Excavation

Chapter 9

The town of Simpson Creeks did not awaken as most country hamlets do. It did not rise early, few residents had early morning chores, since farming had ceased to be a business and was more a pastime for retirees. Charlie Simpson was usually the first up, for the long ride into town to open up the store. The few remaining miners were next, but they didn’t have to report until eight. That left insects and small animals to greet the dawn, a few deer, and one bear.

Bear… yes, there’s bear out there… Charlie thought, and discovered that for the first time in his life he didn’t want to drive into work. In fact, he had the sudden impulse to crawl back into bed with a good bottle of whiskey and pull the covers up over his head. He couldn’t bear the thought of passing those woods—no telling what might walk… or swing or slither or fly out of there this morning. Just no telling.

But he’d been doing the same thing for years and he just couldn’t break the pattern today, not even for what had happened to him out in the woods. Whatever happened… he wondered if he would ever know for sure. He figured not; he didn’t even want to think about it.

Besides, his old hound Buck would be waiting for him, for food and water and companionship. Charlie figured there wasn’t a being alive who cared about Charlie more, or counted on him more, than Buck did. It made him grin just thinking about it. Now, wasn’t he getting to be the sentimental old fool? Mattie would rib him to death, if she were still alive. He pulled on his pants and shirt, fumbled with his shoelaces, and headed out to the pickup.

Happily, Charlie found the old truck fast starting that morning. He roared out of the driveway, hoping to get by those woods just as fast as he could.

Fog usually lay heavy in the valley until almost midmorning, when the sun finally reached over the top of the Big Andy Mountain and began to burn it out of the hollows in layers from the top down, revealing the landscape with no small amount of suspense, if you were driving those roads early in the morning, and if you were still sleepy.

The old timers said the fog was different since the mines came; the streams full of mine acid added an acrid steam to the mist. They didn’t like to be out in it; they swore it would scour your lungs, give you cancer. The land had changed drastically over the past fifty-odd years. Families who had moved away to Indiana or Illinois or Ohio found little they could recognize when they returned. The Big Andy had changed its profile; the bear’s head—a head-shaped outcropping on the north face—had disintegrated from the blasting when they blew out the last tunnels. The chimney formations on the east side were carved off during a stripping operation five years ago. If you looked at the base of the Big Andy you saw what your ancestors might have seen, but above eye level he was a butchered animal, his snout lolling into a landslide of tailings.

When the miners came out of their houses, they stepped carefully into the mist. It was as if Big Andy were dreaming, and they were stepping out into his dream. But something had turned bad in Big Andy’s dream, and the miners drove more slowly up to the main mine inside his severed neck. Something seemed slightly mad about the way Big Andy crouched beside the Simpson Creeks.

Between the mining and the flood there seemed to be little left of the forest that once blanketed the Big Andy and the slighter hills for miles around. Now it was more concentrated: the thicker, wilder areas had mostly been worked around as the mining operations spread. A lot of those areas were virtually impassable, and discomfiting in their liveliness. So much surrounding the town of Simpson Creeks was dead clay now; it accentuated your sense of being on a safe island in the wilderness. The woods were alive, almost obscene with life—crawling with greens and browns.

The forest floor could be alluring; more than one Simpson Creeks resident found himself wandering out where he had no business, just to feel what it was like, see what was there.

Charlie Simpson had spent a lot of time in those woods; as a boy they’d been his playground, his school, his library. And even in their changed, more threatening state, they held much meaning for him. Thoughts of those woods made a lush backdrop for more practical, day-to-day thinking.

But still, Charlie Simpson knew from his more youthful explorations here that the woods were teeming with life, rocks and rotted logs hiding unseen communities on their undersides, and miles of underground tunnels beneath that. A forest floor burning with thriving, agitated life.

There wasn’t much undergrowth in these woods; the odd mix of soil and decaying conifer needles made the land too acidic. Mostly herbs and wood ferns spread their leaves here over ground too cold for the more inviting plants found lower in the valley. Layer upon layer of rich humus—the partially rotted corpses of countless plants and animals—dissolving into the layers below, then the minerals, the weathered rock making more soil, then the bedrock, hard and unchanging, the stoic heart of Big Andy. Layer upon layer upon layer, and all of it unthinkably ancient strata.

From his pickup window Charlie could see the chipmunks scurrying on the embankments bordering the winding gravel road. The sight relaxed him some. Occasionally he would see one disappear and he would wonder if it had entered its underground home a yard beneath the surface. There would be a small central chamber with a bed of grass and leaves down there somewhere, with its own bathroom off a short passage leading even deeper. There might be countless tunnels radiating from the bed chamber like the legs on a fat spider. Thoughts of that busy underground life had made Charlie vaguely uneasy as a boy.

Small snakes were bursting out of their eggs hidden beneath rocks and logs out there, their untouched skin gleaming wet and bright. Infant mice were squirming in pockets within the loose soil. In decaying logs a madhouse reigned: millipedes and centipedes—their bites were toxic, he remembered painfully—wriggling through masses of pill bugs, oil beetles, abandoned snake skins, worms and salamanders, so thick you might think the log had ceased to be a home for them and become a thin armor their thick masses held together.

Charlie could remember as a boy jumping into the soil under those ancient trees as if he were playing on a featherbed. All that vegetable and mineral matter honeycombed with pockets of air, pushing back at him playfully, like one great teddy bear of a beast. At times the ground seemed strangely insubstantial, like the ground you walked on in dreams.

It had always seemed to Charlie that the links in the food chain were unusually close here, the dance of victim and predator so interwoven that one began to blur into the other. Roles were reversed or exchanged. One thing becoming another over and over again—all life was like that, Charlie guessed. It was kind of nice and kind of frightening at the same time. It made it easy to imagine everything becoming animate at one stage of existence—ancient trees shifting their roots in preparation for a stroll, or a patch of insects and moss flowing slowly over a rock like some undersea ray.

Fungi dotted the woods, mushrooms of all different kinds; from the road they looked like jewel encrustations, or shiny balloons, or colorful pillows sewn to the ground, trees, rocks, anything even remotely physical. They appeared from nowhere, and could cover a log virtually overnight, or vanish just as quickly. One time in high school Charlie tried to learn them all, but finally gave up. He could still remember a few—hen-of-the-woods like yellow coral, the milky ones, lots of them, and all kinds of the giant variety (boletuses they were called) with red and brown, pink and yellow caps, like sinister dwarves. Of course the pillowy things were only the fruit—the tiny network of tubes that ran under the ground from the fungi covered the forest floor like an eerie net, rotting everything it came into contact with.

Then there was destroying angel, pure white, one of the deadliest mushrooms in the area. His cousin Winnie ate some of those when she was five, and her parents and relatives had all prayed desperately the Lord would take her soon. Sometimes when Charlie was out in the woods her agonized screams would come back to him, echoing strangely through the conifer walls.

As a boy Charlie had seen a giant water bug stick its snout into a frog, paralyze it with some kind of secretion, then slowly proceed to suck its guts out. Later, when he’d had time to muse on the implications of that, he’d become terrified. The dark woods on the edge of the Creeks took on a new meaning for him. The woods weren’t always a safe, nice place. The lesson had taken a long time to learn. As a young man it didn’t matter so much; he’d brave most anything. But the fear just seemed to settle into him as he got older. He didn’t go into those woods much anymore.

As Charlie drove by Inez Pierce’s boarding house on his way into town, it looked as if no one there was awake. Mist off the Creeks still clung heavily to the large maples and oaks clustered around the house and the numbers of lilac bushes Inez loved so well. Above the line of trees the windows stared out at the road with steel gray panes. Charlie used to like the silence, the ever-present quiet in the town. But there seemed to have been a slight change in the character of the silence, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Something trembling, ever so slightly, in the stillness. He didn’t like it. He gunned the Ford’s aging motor and spun toward the incline leading up to the town proper.

Inez Pierce stared up at the ceiling; she hadn’t been able to sleep all night. She heard the far-off sound of Charlie Simpson’s pickup and turned slightly to the window, but she didn’t really have the strength to look out. She was faintly surprised. She’d never felt so tired in her life. But she was getting old, she thought. She still had some of the young girl in her: the rounded cheeks and the dark shock of still-black hair in front of all her gray, and she still moved more like a young girl, fluidly—nothing like the way most of the old women she knew walked. But time still took its toll; that was pretty much a law, she suspected. When she looked at the clock, it was running past six. She groaned; another late morning start.

It was worry over her brother Hector keeping her up. Ever since they found him by the creek, half-drowned and mumbling nonsense out of his numbed face, he hadn’t been the same. The confusion was much, much worse. And he couldn’t seem to manage to climb out of bed at all. He had the physical ability; she’d cared for enough sick people in her time—father and grandfather and two uncles—to know when a body just couldn’t stand up. There was nothing physically wrong with Hector; it was something in Hector’s mind. He just couldn’t stand on his two feet. One morning she’d been so exasperated with him she’d tried to force the issue. She’d gotten Joe Manors, the miner who lived on the third floor, to help her pull him up out of bed and stand him up. She was sorry she’d done that, but he’d just made her so mad.

Hector had scared her bad. When they got him up on his feet he began to shake like he had the palsy—though far worse than any palsy she’d ever seen—moving his eyes around like he was spastic. “Get away! Bbbb… ear!” And it wasn’t anything physical; she was sure of it. He’d been almost hysterical with fear. Poor Joe hadn’t known quite what to do, and had almost dropped Hector on the floor.

She could hear her tenants stirring on both floors above her ground-floor bedroom. Wasn’t much you could hide in an old house; sound traveled too well through the loose and softening boards. She supposed she should get up and start fixing them all some breakfast, much as she hated the idea this morning. She just hadn’t been herself lately, and for the first time in her life since her father died, she found she didn’t enjoy taking care of people. Something funny about the weather, or maybe it was just changes in her because of age. Whatever, things seemed vaguely out of whack, unbalanced. It made her agitated and cranky.

Perhaps some handsome elderly man would come by one of these days and take her away to his big house in Knoxville. Could be. She chuckled aloud and climbed into her quilted slippers.

Reed’s cold was worse, much worse. He felt terrible: his nose aching, chest and throat inflamed. As the plane neared the Kentucky state line, he’d developed a bad cough, a cough that had two stewardesses immediately at his side with alarm in their faces, the elderly black man next to him pounding his back and making solicitous comments. It was embarrassing, but he’d appreciated the attention; he’d been scared, and didn’t want to be alone.

The cough had gone, but the skin across his chest was sore. Needle pricks raced up and down beneath his shirt. He’d had two stiff drinks, then a third.

It seemed strange how peaceful and safe the ground looked from up in the air. He’d always been a little scared of heights; he would have thought the ground would frighten him as the plane passed over at an angle. He would have thought he’d be thinking of the ground rushing up to meet the plane and tearing it apart. But looking at the ground from this distance, it was hard to imagine anything untoward occurring within those stretches of rolling green, those luxurious swatches of trees. Several times he thought he’d caught a glimpse of the Big Andy Mountain above Simpson Creeks, but he knew that wasn’t possible—he was much too far away. But there were ridges in the distance, crags and rough places, that seemed to hold latent within them the resting-animal shape of Big Andy. Some said a bear, others a muskrat or a beaver or a deer lying down. Uncle Ben used to say the mountain was named by an early settler who thought the mountain looked like his Uncle Andrew lying down, and Ben would kid Reed about when he was going to go out and find a mountain to name Big Ben.

It suddenly occurred to Reed that he might not have any place to stay once he got to the Creeks. He had no idea if his uncle still lived there, or if he lived at all, for that matter. Inez Pierce had had a boarding house and hotel, but that had been years ago, and it might not have survived the flood.

They hit an air pocket and Reed suddenly broke out into a heavy, chilling sweat. His chest seemed to collapse in on him; his eyes burned. He thought he was going to throw up. The place was drawing him on—he could feel it—something like an open, sucking wound. Who had called? Who had started all this? Someone who hated him, but as far as he knew he had no enemies anywhere.

The mountains darkened around him, the lights of the towns coming up, and off in the distance there was the lone light of a coke oven. He wondered if that was the Nole Company mine, he wondered if families were gathering for dinner on the hillsides beneath that light, he wondered if they knew, if they were waiting for him. But the light had begun to blur, and the pain in his chest had at last begun to subside.

The turbulent descent into Louisville jostled Reed out of his sleep, and from a dream he imagined must have turned bad as soon as he crossed the state line. His father was screaming at him—for one of the usual infractions, although he couldn’t visualize it specifically—his father’s face red in that way that had always frightened him, like a cherry red balloon so full of air it was finally going to explode, leaving pieces of skin and bone all over Reed’s face.

His father’s mouth opened so wide he could see the back of the mouth, the gold-filled molars, the pink and vibrant uvula like a fetus in spasm. And for a brief moment, fantastically, Reed knew that this was no human being’s mouth. His father was going to eat him alive.

Reed opened his eyes wide and stared out the window at the dark sky. The plane tilted sharply as it made its approach, until suddenly it seemed as if Reed were staring straight down into the lights of the city. Two red lights, almost beacons, near the city’s center transfixed him. Like eyes. The luminous twin spaghetti trails of traffic curved beneath his window like a feral grin. He traced the grin on the cool glass with his fingers and chilled. He would be catching the train in an hour, and even then he would be several hours away from Simpson Greeks, probably not arriving until well after dark. But the Creeks would be a familiar smile, he told himself, albeit a lazy one. Nothing ever changed in the Creeks; nothing ever happened there.

Charlie’s Ford almost stalled heading up the hill into town. He had no doubt he was going to make it—the old Ford came within a hair of stalling on that hill every morning—but it was embarrassing, and as he did every morning he checked over his shoulder and looked past the first bridge toward the boarding house to see if Joe Manors was out there on the road laughing at him. He wasn’t, but he’d be out there any minute. But when Charlie gunned the engine the truck shot up the hill, and his pride was secured for another morning.

The town proper had been moved up on this little ridge eighty years ago. It used to be down by the Creeks, only a little ways past the bridge that led to the Pierce place. But that site had proved to be too prone to minor flooding from the Creeks, and so some of the merchants had decided to move it a little higher. The old site was pastureland now, although a curious spirit could still find a lot of the area’s history just by digging into the soil around there. Charlie had done it himself once upon a time, finding old tools and brass buttons, even a cracked glass picture. But the picture was faded; water had near erased it.

Then a couple of kids had been scared real bad down there—Charlie had never been quite sure what it had all been about; from the way they’d described it, it had sounded like a patch of shifting earth, or a bog. “The ground came alive!” one of them had shouted, near to sobbing. There were small bogs here and there all through those mountains, he’d told them. But they’d been real scared—everybody could see that. Then something similar had happened with Ames Nickles’s elder brother. He’d died of a heart attack two hours after being scared there. And Inez herself had claimed seeing lights out there. So nobody went down to the old town site anymore, or excavated much anywhere around the ridge.

And Charlie didn’t either. He thought the fear a bit foolish, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to go down there just the same. “Everything finally comes to life in these hills,” his daddy used to say, and supposedly he’d heard that from his grandaddy. And Charlie Simpson did believe that, he surely did.

Before they moved the town, they built a big slab out of rocks and bricks and mortar—whatever they could find—on the upslope part of the townsite. Then they rebuilt the stores on top of that. The story was this was meant to provide a good foundation—the front part made a sidewalk almost a foot off the roadbed—and in case of heavy rains the muds wouldn’t push out the foundations or rot the wood.

The other, big reason, Charlie thought, was that way they wouldn’t have to dig into that ridge, or even level off any rough spots. Profoundly lazy folk, his forebears. Of course, maybe even then they had qualms about digging down under the Simpson Creeks dirt. You heard about strange things happening—people disappearing or going crazy or two-headed calves being born—all over these hills, as if they were a magnet for anything outside your everyday limits.

In any case the road had sunk some over the years, making the sidewalk pretty high to climb up onto comfortably, so they’d added steps here and there. And the slab itself had been so piecemeal it was getting bad cracks. Jake Parkey had the first house on the left as you went into town—butted up right against the end of that slab—and his wife Doris was always complaining that there were things living inside the slab. Half-crazy, she seemed most of the time. It was too bad; when Jake had married her twenty years ago she was thought to be the prettiest woman around. Women seemed to age quickly in the mountains; the hills took something from them, a little more each year. Doris’s beautiful blonde hair had turned the color of a mud creek stained yellow with mine acid.

She said she could hear them scratching around in there at night. Nobody else could hear them, although during the day you might see a mouse or a harmless black snake crawling into one of the cracks. Doris kept saying that the reason no one else heard them was because they only made noise at night and their house was closest to the slab and besides her Jake slept too soundly to hear anything short of the heavens busting open and the Angel Gabriel coming down into their bedroom. They had a roomer, Mr. Emmanuel, a mining inspector with the Nole Company Mines, but he was gone a great deal of the time.

The Nole Company was responsible not only for the flood of years back, but for the gray- and rust-colored backdrop to the town: row upon row of two- and three-room shacks stacked up the sides of the ridge all the way to the Nole’s hills of mine waste sitting above the town. These cabins had been for the miners when the Nole Company was booming; now all but a few were empty.

As Charlie Simpson drove into town he always took a long look at the Parkey place, seeing if that Mr. Emmanuel was around. He’d never trusted that Emmanuel fellow; he was an odd bird. Dressed like someone from the city, even when he was working. Dark skin and a too-neat mustache, tight corduroy pants, and always a tweed or a corduroy coat. He’d even seen the man wearing one of those two coats with his jeans. The other reason he looked at the Parkey place, of course, was to avoid looking at the two abandoned buildings across the street. First one was the old Simpson Hotel, pretty elegant for those parts, a Victorian structure run by his grandfather and now boarded up, the entire second and third stories a tangle of charcoal and the harder support beams that had escaped the ‘38 fire. The other was just an empty storefront, container for a variety of businesses over the years, from a furniture maker’s to an old lady’s confectionery. It made him sad to look at them; they hadn’t been occupied in years, making them sure signs that all growth in the Creeks had stopped and wasn’t likely to continue. He thought about them the same way he thought about headstones.

The first building up on the slab, right next to the Parkey place, was Ben Taylor’s Feed Store. He had a house about fifty feet behind it, on a plot his daddy’d dug out of the slope there. The Taylors always had a hard time of it; they had never been too well off, and during the flood Ben’s brother Alec and his family had all been drowned, most of the property washed away. All but Alec’s boy Reed, Charlie reminded himself. Reed had run away a few years before and hadn’t been heard from since. Charlie had heard Alec Taylor had been a big man with a whip, and most people seemed to think Reed had made the right decision. Ben Taylor was another case entirely—a large, strong man, but there wasn’t a gentler soul ever born. Charlie had always been impressed by the kind way Ben handled Doris Parkey’s goings on. Doris would be in Ben’s store most everyday asking him if he had heard things under the slab. Ben would always scratch his head with one of those great big hands of his, and you could see his face getting soft as dough as he’d say, “Well, now there might have been something a few days ago, Missus Parkey, but I’ve been so busy I didn’t really notice. But I suspect you’re much more knowledgeable about them things than I am.” Then he would always promise to try to notice better next time.

Charlie was wondering if Buck was getting hungry about now. First place he’d gotten a glimpse of the old hound had been on the walk in front of Taylor’s store. The dog had been limping up the slab, turning his head this way and that to sniff, and so slowly it seemed to take him five minutes to check each direction. Charlie had been standing in the doorway of his own store talking to Ben Taylor. Buck had ambled right past him, paying no attention whatsoever, as if he were blind. He crept slowly to the potbellied stove and collapsed there, sound asleep. Charlie had had him ever since, almost ten years. He was an incredibly old dog. And how Charlie loved that dog…

Across the street from Ben Taylor’s store there was a small cafe open three days a week, owned by somebody from out of town but run by Doris Parkey’s younger sister, Audra Larson. Some of the miners ate their breakfasts there, and Charlie tried to get in one day a week for some coffee just to be sociable.

At the end of town on that side of the street there was a small railway and freight station. The train came in every three days, just after dark. Charlie realized there was one due in that evening, and for some reason thinking about it made him nervous. Of course, that meant there’d be more goods to put on the shelves the next day, and he supposed that was what he was anticipating. Seemed like there were always several things wrong with his order, and he’d have items he’d never even heard of before and no idea what they were good for. It was too much trouble to send them back, and they’d usually end up in one of those boxes on the shelves in his storage room. He was too old for such aggravation.

Last store on the slab was his own, with the little building he used as the town post office hanging awkwardly on its left side like a black sheep on its mother’s teat. The post office certainly looked that part; although his store was finished in fine old red brick, the little post office was covered front, back, top, and sides with coal black tar paper. Charlie’s daddy had been Simpson Creeks’ first postmaster and had built the post office with what he had on hand. Charlie had always intended to improve it some, but he’d never had the funds. He had a deal with the postmaster up at the capital; they didn’t get rid of the Simpson Creeks office in favor of some larger office a hundred miles away, and he didn’t ask them for any money.

Charlie usually had the store swept out, the shelves and counters straightened, and the lids off the apple barrels in time to open at eight A.M. But the first thing he had to do before he unlocked the door was to feed Buck, who should have been sleeping out by the shed in back of the store as a kind of honorary watchdog. Some watchdog; Charlie grinned. Buck was so old and toothless… if he had arms and hands he’d carry an armload of Charlie’s merchandise down to any halfway friendly burglar’s automobile. Happily there’d never been a crime in the Creeks aside from husbands and wives—and once two brothers—killing each other.

Buck didn’t come to greet Charlie when he rattled the dog’s water can by the store’s back steps.

“Hey, lazy! Water, boy!” But there wasn’t the usual answering bark, the lumbering of crooked legs trying to maneuver faster than they could manage.

Charlie walked slowly out to the shed. The dog was old, he reminded himself. It was bound to happen sooner or later.

Then he saw where the fence had been torn down, and the streaks of blood here and there on the bright green grass. Buck had always perked up when Charlie had worked on the lawn here, fertilizing it, weeding it. Buck would sit under the big shade tree by the shed, with his head up, as if listening. Eyes gleaming. The most animated Charlie had ever seen the old dog.

He followed the trail of strewn blood, crushed grass, and broken boards around the side of the shed, and even in his apprehension he felt amazed. Incredibly, all evidence showed that the old dog had really put up a fight. Charlie never would have guessed.

The old dog’s thin flanks were pressed against the fence that ran behind the shed. Half-buried by the weeds. Charlie got down on his knees slowly. Another massive hole had been torn in the board fence here. He gazed through it, up the trail of smashed weeds and bushes that led up the slope to Nickles’ Lumberyard on top of the hill. It was the only other business in the community, just outside town; you followed the gravel road as it curled around the hill to its top, and the road ended there in Nickles’ yard. Charlie hadn’t seen old man Nickles in weeks; he kept pretty much to himself. Charlie gazed at the slope for a long time. He could not remember the last time he had cried.

After awhile he turned to his old pet. He wanted to carry him back to the shed, look into the old wrinkled face once more. But he searched for the dog’s head in vain.