Relics (11 page)
After her customary bag lunch—peanut butter and honey on a hot dog bun, because it doesn’t spoil on a hot day and because buns stand up to being banged around and because the combination tastes good—Faye felt fortified for an afternoon hiking the settlement hills. Joe and Elliott were working well together, and she knew she could trust Joe to make sure the job was done right. The sun was shining and the weather was mild. She’d assiduously studied maps and photographs of the Sujosa settlement, square inch by square inch, but there was no substitute for walking a site and looking it over, acre by acre. Even Raleigh had known that, according to Elliott.
Elliott had told her that the professor had seemed to spend most of the past month walking around the settlement, just staring at the ground. According to Elliott, Raleigh had called this activity “surveying the site for areas where artifacts were likely to be found.” Joe, in his own terse yet eloquent way, had said, “You’re saying he spent a lot of time dicking around?”
Which is why Joe was still chuckling when she left him in charge of Elliott and walked away. Elliott, the project’s big talker, had asked, “Where you going?” and she’d answered, “Nowhere special. Just gonna do some dicking around.” Elliott had watched her leave with the open-mouthed gape of a hardshell Pentecostal who’d never heard gutter language slosh out of the mouth of a lady.
***
Faye chose the footpath that branched off the main road to the north, which she knew led to the Smiley place. The path wound up a hillside so steep that she, in her flatlander ignorance, would have called it a mountain. Her goal was to get herself good and lost, looking for places that showed signs of human influence stretching back many years. The distinctions would be subtle—something as trivial as a grove of tremendous poplars edging into a forest of equally tremendous hemlocks could tell a tale to someone who spoke the trees’ language.
Faye knew that, in some climates, poplars were the first trees to retake disturbed land. A homesteader who abandoned a farm might come back years later to find his pastures overtaken with poplars. Hemlocks grow more deliberately than poplars but, given time, they grow tall enough to shade the poplars out. If the homesteader lived long enough, he would eventually see hemlocks wrest his long-overgrown pasture from the poplars’ grip.
Faye was also hoping to get a look at the built environment. Her aerial photographs told her that most of the Sujosa’s buildings were already built in 1939, but her on-the-ground observations told her that the Montrose family lived in a Craftsman-style house probably built during the 1930s. This suggested a surprising degree of prosperity during the Depression that, unfortunately, must have been the family’s last economic upturn in the twentieth century. Faye wondered whether they’d sent a son or two to work for the WPA, enjoying a brief influx of money into the cash-poor budget of a farming family.
When the footpath wound past a few Sujosa homes, she might get a look at outbuildings that pre-dated the houses they served. She had already glimpsed abandoned privies behind several homes. Often, an old homeplace was left standing to serve as a barn when a new farmhouse was built. If she got really lucky, she’d spy an old outbuilding that was just beginning to fall down, exposing all kinds of interesting construction methods.
Just past the Smiley house, a fainter path veered off to the left. Being Faye, she was irresistibly drawn to the route less taken. Part of its attraction was the fact that it sloped steeply downward, so steeply that when her boot landed on a patch of slick mud, she landed on her rear and slid several feet downhill before she even knew she’d fallen. Gingerly patting the affected parts, Faye found that everything was undamaged, but that she was smeared from waist to heels with slick and sticky clay. Irrationally happy to be outdoors on a cool, sunny autumn afternoon, she ignored her ruined clothes and walked on.
The ground beneath her feet betrayed one of the origins of the Sujosa’s poverty. It eroded easily. Any field plowed in such soil would lose some of its precious topsoil with every rain.
The Montrose house came into view on her right, set well back from the pathway. She saw no sign of activity. Even the dogs were silent. No doubt Irene was at work, and frail Kiki was asleep. DeWayne was probably kicked back in his easy chair, enjoying the rest of a man being supported by his teenage daughter. Faye was glad when the sight of that unhappy home receded behind her. The deserted forest was peaceful in a way that the Montrose home could never be.
She rounded a curve and stopped short. The pathway ended at the lip of a deep erosion gully. The chasm was too wide to step across and so deep that only a fool would have risked jumping and falling short. Fortunately, someone had constructed a bridge out of heavy rope, carefully knotted and fortified with wooden slats every few feet. The entire contraption was suspended from a pair of stout trees on either side of the gorge, like a backwoods Golden Gate Bridge.
The rope and slats had weathered to the same shade of dull gray. Faye paused, wondering whether a critical component was rotten, but smears of fresh red mud told her someone walked across within the past few hours. That was good enough for Faye. Gingerly, she took a step onto the bridge.
The gaps between the boards were uncomfortably wide, and the bridge swayed with her first step. Faye stepped forward, putting both feet onto the rickety span, then made a major error: She looked down—way down, to the bottom of the gully, some thirty or forty feet away. Her stomach flopped over. This was worse—much worse—than driving on the settlement’s hilly roads. She gripped the supporting ropes until her knuckles turned white, but she had too much sense to stop walking. Five more steps took her safely across, where she paused to wipe the cold sweat off her face before climbing up another steep incline.
Remembering her earlier fall, she kept her eyes on the ground in front of her. A patch of slick clay here, near the edge of the precipice, could send her on a dangerous skid. Keeping her eyes prudently on her feet meant that the Great Tiger Bluff of Alabama’s Broad River caught her by surprise.
Stepping into sunlight bright enough to cast sharp-edged shadows of autumn’s leafless trees, she was confronted by a Technicolor abyss. Before her was a broad, sweeping gorge that had carved away a section of hillside in a shape that looked for all the world like God’s own amphitheater. The afternoon sun spread across the face of the bluff, lighting up bands of soil in colors ranging from tangerine to peachy yellow to buff white. She judged that the gorge was at least two hundred feet deep. Danger and beauty intermingled here, as it does in the face of a predator. It was a breathtaking sight, dramatic and lonely in a way that only nature can be.
But Faye was not alone. Someone was standing in the path that skirted the top of the bluff, perhaps two hundred yards ahead. She was only a silhouette, but she was an easily recognizable one: tall and broad, with heavy breasts and a small child perched on her hip. Ronya Smiley looked over her shoulder and caught sight of Faye, then stepped over the precipice and vanished.
Faye broke into a run. “Ronya! Can you hear me? Are you okay? Zack!” She reached the spot where the Sujosa woman had disappeared and looked into the yawning pit. The face of the bluff was etched with scores of vertical gullies where the eroding rain washed soil toward the river and toward the sea, one grain at a time. Ronya Smiley was standing in one of those gullies. It seemed to serve as her own personal stairway to the bottom of the bluff.
It was so deep that Ronya, once in it, could stand at her full height yet remain invisible to most passers-by, and it was broad enough to accommodate Ronya’s considerable girth, leaving room for the bucket and curved wooden board that she carried. Zack was standing beside her, carrying a second bucket with the self-important air of someone who knew his help was indispensable.
Ronya looked up at Faye and said, “I don’t suppose it would occur to you that a person might not want company.”
Faye, relieved that she wasn’t looking down at Ronya’s broken and bloodied body, refused to be insulted. “I’ve spent most of my adult life living on an island, all by my lonesome. When you talk about somebody who doesn’t want company, about ninety percent of the time you’re talking about me.”
She lowered herself into the gully. At regular intervals, the roots of long-gone trees extended across the floor and held the soil in place, resulting in a stair-step configuration that made it possible to descend quickly to an open treeless area at the bottom of the bluff. Climbing back up out of the tremendous hole might be a more difficult undertaking.
Without looking back, Ronya headed across the barren area toward a patch of trees marking the beginning of a forest that sloped gently downward toward the horizon. Faye followed her, craning her neck all the while to catch the contrast between the colorful face of the bluff with the dark shadows at the base of the erosion gullies.
As she passed into the first patch of trees, she realized why they grew there. The downward sloping ground intersected with the water table in this area, birthing a bevy of small springs that continuously oozed clear water into a shallow cleft in the sandy soil. Because water is made to flow downhill, this cleft captured all the springs’ output. As it gained water and the water gained momentum, the newborn creek grew deeper and wider, swelling with every step Faye took along its banks. A few of summer’s ferns clung to life in this place, where they were sheltered from wind by the banks of the gorge and from cold by the springwater emerging from the ground at a constant temperature year-round.
“I bet this place looks like a fairyland in springtime,” Faye said to Ronya’s back, since there was no one else nearby to share her delight. “Ferns and violets and wild azaleas—is it as wonderful as I think it must be?”
Ronya turned around slowly and said, “You are just not going to go away, are you?”
“Do I have to?” Faye asked. “I mean, if this is your property, I guess you can throw me off it.”
“Well, it is my property.”
“It’s mine, too,” Zack chimed in.
Faye leaned toward the little boy and whispered, “So—can I stay?”
Zack looked at his mother for guidance. She set her burdens down and crossed her arms as if to think. Zack quickly did the same.
“Look at her all covered in mud, son.”
“She’s pretty dirty,” Zack said gravely.
“She’s carrying half our property with her, stuck to her clothes. If we send her home now, she’ll be taking it with her,” Ronya pointed out. “We might as well let her help us with our work. Some of our dirt might fall off, if she gets busy enough.”
“Good idea,” Zack said. “Mama, I’m going to give her my bucket to carry.”
Faye leaned down to take the bucket and whispered in his ear, “What kind of work will I have to do? Besides carrying this bucket.”
In a low voice, he replied, “Oh, it’s not all that hard, but it gets you mighty dirty. That’s the fun part.”
Hurrying after Ronya, who had resumed walking, apparently trusting her son to follow her, Faye said, “Well, I’m already dirty. I might as well have a little fun.”
As they walked, the creek and the waterside path sloped ever downward, but the banks did not. Within a quarter-mile, even Joe couldn’t have peered out of this miniature canyon carved into the floor of the tremendous one surrounding it. More springs seeped out of its banks and cascaded into the growing creek. Faye reached through the water of one of these springs, trying to figure out why it left a white streak through the colorful soil. She had thought that something white in the water had been deposited on the creek banks, but she found the truth to be the exact opposite. The water had washed loose sand and dirt from the soil’s surface, leaving a bed of white clay exposed beneath the cascades.
She dug into the soft, plastic clay and looked at the bucket in her hand. There were two gardening trowels in it. “What will we be carrying back in these buckets? Are you looking for clay to use in your ceramics?”
Zack nodded vigorously, but Ronya just said, “Well, it’s the wrong time of year to go blackberry picking, wouldn’t you say?”
The small canyon widened, leaving broad, flat banks on either side of the creek. Following close behind Ronya, Faye got a close look at the curved piece of wood she’d been carrying, which she now recognized to be a yoke shaped to fit the curves of a human’s back. When the buckets were full, Ronya would attach them to either end of the yoke, then throw it over her shoulders for the long trip back home. The yoke had the look of a tool that had been used for generations.
“Who taught you to find natural clay that’s suited for making pottery?” Faye asked, following where the antique yoke led.
“My mama.”
“And where did you and your mama learn to work with clay?” Faye asked. The intuitive part of her was sure that the answer would take her to some of the earliest Sujosa. It had been a long, long time since dishes and vases had been so expensive that it was worthwhile to trudge out into the woods, dig up natural clay, haul it home, mold it into shape, and fire it with wood you’d cut yourself. Ronya didn’t answer.
They rounded a bend in the creek and into view of a vista that reminded Faye of the pockmarked terrain left behind at Raleigh’s mismanaged excavation. The sides of the canyon walls and the creek banks were studded with pits where clay had been mined by hand. Ronya and her mother couldn’t possibly have dug them all.
“Who else digs clay here besides you and your mama?”
“No one. Not even Mama, not any more. Her age is really catching up with her,” Ronya said, surveying the area like someone who’d never really paid attention to the scope of this primitive mining operation. “Mama used to say that, before her time, there were usually three or four potters among the Sujosa, but her mama was the only one left by the time she was born. It’s hard to live here. Whole families keep packing up and moving out. People can’t afford a houseful of children any more, and they can’t afford the time to learn things like pottery that don’t pay the bills.”
