Говард Уолдроп - Them Bones

Smoking accounted for about fifty percent of a guy’s time. Took had a thriving business which I was slowly learning. He made all the pipes for individuals, for the religious ceremonies, for nabob Sun Men in far villages across the River. Every guy in the village had his own private tobacco patch that he cultivated. You didn’t touch another person’s patch. Each patch had a secret combination of herbs, tobacco, and weeds that the owner grew and smoked. Some of them smelled like burning tire factories to me.

Took-His-Time, being the guy who made all the pipes for everybody, was not allowed to smoke. It was part of the religion.

We carried our gear through the village, out the gate and down to the River, where the canoe we had fixed up the day before waited. Several people waved good-bye to us.

‘Paddling up this River,’ I said, ‘is like rowing through molasses.’

Took looked at me from the bow, his eyebrow raised.

‘Uh, honey,’ I said, finding the nearest Greek word. He and I still did most of our talking in Greek, although I had picked up enough of the mound-builder talk to sound at least like a simpleton when I talked. I could say things like ‘I own spear. Spear very straight.’ I could understand a lot more than I could say, except when people got excited (which happened fairly often) and talked fast. Pretty good for three months, I thought.

‘It’s a lot better coming back down,’ said Took. ‘Then it’s like paddling through olive oil.’

When we camped out the first night, it was like we were the only two people on the continent. We were on a little raised place back from the water. In the summer here the mosquitoes would only have been the size of moths, not the size of sparrows like they would be down at the River itself.

We had a fire going. Though it was late winter, there were still plenty of night noises. Alligators grunted, frogs chugged, birds screamed, bats flew over. There were snuffles and snorts all around.

Overhead the stars were like frost. Orion, the mighty hunter, bent his bow across the sky. On Cyprus during the blackouts, even after the Big War back Up There, the nights had never been this dark, the stars never so many or so bright.

Took’s face was outlined in the starlight.

‘What do you call that?’ I asked, pointing at what I thought was Mars.

‘I don’t call it anything much,’ he said. ‘The Traders call it Ares. The Northerners call it Loke. When we call it anything, we call it the One That Moves Backward Every Two Years.’

‘Ever wonder why it does that?’ I asked.

‘Because the Woodpecker told it to,’ said Took.

‘When you were with the Traders as a boy, did the Traders talk about the stars?’

‘All the time. They were great sailors, used them to navigate and tell time and things. Even so, I had to tell them they were way off.’

‘How?’

‘Well, I used to count the days I was with them, and when I got into the seven hundreds, I knew it had been more than two years. One time they were talking about calendars and dates and stuff; they said something that was wrong and I told them.

‘“What do you mean?” they asked me.

‘“There’s been half a day extra since you swiped me,” I said.

‘“What do you mean, half a day?” they asked.

‘“Well, every four years there’s an extra day.” I said.

‘“We’ve been using this here calendar for five hundred years now,’ they said.

‘“Then you’re probably planting your crops in late fall,” I said.

‘“You’re twelve years old and a heathen, what do you know?” they said.

‘I told them to look up in the sky at the One That Moves Backward Every Two Years, and decide who knows more. I wasn’t as good at it as Sun Man’s granduncle used to be, but I told them we had this big carved rock two days’ journey downriver from the village I was born in that told us when the extra days were coming. Somebody had copied it from the Huastecas a long time ago. All our people go down there and figure out when to do things by it. They didn’t believe it, of course.

‘That was fifteen years ago, before they really started trading with the Huastecas. Since then they’ve had this big conference with their priests, and all the East has thrown away its old calendars and got new ones.

‘They no longer plant in the winter, I’m told.’ Took leaned back on his skins and went to sleep.

I watched the pale dot of Mars, like a red nailhead driven into the sky.

The second and third days out, the villages got fewer and farther apart on the west bank of the River, while they got thicker on the east.

On the west the land lay flat with fewer trees. We passed a herd of buffalo, thousands and thousands, stretching as far as the eye could see, on the third morning upriver.

‘They’re gonna eat good this spring,’ said Took, pointing toward the next village on the west side of the River. ‘The buffalo must have come in late yesterday, otherwise hunters would have been at them by now.’

The villagers way across the River to the east were already putting out canoes. They’d seen the buffaloes. Their village was two or three times as large as Took’s, with dozens of mounds, some of them fifteen meters tall.

‘They build ’em right, don’t they?’ I said, pointing.

‘Way upriver,’ said Took, ‘they got a place Kohoka, bigger than all the villages put together. There’s a mound there five times taller, twenty times as long as that one. They’ve been working on it a thousand years, though, and there must be fifty thousand of them at it. They should have run out of dirt by now.’

I whistled.

‘Hell, Yaz,’ said Took. ‘Give us fifty thousand people, we’d build a mound so big you’d have to put a trench in it for the moon to roll through.’

On the fourth night we turned up a small tributary and made camp about four kilometers up it. There were already a couple of canoes put in up and down the bank, but the fires were already out and the people were asleep.

‘Go to sleep, Yaz,’ said Took, bedding down in the bottom of the canoe. ‘We’ll need it tomorrow.’

When we woke up the next morning, Took put me to work building a raft.

‘Why make a raft first?’ I asked. ‘We don’t have anything to put on it yet.’

‘We make the raft first,’ said Took, ‘because when we get back here with the cargo, we’ll be too tired to build a raft. Trust me.’

While I dragged dead wood down and lashed it together, Took was shaping long wedges out of hard wood sapling and working them in a fire he’d made. We made good progress. By noon, Took waved me to follow him. He picked up his wedges, a maul, and rawhide ropes.

We went through a small wood, following a hardpacked trail, then came out to a clearing. Above it was a small hill, and on the hill two or three guys were hammering away at the rocks.

We climbed through small rocks and scree. They hurt my feet, even through my boots. How Took did it in his moccasins, I don’t know.

‘Hey, Took-His-Time!’ yelled one of the men who was flailing away at a rock five times his size.

‘Hey, Tree-Gum!’ said Took, going up to him. ‘Meet my friend Yazoo.’ We held wrists a second.

He was a wiry old man, and he was farting so much I thought he had frogs in his breechcloth.

‘Breaking the kid in?’ asked Tree-Gum.

‘Sort of.’ Took looked at the sweating old man. ‘Aren’t you too old to be doing this by yourself?’

‘Oh, I’m not taking a load, I’m getting a heart-stone.’

Took looked at the three-ton boulder. ‘Well, we’ll be here all day. Come over to our fire tonight.’