Chapter 11: The Hundredth

There is a rule in the trade, and they hand it to you before the tools and before the names for the tools. The rule is that ground keeps accounts.

My grandfather said it his own way. Elias Hollis was a water man most of his life. He walked other people’s ground with a forked stick held out in front of him and told them where to put the well down, and when wells stopped being found with sticks he carried the same stick for men who wanted to know which way a seam of ore ran under their property, and he was right often enough that people quit asking him how. What he said, mostly to himself, mostly with his head down over the work, was this: nothing you put in the ground goes missing on you. I asked him once whether it worked the other way. He said it was the same account.

That is what the men who say it now mean by it. The ground holds on to what you put in it, and it goes on holding it whether you meant to come back for it or not, and it does not care which of the two you were planning.

I have heard the sentence since, out of the mouths of men who never met him, and it did not start with him. The men who dig for money will give you three stories to back it up. They are stories. I am giving them to you the way I got them.

The first is the Dutchman. He found gold up in the Superstition country and worked it, and then he covered the way in behind him, and then he died in town — a bullet, or his heart, depending on who has the floor — without telling one living person where the hole was. That was about eighty years ago. Fifty men have gone up that mountain after his gold. Some of them came back with nothing and some of them did not come back at all, and the ones who did not come back are why people still tell it.

The second is the Spaniards. They came up out of Mexico with soldiers and padres and a paper that said there were seven cities in the north, with doors of turquoise and gold in the streets. They walked that country for two hundred years and never found them, and their bones are still out there where they fell over, and the name stayed behind after the cities did not. Men who dig still say the Seven Cities when they mean country nobody has walked, and I have walked a good deal of country and never seen one.

The third is the camps. In the gold rush a man dug his own hole and braced it with what he had, and when it came down on him there were two or three others standing ten feet away with shovels and a decision to make. Ground was worth more per yard in those days than the men standing on it. Two days spent digging out a dead partner was two days off your own claim. The ones who dug, dug. The ones who did not, did not. There were more of both than there are records.

That is the rule. I am not going to tell you any of those three is true. I am telling you it is the kind of thing men who dig say to each other over a can of peaches, and then I will tell you what happened to me.

In the summer of 1969 I was not in the trade. I was in the Army, in the engineers, in the north of the country, in the mountains that come down to the border. I was there because my father had been a colonel and knew a man, and the man he knew had a slot to fill that summer and no one he liked better to fill it with. The slot was in a survey detachment going out to find where a road could cross a ridge. My father told me it was a good spot for a young man, and it was. He said it was out of the way, and it was that too. He did not say out of the way of what.

We had come in on foot. The trucks would not go past a certain place, and they turned around and went back down the way we came, and after that we walked two days, and on the second evening, with about an hour of light left in it, we put the tents up on a slope above a creek. It rained the whole night. Not weather that stops and starts. It came down slow and straight and it kept coming, and everything we owned got wet and stayed wet, and we ate standing up, out of the cans, because nobody had gotten a fire going and after two days nobody was going to try.

There were twelve of us. Four of them were civilians: two engineers off the road job, a surveyor named Lena Voss, and a geologist who had a bad chest and would not admit it. Two days of walking had put all four of them flat in the tents with their boots off and their feet up on their packs, and Voss had her plotting book open on her knees with the pages fanned out to dry and she was not reading it. The lieutenant and the sergeant and Doc went tent to tent with the water cans and a bottle of salt tablets, telling them to eat something, because a man who does not eat gets cold, and it was plenty cold already. I carried the water. That was mine to carry that night, because it had been mine to carry every night since we left the trucks.

Marcus Barrett ate his peaches out of the can with his fingers and held the can out to whoever wanted some. He had been bigger than the man teaching his class since he was fourteen, and nobody had called him Marcus since, and in the platoon he was Tank and had been since the day he got there. Wilson Chee sat with his back against the same tree every night and said about four words a day and heard everything. That night his eyes were on the tents and the civilians in them, and they stayed there. Keene, the radio man, was eighteen years old and had a birthday cake in a tin his mother had mailed him in July that he had never opened.

Ray Delgado sat at the edge of the group with his heels dug in and said things about money the way another man says things about his knee — the note on his mother’s house, what it came to, the day of the month it was due, and whether it had gone out that month or was going out the next. He had been paying it since he was seventeen.

The sergeant was Dodd. He had come up the hard way, five years in and no hurry to go anywhere, and he had a use for me that he was not going to give up: the water cans, the radio watch, the thing nobody wanted. At every meeting, before he got to anybody else, he called on me, and he listened to what I said, and he found the hole in it. If I had a father who was a colonel and a man who knew a man, I do not know what I would have done with a soldier like me either.

Keene said, “Hollis. You’re from a city. Tell us one.”

“Tell you what one.”

“Anything. Something we haven’t heard.”

Tank stopped chewing and sat up. “Yeah, go on, Nate. You’re the one of us that’s read a book. Entertain the troops.”

“I’ve read fewer than ten books in my whole life and I could name them for you,” I said. “There’s a Bible. A dictionary. One volume of an encyclopedia, the one that goes from A to Amer. Two westerns with the covers off. A book about the James boys that is mostly pictures. And a manual on blasting I signed for and do not own. That’s seven, and two of them I only looked at the pictures.”

“So tell us one of them,” Tank said.

“If I tell you one and the sergeant comes around wanting to know who started it, one of you has to stand up with me.”

They all said they would. Not one of them did, that night or any other night, and I did not expect them to, and I am not bringing it up as a complaint.

“One story,” I said. “It’s not out of a book. It’s something that went around the truck outfits. I don’t know if it happened. Nobody I ever met knows if it happened.”

“Go,” said Tank.

“There was a girl named Doris. She was on the train, a day and a night of it, coming home from the school where she was learning to be a teacher. She had a seat by the window and her coat folded up under her head and a book she was not reading.

“Across the aisle was a young man in uniform. Army. He had a ribbon on his blouse and his shoes were shined, and he had the thing about him that gets a girl’s attention before he has opened his mouth. He was not worried about anything. They talked. He had been to college before he went in. His people had money and a house in town, and he had a way of letting you know it without saying it. By the second stop she had the whole life worked out in her head, down to the kitchen.

“They got off at her station. He said he had a train to catch back to the post that night and asked would she sit with him while he ate. They ate at the counter in the depot. He went to the phone in the back and was gone a few minutes, and when he came back he had an envelope in his hand with no stamp on it and a name written on the front. He asked her would she take it up to his mother’s house. He said he would go himself but he had to be back that night, and he said it like a man asking for something small.

“She said yes. She had the whole day free and he was good to look at and she was nineteen years old.

“The next morning she took the envelope to the address. It was a good house on a street with trees. An old woman came to the door in an apron and took the envelope and opened it and read it standing right there in the doorway. Then she looked up, and she smiled, and she asked Doris in for a cup of tea.

“Doris sat down in the front room and drank her tea. It was good tea. She remembered afterward that it was good tea. She was through the first cup and a few sentences into the second when the room tilted and the light in it came apart, and she put her hands down for the arms of the chair, and missed.

“When she came up, the first thing was cold water. The second thing was the sound, and the sound was hers, and she shut it off, because there was nothing in that room that wanted her making a sound. She was on a table. She was not wearing anything. There were canvas straps at her wrists and her ankles and the straps were wet. And the walls — I want to be careful how I say this — the walls were covered. From about the height of a man’s chest up to the ceiling, in rows, pinned and stretched and dried.

“She counted three rows across before she stopped counting. There was enough light in the room to see that some of the hair on them was blond and some of it was black.

“The old woman came in and stood where Doris could see her, and she held the envelope up so Doris could read the letter. The letter was one line. It said: This makes the hundred.

“And the old woman said, so you will know what you are. She said there were men back east who bought the dead for the schools, and they paid by the count, and the count had to close at a hundred before the money came. She said the wall was the count. She said all of it the way you would tell a man he had won something. She said somebody had to be the hundred.

“Then she said something to the men behind her, and one of them came around the end of the table with a knife. Short blade. Turned up at the tip like a hook. Made for one thing and never used for anything else.

“Doris watched the man and not the knife, because his face was the only thing in the room that was doing anything she could follow, and she thought —“

“That’s enough.”

Dodd had come up on the far side of the log without any of us hearing him. He could do that, and he knew he could. He stood there in his poncho with his hands in his pockets.

“All of you. Down by the lieutenant’s tent. Meeting. Hollis goes first.”

Nobody moved fast. Tank put the lid back on the peaches. Keene got up with his head down. Chee got up without looking at me at all, which was how I knew he had been listening.

We went down the slope through the trees to where a poncho was strung between two trunks and the ground under it had been scraped down to mineral soil and already had water standing on it. There were no lights. The lieutenant had a map folded under his arm and a flashlight he held down against his chest so it would throw on the paper and not on anything else.

The road had to cross the ridge somewhere, and the map said the place to look at was the valley on the far side of the creek. Pruitt said the creek bottom ran northwest and that people had used that way a long time ago, and that the geologist wanted a look at the rock on the far side. He said we would go down in the morning and be back before dark, and he said a couple of things after that about who walked where.

Tank never took his eyes off me the whole time. He wanted the end of the story. He had a face on like a man who had paid for a picture show and been walked out in the middle of it.

“Tomorrow,” the lieutenant said, “we go down into the valley and look at what’s on the other side of it.”

Dodd was standing at the low edge of the poncho with the rain coming off it in a sheet behind his shoulders. When the lieutenant finished, he did not say anything for a while, the way he did.

“Hollis,” he said. He said it with nothing in it, and then he waited.

I stood up.