The Deceased

I measure the body with a ruler. The deceased is eight inches long and five inches wide if we count arm-span. There’s not much in the way of arm-span. Mostly the arms are hands. The hands look eerily like baseball gloves. The teeth are tiny but populous and adamant. The tail is stubbish and not a tail you would boast about if you were in a pub and the talk turned to boasting about tails. It’s more of a fleshy rudder than a tail. The eyes are small and black and open. I look in vain for ears. The nose is epic and tremendous and clearly what the face was designed to carry much like a ship carries a prow. I refrain from trying to ascertain gender, out of respect for the dignity of the deceased.

The deceased is, I believe, Scapanus townsendii, the Townsend’s mole, native to this region, found everywhere from swampland to small mountains; but as soon as I read the parade of Latin labels by which it is classified, and wade through discussions of its economic impact on farm and pasture and garden, and its former commercial value (coats and muffs and waistcoats made of mole fur were once popular, partly because mole fur has no “grain,” as do other animal pelts), I begin to ponder the minimal substance of our labels and commentary on this and all other of our neighbors, and I wonder about this particular individual, and the flavor and tenor and yearning of this one life, and long I stand over its sprawled body, leaning on the shovel by which it will soon be returned unto the earth that was its home and heart.

With sincere respect for Mr. John Townsend of Philadelphia, who wandered thoroughly in the forests and mountains of the West, paying such close attention to the beings therein that he is credited with “discovering” plovers and swifts and warblers and thrashers and squirrels and bats and voles and chipmunks and this one tribe of mole, and who died young, merely forty-one, having slowly and unwittingly poisoned himself with the arsenic he used in preserving the animals he killed so as to study them more closely, I wonder what this particular mole at my feet called itself, or was called; how was it addressed, or thought of, or perceived, by its fellows? Was it a father, a grandfather, a great-great-grandfather? It is thought that this tribe of mole generally resides in home territories the size of a baseball field, and defends home court with remarkable ferocity, and that its children are generally born as spring begins, and that the children mature rapidly, and leave home as soon as they can, so that the family cavern, which is lined with a deep soft dense blanket of grass, and is accessible by as many as eleven tunnels running in every direction, is empty by the end of spring, and I stand here with the shovel thinking of the parents, proud of their progeny, but now bereft of their spirited company, and now alone in their echoing nest, busying themselves with quotidian duty; and soon this will be me, trying not to call our children every day, trying to celebrate their independence, trying not to wallow in memory.

This tribe of mole is thought to be largely solitary, I read, and I want to laugh and weep, as we are all largely solitary, and spend whole lifetimes digging tunnels toward each other, do we not? And sometimes we connect, thrilled and confused, sure and unsure at once, for a time, before the family cavern empties, or one among us does not come home at all, and faintly far away we hear the sound of the shovel.

I should toss the body over the fence, into the thicket, as food for the many, such being the language of life, but I think of how we feel when we are tucked tight in bed, inside the cocoon of the blankets, wrapped and rapt, and I wonder if moles love the grip of earth that way, love the press and dense of it, its inarguable weight, the blind swim through the dark, would love finally to dissolve in it; and I bury the body.