Excavation

Chapter 12

Reed stepped down from the train at nine-thirty in the evening. Shivering, his head cold having spread to numb the rest of his body. His legs and arms moved stiffly. Rain was splashing off the tin roofs of Simpson Creeks in thick, broad strokes. Just as he remembered it, the still picture he’d always carried in his mind of the town: shallow pools and tides of water backed up on the hard clay, deepening in ditch lines and small sink holes. Off in the distance, toward the Nole Company mines, he could make out the gob piles steaming under the hard rain, the giant hills of mine waste bleeding down into the creeks in ribbons of scarlet.

The buildings here appeared all the same color: slab shacks like wet gray limestone with rusted tin chimneys anchored to the cracked rock slab his forebears considered some kind of lifeboat. And behind these, more gray shacks leaned back in rows far up the ridge and around the bend of the tracks—most of them empty, unless the mines were doing better than the last time he had been here. Dark scratches and wet paperboard on the dead wood sides of foreground buildings indicated old signs, but Reed couldn’t read any of them.

The town really hadn’t changed much; fewer trees dotted several more tons of clay.

The station house looked less well used than it had when Reed lived here. At least then there was always some equipment being shipped in for the Nole mine, and there were always a few miners commuting from further down the mountain for the night shift. He doubted there was a night shift anymore; he was the only passenger. And he watched the freight man unload the only freight: some crates for Charlie Simpson’s store.

It really wasn’t so bad. He felt sicker than a dog, but he could see nothing frightening here.

“Charlie should have been here to help me unload,” the potbellied freight man said. “He’s usually real good about that. Can’t figure what must’ve happened to him.”

Most of the windows in the station house were boarded up. When Reed tried the door, he discovered it was locked.

“We don’t use the inside of the Creeks Station no more,” the freight man told him. “No reason to. Just use the loading platform, is all.” Reed opened his umbrella and started to step off the platform. “You live around here, boy?” the freight man drawled.

Reed turned and stared, finally saying, “I do believe I’ve lived here all my life.”

The freight man laughed and Reed wondered if he really knew what he was laughing about.

The building across the street from the boarded-up station house had a bare yellow lightbulb over the porch: Charlie Simpson’s General Store. There appeared to be lights on inside, silhouettes. Reed remembered that Charlie had usually kept the store open at nights, selling beer and providing a place for people to gather and talk. He slipped around in the mud in front of the slab, but finally managed to climb up onto the first wide step. He took a few deep, wet breaths. That seemed to bring his energy back with a rush; he suddenly wanted to get things done, get them over with. He gripped the doorknob tightly and pulled.

When he opened the rickety screen door, he was acutely aware that everyone had suddenly stopped talking.

A general store full of old men and younger old men, even at an hour when most country people had gone to bed. They stared, turning slowly at his entrance, not quite simultaneously but close enough that Reed felt suddenly a little wetter in his rain-drenched army surplus jacket.

Their eyes didn’t fit the rest of their faces. Strained and blanked-out, every pair of eyes in the room. Reed could see the bottom halves of the faces talking, making jokes, occasionally suffering a grim smile, but the eyes, and the lines around the eyes, remained frozen. Bleached-white eyeballs, with pupils so pale and small they seemed to have disappeared entirely. White holes in dark faces. Like the faces of soldiers in shock.

Reed was suddenly convinced that there was nothing behind those sockets but the white sky of some hidden countryside. The old surface of the eyeball had been peeled away to let this other landscape shine through. He had the uncomfortable feeling that he might be looking at one old man’s face, and another set of eyes would suddenly peep out of the sockets to get a better look at him. Reed expected the masks to fall away from the old men’s shoulders at any moment, revealing perhaps a bright landscape of exotic trees and colorful birds tended by a dwarf with a twisted back, or some experimental animal with too much and too little brain, all there in miniature, sitting atop their shoulders where the heads used to be. Like the glass paperweights you used to see with the miniature scenes inside and the snow that would fall when you shook them.

Craziness. The train of thought amused him. What would they think, these people he had grown up with, if they knew what was running through his mind? He shivered as the warmth of the potbellied stove struck him. He could feel damp running out of his skin. Sometimes his imagination took on a life of its own.

Then one of the men stood and staggered in front of him, examining him with a dazed expression. Reed saw the blood on his face and hands, the torn jacket, the dirt and leaves in his greasy black hair. As if the man had been wandering out in the woods a hundred years.

Reed’s fantasy suddenly changed as he looked around the room. He could see, so real it made him shudder, skeletal heads on the shoulders, faces dumb and twisted from a heritage of incest, blackened tongues and mouths twisted with pain.

“Boy!” The man gripped Reed’s arms tightly, his red-veined eyes fixed on Reed’s black hair. The man reached up a trembling hand and pulled at it. “What you been doing!”

Reed tried to struggle out of the wild man’s grip, but he was too strong. “Jake? You’re Jake Parkey, aren’t you? I used to know you!”

Then suddenly Charlie Simpson was there, pulling Jake away. “Leave the boy be, Jake. He wasn’t out there; you’re just all tired and confused right now!” Then Charlie turned back to Reed. Reed was shocked; the storekeeper looked so old. “Reed? That you, son?”

“Yessir, Mr. Simpson. I’ve… I guess I’ve come home.”

“Well… welcome home, son.” He scratched his head and looked around. “I apologize for Jake there. See… we had a hunt tonight; a man was killed. Everybody’s on edge… half-crazy some of them. Here now… come sit down with me and your uncle.”

As Charlie led him unsteadily across the room, Reed glanced down at Jake Parkey bent over a beer. The man stared up at him with sullen suspicion. Reed grew cold, acutely aware of the water running down the back of his neck.

Ben Taylor was on his feet beside the table. “Reed?”

“Yessir…”

The man reached out and pulled his nephew into his arms. “Good to see you, son,” he mumbled into Reed’s jacket. “Wait’ll Martha and the kids see you. Another Taylor back in town.” Ben stepped back and looked at him, then said, “You weren’t out on the mountain, up the top of Big Andy, earlier tonight, were you?”

Reed caught Charlie Simpson giving Ben a worried look.

“No, no, I just got in off the train.”

Ben looked at him with a puzzled expression. But then, too quickly, his uncle grinned broadly. “Course not! You can see how old I’m gettin’, Reed. Imaginin’ all sorts of things lately.”

Reed smiled. “I don’t think my Uncle Ben will ever get old. I remember a time when you helped… helped my dad at harvest time, doing twice the work of any young man there. And still had energy left over to take me on a hike through the woods.”

Ben laughed. “Now those were fine hikes, weren’t they? Think I learned as much about the land around here as you did on our hikes. I miss ‘em, Reed.”

“Then we’ll do them again, Uncle. I’ve several things to do here, so I think there’ll be time.”

Ben and Charlie glanced at each other as they all sat down. Something was up, and it was making Reed very nervous. He’d always thought nothing happened here; nothing changed. But obviously something had these men frightened. Men like these didn’t frighten easily. “You said someone was killed tonight?”

“Yeah, I’m afraid so.” Charlie looked at his hands. “You may remember him, Amos Nickles? Owned the lumberyard up near the Nole Mine?”

Reed nodded. He barely remembered the man, seemed like he stayed in his house or at the lumberyard all the time, except when he was bear hunting. “How did it happen?”

“Bear got’m,” his uncle said. “Got Charlie’s dog, too.”

Reed looked at him in surprise. He felt suddenly, unaccountably anxious. He thought of the eyes from a recurring dream: dark, bestial. “There… haven’t been bears in this part of the country twenty years or more,” he said to his uncle, but suddenly could not look at him.

“Seem to be now,” Charlie said. Reed was thinking how Charlie Simpson very much resembled some kind of bean pole in an apron, pushing salt grains across the tabletop with a long, brown finger. He made a circuit of them, his finger tracing loops, spirals, and figure eights. “So… what brings you back, Reed?”

The old storekeeper said it as if Reed had only been gone a few hours, instead of ten years. Nobody ever leaves these hills, he had heard his uncle say one time, and people tended to treat you that way, as if you’d never left. Reed glanced around the room; the old men around a nearby stove seemed to be paying no attention, their shoes bunched on the rusted metal like baking potatoes. But he caught Jake Parkey’s eye; the man had been staring at him. Reed wondered why all the obvious resentment. Actually, he hardly knew Jake Parkey; the Parkeys had moved into the town only eight months or so before Reed left.

“I want to dig up around Dad’s old place… see if I can find anything left there.”

His uncle smiled and touched Reed’s hand across the table. “That’s your right, son. I always wondered why you never sold that piece of land after it was passed down to you.”

Reed thought his uncle was fishing for some kind of answer, but he didn’t feel ready to talk about it.

Charlie flattened the salt out with his palm. “Lot of mud up that holler.” Then, after an uncomfortably long pause, “But you probably take after your uncle and granddad.” He smiled at Ben. “You Taylors’ve always been big about digging, haven’t ya? Arrieheads… ain’t it? That sort of thing. Things off dead folk…”

“Yeah… that was it.”

Ben laughed. “Why, Charlie! You sound just like a sour old disapprovin’ schoolteacher!”

“No, I know you boys do the right things by it,” Charlie said. “I guess it would just make me uncomfortable.” Then he looked up at Reed. “I’d watch myself up around there, Reed. I’ve seen that bear up around your dad’s old place and he’s mean, I swear. That bear’s a crazy one.”

“You be staying at our place, won’t you, Reed?” Ben looked up anxiously.

“I wasn’t sure where I’d be staying. I wasn’t sure if I’d be welcome after all this time.”

Ben looked embarrassed. “Oh now, Reed…”

“I know, Ben. I should never have doubted your hospitality. And I plan to take you up on that. But I would like to spend the first couple of nights at Inez Pierce’s, that is, if she’s still got her boardinghouse.”

“She does… wouldn’t be surprised if she lasted longer than the town.” Charlie chuckled.

“Good… I’d like to stay there just the first two nights. I need time to myself for just a bit… to get used to being back.”

“Well… I can understand that,” Ben said, “but do let me take your bags down, get the arrangements made with Inez. At least that much.”

“Sure.” Reed grinned. “I’d appreciate that.”

Ben stood and eased past Charlie’s chair. “I’ll pick you up in ‘bout a half hour, son.” He squeezed Reed’s shoulder with a chop-sized hand. He held it a little too long and Reed looked up. “You’re lookin’ a little poorly, nephew,” Ben said softly. “Get yourself some rest. Martha’d kill me if anything happened to you now.” Reed nodded and Ben walked away.

“That man loves you, Reed,” Charlie said after Ben Taylor had left. “He never has stopped talking about you. Like you were his son and not his brother’s. Not many men in these parts can love as well. That Ben Taylor is a fine man.”

“He is.” Reed stared after his uncle, feeling a bit guilty. He’d never even written the man in all these years. Somehow, he hadn’t noticed, or had forgotten, how much his uncle cared. “I’m pretty lucky, I guess.”

“I’d say.” Charlie finished his beer. “You know, it feels kind of odd seeing you back here like this. Not many of the young ones come back anymore.”

“I don’t suppose they do, Mr. Simpson.”

Reed thought back to the day he left, his father screaming and cursing him, looking swollen like a great beast in his rage, throwing rocks, bottles, anything he could get his hands on, even Indian relics from his collection—his most prized possession, maybe the only thing he prized in his entire life.

Reed remembered thinking his father had finally snapped, finally gone over, and that any second he’d be going into the house and getting his gun and killing his own son then and there.

Reed had never come back that night; he was on the train to Four Corners within hours.

Two months later the coal waste dam up above the valley had given way, sending tons of the gunk down the Simpson Creeks, and wiping out half his neighbors and all traces of his family.

The Pierce place was pretty much as he’d remembered it, although a bit worse for wear. Ben explained in the truck on the way over that hard times had finally come to the Pierce children. The insurance hadn’t covered Hector’s hospital bills, and as the fortunes of the Nole mine went down, so did Inez’s boarding house. Now there were only a handful of miners staying at her place, and she just didn’t have the money to do her annual spring repairs. The old house badly needed new paint, and work on the plumbing, the gutters, the roof, the electrical system, the foundation stones, most everything. Both Ben and Charlie had offered their free labor and some materials, but Inez had been too proud, assuring them that everything was “just fine at the Pierces’.”

It was the only house with gables and a full wraparound porch in the town, and Reed still loved the looks of it. Daddy Pierce had built it after the Civil War, putting in twelve bedrooms since all the Pierce relations were living together at the time. Reed had seen pictures of old man Pierce—a tall, ugly gentleman with the largest wart he had ever seen planted on one side of the distinguished, hawk-bill nose. At one time every room but one was occupied by a miner or someone who worked for the Nole Company, with one bedroom kept pretty much free for salesmen and other transients. Inez had had to live in a converted pantry at times, the place was so full. She would serve three meals a day for everyone, doing everything by herself, included in the price of the room. It had been said that she was the finest cook for counties around and that some local men used to rent the transient room for a night or two just to escape their wives and get a taste of Inez’s home cooking. This actually clouded her reputation for a time—some of these wives started talking about how “improper” such arrangements were. Until Inez visited each woman individually and put them straight.

Now there was just old lady Inez, a few coal miners—including Joe Manors—who were more or less permanent residents, and the old transient’s room still available for the occasional stranger. Strangers like myself, Reed thought.

One other person lived in the house, on the top floor, Reed discovered. Inez Pierce’s brother—Hector. Inez had been overly solicitous when Ben brought Reed in, wanting to make sure everything was just right with his room, wanting to know his favorite foods so that she might work them into the menu. She showed him the transient room with great pride, and brought up clean linen and towels right away. Like he was an important guest. A stranger.

That night, on the way back from his bath, Reed passed a half-open door, and smelled lilac scent over something stale. Peering around the door frame, he could see the old man tossing in bed, his splotched arm out of the covers, pulling on the sheet, then stroking the smooth walnut headboard, pulling the sheet, then making a wrinkled fist over one eye.

A hoarse voice out of the sheets, “The cab here yet? You take that box of cookies… I’ll take the others. You’re that Mullins boy, aren’t you? The one rode away in the Packard. My credit’s good… my son will pay you soon’s you get me to his place in that yellow cab. You got any cookies?”

“No, I…”

“You got any cookies for the little crippled kids? They sure do like ‘em! I got some for them. I know. I can tell by your voice you’re that Mullins boy. The one with the Packard. I don’t see the cookie box. Mommy downstairs? Ya… ya. Daddy in the mine this mornin’… Lord, he a good man. You… like ta sell that Packard maybe?”

The old man turned over to face the door, and the sheets and quilt cascaded off the side of his bed. He wore bright pink pajamas with white socks like bags over his feet, rolled around the ankles. Reed realized with a shock that both ankles were tied to the bed frame with heavy rope.

Hector Pierce stretched one arm toward Reed, stiff, bent fingers wavering, forearm shaking his sleeve like a banner. Reed walked over and lifted the covers back onto the bed. He looked into the old man’s eyes; he appeared blind, maybe half-conscious as well. His head was thrown back against the pillow, three ridges of skin stretched tightly from chin to collarbone. With his slash mouth, uncontrolled tongue leaving spittle at the corners, dry, flaked skin, he looked like a lizard suddenly discovered under a sun-warmed rock.

Although slightly squeamish about it, Reed found himself tucking the old man into bed, straightening the covers. “Bear! Terrible eyes!” the old man suddenly cried out, then “Her hair’s on fire!” He clutched the sleeve of Reed’s shirt tightly, twisting it with the arthritic fingers until Reed thought it was going to tear, and this filled Reed with a strange panic. “You…” the old man whispered hoarsely, the fear drawing dark lines down his face. “Part of you stayed behind… with teeth!”

Reed pulled himself away and backed out of the room, away from the old man’s trembling, pointing finger.

A short man clutching a bottle stood out in the hall. Reed figured him to be Joe Manors, the miner Inez said had the room next to his. The man’s breath made Reed pull back; he’d had a sizable amount to drink. Flipping his hand at the old man’s room, he muttered, “Ask you if the cab was here? Inez’s older brother… been crazy ever since he got caught in a cave-in up at the mine. Now tonight he was up on Big Andy stark naked. Crazy old man! Been waitin’ for a cab hours now. Hell, ain’t no taxi cabs in Simpson Creeks nohow.”