by Jean Hegland
Suddenly we heard a scream.
It was a sound that shattered everything we had come to depend upon as real. For a vast, suspended moment, we could not assign meaning to that sound, and our minds raced, blindly trying to identify its cause.
I had never heard my father scream, had never imagined such a thing. Like seeing him cry at our mother’s funeral, it made me feel ashamed not so much because of what it revealed about him, but because I had never even considered the possibility that my father might weep—or scream.
It had to be his scream. There was no one else, though as we ran through the forest, I still could not really believe that sound was his, even when, breathless with fatigue and terror, we burst upon the spot where he lay, his thigh gashed and throbbing blood.
I’ll always wonder how we knew to run in that direction. There was a whole forest for him to be lost in, and sound carries strangely between these hills, yet we leapt together from our daydreams and ran unerringly towards the echo of that scream, ran through tangles of poison oak and blackberry brambles, ran oblivious of snakes and pigs, ran to where our father lay bleeding his life into the earth.
His face was white, the skin stretched taut over the bones of his cheeks. His shirt was off, and his tanned and sawdust-covered forearms seemed in sickening contrast to his pale chest. His eyes were dark and already growing distant, and yet he smiled when he saw us and gave me a look so warm and sad, so loving and forgiving that I sometimes think it is the cause of all my nightmares.
“It’s okay,” he whispered. “It’s okay.”
For a moment we hung back as though, even after our headlong run through the forest, we were squeamish, reluctant to get bloody, reluctant to have to witness the meat, the torn jumble of muscle and sinew and fat our father had become. I think we didn’t want to recognize what had happened, not out of fear, but out of a wild hope that if we didn’t admit our father was hurt, then he wouldn’t be—if we refused to see his wound, then he would rise from where he lay, and walk back home with us through the fragrant summer woods.
But that moment passed and we were beside him, kneeling on the forest floor in a paste that was pine needles, humus, and our father’s blood.
“What happened?” Eva sobbed.
His face was tight, and words were hard for him to come by. “A branch. Must have fallen. Hit me. From behind. Pushed me over. Onto. The saw.”
“I thought it wasn’t supposed to do that,” I gasped, staring in horror at the blood-smeared saw with its chain of grinning teeth.
He grimaced. “Took. The chain break. Off. Last week. Stupid. Serves me. Right.”
“What should we do?” Eva said, though whom she was asking wasn’t clear.
Our agnostic father smiled, and with a sound as close to a chuckle as a dying man can make, he answered, “Pray.”
“What should we do?” she asked again, and this time she was asking me. My first response—even after all those months of isolation—was to go for help. The numbers 911 leapt into my consciousness, and I saw myself racing back to the house, snatching up the phone, punching those three sacred numbers. Then I heard the blank wall of silence from the receiver that had been dead for half a year.
Next I thought of the Colemans four miles down the road, imagined running to find them. But I remembered their house was abandoned, a littering-place for pigs. I thought of driving breakneck to town for help, but there was no gas left in the truck. Finally I thought of the police whistles our mother had once hung like charms around our necks, and I believe my fingers even groped my chest as though, if only I could find that lost whistle and blow into it as hard as I could, I would shatter the barrier between the living and the dead, and my mother herself would leave her weaving and come running from the house to help.
I wanted someone to save our father. I was afraid to try to save him myself.
“Come on,” screamed Eva, “we’ve got to do something.”
“What?” I begged. “I don’t know what to do.”
I thought of the first aid kit in the bathroom, with its Band-Aids and iodine and emergency manual. “The first aid kit,” I said, jumping to my feet. “The manual will tell us what to do!”
But Father answered, “Don’t go. Nellie. I’d. Miss you. Too much.”
I felt like I had when I was eight and my fever had risen to one hundred and five, when my senses were so excruciatingly acute that the whorls of my fingertips looked like mountains and it seemed I could feel the individual grain and grit of reality. I felt as though my whole life before had been only a bland dream, and I had just now awakened—to the scream that had been beneath me all along, a subterranean current of horror running under every day.
The only door of escape, I saw, opened into madness. I could rise, and walk away through the sunny woods and never have my mind again, and some part of me wanted to do that. But it was my father who lay there, my sister who expected me to save him, and so I did what I could, though in the end it was nothing.
He was clutching his upper thigh, and when I eased his hands away and saw how the chain saw had tangled the denim into his flesh, I gasped. Unthinkingly I clapped my shaking hands against his thigh, trying to reshape his leg, to press it back together so that no more blood could escape.
I think his femoral artery must have been severed. It had almost quit bleeding by the time we arrived, but every time he moved, a little more blood dribbled between my fingers. At some point I remembered to try to stop the bleeding by applying pressure to the artery. I pushed the heel of my hand against his pubic bone at the place where I hoped the artery ran, and I will never know if he might have lived if only I had thought to do that sooner.
He had begun to tremble, and finally I realized he was in shock. I got Eva to cover him with his shirt and elevate his legs by holding his feet in her lap. But even with his legs up and his shirt spread over him, he shivered as though the earth he lay on was covered with snow.
He said he was thirsty, and Eva reached for his thermos, and I helped him to swallow the last drops it held. But it was all so pathetically little. A little water, a cotton shirt, and our four hands could not heal his leg, and I knew of nothing else to do.
He died as the sun was setting. We held him, stroked his face, and spoke to him the way mothers speak to ill children, promising them it’s all right, murmuring the lies that transcend themselves, become a sort of truth simply because of the force of the love or need that causes them to be spoken. He listened to those lies, and tried to rest quietly. “It’s okay,” he gasped once long after it seemed possible for him to speak. “It’s okay.” Then he summoned his whole fading self, shifted his gaze to me, and said, “Don’t worry. Pumpkin.”
Long after his gaze had turned inward, long after even his trembling had ceased and his ragged breaths caught us by surprise, we talked to him. “I’m sorry,” I choked out once, as the first tranquil stars appeared in the clear sky. But by the time I was able to say those words, I was speaking to a corpse.
And then we were orphans, alone in the forest, with night closing in. No matter what comes next, no matter what we have left to endure, there can be no worse time than that night. We had to stay with him. We couldn’t bear the thought of leaving his body to the pigs, and yet we were terrified of them, and of the snakes and ghosts we were certain the dark was calling out.
It was too late to return to the house for blankets and matches, too late to go for the gun to bolster our courage against the dark, and so we wiped ourselves off as best we could on Father’s shirt, though our hands still felt sticky, and the tang of blood was everywhere. We each found a fallen limb with the heft of a baseball bat, and, hunched together beside the body of our father, we watched the final color fade from the sky, watched darkness take the land, waited for the beasts or demons that would finish us off.
Nothing happened. We huddled together in the chill night, too numb with cold and shock to speak or even weep, fingering the branches in our laps whenever a twig snapped or a
tree creaked or we heard the hollow call of an owl. We endured. Hour after hour we endured, while inside us life’s scream ran on, unstoppable. When the stars began imperceptibly to fade, we were still there, still breathing, and our father was still dead beside us, his face both sharp and slumped.
But perhaps something had happened. For when the forest began to reappear, we hardly felt relieved to see it. It was no longer the benevolent place of our childhood nor even the neutral place it had been the day before. The forest that was revealed as the night receded was a hard, indifferent place, a place where a man could pour his life’s blood into the soil, and the trees, the rocks, the very bloodied earth would be unchanged. Only the vultures, pigs, and worms cared about what had happened.
We buried him there because we had to, in the midst of that mean wood, covered with the earth his blood had soaked. When the sky brightened enough to be able to see the deer trail that had led us to him, Eva went back for shovels, water, towels, and a clean shirt, while I waited numbly beside his body. When she came back, we gave him a sort of crude laying-out. We washed his face, straightened his limbs, and wrestled the shirt onto his body.
We spent the day digging. We had chosen a spot close to where he lay to bury him, but when my first attempt to dig into the sunbaked earth yielded only a jolted shoulder and a scraping of dust, I was almost ready to give up. Only the thought of what would happen if we left him unburied made me stab my shovel back into the indentation I had gouged.
And so, one hard-earned shovelful after another, we dug our father’s grave. We worked at opposite ends of the hole. By mid-morning our blisters had broken and bled, and the absurd crimson enamel had long since chipped off my torn nails. By noon we had drunk all the water Eva had brought, but we kept working, determined to dig a grave no pig would open—while the vultures wheeled high above us, their shadows gliding coolly across our sweating backs.
Only the threat of spending another night outdoors made us stop, for the sun was already behind the hill when we quit digging. Since we still had to cover him with the earth we had moved, our good-byes were brief. We kissed him, edged his body to the verge of the grave, and pushed. There was no way to ease him down, no way to make it gentle, to mask the fact that this was a dead body tumbling into a pit. There was no way to avoid shoveling earth over his face, and there was a time, when his body was half-covered with dirt, that it was all I could do to keep the scream from erupting from my mouth.
It was dusk when we finally finished. We gathered the shovels and towels, the thermos and empty water bottle and bow saw in our broken hands.
“What about the chain saw?” Eva asked.
I looked down at it, saw the dark smears and clots of blood and shuddered. “Let’s leave it.”
“Dad would kill us,” she whispered. “We might need it.”
When we got home, we lugged the mattresses from our beds down into the living room. We bolted the doors, locked the windows, and took brief turns in the chill water of the tub. After we had used a little of our hoarded soap to try to rinse away what would never leave us, we each collapsed, dripping, onto our mattresses, too stunned and exhausted to eat or weep or even dry ourselves.
Then it seems we sat for days, each of us huddled into herself while the weeds took the last of the autumn garden. I think I would almost rather endure having to watch him die than have to face again the emptiness that followed. For what came next were days of complete inertia, when we played Backgammon or assembled puzzles like a couple of Alzheimer’s patients waiting dumbly for something they’ve forgotten, able neither to grieve nor hope.
Somewhere during that time, my nightmares began. Night after night I dreamed my father was torn from his grave. I dreamed the pigs had found him after all, had rooted him from the earth with their brutal tusks. When I tried to shovel the dirt back over his body, I dreamed the shovel melted. When I used my hands to scoop earth back into his grave, they dissolved and my arms turned to stumps. The only way I could bury my father was to cover him with my armless body, and I was afraid to touch him, afraid that touching him would infect me with his death.
But whether I touch him or I run, whether I’m dreaming or I’m awake, on his birthday or on all other days, my whole life has been contaminated with the fact that he is dead.
We ate the last of the green beans today. I pried the lid from the glass jar, tried both to remember and not to remember the heat, the kink in my neck, and my rich and sullen resentment as I bent over the bowl in my lap, snapping beans, while my father lifted another rack of steaming quarts from the boiling water bath.
Today we made a wondrous, marvelous, miraculous discovery! Today we found light and heat and music! We found the source of power and travel, the fluid that changes everything! Today we found gasoline! I could fill this entire notebook with exclamation points and still not show how happy we are.
It was midday. We’d been working in the shop all morning, untangling the chaos on our father’s worktable and shelves. My fingers were stiff with cold and black with grease. My neck was cramped. My feet were numb. It was time to go inside, time to stoke the fire and rinse our hands and fix something to eat. Eva needed to practice, and I wanted to try to finish the J’s before dinner.
I was sitting at the steel table, working through a sodden cardboard box of stuff. I had sorted it down to the final, hateful handful of grimy lock nuts, rusted steel wool, twisted wire, and unidentifiable little pieces of black rubber that might—even now—be junk.
Eva had finished with the shelves and was in a back corner, poking through an odious jumble of cans—enamels, varnishes, paint thinners and rust removers, and canning jars filled with sinister-looking liquids whose homemade labels had long since faded or fallen off. It was the biggest mess we had yet to tackle, and sheer dread made us save it till last.
“Don’t start that now,” I said. “Help me finish this box, and we’ll quit for today.”
“I just want to see what’s here,” she muttered, pushing aside a fruit crate filled with brushes and paint rollers and rusty scrapers.
“It’ll wait till tomorrow. Let’s go in. I’m cold.”
“Just a minute. Come on and help me move this compressor out of the way.”
“Eva, it’s cold. Let’s go in,” I repeated.
I could feel the grit of impatience in my throat as I spoke. Suddenly she yelled and dove behind the air compressor.
“Oh, Nellie, look!” she said, tugging a red plastic container up from beneath a tangle of garden hose.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I think it’s gas!” she answered.
I leapt from my seat. But right behind the adrenaline coursed the fear of another disappointment, and I asked warily, “Are you sure?”
She twisted off the lid, took a whiff, and handed the container to me.
“Smell,” she said.
I pulled air in through my nose, and the scent hit me like a drug. The raw, sweet, headachy smell of a thousand gas stations bloomed in my brain, transporting me not into any one particular memory, but into the total feel of another time. For a moment my body was composed of other cells, cells the encyclopedia says have long since sloughed off me, and I was once again waiting at the gas station while one of my parents filled the car with gas from the chugging black hose and the smell of gasoline permeated even to the backseat.
“It’s almost full,” Eva said. “We’ve got five gallons!”
“I can’t believe it,” I answered.
And amid the cold clutter of our father’s shop, we leapt and hugged and whooped like wild things.
But what yesterday promised to save us has now ruined everything, has soured the very air between my sister and myself.
We carried the gas container inside, set it on the table to enjoy as we ate our pinto beans. We were proud as prospectors who had just struck the mother lode. All afternoon our elation buoyed us—we had gas, gas, gasoline! and because of that, our troubles were as good as solved.
Until we tried to agree how to use it.
“I’m going to go fill the generator,” said Eva, as evening neared and our excitement had finally subsided to a warm and solid glow.
“What?” I asked.
“I’m going to fill the generator,” she repeated, her hand already clasping the handle of the gas container.
“Right now?”
“Of course, right now,” she said. “If I wait any longer, it will be too dark to see what I’m doing.”
“But why?”
“For our celebration.”
“What celebration?”
“We’ll have a party tonight. We’ll turn on the lights, take hot showers, wash a load of clothes. And,” she added exultantly, “play some music. I’ll dance.”
“We can’t,” I said.
“Why not? I’m sure the generator still works.”
“I mean we can’t use the gas.”
“Why not?”
“We’ve got to save it for the truck. So we won’t have to hike to town.”
“But we don’t want to go to town now, anyway. Remember last time?”
“Yes. But sooner or later we’ll have to go, and when we do we’ll need this gas.”
“There’s almost five gallons here. It’d only take two to get to town.”
“And two to get back.”
“So four. But that still leaves a gallon for now.”
“Who knows how far we might need to drive before we can get more. Besides, what if one of us gets sick and we need to run the generator, or we have to use it in the chain saw or something? We might even want it for trade. We can’t just use it up.”