Slave Graves

by Thomas Hollyday

“With all this tension and the heat, it reminds me of the waiting when we knew Charlie was going to hit us,” said Frank, wanting to hear his words against the silence of the night, the desperation he felt.

  No one replied and they continued to dig, working in the last light of the summer evening. For a moment Frank looked out at the river. He was reminded by the glimmering from Jake’s yacht of how the pathways of the Vietnamese village would blink with the little flames of the ceremonial altars along the streets, how those lights would sometimes foreshadow the explosions to come in the deep night.

  A half hour ago a small runabout had come by and taken Jake’s wife away, probably to the River Sunday hospital, leaving only Jake and a few friends and staff aboard. The speedboat’s waves had long ago washed against the riverbank and the river surface was glass smooth again. The noises of dinner being served to Jake’s guests inside the main cabin of the yacht, the tinkling of glasses and of music, and the reflections of the boat running lights stretching across the riverwater, accentuated the stillness of the darkness.

  The heat was overpowering. Along the river the trees were black near the water on the far shore and the limbs of the trees on this side were etched against what still remained of the red western evening sky. Frank slapped at another mosquito on his bare leg.

  “People say the mosquitoes here in River Sunday double their size in the evening, then shrink back to fit into their hideouts during the day,” said the Pastor. Frank could see that the old man too was fighting his exhaustion.

  On the yacht Spyder was leaning over the stern. He was hauling in the Boston Whaler runabout. Frank smiled. “It looks like someone is getting ready to come ashore from the Terment yacht,” he said. “Probably Jake with his final orders for the morning.”

  At that moment, a terrific noise, a thunder boom like a jet fighter breaking the sound barrier, crashed across the river and actually shook the ground under Frank’s feet. Out on the river a tower of bubbling water rose up from the surface a few feet in front of the bow of the yacht. All eighty feet of the yacht rose up on the water surge, the bow pointing almost forty five degrees into the air. Then the hull pushed down in a huge wash of waves like a magnificent belly flop. The immediate surge died, ebbing with three and four foot waves gradually getting smaller. There was no second explosion. Mist and bits of river mud and seaweed returned downward pelting the river surface. In the water at the stern, Spyder hung like a great round insect on a tiny thread, being raised and lowered on the bowline of the Whaler. He kept being dunked by the movement of the yacht, as if he were being baptized again and again. Frank watched, powerless to help because he was so far away. Then, as the water surface quieted, Spyder, after several tries, managed to climb back on the yacht.

  The water in front of the yacht continued to bubble furiously as though a volcano were astir beneath the surface. Bits of torn seaweed from the river bottom washed up in the froth. A thin cloud of white smoke drifted across the river surface.

  “Mercy!” said the Pastor.

  The yacht itself had been fully bathed with the plume of riverwater which had reached a hundred feet into the air then descended like torrential rain over the river and the yacht. Water was still running heavily from the yacht deck. In the confused water around the hull chairs and seat cushions and other furniture that had gone overboard, floated in a tumbled array.

  Frank and the Pastor looked at each other and at Maggie.

  “Soldado,” said Maggie.

  “He’d have to know explosives,” said Frank.

  “I know boys can get any bombs you want. Down here on the Eastern Shore anything can be done you want,” said the Pastor.

  Frank stood up and went to the shoreline. “We should try to help them.”

  “Not much we can do,” said the Pastor. “They’re over there and we’re over here. Besides, I’ll bet Jake’s captain has already called every marine police in the Chesapeake.”

  A few more minutes went by. Spyder, an oversize towel draped around his neck, had maneuvered the Boston Whaler around to the ladder hanging down the side of the yacht. The small craft was pulled snugly to the side of the larger boat. Then a door opened from the cabin and light came out in jagged patterns on the river surface. In a few moments Cathy, Maggie’s supervisor, stuck her head out of the doorway and looked around slowly as if she were expecting another sudden surprise from the dark. Then she stepped out slowly and turned around and climbed down the ladder, her back to the river. Halfway down the ladder she stopped and looked again, then resumed her descent, finally jumping the last few feet into the small boat. She moved to the center and held on to the seat, rigidly facing forward. Then it was Jake’s turn. He descended the same way, looking nervously from side to side. He got into the boat and went to the stern to start the outboard engine mounted there. As he pulled on the recoil starter Spyder came down the ladder and jumped into the bow. The small boat rocked and then was steady. Frank heard the outboard start up, heard the bark of the exhaust and then watched as the boat sped towards where he stood.

  Frank called out, “Are you all right?”

  “We’re all fine,” Jake called back.

  “What happened?” shouted Frank.

  “We don’t know,” asnwered Maggie’s boss, her voice frantic.

  “The Viet Cong sapper teams did that to freighters anchored in Cam Ranh Bay during the War,” Frank said to the Pastor, as they waited for Jake to land.

  “I heard about that,” said the Pastor. “The enemy swam up beside the freighter hulls and attached explosives to the steel sides just below the water line. Then the bombs went off and put holes in the ship.”

  Frank nodded. “Men sat on those ships waiting for their turn to unload cargo, listening down below for tapping sounds that might mean the Cong were at work.”

  “Soldado carried a lot of that wartime freight into Cam Ranh,” said the Pastor.

  Jake was in the back of the Whaler, operating the throttle and steering lever with his right hand, his face intent. Spyder stood in the bow, his grin more forced, his hands holding the bow line. When the boat reached the mud of the shoreline, Spyder jumped to the shore with the line and pulled the boat up. Cathy stepped out, then Jake.

  “That old lady is trying to scare us. I didn’t really think that she would go this far. She might of killed somebody.” He smiled viciously, staring at Spyder, “She wants trouble she’ll get plenty.”

  “You should call the police,” said Cathy.

  “Someone is going to get killed if this kind of thing keeps up,” said Frank.

  “We’ll take care of it,” answered Jake.

  “You better have something besides bones, professor,” said Jake, anger in his voice.

  “We did find something interesting,” said Frank. Jake and Cathy followed Frank to the farmhouse. Maggie walked a few feet behind. The group entered the house, their weight causing the boards of the porch and the kitchen floor to creak. The kitchen light hanging from its black wire made the people’s shadows race against the stained walls, while moths flopped insanely against the glass of the bulb.

  “You found a ship’s bell” said Cathy, pushing at the muddy edge of the artifact with the tip of her well shined but obviously soaked shoe.

  “Cathy, it’s a very important find,” said Maggie. “We think it will tell us what the name of the ship was.”

  “The ship’s name. How can you do that?” said Jake, squatting beside the object, his eyes suddenly showing intense interest.

  “It can be done,” said Frank. “Jake, we can be sure of the importance of the site. It’s strange though. With a bell on board, this must have been a sizeable shipwreck. I just don’t understand why your family didn’t know about all this.”

  Jake looked at Frank. “Don’t you get started on my family. That’s a little bit out of your line.”

  “Sorry.” Frank pointed to a small patch of metalwork. “Here, look at this. On the surface of the bronze bell we think we’ll find
some etched letters or numerals that will help us identify the ship. We have to clean and conserve this carefully though so that the remnants of any lettering aren’t lost when we clean it.”

  Jake, acting the southern gentleman again, smiled. “I was telling your boss that it’s a real hard job to get anything out of the wreck that you can use.”

  “We don’t have any capability to help you in our little office,” said Cathy.

  “Well, I just wanted to show this to you,” said Frank.

  “I wish I could help more,” said Cathy. “Maggie explains these things to me and tells me what she needs. I’m of course not an archaeologist by training but I try to understand.”

  “We’ll try to clean it up some more tomorrow.”

  “I hate to break up this party but as long as I was forced to come ashore with my guests,” said Jake, “I wanted to remind you all of my plans for the morning. Tomorrow morning, Frank,” asserted Jake. “I want you guys out of here. My bulldozer will start early.”

  Cathy smiled. “I guess that’s it. We all know, shipwreck or no shipwreck, the bridge has got to be constructed. Maybe this bell could be a nice exhibit for a local museum in River Sunday.”

  “Cathy,” said Maggie, “This wreck is old. It’s very important.”

  “Maggie,” said Cathy, “The time has come to close the site. I can’t do any more for you. I’m sure Doctor Light will write an appropriate report. That’s my job. Maggie.”

  “Looking over the construction work to be done, Spyder?” Frank asked. Spyder grinned without answering.

  Frank decided to make one last appeal to Jake. “Can’t you see, Jake? This is something important. This is not a site like most of the ones I have worked on where there was no value, where it was easy to argue that it could be closed. Finding an old ship like this one is important to the history of this whole community. There was a true catastrophe here, a mystery. The puzzle should be solved. You’ve got to give us a few more days.”

  Jake stopped and looked at Frank. The Pastor and Maggie went ahead with Cathy.

  “What I don’t expect, don’t want to deal with, is people who change on me. You should have known though, Frank, that you can’t change your mind halfway through the job. Remember the army, Frank. How they taught you to follow orders.You were brought here to work on my team. You best remember that.”

  Frank answered, feeling he was being forced. He did not like the feeling. “What if I don’t chose to remember?”

  Jake went on, “I haven’t got time for this. My wife’s hurt. I got a lot of money riding on a bridge construction. Frank you are bought and paid for. Bought and paid for. You are here to do what I say when I say it. I don’t care what you call it.” He stared at Frank. “I had some doubts about you in the beginning when I read your resume.”

  “You told me you found something you didn’t like.”

  “More something I didn’t understand. I couldn’t understand how a smart man like you could have ended up as a soldier in Vietnam. Then, I thought, this guy must have gone over there to make some money, maybe as a civilian contractor after his hitch was up. I know there was a lot of money to be made.”

  “Your first impression was right,” said Frank. “I was not smart going over there. On the other hand, I served with some of the best men I’ll ever know and many of them gave their lives stopping bullets meant for me.”

  Jake smiled, “I guess I should have looked more closely, followed my hunch. I sure picked the wrong man. No matter. Let me tell you what your report to the Maryland people is going to say, Frank. As the wise archaeology scholar from the world famous university, you have thoroughly reviewed the site. You have decided after two days of reconnaissance probes at the site that this old wreck is likely not of historical significance. While it might be old, you believe the age is too difficult to determine at this time. You also make note in this report that some bones have been found but it is almost impossible from their condition to determine whether they are human or animal. So based on two days of intensive work by yourself and another archaeologist, you feel comfortable with the bridge project proceeding as planned and will recommend that the site be filled.”

  “I can’t write that, Jake,” said Frank.

  “I expect to get a report like that from you before you leave tomorrow morning. I suggest you write it. If you don’t write it, I’ll have someone write it for you. If you don’t sign it, I’ll find another archaeologist who will sign it. I’m sure that will not be a problem. I’ll just have to make sure he’s a little better at taking orders than you were. As for you, cross me any more and I think you will find that your job back at that university of yours doesn’t get funding in future years. You may find also that no one is very interested in what you have to say or write in the future.”

  Jake smiled and turned to walk toward the boat. He said over his shoulder, “Frank, without my friends helping you, you don’t exist. If you were the big scholar you’re pretending to be, I never would have hired you. I wanted someone who could compromise, who knew how to make a bargain.”

  “I never though we had a a bargain, Jake.”

  “I knew we had a deal the moment you got in that fancy BMW of yours to drive down here.”

  Jake reached the side of the runabout, and Cathy reached out a steadying hand. The engine roared, cavitated the river water in a huge swirl of mud and seaweed. Bits of the weed landed at Frank’s feet. The boat then shot forward into the dark river night, towards the twinkle of the yacht lights a few hundred yards distant.

  The Pastor, who had returned and had heard the last of Jake’s tirade, spoke. “Jake Terment never intended to let us study this site. His political pull has convinced your boss too, Maggie.”

  “You heard my boss,” said Maggie. “She’s so wrapped up in preserving the department, she can’t hear anything else.”

  “Her job too.” Frank scratched the back of his neck.

  “She wants me in the office tomorrow,” said Maggie.

  “It’s pretty discouraging,” said Frank. He continued. “I guess I came down here for all the wrong reasons.”

  “Your university sent you. You didn’t have any choice.”

  “I had a choice but wasn’t thinking about choices at the time.”

  “You had no way of knowing it would be like this. How could you have known that he would not keep the project open if you actually found something? Everyone thought there was nothing here. No one considered what to do if we actually found something.”

  Frank shook his head. “With other jobs it was always assumed that the property owner and everyone else would be so excited that they would grant extensions, go out of their way to get more information, help us out. The projects are usually so weak in historic value that no one complains when we close up the sites. Your Confederate site excited people. The media made weak historical value into a political problem. We have a location far more important but we can’t get any excitement.”

  “Jake thought that you were like him.”

  Frank looked out into the darkness. “He even told me I was like him. I guess I used to think that was a compliment. He says that if I was a real scholar he would never have brought me down here. What bothers me is that he had that original impression of me.”

  “What are we going to do?” asked Maggie.

  “How do you stop a bulldozer?” asked the Pastor.

  “You could make this work, Frank. When I was your student I thought you could accomplish anything. I haven’t lost that faith in you.”

  He looked at Maggie. “Since I’ve been down here, I’ve thought a lot about those early teaching days, about who I was.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Like in the war, there’s a time to lock and load.”

  The Pastor and Maggie looked at him.

  “We’ve got to become winners,” said Frank.

  Maggie turned on the floodlights and for a while the Pastor and Frank worked beside each other a
t Q. The skeletons were more exposed. Frank was working on the thigh area of the adult figure. The Pastor was scraping soil from the lower part of the leg of the child’s skeleton.

  “Strange there’s nothing about them that shows why they were here. Usually there’s jewelry or some kind of possessions. These people had no possessions buried with them.”

  “There’s the fact of the fire that burned the bones. Maybe that took away any of the possessions. Burned them up,” said the Pastor. “Hey, here’s something,” he said as he worked at the ankle. Frank moved over to where the Pastor was. He scraped at the bone while the Pastor watched.

  “What is it?”

  “Looks like rust,” said Frank, his face close to the soil.

  The object took form among the bits of the mud and clay of its home. As Frank worked he followed trails of the artifact which led out from the initial point. The rust led in a brown path towards the leg of other skeleton. “It seems to be attached to the ankle area.”

  Then Frank looked at the Pastor. “I know why there were no possessions.”

  “What?” said Maggie.

  “This is part of a leg iron. See, Pastor, this is where the hasp was attached. I think this is one of the old type padlocks. See the bag shape. That kind of lock shape means they are very old. They used these locks long before the padlocks that we have today.”

  Frank stood and motioned to Maggie to come over. He looked at the Pastor. “Chains on a child. These poor people were slaves.”

  “Children were very valuable in the slave trade,” said Maggie. “They had less disease than the adults so they were a better investment for the traders.”

  Frank continued, “These chains indicate that the child here was burned to death with no chance of escaping.” Frank shifted his position squatting and ran his hands with care over the earth in front of him.

  “If these two skeletons were slaves, I expect that there are a lot of slave skeletons in here, probably a lot more children too.”

  The Pastor touched the aggregate also with a tender touch, softly with his fingers, carefully wiping back the trickle of ground water. “So this was a slave graveyard. The legend is true. “

  “Yes,” said Maggie.

  “I wish I hadn’t found this,” said the Pastor.

  Maggie stood up. “This graveyard legend, Pastor. It could have been a story made up by the surviving local slaves, maybe the ones who were forced to bury the wreckage. The legend was a way to keep the story alive, a way that the white overseers could not suppress.”

  “The murderers would not want to let anyone live who witnessed anything. Any witness would have to be very careful the rest of his or her life,” said the Pastor.

  “It could have been an accident,” said Frank, as usual speaking as a scientist, trying to consider all sides of the issue. “We still have no reason to believe it was murder.”

  Maggie said, her emotion showing in her tone, “An accident maybe but it was an accident where no one was saved. In those days if there was a shipboard catastrophe, lots of times they saved the Europeans, put them on the lifeboats and left the slaves on the ship. There are lots of stories of that kind of thing happening.”

  “That giant and his associates in the other end of the ship were burned to death too,” mused Frank.

  “More likely the slaves were killed because the others were killed,” said the Pastor. “Keep in mind they were considered the same as livestock. There may have been no thought about whether the slaves would die.”

  “The slaves had great value,” said Frank.

  “That just means the murder of the others was significant, something that had to be hidden or covered up by fire even with the great loss of the slave value,” continued the Pastor.

  “This explains old Mr. Johnson’s story about Adam and Eve,” said Maggie, who was sitting on the ground. Her hands were around her knees. She stared at the leg iron.

  “How’s that?” said the Pastor.

  “Adam and Eve were old slave names. When the traders loaded the ships over in Africa they would name the first male and the first female brought on board as Adam and as Eve,” said Maggie.

  “Maggie, you must have been interested in black history to know all this,” said the Pastor.

  “No,” said Maggie. “I was actually studying European history. My mother told me of her heritage, of her family’s generations in very early England. In college I was doing research to write a paper on the English tribes.”

  “How did you get into slavery?” said Frank.

  “In the early days the Romans took the English tribal captives back to Rome as slaves. The story of slavery began to fascinate me. I changed the paper and I read about all the civilizations that practiced slavery. I read the diaries of the captains in the African slave trade, some of them dating to the Seventeenth Century. That’s how I found out about the Adam and Eve names. I just didn’t think of it when the Pastor told that story. That old preacher must have heard some earlier story about this place,” said Maggie.

  “This wretched child here,” said the Pastor. He looked at the fragile yellowed bones and tenderly tried to wipe them clean of the muck. “Young, too young to know anything, maybe eight or nine years old. Terrified.”

  “Let me tell you what I remember from the diary descriptions,” said Maggie. “Of course I can only guess at the ending, when the ship got up here in this creek.” Her eyes were closed as she slowly spoke.

  “The children had to surrender with their families to some other African, perhaps a debt collector or a conquering warrior from an enemy tribe. Then they were separated from parents and marched with others in tropical woodlands for miles and miles. Their little legs would be exhausted when they would reach a gathering point, a riverbank, maybe something like this river here, fairly narrow, muddy, with long dugout canoes drawn up on the shoreline. Iron rings were put on the children’s ankles and they were loaded into these boats, pushed down into the bowels of the canoes until there were many packed inside. The canoes were guided out into the river by expert boatmen, and they were taken down river to another place. The children would cry and cry but there were no parents to hear them and after a while they would stop crying and begin to think about survival. One of the children would become a leader, the strongest child, and would whisper in the village language about plans of escape. The thought of escape would keep the children warm for a while in the chill.

  “The iron bites into the flesh of their ankles and the pain becomes intense. They scream or moan, bodies shaking with cold and shock in the night. Their skin has no cover. They are stripped of even the simple loincloth they had worn, and all their body hair shaved so no one can tell their ages and so each can bring a higher price. The iron pulls constantly against their skin with each touch causing more pain.

  “Another move and they reach the trading factory at the port on the Guinea coast and are put inside a large room that houses many other Africans of many different tribes. The darkness is overpowering except there is one small window where they take turns looking out. There they can see the beautiful white beach and the ocean and the low black ship with the white men working on its deck setting up a great canvas cover for when they will be loaded and set out on the deck of the ship in the hot sun. Again there are those who would escape this wretchedness and they listen to the various ideas and they hope and pray to probably Allah because many were Muslim or maybe a woodland god that they had been taught from their tribe. Each hopes that some of these new leaders will have the power to fight the white men who are called English.

  “Then the time comes and each is led in chains outside to stand in the sun and be prepared for the sale. Each body is rubbed all over with palm oil so it will shine. Perhaps each is given brandy so he or she will smile with a drugged smile and indicate that he or she has a good temperament. The slave trader king who is offering the slaves to the English walks around with his own Africans and with the English themselves. These people probe each body
for illness and weakness, with a total disregard for dignity, studying penises, vaginas and rectums for disease, mouths and gums for rot and strength. They haggle over a price for each slave, the price denoted in cowrie shells, these shells brought here from far way because the African slave traders prefer them for trade. These shells are carefully counted out and then a child becomes the property of the English. The same selling sequence happens with each of the others, the other boys and girls, the young men and women, the older men and women, each manacled into their human destiny. They know that those who are not sold are discarded in this process. There is no place, no food for them here on the coast, no one will return them to their village, and they are them taken away sometimes to be killed for sacrifice to the African slave trader’s gods.

  “Then they are taken together to a spot on the beach near a great fire and there strong men hold each child while the shoulder is branded with the first letter of the ship’s name, a mark which the children do not understand but which they think means that they will be eaten sooner than the others. They fear that they will soon be eaten by the white men on the ship.

  “They see and hear the great waves that crash on the beach. They watch as the African king’s men try to launch their small canoes through the breakers, watch as the cargoes of humans going out to the ship scream their way through the terrifying water and they see some slaves fall into the water and drown carried down by their chains. They are packed again into a small boat and they pray to that god they had not seen, they hope and they cling to each other, the grasp futile as all are slippery with the palm oil.

  “They go through the waves and then are being propelled towards the great black ship. They see the fins circling the small canoes, the sharks who have feasted on others who capsized, and they shrink back into the small boat, knowing their naked black skin can be no protection against the sharp teeth of that shark.

  “They are prodded by the men in the canoe to grasp the wooden steps on the side of the great black ship, the barnacles on the hull rising and sinking in the water beside the small canoe, their sharp edges threatening to tear skin to pieces, the children trying to climb with the edges slicing their bare feet. Then they are on the deck of the great ship, down behind the great walls of wood that hide the water, the great guns on both sides of them, the canvas stretched overhead protecting from the sun and the sailors standing around watching. They want their parents. They hear the word Maryland. The word strikes fear and they cannot control themselves and urinate on the deck. They are whipped by a sailor but in such a way that it hurts but does not leave a mark. They soon learn Maryland is where they are going, where, the children think, they will be eaten at some great sacrifice or feast.

  “Some slaves began breaking free and jumping overboard. A teenage girl quickly and soundlessly cuts her foot off below her ankle on a sharp piece of deck hardware, so she can remove the chains and drag the remains of her bleeding body up the black wall of wood of the slave ship and with her last strength throw herself over the side into the water and into the mouths of the waiting sharks below.”

  “They live on the ship for a few days as the other slaves were brought aboard. Then one morning the sailors climb into the great masts and huge white pieces of cloth are dropped down and soon fill with wind. The ship is underway, they see the clouds move above them but they do not see the vision of their homeland falling behind because they can not see over the great walls of the ship. Then they are forced down wooden steps into the inside of the ship where they are placed in a small spot with others massed on all sides of them. Some are very sick and on all sides are other boys who were crying. There is only a smell of vomit and excrement, the stench of fear and disease, and the room is so dark that none can see. The movement of the ship makes them sick too.

  “In time they are permitted on deck in groups to eat. The food is what like home but at first they are too sick and afraid to eat. After a few days they begin to eat. They are given a wooden spoon to eat with. While the children are eating the sailors try to clean the hovel below decks but they never get all the filth and it reeks of death. Each day more dead persons are thrown to the always waiting sharks off the stern of the ship, the sharks literally following the ship across the ocean from Africa.”

  “At night each listens as the young girls are taken up to the sailors’ berths in the front of the ship and to the captain’s quarters in the stern of the ship. There are the cries and laughter as they try to please the men for a few more minutes of warmth in the cold night air. The smell is so bad that no one can sleep. A mist is now always present in the hold. A cloud of filth. Each sits in a pool of his own fluid, a pool of fluid that you can no longer control, that mixes with the filth from the others.

  “After many days of this routine, and after the deaths of a great number of the children in the hold, the ship stops moving. There is a clanking noise of metal against wood coming from the front of the ship.

  “They are locked in the darkness but have more hope. The ship has arrived in Maryland. Perhaps before the feast where they will be sacrificed there would be an opportunity for escape. Perhaps the children can slip under someone large. Some are faster than these men. In the village they had won the races against the other children. They feel the strength that arrives with hope coming back into their bodies.

  “Above on the deck there are voices. There is some shouting. Footsteps and then silence.

  “There is a faint glimmer at the edge of the ceiling. A tiny light that flickers. Then there is a smell like the great fire in the village, the burning wood, the pungent smell and the children smile thinking of the food that will soon be roasting on that fire. Some are also afraid that it may be the fire where they are going to be cooked. They hope for a chance to escape. Soon there is more smoke and their eyes begin to sting. They rub them but the irritation does not stop. There are lines of flickering light along several of the ceiling planks and some along the side of the room. There is the noise of screaming and pounding of fists. They hear more and more cracking of wood and a huge noise like a tree falling right above. When that happens there are sparks flying in the air but still there is nothing but the smoke and the tiny flickering lines. Then a plank falls from the ceiling and several of the chained people die screaming and there is a great amount of light. For a moment the children can see the timber work of the ceiling and brief patches of blue Maryland sky. Some had probably had been good at building things in the village. They had liked to watch the men who could do carpentry. It was their chosen trade. They liked to see woodwork. As the light plays with the carefully fitted boards above them, they are intrigued by how the English have fastened the boards together. They reach towards the timber above them but the chain on their ankles restrain them. The man and the children in front and beside fight to get away. Most of the children still do not understand why this is happening. Suddenly none can not get enough air into their lungs. They are coughing. They all try to tear at the chains. The blood pumps out from the rips they force deeper and deeper into their skin. They begin their last naked screams as the fire touches their flesh.” Maggie stopped. She opened her eyes.

  “Amen.” The Pastor looked out at the river. After a few moments, he shook his head in disgust. He walked toward his Cadillac, saying, “It’s time for a miracle.”

  “The bell,” said Maggie.

  “Lot of good that will do,” called back the Pastor. “No matter what we learn from the bell, after tomorrow, these children will be buried under tons of fresh concrete.”

  The Pastor left them then. Frank and Maggie walked back up to the porch and sat there on the top step in the dark, looking toward the dark site, the light from inside the kitchen sparkling on the tiny leaves of the boxwoods, showing the underside of the leaves of the trees above them, the sky black but pinpointed with the tiny lights of stars. Out on the river Jake’s yacht began a slow trip back to River Sunday, its lights growing dim as it moved farther away.

  He saw Maggie, h
er back up to the old porch post, her shorts and tee shirt filthy with mud, her hair tangled, and her earth covered feet pulled up. For a moment he thought how Mello would have looked sitting there. She would have had a soft blanket under her neat silk dress, her feet in carefully selected shoes that were as clean as the day she purchased them. Mello would not be as concerned about all this death they had discovered. Mello would be thinking where to sell an article about the find, about how to compute her billing for consulting hours, about how to find other work with the great Jake Terment’s huge real estate projects.

  “Frank,” she would be saying here in this heat filled evening, “Frank, you have to be realistic. This is your chance to make some real money. You’ve met a player, Frank. Cash it in. Do him a favor and he’ll give you something in return. A few archeology jobs on Jake Terments other projects. They money you make would be nothing to a wealthy man like him. You could make enough to be set for life.”

  The image of Mello vanished. Looking at Maggie made Frank feel wanted and warm, as if he could be loved. She turned her head and saw him looking at her. Her face was soft and she smiled at him. “You’re tired.”

  “I guess we all are.” She touched the end of his fingers. “I’ve got some cream for the sore skin.”

  They were in the kitchen when the telephone rang. Its abrupt metallic clatter was without harmony, strangely out of place among the steady insect buzz. On the phone was one of the Pastor’s council of elders.

  “He wanted you to know, Dr. Light. It’s Pastor Allingham. He’s been hurt.”

  “How, where?” Frank’s hand shook as he held the telephone.

  “His car. Someone ran him off the road. He’s going to be all right. That big old Cadillac saved his life when he went into the ditch. The car was all tore up but he’s pretty much together.”

  “How bad is he hurt?”

  “He’ll be sore for a while.”

  “Who did it?”

  “He say they come up behind him. Happened too fast. He’s got a pretty good idea who done it but he ain’t got no proof for Mister Billy, the chief.”

  “Where is the Pastor?”

  “We’ve got him in a secure room at River Sunday Hospital.” When Frank hung up, he looked at Maggie sitting across from him in the dimly lighted room. She was staring at him, fear in her eyes for an instant, the first fear he could remember seeing in her face since he had met her so many years ago.

  “Someone just tried to kill the Pastor,” Frank said, taking her hand.

  Chapter 17