I exhaled slowly and investigated my unsteady limbs. Mud provided unexpected definition to my body and showed me, better than Gottschalk ever could, how groups of muscle worked together. The unusual construction of my father’s upper body made sudden sense: I could feel knots burning in the corresponding parts of my own musculature. I fantasized about returning to the Bloughton High hallways in search of Woody Trask, my neck tapering into bulging shoulders, my shirt straining over slabs of chest, back, and arms. That could be me. All I needed to do was keep digging.
Sometime around noon something dropped into the hole. I reached over and picked it up. It was a thermos. I unscrewed the lid and poured the contents over my face, gobbling up as much water as possible—it tasted almost sugary. I shook the last drops onto my tongue. I kept my eyes closed so I did not have to see him.
“You’re too slow,” he said. I felt the coolness of his shadow give way to heat.
The day darkened. Hunger burned somewhere inside me but it could not compete with the million other pains. Five feet, six. The sequence of motions that made up the act of digging became as rote as breathing. The hardest part now was tossing dirt high enough to clear the rim—when it didn’t, it hailed back down on me. Around dusk I struck water. A shallow puddle gathered in the deepest corner of the hole. I fell to my knees and cupped my hands.
I woke up blinking. It was twilight. Something had just landed on my chest. I patted around and felt wax paper. It was a sandwich, crudely assembled and bound. The scarecrow outline of my father towered stories above. I tore through the wrapping. Stale crust and dry meat were pushed around by my arid tongue. I chewed and choked, then chewed and choked some more. My father’s face was backlit and hidden. “You’ll never finish this hole,” he said.
Nighttime—a new coolness turned my hot sweat to a stinging chill. I found myself laughing and wondered what was so funny. Seven feet, eight: when did I stop, if ever? I shoveled now as if the act fueled my very heart and lungs. Far away, inside the cabin, I heard my father rustle through newspapers, piss with the door open, shut his bedroom door to sleep, but of course all I saw was a small rectangle of sky.
I tried to calculate the amount of time I had been down there and couldn’t do it. Hours and minutes had lost meaning—only feet and inches mattered now. I dug. My body revolted. My aim was becoming hazardous. Grinder struck my right foot repeatedly, once slicing into my big toe. I tried to ignore it but saw a patch of canvas soak red. I reached to brush dirt over the blood so I didn’t have to look at it; I lost my balance and was on my back, my head cooling in the puddle, watching a pale worm poke from the clay. I could not get up, and even if I could, I sensed that I had finally dug too deep. The walls were too sheer to climb, and what if my father left in the morning? I began to formulate a rescue plot involving the assiduous use of the shovel, but the ideas were too glorious, too strenuous. I welcomed the void.
22.
SOMETHING WAS TAPPING AGAINST my face. A clear vision of my mother waking me for church darkened into the mud of reality. I blinked into the Sunday sun and spat to rid myself of the earthen taste. I sat up. While I had slept, the thousand aches of my body had merged into a single heaviness that was somehow easier to bear. Sunburn made my forehead and nose feel plastic and inflexible. Something batted my face again. I blinked and focused upon it. It was a noose.
Here it was then, my death. This was no Scottish blade, but I could not blame him for the change in plans. It was so convenient, with me already so deep inside my grave. I leaned my head at the rope.
“Your foot,” came my father’s voice from far above. “Stand up and insert your foot.”
Hand over hand, I used the rope to raise myself. When I was high enough I wiggled my right foot through the noose. Half of the shoe was brown with dried blood. Without warning my body jolted skyward. I snatched up Grinder