You’re going to dig down until your hands bleed, my father yelled. You’re going to pay.

I just held on as we lurched through the end of that night. It’s unclear what payment has ever done. Nothing has been undone. Every act has remained. What is it in us that makes us believe we can pay? This is a belief in some order, some accounting.

My father stayed perfectly on that road he couldn’t see, followed its every twist and turn as every shape leered from above and fell behind, outran all that would cling or follow except, of course, the dead man, who followed just behind us.

The sky bluer, less black, and in addition to the dark branches of trees passing above I could see the woolly shapes of brush to the sides, could see contour of the land, of the mountain rising to our left. The high ridge that led all the way to the top of Goat Mountain, tapering here, reachable, and somewhere just below it the upper glade, a bare patch of grass that fell steeply into pines. The highest open space, with a view out over everything. The dead man would have the million-dollar view, as the dead always have. We don’t believe in death.

The road visible now as two pale tracks with a dark hump between, and the brush and trees vanished from my side. I looked down a long fall into nothing, an edge of the world. The twilight arrived just in time. Boulders and rock faces blue apparitions faint and shifting, pulling from below. A feeling I can remember now, one that has never vanished or diminished, that deep chasm and its tug at us.

My father did not ease off the gas, and he did not hug the uphill side but simply drove on, the tires inches away from the edge, and I must have been holding my breath and willing the truck to remain on its path until we curved to the left and away from this void into trees again, darkened and again nearly blind as we arrived.

I remained in the cab, holding my rifle. I did not want to touch the dead man.

My father came around and opened my door. You’re going to do this, he said. You’re going to do this right now. And I’ll hold your rifle. You’ll need both hands.

I did not want to give up my rifle.

Get out here now.

I couldn’t move. This mountain the wrong place to be. But my father grabbed the front of my jacket and yanked me out. Held me upright in the dust and took the rifle. Tall, much taller than I was, looming over me, a giant without understanding. He did not seem weak. Made stronger without my grandfather near, each generation sapping the next.

I’ll carry the shovel, too, he said, and he pushed me and I walked to the tailgate and let it down and the dead man’s hands reached out. Enough light now in that blue dawn to see the hollow shape of him, thin and pale. With his head ducked and arms up where he could not see, he looked like a child asking for help, asking to be lifted.

Touching the dead. We’re not supposed to touch the dead. This is why we make a comfortable afterlife for them, so they will not reach out. We hope to distract them, keep them busy. Burial is a hope.

Grab his wrists and pull him out.

I can’t do that.

You killed him. So now you bury him.

I can’t touch him.

My father levered a shell into the.30-.30, a sound so loud I suddenly realized how quiet it was. A few small birds, light wings and leaves, an occasional chirp and nothing more. The sky changing from dark blue to a lighter blue did not make any sound.

My father pressed the end of the barrel into my neck. You’re my son, he said. I’m here to help you. I’m trying to figure out what the hell you are and trying to keep you from becoming that. But if you don’t grab those wrists now, I’m going to pull the trigger.

Cold metal against my neck, pressing in, and a hollow I could not feel but the bullet would travel down that hollow and rip through my neck in an instant so fast it could not be known, and I did believe my father would pull the trigger. He had been pushed too far.

So I grabbed those wrists, cold and mostly bone, and felt the dead man’s curled fingers on my forearms, his fingernails the same as any beak or claw or horn, the part of us made of something other than flesh, the part we want to deny, the reminder. I pulled and was afraid he’d separate, just rip in half, but all of him slid, and he did not complain or say anything at all, and I yanked again and he slid out until I was stepping backward quickly and he was falling, the weight of him off the end of that gate, and I could not let him fall on me, jumped back and let go as he landed hard.

The sound magnified in this bend of road, under these trees. The dead man sly still, waiting for the right moment to make his move. Different from the buck, not rooting into the earth but trickier.

Not far from here was where he had begun, a living man sitting on that rock. Dragged downhill by my father. Dragged again by my grandfather across the meadow at the edge of our camp, and dragged back by my father to be hung a second time. Our lives repetition, not only us but all who came before, and Jesus, too, dragging his cross, form of suffering, form of a human life. In all our stories, we drag and scrape a weight across this earth. Called the Passion. Jesus a story of our pity for ourselves.

Get moving, my father said, as all fathers have said, enforcers generation after generation, slaves on every road.

So I grabbed those hands, fingerclaws scraping the underside of my wrists, and pulled him, and he slid more easily than the buck but was heavier, even hollowed out. He could not return to the earth. His connection had been severed. No root to burrow down, no transformation into plant or rock. The buck elemental still, made of the same material as the stars and trees. But the dead man heavier and heavier, accumulation of weight, gravity hole.

My heels digging into that loose slope of pine needles and leaves and fallen twigs over dirt, catching on rock beneath and the next step slipping again. Dragging in heaves backward, all movement shortened, my pull at one end become only inches of progress, all of him expanding and contracting and slipping back down and I didn’t see how I would ever make it to the upper glade.

The dead man with his heels together, maintaining perfect form, swaying back and forth, a diver coming up from the depths or descending still.

Damn it, my father said, and he yanked one of the dead man’s hands from me and pulled hard up that slope.

I scrambled to keep up, pulling with my right hand and clawing at the hill with my left, bent over low and toes digging in.

The dead man pooling all his weight now, hanging back and not wanting this burial, resisting a second death. Removed from the surface of the earth and sent into darkness, mouth filled with dirt and all light extinguished. Grains compacting above, layer upon layer, and no way to swim back through this, held down and drowned for eternity and lost. After Jesus invaded the world with the dead, we’ve been trying to keep the new dead from rising, the Christian burial no longer a chamber but only a thick layer of dirt, a barrier.

The light flooding the sky now a cruelty, a reminder, false promise. The beginning always shown to us at the end. The sunrise behind this ridge. We would remain in shadow. But the stars were gone and the sky a milky blue, without distance or depth. Even this blue a lie and no longer a promise, and the blue removed from every other thing.

Brown of the pine needles, each bundle of three thin spears curving and held together by a wrapping of darker brown. My face in close. Orange tint to the underside of each spear. My mind needing to focus on something other than the weight and labor.

Scab leaves dry and loose, every light shade of brown. Bracken fern and bedstraw. Wild raspberry low and creeping along the ground, rare green. Male pinecones scattered everywhere, thin and brown and dried out, fallen from the lower parts of the trees, their yellow-green pollen shed, like used sparklers on Fourth of July.