"The Dig"

[rfmcdonald]

It was just another bright and sunny day in summer, with a stiff breeze to take the edge off of what would otherwise have been unrelenting heat. It was the same sort of summer day that the tourists who came lemming-like to this island in the backwater hinterlands of the North Atlantic positively loved. It would have been a good day for the beach, or for touring the island’s only city’s half-dozen places of historical semi-importance, or even for visiting one of the derivative amusement parks that casually littered the island.

As it so happened, Jared was stuck at the excavation site with the rest of the crew. The sun shone just as brightly on the excavation site as on the beaches, in fact was quite near some of the most popular beaches, and the wind was just as strong here as in the city. Here, the sun shone hotly, and the wind blew too high to give relief from the heat, but not too high to blow the dry topsoil that had been carelessly heaped up into mound into the faces of the diggers. He wiped his forehead with the back of his left arm, and readied the shovel for another dig into the soil -- brace your back, put right foot on top of blade -- and pressed his foot down on the blade, in just the right bit of soil to hit a rock.

What a summer job. Stupid, stupid, stupid, Jared thought as he bent down and tried to push the dirt away from whatever his shovel had hit. He was wearing gloves, but they were stained and worn thin through the weeks of digging and scraping to date. As he felt the blade of the shovel and felt around for the edges of the stone, he could feel the body-warm smoothness of the one, and the cool roughness of the other. He tried to get his fingers under the side of the rock, to try to haul it out, and remembered just how he got here.

Decades ago, someone on the mainland had dug up an old map that marked the location of what had been the island’s main settlement when the French ran the place. By the standards of the modern day, it would have been little more than a hamlet, but in its day it had been the only place that a poor French colonist who had been sent to a godawful island in the middle of nowhere and bored out of his mind could find a pub or something, and his wife could find a half-decent store and receive confession, and they could both leave happy, ready to endure the next boring year without snapping. It seemed that when the British came to the island, just as they did on all of the neighbours, they kicked out the French, burned down their towns, and completely forgot about it. Jared vaguely remembered his Grade 8 history book mentioning the village in passing, before it went on to talk about the Scots who’d settled on the lake next door, but that was it.

Years ago, someone had come, to the island, from the mainland, and told the powers-that-were about how the village was supposed to be crucial to understanding the nature of the French period. The records held in Paris and London and Boston all said that the village had only been burned, that it hadn’t been looted, and that the poor French hadn’t had time to gather up their belongings. Hence, there was a very good chance that under the sediment of two centuries, very interesting things could be dug up and exposed to the light of day. Jared did remember the eggheads talking at length about the importance of the village is comprehending the French regime in the New World in its final stages, chattering their heads off in front of the camera behind a long table and suggesting that the government should do everything in its power to ensure the excavation of the village. Talking at work, Jared knew that the government hadn’t been particularly impressed -- “So there’s a French village,” Darryl from the hardware store down the road had said over coffee, swearing that he got the Premier’s words directed from the Premier’s brother, one of Darryl’s own suppliers, “so what? There’s plenty of French villages out there already.”

No one was certain what made the Premier and his ministers change their minds, but Jared had heard from Darryl that the second time that the eggheads had appeared on television was the clincher. They had pointed out, at some length, that if the French village was excavated, it could become the centre of a thriving tourist industry. They raised the example of Quebec, which they said as Jared ate supper with his wife and two sons in front of the television had developed a huge tourist industry based on exposing foreigners to its French history. After all, what went on in Quebec could certainly work on this island, couldn’t it?

Five months ago, the packing plant went under when the government had said that it wouldn’t cover its losses any more, and Jared had lost his job. He had known that it was inevitable -- the bigger plants on the mainland could prepare more carcasses for shipment, more quickly, and at a lower price, and the new government had said that it simply could not afford to keep the plant going. Anyway, he wasn’t particularly attracted to the bloody job, with the gore that seeped into his shoes no matter how often he tried to clean them and the back muscles strained by the skinned torsos that he kept having to push back onto the conveyor belt. What hurt him most of all was the fact that he didn’t get his twelve weeks a year in when the plant folded in February, and he couldn’t go on the pogey. If it wasn’t for the fact that Darryl got a few words in edgewise with the Premier’s brothers, he wouldn’t have gotten this job as an excavator for the archeologists that had come in to begin opening the place up. It wasn’t much, but it was decent enough to start, and he would definitely be working for the entire summer and perhaps for as long into fall as the weather would hold out, which should be quite enough to qualify him for the pogey

The archeologists were all from away. Jared didn’t have a single problem with people like that -- he married one, after all, even if she was from an island next-door herself. No, it lay in the fact that none of them had anything to do with his type of locals. He did hear that they went to the theatres, and to the classy restaurants that served specialty Italian food and “real” Chinese food, whatever that meant. Not a single man among them, though, had ever bothered to drink a cold beer with the labourers after they worked hard while he sat inside someplace air-conditioned, and glued together pots that had been broken for centuries and wouldn’t fall apart given another hour to themselves. He obviously didn’t know about the women, but the gossip from them heard through Fred whose wife worked among them said that the women were just as standoffish.

Fine by me, Jared thought to himself sullenly as he caught a ridge of the rock. It was a big one, and it felt too solid to be something sedimentary. I’m getting paid good money for it, and if they don’t want anything to do with me they can just go --

“What are you doing,” a man standing on the turf a metre above Jared’s head said in an absolutely appalled voice.
Jared looked up just as he tipped over the rock. The man was standing silhouetted in front of the sun, and he could tell from his dress that he was one of the archeologists. “I’m getting rid of this rock,” he said dismissively. “I hit it digging down with my shovel --”

The fussy man shook his head, and jumped down into the trench. As the archeologist’s feet crossed Jared’s line of sight, he could see that the man was wearing white canvas shoes. See if he can clean them after this muck, he thought to himself as the man steadied himself just in time to keep from falling backwards into a mud puddle that was the product of the seeping groundwater, or seawater this close to the sea.

“Didn’t you realize what you were doing,” he cried out. “Look, there’s other rocks down by it -- you hit a wall!”

“I did?” Jared quickly got down on his knees and felt the soil. Sure enough, there were more rocks lying next to where the first rock had been, and he could see more clearly now that it looked to be a building stone. “Sorry about --”

The man wasn’t listening. Instead, he was shaking his head in disbelief. “I knew I should have come here in the morning,” the archeologist murmured while he stared at a darkish layer down by his knees. “I knew I should, but I didn’t think …” He turned to Jared, looking angry now.

“Do you know what that black in the soil is? Do you?”

Jared blinked. “I don’t know, what?” He got up off of his knees and began brushing the dirt off of his work pants.

“That’s the ash from the fire that destroyed the town,” the archeologist said with a barely concealed impatience. “For the past -- what, hour? -- you’ve been shoveling out remains from the fire that the British set in this town. God,” he said disbelievingly, “we’ll never be able to piece things together, I’ll have to bring the students in on this, maybe they can guess, I don’t know.”

The archeologist squinted at Jared, and then sighed. “It isn’t your fault -- oh, just go on lunch now,” he shrugged. “Take an hour, I don’t care, I --” He waved Jared off, and before the archeologist could change his mind, he had gone to the roadside.

They had set up a canteen right where the old beach road linked up with the main road. As Jared trudged to get a coffee, he remembered how upset one of the foreigners had been when she had seen that the highway was only a few hundred feet away from the site. What did she expect? That we’d give up the entire area for centuries and leave things pristine for her?
Of course, at this time of day, the canteen hadn’t opened yet. There was a tourist though, standing next to her rental car. She was a small woman, Jared considered, an Asian. Probably Korean or Japanese, or is it the Chinese that are doing all of the travelling now? Whatever.

“Hello,” he said in his slowest English possible to the girl. “How are you doing?”

The tourist looked far more curious about him than anything else, and he expected her next question. “What is happening here?” she said in her sweet accent. Some of the sounds were pronounced badly, but all in all, he judged, a good effort.

“I am working on an excavation,” he said just as slowly. “They are digging up the ruins of a French town that was burned when my people took the land.”

The tourists’ eyes lit up with -- recognition?, but she almost frowned as she said, “Ah, like Yugoslavia! Yes, quite sad.”

Jared cocked his head to the side and squinted at her. “What do you mean, ‘like Yugoslavia,’” he said as he leaned against the corrugated side of the canteen, just a couple of metres away from her.

“Was it like Yugoslavia?” she repeated slowly with some self-consciousness. Jared still stared, and under his gaze she took a thin little book out of a satchel that she had and began writing in it. After a minute, she ripped a page out of it and passed the note to him.

THE BRITISH GET RID OF THE FRENCH LIKE YUGOSLAVS GET RID OF EACH OTHER, RIGHT?

Jared felt decidedly startled. Wherever she came from, he decided, she’s got the history wrong. “No,” he said quite loudly. “No, it was nothing like that. I don’t know how you can even come up with that idea.”