from Section 3

Resting my chin in my palms, I use the timepiece draped around my neck to count three, then four minutes pass in silence—word silence; my heart pounds noisily, and with the urgency of a train, speeding, uninterrupted. Kip finally keeps a foot inside his slipper, uses it to tap a beat; slow, insistent. Uncle's right fingers cradle the side of his tumbler, his left drum its bottom with a rhythm matching Kip's. Hoyle twirls a strand of hair around her right index finger with a pace doubling theirs. This evening it is not wound up on her head, as earlier when she knelt, digging Mount Anf, but flowing over her shoulders.

So Hoyle, finally says Uncle, this is what you excavate for me, stories? I laugh, pant, pant with laughter. I try to keep it silent; use nearly all of my strength trying for silence. Kip, Hoyle, and Uncle laugh too: bending down, straightening up, slapping thighs, palms, foreheads.

I do stay silent, but my panting ruffles Hoyle's papers and everyone's hair, which no one notes, probably assuming it is the wind, which is now nearly raging.

For years, Uncle hired teams of excavators: I'd watch them fan out across Mount Anf's slope, mass treasure hunting, notice them unearth very little. (Artificial hills contain different but just as interesting information on agricultural and historical possibilities as natural ones do). Then Uncle hired Hoyle as their supervisor. Now they work under Hoyle who, even with disabled vision, operates her crew skillfully, excavating and recording piles of Mount Anf animal, artificial, mineral riches.

Laughter peters out of Kip, Hoyle and Uncle, now collapsed, arms loosely draped around one another. To their left, a massive rectangular table draped in linen: yellow background patterned with different sizes and shades of blue x's. Three pewter place settings—plate, goblet, tiny but destructive looking cutlery, especially the fork—are set at the table. Beneath the cutlery, a napkin with the identical design but reversed color scheme of the table's linen: blue, dotted with different sizes and shades of yellow x's.

Kip shuffles into the kitchen, stirs a pot simmering on the stove, ladles its contents—his stew specialty: lamb, shallots, sherry—into three bowls, snaps his fingers, signaling Hoyle and Uncle to come get their meal.

Kip's fingers are spider thin and, despite his youth wrinkled, brown, dry as timber. These wrinkles developed gradually, as did the ripples at the back of Hoyle's thighs. When I first met Hoyle and Kip all their skin was pulled tight, like the aluminum skin of a plane. But over the years, though they are both very thin, their skin has turned somewhat loose in places, or dimpled. Uncle's facial skin has always been translucent, like a layer of ice on a lake, yet his hands and neck show deep wrinkling. At this point my own skin is a soft, flexible covering; inevitably, despite the protective gear designed by Uncle, it will grow withered by tiredness and weather.

Around the table, Kip, Hoyle and Uncle sip, chew, chuckle. It is a warm scene, and happy. Clearly no more will be read from the story, or said about it. The weather has suddenly calmed. I shoot home because I feel tired, not because of sadness.