Doris began to feel the fire in her lower legs.
When Reed arrived at the old homeplace the next morning, he discovered he felt a bit easier about what he was trying to do. The clearing looked like the site of any typical archaeological dig now, similar to any number he had been on over the years. The grid of stakes, the clean-swept dirt, naked of weeds, the layered excavations. He could almost forget that he had once lived here, that his parents and little sister were living here when they died.
He tried to tell himself it was a job, a scientific project. Nothing more. He felt better, physically better, just thinking that way.
He had decided on a vertical-face excavation method for the site, since the various features were probably pretty well jumbled together. If he discovered anything of interest, he would stop and concentrate on exposing that single feature.
In the first square he had to use a pick to break the soil next to the trench he had dug. Apparently some dissolved mortar and cement had accumulated here in a pool several inches deep. It was hard going, and he had to proceed carefully, using the pick in short, careful strokes, since he couldn’t know what was immediately beneath this layer. For the most part, he knew, he would be using the short-handled hoe and a trowel.
He climbed down into the trench and began scraping away the layers of earth, proceeding horizontally across the first square until he had dug a shelf about six inches below the surface and another six inches wide. He stopped several inches from the stakes marking two corners of the grid, so that the stakes could remain standing as reference points. Eventually all the stakes would be left atop high mounds of earth as the excavation proceeded around them, like solitary wooden sentinels or grave markers.
He proceeded carefully in widening his shelf, occasionally finding small objects that he examined and placed in a bag attached to his waist, making a note on his log, or letting the object fall with the dirt into the trench. Pieces of his own past, or someone else’s. Most of the objects held no meaning for him: buttons, pieces of metal, other pieces off something much larger whose character he couldn’t determine from the one piece. One of the things that had always fascinated him about archaeology was the way in which such small pieces were virtually unrecognizable when separated from the whole. It was like trying to identify a person by just the nose or the eyes. Finding the other pieces to the pattern required hard, meticulous work, as well as imagination.
When his arms would no longer reach far enough across the shelf, he climbed out and stood on the shelf he had made. He began to widen it in the direction of the other two stakes marking off this first square. He found several marbles—cat’s eyes, a steelie—and wondered if they had once been his, or some other little kid’s. They went into his sack. Then an old yo-yo with an obscured painted face on the side. He’d once had one with Mickey Mouse on it, but he couldn’t remember the color. Maybe this was it.
The soil profile revealed by the trench and the initial digging was quite unusual—certainly he had never worked in land so dramatically traumatized—but consistent for all that. The top layer seemed to be a mixture of fine sands and silts and dissolved concrete, which made the surface alternately hard and soft the length of the valley. This material ran up to six inches deep in places; most of his first layer consisted of it. Below that were the slightly larger pebbles and stones the flood waters had dropped before the silt, along with the lightest objects—driftwood, small pieces of furniture, and the like—most of it half-rotted away.
Some of the amorphous lumps of wood reminded him of things—blocks, an old push toy, a cart wheel—but he really couldn’t be sure. Many of them were almost cloud-like in their shapelessness—and it was easy to find himself staring at them, trying to read them like a Rorschach of thunderheads. Animals, there, and people in distress…
Below that were the larger pieces of debris from the waste dam: pieces of coal and limestone, sandstone. The extent of the damage could be told from these stones: a layer a foot thick, they had moved down the creek like rocketing blades, shredding bridges, houses, trees, animals and people. Here and there in this layer Reed could see the tiny fragments of wood and cloth and leather carried down with their passage.
There seemed to be little flood debris in the strata below this, but it was scattered throughout these top layers. Below the layer of sharp rock fragments was the first layer of true soil, a light-colored humus, the farmland his father and grandfather before him had owned and worked. Also in this layer was a thin strip of light-colored silt, a remnant of a time when the creek overflowed its banks during a driving rainstorm when Reed had been only seven or eight years old.
And below that the dark, rich soils of his ancestors, and of the animals who had lived here before his ancestors. Dark topsoil blending into a rusty red layer of concentrated mineral compounds. Hardpan, they called it. Terribly ancient stuff. Compared to the lighter grays and sandy colors above, it appeared almost unbearably garish and alive. Reed could see only a bit of the top of it—most of it was now more than four feet below the surface—and for that he was glad for now.
He continued to strip away the first level, using his short-handled hoe to remove a quarter- to half-inch of soil at a time, occasionally scooping up a shovelful of the loose dirt and dumping it through a wood-framed screen he had built to make sure that no small artifacts or fragments were missed. Most of the objects he continued to cast aside: glass fragments, bent nails, and the like. But now and then something demanded his complete attention.
He first saw it as a faint outline in the dirt—a shadow of a small human figure, like a dream miniature or representation. But as he carefully brushed the loose dirt away, he recognized the toy figure he’d had as a child. It was an angular, hard-clay doll, though at one time, he believed, it had been a bit softer. Vaguely humanoid with its large eyes, nose, and mouth, but it had a square head.
He treated it like any other ancient clay artifact, and was unembarrassed. He cleaned it carefully with the brush, blowing off loose dirt as he went. He checked for the presence of salt, since salt in the clay would make it brittle, soaking it in a bowl of fresh water, then removing it. Then he added two drops of silver nitrate to the water. Since the water didn’t cloud, he knew no salt was present.
Then he brushed on a Celluloid-acetone solution to preserve this piece of his past. “Gee.” He’d called it that, he now remembered, “Gee,” he said.
Reed propped the small figure up on the shelf of earth and stared at it, as he remembered doing a number of times when it was on his bookshelf in the old house. The simplicity of the figure had always triggered his most elaborate fantasies: of how Gee was a younger brother Reed was sworn to protect, particularly during their lengthy explorations of the vast underground tunnels that crisscrossed Big Andy Mountain. Of how Gee was an alien from another planet, and Reed was the first person he had decided to contact; this alien had recognized the secret powers within Reed. Of how Gee was actually Reed’s secret self, shrunken and distorted, and whatever happened to Gee, happened to Reed. Gee, of course, had been buried ten years.
Joe Manors was “doing reclamation” that day, which in this case meant merely backfilling some of the areas that had been mined out with waste dirt, filling up the auger holes so that instead of a jagged mountain of useless waste you had a relatively smooth mountain of useless waste.
From his high seat on the dozer Joe could see Louie DeLong working on another ridge. Louie was sitting on top of a tanker truck, spraying a liquid containing grass seed up on one of the old waste slopes. So patches of spindly grass would take root, maybe some stunted pines. But the earth wasn’t compacted, so the banks were still unstable and the plants had a poor place to root. And with the layers turned topsy-turvy, the soil was so acidic plants would have a difficult time of it in any case.