As always, he slipped out of his suit and tugged on the old tweed trousers that hung on the back of the toolhouse door, with their braces and the leather belt (just to make sure). He buttoned up the flies. These old pants still had flies. He found the old shirt, one of half dozen or so he kept down there for the gardening, with its frayed collar and the missing button. He felt comfortable in these old duds and ready for the digging.
There were the potatoes that must be ready now. The soil down that end was clayey and had taken a lot of breaking up with fresh compost and some fertilizer; the spuds should be whoppers, he estimated. Two weeks ago he had made a tentative dig and resisted the temptation. Patience was always one of his virtues. Now it would be rewarded. He measured out the broadest spade, the one that his father had given him, back in the early days. The old man had been a tyrant, but it was amazing the number of things Bernard still retained from then, and the number of actions and habits that endured. Even the gardening. As a kid he had rebelled – or he imagined he had rebelled, though it was simply a matter of demanding some time for himself on a Saturday morning. When he did force his father to give him time off (one weekend in four) he found himself bored and with nothing to do. Even his stamp collection seemed hollow and worthless. It was an evening thing, it did not feel right to be a Saturday Morning pastime. He had returned, of his own accord, to assisting his father, who then gave him his own bed to look after. He still remembered the pure joy when he dug up his first Bernard potatoes, as the old man called them. They made a ceremony that very night, a special Bernard potato dish, with butter and a topping of cheese. It had set him on his way.
Still smiling to himself, remembering all that, Bernard ambled down to the back bed. Was he humming just then? He turned the first sod. Yes, the soil was still pretty raw clay, but not as bad as when he first turned it over and of course he should have put in more compost but it was a start. It was a shale mixed in with the clay down this end. That made it harder and was probably why he never bothered to prepare this corner of the allotment for veggies until now. It had remained grass.
Shale was still mixed in with the clay and the compost, and the first potatoes he uncovered seemed to nestle under and around those lumps of pure rock, or perhaps even to split them up with their subterranean energies and movement. Perhaps a couple of seasons with spuds and they would do the work of their own accord, saving him effort with the pick and mattock like this time last year when he first began the bed’s preparations. A bed had to be dug, and aired, and composted, and then dug again, and given time to settle, his father had always said. Bernard had rationed his activities and the result was now paying off. The first spuds are generous, more than he hoped for, if he is honest. They will keep, though; they are not the starchy variety that rots easily.
Digging for half an hour, almost ready to call it a day (he looks at his watch: 6.15, give it another 10), Bernard rests on the shovel and wipes the sweat off his brow and the top of his head. It is bald now and his weekly barber visit has become a farce, but old Ernie needs the business. It is one of the little duties that stuck. It is an old habit. Gazing idly down he can see a potato he has missed, among the upturned rubble and shards. He bends down.
Stuck to the tuber with clay there is a rather large, flat stone. With clay sticky hands Bernard wrenches it off and is about to toss it over to the fence, where he has thrown several other larger stones. Something catches his eye. He looks closer. The potato had split the shale – two pieces fall neatly apart in his hand. He rubs his eyes. He wipes one hand on the old trousers and pulls out his spectacles from the buttoned-up shirt pocket (Too many times he has had to slouch back to the shed for them. He knows how to rationalise his movements, a real time and motion expert). Putting them on his nose he looks closer.
It is a fossil. A fossilised sprig of leaves. Not a fern, something larger than that. More like the leaves of the Queensland Kauri Pine in the Municipal Gardens. A multipennate sprig, he thinks, remembering from somewhere. Seven, no eight, leaves neatly branching out from a single stem. They are remarkably lifelike, almost as if they had not been underground long enough to rot or decay. And that is the point: the slow process of earth, of weight and heat and enlosure have taken this one twig of an ancient tree and pressed it to its heart. It has been immortalized. Fossilized.
Bernard stares at it for a long time. Something as ephemeral as a single twig of a tree, no doubt one of thousands of trees that had grown and lived here sometime, something that had seemed ordinary and simply part of the busy or lazy life of the valley, Now it was singled out. Now it was made special. All of the endless days, one like another, and he was able to see them as a preparation for this, this accidental uncovering, this discovery. And he had made it. It was his. Discovery is not the new, or the novel – it is the recognition.
It was not easy to describe what he had found, even to himself. Bernard’s jokes had not prepared him. He found himself trying to uncover fossil jokes; he was already thinking of how he might try it out with Jean first, and then even make it part of his line with the customers, who must be told of the information in that letter and the closure of the bank and the end of the eighty-five years of continual commerce that it represented. He must indeed think of how to break the news lightly, how to ease the pain.
The potato had broken the slab of shale lightly, to uncover the fossil. It was not Bernard, it was part of the underground life of the spud. The fossil was part of the underground life of the soil, that was more like it. The whole place was full of forgotten or hidden histories, none of it was virgin soil, none of it was meaningless. Grinning to himself now, Bernard moved automatically up to the house, ten minutes early, and with his working boots still on. He tramped into the kitchen as he was, without the surface washing that always preceded the shower. He stomped over the floral carpet of the living room. His wife was setting the table. They always ate at the main table even though the kids have long left them. It was one of their routines.
“I found this,” he announces, but Jean sees only an ochre-coloured slip of rock. When he pointed out the fossil and the seven – no eight – leaves with the stem almost as precise in its fibres and veins as a living twig, she is about to say ‘Really’ and then chide him. But something about his look, almost boyish and wide-eyed, makes Jean remember, quite suddenly, the young man she had first courted and who had to be nudged into marriage. Those had been exhilarating days and she had felt the first surge of fulfilment.
“Should you advise somebody? The Museum perhaps?” she says, instead. And they both grow rather excited, as if they had unearthed some real treasure. Almost as if they had unearthed a Mastadon Tooth or the shoulder of a Pterodactyl.
Later, Bernard looked up the World Book Encyclopaedia that had not been touched since the kids, and could find nothing that might classify their fossil. It was a tree, they decided, not a shrub or a grass or a creeper. But that was only because it reminded him so much of the Kauri leaves. That night he stayed up unusually late and they talked about the news which had broken upon him earlier. He finally was able to broach that with his wife.
the art is inside
