Hall of Small Mammals

by Thomas Pierce

  Before his journey south, Anders professed to share this belief. He was an ambitious and adventurous man. In the years before he received his formal medical training, he had worked as a ship’s surgeon aboard a vessel called the Holy Wonder. During one of its southern voyages, the Holy Wonder had been inundated by a powerful storm, and Anders had slipped on deck and broken his leg. Despite a months-long convalescence in a Buenos Aires hotel, the injury had not properly healed and was, all these years later, still easily inflamed. It was for this reason that his ride to Golly on the bumping and bouncing mule cart was such an unfortunate development. When he finally reached the town late that night, he could hardly walk at all. Two men had to carry him into the boardinghouse, where a special room was prepared for him on the first floor so that he could avoid the unnecessary punishment of the stairs.

  Anders’s recovery required two full days of bed rest, and it was during this time that a delegation working for Dabney Dubose slipped into town and purchased the bones for the showman’s infamous traveling museum.

  This was not the first time that our efforts had been thwarted by someone as nefarious as Dabney Dubose. All varieties of huckster, scoundrel, thief, and hype-man had been busy snatching up every new fossil find. Some of the bones were shipped to Europe for exhibits in London and Paris. Others were fashioned into parlor furniture and sold for small fortunes.

  Mr. Dubose called his personal bone collection Monsters from a Darker Age, and it constituted one of the chief attractions in the Dubose Brothers Traveling Museum, a caravan of oddities and curiosities that rattled from town to town on creaking wooden wheels, charging poor dupes at every stop for the chance to see its Gander of Six-Headed Geese, Rumpkin the All-Seeing Seer, the Infinity Box, the World’s Smallest Preacher, etc., etc., etc. To claim his newest acquisition, his entire caravan now turned south for the town of Golly.

  Workers had discovered the bones by accident while blasting for a new well on a farm on the western edge of town. For their protection, the bones had then been transported to a nearby barn and nested in bales of hay. Dr. Anders, unaware that he’d already failed in his mission, visited the farm on his third morning in Golly to make the acquaintance of the property owner, a knobby man with two buttons missing from his work shirt.

  “You’ve come too late,” the man said.

  Anders was shocked. That the sale had occurred only the previous afternoon, as he lay in bed recuperating, only worsened the blow. He had traveled so far and, it seemed now, for nothing. If he returned home empty-handed, what would we say? What would we think of him?

  “Can I at least see them?” Anders asked. “Would you mind if I catalogued and sketched them?”

  The farmer scratched at his bristled chin with a jagged dirty fingernail, perhaps looking for a reason to say no. They were standing in front of the man’s miserable one-room house. A strange animal skull hung on a nail above the open door. “You want to draw them, is all?”

  “If you don’t mind, yes. I’ll stay out of your way. I assure you.”

  The man shifted from right foot to left. “All right, then,” he said at last. “But if you try and run off with—”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it,” Anders said.

  He followed the farmer across a long frosted field that stretched behind the house. His leg still aching—a sharp stabbing pain that radiated from hip to toes—Anders hobbled along on an ivory-handled walking stick obtained for him the previous evening by the town doctor. The cane left a trail of small divots in the hard soil. When they reached the barn, the farmer threw open its tremendous doors, and dusty sunlight spilled across the compacted straw floor. Both men’s shadows stretched long and distinct ahead of them. Anders coughed, a handkerchief over his nose and mouth. The farmer motioned at the hay bales and said that so long as the bones didn’t leave the barn, there wouldn’t be any trouble. He gave Anders a final appraising look before spitting in the straw and leaving.

  From his bag Anders removed his pen, ink, journals, caliper, and measuring rods. He was thrilled to find, among the bones across the bales, dorsal and caudal vertebrae, a partial pubis, distal ends of the right radius, the left femur, and the proximal end of the left tibia, ribs, and, best of all, the entire lower jaw. The farmer and his friends had done an adequate job of chiseling away the rock, though some pieces were still embedded. This was no mammoth or mastodon, of that Anders was quite certain. (Our museum already had in its possession a nearly intact mammoth skeleton.) It was not an ancient horse or deer or sloth or cat either. It was much larger, and very likely reptilian. He catalogued the bones in his journal. A truly remarkable find. That it now belonged to Dabney Dubose, of course, was a travesty.

  By no means was Anders an accomplished illustrator, but with help from the Academy he had improved upon his shading, crosshatching, and stippling techniques. He endeavored to make his drawings as scientifically accurate as possible. One day, he hoped to include the figures with the papers he aimed to publish.

  Anders was engrossed in his drawing of the jawbone when he heard the squeak of wood overhead. He glanced up and saw that a wild-looking creature with long twisted hair and ruddy cheeks had climbed into the rafters. The creature—a boy, Anders decided—stared down with deep brown eyes, his toes hugging the splintery edges of the beam upon which he crouched.

  Anders returned to his drawing and said, “You’re welcome to join me. No need to hide.”

  The boy didn’t say anything.

  “My name is Dr. Anders,” he added.

  The boy thudded down into the straw, kicking up more dust. Anders stood to greet him with an outstretched hand. The child shook it uncertainly. His shirt was soiled with dirt and sweat and probably a thousand messy meals.

  “You can sit with me if you’d like,” Anders said, making room. “I don’t mind.”

  The child, noiselessly, fell into a cross-legged jumble at the scientist’s feet. He watched Anders’s pen dance across the page, as if the transference of the ink was a minor miracle.

  “How does it look?” he asked, and the child shrugged.

  “Your name?” Anders asked.

  “Temp.”

  “Temp,” Anders repeated. “Short for what? Temperance? Or temperature? Or temporary?”

  “Tempest.” The child’s eyes darted from bone to bone. “I’m told it was my mother’s family name.”

  As Anders drew, he told Temp of his own childhood, about his mother’s death in a fire, about his minister father, about their lonely years with a congregation in a town much like Golly, about his early fascination with the Creation story and, in particular, with a tantalizing verse in the Book of Job that described a behemoth with a tail like a cedar and bones like bars of iron.

  Temp gazed at the jawbone, fascinated. “So it’s a monster from the Bible?”

  “Well,” Anders said, “that depends on what you mean by monster. Certainly it was of a monstrous size. By my calculations, this creature stood at least ten feet tall. I believe it was bipedal. In other words, it walked like you and me. Upright. On two feet.” He stood to demonstrate, shifting his weight to his good leg. He snarled at the boy playfully and smiled. “But I don’t care for that word, monster. Calling it a monster implies that it was a wholly unnatural creature. In its time, this was no more a monster than any other animal that currently walks the earth. Including you and me, by the way.”

  “But,” the boy said, somewhat alarmed, “how’d it get here? On my daddy’s farm?”

  “Same way as you and me. The evidence suggests there were multiple Creations before our own. You’ve heard of Noah’s Ark? The Flood? Well, before the Flood, there was a different set of creatures here on earth. And before them, there was an altogether different set of creatures that were wiped out by a different and earlier Flood. Each catastrophe makes way for the next Creation, you see, and each Creation is a little better than the last. We’re the lates
t. And hopefully the last.”

  The child ran his hand along the jaw, hard and gray as stone, bits of rock still clinging to it, and asked what the creature would have eaten and what it might have looked like with the skin attached, and Anders—though aware that to make such physiological inferences was well beyond his expertise—guessed that it ate both plants and animals and that it might have had the smooth, scaly skin of a snake. “Yes,” he said, “I’m very sure that it did. It stood upright like us, ate plants and animals like us, and when it craned its long neck skyward it saw the same yellow sun as us.”

  The child looked up into the rafters.

  “Ink, please,” Anders said, and Temp scurried toward the satchel, already proving himself a useful assistant.

  • • •

  The morning that Mr. Dubose arrived in town to collect his prize, Anders was out on one of his early peregrinations. His walks were imperative. In addition to his leg injury, Anders suffered from poor circulation and a weak heart, and a strict routine of exercise was of vital importance. After his walk, he took a bath—always cold with two tablespoons of castor oil over his head. His delicate system demanded that he ingest only a simple breakfast of water and plain whole wheat bread. Butter was a gross injustice to the constitution.

  Mrs. Lang, the owner of the boardinghouse, didn’t care for his diet. “But wouldn’t you like some fruit, Doctor? I have all these lovely apples. It’s such a waste,” she said, eyeing his crusty bread. She was a beautiful if odd red-haired woman who insisted Anders take all his meals with her in the dining room.

  “I’m afraid the fruit would upset my system,” he explained. “But thank you.”

  She couldn’t understand why he’d only munch on hard bread when her cook had prepared them such an elaborate breakfast. She ate the apple with a fork and knife and dabbed the corners of her thin lips with a fresh white linen napkin. Mrs. Lang had traveled to London and Paris as a small girl, and Anders gathered that her childhood had been full of such luxuries—trips abroad, new dresses for every season, tutors. It seemed her father had played a minor role in brokering the Louisiana Purchase, a fact that somehow found its way into more than one conversation. (Mr. Jefferson, it should be noted, was an early member and supporter of our Academy. During Jefferson’s administration, one room at the White House was dedicated entirely to the fossils collected by Mr. Clark on his famous western expedition!) But since those days, Mrs. Lang’s family had come down in the world. Their fortune had been lost in poor investments, though she was hazy on the particulars. Her parents had all but arranged her marriage to a businessman with roots in Golly, but now, fifteen years later, both her parents and her husband were dead, and Mrs. Lang lived alone, childless and perhaps a bit lonely. She took in the occasional lodger, she said, for the company and not for the income.

  “Forgive me,” she said, “we never even blessed the food.”

  “I don’t mind, really,” Dr. Anders admitted, but she grabbed his hands anyway and bowed her head, waiting for him to speak. After a considerable pause, he muttered a succinct but sufficient blessing. She released his hands slowly.

  “Oh, thank you,” she said. “Will you be visiting that barn again today? I suspect so, but I’d hate for you to leave town without seeing what else Golly has to offer besides a dirty old barn. Have you seen the waterfall down at the end of Dempsey Road? It’s a very nice place to take a lunch.”

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  “But you want to look at those bones.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “What’s so interesting about those bones? They probably just came from a big old buffalo. They used to roam all the way to the Atlantic, isn’t that so?”

  Anders smiled. “Perhaps, but these are not buffalo bones. They belonged to a much more fascinating creature than that. If you study the Old Testament in the original Hebrew, you will find many clues that the world is very old and very vast. In the beginning, it was filled with gigantic animals that would have towered over us. These bones are the proof of that.”

  “Interesting,” she said. “You know, my father used to tell me stories about the Cyclops. Do you know about the Cyclops? Well, my father would make up his own silly stories and tell them to me before bed. He told me that the Cyclops’s name was Figaro, and that he was very lonely giant. Poor Figaro wanted a mate, but there were no female Cyclopes on his island. There were only the normal, two-eyed variety, and these women wanted nothing to do with Figaro. They thought he was so hideous. And big. And malodorous.

  “One day Figaro got a grand idea. He picked the most beautiful woman on the island and used a slingshot to knock out one of her eyes. It was very gruesome, and she was utterly depressed, as you can imagine. She had to wear a patch over the hole. People no longer called her beautiful, but it was all she’d ever known how to be. She threatened to throw herself off a cliff. But then Figaro showed up with his one giant eye. He called her beautiful. He said he loved her one blue eye. She saw no other options but to run away with him. So they married and moved into his cave. She was embarrassed about all of it. She imagined her old friends laughing at her misfortune. That night Figaro lifted her into his big bed. He had to be careful he didn’t crush her, but—” Mrs. Lang blushed a little, but pushed ahead with the tale. “Well, let’s just say, after that night, she no longer cared what anyone thought about them.”

  “It’s been a while since I read my Homer, but I don’t believe I’m familiar with this particular myth,” Dr. Anders said. “And your father told this to you as a little girl?”

  “Something like it. So is it a Cyclops in the barn?”

  Anders assured her it was not.

  “Shame,” she said, and blinked across the table. “By the way, I meant to tell you, your little assistant is downstairs waiting to speak with you.”

  “Temp is here? In the house?”

  She nodded with a quick stab of her chin.

  “For how long?” he asked, irritated she hadn’t mentioned it sooner. He had instructed Temp to come and retrieve him upon the arrival of Mr. Dubose.

  Temp had been downstairs, she said, ever since Anders had returned from his morning stroll. He excused himself and dropped his napkin on his chair. The child was waiting for him in a plush red chair at the base of the stairs, hands folded in his lap. He sat there frozen like a museum exhibit, perhaps overwhelmed by Mrs. Lang’s home, its fine white curtains and vases with fresh-cut flowers and crystal figurines and oil paintings in gilded frames. Seeing Anders on the stairs, he stood like a soldier at attention.

  Dabney Dubose had arrived, Temp reported in a rush, and now something strange was under way in the barn.

  • • •

  “I could use someone like you,” Dabney Dubose said to Anders outside the barn. He was a dough-faced man with icy blue eyes, his dark hair receding but wild and curly where it did grow in tufts. He seemed amused by Anders. By everything. “I’m told you’ve been examining the bones over the last few days? I’m curious to hear your thoughts on them. Until now what we’ve seen has been so . . . preliminary. Bits of this, bits of that. I never knew what to make of it. I couldn’t see it. And as a man who prides himself as a visionary, that’s quite an admission. But what we have here, well, now. It really is spectacular. I can almost imagine it.”

  Frustrated, Anders scratched his cane in the dirt. His leg throbbed. In the distance stretched long fallow fields, gloomy and brown. It felt like it might snow. The barn doors were shut, but a commotion of hammering and sawing and the clink-clink-clinking of a chisel escaped between the gnarled slats.

  “Let me buy the bones from you,” Anders said. “Please. For our museum.”

  “I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” Dubose said. “Not even for a good price.” The bones, he explained, were going to become his main attraction. Using wood, papier-mâché, plaster, and anything else necessary, he would present the w
orld with the first fully reconstituted Monster from a Darker Age, a three-dimensional model constructed from the bones themselves. Never before had anyone seen something of its kind. For a few coins, you would be able to view the creature up close, stand in its towering presence, rub its hairy hide.

  “I don’t think it had a hairy hide,” Anders said. “I believe that it belonged to a Tribe of Ancient Lizard.”

  “And that’s precisely why I need your help. You can be my scientific advisor. Help me make the creature as real and accurate as possible. Accuracy is crucial. I’ll give you full oversight of my crew.”

  Anders was aware of course that a compact with such a man was not a wise decision, that Dubose’s intentions were very likely anathema to science. Science eats the dark. Fear not that which is illuminated. Science names the nameless—megalonyx, mammoth, mastodon, megathere. Fear not that which has a name. Science excavates; it makes the unfamiliar familiar. Science knows all; it demystifies. Dubose was an author of mystery in the world, not its unraveler.

  “Think of it this way,” Dubose said. “This is your chance to educate the public. To open minds. Most people won’t believe in something unless it’s right in front of them. You’ve got to wow them. Shake them up.”

  “Yes, but,” Anders said. “But you have a responsibility to—”

  “Of course, a responsibility,” the man said solemnly.

  Anders, we are sad to report, proved himself susceptible to the showman’s false promises and logic. This will come as no surprise to anyone who has examined Anders’s notebooks from this period (now in our archives). The pages are marred with all sorts of revealing marginalia; with fanciful sketches of creatures inspired by the bones he’d long admired in the cabinets and display cases of our Academy’s museum; with his wild questions too: Had the creatures leathery skin? Could they have been pink and soft like us? With long tangled hair or short fine fur? How about feathers? Did their eyes bulge like a fish’s? Did their claws rip and grip like a bird’s? How big or lean were their muscles?