Говард Уолдроп - Them Bones

‘Look at this,’ said Kincaid.

The left arm of another skeleton lay exposed to the right of the first.

‘Right about there, I’d say,’ said Bessie, pointing to the left of the first skeleton she worked on, ‘and up a little.’

‘Just what I was thinking,’ said Kincaid. He began to dig where she had pointed. Soon he had the right arm bones of another skeleton exposed to view.

‘Jameson,’ he called softly.

Jameson came around from his work on the other side of the mound’s test trench. He had his hat off, but his eyes were bright like a squirrel’s. He smiled.

‘It’s a trophy mound, isn’t it?’ said Jameson.

‘I think so,’ said Kincaid. ‘I surely do think so. How many skulls have you found yet?’

‘None. They don’t have heads.’

They both looked up at the conical burial mound which sat atop the platform mound. It was untouched as yet, except for the two-foot profile cut.

‘I vote we go in there,’ said Bessie.

‘Get the photographer and artist down there on those skeletons,’ said Kincaid.

Thunder rumbled. ‘Shit!’ said Jameson.

Smith’s Diary

I was talking with Colonel Spaulding in his bunker.

‘When I was a boy,’ he said, taking a book out of his personal locker, ‘this book was it.’ It was The Book of Mormon.

‘You were raised a Mormon?’

‘The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints,’ he said, almost automatically. ‘I still do that, listen to me. And I haven’t been to services in thirty years.’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘Well, you’ve probably never read it,’ he said. ‘Most people never have, never will. But parts of it keep coming back to me.

‘See, there are a couple of narratives within narratives. It took me a long time to realize that as a kid. The golden plates were supposedly found at Cumorah, but they also recapitulate earlier records also buried there, from an even earlier time.’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, the earliest migration involved prophets who sailed from Jerusalem and came to America. They built great cities here, but fell to fighting among themselves. They divided into the Lamanites and the Jaredites. The Lamanites were punished, their skins turned red, and all their cities fell to waste and ruin.’

‘Those are the Indians?’

Spaulding laughed. ‘I know, sounds like the old Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, or lost Phoenicians, or Egyptians, doesn’t it? When I was a kid, I was hot on archeology. But I’ve forgotten most of it, like I thought I’d forgotten most of The Book of Mormon. Seems some stuck with me, though.’

‘It would be a lot easier if it were true,’ I said. ‘Maybe Arnstein can go speak with them?’

Spaulding laughed, a different tone. ‘From what I remember, those theories about lost Romans and such came about because the early white settlers who found the mounds and earthworks couldn’t believe the Indians had built them. The only Indians they knew were the ones still in the area, who hadn’t moved there in many cases until fifty years before the whites got there. The Indians didn’t know where the mounds came from, either. So the settlers thought they predated the Indians themselves. And were a much more advanced civilization than the Indians could have had.

‘So they searched around for examples of Old World civilizations who had ever used mounds and high fortifications. That was nearly everybody, of course – Welsh, Mongol, Roman, Egyptian, all of them came in for their turn as the original Mound-builders.’

‘These people we’re fighting are certainly better at warfare than we thought they would be,’ I said.

‘The old adage is that primitive doesn’t mean stupid,’ said Colonel Spaulding.

‘Shooting at us is one thing,’ I said. ‘But I think it was the radio business that really upset everybody.’

‘Well, we deserve it,’ said Spaulding, with an anger I didn’t know he had. ‘We’ve disrupted their lives. We killed them as surely as if we held weapons to their heads. They can’t understand we didn’t want it to happen.’ He went quiet, staring down at his desk.

‘We’ve seen enough killing. We’ve seen the whole world killed. Now we’re killing the past, too. None of us wanted this, least of all the Indians.’ He picked up The Book of Mormon again, opened it .

I stood up. ‘I’d better check the guard.’

‘Certainly, Marie,’ he said. ‘Send Putnam over here, will you?’

I saluted and left. Sometimes Spaulding was hard to figure out.

I never saw so much stuff traded in my life. Skins, furs, food, shells, art and pipes went into the ship, and out came beads, knives, tools, cloth, copper, and brass.

I helped as much as I could, going from one haggle to another. There seemed to be no set price for anything on either side. I kept busy, and watched the interaction of the merchants and the people of the village.

The Northerners spoke Greek as badly accented as my own. The turbaned merchants spoke an Asiatic Greek, a lot like that of the Turkish Cypriots. But strange things had happened to it – idioms were lost on me, lots of referents to arid lands, deserts, but also whales and ice-cold water.

They had their own translators who spoke a downriver or crossriver speech, Indians who dressed half merchant, half local. There was lots of gesturing, some common signs and symbols, much body language.

The whole thing was like a refresher course at the Tower of Babel.

Somehow things got traded and commerce went on. I looked to the boat and saw a merchant come out and shoot the sun with a sextant, all brass and enamel.

Sun Man looked up. ‘Noon,’ he said.

In the middle of the afternoon, the whistle on the ship blew and everybody picked up their goods and went back into the village or the ship.

Aroun el Hama and merchants and Northerners accompanied us back to the huts.

Took got into step beside me.

‘We’ll feast them in the village, then they’ll feast us on the ship tonight. There’ll be a little trading tomorrow. Then they’ll trade upriver and hit us back on the way down in a moon or so.’

The fun was already starting. People were tapping on drums and tootling on flutes. One of the merchants had a guitar-looking thing with only five strings.

About a third of the way to the plaza, my horse whinnied over in its pen.

The merchants froze as stiff as Larry, Curly, and Moe had the first time they heard it.

‘I must have trading fever,’ said el Hama. ‘I thought I heard a horse.’

‘You did,’ I said. ‘It’s mine.’

For a moment I thought he was going to cry.

‘Could we see it?’ he asked.

I led them to it. El Hama and the others gentled it down, then began patting it and talking excitedly in Arabic.

‘We have brought no horses to these shores yet,’ said el Hama. ‘Though they plan to begin trading them soon, up around the Eastern Ocean. Where did you get such an animal?’

‘It’s a long story,’ I said. ‘I have thousands of things to ask you, but they can wait. Would you like to ride him?’

‘All I have is yours,’ he said, bowing.

I put the bridle on the horse. El Hama sprang up on his back with the grace of a man half his age.

I opened the pen. El Hama guided the horse out onto the plaza to the cheers of the onlookers, put it into an easy canter. Then he turned it, brought it back to where we stood.