The house did not feel inanimate. It had played a role in all that had happened here. And Galen wished he could see ahead. If he brought his grandmother home, that might appease the house. Wood could return to wood.
Galen set his glass quietly on the floor and moved slowly along the wall toward the stairs. The washer a thing insane, bucking and chugging, calling too much attention to this place, drawing everything from any quieter place outside.
Galen ran. He ran around the corner and up the stairs into his mother’s room, closed the door and locked it, then panicked that something was in here with him. He batted at the wall for the light switch but didn’t find it, felt something behind him and could hardly breathe, then hit the switch and turned and crouched and saw nothing.
The room bright, her bare mattress, uncovered bed, and everything placed neatly in her closet and on the shelves. Her room the way it had always been, and he didn’t know how he could have been so jumpy. Fear of the dark was the opposite of transcendence. The exact opposite. The worst direction possible. Cavemen cowering near the fire, looking over a shoulder, listening for the snap of wood. Fear of the dark was full belief in the world, full enslavement, and it meant there had been no progression. Somehow, all that he had learned was not accumulating. Instead of approaching a goal, he was appearing in flashes and then vanishing again, with no control over where he might appear next.
Galen slowed his breath and walked over to his mother’s bed and lay down. He would keep the light on, he knew. That helpless against himself, that ruled by nothing.
Chapter 30
In the morning, Galen stood at the lock. He inserted a crowbar and could see that he’d be tearing down the entire shed and digging a hole in the earth before that lock would break. And a lock was not a bad thing, really, to keep people out.
The morning the same as any other, exactly the same, the air heating, shadows knitting themselves up toward noon. The last day of his ordeal, but the external world was indifferent. He was going to finish before night came again, even if the world didn’t care.
Galen walked around to the toolshed. This might be his way in. If he cut through this interior wall, he could still lock the toolshed and there’d be no outward sign.
So he cleared away the last of the tools, grabbed an axe, and swung at the wood, swung high on the wall at an angle to cut across a board, and the blade sank deep and stuck. He tugged at the handle, and he could get it to seesaw back and forth a bit, but it wasn’t coming out, and it was too high on the wall for him to pull directly. Damn it, he said.
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.