Free Goat Mountain by David Vann Page A

some help, you’re fucking Aristotle. Hooga booga. We know not what comes from our own arses. Doing something is doing nothing. Waa waa waa.
    My grandfather swung that fist with the fork faster than I had imagined possible, and now his fork was standing up in my father’s forearm where his sleeve was rolled back, the tines deep in his flesh and already turning red at the edges. So sudden it seemed almost as if forks were supposed to stick up out of forearms.
    Then a bellowing from my father, yanking the fork free, hints of red in the air, red even in the flattening light, and my father merged with that great bulk, a collision that reversed time, that took what had calved away and found it entire again, one mass falling backward, suspended, a fall soft and continuing, a kind of love almost, the underside of boots waving above the table now and a whump of sacks of flesh hitting earth, a snarl of sound unrecognizable to me, and nothing set in motion would ever cease. A tumbling and grunting across ground I could not see, so I stood, as Tom did, and we watched this mass work its way toward the land of miniature waterwheels and islands and channels, and these giants, at times separate, at times combined, rose and fell across that land, the water a way to mark movement, great splashes and sprays in the shadow now of the tree but carrying light anyway, a faint blue to it even when lofted, and I was standing now at the water’s edge, and holding my rifle in both hands, and my father labored for me. He was crying. I could hear that. He was weeping as he pummeled my grandfather and was pummeled back, slapping sounds flat and unconnected. Tumbling into light again, farther downstream, and I saw my grandfather’s mouth open, great dark hole inhaling, fueling that mass. I knew my father had no hope.
    My father was weakened by a sense of right and wrong. The unjust was a weight to him, and he would return the world to a perfect order, and that can never be done. But my grandfather worked from older rules, I see now, from what shifted mountains and made light bend. He was waiting only to see what would happen, and no outcome was any less desirable than any other. I didn’t know that at the time, but I had some sense of it, a fear that was wholly earned, an instinct that was unerring, an instinct my father had somehow lost.
    My father lay flat on his back in the stream, face barely above water, and my grandfather lay across him looking up into darkness and used only his elbow, jabs downward and my father buckling each time, and my grandfather seemed not even interested, unwilling to make a greater effort. Only these lazy, punishing jabs, and the blank stare into nothing above.
    That face, that blank stare, is what I still need to understand. How could I kill and feel nothing? Can we ever know how we have become?
    This is why I keep looking to the Bible. It’s almost entirely worthless, and I don’t care about Jesus, but the Old Testament is a collection of stories from an earlier time, atavistic shadows that I keep wandering through, hoping for recognition.
    The fight was over, my father defeated, and my grandfather rested on him, that elbow still jabbing downward now and then. The stream considering them just another island, the cold soaking into my father, and Tom and I stood at the bank and did nothing. My grandfather not a force that could be mitigated in any way. We could only wait.
    And finally he rose. To his knees, pushing at my father for leverage, and then one leg up and a kind of rush and fall forward to get the other leg under him, and he kept falling forward with heavy steps across that stream and past the table and all the way to his mattress, where we heard him collapse again.
    I stepped into the water, bitter cold, and pulled at my father’s arm, helped him to stand and the water fall off him. He had done this for me, but there was no way to recognize that. Very little of what was important