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.

The route from old stack to new stack, held together by the tractor. Galen focused on the screens, the wood he had expected to be cool to the touch, but it was warm. The shed no real shelter at all. The air felt as hot as outside. He didn’t know how that could be. A place of shade, but perhaps the roof and walls baked and became an oven, heating the trapped air.

Smell of walnut, old husks. Acidic and sharp, a green and black smell, and the smell of dust. The sound of heating, of the roof expanding.

Galen carried the screens, dozens of them, until the space behind the tractor was bare dirt, old dirt unexposed since his mother’s childhood. Older dirt smelled more like rock. He would dig here.

He stepped outside through the toolshed for the shovel, emerged in the bright light, squinting. Found a shovel with a good tip and stepped back inside.

Galen set the shovel and pushed hard with his foot, and the shovel buried partway in. But when he pulled up, there was not much on the blade. This could take a very long time.

He went for the pick, pulled it free of its board leaning against the tractor. He swung at the earth with the larger blade end, and the impact was too hard, too much resistance, so he tried the other end, a long curved spike, the one that had punctured the board, and this dug deep and easily, without stunning his hands. He lifted up on the handle and walked forward to rip the spike through the earth, loosening the dirt.

Dirt was inescapable. Always a return to dirt. Galen stabbed again and again, breaking the surface in an oval six feet long and two feet wide. It didn’t need to be deep. He’d be putting the wooden screens back over the top.

Broken earth, old work, heaving iron. Who he was no longer mattered. A question from an earlier time. Grave digger. Mother grave digger.

Each time the pick hit, the buried smell of the earth was released, the smell of decades past, of the earlier shed and his mother playing here as a girl. The work of his grandfather and whoever else had come before.

Galen shaped an oval as lovely as a stained-glass window. An oval of ruptures. And then he dropped the pick and raised the shovel. He buried the blade carefully, scooped the loose clods and grains and set them aside in a neat pile graveside.

Shovelful and shovelful. Sound of it. Drips of his sweat mixing in. All labor took longer than we thought. A small oval, small window, and yet it was more than it seemed, and the pile already becoming larger than he expected, even for this shallow first level, this bare beginning.

Chapter 31

The digging its own eternity, a place where time collapsed. The dirt knew what it was making room for.

Scraping with the shovel, gathering the last of what he had loosened, and then swinging the pick again, hearing the tap against rock, soil impregnated with rock. Soil not meant for planting.

Caving away beneath him. Deepest cave, digging the grave of one’s own mother. This was why the world rushed away on all sides. Without the mother, the container of the world no longer held.

His thoughts in a panic, no still point anywhere. Rushing like the earth and the air. Wanting to look behind him, wanting to find her, needing to see whether she was still alive, but unable to move from this one point, struggling to stand on safe ground.

The pick large, the handle like bone, expanded, hollow inside, difficult to hold on to. Darker soil now, older soil. He was passing beyond the time of his family, crossing into an earlier time.

The meaning of dirt was this, perhaps. The shovel removing time. The eons it took to form the dirt from rock. The water and air that had to work through millions or even billions of years to free it, and then its travel and settling and waiting, layer upon layer. His life now such a brief flash. Any attachment was absurdity. This was what the dirt taught. If he could remain focused on geologic time, human time could never reach him.

The shovel willing, always willing. And the dirt itself. Waiting for so long, yet no resistance to being moved. All order upset, the arrangement of grains, but no resistance and therefore no suffering.

The pile along one side of the grave, spilling right to its edge. The dirt became larger once it was removed. A dark mountain range forming. Another layer scraped and cleared, and he wondered whether she could hear this sound. He didn’t like not knowing whether she could hear. He kept glancing behind him, kept expecting to see her standing there, walking toward him.

He worked as quickly as he could. He did not want to continue into night.

The ground became harder still, rockier and bound together. A large stone shuddering through his hands when the pick hit, and he had to shovel around it, clear away a few inches on every side, gray face and white scar from the pick, then get down in the grave on his hands and knees and pull at it, clawing through the gloves, trying to get a grip, until he was able to hug it onto his lap. Heavy stone, and he could use it to mark her grave. He’d leave it at one end, with that mark from the pick, his mark, and no one else would know, but this would work as a headstone.

Galen shuffled on his knees with the rock held in his lap, scooted to the head of the grave, and rolled the stone up to ground level. Smooth stone, smooth face, old river stone somehow arrived here, so far from water.