Burrowing

Mum was at it again. Unbelievable! What time was it? He gasped looking at the alarm on the nightstand. It was 3 am. And it was the 120th day in a row. Anybody would have been impressed with her persistence. He wasn’t. He was petrified.

The shovel in her hand smelled of doom. She was digging, sniffing the ground. It reminded him of a wolverine, only she wasn’t predatory, innocuous really, almost pathetic. All the uprooted crocus and blood roots lay like dying soldiers looking for respite from the continued battery of days. She would replant them of course, but in the meantime they struggled to survive with these rude shocks in the middle of the night like him. The world was meant to be asleep at night, not unsettling roots deep in the soil.

But he knew she had to find all that lay buried. What was the point whatever she was after? Wouldn’t that unleash more tremors of seismic proportion? Especially now that his dad was dead.

He missed him so much. All the summer fishing by the lake, the bowling and baseball on weekends and making wooden trellises together in the shed for the creepers that needed support for climbing. All the hauling of soil in wheelbarrows planning the next move to beautify the garden  brought fresh hot tears. He wiped them away. He was not expected to grieve, he had to fit into his dad’s boots and carry on with his unfinished work. Men have to hold their grief hidden from others and in his case there was his mother’s grief to take care of besides all this digging business now.

But she wasn’t listening to anyone. He knew his mum; she could be stubborn.

“Ben I have to find the remains”, she had told him one morning when he had confronted her at breakfast.

“Your dad’s landscaping skills were phenomenal; he was in love with the garden. So, there’s nowhere but the garden that I should look to unearth what he hid. Not the attic, not the basement, not the shed, nor the garage, no closets either. It has to be the garden. And I’m looking.”

He had groaned and prayed hard that she would give up this hunt. Neighbors looked at them with suspicion having heard weird sounds coming from their garden.

“Stop Mum. It’s just too dark. Too late Mum. Please..,,?”

“ Look at these Ben. I found them under the tulips. Had to dig them out. Was worth it.”

She was sweating. He could see her bent back, wet muddy hands and grimy boots. She was trembling all over, not so much from the damp spring chill as much as from her discovery of what had slept hidden all this while. He looked at the stash in her hands: a plastic container with a bunch of Ziploc bags one inside the other containing a neat bundle of papers tied with a red satin ribbon. Plastic was non biodegradable he realized with a potential to preserve secrets from being destroyed. Some use, he thought, sitting there forever underground. More of a hazard than any good!

“Wrongs have to be righted. Always. Remember that Ben. Even if you don’t succeed, you need to do all you can. The effort counts in the final reckoning.”

What the hell was the matter with her? Was she losing it? What was the correlation of Judgment Day and all this absurd treasure hunt, if there was any treasure hidden in  these Ziplocs that is. What wrong? What right? He needed divine enlightenment this moment to decipher her code.

He went indoors. She was sobbing uncontrollably slouched on the loveseat in the family room.

“ We need to find her Ben. She’s out there waiting for a hug.”

Again her gibberish confounded him. He might have to consult a therapist, he should have thought of it earlier. All this strange digging at ungodly hours had taken a toll on her.

“ Poor Sophie never knowing love, nor a family. We have to bring her home.”

Her body was convulsed with so many emotions at once that it was hard to get her to come to her senses.

“ You’ll help me Ben, won’t you ? She needs our love, the love that your dad didn’t give her. “

“What the......!”

“ She’s your half-sister Ben living in an institution for the developmentally challenged. Look at her.”

His head was reeling. Something burst in his brain before he was able to stop it like shells bursting, a dynamite blast. Was it his dad’s picture on the mantelpiece smiling at him or was it Sophie’s in his mum’s hand that blinded him from understanding the reality? He waited for daybreak to clear his mind.