BIG SOUTHERN CHAPTER 80

DAVID

David rented the metal detector at the first of the week, tried it out down at the old junkyard to see how effective it was. Like most tools, it seemed self-explanatory but like most tools, in his hands, expressed mostly mystery. There are adjustments to make, according to instructions, and you have to understand the noises the detector makes to discern what it's sensing—or if it's sensing anything at all.

He gave up a couple times but returned to the task, eventually worked out his lack of understanding by uncovering first a tin can at a shallow level and then an old washing machine deeper down. The County, after the local paper exposed the practice of random dumping in the late sixties, had bulldozed the entire acreage without much consideration other than just wanting the problem to go away, be out of sight.

He feels prepared for a trek across the road, and as soon as the pipe mover has set up the four lines into their irrigation mode, he'll walk down the spud rows. They've not fully filled with foliage, the measure of a good crop on July 4th, but have enough vine and leaf to hide his footprints. The ground he'll be walking on was irrigated a couple days ago, is still moist but not so wet that he will sink and leave a muddy trail. He has the distances figured out that tell him which rows to walk down and approximately how far.

When the laborer's pickup leaves and no noises save the sprinklers' tick-ticking and the singing of summer infiltrate the atmosphere he takes the detector down the selected row. 39, 40, 41 paces, roughly a hundred feet from the fence, a good place to start. He sets a flag in the soil to mark his place, flips a switch to turn the detector on, slowly sweeps the head back and forth—not too fast, he has learned. He goes fifty feet, sets another flag, turns back and sweeps again, this time making a wider swath that includes the crests of the rows. The detector doesn't respond.

Flag one row over, repeat the process, no detector alert. Again, same result. On the fifth row, a response at thirty feet. He moves the detector back and forth, isolates the place it suggests metal lies. Out of flags, he sets his hat down to mark the spot, continues, on. Another hit. His long sleeved shirt goes down to mark the area. The rest of the row, nothing.

He works more rows until he's satisfied. He has found five metal hits that form an area roughly four foot by three. All the space outside of that rectangle yield no detector response.

Now he has to work fast if he is to find out what lies beneath the ground. He runs back to the trailer and grabs a shovel, but before he can return he hears a pickup coming on the pavement to the north. It hits the gravel road that comes down to the museum and McTucker. He hurries out to the flags and pulls them, walks his way back by the time the pickup passes by, the driver waving like an out-of-towner rather than presenting the single, one-index-finger lift and head bob of a local. The stranger won't consider David's act suspicious or even of a curious nature, but he can't risk digging just right now. He knows the distance, knows which row, and makes a mark at the row's end with his boot, then paces the distance to a fencepost close to the row. All of the posts have a white stripe at the top and are otherwise green, so he sets a flag inside the fenceline against the identifying post, rips the orange flag off to leave just the wire. No one will think anything of it at all if they even notice.

Success. It always feels good to confirm a thought—Henry's map and the metal detector reveal something, and David wavers between the excitement of it being riches and the projected disappointment of it being buried junk.

© 2025 Ralph Thurston