BURYING ZIMMERMAN (The River Trilogy, book 2) (2 page)

That's why Henry and Jessie were panning for
gold in Rock Run, in the woods between Great Falls and Cabin John,
on a June afternoon in 1893. Drew and I were working our way up the
creek toward a fishing hole that day, or rather I was working and
Drew was gliding from rock to gravel-wash to twisted root to rock,
even though he was carrying a fishing rod and a tackle box. Half of
my steps ended with a foot in the water as I tried to keep up. When
he remembered to look back, Drew would stop and wait with an
outstretched hand to pull me to an even footing. He was nineteen
and I was eight.

***

From the time I could pronounce his name, I
thought the world of Drew, maybe because he was my only brother,
but also because everyone else seemed to think the world of him
too. It wasn't because he was perfect. My father was an engineer
for the Washington Aqueduct and my mother taught school, but Drew
never exhibited the academic curiosity that otherwise ran in our
family. Miss Foster, the long-tenured school librarian who came to
know me well, was surprised to learn I even had an older brother.
Nor was Drew the most reliable or disciplined child a parent could
have wished for. My sisters Cornelia and Penny claim they regularly
inherited his unaccomplished household chores.

But Drew had an innate balance and a
lightheartedness that people found infectious. He'd look you in the
eye deadpan after saying something unexpected, then succumb to a
slow-spreading tight-lipped grin that made you feel the two of you
were in on a secret that could consume the world. By the time I was
old enough to address him as a peer, he had found work and left
home. But as a kid I was always following in his wake, watching
from the sidelines, or fending off his tickling fingers.

Three and five years younger, Cornelia and
Penny were closer to Drew's age than mine, but they were as
captivated as I was. Occasionally the canal would freeze before the
Canal Company could drain it for the winter, and when that happened
Drew would borrow a pair of ice skates from one of the managers at
the Cabin John Bridge Hotel. My sisters had a friend named Lucy
whose family owned a sled, and Drew would shepherd the three girls
down to the canal, criss-cross a rope around his torso, then slash
his way down the ice at breakneck speed with the careening sled and
shrieking girls tied behind him. If the girls hadn't all tumbled
off by the time he got tired, he would stop abruptly in a shower of
ice-dust, then dodge the oncoming sled and prepare to get yanked
off his feet. Sometimes his skates would fly out from underneath
him without any assistance from the sled. My mother would shake her
head at dinner when Drew invariably rolled up his sleeves to reveal
forearms bruised from encounters with the ice.

***

As I followed Drew from stone to bank to
stone, my shoes and socks felt like drenched sponges, but I was
determined to keep myself dry above the knees, so I focused
intently on my target for each impending step. I didn't realize
that Drew had stopped until he was pulling me onto a flat rock in
the center of the creek. He pointed with his fishing rod toward the
nearest bank.

"See him? He's a beauty!"

It was curled on top of a fallen log, but the
snake's colors blended so well that I only noticed it when it
raised its head to assess us.

"I think he's a Copperhead," Drew whispered.
"Should we catch him?"

My eyes widened and I gripped his hand
harder. "Copperheads are poisonous!"

I didn't think he was serious, but I hadn't
forgotten about the snake prank.

***

When the weather turned warm in the spring,
snakes sometimes emerged from their dens to sun themselves on the
towpath. A few springs ago, Drew had managed to snare a four-foot
black rat snake and transport it home in the tied-off sleeve of his
jacket, which he'd cinched and carried like a gunny sack. Without
announcing his trophy to the rest of us, he'd fashioned a cage in
the shed out of an empty wooden barrel, then offered the snake a
chicken egg.

Penny, who would have been ten or eleven at
the time, had a pet mouse named Darcy who lived in a straw-lined
wooden box in her bedroom. Darcy was tawny gray with a pinkish
nose, and tame enough that he would perch on Penny's shoulder,
sniffing and twitching while Penny sat at her desk to read or
write. After school Penny always brought Darcy a tiny piece of
bread crust, and she loved to watch his little teeth jigsaw into
it. Darcy's box was covered by a window-screen held in place by
stones.

Two days after being imprisoned in the shed,
Drew's rat snake finally swallowed the egg. When he noticed the
snake's distended esophagus, Drew waited until his sisters were
helping our mother clean up after dinner. Then he stole into their
room and stashed Darcy in a dresser drawer. Minutes later his snake
had taken up residence in the mouse's warm nest and was coiling and
stretching to measure the place.

Drew ambled into the kitchen and tapped
Penny's shoulder. He pulled an unshelled walnut from his pocket,
saying that he'd found it earlier and wondered whether Darcy might
like it. Penny's eyes lit up, so Drew cracked the walnut open on
the kitchen counter with a whetstone and handed her the pieces with
a smile. Penny swept off toward her bedroom.

Within seconds Penny and Cornelia were
screaming, I was crying, and Drew had rushed in to capture the
offending snake. Assuring my sisters that mice were amazing escape
artists, he helped them execute a thorough search that eventually
produced an unperturbed Darcy. The full story emerged months later,
when emotions had run their course.

***

To my relief, Drew led us to the opposite
bank and we left the copperhead alone.

I wasn't old enough in 1893 to know there
were placer mines dotting the wooded slopes of Rock Run, but Drew
was probably aware of them. So little gold had been pulled out
during the prior three decades that nobody paid the miners much
heed. There was a stamp mill up at Sawyers Mine, but that was
beyond our fishing hole and we never heard it operating that day. I
do remember passing a few trails that led up into the woods from
the creek, so one or more of those mines may have been operational,
but for every pit that was still being worked there were probably
two or three that had been abandoned.

We reached our fishing hole – a broad pool
framed at the bottom by a fallen tree and at the top by a boulder
that intruded halfway across the creek – and Drew studied it from
the left bank.

"See that undercut on the far side," he said,
pointing with the fishing rod, "where it's shady below the
current?"

I nodded. "It looks deep."

"They'll be cooling off near the bottom of
that hole... just waiting for bugs to wash by overhead." I watched
him open the tackle box and choose a hook, then tie it on and bait
it with a piece of live worm.

"After you, Alphonse." Drew had bestowed that
nickname on me after the Alphonse and Gaston comic appeared that
year. Alphonse and Gaston always deferred to each other until they
were hamstrung, but Drew was no Gaston. Hefting the rod, he
tightroped across the creek on the fallen log at the base of the
pool, swinging one leg at a time around a branch near the halfway
point. I tried to follow, but I couldn't negotiate the branch and
had to retreat. Drew told me that I could scout the left bank
beyond the boulder to look for a crossing spot, then navigated into
position near the hole. He flicked the rod so his baited hook hit
the current and drifted down.

I watched him fish for a few minutes before
continuing up the bank and past the boulder. The next bend of Rock
Run was shallow, but broader and faster, and all of the rocks I
could reach from the bank were underwater. My shoes had begun to
feel less waterlogged and I didn't want to immerse them again, so I
picked my way further upstream along the bank, checking downed tree
trunks warily for camouflaged copperheads. When I noticed the
trampled leaves and absence of green that signified a faded trail
leading up from the creek, I got the feeling I was being
watched.

My eyes jerked away from the water and met
large dark eyes a dozen steps up the path. We stared at each other
for several seconds as I watched the doe lift its wet nose and
sniff for my scent. When I let my eyes slip past it, I saw a fawn
frozen twenty feet further into the woods, staring intently at me
like its mother. Deciding I was neither friend nor foe, the doe
hop-stepped into the trees, then paced away from the trail with its
fawn in tow. Deer were still fascinating to me at that age, and I
had spent hours trying to copy illustrations I'd seen on a wildlife
poster at school. I jogged up the path into the woods and tried to
keep them in sight.

The trail was blocked by a downed tree, so I
detoured around it, climbing to the right. When the trail cut
through a stand of mountain laurel and turned parallel to the
valley, I lost track of the deer. But I was ascending a rise that
looked like it might offer a view of the creek upstream. The trail
leveled off with Rock Run still out of sight, but I could see the
path start descending back toward the valley floor just ahead.

Between here and there was a broad-based cone
of upturned earth. The mound was covered with leaves and fallen
sticks, but nothing grew from it and rocks of various sizes studded
its surfaces. Toeing its base, I realized that the mound had been
built with dirt excavated from a hole in its center. I crawled up
the mound and peered down into the hole.

The opening was roughly square, with
five-foot sides that were framed by a cribwork of interlaced logs
extending down to ground level. A rotting plank spanned the hole,
dividing it in half. A dirty rope had been wrapped a dozen times
around the plank, and its free end descended into the hole. At the
bottom of the hole, maybe fifteen feet down, there appeared to be a
bucket, and something in the bucket caught the marginal light. What
was it? I'd read stories about wishing wells and wanted to find
out.

I crawled to the top of the mound, centered
one hand on the plank, and stretched the other forward until I
could grasp the rope. And the plank snapped in half, sending me
tumbling into the mine. To slow my fall and protect my head, I must
have instinctively kicked and grabbed at the dirt walls as I fell,
because I flipped and landed on my back and shoulders. I was lucky
to miss the bucket and land in puddled mud, but the impact knocked
the breath out of me. I lay twisted and inverted, with pressure in
my chest and numbness everywhere else as I tried to breathe.
Sensation slowly returned to my legs and feet, and I noticed my
hand was still clutching the rope near where it was wrapped around
the broken plank.

My eyes teared up and I could feel myself
starting to cry, but knowing that no one could hear me made me
sniffle and stop. I pulled my legs down one at a time and rolled
carefully onto my hands and knees, trying to get my breath back. My
shoulder ached and my left arm tingled, but I realized I wasn't
seriously hurt. I looked up at the window of light and could see
treetops swaying in the free air far overhead.

At the bottom of the shaft, I inhabited a
small world that smelled like mud and decay. The bucket held only a
soup of wet leaves and an old tin cup. When I ran my hands over the
dirt walls of the mine shaft, I concluded that I couldn't climb out
– the walls were vertical. One side of the shaft had been dug out
at the bottom, and a low opening extended horizontally in that
direction, into cool and utter darkness.

I learned later that this extension was a
"drift" in search of a pay streak. A gold vein could lie along the
ancient streambed, which might have been above and uncorrelated to
the current creek. So these placer mines were dug down to bedrock
and then drifted for twenty-some feet. Beyond that distance it was
too much work to haul the dirt back to the shaft and lift it out
with a windlass. Instead the miners would move up or down the
hillside, dig another hole to bedrock, and drift again.

The miners who dug this hole had found
nothing and moved on, replacing the windlass with the worthless
plank, pulling up the ladder, and not bothering to haul out all of
the gold-poor dirt. I don't know why they left the bucket and the
rope.

Kneeling below ground at eight years old, I
didn't realize I was in a placer mine, and I thought the horizontal
tunnel might be the way out. Maybe it led to stairs, or even a
door. I could tell from exploring its aperture with my hands that
it was framed by logs. I reached an arm into the tunnel, then
crawled forward on my hands and knees.

Because I couldn't see, I stopped every few
feet to feel for the walls and ceiling. For someone my size, the
tunnel was spacious enough. I had to fully extend an arm and lean
to reach the walls on either side. And I had almost enough room
overhead to stand up. Rough-hewn wooden posts and crossbeams
supported the dirt roof every few feet. About ten feet in, I nudged
a post in the center of the tunnel and crawled around it. I hit a
shallow puddle and considered turning back.

Then I sensed a presence in front of me – the
dirt wall at the end of the tunnel. I reached to touch it, finding
no magic stairway or door. I prodded the dirt in several places to
make sure. Near the floor I found a pile of stones and dirt. I
swept my hand rightward and shrieked as I touched dead fur and
something that felt like a face. Heart racing, I no longer wanted
to explore an unfathomable darkness on my hands and knees. I wanted
to see the sky again, immediately. I sprung into a crouch and
started shuffling back the way I'd come.

But I'd forgotten about the central post, and
slammed directly into it. I fell backward into the puddle and my
eyes blinked away tears. Before I could gather myself, I heard a
thump followed by a crack, and then a thudding and filling sound
and the smell of fresh dirt. The tunnel roof was caving in!