No Trespassing. We’re tired of hiding the bodies.

A short story (fiction) by Bernie Paquette of Jericho, Vermont. 

              From the series of stories in "It Happened in Jericho, Vermont".

   Being new to Jericho and eager to set roots down, I sought the advice of a long-time resident with a deep Vermont ancestral heritage. The kind that distills a good deal from observation and speaks but few words when giving advice or information.  

 

   Her first advice teetered vaguely close to some clue to a crossword puzzle. “Getting ahead sometimes requires rolling a stone so as not to gather moss,” she told me with what I thought was a wry smile. Stones are one thing, Jericho, Vermont has plenty of. You can dig them up to your heart's (and your back’s) content, but they just keep coming. Re-birthing the locals call it. 

   Just a small plot to grow some potatoes I had shyly shared with her. Well, plan on a good full day or two for clearing enough earthen-bound small boulders in your ten-by-ten-foot plot before you even think of sacrificing your shovel in a head-to-head duel it cannot win. Without hydraulic power behind the shovel, granite will beat steel every time. 

   And with that, she seemed to have fulfilled her neighborly contract; the last word road out with the volume of expired air from her lungs. From then on, she would only occasionally look out across her field at my digging efforts, or shake her head at my cussing. But no more advice would she offer, nor critique for that matter. I was now on my own in this land of rural ways as set as the granite it lay upon. 

   Three weeks later with seed potatoes in the bed, I wiped my brow in relief, and gave a snickering look at my neighbor across the way, as if to say, a city boy knows a thing or two about persistence. There would be no moss growing on my stones I wanted to tell her. But no, I’d just show up in a few months with a pan of homegrown roasted vegetables, and leave the dish in her hands without uttering a word. The Vermont neighborly thing to do. 

   It was a good plan. I wish to almighty I had stuck to it. I inadvertently started a process of disturbing the ancestral heritage of Jericho. No matter how much I might like it to stop, the stone had been overturned or to be more specific I rolled one too many stones. The last stone I was ever to uncover was set to expose a long-held secret of the Jericho community regarding trespassers of their ancestral and soil lineage. A secret that nearly set my face to rest, literally in bedrock. 

   Harvest day in October was as is nature’s way in Vermont, a most glorious release of summers duties, awash in a colorful celebration of dancing crimson, yellow, and orange leaves, of modulating melodies of temperatures, and a fulfilling harvest, enough to fill the pantry, freezer, and root cellar. 

   

   Reminded of my omniscient neighbor as she drove her small tractor along the road passing with nearly a gesture of recognition, I was startled into remembering my good faith return-a-favor idea. That of dropping off some of my fresh produce roasted up nicely with some herbs. Perhaps that might melt a few more words from her less-than-charming personality that kept city folks at bay.  

   And indeed I did intend on moving ahead on building a relationship with my neighbor. Only then, reaching the stone wall that separated our two properties, something caught my eye. I set the hot steel pan gently down on a bed of moss close to the wall. I don’t know what exactly I observed or what I thought I saw sticking out from one of the stones. Indeed they were neatly and artistically set in place to form the no-trespassing wall formidably. Or was the wall only a sheep barrier? With great effort, I rolled away the stone closest to the hot pan which I had laid upon the mossy ground. 

  

Finding some recently disturbed earth and a few tattered remains of a man’s silk shirt I was perplexed. Cleaning off some of the dirt and washing some away with a bit of spittle I made out the Neiman Marcus logo. This surely did not match the common apparel (flannel) of rural Jericho. 

 

   Surely my neighbor would have more than two words to say about this. Still, I resolved to use my steel pan of rock-rolling hard-earned homegrown vegetables, to defeat her stone face and her insinuation that she opposed my excavations of sacred soil as an intrusion on the Jericho heritage. 

   I bent low and lifted the now-only warm steel pan. Steel may be no match for granite, but steel at least when very hot, will cause moss to succumb. 

   And so having rolled an errant stone and not gathered moss, in fact having displaced moss, I nearly lost my head at what I laid my eyes upon only a few inches from the freshly disturbed earth, and the tattered out-of-place big-city man’s shirt. 

   Where there had been moss, now in stark contrast to the surrounding green moss, lay exposed a shocked face profile in stark white, except for the black eyebrow, a black red lined eye, and a blackened downturned mouth. The nose and ear looked outsized as though nose and ear had been used as handles to stretch the face to fit some fissure. It looked as if the face had intruded the surrounding strata. Its expression looked infused with a fear born of shock. 

   

Needless to say, I did not deliver as my neighborly duty called. In fact, I have done my best to avoid eye contact with my neighbor, and to never ever dig up anything of Jericho’s past, stone or otherwise since that day.

 Indeed stone beats steel every time.

   Verbally conservative as she is, the only make-nice she has since offered was to say, one day when we inadvertently both ended up in close vicinity of each other ‘near the wall’,  “I see you rolled a lot of stones and kept the moss from gathering. Did you find yourself getting ahead?

Authors note: The last photo is of exposed rock (the white part) that looks like the profile of a human face. (The 'shocked' face the neighbor was slyly speaking of 'getting 'a - head').