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The Hole

Zachary F. Gerberick

    The man stroked the lacquered wooden handle; hoping a small piece of eucalyptus would splinter off into his palm. He examined the shovel, about four feet in length with a varnished black steel head curved to a dull point, a spade. He removed it from the garage wall, releasing its D-shaped handgrip from the metal hooks that held the shovel for so many years. He tested the weight of it by carefully lifting it up and down, then, finding the fulcrum point of the shovel, he balanced it on the palm of his right hand. He valued the shovel, how it always got the job done. The man slowly walked to his backyard, broke open the earth and started to dig.
    The man’s son quietly observed the digging through his bedroom window. The man’s wife died when the boy was born and the son always felt like he was the one thing that kept his father going. The man always did try his hardest to stay together emotionally. He always went to work. He would take his son out to the zoo and to the movies. He even started to date again. But for the past few weeks things began to change. The day before, the boy found his father lying on the floor of the kitchen grasping an old black-and-white photograph. The boy walked over to his dad and joined him on the cold tile floor, resting his head in the pit of the man’s upper arm.
    The next day, the father decided to take the day off from work. His son was at his aunt’s at the time, and the man called her to ask if she could drop off the boy for the day. Recently, she had been taking care of the boy more and more. She reluctantly agreed.
    The boy arrived at his father’s house right before dinnertime. The man microwaved an old box of scalloped potatoes and a few hotdogs. They decided to eat in the family room so they could watch T.V. during their meal since the man wanted to avoid any kind of a conversation, even with a nine year-old boy. After dinner the man put his son to bed and went out to the garage. He picked up the spade and continued his digging.
    A few minutes later, the boy got up from his bed and walked out the door wearing his pajamas and sneakers.
    “What are you doing Dad?” the boy asked.
    After a few seconds the man answered, “I’m digging for treasure, but it’s your bedtime now. You can help me tomorrow.”
    “Let me help you now. Just for a little bit,” the son asked.
    “Okay, just for a little bit.”
    The man went to the garage and looked for another shovel for the boy but could not find one. He ended up grabbing a small garden spade made of stainless steel with a dark green, rubber handgrip. The man gave it to the boy and they dug together.
    The father brought out a large, ten by ten foot tarp and laid it next to the hole and would toss the dug-up dirt onto it. The hole started to get deeper and deeper into the earth. The man ignored the salty sweat in his mouth and eyes. The boy wanted to ask his dad what they were looking for but he saw how absorbed he was with his digging. It was almost midnight when the man abruptly stopped. He looked up at his son, who was sitting in the grass playing with the leaves. The man looked startled and confused. He almost yelled at the boy for being up so late until he realized he was the one that let him stay outside.
    “It’s time for bed, kiddo. It’s really late and you need to get some sleep.”
    The man carried his son into the house and up the stairs and plopped him on his bed. He tucked the boy under the covers and sat down next to him.
    “Dad, what are we digging for? What’s in the treasure?” the boy asked.
    “Just wait, you’ll find out soon enough.”
    The boy didn’t want his father to leave. Other than his aunt, his dad was the only person that ever comforted him. When the son was younger, the man would crawl under the boy’s bed to prove that there weren’t any monsters. They would lie together and the man would tell the boy the same stories that the man’s father told him, stories of the past, about the Egyptians, the Romans, and the Indians.
    The father stood up and kissed the boy’s forehead, “Goodnight, son.”
    “Please don’t leave yet dad, stay with me a little longer,” the boy pleaded.
    The man looked out the window at the hole then back at the boy.
    “Okay, son.”

    The man grabbed an old shoebox from under his bed. He emptied its contents, which held different color shoe polishes, two shoehorns, and an ivory hand brush. He inherited the brush from his father, who traded a stainless steel lighter for it while in South Africa during the First Great War. There was an African landscape engraved into the brush, with a giraffe eating from an Acacia tree. The man rubbed his hand through the horsehair bristles and remembered when his father taught him how to shine shoes when he was a child.
    Set a towel on the ground so you don’t stain the carpet.
    Wipe the dust off the shoes with a horsehair brush and a damp rag and let them dry.
    Make sure the shoe polish is the same color as the shoes, and if you have to, mix and match the polishes to create the correct color.
    Cover the entire shoe with the polish, making sure you get down into the seams and wait fifteen minutes to let dry.
    Dip cotton balls into water and polish the shoes in a circular motion, using new cotton balls for different areas of the shoe.

    The man carefully went through these steps while realizing that he had never taught his own son how to shine shoes. After the man had finished, he carefully placed the shoes under his bed and walked outside so he could continue with his digging. His fingers began to bleed, staining the eucalyptus handle a dark burgundy. The only time he would stop digging was to pop the blisters on his fingers using a razorblade from his toolkit. But for the most part, the man ignored the pain and went on with his digging, pulling up pile after pile of earth. The dirt was dark brown and moist at first, but it slowly changed into a reddish clay-like soil the deeper he dug. Every once in awhile the man would hit a root and would have to use all his strength to break through it. The man’s sweat blended with the dirt on his face, creating a thin layer of mud. After so much digging, the man’s arms and legs began to numb. The shovel became a part of his body, an extension of his arm. He began to lose control of his movements and the shovel took over.

    The sun started to rise when he heard the voice of his neighbor.
    “What the hell are you digging for?”
    Hearing the voice startled the man. He looked up at the neighbor confused. The hole was about five feet deep so the neighbor could only see the father’s head. This caused him to focus on the man’s eyes, and the bewilderment within them.
     The man stumbled in finding his words.
    “I’m trying to fix one of our pipes. They’re so old that they should be cracking any day now. Figured I would get it done before winter comes.”
    “Why the hell didn’t you say something? I have a friend who owns a backhoe. I could have him come over today and dig it up in minutes,” the neighbor said.
    “Well...I don’t know. I thought I would do it myself. I don’t have much money to spend anyways.”
    “Hell, he wouldn’t charge you. He loves doing stuff like this. It’d be on the house.”
    “Well, I’m almost done anyways. Plus I need the workout. But thanks for the offer,” the man said.
    “Suit yourself. But I know what you mean about the workout. My wife has been nagging me about exercising ever since we got married. I tell her I exercise everyday; I do arm curls every time a put a beer to my mouth. You know what I mean?” the neighbor asked.
    The man tried to laugh.
    “Yeah. I definitely know what you mean. But I better get back to work.”
    “Come on, take a break, drink a few beers with me. It looks like you need the rest,” the neighbor said.
    “Thanks for the offer, but maybe some other time. I really want to get this finished by tomorrow.”
    “Come on, you party-pooper.”
    “Not now, maybe later,” the man said.
    “Well, just stroll on over when you’re done and we’ll watch the game. Hell, bring your kid over if you want, he could play with my son,” the neighbor said.
    “Okay, I’ll try to stop by. Nice talking to you.”
    “Ya, ya, ya,” the neighbor said as he walked away.

    After another hour, the boy came back outside and sat down next to the hole. It was getting so deep that the man was having trouble tossing the soil out of it. The boy had brought out a piece a paper and some crayons. He tried to draw a picture of his father digging. He then started to draw a picture of his mother lying down on a bed. He tried his hardest to draw straight lines but was unsuccessful since he didn’t have a flat surface to draw on. He only had three different colors: Asparagus Green, Macaroni and Cheese Yellow, and Wild Blue Yonder. He used the blue for his mother’s dress and the yellow for her hair. Every few minutes he would look up and watch the dirt soar through the air. The father exited the hole to get a drink and saw the boy’s drawing. The man tried to quickly walk away.
    “Dad, why did mom get sick?” the boy asked.
    “Well...it can happen to anyone. It just happens sometimes, that’s just how it is,” the man said.
    “Did I make her sick?”
    “No, son. Of course not. It had nothing to do with you. People live and then they die, and some people die earlier than others. But it’s not your fault so don’t think that. Okay?”
    “Okay, dad.”

    After some more digging, the man’s shovel hit something hard. It made a loud, hollow noise that rang throughout the hole. The man struck the object a few more times. The son jumped up to see what it was.
    “Well dad, what is it?”
    The father wiped the sweat from his eyelids, “Rock layers are deposited from the bottom up, so the deeper we dig, the farther back in time we see.”
    “So it’s a rock? How are we going to dig deeper, Dad? What are we even searching for?”
    The boy looked down at his father, barely able to make out his face.
    The man looked up at the boy with the sunlight blinding his eyes. “We’re not searching for anything, son. We’re burying something.”
    The father had set a ladder down in the hole earlier in the day since it was getting too deep to climb out of. He rose from the hole and walked straight to his room and collapsed on the bed.
    While sleeping, the man looked as though he was preparing for something, as if he was trying to acquire strength and energy. The boy entered the room and sat down next to his father. He started to brush the dirt and grime off his dad’s shirt. He walked over to the bathroom and wetted a cloth and wiped his father’s forehead. The boy examined the man’s wrinkles and the bags under his eyes, which made his dad look much older than he actually was. He then observed his father’s hands, gently rubbing his fingers over the man’s blisters, feeling the elevated crevasses of his fingerprints. The boy grabbed some disinfectant and bandages and applied them to his dad’s hands. The man woke up during this process, but closed his eyes and acted as if he were still sleeping. A draft was seeping into the room from the open window that broke on the day of his wife’s death, which the man had never fixed. The boy tucked his father in under the covers.

    The father woke up an hour later to his son’s face, which caused him to smile for the first time in weeks. They quietly stared at each other. The father watched the boy slowly fall asleep. As the boy started to snore, the man began to talk.
    “I could hear them come through the window. I was downstairs working on a presentation while your mother was in the bedroom with you. You weren’t born yet; you were still in her belly. I heard every shard of glass from the window fall on the ground one piece at a time. I heard the footsteps and I could tell that there was more than one of them. I heard the screams. She yelled for me and I could not move. There were too many of them...and I wasn’t there to protect her. I was frozen. After awhile I heard them walk out the back door. The sounds of the sirens began to get louder and louder, but your mother made no noises.”
    The man remembered how a neighbor who heard the screams had called the police. They found his wife on the ground, surrounded by a pool of blood, holding her belly in hopes of protecting the boy. They took her to the hospital. They knew she wasn’t going to make it but they thought they could still save the boy if they hurried. The man hid in the crawlspace the entire day. None of the policemen knew he was home. Everyone thought he was gone on a business trip and he didn’t tell them otherwise. The next day he walked upstairs and acted as if he didn’t know what had happened. He tried to forgive himself and let go but couldn’t, it wasn’t something he could control. The pain worsened each day. Every morning he would have to remind himself what had happened. At first he didn’t believe it, he didn’t think he was capable of such weakness. Every morning he prayed to God that it was just a dream, but he knew it wasn’t. He knew what he had done. And not only did his pain grow, but also his love for her. Each day that passed he missed her more and more. His love for her became more powerful than the pain and the regret. He couldn’t stop thinking about her; she lived in every thought that ran through his mind, refusing to leave, refusing his apologies. One day he realized it would never stop. He realized he needed to take action. He tried to make it go away but he couldn’t.

    The next morning, after watching the boy sleep, the man grabbed a lawn chair from the back porch and set it next to the hole. He stood up and started to pace back and forth around the ditch. He stared down to the bottom, not able to see anything but darkness. Walking over to the pile of dirt, he grabbed a small handful of soil and let it gradually fall from his hands down into the hole. He then began to slowly push small amounts of dirt back down to the bottom. At first just a few grains, he then started to kick more and more soil down into the hole. He eventually stopped and walked back to his room.
    The bedroom hadn’t changed since his wife died. It was near the back of the ranch house so no sunlight ever entered the room. The ceiling light was dimming out, making the robin’s egg blue seem darker than it actually was. The wife’s grandfather clock still occupied the front corner of the room. She inherited the clock from her mother, which was passed down from previous generations. The clock didn’t look as though it belonged in the room or even the century. It was a Comtoise clock, a French grandfather clock that is more curved and rounded than a normal one. This one exhibited a striking resemblance to a potbellied man. The clock seemed immovable, as though it had roots that went down into the ground for miles and miles. It was as though they built the house around it. The face of the clock was shattered the day the man’s wife died, splintered into hundreds of irregular shapes. The hour and minute hands remained in the same position ever since. Shortly after visiting the bedroom, the man returned outside and started to dig out the dirt he had kicked down into the hole just before.

    Once the boy woke up, the man presented his son with a cake. It was chocolate with vanilla icing around the edges. The man had put ten red and white striped candles in the center.
    “Happy birthday son. Now make a wish.”
    The boy waited a few seconds and then blew out the candles.
    “Since it’s your birthday, you can do whatever you want.”
    “Lets play a game,” the son said.
    After browsing their board game closet, the boy decided he wanted to do a puzzle. It was a five-hundred-piece three-dimensional puzzle of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City. The pieces were quarter-inch thick, made of lightweight foam. They dumped the pieces on the kitchen table and began to flip them all over so they were the right side up. They started off with the base of the puzzle, and built up from there. The puzzle began to take shape, slowly growing in height and beauty.
    “You’re not really good at puzzles, are you dad?”
    The two laughed, “No, son. I never had the knack for stuff like this, but your mom was really good at them.”
    The two told each other stories and shared memories throughout the entire day. They finished the whole cake and the man cooked the boy macaroni and cheese, his favorite meal. The boy told his father about school, and how his favorite class was social studies. The man teased the boy about having a crush on a girl from one of his classes.
    “So girls don’t have cooties anymore, do they?” the man joked.
    “I remember when I first met your mother. We were in high school and she was one of the most popular girls in school, and the prettiest. I was always too scared to talk to her, but I couldn’t stop thinking about her. I wanted to stop because I thought I didn’t have a chance, but you can’t control love. Luckily, after we graduated we both got a job at Archie’s Fish and Chips and the rest is history.”
    The two continued the puzzle, reaching the spires of the cathedral before the boy started to get tired.
    “How about we finish this up tomorrow. It’s almost your bedtime,” the man said.
    “But we are so close. Come on, dad. Let’s finish it really quick.”
    “Tomorrow, it’s bedtime now. Go upstairs and get ready.”

    After the man put his son to sleep, he walked over to his closet and grabbed his best suit, a silk tweed jacket and a pair of gray trousers. The jacket was the color of the earth, with two wooden buttons underneath the collar. He took his time putting it on, making sure every crease and wrinkle was flattened out. The man then grabbed the polished shoes and slid them onto his feet. He carefully tied his shoelaces and slowly walked toward the window. He stood there for a minute, feeling the icy draft blowing in, eventually pulling down the blinds to cover the broken window.
    The man walked over to the hole and grabbed a tape measure from his toolbox. He measured the depth of the hole. It was exactly ten feet deep. He figured one foot in depth was equivalent to one year in time, which made the hole precisely ten years deep, exactly the day his wife died. He tied a thick rope to the tarp where the dirt was placed on and threw the rope down to the bottom of the hole. He slowly descended down the ladder one year at a time, and arranged himself on his back when he got to the bottom. He reached under his back to remove some small stones that were protruding into his body. The man moved around for quite a bit trying to find the most comfortable position on the rocky floor.
    The man then grabbed an old black-and-white photograph of his dead wife from his coat pocket. He studied the photograph for a few seconds and placed it on top of his heart. He then grabbed the rope with both hands and started to pull as hard as he could. The dirt and tarp wouldn’t budge. He scooted down and put his legs on the wall of the hole so he could have more leverage. He tried again. This time the dirt started to move inch by inch. A few grains of dirt started to fall into the hole onto his chest. The man stopped. He felt something sticking into his leg. He let go of the rope and reached his right hand into his pants pocket. The man pulled out the engraved, ivory hand brush. He studied the brush, moving it around and tracing the engravings with his index finger. The man climbed up the ladder and when he reached the top, he started to pull up the rope. After the rope was completely out of the hole, the man stood at the edge looking at the photograph of his dead wife. A few seconds later, he let the rope fall from his hands and watched it descend back down into the hole.

* * * *

     “Okay, son. I don’t have much time, but the first thing you should know is to always place a towel on the ground so you don’t stain the carpet. This stuff doesn’t come out if you spill. You follow?”
    “Yes,” the son said, still in his pajamas and half asleep.
    “Good, now wipe down the shoes with the brush. Make sure you get deep into the seams.”
    The man grabbed a box of matches from the kit.
    “Okay, son, now for the fun part. Grab the shoe polish and open it up for me. Now, have you ever lit a match before?”
    The boy shook his head.
    “Well, there’s a first time for everything. Now, set the polish down on the towel. Take this match and hold it tight. Now strike the match against the side of the box.”
    The match caught the flint at just the right angle. The red phosphorus quickly turned into white, and sparks flew, igniting the sulfur and potassium chlorate. The smell of the sulfur spread throughout the air.
    “Perfect. Now hold the match still. Don’t drop it; it won’t burn you if you’re careful. Now grab the shoe polish and tilt it into the flame.”
    The polish ignites.
    “Good, now blow the match out and put the lid back onto the polish. See how the polish is a bit melted and runny? This makes it easier to polish our shoes. Now grab the cloth and dip it into the polish. Just a tad. Now start rubbing in a circular motion. You’re doing great, son. Now push down hard, you want to make sure you get into those seams.”
    “How’s it look so far?” the boy asked.
    “It looks as if you bought those shoes just yesterday.”

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