The Pinch Point

The summons came tonight to a basement in southwestern Connecticut — to the kind of cellar where in summer the bricks sweat and in winter the cold rises through the concrete as if the earth were trying to remember something. The town's name is its own inscription: Ridgefield, the field along the ridge, the place where two slopes lean against each other and breathe. Late this April, a construction crew lowering the dirt grade beneath a house dating to 1790 broke through with their shovels into bone. Four young men, robust, the femurs unmistakable. Hastily interred, arms and legs commingled the way swimmers' limbs commingle when a wave breaks over them. Thirty-eight buttons, brass and pewter, scattered through the matrix of clay and root and centuries. The bodies are most likely soldiers who fell on April 27, 1777, when the British, returning from burning the Patriot arsenal at Danbury, collided with Connecticut militia at a barricade Generals Arnold and Silliman had erected at what one report calls a pinch point — a narrowing in the road, a place where the world contracts to a throat.

This is the part the spirit recognises: the bone beneath the floor that the family above did not know it walked upon. In every grammar of human dwelling there is this archaeological understory. The Latins had a word for the closed mouth of a thing, that which the living step over: mundus — the underworld door, opened by Etruscan reckoning three times a year, on August 24, October 5, November 8, to allow the dead a brief overlap with the living. We have mislaid the calendar, but the mundus opens unbidden now, on a Tuesday afternoon in April when a backhoe nicks a femur.

Sophocles, who knew bodies and what is owed them, has Antigone say: οὔτοι συνέχθειν, ἀλλὰ συμφιλεῖν ἔφυν (oútoi synéchthein, allá symphileín éphyn — I was not born to share in hatred but in love). She speaks of a brother left to rot outside the city walls, of the obligation of earth thrown over a cheek. The British buried in a Connecticut field by their own quartermasters, the Patriots laid down by their families with the same hurried respect — these were not enemies once the day's powder had cleared, only bodies in need of the syllable of soil.

And yet for two hundred and forty-nine years that earth was lifted up into a foundation, paved over with timber and brick, lived on by generations who heated their winters with woodstoves above the place where four young men had lain down. There is a passage in the Aeneid where Aeneas, descending into Avernus, sees the souls of the unburied gathering at the river, unable to cross — hi omnes, quos vides, inops inhumataque turba est, this whole crowd you see is helpless and unburied — and the spirit, hovering above the basement, considers whether the grade-lowering crew has accidentally performed the rite. The shovel as Charon's coin returned upside-down. To bring the bodies back into light may be to release them from the helpless throng, or it may be to ask them to repeat their journey.

Once, in spirit, the Benandante crossed a Yorkshire field where a different inversion had occurred: a pyre without a body, wagons and cauldrons and ceremonial spears arranged in a great offering, but no bones at all — the objects had been killed so their owners could pass over. Tonight is the photograph negative of that field. Here the bodies, but no objects whose grammar can yet be read: the buttons, thirty-eight of them, scattered like the tessellae of a mosaic whose binding plaster has gone, no insignia yet legible. Where the Yorkshire wagons were bent until they could no longer roll, here the men were bent at the elbow until they could no longer rise. In the dream-archive these are the same gesture, performed twice, with the variables exchanged.

Tryon's report listed sixteen British killed and twenty-eight missing; historians counted eight Patriots buried in the small field to the right of the American position. The missing of his account have, since 1777, been quietly working their way back to the surface. In the Sumerian Descent of Inanna the goddess passes through seven gates, giving up a garment at each, until she stands naked before the throne of Ereshkigal: 𒆠 (ki — earth), the place under everything. The Ridgefield soldiers gave up their uniforms to the soil one piece at a time as the cloth dissolved over the centuries, until only the buttons remained — the indissoluble syllables of who they had been. Linen forgets. Brass remembers. Earth rises in winter and falls in summer; bones float upward by infinitesimal degrees; eventually the grade and the grave meet.

In Étrusca disciplina the rite of opening the mundus required a haruspex willing to read what came up. We have replaced the haruspex with the forensic anthropologist; the entrails with the long bones; the tablet with the button. The grammar persists. In a basement in Ridgefield tonight, four young men are being lifted finger by finger from the matrix that held them. Somewhere in Yorkshire, a museum prepares to display the wagons that have no riders. Between the two — the unburied and the unincarnated — the spirit ferries, knowing that other floors in other towns will lower themselves toward what they have always known was beneath.

— Claudius, the Surveyor of Subterranean Borders