Mound

April, 1997

The old man brushed the crumbling soil off his hands on his old jeans, sunbleached and soft from years of outdoor work. He stood slowly, and grazed his foot over the lump of dirt to smooth it down. He wiped his nose on his sleeve, shivering as the sweat dried cold on his armpits and back. The sky was a steely blue, and he could already hear the steady hammering from five miles south.

"Don't those people sleep?" Before two years ago, he never heard the construction, but they encroached on his small plot more and more every year. He picked black soil from under a battered grey nail, instead shoving the ageless dirt and grease further toward the cuticle, to slowly soften and split his nails open. As he stared at his work, a light snowfall started to spot the grey earth and settle in his hair. He turned from the mound exhausted and started to head down the hill. He felt he could sense something squirming from within the hole in the earth, as if to fight its way to the surface, could almost hear it calling to him in apology.

Something seemed to thump at the walls of his heart to be let out, to reconcile with him. He squeezed his eyes shut tight and rubbed his face to clear his mind. "Coffee. . ." he said. He hadn't slept all night, having left his small cabin at about eleven the night before to head out here, and knew now that his sleep-deprived emotions were getting the best of him. He didn't mind being tired, or the tightening fatigue nagging at his limbs and chest. He felt an unsettling hollow feeling, which deepened his sadness and made him wish even harder for some sort of relief.

"Coffee. . ." he changed his path and headed for town. . .

"You sure you don't want sumpin' to eat? You look kinda pale."

"No, thank you, just coffee." He sat in the shadowy booth, grey winter light draped over the scuffed wood tabletop. Snow feel thickly outside, muzzling the little diner in on itself, and he was thankful for a warm place to be. He sat and stared out the window, as a gentle swung "I'll be home for Christmas" fumed from the tarnished juke in the corner. Cars poked by in the haze of falling snow, and someone's unwashed kid pegged the back windshield with a snowball. His laughter seemed detached from him somehow, distant and shallow like the old man's thoughts. He was far away when the waitress brought his cup. "Awful early for you to be on the town, innit?" she attempted conversation.

"A little." was all he could manage, and she quickly turned away, feeling foolish for having waited for his answer. The winter light shed immense rounded clarity on anything in its path, and as the cream poured into his coffee, the old man watched it twist and mingle into a lazy whirlpool. The reaching fingers of brown reminded him of digging, of pulling rocks from the deep hole, his arms blackened by soil in the thick night. He had worked quickly, efficiently, the years of tearing and treating the land bringing a steady confidence to his gestures. Sitting in the dense heated air of the coffee shop, he couldn't even conceive of himself as the same person as the one who dug that hole, who dragged the dirt back over the pile, vision smudged with tears. Right now he just felt so tired and empty, the bitter coffee stinging his heart instead of kissing it. He hadn't had coffee in twenty years, and as it scalded his throat and soured between his teeth, he couldn't imagine why he had wanted it now. He finished the cup anyway, and felt the weight of its influence on his tired mind. Whatever coherent thoughts he had been nurturing fell victim to the scattering wind of the caffeine. It made him tense, and he rose to leave. He left and didn't pay.

He felt cheated. The cold wind blew at his face, but he only felt it in the corners of his eyes, his face hardened by the ages. As he walked, he surveyed the narrow paths of town like they were his own. Everything bleached a cottony grey from the snowfall, he remembered how it looked when he came here as a younger man. Smaller, more accepting of a stranger with a distant look, now everyone stood in spiteful resignation as cars crowded the tiny streets. The old man himself now greeted the influx with the same distaste as the others who had greeted him when he arrived, retreating into the cool solace of the country to start a new life. At the time, tiny farms like his were common and healthy with local business. Over the years, many had sold to contractors or land developers, and now the old man's farm was a rare, popular commodity. In the summer, tourists would skulk past the rows of corn and lettuce, taking pictures of the gray naked structure that was his tiny house, gasping and ohhing and pointing at the quaint relic, as the old man collected soil samples in test tubes to analyze in his tiny kitchen-sink lab. He was constantly complimented on the vitality of his crops, and asked for advice from the frustrated few who still depended on the land for their livelihood. "It's all science," he would respond to their allegations of his almost supernatural command over the soil. The old man credited his past career for his talent for growing, a mindful of biochemistry the unshifting background of his life. But he stepped out of a tenureship, a fellowship, and hard-won federal research grants, and never explained it to anyone when he bought the farm. His colleagues had joked the clich=E9 with him, but he simply turned his back and walked out. He balked at his successes as a farmer, wondering why he could not nurture himself like he did his precious plants. But he had tried. . .

Halfway back to his little house, the weight of his exhaustion bore down on him, and he rested under a snow-laced oak. The snow fell thickly and the wind was cold, stinging his eyes and darting inside his coat. He pictured the layers of snow blanketing the little mound, burying its icy charge further under the earth, and silently thanked nature for the gesture. Still there was the emptiness. He was tired. He would feel better after he slept, and had put a little distance between himself and the frenetic night. He dug his hands deep into the pockets of his coat, and felt the dirt that had settled there from the mound. "I can't get rid of it" he mused to himself as the dirt flaked out from between his fingers and into the snow. He turned and continued for home.

The snow was high around the old man's waist when he realized he was lost. Having been so preoccupied with his exhaustion while he trudged in a slump, concentrating on the two feet in front of him, he now looked up to see nothing he recognized. The naked spines of branches scraped at the muted noontime sky in all directions, there being no sight of any man-made structure at all. He turned back on his steps, the weight of his travels bearing heavily on his knees and spirit, and stopped slowly when he noticed how the wind had covered over his tracks. He gazed about him, his old coat heavy and damp on his slumped shoulders, and set off on a tangent over a small hill. Forging up the difficult slope, the rhythm of his feet and the slurred popping of the snow brought back the inky black, the sliver of moon his only guide as he set off from his house to cast out the mound, his hands heavy with tools. He tasted the soil, the tears, and collapsed in the soil, the cold teeth awakening him from his dream. His head shuddered with a rush of awareness as he gazed down at the concentric tracks of his own footprints, tread deep into a pitted snowy groove, circling and circling around the knoll where he now lay in a shivering heap, circling the mound.

"This him?"

"I dunno. I never met the guy. Just heard about him from folks in town."

"Well, the description checks out, though he doesn't have any ID."

Deputy Sherriff Chance brushed the wet soil from his standard issue slacks, standing up and gazing around at the budding trees.

"Jimmy pretty freaked out when he talked to you?"

"Yeah, pretty much, " Officer Shanke muttered. "Was just out here with his cat when he came across him. He ain't seen nothin' like this before."

"Me neither." Shanke pulled another box from the hole. "What is all this crap?"

"I dunno. Looks like junk to me. Garbage."

"Maybe this guy doesn't have a sticker for the transit station."

The Sherriff chuckled. "Well, this ain't even his land. His plot ends about half a mile that way." He finished his coffee and threw the empty cup on the heap. He bent down and picked up a small doll, turned it over, threw it down again. "I don't get it."

"Yeah." Shanke got up, being careful not to disturb the body.

"Well, we better get the coroner out here. I an't touchin' him."

The two men started the slow trek back to their squad car, a quarter mile back down the hill, the Sherriff holding the plastic bag which held the tarnished kitchen knife.

Later, the coroner and his assistant would lift the old man from the hole, forcing a photograph out of his stiff grey claw. The coroner would pause at the photo, examining the youthful smile of a handsome, intelligent-looking man standing proudly beside who was surely his young beaming wife, waving from the steps of a stately arched building, tendrils of ivy masking the sun-beaten brick. The man wore a new suit, she a floral print, and their hands held each others' in a tight, exhuberant clench. The coroner would drop the photo blankly, as it billowed down to rest beside the soiled white lace of a wedding dress, half submerged in the rocky soil .