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Diggers Human fingers contain no muscles. They are tremendously strong; Michael once kept a bathtub-sized sow from slobbering over my pretend-cowgirl boots by looping his index finger in a bit of rope around the sow's neck just in time. But the strength of fingers is untraceable to their own innards. It's given and taken from somewhere else, the muddy bottoms of wrist vein-rivers or the white twines of tendon that make the human body so hard to stretch. Still greater nullities are finger-spaces. The gaps between fingers contain no muscles, no bones, no solid atoms at all. Yet they are unmistakably part of the body. For proof, have a stranger touch your elbow. Have a stranger touch the air between your middle and ring fingers. See if either touch feels any more or less like human contact. Michael was grabbing my fingers and my finger-spaces, twenty of my personal possessions all curled and pressed and pressured around the thick scuffling heat of his own twenty. In the midst of this he brought my thumb to his mouth and kissed it, but that was the only true act of greeting in the entire gesture. The rest - the knotting and unknotting of joints, the soft lumps of palm revealing bone beneath and then pillowing to fat and skin again, the deep lines of life and heart forded and channeled and dredged - was a large, round question. "Where is your ring?" any other man would say. Michael never asks for what I don't offer. I in turn have grown accustomed to giving the unrequested, the way a baby becomes accustomed to crying for its needs, or a painting to the mute stare. "It's on the bureau. I thought it would be too showy, too city-girl, that people wouldn't approve." Then he was holding my fourth finger, the naked one, and shaking it gently like a crocus in its first rainstorm. This, too, a ghost's silent interrogative. Michael doesn't ask for much, but he doesn't offer much, either. This cold pact seems fair on the surface of things, but on the margins of things - in the finger spaces - it means I am always the one who has to ask the questions. "Was that a mistake?" I asked, annoyed. He toyed with my finger. Then he ducked down to kiss me, but I swung my face aside and hid my mouth on his collar. Tell me, I breathed onto the flannel. He considered, as if pausing to drink my School Board smell of instant coffee and photocopies and linoleum. "They might've found it odd, that's all. Women take off their wedding rings if they're on the market or about to do something tough and dirtying." Occasionally Michael warms enough to speech, but always too late, too late. "You could've told me that before I left." I felt the tightness in my throat as before one of my "spells," as Michael so quaintly calls them. He grinned. "I thought maybe you were preparing to do battle by any means necessary." I don't understand them. You knew this. You didn't help, I didn't say. Ached to say. How did it go? his hand on my back asked me. I prefer words. "The same eight want to keep Harvest Break. The same four want to scrap it. One or two on each side thinks a shortened break wouldn't be so bad, but most would rather keep this a clash of civilizations." I listened to myself: tinny, chatty, the party voice I used to use in the old world of people and parties. It was too bright for this room, for this town, for this man, for this shrinking shrinking in my throat and the mist that cloyed along the edges of my eyes. Silence. I went on. "I told the board how bad Harvest Break is for Jack. They thought that was funny, because he's exactly like you used to be, and you didn't turn out so bad." "I should've come with you; I can foam at the mouth on cue." He bent down again. I kissed the unfoamy mouth. Sometimes he plays the tin-voice game too, and then I remember that I love him. Need him, in this paucity of voices and monstrosity of lone space. "Jack went to bed all right?" Michael touched my hair in answer. Everything was all right, now. I feared - "morbidly," Michael would say - waking Jack, so light and flitting were his waves of sleep. It is maddening, that to care about someone can be limitless but to care for someone must, always, be limited. Otherwise you both choke. So instead I said goodnight to Jack's double. On the staircase landing we keep a photograph taken on Jack's second birthday, his fat infant body rolling on the strip of long grass between our yard and the farm next door. He has red overalls and a blue jean jacket, and every part of his face is wide-open as church doors. Each time I pass the photo, I thank God that I have a child and that photographs have frames. Without those wood edges, that face could go on opening out of its center and beyond my sight. They keep him, hold him close when I cannot. I kissed the face and left it in its hung box.
In parts of Maine like Mooseneck, schools close for three weeks in September so that teenagers barely more than children can harvest the potatoes. Mooseneck farms still do most of the work by hand. When the ground is dry, dirt slides up into your fingernails, burrows into the skin's scrapes and cuts, reveals shards of quartz and shale with the low glint of snakeskin. When the ground is wet, it swallows body heat and leaves youth white-blue and fragile. People call death dry. They think, perhaps, of bones. But it is fog and chill and hovering. During the school break, children too young to dig still follow the harvest with the grave processionals of nearly-flightless birds or nearly-blind scholars. They circle fields, unsure how the laws of the universe might have changed now that bigger people are seen seeking and hoarding objects lower and smaller than a child's foot. Teachers of Mooseneck complain that the vapors and the roving hold the mist round the children well into October. The shrill note goes missing from the schoolyard, replaced by a too-soft fluting and a gentle obliviousness to the sternest authority. Eager August dulls to the grey-pink of sleepless eyelids. All forget to laugh, to bicker, almost to be. Last September Jack forgot how to read. Impossible to know what Michael might have learned and forgotten in his first autumns growing up here. When we met and I spoke of New York City as an island, he thought I was being poetical. Hence the second date. When we bought our first house, I discovered that he didn't know what a foyer was. I loved him for the gaps and the distances between us, loved stretching my arm down a cold furrow and pulling him closer and closer. Besides, in some respects I knew as little as he, and sometimes less. Neither of us knew how to raise a child, though I had hardly skipped a day of school in my life. I knew nothing of harvests, and I knew nothing of the diggers. September nights in Maine unease foreigners like me despite years of habit. They are cold. This is not bad; all nights in Maine are cold except in July and August. The obscenity is that September days are still sunbaked warm and yellowy - residual, unobtrusive warmth like clay roofs or popcorn. When they turn leached and brittle after dark, it's like one of those dreams in which the person you love most has come to murder you. I couldn't sleep those nights. Needing another creature, fearing to wake Jack, I'd wake Michael slowly, peeling back the blankets and sheets one by one. At bottom there was nothing left but the sluggish s-scrawl of his body on the mattress. It is difficult to understand the word "opaque" until one has seen the body of a sleeping man at night. No light passes through it. Michael would give a great shiver and wake. Then I'd take his wrist and walk with him to the garage, where I kept two stitched-together sleeping bags and a small electric heater. By day I received signs. Once, a single, rotted potato tumbled slowly down the flat driveway. There was no wind. It smelled like afterbirth and pond thaw. Things were unloosening. Things undug. Another morning I stepped outside in my nightdress for the newspaper. Someone, something had left a small bundle of purple mums, stems neatly, freshly sliced, on the stoop of our kitchen door. I put them in a dish of water in Jack's bedroom. This, too, was probably a mistake. Above all, you must never, ever invite them in. They come too close already. The week before the diggers, Michael, Jack, and I were all sitting in overfull silence after dinner, when Jack shoved from his chair and ran to his bedroom. A minute later he was back, slapping a queer rounded vegetable in the platter where the meat had been and splashing greasy pink on the tablecloth and both our chins. "Baby," he said, grinning. A drool-line of meat juices was running down the table towards me. It had never been planed properly after Michael built it. The tiny streams of grease sickened me. I got up and stood in the kitchen until I could no longer hear my heartbeat in my neck. Michael was explaining. Somehow his silences swallow only me. "Actually it's not really a baby pumpkin. They're a whole different kind of plant, the way Macs and Granny Smiths come from different trees. What you've done is, you've taken a regular pumpkin that was meant to be big, and you took it away from the plant before it finished growing." "Will it grow more?" Jack sounded tearful now. "No, I don't think so." "Was I bad?" "No, you didn't know. But next time you should let things finish what they're doing, especially when they don't belong to you." After Jack and Michael had gone to sleep that night, I walked through the house to close all the windows. I saw in the living room that Michael or Jack had put the pumpkin on the mantel. It hadn't finished coloring yet, and had the odd lukewarm yellow of a flower vase's unchanged water. The ridges of longitude had begun, but not like a grown pumpkin where each crescent-strip holds itself taut and apart. The lines made mere light scars. Pocks melting and running down a face. The dead unformed newness was hideous. Set upon the massive fireplace, the pumpkin's dwarfishness was even more apparent. The house had fireplaces scaled to the excesses of the very social and very wealthy, something I had noted with delight when we bought the house for nearly nothing. A whole generation of mansions stood tottering in Mooseneck, testament to riches sprung from the Great War and made useless a year later by the Great Flu. Farmers who sold to the starving in Europe tripled their profits, building victory mansions alongside new neighbors who'd done well enough in bonds to move out of the city soot. But the best, the greatest, the youngest, had died, and when all were buried, the plagued houses were quietly made middle-class and ungloried. A little wood and plaster made a duplex. Parlors became storefronts, or simply moldered. Mine had been painted pink, then green, then blue, I think. Now it took an uncertain lint color as if hoping to shroud the too-loud gape of fireplace. Approaching the old mouth, I took up the pumpkin by its stem and carried it outside to the compost heap. Something moved in the heavy sweetness. I hurried back in. Jack spent more and more time outside in those last days before the diggers. They must have lured him sometimes. It would not have been hard: a riffling in the grass, a tumble of crabapples, a ring of mushrooms, a trail of colored leaves. He would have seen the little charms and gone looking for the fashioners of their creation. Or else believed himself a man on the moon, the lone emperor of a brave and beautiful new kingdom, and gone to survey and to lord his state. I would have kept him in, but with Harvest Break imminent, teachers had nearly given up on homework in particular and teaching in general, and often sent Jack home with nothing to do, not even a book to carry. Already his eyes were foggy and his cheeks too soft a pink. "He needs more cold air. Put a little crisp in his curl," Michael said to no one while frying eggs for the three of us one morning. I had just finished folding Jack's coat into the saucepan cabinet under the oven to give it extra warmth for the bus ride to school. "Look at this boy! All fog and frost where his eyes used to be, and you want to make it worse?" It was my bright voice, my near-spell voice, but sometimes I lose control over the simplest things. I realized Jack was with us, though barely - staring out the window, plucking at each bandlet of his red corduroys - so I made the plea a tease, a banter. "Cloudy, cloudy Jackie. What he needs is some hot food and a sturdy coat and a few friends to play with. There's no one to talk to here, Michael. It's too quiet." Michael slid the eggs off the burner and took the knobs of my hips in his hands. I feel like a piece of equipment whenever he does this - a press, a plough, a gate, a wheel. Usually I love this feeling of being the means to some great design. "Jack, it's time you hit the road. Why don't you grab that muffin and eat while you walk, and we'll make an eggs-and-pancakes dinner tonight." "Michael, he's got at least five minutes before the bus comes." But Jack was already gone, coatless. I watched the last flash of red overalls - or was that a maple leaf? - turn the bend of the driveway. Michael didn't let go, but watched with me. See, he wanted to go. The time of his life, and he doesn't want to miss it. I don't want him to miss it. All in a long grasp and stare.
"First digging tomorrow." He should be there, hands added. "It wouldn't be good for him, all that fog and damp and nothing to do but stand and stare in the cold. He'll get sick." My thin voice. He's already slipping from me, I would have said. Let him go. I want you to. You would, you would, I tried to reply. Instead: "So who is this for, then? For Jack or for you?" Michael's arms were around my back and we were spinning around and around the kitchen floor. For you, for you, he might have been saying. Or, For everything, everyone under the sun. Or, Nothing you could ever understand.
The next morning, I woke to an ugly heat cloying rot-sweet trickles of sweat down my neck and chest. For a moment I thought I'd been buried alive in the mantle of the earth, or stuffed in the body of a fevered monster. I was alone in bed, and Michael had thrown his share of the blankets sideways so that twice the usual cloth lay over me. The closed windows, leaking new sun in but no air, were intolerable. I gasped to the doorway. Jack's room is always cool. Just to hold him a moment, I thought. When Jack was a baby, I once I hugged him so hard he bruised. I would be more careful this time. Without the folds of blanket I moved light and quick down the hall to the bed he should have lain in. The first moment you scald your tongue, the pink skin feels freeze and burn at once, then the scratchy soft fur that precedes pain, then finally pain itself. The fur clings on and above the hotness, but not of it. The bed's ghost-print of Jack's missing body came to me before the pain of his loss, but once the sharp cry had left my mouth and the hurt had begun, that pressed outline of absence noted on cotton, hovered about me, a mist held round. I followed the haze downstairs. On the landing, Jack's photo hung as it always had, and not an edge of frame seemed out of joint. But something had changed it. A deep shadow I had never before noticed fell across the boy's face. The darkening of the chin could have been a swath of beard if the fat red overalls and the rolling pose hadn't made the thought an absurdity. The shadow lengthened him, pulled at him. This one is a stranger. Disquieting. Like coming home to find a bootprint on your doorstep. The door. I ran to it, unsure in the moment before reaching it whether it was to lock or to unlock or simply to feel the motion of a doorknob, free to spin but not to spin free. I held it, and it turned, and I stepped out. But they had already begun to move, were far gone in their movements. A dim procession strung long down the road, pooled and uncurled in my yard, and kept on into the waiting field. I scanned a hungry eye for Jack and Michael, but as soon as I realized the nature of those walking, I prayed that they be not among the crowd. Most of the time, those that walked shuffled a foot or two off the ground, sliding on the air like waterflies on ponds. Most horrible was when their feet would tap the ground below them, for it was so evidently unnecessary, even unnatural. Their touch on the earth pricked a soft nerve from out its bundle. Still they tapped on. They had come for this ground. They had come to unearth. Many of the diggers had the tight, encased foreheads of unbroken fever. I saw among the diggers a girl and a boy, the girl mincing in brown laced boots and tattered muslin while her brother or beau held a shovel in one hand, her waist in another. They, like the others, smelled even from my great distance like caves and dark soil. I believe the girl trailing behind them may have been blind, for she walked with the cocked head and the shuffle of the uncertain. Sometimes she would slow to a halt as if having lost the trail, only to hear the rot-soft scuff of another digger's foot brushing the ground, then she'd skitter forward in the direction of the sound, pink skirt flapping. And only she would move no faster or slower when the procession passed through a sheet of fog. The rest of the diggers unspooled off into the wrapping white damp, off the crowd in a kind of silent dance. Their halting, gawky circles - they were, after all, mostly young in shape - spun dizzy and wide until a breeze held the mist aloft and the walk continued. Sometimes alone, sometimes in swarms, sometimes in long goose-lines or clutching pairs, the diggers returned. The harvest was begun. They paid no attention to me, and I began to think that if I held still long enough, let the itch and haze of unblinking settle over my eyes, that they might leave or I might cease to see. To close my eyes would have invited the greater horror of surprise, but after some time I was able to look without comprehending, to see only a flash of brown satchel or a swath of pale shirt or a green-tinged white bulb that I only now realize was likely an elbow. It continued. Yellow boot. Blue slicker. Grease-blond hair. Greyed hand. Red leg. My heart stopped. Red. Boy. Jack. There wrapped in crowd, a little boy, undistinguishable but for bright corduroys, bobbed past me and toward the potato fields. I ran, but somehow the ground felt as unfit for my feet as it did for those others. I realized my feet were bare, numbed from chill to crude pink slabs, and I could barely totter. At the first fog stretch, the damp slid inside my nightgown, and when I broke through the cloud - one dancer's finger still felt where it had touched mine – the moisture hung in the seams and at my throat. I tore at the fabric. It gave way. So did the road, ending abruptly in brown turf, the dirt already slighted by the shovel. Far off I could see others, grounded, working or watching the work. Michael and Jack stood off some yards from the diggers, Michael pointing at something an older boy was doing with a spade, Jack nudging his boot-tips into a black clod and nodding slightly. Then he looked my way and tugged Michael's sleeve. Michael turned and the two stood facing me, neither moving. For a moment they looked puzzled, as if wondering why a strange woman was stretching towards them, leaning, leaning, nearly falling. Then their mouths made twin O's, silent I thought but the shape of a scream. I laughed a little in spite of myself: Michael's talking, oh, he's talking now, the quiet one, he speaks! Yes, yes, let us speak. Let us reach. Let us pray. Let us. Let us. I was on the ground, dirt was on my cheek, but this was all right because this was not pretend weight, this was not the lying dead, this was the real fall. I would have held on, I would have dug in, but the ground it was cold.
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