ELYRIA MAN

1

Thompson scrapes off the residual mud, the encrustation of years, with the blade of the shovel, with the edge of a crowbar from his truck, working carefully around my head, avoiding eyes and orifices until ultimately a face is revealed. He gives a soft exclamatory murmur. He’s reluctant to uncover my eyes. He fears sockets. But he does it. The uncovering of eyes is a one-shot trick, not to be repeated. And in any case he has already quickly adapted to the ugliness of my features. He appreciates my originality, the leathery incarnation of a primal self, as he pauses, leaning on his implement, his hoe or his pitchfork (preferably the three-pronged variety). In the late-morning light I appear forsaken in my clench-jawed agony, my pale crumpled eye sockets, and my positioning in the earth: one arm tossed back in a relaxed sleeping position. Think of those time-lapse films of couples sleeping together, making unconscious bodily adjustments, both working in what seems to be a congruence, eerily responding in turn to the other on the white wrinkles of fresh sheets.

In the silence of an Ohio field—the irrigation pipes dripping softly behind him—I look fetal, protean, like a newborn foal just before he ungathers his legs to stand for the first time. In the contours of my face is the ungainly intelligence of the greasy womb-wet newborn. Thompson stares down at my form rising up out of the earth and absently chews his tobacco, spits sideways, sniffs, coughs, unfolds the squares of his handkerchief and deposits phlegm, and then refolds it and carefully puts it into his coat pocket. The forsaken are nothing new to him. He’s seen the look a hundred times at cattle auctions. In his wife’s eyes. In the eyes of his kids.

2

Thompson was taking a soil sample when the blade of his shovel touched something firm. Often a digger unknowingly amputates an arm with the shovel blade, decapitates, disembowels the dusty nothingness from a puckered gut. It happens most of the time. The haphazard surgery of the blind digger: the blade driven under the force of a boot, applied pressure condensed to the edge. But Thompson was a careful man. When he felt something in the ground he paused to think about it, to consider his options.

3

In town that afternoon the Amish man named John, hitching his buggy to a post, is receptive to hearing about me. He’s always wondered about bog folk. Ohio bog folk especially, he adds, looking down at the hard-baked street. Bouquets of Queen Anne’s lace sprout from the cracks. The road is absurdly wide, as if speaking to some long-ago hope for greater commerce.

Me own father found one once down to Wooster, John the Amish says, and this one had a small noose-like apparatus around his neck and was gripping a sacred heathen ornament. Them bog people were idolaters of the most basic sort. Certainly they weren’t God-fearing folk. No sir. They mocked the Lord. But nonetheless, I’d be interested to see your bog man.