Suddenly he wanted to forget about all his careful methodology, hire a bulldozer or backhoe, and strip it out as if he were mining here. Rake at it with bleeding fingers if need be. Mine his past, dump the debris out of him.
He had gotten down to topsoil in several of the squares, topsoil that made a rising curve on the soil profile. The small mound that used to be east of the house. Now he found himself going deeper, digging out the rich, dark earth.
As he went deeper, Reed discovered that the soil layering was mixed, perhaps indicating an artificial structure, the soil brought in baskets from a barrow pit. Then traces of charcoal, sharp stones in the top layers. Traces of red paint, here and there, and then Reed could tell the disturbance was oval in shape. A black layer of soil and then, as expected, the first traces of bone.
Clavicle, sternum, thorax, bits of rib. Then the skull nearby, with a partial closing of the cranial sutures. Some wearing down of the teeth. Obviously a young adult, anywhere from twenty to forty years old. But not from the flood. He’d dug into an ancient Indian burial mound.
They had lived by the mound all those years; he wondered if his father had known. No doubt he had. His father had been fascinated by burials, had always wondered what it would be like to dig into one one day, but had also been nervous about it. Grave robbing was the word for it, and Reed’s father wouldn’t have any part of that—more, Reed suspected, out of superstitious dread than any sort of reverence, although maybe there wasn’t much difference.
Strange how layers of earth and bones and memories were all mixed together here, all commingled in the earth, which did not differentiate. One becoming another, endlessly throughout time. Grave robbing. Thinking that, Reed felt the strange excitement that had led him to archaeology in the first place, and was surprised and a little alarmed that he could be feeling it here.
He looked at the falling-down matchbox of a house he’d grown up in, the barely visible second story now leaning crazily toward the woods as if pulled there. A plant drawn to the light. There was one square measured off directly in front of a second-floor window, the window of his old bedroom. He would be excavating that square, he knew, when the sun rose in the morning.
Charlie Simpson closed up early that afternoon; the men had exhausted all that could be said of recent events—Doris Parkey’s new craziness and the flooding of Willy’s sinkhole—and no one had been in to buy all day. He might have missed them during the morning; like all the others he’d gone up to examine the sinkhole, to search for clues to the water’s source, to speculate about what might happen.
“Groundwater seeping into the limestone,” one old man had said. “Go away when the heat rises.” They’d all nodded sagely, and it had sounded good at the time, but Charlie had no idea in hell what it was supposed to mean.
They’d all hiked around the slopes looking for weak spots, looking for damp areas, listening for bubbling, all acting as if they really knew what they were doing, Charlie included. Then they’d walked back to the store and sat around exchanging theories.
“Same thing made that water made Doris Parkey crazy,” Tim Colmano had said, and they’d all just looked at him. Charlie had wondered if they all felt as uncomfortable as he did when Tim said that.
Charlie had pretty much isolated himself the past few days. Suddenly there was an agitation in town, for the first time he could remember since the year following the big flood. Of course, there had always been a slight tension after the flood to mar the natural peacefulness—because of what people had done or hadn’t done at the time—but nothing like this. They were used to controlling things here; you could always send a troublemaker away until he cooled off, or the preacher could set straight a domestic quarrel.
But you couldn’t affect this kind of tension; everybody was feeling it.
He had always been an outgoing man, but he couldn’t pretend right now. All his easy talk and comfortable manner had been stripped away from him. He was all sinew and bone and blood vessels now. And fear.
A shadow appeared at the yellow-shaded front display window. Large and bulky, walking unsteadily on its hind feet. Charlie reached under the counter for his gun.
Then he saw red plaid flannel through a crack in the shade and halted his reach. There was a sudden pain in his arm that made him wince. But he kept the groan to himself. He leaned back and gritted his teeth. There was a knock at the door but he didn’t answer.
The store was dark, but a comfortable dark. He’d spent a large part of his life in this one room; some of the displays were arranged virtually as they were when his father had run the business. Old tonics and oils no one except an occasional old-timer bought anymore, but he kept them on the shelves just the same. A large scale for weighing grains, the same one his father had had, an old-fashioned coffee grinder, counters stacked high with every size of blue jeans imaginable, racks of cotton dresses, hardware of every description, a rotating, glass-fronted case full of thread spools a tourist had offered him eight hundred dollars for one time (“Then where would I show off what thread I got?” Charlie’d asked), all manner of canned goods, fresh meat in the freezer he bought regular from Tim Colmano, and all kinds of stuff on the back and top shelves he never would sell, like the silk and lace baby coffin left over from the flu epidemic of 1917.
He’d hate to lose any of it. But he might just lose it all, oh Lord… he knew he might if things took the wrong turn. Like back during the flood, after the Creeks jumped bank—only a few degrees of turn this way and that along the course of the racing waters had spelled the difference between narrow escape and death and destruction.
And some of us maybe didn’t deserve to be saved.
He’d tried twice in the past two days to talk to Reed Taylor out at his uncle’s, but apparently Reed had been spending almost all his time out at his father’s place. “Digging the past up and filling himself with the memories” was the rather poetic way Ben had described it. Charlie had broached the idea of maybe going up to see Reed there, but Ben had emphasized that the boy had wanted to be alone. Probably thinking of all we didn’t do for his family, Charlie thought.
He was working himself into some kind of mood, he realized. But he couldn’t seem to help it. Before, he’d always had Buck to cheer him up when he got down about something, just being with the old dog, seeing somebody with a bigger hound-dog look than he could ever manage.
He wasn’t sure what he would say to Reed if he talked to him anyway. Probably nothing.
Oh, he’d rehearsed it enough times… hundreds of times over the past ten years. A speech for the friends and relatives of the dead. Not to obtain their forgiveness, but at least so maybe they could understand a little about why the town had done so little before, and after, the flood. When there were wrongs to be set straight, dead to repay. Why the Creeks had never changed.
He’d always been afraid somebody like Reed Taylor would ask him that question point-blank someday: “Why didn’t you people change? Why didn’t you get off your asses and get Nole coal?” He wanted to be able to come up with something more than “We were afraid,” but that seemed increasingly unlikely. They’d been scared to death of losing everything, all of them.
The town had been an accomplice to what the mine had done in the first place: survivors, victims, Charlie and Ben and Amos Nickles and Inez, Reed’s parents, all of them. They’d known for years that the waste dam was unsafe, but had stopped at the mildest sort of complaints. Because the Nole Company had their jobs, and kept the town alive with its money. People figured if the Nole Company pulled out there wouldn’t be any Simpson Creeks anymore. The lies had been simple ones: lawyers had ignored small aspects of the cases and neglected to do adequate research, merchants had rationalized the shoddy materials they sold, laborers had told themselves that the company bosses knew best, husbands had reassured wives that at least there was still food on the table, politicians made deals “for the good of the community,” local regulators figured the statutes discriminated against an important source of local income—but the accumulation had meant one enormous, dangerous falsehood.