To the Mountains: Fall on Us

Blankenship didn't hear the priest's opening words. He heard people sit down behind him, and he noted that the sound of water hitting the makeshift tent mingled with their whispers and their folding, shivering umbrellas. A little girl carried a yellow one, and he saw the light of it amidst the intermingled shadows of gray clouds and those cast by ancient oaks as she walked toward the grave. The age-worn branches labored in the wind; endlessly they creaked and rubbed into life a music, a siren's song, the lyrics a sighing lament that told of what lay beneath the turf. Blankenship wondered what the roots knew and how much they would tell if he listened, if anyone listened.

He realized he missed the reading when the prayer began.

The priest spoke words into the air, but Blankenship pictured in his mind's eye his boy's room the night he learned of the sickness. A window had been left open and the wind swept in, and wave upon wave of dust was tossed over the floor. Hours had passed this way, he knew, because drifts of what looked like smooth desert sand grew up the walls where they met in corners; once the room was quiet, defended by the thin window glass, the grains floated in soft columns and settled.

Now, words gathering from behind and before him, Blankenship felt the sting from that afternoon, and he knew the coarse nature of sand and words alike.

And he heard the small boy's voice, too, as it talked and murmured of things outside: of days in the sun, of lakes made by sudden rain in the streets, of dogs barking and running on the green lawn of the park, of his drawers full of collected rocks.

"Ash to ash, dust to dust. Of dust were we made, and to dust we return." The absence of thunder left room for the beat of drubbing rain. The girl's umbrella bobbed away once it had stopped over the casket a moment. Blankenship thought of a train of ants traversing the ground as the yellow faded away and was gone.

There Blankenship sat, alone now, his chair sinking into the wet ground, unaware of the gravedigger's stare as he waited to finish the job. The rain complicated things, this was the thought the old man chewed on, and it fell steadily. He leaned on the shovel and marked the steam that rose before his face. The rain complicated things.

"There's a place down by the river where I can see the otter's hole, or I think it's his hole." Toward the end the boy lay in his own bed, and he looked out the window as frost grew on the pane. It made a spider's web while he watched, the condensation from the heat of the room painting vines and splinters in geometric perfection. But the boy talked of summer days. With his eyes half open he spoke like he could hear it and smell it -- rocks plopped in a pond, sparrows' domestic quarrels in a nearby pine, clay baked to a curl, grass and animal fur warmed and pungent. And the otter, too. "He poked his head out at me once. Rolled in the water to see what I was about. Do you remember the red ball you gave me? On my birthday?" He remembered. "I wanted it to throw to the otter." He mumbled other things into the night and beyond, things Blankenship carried in coat pockets that reeked of antiseptic.

Blankenship's hand clenched and unclenched then as it did now; sound of rain, sound of rain, smell of autumnal gifts to the earth.

Had the old gravedigger slept? Surely the rain and the wind played tricks, for the chair now saw empty, one leg buried in the mud, and he had not seen Blankenship leave. No matter. The shovel fell to work on heavy mud, then dry dirt underneath. Soon, the fire burning on his hearth close by would ease the ache in his hands and spine, and his wife would work on him with pleasant complaints from the day's work. Soon enough.

The boy's bedroom window opened wide to the sky, and instead of blowing sand received water; the floorboards greeted the droplets and let them soak into their grains.

It had been a simple thing to crawl into the grave. There is was, open to him, a shelter from the downpour of endless sound piling up in the corners of his mind. The wood of the casket didn't budge at first, but soon the further shelter, and its first occupant, welcomed him.

"Did the ants come out today?" A question from an early spring ages ago now, but, no, the frost still lay thick on footpaths and bare branches at dawn. The ants had not appeared, their tunnels still closed. "They come out soon as the sun comes. Do you think they hear or see strange things underground?"

He said yes then as he did now; sound of lonesome heartbeat, soft sound of rain, smell of summer on his boy's shirt.

Clay and then dirt fell from six feet above. The pattering of rain was soon drowned away with earth, and inside they saw the light of ever-searching roots throbbing to slow rhythms. Blankenship closed his eyes and listened to their secret knowledge.

***

The last of his job done, the old man walked with his shovel over his shoulder. Death stirred him little, but the tilted chair by the graveside haunted him. He thought to remove it, but instead backed away. It looked to him, with one leg submerged in mud and water, as though it leaned over to see the fresh mound he'd made and through it to what it covered.