Goat Mountain by David Vann Page A

we even had memory.
    I’d erase it all.
    You’d erase your whole life.
    I would have had a different life, is all, and no matter what happened, it would have turned out better than now.
    That’s fear, my grandfather said. That’s only fear talking, and nothing about it is true.
    Please, my father said. Please just stop talking, both of you. His head bowed as if in prayer, mouth resting on his folded hands, elbows on his knees. His eyes closed. Praying to the fire, and the fire leaving shapes across him, the form of every beast from the beginning, atavistic summoning of which he was wholly unaware. We can never see these shapes in ourselves, and we can never see them in time. We can only remember them. If we go back and search, we can find all portents, every moment of our lives speaking to every other.
    That body is still hanging there, my grandfather said. You don’t seem to understand, either of you, that what you do or say or think doesn’t matter now.
    Please just don’t speak again, my father said.
    My grandfather rose then and stepped into the fire. His boot with all that weight above it crushing down through half-burned limbs and coals, a hive of sparks, and then he stepped out, and no part of him touched. He was not something that could burn, and the fire now was broken, the pieces of wood become individual, flames reduced to their sources and no more than a few inches high anywhere.
    My grandfather continued on to the table, took his spot on the high side closest to the tree and creek. Sat down heavy and pulled his hat from his jacket pocket, an old green plaid hat with earflaps. No expression, just staring ahead into the darkness where the poacher hung and the brown of the burlap caught the light even from that diminished fire.
    My father turned away now from the fire, sitting on his low stump with his hands in his pockets and looking uphill, the base of the higher ridges, the trees showing faintly against the dark. I wanted in that moment to be able to talk with him, but what would we have said?
    Tom set the paper plates on the bench and filled each one with a steak and onions and slices of bread, and brought them to the table. He and I sat on the lower side, and the three of us began eating, and after some time, my father joined and ate also and we said nothing. Only sounds of chewing, the muted roar of the lantern, the water in the creek beside us, the wind above in the trees. We could have been alone, each of us, and that to me is the strangest thing now. That’s something I don’t understand, why there was never more connection. When I search my memories, it seems it was always this way, that every moment spent with my father or grandfather or Tom was a moment alone. And so it’s hard to know why they even matter. But they were the closest people to me in my life. My mother had left before I had memory, my grandmother was dead, and these three men were all I had. They were all I knew, so at the time the distance must have felt natural, just the order of things. And it seemed inevitable that we would always be together.
    We finished our food and Tom threw our paper plates into the coals where they flared and curled and died out. He washed the forks and the griddle and wiped his hands on a towel and walked into the trees to his bedroll.
    My father disappeared also into the trees. And then my grandfather having to use his hands to help push up onto his feet and that unsteady walk to his mattress, the sound of the springs, rusty and old, as he settled himself in his sleeping bag.
    I sat for a while longer listening to the water and the lantern, two sounds from different worlds that fit together anyway because my earliest memories included them. Anything can become familiar and seem meant to be.
    I reached up and turned off the gas on the lantern. An immediate loss of light, and the water grown, the tea-bag wicks glowing red along their edges, thin lines that looked as