Iris had done well for herself and so wanted to invest in some land: something reliable and permanent, a sound investment. She’d saved for eighteen years; she cashed out her 401k. After months of site visits, she had found the most charming plot of land in the city. She was sure of it. Unlike her mother, she refused to second-guess things.
This was her lot. It was in the right neighborhood; the oak trees made for uproarious shade. The overgrown yard was skinny and long: a rarity in her historical city. The agent said its potential was endless. Iris could build a house here that was perfectly her own. She might even add a pool, someday. By then there might be children to swim in it, a partner to play lifeguard.
Iris took her mother out to a nice lunch to celebrate. The milestone felt realer with a witness, and her mother was the perfect—perhaps the only—person who could recognize how far Iris had come. Iris wanted to involve her mother, and enjoyed introducing her to the kind of fashionable and new places she would never go on her own, like an act of charity, or education.
They sat outside, the white tablecloth lifting in the breeze, and ate chargrilled oysters, meaty and slippery. Between bits of conversation they lifted the jagged saline shells to their lips. The only sour note, Iris thought, was that her mother kept apologizing needlessly: for arriving early, for changing the subject, for asking too many questions. Iris snapped at her for it, but couldn’t well apologize herself, then.
Their sidewalk table skirted the intersection where angry SUVs routed around an abandoned roadworks project. Her mother was more interested in this hole than the blue-crab hummus. She kept glancing over there while Iris described open floor plans and trends in patio design.
Iris’ mother had been a minor archaeologist for a stint. In her twenties she’d spent summers in Delaware excavating three-hundred year old outhouses for clues about ancient diets and diseases. She spoke of them often, like those summers belonged to a different person: a plucky, impossibly young one who subsisted on tuna straight from the can and drove a Chevy that constantly broke down.
While Iris was paying, her mother wandered over in her pale sneakers and khakis to the edge of the rectangular cutout in the pavement, barriered only by thin tape and orange cones. She lifted the tape to get closer. Iris went to remind her of their next appointment—bathroom fixtures—but for a moment stood beside her looking down at the exposed cobblestone, surprisingly fresh: an older road preserved below. Her mother brushed the hair from her eyes, said, “Baby, would you look at that.”
It was this minor detour that inspired Iris to consider offering her mother the chance to conduct the dig on her new property. The city required one before building could begin to assess the history and rule out the kinds of burial-ground-bludgeoning that made for unpleasant headlines. Iris figured her mother would enjoy this project. Her retirement seemed empty. Besides, she’d know the best way to conclude the dig without delay.
Weeks later, Iris propositioned her mother while they were sifting through salvaged stained glass. Iris had long imagined a venetian-glass window over the kitchen sink: her model image torn from Southern Living and moved from rental to rental.
“Shouldn’t be too big a project,” she ventured. “I’d consider it a favor.”
+
Iris visited her land on the first day of the dig. Her mother was holding a clipboard and directing the men in English, then thanking them in Spanish. “Gracias, gracias.” Iris had wanted to make introductions but soon felt out of place. She tried to imagine the soaking tub she’d picked residing in its new spot, but it was a struggle amidst the noise.
“Did you find anything?” Iris asked her mother that night on the phone.
“Mostly today was set up.”
“Oh. Do you expect to find anything?”
“Oh yes. Always something.”
+
The next day two workers were digging in a chess-board pattern marked out by string.
“Glass bottles,” her mother pointed her to a growing pile. “From old drugstores.”
“Can I touch them?”
“From around 1810! Aren’t they remarkable?” her mother said. Iris would not have gone so far as that. The bottles were heavy and caked in dirt, but might otherwise have been used yesterday. They were empty but, holding one, Iris imagined cool cola thickening under the earth into a pungent syrup.
+
Two weeks later, Iris was selecting counter slabs, running her manicured fingertips over slices of geologic time: sandstone, limestone, the imprint of reeds and small spiraled shells; pressure and fissure, thinking this one will go very nicely with the brass faucet, when she got the call from her mother.
“A significant discovery—” her mother breathed hard. “—a midden.”
+
Arriving, Iris saw that the orderly string squares were mapping out a deeper and widening tear in the ground. The birds of paradise she had hoped to save were uprooted and flattened by the excited feet and wheelbarrows of workers hauling away clay. A seawater smell emerged, repulsing her future neighbors, who paused in the street to murmur complaints.
“Why, it could be another World Heritage Site,” Iris’s mother was saying. She was arguing on the phone with a representative from the Neighborhood Association.
Iris recalled fourth grade class field trips to prominent local middens. Her mother had chaperoned, extolling the mysteries of these mounds: essentially very old indigenous trash heaps, pottery and banks of oyster shells tossed aside after eating, piling up into the high ground beneath them, their great accumulation providing safety from floods and signifying ancient settlement. “People! People were here!” Iris’ mother had insisted. She’d taken dozens of photos, which, when developed, seemed to Iris to show little but dirt.
Iris listened as her mother paced. “600 BCE… a time of peace. For so long we’ve conflated civilization with edifice…” Her eyes were shiny, unequivocal, holding no hint of apology.
+
Everyone soon lawyered up as the significance of the site—two-thousand year-old cooking ash, stone tools, ceremonial objects—became clear, and the dig dragged on. There were cold and long silences. Arguments between Iris’ legal team and the parish’s took place on letterhead: debates over valid ownership and appropriate compensation for the home’s assessed value and the sideswept renovation. Numbers went up and down, back and forth. Iris drove with her phone in her lap but did not call her mother.
Eventually, Iris gave up her fight for the property. She forfeited her claim to her lot upon learning that her mother was planning to testify for eminent domain on the side of the parish and the state and the memory of the long-gone Tchefuncte: testify to the irreplaceable archaeological significance of this upturned ground. Iris’ dreams for the house began to feel small in comparison, and she folded them back in the box of herself.
She signed copier-warm papers on the top floor of a sleek downtown building with floor-to-ceiling windows, the word settle heavy in her mouth.
+
But Iris’ surrender was seeded months before the settlement, on the night she brought take-out to the dig site. There were still weeks to go before the authenticators and experts would be called in. It was late at night, and Iris knew her mother had not eaten. She found her in the open pit. Flood lights illuminated the dirt like the surface of a moon.
Iris passed her mother’s muddied hands an iced tea and a plastic-wrapped utensil pack. There was the pleasant snap of Styrofoam tabs. Brushes attuned to the tasks of unearthing, from brutal bristles to soft dusters, laid around her mother. Iris had never seen her so at ease.
They sat together on the edge of the hole, legs dangling over. They forked sweet plantains.
“Let me show you something,” said Iris’ mother. She offered the handle of a filthy trowel, gripping the sharp part in her own hand.
Iris accepted it. They dropped together into the clay.
Iris dirtied her knees.
“Come see, baby.” Her mother palmed the rough earth, so Iris understood she was allowed. Iris dug the trowel in. She plucked an oyster shell from the warm walls that embraced them. It was ruffled then smooth. Something familiar, though the living flesh of the oyster was long gone.. In that hollow, Iris glimpsed what her mother saw in the midden: the traces of a thousand too-brief lives. Each shell was another peal of laughter echoing in a just-vacated room; the jokers and the joke were lost to time, but their laughs lingered, innumerable. They were never hers at all.
+++
Marguerite Sheffer is an educator who lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Offing, Epiphany, Smokelong Quarterly, and The Pinch. Maggie is a founding member of Third Lantern Lit, a community writing collective. You can find her online @mlensheffer and www.margueritesheffer.com.