BIG SOUTHERN CHAPTER 92

MARCH 2013

DAVID

He has packed the truck with his belongings just after dusk, and as if on cue the sky starts to shed a white, dry flaky skin. One not much more dense than hoarfrost. You might confuse the light material by considering it delicate, but he remembers a layer of it, so thin you could see through it to the wheat it covered, shearing the auger pins—hard water, even as hoarfrost, is rock, after all.

The quietude still grabs him, he knows he'll miss that as much as anything, knows his respiration rate will change when he returns to so-called civilization, with his breaths shortening, his muscles tensing slightly, only noticeable again should he ever return—when their absence reveals their earlier presence. Which he doesn't expect will happen.

Shovel in hand, he walks to the grave site and begins digging. The uppermost layer resists slightly where plant debris remains mixed in the soil. The shovel's blade, not being the sharpest, pushes rather than cutting. He concentrates on one area, going deep rather than spreading across a wide area, just in case he started in the wrong spot. But when he gets two feet down he strikes the chest.

He works each way from the first strike until he finds the corners. Once the outline comes clear, he straightens his cut, then works quickly on the center, remaining portion of soil.

He listens for traffic, less excited and less nervous than months ago when he was anticipating discovery—he'd been a virgin imagining sex, that first touch yielding surplus sensation, now he is an experienced lover searching for lost intensity. He hears nothing, the quiet remains, save for the clang of his shovel on small gravel and the heaving of his lungs, and soon he gets to his knees, brushes leftover soil aside. He lies down aside the hole, tired, his breath belabored.

He hasn't looked forward to opening the chest, not for some time, not since he decided what to do. He hasn't yet healed from the stymieing face-to-face encounter with death, but treats it like the task it is: sometimes it takes less effort to do than to think. Deprive it of drama and it is just a fact.

He gets up, pries at the lid. It creaks open, has suffered no damage in the prior months, and when his headlamp hits the skeleton it appears the same as before, bothers him not at all. You can get used to anything. He reaches into his pocket, takes the small box with papers and replaces it approximately where it had been. He has added his own note to Henry's and Uriah's—"Ditto," he wrote, along with his initials and the date.

Before he stands to start burying the chest, he can't resist opening a corner bag again. When he lifts it, it shreds, and rather than completely unwrap the contents he shines the light upon what the tear reveals. Gold, for sure, though darker than he expected, the oxygen in the soil mixing to change its color. With his teeth he pulls a glove off, scratches the surface with a fingernail—softer than he'd imagined—to reveal a brightness he immediately understands is a lure for not just the simple-minded but the wishful. It's enough for him just to see it, there is no need to have it, and he returns the bag to its corner.

It doesn't take long to fill the hole and smooth it, the snow not as heavy as the prior fall, the flakes smaller by far and more numerous, the quiet holding steady. Later, in the spring, someone may notice the ground having been disturbed, but likely, given the thousands of acres the renter has, any observer will just dismiss the differences, thinking of work needing to be done. Any laborer will be on his phone and letting the tractor drive itself. If not on the phone, his attention will be elsewhere, on the next task, on an evening with his wife or girlfriend or buddies, though hopefully not on a past mired in regret. That would be David.

Done, he lays the shovel against the deck's step railings before he goes into the trailer. He grabs the survey map of Tilden, spread out on the table, and crumples it into a ball, then wads it further until the sheet of paper fits into his coat pocket. He places the note he wrote for Doyle, his notice of resignation, in the survey's stead, and while he knows it's not the appropriate way to quit he just wants to be gone, doesn't want to haggle about staying, doesn't want to wrestle regarding a decision already made. He understands leaving, understands being left, and knows the clean break is the simplest, much like pulling a band-aid from a cut.

He considered sending Kali a note, but where would he send it without creating drama, who would he leave it with without instigating a swirl of speculation, be it from a family member or the messenger. Some things just need to be left alone. And what would he say? He still doesn't know what to say, doesn't know if there's anything that could be said. Once scarred, no place or thing really heals, the mark upon it as good as a tattoo signifying a past mistake. The only real end to a thing is the one you make yourself. You don't hit the ball into someone else's court and not expect it to be hit back. Just walk away. Done. But, he admits, he remembers her address, can't get it out of his head, having seen it on all those envelopes he threw away on the way home from the Post Office.

As he drives, his headlights smack hundreds of snowflakes each second, their paths changing so they look like they are coming at him at one moment, moving away at the next, going sideways at yet another. He tries the dimmer to no avail, just as he expected and yet still he tries. He decides to drive slower and allow his perspective to shift with the changing wind direction. Back and forth, here then there.

Forty years ago, not everyone's yard possessed a light to illuminate its possessions and territory as yards do now. He cannot imagine an area young person experiencing life as he did—the darkness now gone, a phone always nearby, if you ran off the road in the winter there would be no risk of freezing to death—as there was back then. And David's sense of possessing the whole world within sight, that would be gone, too, for just as you can reach out now on the Internet throughout the entire world, the entire world can reach you here, too. No doubt a sense of aloneness pervades that imaginary youth, just a different one he can never access—just as the imagined youth cannot access his earlier solitude. From one perspective, this is a comfort, from another perspective a tragedy, and from yet one more it is a wonder.

His right hand goes to his pocket where the survey map fits snug and crumpled. He squeezes it, rolls it, its new edges a small irritant of sensory information against his skin. Each time he wads it, its recovery state gets smaller, each time he rolls it, it softens somewhat, if imperceptibly. The action takes his attention from the road—which is getting slick now, so he reassembles his nervous tension by relocating it onto the wadded up map.

When he comes to the highway an impulse strikes him to alter his original route. He was going to drive into Blackfoot, then cut west on 26 out by Atomic City and to Arco, eventually hitting Boise and then parts west. Instead, he turns west on 39, when he gets to Springfield takes the Taber Road. Parts may be muddy or drifted but it will be passable. The road will save miles but not time. His pocket hand opens edges of the paper and reconfigure them, a little game of distraction. He was going to drop off the Pingree Depot ledger at Grace Johannson's, set it on her doorstep, but he can mail it along with a letter thanking her for the many cups of coffee she provided not just this last year but when he worked for John.

There were still numerous zigs and zags in this road back when he worked on the farm, each of them circumventing a rock pile, but the County has straightened out the wows, filled in low spots, cut high ones where needed. Taking the fun out of driving, he thinks. He is still averse to straight lines.

He eventually comes to the labor camp after crossing several intersections, and stops only because the railroad tracks and old highway form the road's endpoint. There is a trail, more like a farm road, to the new highway, a better kept road that serves thousands of Site workers, but he imagines the old highway, despite being unpaved now, is at least traversable, if considerably slower. Eventually his hand tires and he moves the paper to his other pocket and hand.

The miles go by, farmland's end appearing, pavement turning to gravel, the gravel road narrowing, rutted in some spots so badly he has to slow to first gear. As he gets to the Atomic City townsite, a sad looking place, he considers taking a left to the foot of the Big Southern. It had crossed his mind, enough times to warrant bringing along the hemlock, that it would be a good place to die.

The snowstorm is still at work and precluding a view of the Butte. The cutoff to the new highway goes north here, is just a mile long, and he takes it. Arco comes next, thirty miles off, Craters of the Moon after that and a series of small towns on the road that once preceded the interstate as the major artery west. His is no settler's mindset, he knows, but nonetheless: to the frontier and its promise! His internal voice has a Pavarotti-ish quality—he has to laugh at that.

The paper in his pocket starts to tear, he pulls it from his pocket and tries to open it with one hand but finds it impossible. He rolls down the window, tosses it out—he is typically not a litterer.

"Good-bye, Tilden," he says out loud.

"Hello, Seattle," he says silently. "Or, conversely, Coos Bay."

As if conducting a dialogue, he pauses, says out loud, "Hell, why not both."

© 2025 Ralph Thurston