Something moved in the brush and loose gravel behind him. But when he turned… he could see nothing.
Scraping away and scraping away at all that awful aliveness in the Big Andy. That wrinkled maze of ridges. Like skinning some creature alive. Sometimes Joe had this nightmare that after scraping away at Big Andy’s massive body for years they’d finally reach his insides… reach something. He didn’t think he wanted to be there when it happened. There were lots of places on the Big Andy he’d never been, woods so thick and entangled they were almost impassable. It agitated him just to think about running a dozer into those areas… no telling what might get turned up.
A squirrel dropped from a moving wave of earth and was pulled under the dozer. Joe gritted his teeth and plowed on.
Toadstools, moss, dandelions, rusted farm tools, somebody’s spectacles, a fox skeleton, churned under by the giant blade. Joe gritted his teeth and plowed on.
Once he was finished with the bench there’d be a “high-wall” of some sixty feet straight up. They’d have to detonate to get it down to size. Occasionally there’d be one tree left, a patch of grass. Most of the time that seemed worse than not having anything left at all. Joe tried to be extra clean about it, and not leave anything.
Someone was definitely here who did not belong. Mr. Emmanuel scanned the ravaged hillsides nervously. A moment before he’d caught a glimpse of a shadow at the edge of the woods where Joe Manors was stripping. But he hadn’t quite been able to make it out. Dark hair? Or bigger than a man… an animal? He couldn’t be sure, he just couldn’t be sure.
Joe watched, mesmerized, as the dozer blade cut through a nest of field mice, a few rotted logs, rich humus containing a variety of small creatures. The earth groaned and the machine seemed to be groaning back.
Joe felt the blade snag on something, gave the dozer more power, and was satisfied despite himself to see the mound of earth, rock, and vegetation he was attacking break into three pieces. Brush began tumbling off the ledge above him. He looked up to see the large brown head with dark eyes resting on top a moving ridge of earth, moving toward him…
The bear… he cried out and tried to pull the dozer loose of the mound. But the machine’s movements only caused further decay of the embankment—the head was coming closer, looming. And suddenly it fell through the open cab and was in the dozer with him.
Joe looked down cautiously. It was Buck’s head—Charlie’s old dog—the flies at it thick and heavy.
Chapter 16
The house was several miles up the hollow, about as far as you could go without climbing, and actually only a short distance from the ruins of the old waste dam. It had been the first lot hit by the wall of water and mud, and so had actually suffered less damage than some of those homes downstream where the flood had had time to build up speed and broaden out into a wide front.
The road was no longer where Reed remembered it; the rampaging waters had washed most of it out, and the new road had been cut higher up the hillside, completely bypassing the old place. Reed had to park his uncle’s ancient pickup back on a bend in the new road and clamber down the loose embankment.
He stumbled over an old cast-iron newel post with a date—1902. He supposed that was from the Little Simpson Bridge, washed out at the high-water mark. There were more sections of the bridge farther down the embankment, buried almost completely. He could see where the pins connected up the beams, the bridge having been erected back before they had rivets, when they used square nuts instead of hexagonal.
An old wheel Reed recognized from the cable-run oil-pumping operation back near where the old dam used to be was lying on its side, with weeds growing out of the empty hub. The rotting boards must have come from the powerhouse in the rear.
The woods had gone wild, uncut and untraveled, and it was about a half hour before he began finding sections of the old gravel roadbed, another half hour before he’d cut through enough brush to get his first look at what had been their front yard.
He really hadn’t expected to feel anything, but with all that growth, and the way the lines of the hollow had changed, it was like looking at ruins a hundred years old.
As a boy he’d often had the fantasy that his parents weren’t his real parents, that actually he was self-created, born whole out of nothing. How could he possibly have come from this? Pioneers might have lived here, Indians, prehistoric natives. But never any family of his.
He felt a little too hot, and pulled his wide-brimmed hat down over his eyes. He seemed more sensitive to the sun than ever before. He fiddled with the brim nervously.
He was almost into the old clearing itself before he finally saw the house. It had been swept to the side by the flood, knocked off its foundations, and it leaned into the hillside like a damp and empty box, its first floor filled with earth almost to the line of the second story. Otherwise it seemed to be basically intact, which added to Reed’s sense of the impossible.
“Us Taylors are good builders, son, build ‘em to last…”
In the early morning light the hollow south of the old Taylor homeplace seemed like moonscape, the vegetation almost ending where the old creek bed had been, and much of the small valley bottom covered with miscellaneous debris. There’d been so much mine waste in the water the night of the flood—settling down to fill the channel after the waters had receded—that the stream bed had pretty much been ruined for any form of life. Reed could tell where the old springhouse had stood from a fragment of limestone wall. Otherwise he’d never have guessed; the ground slope there had changed drastically with the several additional tons of mud, stone, and silt. Small saplings had begun to grow back where large trees had washed away. It was the same as it had always been: the great forest coming back by means of its extensive restorative powers, although it was beginning to look as if these restorative powers had their limits—the world was no longer such a hospitable place for trees.
It was angry-looking country. He’d read that rage remained forever in a place that had once nurtured it. “The spirit of the place.” With the twisted trees, the broken rock, the demolished structures, Reed could see how someone could believe such a theory. This was a raging place.
When he thought of this homeland of his, he thought of trees, a greater variety here than anywhere else in the country. Some straight, some twisted grotesquely by inhuman force. Remnants of the great forest.
Unlike the Indians, who gathered branches for firewood, the first white settlers girdled the trees to clear the land. And the great forest began to dwindle. As they would everywhere they went, the settlers used up the land to the point where they couldn’t grow enough food. The great forest began creeping back, making fast headway into its old environment, filling the clearings and fallow fields, before stripping began.
That was the turning point, Reed supposed. The great forest had finally faced something it could not overcome.
A few hundred yards down from the old springhouse foundations, diagonally across the valley where the old stream had turned, was a high, limestone cliff wall. He could make out faint lines across its surface where the onrushing water had struck, scraped trees and other debris brushlike down its length, then lingered before finally receding through narrow underground tunnels into another branch of the creeks. Reed had known about the tunnels for years; you could see the edge of them sometimes when the creek level was low. His mother had warned him against swimming into them, and he’d always obeyed. Not because he was naturally obedient, but because the tunnels scared him. They appeared so black beneath the brilliant surface he sometimes imagined that they were just painted on, and he always wondered what terrible creatures might live there.