Excavation

Chapter 20

Doris pushed herself back into the corner, pushed back and back until she could feel both walls coming together in her skin, the corner becoming part of her spine, hurting, hurting, but at least she didn’t have to know what she was seeing here, passing through her window, floating through her window like it wasn’t even there, all blazing like a fire ball… but it was a woman, wasn’t it? The most beautiful woman Doris Parkey had ever seen. She even wanted to touch her, she was so beautiful, although she was terrified, have that beauty against her skin, but that was wrong… but oh, so beautiful it hurt your eyes!

Doris knew this woman, she was sure! Something about the face… she had known this woman at one time, had seen her shopping… years ago… had talked to her, but the woman was long gone now, long gone. Moved away…

…or dead.

She wasn’t sure, she wasn’t sure… oh, how could she be sure?

The woman came closer, slipping across the carpet and not even bothering it none… and Doris wanted to stay and talk, she really did. She wanted to be sociable and show this pretty lady just how sociable she could be even living in such a hick town, but Doris was afraid of fire… see… and this woman’s hair was all in flames.

Doris opened her mouth wide, somewhere between a laugh and a scream, and felt her body take her through the doorway and out into the night.

She must have turned out in the street, reversed herself and run back past the house, past the Taylors and up the hill, heading off the left side of the embankment there, because before she knew it she was in the woods. And there was no one there, not even any sounds. And the glow was bobbing in and out of the darkened trees behind her, like a child skipping and dancing with ajar full of fireflies in the dark. Just like Doris had done herself when she was a child. Just like Doris had done a long time ago.

This woman wanted something from Doris… what did she want?

Doris started to run, but didn’t want to take her eyes off the glow, no telling what might happen to her if she took her eyes off the glow, so she kept turning her head, turning her head. And she fell on her back. Legs spread. Dazed.

And looked up at the woman with her head on fire. Beautiful. Staring down at her.

Doris felt the vague itchiness, the anxiety running down the inside of her legs. And thought of Mr. Emmanuel, strange little dapper man, whom she had thought and thought about since he had first come to live in her house. After years living with that rough, smelly man who drank all the time and didn’t care what bothered her, didn’t care about what she needed. Doris hadn’t felt much like a woman in years…

She felt the tension in her legs, and lower belly, and thought of him. And saw the woman with burning hair watching her, rubbing her own pale legs.

It was then Doris knew what the flaming lady wanted from her. They were very much alike, the two of them.

Doris began to feel the fire in her lower legs.

When Reed arrived at the old homeplace the next morning, he discovered he felt a bit easier about what he was trying to do. The clearing looked like the site of any typical archaeological dig now, similar to any number he had been on over the years. The grid of stakes, the clean-swept dirt, naked of weeds, the layered excavations. He could almost forget that he had once lived here, that his parents and little sister were living here when they died.

He tried to tell himself it was a job, a scientific project. Nothing more. He felt better, physically better, just thinking that way.

He had decided on a vertical-face excavation method for the site, since the various features were probably pretty well jumbled together. If he discovered anything of interest, he would stop and concentrate on exposing that single feature.

In the first square he had to use a pick to break the soil next to the trench he had dug. Apparently some dissolved mortar and cement had accumulated here in a pool several inches deep. It was hard going, and he had to proceed carefully, using the pick in short, careful strokes, since he couldn’t know what was immediately beneath this layer. For the most part, he knew, he would be using the short-handled hoe and a trowel.

He climbed down into the trench and began scraping away the layers of earth, proceeding horizontally across the first square until he had dug a shelf about six inches below the surface and another six inches wide. He stopped several inches from the stakes marking two corners of the grid, so that the stakes could remain standing as reference points. Eventually all the stakes would be left atop high mounds of earth as the excavation proceeded around them, like solitary wooden sentinels or grave markers.

He proceeded carefully in widening his shelf, occasionally finding small objects that he examined and placed in a bag attached to his waist, making a note on his log, or letting the object fall with the dirt into the trench. Pieces of his own past, or someone else’s. Most of the objects held no meaning for him: buttons, pieces of metal, other pieces off something much larger whose character he couldn’t determine from the one piece. One of the things that had always fascinated him about archaeology was the way in which such small pieces were virtually unrecognizable when separated from the whole. It was like trying to identify a person by just the nose or the eyes. Finding the other pieces to the pattern required hard, meticulous work, as well as imagination.

When his arms would no longer reach far enough across the shelf, he climbed out and stood on the shelf he had made. He began to widen it in the direction of the other two stakes marking off this first square. He found several marbles—cat’s eyes, a steelie—and wondered if they had once been his, or some other little kid’s. They went into his sack. Then an old yo-yo with an obscured painted face on the side. He’d once had one with Mickey Mouse on it, but he couldn’t remember the color. Maybe this was it.

The soil profile revealed by the trench and the initial digging was quite unusual—certainly he had never worked in land so dramatically traumatized—but consistent for all that. The top layer seemed to be a mixture of fine sands and silts and dissolved concrete, which made the surface alternately hard and soft the length of the valley. This material ran up to six inches deep in places; most of his first layer consisted of it. Below that were the slightly larger pebbles and stones the flood waters had dropped before the silt, along with the lightest objects—driftwood, small pieces of furniture, and the like—most of it half-rotted away.

Some of the amorphous lumps of wood reminded him of things—blocks, an old push toy, a cart wheel—but he really couldn’t be sure. Many of them were almost cloud-like in their shapelessness—and it was easy to find himself staring at them, trying to read them like a Rorschach of thunderheads. Animals, there, and people in distress…

Below that were the larger pieces of debris from the waste dam: pieces of coal and limestone, sandstone. The extent of the damage could be told from these stones: a layer a foot thick, they had moved down the creek like rocketing blades, shredding bridges, houses, trees, animals and people. Here and there in this layer Reed could see the tiny fragments of wood and cloth and leather carried down with their passage.

There seemed to be little flood debris in the strata below this, but it was scattered throughout these top layers. Below the layer of sharp rock fragments was the first layer of true soil, a light-colored humus, the farmland his father and grandfather before him had owned and worked. Also in this layer was a thin strip of light-colored silt, a remnant of a time when the creek overflowed its banks during a driving rainstorm when Reed had been only seven or eight years old.

And below that the dark, rich soils of his ancestors, and of the animals who had lived here before his ancestors. Dark topsoil blending into a rusty red layer of concentrated mineral compounds. Hardpan, they called it. Terribly ancient stuff. Compared to the lighter grays and sandy colors above, it appeared almost unbearably garish and alive. Reed could see only a bit of the top of it—most of it was now more than four feet below the surface—and for that he was glad for now.

He continued to strip away the first level, using his short-handled hoe to remove a quarter- to half-inch of soil at a time, occasionally scooping up a shovelful of the loose dirt and dumping it through a wood-framed screen he had built to make sure that no small artifacts or fragments were missed. Most of the objects he continued to cast aside: glass fragments, bent nails, and the like. But now and then something demanded his complete attention.

He first saw it as a faint outline in the dirt—a shadow of a small human figure, like a dream miniature or representation. But as he carefully brushed the loose dirt away, he recognized the toy figure he’d had as a child. It was an angular, hard-clay doll, though at one time, he believed, it had been a bit softer. Vaguely humanoid with its large eyes, nose, and mouth, but it had a square head.

He treated it like any other ancient clay artifact, and was unembarrassed. He cleaned it carefully with the brush, blowing off loose dirt as he went. He checked for the presence of salt, since salt in the clay would make it brittle, soaking it in a bowl of fresh water, then removing it. Then he added two drops of silver nitrate to the water. Since the water didn’t cloud, he knew no salt was present.

Then he brushed on a Celluloid-acetone solution to preserve this piece of his past. “Gee.” He’d called it that, he now remembered, “Gee,” he said.

Reed propped the small figure up on the shelf of earth and stared at it, as he remembered doing a number of times when it was on his bookshelf in the old house. The simplicity of the figure had always triggered his most elaborate fantasies: of how Gee was a younger brother Reed was sworn to protect, particularly during their lengthy explorations of the vast underground tunnels that crisscrossed Big Andy Mountain. Of how Gee was an alien from another planet, and Reed was the first person he had decided to contact; this alien had recognized the secret powers within Reed. Of how Gee was actually Reed’s secret self, shrunken and distorted, and whatever happened to Gee, happened to Reed. Gee, of course, had been buried ten years.

Joe Manors was “doing reclamation” that day, which in this case meant merely backfilling some of the areas that had been mined out with waste dirt, filling up the auger holes so that instead of a jagged mountain of useless waste you had a relatively smooth mountain of useless waste.

From his high seat on the dozer Joe could see Louie DeLong working on another ridge. Louie was sitting on top of a tanker truck, spraying a liquid containing grass seed up on one of the old waste slopes. So patches of spindly grass would take root, maybe some stunted pines. But the earth wasn’t compacted, so the banks were still unstable and the plants had a poor place to root. And with the layers turned topsy-turvy, the soil was so acidic plants would have a difficult time of it in any case.

Reclamation almost never included cleaning up the landslides or moving the boulders or refilling the bench cuts. And hardwood forests were almost irreplaceable.

Joe looked behind him, at the way the cut had widened as it was stripped. Benches they called them, like places where a giant might sit.

Nothing much was ever going to grow here again; the topsoil was now buried a good thirty feet or more. The top layer was all rocks and boulders, bits of slate, pyrites, coal. Loose and sliding material. That coal and pyrite, now unprotected by surface rock, exposed to the air for the first time in millions of years, would begin to oxidize and combine with rainwater to make an acid runoff.

Joe had seen concrete foundations dissolve in contact with that runoff.

He knew people, his uncle included, who’d lost homes and good farmland to a coal waste landslide. Churches buried under forty feet of dirt. Boulders dropping through the roofs of homes. Plaster cracking from the blasting. The people still had their land, the lawyers claimed… all the companies wanted was the minerals. Of course, it still might get a tad difficult for the people living around the mines. The noise and dust and all.

“Polly-ticks and money,” the three words Joe’s father had always used to explain the reasons behind almost any situation. He’d say it about a dozen times a day, no matter what the subject matter. Joe figured now the old man had probably been right. Local communities and merchants depended on the mines for their living, and when the companies told them that new regulations would surely knock the mines out of business, it scared them; they put pressure on the politicians. And both the politicians and the judges depended on the companies as well. Joe guessed it just came down to a choice of evils: devastation of the land or abject poverty. Problem was, he didn’t see that many local people awfully wealthy from it

He had to laugh at himself. My, but wasn’t he feeling bitter today! He was going to have to stop this drinking every night, this staying up to all hours brooding, brooding…

But how was he going to stop… with all that had been going on… He couldn’t remember ever being so scared, not since he was real little, so terrified of noises whose source he couldn’t see, of the darkness, of the cold wrapped around the Big Andy just before morning, of the fog the cold brought with it like an ill-developed twin.

It wasn’t doing him any good ignoring her, so he finally let the image of the little drowned girl expand to fill his attention. That was the problem right there. She wasn’t his little girl, left back in Cincinnati, but she could have been. About the same age, build. And here she was floating around where she shouldn’t be, out of her grave…

As much as he thought about it, he still didn’t think he could have made any other decision. He would still have had to leave that city, come back home. He’d never really loved the girl’s mother; he was pretty sure she hadn’t loved him either. But then, as far as he knew, she’d never bothered to get a divorce, and that made him feel funny.

They’d both been lonely and afraid. She’d grown up in a county only eighty miles away, one of his own kind, and she’d been just as homesick as he, at first. They met right after he arrived in Cincinnati; she’d already been there four months. Married a month later. Then he left right after the baby was born—Annie, after his great grandmother.

But she wouldn’t go back; she’d started to like the city and there was no life for them back in the hills, she said. He didn’t want to leave the child, but a child belongs with its mother.

Seemed like he had made nothing but bad decisions in his adult life. Leaving a younger sister at home all by herself the night of the big Simpson Creeks flood while he went hunting—his parents out of town—coming back to find nothing left. Then leaving for Cincinnati because he heard there were jobs there, and his daddy dying because none of the young ones were around anymore, his mother following him six months after.

Then abandoning that little girl of his to come back to… seemed like nothing so far but headaches from too much drinking and having to suck up to the Nole Company bosses.

And this other, drowned little girl. Looked like he had come back to her. Pale eyes and skin so damp gray… so that if he were to touch her, the water would just ooze out of her.

He finished with the first stretch of backfill and pointed the dozer down the long incline that led into “Willy’s sinkhole.” The sinkhole was the final remnant of the first stripping operation begun here fifteen years ago. It got its name when the backhoe Willy Daniels had been driving suddenly disappeared from view while returning from the equipment yard, much to everybody’s consternation. One moment he was sitting up on that big orange grasshopper of a machine, grinning and swearing as he fought the gears, and the next he was gone in a cloud of white limestone dust. “We all figured the devil’d just got tired of waiting for him to come voluntarylike, you know?” Joe’s daddy used to say.

Then they’d heard Willy calling for help, and swearing worse than ever. When they ran to the site they found him, still on top of his machine, at the bottom of a limestone sinkhole; he’d fallen through the thin shell covering it. They’d pulled him out and he quit that very day.

So they’d worked around Willy’s sinkhole for years, backfilling the cuts around it. Now the company geologist said it was nice and solid under there, and they could fill in the sinkhole with no danger and forget about it.

Joe’d been elected. But he wasn’t taking any chances, despite what the geologist said. He was going to ease in slow. He’d heard reassuring words from geologists and safety inspectors before. Believing them too much was a good way to get yourself killed.

He took a load of waste dirt off a pile north of the sinkhole and crept forward as slowly as possible, listening as well as he could through the engine’s roar for any creakings or shiftings in the ground, staring at the ground so intensely he couldn’t blink, inspecting it for cracks.

As he reached the lip, he knew there was somebody down there.

A dark, small form, all stretched out… stringy hair. He killed the engine and jumped off the machine, running up to the lip without thinking.

But it was just a dark log, patterned with gray lichen, floating. Floating.

He stared down into the sinkhole. Water was bubbling up out of the ground all around the log. Cloudy, mineral or waste-laden water, bringing its own brand of fog up with it. Like the fog you might see capping the sinkhole early in the morning, before the sun could scour it out. Or like the fog covering the soup an old woman might cook up… for someone like Hansel and Gretel. He’d loved that story as a child. It had been damned important to him… couldn’t hear it told enough times. It had scared him near to death… but he’d loved it.

Audra thought she might have a secret admirer. It seemed silly thinking in those terms; after all, she was twenty-five years old. It was hard to believe. It was the first indication of any romantic interest since she’d moved back to the Creeks five years ago.

Sometimes she’d leave the cafe at five to take her walk before going back to her room, and there’d be someone standing over by the boarded-up hotel, standing in the shadows so she never could tell who it was, although she thought he was a young man, a little shorter than normal.

It was silly, but some nights she stayed up late, unable to sleep, trying to figure out just who it might be. Maybe it was someone she had known all her life, or maybe even it was Reed Taylor, come back to the town after a long absence just the way she had. Maybe they had a lot in common. Already he was making her feel like a high school girl again, and some of the tension that had built up over the past few days was leaving.

She knew he had a wife, but she also knew he wouldn’t be here if things were going right at home.

Tonight when she left the cafe she looked for him, and at first thought he wasn’t there. She looked hard into the shadows by the old hotel, and finally, as if the very darkness were solidifying there, she saw him step out slightly into the street. His hair dark and clothes dark. His face… dark. It was as if he had carried the shadows out with him. She blinked her eyes and looked, and looked, but could find no faint glimmer of light in his perfect darkness.

She could have cried. For now she was afraid of him.