UNBURY ME

Ben Walter

Gary Wilson is a garden of aches; there are shoots blooming in his elbows and flowers unfolding in his shoulders and the palms of his hands are bleeding out so much dirt. It is mid-morning and the rain is pouring down with many cool and dispiriting notions catching a lift on each drop, but still he works on, pruning with oversized hands, snipping away at the fruit trees to sculpt them into vases and fans and elegant furniture in the corners and fence lines of the yard. Come and sit among these branches, he thinks to himself. I will build you a bench from their offcuts.

But Nicole has picked up Lachie in the morning’s haze and taken him to school; his small glow has left Gary alone once again, and he thinks it’s a wonder that any vegetables grow when they could be slumped indoors all day, staring at the television’s blank, unhappy screen. Outside, the air rises up to great heights above the ground, and Gary finds that if he makes an effort to join it, the air will sometimes carry him along as though he is an enormous balloon, softer and more sensitive and capable of carrying so much weight; and it is much better letting the clouds whisper to his skin than it is to bob against the mouldering ceiling of his living room.

When he is outside, he has visions of the whole landscape opening up before him, the valleys that stretch and contract like muscles, hills and higher hills with cresting waves of rocks that are ready to break, crash and tumble down the slopes. Closer in, he follows the main road as it drives through the centre of town with the general store sitting to the side and whittling at bark. The small church that summons up sermons once a month when the pastor can remember to make the journey from the city, and the loose arrangement of houses, thrown like dice from a cup.

As his mind strolls on, the density of housing thins till the grid of dwellings next to the school takes over: the company town standing smartly on the side of the hill like a regiment. The mine, with its heaps of waste. The wail of an alarm smoking up the air. Gary’s vision shifts back sharply, like he has missed something, to the road leading to the town in the next valley where Nicole lives with his son. He can see it for real from his back fence; so close that they seem to occupy the same world, a world where he isn’t constantly reminded of how empty the rooms have become.

*

Every day Gary slams the back door, the flyscreen rattling its bars as though the whole house has been jailed and confined. He strides down the split concrete path with its audience of lawn crowding at the edges and the weeds volunteering from the cracks, and he pours his hands into the soil, ripping the dock and thistles from their comfortable seats, replacing them with eager seeds of kale and beetroot and youthful wisps of broccoli and corn, and he trickles fertiliser through his fingers as though he is sowing another kind of seed. He covers the ground with canoodling mulch and builds up great compost heaps that burn slowly on the inside, like peat fires. And the wet dirt has a smell and it is a real smell; it is almost alive – it breathes.

The night before, he had been tucking Lachie into bed and telling him stories of beanstalks, explaining that the stalks in the story were not as good as the beanstalks they had planted together months before, for the beanstalks in the story led to treasure and plenty of arguments, while the wiry stems in the backyard led only to beans, and this was all that anyone should ever want from a beanstalk. ‘Beans,’ he had said, winking. ‘You know, beans, beans, they’re good for the heart,’ and his son had giggled and finished the line and Gary had kissed him on the forehead and made sure that he was belted into the safety of his blankets and then he had wandered out into the living room and tried to read a book, a history book that Nicole had given him several years before. But it was a very thick book and trying to read it was like digging through clay with a blunt spade; he had put it aside and watched the first movie that had rushed to his screen. The film had finished quite late, and then there had been another one and he had slept through the alarm and woken up stiff with his eyes all sanded by their own rough grit, and when Nicole had arrived to collect him for school, Lachie was still in his flannelette pyjamas, eating toast that was smothered in honey, getting honey all over his pyjamas – and even though she was standing there in the hallway, waiting calmly with her arms crossed, it felt to Gary like she was fuming in the car and pounding away at the horn.

*

For Gary, the smell of dirt is a strange camouflage. Once, he had worked in the shafts of the mine, watching as the tailings grew up around him like so many blundering children of the ground; keeping strange shifts as the seams of coal lined his clothes. Worn out and collapsing on the couch with all of the labour built into his body; one day the coal was so thick on his face that Nicole didn’t recognise him at all.

Gary was shocked when she took off to the town in the next valley. But the week after she left him, Gary had walked up to the manager’s office and quit. It was time. He’d had enough of the job for years: the off-kilter hours, the aching work and the long, dark throats whispering threats below the ground. But the routine of getting up in the morning, the shortage of other work in the area for a man of his experience, not to mention the secure housing – well, it had taken Nicole leaving to jab him into some sort of action. If the manager had been surprised he didn’t show it, just nodded at everything Gary said, got him to sign some forms that he didn’t bother to read, gave him four weeks of pay to find a cheap rental in the jumbled part of town before finally shaking his hand and saying, ‘Bloody oath, Gary. Not as if you haven’t earned a change. Fucking good luck.’

Of course, Nicole said it was too late. He had slid into her bright living room with his eyes down, as though the glare was all too much, and she had made coffee in the kitchen, taking her time and tinkling the spoon, chasing milk and sugar round the cups. Gary had sat on what had been their couch, thick fingers circling a coaster on the glass coffee table. He wondered if she was waiting in the kitchen for him to leave.

When she finally walked back into the living room, he had explained that he’d given the job away. Perhaps he could retrain or get some work at a nursery in the city? He’d like to work at a nursery. The shifts would be steady, and he could spend more time at home.

‘Gary,’ Nicole had said. ‘It doesn’t make any difference. You can do whatever you like. Finish up at the mine, or head up there tomorrow and see if they’ll give your job back. Or great, work in a nursery. It just doesn’t make a difference anymore.’ And her coffee sat untouched on the table between them.

Gary had felt a weight sinking into his skin as he sipped fiercely at his own drink. He had wanted to ask about Lachie, dozens of questions that all came back to Lachie; but it seemed to him, even as he sat there, that he had become a corpse, and he could see that Nicole didn’t want to live with a corpse any longer. That it must be hard just to have his shadow staining the same room.

*

The food that Gary grows supplements his unemployment benefits; he sells a little in an honesty box out the front, which chips away at the power bills and the cost of firewood. But it’s more than economics, or even just getting outside and being active, letting his blood run. At the end of the day, Gary knows that he is gardening for his son, as though they all still lived together and he needed to supply Lachie with healthy, nutritious tomatoes and carrots to weigh down and darken his plate and help him to grow into life. He gets the boy on every second weekend, and he feels that there is no better way to create a positive impression of himself, to counter whatever Nicole has been telling their son; that there is no argument against a healthy yard full of pumpkins. And so he digs and plants and clasps hands with the sun and the rain and he thanks them as they all work together to mine the true goodness from the ground.

Now the rain is cold and it is getting heavier. Gary is shifting a compost heap from one box to the next, the compartments made of old pallets scavenged from his mates still working at the mine, and he looks across the misting valley towards the bottom of the hill, where his son will be chewing his pen and puzzling over tens and units, and he turns back to the task at hand, and he wonders at all the colours and textures from his garden and kitchen – the long, stringy grass, the fat cabbages, the yellow bananas and the purple windblown plums – how all of that rots into a dark mass of soil.

And he senses the appeal of such warm, sweet compost. Gary puts his fork aside and begins scooping it up with his palms and heaving it, by hand, into the wide mouth, waiting.

An alarm sounds in the distant hills.

*

Whenever Nicole collects Lachie, she asks, in exactly the same tone, ‘How’s the garden going?’

‘Good,’ Gary always replies. ‘Really good. Do you want to see it?’

And Nicole will nod briefly, but that doesn’t mean that she does. This morning she was in such a hurry that she didn’t even ask, just dragged Lachie out the door as soon as his pyjamas had been swapped for a school uniform that Gary hadn’t gotten around to ironing. She didn’t even wait for him to brush his teeth. ‘I’m already late for work,’ she said. But seeing Gary’s face slump into despair, a face that she knew well, a face that had no answers, she softened. ‘He can do it at school,’ she said. ‘But Gary, you know how this has to work. It’s all been set down. He’s got to be ready at eight a.m.’ And they’d both looked up at the plastic clock in the hallway.

When they’d first got married it had been Nicole who had maintained the garden. Nothing quite so forested as Gary’s plot, but a few herbs held up with a pile of soil and a dozen rocks filched from the slopes, tomato plants in the summer and greens in the winter, a boutique collection of fresh produce that made her feel healthy and productive, that brought an extra presence to her home and all that she cooked, as though the thin sprigs of oregano would lift the pasta sauce into a new and very personal dimension and, at the same time, an older one that needn’t rely on faceless mass production.

‘Can you taste the oregano?’ she would ask as Gary shovelled food into his mouth. ‘That came from the garden.’

Gary would nod wearily and mumble. ‘Yep, it’s really good.’ Slowly Nicole grew disappointed, frustrated that the herbs weren’t up to casting the spell she was searching for, that the rosemary didn’t transform their table into a bright light of cheerfulness and lively conversation. One year, as a particularly wet and grey winter groaned on, she had let the garden drift into an uneven mess of thatched weeds, bought up the dry varieties of green dust from the general store, and stopped asking Gary if he could taste the seasoning in her dinners. And then she found that they had even less to talk about when they sat down in the evenings and waited for their plates to empty.

Gary has taken over the habit so completely, as though he is trying to wind back time, to find a way to resume a conversation; to give an answer to a question his wife had asked many years ago, which he has only now gotten around to pondering properly.

*

Gary has moved on to shovel a pile of manure over the straw. He is building another raised bed – that will make five; easier for crop rotation – when he hears a great roaring sound from across the valley, as though thousands of lions or bears are tearing down the hill to rip the town’s souls to pieces, and in the thin mist he twists his body in fear at the judgement he senses tumbling around him.

All down the street he hears the other doors slam.

*

‘Carrot,’ he will say. ‘Tomato. Zucchini.’ Lachie has known these simple, basic words for years, but Gary is scared that his son is growing up in a world that can’t tell the difference between a potato and a cucumber. ‘Turnip.’ He cuts the small, purple hearts into pieces, throws them in the pan, adds a packet of mince. ‘Cabbage.’ The mass of food boils a blend of signals into the living room, where Lachie is watching cartoons and fiddling with his shoes, tying and untying them to pieces of furniture. ‘Broccoli.’ Gary thinks of all the vitamins and nutrients in the sauce that will be prized by their bodies, that will pleasure their cells and sing through their veins. ‘Spinach.’ And then, ‘Lachie,’ he will call, ‘tea,’ as he plonks the bursting sauce over two plates of microwaved noodles and there, his son’s face will be shining in the doorway.

Every morning he longs for the evening past, as though he’d been busy doing something else entirely and hadn’t been paying attention.

*

A hook grabs at Gary’s head, dragging him around to look up at the hill, at the mine, and a great sickness sweeps over him, a sickness that makes him want to vomit and cry all at once, and he realises that he is running back through the house and out the front door, running as though he is trying, desperately, to escape the flooding tailings of mud that are sweeping down the hill, even though he is hurtling directly towards them.

And he is sure that there are others near him, other parents running and stumbling, but he also knows that if one of them were to get in the path of his rush he would be sure to grab them by the neck and fling them out of the way. It is not a long distance and he is not puffing; he is not even breathing by the time he pulls up at the chain-link fence that blocks out dangers from the school, a fence that had been wiped out with the first rush of suffocating mud. Gary leaps over the gate and runs towards the classroom where Lachie would have been studying, the classroom that he visited just last week for a parent–teacher evening assuring him that his son’s progress was good, but that he needed to apply himself more in his writing exercises; the classroom that is now barely there, that is covered in mountains of proud, self-satisfied mud, and Gary is shocked into stillness for two seconds as his brain calculates everything, the air in his lungs, the mud in his nostrils – and he thinks of Nicole, who is leaping into her car and driving the few minutes between them like a madwoman, for they will have to speak words that are not words, they will have to find a way to reach out their hands towards each other, but right now – and he is running again, as fast as he possibly can towards the mess, leaping on to its back and tearing at its skin and cutting at its tendons and flesh, anything at all to make the great monster leap off his small and twisted boy, before stopping for just a second, shaking his head and telling himself that he needs to focus.

Because right now, Gary knows, he needs to dig.