Behind the blade of the behemoth was a vast, bellylike hopper, slung so low it nearly dragged the ground. The dirt removed by the blade would be collected continuously in the hopper, which would need to be emptied regularly. As I gave hand signals to guide the operator, the scraper eased forward and the blade eased down, a fraction of an inch at a time. When the depth of the cut reached two inches, I signaled the operator and he locked the blade in position. The machine crept across the ground, ripping up ferns, leaves, sticks, scrub growth, vines, and shallow roots. Just as I’d done a quarter century before in the South Dakota prairie, I walked behind the scraper, this time in a Florida live-oak forest.
The first pass was the slowest, the gnarliest, the most debris-laden. As the machine bulled and tore a path beneath the spreading canopy, a windrow of limbs and shredded brush piled up alongside the cut. When he reached the end of the hundred feet we’d marked off, the operator circled back and shoved the debris farther to the side, to give the machine and us a bit of breathing room and make it easier to monitor the depth of the cut.
The second pass—which bit down another two inches, as would each successive pass—proceeded more smoothly, with less ripping and grumbling. The machine chewed forward and downward, a ponderous, insatiable beast, feeding upon the very earth itself.
By the third pass, the hopper was filling, the topsoil was giving way to clay, and I was giving in to serious worries. What if the technique that had worked so well in South Dakota couldn’t simply be transplanted to Florida? What if I’d unintentionally sold everyone a bill of goods? If we failed to find more graves, there would surely be hell to pay. The bill wouldn’t come to me, of course—I could simply tuck my tail between my legs and slink back to the safety of Tennessee—but Sheriff Judson would doubtless find a way to wreak vengeance on Vickery, possibly on Riordan, and perhaps even on Angie as well: the three people who embodied the invasion of his county and the challenge to his authority.
There was another possibility, of course. It was possible that no matter what techniques or technologies we harnessed, no matter how much time we invested, we’d never find anything more, because perhaps there were no more graves to be found. Perhaps the dog had already done a thorough job. And shouldn’t I be hoping for that, after all: hoping that only three boys were buried here, no more? And yet, though I felt a tingle of shame, I scanned the ground avidly for signs of another burial.
At the end of the third cut, instead of making a U-turn and starting a fourth pass, the operator raised the blade and made for a briar patch at the far end of the site, where we’d decided we’d dump the dirt. There was a slight chance, of course, that we were dumping dirt atop a dozen undiscovered graves, but that was a chance we’d have to take; the dirt had to go somewhere, and putting it at the farthest edge of the site seemed a reasonable gamble. When he reached the briar patch, the operator opened a pair of large doors in the machine’s belly—like bomb-bay doors in a B-52—and dropped the load. Then he looped back and resumed where he’d left off.
I was waiting for him. Anxiously waiting. He lowered the blade again, farther, bringing the cut to eight inches, a depth I confirmed by measuring the wall of the trench. As another layer peeled from the ground, the coolness of the underlying earth caused the moisture in the air to condense, giving the clay a moist sheen in the glinting light.
Barely twenty yards after the grader had resumed its course, the blade snagged and yanked at the remnants of a root that had pushed its way down into the clay. But then, as the machine tore the root from the ground, I realized that the soil clinging to the root wasn’t pure clay; the clay was mixed with darker, looser topsoil. That same mixture, I saw with mounting excitement, extended well beyond the spot where the root had burrowed in. As I drew close and leaned down, I found myself peering down on an oval patch of disturbed soil, roughly two feet by four feet, Roughly the same dimensions as hundreds of Arikara Indian graves I’d excavated so many years ago in South Dakota. Silently, so as not to raise doubts about my sanity, I raised a triumphant war whoop.
Late in the morning, a Winnebago-like RV lumbered and scraped its way into the site—a mobile command post, Angie informed me. I wondered what Sheriff Judson thought about this latest development. Actually, I had a pretty good idea what the sheriff thought about it, since he chose to boycott the scene. What I didn’t know was what cajoling or threatening Riordan had done to get the command post onto the site.
Shortly after noon, a siren whooped from the direction of the command post, followed by a loudspeaker announcement that lunch was available in the tent. Tent? What tent? Then I noticed that at some point since the command post’s arrival, a big canvas canopy had been raised beside it, and underneath the canvas were tables loaded with food and drink.