the beams into the piled books below. The air is filled with a lofted, fluttering confetti of shredded paper. She carries the smoking chain saw to Daddy’s bed and touches the blade to the runner and the bed splits and collapses, and holding the chain saw in one hand she drags the headboard away from the wall. She goes down through it. The phone rings and she walks to it and pulls it from the wall. She stands in the bedroom breathing hard and looking at the ruined furniture, the tangled sheets. She kills the saw and sets it at her feet.

She retrieves a shovel and a pick mattock from the basement. She carries them through the foyer, out the door. The perimeter spotlights switch on with a clicking sound. She walks out through alders and the elderberries, spotlights switching on as she comes into each new tract of darkness, lighting everything up with halogen glare. She digs a pit among the pines, whole branches and trees gone dead with some unknown blight. She cuts through the knotted roots with the pick mattock, digging steadily and carefully, taking breaks to prop herself up on her knees. She digs for a long time. It only needs to be big enough for whatever will be left, the ruins, the ashes, the fused remainder of springs and screws. She stops sometimes to roll her shoulders and to knead the meat of one hand with the fingers of the other. Then she returns to it. When she is done, she sits on the edge stirring habanero sauce into a can of refried beans with her knife and eating straight from the blade. She wipes the knife on the thigh of her pants and pitches the can into the pit.

She drags out the sheets and the mattress. She drags out the sectioned runners and the headboard. She drags out the desk and the cherry bookshelves. The face cuts shine in the gloom. She opens the footlocker and it is full of pictures of her and her mother. She overturns it and stirs through them with the knife blade. She heaps them back into the locker and carries it out. In a drawer, she finds a checkbook with $205 left in the ledger and three envelopes full of cash, stacks of hundreds, fifties, twenties. She counts it out as $4,620 and leaves it beside the checkbooks on the kitchen counter. The bills, the bank statements, the documents, she carries all these out into the pit. She fetches a red wheelbarrow out of the high grass and pumps up the tire and wheels it into the kitchen and shovels dishes from the counter and empties each drawer and props them empty against the wall. She retrieves the skillets and the Dutch oven and carries them to the fireplace and banks them into the ash and tears out the pages of The Brothers Karamazov , crumpling them and piling them and teepeeing the kindling. Then she leans in and blows the coals to life.

She walks to the couch by the fireplace, lies down on it, slides her palms across the upholstery. Then she climbs out of it and takes the axe off the floor and stands glossed with sweat, the sandy soil stuck to her jeans and to her boots, and brings the axe hard down into the spine of the couch. She works with rhythmic deliberation until it splits, and she passes the knife through the upholstery. She cuts and tears, lifting it from its staples until the frame of the couch becomes clear. In the shed she pumps up ten gallons of gas from the underground tank and carries it out and climbs high up onto the pile and, standing on his crumpled mattress, empties the steel gas cans, treading back and forth across ruined shelves, the remains of the footlocker and the bed. She sets the pile on fire, and it burns huge and greasy black while she watches.

She works all night. In the morning, kneeling before the river stone hearth, she drags the skillets from the fireplace with the poker. They are caked in a scabrous red ash and look ruined, fire-ravaged and rusted out. Fishing through the hot ash and dragging each onto the hearthstones, she is afraid that the fire has oxidized them. She carries out a Griswold number 14 skillet and lays it down on the porch and picks up the hose and blasts the skillet with water. The burned grease sheds in clots. Beneath, the bare steel is shining and clean, unmarked and unwarped, as good as the day it was cast. She holds it up to catch the light.

It is four miles north along the Shoreline Highway from Turtle’s house to Mendocino, where she goes each day to look for Jacob. She walks on the embankment above the road, eating dandelions and curly dock. She rips up thistles and, handling them with the skirts of her flannel, pares off the thorns and chews the stalks speculatively, polishing dirt from their twisted taproots with her thumb. People pull over to ask if she’s okay, to ask if she needs a ride, and she stands raking one boot against the blacktop and cracking her knuckles and says that she’s going to meet her friends and that she likes to walk. One guy, leaning over to talk to her through his passenger-side window, says, “Are you . . . eating a thistle?” Turtle looks at him. He says, “Is there any meat on that thing at all?” She shakes her head no, not really. He is looking at her intently. Turtle straightens up away from his truck door and mounts up the embankment into the woods. He calls something after her, but she doesn’t catch it.