Mound Of Sugar

I don't know why the man chose my cross-street to die, but I'm rightly glad he did. Even though it's no different than the cross-street in all towns, once you understand what a real town's like. The towns that ride the edges, with people existing in the periphery. Sprinkled across maps like motes of dust. The focal point of my own dust mote is an intersecting pair of dirt roads, years of travel slowly flattening them away into functional thoroughfares. Flanked on all corners by four crumbling poles of timber, each brandishing a splintered waypoint sign, hauled up by long-gone grandaddies who got the notions sometimes to go out and dig gold. It's a big old place too, this land which never seems quite large enough to fit everyone in and yet never seems to end. Right at the heart of a ragged assembly of buildings laid out like buckshot. There's the rooming flats, where I live, a general store, a post office, a jail (mostly for nomadic drunks), a saloon which feeds the jail, and a church. The church was old, likely around before fore anything else was even thought to be placed. Probably not a religious decision either, for isn't much of that around here. Other men might say it's the promise of community, the benefits of kinship that come from a place to organize, to talk about matters befittin' a good and lawful society. But you put a church down first because it works and it's safe and when something's safe, it don't matter how the winds roar behind the shutters as the sands kick up from the chinooks screaming their way down the mountains every spring, or how a funeral lays bare all the hideous grief behind our knees, hoping for something to push you backwards. You huddle together in the pews, clamp your eyes shut, and them walls stand sturdy around you.

Perhaps it's also why no'one but me noticed when the man walked into the middle of the cross- street. The inertia of day's rituals was too powerful to interrupt. Even as he shovelled, few others paused to glance, just continued on errands or floated around in the dusty air. It was only when the man's hands finally disappeared and his shovel clanked to the ground that the curiosity formed a crowd.

The attraction was a freshly dug mound of earth was now standing like an obelisk directly in the middle of the intersection, its conical base resting a foot below the surface of the raw dirt road inside the hole from which it had been sprung, reaching about 5 feet high and near perfectly symmetrical around all sides, with a top that was caved in like the summit of a volcano. A lone shovel was lying haphazardly at the dirt mound's base. Two people standing and gawking at it from the western side of the street became four, then six, then fifteen, attracting each other like orbiting moths. A little girl grasping a tattered doll tore loose of her mother's arms, scampered up to the mound, slapped its base with a cherry-red palm, and scampered right back to bury her face deep into the long, flowing fabric of her mother's dress. Two old men pointed and spoke in hushed and heated dispute. And then came the whispering: swelling up like a like a shimmering gas, the sound of more and more passersby pausing to take notice, to ask around, and maybe even the sliver of excitement, a note as delicate as a key change in an orchestra. But I didn't whisper with them because I seen what happened, the whole thing, from the north side of the street, swinging a fresh bag of sugar as I head home to the rooming flats:

That man walked into our town with bare feet and a clean face. On his back was a shovel, held up by strapping that criss-crossed around his waist like bandoliers. Dressed in a freshly-pressed white suit, highlighted with crimson thread stitched delicately around the lapels, he stood nearly invisible against the blazing bone-bleached surroundings. In contrast to his clothes, his features were dark, lumpy and rough, and they almost seemed to quiver and transpose themselves, like a hunk of clay not yet decided on its final shape. He walked smoothly forward, a practiced walk, and the shadow of one of the cross-street's timber poles fell across his cheeks; he became rudely handsome, with a sharp jaw and a thick brow. But as he passed into sun again, he was ghoulish and almost unbearably repulsive, his image bending into a terrible cartoonish caricature of a face, his eyes fixed and burning a hole straight through the horizon. And, with a few more steps, it was just a face again, forgettable, anonymous and lonely. The eyes never changed, though. They didn't move, dart or glance; they seemed stuck on something I hoped I'd never see. When he reached the very center of the square, he suddenly quit walking. He didn't exactly stop entirely – rather, the forward momentum of his last step flowed like a wave through his body, motion whipping into his arms, bringing them deftly behind him as he snapped the shovel off of his back and started digging. His task was repetitive, steady and efficient. He was digging a hole around himself, starting with the ground just circumferin' his feet, but then into an ever-widening pupil gaping up from the earth. Mostly stones and detritus to start, and then thick, dark, wet soil as he penetrated below the caked and cracked surface of the road. After a moderate depth, he pulled the perimeter of soil accumulating around the hole's edges toward him using the spoon of the shovel, burying his legs up to his knees. He began to reach further and further over the mound that was slowly building up around him, shovelling earth from its base, raising it up, piling it higher and higher, carefully tamping it firm and tight. Maybe twenty minutes later, he was buried entirely up to his chest, with only his arms, upper torso and head sticking out of a broad, conical skirt of earth, the rest of him completely ensconced within. The man finally stopped, a real and true stop since the first time I seen him. He simply stood there in his dirt pile, breathing and gasping. It wasn't just from the effort of the dig. He looked like he was trying to suck up every last particle of air that he could, savoring it in his lungs and tasting it on his tongue. His eyes bugged out of his head, but they never moved away from that same unseen phantom, never lost that vicious lucidity. And then he stuck both hands straight up into the sky as if he were preparing to dive into water. Letting go of the shovel, he took one last enormous, desperate drag of oxygen, and dropped straight down into the dirt. The top third of the mound collapsed immediately, filling itself in, burying the man completely, giving it that distinctive caved in volcano shape. The shovel rolled end over end into the road. A few stones tumbled after it. Everything was still again.

When more people started to circle around, whispering and gawking, and I got up from the bench and continued home, swinging my bag of sugar. When I got there, I went to the bedroom to sit and look out the window.

Those rooming flats where I stayed was one of the closest to the town center, facing directly out into the cross-street. The sugar I bought was for a sweet root bake, but I found a spoon and took it directly. I watched the little moth people slowly orbit and flutter away, never getting within an arms stretch of the mound. I watched the sun deflate like an overripe pumpkin, the moon crawling up to take its place. I watched the tomb mound dim away into the evening, the square of cross-street becoming empty again but for it, piercing its center, starting to feel sick, the bag of sugar a quarter emptied and my stomach turning horrendously. And I became fearful for the very first time. It was the tower of the church that afeared me. Its looming, conical obelisk silhouetted black against a sky lit with frosty moonlight.

Someone eventually showed up to pull him out, dead of course. I don't know after how long and I didn't see that. In fact, the next day I baked my sweet root and after that I mostly just forgot about the whole thing. But I did happen to know where he was laid, and years on, I woke up one morning and decided to visit his plot. It was a simple, bare headstone, with no name or etchings. I walked up to it, wincing at my own footsteps crunching their way through that peculiar cemetery quietness. Hesitantly, I touched the cold stone, feeling its sandpaper coarseness under my fingers. I reached into my pocket, and scooped out some of the sugar I had stowed there. I piled it up carefully on the grave. Moulded it with my palms and fingers, shaping it into a mound, perfectly symmetrical around all sides. Using one thumb, I gently depressed the top, creating that distinctive volcano shape. I stepped back and looked at it. Looked for a real long time too. Then, suddenly feeling the dandelions that were growing beneath my feet, right above where the simple pine box casket would be, pushing their way up through the earth, forming little mounds of their own, I wanted nothing more but to leave. So I did.