A Shovel of Dirt - The Rescue

So the man with large hands had buried Karen Mellon in a gravelly grave, wrapped in an industrial sack.

Like the tradesman he is, the man with large hands, her ex-husband, Conrad Mellon, thought he was done, that he had finished the job, that it was complete.

He overlooked one thing.

He had been watched during the entire burial. From the moment he pulled the sack containing Karen Mellon out of the backseat of her car, to the point where he rolled her body into the grave, to the final thrusting of the shovel at the head of the grave taking the place of a formal headstone.

"What is this guy doing?" one of the teenagers asked his friend.

"I don’t know. He’s just burying something, that’s all."

"Something? Or somebody?"

Like teenagers everywhere, they felt they were witnessing something they would be blamed for.

"My Dad would say, ‘Why didn’t you stop that man?"

"Yea, mine, too. But what are we supposed to do?"

The man with large hands, Conrad Mellon, had left now, and had driven Karen Mellon’s car away from the scene. Time had passed, maybe six, seven minutes.

The boys came out from the hiding spot in the woods. They moved carefully to the grave.

"It seems hot, like steam is coming off of it," one of the boys said.

The other nodded, and kicked some gravelly dirt off the top of the grave.

"Suppose there is somebody down there?"

"That bag that guy had, it looked like it had a body in it."

The first teenager, a boy named Nelly, reached for his cell phone to dial 911. An error message read: No Service.

"We gotta do something," said the second boy, Robert. "Just in case. Just in case there is somebody down there."

Ten minutes had now passed.

The boys started looking around for tools.

"You start digging with that shovel," Robert said to Nelly, pointing to the makeshift headstone. "I’ll see what else I can find."

Nelly started shoveling. The dirt was full of rock and stone, and they scraped against the shovel, causing a grinding sound. He had to stand on the shovel with both feet to force it into the dirt.

Nelly cried out: "I need a motor on this thing. I’m too light. I can’t get it into the dirt."

Robert had found a few tools, abandoned by quarry workers who knows how long ago. There was another shovel, with a wood handle dry rotted. There was a rusty cross cut saw. And there was a post hole digger, also rusty, with its wood handles laying in a pool of rain water.

Not knowing what to do, Robert took all three tools over to the gravesite.

Nelly had made little progress. Twelve minutes had now passed. Robert grabbed the shovel. Being bigger, a high school football player, he jumped on the shovel and it plunged into the gravelly dirt. He started making progress.

"Grab that thing," Robert directed Nelly. Nelly picked up a shovel type of tool with two wood handles, both still wet from lying in water.

"You dig post holes with this thing, don’t you?" Nelly asked his friend.

They paused for a moment. "Here, I’ll work this end," Robert said, moving his shovel to one end of the grave, "You work on that end."

Together they began to dig in earnest. It was slow digging, with small rocks and stones and chips of concrete making it difficult. After about ten minutes Nelly had dug a post hole about four feet deep.

"We gotta get air down there!" Robert cried.

They looked around again for more tools. Robert went back to the area where he had found the first tools. There was a wooden shed there, rotted out, tilting like it was about to tumble. Robert noticed a long metal pole sticking out the back and grabbed it. It was heavy, solid iron, with a flat poker on one end and a sharp round tip on the other.

He dragged it back to the graveside. Seventeen minutes had now passed since the man with large hands, Conrad Mellon, had driven off.

"Ram that thing down your post hole." Nelly cried.

It was hot out, now early evening, and the sun hung overhead like a heat lamp.

Robert jammed the rod down the post hole again and again and again. Then! The rod fell through to the spot where Karen Mellon was buried in the industrial sack.

"I broke through!" Robert said.

Robert and Nelly looked at each other. There was nothing to say. They had to dig. There was somebody down there.

They dug and dug, Robert on the shovel, Nelly digging more post holes. The gravesite started to resemble a bad block of Swiss cheese. Holes on one end, and a solid scarred mass on the other.

Young as they were, they were running out of energy.

"Try your cell again," Robert said to Nelly. Still an error message: No Service.

Robert said, "I’ll keep digging. You go out to the road. Flag somebody down."

The shovel again penetrated the gravelly dirt and Robert stood on it with both feet to get as much leverage as possible. Mounds of dirt started to become evident alongside the grave. Maybe, if they were lucky, they were three feet down. But an air hole had been breached. Was there enough air to save her, or was it too late?

Nelly stood alongside the highway. It was country, and there was scant traffic. The man with large hands had been gone twenty seven minutes now. Nelly marched up and down the shoulder of the highway, hoping for a car, a truck, a tractor…anything.

Meanwhile, Robert shifted his digging to the post holes that Nelly had dug, using them as a speedier way to get all the way to the bottom of the grave.

But the gravelly dirt collapsed, and sunk down into the grave in a solid mass.

Robert cried out to Nelly: "I need help!"

Nelly joined him in digging more furiously. The post hole digger was now breaking through and Nelly noticed a black splotch of fabric, the industrial sack.

He dropped to his stomach and reached in the hole and pulled on the sack. Something pulled it back.

He called out: "Hello! Is there someone down there?"

There was no answer, but the sack continued to move about.

Robert pulled Nelly aside and started digging anew. There was now a two foot circle of fabric showing. Robert knelt down and reached for it. He pulled and yanked, hoping for a sound, or a response. The bag pulled back, and for the first time he heard a muffled voice.

"Did you hear that?" Robert said to Nelly.

Nelly nodded.

We gotta get that sack out of there," Nelly said. They both pulled on it, and with some resistance it started to come up out of the hole. But there was still too much dirt.

Robert went back to shoveling. Thirty eight minutes had now passed since the man with large hands had driven off.

Piles of the gravelly dirt were getting noticeably bigger next to the grave. There was now more dirt out of the grave than in it.

They both knelt down, grabbed the fabric and pulled upwards as hard as they could. It came loose from its dirt cover and together they started pulled the industrial sack out of one end of the grave. Finally, they had it completely out of the grave and alongside it.

There was no movement from the huge sack.

"One of us has got to look in there," Robert said to Nelly.

Robert was the stronger of the two, but Nelly must have had more guts, because he pulled the drawstring apart and started to peel the sack off the body of Karen Mellon.

They immediately noticed the huge knot on her head. But Karen Mellon was not moving.

"Check her pulse," Robert said to Nelly.

Nelly held his finger along her neck like he had seen them do on TV.

"I don’t feel nothing."

Robert put the back of his hand against her forehead. "I don’t know. She still seems kind of warm."

Nelly noticed a bulge in the pocket of her jeans. He reached in and pulled out a cell phone.

"Try to call her family," Robert said.

This time the phone dialed out to a name listed as Conrad.

Conrad Mellon was drinking a draft beer in his favorite bar, the Knotty Pine Inn, when his cell phone rang. The name displayed on the dial of his cell phone read: Karen.

Conrad Mellon was not a man easily frightened, but his throat tightened. He looked at the call coming in. It seemed unbelievable. Yes, the name on the display was: Karen.

"Hello. Hello," Nelly said. "Is this a family member?"

"What’s up?" Conrad answered.

"We have this lady here. She was buried and we dug her up. We think she is still alive.

"What should we do?"

The man with large hands known as Conrad answered: "You just stay right there. I will be there as soon as I can."

The boys seemed relieved. Help was on the way.

Karen Mellon was about to come to. And that is not the way she would see it.