Upon This Waste

Chapter 21

How can a sailor say goodbye to the sea? – David's Notebook

He rested with his head leaned back against a tree. It had been a long day, very long. He had ambled around the place. Desolate and barren. Like a cold and infertile womb. Like a strange and abandoned world. A place where once a people had dwelled. A place where once, perhaps, children had played and meals were shared and people had met to laugh or sing or dance. Now, rusty and alien machines laid in waste, and the place was littered with metal and shadow. The foundations of onetime buildings were laid bare, and it looked unnatural. Like a graveyard whose lawn was scattered with broken bones.

He felt uneasy as he walked around the machines. He hadn't gotten close to them, but he could see them easily enough. As he stared, he had been able to make out the ghosts who had operated them. Those ghosts who had taken this piece of land some time ago and made it a field of blood and ashes and oil. This place, the people who had come to call it home, didn't deserve this. But it had happened. And here it was.

He'd heard that those who had been killed that night had been buried in a mass grave. He had seen the likes of those more times that he would have wished. And he had yet to see one that made sense, had yet to see one whose unlucky occupants deserved their fates, their fragile remains desecrated by dirty hands who tossed them together, like impotent seeds, into the earth. He didn't know where it was, but he had looked for it anyway. He hadn't found it, but that was okay. He had found their tombstones being weathered and rusted by the wind and rain, the unlucky machines that shared their fate.

But that isn't why he had come. He lowered his eyes and looked at his feet. His shoes were sorry, torn and nearly broken. That didn't bother him. He looked past his feet at the pines that grew around him. They were much larger now than when he had seen them last. Just fledglings then, they had grown tall and proud. The oak that was surrounded by them was still the tallest of them all, but they were gaining on it.

It had taken Isaiah hours of searching to find the little dell in the forest. He had been nervous the whole time he was looking, thinking they might have ruined the spot with tools or machines. But they hadn't. Isaiah thought that maybe they had never even found it. After all, it was found only by accident in the first place.

He had sat under the shadow of the oak for a while now. He hadn't wanted to start immediately. There was no rush. It was likely that the last time someone had stepped foot there, it had been him, long before. No, there was no rush. He had had much thinking to do before he began anyway. Much thinking and much remembering, and he figured that they were equally important.

But he had done his thinking now, and his remembering, and he stood up slowly. He went over to the spot where he thought it was and bent down to pick up the shovel he had laid there. And he began. He only removed a little bit of dirt at a time, but the hole began to form. He took several breaks as he dug, but finally, with the sun directly on his back, he uncovered one of its corners. He bent down to wipe it off. Yes, he thought, though he had never doubted. That was it. And he dug some more.

Slowly, every corner was uncovered, and he kneeled down in the fresh, black dirt around the hole. He reached into it, and with some wiggling, the box came out. He brushed it off, and the top came off easily. And there they were. Unchanged, somehow mostly preserved from weather and years, the things sat comfortably, piled in the box. He looked at them for a while. The whole time, he smiled, looking at the things that he had seen buried in the box long ago.

He had always figured that when he came back to open the box, Little-Cub would be with him. But he figured that now, somewhere, possibly with the birds in the branches of the lone oak that wove above him, Little-Cub's wind blew happily. The first thing he pulled out was the scarf that Little-Cub had brought to put in the box. He had forgotten how beautiful it was. And then he pulled out the marble, coin, arrowhead, and rock. Little-Cub had loved all of them. Isaiah's smile was renewed every time he set one down and picked up another. Little-Cub had given him the marble and the coin. He could remember it distinctly. To him now, his thank you seemed like not nearly enough. But it had been enough. They both had known it meant much more.