Over Tumbled Graves: A Novel

by Jess Walter

the river dropped to reveal rocks as white and shiny as cleaned bone—rounded boulders and fingered slabs picked up ten thousand years earlier by glacier and deposited dumbly along the gravel and dirt riverbed. A few miles downstream, the receding water brought three old men with metal detectors to a calm stretch of midriver, where there were rumors of a sunken ferry boat and lost mining treasure. The old men combed the newly exposed banks, each listening to his own progress through headphones, each playing in his mind some version of the story of old coins and silver nuggets, each willing to settle for a narrative of old plows and car parts—for anything containing mystery, really, since that’s what their lives lacked. Like all people, they realized too late that mystery was the key to staying interested in the whole business, to distracting themselves from the surety of what came next; that a man strives and settles and strives and settles and this pattern eventually kills him. But the old men didn’t acknowledge the affliction, not to one another. Instead, they passed on the glistening riverbed with nods and raised eyebrows, sweeping their metal detectors before them like blind men with canes, oblivious to the deep water at their backs, where life goes on—swimmers and fishers and boats carving the river into sheets and beads that explode in tiny prisms and rain back on the river.