Steve Tem - Excavation

Reed climbed as fast as he could. The little boy roared behind him.

Ben held Audra and Inez to him. He was crying. He stared after Charlie, but Charlie wasn’t even looking at him anymore. He was staring at the edge of the falls, now only a few feet away.

Charlie watched as the two figures climbed up on the roof of the Taylor house. Two almost identical figures. But it was hard to tell from this distance. He figured that one of them must be Reed, but who was the other one? Could Joe Manors have come out here trying to save the boy, too? Charlie had always liked Joe Manors; he hoped he made it out okay.

There were more immediate concerns at hand, however. He was smelling lilacs. Not just any lilacs, mind you, but Mattie’s lilacs. He knew.

Charlie looked down over the approaching edge of the falls. It looked like you could see forever, forever down, that is. Charlie chuckled to himself. But he was still smelling lilacs. The foaming water was like thousands and thousands of yards of lace. Doilies. Embroidery. His Mattie had had a hand in all of this, yes indeedy. He would recognize her handiwork anywhere.

And as he looked over the edge, right straight down, he could see her face, shining up at him out of the water. Like she was taking a bath, her face well scrubbed and glowing so pretty. Smiling at him. And smelling so strongly of lilacs.

The worst thing about people dying on you was sometimes it seemed that they hadn’t even existed, and that they’d taken part of your own past with them when they died. Practically stolen it from you, Sometimes you had to spend the entire rest of your life trying to get those pieces back. Having to face those old ghosts again and again till you got things settled between you.

Charlie hoped his death wasn’t going to give anybody that kind of trouble. He sincerely did. He wished them all well.

Those last minutes on the roof. The water was so loud, filled the air so completely, everything seemed strangely nullified, silenced, and Reed felt as if he were huddled in the quiet heart of the world.

But there was still this roaring inside his ears; the giant waterfall had slipped into his head and was raging there. He had to get Carol and the children away from this angry, insane waterfall, but where could he put them? He jerked the soggy handkerchief out of his pocket and thought about wrapping them up in that. He’d wrap them up safe and they’d be there in his pocket, warming his damp cold body, for all time. He couldn’t bear to think of them drowned, or kept from him forever.

Once as a boy he’d gotten lost in a heavy rainstorm, only a mile or maybe less from home. He’d become hysterical, convinced he was forever lost in the fury of the storm, and alarmed that he could not feel his own tears in the angry rain. His parents could not hear him above the angry rain. And the angry rain blinded him so he could not find his way.

He’d spent almost a lifetime in that rainstorm; he was in the center of that raging storm even now. All the people who had died here, all the people who had been betrayed. They wouldn’t rest. He knew; he had betrayed himself.

Reed saw his shadow in the rain, straddling the rooftop and mocking him. He thought he should jump, let himself drown, but he could not. As long as he lived there was a chance he might see Alicia and Michael and Carol again. Alicia with all the questions, Michael with the dark hair and burning gaze so like his own, Carol with the arms to hold him and make him feel part of the human race.

Animal fear escaped him as the shadow approached. He wet his pants, and felt absurdly grateful that later no one would be able to detect a urine stain on his corpse, so wet and soggy he would be. Like cotton. Like morning fog. Like a drowned rag doll.

The shadow came closer. He tensed and crouched. Reed wasn’t going to make things easy for it.

Reed leaped, and saw the toothy grin in the pale face filling the storm. Lightning flashed, and he could feel his own face lose definition…

As Charlie went over the falls, it was as if the whole world went down with him in an earthshaking explosion of water. The flood escaped from behind the trees and rapidly surrounded the old Taylor house, pulling it apart in seconds with a thousand invisible claws. The water level dropped immediately with a roaring all around Ben, Inez, and Audra, who ran as far away from the edge of the cliff as they could. Then the hollow filled up again, great waves splashing over the edge of the cliff, almost swallowing Ben’s pickup. It rocked near the edge, but stayed.

After a few more minutes the storm subsided, and the new lake grew calm. The three half-drowned former citizens of what had been Simpson Creeks looked out on a long valley filled with miles of water.

Big Andy’s become a serpent, Ben thought, and began to shake all over. Inez was tugging at him.

Floating out in the distance was a large piece of wall. And his nephew Reed was on it.

He kept thinking of it as Simpson Creeks after the flood, but that was foolish. There was no Simpson Creeks anymore. It had been absorbed, erased, drowned. A new lake nestled here, thirty miles long and almost as wide as the original river valley, winding its way tortuously through the southeast Kentucky hills, always doubling back on itself, always presenting a surprising twist, a brand new turn to the eye. It seemed strange that it was still accessible by road—the old dirt logging system. The flood had leveled off a few yards below its hard-packed, though sometimes overgrown, surface. It was as if Big Andy wanted all to see his new face.

There were bits of the old stream system here and there, reduced to tributaries feeding the enormous lake. In several places waterfalls had formed where the ground had sunk. In one spot a small waterfall emptied out directly onto the road, and the occupants of the old pickup had to grip the seats to keep from screaming when they passed under the thundering waters. He wanted to say something to soothe them, but could not.

There was surprisingly little recognizable debris around the lake—mostly bits of bark, branches, leaves, moss, floating in large masses in the water. As if even the last dregs of memory had been wiped away. Here and there the thick trunks of fallen trees. As they passed it, a large oak standing at drunken attention on the bank suddenly shuddered up its entire height, as if with delayed terror, leaned crazily over, then fell with a series of moans and creaks into the lake. Squirrels and small birds exploded from its branches and rushed for other shelter just before its ragged roots let go completely and it turned over, corpselike in the water. He watched it turn in a slow, graceful circle before drifting away from shore.

Tiny jewels of water glittered over everything: stone and leaf and even the top branches of trees. With this morning’s sunrise, for the first time he could remember, there was no fog in the valley. No fog around Big Andy at all for the sun to burn off in layers. The mountain had been already stripped naked, with nothing left to conceal.

Most of the animals stayed hidden, probably as shocked by this strange land as were the occupants of the pickup. It was as if they had been picked up and transported a thousand miles or so. Nothing looked familiar. The animals, too, must have found it difficult to adjust to the morning’s unaccustomed brilliance. The sun’s heat must seem several hours early this morning. As after many disasters, natural enemies, still in shock, seemed to have made a truce. He saw a wildcat on the bank right beside a small deer.

Periodic winds stirred the water this morning, as if the previous night’s storm were threatening to begin again. But each died fitfully, as if they were Big Andy’s stray thought, his shadowy morning dreams, after a long night awake.