Them Bones Read online

As Basket spoke, there was another gigantic flash and crack. Bessie saw him illuminated, white and searing, in her gaze, outlined by a crooked lightning bolt that dug itself into the woods beyond the road. She saw beyond the tent walls the outline of the LaTouche house. She saw something else, too, in Basket.

  ‘Two years ago,’ he said again as the thunder died, ‘the river left its banks and was forty miles wide, and killed many thousands of people. The government got excited and now wants to make the river flow like a creek.

  ‘But in the time of my father’s father’s great-great-grandfather, it rained once for three years. There were never more than two days with sunshine. There were no crops. There was no summer and no winter either, just rain and fog, the woods, the fields, the sky lost in gray.

  ‘The second year the ground could hold no more water. The rivers started to rise more and more. The little creeks spread out and joined each other like hands of water. All the grass had died in the rain and the waters covered that. All the weeds had died and the creeks covered them. The small trees were still standing, and the waters began to rise up their trunks.

  ‘Our people began to be worried. Where will we go? What can we do? Already dead buffalo and deer and wolves were floating in the water, more and more. Snakes climbed into trees, and when the waters rose up them, they hung like vines and fell into the water and swam to larger trees. They waited there for the waters to rise into them.

  ‘A catfish the size of a bear swam between the huts of our village and paused at the knees of the shaman, swimming around him in slow circles.

  ‘He wants us to follow him, said the shaman. Into your canoes as fast as you can.

  ‘So the people got into their canoes and went to the village center, and when they were ready, the catfish turned and swam past the chiefs house, and over the fields, and our people followed, paddling their canoes. And the catfish swam slowly so that even the weakest of our people could keep up in their boats.

  ‘As he swam, our people passed the mounds of the Old Ones who were here before us. The mounds were washing away into the rising waters, exposing their ornaments and weapons, their bones and grave goods. We watched many of them fall into the rushing streams, large mounds, small ones, ones without anything in them, some as full of things as a store in Baton Rouge.

  ‘And then the catfish brought my people to this place where we are now. It brought them to the mound out there, and they pulled their canoes up on it, all ten thousand of them. They had all remembered the mounds to be very small ones, below the bluff, but they all stood on its top in comfort, and the bluff was nowhere to be seen in all the moving waters.

  ‘The big fish turned and left, swimming away without looking back, but some said they saw it turn into a crow and fly away into the rain and darkness before it got out of sight.

  ‘So my people stayed there for another year, and they planted their corn, and it grew, and they were content, and got used to the rain, the waters of which had covered everything in all directions, as far as their eyes could see.

  ‘Then one day a year later it quit raining, and the sun came out and the waters began to drop away, so that first the trees on the bluff, then the top of the bluff, then the trees toward the bayou, then the saplings and the shrubs and grass all came into view as the sun dried everything out.

  ‘And my people noticed now that the mounds were very small, and that the crops were only a few inches tall, and that their canoes were the size of toys. They noticed also that the bluff and the trees were much higher than the mound, and they wondered greatly about the whole matter.

  ‘But the shaman had them give thanks to the catfish and the Old Ones who built the mounds, and the crow (if there was one) and to the miracle of the whole thing.

  ‘And so they harvested their little crops and picked up their toy canoes and they walked back many miles to where the village was and started all over again.

  ‘And they named this place the Great Big Small Place and they remembered it in their prayers until the white men made them quit praying to things they could see and hear.

  ‘All this happened in my father’s father’s great-great-grandfather’s time, and that is the way they told it to me. I see it has stopped raining.’

  Bessie looked around. It had stopped. There was the constant drip of water running off the tentflap, the sound of a small rivulet gurgling down the bluff. She didn’t know how long she had listened to Basket talk, his face shining in the glow of the lightning and the lamp.

  Ned and Washington were asleep. Leroy stared ahead of him.

  Bessie climbed to her feet, took the lamp, opened the tentflap and stepped outside. Her feet squished in the mud. There was a cool wind blowing from the north, and lightning still flashed in the east.

  The other tents were wet glows on the bluff line, light and shadows from the lamps inside them falling on the dripping boxes and the wheels of the trucks parked around them. Farther back toward the road, there was a single lamp burning at the LaTouche place. Away to the westnorthwest over the bayou, she could see the light from the boat landing in front of the Crimstead house.

  Below her she saw the dim outlines of the mounds under their tarps and covers.

  She saw too, in the darkness for the first time, that there was a slight depression, extensive in area, to the northwest of the mounds, where the ground sloped off toward the bayou. She had walked over it dozens of times on the way between Mound One and the connected mounds. She was sure it was marked on the contour maps.

  She turned back inside the tent, looking past the sleeping black men.

  ‘There was some kind of settlement here,’ she said.

  She looked wildly around.

  Bob Basket was gone, only a wet place on the ground cloth showing where he had sat.

  THE BOX VII

  Smith’s Diary

  *

  November 1

  I went to see Kilroy.

  I told him the brass told us to come up with a real longterm plan. Not like the seventy-year plan we’d started with, the one more than a hundred people had worked on.

  ‘Great,’ he said, ‘just great. How long?’

  ‘At least five hundred years,’ I said.

  ‘I’m not going to be around that long, and neither will any of us.’

  ‘That’s just the kind of plan they want, Specialist,’ I said. ‘How do we go about setting up anything that’ll take half a millennium? What are we supposed to do, kidnap Indian kids, brainwash ’em, set up an operation that’ll elect Stevenson in ’52 rather than Eisenhower? Or what?’

  ‘If I’m supposed to figure all this out,’ said Kilroy, ‘why am I just a grunt? I thought only officers had that much foresight.

  ‘It’s not just for them,’ I said. ‘It’s for me too.’

  ‘It’s you?’ he asked. ‘You want me to come up with a five-hundred-year plan for you? While I pull bunker guard and shitburning detail? For your amusement, or what?’

  ‘To see if there’s any reason for keeping up this whole charade,’ I said.

  He put down the bottle of Indian honey wine he’d been drinking from. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Free will versus determination? That kind of stuff?’

  ‘It’s not all of us, and everybody, anymore.’ I tried to make myself clear. ‘It’s just every one of us, alone. By ourselves. If there’s a plan, anything, it’ll be easier for all of us. Don’t you see?’

  ‘Yes. First thing is, we’ll have to make lots of babies. I’m ready!’

  ‘That’s pretty stupid, Kilroy,’ I said.

  ‘Probably. But for an officer, ma’am, you’ve got great legs.’

  ‘Uh,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll get on it,’ he said. ‘God knows I’ll have to think about this.’

  I started to go. Then I said, ‘Thank you.’

  ‘That’s what I’m here for,’ he said. And made a fake smile. Then he added, ‘You’re the only one who really cares about any of this. Not just the mission but what happens to us.’
>
  ‘Shut up,’ I said. ‘Get some sleep.’ Then I left.

  Leake VIII

  ‘The great mutations of the world are acted, our time may be too short for our designs.’

  –Browne, Urn Burial

  The canoes came across the River, row on row. They were full of guys dressed in their best feathers, their brightest jewelry, their gaudiest clothes.

  They carried their best weapons, too. Spears, atlatls, bows, axes, clubs, shields, reed and leather armor, and knives. They could have wrecked any bar in Hong Kong.

  But we were going out to meet the Huastecas for a ritual battle, a flower-fight they called it, and the way it was explained to me, the idea was to capture as many of the other guys as you could, not to kill them.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Took, as we watched the dugouts slide up the shore and the warriors jump out, whooping and hollering. ‘When you see some of our people knock one of the Huastecas down, jump on him a few times. Everybody will think you’re a fine fellow.’

  ‘What’s the purpose?’ I asked.

  Took looked at me. ‘Well, you can’t have wars with your own people, can you?’

  ‘What happens to the ones who are captured?’

  ‘Ours, or theirs?’

  ‘Uh, theirs.’

  ‘Oh, they ransom them, usually. Mostly for pretty stuff. Clothes, ornaments. The Huastecas make nice rings and things.’

  ‘What about ours?’

  ‘Well, we usually try to ransom them, and they do send some of them back, but not all.’

  ‘What happens to the ones they don’t send back?’

  ‘I guess they eat them,’ said Took.

  *

  We fanned out, maybe two thousand of us in all, as agreed. I knew what Custer must have felt like on that bluff over the Little Big Horn, only now I was part of it. We were a day out of the village, heading west. We skirted the edge of some bayous. We headed through open rolling grasslands toward the setting sun.

  At one bayou, Sun Man’s people, Took, and I broke away from the rest of the main group. We walked through water up to our knees, under cypresses and Spanish moss (I’ve got to think of another name for it) until we reached an opening in the waterway.

  The trees here grow in a circle maybe two hundred meters across. All except for one. It was the biggest cypress I’d ever seen in my life, maybe eighty meters tall, five hundred or a thousand years old, maybe older. It was nothing but a trunk, except for one limb that started halfway up. The top of the tree was missing.

  I noticed then that the Dreaming Killer and his Buzzard Cult people weren’t with us. I asked Took.

  ‘Religious differences,’ he said.

  Sun Man raised his arms and yelled three times, like he does every morning. I caught enough of his chant to know that he was calling on the Big Woodpecker. Then we marched back out of the swamps and rejoined the holiday crowd heading for the battle site.

  ‘That was the tree in which the Great Woodpecker sometimes sits,’ said Took.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘One of our great-great-grandfathers accidentally saw it one evening. He went blind, of course.’

  ‘Of course. Did he say how big it was?’

  ‘He said that before he went blind, he saw that it sat on the limb, and the top of its head was higher than the top of the tree trunk.’

  ‘That’s awfully big,’ I said. I had been expecting something maybe two meters tall.

  ‘Sure is,’ said Took-His-Time. He broke into some kind of song. Others took it up, including the Buzzard Cult people.

  *

  We watched their fires, and we knew they were watching ours. There was an old flood plain between two small bluffs about half a kilometer apart. We were on one, and the Huastecas were on the other. The battle would take place on the flat place between us tomorrow.

  ‘Better get some sleep,’ said Took, who had spread his skins out beside mine. We were eating a supper of jerky and ground cornmeal with a few walnuts mixed in. Took passed the waterskin over.

  ‘It could take all day, what with breaks for lunch and stuff,’ he said.

  ‘Pretty civilized.’

  ‘You won’t think so if you get caught, or off by yourself, which is the same thing,’ he said. ‘Stick close to a mob. If you get caught, they’ll probably come get you. Don’t let them cover your mouth, whatever you do. Keep yelling.’

  ‘Thanks. What really happens?’

  ‘Well, we sort of run together in a big bunch and hit each other, and drag off captives, then eat, then do it some more, and about two hours from sunset we all go home, and three days later we ransom, but that’s only chief man business. Our part will be over. If this were a real battle, we’d take heads instead of captives.’

  I watched the bright stars overhead through the glow of the fires. It was early spring, and still cool.

  I know it was just me, but I had trouble sleeping. Took called out in a dream. He woke up and looked at me.

  ‘My spirit is troubled,’ he said. He closed his eyes and was asleep again immediately.

  *

  ‘Yee! Yee! Yee!’ yelled Sun Man, facing east. Up and down our bluff, other Sun Men were doing the same thing.

  Not that everybody wasn’t awake anyway. Men had started moving around long before sunup. I know; I was one of them.

  I was sharpening the point on my javelin. I had my own survival knife with me, and was depending on my club, which was about half the size and shape of a Louisville Slugger. I was hoping I wouldn’t get close enough to anybody to have to use it.

  Sunlight came through a break between the clouds and the horizon. There were pines behind us, where we’d come from, and bayous past that. The land behind the Huastecas was more open. Far to left and right were sparse trees. The flood plain between us was smooth with sand and short grasses. It was about the closest thing to a playing field you could ask for.

  After we stuffed our faces, the Sun Men moved around, talking with each other. Our Sun Man came back to us. Some other Sun Man had been elected battle captain.

  ‘Wait for the signal,’ said Sun Man.

  We all filed up on the bluff. A like number of Huastecas faced us across the flat place. They started to rap their spears and clubs against their shields. I could barely make them out – feathered and furred headdresses, copper, maybe gold breastplates and armor. The racket increased, settled into a rhythm – chunk, chunk, chunk. It was my own heartbeat, my pulse. Jeez, those guys knew how to get on your nerves.

  The Huastecas hit their shields harder, louder. The booming came like surf across the flood plain, wave after wave.

  The Sun Man battle chief raised his arm. We were all quiet, tense. I licked my lips and regripped my club.

  The Huastecas came down the bluff like a gold and copper waterfall.

  ‘Go get ’em, boys!’ said Sun Man.

  We took off down the slope, whooping and hollering.

  *

  Our first hint that something was wrong came when a whole forest of arrows filled the sky from behind the Huastec bluff.

  Those who had them stopped and put their shields over their heads. I climbed under one with three other guys. ‘Quit shoving!’ someone yelled.

  The arrows whizzed half a meter into the ground around us, bounced off shields, stuck in people’s hands. There were screams.

  ‘Hey, you assholes!’ yelled Moe at the Huastecas. ‘You can’t use arrows!’

  They were still running toward us, and another rain of arrows came up like a curtain.

  Arrows also came from left and right.

  ‘Shit!’ yelled Curly.

  This time arrows bounced off shields and ricocheted into arms and legs and chests.

  ‘Hell with this!’ Larry said; he dropped his spear and unlimbered his ceremonial bow from across his back, stringing it in a swift motion. He put two arrows into the wall of advancing Huastecas.

  ‘They mean business,’ said Took quietly.

  We looked back toward the
bluff. The chief Sun Man was jumping up and down pointing to both sides.

  It was just like in an old Western movie. On three sides of us was a long continual line of Huastecas, with archers behind them. They seemed to have come from nowhere. Arrows sailed up again. The warriors running toward us stopped short, waiting for the arrows to fall on us.

  The noise was like hail on a tin roof.

  From under the shield with the other guys I saw the second wave of Huastecas start down the bluff – at least twice as many as in the first wave.

  ‘Every man for himself!’ yelled Sun Man. ‘This is death stuff!’

  The Buzzard Cultists let out a tremendous yell and sprang out from under their shields straight toward the Huastecas.

  Then the Meshicas were on us.

  *

  I saw a guy with a jaguar headdress raise a club so I pushed my javelin at him. It went right in. He was as surprised as I was, dropped his club and held his stomach around the spear shaft. He fell down, taking the short spear with him.

  Then some sonofabitch hit me in the face with his shield as hard as he could. I didn’t have time to think. I was down and all I could see were his feet. So I smashed one of them with my club. He fell on top of me. I tried to get out from under him so he couldn’t kill me.

  He turned dead weight. I got out from under. Somebody had stuck a javelin in his eye.

  I pulled my spear out of the guy it was still sticking in. He gave me a startled look. He was still kneeling and holding his stomach. Guys were fighting all around him. He paid no attention.

  I waded into six or eight guys who were fighting and started hitting all the ones with eagle feathers and jaguar skins.

  *

  Horns and bugle things were blowing. Drums rattled off in the distance. There were grunts and screams all around. Dust hung in the air. The sun glinted off metal. You couldn’t see jack shit.

  A spear came at me, got larger, stayed the same, went past me a meter away. I saw the Huasteca who threw it and started for him. Five or six of his buddies came out of nowhere and started for me. Two of them sprouted arrows from the chest.

  ‘Sonofabitches!’ said Larry, behind me. He threw down his bow. His quiver was empty. He had time to get his obsidian-studded club out before the four Meshicas got to us.