A Vacuum With Nothing To Fill It
By Matthew Stanley
Inspired by the painting Alone in the World by Josef Israels
Foot to the shovel. Foot to the shovel. With each stroke the shovel resurrects dirt laid at the foundation of the earth. Never moving. Now it must move to serve its purpose. This is no mere dirt. This is no mere hole. This is a grave. The man digging this grave is an old man. His crooked back groans under his burden and his rough hands grip an ancient shovel. An excavation is taking place in the churchyard. The old man is its lone participant. Only the ravens watch him from the trees. They dare not caw for fear of breaking the holy silence. For years, they have been his only company as he has dug grave after grave. All the large oak trees have grown from frail saplings to pillars of strength before his eyes. The mighty forest wraps its arms around the country church and the cemetery. The stones of the church tower have become weathered and cracked from age. The old man sighs in weariness as he remembers the day that chapel reached completion. His memory fails him as he attempts to recall the interior of the building. He has watched as the graveyard has slowly filled itself. With cold and mechanical motion, he has dug every barrow.
But, a man cannot live without hope. He may eat and breathe, but life has fled his body if he is without hope. Laying in the yard is the hope of many people, but his hope lay elsewhere. His hope drew breath. As a young man, he had returned each day to the hovel he called home. There, waiting for him, was his hope. Each evening he lit a small candle and gazed at the magnificent face of his hope as she blushed in it’s glow. Each night he lay beside her in bed as she slumbered without care. The drab olive blanket scratched him and did not cover his feet. It still covered hers though. That was enough.
The years rolled over their heads. Daily, he came home to his hope and daily his hope revived his soul. Once they watched the revelry of nature. Once, they partook in its bacchanalian celebration of life. Now, her age prevents her. She no longer leaves the house. Its four blackened walls are her cell. Within her cell, a bed. There she lies all her days. Waiting. Wishing. Breathing one breath at a time. As she hears the scrape of the old man’s boots down the lane, her body cries out in pain as she sits up in bed. He must not know how bad it is. So as the old man hobbles into the shack, aching from his labors, she smiles at him. This is what he lives for. Each grinding day is forgotten in the subtlety and beauty of her smile. She is the reason that he rises each morning, the reason he digs ditches all day long, and the reason he draws each breath. How could she take that away from him? Her body is broken. She musters every ounce of strength within herself and put herself together each day. All for the old man.
The charade could not last. Simply put, death wrote his signature upon her face. There was no hiding it. First, it was a tiny cough. Then, a seemingly insignificant bloodstain on the blanket. Soon the coughs came more frequently. They were longer. They were deeper. They were accompanied by copious amounts of blood. The writing was upon the wall. But, the old man refused to see it. His desperate grasping for meaning left him blind.
The thick fog of gloom pervaded the old man’s brain that day. Finding it’s way into every crack. Every thought. His mind was choked with sorrow as he dragged his weary body home that day. A dog barked. He ignored it. The long unpaved road stretched out before him. At the farthest end of the lane sat a dilapidated building. The old man hobbled down the lane towards that building for the millionth time. Turning into the yard, things were strangely silent. The birds had stopped. An unholy stillness pervaded the air. The only sound was the crunch of dead grass beneath his feet. It appeared as though the entirety of nature was holding its breath. He tripped over a small stone but caught himself. His heart skipped a beat. By some miracle, it resumed its clockwork. He continued up the walk. Hand on the knob. Turn. The hinges of the ancient door emit a high pitch note in sharp contrast with the low creak produced by stepping into the house. His eyes never waver for a moment as he enters. They are fixed upon his hope’s bed.
What meets his eyes is an image he had seen before, but has always pushed away. It had been crammed back in the recesses of his brain. Somehow, it had extricated itself from his mind and become a reality before his eyes. Yet, what washed over him was a feeling that he never could have comprehended before now. This image was infinitely more vile and abhorrent to him than the one that had once been lodged in his skull. No man can endure the endless grinding of the millstone of time. The old man’s bones were ground to powder by its ceaseless motion. Now he could not lie to himself. The gravity of the situation pierced through the old man’s blindness. As a veil being rent in two, the world in true color stood arrayed before him. Death’s axe had finally chopped through the old man’s very foundation. The demise of not just one soul, but two. The second soul being a mere casualty.
All the while, his feet had remained unmoved. Now, the nails were removed from them. Mechanically, he draws up his only chair to sit beside her deathbed. In utter stupor, the old man relinquishes the job of supporting himself to the chair. In its finest moment, the chair held the man. The chair existed for the sole purpose to hold the old man in his darkest hour.
Time slowed down in that room. Every other thing in the world melted away. What slowly crept upon the man was a feeling. An emotion. Yet, it somehow could not register. The pure despair that slowly seeped into the cracks that were forming in his soul began to freeze and rip it apart. A wedge was driven into his heart. Under the force, it shattered into a multitude of shards. One single tear emerged from his tear glands and snaked its way down his cheek before plummeting to the floor and pooling amongst the dust. This tear was followed by a flood. This old man, who has been daily beaten low by life and yet continues to stare it in the eye, wavers. He blinks. He surrenders. Death has deprived this man of his only possession of value. The riches of the earth stand arrayed as dross before his eyes. He buries his face in his hands as he daily buries caskets within the earth. There is not one soul in the universe to share his burden. Blindly, he reaches out into eternity in a vain attempt to grasp a hold of something. Anything. As a noiseless and patient spider, he casts his string into infinity but finds nothing.
He vainly attempts to stand but his legs give way beneath him and he falls to his knees. There he kneels before a cracked and blackened wall. He beats it until his hands bleed. He cries out loudly until he is hoarse. With his head laid low, he cries one last tear before collapsing in exhaustion.
As his frail frame lies upon the cold ground, he contemplates existence. The old man was never much of a philosopher. He was a worker. However, his hope’s death had pulled things into perspective. In tragedy, every man becomes a philosopher. The meaningless of existence slowly wrapped itself around his frozen limbs. His chest seized up as his own life came into view. He had only been a drop in the ocean of existence. Yet, had he even been a drop? His eyelids slowly shut as his mind became dull with the anesthesia of sleep.
Eyes open. Back to reality. The old man’s temples throbbed as he awoke. He closed his eyes again and reopened them in hope that yesterday was a dream. A nightmare. When he reopened his eyes, the same sad shack met them and his hope lay in the exact place he had found her. His soul is crushed once again in the face of cruel reality. Her body still lay in the bed and scabs were forming upon his hands. He clenched them in fury but he knew not what to do.
Suddenly, horror grips him as he remembers his occupation. The irony of Death laughed him to scorn as he once again collapsed in tears. He cries out for Death! He counts Death a friend! But Death is not kind enough to grant his request. With his lungs collapsed within him, the old man walks the gravel road to the churchyard. Each step is agony. Life is abhorrent to him! Why does Death suffer him to languish in the realm of the Living? These thoughts course through his brain as he slowly opens the gate to the cemetery. Its crash rouses the birds to scatter. The army of tombstones loom all around him. A feeling of belonging begins to creep over the old man. Here he was in the kingdom of the dead and here he stood as a man who had found his place. The soft moss was flattened under his boot as he patiently weaves amongst the grave markers. His eyes pass over every soft patch of earth. He meticulously analyzes which patch of ground would be suitable to bear the honor of housing his hope’s corpse for eternity. Soon he comes upon a plot overshadowed by a large willow tree. Descending now into delirium, the old man could imagine that he heard a voice. It almost sounded like his hope’s voice! It tells him that this is the place.
That voice promptly vanished. Silence descended like a sheet. One could hardly think. The intense knot of emotions within the old man’s chest tightens, relaxes, and seizes up over and over as he dug her grave. The shovel excavates small portions of dirt with each motion but for the old man, the end of the job was too close. He wished he could refill the hole and start again just so it didn’t have to end. The end arrived in spite of the old man’s delay. At last, the gaping chasm stares him in the face. Straining his ears, the old man could just here Death’s scornful laughter rising up from the abode of the dead. It echoes and reverberates through the old man’s mind. Death was what he longed for, but did Death long for him? Perhaps Death’s hatred was of such vehemence, that it would elect to torture him with everlasting life. Such a thing could never be. Could it? But surely Death’s wickedness springs forth eternally.
His heavy heart resided within his boots as he returned to his broken down house. The strain of the physical and emotional deterioration causes the walk to become somewhat of a dream. Even when he thinks he it is over, his legs carry him on. He again returned to the charred cell. The way he removed his hope’s body from the bed, one would think she was made of glass. She was the most precious thing to him. Now, he had to wheel her through the streets. His mind entered a tunnel with that plot of land at the other side. No street or hill was a match for him. The old man was the only participant in his hope’s final funeral procession through the street. By the light of the morning sun, the old man cast long shadows down the lane. Shafts of light dance around him, but they are grey. The world had lost its color. His mind was hardly aware of this though. His only thought was the plot beneath the willow.
Beneath the willow, the heavy smell of fresh soil fills the man’s nostrils as he tenderly touches his hope’s pale cheek. He savors every moment. But his task at hand violently intrudes his thoughts and reminds him of its existence. His ancient muscles cry out in agony as he places her within the hole. He doesn’t want to relinquish her. It can’t end this way! The wind takes life and swirls about him singing, “Oh, but it can!” Dehydration prevents the old man from shedding another tear so he simply closes his eyes and breathes. The cold forest air enters and exits his lungs in rhythm. He frowns. Yes. It has lost it’s magic. He cannot rip his eyes away from the final view of his hope. Now his hope lay with the others’ hope. Each shovel of dirt pains him to the core of his being as he slowly fills the hole. Her grave is left unmarked for the old man is too poor to afford a tombstone. Her only monument is the willow tree.
It was the first day of the rest of his… life? No, it wasn’t a life. It was less a life and more the absence of death. Death had spread like a disease and infected every aspect of his world and thought. Every joy was dull. Every beauty was corrupted. Somehow, Death had crossed over his metaphysical bounds and had invaded the material world. The old man passed through the village in a trance. Physical existence hardly registered in his shattered mind. He was conscious of standing once again in the dead yard of the ruined shelter. It wasn’t a home anymore. Whereas it had once been his wife’s cell, now it was his. The old man submitted to his sentence and crossed over the threshold. The sensation of stepping into a state of purgatory swept over him. He thought he could hear the cries of the tormented. He wanted to be among that number. And as he closed the door to his cell, he thought he could hear Death sealing it tight.
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