Excavation

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.

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.

Half-submerged, water-marked debris littered the surface of hard red clay around the old streambed. Reed went from piece to piece, prodding the objects with a stick, pushing them out of the dirt, turning them over. He made a list of everything he found, then stacked the objects into piles for sorting. A rusted can. Gray board. White fence. Nondescript cloth. A boy’s shoe—he couldn’t tell if it had been his or not. A coat hanger. Part of his momma’s white china teakettle, the spout and one side gone. A twisted bucket. Rifle barrel. His grandfather’s mantel clock, the wood rotted away, the workings bent as if a fist had entered. Two Civil War coins. Six arrowheads. A musket ball. Part of an Indian pipe. The frames of his father’s glasses.

Starting at the south wall of the house, he began systematically sweeping the surface of each square, listing objects, descriptions, locations, and jotting down any associations that seemed pertinent.

An old mason jar, a dried-out green substance filling the bottom. When his mother canned she had always worn that yellow smock Grandma had given her. One year she had been burned down one side of her neck; she wore high collars after that. His father couldn’t tell her he was sorry it happened, so he had made fun of her stupidity instead.

Decaying horse harness near the springhouse wall. Rusted hedge shears under two old boards. Pieces of a chicken’s skeleton. Two ladder rungs. The oven door with a large dent in the center, found under part of a roof beam. His father had gotten drunk on Reed’s fourteenth birthday, and when he thought Reed was talking back (Reed hadn’t said a word to his father all night), he jumped Reed, straddling him on the kitchen floor, and beat his head against Momma’s oven. Headless hobbyhorse, a gash in one side. His baby sister played with it for hours on the back porch.

A lizard worked its way out from between stones, its crest such a vivid red Reed wondered if he were hallucinating.

Assorted beads and brass fittings. Doorknob. Odd electrical wiring. Drawer handle. Three-inch piece of picture frame. Shapeless steel. Bag full of plaster dust. A baby’s… no, a calf’s broken skull. His hands trembled as he brushed it off.

He felt strangely uncomfortable when he had to dig a little in the dirt to get a piece completely out. The wind rose, and it was as if that wind were also rising inside himself. Something was in the woods, but he knew he had no chance of discovering it.

He continued with his work. Eyes beginning to water, cold coming back. He was a mess. He was feeling guilty now, as if he were grave robbing.