Then: Smelled like pipe tobacco, she even admitted it and we laughed and took a turn out in her car—one of those little compact Japanese deals—to the lake, where I must admit we kissed a long, long time, first one, first time, a kiss lasting a good twenty minutes minimum.

He leans down to whisper this fact into my ear, tapping it softly with the tip of his trowel.

Slipped me the tongue, he whispers, his voice gaunt and tight. She was up here at the house—snuck up one night—and we were on the sleeping porch and the house was quiet behind us and we were on the hammock I have back there and that’s when it happened, my dear bog friend, when I went over onto the other side of sin and salvation and found myself in the darkness…but here his confession waned. He had reached that point we all reach when the desire to speak the truth meets up with the pain it produces.

Carefully he dug out around the northern side of my head, working gently in the darkness. Night swallows dipped through the sky. The first stars emerged. I saw Lyra for the first time in years. The Big Dipper. The Little Dipper. Polaris nailed the whole spinning arrangement down and gave me a sense of orderly circular motion.

7

Arriving from Ohio State and points east (Harvard had a fine bog team), pulling up in station wagons (with the OSU logo), professional types in horn rims and chinos speaking in baroque accents, they would examine me reverently, find the tuberculous infection in my spine that caused my hunchback (yes, folks, I suffer certain deformities). Eventually they’d order a crane in, box me with sheets of steel on all sides, and heft me skyward. They’d look up at me in their absurd orange hard hats. The chief bog guy, Scrunk, would stop and promise Thompson full visitation rights. You’ll be given full credit for the find, he’d say. You found Elyria Man. Who? Elyria Man. Here he’d point up at me. In the historical record, Scrunk would get full credit for the name coinage. He’d get all the glory.

If the Ohio State people came, I’d tell them to get off my farm, Thompson says eagerly. His voice is soft and wispy and clearly not directed at me or even at some imaginary Scrunk but, for the most part, at himself.

That’s what I’d end up saying to them, he quickly adds. He’s tapping a finger firmly against the leather of my cheeks the way you might play a bongo drum.

8

Tollund Man lay still a good two thousand years. Tollund Man—contrary to opinion—had a forlorn look, and didn’t much like being dug up, either. He was resting nicely—after some sheep-counting and some concentration exercises, after stretching a charley horse out of his right leg. Sound sleep. Deep sleep. When the peat diggers came upon him he felt the way you might feel waking up on a hot, humid morning after bathing in dream-sweat all night. You try waking up in a fen, in the dead heat of a summer midmorning after a good two thousand years’ rest with a noose of rope around your neck, and see how you feel. Tollund never got over it. He’d be quick to point out that he had to deal with the Danish police, too, who accused him of being a murder victim.