I asked my mother where this site was, but it was almost a rhetorical question. I knew where it was. I had been to that spot before the soil was broken and before it had been filled in; I had fallen in that hole when I was ten years old.
I felt a tightening in my chest as my mother continued.
He stabbed his shovel into the dirt to test its consistency, and to his surprise and disappointment, the shovelhead disappeared almost entirely below the earth. The soil was weak, and while that would make it easier to move, he had not anticipated what might be such an extensive delay so soon into the job.
Pulling back on the wooden handle, he moved a small mound of dirt off to the side and began his project. Before too long, he had dug a small hole about three feet down. When he reset his position and drove the metal blade into the earth, a tremor traveled up the pole and into his arms. His shovel had collided with something hard. He smashed his shovel against it repeatedly in an attempt to gauge the thickness of the root and the density of the network, when suddenly his shovel plunged through the resistance.
Confused, he dug the hole wider. After about a half-hour of excavating, he found himself standing on a brown blanket that was stretched across and stapled to a large box about seven feet long and four feet wide.
Our minds work hard to avoid dissonance — if we hold a belief strongly enough, our minds will forcefully reject conflicting evidence so that we can maintain the integrity of our understanding of the world. Up until the very next moment, despite what all reason would have indicated — despite the fact that some small but suffocated part of him understood what was supporting his weight — this man believed — he knew — his son was still alive.
My mom received a call at six o’clock in the evening. She knew who it was, but she couldn’t understand what he was saying. However, what she did comprehend made her leave immediately.
“Down here… now… son… please God!”
When she arrived, she found Josh’s dad sitting perfectly still with his back to the hole. He was holding the shovel so tightly it seemed that it might snap, and he was staring straight ahead with eyes that had no life or light in them. My mother approached him slowly and tried several times to get his attention, but he wouldn’t respond to any of her words. He only reacted when she tried, with delicate and hesitant hands, to take the shovel from him.
When she touched the shovel, his vice-like grip on the handle tightened, forcing all the blood out of his fingers to the point that they were as white as bone. He dragged his eyes slowly to hers and just said, “I don’t understand.” He repeated this as if he had forgotten all other words, and my mother could hear him still muttering it as she walked past both him and scraps of broken wood to look in the hole.
My mother told me that she wished that she had gouged her eyes out before she faced downward into that crater, and I told her that I knew what she was about to say and that she need not continue. I looked at her face; it was expressing a look of such intense despair that it caused my stomach to turn. It struck me that she had known of this for almost ten years and was hoping that she’d never have to tell me. I imagine that she made a firm decision all those years ago to never share this information, and as we sat there at the same weathered table that had forever been the meeting spot for our talks, I felt a twinge of guilt for forcing her to break the promise that she made to herself. Because she never intended to tell me, she never came up with the proper arrangement of words to describe what she saw. As I sit here now, I’m met with the same difficulty of articulation, but for different reasons.
Josh was dead. His face was sunken in and contorted in such a way that it was as if the misery and hopelessness of all the world had been transferred to it. The assaulting smell of decay rose from the crypt, and my mother had to cover her nose and mouth to keep from vomiting. His skin was cracked, almost crocodilian, and a stream of blood followed these lines and dried on his face while pooling and staining the wood around his head. My mother wanted to look away. She wanted to move her eyes, even if just a little bit, so that she could see something else, anything else. But she couldn’t. Her eyes had locked with Josh’s, which lay open and facing up out of the tomb, and although he couldn’t return her gaze, it felt as if he were looking directly at her.
She said by the look of him he had not been long-dead, but she couldn’t hazard a guess because she simply had no referent. Selfishly, and horribly, she wished that more time had passed before that day, so that time and nature could have brought the mercy of degradation to erase the pain and terror that was now etched into his face. She said that it felt as if he knew she’d be right there — that he had been waiting for her to enter his line of sight; his open mouth offering an all-too-late plea for help to ears that could do nothing for him. She forcefully covered her eyes to break the stare and attempted to confront the scene as a whole, but the rest of his body wasn’t visible.
Someone else was covering it.
He was large and lay facedown on top of Josh. As my mother’s mind stretched itself to take in what her eyes were attempting to tell her, she became aware of the significance of the way in which he laid.
He was holding Josh.
Their legs lay frozen by death, but entangled like vines in some lush, tropical forest. One arm rested under Josh’s neck only to wrap around his body so that they might lay closer still, while the other arm lay limp with a bent elbow against the wood, his fingers entangled in Josh’s hair. The man’s back was covered in dirt, and as she looked back to the area near Josh’s head — ashamedly avoiding his gaze — she could see that some of this scattered earth had mixed with the blood and formed mud that lay still wet in the damp casket.
As the sun passed through the trees, its light reflected off something pinned to Josh’s shirt. My mother stooped to one knee and raised the collar of her shirt over her nose so that she might block out the smell while she attempted to train her vision on the object rather than Josh’s face. When she saw what had caught the sunlight, her legs abandoned her, and she nearly fell into the tomb.
It was a picture…
It was a picture of me as a child.
Gasping and trembling, she staggered backwards and collided with Josh’s father, who still sat facing away from the hole. She understood why he had called her now, but she could not bring herself to tell him what she had kept from everyone for all these years, not that the information could do any good now anyway. Josh’s family never knew about the night I had woken up in the woods. They never knew about the Polaroids; they never knew about the note she had found on my pillow. They never knew the real reason we had moved out of our old home with such haste.
She had moved us into a new house to protect my life, and she had kept all of these things a secret so that life might be a normal one. She had talked to the police; she knew now that she should have talked to Josh’s parents, but there was nothing to say anymore. As she sat there resting her back against Josh’s father’s, he spoke.
“I can’t tell my wife. I can’t tell her that our… that our little boy—” his speech staggered in fits as he pressed his wet face into his dirt-caked hands. “She couldn’t bear it…”
After a moment, he stood up, still shuddering, and lumbered toward the grave. With a final sob, he stepped down into the coffin and positioned himself over the dead man’s body. Josh’s dad was a big man, but not as big as the man in the box was; however, he seemed unable to grasp this fact. He grabbed the back of the man’s collar and pulled hard — it was as if he intended to throw the man out of the grave in a singular motion. But the collar ripped, and the body fell back down on top of his son. As this happened, what air remained in Josh’s lungs was violently forced out through his mouth, and the father shrieked as he both watched and heard his son’s last, empty breath.