Excavation

Chapter 17

Reed moved out of Inez’s boarding house and into his uncle’s home that first day of the excavations. He was hesitant at first, thinking that might be much too soon. He wasn’t sure he was ready to be deluged by family and the accompanying memories so quickly, especially when he was digging into those same memories at the old homesite. But Ben Taylor was a hard man to turn down. And besides, Reed found his uncle’s eagerness to accept him back into the bosom of family and neighbors very appealing.

“Now we don’t want you lifting a finger, Reed. This is your time to relax.” His Aunt Martha busied herself with cooking as she talked to him, moving plates and pans with such skill it seemed like a circus act. Her gray hair was neatly kept, except for one long strand that kept coming loose, hanging down between her eyes. She would periodically scratch at the irritant by raising her eyebrows, then brush it away with the back of her hand. Suddenly she pulled open a drawer, brought out a pair of scissors, and snipped the offending hair. Without missing a beat she had the scissors back in the drawer and continued with her work. “We want you to feel at home here. This here’s where you belong.”

Reed didn’t know why, but her statement made him profoundly uncomfortable.

The kids ran in and out of the room, sometimes dragging playmates in with them—the Wilsons, the Norrises, Martha trying to hush them. It gave Reed a warm, bittersweet feeling.

“Ben says he’s going to take you down to the new house later.”

“Yes, he is.”

She looked at him briefly and smiled. “He doesn’t show that place to just anybody. You know, that man really loves you, Reed.”

“I know…” and it made him nervous to think about it.

Tom Schmidt arrived just before dinner. Mr. Schmidt had done odd jobs for Reed’s father and uncle a decade or so before the flood, before he’d saved enough money to get a small place of his own. Reed’s uncle invited the man to stay, and he ended up sitting next to Reed during the meal. He seemed perpetually dirty—oil and coal stains on his britches and his white hair yellowed with dirt and grease. And he smelled—not unpleasantly, but strongly enough that it was distracting. He remembered Reed only by name.

“You were Alec Taylor’s second son; I remember, the first boy got killed in that green pickup.”

“No, I was the only son.”

“Yeah, yeah, I remember. And you ran the mill in Barclay, gave me good rates cause I’d worked for yer daddy.”

“No, I went away to school, never had a regular job around here.”

“That’s right! That’s right!”

Ben Taylor had rebuilt their home after the flood had leveled the old one. A freak situation, that: although the flood waters had never reached the town itself, the mud embankments were loosened by the heavy rains. One had collapsed above the house and virtually flattened it. In rebuilding the place, he had added three rooms. Reed’s uncle had always taken pride in his skills as a carpenter. Mr. Schmidt had been impressed by that.

“Did it all by himself, boy. I watched him. Took six months, workin’ daybreak till two hours after dark.”

“Now, Tom,” Ben Taylor said, smiling proudly.

“Well, hell; you worked hard, Ben. I tell you, Reed. He leveled the ground, redug the root cellar, straightened out the old nails cause he didn’t have much money… did it all. Lots of us watched.”

The house was interestingly, if not aesthetically, put together. Ben had had no money for new lumber—and Amos Nickles wasn’t extending credit then—so he had made do with what scrap was lying around after the flood. Not a right angle in the place, maybe only a dozen full-length boards, the rest being patched-together half and quarter pieces.

Mr. Schmidt leaned over toward Reed, who pulled away from the onslaught of the man’s unusual breath. “I felt real sorry about your family, son… real tragedy for the entire community.” Schmidt took another bite out of his chicken leg. “Hear you’re diggin’ up around the old place?”

“Yes. I’d… like to see what’s left.”

“Well, sure is your right, sure is. Know you won’t get nothing out of that coal company, nosir. They got the power round here for sure. First they leave the Simpson Creeks all yellow and red with that mine acid, then them gob piles that gonna burn and smoke ‘till Gabriel blows his horn, then they kill off all the old men with their black lung, then top it all off by killin’ half the valley with that damn flood.” He paused and looked at Martha Taylor sitting shyly at one end of the table. “Damn dam,” he said, and chuckled. She smiled and looked down at her hands. “You sure have had your share of the troubles,” he continued. “Haven’t you, son?” He turned and looked at Reed straight in the eyes. “Wouldn’t want to see nothing else happen to you, son, nosir. Now you watch out for that bear.”

“I’ve heard.”

“Now, I’ve seen that young brother o’ yours hangin’ round those woods… you tell him it ain’t safe, y’hear?”

“But I’ve no…”

“Boy looks something like you. Maybe somebody else’s boy… don’t know. Never saw him before. Seen him a hunderd times up that woody holler.”

After dinner that night Reed and his uncle went for a walk in the woods. Reed hadn’t walked that much in the city. The moon was full, giving a silvery pallor to the trees and polishing the limestone outcroppings and shallow pools to a mirrorlike finish. Ben had said he was going to show him the new house—”new” even though his uncle said he hadn’t done any work on it in about six years.

“Our dream house, mine and Martha’s.”

Ben had worked on the house in the little hollow behind his property a long time—almost ten years. It was to be their own special place, his and Martha’s, a place where they could live in the summers and after they retired. They’d both worked on it every chance they got, adding rooms, laying down tile, building bookshelves and furniture. And there was a little creek, a small branch of the Simpson, running right through the front yard.

They had loved it; it had been one of the reasons they decided to build where they did. But it had turned into their downfall. Reed stared at the house in disbelief.

“The Nole Company began stripping the mountain above here when Martha and I were almost finished with the building. I did everything I knew to try to stop them. But they wouldn’t even compromise. When I told them what stripping would do to the property, they just laughed.

“Well, at first it looked like it wasn’t going to affect us much—it was too far away. But then those Nole workers started doing what they always do in stripping operations—they bulldozed the excess soil, the overburden, over the side of the mountain, where it drifted down into the little creek here.”

Reed looked. The creek was just a trickle of water now; silt had filled in most of it.

“The creek couldn’t carry that much silt and it overflowed its banks. Again and again and again. I begged them, then I threatened them. Nothing worked.

“Our dream house sat in the damp year-round.”

Ben took Reed inside. Walls and floors and posts and old furniture were mildewed. “The mildew just crept right across these planks like a disease.” Like a plague, Reed thought. “Expensive planks, too. I hand chose ‘em. The linoleum buckled, tiles popped loose, doors and windows swole up ‘till they couldn’t be opened. New carpet rotted right on the floor.”

As his uncle described these effects, Reed confirmed them with his own observations. Twisted tile and warped wood. Doorways seemed vaguely askew when he walked through them. The floors slightly drunken. The smell of decay. The dampness seemed to have brought out all the corruption latent in the building materials. All the surfaces were dull, the shadows in the rooms like stains and somehow… soiled.

The new house sat there and, even as they watched it, creaked as moisture worked its way through the wood, the structure falling apart a little more each year. Each day, each moment, Reed thought, as he imagined he could see the walls falling around him.

This house, he imagined, must have had a much different feel to it than the house he had grown up in, the house his stern grandfather had built and his father had added on to. He could see that even beneath the distorting effects of the dampness. The living room was an open, living place. There was a swing for two on the porch. The kitchen had lots of room for storage and a table for eating right next to the cook. There were nice guest rooms. The bedroom had lots of shelves for books and for displaying memories. And the bed there was for two people who wanted to be close during their dreaming.

And suddenly, staring at warped floors and buckled woodwork, Reed saw a house full of water, human figures floating in it like rotting driftwood.

“You should have done something, Uncle. You should have sued,” Reed said quietly.

“There was no point, son. They’ve got the power. The courts say that’s their right.”

“But still… weren’t you angry?”

“Of course I was angry. Damn angry. But I was powerless… and that made me sadder than it made me angry, I guess. I was always like your father a little in that respect, Reed. It was hard to show my anger. Now your dad could rage sometimes, really go crazy. But only sometimes; there was a lot more rage where that came from. And he could never get it all out.” Ben looked off into the woods with a puzzled expression, as if distracted by something there. “Guess that must seem a funny way to look at it, from your viewpoint. Guess it must have seemed he was angry all the time.”

“Yes… it sure did.” Reed looked out toward the woods in the same direction his uncle had been looking, although he didn’t know what he should be looking for. “What was my father like… as a boy?”

“Unhappy,” his uncle said, then paused for a long time. “Your granddad was a hard man sometimes, especially where brother Alec was concerned.”

“He doesn’t look like a very warm person in his pictures.”

Ben shrugged his shoulders. “Only passion I ever saw him show was when he was angry. And you never could tell what was going to make him angry; he was a changeable man.”

Reed saw that his uncle was staring off into the woods again.

“One time your dad broke a jar of pickles; he was in a hurry climbing out of the root cellar with it.” He frowned, hesitated. “Daddy locked him in that root cellar a good twenty-four hours. Alec screamed that the rats were coming after him, that there were dark things down there that were going to get him, but our daddy paid no mind, and slapped Momma when she tried to sneak out and let Alec go.”

The wind was swaying the trees at the edge of the wood. The water-logged house creaked loudly in the cold breeze. Reed looked away from his uncle.

“Your daddy never acted much like a child again after that,” Ben said. “He hated our father then, simple as that. Then years later, after your granddad died…” He stopped, and they both listened to the wind inside Ben’s dream house, trapped in there and making sounds like a small, desperate animal. “If you remember, your dad didn’t go to the funeral. What you didn’t know… well, we all hushed it up pretty well I guess.” He sighed, “…the preacher caught Alec out in the graveyard. He’d shattered the stone into a hundred pieces with a hammer… and was digging into the grave… snapping and yowling like some animal…”

Something fell inside the dreamhouse. Dream of drowning house, Reed thought. The screen door swung open and clattered against the porch wall.

“…I tell you, Reed. Sometimes I wake up at night hearing your dad… snarling and yapping like that… like some dog that’s been abandoned out in the woods a few years.

“What if they hadn’t stopped him in time?”

Then Reed heard the low growl beneath the wind… the popping lips. He turned around as if under water. His uncle was turning in slow motion, returning to the darker shadows beyond. Turning. As if he too were drowning, dancing a death dance beneath the flood.