Lyla followed me outside. Scarface sat erect next to his latest hole, as if expecting a bone. I said, “Good boy. You can retire. Go chase a car if you want.”
After that I dug up ten thousand advertising yardsticks wrapped in a conglomeration of plastic and wax to prevent termites, and understood that my father had requested them at every hardware, appliance, and home-furnishing store, every car dealership, hospital, and sporting goods outlet in a three-state area, that he had foreseen the demise of a metric-converted America, that he’d journeyed to building supply conventions and extravaganzas in Charlotte, Atlanta, Columbia, and Asheville.
After Lyla clinked into a giant hole full of ashtrays, International House of Pancake syrup containers, and old automobile hubcaps and car lighters, she said, “It’s like a yard sale for the dead in Hell, Mendal.”
I couldn’t respond. I myself had come across a stash of fishing lures, railroad spikes, and old oilcans. When I unearthed mounds of both clear and green telephone-pole insulators, I tried not to undergo flashbacks of my father waking me up early weekend mornings to walk the roadsides of Forty-Five armed with burlap bags in search of such treasures.
I lined those insulators up all the way to the back door twice, to make a sidewalk for Lyla and me to follow. In another hole I found a group of metal church signs, Lion’s Club signs, Rotary Club signs, Shriners signs, and town-limit signs. My wife found six lockers filled with stolen first-edition books. I uncovered the bones of my boyhood dogs, Peewot and Gypsy, strays that had shown up, received attention, and never chased cars to their deaths. Or at least the bones looked big enough to be dog bones and too small to be the mother who supposedly ran away in the early 1960s.
All in all, Lyla and I dug up an old john boat, two airplane propellers, a section of the Forty-Five High School football stands, twenty-two old oak school desks with ink-well holders, enough car bumpers to refield a demolition derby, enough restaurant salt shakers to kill all the slugs in the Southeast, enough free-pour sugar containers to sweeten Republicans into understanding the plight of unemployed workers in need of health insurance. I thought it might be good either to rent out a Quonset hut somewhere or start cataloging these things for sale on an Internet auction site. There was a filled hole of unopened Billy Beer cans and rotary telephones. Another hole held nothing but rubber Quikoin change purses made in Akron, silver church-key can openers, and wall calendars—all advertising giveaways—everything wrapped in plastic garbage bags. Lyla accidentally scooped out what must’ve been a refuse heap from a hundred years earlier, when an antebellum house had perhaps stood nearby in the middle of something like two thousand acres of cotton, corn, beans, and tobacco. She found old, old cobalt blue bottles and what appeared to be the remnants of a still. After I dredged up one last set of buried yardsticks, I wheelbarrowed off the last of the excess of red clay to the front yard’s property lines. By then—and it took more than a week—I had built a wall not dissimilar to those that surrounded Old Testament cities.
After I found enough black-and-yellow tin NO TRESPASSING signs, red-and-white KEEP OUT, and regular posted signs, I understood my father’s belief that the entire globe should be traversed easily by all persons, regardless of land ownership. He never locked his door, in keeping. After my wife and I had disemboweled the backyard of my upbringing, we stood three-to-six feet below original ground level and looked at everything my father had amassed, the great junk and precious, rare items. I thought Lyla, an archaeologist by both trade and nature, an antique-hunting freak by avocation, would’ve been overjoyed with our newfound Americana. After she said, “You’d think he could’ve buried a few mayonnaise jars filled with silver quarters; you’d think we’d’ve come across some liberty dimes jammed into Ball or mason jars,” I figured our marriage was back in trouble.
“There’s a million dollars’ worth of stuff here,” I said.
Here’s what Lyla said to that: “A million dollars that’ll take two million to move, store, advertise, and sell. Add in your time and the years you’ll have to spend with a chiropractor, and you’ll wish he’d only buried coins in the ground like every other paranoid schizophrenic does if they haven’t been committed.” Lyla leaned on her adze. She wore one bandanna around her neck like a cattle rustler and another over her scalp hoodlum-style. If it had been pollen season, she would’ve worn a third one across her face like a post–Civil War Texas bank robber.
We’d been married long enough for me to see a side of her personality that might’ve suggested cold-blooded accusations and a thin heart.
Lyla said, “I’m sorry I said that about your daddy,” looking at the dug-up Frisch’s Big Boy statue as she spoke. Scar-face limped off to the side of the house and lifted his leg on one of the Golden Arches.
WHILE I WAS growing up there weren’t but ten houses along the entire three-mile length of Deadfall Road. A hundred years before, I would imagine, there’d been only one. By the time my father died near the end of the century, nearly every landowner’s inheritors had sold off acreage to developers who built nearly identical ranch house subdivisions, or nearly identical two-story brick pseudo-Tudor homes, or rented out nearly identical mobile homes with phony stone underpinning. The original ten houses from my childhood stood surrounded by a horseshoe of “homes,” the inhabitants of which all worked at foreign-owned industries between ten and sixty miles away: Fuji, Michelin, BMW. Their children sat in front of televisions all day long and showed no curiosity about the graves, bullets, and arrowheads that lay beneath their canned homesteads. The homeowners invested in garage door openers, commuted to and from work alone, and never saw their neighbors on either side. Occasionally Lyla and I drove through the anemic development behind my father’s house and watched men ride their lawn tractors as if competing in a synchronized swimming competition, with a yard always in between them. The residents of, say, 101, 105, and 109 Chaucer Court would be up and out to cut their front yards by ten A.M. on Saturday mornings while the men of 103, 107, and 111 did their backyards. Index fingers poking through venetian blinds meant these people feared conversation, that waving at one another two doors over satisfied their intentions to be neighborly. Did similar dances occur out of my view, all along the perfect arterial U of Shakespeare Lane and its veins and capillaries: Marlowe Street, Walter Raleigh Court, Dickens Circle? The whole dopey neighborhood together was called Sherwood Forest, which made me wonder what kind of grades land developers in America had made in their English 102 classes. The subdivision that ran behind Compton Lane’s father’s house had streets named—get this—Marlin, Sailfish, Dolphin, and Barracuda, but it was called Freshwater Acres.
Some days I hated life altogether.
A week after my wife and I had, we figured, excavated the entire back acreage of my dead father’s soil, Lyla walked into the kitchen and headed straight for the blender. She pulled it forward, turned to the refrigerator for ice, then reached below the sink for a bottle of tequila. “I’m making margaritas,” she said. “When we have had about two each I’ll talk again.”
I’d been on the Internet and telephone all day dickering with woodplanks.com, heartpine.com, pineplank.com, heartwood.com, and woodheart.com. I e-mailed them all, requesting prices for what I knew I owned out in the front yard. Then I called them back, said my aim was to see what a middleman like I should receive for his product, and so on. Because I knew that I had enough ancient lumber to make me wealthy no matter—and my father had sold off at least this much twenty years earlier, but that’s a whole other story—I didn’t make anyone stew for days like a regular bastard businessman might. I sold the unfinished and rough ex–barn wood to a man named Terrell Smoot for two bucks a foot on seven-to-ten-inch widths in full knowledge that his people got upwards of twenty dollars per square foot. We made a gentlemen’s agreement, and he promised to drive up from his home base in Goose Creek the following morning, a couple of semis behind him.
Lyla poured her drink into a plastic Tupperware tumbler and finished it o
ff. I said, “What’s up with you? Where’ve you been all day? I kind of have some good news.”
My wife had taken a job as a substitute teacher at Forty-Five High while she puzzled out what we would end up doing and where we’d go after I settled my father’s strange and cumbersome affairs. Lyla also volunteered for the literacy program and taught the teachers of Forty-Five Middle School and Forty-Five Elementary on Tuesday and Thursday nights. In January she would sign on to teach Intro to Archaeology down the road at this place called Anders College and would come home every night saying she’d discovered another Cro-Magnon alive and walking the campus. “Lookee here what was in our mailbox.” She pulled a recklessly folded sheet of typing paper from her shirt pocket.
I read aloud, “‘Last year the Sherwood Forest Homeowners Association voted unanimously that your father’s house and property was an eyesore to the surrounding community. Since then, we have never heard from your father. We invited him to clean up his yard, put siding on the house, and join us—even though the house isn’t even close to our three-thousand-square-foot requirement. We are hopeful that you will be more flexible and understanding in our concerns. You wouldn’t want a KOA campground surrounding your property, would you?’” It was signed, “The Concerned Residents of Sherwood Forest.”
I said, “Concerned residents. Well, I better walk out back and hunt down Friar Tuck or Robin Hood and see what this is all about.”
Lyla said, “I’ll stay here for the rest of our lives out of spite, Mendal. I will! These idiots obviously haven’t ever tangled with an archaeologist with minors in anthropology and art.”
I stood up and stretched my aching back, ruined from backyard excavation and Internet retrieval. I didn’t say anything about how I knew my father well enough to know that he’d managed to ruin these people’s lives without knowing them. “I sold all the heart pine today.”
Lyla turned from the kitchen window as if I’d zapped her with a cattle prod. “No. No, no, no. If you sell that wood, they’ll think they’ve won. If we sell anything—anything we spent all that time digging up—these hammerheads will see it as a victory for their little club.”
I shook my head no. I raised my palms. Lyla stormed around the house, put Southern Culture on the Skids in the CD player, and worked one speaker out of the den window, aimed toward Sherwood Forest. It was too loud for me to tell her how, when I wasn’t but maybe five, my father had foreseen this day and made me help him with a gross of fifty-five-gallon drums, that I even had a picture in my year-book as part of a Before-and-After extravaganza.
COMPTON LANE, MY best friend growing up, found his way out of Forty-Five, South Carolina. He became a veterinarian and then quit his profession altogether when a strange group of people threatened his life daily for fixing AKC bitch dogs after they’d hooked up accidentally with nonpurebreds. At least that’s what he told me over the telephone once, right before his crazy father died in a tragic, fluke incident involving a gust of wind and a less-than-stable Duke Power electrical line. Comp took a job in Montgomery, Alabama, straight out of vet school and spent a decade as an upstanding member of the George Wallace–loving community until somebody decided that God didn’t cotton to abortions of any type if said animal had once lived in the Garden of Eden. According to Comp, a pregnant snake was held in more esteem in Montgomery than anyone knowing post-1865 history. He came back home after demonstrators regularly held FICKSING IS BAD and NEUTER IS A GEAR, NOT A LIFESTYLE signs outside of his clinic. It made the national news, and about three years later—just as the Forty-Five town council voted that a cable television company could open up—there was a front-page item in the local paper about Compton’s woes. He lived quietly in his old house, intent on writing something better than all those other writing veterinarians.
“Now you know what it’s like,” he said to me the day after Lyla got our ultimatum in the mail. “It’ll get worse. My first anonymous letter back in Montgomery went something like, ‘It’s okay to litter.’ And there was a Xerox of an X ray. That’s how it started.”
Compton got started on veterinary science because Forty-Five’s only vet had found an odd Christian Science God in the middle of his career, and whenever anyone took a rabid, wormy, or car-struck hound to him, Dr. Wimmer just said, “Let’s have a little prayer,” or “If God wants Gypsy to get better, Gypsy will get better.” Then he charged five dollars for the visit.
COMPTON AND I sat in my father’s kitchen, drinking beer and bourbon at ten o’clock in the morning. Lyla was off subbing for forty dollars a day. Although Comp and I hadn’t stayed in touch very well over the years—I’d seen him only once, at my daddy’s viewing and funeral, since I’d returned home—we fell right back into our old ways as childhood friends fall, no awkwardness evident. I said, “I can’t remember if you were in on this, man, but do you remember when I found out how my father bought all those fifty-five-gallon drums? Did I let you in on that?”
Comp turned a jigger upside down and chased it. He said, “This is just like those times we cut school in seventh grade. And eighth, ninth, tenth…” Although he still had a boyish face, his eyes showed the strain the people of Montgomery had forced upon him. He said, “Kind of. I remember your dad and mine always up to something, trying to teach some do-gooder a lesson. I remember the bait-shack scam.”
“That Before-and-After picture of me in the yearbook was from this particular episode in Dad’s life. He went and got ahold of a bunch of steel drums and he buried them for some reason. I was too young to recall the incident. It’s kind of like a dream now, but then again most of the time I feel like that when I go back to ages three through eighteen. My father got these big drums from somewhere, and we buried them because he had a plan of sorts. He painted TOXIC MATERIAL on each one and buried them over there at Sherwood Forest, I believe. I don’t think I’m dreaming all of this up. I don’t think he told me a lie, either.” I got up and looked out the window. “This is weird, but when Dad told me all about what he did, he kept telling me that I wasn’t listening to him—which I probably wasn’t—but that I’d thank him one day. He even said that my wife and I would thank him.”
Compton stood up and looked out the window into my excavated yard. He nodded his head to Workingman’s Dead blaring out of my father’s console stereo in the den, an album I’d not listened to since 1976 or thereabouts, a band that in Forty-Five, South Carolina, only Comp and I knew. He said, “Toxic. Yeah. You told me. We were stoned, or trying to get stoned. Or we were selling Lipton’s tea to those two teachers. Later on my father told me how he had some of those metal stencils you piece together and spray paint over. Your father borrowed them and sprayed TOXIC WASTE on those drums. Dad helped him bury a couple right back there.” He pointed to what used to be good farmland, toward the subdivision. “I kind of remember the Before-and-After picture, but I have to admit I haven’t looked at our old yearbook. There are people around here we went to school with who keep theirs on the coffee table. It’s the only book they own.”
I poured two more shots and said, “This old boy named Terrell Smoot is showing up later to pick up all the leftover heart pine. I ain’t figured it out yet but I’m thinking I’ll get a few hundred thousand dollars for Dad’s big collection. Who’d’ve known he knew what he was doing all those years saving torn down barns.”
“My dad said that your dad pissed in those fifty-five-gallon drums before burying them. The time my father helped, they drank beer and peed a bunch, and from what I heard, your father kept saying, ‘This’ll get ’em good,’ every time he dropped one into the ground.”
Comp and I sat there like deaf-mutes for a half-hour before he finally asked if I got the Animal Planet network on cable. Then he moved to the den and watched a documentary on North American burrowers.
MR. SMOOT BROUGHT his two semis, five men, and a number of tape measures. He said, of course, “I got to tell you. A lot of this wood is worthless. A lot of these boards have too many nail holes and splits in them.”
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Lyla had come home from sub teaching early. Comp sat in the den staring at the Animal Planet channel. I walked in once to get beer for the workers and felt pretty sure that Compton had been crying. On the TV they were showing emergency surgery on a dog that had fallen off a cliff trying to get to its buddy that fell off first.
“Oh. I’m sorry to’ve wasted your time,” I said to Smoot. “Hell, I thought you could use this. Let me let y’all go, and I’ll get back in touch with plankpine.com, or one of those others.”
His workers—Jose, Jorge, Pedro, and Senor Jorge—continued to measure out lengths and yell “ten!” “twelve!” or “sixteen!” which a short man, who looked like Pepino on The Real McCoys, wrote down on a legal pad. I knew that they’d probably slipped a couple hundred feet into the trucks without my noticing, but it didn’t matter. Smoot said, “I’m not saying we won’t take your wood. I’m only saying we’ve gotten better lumber over the years.”
“Don’t let me go down in history as saying I offered up the worst wood,” I said. “Come on. Y’all take that lumber out of the truck and I’ll write you out a check for the gas money it cost y’all to come up here.” I pulled my arms in the international sign for unloading the loaded and said, “And let me go inside and make some barbecue sandwiches for your drive back home. Doggone, I’ll have bad dreams about this the rest of my nights.”
The Mexicans stopped for about two seconds in my front yard, then continued calling off lengths and stacking wood. Smoot said, “We’re good. You and me, we’ll be all right,” and he laughed.
Lyla came out of the house and said, “Hey, Mendal, I don’t want the homeowners association thinking that we’ve caved in. I ordered a bunch of plastic pink flamingoes over the phone, if you don’t mind. I’m going to get some lawn jockeys, too, and paint their faces white. I’m going to buy some cement birdbaths.”
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