Tucker’s Grove (34 page)

Arne let out a sigh. “
Ah, Davey, you should have been a teacher.”

Less than an hour later they struck water.

The sun nudged toward the southwestern horizon, and Arne stood in his mud-splattered overalls, hoe in hand, at the edge of the vast garden. He r
ealized he looked like an old cover from
Reader
’
s Digest
, the kind that were “
Rural with a Vengeance”
according to David.

Each spring Arne planted a garden six times larger than he needed for himself, but he enjoyed the work, and he enjoyed giving the vege
tables away. And if he didn
’
t feel like harvesting everything that ripened, he threw it all in the compost pit; after all, the vegetables didn
’
t care if they were harvested or not.

Inside the farmhouse, David had cooked a fancy farewell dinner for himself
and his father. Arne usually cooked for one, and
—
thanks to the fouled well
—
he had become accustomed to not cooking at all in the past week. David had filled a few old milk jugs with water at the neighbor
’
s to tide them over until the new well could be hoo
k
ed up to the house
’
s existing plumbing.

By himself outside, Arne waited in the expectant silence, looking out across everything he had known. It had changed very little since his own childhood. The unplanted half of the garden stood in black, hard chunks,
just as the plow had piled them a month before. The garden seemed transformed in the reddening sunlight of the dying afternoon.

Arne stared at the lifeless earth, amazed at the lack of weeds. Although there had been no rain for two weeks, several viscid pu
ddles lay in the dirt, covered with slimy green. He hadn
’
t n
o
ticed them before. As he watched, the pools seemed
alive
, crawling, oozing, glittering with ancient secrets: algae groping for a foothold on the blasted, sterile landscape of a newborn Earth. Whe
n Arne pulled in a hitching breath, the air seemed o
p
pressively damp and steamy.

Suddenly, something felt wrong. The sun hung motionless on the horizon, but as he watched, it picked up speed in the opposite direction and heaved itself above the edge of the
world, like a fiery red behemoth whirling from west to east. The huge clock-hand of the sun moved backward, counter-clockwise.

Conflicting thoughts battered his mind, terror and awed fa
s
cination at the same time. What if, in his thoug
htless drilling, he had punctured a bubble of the past, a cyst buried three-hundred million years below the surface? Like the primordial water that had invaded his old well, causing it to dry up? What if that a
n
cient past was even now seeping toward the su
rface?

Arne blinked, and the illusion of the sun
’
s motion vanished, leaving it half-sunken on the horizon. When David called him to come in for supper, he almost ran to the house.

That night, Arne lay tossing on his creaky bed, smelling the taint of brims
tone in the air. He and David had sat up talking next to the fireplace, where Arne insisted on burning a few old lumps of coal he had found in the cellar. His eyes sparkled with chil
d
like fascination as the 300-million-year-old light spilled into the prese
nt.

David had to leave the next morning to catch a flight to Ch
i
cago, connecting to Great Falls, Montana, and already Arne felt more lonely than he had been in years.

In the numbness of night, Arne could hear the echoing drip of the faucet in the kitchen.
How could a faucet drip with no water pressure behind it? The dripping pounded deep into his co
n
sciousness, into his imagination.

Drip drip drip drip drik drik trik tik tik tick tick tick tick

Nature
’
s own clock. Time was passing…
but he couldn
’
t tell which
direction it moved.

From outside, through the window screen, came night sounds he had never heard before, awful and primeval. Eerie calls and haunting burbling noises as of something that moved slowly through a swamp. The air in the bedroom felt hot and h
umid, i
n
tensifying all sounds.

A thrill of fascination traced Arne
’
s spine, a thrill of fear. He had immersed himself in something strange, a true mystery of Nature. He didn
’
t know whether to be eager for morning, or to be terrified of it.

Arne stood on t
he porch in the still-wakening dawn and stared out into the new universe of what had been his backyard. His jaw hung open in an unabashed expression of astonishment.

He took a step off the porch, compelled to walk toward the misty, primeval swamp that had
appeared during the night, seeming to stretch beyond his distant fields. Ruddy sunlight shimmered and reflected in the steamy air, as if slowed down by plowing into the past.

The ground felt spongy and damp beneath his work boots. He could smell the bizarr
e vegetation and the sultry ooze lurking in the swamp. He paused, torn between his fascination and the urge to run and hide under the bed.

He thought about calling for David, but the sense of wonder clouded all his fear. Arne was experiencing something no
one else had ever imagined. David would never believe this; in fact, Arne feared that his son might not be able to see it at all. This simply couldn
’
t be real.

The air was hushed and brooding, as if noise-making cre
a
tures had not yet evolved. Far off, beyo
nd where neighboring Tucker
’
s farm would someday be, Arne could see the smoke-belching crown of an ancient volcano, but the rumble had been dimmed to a low drone in the humid air.

Giant rushes and wide-spreading ferns rose around him, dri
p
ping starpoints o
f dew. Huge fern-trees towered overhead, some rising almost a hundred feet high. Primitive evergreens and trees with no flowers clustered in the wet undergrowth. When a sound like a chain-saw whizzed past, he gawked at an armored drago
n
fly with a wingspan
of two feet. The dragonfly circled Arne
’
s head and then sped deeper into the swamp, as if beckoning him to follow.

He walked along, hypnotized by the primeval beauty.

Billowing seed-ferns and giant, cactus-like club mosses shed green reflections into the h
eavy forest. A large beetle scuttled sluggishly down the fallen trunk of a fern tree, picking its way across a wet mass of algae.

Arne pondered beside a quiet, glassy pool crowded with bored-looking fish. All around him was a pervasive, relaxing hum, like
a cicada
’
s song played backwards. A spider the size of an apple watched him from a scale-tree, but did not seem inte
r
ested in prey so large.

Arne felt a delicious lull in himself and enjoyed a moment of peace. He had always known there were mysteries in th
e world far greater than himself. This made the most profound religious experience seem like no more than a sneeze. He wished David were here with him. He decided to return to the house
—
at least to within shouting distance, so he could rouse his son. No o
n
e should miss this!

Arne didn
’
t think he had stayed in the swamp for long, and the sun still hung low in the morning sky. He hadn
’
t gone far, but when he turned back toward the farmhouse, the prehistoric swamp had swallowed everything, and stretched for mi
les and miles in all directions.

The past sprawled forever and ever before him, and he was three hundred million years away from home.

Early versions of these stories have appeared in previous publications, some under different titles. All have been su
bsta
n
tially revised for this collection.