| Epitaph :: short fiction. Coke Newell |
 “The hero is commonly the simplest and obscurest of men.”
- Henry David Thoreau, Walking
I
When he caught that Greyhound bus in 1956, Reynolds Peterson swore he would never come back. But here he was, looking into the black throat of hell.
Mel Chapman had called him one Thursday night, caught him and Gladys eating cookies and sharing a single tall glass of milk at their place in Norman, and said, “We found a body.”
Peterson knew what he meant.
It would be the first human body ever recovered from the 1947 blast. Peterson had even asked, “What makes you think it’s from the blast?” All he needed to say to Chapman: “The Blast.”
Unspoken but understood: why not an earlier volcano? Why not one of the prehistoric ones, the ones in which Chapman had established his own immortality in the tight circles of mammalian paleontology with seven merychippus skeletons, charred but intact: twenty million-year-old horses.
But to his question, Chapman had gently but firmly said: “This guy was wearing a knapsack or something. There’s an imprint of a buckle branded into the flesh at one shoulder.” Or what had once been flesh, anyway.
Ren Peterson had had to sit down, Gladys taking his arm and giving him The Look.
When Peterson got out of the cab there were people everywhere— hundreds of them just standing around looking into the pit— no one he knew, and not a soul who knew him. He had been gone for 47 years. Caught that bus for Lawrence after hugging Mel’s mom, his adoptive “Aunt” Betty Chapman, goodbye, almost tearing up when he called her mom and she called him son, and never looked back.
He had taken a degree in geology at Kansas State. Mel and Aunt Betty had both laughed at that— they teach geology in Kansas? — to which Ren had said, yeah, and they don’t have volcanos. Then up to Michigan State for a Ph.D. in paleontology, and down to the University of Oklahoma for a job and 41 years and counting of flat, level, absolutely perfect boring bliss as a perfectly boring lecturer and clinician who wanted nothing to do with risk, ambiguity, or his personal past. A past long since buried and which he would never dig up.
And now this.
Down in the pit, Mel saw Peterson just as he was aligning his feet with the top rungs of fiberglass ladder so as to descend into the excavation. He stood and ran to greet him, pulling him into a firm hug.
“Hey, Ren, you’re looking great!” It had been six years; in Oklahoma. Always in Oklahoma.
“You, too,” Peterson said honestly. But he was visibly uneasy, and Mel could hear it in his voice. “What was going on here?”
Mel waved his hand around. “Supposed to be a Texaco by the end of summer, only Monday morning this guy driving the power shovel pulls off a scoop of clay and ‘bout drops his chompers. ” He directed Ren Peterson’s gaze to the vertical wall where two graduate assistants were chipping lightly with hand picks and trowels. A human body was embedded vertically in the wall. An adult male.
They started toward it, and Chapman continued: “Bulldozer guy peels off a load of this clay, sees an arm, then the thigh and most of a leg and freezes. Just mentally freaks out. Supervisor comes over spitting nails and saying what the hell and the guy just points. So then the super says ‘we better call the police,’ and the cop says, ‘we better call the university,’ and Jill Trainor takes the call and says, you need Dr. Chapman. I walked right out of a lecture, Ren. Just dropped the chalk and walked. Called you that night.”
He paused and then added, “I wouldn’t have bugged you, but it’s definitely the 1947.” He pointed to the imprint just above the man’s left collar bone. The previous eruption had been in approximately 1100 A.D. Way before knapsacks with brass buckles.
After two days of slow and precise extraction work, the victim’s head was now fully exposed, and Ren Peterson found himself looking straight into the face of a man frozen in stone: possibly mid thirties, probably Caucasian. No clothing or facial hair remained, but the structural and epidermal detail was remarkable. A flood, with the resultant burial in mud, wouldn’t have stripped his clothing like this, or left him standing vertical, or near vertical, like he was. The man was in fact hunched over a bit, his arms wrapped around something that was still resisting the probing taps of their hand picks. Probably a boulder, or a tree stump.
Peterson reluctantly, almost by force, shifted his gaze to the grey-green rock that entombed the man, and then reached down and caught up a clump of it: about the texture of chalk and the density of graham crackers. He powdered it in his fist. This wasn’t clay, it was volcanic tuff, the hardened fallout of the incandescent ash cloud that had fled the throat of King Mountain, moving down slope and laterally at speeds approaching 300 miles per hour and holding its heat at about 1300 degrees Fahrenheit for up to fifteen miles.
June 8th, 1947.
Little Ren had been supervising the twins at the playground in Lava Park, so named for the ancient lava flows that had fingered into this area and then stopped to cool, forming a natural shelter on three sides. Mom and the baby, Marian, were right across the street shopping for groceries at the Red Owl. This was the routine, every Saturday. In those days no one worried about a nine-year-old “babysitting” a pair of six-year-olds in a park for twenty minutes. Not in a peaceful nowhere town like Kingston, anyway. From the playground they would all walk back to the trailer park at Elm and South Center Street, put the groceries on the shelves, and help mom clean the kitchen and bathroom before anyone played outside.
Peterson swam back out of the memory at the sound of Mel Chapman’s voice explaining the process to one of the construction supervisors still hanging around the dig: a volcanic ash entombment, like the ones found in Pompeii under 30 feet of Vesuvius tuff. Trees had been obliterated, exploding into molecular chaff so like so much Oklahoma dust, but nearly a dozen bodies of dogs and humans had been vaporized and transformed into carbonized mineral mannequins so rapidly and efficiently that even the tread imprint on their sandals and the texture of the cloaks on their backs had been preserved in the metamorphic surrogate that had displaced their actual bodies: stone people.
But like most of his American colleagues, Ren had only seen the photos in textbooks. This was the real thing.
He reached out to touch the face— highly inappropriate, but completely unavoidable, his emotional response ineluctably overriding his professional detachment for just a moment. But in that moment: a man, hard as rock.
An immortal man. An unknown immortal man.
Ren’s father had been called into service in March of 1942, three days after a Japanese sub torpedoed Ellwood Beach north of Santa Barbara, FDR fearing an invasion of the U.S. Pacific Coast. On May 30th he sailed west from Pearl Harbor on the aircraft carrier Yorktown and watched the Japanese Zeroes coming in from the Hiryu on June 4th, splattering the deck with machine gun fire. When a 20 mm wing-cannon blew apart a railing on the conning tower, Ensign Peterson was killed instantly by the flying debris, or so said the official telegram. He was the only man on the Yorktown killed that day.
The only memories Ren Peterson had of his father were those distant and indefinable ones, like whispers, that emanated from a photo his paternal grandmother had given him at the mass memorial service held in Salkum two weeks after the volcano blast: Michael Stephen Peterson, then five years dead, offering a strained and lonely smile above the crisp uniform of the United States Navy.
The town of Kingston had been burned, wiped or buried right off the map. Half-peeled and bloodied little Reynolds Peterson had badgered his way to the surface three days later from his shelter inside a thick concrete play tube, living only because the tube had rolled away before the tidal wave of the ash cloud like a Lincoln log kicked down the stairs.
He was the only survivor.
Sounds on the ladder brought him around again. Dozens of people surrounded the pit, a couple of cops replacing the plastic crime scene tape with half-inch twine strung between fence posts. Two men wearing hardhats and tool belts were coming down the ladder. A Case power shovel was rolling toward the edge of the pit with a stack of two-by-fours in the bucket.
Looking up and pointing with his chin toward the tool-packers, Chapman said, “That’s Halloran’s boys, the crate builders from Paleontology. I haven’t needed them in years.”
Peterson looked around the pit, an excavation site for a Texaco station that would, now, never see the light of day. Not if he had anything to say about it. But the power shovel rolled right up to the lip of the dig and sat there, its driver peering into the hole while he sucked on a Pepsi and stuffed a fat sandwich into his mouth.
“Get that tractor...” Peterson started to yell, but then turned to Chapman, who hurried over to the construction supervisor watching from nearby. “Can we please get him to move that thing back?” Chapman pleaded. “ This is a significant archeological site. That dirt wall breaks away and...”
“We’re okay,” the foreman answered, “he’s sitting right on bedrock. He’s solid.”
Ren Peterson had joined them. “That isn’t bedrock,” he said heatedly, “it’s basalt, part of the old volcanic flow, and basalt flows are frequently hollow. They’re crystallized tubes!”
The foreman shook his head, and then said all right and waved the sandwich stuffer back away from the edge.
Just then one of the graduate assistants yelled: “Dr. Chapman, look at this.”
Chapman and Peterson hurried over to see where the last tap of the hand pick had opened a crack around the large mass at the stone man’s waist. The entire slab of ash-stone, going from near his chin almost to his knees, was ready to pull away from the body. A miniature whirlwind swirled through the pit, blowing dust into their eyes, and as Chapman coughed, Reynolds wiped at the air, and one of the grad students pulled at the slab. It came off complete, then collapsed in chunks at their feet.
Mel Chapman said, “Oh, good lord!” and had to sit down.
Children. Two of them, holding hands and being cradled tightly to the man’s chest in their last moment on earth.
Dr. Reynolds Peterson could only stand and stare.
II
Roger Fagan was half a man, but he didn’t feel anywhere near that whole.
His mother had died of tuberculosis when he was twelve and his father had disappeared when he was fifteen. Just up and not been there one morning, Roger climbing out of their tin and plywood lean-to outside of Pixley, California, Grapes of Wrath country, and asking Maud Comley next door, “Where’s Papa?”
The old woman had just shrugged and wandered off to join the other cotton harvesters, her pickin’ sack wrapped around her head to keep off the sun.
Roger had gone on to the fields, thinking on one side of his head maybe papa had just gone on out to the fields without him, but on the other, hell, I bet he did it. I bet he left. As he’d been talking about it for three years.
By the time Roger returned that night, not a glimpse of papa all day, the lead thought in his head was: “I hate cotton.”
So he gathered up his things, tossed them in Maud Comley’s sack when she was down to the laundry shack for water, and wandered out to the highway just as the sun was getting red. Reached Freedom by nightfall, slept in a box car, and made San Francisco by 10 a.m.
He worked on a tuna trawler for a year and a half then went inland, telling Joe Murphy he was “heading to the heartland.” Spent almost a year cutting beef carcasses in Kansas City, then Chicago, wondering the whole time where the heart of the place had got to, certainly not anywhere he’d been. Then he took a job running a depth finder on a coal barge rolling south to New Orleans the same week the Japs burned Pearl Harbor.
He enlisted and went to the Philippines first, perhaps the only man in the Pacific entirely content with Maj. Gen. Lewis H. Brereton’s low rations and outdated weaponry, eating three squares a day and packing a World War I Enfield rifle. Better tent than he’d ever seen in his life. His tour ended a year and a half later when he took a belly full of shrapnel on a trail above Port Moresby. He was almost dead when his litter reached the MASH unit, but the surgeon plucked and cut for two and half hours, taking half his guts out, then sewed him up a new man.
Told him, “Your war’s over, soldier. Where’s home?”
Nine weeks later he’d come back to New Orleans, since he’d never reached it the first time, and worked his way right back up the Mississippi doing odd jobs, then up the Missouri until he came to the North Platte. He went west as far as Kearney, where he married a girl who wanted a brave decorated veteran but then couldn’t put up with his constant tiredness and frequent pain, man with half his guts flung around the bush of New Guinea. And left him.
Just up and wasn’t there one day.
He’d been on the road again for three years when a trucker coming south out of Billings said you ought to head on over to Washington state, apples coming on and plenty of cash money for someone who can pick and doesn’t care about sleeping under the stars.
Said: “So you’re a veteran? Got that scar on your neck.”
And Roger had said, “Yeah.”
And the truck driver had said, “Pacific?”
And Roger had said, “Yeah. Where at in Washington?”
Which brought him to Kingston, his guts hurting real bad and his heart nowhere in sight. That hurt the most. He been so lost and confused and abandoned and bruised for so many years he didn’t know what love or compassion or homesick even felt like.
The air for thirty miles coming in to Kingston had been thick and murky and strangely green for a town with no heavy industry. Man and his woman in a stake-bed truck hauling sheep had picked him up clear back in Moses Lake, guy saying not much more than “Gonna rain” for three hours. Which was okay, because Roger hadn’t slept much in two days. Or eaten.
Coming out of the Cascades near Randle the woman had actually commented on the skies, changing color now, saying, “I don’t think that’s rain, Earl.” That much.
And Earl had said, “Apples right up this road to the right, young feller. Ask for Tilmann. Marvin Tillman.” And let him out at a dirt road going north toward nowhere.
Thirty minutes later Marvin Tillman had said, “Ain’t picking anything til it rains, young man. We pick now I gotta wash all this fruit before we go to pack.”
And Roger had said, “Looks like it could rain anytime.”
And Tilmann had looked at him real suspiciously and said, “Those clouds? That ain’t rain, young feller; that’s the volcano, and she’s dusting my fruit with ash. If’n it rains anything it’s gonna be the top of that there mountain. Me and the missus, we’re skedaddling down to Yakima for a few days.”
So Marvin Tilmann gave him a ride back out to the highway and Roger headed in to Kingston, the town just below the volcano, about seven miles as the crow flies from town hall to tip top. He’d found two days of work at the rail depot loading box cars with crates of apples headed for Denver and Salt Lake City, apples picked and crated before the ash started to precip.
He'd asked a guy, the foreman, “Does it do this all the time? The ash.”
And the guy said, “It’s been blowing steam most of my life. Always melting the snow fields up on the summit, around the crater. But this ash? No, this is weird.”
And Roger had said, so what’re you gonna do? And the foreman had shrugged and said: “See what happens.”
The first night, just wandering around, he had found a dense little copse of bushy woods snuggled tight into a ravine between two thumbs of an old lava flow that rimmed a city park on the south side of town. He pressed through the brush and laid himself out a comfy little nest for his bedroll.
Waiting for dusk at the playground that third afternoon he could tell the locals were nervous. Mothers kept sniffing the air, sulfur and ozone, and the kids kept watching the grey-green clouds roll around, saying, “Oooh!”
He had himself a nice little bench in a patch of what was passing for sunshine, so he just sat eating an apple, his fourth that day, and waiting for everyone else to go home. He had cash in his pocket, even after eating two real-live sit-down restaurant meals that day, but the apples gave him a certain peace. A nostalgia.
They had picked apples in California, up north around Shasta, as he remembered. Picked and eaten for weeks, then dried a bunch on a sheet of corrugated tin and saved them for when times got lean again that winter, which they always did. His mom, rest her soul, had once laughed with a shanty-town neighbor that her family ate dried apples for breakfast, water for lunch, and swole up for dinner.
He laughed and a little girl looked at him down the length of his park bench and said, “What’s so funny?” Smiling. The sweetest little thing he ever had seen.
He was embarrassed. The last thing he wanted was for some poor mother to think he was harassing her kids. But the only adult in the park was pushing a toddler on the swingset way over on the other side.
He shrugged, and tried a comforting smile. “Oh, just remembering my ma.”
“Your mother?”
“Yeah.”
The girl said, pointing, “My mommie’s over there buying go-shees.”
Roger was putting two and two together just as a little boy, same size, same look, came up and said, “She means go-shees.” As if he’d corrected something.
“Groceries?” asked Roger, chuckling but fairly confident. It was years since he’d been around children, clear back to the poor camps, and none of them ever had time to stop and just play. His had been a mean, hard, adult world as far back as he could remember. He could hardly believe it was otherwise, yet other soldiers in the Army had told him stories.
“Are you okay here all alone?” he asked, really kind of disturbed for them. “I can walk you over. It’s getting on to twilight.”
The boy said “what’s twilight” and the girl said, “It’s okay, our big brother is right over there,” which he was, a nine- or ten-year-old climbing in and out of a big length of concrete culvert that had been retired from civic service as a playground prop, laid on its side.
Roger looked back at them and smiled. And they both smiled at him.
“Do you live here in Kingston?” the little boy asked. “We’ve never seen you.”
Roger had to hesitate. “No, I’m just... I’m just working here for a while. Then I’ll probably move along.” But what he wanted most in life was a comforting hand, the security of a family, of a home that cared, a place he could come back to at night and find a warm meal, a pat on the back. Maybe a wife. And children.
He started to tear up, big tough guy soldier right there in front of a couple of kids, and the little girl came right up to him and actually put her hand over his, saying, “You’ll be okay. Promise.”
He had to stand up and turn away, saying thank you, but throwing his knapsack up over one shoulder and wanting to run, run and hide his head, run forever. But he just stood there, immobile, as the crustal plate finally slipped 6000 feet below them, dropping nearly a foot in an instant and sending temblors racing to the surface faster than the speed of sound.
The shudders of earth reached the mountain crater in seconds, disintegrating the magma plug. More than a billion cubic meters of rock were incinerated and thrown toward the heavens in an incandescent ash plume that looked just like the Hiroshima blast cloud he’d seen photos of.
When the ground shook, the little girl fell to her hands and knees and the boy fell into Roger. Roger lifted the girl and pulled both of them into him as he looked up at the peak, the whole thing coming apart. He looked at the Red Owl, at the concrete tube— no one there— then lifted the two children straight up to his shoulders and ran for the ravine, his bowels screaming in pain all the way.
When the eruption blast reached 60,000 feet the outer layers of the column began shearing off and collapsing in waves, pyroclastic pulses of molten rock, ash and gas that raced across the ground consuming everything in their path.
It took just under three minutes for the first wave to hit Kingston.
III
Reynolds Peterson and his first cousin Mel Chapman would never know for sure, but they both cashed in some Treasury bonds and commissioned a Seattle artist to make a three-foot bronze stylization of the anonymous man with two children in his embrace. The Meade city council paid for mounting it on a large block of chiseled basalt and then had it placed prominently near the center of King Mountain Memorial Park.
Ren wrote an epitaph for the bronze plaque that was mounted below the bronze, a moving yet impersonal dedication to all those who died in the blast, adding a special commendation for those, like the anonymous man of the monument, who gave their lives that others might live.
Anonymous but for the face. For that the artist worked from an old photo Ren Peterson let him use.
The smiling yet lonely portrait of a Navy man.
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