Inearth

Inearth (maybe we should change it to Inearthed)
by Marcus Eagan & Isaac Wilder

There was something surprising to her about how hard the earth could become, in the salted wind of mid-December. The earth stood in a solemn heap. The earth was surprisingly hard, unbearably hard. It was brittle and implastic. The mound of earth had a quality of fragility, too - something that goes along with a lack of plasticity. She had expected the earth to deform beneath the weight of the shovel – instead she found herself capable only of breaking the earth, of cleaving it chunk by chunk. The earth was harder than she had ever imagined the earth - and this was only sediment - only the six feet or so of loose stones and ruddy soil between infernal suffering and eternal rest. Her hands were not raw or callused in any way. Rarely before had they broken the earth, cracked the earth, shattered the earth. Rarely had they cleaved the earth into smaller and smaller pieces. Never had she had to fill a hole so big.

The hands were cold. That's why she left me alone. The air and the earth were cold, too. Earth frozen beneath a sheath of snow prohibited life within it. I did not even make use of Earth, I was only being controlled, given one task. She said, "son, clear the snow," but I heard part the waters. From time to time I thought of the places most people know need water. Other times I felt fatigued from the dig and the desire to scoop a glass to refuel. Then I found some rhythm, maybe samba. Some beat my mind hijacked from Latins began to daunt the snow. The tides had shifted, and my mind found solace in sol, Spanish for sun. Its rays that permeated sky pillows we reassuring and on my side. On my face they felt like blankets. Every time I threw a load into the air, a few particles would sparkle. It all seemed too beautiful to be nuisance. Still, it had to be moved. Not even sure why.

The earth had to be broken, and moved. That was the commandment. She was inearthing her father, and the tradition of her people, the people of the book, was that she herself would have to crack, break, and cleave away little pieces of the mound. She would have to feel the crunch as the pointed metal tip of the shovel broke the resistance of the frigid, teeming soil. It was December - the sickness had come a month prior, when the wind was not so salty, and didn't turn cheeks so quickly to a defensive ruddy flush. But now it was december, and here she stood, with a shovel in both hands. You might also say that she had a book in both hands, because it was her people, their book, that commanded her to break this soil and fill this hole. It was just their way - the way that they had done it for generations, these so-called people of the so-called book. But what book? Whose book? Surely a shovel is more useful than a book, when it comes time to bury the no-longer-living, and there is a disconcerting amount of salt in the wind.

The salt dried the skin, yet more salt was needed because it would help to break the ice, in rock form, and with a bit of magnesium chloride added to it, nowadays. Most things had changed for most people, but I still used mittens and the shovel. Neighbors preferred snow blowers. Even though they called their machines that name, I just saw exhaust. Since that was so dark, I could not see the snow, and who knows if the machine blew anything. It was probably just a noise maker that screamed to scare the snow aside. My father, the being that I dug for, told me that was the lazy way, unless you are a senior. "People need to bend their backs regularly," he would say, "otherwise they hurt to bend." So I despised those that only pulled out a 62-page instructional on how to work their snow blowers. To shovel all the water this December had to bring, at least a 400-pager seemed better suited because if you didn't shovel, you would have all day to read, and because a word of scripture might have been the best thing to get you through the approaching hell. Somewhere in time, someone added fire and heat to hell's climate, but I bet there's a "Blizzard" section.

In a lot of ways, she was in hell - out there in the atmosphere, with a bunch of second cousins and whatever is more distant than a second cousin, just watching her break the soil. In a lot of ways it was hell, to know that her father would remain down there, below they earth that she was slowly breaking and tossing into the deep hole with more resignation than determination. Still, in some way it was the first relief she had found. The cancer had been diagnosed just after Thanksgiving, and now, just barely after the beginning of December, was the first even iota of relief from the onslaught of grief. The rapid and rhythmic contraction of her bicep was real, and physical, and though it was not pleasant, it was also not unpleasant, which in and of itself was actually pleasant, that fact that something wasn't unpleasant. She wondered if the second cousins and the second cousins once removed, and the great-great uncles, and the step-uncles were becoming impatient with the slow, with un-unpleasant process of filling this hole. She wondered if they would care to take a hike, if that was the case, and who would be the last to grow tired of the tedious crunch, the monotonous dry heave-thump of the cold, hard, cleaving earth against the plain pine box.

Gone in less than a month of diagnosis was not easy for me to swallow. My father had six months or so, just did nothing about it, probably so he would never have to shovel again. Although, we can't be so sure. If he hated so much, he would have stopped coming out at 80, not 81. There was something about the pain, or the task, or completion, or being the master of your universe, which is what it takes to be outside when the wind chill makes the temperature feel like negative double digits, to keep going out. The cold had a numbing effect, at a time when every bone in my body ached. The digging was my enemy and my duty, a thematic balance act. So it never was so hard for me to get out there and do it. Since it happened more than once,I'd like to say I got better. I never could forget about about my father, though, who would still be digging at 85. Blizzards confuse brake systems, but do little to determination.Even if dad was determined to drink vodka, I doubt that came before. And if it did, than so be it, probably made duty more fun. I have not manage to separate myself from mourn, actively feeling a higher pain, when fulfilling the snow removal duties bequeathed to me.

Was it determination, or resignation, with which she made stab after stab into the crust of that mound? It seemed to be resignation. That what the commandment says it must be. That's why the commandment says that the first stroke of the shovel should be with the blade upside down. We should be in no hurry to bury the dead, yet they must be buried. This is what the tradition says. This is what it says in the book. It almost goes so far as to say that we should use the book as a shovel, even though it says no such thing. Her father was hardly into the second half of his sixth decade, but the book had been around for damn near six millennia. Seems to me like maybe she would have rather buried the shovel, using a book, by the commandment of her father. But that wouldn't work. Not any of it. She was resigned to continue to bury her father, using a shovel, by the commandment of the book. It was not determination that she felt, but resignation - to tradition, to mortality, to silent hysteria, to many thousands years of dust in quick ballistic descent from the tip of a tool.

Father would not commit himself to the hospital before the snow was shoveled, but he knew that work would be undone. I know for two reasons. It always snows in Detroit, and we leave outside in the winters for good luck. If it snowed, he would know before I would. I guess you build a relationship with the elements that you battle frequently; what an advantage a friendship with snow would be in Detroit? The recurring events everyone feared came as only lectures to him. That's what happens when you like organic whats its called. I never took the class nor cared to remember its name. Anyway my memory is preoccupied with his face and the digs. He smiled, but without teeth. He wasn't jealous of his. He simply no longer had them. His digs did not follow a samba meter, and I doubt mine did either. The rhythm was in my head because of the head phones, you know? The Latin was somehow forgotten. My focus was my father. Some houses near mine could feel my pain as their owners pelted them with clumps of ice blackened by the "blow" process, so they cried for my father and I. We call those icicles, but if we remembered the buildings many reasons to weep, we might call them frozen tears. Which is what they are, I assure you.

At this point, the weeping just pissed her off. She wasn't weeping, so why should anyone else? He was her father, after all. It's not like she hadn't wept. She had wept mightily, nonstop, like a goddamn fountain, but this was not the time, even if it was the place. This was a time for manual labor, beads of sweat, tender hands, and silence – except for the sound of the blade chopping the mound of earth at the bottom of each stroke. This was a time for resolute resignation and steel. This was her time, even though maybe it was supposed to be her father's time, it was her time, because her father was dead, dead you hear, and she was the one holding the long wooden handle attached to that steel blade. She almost wished that the creepy second cousin ron would come up and tell her it was time to say the blessings so that she could hear the crunch of a shovel blade breaking through a ribcage. It was her time is all, and she would take her damn time, even if it meant that the second cousins had to stand and huddle in the background against the saltwind.