Them Bones Read online

We just don’t have weather like that in the time I come from. The sky had clouded up late in the afternoon. A huge black thunderhead covered the whole southern sky by dusk. The top of it flashed silver and purple with lightning even before the sunlight faded. It must have been forty kilometers away when it formed. It was moving slowly and majestically toward us.

  We were hearing the thunder by the time the midwife came and shooed us out. A flash of lightning made the sky white. Torches were lit down at the plaza.

  ‘What’s up?’ I asked Took-His-Time.

  ‘People are going to pray to the Woodpecker God,’ said Took. ‘Lightning tends to hit the village.’

  ‘Oh? Should we go down there?’

  ‘I can pray just as good here. Sun Man’s in fine form without me.’

  There was a high moan from Sunflower in the hut.

  ‘Let’s get a little farther away,’ said Took.

  ‘Are you worried? I am,’ I said.

  ‘It’s in the beak of the God,’ said Took. ‘Tradition says I shouldn’t be in earshot, though, or he may be born deaf.’

  We walked farther toward the plaza. Some of the Buzzard Cult people were standing in the doorway of a hut, looking toward the storm, not moving, not saying anything.

  The thunder came in a continuous rumble, the cloud a constant pulse of lightnings. I saw bolts dancing beneath the cloud over the notches in the palisades. The smell of ozone came to us wetly.

  ‘Soon the Buzzard Cult people will start dancing to call down the thunder,’ Took said.

  ‘Why would they do that?’

  ‘They revel in death even more than we do,’ he said. ‘They invite it. It’s their way.’

  ‘I don’t think this storm will need any help,’ I said. The sound of the thunder was like a kettledrum being beaten just in front of us.

  I looked out past the wall and the burial mounds, the dried fields. The woods, lit by the coming storm, began to rock and bend. Wind and water smacked me in the face.

  Lightning bolts sizzled beneath the cloud, walked across the sky, boiled inside the thunderhead. Thunder smashed at us.

  There were torches in front of the temple mound, and chanting I couldn’t quite catch through the wind and the noise.

  ‘Let’s go to the big mound,’ said Took.

  People ran by, heading for the plaza. We ambled down that way, going instead to the big mound that had once been used for burials on the east side of the courtyard. We sat down.

  The wind was whipping the straining woods. The thunder was as loud as a 155 going off next to your ears. The cloud leaned over us. A ragged wall cloud spun around, its top nearly touching the trees. The undersides of the clouds were green and purple.

  ‘We’re going to get hail,’ I observed, needlessly.

  Took had one of his unfinished pipes out. He could have worked on it by the continuous lightning. I couldn’t keep my eyes off the storm.

  Over on the plaza Sun Man was atop the temple steps. Thatch from hut roofs blew across like long snow. Torches went out.

  The cold wet air hit us like fists. The hail hitting the River and the trees beyond sounded like an animal gnawing on them.

  Lightning struck the palisade to the east. Thunder sounded like hot grease thrown on ice. Fist-sized hail started bouncing around like batting practice at the Astrodome. We got off the mound just as rain crashed into the village.

  We made it to a hut belonging to Took’s cousin, along with a few other relatives. The wind shrieked, rocking the mud-wattled walls. We stood in the doorway, looking out. The plaza was a deserted blur. There were a few torches under the eaves of the temple showing where everyone ran.

  Lightning hit a hut across the village, setting the roof on fire in a screaming explosion. Hailstones strobed in the flashing light, like a sky filled with Christmas tree ornaments. The white sky went away and fires sprang up. People pulled others from the burning hut. One of them was hit with a hailstone, then the hail quit and the rain came in flat level sheets.

  Thunder crashed. I thought my sphincter would open. Part of the hut we were in blew away. Rain came in lumps. We ran around inside bumping into each other and getting things up off the wet mud floor.

  Then two things happened at once:

  I saw the midwife and Sunflower coming between the huts, towards the plaza, carrying something.

  And lightning hit the temple, exploding it.

  People screamed and ran toward the temple mound, Took with them. I ran toward Sunflower.

  The lightning was horrible. We could all be hit anytime. The wind and rain mauled us. I was soaked in a few steps. If the hail hadn’t already stopped, I would be dead.

  Flames lit up the night between the lightning bolts. The whole top of the mound was afire. Men were climbing up the temple walls, across the roof, cutting lashings, throwing handfuls of mud and dirt.

  I reached Sunflower and the midwife. Sunflower looked up at me, the rain washing her face in streams. She and the midwife held a covered bundle between them. They said nothing. They didn’t have to.

  Between thunderclaps I could hear Sunflower crying softly.

  More lightning hit the village, a real explosion of flying sticks scattering in the air toward the north wall.

  Now the Buzzard Cult people were dancing in the middle of the plaza, standing in one place, rocking back and forth on their feet, chanting some tune to themselves, not helping with fighting the fire or pulling people out of their huts.

  Rain pressed us down. The whole roof of a hut gave way and sailed like a tumbleweed through the plaza, missing everyone. Wails and moans were starting all over the village, with real names, not ritual ones. People were getting hurt, crushed, burned, maybe killed.

  I reached out and took the limp bundle from the midwife. I pulled Sunflower to me by the shoulder. She was weak, shaking. I guided her toward the temple mound.

  Up on the mound they had some of the fire out, and most of the stuff was outside. People were still running around, Sun Man directing them to other parts of the village to fight other fires. He yelled to the women to get baskets and jugs and bring them back. Everyone was outside the huts now, oblivious of the rain and the lightning.

  Then we heard the rumbling like a freight train coming through the forest to the south, the sound of tearing trees rising above it.

  Through the lightning I could see a low wall cloud.

  Then the rain stopped, like a faucet turned off.

  The roaring grew louder. Lightning flashed deep within the cloud, and we all saw the tornado hanging like a fat anaconda from the ragged clouds, heading straight for the fields and the village.

  Through the roaring tornado I heard other things. In the stillness of everything else I heard a cricket chirp, and rain dripping from a roof. I heard someone’s feet run through a small puddle. I heard the crackle of fire from the temple roof. I heard someone across the village say the word ‘basket’.

  Then the roaring became louder, like a volume knob being slowly turned up.

  I started Sunflower up the temple steps.

  ‘I can’t go up there,’ she said.

  ‘Yes you can,’ I said, and pulled her.

  She came with me.

  Everyone was transfixed watching the tornado tear up the trees. There were lightning flashes, but the thunder was drowned by the echoing roar.

  The twister looked like a sideways S. Lumps that were trees, alligators, fish, boulders flashed and disappeared around its outside. The bottom was a haze of airborne garbage. Trees leaned in toward it from all directions, tearing away in the drowning roar and being sucked into the funnel. My ears popped.

  Someone saw us.

  ‘No,’ they said. ‘No!’

  We had reached the top step. Sunflower, me, the dead child. I turned facing the tornado and held the bundle up over my head.

  The screaming tornado reached the edge of the fields, ripped up leaves and dead vines, heading for the south wall.

  I held the baby up as high
as I could. Nobody tried to stop me. The lightning was a purple dance around the tornado funnel. The landscape looked like it would through the bottom of a Vick’s Salve bottle.

  The tornado lifted up.

  It left the ground, broke contact with the dirt and debris, just outside the south wall. I felt my hair stand up. It was dark for a few seconds. The lightning quit for the first time in two hours.

  Then a huge flat sheet of light enveloped everything. Up above my head, past Took and Sunflower’s dead child, I saw it.

  The tornado hung. I could see inside the funnel, straight up. I tingled from fear and static electricity, my hair glowing. The tornado roared above us, moved to the north majestically, as if a moving cliff hung over us, upside down. It roared louder, set down to the north of the fields, tearing up the woods again, moving toward the River.

  Thunder fell. A gentle rain started, cool and slow. Lightning still played but the thunder got lower, farther off. The last of the flames went out on the broken-down temple.

  Took came to us, put his arms around Sunflower. I lowered the baby, went back down the steps. The only manmade sound in the village was that of the Buzzard Cult dancers, who had stopped only at the first appearance of the tornado.

  The midwife was gone when we reached the plaza. Some of Took’s relatives joined us at the bottom of the steps.

  From up above on the mound, Sun Man started a chant of thanksgiving, which everybody except Took and Sunflower and I joined in.

  Before we reached our hut, stars were peeping out to the west.

  Bessie IV

  The test trench, begun fifteen feet out, hit the large mound six feet off center to the left. William, Washington, and the diggers from Jameson’s team took the trench only to the original ground level before Kincaid sent them in toward the mound itself.

  ‘Do a one-foot profile, then on down,’ said Kincaid. ‘Bessie, make sure the grids stay marked. I don’t want to lose anything on this one.’

  Jameson was fidgeting on the edge of the cut. He and Kincaid sent two of the diggers off to help unload the trucks, and helped with the digging to work off some of their nervous energy.

  There were gathering clouds on the northern horizon. The day was becoming still and hot with a high hazy overcast. There was as yet no thunder and lightning to be seen even in the darker clouds.

  Bessie kept running checks on the digging, drawing new profiles in her notebook, a cross section of the mound at one-foot intervals, ready to be filled in as they worked. She sketched quickly and surely, and had sixteen of them, numbered and in sequence, before the diggers had reached the center of the mound on their first one-foot cut.

  Kincaid and Jameson waited until the workers had gone down off the mound’s crest to the ground level on the other side. Then they lay on their sides, one to left and one to right, crawling the entire length of the cut from one end to the other, staring at opposite sides. They looked like they were playing a child’s game, or were two thirsty men crawling across the desert in a newspaper cartoon.

  The workers leaned on their shovels, talked, sweated and joked. Somebody said something really rich and they broke into hoots of laughter. Bessie jerked her head around at the sound.

  Kincaid and Jameson were oblivious. They finished their crawl, careful of the grid markers, and came to their feet, brushing dirt from their hands and clothing.

  They had a hurried consultation, then went to the workers. The diggers went back around to the side they had begun the trench on. Once again they started a slow careful cut, a yard wide, another foot deep, from the edge of the mound, over the top, to the far side, carrying the dirt carefully over to the sifting screens as they worked, where others went through it.

  Bessie knew it had probably taken the Coles Creek people who built these mounds at least a month to get them to this size, perhaps longer. They had carried basketfuls, skinfuls of dirt at a time, to raise it. The dirt had been dug with hoes made of the shoulder-blades of animals strapped to handles, or with shells, even scooped up by hand. Making a mound took a long time; they stood for hundreds, even thousands of years. They could be taken apart in a few days by skilled workers, or as had happened in a few disastrous cases, in a few minutes by treasure seekers with the use of grader blades and dynamite.

  William and Washington could dig a trench straight as a ruler, never varying the depth by more than an inch or two, pretty quickly. Kincaid said William had azimuths for eyes. There were a couple more, including a white man named Griggs, on Jameson’s team, who were good, and all could do fine work under William’s directions.

  The second one-foot cut went faster than the first, since they had already gone through the roots of the ground cover in the first foot. The diggers stopped, and once more Kincaid and Jameson made their long crawls, this time more slowly, and from the ends opposite to where they had started the time before. They met near the top of the mound.

  ‘How you doing?’ asked Kincaid.

  They both laughed for a few minutes, then continued on. One of the guys from up on the bluff lugged a new watercan down, passing the dipper around among the workers who lay resting in the heat.

  Kincaid finished, got up, took a dipperful of water and drank it down.

  Jameson came around the mound, pulled a collapsible metal cap from his shirt pocket, opened it, dipped it in the watercan and took a sip.

  ‘Bessie, come down here,’ said Kincaid.

  The three put their heads together.

  ‘There’s no sign of an intrusion, on either of the sides. Either that, or the whole top has been taken off, which I doubt. We’re going to assume, from now on, and until we find differently, that the mound is original.’

  ‘And it’s possible,’ said Jameson, ‘that this may have been a religious platform, and has nothing in it. And that we’d be wasting our time on these one-foot profiles.’

  ‘Then what’s next?’ asked Bessie.

  ‘Right straight through?’ asked Kincaid.

  Jameson nodded. They gave the instructions to William.

  The camp shifted gears again, becoming not faster, but slower, smoother, as though it had more traction. Bessie could feel it. People moved more slowly but wasted no time. Things were put in order for the long haul, watercans appeared, a wheelbarrow line started, up to the sifting screens, where miniature mounds were starting.

  Bessie sketched the left profile of the two-foot cut. There were the usual rounded forms where baskets of earth had been dumped and tamped, but Jameson and Kincaid were right – no intrusions. Only the differences in individual earthloads showed, and that one kind had been used for the lower and another for the upper, conical mound. Either the smaller mound had been built at a different, later time than the platform, or they had been built specifically of two kinds of earth – not unknown, but rare.

  Everything about these mounds is uncommon, she thought. The location – below the bluff rather than on it – the shape, two connected mounds, and the strange platform and cone shape of the larger one – and their composition: aside from the horse bones, and the fact that only horse bones were in the smaller mound, there were also the two kinds of earth making up the larger one.

  The labourers were in the test trench now. They were careful, but their shovels bit deep, carving into the mystery, throwing the layers of the past out into the waiting wheelbarrows.

  Thunder rumbled.

  A wind of relief blew across the digs, making the tents on the bluff crackle and flap.

  THE BOX IV

  Smith’s Diary

  *

  October 15

  I came out of my tent to go on Officer of the Guard duty just after sundown.

  The bluff was already dark behind us. Somebody had been fishing and was coming back with some catfish from the bayou.

  We had all turned into pretty decent fishermen in the last two weeks. The smell of cooking meat came from the cook shack. Tomorrow’s breakfast and lunch. We weren’t tired of venison yet.

 
The loudspeaker was on. A lull was settling over the camp. People were sitting around talking. The sentries were in their bunkers toward the bayou and up on the bluff. There was a light on in Spaulding’s tent, the only light not made by fires. There was laughter and low talk from the soldiers. I went up on the bluff and said hello to the guards.

  The moon was coming up like a pumpkin over the water. The camp was settling toward a night of sleep. The bayou turned into a flat tree-lined sheet of glass with an orange strip of moonlight in it. Bats flew across the face of the moon.

  Moonlight Serenade came on the loudspeaker.

  It was real neat.

  Leake V

  ‘In the beginning the whole world was like America.’

  –John Locke

  It had snowed during the night. It was cold when I’d gone to sleep under my deerskin the night before. I woke sometimes during the early morning with the tick-tick of ice pellets on the sides of the mud and wattle hut.

  Outside, the village lay under ten centimeters of white. Took-His-Time stood in the doorway. Sunflower had stirred up the fire and sweet pinewood smoke filled the house.

  ‘Winter’s here,’ said Took.

  ‘I didn’t think it would snow here,’ I said.

  ‘Usually doesn’t.’

  We sat down to eat jerky and hominy but never got that far. There was a yell outside the doorflap.

  ‘What now?’ asked Sunflower.

  ‘Come!’ said Took-His-Time.

  Hamboon Bokulla, the Dreaming Killer, stepped inside, followed by Moe. They began talking with Took so fast that I only caught every fifth word. Sunflower listened a minute, then picked up two pemmican bags and put jerky in them.

  Moe and Dreaming Killer went outside. Took said something to Sunflower. She handed him the pemmican bags.

  ‘Yaz,’ he said to me while rummaging in the pipestone pile, ‘there’s something I have to do, and something you need to see.’

  ‘Sounds good, Took,’ I said. I didn’t like Dreaming Killer at all and didn’t think he was bringing any good news.