“Polly-ticks and money,” the three words Joe’s father had always used to explain the reasons behind almost any situation. He’d say it about a dozen times a day, no matter what the subject matter. Joe figured now the old man had probably been right. Local communities and merchants depended on the mines for their living, and when the companies told them that new regulations would surely knock the mines out of business, it scared them; they put pressure on the politicians. And both the politicians and the judges depended on the companies as well. Joe guessed it just came down to a choice of evils: devastation of the land or abject poverty. Problem was, he didn’t see that many local people awfully wealthy from it
He had to laugh at himself. My, but wasn’t he feeling bitter today! He was going to have to stop this drinking every night, this staying up to all hours brooding, brooding…
But how was he going to stop…with all that had been going on…He couldn’t remember ever being so scared, not since he was real little, so terrified of noises whose source he couldn’t see, of the darkness, of the cold wrapped around the Big Andy just before morning, of the fog the cold brought with it like an ill-developed twin.
It wasn’t doing him any good ignoring her, so he finally let the image of the little drowned girl expand to fill his attention. That was the problem right there. She wasn’t his little girl, left back in Cincinnati, but she could have been. About the same age, build. And here she was floating around where she shouldn’t be, out of her grave…
As much as he thought about it, he still didn’t think he could have made any other decision. He would still have had to leave that city, come back home. He’d never really loved the girl’s mother; he was pretty sure she hadn’t loved him either. But then, as far as he knew, she’d never bothered to get a divorce, and that made him feel funny.
They’d both been lonely and afraid. She’d grown up in a county only eighty miles away, one of his own kind, and she’d been just as homesick as he, at first. They met right after he arrived in Cincinnati; she’d already been there four months. Married a month later. Then he left right after the baby was born—Annie, after his great grandmother.
But she wouldn’t go back; she’d started to like the city and there was no life for them back in the hills, she said. He didn’t want to leave the child, but a child belongs with its mother.
Seemed like he had made nothing but bad decisions in his adult life. Leaving a younger sister at home all by herself the night of the big Simpson Creeks flood while he went hunting—his parents out of town—coming back to find nothing left. Then leaving for Cincinnati because he heard there were jobs there, and his daddy dying because none of the young ones were around anymore, his mother following him six months after.
Then abandoning that little girl of his to come back to…seemed like nothing so far but headaches from too much drinking and having to suck up to the Nole Company bosses.
And this other, drowned little girl. Looked like he had come back to her. Pale eyes and skin so damp gray…so that if he were to touch her, the water would just ooze out of her.
He finished with the first stretch of backfill and pointed the dozer down the long incline that led into “Willy’s sinkhole.” The sinkhole was the final remnant of the first stripping operation begun here fifteen years ago. It got its name when the backhoe Willy Daniels had been driving suddenly disappeared from view while returning from the equipment yard, much to everybody’s consternation. One moment he was sitting up on that big orange grasshopper of a machine, grinning and swearing as he fought the gears, and the next he was gone in a cloud of white limestone dust. “We all figured the devil’d just got tired of waiting for him to come voluntarylike, you know?” Joe’s daddy used to say.
Then they’d heard Willy calling for help, and swearing worse than ever. When they ran to the site they found him, still on top of his machine, at the bottom of a limestone sinkhole; he’d fallen through the thin shell covering it. They’d pulled him out and he quit that very day.
So they’d worked around Willy’s sinkhole for years, backfilling the cuts around it. Now the company geologist said it was nice and solid under there, and they could fill in the sinkhole with no danger and forget about it.
Joe’d been elected. But he wasn’t taking any chances, despite what the geologist said. He was going to ease in slow. He’d heard reassuring words from geologists and safety inspectors before. Believing them too much was a good way to get yourself killed.
He took a load of waste dirt off a pile north of the sinkhole and crept forward as slowly as possible, listening as well as he could through the engine’s roar for any creakings or shiftings in the ground, staring at the ground so intensely he couldn’t blink, inspecting it for cracks.
As he reached the lip, he knew there was somebody down there.
A dark, small form, all stretched out…stringy hair. He killed the engine and jumped off the machine, running up to the lip without thinking.
But it was just a dark log, patterned with gray lichen, floating. Floating.
He stared down into the sinkhole. Water was bubbling up out of the ground all around the log. Cloudy, mineral or waste-laden water, bringing its own brand of fog up with it. Like the fog you might see capping the sinkhole early in the morning, before the sun could scour it out. Or like the fog covering the soup an old woman might cook up…for someone like Hansel and Gretel. He’d loved that story as a child. It had been damned important to him…couldn’t hear it told enough times. It had scared him near to death…but he’d loved it.
Audra thought she might have a secret admirer. It seemed silly thinking in those terms; after all, she was twenty-five years old. It was hard to believe. It was the first indication of any romantic interest since she’d moved back to the Creeks five years ago.
Sometimes she’d leave the cafe at five to take her walk before going back to her room, and there’d be someone standing over by the boarded-up hotel, standing in the shadows so she never could tell who it was, although she thought he was a young man, a little shorter than normal.
It was silly, but some nights she stayed up late, unable to sleep, trying to figure out just who it might be. Maybe it was someone she had known all her life, or maybe even it was Reed Taylor, come back to the town after a long absence just the way she had. Maybe they had a lot in common. Already he was making her feel like a high school girl again, and some of the tension that had built up over the past few days was leaving.
She knew he had a wife, but she also knew he wouldn’t be here if things were going right at home.
Tonight when she left the cafe she looked for him, and at first thought he wasn’t there. She looked hard into the shadows by the old hotel, and finally, as if the very darkness were solidifying there, she saw him step out slightly into the street. His hair dark and clothes dark. His face…dark. It was as if he had carried the shadows out with him. She blinked her eyes and looked, and looked, but could find no faint glimmer of light in his perfect darkness.
She could have cried. For now she was afraid of him.
Chapter 21
It was a quiet Sunday afternoon at Uncle Ben’s house. A veritable feast of a dinner at three, followed by a walk to burn off some of that delicious country-style food, and then lounging around on the old wooden lawn furniture Ben had set up under the oak. Lannie and Tim, Ben’s kids, circled the chairs like enormous flies, one of them occasionally plopping down into Reed’s lap with a giggle.
He hadn’t had a Sunday like this in years; he and Carol and the kids had gotten into the bad habit of watching TV on Sundays, and Alicia usually couldn’t make it until a mid-afternoon meal, so they had lunch at noon and dinner at six. It didn’t seem right. One meal on Sunday, a big meal like this one—that was the way to do it. Reed was so contented he didn’t bother to stifle the belch he felt climbing his belly. Lannie and Tim giggled insanely, Ben began to laugh, and suddenly Reed found himself joining them, so enthusiastically he didn’t think he could stop. It felt good; he
couldn’t remember the last time he had laughed like that.
He looked over at Ben, who was gazing at him with a wide smile, his eyes twinkling.
“So whose canary did you eat, Uncle Ben?”
Ben chuckled. “It’s just good to see you laughing, Reed. I was afraid you’d lost the knack.” He sat up in the lounger. “And it’s good to have you spend a nice, normal day in the Creeks. You haven’t had one since you’ve been here. You know, we don’t spend all our time gettin’ eat by bears and chasing Hector Pierce in his birthday suit all over creation.”
Reed laughed. “I should hope not. I was beginning to wonder if things had changed that drastically over the years. There’s been a lot of excitement around here lately, more than I could have found back in Denver.”
Ben stretched his legs and sighed. “Yep. Sure has…since just before you got back.” There was an awkward pause. Reed looked past Ben at the garden, all harvested out. Lannie and Tim were playing among the brown and gray cornstalks. Lannie was going to be a beautiful woman: she had fine delicate features, high cheekbones, and long, lustrous brown hair. A bit on the thin side, but she held herself well. Besides, she was only nine years old. But damn if she wasn’t going to be a heartbreaker when she grew up. It made Reed wonder what he might expect to see in Alicia in a few years. Alicia had some of the same characteristics, although she was a bit chunkier. Baby fat. He actually didn’t look forward to her losing it—now he could cover her belly with one hand and it made a soft, rounded bulge like a ball. He loved that. And they had this game where if he pushed on it she would puff up her cheeks, hold it, then blow all the air out in an explosion of bubbly laughter.
For a moment he wondered if he’d be around to see her lose that baby fat. Stop it. Stop it.
Tim was quiet, dark, a lot like Michael, and, Reed suddenly realized, a lot like almost all the Taylor men at that age. He’d seen pictures of his father and grandfather when they were boys—pale faces below broad swatches of raven black hair, their dark eyes seeming to pierce the camera lens. An intense look about them, so that it made you wonder if they knew far beyond what they should know. Reed had that same look in his early photographs. Of course, a lot of young boys with those kinds of features gave him that impression, Reed reminded himself.
Ben was different; he hadn’t fit the Taylor mold in a lot of ways. He’d always been sandy-haired, jovial, open and friendly to almost everybody. Reed could remember when he was young wanting to look more like his Uncle Ben. He hadn’t consciously realized the drastic difference in character between his Uncle Ben and the other Taylor men until years later, when it made him uncomfortable that he resembled his father and grandfather so much.
“You there, Reed?”
Reed jerked in his chair. He could hear Ben chuckling a few feet away.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you.”
“Just daydreaming.”
“I know what you mean. Sunday’s a good day for it, all right. Fact, any day is, if you ask me. Folks round here work so hard sometimes they start takin’ themselves just too serious. And that ain’t good for you. Gotta put aside some time for daydreaming. Fact is, sometimes daydreaming is one of the most important things a body can do, if you ask me.”
Reed looked at his uncle. He’d forgotten how well put-together the man was, how wise for this place and time. He’d met few men in his life he admired so much—odd that he was just now beginning to realize that.
Simpson Creeks was a normal place. His Uncle Ben was supremely normal, and healthy and generous. Reed had almost forgotten that over the last few days. Strange things were happening, but they were essentially isolated incidents. This was an essentially ordinary place. Just like home. Home in Denver.
On their honeymoon he and Carol had gone back to her hometown. Reed had loved the feeling of the small town, the friendliness of people and architecture, the quiet, restful atmosphere. That’s the way small towns should feel—he didn’t get enough of those qualities in Denver. Now Simpson Creeks had that small-town feel for the first time since he’d been back—here, in his uncle’s backyard.
Martha brought out cookies and tea. The family sat around, and indeed Reed was feeling like part of this family, eating and drinking, listening to the crickets starting up late in the afternoon, feeling the cool breeze slipping under the trees, smiling at each other.
“Why, Reed, you’ve grown up into a handsome young man!” Martha squinted over her tea glass. She needed glasses, but had always thought they made her look ugly so she didn’t wear them in front of other people, just in bed to read, Ben had told him. She wouldn’t even let the kids see her wearing them. This uncharacteristic touch of vanity in his aunt amused and touched Reed. “Not that I ever had any doubts, mind you!”
“Why, thank you, Aunt Martha.”
“No…you’re better lookin’ than any of the other Taylor men by far.” She winked. “‘Ceptin’ Ben here, of course.”
Ben laughed. “You’ll turn my head talking like that, Martha. I’m liable to sweep you off your feet and take you up to that waterbed I’ve been hidin’ in the attic as a Christmas surprise!”
“A waterbed! Ben Taylor, if you’ve gone wasted our money for some oversized balloon, I’m gonna…” She stopped, looked puzzled a minute, then smiled almost imperceptibly. “Old fool.”
Ben and Reed went for another walk after the cookies had digested, and Reed would wonder for a long time after that just why they did. Uncle Ben took him farther up the Big Andy this time, up two connecting hollows and halfway up a ridge. It took them an hour just to go one way. Reed was out of breath by the time they reached a resting place on the ridge, and dizzy from the thin air.
Actually Ben had been maintaining a steady monologue the whole time; Reed had caught a line here and there, but mostly his mind wandered during the exertion.
Ben had been talking about Reed’s father, and what it had been like growing up together in these woods.
“A man can get lost pretty quick out here, so, as you might imagine, an inexperienced boy can get lost a lot quicker. Your granddaddy used to let the two of us boys loose in these woods just to see who’d get back. I’d be stubborn, wouldn’t play along, and as a result I wouldn’t wander too far afield. Now your daddy, he took all that real serious, saw that as a test his daddy was givin’ him that he needed to pass, and so he’d break into a run trying to be the first one back, and most times he just got lost worst than ever.”
Off to their left was an overgrown area full of bright pink rhododendrons, the clumps spreading all over the edge of the woods, obscuring fully the first half of the shadowed trunks. A number of ridges fell back from the one they were on, like great green ocean swells. The boughs and leaves were so tightly packed here that Reed couldn’t see a spot of ground. He knew the undergrowth must be just as thick and impenetrable.
Stands of forest looking much as they did when the first pioneers came into this valley—it never ceased to amaze him.
The view here made Reed remember one of the few good times he ever had with his father and grandfather. It was shortly before his grandfather died. There were four of them: grandfather, Reed’s father, Uncle Ben, and Reed. They’d gone up on some old forgotten patch of land his grandfather owned on the Big Andy. It might be this very one, in fact. After all these years it was difficult to tell.
Reed had been suspicious of going; he didn’t trust his father and grandfather. But things had really worked out okay.
They’d been planting red cedar on a bare slope next to some older trees. They had worked since sunup, which had been too much for Reed, but his grandfather—who was always in charge of any such group activities—had allowed him to rest on some limestone outcroppings. Later he’d pointed out to Reed the nearby black locust and cedar, giant trees over fifty feet high. “Trees won’t ever be that tall again,” his grandfather had said, and Reed could still remember the bleak feeling that had left him with. Even back then you could see the devastating effect
s of stripping four ridges away—the mountain there was bald. Now that particular ridge didn’t even exist anymore.
In most parts of the woods here tulip poplar and red oak had driven out the cedar. Cedar requires a lot of sun, and once the poplars come, needing lots of shade, they soon take over. After a time the poplars themselves grow so large they darken and crowd out their own seedlings, leaving room for the beech and hemlock that eventually take over the forest.
His father and grandfather between them had taught Reed all those things on that one outing. He’d remember them a lifetime. How an old forest invites new plants and animals. How the waxwings destroyed good fence post wood. How woodpeckers nested in knotholes softened by fungus. How a catbird can eat its weight in bugs each day.
For dinner that night the four shared a rabbit Uncle Ben had caught, and slept underneath the oldest cedar in the forest, maybe the oldest in the state, grandfather had said. It had been a good day.
Reed and Uncle Ben started back down the ridge around sunset. A few times Ben stumbled, and with a pang Reed realized his uncle—who had always seemed impossibly youthful—was getting old. After a time Reed put an arm around his uncle’s waist to help him.
Ben smiled and patted his nephew’s hand, and didn’t take it away.
Chapter 22
Reed rested in the shade of an earth wall running midway between the cliff and his old homeplace. He’d been working since sunup, and it had been good work; he’d found far more artifacts over the past five hours than in all the time before.
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