24.
ALWAYS SOMETHING MISSING
SAMUEL WAS THE LAST BACK TO CAMP, JUST like the past four days. He’d prospect until the sun fell below the horizon, and only then trudge back to camp, clothes damp with sweat, face pale with grit.
“Early days yet,” I said as he sank wearily down beside me. I took his hand, and he squeezed back absentmindedly and forced his lips into a smile, but his eyes were focused inward.
For me, each day began with an excited thrum in my head. I walked eager and alert among the ancient rock with my geological hammer, hat shading my eyes, looking. I still felt the same delight I had as a girl in Connecticut. But I knew it wasn’t like that for Sam. With every day I saw him get quieter and more intent.
He barely touched his dinner. He just talked about how much ground we’d covered, how much there was left. And he talked about the Black Beauty itself, what it must have looked like when alive, making size comparisons with nearby boulders and hills and buttes.
He reminded me of his father in Philadelphia. Samuel was the same masterful showman, but with a hint of desperation, so eager to impress. He was inventing, adding imaginative flourishes to the rex, as if he wanted to keep Withrow and his men keen. It made me sad to see him trying so hard but also kindled a protectiveness in me.
“I saw a rider today,” Thomas said.
Browne picked a baked bean from his beard. “Army?”
“Too far away. Might’ve been anyone—Sioux, army, trapper.”
“Did he see you?” Withrow asked.
Thomas shrugged.
I knew what Samuel was thinking; my father was looking for us. I did not know what he’d try to do if he found us.
Later, in our tent, trying to distract him, I asked, “Where will we live? Back east, or out west?”
I wanted to remind him of how we’d talked about being a great scientific couple, working side by side in the field, being beholden to no one.
“Nowhere,” he said, “if we can’t find the rex.”
“We’ll need a place to live regardless.”
“Hard to find a place if we’re penniless,” he muttered.
“I was thinking,” I said, “about my father. I can’t believe he’d cut me off entirely. And even if he does, there’s my aunt—”
“I don’t want your family’s money,” he snapped.
“Even just at first, before—”
“I’ll find this rex,” he said. “If the map isn’t a lie, I’ll find it.”
“We’ll find it, you mean.” My words came out harsher than I’d intended. I’d meant to reassure him, but it made me angry, the way he talked about finding it alone.
“Yes, I meant we,” he said wearily.
“We’re partners. And our team’s not so bad. Withrow’s pretty good, and Browne’s coming along.”
“That’s good,” he said.
And he turned onto his side, away from me—the way he always slept—and was silent. He hadn’t made love to me yesterday, either, and I missed it. I wanted his weight on me; I wanted to be inundated by our heat.
I touched the coarse curls at the back of his head, then the fine hairs on his nape, but he was already asleep. I pressed myself against him a little bit, but he did not stir. I hoped it was truly sleep; I couldn’t bear the idea of him lying there in the dark, ignoring me.
It was as though he’d sealed himself away from me, like a barnacle. I felt forlorn. I stole his heat like a wary cat. Was he tired of me already? Now that he’d seen me, known my body, was he already regretting it?
“Samuel?” I whispered.
She said my name, but my thoughts were tangled as sagebrush. Here’s what I had: a map that might or might not be truthful, sixteen dollars and fifty-nine cents, the clothing and boots on my body. And a wife.
It was craziness. Without the rex, how could I support a wife, a family? I had no money. I hadn’t even finished school. And I’d promised to send Rachel to university—how could I afford the tuition? Our fathers wouldn’t help—the opposite. They’d try to separate us. I was entirely alone. All day I’d glared at rock, desperate to see something. Every passing hour was another failure, stacking up atop the others. There was still so much rock to cover. Who knew how much time I had before Cartland and the army found us and tried to separate us, or poached on our site? I’d promised Withrow something I might not be able to deliver. I was a boy pretending to be a man.
I felt a hopelessness all through me, wanted to snuff it out like the lantern wick. I wanted the oblivion of sleep.
“Samuel,” she said again, then eventually moved away.
I didn’t want her to see my fear. My thoughts began their little wander before sleep, and I thought about how there had never been a complete fossil found. Not ever. There was always something missing. A phalanx or a tiny rib joint or, even more often, the skull itself. You’d never have everything. Over millions of years things got scattered and crushed and lost. But I bet there wasn’t a single paleontologist who didn’t hope that, one day, he’d get every bone accounted for. The perfect specimen to complete the collection. The one thing that would finally make you say, There now, yes, it’s done.
Throughout the night he muttered like he was having a prolonged nightmare. Once he thrashed and pulled the blankets off me; I gingerly tried to pull them back, but they were pinched beneath his body. I wasn’t standing for it, so I gave a sharp yank and got my share back. Later he snored; once he passed wind quite musically. I hadn’t imagined what it would be like to share a bed with a man—especially one so active and greedy in his sleep.
I slept poorly, dozing, waking suddenly, reaching out to make sure Samuel was still beside me. It was so dark I had to remind myself where I was, all that had happened to me in the past few days. I had to imagine there was still a world outside the tent, and the sun that would bring the day.
When I next woke, Samuel had dressed and left the tent, without even a hello.
I turned away from the rock face, massaged my sore neck. Mosquitoes seemed to have given up on me altogether. My skin was baked like clay from a kiln.
Nothing, and more nothing—except my thoughts echoing inside my skull:
The map was a lie, or—
The map wasn’t a lie, but the Black Beauty had been weathered out too long. The elements had destroyed its bones. Sun had bleached them; ice had cracked them; rain had washed away the chalky remains; or—
The Sioux man, all those years ago, had just discovered a lone tooth, like the one Plaskett had found. And that was all. The rest of the Black Beauty was elsewhere.
Back to work, back to the rock.
And then, wafting crookedly through the air between the buttes:
“We got something! Something over here!”
When I reached them, Rachel and Withrow were peering at a spot about seven feet up the rock face.
Definitely bone.
“I think it might be part of a mandible,” Rachel said. Her eyes were bright with excitement.
More than anything I wanted it to be the mandible—I wanted to see exactly what the Sioux man had seen. I rose up on my toes. There were several large, fractured bits of bone, buried at an oblique angle, but the shape of them made me think it might be the dentary bone of the lower jaw. Couldn’t see any teeth, but the stone was sharply ridged just off to one side, and I wondered if there might be something underneath. It was hard to get a sense of its overall size. What was showing, how much was still hidden.
When you saw a fossil laid out all orderly, or in an illustration, the parts seemed obvious. But in the rock all the pieces were broken and jumbled and lying on top of one another, and it could take a long time to figure them out.
“I wouldn’t call it exactly black,” Withrow remarked.
That bothered me, too. Fossil teeth were often blacker than the other bones, but in the legend, the entire skeleton was described as black. But that was legend. The Sioux man who had found the tooth couldn’t have seen much of the ske
leton at all; he might’ve found the tooth on the ground and never glanced up.
All I said to Withrow was “Can we get some crates and lumber for a platform? It’ll be easier to work.”
After we set up our simple scaffold, Withrow asked, “What do the rest of us do?”
“Just wait,” I said. “I want to see what we have here.”
“Why can’t we just start digging and dragging out bones?”
“We’d probably butcher them,” I said. “We’ll need to dig down from above, remove all the overburden, prepare a proper quarry.”
“And that way,” Rachel added, “we get to see how the bones lie and how they might fit together.”
“All right,” Withrow said, with a grudging nod. “You’re the experts. Get to work. We’ll have lunch.”
Rachel and I stood side by side with our awls and hammers. I turned to her, and she grinned.
“This is how I imagined it,” she said.
For the first time in days I felt like things were going to be all right. We went to work. I should have been slower, more careful. I burrowed deeper. Splitting apart stone. Too impatient. We worked out from the dentary bones, exploring. Like patting your clumsy hand into a dark closet. I wanted to get a sense of how big the skull was. I wanted to find teeth.
“Big jaw,” she said. “I think I might have the maxilla here.”
I looked. “Maybe. If its jaws are shut. But where are the teeth?”
We whisked away the silt with a broom, rubbed our watering eyes, kept going. We were making quite a hole in the slope, and I didn’t know much deeper we could burrow without having to remove some of the overburden. A bit longer yet. I didn’t want to break off. My world became very small, all edges and textures. The point of a blade. Tip of an awl.
Working back along the dentary bone, I uncovered a grooved stretch of darker bone. Its surface was smooth.
“Here we go, here we go . . . ,” I breathed.
“What is it?” she said, looking over.
“Teeth, I’m pretty sure. . . .”
I worked around them, guessing at the edges, teasing them from the stone. Then I stepped back. Stared.
“This isn’t it,” I said.
She came closer, swiping dust and sweat from around her eyes.
“The teeth are wrong,” I said.
I was aware of Withrow coming closer, hopping up on the boards to get a look.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“How do you know?” Rachel asked me.
“Look at them!” They jutted from the big jaw like narrow leaves. “Right off they’re too small.”
“But you haven’t cleared them all yet.”
“Don’t need to. Can’t you tell?”
She stared harder. “Maybe they’re juvenile teeth. . . .”
“They aren’t even carnivore teeth! These are a completely different shape. You’ve seen herbivore teeth, haven’t you?”
“Yes, I am familiar with teeth, thank you,” she said.
“These ones chew plants, not meat. It’s an herbivore.”
“So this isn’t our Black Beauty?” Withrow asked.
I took a good long look at the front end of the jaw Rachel had been working. “That’s a beak,” I said, pointing.
She frowned, trying to see it. “Are you sure?”
It was so clear to me. “Positive,” I said impatiently. “This is not our rex.”
Withrow licked his dry lips. “But you’ve never seen a rex, so how can you be absolutely sure?”
“This thing’s like a giant cow,” I said. “Look how far back the teeth start. Carnivore teeth start right up front and run the length of the dentary bone.”
“Don’t you think we should stick with it a bit longer?” she asked.
I could tell she wasn’t convinced by what I was saying. She didn’t trust me. All my life I’d puzzled and pieced together bones, and I was better at it than my father. And she didn’t even trust me.
“It’s not nearly big enough!”
“Those calculations of your father’s—”
“Don’t argue! It’s not our rex!”
She glared at me, and I could see a wet shine in her eyes.
“There’s no point quarrying it out,” I muttered. She shouldn’t have contradicted me.
“Well,” she said coldly, “what does Mr. Withrow have to say, since he is our employer.”
I bristled. An employee. But it was the truth.
“If you’re sure,” Withrow said to me, “let’s keep looking elsewhere. The Black Beauty’s the prize. This one isn’t going anywhere. But if it’s not even a predator, I can’t see Mr. Barnum caring much about it.”
“We’ve still got a few hours of daylight,” I said, checking the western sky. “Let’s just carry on.”
“Sounds good, boss,” said Withrow. I think he was trying to make me feel better.
As the others headed back to their prospecting routes, I stayed put. I tightened my grip on my hammer. Watched my knuckles whiten. My mind felt empty, but in a dangerous way.
“You didn’t need to be so rude to me,” she said behind me, and I started. I thought she’d gone too.
I said, “You were arguing with me in front of Withrow.”
“We’re partners. That’s what you said. It was going to be our find.”
“I made the deal with Withrow; it’s me he has to have faith in.”
“My father never humiliated me publicly like that.”
“Go back to him, then!” I shouted, and raised the hammer’s sharp end and smashed it into the bone. She cried out for me to stop, but again and again I drove the hammer, rock and bone fragments flying until I’d crushed a foot-long section of it. Panting hard, I let my arm drop to my side.
When I turned to Rachel, she looked shocked. And afraid.
Maybe I should have tried to comfort him, touched his back and told him we would find it, everything would be all right. Would that have made things better? But anger held me back. He was no different from his fist-fighting father, a volatile bundle of temper. Even after his outburst, his grip on the hammer had been tight.
We didn’t speak much that night, and when he turned away from me, I turned away too. I was furious with him, for treating me like a dim-witted student, for ignoring my body. Where was all his passion now, all his beautiful words?
In the middle of the night, when I felt my monthly bleeding start, I was glad I wasn’t pregnant.
25.
A FATHERLY VISIT
PAPA WAS WAITING FOR ME WHEN I RETURNED to camp.
He sat on a crate near our cookstove, his saddlebag near his feet. Aside from his slouch hat, he looked like he might have just given a lecture. Leaning against the shady side of our wagon was the Pawnee scout, Duellist. I couldn’t see any soldiers. Their two horses were cropping nearby.
“Where is Samuel?” he asked, standing. His gaze flicked over Withrow and Browne.
“Still out prospecting. Why are you here?”
“To ensure the welfare of my daughter.”
I was surprised at the pang I felt, the sheer familiarity of his sturdy shape, the shining curve of his forehead. My whole life, with scarcely an exception, he’d been the one person I’d seen every day.
“We knew you hadn’t taken the train, and Samuel abandoned his horse in Crowe. I had a hunch you meant to continue prospecting on your own, but you’d need some help.”
“We’re helping each other,” said Withrow. “Your daughter is a fine fossil hunter.”
Father glanced at Withrow with barely veiled disdain, and then returned his gaze to me.
“I am absolutely fine,” I told him. “I’m sorry you worried. I would’ve written a note if there hadn’t been such a scene in the hotel.”
He lifted his chin, as if he was too dignified to think about it. “Shall we walk a bit?” he asked.
“Are there handcuffs clipped to your belt?”
“Ha,” he said, and pulled back his jacket.
“No handcuffs, you see.”
I looked at Ethan Withrow, and he tipped his head gently. Go. Papa and I walked to the edge of the camp; I made sure the others were in plain view. Ethan kept his eye on us.
“My dear,” Papa said, and lifted his hands in entreaty. His fleshy hands had handled geological hammers and picks and shovels. They’d held pens and written journals and lectures. They’d hefted me up into a wagon when I was little, helped me shape my first letters. “You can’t mean to continue like this. Come back with me.”
I said nothing.
“You don’t need to ruin the rest of your life because of one youthful misadventure.”
“You’re saying I should abandon my marriage?”
At the word he winced as though someone had put something unpleasant into his mouth. I saw his eyes counting the tents. “Whether you’re married yes yes is debatable.”
“We are married,” I said, “in every sense of the word.”
“That being as it may, I simply want you to come back with us and think things through. You may find some time alone will be clarifying.”
I almost smiled at his attempts to be cunning. But I was ashamed at the pull I felt. Even for the most mundane things: a softer bedroll, a tent to myself, my clothes, a better washbasin. I wished Samuel were here. Where was he?
I inhaled. The words were surprisingly hard to say. “I’m not leaving.”
“That boy can’t offer you a respectable home. He’s had too poor an example from his father. A known philanderer.”
“So you say.”
“The stories of his womanizing are numerous. He makes a mockery of his faith.”
I thought of the woman on the train. “Samuel is not his father.”
He sniffed. “You will come to grief if you stay with him. You will most certainly be very poor.”
“Is that a threat?”
He sidestepped. “My dear, he cannot support you.”
“We’ve hired our services to Mr. Barnum. If we make a find, we will be paid.”
“Samuel’s plan no doubt. He shows the same poor judgment as his father. I’m not hopeful of your prospects with this lot.” He tilted his head toward camp. “They look about as skilled as grave diggers”
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