Red Jar

Meadow’s wife was with child, and it had given his mind no end of trouble. That Saturday in April he was out at the family’s country property, running the noisy tiller along the flat bank just above the Maury River. Since the newcomer wasn’t due till early August and he had heard what a misery it is to carry a baby through dog days, he figured Sandralee would find some relief lounging in a wicker chaise under the willow limbs and gazing at a broad bed of Red Mammoth sunflowers and beyond them to the silhouette of Jump Mountain. The view would be especially soothing here alongside the cascade where the little river rounded the bend and headed west, the stretch his father still called “Indian territory.”

It wasn’t the muggy discomfort of the coming summer that troubled him, though. It was the mystery of Sandralee’s moodi-ness back in the fall, the strained times they’d been through as he attempted to decipher the cause and then the final numbing an-swer itself, which was that she’d been sharing vodka tonics and a Buena Vista motel room with Josh Riles, a night dispatcher from the sheriff’s department. And though she’d wept and begged, prayed with him, and sworn Terrible mistake and Never again and Please forgive, anybody who knew the facts and could count to nine would guess that the child might not be endowed with Meadow’s green eyes and rusty hair, and that was only the surface wound.

So it was not exactly affection that brought him down Route 39 and onto the graveled spur he had called Arrowhead Way since childhood. It was a kind of revenge of which he was ashamed yet addicted. He had forgiven her, a part of him reasoned, and acted out of exaggerated considerateness only in order to remind them both what domestic harmony was like, to set a good example, to open a new path. He would make her a sanctuary out here and in the process perhaps find some remedy for himself.

As the ten-horsepower Mantis bucked and sputtered and threatened to stall in the rich loam, Meadow realized he’d snarled into some roots, so he tightened his grip on the throttle until the tendrils were worked through and the curved handles reverted to their usual low-key trembling. The contraption always amazed him with the way it easily churned silt and clay to a powder lit with chips of chert and mica. He knew from experience that he was also leaving bits of history in his wake, as he had found shards, bird points, and antler tools since he was old enough to be enchanted by the fact that native people had once lived and farmed this stretch where his family fished and picnicked and pitched horseshoes. And just across the stream, where the bank had severely eroded in the past two decades, he’d been the one to discover a rare and haunting funerary jar. But that was back before he’d even begun to shave. Now, the whole span of river seemed occupied only by the engine’s hungry roar and the anger nagging his mind, and it was hard to believe this place had been the site of long-ago ceremonies and his own encounter with the face of the dead.

He also knew that his current benevolence wasn’t fueled exclusively by forgiveness. A darker part of him, of which he wasn’t proud but could not dispel, wanted to rub her nose in his goodness, his victimhood. That was the outraged Meadow, the uncharitable part. The part that savaged his good intentions and Christian virtues the way the teeth of the whirling blades gouged through the dirt.

During the first six years of their marriage, Sandralee had seemed for the most part a caring and engaged partner, tolerant of his quirks and shortcomings, an older, settled version of the saucy and clever art major she’d been when they met. He had mellowed in similar fashion, and they had become quiet complements, a widely admired functioning couple.

Most mornings she dropped him at school with a kiss and a smile and drove off humming some Lucinda Williams tune. She then spent several hours dealing with customers and other co-op members at Good Hands Gallery, which displayed and sold the silver jewelry she fashioned. He would call her during his planning period and talk to her in a playful Swedish accent, and they would chat and flirt. At home they shared the chores and a taste for BBC movies, badminton, and Mexican food. They occasionally attended First Methodist in Lexington and made time for many of the string quartet concerts at the college. Vacations in national parks, summer weekends at the river, usually with boisterous family members. Babies would come, they always agreed, but they hadn’t been ready yet, despite noisy encouragement from Sandralee’s mother, Maxine. For the time being, they laughed a lot, and neither seemed to have much cause for complaint. So Meadow had believed.

Because he loved and was attentive to his wife, the fact that she had become more lulled than excited by their marriage was not entirely lost on him. Meadow was a sober man who spent much of his time marking civics papers, reading books on European history, and running the ticket office at ball games, while Sandralee made change at the gallery or sketched and molded her Celtic silver out in the renovated workshed. Occasionally he would un-cover the cases of his artifact collection in the den and improve a label or rearrange some scraps and stones. Sometimes she would go out to a fern bar for daiquiris with her friend Margot. And though he knew their hobbies—”Light Classics” on the satellite radio and The Mayor of Casterbridge—were not exactly exciting pastimes, their routine was reliable and as mildly satisfying as their weekly lovemaking. He tried to spice things up with weekend trips, flowers—streaked irises, usually—and cards, other surprise gifts, and he believed that helped some, but he was given to understatement and had little of what his father had always called “ambition” and “drive.” Ever since they’d graduated from JMU, he’d been teaching at his old high school, and she’d been “devoting her time to her art” and planning a gallery of her own. It seemed a viable existence.

One evening last summer, as they’d been lazily gliding on the porch swing and watching the sparking fireflies, Sandralee had set aside her vodka tonic, taken his chin in her palm, stroked his cheek and kissed him, very lightly, almost like a secret.

“It’s good to feel safe,” she whispered.

He listened to the clink of ice chips against his lemonade glass for a moment, feeling the steady sway of the swing.

“You make me happy, Sandy,” he said.

“Safe is a kind of happy.”

“A kind of.” Perhaps he should have wondered more about that phrase, but in the dusk her face appeared placid, and though it was early, they soon went upstairs to bed.

Turning the tiller at the end of the plot and starting to break up a new row, he looked across the water to the crumbling bank where he’d once found the remains of two people from the distant past in one red clay container. Just as he was reeling his mind back to that day, a wasp hovered before him, and as he swatted at it, his memory shifted to the first time they’d met Josh Riles. It was right after a baseball game, and Riles had been there to watch his brother Buddy play. The boy was good, a peppy shortstop with a clean swing, a whip arm, and an overdose of hustle. He was also a military history buff and wanted his teacher to meet his famous older brother, who was a Colonial reenactor and had once hit four home runs in a high school game down in Norfolk.

“Mighty pleased,” said Riles, as he wrapped his fingers around Meadow’s smaller hand. “I just moved here from Richmond. Not much Revolution reenactment up this way. It’s all Civil War hoopla around here, but I hear the trout are fine.”

“Do you fish?” Meadow was himself a dedicated spin caster who had never quite gotten the hang of fly fishing.

“I can’t not do it.” As the tall man smiled, Meadow registered that he had the Field and Stream outdoor look about him—deep tan, crow-black hair, a taut but slender body, strong veins on his wrists and hands.

“I’m Sandralee.” He had neglected to introduce her, and Riles was now taking her extended hand.

“You teach too?”

“No. I’m an artist, jeweler mostly. I make things from silver.” She was wearing her proud smile as she turned her head to display a dangling, fern-shaped earring.

“Maybe you could make me some lures.”

They all laughed, and by then Buddy was shifting about, eager to get back to his teammates. There was a victory party for the boys at somebody’s house, so they all said goodnight and the encounter was over. On the way home, Meadow had tested his wife’s response: “That Riles seems like a nice fellow.”

“I suppose.” Her silhouette in the dark of the Toyota revealed nothing, but when headlights of approaching cars washed across them, he was surprised to see how her dark hair seemed to spar-kle momentarily, as did her eyes.

“Buddy’s got promise as a student, and you can see the athletic streak runs in the family. Maybe he’ll become a first-generation collegian.”

She didn’t respond, so he let it drop. That was the only time he had observed them together, and later, uncovering the details and logistics of the affair didn’t appeal to him. He’d seen her agitated at the end of summer and through the first chill of fall but hadn’t even registered that she was avoiding functions at the school and working more at the gallery than in her workshop. Perhaps he would never have known if Steve Magee hadn’t mentioned seeing Sandralee and someone in a police uniform having coffee at Ber-ky’s Trucker Haven.

It was a warm spell around Thanksgiving, and the geese were flying low, arrowing south. Watching them through the windshield, he felt a tinge of envy. He’d had a frustrating day at school because of a favorite student’s plagiarism, and then he and San-dralee had begun sparring about where he hung his barn jacket, what he’d forgotten at the Quickmart, and an unpaid State Farm bill—tedium, really. Just in passing, he mentioned what Magee had said. She’d dropped the pork chops on the floor, but Meadow hardly noticed, as he was across the room searching for the remote to turn on the TV before ABC shifted from real news to human-interest fluff. She was still apologizing for the spilled chops as they ate their ice cream, and suddenly she covered her face with her hands and started to cry.

“I don’t understand it myself,” she had said, following him as he paced the edges of the dining room. “It was crazy, a cheap thrill. When we went from coffee to drinks . . . I don’t know how . . . I’m the most ashamed I’ve . . . You know, it’s over. Completely. It wasn’t anything but stupidity.” Then she sat down on the carpet and sobbed, rocking back and forth, until he’d kneeled beside her and put his arms around her shoulders, almost like a mother pro-tecting a child. He knew this was what he should do, what she needed him to do, but it seemed unfair for him to have to. After she went to bed with a large glass of wine, he would spend the night sitting on the sofa, examining bird points from an old denim sack his mother had made when he was in Scouts. He’d hold them up to the lamp one by one, as if he had never seen them before, and try to register their slightest nocks and imperfections. Even-tually he got around to the frog fetish he’d kept from the burial jar. After all these years, it still had a mysterious hold on him, still seemed a personal message concerning mortality, a message he lacked the power to understand. He kept sipping orange juice from the quart bottle and fighting to control his anger until, near dawn, he slumped over and slept.

There was no way short of testing to be sure of the father, and abortion was out of the question for Meadow. Since Sandralee’s coloring wasn’t too different from Riles’s, they just might keep the secret, if he could find a way to stand it. “We still love each other, Sandy, so we’ll have to make the best of it,” he’d said after things calmed down, and he was trying to sound convinced, working to believe it. Maybe the child would bear his features after all. Maybe that relief was in the cards. Still, the other voice from back in his primitive brain said “betrayed” and wondered if trust could or even ought to be restored between them.

The subsequent evenings were often chilled by mutually ac-ceptable silences, but occasionally he would snap at her over noth-ing, and then apologize as she stared away. Their sex life was meager and wordless, a desperate and selfish fumbling in the dark. Sometimes she would sulk about mornings and couldn’t go to work, but they kept up appearances, made the announcement, and learned to deal with Maxine’s excitement. He spent more time idling over his collection, almost but never quite keeping at bay the image of the crouching frog and the ancient deaths he had discovered on that day long ago after the Maury went wild and ripped at its own ancient bed.

Riles’s name was never mentioned again, and Meadow figured that exactly how Sandralee had broken it off was another thing best left in the dark. Though he often pondered the word “safe,” turned it over in his mind like a stone polisher, it was a syllable he kept out of his conversation.

When they got home from Meadow’s awkward birthday cele-bration in February—his parents’ living room, along with Maxine and Margot and Bob Wilson, a carrot cake with sparkling candles, a cashmere sweater and comic cards—they discussed a counselor but finally decided against it: small town, extensive grapevine. If it weren’t already widely known, better for a teacher to keep such a thing as quiet as possible. If students found out about an affair and had even an inkling of problematic paternity, it would make him an object of both pity and contempt. It was hard enough for a bookish thirty-year-old ignorant of iPods and reality TV to maintain the students’ attention and respect without the complication of snickering gossip, and Meadow did not relish the thoughts of either Manny Sams and Kristen Harpaugh winking behind him in the teachers’ lounge or of relocating for a fresh start.

Shifting his weight onto the handles for leverage, he lifted the locked blades out of the earth and used the shear as a pivot to turn the shuddering machine around. His father had taught him this maneuver, but it required all his strength and weight to execute, as the old motor raced and the struts and loose bolts rattled. This was a lot of effort to build a sunflower bed for reasons he couldn’t quite sort out. When the teeth were again spinning and ripping, he began to rehearse some of the revenge fantasies he returned to like a tongue drawn back to a chipped molar. He couldn’t go to Riles’s supervisor and accuse the man of bothering his wife because that might lead to wider disclosure. But he could write Riles anonymous letters suggesting he go back to the coast, if he didn’t want trouble. But what trouble could a man like Meadow stir up? He could insinuate and make veiled threats. Puny, at best. Other scenarios in his mind ranged from raking his keys along the side of Riles’s Jeep to making bogus midnight emergency calls to the sheriff’s office and even to spilling kerosene around the man’s garage and burning his house while he was at work. Once, when he’d seen it in a TNN movie, he thought about splashing acid in the dispatcher’s face, but it was just fantasy and less satisfying than alarming to consider.

The tortures his mind provided for Sandralee were more subtle. He could leave crime novels where she would see them or mention Buddy Riles’s schoolwork. He could use the phrase “joshing around” now and then. Or he could employ her jewelry vise and magnifier to start tying trout flies. He could propose dinner at Berky’s. It was stupid. Why did he want to even think about all this? And he had now developed a new and subtle gaze that she quickly recognized as hostile, which didn’t make their truce any easier. His mind was saying “safe,” while his eyes were at once sad and accusing. Meadow wasn’t a cruel man, he knew, but he wasn’t a saint, either, and though the light in his mind made it clear that even feigned forgetfulness would be better, a voice at the edges—feral and almost not a part of his nature at all—kept whispering, “That bitch, that bitch. What has she done?”

When he had heard her singing in the shower that Saturday morning, the knowledge that she and Maxine were planning to go shopping for a bassinet and crib in Roanoke brought the random thoughts in his mind together to a wicked chord, and he needed to get away, ride out to the river, and sweat some of the malice out of his system. He clenched his fists hard, as if squeezing the life from something, and he knew from experience that nothing but a few hours of work would calm him.

When she stepped from the shower, pink and shining, her belly and breasts flushed and clearly swollen, he couldn’t help thinking that the cliché was true: despite the circumstances, she had a radiance he found beautiful, which just amplified his sadness.

“I’m going out to do some work at the river.”

“Okay. Be careful with those mowers and things. Take your cell phone, okay? Anything you want from the Star City?”

“Not today.”

As he turned, she’d said to his back, “Tuna casserole for dinner? Take care, Meadow.”

Suddenly, the whirling tiller blades clanged against something, and the machine bucked hard, snatched at his arms, then tilted right, almost far enough to topple. Meadow released the accelera-tor grip and dragged the Mantis backward until it was clear of the patch where he’d struck something under the surface. If it was a big rock, he’d have to retrieve the pry bar and spade to remove it, as he’d had to do several times already. They didn’t call it Rock-bridge County for nothing.

But that thought was quickly brushed away. It was impossible not to remember that long-ago June, and a shiver went up Mead-ow’s spine. He’d been squirrel hunting with his new .20 gauge pump, and when he knelt at the river to splash water on his face, he’d noticed all manner of objects protruding from the opposite bank where the fast water had ripped away tons of dirt. He al-ready knew the place was rich in small reminders that Indians had camped here, but the newly cut soil was revealing its secrets by the dozens. Wading across, he found a lance head jutting out and several palm-sized bowls, some pestles, literally hundreds of chips and bits in black sockets of earth that must have once been firepots. Then he’d seen the lip of a large red vessel jutting out at the crest of the bank.

He knew he shouldn’t disturb anything. Though he had not yet become a student of finding and saving, he was sure experts would go about securing the items by making string grids and working with spoons and brushes. This was different from picking up just an arrowhead or shard. Even on his family’s private land, he thought he might get in trouble. But how could anybody stand it, when there was something begging to be seen, beckoning to him, maybe something amazing? When he reached down and pulled on the edge of the jar, a huge piece snapped off in his hand, and he fell onto his backside with the momentum.

What Meadow saw that afternoon, as he crawled forward with two dead squirrels in his pouch and his tailbone still smarting from his fall, had lingered in his dreams for almost twenty years, sometimes as radiant and satisfying as seeing an angel but more often a frightening reminder. Had he even once made it a whole year without waking up in a cold sweat, breathing hard, even crying out at the image? Probably not. The bone face peering up-ward at him was indelible.

A scientist would have stared into the grave without being startled, but Meadow had seen in the dark, dead gaze of the skull something private and final, a reminder of the end of the road. Still, he reached down and pried off another chunk of the jar and was able to see dust, scraps of clothing, ornaments all mingled with the bones. On his hands and knees, looking down, he saw the shadowy sockets peering back at him were not all the container held. Though the jaw was missing, strands of hair still clung to the pate, and the nose hole was shaped like an arrowhead.

Seeing the remainder of the skeleton, the entire body folded like a jackknife, he realized that, amid the debris, there was a second occupant, a coil of kitten-sized bones caged within the ribs of the larger skeleton. Even now he could remember the river whispering over its path of stones, some kind of bird—had it been a jay?—scolding in the distance. He was sure of what he’d found. The jar had served as tomb for a woman and her child. That was horrible to him, a tiny child dead, and a mother, but he could not be certain whether the figure with a skull no larger than a plum had been in the belly of the woman when she died, or if it had already been born and was buried with her, the bones slipping into the larger ribcage after the bodies had decayed and the ligaments gone to dust. He didn’t have a name for the current that raced through his body, but he had begun to shake, and tears ran down his dusty face as he examined the heaped-up debris under the bones. The soapstone frog seemed to offer itself, and when he pulled it into the light, he knew he would keep this small token and report the rest.

This time, he was much more informed. The people from the college back then had worked furiously to grid and scan the far bank, to read it before the rains resumed and washed the valuable evidence away. They’d found, amid the dust that had been these two people, scraps of deer hide, scattered molars, a turtle shell, and some stone-hard kernels of corn that resembled human teeth. A cup-sized gourd with a crude bird scratched into its bowl was one prize disclosure, and in the midst of the remnants, they’d been delighted to discover a dozen small freshwater shells. There were other artifacts but none so emphatic.

As he kneeled now to brush aside the loose soil, he remem-bered how kind Professor Siefert had been, explaining that stum-bling on a grave was not like disrespecting one, though Meadow had never really been convinced. He kept pitying the people, even as he said, “I don’t know anything about them.” And he had stolen the frog. He kept waking—nightly for weeks, then less fre-quently—with faint echoes of some curse the dead people’s kin might have chanted still whirling in his mind. It was all a riddle that cried out for solution but allowed none. Several years passed before he would go to the museum to look at the display where the sign announced the place and date and credited him with the discovery.

Now, moving carefully, he found a red slab of freshly broken pottery smaller than his hand and shaped somewhat like South Carolina. It was evidently part of some larger object. The more dirt he moved—first just scooping, then breaking off chunks—the more smoothed curvature of russet clay he revealed, and soon he understood that he was uncovering another large jar of some sort, more substantial than any artifact he or anybody he knew had ever stumbled on, what archeologists would surely call “a find.”

Probably, he should stop. The experts, Siefert, would still know far more about how to excavate a fragile object with minimal damage. It might be a museum piece, an important clue to the past, but he scrambled around and found a green stick, then began to probe the immediate area anyway, to determine the dimensions. It was his land, he thought, and up to now, his secret, solely his possession. He wanted to see what it was that his family had walked and played over for decades without guessing, and something inside him wanted to break the rules, to follow his own desires, no matter what.

As he carefully trenched around the spot with his mattock, Meadow rehearsed what he knew about the local Indians. Proba-bly not Saponis or Tutelos. Monacans, he’d read, up from the James River, would occasionally venture this far for summer hunting camps. Sometimes they’d stay long enough to put in crops, the “three sisters”—beans, corn, and squash. They lived in bark domes, avoided other tribes early on, and usually buried in mounds. It was probably a Monacan interment that Thomas Jefferson had excavated near Monticello right after his wife’s death. The founder’s habit of documenting everything had earned him the title “Father of American Archeology,” but even the new high school textbooks mentioned that Native Americans thought of him as just another grave robber with a tendency to advertise himself.

As he worked, rested, and then threw himself back into the labor, he lost track of time and let his mind meander.

Since he had shown her his collection (the frog excluded), San-dralee had developed an interest in the trinkets and adornments of the woodlands terminal tribes in the area, and he recalled one trip down to a big flea market near Asheville. They had met the affable Paul Price, who had collected all manner of charms and jewelry from other rogue artifact hunters, and he could knap Clovis points like an arrowmaker.

Sandralee had found the carved fetishes and shell jewelry fas-cinating and considered updating the designs to a new line, but she quickly abandoned the notion because, as she said, “We’ve shanghaied enough from them already.”

The more he dug, cut and yanked roots, and scraped around the vessel, the clearer it became that he had again chanced onto something unusual. It was much larger than a jug, larger even than a butter churn. Bits of sandy earth cascaded into the hole he’d made, but he scrambled around his little crater, shoveling and pitching, more excited by the emerging curvature of the container than by any thought of contents.

Severn Rameau, a local antique dealer and collector, had told Meadow that there wasn’t much native material left to find in the area. After all, Monacans had been transients in this neck of the woods, though a developer up near Steele’s Tavern had uncov-ered some middens and a cache of trade goods. It made the papers because everyone was amused that the site contained more than two dozen Jew’s harps, common items any blacksmith could make but which the Indians seemed to prize and present as wedding gifts. “Incidental,” Severn had said, “complete serendipity. You could grid this valley and scan it systematically and still not nose out more than one or two comparable troves.”

The sun was edging toward the rim of Jump by the time Meadow had entrenched enough to see how he might move it. He wiped the sweat from his brow and eyes, not noticing that the clay and silt from his site was so ground into his jeans and cotton shirt that he had begun to resemble something that had been dug up. What he was thinking about instead was secrecy. If he could raise it, would he keep it to himself this time? How long? Where? And how much pleasure would that yield? If it wasn’t his property, did it belong to the state or the county or the Monacans whose descendents lived down by Natural Bridge? Could you trespass on your own land? What could you really own, after all? What were the laws?

As soon as the notion of justice entered the equation, he blinked hard, and a red flash almost like a cardinal darting through his mind turned his thoughts in a different direction: the dispatcher with a silver star over his heart, almost something Sandralee might have designed. “Authentic”? “Safe”? “Trespass”? He imagined the sky-blue Jeep outside a room at the Days Inn, a scratched door with tin numerals fastened to it, but he wouldn’t let his mind turn the handle.

She didn’t deserve to know about this incredible jar, he thought, and he was glad he’d never shown her the frog. She’d forfeited her right to beauty. He could hear his breath coming fast through his nose. He felt his pulse running faster. What had he done to make her so unhappy, so desperate and foolish? “I didn’t do a damn thing,” he said aloud, “she was safe,” but it took only a minute for him to feel ashamed of his spite, and he tried to shake it off as he returned to the task at hand.

Although he had cleared away the surrounding soil, he couldn’t get a clear view of the contents. He worked carefully in the clay, as precise as a sculptor freeing a figure from its natural habitat. The vessel itself was as large as the circle he could make with his arms, and the top was stoppered snugly with a wooden disk which showed scant signs of rot. He didn’t have a flashlight, but he was now desperate to know what the jar concealed. He paused in his efforts to listen for a car crackling the gravel around the bend, but he heard only the whisper of the river, some wind in the leaves, and a pair of quarreling crows in the distance, downstream. The water, fast from last week’s rain, glittered with sun silver.

Since the jar seemed not to have any other cracks and was probably more cumbersome than heavy, he fashioned a ramp to roll it up. This was the most delicate step, he thought. If the clay around the hole his tiller vanes had chipped open took the stress wrong, cracks could spread, and he might find himself with more jigsaw than jar. He wiped sweat from his face with a sleeve and inhaled deeply.

Then the relic was nearly free and he was in the trench, cradling it with his chest and arms as he eased it along the crude ramp and toward the lip of his excavation, and though he felt the strain in his back and shoulders, it was working, the jar moving, his boots gaining traction as they inched forward. Slowly, slowly, alert for any insinuation of something wrong, a change in the feel of the surface, a shift. Soon, on his knees, just as he was ready to give the red jar the last nudge, he felt something, or perhaps imagined it. He paused and hoped he’d been wrong, but then he clearly saw a fissure spreading like slow, dark lightning just inches from his eyes. He could feel the change in his own body and tried to ease his treasure back down, to control the cracking, but he wasn’t in the right position for that—too little leverage—and as he relaxed, it stalled, teetered, and then rolled back, pushed him over, and broke into a dozen large slabs.

Empty this time. No charms or bones or fetishes. No vessels or shells. Nothing but a ferric-looking dust, and seeing it he sighed deeply and said, “Thank God.”

The sun was nearly gone, and the current a dull pewter, shad-ows connecting to one another all around him like a too-vivid dream. A chill rippled up his neck and flared out to his face, spread to his arms, and he felt it in his groin, in his knees. His digging up these people’s graveyard was a sacrilege. He could almost hear their kin chanting some curse. Why in heaven’s name had he done it and now done it again? Why were the remnants of a people who had never made war or stolen land or been spiteful and cruel . . . but he couldn’t sustain the speculation, and suddenly didn’t know anything, except that the job of the living was to help one another heal, to create safety, and value it and sustain it.

Staring at the wind-swayed leafage in the crowns of the river-side hardwoods, he didn’t know exactly how he would say it, but he would call Siefert and report his discovery. The fragments of the jar could be gathered and reassembled, mended, and perhaps some conservator could restore it to the strength and beauty it had before. Even empty, it was important, and as he felt the tears begin to come again and his body shake with the effort of holding back, he knew he was meant to welcome the child and care for it, no matter what color eyes it had, no matter whose blood.

When he got home, he would ask Sandy to sit with him at the dining table, where he would take her hands in his and, for a change, look straight into her eyes and speak quietly. He would try to convince her that what the future held was everything, the past just a series of lessons. He’d been a fool, but he was over it, and what they now must do was build a life based on a larger view of the world and themselves. He would get past his reserve, tell her the whole story about both burials and the frog and the dreams. He would somehow make her understand. What words he would use, how he would break through his own habits and reluctance, he had an hour to decide, but as the light failed and peepers started their lullaby in the understory, he was ready to lead his wife and their child to whatever safety anyone could find.