Requiem [COMPLETED]

Ghosts

            Autumn has come; the crisp breeze has turned to raw winds and rain-splashed fields, the clay soil swelling with wet until treacherous puddles the consistency of chocolate pudding, like quicksand, make the corn stubble and wheat chaff impassible for chisel plowing. The farmers have given up on turning over any more root-mat before the ground freezes hard, and sit inside their small homesteads every day, drinking coffee and staring out at the barren fields. The wind is strong enough to cause sodden leaves to flurry and skirt across the vast openness between the windbreaks, and the edges of wet mats of them to flutter like a newspaper left out in the rain on the doorstep.

We hit the jackpot, that is, if you consider finding dead bodies a pleasant reward. The next two days of excavation flew by. For the first day we had Seamus's help, which made an enormous difference as both he and Sven were good at feats of brutal physical stamina--like heaving spadefuls of dense, wet clay for hours over their shoulders.  Barely two feet down we hit the first skeleton, which was laid immediately on top of another, which had a broken skull. They were both taller than me, but shorter than Sven. We figured they must be our uncles. But then we found an extra hand.

It looked as if it was reaching out to the other two, in a posture of reaching out as if to brace the others, the action stultified by the weigh of the earth that each year washed downslope into the little basin, ever deepening the embrace of the clay layers above and which exuded into the cavities of their bodies, trickling in between the slats of ribs and weeping through the nostril and eye holes, filling the cavities with agate-like cohesions, ribbons of sediment. Like quicksand it had become one with its victims, hungrily devouring what it could never never transmute into until nothing was left except calcification and dust. We excavated into the side wall, following the hand up the arm to the next victim, who was roughly the same size but huskier, with thicker bones.

The sump pump only lasted one of those days before breaking down; the water had too much sediment floating in it and the sludge kept clogging up the pump. The next day we found the pond saturated again, which meant that despite Sven and I wearing wool socks and galoshes and rubber dishwashing gloves trying to keep our hands and feet dry, the icy mire kept caving in and seeping back into the holes we dug, splashing on our clothes, the chill sinking into our bones. It almost felt like we were being buried, slipping and falling and clawing our way upright again in the mud pits. We all cursed that Seamus had to work wasn't here when we needed him even more than the day before.

It was a shambles of an excavation. Rita would have been horrified. I gave up on precise measurements and rounded approximate depths and positions. We had to stop every hour and chafe our hands and wear mittens to keep our fingers from becoming numb and unresponsive. It was hard work. That afternoon snow started spitting, the steely gray sky darkening even earlier than sunset due to the storm. The temperature dropped 15 degrees in an hour with the wind picking up and Chuck held two lanterns over us to help us see and not accidentally step and crush any bones. On the other end of the pond, again about two feet down, we found a petite skeleton with a large one. We also found some old buttons from a military uniform. The sludge was starting to freeze like slow setting cement, so I abandoned notes and Chuck helped us pile the bones into garbage bags.

"I feel like I'm in the mob," Chuck said, trying to make light of our situation. "I keep expecting the Feds to come tearing up the road with sirens. Where are the bags of cement?"

"Grandpa wouldn't let us know if he was coming and he wouldn't call the police's attention; you've been keeping an eye on the road, right?" I tried to not sound anxious, but I was eager to leave. Even though I'd resisted Sven's idea originally to not see grandpa,I had a growing fear of facing him as the end of our safe time approached.