by Ann Pancake
Still in her school clothes for the funeral, Jos’d stood behind the dug-up dirt pile while Uncle Derek carried Goldy to her grave wrapped in a bleach-splotched blue towel. Jos kept her head bowed, scared to look, then guilty that she felt more afraid than sad. Granddad wore the pressed red-checked shirt that reminded her of a cowboy, his hands clasped reverently below his dress belt buckle, a steel rope lasso that looked also like a snake. When Goldy’d first vanished, Granddad immediately named the pony shed, and when Uncle Derek found Goldy stiff behind a pile of pallets there, Joslin wasn’t surprised. Granddad’s snifters were almost always right. From the edge of her eye, Jos watched Derek lay the blue towel bundle down.
“Open it up,” Granddad said.
Uncle Derek hesitated. Jos could see Bunker watching, stock-still on his haunches at the end of his chain. Then Derek unfolded the top like giving Goldy a breath before she went under, and as he did, Jos finally felt it. A sharp high ache in her fingers. An unswallowable stone lodged in her throat. She forced her gaze to Goldy’s head, Goldy’s tongue poking out the side of her teeth in a way Goldy never did, but when she reached Goldy’s eyes, the shock took her breath. They had no more Goldy in them than a black beetle’s back. Instantly the sadness dissolved, leaving Jos a little stunned by its going. Her unable to cry for what was left, and weirdly unable to recall, though it’d been just three days, what had gone.
After the hole was filled and Granddad said the prayers, her uncle turned back to the house. Jos did, too.
“Help me pretty it up with some rocks, Jos.”
Her grandfather was already shambling towards the creek bank. These days even on level ground he walked always like he was stepping out of something sticky, and Jos followed behind. He made it safely to the rock bar, where he squatted himself like a stubborn folding chair and began to sort, culling rocks round and smooth, about the size, Jos noticed, of Goldy’s paws. He’d collected rocks that caught his fancy since he was a boy, and when Jos was younger and his body sounder, they’d look for them on their walks. “I’m just an old rockhound,” he often said. Most of his finds he stored in shoeboxes, but his favorites he displayed in the twins’ old room where he now slept, the rocks on the blotter of their homework desk. When she was littler, Jos visited the rocks often. Tiptoed in and pressed her chest against the desk, placed her fingers in the fossil prints and stroked the ridges shells had left.
Now she filled her hoodie pockets. The cool rolling out the hollow mouth called the smells from the ground, rotting oak leaves, groundhog shale. She pressed a rock under her nose. Odor of creek water on it, so different from the smell of a rock in the woods. Twice they clambered up to the grave where Jos did like Granddad did, working each stone carefully into the dirt until the grave was ringed all around.
Finally Granddad wiped his hands on the seat of his pants. Jos brushed hers. She looked back at the creek, reflecting like aluminum in what little light was left. The creek water looked the same as it always had.
IT’D BEEN SIX months since her uncle’d come back in a Honda Civic that’d been wrecked at least twice but still ran. Wisconsin tags. Montana bumper stickers. He’d come back with a ring in his nose that he’d since taken out, but Jos couldn’t help staring at the hole, especially during meals, when it turned her stomach a little. A good bit younger than her mother, he’d been born when her grandparents were almost old, and that was part of why he’d been so spoiled, her mother’d told her. All of Joslin’s nine years he’d been away, appearing only at Christmas and now and again for a week in the summer. Most of those years, he’d been “out West,” and before that he’d been to college, the second in the family to go and the first to finish, Joslin knew because now she was expected to go and finish, too.
“Although you wouldn’t know it to look at him,” her grandma’d say about the college. Him in jeans that looked slick from lack of washing, worn out around the hip pockets with his underwear showing through. Coffee-stained thermal shirts and floppy black hair without direction unless he rubberbanded it back in the tiniest of ponytails. Sometimes he’d not bathe for a solid week, and this outraged her grandma, who’d grown up without plumbing and kept herself and her house vengefully clean. But Joslin thought she understood. A group of college kids had driven down from Massachusetts last spring to work in Booker Hollow, where poor people lived. Jos’s church had sponsored them for a dinner. The college kids came looking and smelling much like Uncle Derek, and her grandma’s friends were still talking about one girl who appeared to have half-dried pee dribbling down her leg.
Like Grandma, Uncle Derek was no smiler, and like Granddad, he angered quick as a yellow jacket, but unlike Granddad, Derek carried inside some kind of reservoir that could fuel a fury forever. At first Jos figured he was mean and kept her distance, but soon she learned he’d also gotten Grandma’s give-you-the-shirt-off-her-back. A little longer, and she saw he had too Granddad’s mushiness under the crust, although Joslin had lived with that long enough to be far more leery of it than of Grandma’s steady hard. Uncle Derek knew nothing about soccer; they didn’t have that here when he was a kid, but he’d play it with her anyway even though she was better at it than him. Once he got used to her, he’d sometimes take her with him to town, where she’d fool with the library computers while he keyboarded furiously on his laptop. He helped her find soccer sites and soccer books, and it was Uncle Derek bought her the first pack of animal wristbands to be seen in her school after he learned about them from the son of a friend in Pittsburgh. In the evenings, especially when it started getting cool, the old people monopolizing the television, Joslin took to doing her homework on his bed, him busy on the laptop or with his magazines and flyers and books.
It was there in his childhood room in early September not long after school started that he’d explained it to her. Before that, of course, Joslin understood he was in an ongoing, unspoken rage at her grandparents, but her mother was angry at them always too and never with a reason that made sense, so Jos thought little of it. What did unsettle her was his bitterness towards the Hackerts, who had two girls younger than Joslin and lived on the mountain above. She and Sylvie Hackert played on the same soccer team. The Hackerts gave her rides to practices and games. Usually when their name came up he’d just snake-spit under his breath, but that afternoon, he’d blown. By the time Joslin got down to the kitchen to hear better what was going on, her grandma’d shut him down.
“Now don’t you be badmouthing the Hackerts!” Her voice with the tremolo it got when she really meant business. “As good as they’ve been to Joslin. Me and your daddy can’t be doing all that running around anymore.” But Derek was already slamming the front door so hard the photos on the TV toppled, then Joslin heard the Honda throwing gravel behind it.
Shortly after, Addley from down the road dropped in like he often did, always right around time to refuse supper. He’d sit back along the wall with his chair tipped forward while her grandma’d beg him to eat, and just when they were ready to clear the table, Addley’d inevitably give in.
“You know the business sense Gary Hackert’s got,” her granddad was saying to him. Granddad’s jaws worked his chicken patty twice as hard as they had to and Jos could see the red webs showing themselves on his cheek and the one side of his nose. “If he thinks it’s the smart thing to do. . . . Why not have the property bring in a little income for a change?”
“You’re right, Lloyd. You’re exactly right,” said Addley. Jos prodded a green bean, dull as straw, her grandma having left out the bacon grease because Uncle Derek wouldn’t eat meat. The land man had come while she was at school, two years ago, but she did know now, after overhearing Granddad and Addley at dinners before Derek’d come home, that the Hackerts had come to the house with the land man. The land company wanted every acre they leased to touch. The Hackerts’ hundreds. Her grandparents’ twenty-seven.
“We can no longer be dependent on foreign oil,” her granddad went on in the tone he used to quote TV news
and the Bible. “The country needs natural gas. Energy independence.”
Addley made his whole chair nod. “You’re right, Lloyd. You’re exactly right.”
“Our young men and women being sent overseas to die for oil. It’s a tragedy.”
“You’re right, Lloyd. Buddy, you are right.”
Jos took a long look at Addley. The bottom half of his face was twice as long as the top, out of balance even by horse standards. Although Derek’s name was never spoken, Addley knew it was against Derek Granddad was defending himself. Because Addley could not stand Derek, an arrogant enigma, and because Granddad wouldn’t abide Addley speaking outright against his son, Addley was savoring this conversation like a pup rolling in a dead deer.
“He needs to find himself a woman and settle down,” Addley declared. Granddad ignored this.
“I can show you the lease, Addley. It talks about the United States’ energy independence right on it.” Joslin had seen the lease herself, a photocopy Derek had made at the library after sneaking the original out of Granddad’s files. In the upper right-hand corner was stamped a small American flag in a frozen ripple. “And it’s not like they’re gonna strip-mine it or something. This ain’t southern West Virginia.”
“It’s your land, Lloyd. You can do whatever you want with it. It’s your business.”
“Besides,” Granddad said, and now Jos could hear his indignation running down as it always did. He had a fraction of the fury reserve Derek did. “If we hadn’t leased, they probably wouldn’t of signed the Hackerts.” He pushed his plate back. “It was the neighborly thing to do.”
LATER, ON DEREK’S bed, Joslin tried to study for her social studies quiz. Her uncle’d snuck back in right before dark, and now he hammered away on his laptop like usual. All around them hung his childhood relics, things he never seemed to notice were still there, his sports trophies, his 4-H ribbons, photos of him with his teams, football, basketball, track, Derek’s dark hair cut neat, him skinnier, but even back then, Derek didn’t smile. Jos plucked at the rubber bluejay band on her wrist with her thumbnail. Every time she looked at Uncle Derek’s hunched back, anger tightened between her eyes, anger over what he’d said about the Hackerts, anger at herself for wanting to be near him anyway.
Although you could start soccer when you were five, Jos had never played on any sports team before this season, this year the first Granddad and Grandma would pay for the uniform and league fees, and only after the Hackerts offered the rides. The next game was Saturday, three days away, and looking towards it opened a little blossom in her chest. To be on that field and moving, her body knowing exactly where and how to go without any mind thinking to it, it had always been that way, her body smarter than she was, but before soccer, no one cared about that. She looked back at her textbook. The dirty-clothes air of Derek’s room was cottoning in her mouth. She slid off the bed and slipped through the floor clutter towards the door.
Derek turned in his chair. “What’s wrong?” He pushed his hair back out of his face and held it to his head with his fingers the way he did when he really looked at her and expected her to look back.
Joslin shrugged.
Derek continued to hold her eyes. “It’s because I don’t like your friends.” Jos said nothing. She pulled her gaze away from his and towards the door.
“Do you understand what your granddad and Hackert have done?”
She looked sideways at him and nodded, knowing as she did that he wouldn’t be fooled.
He still didn’t move, so Jos couldn’t either, suspended just a step from the door and freedom. Then, so abruptly that she flinched, he dropped his hair and shuddered his head, reaching for his laptop. “You need to understand,” he muttered. “You do. Especially for after I leave.” He rammed his chair against the side of the bed, computer in his lap, and lay his hand on the mattress. Jos knew that meant sit. She did.
Not until later that night, when she was in her own bed, unable to fall back asleep, did she unnumb enough to feel what he’d said. She lay on her side, looking towards the window across the room. The house was tucked tight against the hollow side, and her second-floor view, if there’d been light enough to see, was a groundhog shale bank. No, Uncle Derek had said, it wasn’t groundhog shale that they wanted. It was Marcellus shale. Darker, older, so deep under the ground they ran a drill for a mile before they blasted the water and the secret chemicals sideways into the earth. Besides, he said, I already told you. Groundhog shale isn’t shale at all. It’s pressed clay.
But groundhog shale was what Granddad called it, and he and Jos both loved it for the fossils layered there. The rock so scaly you could nearly dig them with your fingernails, but she and her granddad would bring a trowel, a never-painted-with paintbrush, and an old tackle box. Joslin squatted while Granddad gentle-scraped, and almost all the fossils they found were shells, no matter where they looked, in the groundhog shale, in the chunky creek rocks, in the slatey woods ones. Different sizes, different shapes, but shells all, and despite how hard Joslin stretched her brain, she could never quite believe it. The impossibility of ocean ever over where she and Granddad stood now.
Then she found herself leaving her room, floating it felt like, and in the dark hallway her nightgown seemed to glow against the leftover summer brown of her arms and her legs. She flowed down the hall and into Granddad’s room, past the humpled bed where Granddad and Goldy burred their separate snores. The desk caught Jos right at her hipbones. The rocks a startling distance from her face, how much she’d grown since she’d visited last. She reached out a hand and pressed one finger in a small fossil print.
“Not every place has fossils all over like here,” her grandfather’d told her many times. Another reason their place was special. Another reason to be proud of their state. She paused and tuned again to the snoring, made certain both of them still slept. Then she laid her whole left hand on the rock that used to awe her deepest, a slab shell-tracked densely as a tablet that reminded her of the Ten Commandments. She hefted in her right hand a blocky creek rock. Then with both hands full of rock she closed her eyes and waited for the old feeling to come. A funneling of her down from her mind to gather, solid, in her chest. And eventually it did come. At least some and for a little bit.
Not until a few years before had it dawned on her that she and Granddad had never found the original shell that created a print. All the creatures left were shadows of themselves. Had the way she felt about them changed between now and back when she hadn’t known anything was missing? A little, she thought. A little of the feeling had.
SHE SAT CROSS-LEGGED on the living room floor, her animal bands spread out on the carpet in front of her. After Granddad and Derek had agreed on the coyotes, they’d all three spent a good half hour searching for Goldy, first up the hollow behind the house, then in the field on the other side of the road. No one had more than scant faith the coyotes would have given up the body, especially so near the house. Still, it seemed the respectful thing to do, at least to look a while. Jos untangled the bands for the three she always wore for luck at soccer games: Cardinal, the state bird. Eagle, the American bird. Blue jay, their team name, and the most potent of the three.
“I’m going in town to check my email. You all need anything?” It was Derek, in the kitchen.
“Kickoff’s at noon,” her granddad reminded.
“You could pick up some milk,” Grandma said. “Get you five dollars out of my pocketbook.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Derek mumbled.
The old people continued banging around in the kitchen, revving up for the Mountaineer game. More spirited than they’d been in weeks, they’d splurged on pepperoni rolls for a special game-day lunch, and they’d want both her and Derek there, at least for when the team rampaged out of the tunnel. Jos felt glad for them, but she felt gladder for herself, her own game starting a little late today, the Hackerts picking her up at 2:15. She smiled. Sylvie and her little sister Madison had been on teams since they w
ere five, most of the kids had, but Jos had outplayed Sylvie by the end of the first game, outplayed everyone else, including the boys, by the end of the second. She had “a way with the game,” all the grown-ups said it, although she’d told her grandparents none of this. She knew how they felt about bragging. She rolled the good luck bands onto her right wrist, then picked up a couple others to trade with Sylvie and Madison on the long ride to the fields.
It was when she slipped out to practice again that she saw Bunker’s chain slack. Her heart cramped quick, and her lips already going to “B” when she remembered it’d be best Granddad not hear her call. “Wasn’t no creek water got Cuddle Dog,” her grandfather’d told her several times, including twice when she’d caught Granddad in the liberating act. “She just got into something somewhere.” Jos nudged the chain clasp with her foot. When Granddad had pressed the tuna to Goldy’s lips, the dog’d cringed away like it hurt. If Bunker was fresh let loose and not in sight, Jos knew pretty well where he’d be. She lobbed her soccer ball underhanded back to the porch.
She jogged directly behind the house, towards the pony shed and then on past it. The quickest way to the big bottom hollow was over the ridge above the pony shed, and the fastest way to the ridge was straight up the groundhog shale outcrop. So then Jos was scrambling it, the scabby earth colored the dullest butterscotch, her cutting footholds with the sides of her tennis shoes and using her hands, too, and she thought of her cleats—Mr. Hackert had given them to her after that third game—but she dare not use them on something not soccer, and besides, the damage they could do to the fossils right under the surface. Then she was passing through the oaks and hickories on the ridge, heave-breathing a little, a breeze driving leaves towards her, them glancing off her head and shoulders like slow unshy birds. When she got to where she could see down into the hollow’s broad bottom, she stopped to quiet the leaves under her feet so she could hear the leaves under Bunker’s. This was another place she and Granddad had little by little stopped going as his legs got worse.