The Quarry

410 million years ago the Iapetus Ocean closed in a continental collision, the Caledonian Orogeny, forming the Southern Uplands, now the Border country, and fusing the crustal foundations of Scotland and England.  You think about geologic history helping your ex-boyfriend drag a corpse around a quarry on a chilly Friday night in April.  You think, God so much cold stone.

She was eating a Cadbury’s bar.  I remember her offering a block of dark squares, so it wasn’t Dairy Milk.  It was her last day working the chippie.  She’d seen enough fish suppers to last a lifetime she said and wanted to explore retail. John Menzies I think it was.  She’d nicked the bar out the confectionary case as a souvenir.  I told her I didn’t think you could eat a souvenir and she said how people ate Blackpool rock all the time, and how it was the same thing, nearly.  Sandra never was a girl overburdened by scruples.  I told her I was allergic to glucose, how it made me erupt in hives the size bees lived in.
“This’ll be my sugar Spring,” she said, not listening, never listening.  “I need tae put some flesh oan my bones.”

The far side of the hill sloped down to the quarry’s sheer cut sides.  They didn’t work it on weekends.  It was almost exhausted, the eastern ridge abandoned.  Dead quiet up there.  We lay on the clover beds above the Boots Chemist factory. The place we played at being women that summer.
I tore a buttercup up by the roots and cupped it under her chin. 
“Whit?” she said, brushing the yellow away that irritated way she had.
“You like butter,” I said.  “But nothing too sweet.”
“I like sweet things fine.”
She plucked daisies to make a chain, a little yellow-white wreath for her hair like a Greek goddess would wear.  That was what she was doing: ripping daisies out the warming ground and laughing, flecks of chocolate spotting those red lips of hers.
“Kevin cannae touch cheese,” I said.
“Whit?”
“He isnae able tae touch it.  He disnae like how it feels.  Cannae even cut it.  He says it feels weird against his fingers, cheese does.”
She’d stopped fidgeting the daisies now. “That’s downright weird that is,” she said.
“It is.”
“Is there a name for that?  Cheeseaphobia?”
“Probably.  Coulrophobia is being feart of clowns.  I looked that up.  I have it.”
She started up giggling.  “You’re feart of clowns?”
“Aye, I went tae a circus, when I wis a wee girl, and saw this clown knock anither clown’s heid aff. It wisnae his real head, well obviously. I had nightmares for years of this clown withoot a head screaming at me.  It wis Billy Smart’s fault.”
“How can a clown scream at you if he’s no got a heid?”
“It’s a dream.  It disnae have tae make sense. Don’t you ever have nightmares?”
“No.” She thought a moment, scrunching pale blue eyes.  “There’s nuthin I’m afraid of in this world.” She dropped the daisy ring on her hair.  “How’d I look?”
“Like a Greek goddess.”
“Which wan?”
“I don’t remember who they all are.”
She lay flat on her back impressing the grass, a single green stalk clenched between those pretty white teeth.
“Persephone maybe,” I said. 


Later glaciations changed everything, hills molded and streamlined by the passage of the great ice sheets and the lower ground acquiring its cover of drift deposits, the till and sand and gravel, a surface sketched by eskers, kames and outwash terraces. See, you think hard about glaciations hiding a corpse in a quarry. Dragging it through weeds near an outcropping, you will see how strata dip southeast and the upturned edges are smoothed and striated by the action of ice.  But you’re in this awful panic, the world you know a sudden terminus, your hands shaking, your breathing shallow, you’re crying, shaking yourself out a nightmare beyond clowns. You think, nothing feeling this real could be real.

“I don’t remember aboot Persephone,” she said.  “In Latin class wee Kenny Syme went and pronounced it Percy Phone.  Mitchell went near ballistic.  Kenny wis the same wan wrote oan his test that Nero shot his mother.”
“Imagine,” I said.  “Under us somewhere are they buried miners from that Stanrigg disaster.  The bodies never got brought up.  Boys oor age, hiding in air pockets doon there, the water rising and rising.”
Sandra had to keep taking the grass stalk out her mouth to speak.  “Well, you’re in a right morbid mood theday.  Dead miners.  Ancient Greeks.  Crazy people feart of clowns and dairy products.”
I smoothed down a tufting of long blades with my palm.  They sprang back.  Forklifts scooted across the factory lot way below. 
“Doesn’t the afternoon smell just like chocolate?”
‘Chocolate’s no got a smell,” I said. 
“No,” she said.  “It smells thick and dark and chocolatey.  Usually autumn is chocolate warm, this year it’s the Spring is but.  Your Kevin says he can taste colours. You ever feel that yirsel?  As if you could taste colours?”
The sky was copper gray and the hills in the distance, the blue-green Campsie Fells, jutted against the heaviness of it like needles into cotton.  The birds of spring cried and wheeled under the warm yellow sun, and my fingers closed tight around this jaggy rock.  It fit my palm nice it did.


The quarry was a mile wide and the bottom bench 350 feet deep. Giant stone arches had been carved by the blasting from the top down.  In the bed the mining equipment cast shadows in the dark.  Dump trucks and scoop loaders by the primary crusher, an octopus with metal tentacles radiating from its center.  A Jaw Crusher was connected by a crisscross of rubber conveyors to the outbuildings where the aggregate was screened.  The sand plant was a scatter of connected metal shacks. The purpose of a quarry is to crush and chew large rocks into small rocks, erasing history as you uncover it.  It’s what you’d want to do, really.

“I didnae know you and Kevin talked that much,” I said.
“How’d you mean?”
“I didnae know youse two had conversations.  Aboot colors and all that.”
“Did you think we communicated by waving flags?” Sandra laughed at that, the way she always laughed at things.  She should have been a more serious person.
I closed my eyes against the yellow glare, and purple and turquoise spirals whirl-pooled on the inside of my eyelids. It was dark behind my eyelids, behind anyone’s eyelids I suppose, this panorama of circles pulsing dark spinning indigos.  It’s a funny thing to look at your own eyes.
“I know.”
“Whit?”
“I know all aboot it.’
“All aboot whit?  Whit is it you know?”


Quarry pumps whirred all night.  To reduce surface leakage there was a moat lined with clay, but groundwater seeped through the cracks in the walls into the pit.  In the 30’s the quarry operated by hand digging, sieving and the breaking of pebbles into road macadam by hand hammers.  The earliest crushers were primitive.  Rock dropped from a height into square stone basins lined with steel and sieved below.  The old part of the quarry was abandoned, crumbling stone whose interior once had crumbled stone.  Upon the high walls, overgrown with carpets of creeping plants, yellow and black triangle signs warned of cascading rocks.  It isn’t safe in the rock-basins and so into that unsafe place you’d drag the thing that was her. 

“I know how you went and started screwing Kevin.  Get bored, did you?”
She didn’t say anything.  She put the stalk back between her teeth and worked it around a bit.  One of those little fuzzy packets of seed on the tip weighed it down. 
“I don’t know where though,” I said, filling her in. “Did you do it up here?  Eh?  Oan oor hill?”
Sandra looked up at the sky for a long, long time before turning her face towards me. 
“Oh, Maggie.’
“It wis a shite thing tae do, you know.  It wis a shite slutty thing tae do.  Tae me.  I think I’ve hated you for a while.”
She threw the grass stalk away, rubbed her lips with her thumb, still the chocolate lingered there.  I didn’t say anything.  She sat up straight, put her hands on her knees and examined the crimson polish of her nails. She was wearing jeans and this green shirt I’d always liked.  It had curlicues of lighter greens inside the vermilion. She wore the shirt un-tucked and over her jeans.  Casual work clothes, but gorgeous as ever, what a piece of work that one was. 
“He’s a Fenian, Maggie.  A Tim.  It wisnae like you two were going anyplace wi’ it.  You think it wis?  Don’t kid yirself, hen. It wis ower afore it started.  Yir old man wid have got wind of it.” Her eyes were right in mine, all mixed up in my own.  “You didnae miss oot on nuthin anyway.  He wisnae very good at it.  He wis way too nice.”

That was where we left it. He left the shovel there too.  It was his idea, crying like he’d never stop, weeping I suppose if that’s the too much crying, these strands of wet snot that I wiped from his nose and mouth.  He took all its clothes off.  He was very gentle.  He had seen it naked before, or near naked.  You wouldn’t want to be totally in the scud on a hillside, just in case.  That would be embarrassing. Maybe they did it in her house.  She’d have done that, her that wild. I was surprised how small the breasts were, how narrow the hips, how terrible long the legs. 

“I loved him,” I said.  “I went and loved that one awful bad.”
The stone was still in my hand.  My palm was sweaty, soaking it damp.  The stone might have been getting a bit slippery and that was why I was holding it so tight.
“You’ll git ower it.  When I wis a wee girl, I used tae think I’d die for love.  That wis for Les of the Bay City Rollers though.” She shook her head and her lovely hair fell softly in waves across her cheeks. Her hair looked lovely and red wreathed in that daisy chain.  She had all these freckles, but it took nothing away from her.  You only wanted to count them, and take your time at that.  “You know whit boys think of love?  You know?  Maggie, for a teenage boy love is three minutes of squelching noises.”
The sun could have been there or not.  It was the sun of nothing.

Naked, it looked very boyish lying there in its faceless way, except for the legs.  You can’t be that cynical about love.  It isn’t right.  You have to believe in something.

The thick wet smack on contact.  I felt it sink into her and something gave, a crack and splitting of little bones. I didn’t think about anything except the need to sponge that softness with the stone. I don’t know how many times.  I doubt she felt it after the first two or three.  She gave a wee grunt the first time.  I think she was out pretty quick. She went sort of limp I think. She couldn’t have felt much. By the time I stopped what I was doing there was no face anymore and it was all over me.  I tried to find something to feel.  I thought it important to be feeling a thing.  I sat for a while.  The sun was so bright you had to squint your eyes against it. Then I took off my pullover and folded it over neat on the clover and picked it up and walked home in a hurry.  It was sticky a bit.  I had a bath.  It was a warm bath felt cold.  Then I put my clothes back on and I walked to Kevin’s house. 


I don’t know if he cried the other times he dug there.  It took him two afternoons and a night to cover it over with the rock and debris.  The summer after, when he quit college for good, he went back up there and planted a bed of wildflowers.  He told me about the wildflowers, their names and everything.  I’ve forgotten all he planted.  It was a terrible thing he did.  He should have walked away when she came to him like that.  But he was such a sweetheart that the polis never bothered him.  They heard how wild she was and with her giving Gino her notice they thought she’d done a bunk to England with some boy.  It’s dead easy, the crustal foundations being fused like that.



“I need your help.” That was all.  I looked at him.
He was hunkered in his backyard fiddling with a sprinkler.  He was at it with a screwdriver.  It looked like a cheap sprinkler the kind would break if you looked at it funny.  It was early in the year to be sprinkling anyway.  It rains near every day in April. It was a stupid thing to be doing.
“I’ve done something,” I said.  “Something terrible.  You need tae tell us whit tae do to make it go away.  You need tae make it go away.”
“Did you torch the school, Margaret?”
“Please help me,” I said.
He had noticed how I was.  “Calm down a minute, will you?  What’s the matter?  You look sick. Are you sick?  What is it you’ve done to your pullover?”

“Please come help me,” I said.  I clawed his wrist and tugged and he dropped the sprinkler on a flowerbed with the screwdriver still lodged in it.  “You need tae come wi’ me this minute and help me and make it go away.”

And he did.  He didn’t have to or want to.  I know he didn’t.  But he did for me. He made it go away a good long time.

As you read this great stone book of nature around us, the excavated quarry is a key. And each has a version to give of the chapter of history it illustrates. For those with no interest in exegesis a stone is a stone and a quarry a pit in which men dig, exploding through layers of unfathomable strata.  But for others, hammering sermons out of rock is a profound mystery.  How can you think otherwise watching the silver-grey sheer surface ooze driblets of asphaltum on a hot summer’s day, or how a chisel against a bottom end of pure white limestone sculpts out chalk-lamp shells of sea-urchins, star-fishes, sharks teeth? The Irish who quarried the escarpments believed that the burning white translucence of selenite was water congealed by the moon.

Rob McClure Smith is a fiction writer living in Galesburg, Illinois.