All material © 2025 Ralph Thurston
LATE NOVEMBER 2012
DAVID
With every shovel thrust, air rebounds inside the buried boxlike framework, creates a small explosion. Wood. A chest, crudely built. That's David's guess, the darkness reluctant to reveal, even with the headlamp's aid, exact textures, precise dimensions, evidence any more telling than a vague impression.
The hole he's dug is just two feet deep to the chest's top. That is deep enough to have evaded farm equipment's reach given that, while on its way to rotten, the chest hasn't been broken to shambles. David believes that three decades ago a ripper's shanks tore through the caliche layer above the chest. Struck it. He heard the thumps he was driving the tractor pulling that ripper.
Less inquisitive then, well into the far flung drone of a monotonous farm day's work, he didn't stop to investigate. But he wondered. Speculated. Thoughts come in, thoughts go out, in the hours aboard a tractor, offsetting the back and forth that defines tillage but making their own repetition: first, it's buried treasure! then, it's nothing, it's junk. Soon enough, that little war in the mind passed away, broken by the tractor engine's forceful, unchanging roar.
Since, at random moments, he's wondered again about the ripper's strike. Something other than rock lay beneath the soil. The notion lit him momentarily, but the burst lasted but a millisecond, logic setting in. Statistical likelihood denied anything of worth was there.
Excitement leading to disappointment, a Christmas microcosm—unfettered anticipation dwindling dispiritedly, the length and breadth of hope corresponding to the strength of the dismay that followed. But there is hope now. His adrenaline flows. His headlamp sprays across the buried chest, just a few granules of soil left atop it, his shovel having scraped off the rest. In this late Thanksgiving chill the soil will be frozen again by morning, the winter's first layer of snow upon it, heavy flakes already falling. "Like ducks dropping in," his father would have said, appraising them. His mother may have likened them to the lost American parachutist dropping into Weimar as World War Two was coming to a close.
David wedges the shovel blade under the lid and pries. Nothing gives though there are shifting sounds. He repeats the process at the chest's other end, using the handle as a lever. Gently, not too much force. He doesn't want to break the shovel handle or the chest.
Henry Herr's map, left in David's father's care nearly forty years ago along with boxes of Henry's other papers, was right, there is something here. David will soon see if it's what Henry suggested it was. Henry's map and a metal detector—something Henry lacked—made the find easy earlier this summer. Much harder was the secretive wait to uncover it—drawn out, an ebb and flow of eagerness and renunciation.
He had waited for the spuds to cover the rows. Eyed the spot dozens of times a day, obsessive, but unable to walk out the hundred feet lest he leave a trail to invite speculation. After he located the spot, he still couldn't dig without being seen. So he had waited for the spuds to be harvested, could then go into the trammeled field untraced, equipment wheel tracks obscuring his path. Even then, a pit would be noticed. Then he had waited for the field to be disked, to be plowed, had still his tracks would be evident. Then he'd waited until the hunters and fishermen ceased their annual invasion, their appearance unpredictable but sudden, their brashness equivalent to a platoon's sweeping through just-conquered territory. He had waited for the sprinkler pipes to be retrieved for the winter, taken out of the way to make tilling and planting easier the next spring. Waited for the mainline to be drained, so farm laborers would have no more reason to be in the area. Finally, he had waited for the cold to come, solidify the earth enough to bear his weight without yielding an obvious track, but not stiffening it so much that he couldn't dig. This snowstorm was fortuitous, so long as it continued and he worked with alacrity. It would cover his footprints and erase evidence of his excavation.
He moves around the chest, continues to pry in different places, a slow, gentle loosening required to break a seal a hundred and fifty years old, if Henry was right. It was like saving the Christmas wrapping paper, working the tape off to avoid tears while wanting to rip it off to reveal the prize. The top finally gives. The headlamp's erratic movement reveals little, though, so he stills his jittery excitement to focus its light. What he sees makes him drop the lid and recoil.
Bones. A skeleton.
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