where her death was first assigned to him. He explains to her how he chased the deer for miles before it limped, as if preordained, into the quarry. Beneath these pines, he tells her, is a nice place to be buried. There’s plenty of shade, a gentle stream nearby, and it’s not far from a good view of the valley. Here is where he would be buried, he says, if the state would allow it.
Her response is to plant a snapshot of her parents in his head, as if she is demanding to know why he is hiding her from them. John refuses to answer. Instead, he tells her of his belief, recently arrived at, that souls are liberated by the earth. That once she is in the ground, she will be free to move easier than the wind. She can visit her parents or, if she hasn’t already, go to Hawaii. He realizes that he is talking quite loud, that maybe the fever is causing him to rave. The crows and grackles are yelling back at him. Suddenly he is angry at the dead girl for making him see that he is as much a coward as most of mankind. He stops walking and puts the back of his hand to his forehead. It feels like room-temperature beef. “You’re dead and I ain’t,” he tells her, “and I don’t want to go to jail, all right?”
She doesn’t answer.
John starts lugging her toward the truck again. He’s on the edge of the fire zone. Although it’s been razed nearly two years, the area still breathes a faint odor of smoke. A hundred feet ahead, he can just see, nearly parallel to the ground in the brush-tufted swale, the pickup’s roof, dully reflecting the sun. Now he starts to consider the difficulties of performing his task. Though the fire-dead earth should be softer to dig, in John’s weakened state, and with only one functional hand, doing so will be torturous at best. That his pain should be commensurate with his deviousness seems to him exactly right.
At the swale’s edge, he drops the lead rope, climbs down the indention into the pickup, starts the engine, pulls the truck up onto the flat terrain, then shuts it off.
For several seconds he can hear his raggedy breathing and rivulets of sweat splashing onto the seat. Then the birds start in again. Out the windshield, John sees more crows and grackles than he can count perched in the live trees encircling the dead zone. He jumps from the truck and nearly lands on a porcupine. He leaps back. The porcupine doesn’t move. John prods it with his toe. The varmint just lies there. John rolls it over and sees that only the animal’s head and quills haven’t been eaten. He kicks the carcass into some bushes, then hurries over to the toboggan, draws back the tarp, unties the dead girl, and grabs the shovel from between her legs. “In a coupla years,” he tells her, reentering the swale, “this spot’ll grow up to be beautiful again. And you’ll be a part of it.”
The digging is even slower and more painful than he had imagined it would be. After each one-handed shovel thrust into the dark loam at the swale’s bottom, he places a foot atop the metal blade and pushes until it sinks to the hilt; then, simultaneously yanking back and lifting the handle, he extracts the blade and, using for ballast the forearm of his injured limb, shakily dumps to the left of the hole what soil he manages not to drop, usually less than he doesn’t. From start to finish, performing the procedure initially takes him close to half a minute, and, as the grave gets deeper, necessitating even higher hoisting of the shovel, successively longer, while each time he removes less dirt. So that he can easily stand while working, he makes the hole about four feet wide. Having started close to five feet below ground level, he soon can’t see beyond the swale’s borders.
Whenever he stops to rest, he hears the ceaseless yakking of the birds; intermittently one or more of them will dive down out of the trees to peer curiously into the depression. Once, a noise resembling asthmatic wheezing begins above him. John abruptly drops the shovel and scrabbles from the grave to find a pair of red foxes sniffing at the dead girl. He chases them off with a volley of rocks, then ascends to the forest floor, grabs the lead rope of the toboggan, and yanks it to the swale’s edge. He climbs into the grave again and recommences digging. After a while his left arm hurts as much as his right. He suffers periodic dizzy spells; his eyes blur; in his gaze, objects vacillate; rocks become people drowning in the knee-deep pool of blood that he bales. He begins ascribing to the birds’ toneless squawking a blend of poetic insight and cold intelligence. He imagines their varied flights composing silent funeral marches. From the shovel’s blade, his father’s face screams at him, “Was a wolf, I tell ya. A goddamn wolf!”
The birds abruptly turn mute. A moment later, they start in again, even louder. In that brief interlude of silence, John is certain he heard voices—real ones—from somewhere above him. Once more he exits the grave, this time with more difficulty. With his eyes, he circles the woods and brush above him. To the west, a patch of yarrow sways harder than he thinks this gentle wind could cause it to. Or is it his imagination? He’s not sure. It surprises him to see that the sun is three-quarters of the way toward the horizon. How many hours has he been digging? Three? Four? Reaching up to the toboggan, he whisks several horseflies from the dead girl’s face. “Gotta put ya in deep ’nough,” he tells her, “where somethin’ don’t dig ya up.”
Again he descends into the grave. He has no idea for how long. Time is like recycled water rising and falling, and John dead wood on its surface. Even his physical distress isn’t reliable; like all human conditions, it can’t maintain its intensity. His pain loses its sharp edge and becomes merely monotonous. Periodic pangs, twinges, and abnormalities remind him he is unhealthily alive. When he spits or swallows, his swollen tongue feels like a live fish wriggling in his mouth. A loud throbbing sound fills his ears. His sweat tastes like bitter almonds. He urinates a burning, dark yellow froth into the bottom of the grave. Twice more he thinks he hears voices and maybe branches cracking at ground level, but, after crawling out to see, spots nothing amiss. The third time, he doesn’t even bother to look; recalling his dying father’s hallucinatory wolf, he dismisses the sounds as audible phantasy.
Beyond a certain depth, his one hand can barely heft to the lip of the hole an empty shovel, let alone a dirt- loaded one. His efforts prove fruitless. Abruptly dropping the tool, he gets down on his knees and begins scooping up single handfuls of soil, then tossing them out of the grave. At some point during these labors, he becomes convinced that a carnivorous animal is trying to exit through his throat. Gagging, he tries to heave the beast, but having eaten nothing but berries for forty-eight hours, can’t. His skin temperature drops from hot to clammy. An almost peaceful mood attends him. He believes he is dying and is not overly troubled by it. After several seconds he is able to breathe again; then the experience upsets him terribly. “This is gon’ have to do!” he yells up at the dead girl. The floor of the swale is maybe six inches below his shoulders. Shadows half-fill the indenture. John tries to exit the grave, and finds he is unable to.
Worn out from shoveling, his uninjured limb trembles like jelly while failing to pull him up. His right arm is even more useless; monstrous-looking in its tumescence, it radiates enough pain from even the slightest pressure to present John with a phantasmagorical longing for death as life’s first prize for suffering. He nearly faints. Then, emitting a whimpering sound, he exhaustedly sits down in the grave. Though he’s not seriously concerned with being infinitely trapped there—he can, after all, always refill a portion of the hole with dirt and walk out—the idea of being imprisoned in a pit not even up to his chin infuriates him. He thinks of the hours of labor he spent to confine himself and wonders if burying Ingrid Banes will result only in more suffering for him, rather than less. Then he recalls his father saying that “life is for the living” and John’s own determination at least to try, as had Robert Moon, to be a presence in his son’s life. And how can he do that from a jail cell?
Rejecting the disheartening and painful prospect of refilling what he has dug in order to escape, he stands up, grabs the shovel, and lays it on the swale’s floor near the edge of the hole. With his good arm, he pulls himself as far as he can up the wall, then grips it with his knees, the swale’s floor with his elbow, and the shovel’s handle with his left hand. Slowly he inches the blade toward the toboggan’s lead rope where, six feet from him, it dangles from the forest floor into the swale. Several times he falls back into the grave. Each failed effort brings the blade closer to the looped rope. Finally, he manages to work the blade into the loop and, pulling the rope gradually toward him, removes most of its slack. Hoping to stop the sled next to the grave, he begins easing it gingerly down the steep bank of the swale. Suddenly he again loses his balance and, still holding the shovel, tumbles backward into the hole. In the split second that the toboggan and its contents career down the abrupt embankment toward where he lies face-up in the grave, John is aware of the birds’ heightened screeching and, once more, voices, real or imagined.
Either he has been unconscious for a day or only for a few seconds, because the hole is still half filled with dying light and overhead the crows and grackles swoop and cry. There are other noises, too. Snapping brush. Frantic whispering. Wedged by the sled’s bow against the grave’s floor, John stares into the nondislodged eye of the dead girl, catapulted by the collision onto him. She reeks a stench that begs for the warm blanket of mother earth. Spoken words float like pollen in the air above them.
“He dead?”
“Looks to be.”
I’m not! says John, only he can’t hear his own voice or feel his mouth speaking it.
