Dig

Witness Interview Transcript: Wayne Elrod Harlan County Sheriff's Office, March 14, 2009. Tape 1 of 1. Present: Det. R. Sizemore.

I was about fourteen when I understood. What I put under the word normal didn't weigh the same as what other people put under it. We lived in one room. All of us. Live isn't the right word. Live is a wide word. Live is a word for people who don't count how many they are before going to bed. We fit in one room. Stowed. Like tools in a shed. Standing by day. Lying down at night. Counted by habit.

No electricity. No water. Someone had nailed plastic over the windows. Cloudy tarps, poorly stretched, that snapped when the wind blew. In the middle of the room there was a cast-iron stove. It smoked all the time. We fed it green wood and stolen pallets and whatever could be found that would burn. It smelled of resin and metal heated white. It didn't heat anything. It heated the soot. The smoke caught the throat. A black grease accumulated up there that no one ever cleaned.

In winter, when the cousins showed up or an uncle brought back one more kid, there was no room left. The children slept outside. Under tents. Behind the shed, on the frozen ground. We lay in the dark and watched the stars through the fabric hanging above our faces. We heard the breathing of others close by. One breath and then another breath and then another. In the morning we had crystals in our eyelashes. We crawled back in. We shook off the mud. We sat down. Nobody said anything. Nobody found anything strange. That's how it was.

On Sundays we walked. The dirt road started behind the shed and climbed through the pines and we followed it without speaking. We walked single file. Adults in front. Children behind. The mud stuck under our soles and we carried it with us.

At the end of the road there was the church.

Inside it smelled of wet wood and wool and the dust of pews. And another smell. A dry smell that came from the Book set up there on the lectern. Ink. Paper. Something sweet and old like an apple forgotten in a drawer for years.

A man would stand. He would open the Book with both hands the way you open a ledger. And he read.

He read of peoples put to the sword. Infants smashed on rocks. Cities that burned on God's order and the people inside who burned too and nobody came to get them out because God had said that's how it was. Firstborns slit in their beds while the mothers slept beside them. He read it in a flat voice. Like a man reading the weather. The Book was full of blood. The man reading had none in his voice. So the blood was just words. And words don't stain.

The women listened. Their hands on their knees. The children too. Their hands on their knees. The men stared ahead and their hands on their knees. Everyone had their hands on their knees. At the end we said amen. It made a sound. A clean sound. An almost gentle sound. A sound that passed over what had just been said and erased it. Like a rag on a slate. Amen. And it was over.

[Pause.]

We walked back. We walked the dirt road the other way and nobody said anything. It was just another Sunday.

After church the men corrected.

That was the word we had. Correct. Like you correct a mistake on a piece of paper. You correct it and it's clean.

My father corrected with a belt. Leather. The buckle was shaped like a horseshoe. I don't know why that's the shape I kept. The pain I don't remember the same way. It blends with other pains and after a while you don't know which one it was. It dissolves. It becomes a noise somewhere. But the shape stays. The cold metal. The oval. The two prongs. The light catching it just before it fell. The pain passes. The shape stays.

He raised his arm. The leather made a sharp sound. Then my mother came. She cleaned.

The same basin. The same rag. The water smelled of soap and something strong that stung the nose. She scrubbed the floor until the wood drank. Then she moved to the faces. The cheeks. The mouths. She wiped a trace of blood from the corner of a lip the same way she would have wiped jam. She tucked a strand of hair behind an ear. She served the meal. The same gestures. The same order. Like every Sunday.

The silence was the hardest thing in that house. Harder than the cinder blocks, harder than the frozen ground under the slab. The walls moved when the wind hit them. But the silence held. It held everything. The gestures. The lips. The eyes. The sound you feel rising in your throat and you swallow before it comes out. You swallow it the way you swallow spit and it goes back down into your chest and it lies there and it doesn't move and nobody will ever know it existed.

My father sat down. He took his spoon and blew on his soup. He blew slowly. Like a tired man. Like a man who worked all day and did nothing else but work. His hands held the spoon and the spoon went from the bowl to his mouth and from his mouth to the bowl and they were the same hands. They were the same hands that held the belt and they never trembled.

Nobody left. Nobody died. Monday came back and then Sunday and then Monday and it turned like that. I didn't have hair on my chin yet and I'd already learned this: that the same hands do the same things, the good ones and the others.

We had a cat.

A gray one. Thin. One ear notched. Nobody knew how or when. He slept on the stove in winter, belly flat against the cast iron, and when it was hot he disappeared under the house. We heard him scratching sometimes. Sometimes not. Nobody gave him a name. It wasn't cruelty. It was just that we didn't need to. A name is a space you make for something. We didn't make space.

[Det. Sizemore: Take your time.]

I was fourteen. I remember because of what happened after. Fourteen is the age where the body starts talking before the head. Something rises in the belly and it looks for a way out. A hole. A word. Anything.

I took some rope from the shed. Parachute cord. Thin and strong and smooth. It came from somewhere else. Army surplus. It smelled of dust and oil like my father's hands.

I went out behind the house. There was a birch. White. The bark hung in patches.

I looped the rope around. No fancy knot. Just enough.

I didn't squeeze like you choke. I squeezed like you tie.

The cat struggled. Not long. Its claws scraped the bark. That dry sound of paws finding nothing. Then it stopped.

It stayed taut. Eyes open. It wasn't begging. Cats don't panic like dogs. Dogs panic. Dogs throw themselves everywhere and they scream. Cats are something else.

I stepped back. Ten paces. I counted them with the toe of my boot in the hard ground. One. Two. Three. Up to ten. And at ten I stopped and I stood there with the rope no longer hanging from my hand and the cat watching me from the birch and the sky too big above and nobody else. Nobody else in all that country.

The .22 weighed too much for my hands but I held it anyway. The stock held my father's grease. The sweat and the metal. His smell that he left on everything he touched. The barrel pulled the arm down. The metal held the cold even in broad daylight.

I raised the gun. My breath was too high in my chest. My heart started doing something. Something it had never done before. It beat fast. It beat hard. But it wasn't fear. I knew fear. Fear was Sunday evening and the arm rising and the buckle catching the light. This wasn't fear. It wasn't joy either. A thing that had no word in that house because that house didn't have enough words for everything that happened inside it.

The cat moved its tail. Slowly. Just once.

Right before I pulled the trigger, an image crossed my mind. No reason. The cat on the porch in the square of sunlight. The dust always floated in that square of light and nobody knew why and nobody asked why. The cat and the dust and the sun.

I squeezed the trigger.

The shot cracked. Too loud.

The cat jerked sideways. Its paws scraped the bark. It didn't cry the way I thought. It made a small sound. Strangled. I wasn't expecting that.

Then the blood came out.

Darker than I thought. Thick. It didn't flow like water. It stretched slow and heavy. It stuck to the fur. The stain spread without hurrying.

The cat opened its mouth. No cry came out. Air came out. A broken sound.

I raised the .22.

I fired again.

The cat made no more sound. It was making an effort. And I watched. Not the meat. Not the blood. I watched the moment. That moment.

I didn't look away.

I fired one last time.

When it was over the cat still moved. Reflex. Its paw scratched the trunk as if looking for something. Then nothing. I felt someone. I didn't turn around.

My sister was there. I don't know since when. Two other kids too. They were watching. Nobody said anything. My sister's mouth was open but nothing came.

The kids drifted away after that. Not all at once. One day you're with them. The next day there's distance. Then a little more. It has no date. They watched me from the other end of the field. They talked among themselves. When I turned my head they went quiet. They said nothing you could catch. The parents watched me too. Different. Back then I couldn't read what they had on their faces. It wasn't fear. It wasn't hate. It was something tight. Back then it was just one more expression.

The week after, someone said something to my father. I didn't see who. I never knew who. What I saw was my father pushing the kitchen door open without a sound and the air in the room changing.

He raised his eyes to me. One second. Long enough to see me. The look you have for a tool you left outside and find rusted. Not anger. Not disappointment. Something simpler. The idea that a thing no longer works the way it should.

He took off his belt.

He said nothing. The first blow caught the shoulder. The second the back. The third the hip where the bone sits just under the skin and where it carries.

He stopped. His hand stayed in the air. Just there. In the air. The belt hung from the end of his fist and the buckle turned. It turned slowly on itself like something looking for north.

I waited for the fourth.

The fourth always came. That's how it was. That was the rule even if nobody had ever said it out loud. After the third there was the fourth and after the fourth there was the fifth and after the fifth there were the others. The fourth didn't come.

My father lowered his arm. He set the belt on the table. He walked out. The door closed on its spring. It shuddered once against the frame.

I heard him behind the shed.

He vomited.

[Silence.]

When he came back he wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve. He sat down. The wood of the chair scraped the floor. He took his spoon. He blew on his soup. Slowly. Like every evening.

The others ate. The spoons scraped the bowls. Nobody said anything.

It was an evening like any other.

I looked at the table where the belt had been set down.

Three blows.

Last time it was thirty. I'd counted them. Thirty. A number gives you the feeling you're holding something.

This time three.

The twenty-seven missing were somewhere in the room. I could feel them. They weighed more than the three I'd taken.

My father finished his soup. He pushed the bowl away. He looked at me.

— Go to bed. Tomorrow we head out at dawn.

His voice had nothing in it. No anger. No lesson. Nothing.

I lay in the dark with my eyes open. The three blows on the body. The other twenty-seven nowhere. And the throat sound he'd made behind the shed.

My father worked. He ate. He corrected. He slept. Nothing came out of him that he hadn't decided. And that evening something had come out without him wanting it.

I didn't sleep.

Dawn.

My father was outside. He was smoking. The cigarette lit up his mouth now and then. The air was so cold you couldn't tell the difference between the smoke and the breath.

The cat was at the foot of the birch. Where I'd left it. It was smaller than yesterday.

The rope hung from the branch. The blood had blackened in the frost. It didn't look like blood anymore. It looked like dirt.

My father took one last drag on his cigarette. He crushed it under his boot. He went to the shed. He came back with a shovel. He pressed it against my chest. The ash handle was cold and smooth. The blade had rust on the edge.

— Dig.

One word. He said one word. He pointed with his chin to a spot near the fence. Where the water never went. Where the frost came up from underneath and squeezed everything shut. Hard like something that doesn't want to be opened. And that's where I had to dig.

I drove the shovel in.

The metal rang against the ground. A stone sound. The blade bit nothing. It slid over the surface like over a lid. I pushed with my foot. It wasn't enough. I pushed with both feet. The blade went in one centimeter. Maybe two.

— Dig.

I struck.

The shovel bounced. The frost had sealed the earth. There was no way in. I tore out chips the size of a fingernail. Crumbs. My arms burned. My hands slipped on the handle. The hole wasn't getting anywhere.

— Harder.

I struck harder. The palms burned. The handle rubbed the skin between the thumb and forefinger where the callus hadn't grown yet. Kid hands. Not finished. My father watched. He smoked. He didn't help me. He wouldn't help me. I knew it the way you know it's cold without needing to check.

I gripped the shovel tighter. The skin split. It split between the thumb and forefinger of the right hand. It split without warning. One instant it held and the next instant it didn't. I felt the cold enter the wound. The blood came. Not much. A little blood that mixed with the sweat on the ash handle and the wood drank the mixture.

— That's what you know how to do.

He said that. He said it behind me. He said it to my back.

— Can't even dig a hole. You can kill a beast but you can't bury it. That's it huh. That's it.

His voice was rising. I could hear it rise the way I heard the arm rise on Sunday evenings. It was the same mechanics. Except this time it was words. And words are something else from the belt. The belt leaves marks. You count them after. Twenty. Thirty. A number. You hold it. Words don't leave marks you can count. Words go in somewhere and you don't know where they go.

— Dig.

I dug.

The sun moved above the pines. It lit nothing. My hands burned where the wood ate the skin. The hole grew badly.

My father yelled.

I dug for an hour. Maybe more. My arms shook.

The hole was the size of a cat. Just the size. No deeper than two hands. The exact measure of what my body had been able to tear from that earth and not one chip more.

I dragged it to the hole. It weighed nothing. I set it at the bottom. Crooked. The rope still around its neck.

One eye was open. The other halfway. The mouth was frozen.

My father came closer. He walked toward the hole. He didn't walk fast. He walked the way he always walked. Like a man who has all the time in the world because time belongs to him the way everything else in that place belongs to him.

He looked at the hole. He looked at the cat. He looked around. The pines. The shed. The house behind.

— Look. Look around. Everybody's watching you and everybody knows what you are. I ought to throw you in the hole with the cat. Leave you there. Leave. Leave you with your beast in the ground.

He walked back toward the house. His boots cracked the frost. The ground cracked under him.

I stood in front of the hole.

The shovel in one hand. The air burning the lungs. The cat at the bottom with its one eye open on the sky.

I filled it back in.

The earth was easier in that direction. It fell back. It did what it was told. Above, the rope still hung from the branch. It moved a little in the wind. Nobody took it down that day. Or the next.

[End of recording.]