Говард Уолдроп: Them Bones

‘Did Miss Bessie tell you what I found?’ asked William, an old black man. He was dressed in shapeless clothes and wore shapeless shoes with bunion slits cut in them.

‘She says you found us a horse, William,’ said Kincaid.

‘She didn’t believe me at first, either, Dr. Kincaid. But my uncle Bodie used to work at a slaughterhouse in Memphis when I was a kid, and I used to watch them dress out everything. I reckon I seen more cow skulls and pig heads than you’ll ever see. And horse skulls, too. Ain’t no mistaking one, no siree.’

‘You probably have seen more, William,’ said Kincaid. His face took on a troubled look again. ‘Since I deal mostly with a time before the horse was brought back to America.’

Kincaid took the lantern and eased sideways into the test trench. He knelt, using a small brush on the dirt of the trench wall.

No one said anything. A mosquito went into Bessie’s nose; she snorted and waved her hand in front of her face. The bullfrogs had calmed but the night was full of gleeper sounds. A dog barked far away, over on the Skirville property to the northeast, beyond the barbed wire fence that crossed the old bayou terrace. From there the slow flowing waters turned to trace a course toward the Mississippi River.

Kincaid stepped out of the trench and opened the preservation kit. He picked up a bottle of amber acetone, two one-inch brushes, and an ice pick bent into a curve. He stuck a roll of gauze into his left shirt pocket.

‘It’s a horse, all right,’ he said. ‘I want to go over all the survey notes, and your stratigraphy charts first thing in the morning, Bessie. What time’s sunup, William?’

‘5:32 a.m., Dr. Kincaid.’

‘Everybody up at 4:45, eat, and have them leaning on their shovels right here when that sun comes up on that bluff.’

‘Sounds like you want some powerful digging done.’

‘Before you and the boys are through,’ said Kincaid, ‘you might have to dig up this whole parish.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Get some sleep, William, because none of us might get any for the next week or so.’

‘I thought we was only going to be here till Thursday, then move up to Pecania,’ said William.

‘Plans might change,’ said Kincaid.

‘Yes, sir. Holler if you need me, Doctor. Miss Bessie.’ He went off toward the bluff and the tents.

‘You, too, Bessie,’ said Kincaid. ‘I hope the first thing we do when we widen this trench tomorrow morning is to find an intrusive burial coming in from the other side. Because what’s bothering you right now, and me too, is how a horse got into an undisturbed thirteenth century burial mound.’

He turned back to the trench and went in. He puffed on his pipe and began to work, dipping the brush into the acetone, coating the thing in front of him.

‘Good night,’ said Bessie. Kincaid grunted. Bessie walked up the path, taking care to avoid the grid stakes.

She stood on top of the bluff for a few minutes, watching the lighted trench where Kincaid worked. The lantern cast his shadow up across the face of the larger mound, making it seem to move and jump in the night.

She went back to her tent, closed the netting and took off her clothes without lighting the lamp. There was a mosquito in the tent. She knew it would start to suck her dry as soon as she went to sleep.

After a while, the workers grew quiet in their tents. A dog barked occasionally from the road leading in past the Latouche farmhouse.

Some time later, the moon came up, lighting the campsite and the bluff.

Bessie slept fitfully.

She awoke in the middle of the night. There was a dim light on in Kincaid’s tent, which she could see through the mosquito netting. Louis Armstrong was on the phonograph again, still playing ‘Potato Head Blues’ but quietly now, so that only the loud parts carried. Kincaid must have put the soft needle on the tone arm, something he rarely did.

Bessie went back to sleep.

The sun was almost up. The east was gold and pink where the dawn light hit the bottom of the clouds. Bessie had gotten bacon, eggs, toast, and a mug of terrible chicory coffee from Eli, one of the diggers who was paid two dollars extra a week to cook. She carried the plate and coffee to Kincaid’s tent. There was no music playing.

‘Knock knock,’ she said.

‘Come in, Bessie! Just the woman I want to see.’

‘You’re especially chipper this morning.’ She stopped. On the camp table before her was the horse skull, empty eye sockets staring vacantly at her. The skull was covered in varnish and was a dull greasy yellow colour.

‘Was thin as paper in some places,’ said Kincaid. ‘William’s a good digger. Tell me what you see here.’ He pointed to the center of the skull, just above the eyes.

‘A hole,’ she said. She put her breakfast down on a chair, drank a gulp of the peppery coffee.

‘Use this pencil,’ said Kincaid. He handed her a Venus #2. ‘Unfortunately, you’ll find that it goes all the way through and exits near the foramen magnum.’

Bessie slid the pencil in the hole carefully, pushed it in. It stopped. She moved the pencil and pushed it until she heard it tap the table.

She examined the hole.

‘It doesn’t look like it was drilled,’ she said.

‘Go on.’

‘Couldn’t have been a projectile point.’ She carefully slid the skull to the edge of the table until she could look up from beneath and see the back of the skull and the exit hole. ‘That would have either shattered the back of the skull or have been shattered itself.’

‘You’re wonderful, Bessie,’ said Kincaid. Then he handed her a globby nodule of dirt, green and corroded-looking.

‘What’s that?’ she asked. She took her small brush from her pocket. She brushed away tiny hard pellets of dirt. Something was exposed – blue-green, hollow and cylindrical.

‘A hair ornament?’ she asked. ‘A copper pipe-stem? That would be something new this far south. Shetrone found some in Ohio last year. Wait. This metal looks too thin to have been cold beaten.’ She peered at it, end on.

‘It’s the other end you should be looking at,’ said Kincaid. He smiled. ‘I have another, just like it, here. I found them both under the skull while I was working on it. Sorry I couldn’t leave them for you to find.’ He handed her a greenish metal cylinder the size of her little finger.

‘We’re in trouble if we don’t find signs of an intrusion, Bessie. I’m going to call the University and get the head of the survey here anyway. Even if we do figure out some explanation.’

Bessie turned the object over. One end hollow, the other closed, with a raised rim on the back. In the center of the rimmed end was a lump.

‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ said Bessie. ‘Either on a dig or in the literature.’

‘Sure you have, Bessie. You see them every time you go hunting.’

She looked down at the horse’s skull and the hole above its eyes. She looked back at the object in her hand again.

‘What are we going to do, Bessie?’ asked Kincaid. His eyes were serious through the lenses of his glasses.

She-realized that what she held in her hand, green, corroded with time, was a brass rifle cartridge.

I’m no Audie Murphy.

So when it was time, I grabbed the reins of the horse, took a deep breath and stepped through the time portal.

There was every chance the horse and I would appear inside a B–25 Mitchell bomber, or a little earlier, a bulldozer or steamroller. Or in the walls of a portable building. They’d assumed that hadn’t happened, because they had no record of an explosion that destroyed half of Louisiana during World War II.