Findings

by Mary Anna Evans

  The library kept short hours. The drive to Tallahassee made book research a lot less efficient on Saturday and Sunday. It made more sense to wait until Monday to go to the library. So should she strike out into the unknown and pursue Bachelder’s homeplace today, or should she dig for buried treasure in her own back yard? Faye knew from soggy experience that the weather in April could be iffy, but there wasn’t a cloud in the sky today.

  She stuck her head out the window and squinted at the clear blue dome above her. There was always a chance in this climate that a roiling black thundercloud would blow in and drench her world in rain, but that prospect was as unlikely today as it ever would be. It made sense to attack the goal that would require her to venture farthest from home on this cloudless morning. If she had to, she could dig for an emerald in her back yard on any old blustery day.

  Faye had a long history of working frenetically while a thunderhead loomed on the horizon, only dashing indoors when the deluge hit, and she hadn’t been struck by lightning yet. When she thought about being caught in a deluge in the swamp in a metal johnboat under a forest of trees shaped like lightning rods—and she had been in just that precarious situation on many occasions—Faye considered working at home, even in bad weather, a comparative piece of cake.

  Having come to her decision rationally, Faye started gathering her maps of the area around Jedediah Bachelder’s old home place. She also started packing food. Joe could go all day out in the woods without eating, but she most certainly couldn’t.

  ***

  Their destination had been so clear-cut on the maps. Who would have expected Faye and Joe to still be poking fruitlessly around in the swamp, after spending most of the morning in the boat?

  The springtime air was warm, promising that the gators and mosquitoes and snakes would be out soon, if they weren’t already. Property records had shown her where Jedediah Bachelder’s plantation had been, acres and acres of it. Existing documents gave her his property boundaries, but they didn’t tell her where the house had been located. This was not a trivial problem when you considered the hundreds of acres Bachelder had owned.

  Without overt information on his home site, Faye had gone looking for indirect evidence, and she’d found some. Topographic maps showed a small area of high ground on the margin of a broad, flat area that would have been perfect for large-scale agriculture.

  Faye would have bet money that Bachelder chose the high ground for his homesite. It would have been a typical choice for his historical period. Besides, a good-sized river snaked past the presumed house site. In an era before UPS and highways and big rigs, Bachelder would have needed a way to get his crops to a port or a railroad, so that they could be shipped to market.

  Conversely, without access to a river, he would have had a devilish time getting supplies. Bachelder’s slaves could have grown food for everyone on the plantation, but they couldn’t have conjured up the mechanical equipment that was, even then, growing more critical to a successful farm every day. And they certainly couldn’t have provided the luxuries that wealthy planters expected: oysters on ice, rosewood furniture, velvet window hangings, pianofortes…

  In Faye’s search for Bachelder’s home, the river had been a dead giveaway. Too bad it looked a lot different from a boat than it did on the map. She and Joe had been puttering around in the swamp for quite some time now. Fortunately, Faye rather liked cypress trees and tea-colored water and heavy draperies of Spanish moss.

  The shallow draft of Joe’s johnboat meant that they weren’t constrained by the river channel. They could explore the creeks and bayous and wetlands that fed the river and kept it healthy, and they could do it legally. A landowner can throw a trespasser off private property, but the waters of the state belong to everybody. At the moment, Faye and Joe were perfectly legal, although she hadn’t promised herself that they would remain that way. Being this deep in the swamp more or less guaranteed that trespassing could be accomplished without consequence.

  The sight of a crumbling brick foundation, topped with the leaning remnant of a single column, pulled her right out of the boat. Sometimes trespassing just had to be done.

  ***

  Joe was handy with a machete, but Faye had known that for years. He had already cleared much of the undergrowth away from the old foundations of Bachelder’s house, enough for Faye to see its layout. There were no surprises. It had been a big square house with porches, front and back. Sturdy piers as tall as Joe had lifted its bulk off the ground so that cool breezes and periodic floods could pass beneath the floors. A broad hallway had split the house in two, and each half had been split into just two tremendous chambers. People liked their rooms spacious in those days.

  The length of a toppled brick column told her that the house had been at least two stories tall. This had been a lot of house for a childless couple who owned several other homes. Standing within its walls made Faye feel a connection to Jedediah and Viola Bachelder. It made them real.

  The ground within the foundations was pocked with holes. Faye could see dozens more pits scattered around the house site in all directions. One or two of them looked new, with fresh dirt piled at their edge. The rest of them had been eroded into a shallow dish shape. Were pothunters really this active out here, so far from everything?

  She sighed and said, “Let’s look out back.”

  Joe brandished the machete, ready to clear her a path before she even told him why.

  Faye started wading through the weeds, heading for the rear of the old house. “I want to find the family cemetery.”

  ***

  More bricks. They were handmade and they were everywhere. They lay where they had fallen when the house collapsed, one wall at a time. They protruded from the earth, scattered relics of a garden path. And a low ridge of them enclosed a rectangular spot of earth dotted with leaning tombstones that were as chipped and stained as an old man’s teeth.

  The graves had not been desecrated. Faye thanked heaven for small miracles. Some of the markers were so old that their faces had been smoothed by wind and rain. One of the less ancient ones, a tall marble obelisk, still bore most of the name that had been carved on it, long ago. Many of the letters were lost to time, but the capital letters had been carved large and bold. There was no mistaking the J and the L and the B. The letters following the B were blurred, but Faye could make out an “a” and an “l” and two “e”s, all of them in the right positions. She felt sure that this was Jedediah L. Bachelder’s final resting place.

  She looked around for Viola, but realized that Mrs. Bachelder would have been buried where she died, in Alabama. Their brief biographies had told Faye that Viola’s husband survived her by thirty years. He might even have remarried. When the government Bachelder had served lost its war, he had become less worthy of a biography, so the information in the book of biographical notes was sketchy in the post-war period.

  There might or might not be any useful reason for Faye to know the rest of Jedediah’s story, but she knew she’d keep looking for the Bachelders and their history. The man’s letters had spoken to her. If she neglected his story, it would have been like abandoning a friend.

  “Faye.”

  She realized that Joe had been repeating her name quietly, trying to get her attention.

  “Faye,” he murmured in a voice just loud enough to be heard over the wind through the swamp grasses. “There’s somebody out there. We’re not alone.”

  ***

  Joe belonged in the swamp, with its palpable air and mucky soil. Many are frightened by the hard-edged black shadows of thick-chested oaks, or by the blurry Spanish moss that drifts down from their branches like a soft collection of wraiths, but not Joe. The ruined house held no ghosts for him; it was nothing but a pile of bricks that time had brought to its knees.

  He might have been chilled by the cemetery, being Creek and thus aware of the need to respect the dead. But this graveyard had been undisturbed so long that the air aro
und it felt untroubled. The dead here truly slept.

  No, the intruder did not disturb these dead ones, only Joe and Faye. Joe could almost feel the vibrations of the man’s footfalls through the soles of his moccasins. The man’s labored breathing stirred the air, and Joe could sense that disruption. Like a wild beast, Joe’s hearing was keen, and his senses went beyond mere sight, sound, smell, taste, touch. When he heard a change in a blue jay’s cry, he knew there had been a sound to upset the bird, even if he couldn’t hear that sound himself.

  During his recent studies, he’d learned that sound waves could be thought of as a disruption in air. This made sense to Joe. Sometimes it seemed to him that he detected faint sounds as a breath of wind on the skin of his face. He inclined his head toward the subtle sound that had caught his attention, pointing with his chin, so that Faye would know where the trouble lay.

  A buzzing noise that even Faye could hear struck their ears, and they both smiled. It was the sound of a zipper, followed by the rustling of a man adjusting his fly so that the cloth would be out of the line of fire, so to speak. Somebody had stepped out of the open field that lay just inside Joe’s field of vision and into the woods to relieve himself. A second’s thought made this situation more troubling. If the man had been alone, he wouldn’t have bothered to step into the woods for privacy.

  Who was out there in this empty wilderness? And why?

  If Joe intended to live up to his job as Faye’s protector—and he did—then he needed the answers to those questions.

  ***

  Faye and Joe didn’t have to lurk long in the dark, quiet swamp, wondering how much to worry over being detected by their new companion. Before long, he had walked out of the trees and back into the sunny clearing beyond.

  Within a few minutes, any noise they might have made would have been drowned out by the racket of large trucks using four-wheel-drive to navigate rough and rutted woodland trails. Periodically, the ringing impact of hammer on nail echoed through the air.

  “We’re mighty far out in the woods for a camp-out,” Joe observed. “And they’re not here to hunt, or they wouldn’t be making so much noise.”

  “Even if they were hunters—isn’t deer season over? What’s left? Squirrels?”

  Joe grunted, which said pretty much all he had to say about the need to honor governmental hunting restrictions out here on the edge of civilization. “Doesn’t matter about the season. Like I said, these noisy folks aren’t hunters.”

  ***

  Joe counted twenty-two trucks and jeeps in the grassy clearing, and at least that many ATVs, all fully loaded with passengers. Ten minutes ago, he and Faye had been alone. Now the population of a small town had burst into the pristine wilderness. Well, not so pristine, he guessed, since somebody’d had a big farm out here a hundred-and-fifty years ago. But it was fixing to get a whole lot worse, now that these guys were out here scaring the wildlife and just generally making nuisances of themselves. The birds had made a big ruckus when the invasion had first begun, but they’d quickly gone silent.

  Metal detectors began emerging from pickup beds, and Faye swore. Joe was a little surprised. She didn’t swear much. For a woman who shopped for clothes at the Army surplus store, Faye’s habits were remarkably ladylike.

  “They’re having a pothunting party,” she whispered.

  Joe raised an eyebrow. No sense talking when it wasn’t necessary. Not until he figured out how important it was to stay hidden from these people.

  “Landowners who own property where artifacts are common can make a good little profit by charging people to dig there.” Faye was whispering, but she sure was talking a lot. “Pay a flat fee, pitch a tent, and go home with a piece of history. These are people who would be willing to strip mine a battlefield to find a new prize for their collections.”

  Joe had crept a few feet forward to get a better look at the jovial newcomers as they fanned out with their shovels and their metal detectors. “We know some of these people.”

  ***

  The crowd was so far away that Faye could barely make them out as individuals but, after a few minutes of squinting, she realized that Joe was right. They did know some of the people gathered in the clearing. She saw the small wiry form of Wayland. His wife Nita stood beside him with the posture of a dancer. Her graceful carriage should have been incongruous with her near-bald head and violent tattoos, but the look somehow worked for her.

  They stood close to each other, almost shoulder to shoulder. Faye realized that she’d never seen them more than an arms’-length apart, as if their marriage bond was extraordinarily strong. Or as if they didn’t trust each other.

  She saw Chip’s tall, athletic shape and the portly profile of Herbie, the re-enactors’ natural leader. The faces of the crowd around him were indistinct, but they moved like people who looked to Herbie for guidance in all things.

  Wayland and Nita separated themselves from the crowd, walking so directly toward the shadows where Faye and Joe stood that she was sure they’d been seen. Herbie continued moving through the group, shouting instructions Faye couldn’t understand because they were garbled by distance.

  Wayland and Nita’s lean-hipped swagger was as different from Herbie’s brawny stride as a king cobra was from a diamondback rattler. They didn’t move like shrimpers. They moved like rock stars. She shrunk back into the inky shadow of a live oak.

  “Does it matter if they see us?” Joe’s voice was as quiet as the running river water.

  Faye tried to think through her kneejerk reaction to hide. The landowner was within his rights to dig on his own property, or to allow these people to dig there. She and Joe were trespassing, but they weren’t interrupting criminals in the act. Still, the landowner would obviously want to avoid trouble. Also, some of these people would recognize her, and it was no secret that she was an archaeologist. That might not be a good thing among this gathering of pothunters.

  “We don’t want to be recognized.” She thought for a second, then added, “And that means we don’t want to be seen. We do stand out in a crowd, you know.”

  There weren’t all that many women with café-au-lait complexions and short black hair wearing size-four Army pants roaming the Florida Panhandle, but Faye might have had a faint hope of anonymity. Joe, on the other hand, was…distinctive.

  Joe reached up and untied the leather thong holding his ponytail back. Elbow-length hair spread itself over his shoulders.

  Faye shook her head at his idea of a disguise. Joe was still wearing buckskin pants and moccasins, he was still memorably tall and broad, and he still had the face of a romance novel cover model. “Nice try. But it doesn’t help.”

  Wayland and Nita kept coming. They stepped out of the clearing and into the trees, heading for the high and dry homesite as if they’d been there before. When Wayland pointed Nita toward the crumbling garden path, Faye understood that he, at least, knew where he was going.

  “The house site is right over there,” he said.

  “How come Herbie keeps us off this part of his land?” Nita asked.

  When Nita and Wayland took a dozen more steps, they would stumble onto Faye and Joe huddling in the underbrush like two rabbits. They were going to be discovered. There was no help for it. Faye figured they might as well control the situation.

  She made eye contact with Joe and he nodded. They rose together, interrupting Nita saying, “I always wondered about this place. I heard tell—”

  Faye cursed her timing. Whenever a rural person says, “I heard tell—”, anyone interested in the past should shut up and listen. Stories live a long time in oral history. She wondered what Nita had heard told about Bachelder.

  Sticking out her hand, she mumbled something inane like “Nice to see you two out here.”

  Nita and Wayland looked back and forth from Joe’s face to Faye’s. She could tell that they did in fact recognize them. Despite Joe’s excellent disguise.

  Nita looked a
t Wayland. “Do archaeologists spy?”

  “Apparently.”

  So these two scary-looking people knew who she was and what she did, and they were savvy enough to realize that she might pose a threat to their treasure-hunting escapade. Joe, with his uncanny intuitive sense, did just the right thing. He straightened up, displaying his full height and the machete in his hand, and glowered silently down at Wayland.

  “We came out here to look at the old house,” Faye said with an ingratiating smile. “Just like you. Joe cleared the foundation, so we could see. Want a look?”

  Nita cut her eyes in the direction of the piles of brick. She did indeed want a look.

  Wayland turned out to be the kind of person who felt the need to bluster when faced with a larger man. “Wait. Where’d you two come from? You weren’t here on any of the other days. You didn’t drive out with us, and there wasn’t any cars around when we got here. I’m thinking you didn’t pay any two-hundred-and-fifty dollars, either.”

  Two-hundred-and-fifty dollars? Coming out of the pockets of more than a hundred pothunters? Faye did the math, and the number was big. How often did the landowner—had Nita said it was Herbie?—throw these parties? A person could quit working on that kind of tax-free income…for as long as the artifacts lasted.

  Her professional journals were full of articles cataloging the sordid details of these events. As soon as the paying customers went home, treasures would start turning up on EBay. They would start with common and cheap finds, like the stone points that were often offered by the dozen. The artifacts’ significance—and their prices—went up from there. In fact, they went up substantially.

  The most disturbing thing Faye had ever seen being offered on the Internet was a complete set of buttons from a Civil-War-era Confederate uniform, ostensibly found at a battlefield located on private land in Tennessee. Now a man might conceivably lose a button in battle. He might lose two. But if a person considered how likely it was that a complete set would be unearthed, unless the jacket had been buried intact, the commercial offering of those buttons began to take on a new look. And if that person meditated for long on how likely it was that a jacket would be discarded by a soldier whose army was losing and whose government couldn’t provide him with another uniform, then there was only one conclusion to be drawn.