Circling Home

Fred's Cache

Stone is of the earth, like us, but it is lasting. We want to marry our short days to stone. . . . But stone is a ticking clock. It is a slow clock, slow enough for us to believe in its consistency. howard mansfield, The Bones of the Earth Fred’s Cache In William Faulkner’s sense of time nothing dies. Time for Faulkner is a place where everything “is” and nothing “was.” The southern land for Faulkner is, as Frederick Turner put it in Spirit of Place, “a great conservator, repository of all artifacts, of the bone and trinkets, and even the dreams and deeds of the ancestors, for the long, tangled, tragic, and sometimes wildly comic chronicle of the ages could not have been invented for nothing and then thrown into cosmic discard. The spirits of the departed were substantive.” This week I’ve been thinking about Faulkner and his mythic Mississippi “Big Bottom” and about Terry Ferguson. It’s through Terry I most often wander into the complexity of time. Was Faulkner right? What’s left of the “was” within this mile circle? Where does time still show itself? Where do the edges of eternity make themselves visible? Walking with Terry along Lawson’s Fork is when I often trip upon the frayed edges where the past and present are sewn to78 gether. Terry sees time in the bend of the meandering creek just upstream from the Lake Forest Bridge. Once when visiting that spot, he shaved the bank with a shovel until he could see clearly the horizontal bands of sand, silt, and clay that the creek had deposited in the past. He called this the “erosional bank of the creek, the opposite of the deposition bank.” The bands of sediment told him stories of flood “events,” some ancient, some historical. He explained how one way to know for sure is to find some carbon or some cultural artifact lodged in the layers, one of Faulkner’s trinkets. In 1968, just downstream from Terry’s deposition bank and a quarter mile upstream from our house, Fred Parrish found a “cache” of cultural artifacts, dozens of what at the time he thought were spear points. Fred was raised just up the hill, on the south side of the creek where Lake Forest Drive now crests the ridge top. He says he was out riding a horse in the floodplain , and he saw one point, just an outline, covered by a thin wash of mud in a puddle. He jumped off his horse and reached for the gray, three-inch stone and quickly realized there were many more, all within a four-foot circle. Fred is a ball of energy, full of the curiosity of a boy and ready to speculate about soapstone or rivers or arrowheads or anything man-made, growing, or green. He’s in his early sixties, retired from work in the accounting office of a now-defunct textile mill, and spends most of his time doing volunteer work for SPACE, the local conservation organization. He is compact with a shock of gray hair and glasses. He’s had a bad stutter since childhood, but his elegance of thought and deep learning make you quickly forget about it. “They came up in a scoop,” Fred told me one day, recounting that horseback ride, then almost forty years in the past. “That was a link to what was.” Six months after we moved in I invited Terry and his friend, archaeologist Tommy Charles, to lunch at our house. We all sat around the dining room table and talked about the deep past. Fred’s Cache ° 79 Fred came too. We ate chicken salad sandwiches and drank tea, and Fred and I listened as Terry and Tommy laid out the context for Fred’s artifacts within the sketchy story of piedmont archaeology. Terry picked up one point from the box Fred had brought them in and looked at it and said they were probably “preforms ,” pieces of quarried stone that had been chipped into a rough shape to be fashioned later into finished tools and weapons. Tommy picked one up and examined it too. He said the rock came from elsewhere—rhyolite or felsite, possibly from the Carolina slate belt a hundred miles to the northeast. After it was quarried and partially chipped it was probably carried here and hidden at different places in a foraging...