Night Soil

by Dale Peck

  My mother smiled so brightly I might’ve won the county spelling bee.

  “It’s all over the back of the house. There must be a quarter acre. Strawberries too, though there aren’t any ripe ones yet.” She walked me to a window, pointed to the ground directly behind the house.

  “Look.”

  I shrugged; looked; saw: green. Green and brown and . . . green and brown, all the way down to the stream, all the way across to the mountains.

  My mother noticed my wandering eye and put her hand on my cheek, angled my face down. “Here,” she said, again indicating the land just behind the house.

  She let her hand sit on my cheek, her finger tracing the outline of the purple finger that pressed against the corner of my mouth. The odor of dill and dirt filled my nostrils. It took an effort to focus, but when I did I still saw nothing besides green stalks, brown smudges, green leaves, brown smears. Green. Brown. Then a breeze swept across the flood plain and something flickered at the edges of my vision. An outline. A circle, the dark vegetation of my mother’s dill and strawberries set off against the paler phragmites shoots that surrounded them. Once I’d seen it the border was as sharp as the moon’s penumbra at full eclipse. I swallowed my gasp because I didn’t want to give my mother the satisfaction. But she could tell I’d seen.

  “I think it’s the pit,” she said in a hushed voice, as if describing an archaeological find. “Where they dug the clay for the bricks? It must’ve silted up during the floods and they turned it into the kitchen garden.”

  “Holy Nile River Delta, Batman!” I said so loudly that my mother took a step back and her hand finally left my cheek.

  But now that she’d pointed it out it was all I could see. The circle was maybe twice as big as an above-ground swimming pool, nowhere near the quarter acre my mother had suggested, but even after the passage of a century and more—a hundred floods, a hundred summers and winters and who knows how many shortcakes and pies and creams and potato soups and salads—its edge was still clear, the delicate dark dill and strawberry already dwarfed by the new growth of phragmites surrounding it, yet remarkably inviolate, as if protected by a witch’s chalk circle against the invading reeds.

  I sniffed the dill in my mother’s hand again, resisted the urge to bite it.

  “Dill and strawberries?”

  When she didn’t answer I turned to face her. She was staring at the long curved tiers of books that spiraled in toward their hidden center.

  “Flemish bond,” she said, proudly but skeptically. Then: “You know I despise masonry? The idea of taking solid earth and puffing it up around empty space, making it hollow, dead . . .” She shuddered, as though the horror were self-evident. “And the sameness. The repetition. How do they live with it?” She laughed. “I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, Isn’t that what you do? But it’s the utility that terrifies me. To do the same mechanical task over and over because you have to.” And then, without any transition, in the same faint, proud voice with which she’d said “Flemish bond,” as if I’d learned a lesson or earned a reward: “I suppose it’s in your blood. You were conceived in a room lined with books, after all.”

  I waited for her to say that I was conceived in a room lined with these books, by which I mean that I waited for her to say my father’s name. Because that’s how she’d do it. Off the cuff. By-the-by. There’s dill growing in the backyard. Your father’s name was Master Moustache. There are also strawberries. But all she did was look down at the green stalk in her hand and start, as if she’d forgotten she was holding it.

  “Dill was the most popular herb in the nineteenth century,” she said as if she’d only just remembered, “and strawberries give fruit all season long. Great staples for an inn or roadhouse or—”

  “Whorehouse,” I said, though I was looking at my father’s books when I said it. (Also: there really was a Master Moustache. He was the Egyptian and Near East scholar for more than forty years.)

  “One that served its pussy with a side of pie.” She shrugged. “I’m sure there were other things. Potatoes. Corn. Beans. Tomatoes.”

  “Dick.”

  My mother didn’t blink. “I’m guessing that was the masters’ innovation.”

  “You’d think. But if there’s a single unreconstructed pedophile among the whole lot, I haven’t been able to sniff him out. Unlike you,” I threw in, and waved a hand at the books to make sure she got it.

  I expected another stone-faced reaction, perhaps an eye roll, maybe even a gasp. What I got was laughter. “Oh God, Judas, promise me you won’t!” A green-pennanted wave at my spiral as she headed for the stairs. “A master! It’d be like sleeping with your own father!”

  I woke the next morning to music floating up from the back of the house. A single track on repeat, my mother’s agnostic falsetto warbling atop Clyde Orange’s Pentecostal rasp:

  “She’s a brick. House. She’s mighty mighty. She’s letting it all hang out.”

  I endured three revolutions before I shuffled out of my maze and threw open a window, but when I looked down at my mother’s magic circle my shout died in my throat. Where yesterday had been a delicate dark green disc, there was now a half moon of bare, black soil waxing rapidly toward the creek. A mound of greenery as big as a muskrat lodge lay to one side—all the dill and strawberries my mother’d been so excited about eighteen hours ago. She stood at the outer edge of the plot, pitchfork in hand, ankle deep in muck and covered by a straw hat, so that she couldn’t have looked more like a human flower if she’d tried (from this angle especially, which made me wonder if I was the one she’d dressed for). She worked the pitchfork methodically, used weight rather than muscle to push the tines into the soil, then lift them out again. The exposed earth was dark as chocolate, as charcoal, so primordially black that it cried out for the scattering of seeds—the serpent’s teeth from which Cadmus grew his Spartoi rather than the potatoes, corn, beans, and tomatoes my mother sowed over the course of the next few days in homage to the garden that might or might not have existed a century ago.

  The whole enterprise was typically, ridiculously Stammers: my mother saw a plot of dill and strawberries she professed to love, and she dug it up. Of course she didn’t see it that way. She wasn’t “digging anything up.” She was “gardening.” But she wasn’t just gardening: she was asserting her control over the land. Finding out not what it could do, but what she could make it do. By which I mean that the plump, ripe vegetables she produced interested her only in so far as they were proof of her mastery. Though I sometimes saw her pick a bean or peapod and munch on it as she wandered down to the creek, it seemed never to occur to her to bring her crops indoors, to cook them or serve them in a salad or sell them from a stand by the side of the road. (God knows she never offered me anything.) If her failure to harvest her crops wasn’t proof enough that her motivation for working the earth had nothing to do with food, then the slabs of soil she began cutting from the ground before her first plantings flowered gave away the game. The cubes were a foot and a half on a side, probably weighed fifty pounds each, but she pulled them intact from the ground and slotted them into a wooden milk crate that she hauled into the house on a Radio Flyer. The wagon’s plaintive squeaks echoed my confusion until she upended the crate on her potting table and wiggled its damp contents free in a chorus of farts, and I saw that it wasn’t actually dirt she was harvesting, or just dirt: it was—drum roll, please!—clay. Clay mixed with a lot of stones and sticks and other organic matter, but clay nonetheless, darker than the kaolin she’d worked with all my life, and not nearly as dense, at least when she first harvested it, but still: clay.

  A few days later I realized I’d made another mistake: it wasn’t a milk crate she packed her harvest in, but a box she’d built based on the dimensions of Marcus’s cubed cubits. I wondered if she was going to make bricks from them, like the people who’d built our house a hundred years ago, and s
he did indeed dry the blocks she dug up, only to dissolve them in water and run the slurry through a screen, repeating the process two or three times until half a cubic yard of black earth had been transformed into a golden-brown slab that looked less like a brick than a bar of jaggery: dozens of bars, which she stacked in the storage kiln in crisscrossed layers like ingots in a vault. (“It has to set, Jude, not sit. Set. I will give you ten thousand dollars to shave that skidmark off your lip.”) The purer product lay farther down, and her holes grew five, six, seven feet deep, until they resembled (no doubt intentionally, c.f., “Potter’s Field”) a set of open graves. There were three pits by the end of that first summer, scattered inside the garden’s circular border at right angles to each other, so that the plot had the look of a Kandinsky or Miró, red- and orange-dotted washes of green fenestrated by aggressive dark rectangles of negative space. The holes stole glimpses of the sky through the garden’s foliage all summer and fall, then gaped starkly when winter came and the annuals died and the frozen moisture in the holes’ walls glittered like icy asphalt until the spring flood swallowed everything the following March. When the water retreated in April the holes were filled with a soupy quicksand too soft to support a human step, and even after it dried the fill was too fine to be mined, but that much more fertile. My mother planted her vegetables in the new soil and shifted her spade a few feet over to harvest a fresh crop of clay, dissolved it and dried it and packed away the amber ingots in the broken kiln until, two years and four months after she’d last made a pot, she sat down at her slab of porphyry, switched on her halogen lamps, and, before the raptured, stoned gaze of the Three by Stammers crew, rolled out three pots in three days, numbers 124 through 126, each of which, when dried, fired, and glazed, was as perfect as, and perfectly identical to, the 123 that had preceded them. Three by Stammers had its premiere at Sundance, and even before the festival was over an anonymous benefactor had purchased the set for $5 million and bequeathed them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where they were displayed beside the 1200-year-old funerary casket that had inspired my mother to become a potter almost a quarter century earlier, and where, not quite three years later, a little over a month after she died and ten months before an outfit calling itself Clean Energy Solutions reopened the Magic Mountain Coalfield, all three pots—and all forty-five she made after them—disintegrated into dust.

  4

  A black cloud hung over the ruined remains of the Magic Mountains nearly two years after the last stick of dynamite had been planted beneath the range. Depending on the wind, it sometimes stretched for twenty-five or even thirty miles along the horizon, yet there remained something ethereal about it, unreal, as if its ombré tatters of soot and shadow were nothing more than a dirty curtain that would at any moment blow aside, revealing Appalachia’s unsullied—unsulliable—vales and scarps and leas. It was the cloud the muckrakers wrote about and the cartoonists drew, the cloud and the tumulus of rubble it shrouded, and to the degree that the Stammers family exists in the American romance it was the cloud and the rubble that closed the mines, and not the hundreds of black bodies that had died beneath them. Marcus Stammers had defied God and defiled nature; had been rebuked and reduced; had reformed and atoned. Everything after was coda, from the conservancy and the Academy to Dixie and her pots and progeny.

  But the truth is Marcus had been looking out on this ruin for thirty years, and it was all but invisible to him. Though May 6, 1881—the day of the explosion—is almost always recorded as the date Stammers Coal ceased operations, in fact Marcus reopened the mines three weeks later and kept them going seven more months, until it became clear that shutting them down was the only way to keep the family fortune from falling into non-Stammers hands (and if that fortune was reckoned only in the millions earned during the second half of 1881, we would still have ranked as one of the wealthiest families in nineteenth-century America). No, what held Marcus’s eye was something that wasn’t there, namely, the White Woman and its vanished waters. The creek had always fascinated Marcus. In years gone by he had tried to find its source and failed; had tried to dam and divert its course and failed at that as well; had settled for excavating the Lake and stocking it like a private pond only to see that project, too, evaporate with the morning dew. Like a spurned but enlightened Lothario, he’d come to regard the White Woman with a grudging respect, and it struck him to the core to have it vanish “in such Preternatural Fashion,” which enigmatic phrase might refer to the mystery of the creek’s disappearance, or simply to the fact that it had stopped flowing without his permission.

  Every morning during the second half of 1881 and all through 1882 he crabwalked onto the upper terrace, an eighty-three- and eighty-four-year-old emaciated opium eater leaning into the splayed crutches that had recently replaced his sticks. For two or three hours or the entire day he would stare down at the sperm-tailed muddy basin at the end of High Street, as if, like a lookout in the crow’s nest of an ocean-going whaler, his peeled eyes must at last be rewarded with a geyser of spume. But all he saw, hour after hour, day after day, was the frayed coils of the waterless streambed shredding the coal-blackened flood plain like the welts of a cat-o’-nine-tails on a slave’s back. A dense growth of moss and sedge had dulled the streambed’s scar by the end of that first summer, though you could still make it out in the same way you could make out the circle of dill and strawberries behind the Field (or could until my mother dug them up anyway). To Marcus, it seemed as if nature was erasing the White Woman not just from the landscape but from memory and, half panicked and even more furious, he hired a small army of hydrologists, geologists, and engineers to find out what had caused the blockage. Decades after his death this team was retconned as the first step in some grand ecological/pedagogical master plan, but in fact it was another year before he began to restore the mountains themselves, another eight before he made any mention of the Academy. At the time he seems only to have wanted to assert his continued mastery, not just of his present domain, but past and future as well.

  But nature continued to toy with him. For two years Marcus’s scientists searched vainly for the source of the blockage, only to have the creek surreptitiously resume its flow beneath the spring melt of 1883. But now a new problem presented itself. The resurgent water flowed as powerfully as it had before its disappearance, but it returned suffused with an anthracitic particulate finer than truffle flakes. The flecks sparkled prettily as they bubbled out of the ground, but within a couple of miles the creek ran black as gunpowder tea. After ten it was sludgy as tar, and by the time it oozed into the lake was prone to combust. Filtering the sediment from its subterranean source was out of the question. At twelve cubic feet per second the White Woman barely qualifies as a second magnitude spring, but the discharge was still strong enough to prevent a diver from making it anywhere close to the bottom of the well shaft. Nor could Marcus’s team risk entry underground, lest the water burst into the mine and emerge from who knew which adit or air shaft. No, if the water was going to be cleaned, it had to happen on or near the surface. The narrowness of the well offered a logical focal point for their efforts, but every filtration system the scientists designed was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of solute and water. The sieves and screens and strainers gummed up within hours, and before they could be cleaned or changed were hurled from the shaft by the hydraulic force behind them. It took nearly four years for Marcus’s men to hit on the idea of phragmites as a natural filter (if in fact they hit on anything: by all accounts the reeds sprang up of their own accord, and all Marcus’s team did was notice that the water apppeared cleaner after it passed through them). In the interval—in the background, as it were, apparently as a kind of busywork—Marcus’s workers had rebuilt all seven mountains to a uniform height of 1,900 feet, a gargantuan undertaking that seems only to have been done in a kind of nervous anticipation, to provide a more suitable backdrop for a body of water that was not yet, and might never be, clear enough to reflect it. Indeed, even a
fter the phragmites had cleaned the water that rose from the spring, so much coal dust poured off the recreated mountains every time it rained that the reeds’ benefit was rendered moot, and as far as I can tell this is the only thing that prompted Marcus to cover the camelbacked slag of the rebuilt range with five feet of soil dredged from the lake bed. The fertile mud was sown with a combination of deep-rooted bunchgrass and spreading grama to hold it in place, and, since trees would have sprung up anyway, Marcus took charge of them as well, ordering more than a quarter million saplings planted over the course of the next four years—a combination of longleaf, loblolly, and Sonderegger pine, mirroring what had been there before, though Marcus’s choice seemed to have less to do with fidelity than convenience, since longleaf and loblolly and their Sonderegger offspring are among the most common trees in the region.

  And so, by fits and starts and trial and error, the curtain of dust lifted and the moat-girded Magic Mountains materialized in its place, millions of years of geological activity compressed into a single decade of frenetic and, as far as I can tell, wholly orological unpremeditated activity. The pines were no taller than a teenaged boy in 1891, no thicker than that boy’s wrist or ankle. From a distance—from Stammers Hall, presumably, or maybe a little lower down on High Street—they scored the hillsides like the individual hairs of a teenager’s stubble. Or at least that’s what they look like in three watercolors by Jorge Castell Davis, the Catalan-Canadian dendrologist who oversaw the reforestation project, as well as in about half a dozen cruder sketches in Marcus’s diaries. Marcus was ninety-three by then. He had no expectation of seeing the trees achieve anything like their full growth, but he’d lived too long to feel any anxiety about this. Perhaps he was simply too impressed by what he’d pulled off. The size of the project was unimaginable, its cost incalculable. In fact, from an engineering standpoint it was pretty mundane. It was basically seven big piles of rock and dirt, differing little from the monuments constructed by North American mound builders five thousand years ago. It was only scale that made them unique. Imagine razing the whole of Manhattan island and restoring every one of its lost hills and streams and forests. Now: double that. At its peak Marcus had more than six thousand men working on the project—50 percent more than he’d employed in the mines—and was estimated to have spent nearly $50 million on the job (in 1880s currency, mind you, or a cool billion in 2001 dollars), which amounted to about 95 percent of his fortune. If the final product was a little cartoonish, like early computer graphics—an indication of real things rather than a depiction of them—it still had the gasp-inducing flourish of a magician’s trick. A flash, a puff of smoke, et voilà: the rabbit appears! Except in this case the flash was an explosion that killed 239 people and the rabbit was seventeen miles long and covered in 33,000 acres of wrinkled baize lanugo, which half-formed creature Marcus blithely handed off to his assistant while he turned his attention to his next trick.