Excavation

Chapter 3

Charlie Simpson woke early on Monday morning. For some reason he hadn’t been able to sleep very well of late. Seemed to be having lots of dreams that were waking him up in the middle of the night, yet he couldn’t remember any of them. Not even one little detail. It wasn’t like him; he usually remembered his dreams.

So there wasn’t much sense in knockin’ around the house all morning. In any case there was work he might do in the lot behind the store. Old Buck, his hound dog, loved it when he worked there. There wouldn’t be much reaction when he got the yard tools out of the shed—just a raised ear or an opened, slack mouth—but for Buck that was the equivalent of hysteria.

He had a special treat for Buck today—a box of those yellow marshmallow birds they called Peeps—left over from Easter. They were quite stale now, six months later, but Buck liked them best that way. He’d wedge each one between his two front paws until they were sort of standing up, then he’d stare at them a minute, bark softly as if they were supposed to answer him, then eat them, one at a time in the same way. He never seemed to get tired of the game. Every Easter Charlie always laid in a supply of the things about four times too large for his needs so that Buck could have a box each month of the year. It was Charlie’s only extravagance.

Funny how Buck was scared to death of real birds. One time Ben Taylor’s little daughter Lannie brought over a chick he’d given her, and Buck took one look at the little yellow ball of fuzz, cheeping and hopping, and dashed around behind the storage shed. Charlie’d never seen him move so fast. The chick had followed in its awkward way, and Buck kept retreating, until pretty soon the chick had him cornered under the lilac bush, just his nose and two enormous, shock-filled eyes showing. The chick was having a grand old time, cheeping away to its heart’s content.

Buck wasn’t the bravest of animals, not the most practical for a country storekeeper, Charlie knew, but he was all he had since Mattie died five years ago. It wasn’t like Charlie to be so unrealistic about an animal, to give it almost human characteristics—animals were animals, after all, and their thoughts a mystery. But the dog had filled a big hole in his life.

Charlie stood for a moment in his living room, finding it difficult to leave just yet. Normally he dusted here every morning before going to work; it was the best kept up room in the house. Not that it required much dusting and straightening up, because it was a room he never used. It really wasn’t a room for the living anymore. Mattie and he had spent most of their time here during their years of marriage—reading, playing cards, singing along with Mattie on the piano, and listening to the old Philco back when there were things on the radio worth listening to, dramas and such. Practically every morning he’d dust a little, move a knickknack or a book a fraction of an inch one way, look at it, then usually move it back to where it was. Then he’d stand for a long time on the braided green rug at the center of the room and look around, and remember. The whole process usually took an hour, yet almost every morning he managed to get up early enough to do it. It didn’t seem right to skip it this morning, but lately he’d been feeling it was time for a change. It was time to engage himself in something else—it was a feeling in the air.

Charlie’d slipped on his white shirt and overalls, his old hunting jacket, jumped into the old Chevy pickup, and headed down to his store in the Creeks. The road had been unusually foggy for the season, nothing but cloud about ten feet ahead of him. Breaking into torn fingers that separated occasionally just to show him a bit of limestone outcrop or fencepost. His usually brittle gray hair felt wet, clammy, and water seemed to line the many cracks in his weathered skin. With the fog he could hardly see the old walnut trees that grew along the roadside. He was thinking of stopping and picking up a few of the nuts when the shadow stepped out in front of him.

He slammed on his brakes and cried out. The dark shadow passed into the woods. Bigger than a man, he thought, swollen and dark. But walking upright like a man. He thought about a bear, but there hadn’t been bear in those woods in years. Not since before the flood.

He opened the pickup door and slid out. Later, he would wonder whatever possessed him.

The fog had begun to burn off in earnest, but it only made the countryside more unapproachable as far as Charlie was concerned. In spots, like fifty feet in front of the truck, it was clear as a new picture window. He could see the corner fence post of Jack Martin’s north pasture, one cow coming up to it even as he watched, and further down the road the big roadside hickory that marked the beginning of Bob Collins’s land.

But closer in, in the shadows of the trees, the fog was thick as lace hung up sopping wet, seeming to cling to every irregular surface. On the left bank it was especially thick in places, heaviest where the bank was piled high with old debris and driftwood from the flood, pushed there when the road crews bulldozed the road clear. You could tell the dirt was from the old dam: the color was darker than the rest of the bank, with coal trailings here and there. The variation of thickness in the fog made Charlie uneasy; it made the fog seem more substantial than it should be, as if it had something in it for thickening, like flour added to milk gravy.

He began to sweat profusely, a sure sign that he was nervous. Charlie could always tell by the way his hair began to feel like wet cotton stuck to his forehead, even before he was consciously aware of being scared. But he had been in these woods a thousand times; what was making him so nervous now?

He didn’t hear any noises in the brush. In fact, things seemed much quieter than usual. A bear would have telegraphed his passage a long way, breaking and smashing a trail.

He moved toward the woods—again, the action would puzzle him later—breaking apart the emaciated embrace of driftwood as he made his way up the embankment. He paused momentarily at the top, fiddling with something made out of cloth hung up in the branches. When he got it loose he examined it: old and grimy, but it was a child’s doll, cheeks and hair smeared with black, one button eye missing. He started to throw it away, then on second thought stuffed it into the pocket of his red-checked hunter’s jacket.

There were more signs of the flood further into the woods. When the Simpson Creeks left their banks and roared down the hollow that day, they hadn’t made the creek bend behind Jack Martin’s pasture. Instead, they’d slopped over that good bottom land and hit the left road embankment like a freight train, catapulting tools and pieces of houses and bodies and all manner of things into the trees beyond. Charlie had helped recover some of the bodies after the waters dropped. Chickens, pigs, and two little kids, were hung up in the upper branches. He knew immediately that the little boy belonged to the Willis family. The little girl’s face had been broken and washed clean of character, just like a blank-faced doll you’d buy in a store—not looking like any real person in particular, but resembling a number of them. Charlie would never forget that. Never.

Charlie tried to kick a rusted bucket out of the way, and it broke apart around his boot. He listened for the bear, or whatever, but there was nothing.

Patches of fog still hung here, but drifting a bit, so that areas, and objects, completely concealed only a moment before were revealed suddenly, as if to startle him. An ax handle. A lady’s handbag. Two broken mason jars. A torn picture of the Empire State Building. Part of an old radio. A high-heeled shoe. Pieces of clothing. Charlie was careful not to disturb them. What was scary about the fog was that he wasn’t sure what he would find when it separated.

Charlie Simpson felt guilty about the flood. Having his name on the creek that had killed so many people, left so many others homeless. His great grandfather had founded the community, then sold the mineral rights to a large portion of the land to the coal companies for a dollar and less an acre. Sold the rights “in perpetuity,’’ the birthright right out from under his great grandson’s feet.

The Nole Company had built the coal waste dam. Built it damn poorly, for all their money and technical expertise. And that same creek named after his great granddaddy had ripped the dam apart during a rainstorm one night—ripped it apart, Charlie liked to think, in righteous rage.

And brought down death and destruction to the innocent, people whose last name wasn’t Simpson, and who had nothing to do with that coal company.

Charlie grimaced as he pushed through the brush with his bare hands. The woods seemed much too quiet for this time of the morning. More and more fog was burning off as the sun penetrated through the top boughs, illuminating the small clearings, but no animals appeared to greet it. Several times he thought he saw the great shadow again, as the fog drifted away in pieces, the gray bulk appearing just behind the white curtain that had been torn away, but each time he was mistaken. Just a thick tree trunk, or a shadow between two overlapping sets of tree branches.

He’d gone a good distance into the trees before he realized it. He was ready to turn around and get back to his truck when something heavy seemed to shift its weight off to his left. He could hear it; the trees seemed to groan.

Charlie began to wonder what possessed him to be out in the woods like that. But he could not seem to leave. Even as everything was telling him to turn around and go back, he began stepping forward, slowly at first, then more rapidly, until it seemed he couldn’t wait to meet whatever it was out in those woods.

The woods seemed to be crashing around him, and so he ran, but forward, closer and closer to the loudest sound, trying not to look back at the source of the other sounds, the echoes, at what he imagined were great trees falling at his heels.

The woods seemed thicker here, the underbrush heavier, and driftwood and house debris were stacked among the trees. Brush and planks and pieces of sheet metal, and a soupy layer of mist over that, stretching out before him like strata. He felt suddenly trapped, and ran alongside the wall of debris and fog, seeking a way around it. He thought about the large shadowy thing finding him here, and he almost cried out. He turned around, intent on escaping back to the road and his truck, but a thick fence of hickories loomed before him, the brush so thick between them he knew he’d never be able to get through.

Charlie stumbled around a large tree, falling, sending his hands out to the wall of brush and debris. And found a little girl hung there between two layers of strata, a mummy excavated from the flood sediment, her arms like discolored dough pierced by the branches.

Charlie beat his knees with quivering fists. “I’m… I’m…” He coughed. “…sorry!” he gasped out, and began to sob.

He leaned back against the tree trunk and stared at her: a gob of wet rags and a piece of an old white plastic container. Impossible. For he had seen her eyes, fixed on him.

Charlie Simpson rose weakly and began to walk, numbed to the branches slapping his bare skin through the torn jacket. The fog was almost completely gone now, just a little mist in the air rising off the leaves. He had secretly wished the waste dam would break, had wished it with all his heart. The waste dam up at the top of the hollow had loomed there all his life, reminding him how much his family had given away. He hadn’t thought about so many people getting killed; he lived so high up on the ridge no flood could have gotten him. His imagination just hadn’t taken him that far. He couldn’t have imagined something like that little girl drowning. Could he?

The woods stopped just ahead of him. He was surprised. Apparently he’d circled around—that was the old Taylor place up ahead, or at least what was left of it, north of where he had parked the truck. The flood had hit here hardest, in part because of the cliff southeast of the property. The high waters had poured through the narrows north of the house, washed over the yard, hit the cliff, and come crashing back. The resulting turbulence had moved everything around so that the countryside here didn’t even resemble what it had been before. A good deal of the waste from the dam itself had been dropped here, leaving the fields under eight feet of mud, double that in some spots. In the distance Charlie could just see the top of the rusted tin roof of the Taylors’ two-story house. It had been knocked off its foundations, carried a little ways and dropped, and then filled with mud to its second story. The top of the ground now, and for several feet underneath it, was littered with everything the family had owned. Nobody had come after it, at least nobody he knew. He figured kids might have scavenged here, though—at least Ben Taylor, the uncle, thought that some of that had taken place. None of the neighbors had the heart, even as poor as most of them were, and all the Taylors had died: mother and father and little girl. Reed Taylor had been out west at the time—story was the old man, Alec Taylor, had thrown him out of the house. Charlie didn’t know for sure Reed even knew that all his family was dead. That would be a terrible, terrible thing, he thought, to have something that tragic go on in your family and not know a thing about it.

Charlie was gazing down the old path up on the left side of the hollow that wound its way to the bottom of the cliff and then up to the Taylor place, parts of the pathway remarkably intact despite the flood, when he saw the bear rise out of the brush and gallop up the path. Brown or black, he couldn’t tell from this distance. It looked kind of gray, and out of focus. Larger than the norm, a good eight hundred pounds, and well over four feet at the shoulder.

Then the bear appeared to rear on its hind legs, leaning forward as it ran. Charlie squinted but couldn’t see any better. He’d never seen a bear do that before. Running almost like a man.

It took Charlie a good hour to get back to his truck and on his way again. For a while all he could think of was how hungry Buck was going to be. He didn’t want to think about a bear around Simpson Creeks.

When Charlie Simpson was driving into town that morning, still shaken by his experience in the woods near the Taylor place, he saw Hector Pierce wandering across the field behind Inez Pierce’s rooming house. The old man was feebleminded certainly, ever since the big cave-in in ‘53. Four men had been buried alive in that, and Pierce the only one to survive—intact, except for a piece of brain missing, left somewhere back down in the mine. But even a man as feebleminded as that deserved a little freedom now and then, not being cooped up in that third-story room all the time like his sister Inez seemed to want. So seeing Hector Pierce out in that field, staggering around, hairless scalp and baby like skin shiny as metal in the morning light, arms out and touching everything he passed, seemed to Charlie something perfectly right and proper, a kind of righting of past wrongs. He found himself waving to Hector, smiling when Hector waved back, and driving on to the store feeling just a little better.