His feet were buried in the loose piles of dirt, the grains settling in the tops of his sneakers, and he felt claustrophobic, everything closing in around him. He stepped down into the grave, knelt on either side of her legs, and the entire world was collapsing in toward him, grains coming down over the edges of the grave, and he needed to hurry before he was buried along with her.

He dug his hands under her body, working along the cool earth, leaned forward, embracing her, and pulled to turn her over as gently as he could.

Her legs and hips facing upward now, and he scooted higher, worked his arms fully around until he could ease her onto her back and was holding her close. He lay his face against her breast. He would rest here a moment. Mom, he said.

His breath tightened and shook and the sobbing rocked his chest. He had never wanted his mother to die. She was all he had.

Mom, he said, and the grief was more than he’d expected. He needed to remember that she wasn’t real, that she was only an illusion, manifested here to teach him. His final attachment. There was no longer anything to hold him to this world, and that was right. That was good and necessary.

She was still warm, her breast still warm. I love you, he said. Thank you for coming in to my life. I honor you. Mother. He let there be a ceremonial pause and then said it again. Mother.

He held her as tightly as he could in his arms, and he imagined he could hear a heartbeat, but he knew it was only his own blood and breath.

Mom, he said, and he let himself cry, let himself sob and weep, didn’t try to hold back anymore, pressed close against her, and now he thought he really did hear a heartbeat, and he sat up quickly.

He sat still and listened, as if he might hear it again through the air, and then he stood and got out of that grave quick and grabbed the shovel and tossed a load of dirt onto her, but a shovelful was not enough. This was not fast enough.

Galen lunged at the biggest pile on his hands and knees. A mountain range that he needed to move. He braced his feet against a tractor wheel to push with his chest and both arms, turning himself into a plow, filling the grave. Her face and upper body gone now, the dirt already deep, and he shifted to the side, braced against the other wheel, collapsed the next mountain. He was a giant, forming the earth, deciding what the world would be. Origins. Coming closer to origins, another gift of the dirt. A cataclysm of earth, centuries high, spilling down over her stomach and hips and legs and feet, and even after she was gone, he kept pushing, inhaled the good breath of dirt, felt it caked in his eyes and mouth, taste of time, of the accumulation of time and its release, and felt his hands like claws.

Acknowledgments

I’d like to thank the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the University of San Francisco for generous support during the writing of this novel, and Colm Tóibín, Janet Burroway, and David Kirby for recommending me.

I’d also like to thank everyone at Harper, especially Gail Winston, Jonathan Burnham, Jane Beirn, and Maya Ziv, and everyone at Inkwell, especially Kim Witherspoon, David Forrer, Lyndsey Blessing, Patricia Burke, and Alexis Hurley.

And I must of course thank Galen Palmer, my best friend in high school, whose name I’ve borrowed here. Early on, he was the one who helped turn my life around.

About the Author

David Vann is the author of Legend of a Suicide, which has won ten prizes, including the Prix Médicis étranger in France and the Premi Llibreter in Spain. Translated into eighteen languages, Legend of a Suicide is an international bestseller, has been on forty Best Books of the Year lists worldwide, was selected by The New Yorker Book Club and the Times Book Club, was read in full on North German radio, and will be made into a film. His novel Caribou Island is an international bestseller, was a finalist for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, and was read on the BBC. It will also be made into a film. He is the author of the bestselling memoir A Mile Down: The True Story of a Disastrous Career at Sea and Last Day on Earth: A Portrait of the NIU School Shooter, winner of the AWP Nonfiction Prize. A current Guggenheim fellow and former Wallace Stegner fellow and National Endowment for the Arts fellow, he is a professor at the University of San Francisco and has written for The Atlantic, Esquire, Outside, Men’s Health, Men’s Journal, the Sunday Times, the Observer, the Guardian, the Sunday Telegraph, the Financial Times, Elle UK, Esquire UK, Esquire Russia, National Geographic Adventure, Writer’s Digest, McSweeney’s, and other magazines and has appeared in documentaries for the BBC, NOVA, National Geographic, CNN, and E! Entertainment.

www.DavidVann.com

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