Free Dirt by David Vann Page B

the counter beside the stove. There was no space in this room. The five of them bunched around three sides of a tiny old table that was built into the wall, covered in a yellow plastic tablecloth. The walls uneven planks painted white. A single bare bulb with a chain. The floor a faded brown linoleum. The stove like a furnace. All their faces wet with sweat.
    Galen’s mother opened a bottle of white wine, Riesling, and the smell brought Galen instantly back. She poured glasses for herself and her mother and didn’t offer to anyone else. The two of them drank and ate while Galen and the mafia watched, and Galen wondered why they were all together here.
    What’s the point of trying to be a family? he asked. Why are we doing it?
    Galen’s mother sighed and downed the rest of her glass, then refilled it. Galen’s grandmother was staring at her own wine with a kind of wonder. She had rested it, nearly empty, on the table, just beyond her plate. The stem between two fingers, she was swirling it gently, her hand facing downward, open, as if she were waving her palm over something, as if the table were a looking glass and the wine upon it a kind of golden key. She looked mesmerized, her blue eyes wet and large, her lips moving slightly, as if she were reciting some invocation, something from long ago, something none of the rest of them would understand. She seemed about to announce something, and this was what kept the rest of them silent.
    The bare bulb and its harsh light made it seem that if you removed his grandmother, you’d have to cut her from the fabric of the world and there’d be a hole left. Each of them felt that way to Galen, as if all were two-dimensional, flattened, and lodged in place. Jennifer with her arms still folded, looking down, unmoving, stationary. His mother with deeper lines around her mouth than he had noticed before, as if her lips were separate from the rest of her face, something added. Her eyes buried in sockets too large. The waves of her hair something sculpted and not attached. She looked fabricated, put together in pieces, invented.
    Galen felt the unreality of her, felt it for the first time as something immediate and undeniable. She raised her glass again to her lips, but even that movement was jointed. The world put together with some kind of ratcheting action, each piece pulled into place under tension, all of it threatening to snap.
    Galen wanted to leave. He wanted to get away from this table. This table felt extremely dangerous. He understood now that what held his family together was violence. But he was locked here, glued in place, unable to move. He could only watch, and the only movement was his mother’s glass, and his grandmother’s glass and palm moving in its slow circles, and the wavering of the light.

Chapter 11
    G alen read Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet , his most precious book, the one he studied when his attachment to the world became too much.
    Your children are not your children.
    They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
    They come through you but not from you,
    And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
    Galen knew this to be true. He was greater than his mother, meant for more. She needed to understand that she had no claim over him. Or the illusion of her needed to understand that, or he needed to understand that the illusion of her had no hold over him, or something. It was all confusing. In any case, he needed to break her attachment to him, because she was holding him back. And his aunt needed to understand that she was free from her parents, that her life was her own. If only everyone could understand Gibran, there could be so much less suffering.
    It was difficult to be in a family of younger souls. Galen was an old soul, nearing transcendence, learning his last and most difficult lessons, his final disengagements from family, but the rest of them were just beginning. They didn’t know,