Dirt by David Vann Page A

was standing at the sink chopping carrots now, and didn’t turn to look at him. He wasn’t sure how she even knew he was here.
    Okay, Galen said. His head hurt, but he liked the idea of getting away from the kitchen and his mother, and he liked chopping wood.
    He went out the front door, walked around the deck to the toolshed. About the size of an outhouse, and older, even, than the cabin. No light inside, and he had to let his eyes adjust. Shovels, picks, several axes, as if this were a mining camp. All the tools old, the wood handles dark and polished from use. The fishing gear was in here, too, old wicker baskets and ancient poles. He didn’t know how to use any of it. In all the times they’d come to the cabin while his grandfather was still alive, his grandfather had stayed in Carmichael and worked. Never retired. Had a stroke, finally, went to the rest home, and died. He’d been a civil engineer, designing highways and even that bridge in Sacramento that his grandmother was always mentioning, but what did that mean?
    Galen pulled out the smallest axe and grabbed a wedge from the floor. Cold heavy steel, the edges of it dented and smashed from years of blows. Then he pushed the door shut with his foot and went to the chopping block behind the cabin. He dropped the wedge in the dirt and swung the axe over his head into the block. He loved the feel of that swing, of the weight on the outer arc, his right hand slipping down on the smooth handle.
    Yeah, he said.
    The wood was stacked along the back wall of the cabin, with an overhang from the roof to keep it dry. Gray-looking because it’d been here so many years. Their visits were never very long. Galen grabbed a log and worried about spiders. He didn’t have any gloves. He upended the wood on the chopping block and took a large swing with the axe. The blade glanced off the edge of the log and buried into the ground a few inches from his left foot.
    Whoa, Galen said. He stepped back, the handle standing up, and looked behind him, as if someone might have seen. He had this dizzy feeling like tottering at the edge of a cliff, the air pulling him downward. Holy crap, he said. He looked at his old Converse sneakers, dirty canvas, so thin, and just couldn’t believe how close he’d come to losing his foot. He had this awful feeling he could still lose it. He shook his arms, shaking off the heebie-jeebies, then picked up the axe again.
    Anything could happen at any time. That was the truth of the world. You could just lose your foot one day, and after that you’d be a guy missing a foot. You could never know what was coming next, and that was true for even the smallest things. You couldn’t know what thought you’d have next, or what someone would say in conversation, or what you might feel an hour from now, and this effect was always amplified by his mother. His conversations with her could go from zero to crazy in a few seconds. He didn’t know why that was true only with her. She could be calling him pumpkin one minute and threatening to throw him out on the street the next. And when he felt angry at her, it came from some terrible source, something you’d never know about, never suspect, and then suddenly he was drowning in it.
    Galen wanted peace with his mother. He wanted peace. But as soon as he came near her, he wanted to kill her.
    He was more careful to keep his feet wide, stood farther away and focused on the top of the log as he swung. A satisfying chock this time as the blade hit. He used the wedge in the gap and swung again, split the wood in one stroke. Brighter flesh inside, the wood yellow instead of gray.
    Okay, he said. And he worked into a rhythm, log after log, focusing carefully on the target, enjoying that swing, the high weightlessness of it, the feel of the muscles in his arms and back, the sweat on his skin, the sound of the blows muffled in the trees.
    Earthly labor. That was perhaps the fastest