Anything washed out of his old home might be scattered between the house, the springhouse wall, and the cliff.
Reed thought at first there was a man crawling up around the top of the cliff. But the figure was too big, too dark to be a man. He squinted: the figure was going back into the trees at the top. He couldn’t quite make it out, but he knew it was some kind of large animal, perhaps a moose. Or a bear. It was cold down in the hollow, he suddenly realized; fall was coming on. He should have brought a warmer jacket.
He was much calmer than he’d expected to be about returning to this place of his childhood. This bad place, like the bad places he’d read about in books: haunted castles, cursed sections of land, bewitched streams. He knew that good things had happened here, too; there had been happy times, but it was hard to remember them specifically. It was the beatings, the rages, that he remembered.
Stop it. Stop it. His parents had died here. His sister. His chest seemed filled with water pushing on his ribs.
Much of the land here was unrecognizable; the flood had completely changed the contours of the valley floor. And the house was so weathered that it looked like a different house. The old homesite appeared disturbingly like a landscape transformed by a bad dream—vaguely similar to its model, and yet frighteningly different at the same time. It was as if the flood were a bad dream—and now he was seeing the results of its transformations.
“Things change, boy!” His father had shouted that more than once, angry at Reed when he was sad because an animal had died, or when he had been disappointed. His father said it after breaking a promise. He said it when times were hard. His father put more passion into that one short sentence than Reed had heard him put into anything. As if the phrase summed up all of his father’s philosophy about things.
He once saw his father, drunk, fighting someone up in the woods behind their house. Calling the man “daddy,” but Reed hadn’t been able to see who it was. And at that point Reed’s grandfather had been dead five years.
Reed often wondered what his father had been like as a child, if he had changed drastically over the years, or if the man’s habits and disposition merely set with age. Sometimes, when he spoke—however briefly—about his own parents, he did so with such a wistful note in his voice it had caught Reed’s full attention. He often wondered about his grandparents, but his father never said anything very specific about them.
His grandfather had died when Reed was just a boy. A stony-faced man, who never talked. Story was he’d been married at least three times. The story also said that he might have murdered his first two wives. It had been hard for Reed to picture that small, wrinkled old man as a murderer. Especially a young one. It was hard to picture him caring that much.
What was his father afraid of? What made him so angry? Reed knew then he was going to have to have a long talk with his Uncle Ben.
He had decided back in Denver to handle the excavation of his old homeplace just as he would any other archaeological dig—marking off a grid of squares and taking precise measurements, making careful notes as to the exact position of every relic he found. That always enabled him to create some sort of visualization of the original state of the site, let him know something about the way the people lived. In this case, it might let him know what his family had been doing the night they all died.
He would recreate the flood.
Audra was serving coffee to Charlie Simpson and Bill Kramer when Jake burst in, slamming the door back against the wall so hard she could hear the hinges creak and the wood split.
“Dammit, Charlie! We gotta do something about this Reed Taylor!”
“Now, why is that?” Charlie looked over his coffee cup at her brother-in-law, as calm as she’d ever seen him.
“He was starin’ in at my wife last night, and now he’s up that hollow messin’ round his daddy’s place.”
“Well, Jake, I find it real hard to believe he’d be lookin’ in on Doris…” Audra blushed, almost grinning at the offhand way Charlie said it. “…and he does have a right to go up to that farm, and any of the land around it. It’s his now, you know.”
“Why’s all this stuff happenin’ just as he decides to come back to the Creeks? Tell me that?”
“Why’s that bear down here where there ain’t been bears in ages? I don’t know, Jake. Now just let me finish my coffee in peace.”
Jake spat on the floor. Audra opened her mouth to protest when he opened up the cash drawer, pulled out some bills, and started to leave. At the last minute he turned around.
“I’m auditing you tomorrow night, Audra. Make sure it’s all in order for me.”
Audra nodded, thinking maybe she should get to know Reed Taylor. Anybody Jake took such a dislike to couldn’t be half-bad.
Out of his pack Reed pulled compass and level, twenty-six two-foot stakes, tape measure, camera, short-handled hoe, Celluloid-acetone solution, a pointed shovel he’d bought at Charlie Simpson’s store, small brushes and picks, and several sizes of trowels. He spent a couple of hours staking out a baseline aligned north/south that ran from the springhouse foundations to the corner of the hollow where the house had been pushed by the flood waters, the line passing through the old location of the house. Working from the baseline east and west, he created perfect six-foot squares using the rest of his stakes.
Then he began a trench along the baseline, hoping that would give him some indication as to the depth of mud and debris covering the original ground horizon here. Happily, the soil was still loose, the digging relatively easy.
Reed knew he’d never been particularly concerned about the plight of the Appalachians when he’d left home. He’d been young at the time, and anxious to make a new life for himself. He didn’t even want to think about these hills. He had spent so much energy divorcing himself from this area of the country and its ways that it was difficult to change directions. And he was beginning to feel guilty about that.
What the mining companies were doing was wrong. The long deeds that took all the mineral rights beneath a piece of property for mere pennies—there was no justifying them. Then the companies could completely undermine the property, let the house and farmlands slide down the hill, and there was nothing the landowner could do. The birthrights for generations had been sold right from under the Appalachians’ feet.
And lives. The lives of entire families.
Reed suddenly felt cold. He was compelled to look around him. The shadows seemed suddenly darker somehow, and the black area beneath one large tree appeared to shift slightly to the right. To the left. A breathing there, as if the darkness had suddenly exhaled.
Two eyes opened in the blackness. He imagined he could smell dead meat in the animal’s mouth. He had never felt so self-conscious, so watched.
Reed suddenly knew the animal would not leave him alone, and knew a despair he had not known since childhood.
Shadows were growing long. Reed stared at the point where he had thought the bear to be. But nothing was there. Perhaps he had imagined it… most likely he had imagined it.
With the ground divided into squares, all that was left here was to make a surface sweep through the area, picking up and cataloging material that was easily retrieved. Much of it wouldn’t have belonged to his family anyway—it had been swept down from farther up the valley. He wanted to get it all out of the way so he could begin the real work in the morning.