I am Digging a Hole and I Cannot Stop Digging

by Kristi Ferguson

The dirt is supple and dark close to the house, by the corner notch of the logs that Pop joined together, out of sight from the kitchen window that Ma will look from when she gets home. I’ll be long gone by then, I hope. If the earth will only yield to me one more time. If I can just get his legs to stay down in the hole. If the echo of his cry through the treetops ever stops.

Ma always tells us we need to look after each other, that we are all that we have. But that’s not what Bel remembers.

“Ma said for you to take care of me,” he’s always whining. Wanting me to do his chores. Trying to get me to skin the lambs when I said I didn’t like it. Why do we have to kill them anyway? We raise them up from tiny lost things, pink with wet blood, just to send them scared and red back to lifelessness. To put their flesh on the fire and between our teeth. I can’t stand the stench. Something about sacrifice, Pop is always saying. Something about protein. I’ve tried to convince them the garden’s enough. That there’s not enough space for sheep here anyway, barely a half-acre of grass in the woods.

For as long as I can remember, Ma and Pop have gone on about how hard everything is. How awful the world is, how much work it took for them to give us a good life. But it didn’t seem that hard to me. I was using a hoe as soon as I could walk. All on my own I started growing lentils and peas and wide fava beans, pumpkins big as a head on dense curling vines. Everything was going just fine.

But Ma and Pop never could see that. They were always wandering around, looking for a trail back to the place where they used to live before we were born.

“Everything was perfect there,” Pop would say. “Just the two of us with every tree always green, heavy with fruit growing in arms’ reach.”

Every spring they plan search trips. They never know what’s going on at home. When Bel found a pregnant sheep, lost in the woods, and said he wanted more, they didn’t think it through before they said yes. He breeds them and kills them and cooks them and they say, Okay. Yes. It’s probably fine. Who cares. I try to tell them we don’t need to, but they wave me away. They like the meat dried, it’s easier for their trips than the beans that I grow. I asked them for the hundredth time why they have to go looking anyway.

“There’s nowhere else to go,” Ma insisted, face hot with rage. Nowhere else in the world but the place they came from. That orchard they never find.

But just yesterday, two weeks into their latest expedition, I heard strange voices in the woods while I hunted for seeds. I swear that I saw them. Other people. Like Pop but not Pop. Walking with purpose, like they knew where they were going. I followed. Silent as a red fox I tracked them through the woods till they came to a black ribbon of river they walked on, and in the distance, I saw dozens of houses like ours that Pop built but bigger. So many all together.

I came back to tell Bel but he said it was a lie. I tried to show him, but he insisted we needed to prepare for Ma and Pop, they’d be back soon for supplies before the next leg of their search. I told him we’d go and come back but he got a funny look on his face, and said he’d come with me only if I skinned one of the lambs. He made me so mad.

I didn’t mean to hit him. I forgot how hard I can swing, how deep the hoe cuts. The sound it made was the dull thud of sliced soil, not the ring of metal against stone. Bel wailed, his mouth open, his eyes flat as burgundy seeped from the side of his skull. He looked confused and afraid, like a lamb with its throat against the cold of a knife. I panicked. I pulled at the hoe—it was automatic, an instinct, but then the blood poured out in a flood, spattered my face, my calloused hands. It’s still not coming off, though I’ve been digging for hours.

But it doesn’t matter. It can’t. As soon as I finish digging this hole, I can go, and it will all be better. That place where those men went, there were so many other people, milling around. People like Ma and Pop and Bel and me, but not us. Other people like us when I thought we were all that there was, all that I could have. I guess Ma and Pop were wrong about that too.

Kristi Ferguson is a researcher and writer. Originally from Brazil, she currently lives in Arlington, Virginia. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Bellevue Literary Review, BULL, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere. Connect with her on Twitter @KFergusonWrites.