Them Bones

by Howard Waldrop

  When I turned back, the men were gone. One of the nearby bushes still swayed a little where they had brushed it on their way past.

  ‘Hey, wait!’ I yelled.

  My hand started to shake. I had been holding it up in the air the whole time.

  *

  I followed their tracks. They joined others on a footpath. I rode slowly. I don’t think I really wanted to catch up with them. It was late afternoon. I neared the Mississippi.

  I saw the village long before I got near it. The trees thinned out. Then there was a cleared area, which had been slashed-and-burned, half a kilometer across. Beyond that were the fields, stretching a kilometer in three directions. Their village lay beyond the fields.

  It was palisaded, surrounded by an earthen embankment higher than the surrounding fields. The Mississippi River lay back of it. I could see two high places within the town walls – one had a building atop it, and there were statues of some kind on the roof. I counted housetops, rounded, mud-covered things. There were at least fifty inside the part of the walls I could see.

  At the near edge of the fields were two huge mounds of dirt. Ten meters high, twenty in diameter. They were scraped bare and had nothing growing on them.

  The fields were full of various kinds of beans, squash, pumpkins, and gourds. It was late in the season. Tendrils of climbing beans hung in the air on sunbleached cane poles. Row on row of short cornstalks with small ears on them grew as far as I could see to the right. Their leaves were beginning to curl and turn yellow. It must be September here.

  There should have been people in sight, but there was no one. I thought maybe they had all run away. Then I saw that the walls, which must have ramparts inside, bristled with spears. At the log notches, more than two hundred people watched me, unmoving.

  Then I saw the fields weren’t entirely deserted. Someone sat on a stump, working at something in his hand. Whittling, maybe. The stump was next to the path through the fields, surrounded by pepper plants.

  I rode within thirty meters of him, then dismounted and tied the horse to another stump. I eased the safety off the carbine and kept an eye on the village. They just stared back, unmoving.

  I walked toward the man, held up my hand. Wind rustled through the corn. He stopped what he was doing. He had some kind of stone in his hand and was carving on it with a piece of metal.

  He was unarmed. He had on a red-and-white-striped loincloth and wore a pair of moccasins. His hair was black, pulled back in two braids, and had a single feather in it. He had one small pearl in his left ear. He was much more confidence-inspiring than the three who had surprised me at the spring.

  I stopped. He regarded me calmly. His skin was an even copper color, like an old penny. He had no tattoos.

  His eyes went to the horse tethered far away. Then he studied me, my carbine, my clothes.

  My arm was still up in greeting.

  ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Amigo. Friend.’

  ‘Hello,’ he said, in Greek.

  THE BOX I

  DA Form 11432Z 01 Oct 2002

  Comp 147TOE 148

  Pres for duty

  146

  Missing, line of duty

  1For: S. Spaulding

  Col, Inf.

  Total: 147

  Commanding Barnes, Bonnie

  Cpt ADC

  Adjutant

  Smith’s Diary

  *

  Oct 4

  It took two and a half days for us all to come through, though we started at thirty-second intervals. I came through in the middle of the first night.

  Forty-five minutes later Sgt. Croft came out of the portal behind me.

  And so on through the night, the next day and night, and early into the second morning.

  One hundred and forty-six of us.

  There is still no sign of Leake, or of what happened to him. Dr. Heidegger thought the jump-reading on the instruments just before Leake went through may have something to do with it. The point man could be back where we started from, a few days before or after where we started from, Up There.

  If he is, he knows where he is better than we do. Or when, for that matter. Colonel Spaulding sent scouts out on two-hour rides in every direction. All they found were trails, but nothing else manmade, so far. No smoke, no footprints, no boats, no houses, no aircraft.

  We have set up camp on the bluff overlooking the bayou. It’s the highest point for kilometers around. Spaulding had us dig in the usual star pattern defenses, but hasn’t let us set up anything permanent yet.

  Everybody’s getting this wild look in their eyes, if they didn’t already have it before we left Up There. This is it, whenever and wherever it is. We’re stuck here, unless life somehow goes on Up There, and they find some way to come get us. We knew that when we came through, but we also thought we’d be somewhere in the neighborhood of eighty years from the time we started.

  Spaulding is taking it right, acting like this is just another exercise, some problem the War College has set for him. What did we expect from a thirty-year man? Come to think of it, what’s a ’copter pilot like me doing here, anyway? As acting assistant adjutant, no less.

  It’s better than being back Up There, dying with the rest of them.

  Acting assistant adjutant, I can see giving the CIA spooks orders some day when everybody else is out of the camp. They all have shifty eyes and look like insurance agents on an overnight campout. Jeez.

  There are more lightning bugs and bigger mosquitoes here than I ever imagined could live in Louisiana.

  And so, as Pepys used to say, to bed.

  Bessie II

  They looked like a bunch of ants. They were doing several things at once with a minimum of frenzy. Picks and shovels rose, fell, ladled. Two workers were tossing dirt in the air over a fine wire mesh screen. Only Kincaid’s shoes and elbows showed out of the test trench.

  Bessie coated the second horse’s skull with shellac. It had no bullet holes in it. There was such a tangle of bones in the mound that it was impossible to leave the topmost in situ and still find out anything. Bones of horses, all in a twisted pile, five, six, maybe more complete skeletons.

  Bessie looked up at the large double mound with it rows of stakes. A small shiver went through her. She rubbed her arms. The air was hot and blue, with no seeming promise of rain.

  The Suckatoncha Bayou was gray and flat through the brush. In the great flood of two years ago, thirty people had been drowned by its waters. Livestock, bloated and ruptured, had floated in it for weeks. Whole houses had been found fifty miles from their pilings. Water had come halfway up the bluff.

  Under Huey ‘Kingfish’ Long, the state had set up the Suckatoncha Bayou Relief Project, a series of dams to hold back future floods. The first of the dams was ten miles away, and the land around the bayou was to be slowly covered during the next two years. The state Salvage Survey had mapped those archeological sites which would be flooded (and found a few new ones in the process). Now Bessie, Kincaid and five other teams were digging along the edges of the Bayou, trying to learn what they could before the waters covered them forever.

  The Salvage Project had started with the understanding that there were three months left before the first of the mounds would be covered. That had been before spring rains caused the state water people to shut the dams ahead of schedule. The spillways ten miles up weren’t completed yet, so they had shut some farther downstream, starting the waters creeping upward.

  Time and rain were the enemies now. If rainy weather set in, the waters would rise at a tremendous rate in a few days. They would also stop or slow down work on all the digs at the same time. All the salvage crews’ time would be spent trying to keep the opened mounds and village sites dry and intact.

  There was a chance of rain that afternoon, the usual southern evening thunderstorms. The air was humid and thick though as yet there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

  Early morning had been no less busy. Kincaid had driven to Suckatoncha, used the
town marshal’s telephone, and called the University. He’d talked to the Project Director and laid it on the line. He wanted to pull in two other teams, plus the office staff, photographers, artists, and curators, to the site.

  That had been on the basis of the first equine skull.

  While he was in town, Bessie had taken the second out of the test trench. Now Kincaid was back, submerged in the dig.

  William brought her a few potsherds with Kincaid’s ink-scribbled location numerals on them. She recognized them immediately; Coles Creek red, white, and black rims. That would normally mean somewhere between 700 and 1500 a.d. No surprise there, except the upper date. That might explain the horses – not really, though. The first hadn’t been on the continent until the second or third decade, none known in this area until de Soto’s march north of here in 1540.

  It was possible this segment of the Coles Creek culture could have lasted a few more decades, maybe until the middle of the century, still been viable when the Spanish came through.

  What about the cartridge, though?

  That was no Spanish musket ball, no arquebus load. Most of the conquistadors depended on crossbows for their main armaments until the mid–1500s anyway. Usually they only had ten or twelve firearms, plus a few small cannon, for each hundred soldiers. This was a modern brass cartridge.

  There must be a modern intrusion. The soil was layered and undisturbed on each side of the test cut. They had cut a second trench in from the other end. It would meet the first trench slightly off center of the mound.

  So far the soil there too was undisturbed, evenly layered, as Kincaid had said in his last note brought in with the shards.

  Bessie left the sorting tent and went down the bluff to the dig. She stepped into the trench behind Kincaid. All she could see of him was his back.

  ‘How are the potsherds?’ she asked.

  ‘If this is a hoax,’ he said, dusting away with a small paint brush, ‘it’s a good one. Come down here.’

  Bessie wedged herself down in the trench beside him. The smell of drying earth filled her nose, surrounded her, got in her clothes. She let her eyes go up from the floor of the trench, paved with horse bones, to where Kincaid pointed.

  Embedded in the dirt, above the bones and skulls, were grave goods – weapons, pots, black mold where the wooden handles of axes had been. Each was broken, in one place on the projectile points, with a single hole through the clay pots, making them useless in everyday life.

  But not the life beyond. The people who had made these mounds had broken the objects they placed in the graves with their dead, killing them as dead as the persons or animals buried there.

  Bessie stood up. She brushed her hands on her jodhpurs, straightened a marker stick on the trench lip. Kincaid stood up too.

  ‘William! Washington?’

  The two men put down their work and came over.

  ‘Yassuh?’

  ‘Put the number-two tarp over this mound, will you. Put spike markers in all the stick holes, but leave it just like it is. Maybe a support in the center of the trench. Stop the digging here. I want it just like this when the Director gets here.’

  ‘Can do,’ said William. ‘What about the other test trench?’

  ‘More horses?’

  ‘Two or three, maybe more.’

  ‘Grave goods?’

  ‘Yessir.’

  ‘What I expected. I knew you would have called if you found anything else unusual. We’ll finish this one as soon as the others get here.’

  ‘Once I got used to finding them horses, I was okay,’ said William. He wiped his hand across the stocking he wore over his hair while digging.

  ‘This is going to turn into the major dig. How are we for food?’

  ‘Fine for us. How many people coming?’

  ‘The other crews will have their own supplies. The office staff will come. I think they’ll bring the big tent.’

  ‘We can stretch it, I guess,’ said William. ‘We have to reprovision the end of next week anyway. Might have to move it up a few days.’

  ‘Well, let me know when the mound is secure. We can figure out what to do from there.’

  Bessie walked beside Kincaid up the bluff to the sorting tent and sat down at the table. The first horse skull with the bullet hole in it stared at them like a three-eyed monster.

  ‘It’s not like you not to talk,’ said Kincaid, taking off his hat and lighting his pipe.

  ‘Well, this is where our reputations go on the line, isn’t it?’ she asked. ‘I mean, there could be some explanation that makes some sense.’

  ‘I can see it now,’ said Kincaid, smiling. ‘Someone dug a hole, filled it with dead horses, shot them with a new rifle, put the cartridges in the pit, filled it up to the level of the horses, put in Coles Creek grave goods, finished off the mound and planted a tree on top of it.

  ‘And they did all this at least sixty years ago, when the first metal cartridges came into general use, so they could pull a good one on some poor damn fool university professors in the year of the Lord 1929.

  ‘That’s the obvious explanation,’ he finished.

  ‘Are we going to leave it like this until the Director gets here?’

  ‘Mound 2B anyway. As soon as William gets the tarp on, and I finish my pipe, let’s go start trenching 2A.’

  Bessie walked to the open tent flap, watched the men covering as much of the small mound as they could. She heard the snick of Kincaid’s match, the puff of his pipe.

  He was staring into the eyeholes of the horse skull as if they could tell him something.

  She looked back at the large mound, which loomed over the other like a small fort. Her knees shook.

  ‘Damn,’ she said quietly.

  Kincaid looked at her through his thick glasses. ‘Ditto,’ he said.

  Leake II

  ‘Time will bring to light whatever is hidden; it will conceal and cover up what is now shining with the greatest splendor.’

  –Horace

  They were trying to feed my horse meat.

  The man’s name, he said, was Took-His-Time, because of the extraordinary pains his mother had when he was born.

  I asked him where he had learned to speak Greek. He said that when he was a boy, some mean Traders had taken him away from his people and made him interpret for them. He had escaped, but still spoke Greek because the Traders now, much nicer ones, still came back each year to do business.

  He asked if I was a Trader or a Northerner.

  ‘No.’

  ‘We didn’t think so’ – he indicated the crowd who had come out of the stockaded village – ‘because your dong isn’t whacked.’

  I blushed.

  ‘All our men are,’ said Took-His-Time. ‘So are the Northerners and the Traders, even though their customs are nothing like ours.’

  ‘Uh, where am I?’

  ‘Right here,’ said Took-His-Time.

  ‘No. I mean, what is that river?’

  ‘Mes-A-Sepa,’ he said. ‘That means Big River. That’s what we call it.’

  I watched the skittish crowd putting down clay dishes of meat a few meters from my tethered horse. It was getting nervous.

  ‘Could you tell them it eats grass?’ I said.

  He looked at me with his dark eyes a moment, then said something in his own language. They looked at him, then some of them ran back inside the walls.

  ‘They think it’s a big dog,’ he said. ‘What is it?’

  ‘A horse,’ I said.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, looking at it a moment. ‘So that’s what they look like! I always thought they had wings.’

  ‘You know what they are?’

  ‘I know of them, the name,’ he said. ‘Sometimes it was all the Traders talked about among themselves. All the time they talked of their homes across the sea, and their horses. But I’ve never seen one. They run fast?’

  ‘This one doesn’t,’ I said. ‘Would you like to touch it?’

  ‘Looks dangerous to
me,’ he said. He said something in the other language. I noticed a subtle change in six or seven of the guys with spears and clubs. They began to watch me instead of the horse.

  ‘I have to ask you this, old custom,’ said Took-His-Time. ‘Do you mean us any harm, or are you a thief?’

  ‘Huh? No, I don’t want to hurt anybody. I’m lost.’

  Took-His-Time said something to the others. They smiled and turned back to watching the horse.

  ‘If you’re lost, can we help you find the way?’

  ‘I hope so. Have you seen any others like me?’

  ‘Guys with their dongs not whacked riding horses? I’m sure you’re the first.’

  ‘Some of them might be women. But they’d be riding, too.’

  ‘That would scare the average guy to death,’ said Took-His-Time.

  Somebody rolled the horse a cabbage-looking thing. It reached its neck out and began to nibble at the leaves.

  ‘Ooooh,’ said the crowd.

  ‘Have you fallen down recently, or anything like that? Excuse me,’ said Took-His-Time. ‘I forgot to ask your name.’

  ‘Madison Yazoo Leake,’ I said.

  ‘Yazoo is a name I can say,’ he said. ‘Well, Yazoo, would you like to come to my house for supper?’

  ‘Will the horse be all right?’

  ‘I guarantee nobody’s going to touch it,’ he said.

  *

  He took me to his wattle and lath hut, which looked just like all the others. A very pretty woman, about eight months pregnant, was cooking inside.

  ‘This is Sunflower, my wife,’ he said. ‘We are going to have a child soon.’ He said something to her, she answered him, and smiled. There was a pot cooking. In it was a stew, corn, beans, and meat of some kind. The pot wasn’t over the fire. Round clay balls, glowing red-hot, were heaped in the coals. Occasionally Sunflower would lift one and drop it into the stew. Soon it was boiling. It smelled wonderful.

  The room was dark, covered with skins. Around the corners were various kinds of stone, sticks, carvings of some sort. I looked at one. It was a small raccoon with a fish in its paws – you could see each band in the raccoon’s tail, every scale on the fish.