Pit

“Money makes people rotten.” Grandma would tell me repeatedly. She’d let out a whistle through the gap in her teeth and say with a subtle satisfaction after the noise, “You promise me here, you better never get rich. Money dirties souls.” I’d nod my head vehemently so she couldn’t look into my eyes. I didn’t want her to peer in and see my excitement. Nothing was more enticing than the thought of being rich enough to move out of our prefabricated house surrounded by lumped dirt and dying weeds steeped in fracking slurry. I knew she’d be able to see it, because I had seen it once. The look. It was probably when I was ten or eleven when my mother had just been let out of rehab or prison, by then I’d lost track. She had come home and ruffled my hair between yellowed fingers, leaving my hair smelling like cigarettes. She told me that she was going to be a better mom; that this time was different. I knew it was a lie but like most children, I chose to believe it. Three days later, I came back from school to a broke piggy bank and a note. What I missed more, I’d tell myself, was the piggy bank. I’d been saving up by pocketing some of the lunch money Grandma would give me. I’d gone hungry every Monday planning to buy a sewing machine, my ticket out of this town. But one heroine dose later and my dreams were in shards.

Grandma tried to console me, she grabbed the back of my head and pushed it into her chest. She rocked and told me that we were all that we got, that the world would keep turning, and the universe would keep forgiving. But I knew the world didn’t turn in this town. We were walled in by dust and asbestos. No matter how much wealth flowed under the town, we’d still have to break beer bottles over each other’s heads for a few extra dollars. When she finally let me go, I went to the bathroom. It was the only place in the house where I could collect my thoughts, since Grandma and I slept on the same twin bed at night. It was the only room with enough ventilation that ephemeral promises and cigarette smoke couldn’t linger. It was when I looked in the mirror that I saw my eyes. It wasn’t anger and it wasn’t sadness. It was the look of a kid whose future lay among pig-shaped plastic scraps, an empty bag of chips, and a used syringe. They were eyes that I immediately recognized because they were the same eyes as Joe, the neighboring kid who had pulled my hair and given me a black eye over a dollar. It was the same glower that Ms. Miller gave me when she took Grandma’s tarnished wedding ring out of my mother’s shaking hands and replaced it with a bag of half-crushed codeine. Grandma was the only one left in town who didn’t have the bottomless pit of desperation in her eyes.

I never did end up getting that sewing machine, but I got a degree at the local community college. Then I somehow managed to fit six years of graveyard shifts and a baby into a four-year accounting degree. By then, the town had fallen thousands of miles away and I’d gone from picture perfect American poverty to a one-bedroom flat in Bushwick. By my town’s standards, I’d made it. By New York standards, I was a gap-toothed, single mom with a Southern lilt and melanoma. Whatever they might say, Grandma was the only connection I had left to that town.

At first, I called once a week, but as my son grew, it became every other week, and then once a month. On the last call I ever made to Grandma, she told me the same thing that she always did, Joe’s kids were starting football training early aiming for a college scholarship, Cousin Lucy had finalized her second divorce but had moved back in with him, and there was yet another tornado warning in the area, but nothing had touched down so far. She told me, “remember your promise to never get rich. I love you.”

On April 19th, Grandma passed away. She had gone to the neighboring hospital after Joe’s wife found her slumped over in her plastic garden chair, her iced tea spilled on her lap, and her romance novel flat in the dust. Ten hours, two heart attacks, and a flat line later, Grandma had finally gotten out of town.

I couldn’t get the next flight out because I had to wait one more day for my paycheck—the babysitter insisted on being paid upfront. The day after I was a four-hour flight and a two-hour drive away from Grandma’s final journey. The whole family had gathered and wept; the only person missing was my mother. We each tossed a penny into her coffin, hoping that the weight of the copper would make her soul lighter. Through the soft opacity of tears, I could briefly see what their faces might have looked like if oil and carcinogens hadn’t folded and mottled their skin. What I forgot was that tears were short-lived in this town.

Uncle Fred found Grandma’s will a day later, tucked under the silverware in her kitchen drawer. The will had been off-handedly scribbled into a little black book with worn corners. It was simple. Too simple. All of Grandma’s assets were meant to go to her granddaughter and her great-grandson. None of Grandma’s surviving children would inherit anything. No one said a word at first, given that Grandma was leaving behind a house with a 30-year mortgage, a leak in the bathroom, and a broken front door, a car in the front yard that hadn’t worked in 20 years, and her only remaining wealth seemed to be a treasure trove of gas station romance novels. And, perhaps no one would have said anything, if it hadn’t come out that Grandma had left $20,000 in a safety deposit two townships over. $20,000 wouldn’t mean much in New York City they said, but it would mean escaping this town for the rest of the family. Then it all began.

The first sign that something wasn’t right was an off-handed joke made by Uncle Luke. “What are you going to buy first with all that money? A new crack pipe for your mom? I heard she needed one.” He winked at me and belted out a laugh. Afterwards, he stood up to pour diet soda into his whiskey and gave me two quick taps on my back. I had heard it all before, but it was strange to hear Ms. Miller’s same jokes in the mouth of my uncle.

That night I laid down in the same bed that I used to share with Grandma. No matter how hard I chased sleep, it escaped me. I grabbed the little black book off the nightstand in hope that I might find some final thoughts in Grandma’s final chapter. Most of the pages were filled with phone numbers without names and mundane shopping lists. I found a page where a letter had been half-written and then scribbled out. The pen marks were so vigorous that they had carved small lines into the next page over. However, it held no indication of what she’d written, only the one sentence will.

Before I could turn the page, I was jolted out of my jumbled thoughts by a loud crash. It was the sound of the broken door being slammed against the wall so hard that the windows rattled. I waited with shallow breaths for the second impact that would break the separation between Grandma’s room and the town, but it never came. Only the stench of gasoline assaulted me. Instinct drove me through the window before the lick of flames melted away all that was left of Grandma’s little mark on the world. Uncle Fred’s distinctive single taillight made the billowing darkness glow crimson, and the bitterness of smoke taste like ash.

As I stood in house fire’s glow, I noticed that I was still clutching the little black book, now stained by summer sweat. The only remaining memento of Grandma. I thumbed through it idly and noticed the loosening of two pages that had been glued together, intentionally. I peeled the pages apart and saw that Grandma had left me one final sentence. It read simply: “Dig at Curtis’ grave.”

Curtis had left Grandma when I was six. The day he left was the same day that she declared him dead. She would not hear otherwise; if he had left her, then he was the same as dead. She held a small ceremony in her backyard where she buried everything he had left behind and even planted a small wooden cross as a headstone. She got up the next day, put on her same red cream lipstick, and never spoke of him again.

I didn’t wait for the firefighters to finish. I got right to work digging into the soil marked as “Curtis” behind her now buckled house. The matted roots of weeds were nothing against human desperation and grown-out acrylic nails. The ground gave way as I dug a pit into the town. As I dug, I went beyond the corn-syrup-fed fat that draped our body, I dug further than our tar-oozing lungs, and even beyond the clotted cholesterol that laced our arteries, choking us before the ripe age of 50. I was digging to find the core. What was at the bottom of the pit inside all of us?

Between my fingers a buried marriage was unearthed and scattered by the wind. As I clawed deeper, Grandma’s tears welled up and spilled over, staining the dry earth. And I encountered the lost hopes of a mother scattered among the pipes and spoons she had hidden. Suddenly, I realized Grandma’s grave went beyond my reach, all I could do was scratch its surface.

At the bottom of Grandma’s pit was the box that she had buried all of Curtis’ belongings in. It was a small tin box that he had left behind filled with love letters from a certain Linda. But instead of Curtis’ infidelity, all that was left in the tin was a single sheet of paper. It was a title document for a significant amount of acreage on the outskirts of the township. It wasn’t just the charred lawn, or the $20,000 nest egg that I had inherited, it was the very oil that had blackened our hands to begin with. And therein, the futility of humanity trying to dig for value that it can only exploit.

It was in that moment that I knew that there would be no end. As long as my family existed, as long as the town existed, as long as a dollar existed in one person’s fist and not another’s, there was no escape. Perhaps that’s why she always told me to never get rich. She knew more than anyone that no dirt in the world could fill this pit that we had dug.