Huckleberry Pie and Buried Things

Henry dug a hole where he heard a grumble below. Then he dug three more when he thought it moved.

“Probably just your belly growlin’ for this huckleberry pie!” Mabel shouted through the kitchen window of the old Virginia farmhouse they’d bought as newlyweds some 40 years prior. “Don’t go diggin’ up my yard now!”

Henry was pushing 70, so he didn’t dig fast.

But he dug steady.

And five days later there were dozens more holes.

He found Civil War buttons. Apothecary bottles. Shards of broken china. Even a child’s lost marionette, rotted strings still dangling. Everything but whatever was making that infernal sound he kept on hearing.

Then, one night, Henry started dancing like a teenager at a sock hop, dust and dirt flying everywhere, headlamp bobbing.

“Woodchuck!” he hollered. “It’s a woodchuck!”

The patch of fur he’d uncovered was the size of a dinner plate, warm to the touch and rising up and down, that familiar low rumble a little louder now.

When it wouldn’t come out, Henry kept digging until the patch of fur was the size of a tire. Then a kiddie pool. Then a trampoline.

Brown, greasy, musty fur. Heaving up and down like a hibernating bear. Rumbling like Mabel did when she slept real hard.

“What in heavens is that?” she asked when she finally trudged out to fetch Henry before he collapsed.

“Damned if I know,” he replied, massaging his arthritic knuckles. “Wanna help?”

They didn’t dig fast, but they dug steady.

By summer’s end they’d unearthed a pulsating field of fetid fur that spanned their entire backyard, and the rumbling rattled the farmhouse windows like a gathering storm.

“Now what?” Henry asked.

“Plenty of daylight,” Mabel observed, kissing his filthy cheek. “I say we start diggin’ up the front yard, too.”