The Seventh City

The Trade This is not a sermon, and it is not a wedding, and it is not a eulogy. It saves nobody, it joins nobody, and it lays nobody to rest. It is a trade. A trade in breaking things, and it always has been. Men in this line have always liked the other words better — the ones a man hears across the counter of a junk shop, or in a bar at two in the morning when somebody has had enough to drink to start talking about a map. Treasure. Recovery. Preservation. Salvage of antiquities, if he can still get all four out. I have heard all four. I have used two. What we do is open what was closed and take out what was put in, and each of those is breaking. The only honest question in the trade is where a man stops. People who had money and died a long time ago did not want to be dug up, and they thought about that harder than they thought about most things while they were alive. The builders ran out of fresh ideas about four thousand years ago. Rock that drops when the wrong stone takes a man's weight. Sand that swallows a shaft and the man in it. Teeth and stingers kept alive on purpose, in the dark, with nothing to eat but each other. A floor laid over a hole; a lid laid over a well; a passage narrow enough that a man has to go through on his side, where he cannot swing anything but his arm. What changed over the centuries was not the idea. It was patience, and money, and the quality of the ironwork. By the eighteen-fifties a man could buy a coffin with a lock worked into the lid, key and all, and men did buy them, and I have opened two. The first took four of us eight hours, and we spent what was left of the night filing the points we had dulled on it. The second one had a woman in it. We put the lid back on her. Nobody in that crew had anything to say, and nobody took her rings. I have thought about that crew more than once since. This country came to the same business late and loud. After California in 'forty-nine, a whole western slope was men digging at other men's ground, and a claim was a piece of paper, and a man held it with a rifle and the company of one friend, and the best ground was always the ground somebody else had already found. Nothing about that changed when the gold played out. It just moved. Out here there are two stories everybody knows. The first is the Lost Dutchman — a man everybody calls the Dutchman, and nobody agrees on what he was, who is supposed to have found a vein and died before he could spend it, so that men have walked that range with a mule and a pick for eighty years, hunting a hole that somebody's grandfather covered up on purpose. The second story is older. The Spaniards came up out of Mexico behind a rumor about seven cities, and stayed a hundred years, and left behind no gold that anybody has found. What they left was maps, graves, and the habit of writing down what they hoped they had seen. The old work is finished. That is the part nobody outside the trade understands. What stops a man now is not a lock. It is finding the door. Anything with a headstone on it has been through twice — once by the family and the church, and once, later, by somebody with a rod and a lamp. Mounds settle. Fences rot. What is left is what is under the ground with nothing on top of it: no stone, no name, no fence line, nobody alive who will tell the story. That is the work now, and it is slow, and it is cold, and most seasons it pays for the gas and nothing else. So a man carries equipment, and the equipment is dull, which disappoints anybody who came in off a movie. A steel rod in sections, four foot at a time, walked down into the ground so that the hands can read what the metal is passing through. A mud auger, to bring up a core of earth and let a man look at it in the light and smell it. An entrenching tool. A pick with one point ground into a hook. Rope. A compass. Lamps. And a candle — a miner's candle, and every man in the trade carries one, and every man in the trade knows what it means when one goes out. That is a longer story, and it will come up on its own. And, in the years I am talking about, a mine detector. Army surplus, sold off by the pound out of warehouses in Arizona and New Mexico, tuned to sing over a can, a buckle, a tin cup, a pull tab. Men who had spent a year sweeping roads in another country with one of those things came home and walked pastures with them the same way, and dug where the needle sang. There are three ways to find a grave, and only three. One is the tools. Two is paper: the county recorder's office, the church burial register, the death notices in a paper that folded in 1911. A man is not reading for names by then. He reads for absences. An acre that never shows a plow line. A name that stands in the tax roll for nineteen years and then stops, with no widow's name entering the roll behind it and no recorded sale. Three is the way that gets laughed at in daylight, and it is the one I was raised into. The word for it in daylight is dowsing, and I have never liked the word. Dowsing is a forked stick and a man who wants forty dollars and a well. What my grandfather did was read ground the way another man reads a creek — where it has been, where it wants to go, where the water went when it had no choice. Rock runs in lines. Water runs in lines. Old men pick the place they want to be buried the same way, and they are not nearly as original about it as they believe, and after enough years on the ground a man can see where a hillside has been arranged and where it has not. Judge me how you like. I came into this the way anybody comes into a family business — standing in it before I knew what to call it. There were never many of us in the third kind. There are fewer now. All of it leads back to one object, and it is not the kind of object a man shows off at a table. My grandfather, Elias Hollis, left a book. It is called The Book of Hollow Ground, which was a phrase men used in that country for ground that had been opened and closed again, and the book was already old when my grandfather's father came to own it. It was one book, written in two halves. The first half is a manual for reading ground. The names for the shapes a hillside makes. How to tell where water has run and where it has never run. Why a family would put a grandmother into the low seam of a ridge a mile from their own church, and what that choice says about what they had and what they were afraid of. I can read that half, and it is the only reason I have ever found anything. Most of what is in it is method. A patient man with a library card could work out a good part of that on his own, and I expect a few have tried. The second half is gone. It was not cut out, and it was not burned, and it was not lost in a fire or a flood or a trunk that went to a pawn shop and never came home. It was torn, by hand, through the middle, close enough to the stitching that a strip of the first half went with it. Two hundred and some pages became a hundred and ten. The mystery is the second half. The loss is the end of the first. That strip was the last of the method, the rule for what to do with everything the earlier leaves teach. Read the ground all you like; without it you are a man with a good eye and nowhere to put his feet. There is a seam in the binding where the strip was taken. I have run my thumb down it more times than I can count. I have never learned who did it. I have asked, and the asking told me something I did not want to know, which is that the question is not welcome in certain rooms in this state. Twice I asked it in the wrong one, and both times the conversation changed direction, and I was not invited back. The binding held. Whoever tore the second half out closed the book again and left the rest of the house alone, as far as I know, and left no note, and did not want anybody to know what had been in it. That last part is a guess. I am marking it as one. The old work is finished. That is the part nobody outside the trade understands. What stops a man now is not a lock. It is finding the door. Anything with a headstone on it has been through twice — once by the family and the church, and once, later, by somebody with a rod and a lamp. Mounds settle. Fences rot. What is left is what is under the ground with nothing on top of it: no stone, no name, no fence line, nobody alive who will tell the story. That is the work now, and it is slow, and it is cold, and most seasons it pays for the gas and nothing else. So a man carries equipment, and the equipment is dull, which disappoints anybody who came in off a movie. A steel rod in sections, four foot at a time, walked down into the ground so that the hands can read what the metal is passing through. A mud auger, to bring up a core of earth and let a man look at it in the light and smell it. An entrenching tool. A pick with one point ground into a hook. Rope. A compass. Lamps. And a candle — a miner's candle, and every man in the trade carries one, and every man in the trade knows what it means when one goes out. That is a longer story, and it will come up on its own. And, in the years I am talking about, a mine detector. Army surplus, sold off by the pound out of warehouses in Arizona and New Mexico, tuned to sing over a can, a buckle, a tin cup, a pull tab. Men who had spent a year sweeping roads in another country with one of those things came home and walked pastures with them the same way, and dug where the needle sang. There are three ways to find a grave, and only three. One is the tools. Two is paper: the county recorder's office, the church burial register, the death notices in a paper that folded in 1911. A man is not reading for names by then. He reads for absences. An acre that never shows a plow line. A name that stands in the tax roll for nineteen years and then stops, with no widow's name entering the roll behind it and no recorded sale. Three is the way that gets laughed at in daylight, and it is the one I was raised into. The word for it in daylight is dowsing, and I have never liked the word. Dowsing is a forked stick and a man who wants forty dollars and a well. What my grandfather did was read ground the way another man reads a creek — where it has been, where it wants to go, where the water went when it had no choice. Rock runs in lines. Water runs in lines. Old men pick the place they want to be buried the same way, and they are not nearly as original about it as they believe, and after enough years on the ground a man can see where a hillside has been arranged and where it has not. Judge me how you like. I came into this the way anybody comes into a family business — standing in it before I knew what to call it. There were never many of us in the third kind. There are fewer now.