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 moodiness back in the fall, the strained times they’d been through as he attempted to decipher the cause and then the final numbing answer 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...