Orphan of Creation (9 page)

Hilarious tales of how one dealt with the locals was always one of the prime topics when a gang of diggers got together over a beer. Somehow they always got around to the half-legendary, huge, impressive, flowery, colorful, and quite meaningless certificates and requests for permission some diggers allegedly would produce in order to convince the local leaders, who nine times out of ten couldn’t read English anyway, to cooperate. “Dago-dazzlers,” the things were called. One tale that never died was of the high school diploma pressed into service as a dazzler. The digger in question was from Tennessee, and he had swiped a blank somehow on a visit to his alma mater and filled in the appropriate name. The illiterate chief to whom it was presented kept it and hung it proudly on his wall, much to the confusion of later visitors who wondered, but dared not ask, how the chief had come to be a graduate of Daniel Boone High School.

But the locals, anywhere, anytime, were more than just the butt of the diggers’ jokes. For this far-flung tribe of paleoanthropologists, paleontologists, archaeologists, and all the other kinds of diggers and diggers’ allies, the locals were the outsiders, the strangers who did not speak the language. The locals did not understand the diggers’ hidden dreams, did not understand the diggers’ fiercely competitive clan, and did not realize how abruptly the intramural backstabbing could end when the diggers needed to close ranks against an outside threat.

And now Barbara’s own family were the locals, the foreigners, the barbarians.

It made for a strange feeling inside, strange as the knowledge, when she felt alone in the world, that her own name was rooted in the word “barbarian.” She tightened up the last of the grid-mark lines, and heard Aunt Josephine and her own mother laughing at some joke about the grid lines being the perfect height for string beans.

The jokes ran both ways, for all people laugh away the discomforting feeling of seeing what they do not understand, what they are not a part of. Barbara felt a strange, deep sensation in her gut. It was the first, faint crack, splitting the scientist in her away from the person. She found herself wondering which side would win.

Chapter Six

The metal detector’s meter quivered again, just barely. “Make that a point oh-three, Liv,” Barbara said. She pointed down, and swung the detector’s head out of the way, then picked up her clipboard and carefully marked the point on her graph-paper grid-map of the site. Meantime, Livingston knelt down and poked a small stake into place where the detector’s head had been. Using the meter stick, Livingston carefully noted the distance from the edges of the grid block and logged that and the metal detector’s reading-intensity into the notebook. Finally, he bent over to write the same figures on the side of the stake itself. Relentlessly thorough, endless record-keeping.

Dr. Barbara Marchando wiped the muddy sweat from her forehead with the back of a grimy hand and considered their handiwork so far. She had marked out the grid square in columns A to H labeled east to west, and rows 1 to 8 numbered north to south, then had started a survey of the entire grid with the metal detector. They were now finishing up in H8, the last of the sixty-four grid-squares that defined their eight-meter-by-eight-meter prime site.

Livingston had logged in 37 hits from the metal detector. A glance at the grid map showed that three-quarters of those hits were clustered in two zones—the squares B2, C3, B3, C4, and another cluster spread somewhat more diffusely through F3, F4, G3, G4, H3, H4, with some slopover into Row 5. She took out her pencil again, circled the two concentrations of hits, and named them
Alpha
and
Beta
respectively. Barbara had done her best to center the prime search site on the crossroads itself. Her best guess was that the burial ground road had run pretty much straight along Row Five, as it presently did, and the old plantation road had run at a slight diagonal from D1 to E8. It looked more and more as if she had spotted the fossil roads correctly. If she
had
gotten that part right, it would put Alpha to the northwest of the crossroads, and Beta to the northeast. She noted the far vaguer collection of hits in the southeast edge of the grid and marked it
Gamma?

The odds were perhaps fair-to-good that at least one of those three clumpings of points on the grid represented the partly rusted-out nails and hinges that had once held together the packing cases Zebulon’s gorillas were buried in—unless they were the dump sites from the blacksmith shop, or even just random collections of rocks with extremely high iron contents.

Or maybe there were never any burials in the first place. For all she knew, Zeb had been kidding all of them, or had unwittingly injected his first-person recollections into someone else’s tall tale. He could have heard the story a hundred times, each time a little grander, a little greater, his child’s imagination working on it, until the tale took on every bit as much strength as genuine memory. It happened all the time.

She shook off her moodiness and doubts. They always hit her when she got close to the moment of truth on a dig. When it was time to make the decisions that would steer the rest of the project, Barbara invariably came up with plausible theories that showed her every premise was fatally flawed and that they might as well pack up and go home. It was her version of stage fright. She did her best to put her doubts behind her and
think
.

Careful not to get tangled in the strings that marked out the grid, she crossed over to the now mostly empty lawn chairs and sat down. The only observer still present was her own mother, and she was fast asleep, a light blanket tucked around her feet, her faced calm and untroubled as she quietly snored in the gentle afternoon sun. The rest of the audience had drifted off to more exciting entertainments, though certain of the younger boys had extracted a promise from Barbara to let them play with the metal detector when she was done with it.

And, for the moment, she
was
through with it, though none of the kids was around to lay claim to it.

She knew that she had accomplished a great deal that day, though no one outside the profession would realize it. Using improvised materials, and procedures invented to make the best of the situation, she had avoided some traps that would have thrown the amateur or journeyman (such as assuming the road would not move), eliminated ninety-nine percent of a dauntingly large search area before she started to dig, and kept a record of her work that should silence any nit-pickers later on.

But what to do now? She took a look at her watch, and at the sun. Two-thirty p.m., in late November. They were going to lose the light in another hour or two. The tedious work of digging out a grave, assuming every conceivable effort to preserve an accurate record of stratification and protect any possible additional artifacts could take a week, a month, easily. She had
three
potential grave sites, and at best two days—plus these two hours of daylight—left in which to deal with them. Obviously, she would have to concentrate on one potential grave, do it fast, and pray it would pay off.

She looked again at the grid map. Alpha was the most obvious bet. It was by far the most concentrated and tidy grouping—but something made her shy away from it. Maybe just that it
was
the most obvious. But then she put her finger on what bothered her about it. Alpha was the closest of the three to the slaves burial ground. If the point of the crossroads burial had been to protect the sanctity of that hallowed ground, then it seemed to Barbara that the slaves who had done the burying would have wanted the psychological distance and barrier of the plantation road between the gorillas and their ancestors’ resting places.

Livingston stood up from the last of his labors and stretched, his massive muscles straining under the fabric of his shirt. “Break time, by any chance, Barb?” he asked. “Haven’t eaten all day here.”

Barbara suddenly realized that her stomach had been rumbling for hours. On the other hand, she knew what kind of eating her cousin could do. There had been jokes the night before about serving him his own turkey. Right now, there wasn’t time for that. “Okay, Liv, but we can’t waste the daylight. I want to be back out here in twenty minutes.

Livingston moaned. “Come on, Barb, have a heart!”

“Don’t you go starting a union on me, Liv. You can eat all you want after sunset. Let’s hurry.” She turned and gave her mother a poke. “Momma, we’re heading in for dinner. Don’t stay out here too long or you’ll catch yourself a chill.”

Her mother shifted sleepily and opened her eyes. “Find any monkeys down there yet, child?” she asked with a smile.

Barbara grinned back. “No, Momma, but we’re hot on the trail.” They all went back inside, Barbara and Livingston to eat, and Barbara’s mother to a more comfortable nap on a bed upstairs.

It was a wash-the-first-layers-off, stand-up, eat-the-leftovers-fast meal, but even that sort of eating was better than a sit-down dinner in most houses, when you were in Aunt Josephine’s kitchen. The turkey sandwiches and apple pie were perfect. And with a generous helping of stuffing, they were filling enough for Liv to stop grousing. Then they were back at it, at the moment of truth. Barbara discovered that she had decided on a strategy during pie. Over a quick cup of coffee, she showed him the grid map and told him her plans.

“Okay, partner, let me tell you how I see it. I figure this Beta area, a rectangle from E3 to G4, is our best bet at finding a grave.” She pointed at the area on the grid. “With the stuff we shaved off the surface this morning gone, we’re probably already below the 1850-era horizon—that is, the ground level for the time period we’re interested in. It’s purely the intrusive burial that we have to worry about anyway—there shouldn’t be much else down there of interest, so we don’t have to run every bit of dirt through a microscope just yet. I’m assuming that if our gorilla friends are down there at all, it’s in some pretty shallow graves—maybe only half a meter or so deep. I doubt a bunch of slaves who just wanted to get some rotting bodies underground and away from their ancestors would dig the regulation six feet down. So let’s go.” She was already halfway out the door, eager to get back to it. Livingston had to hurry to catch up with her, downing the last of his coffee so fast he burned his tongue.

<>

Barbara stepped nimbly over the strings marking the grid marks. “I want to see if I can hit the center of the grave first. We’re going to dig out the square formed by F3, F4, G3, G4 to thirty centimeters below current ground level, using spades, but going very slow and gentle, and saving all the overburden,” she announced. “We dump all the overburden into the wheelbarrow, then dump the barrow onto that tarp over there.”

“Why save the old dirt?”

“So we’ll be able to sift it later if we have to.”

Liv thought that was going a bit far in planning ahead, but he heard a bit of his old college coach in her authoritative, confident tones and knew there wasn’t much future in arguing.

Barbara went on. “Once we’re at thirty centimeters, we do another metal detector sweep and see if we’ve accounted for any of the hits. If we find out we’ve dug right past some ferrous rocks that fooled us, we can quit while we’re ahead. But assuming we’re still on track, we switch to trowels and go down as far as we can before nightfall. Hand me a shovel.”

“Finally, we’re digging,” Livingston said as he walked less gracefully across the string lines. “I thought pick-and-shovel was all you guys did, and we’ve taken all day to get started on it.” He picked his spot and pushed his spade into the earth, almost relieved to get to the hard part after dreading it for so long. “Y’know, somehow or another, this whole thing reminds me of the old triangle trade. The traders went from Africa with slaves for the West Indies, bought rum and sugar there, then went to Europe with those goods, and back down to Africa with guns and trinkets to trade for more slaves. Slaves, rum, and guns. All those vices going around and around in a circle. Aunt Jo would love the symbolism for her Sunday School class.”

Barbara looked at her cousin with an odd expression. “What’s all that got to do with digging a hole?”

Livingston pointed down at the hypothetical bones beneath their feet. “Slavers brought these gorillas to Mississippi from Africa. You’ll take ’em from here to Washington if you find ’em. Then somebody or other will get all stirred up and head back to Africa looking for sources, clues. Same damn old triangle, except the products are gorillas, bones, and curiosity. I bet Aunt Jo could teach the congregation some very apt lessons from that.”

“You are a very weird guy, Livingston,” Barbara said. “You get back to your digging before you think of something else strange.”

He grinned and stabbed the shovel back into the earth.

With Livingston’s strength and Barbara’s experience, the first phase of digging went quickly. They paused once, to open up a few of the grid lines so the barrow could get through, and took turns doing the digging and running the barrow back and forth to the overburden tarp.

Barbara’s biggest worry was keeping the sides of the little excavation from caving in. Livingston was better at getting the hole deeper than he was at keeping the side shored up. Albeit with a great deal of fussing, she managed to keep sides square enough to satisfy her professors.

They found nothing more exciting than rocks in that first part of the dig, which made Barbara feel better. If the upper soil had been full of artifacts. the odds against the coffin nails being what had registered would have gone down. But with the dig a blank slate so far, there seemed no other possible explanation for the hits, except that something metal had been buried far deeper than people buried casual trash.

The sun was showing signs of lowering alarmingly by the time they were near the thirty-centimeter level. When they ran a metal-detector sweep at the 30 cm. horizon, none of the previous hits vanished, meaning that whatever had made them was still
below
and not thrown up on the overburden tarp. Indeed, all the readings had strengthened and two more faint ones registered. A few of the readings had shifted their apparent positions, and seemed to be clustering in a bit closer to each other. Barbara was pleased, but not surprised. A lot of things could throw a detector off: moisture in the overlying soil, a misreading of the peak on the gauss meter—or Livingston getting his big feet in their metal-toed work boots too close to the detector head.

As afternoon wore on into evening, Barbara had to use the flash on her camera to photograph the thirty-centimeter horizon with the restaked hits marked in.