---

 

This writing was accepted for publication in the 96 page perfect-bound ISSN# / ISBN# issue/book... “Treading Water” Down in the Dirt (v127) (the Jan./Feb. 2015 Issue) You can also order this 6"x9" issue as a paperback book:

Order this writing in the book Adrift (issues edition) the Down in the Dirt Jan. - June 2015 collection book		get the 318 page Jan. - June 2015 Down in the Dirt magazine issue collection 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback book:

Order this writing in the book Adrift (issues / chapbooks edition) - the Down in the Dirt Jan. - June 2015 collection book		get the 378 page Jan. - June 2015 Down in the Dirt magazine issue collection 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback book:

Old Bones

Sam Wilder

    Scoot Filson had decided that after fifty years crafting furniture out of his garage for the residents of Black Dog, North Carolina, it was time to hang up the old coping saw responsible for the glossy four-inch scar across the top of his right thigh, the thumbnail gouge responsible for the dead nerves in the lower half of his left palm, the jack plane that thankfully’d never caused him a bit of hurt, and all the other tools that’d provided his living. He was seventy-seven after all, and even though he was still more than capable of building furniture that’d live longer than its owner, he had to admit his last couple projects hadn’t been his finest. Scoot hadn’t notched the walnut just right on the butcherblock Smithy Hungar’d ordered. He also hadn’t clamped the glued slats tight as they should’ve been, and Smithy’d returned the piece after just a week of use because sections of wood had started to separate.
    “I ‘member when you used to boast your work was guaranteed for life,” Smithy’d said as he dropped the broken butcherblock on Scoot’s workbench.
    “People livin’ a lot longer these days,” Scoot’d replied as he unfolded ten greasy twenties to refund Smithy.
    Over the years, Scoot hadn’t spent much of the money he’d earned. He’d never taken a wife, and he didn’t have children, so he didn’t have many expenses outside good-looking wood for his projects, replacement tools, or a fresh pair of work gloves when he wore through the previous pair. Unlike most men in Black Dog, he didn’t have a taste for liquor, so he hadn’t drunk away his earnings at the Block ’N’ Tackle. His little house at the foot of Mount Sugar Fiona off Bramblewine Drive had been in his family for three generations, so he didn’t owe anything on it except taxes, which he grudgingly paid every April.
    Scoot figured he had enough money stuffed in his boxspring to last him ten or twelve years, maybe more if he was careful, his age be damned, so other than a faint feeling of emptiness, like learning a favorite family legend turned up a lie, Scoot put woodworking behind him.

—

    The first couple months of retirement, Scoot was content to sit on his porch with a flannel pulled over his bony shoulders against the early-Spring chill, drinking coffee thick enough to chew as he read his Bible and dogeared passages he’d return to until he had them memorized. But as the days grew warmer and the sun’s meander lengthened, he felt an itch to take advantage of the weather, and every other day or so, he’d wander to Main Street, settle into the porch swing at Callaghan’s General Store, and make small talk with whoever’d happen by.
    On the first day warm enough for Scoot to leave his jacket at home, Hester Maguire stopped by Callaghan’s to peruse the flats of flowers freshly carted over from a greenhouse in Asheville.
    “You know you made me a dresser back in the nineties that looks better now than the day Gregor brought it home,” Hester said.
    “Happy to hear it,” Scoot replied, smiling behind his chest-length beard that, years back, had gone white as the willowy clouds overhead.
    Hester squeezed the blossom of a snapdragon, and the little yellow flower yawned. “Rumor has it you ain’t woodworkin’ no more,” she said.
    “No ma’am,” Scoot replied, and nostalgia nipped at the pit of his stomach.
    “How the hell you passin’ the time, Scoot?” she said. She fingered a flat of fawn lilies, their cream blossoms drooping like bells. She tipped a lily upward, held it to her nose, and closed her eyes.
    “I do alright,” Scoot said. “I read my Bible and chat with folks like we’re doin’ now.”
    “That all?” Hester asked.
    “Life’s quiet,” Scoot said. “I’m happy enough.” But there was no denying he was tiring of the Bible, and without woodworking to occupy his time and hands, he found there were too many hours in his day.
    “Y’ever thought about startin’ a garden?” Hester asked. She balanced a tray of flowers against her broad chest, and she thumbed through the packets of Summer seeds in the spinning rack next to the flats. “Garden’s a great way to keep yourself busy, and corn fresh from the stalk’s about as good as it comes.” She smiled, the apples of her cheeks pink as blush roses. “You’ll have to wait a few months for corn, though.”
    Hester went inside to pay, and Scoot eyed the flowers she’d just picked through. Flowers were flimsy, he though, too delicate for old woodworker’s hands. But it would be nice to eat produce he’d grown himself instead of the half-rotted tomatoes, brown iceberg lettuce, and bagged baby carrots he bought from Smallwater’s. In fact, as Scoot toyed with the idea of a vegetable garden, his fancies grew. He imagined tomatoes large and round as softballs, ready to burst with fresh juice, hanging every inch from vines climbing stakes hewn from saplings. He imagined a corner of his garden populated with corn stalks skinny as him sprouting cobs every direction. He wasn’t quite sure what carrots looked like growing, but he imagined rows of orange cones poking up from the earth in military formation.
    Scoot spun the rack, plucking packets of anything that sounded tasty. Peas? Sure. Runner beans? Yep. Eggplant...? What the hell was that? He left the eggplant seeds on the rack. He stacked his seeds at the end of a set of potatoes, and even though he wasn’t fond of onions, he snagged an onion set as well. He’d serve onions when he had folks over to feast on his garden’s offerings.
    “Looks like you’re fixin’ for a football field-sized garden this year, Scoot,” Donal Callaghan, the owner of the General Store, said as Scoot slapped the sets and seeds onto the chipped formica counter by the register.
    “Gotta find somethin’ to pass the time,” Scoot replied.
    “Just so you know,” Donal said as he arranged the seeds and sets in small cardboard box. “Unless your plot gets sunlight most all day, you’ll have a hell of time with a couple these.”
    Scoot’s backyard ran up the foot of Mount Sugar Fiona. It never saw sunlight, and the soil was always spongy with with mountain runoff.
    “Where there’s a will,” Scoot replied, smiling. He handed Donal seventeen dollars to cover the cost, but something like disappointment slithered in his stomach as he collected his box and started home.

—

    Scoot leaned against the backside of his house and surveyed his sloping yard. Several places, boulders sprouted from the sparse grass like turtles half-buried, but thirty feet from his back door, right before his yard bled into the red spruce forest covering most of Mount Sugar Fiona, there was a stretch Scoot figured would make a fine garden. Unlike much of the rest of his yard, the plot got a couple hours of sunlight a day.
    The hoe Scoot fetched from under his porch had been handed down at least two generations, and the tool’s old iron blade was blunt and heavy enough to knock the head off a possum with a halfhearted swing.
    Scoot struggled the hoe over his shoulder and hefted it earthward. When the blade hit, the mud swallowed it whole, and Scoot pitched forward, which caused a muscle in his lower back to twist and pop like a rubber band stretched past its limit. Scoot dropped the hoe and rubbed the area above his ass, trying like hell to slow the pulsing pain.
    He eased the hoe from where it had been swallowed, and swung slower, aware of how the ground would react. His back smoldered with the motion, but he grit his teeth, and half an hour later, he’d turned up the bottom edge of his garden.
    Scoot was working his way toward the treeline, and he’d just navigated past one of the turtle boulders that populated his yard when the hoe’s heavy blade glanced off something solid hidden under the grass, and for the second time in under an hour, sharp pain climbed Scoot’s back. “I’ll be goddamned,” he cursed aloud. He threw the hoe to the ground, and knelt next to it to wipe dirt away from whatever he’d hit. He clawed the loam. Loose tendrils of grass clung to his fingertips like hair, and eventually he found a layer of granite three or four inches under the topsoil. The sun was setting off to the west, and most of Scoot’s yard was cast in shadow, but he kept digging until his fingertips were raw and flecked with mica.
    Even after clearing a considerable patch of dirt, he hadn’t found the edge of the speckled granite.
    Frustrated, Scoot stood, hefted his hoe, and chopped at the earth until the ground gave way beyond the shallow bedrock. The sun was now behind Mount Sugar Fiona, and the warm day had gone cold. Scoot shivered beneath his sweaty shirt, but he kept working, because, despite the discomfort, his yard was cooperating again and he was determined to at least outline his garden before he turned in.
    Turning the soft soil, Scoot fell into a rhythm. The slice of his hoe working earth carried his mind off, and he recalled the striped cherry dresser he’d fashioned for Gracie and Abelard Thurkettel back in the ‘80s. He could still trace the scalloping along the lips of the drawers, as well as the crow feathers he’d fashioned under each handle.
    When Ramsey Whittaker was born, Scoot’d whittled a toy soldier that Butch, Ramsey’s daddy, had said looked so real it might climb Ramsey’s crib and march straight out of their trailer.
    And when Mildred McCree was suffering flooded lungs, Scoot’d built her a black walnut dying chair with a high, straight back to keep her lungs above the phlegm. Mildred’d died in that chair, and Scoot was certain it would be busted up. But Carol Rose, Mildred’s daughter, said Scoot hadn’t just made her mama a dying chair but a throne, and she’d called an Appalachian Cultural society from a university down in Raleigh come pick it up.
    A blinding light and a roar of pain that ran from shoulders, to spine, to the pool of pain present in his lower back tore Scoot from his thoughts and thrust him back to the task-at-hand as the blade of the hoe glanced hard off another rock buried half an inch under the grass along his planned path. Scoot crumpled where he stood, muscles suddenly unable to support his gaunt frame, and when he tried to stand, his muscles insisted he stay put until the nerves cooled.
    It was full night behind him to the east, and the stars had begun to show. A pastel orange and purple band had settled on the western horizon on either side of Mount Sugar Fiona, and Scoot felt a chill under his skin as dew collected along his sparse, gray arm hair. He reminded himself he was seventy-seven, pushing seventy-eight, and he cursed himself for committing to yard work that would tax a man thirty years his junior. But he thought he could handle the labor, because the only signs of age his body had ever given him were a few wrinkles around his eyes, a white beard, and stiff fingers. Sure, when he woke in the morning, he had to let his muscles loosen in order to pull himself out of bed, but everyone who understood hard work suffered a stiff back before breakfast. And sure, when he pissed, the stream came slower than it had even a year ago, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t capable of manual labor.
    Scoot pawed the ground and found another patch of granite under the wet topsoil. He clenched his teeth until his jaw throbbed. He was going to have a goddamn garden if he had to buy a jackhammer and grind the shallow bedrock to gravel so he could shovel it out of the way.
    Night had fallen completely before his muscles had calmed enough to let him up, but while he was down, knees sinking ever-deeper into the loam, an idea’d come to him. Hester Maguire’s boy, Brock, had a pickup with tires tall as Scoot’s waist. You could hear that machine for miles near every morning when Brock shifted gears and tore ass down Main Street out of town towards the highway that took him to the garage over in Waynesville where he worked. Scoot was sure if he and Brock could figure out a way to get a chain attached to the rocks in Scoot’s yard, they could pull them up out of the earth.
    When Scoot finally forced himself to standing, his sore muscles wouldn’t allow him to walk upright, so he hobbled hunchbacked toward his cabin, and he let the screen slam hard behind him as he tracked watery mud and blades of broken grass across this kitchen’s yellowing linoleum. He didn’t bother shutting the brass-handled hickory door behind the screen. His boots were almost clean by the time he shuffled into his living room, and what mud was left, his faded green shag carpeting wiped clean. Scoot tried to gingerly settle in his hard pine rocker, but his muscles seized as he sat. He fell the last six inches, and a bolt of pain shot up his back as he hit the worn wood. Scoot cursed and grunted as he turned on the lamp by the phone and mashed the buttons to call the Maguires.
    “Need to speak with Brock, please,” Scoot said when Hester picked up.
    “What can I do you for, old man?” Brock said after Hester’d handed him the phone.
    Scoot winced when the boy called him old, but he ignored it and explained his rock problem.
    “Truck’ll prob’ly tear your yard up,” Brock said after a hesitant pause. “But if you don’t mind, we could give it a try.”
    Brock said he’d be over the following morning just after sunrise. Scoot set the phone back on the receiver and smiled, satisfied, behind his white beard. All the while, the pain in his back hummed.

—

    Scoot woke well before sunrise, and once his back was limber enough to allow him to swing his feet over the side of his bed, he shuffled to the kitchen and put a pot of coffee on. Scoot slipped his quilted flannel over his shoulders as the mud percolated, and after the coffee was finished, he poured himself a cup and limped outside. He tried to enjoy the morning sun cutting through the low-hanging fog as he waited for Brock’s pickup to come growling up the driveway, but as he sipped his steaming coffee, he couldn’t ignore the pain in his back, which he’d expected to feel better after a long night’s sleep instead of worse.
    The sun was cresting above the Carolina hemlocks at the eastern edge of the front yard when Brock’s grumbling truck crawled around the switchback in Scoot’s driveway.
    Brock pulled into Scoot’s front yard, just feet from Scoot’s porch. “Howdy, old fella,” Brock called down out his open window.
    “I ain’t old yet, boy,” Scoot said, shielding his eyes from the morning sun reflecting off the mirrored chrome that seemed to cover every inch of Brock’s truck.
    Brock leapt from the cab and jogged over to Scoot. He extended his hand, big as a baseball mitt, and Scoot took it. Brock had hair black as crow’s down, and his wide, square shoulders strained his old Swain County High wrestling t-shirt.
    “Let’s get ‘round back and get this job finished so I can get to the garage,” Brock said. “Hop on in so you can show me where to pull up out back.”
    Scoot knew he wouldn’t be able to climb into the passenger’s seat of Brock’s lifted machine, so he told the boy he’d just meet him out back.
    “Suit yourself, old timer,” Brock said, and he swung himself back up into the driver’s seat.
    Old timer echoed off the walls of Scoot’s skull as he loped through his cabin, passed the mud from night before that’d dried to dirt, and out his back door.

—

     As Brock steered his truck over the rocks jutting from Scoot’s yard, the vehicle’s suspension bent and flexed at impossible angles, tubes and rods compressing and stretching to their limits. Brock parked with one of his monstrous tires atop a turtle boulder.
    “Show me what we need to hitch,” Brock said, leaping from the cab, and Scoot led the boy a few feet up the gentle slope to the first patch he’d clawed up the evening before.
    Scoot watched Brock squat and paw through the mud. The boy moved like an animal, supporting his weight with different limbs as he needed to, and before long, Brock found a notch in the rock where he could attach the hook at the end of his towing chain.
    “If this is just a slab, it should give easy enough,” Brock said. “But if it goes deeper, it’ll be a different story. You sure you wanna give this a try, Scoot?”
    “Do it,” Scoot replied. Over the course of his life, there might have been one or two things he’d let go of once he set his mind to them, but that was because they’d gotten in the way of other things he’d wanted worse. With woodworking behind him and his Bible read through time-and-again, there wasn’t a thing Scoot wanted more than this garden, even if it turned his yard to a patch of hell.
    Brock retrieved the chains from the bed of his truck and set the hooks against the rock. “Since you been around since the prophets, you might want to ask ‘em for help,” Brock said with a sideways smile.
    “Shut the hell up,” Scoot mumbled once Brock was out of earshot.
    The machine roared to life and belched a plume of black smoke into the clean dawn air. The tires spun, and the tread tore at Scoot’s yard, spewing seven-foot columns of mud into the air. The chains strained, and the rock didn’t budge at first. But when Brock gunned it again, the chunk of granite began to buck up out of the earth. It was a flat stone, thank goodness, and after Brock hit the gas a third time, the rock stood on end before toppling over. Brock drug the slab down Scoot’s yard ten or twelve feet, and it cleft a shallow gash in its wake.
    The morning sun had crept above the mossy roof of Scoot’s house, and from the turtle boulder Scoot had chosen to watch Brock and his truck wrestle the old earth, he now saw something stark white shining in the center of the fresh black crater. Scoot struggled to standing, his back pulsing with pain, muscles expanding and contracting as his nerves flared just under the skin, and he shuffled toward the hole, sliding his feet against the dewy grass instead of lifting them and placing one in front of the other. Scoot looked over his shoulder to see if Brock was watching him labor towards whatever waited exhumed.
    At the edge of the muddy patch, Scoot found himself staring into the empty eye sockets of a pearly, grinning skull a foot from the top few vertebrae, clavicle, and dislocated right ball-and-socket shoulder of a skeleton.
    “I’ll be goddamned,” Scoot whispered, and despite his protesting back, he knelt and shoveled handfuls of mud from the bones. His fingers tangled in a mess of beads and sinew as he uncovered a smooth stick lashed to an animal skull. Shards of a shattered pot lacquered black were scattered like confetti around the skeleton, and a chip with a razor’s edge opened his right index finger from the second knuckle to just below his nail.
    “That was easy enough,” Brock hollered from down the yard. “Ready to try the next one?”
    Scoot ignored the boy as he cleared dirt from the bones.
    “Hearing not as good as it used to be, old man?” Brock teased, and when Scoot didn’t answer, Brock yelled the same again. Scoot continued to ignore Brock until the boy stood by him at the edge of the pit, over the bones.
    “What the hell is that?” Brock asked.
    “An indian,” Scoot said. “Probably a Cherokee.”
    And to Scoot’s surprise, Brock chuckled high and light. “You remember his name?”
    Scoot forced down a flash of anger and continued to dig despite his bleeding finger. Scoot knew the teasing hit home because it pointed towards a truth Scoot wasn’t ready to face down.
    “Was that old fella a buddy of yours?” Brock chuckled.
    Clumps of mud clung to Scoot’s bleeding cut, and pill bugs scurried in the spaces where his gnarled knuckles kept his fingers spread.
    “Even now, he ain’t quite skinny as you are,” Brock contined, laughing like a child with a housefly on a string, toying with it before plucking its wings.
     Scoot Filson stood, ignoring the pain like his back muscles were forcing themselves from under his skin, tearing their way through his translucent skin. Standing tall, the man towered a full foot over the boy. “I ain’t that old,” Scoot spat. “And I’d say it’s about time you leave.”
    “Whoa Scoot,” Brock said. “I was just teasin’.” The boy had his hands up, palms forward like he’d just had a pistol thrust in his face.
    Scoot turned his back on Brock, eyes on the shallow grave.
    “Are you at least gonna throw me a couple bucks?” Brock said, the hint of a whimper on his voice. “A little gas money?”
    “Git,” Scoot grunted.
    “To hell with you then,” Brock said. “Won’t be long ‘til you’re dead as that old indian, anyway.” Scoot listened to Brock’s soggy footsteps grow quieter before the truck roared to life.
    Scoot knelt at the edge of the Cherokee’s grave, and the pain in his back was such he worried he might spit up the thick coffee he’d had earlier. The skull grinned at Scoot like it was still amused by Brock’s teasing.
    Scoot sat on his heels staring into the empty eyes of the dead, and he felt a pain that had nothing to do with his back. Scoot Filson had wandered into the twilight of his life, and what he thought would only be the next step of his life was, in fact, the last.
    The sun had climbed well above Scoot’s house, and another warm day was blossoming over Black Dog. But Scoot stayed low to the ground. He sunk his hands deep into the shallow grave and blood from his cut smeared rust up his arm. He lifted fistfuls of cold dirt from the earth, closed his eyes, and felt it fall from his fingers.

Copyright of written pieces remain with the author, who has allowed it to be shown through Scars Publications and Design.Web site © Scars Publications and Design. All rights reserved. No material may be reprinted without express permission from the author.

Problems with this page? Then deal with it...