Funny how he was able to maintain a professional attitude through it all. Without a professional attitude, you missed things, or jumped to false conclusions. He couldn’t afford that on this particular dig. So he kept all the proper paperwork, spending a couple of hours each day on it. Archaeological site and survey records: owner’s name and address, physical description of the site, location of the nearest water, area of the site, physical condition of the site, artifacts discovered, sketch map. Daily field records, feature records, archaeological stratigraphy record, archaeological field catalog, archaeological photo record. Directions for reaching the site, vegetation, depth of deposit, surrounding and site soil, possibility of additional destruction. Site is partially damaged or inaccessible through: a) buildings on site, b) roads on site, c) cultivation, d) wind erosion, e) water erosion, f) vandalism.
Reed thumbed through the reports. Meaningless, finally. How had it happened here? How had his family died? How did they feel? Was there much pain?
Stop it…stop it. Getting emotionally involved was a trap. Dr. Simms had said that too. The “spirit of the place.” Make yourself open to it.
The spirit of this place had been a harsh one, no question about that. But there really wasn’t much in what he had found to indicate as much.
Slope west to east with a gentle fall of 4.3 feet in 100 feet…baseline X staked out along the crest of the long axis from the south edge of the front door…lines crossing the base at right angles lettered A through H, starting at the wood’s edge…square designated right or left as one faced the house…fill to the left and right of X removed by blocks and the profile of the exposed face of the transverse line was drawn…
Reed woke up from his earthy dream, the back of his skull cool where it had rested against the dirt wall. He shook his head and small clay particles drifted over his shoulders. Dig and dig and dig, and what was he finding?
Miscellaneous pieces from a set of blue china, along with several silver forks and a spoon. They hadn’t had such things that he could remember. Maybe they belonged to some other washed-away dwelling. Or maybe they came from his mother’s, maybe even his father’s side of the family, tucked away in storage for a special occasion that never came. Brushing away some of the dirt, he could clearly see the blue cupids that danced around the border. Hideously ugly stuff.
Decaying copies of Pilgrim’s Progress and Paradise Lost. No doubt they had belonged to his grandfather, who had been far more intelligent than he pretended to be. Miscellaneous pieces of decaying cloth and a shattered trunk lid. His mother had kept her finer things in there.
A few rusted iron skillets, an iron pot, cast-iron trivet. His mother had gotten those from her mother. Empty bottles of medicine for his mother’s aches and pains and general “women’s complaints.” She got them from an old peddler who came by once a year, in June. Reed doubted that they had any real value as medicine, but he was sure their alcoholic content had made his mother feel better. She’d never take a legitimate drink of liquor.
A few yards of rotted ribbon, some empty spools from her sewing box, the glass handle of the sewing box itself, a few odd needles he caught in the sieve, a glass doorknob, some rusted coat hangers, some foreign coins a relative had brought back from the war, coils from the refrigerator.
He found other parts to the Philco later—it must have hit some rocks, or logs, as it had been virtually ripped apart by the force of the waters. For the first time he realized how savage those flood waters must have been. Nothing but this debris.
Reed found himself thinking about the trash mound at Badger House in Mesa Verde. A way of life reduced to just so much garbage.
But there was a certain kind of peaceful satisfaction in this work. Counting artifacts, sorting them, fitting all the different pieces together. A gigantic jigsaw puzzle. There were items that had become so distorted through age and trauma they weren’t recognizable at first glance. He’d spend a great deal of time examining them, playing the game of fantasizing what their original form might have been.
A melted oblong of glass might have been the top of his mother’s flower vase—the big one that she kept in the window and that broke the light in such a way that you could stand by her stove and feel like you were trapped inside a prism. A fragment of dark-stained wood might have come from the small three-legged table that used to stand by the stairs. His mother always put the mail there, and if it wasn’t there when his dad got home he’d knock the table over in anger. There were several chips out along the edge of the tabletop.
He’d found miscellaneous pieces of old toys: a wheel, several doll’s arms, button eyes, windup keys, and a variety of plastic parts. He kept all these in a separate sack, determined to go through them someday, figuring out which toys they had come from, if they had been old toys of his, or his sister’s. He found himself thinking about the metal and plastic robot he’d had when he was nine, and now he looked for that robot in every piece he picked up.
As the sun rose higher in a sky spotted with torn swatches of cloud, Reed found that scene after scene arose and surrounded him as he picked his way through this, the richest vein so far in his mining. The days his mother hung out the Indian corn to dry over the porch railing, the setting sun catching each kernel and setting it afire. The time his sister fell on a rake, her yellow sundress turning crimson as she ran into their mother’s arms. The afternoon some of the boys from town had wandered out and they’d played stickball out front with him, and the whole family had watched.
Each scene arose and swelled oppressively around him, before breaking apart and falling into these pieces scattered through the dirt and underground. Red plastic and blue metal. Orange sun and white cheeks. Fragments of a young boy’s shoes and cooking spoons and pieces of eye, cheeks, smiles, and tears. The fragmented colors of grass and blood and dog and wrinkled hands and laughter and fear.
Reed found himself trying to visualize scenes in Denver, with his family, Carol, the children. Nothing. For a moment he thought he could see their fragments also lying in the dirt before his feet. His face stiffened, but he could not cry.
He raked through them all with his bare fingers held clawlike, the fragments wedging under his fingernails and tearing the skin. But Reed didn’t notice, intent on the digging.
The bear had spent some time resting in the green undergrowth. So much green, and cool to his hot muzzle and hot tongue and hot eyes. His thoughts and smells still burned him, but it was better now. The things inside him, the thing inside him, had quieted, maybe asleep for a time. That would give the bear time to sleep; he hadn’t been able to sleep for what seemed like a very long time.
The world was becoming a stranger place for the bear with each passing hour. So many sounds and thoughts and things he had never known about, and in his confusion these things had burned him. He had felt fire deep down in his throat as the thing inside him had tried to come out.
Now he sniffed the cool air, was puzzled, then irritated. What? He sniffed again. There was no real smell but…something. No real smell. Something.
The young human child stepped softly over the bear’s back. He stared. No smell. And this was a dead human child, a female, but still moving. Her feet did not touch the ground. He roared and snapped at her; she broke apart and drifted away in pieces. No smell. Was she attacking? No…more like play. She had been playing with him. The bear roared his displeasure. Then he realized he knew this child; the thing inside knew her. This thought made him roar again, and smash out at the cool green around him. Pieces of green filled the air. He breathed it in and snarled.
Bright flame filled the sky above the green; he looked up in puzzlement. The human woman smiled down at him. But no smell. He charged and she drifted apart, filled his throat and made it burn.
The human woman’s laughter filled the green. He roared. No…not human. Like human. No smell.
The laughter died away. The bear looked around him: no more green. In his rage he had destroyed it all, and not even known.
The
cool was gone; his body began to burn hotter. He groaned deeply inside, shaking the thing inside him awake. But he didn’t care. He loped out of the edge of the wood, letting the thing inside guide him.
Chapter 23
It was the fourth day that Reed had been carefully, methodically excavating the land around his old home-place. Keeping a calm mind, holding back any premature conclusions, meticulously examining the evidence. So far he had stayed away from the house itself.
Being careful: that was what he was doing. Being scientific. But at the moment that didn’t seem much different from being afraid.
The cold was back, worse than ever. It was a fire inside his head, inside his chest. He thought he might have pneumonia. But he couldn’t stop; there seemed so little time. And he had to keep his Uncle Ben from stopping him, only meaning him well.
He had come out here every morning, intent on his work, eating breakfast at his uncle’s as quickly as possible so that he could get an early start. He met his uncle’s questions concerning the progress of the dig with bland, noncommittal statements, and twice he had had to discourage Ben from coming out here with him. When Reed got home at night, everyone else was in bed. Martha always had something waiting in the oven.
He didn’t have to get in that late; he had to quit digging around sunset anyway, when the dusk shadows started confusing him, showing him discolorations, evidence of features that weren’t really there. And every shift of the darkness in the woods seemed a large animal. He’d climb into the truck he borrowed from his uncle and sit there for hours, watching the shadows spread and the dark creep out from the trees, and try to recapture his lost feel for the place.
Hiding…he needed to think the word, for that was what he was really doing. For all his excuses about getting to know the site, educating himself on the lay of the land, he was hiding. He was beginning to sense a panic beneath the easy exteriors of the citizens of Simpson Creeks, even in his uncle. Things had been happening to the town since before he got here, but they seemed to have intensified after his arrival, as if he had carried some sort of disease into the valley with him.
Things were going subtly wrong in the Creeks. No one thing so obvious, but the accumulation of little events…
A couple of days ago Jake Parkey had found his wife wandering out in the woods with her clothes half torn off, babbling nonsense. Jake had beaten her badly before Charlie Simpson happened by and pulled him off. Then they discovered water seeping into parts of the Nole Company stripping operation and they had to shut down. Reed couldn’t care too much about that, but no one could explain how such a thing could happen. The water had stopped for a time, and Mr. Emmanuel had sent for geologists from the main office to study the matter. They’d be sending a staff of lawyers too, Reed knew. They’d want to cover themselves in case of possible damages.
His uncle said people were recalling the big flood, but they weren’t talking about evacuating. Of course, there’d never been flooding caused by a leaking sinkhole before, at least not that he’d heard of.
And so Reed had stayed by his excavations, reviewing his notes and studies, feeling too guilty to talk to anyone. Afraid to talk to anyone. He had been so sure that careful inquiry and analysis would protect him from the traumas of the past. But they were breaking through the dam he’d erected; they were clamping their jaws around the back of his neck.
Suddenly he wanted to forget about all his careful methodology, hire a bulldozer or backhoe, and strip it out as if he were mining here. Rake at it with bleeding fingers if need be. Mine his past, dump the debris out of him.
He had gotten down to topsoil in several of the squares, topsoil that made a rising curve on the soil profile. The small mound that used to be east of the house. Now he found himself going deeper, digging out the rich, dark earth.
As he went deeper, Reed discovered that the soil layering was mixed, perhaps indicating an artificial structure, the soil brought in baskets from a barrow pit. Then traces of charcoal, sharp stones in the top layers. Traces of red paint, here and there, and then Reed could tell the disturbance was oval in shape. A black layer of soil and then, as expected, the first traces of bone.
Clavicle, sternum, thorax, bits of rib. Then the skull nearby, with a partial closing of the cranial sutures. Some wearing down of the teeth. Obviously a young adult, anywhere from twenty to forty years old. But not from the flood. He’d dug into an ancient Indian burial mound.
They had lived by the mound all those years; he wondered if his father had known. No doubt he had. His father had been fascinated by burials, had always wondered what it would be like to dig into one one day, but had also been nervous about it. Grave robbing was the word for it, and Reed’s father wouldn’t have any part of that—more, Reed suspected, out of superstitious dread than any sort of reverence, although maybe there wasn’t much difference.
Strange how layers of earth and bones and memories were all mixed together here, all commingled in the earth, which did not differentiate. One becoming another, endlessly throughout time. Grave robbing. Thinking that, Reed felt the strange excitement that had led him to archaeology in the first place, and was surprised and a little alarmed that he could be feeling it here.
He looked at the falling-down matchbox of a house he’d grown up in, the barely visible second story now leaning crazily toward the woods as if pulled there. A plant drawn to the light. There was one square measured off directly in front of a second-floor window, the window of his old bedroom. He would be excavating that square, he knew, when the sun rose in the morning.
Charlie Simpson closed up early that afternoon; the men had exhausted all that could be said of recent events—Doris Parkey’s new craziness and the flooding of Willy’s sinkhole—and no one had been in to buy all day. He might have missed them during the morning; like all the others he’d gone up to examine the sinkhole, to search for clues to the water’s source, to speculate about what might happen.
“Groundwater seeping into the limestone,” one old man had said. “Go away when the heat rises.” They’d all nodded sagely, and it had sounded good at the time, but Charlie had no idea in hell what it was supposed to mean.
They’d all hiked around the slopes looking for weak spots, looking for damp areas, listening for bubbling, all acting as if they really knew what they were doing, Charlie included. Then they’d walked back to the store and sat around exchanging theories.
“Same thing made that water made Doris Parkey crazy,” Tim Colmano had said, and they’d all just looked at him. Charlie had wondered if they all felt as uncomfortable as he did when Tim said that.
Charlie had pretty much isolated himself the past few days. Suddenly there was an agitation in town, for the first time he could remember since the year following the big flood. Of course, there had always been a slight tension after the flood to mar the natural peacefulness—because of what people had done or hadn’t done at the time—but nothing like this. They were used to controlling things here; you could always send a troublemaker away until he cooled off, or the preacher could set straight a domestic quarrel.
But you couldn’t affect this kind of tension; everybody was feeling it.
He had always been an outgoing man, but he couldn’t pretend right now. All his easy talk and comfortable manner had been stripped away from him. He was all sinew and bone and blood vessels now. And fear.
A shadow appeared at the yellow-shaded front display window. Large and bulky, walking unsteadily on its hind feet. Charlie reached under the counter for his gun.
Then he saw red plaid flannel through a crack in the shade and halted his reach. There was a sudden pain in his arm that made him wince. But he kept the groan to himself. He leaned back and gritted his teeth. There was a knock at the door but he didn’t answer.
The store was dark, but a comfortable dark. He’d spent a large part of his life in this one room; some of the displays were arranged virtually as they were when his father had run the business. Old tonics and oils no one excep
t an occasional old-timer bought anymore, but he kept them on the shelves just the same. A large scale for weighing grains, the same one his father had had, an old-fashioned coffee grinder, counters stacked high with every size of blue jeans imaginable, racks of cotton dresses, hardware of every description, a rotating, glass-fronted case full of thread spools a tourist had offered him eight hundred dollars for one time (“Then where would I show off what thread I got?” Charlie’d asked), all manner of canned goods, fresh meat in the freezer he bought regular from Tim Colmano, and all kinds of stuff on the back and top shelves he never would sell, like the silk and lace baby coffin left over from the flu epidemic of 1917.
He’d hate to lose any of it. But he might just lose it all, oh Lord…he knew he might if things took the wrong turn. Like back during the flood, after the Creeks jumped bank—only a few degrees of turn this way and that along the course of the racing waters had spelled the difference between narrow escape and death and destruction.
And some of us maybe didn’t deserve to be saved.
He’d tried twice in the past two days to talk to Reed Taylor out at his uncle’s, but apparently Reed had been spending almost all his time out at his father’s place. “Digging the past up and filling himself with the memories” was the rather poetic way Ben had described it. Charlie had broached the idea of maybe going up to see Reed there, but Ben had emphasized that the boy had wanted to be alone. Probably thinking of all we didn’t do for his family, Charlie thought.
He was working himself into some kind of mood, he realized. But he couldn’t seem to help it. Before, he’d always had Buck to cheer him up when he got down about something, just being with the old dog, seeing somebody with a bigger hound-dog look than he could ever manage.
He wasn’t sure what he would say to Reed if he talked to him anyway. Probably nothing.
Oh, he’d rehearsed it enough times…hundreds of times over the past ten years. A speech for the friends and relatives of the dead. Not to obtain their forgiveness, but at least so maybe they could understand a little about why the town had done so little before, and after, the flood. When there were wrongs to be set straight, dead to repay. Why the Creeks had never changed.
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