Chapter 2: Ninety Percent Certain

The third trailer along the row had people in it, and the rain sounded different on its roof: thinner, with the wind taken out of it.

Five of them around a folding table pushed against the far wall, and two more somewhere behind the door where Theo couldn’t get a look at them. He took the room the way he took every room, from the outside in. A woman at the near end in a university rain shell with a lanyard over it. A man in a state rain coat, young enough to still be holding a trowel, which he set down on a carton of sample bags and then picked up again. A woman with a camera bag and no camera out. A man in a fleece with an ID clipped to the zipper, turned so the photo faced his chest. And at the far end, where the light off the ceiling panels didn’t reach as well, an old man in a windbreaker.

The table had books on it, stacked and open and stacked again, a laptop, a camera still in its case. The floor had everything else: buckets, a screen lying on its side, a transit case, three mud-caked trowels, a coil of flagging tape, a paper cup with a cigarette butt in it that somebody had been too polite to throw out.

“You’re wet,” said the man in the fleece. “There’s coffee. It’s been on since noon.”

“He’s not staying long enough for coffee,” Voss said. She shut the door. The wind got under it and worried at the edge. “This is Theo Marsh. Cynthia Marsh’s son.”

The young one with the trowel said, “He’s still in high school.”

Nobody contradicted him. The woman with the lanyard looked at Theo, and then at Voss, and something went between them that Theo couldn’t read. What he could read was the room. Two of the five had already turned a shoulder to him and gone back to their papers.

“Mr. Hollis,” Voss said. “With our office.”

The man in the fleece lifted two fingers off his cup and put them back down. “He hasn’t finished,” he said.

“Gerald Quarles,” Voss said. “The state archaeology office. Mr. Quarles is running this excavation.”

The old man at the end of the table moved his head. It was the voice from the phone at the gate, dry and unhurried, and now it had a body under it: a windbreaker washed so many times the logo had gone to a shadow, reading glasses pushed up on his forehead, hands flat on the table.

Theo said, “Sir.”

“Mm,” Quarles said.

Theo’s eye went where it always went in a room full of paper: to the thing that wasn’t paper.

The photographs. Eight-by-tens, most of them, a couple of them run off on the office printer and still curling at the corners. On top of the stack, two prints of carved figures.

They stood side by side in the frame, on either side of a doorway that had been propped and braced and lit with a work light so the paint would read. A scale bar sat in the corner of both prints, and somebody had written the numbers on the white border in pencil.

“Four inches,” Theo said.

“Ten centimeters,” the woman with the camera bag said. “Yes.”

“So they’re tall. Five foot six, five foot seven.”

“About a foot and a half taller than anything else out of that room.”

“Then they weren’t carved to fit in the room,” Theo said. “They were carved to stand at the door.”

The young one put his trowel down again and left it down.

Theo leaned in. The figures were wood, and the wood had been painted, red and black, in bands and borders, the color sitting down in the grain instead of on top of it. Both had faces carved to the last line of the eyelid. The one on the right had a spear and a coat with a collar, and the collar had a pattern in it that went around and around without finishing.

The one on the left had an earring hole.

“They pierced the ear,” Theo said. “After they carved her, they drilled the ear.”

“That’s been discussed,” Quarles said.

“And she’s not in work clothes. That’s a plaid. That’s a plaid skirt with a sett to it, they’ve matched the corners. Nobody puts a sett in a work skirt. That’s for being seen.”

“Go on,” Quarles said.

“She’s got a spear,” Theo said, “and she’s not holding it.”

He held his finger above the print without touching it. The woman’s right hand was up at the height of her own mouth, three fingers straight, thumb folded against the palm, the whole hand turned a quarter turn out. The left hand was closed at her waist. The spear stood in its own socket cut into the base beside her, a foot clear of her hand.

“Her hands are doing something,” Theo said. “That’s not a grip. That’s a shape.”

“An empty hand isn’t a shape,” Hollis said.

“Mr. Hollis,” the woman with the lanyard said, in a warning voice, and Hollis drank his coffee.

“It’s a hand form,” Theo said. “You put the form on and you hold it. It’s how you’re supposed to stand at the door.”

“At the door of what?”

“At the door of the thing you’re standing at the door of.”

Quarles took his glasses down off his forehead and put them on, which was the first thing he’d done with any speed.

“Say that again,” he said.

“They’re not guarding,” Theo said, and heard his own voice go flat while he said it. “Guards face out. Both of them are facing the doorway. They’re keeping the mourning. That’s the Great Mourning Guise.”

The trailer was quiet except for the rain, which had thickened into something with weight in it.

“The Guise is what we do here,” Theo said. “Once a year, Founders’ Weekend, everybody lines up in the mask and walks the route, and at the end of it there’s the sending-off, and then it’s done and everybody goes and eats. That’s the ordinary Guise. The Great Mourning Guise is the other one. Same masks, same steps, but it isn’t for a holiday. It’s for a death. And it doesn’t get performed by whoever’s willing. It gets performed by the household.”

“The household,” Quarles said.

“The family. You don’t hire it out. It isn’t a thing you can buy.” Theo tapped the border of the print, at the pencil numbers. “So you’ve got two of them at the door in the mourning form, a pair, matched, dressed cloth, the ear pierced, and however much paint and labor that is. You don’t get a household standing at a door like that unless you’re the family that opened this valley. So either you’ve found their grave, or you’ve found a grave they wanted everybody to think was theirs.”

Quarles took his glasses off. He folded them. He set them on the table.

“I’d put the first half of that at ninety percent,” he said.

Theo’s heart did something stupid and he kept his face still.

“Ninety,” he said.

“I don’t say a hundred. I’ve been at this since the seventies. A hundred is how you end up in a room explaining yourself.” Quarles slid a folder out from under the laptop, opened it, turned it around, and pushed it across the table with two fingers. There were two lines at the bottom of the second page and a pen lying in the crease. “Which brings me to this. It’s a page and a half. It says you don’t talk about what’s on this table, what’s in that ground, or what you hear in this room, to anybody, at any time, by any means. Your school, your friends, your phone. There’s no end date on it.”

Theo looked at the two lines. He did not pick up the pen.

“I’m seventeen,” he said.

“So I’m told,” Quarles said. He put one finger in the crease, flipped the pen out of it, and put the pen in his jacket pocket. The folder stayed where it was, open, the two lines empty. “We’ll take the rest of it up in the proper order. Read it as long as you want.”

Voss crouched. There was a canvas bag under the table end, and she dragged it out, a good heavy one, sea-bag weight, the top folded over and stuck shut with its own stiffness.

“I have a list,” she said. “It’s an old list, and I want to be honest with you about how old it is.” She got the top open. Inside, packed flat: a brick of paper, cut to size, still in its band. A twist of something brown wrapped in waxed paper that gave off, when she moved it, a dry sweet smell like a hot pencil sharpener. A coil of hemp rope. A folding knife with a wooden handle.

“That’s off a card in the files,” Voss said. “Nineteen seventy-four. There’s a photograph of the card. We did what we could with the photograph.”

Theo didn’t touch the bag. He looked at the paper. It was cut, not torn, and it was cut to a size he knew the way he knew the yard behind his own house, because he had spent a large part of his childhood cutting that size of paper.

“Professor Nye went down at two o’clock this afternoon,” Voss said. “He’s above ground now. That’s the only good thing I can tell you about it.”

Theo’s eyes came up.

“He’s sixty-eight years old,” Voss said, “and he’s been in worse holes than that one and come out of them cross about lunch. So.” She stopped. Started again, flat, an official giving an official account. “We’ve tried everything we’ve got. Everything anybody at the site knew to try. It has not made a difference.” She straightened up. “So I’d like you to try.”

“Try what?”

“Whatever it is you do.”

“What is it I do?”

“Whatever your mother does,” Voss said. “And if you need something that isn’t in that bag, tell me what it is and I’ll send a car to your mother’s house tonight. We have her address. We’d have someone at the door in forty minutes.”

The rain went on. The generator out back went on. Theo stood with his hands at his sides.

“Hexes,” he said.

Voss blinked. “What?”

“A curse. You want me to take a curse off.” He looked around the table. “He’s sick. He’s sixty-eight, something happened to him underground, and he’s sick, and you want me to — “ He stopped, because there was no good way to finish it. “Take him to a hospital.”

“He’s at the hospital,” the woman with the camera bag said, in a small voice.

Nobody laughed. The woman went back to looking at her shoes.

“Are you actually with the excavation?” Theo said. “At the school she said the office was consulting on the tradition elements. That’s what I came for. That’s what I told the assistant principal. I do the parade. I know the masks, I know which sett goes with which household, I can tell you which year the steps changed, I’ve done it since I could walk.” His voice had gotten loud in the trailer and he did not stop it. “Nobody said anything about a man in a hole.”

He had worked it out already, somewhere under the talking: the pass in Voss’s bag, the gate, the mile of rutted track back down to the road, and the rain, which would not have cared either way. It would have taken him twelve minutes to be off this site. Nobody in the trailer would have come after him, and that decided nothing, because he stayed where he was.

Voss put her hand up to the knot at the back of her head, found the pin in it, and left the pin where it was.

“You said you fold slips,” she said.

“I do.”

“You said you’ve folded them since you were three.”

“I have. A hundred an hour if they’re cut for me.” Theo held up his hands, palms out. “For the display case at the historical society. For the booth at Founders’ Weekend. For the boxes in the back of the church hall at Christmas, because the Presbyterians buy them from my mother every year and hand them out to the shut-ins.”

The trailer was quiet.

Hollis set his cup down on the table. He hadn’t moved from where he stood, near the door, and he hadn’t asked anything yet, and it turned out he had been saving it.

“What paper does your mother use?”

Theo turned his head.

“What do you mean, what paper.”

“For the slips,” Hollis said. “What paper does she buy, where does she buy it, and how does she keep it dry in a house with no dehumidifier in it.”

Theo knew. She bought it three reams at a time from a printer in Ryansburg who thought she was a church group, and it came in a blue wrapper, and it lived in the top of the hall closet inside a plastic tub with a lid that had a broken corner and a strip of tape over the break, and the tape was old and had gone amber, and she replaced the tape every August. He knew the weight of the tub.

He said nothing.

Voss let a few seconds go by. Then she said, “Mr. Marsh. Give me something I can put in a report. One sentence. That’s all I’m asking. I have to type this up tonight and I would like to type something that makes sense to the man who reads it.”

Theo heard the pitch of his mother’s voice in his own mouth before he heard the words. It was the voice from the church hall and the visitors’ bureau and the bandshell stage, the one that carried to the back of a crowd without ever going loud.

“The Guise,” he said, “is a living tradition of the Redkiln Valley, one of the Commonwealth’s most distinctive regional folk arts, preserved continuously by local families, presented annually as part of Founders’ Weekend with support from the county heritage commission and a grant from the state council on the arts, and documented in partnership with the historical society and the visitors’ bureau, and it remains, in the words of the commission, a genuine cultural asset and a source of pride to every resident of this county, and a light in the window—“

He stopped himself. Nobody had asked him to.

The rain ticked on the roof. The laptop woke up, showed the time to nobody, and went back to sleep. The young one had picked his trowel up and was holding it against his leg. Hollis drank his coffee and looked at the wall above Theo’s ear, where there was nothing to look at.

Quarles had not said anything for a while. He looked at the table. Then he leaned down and put his toe against the canvas bag and pushed it back under the table, out of the light.