WE IMAGINED A CAMP. Eight hundred to twelve hundred years ago, it would have been on the flat plain behind the cliffs above us.
We dug. Fifteen minutes in my fingers found an arrowhead lodged sideways under eight inches of damp earth. Twenty minutes later, Slade found another.
The Edwards arrow point he spotted a few days prior had lead us there. Near forty years I had walked over this small piece of earth. As a kid I made homemade bows from poverty weeds growing on the cliffs above, substituting yellow weed-eater string for chewed sinew. I shot at cowboys that weren’t there.
As a teen I brought my girlfriend, now my wife, down there among the junipers, live oaks, and cedar elms to show her the creek bottom that helped make me a man, and to taste her kiss. But I never probed for native artifacts until my son showed me how to look.
We guilted Stone into putting down his X-Box controller and liberating beer from Grandpa’s garage refrigerator. He dug with us for a while. His dirty jokes and ceaseless commentary, the kind a 16-year-old male does well, made our sides hurt. The beer helped. Skye joined us for a bit and talked about her love life, preferring not to soil her nails. She endured my advice as if I had some. Some things are better left to mothers.
Slade had moved off to college four months prior. We left him in a new town, the six of us walking to the car with the sniffles, everyone feeling our family of seven enter an era of six.
That August evening I looked into the garage at the spot where he used to flint-knap and work on his traditional bow. Many nights in the previous year I peeked my head out the door and found him sitting on a bucket, listening to music, striking a piece of whitetail antler against a shard of flint he had found, recreating an ancient ritual of necessity.
“Need anything?”
“No, Dad. I’m good.”
“Good night. Love you.”
“Love you, too, Dad,” he would say with the same smile he once gave me from his crib. I wished I hadn’t been so tired all those nights. I was naïve enough to think he’d always be there.
But there was no tink of hard antler striking stone. No Colter Wall nor Tyler Childers filling the space. Just the socket wrench of dwindling katydids at the end of a hot summer. The driveway was absent a car. The table short a mouth. The noise missed a laugh.
I had that Thursday before Christmas off.
“Dad, wanna go dig for arrowheads with me?”
“Bet your ass I do. And we’ll drink beer.”
A black-bellied whistling duck flew over. Its sweet call gave me pause to look up through the trees and be grateful the air was cool, the sun subdued behind a blanket of gray.
I heard Slade laugh and hold up what looked to me like an everyday round rock. He showed me where years of use had left marks and grooves in some parts, but polished the rock smooth in others.
“I can’t believe I just found an abrading stone,” he said. “They used these for grinding things.”
It was quite a discovery. This new world I had entered with my son, inches below a patch of earth I had seen thousands of times.
That evening after our dig I showered while he washed the centuries from our finds. The seven of us crammed into our little kitchen once again, overtalking, laughing, tossing insults, off-loading the December day. Mom smiled with red eyes, grateful dinner was again seven plates, even if only for the holidays.
We examined each artifact and wondered. Tiny serrations, primitive strike marks, primordial history. Slade looked at me.
“Dad, when Columbus sailed, these arrowheads were just sitting there. When you were born, they were just sitting there. Ever think about that?”
“When Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel, they were just sitting there,” I replied.
He smiled and shook his head in wonder. I nodded back with my own.
