The Char and the Square Nail

The augur at Red Banks, working down through the clay with the stones the ice left, brought up a handful between four and five feet that I have not been able to put out of my mind. River stones, rounded the way only water rounds them, and char among them, worked into the clay, and one square nail.

River stones do not climb a bank. Somebody carried these up from the water, and set them in a ring, and burned inside that ring long enough and often enough for the fire to get into the stone. One face of each is smoked and spalled and the other is clean. That is a hearth. When it burned, the clay does not say. The clay is a filing clerk, not a historian. It keeps everything and dates nothing.

The nail is another matter. It is square-cut, the kind the parish built its barns and its pews with, and a nail like that can only be from the century that brought nails here in kegs. So the handful holds two fires, so to speak: a hearth that could be older than any paper in this archive, and a nail that names its own hundred years. The ground filed them a hand’s width apart, as if the distinction did not interest it.

The log writes undated, and I have let that stand, because the honest word for the handful is not a number. Dating the nail would only let the nail speak for the char, and the char owes it nothing. People have warmed themselves on this ground for longer than anything I keep can certify. The boring does not date the habit. It only proves it.

A stone set back in creek mud is set back. A handful brought up through four feet of clay is not; a boring is a reading you cannot unread. So the handful is filed, and the date line stays empty, and the empty line is the finding.