Говард Уолдроп: Them Bones

The mouth and ears were hidden in the hair. Only the eyes, black like two pools of tar, showed clearly through.

It dwarfed everything. The frozen pool and the landscape looked too small to contain it. Nothing that big was alive.

We stood for a moment before it noticed us. It turned to face us, its tree-trunk legs crunching ice, and stood stock still. So did we.

It was forty meters away. It raised its trunk and blew out a clot of water in a snorting spray, then made a noise I’ll never forget, half tuba, half diesel, which turned into a bass note that hung on the wind.

I felt some of the frozen mist from its trunk on my face. I really wanted to run then but couldn’t, any more than you can run in a dream.

It looked at us with those tar-drop eyes, then turned slowly, oh so slowly, and moved across the shallow end of the pond toward a dark tangle of woods to the west.

It stopped once, behemoth, leviathan, monster, and raised its trunk and called again, tusks out. It had a red fringe of beard around its mouth, streaked with black and gray. The tusks hung straight out while it trumpeted, three meters from the ground.

Its call echoed through the woods and the white countryside. There was a crashing of tree limbs and thump of heavy footfalls and it was gone.

The only sign that it had been there was the broken surface of the pond where chunks of ice washed slowly back and forth.

It called again, far away, then we heard no more.

Snow began to hit us in the face, a few flakes at first, then more. The wind picked up. We turned and walked back toward home.

My heart was as loud as a drum. I wondered why the others couldn’t hear it.

‘Not many of those left,’ said Dreaming Killer.

‘Damn good thing,’ said Moe.

The director showed up a few hours later with the office staff. They came in four trucks and two sedans. The top of the bluff was beginning to look like a Ford dealership.

The storm threatened. The trench had reached four feet deep on the northwest side of the big mound. Kincaid was poking around in the test cut.

The director was a small man named Dr Perch. He was nattily dressed in a suit and a floppy-brimmed hat. He wore thick glasses. He had been chairman of the anthropology department since there had been one. (There was a joke that he had held the measuring tape for Squier and Davis when they were researching their Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley , which had come out in 1848. That wasn’t true, but he had helped Cyrus Thomas with the Report on the Mound Explorations of the Bureau of Ethnology , which took up 730 pages of the Twelfth Annual Report of 1890–91. And he had not been in the field since then.)

Bessie led Dr Perch to the sorting tent. She showed him the equine skulls, the cartridges, the potsherds and the mound profiles. Perch studied them without saying a word.

Wind whipped through the campsite, the tents shaking like sails on a ship. Across the bayou the storm gathered, like a nightfall in reverse.

Dr Perch said, ‘Looks like a real blow coming. We’ll go back to the hotel. Make sure everything’s battened down so we can start photographing tomorrow. I’m going to get on the phone to the governor’s office, although he’s on some damn speech-making tour over in Mississippi somewhere. You’d think he’d have more sense than to leave the state after they tried to impeach him five times this spring. He must have all the legislators locked up in the parish jail.’

‘What are you going to do?’ asked Bessie.

‘Keep those damn floodgates closed above and open below, if I can. That’s a start.’

‘People are going to be upset if this thing goes wrong,’ she said.

Perch looked at her over his thick glasses. ‘If this thing goes wrong, and we both know what we mean by that, you, Kincaid, and I are all looking for jobs. I don’t believe this stuff’ – he pointed around the sorting tent – ‘for one minute. But if you and Kincaid and Jameson are putting your jobs on the line, so am I. And I’m too old to look for honest work.’

Perch and his staff took two of the cars and one truck with them back to town.

Kincaid called from the mound.

‘Bessie, come get me the minute Perch gets here.’

‘He’s already gone,’ she yelled to him, then walked down the bluff.

Kincaid tried to light his pipe with one of the big kitchen matches he always carried. Grit flew into Bessie’s eyes; the wind picked up again.

‘What did he think?’ asked Kincaid, giving up on the pipe.

‘He’s calling the governor about the floodgates.’

Kincaid laughed. ‘I can see the governor letting farmers drown because of what Perch says. I doubt the governor knew there were Indians in this state once.’

‘Where’s Jameson?’ asked Bessie.

‘Under the tarp on Mound 2B. He wanted another look before the rain. Who’s that?’

Bessie looked around where Kincaid stared. Up on the bluff, amid all the activity, one person stood still. Bessie didn’t recognize him as from the staff. He was gazing down at the mounds. He wore a tall-crowned western hat, a dark vest and khaki shirt. His pants were patched. He held a knapsack under one arm.

‘The curious are here already,’ said Kincaid. ‘May be one of the LaTouche’s. Better go find out. I’ll take another quick run through the trench before we get the tarps down.’ He sighted toward the storm. A lightning bolt silhouetted the woods on the other side of the water.

Bessie hurried up toward the tents. She met Washington on the way down.

‘Know who that is?’ she asked, pointing at the stranger.

‘No, ma’am, but William was talkin’ to him a few minutes ago.’

William was coming out of the sorting tent.

‘Oh, him? He said his name was Bob Basket. He looks just like an Indian to me, Miss Bessie. He said he heard we were tearing up them mounds and wanted to take one last look at them. I told him he could stand right on the edge of the bluff there, but don’t get in anybody’s way, and don’t go down to the mounds. He’s been standing there for an hour or so.’

There was a frying noise from across the bayou. A gray slab of rain stretched both ways as far as the eye could see. The woods disappeared, and the faraway tin roof of the Crimstead house faded from sight. Then the waters of the Suckatoncha buckled and seethed with rain on the far side.

‘Get everything covered up,’ yelled Bessie to the crews on the bluff.

She ran to check the windows on the office staff trucks. She put one windshield up and snapped the canvas cover in place. A few raindrops the size of fists beat the ground around her, sending up little crowns of dust.

Thunder screamed close by.

The wind and rain hit her in level sheets.

Bessie dove for the nearest tent.

Smith’s Diary

They call us the Music People.

I never thought about it. In any kind of primitive society, you don’t have music unless you have people making it right then and there. Without music, there’s nothing but natural noises; people talking, birdsongs, squawks, all that.

That must have been the first thing they noticed about us.

What we noticed about them first is that they don’t look like movie Indians.

They’re tattooed, a lot of the ones we’ve seen. They have feathers, but not many birds. A lot of them have shaved heads, the men, that is; the few women we’ve seen have their hair up in a sort of bun or French twist on the top or sides of their heads, keeping it out of the way.