Steve Tem - Excavation

Shadowy hollows under the eyes, as if his skin were retaining sleep there. He hadn’t gotten enough sleep, just when he needed it most. Dark veins in the whites of his eyes and a coppery cast to the pupils. A tight look to his lips, nostrils thinned out and protruding more than he thought they had before. Membranes beet red inside; he’d become so used to the difficulties in breathing he had stopped noticing them. A general pallor to the skin.

He looked very, very ill. It frightened him to look.

So he decided not to look anymore.

The phone was ringing downstairs. Once… three times… then it stopped.

Reed could hear his uncle moving to the foot of the stairs. “Reed… it’s your wife on the phone.”

Reed looked at himself in the mirror. He was so pale, he hardly recognized himself. His throat convulsed, and he was afraid he’d throw up then and there, and not be able to stop. “Tell her I’m not here right now.”

“But, Reed…”

“I’m not here, Ben!” Then Ben went away. Reed listened hard, and he could just barely hear the phone being returned to its cradle. A click. He closed his eyes, his body suddenly weaving.

Reed spent several hours driving around before heading out to the homesite to begin excavating the stairwell. He just couldn’t face it yet; maybe Ben was getting to him. Maybe he didn’t really know what he was getting into.

He wondered what Carol and the kids were doing right now. He wondered what she was telling Alicia. She might lie to Michael, but somehow Reed knew that Michael would see through the lie. He thought of his son: pale white skin and dark black hair. Piercing, burning eyes. So much like Reed. He always looked slightly feverish. Too intense for comfort.

He had badly wanted to talk to her. But he knew he couldn’t. Not now, maybe not ever. The sense of loss sneaked up on him, and threatened to overwhelm him. He hadn’t realized it before, but that sense of loss had been waiting for him ever since he arrived in Simpson Creeks.

He passed Charlie on the road, walking in the direction of the Nole mine. Reed honked and waved, but Charlie gave no sign that he’d even heard him. Later Reed saw Mr. Emmanuel climbing the hillside behind the mine and wondered why the man wasn’t at work.

He didn’t see Inez Pierce, who was already a good mile into the thickest section of the forest covering the Big Andy Mountain.

When Inez awoke that morning the sun wasn’t up yet, but it cast a silver glow on the trees outside from its hiding place beneath the horizon. She lay in bed for some time, staring at the trees, watching the ghostly illumination come into them, annoyed that she was awake and that daylight hadn’t yet come. The dim glow in the trees made the darkness in their boughs seem somehow more terrible, and she saw faces there: teeth and eyes, a knob on a branch becoming a dark nose damp with perspiration. She pulled herself out of bed, dressed, and climbed up to the attic. She had planned to clean it today anyway… might as well get an early start.

The bulb produced a yellow light that filled much of the room, so that the scene looked very much like a brittle, sepia-tinted photograph. At any moment she expected the walls to crumble, the trunks and discarded furniture and boxes of memorabilia to curl into fragile two-dimensionality. Cobwebs hung like decaying swatches of hair from exposed beams and broken roof sheathing. There was an oppressive mustiness in the air, and she wondered if maybe the roof had been leaking every rainy season, if the things stored in the attic had been soaked and then dried so thoroughly they began to break apart, only to be thoroughly wet again the next rainy spell. It was a terrible smell… as if the flood waters had indeed reached her house that day, leaving something damp and dead here when they finally receded.

She had no idea what had possessed her to clean the attic today, of all times, with everything going on around town, people dying and marriages like the Parkeys’ falling apart, and Doris still gallivanting around. Inez wasn’t even sure if Doris knew about her husband’s death—now there was a pleasant thought.

It was a long time since she’d been up here, maybe five years. Longer than that. The last time she had put something away here… why, it had been the day she put away all of Adam’s old letters to her. Adam had been one of her father’s hired hands—they’d dated, and she even thought she loved him. But he was from Four Corners and he eventually went back, and from there to the Navy. The letters stopped after a while. He’d always promised he’d come back someday and court her, see what might happen between them, but he never had. That had been… why, it couldn’t be … almost twenty years. She hadn’t been courted since then, except by her father’s illness, then by her brother’s craziness. They had taken all her time, all her memories.

She looked around at the dusty wooden cave crowded with objects. She hadn’t even had the relics of a life of her own to add to these… in twenty years. Not since Adam. It seemed impossible. It seemed that burglars had broken into her home and taken everything.

She sank slowly onto a three-legged stool and stared at the leather-bound trunk near the middle of the room. She could vaguely remember lifting the lid that day, dumping his letters helter-skelter, dropping the lid and returning to her room. Then sleeping for almost three days.

She stood and leaned over the trunk. With the corner of her apron she wiped the thick dust from the lid and stared at the initials W.P. It had been her father’s trunk, passed down to her. She slid her fingertips beneath the lip and lifted.

White and yellow wings fluttered out, raising the dust. She reached out to pluck one from the air, and it fell apart in her fingertips. She cried out and tried desperately to gather them all to her before they crumbled, but her efforts only damaged them further.

Letters from Adam like white ash over her apron, like scrapings from a crematorium. She could see the large brown watermark on the underside of the trunk lid, and the narrow tendrils of stain where the water had crept farther, seeking his letters, corrupting them, destroying her memory of him. Had he brown hair, black? She couldn’t even remember his face.

But there were more things under the broken letters, a past the water hadn’t yet reached.

She lifted the items gingerly, one at a time, placing each in its appropriate pile around her knees as she sorted them. A pocket prayer from her grandmother. A book of love poems from her father—who had given the chest to her, joking at the time that it was to be her “hopeless chest.” Once he got sick, and watched her grow old caring for him, he never made that little joke again.

Drama programs from school, pressed flowers, a silly rhyme a little boy wrote her in grade school. A medical textbook. It was an old one her uncle had and she’d begged him for it because she wanted to be a doctor someday. She’d been twelve at the time. She’d completely forgotten she’d ever wanted to be something like that. More than everybody’s nursemaid. More than what she’d finally become. She was suddenly angry, and went through the trunk more rapidly, no longer bothering to arrange the items in her careful piles. Wooden-faced doll. Marbles. The first bottle of perfume she’d ever owned—most of it still there because she’d been so conservative with it, afraid it would run out too soon. Old copies of Argosy and Life magazine. A ticket to the theater in Four Corners, her first—something called Freaks, about all these terribly deformed people. She could hardly stand to watch, and they’d pulled the picture after two days. But she’d never forget that movie.