The Tramp (The Bound Chronicles #1)

by Sarah Wathen

  She shook her head and motioned to her open notebook, “Lecture first.”

  Ms. Collins had her back to the class and was already writing an outline for the day on the whiteboard at the front of the room:

  Mississippian Culture

  1. Mound Builders

  2. Widespread Trade

  3. Maize-based Agriculture

  4. Southeastern Ceremonial Complex (SECC)

  She said she started class promptly and she wasn’t kidding. John could tell that she was irritated having Monday’s homeroom steal at least 20 minutes from her first period class, so she made up for it by extra homework and heightened efficiency during the rest of the week.

  I’m what, one minute past the bell? Even though he should have made time by not picking up Candy that morning, he seemed to have lost time. He glanced sideways at her, a portrait of concentration, under violently windblown hair. Her hair looks better a little wild, actually. More her.

  “Alright, class.” Ms. Collins finished her outline and turned to face the room. “Mr. Robinson, so glad you were able to join us. Our focus for the year is on regional culture—who is able to recall yesterday’s homework assignment? Start us off today. Yes, Miss Douglas.”

  “Well, you asked us to think of what makes our culture our own, like in Shirley?”

  “And have you brought in an example for us?”

  “Yes…” The girl seemed to hesitate, proud of her show-and-tell, yet not sure she was on the right track. She pulled a pair of well-worn, mud-caked, hiking boots out of a paper grocery sack. “I’ve hiked on every trail through Eastern and Western Mountain, and along the highest ridges—as high as you can go, to 6,319 feet up on Aurora’s Dome. Four times.”

  “That’s an impressive feat, Julia.” Ms. Collins congratulated her, with a reproachful look around the room at the origin of groans and snickers. Dried mud flaked from Julia’s boots, sprinkling the floor with Eastern and Western Mountain. “And tell us how your story fits into an examination of our culture.”

  “Well, the mountains close us in, don’t they? It’s a pretty remote place because of that, and I just feel like the mountains have made us what we are in a lot of ways.” Shoving her boots back into her bag and stuffing them under her seat, she collapsed back into her chair. Her part in the morning lecture was finished.

  “What a wonderful beginning to our conversation; thank you for being our first brave contributor, Julia.” Ms. Collins moved amongst their desks, examining faces, wardrobes, postures. “You are quite right about our geological surroundings being an integral force in shaping culture—ours and others. We will revisit this concept again and again this year, class, so remember it well. Let’s have another example.”

  Julia looked around smugly, waiting for someone to best the very mountains themselves.

  “Miss Norman?” Candy’s friend Erica stood, and held aloft one of her father’s mountain dulcimers.

  A girl behind John murmured, “Predictable.” A guy next to her snorted.

  “I guess most of you probably know my dad builds these, but I thought it was the perfect example right in my house, of both regional music and craftsmanship. Definitely a part of our culture, past and present.”

  “Hey, that’s not fair. She took two examples: music and crafts,” a girl that John recognized from the cheerleading squad complained, springing to her feet.

  “We will all have our turn. Sit down, Abigail.”

  “But, my example was music.” The girl sat down and folded her arms across her bright pink polo shirt, her ponytail swinging.

  “I’m sure examples will intertwine and overlap, everyone. That’s the beauty of cultural fabric. A fine example, Miss Norman. Mr. Bartlett?”

  The friendly linebacker stood, nodding hello to John when they met eyes. “My example is sports. Football.”

  Someone reproached him in a lazy drawl from the back of the room, “You can’t be your own visual aid, man.” John turned to see the famed quarterback, Tristan Jameson, lounging back in his chair with a lopsided smile on his handsome face. Ms. Collins quieted giggles from a few female classmates with a look.

  Isn’t this third-level history? I thought that guy’s a senior. John shrugged. Good looks don’t always pair up with good brains.

  “I’m not,” Will argued, his cheeks showing more color than usual. “I brought pictures, too.” He opened his notebook and brought out a thin stack of photographs, positioning himself closer to the front of his aisle for better viewing. “See, my family’s been playing football so long—even before photographs were invented. But I don’t have visual aids for those, of course.” Tristan laughed and several girls followed suit. “See how the uniforms change? Seems like bodies change, too. Everyone looks so skinny in the old ones. Even the rules of the game change, my grandpa told me.”

  “And why would ‘bodies changing’ be of cultural significance, William?” Ms. Collins prodded. The whole classroom leaned in to admire Shirley County’s most glaringly significant cultural phenomenon, football.

  John had to admit the photographs were enthralling; the oldest were faded and torn at the edges, youthful faces like smiling ghosts: the proud heroes of their day, probably dead for more than a generation. And there holding the pictures was the essence of youth, wearing the newest version of the Bobcatt-jersey, just as his father had and his father before him. He nodded at Will with respect. Good one, man.

  “Bodies change, because food changes, I guess,” Will shrugged. “When we got good roads, and the train, more food could come into the valley. Plus, people didn’t have to work so hard on the farms or hunting no more.”

  “It wasn’t just that, though,” Candy’s friend, Louis, spoke up. “In the modern age, there are magazines, TV’s, movies. Now, players want to look like Hollywood football stars. All beefed up.”

  “Thanks.” Will collapsed his photos into one hand and headed back to his seat. “I never thought of myself as a Hollywood star type, but that’ll work for me.”

  Louis scowled at the general amusement. “You know what I mean, cultural ideals shift,” he insisted.

  One by one, students offered their own examples of cultural determinants. John brought a shadowbox that he filched from the restaurant; an old photograph of his grandfather as a child, helping some long-dead relative at a barbeque grill, grouped with a yellowed, handwritten recipe and an obsolete Fourth of July firework that was probably banned by the ETA. “Tradition.”

  The musical cheerleader jumped up and waved her hand in the air when he said that word and proceeded to sing from her church choir’s program. Afterward, she explained it was traditional Sacred Harp music, a cappella.

  Candy showed some handmade paper greeting cards and talked about the Fine Craft movement in the Appalachian Mountains. When Ms. Collins recognized one of the painted designs as derived from a Native American motif, she transitioned into the lecture and instructed the class to begin taking notes. Sighs of relief sounded around the room, from students who hadn’t participated in the show-and-tell, until Ms. Collins told them she’d expect a one-page, written explanation on her desk by the end of the day.

  Candy leaned over and whispered to John, “We’ll be tested on the lecture stuff.”

  He held his pen poised over his loose-leaf paper, and made a studious face. “Ready.”

  “Our current culture is not only knitted together by the food we eat, the language we speak, the art we produce, and the land on which we live and work today, but by the myriad of peoples who have travelled here, migrated here, and those who once lived here. Many ages past. Remnants from our cultural past, in all its stages and transformations, survive today. They are not simply in history books or in museums, but also in our newest art like Miss Vale’s example, in our favorite foods or past times, in our ideas about ourselves, and in our very genes. So, this is where we will begin our formal invest
igation into our culture, class; in the furthest reaches to our past, with the first peoples whom we know inhabited our land.”

  She moved to the whiteboard, extended her metal pointer, and tapped under the title of her outline.

  “The Mississippian Culture, lasting from about 800 to 1500 CE, was the most complex, far reaching, and most culturally homogenized ancient society that we recognize from this region. Many modern Native American tribes you should be familiar with arose from this culture: Sendalee, Cherokee, Seminole, Masapiti, and Timohukhs, among others. We’ll go over them in detail later. Important to note, however…David, please turn off the front lights.”

  The lights flickered off and the whiteboard dimmed. Ms. Collins let down the window blinds and headed to the back of the room. “You’ll have more time to copy my outline later, if you haven’t already finished. It’s important that you listen, as well as copy.”

  The hum of a projector motor whirred behind them and the screen showed a green expanse of grassy fields, and a large earthen mound in the center, surrounded by sparse trees.

  “Note that archeological records point to a much earlier civilization, of whom we know very little, except that they were capable of organizing to build massive earthworks. You are seeing one here that was built nearly a thousand years before the pyramids were constructed in Egypt.”

  She advanced the slides to an illustrated collection of several mounds, which together formed an elliptical pattern.

  “This is a map of the oldest one we know of, Watson Brake in Louisiana, circa 3400 BCE.”

  She slowly clicked through several slides of different aged, grassy, flat-topped pyramids, cones or elongated ridges. Many were bird’s-eye view, to capture the vastness of their total area.

  “These are here, in the United States?” a girl from the middle of the room asked dubiously. “How come I’ve never seen one?”

  “I’ve never seen one, either,” Candy whispered and pinched John’s arm. He shook his head in agreement; he had never even heard of them. “Sort of creepy, all lurking in the hinterlands, almost invisible.”

  John nodded. Yes, it is.

  “This one is called Monks Mound, near Collinsville, Illinois.” The projector showed a double-tiered, flat-topped pyramid, covered in green grass, with a stone stairway climbing to its summit.

  “At over one hundred feet tall, this is the largest Pre-Colombian earthwork in America, north of Mesoamerica.”

  “What were they for?”

  “We can’t be sure since these are Pre-Historic sites. Remember, there is no written record. Some evidence suggests they were part of complex villages. Yet some were known to be built by hunter-gatherer cultures, who would have only visited them seasonally. They speak to a cross-cultural belief in cosmology. The Mississippian Culture that came later recognized a religious triad: a spiritual underworld, a celestial realm above, and our middle-earth between.”

  “So, the mounds are like a bubbling up of the Underworld?” Abby Miller’s sweet singing voice trembled.

  “No, they built them, she said,” Louis supplied, pretending to comfort her, but then added, “They might have buried dead people in them, though.”

  Abby gasped and Louis chuckled.

  Ms. Collins clicked to an undulating earthen serpent. “Some were effigy mounds of culturally significant animals. This is Serpent Mound, in Southern Ohio. It’s over thirteen-hundred feet in length.”

  The eerie glow of the gigantic snake, a skulking predator carpeted in weeds, was mesmerizing. When the automatic cooling fan on the projector made a loud noise, several students jumped.

  “This old machine won’t last much longer, but just a few more images here…” and they were greeted with watercolor renditions of bustling ancient cities. They were full of mounds, with working smokestacks in between and people carrying goods or conversing along neatly delineated streets. “Some of the first Europeans to encounter indigenous communities here in the 1500s recorded what they saw. So, here you see the building of mounds still in practice, some five thousand years later. During the United States’ westward expansion, the mounds had faded into pre-history and the Native Americans encountered didn’t know about the earlier civilizations that produced them.”

  The next slide showed a modern collection of buildings decorating a steep hillside—

  Will Bartlett was the first to ask, “Is that what I think it is?”

  It took a few moments for John to recognize what he was looking at. Candy and elbowed him, “Oh my gosh.”

  Louis supplied the obvious, “That’s Buffalo Square.”

  “Well, you didn’t think such a landmass was natural, did you? A hill that large and steep jutting into the river, in the midst of a flat valley,” Ms. Collins said simply, enjoying the reaction.

  “There aren’t dead Indians buried there, are there?” Abby wanted to know.

  So did John, come to that.

  Ms. Collins gazed at the image of Buffalo Square for a moment before answering, “The mound has never been completely excavated.” The classroom had fallen silent and she let that thought sink in.

  “David—if you please, the lights?” Ms. Collins pushed the projector back into a corner and cranked open the blinds, continuing her lecture in her more habitual, brusque manner. “The mound-builders were earlier, as I said. The Mississippian Culture that probably derived from them is more clearly understood and better recorded. So, that will be our primary focus this week.”

  She reached up and selected a pull-ring from a dozen or so spring-loaded, rolled display charts, and stretched out a map of the United States. “Similar artifacts, including highly stylized clay pots and carved medallions made by the same artist, have been found throughout what is now,” she used her metal pointer to tap regions on the map, “the Midwestern, Eastern, and Southern United States…”

  Her voice faded out, John’s mind swimming with implications. Did Grandpa Joe know his property sat on an ancient mound? Ms. Collins said it hadn’t been “completely” excavated. Had it been partially excavated, then? John looked around at his classmates; everyone else seemed to be recovering from the shock of such new, important information much better than John was. He felt Candy watching him and when he turned to her, she offered a sympathetic smile.

  “Creepy, huh?”

  He nodded. It was a lot more than creepy, though. Maybe it was different for John, since his family owned a large part of that mound. How could he not have known anything about it?

  Does Grandpa Joe have more secrets than I thought? Grandma Pearl, too?

  Ms. Collins crossed to her desk and picked up her copy of their assigned textbook. She began thumbing through pages marked with florescent tabs. “Turn in your text to page…154.”

  John lingered before reaching for his bag. Yes, they must know about it.

  Most of the class had not yet unearthed the heavy books, so there was a general clatter of scraping chair legs and rummaging in backpacks. Ms. Collins waited and watched, while books were thumped on desks and pages were flipped through. One by one, students opened to pictures of intricately carved stone sculptures and finely painted shell gorgets.

  “What do you see? Look at the craftsmanship, notice how skilled the artists were.” Ms. Collins nodded at begrudging murmurs of assent from her students. “Now, turn to page 158.”

  John flipped through the next few pages, mildly interested, but he froze in consternation when his eyes focused on the next illustrations, in a table explaining the meaning behind a list of artistic motifs. His eyes went immediately to the “tri-lobed” symbol, which looked like three circles joined, melded into one at the center. He had seen it scratched all over his grandfather’s drawings, running through some of the animal faces like tattoos. John figured they were just random doodles at the time, but he had wondered about a decorative motif within such otherwise hideous drawings. Now that
he saw the design in another context, he was chilled to the bone. The description read, “The Tri-lobed Motif functioned as a serpent marking and may have symbolized a supernatural ability to travel from the Underworld to the Celestial World.”

  John ran his finger down the list and found another familiar symbol. The Swastika. Also prominently featured in Grandpa Joe’s nightmares. John had tried to ignore the Swastika when he saw it in the drawings, feeling ashamed that his grandfather used the Nazi symbol. But, next to a depiction of the Swastika, the caption in his book read, “Symbolizes the creative, generative power of the Underworld.”

  Where would Grandpa Joe have even seen this stuff? And why would he be drawing it? John recalled the grisly, screaming masks, the primitive, sharp claws and teeth, and the savage tears through the paper. He felt his head start to swim and his blood go cold. He does know about the mound. He has to.

  He flipped to the next page in the text, and was confronted with a cave drawing of a winged beast. It had the horns of a stag, the face of a mountain lion, and a writhing serpent for a tail. In a flash, the same creature that John had seen in his own dream came back to him—but in fleshy, snarling realism.

  The room seemed to tilt.

  John muttered a quick, “Excuse me,” his hand over his mouth. He moved slowly and calmly towards the exit, though calm was no emotion he could hold onto.

  The closest men’s room was blessedly empty. He gripped both sides of the porcelain sink and stared into the basin, willing the nausea to ebb. When his hands steadied, he turned on the faucet and splashed his face with cold water. He let the water trickle off his chin and watched it swirl down the drain, trying to regain his grip on reality. The forgotten creature—from the dream he had shared with Candy, the night he arrived in Shirley—was bright in his mind. The campfire ghost story. He didn’t embellish the ghost story with the winged monster that pounced on him right before he woke up—trying to tear out his throat—because he hadn’t remembered it before.

  How did I forget that part? I must have fallen back to sleep and...