by Gin Phillips
After that second—two seconds, three seconds, four seconds—of stillness, Ren took the first step out of the pit, allowing the others room to move. Ed was already reaching for his camera, and the others cleared out of the space. Ed snapped photos from every angle; then he and Ren stepped back into the pit, reaching for brooms. Ed and Ren worked with quick flicks of their wrists to brush back the dirt from the bowl. They squatted on the balls of their feet, leaning onto their toes, touching the ground as little as possible. They pressed themselves close to the dirt walls, trying to avoid where the body might lie.
It did not take long. Soon the clavicles came into view. But one bone did not mean a body. Once Ren had felt confident she had found a burial at a site in the Mimbres Valley—she’d unearthed a toe bone, then, at the appropriate distance away, two leg bones, parallel. She’d stopped digging, called for photos. But a little more poking and prodding revealed that the tibiae were only two random leg bones, perhaps from some grave disturbed long ago, but lacking all requisite bits of torso and arms and head to create a proper body.
Since then, she liked to uncover the better part of a skeleton before she declared a set of bones to be a burial.
They found the hip bone next, only a few sweeps away, surfacing wide and curved in the dirt under Silas’s broom. As they continued to take away the dirt, they revealed the entire outline of the body, lying on its back with knees drawn to the chest. It was surprisingly small, as bodies always were once they were condensed to a pile of bones.
Only the back of the skull could be seen. The bowl, facedown, shielded the woman’s face. No, Ren reminded herself—they didn’t know it was a woman. She couldn’t be certain of that. But she felt certain. She couldn’t shake the sense that she’d seen this face, seen the slashes of red paint on the cheeks and the proud tilt of the head. As she stared at the unseen face, she heard Silas say that the pelvis seemed to indicate a female. She felt comforted by the clinical, concrete feel of the pronouncement.
“She has a broken wrist,” said Silas, gesturing. “It’s healed crooked.”
Ed pointed to a yellow-white circle of bone lying under the radius and ulna. It was not a bone that belonged with the arm bones. “Bracelet,” he said. “That’s a bone bracelet, not human bone.”
“Yes,” said Silas, appreciatively. “Nice catch. Old Eagle Eye Ripley does it again.”
Ren had cleaned off the bowl, though its edges were still lodged in the soil. It had a long crack down one side, and a piece of the rim had broken off. The kill hole had destroyed a couple of centimeters, but otherwise the vessel was intact.
Ed picked up his camera again. More photos, this time of the exposed skeleton and the uncovered bowl. The sun had inched higher, and the shadows from the walls were infringing, so Ren and Silas held the tarp to even out the lighting.
There was barely room for them to stand without touching the skeleton, but they all climbed into the hole again as Ren knelt. She skimmed her fingers over the bowl, barely touching it.
“Go on,” said Silas.
She fit her fingertips under the edges of the bowl, testing its solidity. She lifted it slightly, then with more confidence when it remained steady in her hands. She raised it into the air but did not look up. Bowls could give a glimpse of life as it had been; they reflected back once living loves and thoughts and hands and feet and faces. The bowl was only a route to the people themselves. So before she glanced at the inside of the bowl, she looked at the woman’s face and acknowledged her, acknowledged that she mattered.
The skull was filled with dirt, eyes and nose and mouth packed solid. The jaw was askew. A few strands of hair remained beneath it, and a few of those strands were braided through with feathers. A dull red, an algae-colored green, a yellow that almost matched the dirt. Tattered feathers with no segments bigger than a fingernail.
As Ren bent closer, the wind swirled into the pit, mingling the feathers with strands of Ren’s hair. She did not move away.
“You want me to take that?” asked Ed, on his knees, reaching down.
She didn’t look up. The wind snatched Ed’s straw hat from his head, tossing it out of the hole and toward a cholla.
“The bowl, Ren?” he said. “Careful.”
Ren looked toward him, then glanced at the bowl she was holding. It had slipped her mind for a moment. Ed had one hand waiting under the bowl, just in case.
The inside of the bowl was a complicated image, small details jumping out from the larger shapes. Black lines zigzagged against a white background. One figure covered most of the bowl. It could have been a man or a woman—there was no hairstyle or clothing to give any clues—but the smooth white oval of a head was dominated by two diamond-shaped eyes. The two shapes were filled with smaller and smaller concentric diamonds, tapering down to a solid black triangle in the center. No nose. A straight line for a mouth. The arms sloped down, and the hands were raised, palms up. The torso and lower half of the body bloomed into a bird’s tail, with a great fan of feathers spreading across half of the bowl. Black feathers and white feathers and feathers with diagonal lines. The same kind of hachure Ren had mentioned from the Crow Creek bowls. They were bold, geometric feathers shaped like the blades of a fan. The design was closer to the half-circle of a peacock’s tail than a parrot’s tail, but the effect of half human, half bird was unmistakable.
Silas studied the bowl over Ren’s shoulder.
“Her hands,” he said, pointing to the design. “Or his hands. They have long fingernails. I’ve never seen that.”
“I think they’re talons,” said Ren. The three men, as if a string were attached to each of their necks, looked down toward the skeleton’s hands.
Ren laughed. “Not so literal. I didn’t mean the person actually had talons. But I think the artist was very clear on the connection to birds.”
Ren finally passed the bowl to Ed. She clambered after it, holding out her hands again. She was not ready to let it go.
“We’ll have to walk up to Braxton’s to call the medical examiner,” Silas said. He hoisted himself from the pit and wiped his dirty palms on his khakis. “I saw his truck at the house this morning.”
“Medical examiner?” Paul asked. He’d been studying the diamond eyes, his own eyes a few inches from the pottery. “For someone who’s been dead for a few hundred years? Or a few thousand?”
“Procedure,” said Ren. “They have to come out to confirm that this isn’t a murder. Or, at least, that even if it was, it was a murder from several centuries ago.”
“How do they do that?” asked Paul.
“They’ll ask Ren or Silas if this is a body from several centuries ago,” said Ed.
“Then what?”
“Then we cover her back up,” Silas snapped. “Let her rest again. Just pretend it’s your great-grandmother we dug up—what would you want us to do?”
“Okay,” said Paul quickly, quietly.
Silas’s mouth was tight. “There’s a difference between a piece of pottery and a person.”
“I know,” said Paul. He looked confused and uncomfortable. “I’m sorry.”
Ren suspected he wasn’t sure what he was apologizing for. She wasn’t quite sure, either. But Silas nodded. He rubbed the bridge of his nose.
“You guys can start on the next room block while I make the call,” he said, the sharpness not quite gone from his voice. “I need a walk anyway. Then we’ll drive the truck up so we can bring the bowl down.”
He turned to Ren. “You still haven’t met Brax. Walk with me.”
She looked from the bowl to him, then back to the bowl.
“If you don’t mind,” he added.
He seemed edgy, and she suspected he wanted to talk through what they’d found. She wasn’t quite ready to leave. She ran her finger tips along the rim of the bowl, reluctant to let go. She took a
last look and offered the bowl to Paul, whose eyes widened as he felt its weight in his hands. Her eyes stayed on it for a long moment after her hands had let go. Finally she broke her gaze and moved toward Silas.
“Don’t drop it,” she said to Paul, partially joking.
He did not smile. Ed suggested he sit down so the bowl wouldn’t have as far to drop.
Silas and Ren headed toward the elk trail and the main road up to Braxton’s.
“You okay?” asked Ren, as a hawk dipped toward them.
“Fine.”
“All right, then.”
Silas did not want to talk. He wanted to watch her walk in front of him—her windbreaker was gone, and if she leaned forward, he could see the concave small of her back—and think of something other than a broken wrist rising out of the ground. It was one thing to sit by the creek at night and listen to a pretty story about friendly ghosts roaming the hills of the canyon. It was another thing to dig up a friendly ghost and see its bones scattered in the dirt. Scattered right where Ren had said to dig.
He hadn’t been lying when he said he believed her about the visions. In his experience, plenty of people had dreams and hunches and maybe helpful hallucinations. She was a creative type. If she liked to reconstruct the past and occasionally got lost in her own imaginings, so be it. It was sort of charming, and it was particularly charming when they were lying in bed out of breath. He had had no issues with ghosts last night. But this morning had left him feeling uneasy.
He didn’t like finding bones.
When he talked to student groups, he always started with the same line, which he thought he might have plagiarized from some long-ago Introduction to Archaeology book: “Archaeology is more than a study of the past—it’s a chance to add a new page or a new chapter to the human story.” That was what he did. He imagined cities from ruins; he imagined lives from corpses. He gave stories to bones.
But staring at the bones themselves, naked, exposed to the air and the sun and clinical study, he did not feel like he was giving anything. He was taking away. Taking away rest and shade and quiet, and throwing a blinding light on it all. The sight of a burial always left him wanting to apologize, to push dirt back over the bones with his bare hands. He hated this, hated it more because of the inevitable thrill: It was an exciting discovery, an entire skeleton, particularly one with an entire bowl. The giddiness never really quit warring with the guilt.
The bones were slightly yellow, smooth as river stones. A bit porous. When he’d pressed his mouth to Ren’s neck the night before, her head thrown back, his beard against her skin, he’d felt her hard clavicle under his cheek.
His mother used to tell him that he managed to see even his strengths as weaknesses. And this was certainly one of his talents: reading the bones themselves. Interpreting power and status and health and age and success and love from the contents of graves. How much time and thought was taken with a body? How much labor was required to dig the grave? What valuables were left behind? Those were clues of status. The teeth could tell you what they ate; the curve of the spine and shoulders gave clues as to what kind of work they had done; multiple bodies gave hints of family ties.
Bodies were often found below living areas, and not even the most precise dating could answer the fundamental question: Were they buried before or after a family stopped sleeping or cooking or working on that same floor? How much crossover was there between the dead and the living? This woman’s body was in someone’s home, in what seemed to be a storage room. Her loved ones had buried her, placed the bowl over her face, and then, above her head, inches away from her, in the adjoining rooms or even in the same room, the family had continued. The graves could have been a sign of ownership, a claim of possession. Our space. Our people.
There were things you could know about the living from how they treated the dead. “Everything has to die sometime,” Bob Gardner had said. A man who stole bowls from corpses, who had his men till up their bones and rip the burial adornments from their faces, to be sold to men in suits and women in heels who would place the sacred things on marble mantels and shelves with flawless recessed lighting.
Silas had seen Bob Gardner bared like the pelt on the wall, and he’d been horrified by the man. And yet he looked at himself and saw a man who could lift a bowl off a dead woman’s face and consider how best to analyze it. For posterity, for knowledge—those were the words they used. He did not think the dead woman would know those words.
He and Ren had descended the elk trail without a single word. The main road opened up in front of them, the creek splashing against the stepping-stones a few feet away. Ren stepped into the middle of the creek, both feet on one flat rock. She turned to face him.
“Yes?” he said. The tips of her boots were getting wet.
She reached her hand toward him, and his hand rose up. She slid her straight splayed fingers into his hand, palms not touching, like they were starting a game of “This is the church, this is the steeple.” Then she pulled. Hard.
He yelped, taking a step at the last minute so he wouldn’t fall into the water. He landed on the edge of her rock, toes on, heels hanging over the water. She scooted backward, offering slightly more rock to stand on.
“You think too much,” she said.
If he stepped off, he wasn’t sure that even his ankles would get wet. But he jostled on the rock with her, both of them off balance, chests pressed together. He snaked an arm around her waist and pulled her hips against his. She kissed him, eyes open, and he thought she would push him into the water, which would be okay, but he was taking her with him.
She did not push. She took her time, sliding her hand down his back, under his khakis. He tilted to one side, one arm windmilling, and she laughed against his cheek.
He had to admit—she’d broken his train of thought.
When they leaped to the other side of the creek, his mind had cleared somewhat. The bones seemed slightly less vivid in his mind. And so what if they had found the apron and the body right where she had suggested? She had seen something on the ground. She had processed something he had not. Or she had gotten lucky. It was impossible to feel anything alarming as he watched her now, flushed and dusty and smiling, her hand brushing against his as they walked.
“That bowl was made for her,” Ren said.
He took a moment to catch up with her thoughts. “Are you that sure?”
“Yes,” she said. “My artist knew the woman buried under that room, and she made that bowl for her specifically.”
“But you still feel sure that the woman we just found isn’t your artist?”
“The bowl looks like it was intended as a burial bowl. The artist could have painted her own burial bowl, I suppose. But there’s nothing in the design to suggest the woman depicted is an artist. Nothing to designate her as a potter. No tools buried in the grave. A family member of the artist’s, though? A friend? Someone loved and respected? That feels right.”
“Mother and daughter?”
“Maybe. I’d lean toward believing that mothers passed along pottery-making to their daughters. And on and on through generations. I don’t see how parrots would fit into that scenario. But it could be the artist’s mother.”
“What about a gift simply as a gesture of respect to someone important?” he asked. “The skirt certainly implies importance. Maybe the artist and this woman weren’t particularly close.”
“Those lightning bolts around the edges of the bowl—we sometimes see those painted on animals the Mimbreños considered dangerous or worthy of respect. So that fits your theory,” she agreed. “But there’ve been exceptions to the trend of one bowl per burial. Jewelry, shells, tools. If this woman was so powerful, so respected, wouldn’t she have had more tributes?”
“Not necessarily. These aren’t a materialistic people.”
“They’ve found up to
seventeen bowls in one grave. Finding multiple grave goods with the burial would lead me to believe this was about honoring accomplishment. But there’s such detail in that bowl. It feels personal to me. I think it speaks to love, not power.”
“Hard to tell the difference sometimes, isn’t it? But okay. We think there’s a connection between the artist and the bird woman. Could be power. Could be love. Could be something else that we haven’t thought of.”
She nodded. “But regardless, they knew each other well enough that the artist would design a bowl for the woman with the parrot feathers.”
“What if the bowls were made here?” he asked. “What if they were transported down to Crow Creek at some point, but the manufacturing site was here? What if the artist started here?”
“The clay from the first set of bowls came from along the Gila,” she said. “It matched beds we found a couple of miles from the Crow Creek site. But that doesn’t mean this bowl wasn’t made here. It would make sense that the artist was trained by someone from the north or had spent time with Northern Pueblo people. This canyon is certainly a logical intersection point. If she lived at Delgado, she could have seen northern-style pottery being made by the next-door neighbors.”
Silas rubbed his chin. “We’ll get the clay tested and see if what we found today came from local banks. For now, let’s say we have an artist who moved from the Cañada Rosa to Crow Creek. Or maybe vice versa.”
“If she learned here, it makes sense she started here,” said Ren. She couldn’t help picturing the ragged-haired girl at Crow Creek, so young and sure. But there was no proof that the girl was her artist. The artist could have grown up playing in this canyon, splashing in this creek.
“We can’t back that up,” said Silas firmly. “It’s still pure conjecture. Logical, but pure conjecture.”
“I thought you were the one who didn’t believe in fact. Who thought there were endless possibilities.”