Buried

Fleeing from his troubles, a man forced by chance to shelter in a site of historical atrocity finds that the evils of the past are both very real and undying.

***Content Warning: This episode deals with themes of exploitation of minors, misogyny, and the abuse and murder of Indigenous people. Listener discretion is strongly advised.***

Transcript

NARRATOR

For all the young souls, past and present, who have suffered at the hands of self-satisfied abusers, and for all those who have been denied the chance to hear and speak their own words, those who remember have a duty to speak and to keep the memories alive.

The past may be buried, may even be forgotten, but it never dies.

[Darker Pastures Theme - Intro - Continues]

NARRATOR

Episode Thirty-Two: Buried.

(Sound of Northern mockingbird singing)

NARRATOR

Harsh and hot, the September sun beats down upon the Texas highway. The wind smells of boiling asphalt and mesquite, of sweetly baking sage and buffalo grass and yucca, of sere prairie dust formed from millennia of dried bison dung and centuries of cattle manure.

A spiny lizard begins to creep through the heat haze that shimmers over the winding blacktop, then goes instantly and perfectly still, its head pointed skyward in an attitude of wary alertness.

The roar of a Harley Super Glide rolls over the horizon, and the lizard turns and darts back toward the sparse mesquite grove whence it came. It disappears into the silvery growth just as the motorcycle thunders over the space it occupied but a few moments before.

The rider, heavyset and bearded, is heedless of both lizard and landscape. Francis Hart, who prefers to be known as Frey, loves the sensation of the sun and the wind of the open road, kissing his skin, running through his receding electrum hair, but his mind is elsewhere today, divided between what he has left behind and where he is bound. Frey pushes the engine to a higher roar, trying and failing to drown out the echoes of his final shouting match with Jenna.

Once more, he tells himself it was not his fault. That little harlot Danica practically threw herself at him, after all. But Jenna would not hear it.

Trying once more to redirect his troubled thoughts, he tries to calculate the remaining hours of daylight, and the distance that still stretches between him and his brother’s place in Kansas. The results are not to his liking, and he grinds his molars in mounting frustration. All he has to his name is either on his back, stuffed into his saddlebags, or stowed in the cheapest storage locker he could find back in Lubbock. For the hundredth time, he wishes he’d kept his apartment lease in spite of Jenna’s annoyance with it, that he had stood firm it no matter how often she insisted on calling it his “smash pad”.

And for the hundredth time, that thought is tailed by the one telling him he could never have afforded it, had barely made ends meet while living with Jenna. Her paychecks from working at the gas station and at the hotel had covered most of their expenses. For the past two years, almost as long as he has lived with Jenna, Fray has been “between jobs”, earning only a little money here and there from DoorDashing and from his irregularly updated YouTube channel. For a while, he even managed to bring in a little from sponsorships and from a few loyal subscribers to his Patreon, but it has been so long since his last posted video that most of that income has dried up and blown away.

Even before things went to hell with Jenna, and with that little whore Danica, Frey had felt drained of all inspiration. Though all of the woke culture he railed against is still out there, ripe for his vitriolic video commentary, the words seem to evaporate from his mind every time he turns on his camera. The rage and resentment remain within him, but where it was once a fire that brewed in a dragon’s belly, fuel to be spat forth for his glory, it is now like a grey poison, slowly necrotizing his insides.

And now, he grinds his teeth more furiously, he is homeless, and it is all Jenna’s fault; hers, and her little whore of a daughter’s. Only sixteen, and already leading men on and ruining their lives.

Bitches, Frey thinks. They’re all bitches.

He considers making a video about them, about how this is what comes of women’s liberation and feminism, of the erosion of traditional values. But he sees almost instantly how that might turn against him, how Jenna and Danica would find a way to twist things and make him look like some sort of pervert.

Bitches, he growls into the wind, and pushes the engine still harder.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

When he crosses the border into Oklahoma, the ride has soured for him completely. Just as ruminations of the shambles of his life in Lubbock have darkened his mind, gathering afternoon clouds have darkened the previously unthreatening heavens, coalescing into what looks to be a massive bank of thunderheads.

He tells himself that he will pull over at the first motel he sees, putting the charge that he can’t really afford on his credit card and hoping for the best. But he passes through only one small town, which is barely more than an old church, a few houses, and an anachronistic single-pump gas station, the latter difficult to even be certain whether it is still operational.

Forty minutes later, he is praying for another town to rise from the dreary plains, as the swelling storm bears down on him and his fuel gauge veers uncomfortably close to empty.

Yet still, the road stretches long and empty before him, offering no promise of respite. Ten miles later, an old roadside filling station momentarily brightens his spirits, before he draws closer and sees that it has clearly been shuttered for years.

The countryside grows rougher around him, the flat plains giving way to thirsty red hills and rocky ravines. The wind now smells of rainfall and ozone, and grows steadily sharper. Shockingly chill raindrops begin to fall, sparse at first, but large and hitting him with the force of hail pebbles. Frey feels the beginnings of panic welling up, and casts his gaze about for any shelter, even the meanest, but he has entered perhaps the most inhospitable stretch of his drive yet.

The rain grows heavier, colder still, and he can feel his wheels’ uncertain grip on the rapidly wetted asphalt. Just as he is beginning to wonder whether he should turn back for the abandoned gas station, he tops a small rise and sees the dark bulk of a large building squatted atop a hill before him, screened feebly from the road by a scrubby grove of wild cedars.

Gratefully, he turns off the road onto what appears to be an unpaved driveway, though it is so choked with weeds and returning native grass that he sometimes fears he will lose it. An ancient, crazily askew timber sign rises to greet him, long faded and splintering. Through the heavy rain, he can hardly read it, but slowly a few letters take shape before his eyes: SA… T… AN… I… C.

He blinks, as though to dispel an illusion, and when he looks at the sign he sees where the other letters have faded: Saint Anthony’s Indian School. Laughing at his imagination, he looks back to the large schoolhouse, three stories high and hideously spartan. Nearer now, he can see how it too looks decrepit and forsaken, many of the windows broken or boarded over.

Not a man given to superstitious feelings, Frey nevertheless feels cool and spidery fingers of discomfort crawling along his spine. And this feeling is only intensified when a dim memory stirs in the depths of his thought, something about a discovery some years back of a secret graveyard at an old Indian boarding school, where dozens of children’s remains were found. The name Saint Anthony’s strikes him as all too familiar.

Yet, along with his disquiet, a seedling of excitement germinates. Just when he felt wholly out of inspiration, he happened upon this, a hidden gold mine ripe for plundering. There is a God after all, Frey thinks.

He rides his Harley into the leeward side of the imperious stairway at the building’s front entrance, and kills the engine. Once he is satisfied that it is as protected from the furious elements as he can manage, he takes his pack and runs for the door, praying that he can get inside without too much trouble. To his surprise, the heavy padlock and chain on the front door are not fastened, but rattle and clatter uselessly in the wind.

Once again mouthing a prayer to the God he only believes in when it suits him, Frey pushes the door open and steps inside. And not a moment too soon – he can hear the telltale ringing patter of small hailstones hitting the roof and the side of the building. Hoping that his bike will be unscathed and knowing there’s not much he can do about it now either way, he looks around the barely illuminated space by the door. The murk within is something thicker than he imagined, and he cannot help but think that the air feels almost soupy with the dark and the mustiness of long abandonment. There is some sweeter note beneath that scent, something he cannot quite place, but which makes him feel vaguely nauseous.

Thankful for his own foresight, he opens his pack and fishes out first a heavy-duty flashlight, then the cheap digital camcorder he picked up at Walmart last year for his videos, just before he stopped really making them. Turning the latter on to check its charge, he is pleased to see that it is almost full still. He shines the light around the dark interior, trying to catch it all on camera as he does so, awkwardly for a few moments until he figures out how to coordinate the two.

He narrates where he is, and reminds his future viewers of the old news story about the place, as best he can remember it. And then he launches into his familiar acerbic commentary, talking about the usual woke revision and erasure of American history, about the perpetual shaming of white Christian men.

Who else, he asks, as he so often does, built America?

He wanders around the hallways for a few minutes, then peeks into a few of what he assumes were the old classrooms. The place has been mostly gutted of furnishings, but occasionally there are odd leftovers that have sat untouched for decades – a few old-fashioned wooden desks here, or a pile of moldering and outdated textbooks there. If Frey remembers correctly, the school was finally closed sometime in the seventies – about half a century ago, he realizes.

All the while, he talks about how the building looks just like the inside of any other old school of the time, not at all like the charnel house of horror the media describes. This is always the way of it, he says, leftist radicals and social justice warriors making mountains out of molehills, all to justify communist handouts to no-good do-nothings.

Then he stops, as the beam of his flashlight passes over something anomalous. He has to focus his eyes for a few seconds before he truly understands what he is seeing. An old, framed photograph of black and white hangs still upon the brick wall, lonely and out of place. Moving closer, Frey thinks it must be a portrait, but he has to wipe away a layer of gathered dust before he can make out any detail.

A man in a suit stands posed by the front entrance. Though the silvery photograph is clearly many decades old, Frey notes with disquiet that the face of the man depicted is remarkably like the one he sees in the mirror.

He wipes away the dust over a small bronze plate at the bottom of the frame, and reads what is inscribed there: Grisham Hart, Mathematics Instructor.

Frey’s mind reels, groping for an explanation. And as he stands there in the gloom, his flashlight trained upon the photograph and his camcorder forgotten in his other hand, capturing this protracted moment of confusion, another long-submerged memory slowly surfaces. He remembers family dinners from his childhood, remembers his aunts talking about his great-uncle, who was a teacher somewhere that seemed to him then very far away.

Uncle Grisham, he thinks, and the name feels right.

The way they had talked about him then had made him think that this uncle was some sort of larger-than-life figure. A soldier, he seems to think they said, who as a young man had fought in the last war against the Comanche.

A man who brought civilization to the West, or something like that. That was how they spoke of him.

Frey, remembering the camcorder, slowly reaches to turn it off. For a few more minutes, he gazes at the window into a past he barely knows or understands, wondering at the deepness of the shadows in the dated and monochromatic photography. They seem almost like they are reaching hungrily for the man in the picture – and for the viewer too, Frey thinks unpleasantly.

Outside, the storm’s fury waxes, the hail pounding down now like hammer blows from an angry sky-god.

(Hailstorm sounds, eerie music)

[Long pause]

NARRATOR

He wakes on the old, stinking sofa in what was once most likely an administrative office. After the discovery of the picture, it was as if all his will had drained out of him, and as the rain and the wind and the thunder raged outside, he felt his eyes growing heavy in the oppressive blackness of the school interior. He dared not waste any more of his flashlight’s battery than necessary, and his phone had virtually no signal, so he decided to crash in the first likely place he found.

Now, upon waking after what he assumes were two to three hours of sleep, the night is quiet, with only the occasional creak and pop of an old structure settling with the cooler air of the dark hours, and the singing of a distant mockingbird, working its way through its repertoire of stolen songs and cries.

He rises from the sofa and fumbles for his flashlight, then makes his way to the front entrance by its pallid beam.

A waxing gibbous moon greets him outside, the sky now almost fully clear but for a few disintegrating tatters of the great cloud bank. By the moonlight, he can see well enough to turn off the flashlight, and looks around the grounds. Aside from the encroaching cedars, the area around the schoolhouse is flat and depressingly featureless, the hill descending gradually toward the highway without any other interruption aside from the deteriorating sign.

The view makes him feel strangely exposed, and he turns away from it to check on his bike. There are, to his annoyance, a few dings upon the metal body, and the seat is hopelessly soaked, threatening mildew and disintegration if he doesn’t give it a proper chance to dry, but it appears to be otherwise undamaged.

He ponders hitting the road again, not wanting to stay here any longer and fully abandoning any thoughts he had of shooting more digital footage in the morning. What struck him earlier as a perfect opportunity for his next video now seems somehow ill-advised, and he knows he dare not include the discovery about his great uncle working here. The haters would have a field day with that revelation.

So he goes back inside, thinking only to lie back down on the sofa and get what sleep he can before dawn comes. But halfway back to the old office, his feet turn, as though of their own accord, toward the photograph of Grisham. With every step closer, he feels a sinking sensation in his stomach, and he thinks he now remembers another detail about those decades-past dinner table conversations, remembers his aunts commenting on how Grisham had never married, saying he was too devoted to his work to find a wife while their knowing looks suggested something else.

When he stands before the portrait, he stares stupidly, confirming to himself over and over that he has indeed returned to the same spot. For while his great uncle still stares out from behind the glass, a young girl stands beside him now, her face looking as if it has never known even the possibility of joy, as Grisham’s hand rests with inappropriate familiarity on the girl’s back.

And for a second, he almost thinks that the thinner Grisham seems to have gained weight and grown his hair and beard out, that the Native girl and the man look uncannily like Danica and himself dressed in the clothing of another century.

It wasn’t my fault, he whispers aloud.

The shadows stretch blackly.

And then, the girl is nothing like Danica, apart from being of a similar age, and Grisham is thin and sharply shaven again. But the haunted look in the girl’s eyes lingers in Frey’s mind long after he returns to the office and lays down upon the sofa, staring sleeplessly at the water-stained ceiling.

(Soft, unsettling music)

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

The grey of dawn has begun to creep into the sky when he wakes a second time, or at least, surfaces from the dreamless half-sleep in which he has drifted. But perhaps it was not entirely dreamless, because he seems to recall an image that kept running through his mind, an image and a sound.

Slowly, it reforms in the murk behind his eyes – a thin man, dressed austerely like a teacher from the early 1900s, grappling with a spade in the dry prairie earth beneath a gibbous moon, and the sound of metal on gritty parched soil. And at the last, a heavy, lifeless weight dropping into the dark below.

He sits up, and rummages in his pack for the camcorder. Turning it on, Frey scrolls to the last video he shot, and begins playback. The first minute and a half are exactly as he remembers, but then the audio begins to cut out, and when it returns, a high keening note in the background mars his narration, making it totally unusable. Frey swears softly, wondering if there is some way he can edit the audio and salvage what he has, but he has never been particularly good at this – in fact, the main criticisms of his videos, apart from ideological objections, have been that they amateurish shot and edited.

He restarts the video file, and this time after only about ten seconds of playing, the video distorts and pixelates, then becomes just a single white orb in the center of the tiny screen. Frey pauses the video, just to check if the camcorder has completely failed, but aside from the corruption of this one file, it seems to be functioning normally. He resumes the playback, and slowly, the pale glowing spot expands to fill the screen, and a monochromatic image fades in as though forming from black and silver sand particles. The footage no longer looks like a digital product, but like the primitive film of a century ago, grainy and scratched, fading in and out of focus. And the images playing upon the little camcorder screen are like nothing he has ever shot.

A teacher, the one he saw in his dream or vision, digs in the prairie soil beneath a gibbous moon. Beside him lies a small shape, so poorly illuminated that it should not be so clear that it is a young girl, and yet Frey knows it is. She lies perfectly still, lifeless, as the man digs and digs, all of this occurring in perfect silence.

Then the man drags her into the hole, and at last there is a single sound, that of a small body hitting the dull, dead earth. Grisham looks into the camera, his eyes flashing white from some unseen light source, and waves.

The video ends.

Frey drops the camcorder, hears a telling crunch as it hits the floor, but he is past caring. Clumsily seizing his pack, he feels his way to the office door, then out into the hallway.

Welcome home, something whispers from the darkness.

No, no, no, Frey begins to whimper. He feels in his pack for the flashlight, feeling like his heart is creeping up his esophagus as his fingers grope blindly and do not find the smooth metallic cylinder. Then, at last, they close upon the familiar and comforting heft, and he pulls it out and flips the switch on with weak and quivering fingers.

The flashlight illuminates the hallway wanly for an instant, then flickers and dies.

Welcome home, the something whispers again.

Frey drops the pack, staggering blindly and tripping over something unseen. He is beginning to babble now, begging for it to leave him alone, to please, please just let him leave. He thinks of his older brother, pious and dour and condescending, waiting for him by the front door of his little country house, then slowly rising and turning off the porchlight.

How Frey had dreaded being forced to stay there until he could figure something else out, yet know he calls his brother’s name, longs for nothing more than to see that face emerge from the blackness and call for him to come home.

Welcome home, the schoolhouse answers.

Sobbing, Frey begins to crawl upon the tiles of the hallway, littered with the detritus of five decades worth of human abandonment. When he first saw the place, Frey assumed that at some point, teenagers must have broken in and partied here, or children come in on dares, but now he is certain that no one has entered and stayed for long.

Something lives here, something terrible, and its breath is palpable in the sun-starved innards of the rotting schoolhouse.

He crawls, and he crawls, and at times he is sure he feels small things moving near him and brushing his fingers, his clothes. Rodents, perhaps, or spiders and insects… or maybe, his thoughts skitter and hiss, something less definable.

And then, he feels a solid obstruction before him, not brick, but smooth and superficially brittle – like wood under old paint, he realizes. Feeling a momentary surge of fragile hope, he rises to run his hands over the surface, and after a bit of blind grasping, his fingers close on the cold, round metal of a doorknob. He seizes and turns it, praying incoherently that it is an external door and not simply a portal to further darkness, and then the blue-grey light of predawn slants across his face, and he drags himself outside. He lies breathing heavily on the crumbling cement stoop of a side entrance, looking back at the darkness beyond the door in expectant dread. Nothing stirs from within.

When his breath and heart have finally slowed to something approaching a normal rhythm, he climbs clumsily to his feet. Totally disoriented, he begins to circumnavigate the massive, ugly bulk of the boarding school in what he thinks is the likely direction of the main entrance and his sheltered bike. Doing so brings him through the stand of wild cedars, whose concealing shadows he loathes, but now that he is moving again he cannot abide the thought of spending a second further than absolutely necessary in this place, so he pushes his way through.

Too late does he see the open hole in the earth, and his heavy, aging body no longer possesses the reflexes to react in time. He falls the brief six feet, landing awkwardly on the fine, reddish soil. Before the pain can reach him through his shock, he already knows that he has wrenched his knee and ankle to a normally impossible angle, that something within his left leg is badly torn.

He tries to rise, once, then falls flat again, shrieking at the sudden agony that sweeps through his leg into his stomach, into his brain. He vomits thinly into the dust at the bottom of the old grave – and he is sure that it is, in fact, an old grave, certain beyond all rational possibility. Whether it is one that the investigators of years past dug, locating the remains of long-dead children and perhaps relocating them to more proper resting places, or simply one that was dug even longer ago and somehow never filled or collapsed, he is less certain.

And some mad whisper in his rattled brain says that maybe, just maybe, this was dug while he slept, dug specially for him.

Welcome home, the sifting dust whispers, as it falls from the disturbed edge where he slipped to his ruin. Welcome home.

Yes, he thinks, he is home, here in the cool silence and the sheltering, hungry dark, where the living can never again look at him with accusation or disappointment

Then the soil hisses exultantly, and he screams as the open maw of the prairie closes around him, swallowing him forever as it has swallowed so many, both the guilty and the innocent.

(Eerie wind sounds)

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

Timothy Hart wakes in the morning, long before his wife Amy, and moves out into the kitchen to make his coffee just as he always does. He has never been able to sleep past five, and yet before his first cup of coffee, his brain is nimble as old molasses.

As the coffee brews, he steps out onto the porch. Though the previous day was hot, the morning is chilly, a presage of the coming autumn. He looks up and down the road, wondering if his brother chose to spend the night in a motel – or maybe with some woman.

Timothy only hopes she was more than half his age. If even half of what he gleaned and guessed from Francis’s pleading call is correct, he thinks, and not for the first time, that the world might be a better place if his brother were behind bars. And he wonders if he made a mistake agreeing to let him stay under the same roof as his wife, even for a few nights.

As the morning wears on, he reluctantly dials Francis’s cell phone, but it goes straight to voicemail. Two more times throughout the day, he calls from the cab of his combine harvester, and when he comes home from the corn fields that evening, he tries a fourth and final time. No answer, not even a single-word text.

He considers calling the police, just in case something serious has happened, but as he sits to dinner and talks it through with Amy, she tells him that this is nothing new for Francis, that he has always done what he wants, when he wants, and damn the consequences to anyone else.

Timothy nods, knowing that this is all true, and puts away his phone. He feels a little guilty at the relief that washes over him that his brother is not here, but then, Francis has never been a good influence in anyone’s life.

When he sleeps that night, he dreams of Francis digging beneath a gibbous moon, on the open prairie. And when he sees what lies at his brother’s feet, he bolts awake with a ragged cry, waking Amy beside him.

She asks him what is wrong, and he says it was only a dream. As her breathing settles back into the slow, steady rhythm of slumber, he looks out into the night sky, at the moon that is nearing its fullness, and tries not to think of his brother’s face illuminated eerily by that same moon as he digs.

No, he thinks, he will not call Francis again. Better to leave things where they lie.

And for the rest of the night, he and his wife sleep, untroubled.

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro]

NARRATOR

If you enjoyed today’s story, please rate, review, and share. Thank you for listening. We’ll meet again… in darker pastures.

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro - Continues]