Excavation

Chapter 13

Reed sat out on Inez Pierce’s porch long after everyone else was in bed. Whether he was afraid of dreaming his first night home, or if he was just so anxious to start out for the old homesite in the morning, he didn’t know, but he couldn’t sleep. Big Andy Mountain stretched out just beyond the house, a pitch-black body with a shallow fringe of pine illuminated by the moon on one bare slope. There were darker bands of pine farther up, then they thinned out again approaching Big Andy’s near-bald pate.

Much of the mountain must have been stripped away; he remembered there being more. When? He couldn’t remember when, sometime when he was a child, and the mountain in those days had looked like a giant wooly worm.

Two small suns lit up clearings on opposite sides of the range. The coke ovens at Dante and Trashtown: he’d grown up with their twin glows. One could be seen from his room’s window, the other from momma’s kitchen window. But which was which on this night, over a decade later? He couldn’t tell; the steady progression of the stripping and the flood had changed the mountain completely, until it was hardly Big Andy anymore.

Like his Uncle Ben had said in the truck tonight, “Mountain like that can’t have a name no more.”

A dark shadow approached the porch from the side yard. Lumbering. Brushing against one of Inez’s immense lilac bushes. Reed started from his chair, ready to cry out or run. Would the bear have come this close to town? Jake Parkey staggered into the light cast from the porch lamp.

The drunken man weaved about on his feet, then climbed the porch steps rapidly, sliding into the chair next to Reed’s. He held out his bottle. “Drink?”

“No… thanks.”

“Suit y’self…” Jake took a long pull from the bottle, then threw it over the porch railing into one of the lilac bushes. Then he turned on Reed, swiftly and off-balance, almost toppling from his chair. “Why you back here!” He gestured in a sweeping motion with one finger.

“I was born here.” Reed leaned back into his chair.

Jake looked at him with a puzzled expression, then frowned. “Friend o’ mine died ‘night. Mister Amos Nickles. Real good friend o’ mine.”

“I know. I was really sorry to hear.”

“Got et by a bear, crazy bear.”

Reed watched him carefully, wanting to leave, to go to bed.

“I knowed about your family!” Jake said suddenly.

“Yes?”

“The way they drowned up that holler…” Then he fell silent.

Reed thought about digging into the family land the next day and felt a little foolish. Who knew how much red clay had baked over the ruins in ten hot summers, how many feet he’d have to remove to get to any of his family’s things, or how far downslope the water might have spread the debris? What had Uncle Ben told him about the flood waters down that section of the hollow? He couldn’t remember if it had been better or worse there than in the rest of the valley.

Then Jake began his story, in that breathless, whiskey-sour voice of his. Reed tried not to listen, tried to leave, tried to shut the drunk up, but nothing would stop this last torrent of old family news.

“Swear boy, water twenty feet high… took out four bridges up above Carter, ‘fore it even got started, hell, cows and trees, four-foot rocks, houses—rollin’ over each other. People too… men, women… couldn’t tell no difference even with their clothes… ripped off… they was so tore up, worn out like creek stones… horses with their guts hanging, stuck on broken trees. Clothes. Swoll up dogs. Saw three houses, explode against that… state bridge ‘fore ya get to Two Forks. That coal waste dam, what it was. The company just kept dumpin’, an’ dumpin’ there. Couldn’t hold, after a rain. Hundred people, boy. Kilt and mangled. Company man say, it were an act of God. Didn’t see God… behind the wheel… them coal company dozers. Boy, ya hearin’ me? Saw yore daddy’s hand, yer momma’s dress, miles down, from home. Never did find… yer baby sister. Boy? Just to get a little strip of coal… hear that?”

Of course, he didn’t believe the bizarre detail concerning his father’s hand, which made some of the other details of Jake’s story suspect as well, but the audacity of the lie was almost exciting. He’d heard that Jake didn’t have much sense, and he supposed this proved it. But lots of people around the Big Andy had always seemed to possess this heightened sense of the grotesque, including the members of his own family.

Once his father had described to him in detail how a friend of his had died with rabies when his father was just a boy. And there were stories his grandfather used to like to help the old doctor with some of his operations, would even make rounds with him.

Jake fell asleep in the chair. Reed didn’t disturb him, just watched the mountain. Finally Jake woke up and stared at Reed several minutes before rising and stumbling off the porch.

Reed found himself reconsidering the job he had set up for himself for the next day. Chances were he wouldn’t find anything; the flood would have scattered his family’s possessions far and wide. Or what he did find… he might just as well not know about.

It seemed slightly ironic that while his father had prepared him for very little in life, had given him almost nothing, he had at least prepared him well for the task of excavating the old homesite. When his father had reached his sixties and the company forced him to retire from the mines, he started collecting odd rocks and Civil War and Indian relics. As he read more books on the subject, he started taking long trips down to the universities in Louisville and Knoxville, carting boxloads of his findings to various professors, learning more, collecting, and then reading more. He’d always been a large, pale man, and stoop-shouldered from a lifetime down in the mines. But the older Daddy Taylor was straight-backed and sunburnt. And the fierce, coal black eyes had taken on a thoughtful aspect. It was difficult sometimes connecting the two: the thoughtful amateur archaeologist with the hard-drinking, swearing, brutish bear of a man Reed had grown up with.

Reed had always tried to believe that he and his father had nothing in common. But over the years various traits—little habits, the way Reed told a story, or talked “around” awkward subjects, or prowled his room with nervous energy, too nervous, almost, to let his feet fall—had made it all too clear that just wasn’t true. In many ways he was very much his father’s son. So it was no surprise, really, when he took up archaeology in college. Dr. Simms and his father, they’d both helped foster that obsession in him.

All that death and destruction just to get a little strip of coal. Seems his father had said that once; now Jake Parkey was echoing him. Reed shared, he suddenly realized, his father’s interest in bitterness as well.

Funny how his cold seemed so much better now. Maybe he was already getting used to being home.

Before Reed went to bed he walked out into the front yard to get a better look at the stars. A shadow crossed his. He turned. Miss Pierce’s brother was standing up in the window, looking down at him, mouthing words silently against the glass like some pale fish in an aquarium.

But Hector Pierce was tied to his bed. Reed strained his eyes. The figure seemed shorter than Hector Pierce. Dark hair. Slight build.

He couldn’t make out the face. He couldn’t tell who it was.