BIG SOUTHERN CHAPTER SEVENTEEN (INTERLUDE)

NOVEMBER 2012

DAVID

David's impulse, a child's or an animal's, is to run. But logic emerges, stifles his initial instinct. He considers the context, weighs the options. There are two: unravel the mystery or leave. He knows himself too well to do the latter. He would change his mind later and return. "Finish the job" says the voice in his head, its source unknown. His father's? A teacher's? A coach's? An employer's? Or some stranger's from an adjoining barstool, his words periodically bobbing to the surface, permanently eddying in the whirlpool of consciousness? His heart beating hard, he breathes deeply twice. There is no danger here, he tells himself.

There is more than a skeleton here. The metal detector verified that. The list of 1860s stage robberies with unrecovered loot, which accompanied Henry's map, implied that this spot might be the site of some of it. He bends, reopens the chest, holds the lid up with one hand and scans the contents.

A coffin, for sure, but in each corner a pouch. Their placement matches his detector readings, which drifted off and on as he swept the surface. Four direct hits, corresponding to the chest's four corners, and a fifth weak one, situated midway between two of them. He pokes the nearest bag. Solid. Most certainly metal. He sees a box near the skeleton's hands, where a reading had read more weakly. The body, a child's or a small adult's, is on its left side facing southward. The chest being too short for the body to be fully prone, it rests in a semi-fetal position. At its waist, the box. He squats forward, lifts it from the skeleton's grasp. As expected, metal. But not solid.

He removes the box, rests the chest lid against the hole's side at a roughly ninety degree angle. The hinges, wired on, barely keep the lid—it is a double lid, he now sees—attached, so David works gingerly. In the box there is a plastic bag, which defies logic, protecting papers inside. He holds the bag to the lamplight, but the pages give no immediate clue as to age or nature. His fingers are too cold to open the bag or unfold papers, which may be too fragile to handle, anyway. He will look at them later. The plastic puzzles him. When did plastic bags appear in the world, surely not the 1860s.

The night has been quiet, all his own. Its exudate is reminiscent of his late teenage years when he haunted the city twenty-some miles away and the roads between it and home. At all darkened hours. And daytime, too. But the essence of the night, its silence, defied understanding as the day did not. It still possesses that timeless nature, speaks without speaking.

There are no hunters about, not even the poacher whose habit he knows. No fishermen, given it is night. The local kids who come through in the summer are fewer, too, an outdoor keg party in the bottoms less appealing in sub-freezing temperatures.

But the silence is abruptly broken, a vehicle's approach evident from at least a mile away on the gravel road. Looking up, he sees its headlights bounce off low clouds to the north. It's coming from west to east along the reservoir road.

He puts the box in his coat pocket. It just barely fits. He turns his headlamp off. The vehicle lights near the intersection a quarter mile north. The vehicle brakes, preparing for a turn either north, away, or south, toward him. When the first glimmer of light swing his way he instinctively thinks to evade it, drops into the hole and lies down. His face meets the child's skull.

His recoil envelops not flight or fight but freeze. Emotions lock him into place: an unreasonable fear of being caught in a forbidden act; repulsion to a dead body, though it must be 150 years old; and an energized urge to act, wildly, with no particular aim—the impulse to do, a familiar one he is expert at quelling. The headlights near, the rush of strangeness fades to a tolerable level, to a state of endurance—an alloy of patience and faithlessness, an erasure of possibility. One can stand anything, Schopenhauer said, so long as one doesn't imagine it as lasting forever.

The hole is deep enough to hide him. But the hump of dirt around it, to a discerning viewer, might give him away. The heavy snowfall, David hopes, will divert the driver's attention, his headlights needed to see in the thick drop of precipitation. Their relative ineffectiveness will force a heightened awareness. The driver will flip on the high beams, then the low, then the high again, trying to improve his sight but failing to do so.

David hears the distance shrinking, the road's gravel revealing the vehicle's increasing nearness. Rocks spin up against the chassis, skip against other rocks, hit a fencepost from time to time, the noise strengthening as the vehicle approaches. His heartbeat slackens, his breath becomes less shallow—though each inhalation draws in dust, brings a new disgust. His imagination suggests death rising from the body into his already damaged lungs.

A hundred yards, fifty, the engine noise announces its arrival. It's a young man's pickup by the sound of it, one that seems familiar, its muffler either broken or intentionally fashioned to announce his presence—big truck, little penis, the office secretary used to say. Though David faces downwards, he catches the headlights' penumbra, small at first then vivid. The vehicle continues on past him, he imagines to the point a quarter mile further south, where it idles momentarily, then swings back toward him. The process just experienced reverses, the headlights meager, then strong, the sound distant, then near, then a waning of both until silence and darkness regain their reign. The vehicle is gone.

He recovers his composure, stills his breathing, stills his heart, stands. Whoever is buried has been dead a long time, there is no danger here. He peers into the chest, his light back on, looks more closely. A child. Bags by the head and feet, each as big as two fists, made of cloth or leather. His eyes go to the skull, where his own head was, and short-term memory strikes, the moment just past taking over the present one. His sudden urge is again to run from the strange experience, remove himself from disgust and non-understanding. He heads homeward, across the road, before realizing he must cover his tracks.

He considers retrieving the bags, is too eager to end the moment so doesn't do so. He cannot carry them all at once, it would take too much time, he is in a hurry. He closes the chest, races to cover it before another vehicle comes. The image of the skeleton's proximity keeps returning, its inability to harm him nonetheless harming him. He levels the hole sloppily, walks swiftly toward the trailer. His footsteps crunch, compressing the fallen snow, and when he looks back he sees that the heavy flakes already partially obscure the grave.

Inside he sheds his coat, his boots, his clothes. He jumps in the shower, stays in until the water turns cold. Still he can smell the recent past, its odor unmistakable. He labels it desperation, it smells like desperation. He waits fifteen minutes for warm water and showers again. Waits and showers again. There's nothing to smell, still he smells it. The tang of an odor like that of an empty spud cellar but far, far older. An odor like a disked, dry field warmed by winter sun. He has been in that field, those fields, the wind kicking up, the Mexicans gone south, the hired harvest help gone, activity ceasing, thwarted by weather. Aloneness. Desolation. The place where things were but no longer are.

The steam fails to eradicate the smell. He scrapes his tongue against his teeth, works his lips, dry-spits, but still it is there. He needs alcohol, he thinks, but he doesn't drink. Shouldn't drink because he used to drink. Far, far too much. And it didn't help then, it won't help now.

Adrenaline, of two different streams, run out their capacities, less strong than they were but still too strong. One of fear—though why should he fear a kid in his pickup, espying nothing wrong if he saw him at all. But he starts there, with fear, always has, has always been afraid. Ready to pull over when a cop passes, even when innocent. Fearful he'd be accused of cheating on a test though he wasn't. Afraid when he left a store that someone would think him a shoplifter. The other adrenaline stream, one of revulsion, kicked in when the pickup left, when he realized where he was, in a hole, in a grave, with a dead child. It hasn't left. He suspects it won't for some time. But he knows how to wait it out.

He dries off. Cold, he climbs into bed, his thoughts churning. He sniffs the air, imagines the smell of bones. He showers again. The water soon runs chill, he towels sparingly, gets into bed again. Turns, tosses, the silence noisier than it has ever been. Little creaks in the trailer take his attention. Sounds in his skull—from touching the pillow, from moving his jaw, from blinking his eyes—take on enormity. Surrendering, he dresses, makes coffee, sits at the table and unfurls the papers he has just unearthed.

© 2025 Ralph Thurston