Excavation

Chapter 22

Reed rested in the shade of an earth wall running midway between the cliff and his old homeplace. He’d been working since sunup, and it had been good work; he’d found far more artifacts over the past five hours than in all the time before.

Funny how he was able to maintain a professional attitude through it all. Without a professional attitude, you missed things, or jumped to false conclusions. He couldn’t afford that on this particular dig. So he kept all the proper paperwork, spending a couple of hours each day on it. Archaeological site and survey records: owner’s name and address, physical description of the site, location of the nearest water, area of the site, physical condition of the site, artifacts discovered, sketch map. Daily field records, feature records, archaeological stratigraphy record, archaeological field catalog, archaeological photo record. Directions for reaching the site, vegetation, depth of deposit, surrounding and site soil, possibility of additional destruction. Site is partially damaged or inaccessible through: a) buildings on site, b) roads on site, c) cultivation, d) wind erosion, e) water erosion, f) vandalism.

Reed thumbed through the reports. Meaningless, finally. How had it happened here? How had his family died? How did they feel? Was there much pain?

Stop it… stop it. Getting emotionally involved was a trap. Dr. Simms had said that too. The “spirit of the place.” Make yourself open to it.

The spirit of this place had been a harsh one, no question about that. But there really wasn’t much in what he had found to indicate as much.

Slope west to east with a gentle fall of 4.3 feet in 100 feet… baseline X staked out along the crest of the long axis from the south edge of the front door… lines crossing the base at right angles lettered A through H, starting at the wood’s edge… square designated right or left as one faced the house… fill to the left and right of X removed by blocks and the profile of the exposed face of the transverse line was drawn…

Reed woke up from his earthy dream, the back of his skull cool where it had rested against the dirt wall. He shook his head and small clay particles drifted over his shoulders. Dig and dig and dig, and what was he finding?

Miscellaneous pieces from a set of blue china, along with several silver forks and a spoon. They hadn’t had such things that he could remember. Maybe they belonged to some other washed-away dwelling. Or maybe they came from his mother’s, maybe even his father’s side of the family, tucked away in storage for a special occasion that never came. Brushing away some of the dirt, he could clearly see the blue cupids that danced around the border. Hideously ugly stuff.

Decaying copies of Pilgrim’s Progress and Paradise Lost. No doubt they had belonged to his grandfather, who had been far more intelligent than he pretended to be. Miscellaneous pieces of decaying cloth and a shattered trunk lid. His mother had kept her finer things in there.

A few rusted iron skillets, an iron pot, cast-iron trivet. His mother had gotten those from her mother. Empty bottles of medicine for his mother’s aches and pains and general “women’s complaints.” She got them from an old peddler who came by once a year, in June. Reed doubted that they had any real value as medicine, but he was sure their alcoholic content had made his mother feel better. She’d never take a legitimate drink of liquor.

A few yards of rotted ribbon, some empty spools from her sewing box, the glass handle of the sewing box itself, a few odd needles he caught in the sieve, a glass doorknob, some rusted coat hangers, some foreign coins a relative had brought back from the war, coils from the refrigerator.

He found other parts to the Philco later—it must have hit some rocks, or logs, as it had been virtually ripped apart by the force of the waters. For the first time he realized how savage those flood waters must have been. Nothing but this debris.

Reed found himself thinking about the trash mound at Badger House in Mesa Verde. A way of life reduced to just so much garbage.

But there was a certain kind of peaceful satisfaction in this work. Counting artifacts, sorting them, fitting all the different pieces together. A gigantic jigsaw puzzle. There were items that had become so distorted through age and trauma they weren’t recognizable at first glance. He’d spend a great deal of time examining them, playing the game of fantasizing what their original form might have been.

A melted oblong of glass might have been the top of his mother’s flower vase—the big one that she kept in the window and that broke the light in such a way that you could stand by her stove and feel like you were trapped inside a prism. A fragment of dark-stained wood might have come from the small three-legged table that used to stand by the stairs. His mother always put the mail there, and if it wasn’t there when his dad got home he’d knock the table over in anger. There were several chips out along the edge of the tabletop.

He’d found miscellaneous pieces of old toys: a wheel, several doll’s arms, button eyes, windup keys, and a variety of plastic parts. He kept all these in a separate sack, determined to go through them someday, figuring out which toys they had come from, if they had been old toys of his, or his sister’s. He found himself thinking about the metal and plastic robot he’d had when he was nine, and now he looked for that robot in every piece he picked up.

As the sun rose higher in a sky spotted with torn swatches of cloud, Reed found that scene after scene arose and surrounded him as he picked his way through this, the richest vein so far in his mining. The days his mother hung out the Indian corn to dry over the porch railing, the setting sun catching each kernel and setting it afire. The time his sister fell on a rake, her yellow sundress turning crimson as she ran into their mother’s arms. The afternoon some of the boys from town had wandered out and they’d played stickball out front with him, and the whole family had watched.

Each scene arose and swelled oppressively around him, before breaking apart and falling into these pieces scattered through the dirt and underground. Red plastic and blue metal. Orange sun and white cheeks. Fragments of a young boy’s shoes and cooking spoons and pieces of eye, cheeks, smiles, and tears. The fragmented colors of grass and blood and dog and wrinkled hands and laughter and fear.

Reed found himself trying to visualize scenes in Denver, with his family, Carol, the children. Nothing. For a moment he thought he could see their fragments also lying in the dirt before his feet. His face stiffened, but he could not cry.

He raked through them all with his bare fingers held clawlike, the fragments wedging under his fingernails and tearing the skin. But Reed didn’t notice, intent on the digging.

The bear had spent some time resting in the green undergrowth. So much green, and cool to his hot muzzle and hot tongue and hot eyes. His thoughts and smells still burned him, but it was better now. The things inside him, the thing inside him, had quieted, maybe asleep for a time. That would give the bear time to sleep; he hadn’t been able to sleep for what seemed like a very long time.

The world was becoming a stranger place for the bear with each passing hour. So many sounds and thoughts and things he had never known about, and in his confusion these things had burned him. He had felt fire deep down in his throat as the thing inside him had tried to come out.

Now he sniffed the cool air, was puzzled, then irritated. What? He sniffed again. There was no real smell but… something. No real smell. Something.

The young human child stepped softly over the bear’s back. He stared. No smell. And this was a dead human child, a female, but still moving. Her feet did not touch the ground. He roared and snapped at her; she broke apart and drifted away in pieces. No smell. Was she attacking? No… more like play. She had been playing with him. The bear roared his displeasure. Then he realized he knew this child; the thing inside knew her. This thought made him roar again, and smash out at the cool green around him. Pieces of green filled the air. He breathed it in and snarled.

Bright flame filled the sky above the green; he looked up in puzzlement. The human woman smiled down at him. But no smell. He charged and she drifted apart, filled his throat and made it burn.

The human woman’s laughter filled the green. He roared. No… not human. Like human. No smell.

The laughter died away. The bear looked around him: no more green. In his rage he had destroyed it all, and not even known.

The cool was gone; his body began to burn hotter. He groaned deeply inside, shaking the thing inside him awake. But he didn’t care. He loped out of the edge of the wood, letting the thing inside guide him.