Говард Уолдроп: Them Bones

‘I didn’t mean to burn your forests,’ I said. ‘I’m bringing Took-His-Time home. I’m bringing the raiment back to the temple. I’ll never touch it again as long as I live.’

‘Easy for you to say,’ said the dooming voice. It was quiet a moment.

‘Tell them all,’ it began, and its voice had changed, ‘tell them all a great judgment has come on them, and that I can’t help them any more.

‘All the gods are going tonight. We will not be back. Tell them they are on their own, tell them …’ And here the voice changed again, became a little less godlike, ‘tell them Hamboon Bokulla was right, he and the others. Tell them Death is God now; he is alive, he is walking. Tell them, Yazoo, that I wish them well.’

The great shadow lifted from the water. The moon came back. The sound of flapping wings, huge, close, grew lower, farther away to the west, was gone.

I heard its cry from far off, once, twice, sounding like ‘Good god, good god.’

‘Good God!’ I yelled. ‘Good God!’

The sun was coming up. The fire was dying all around. I pulled Took from my left shoulder to change him to the other.

He was dead.

They were losing the battle.

Even with the highway crews and their machinery, the water crept up the dam.

The state water people would neither close the gates upstream nor open those down. Rivers were out of their banks for miles, farms were being covered and lost. The Crimstead house across the way was swallowed up – the state police had come the day before to help them evacuate.

Crowds had come to watch since the governor had paid his visit. LaTouche was charging them a dime apiece to watch. Two state troopers had been sent to keep them up on the bluff, out of the mound sites.

Perch had caught a bad cold. They had made him go back to the Dixie Hotel. Their own work crews were reinforcing the dam. The highway crew was leaving; they were needed to save lives, keep bridges intact.

‘Just two more days,’ said Jameson. ‘Maybe we can find out in two more days.’ He looked up at the rain. ‘We’ll have both mounds down to the ground by then. It’s too damn wet to do anything right!’

None of them, Thompson included, had had more than a few hours’ sleep for the last two days.

Kincaid and Jameson had removed the conical mound, then started on the platform. All the grave goods were in two tents now. Broken pottery, pipes, weapons, the breastplate and head decoration of beaten copper, unidentifiable rusted things, more cartridges, shells, beaten gold ornaments were in the sorting tent.

The second was full of skeletons, the first they’d exposed from the platform mound, one of the horses, the upright chief’s skeleton. Some of the skulls, exhibiting exit wounds, were in there among them.

The weather had turned the others to powder as they were uncovered.

The cook tent now covered the platform mound. Kincaid’s tent, and one other, were over the horse mound.

Water had begun to trickle in through the sandbags. Kincaid sent the work crews to fill more and stack them.

The crowd of onlookers squealed and moved back on the bluff. Their cars, trucks and wagons clogged the highway turnoff. Rumours ran through the crowd ten times a day – they’d found a mound filled with gold, with giants, with elephants, with a wagon made of silver. Washington brought the latest gossip from the crowd to them every hour or so.

‘How that stuff starts, I don’t know,’ said Bessie.

Thompson was studying a long piece of rust. ‘This could have been a sword,’ he said.

‘Or a rifle,’ said Bessie.

Thompson looked at her. She flipped her field notebook, making sure each specimen was catalogued by its proper grid mark. She put the book down on the camp table.

‘Dammit! We don’t know any more than we did the first day!’ she said.

‘You’ve got the chief, and the ID tags.’

‘That’s not the answer. That’s more the question,’ she said. There were oohing noises outside. Then yells near the mound. She stood up. She opened the tentflap. The skies were gray and rainswept. Down near the horse mound, several of the diggers were running back from the dam. A small jet of water curved out from it.

‘Pull the tents,’ yelled Kincaid nearby. ‘Get everybody up here!’ He stepped in, wet as an otter, his eyes red-rimmed. He slung his wet raincoat off.

‘It’s all lost,’ he said to Bessie. ‘We’ve got everything we’re going to find down there. The dam’s going. We’ll lose a few horse bones, some skeletons, maybe more grave goods. But there’s no answer down there. We’ll have to piece one together from what we’ve got here.’

‘I’ve come to the same –’ she began.

There were whoops and hollers down the bluff. Kincaid stepped into the rain, yelled. ‘Get those kids outta there! The dam’s gonna go! Hey you! Troopers! Get –’ He began to cough, great coughs that turned into ragged sobs.

Bessie held him while he cried.

‘Jameson, I need a drink,’ said Kincaid after a moment. ‘People let their goddam kids down there. They want them killed, I guess. I’m going to have a big drink and watch the dam burst. Coming with me?’ He and Jameson left.

In a minute, she heard ‘Potato Head Blues’ crank up on the phonograph.

She turned. Thompson had his head turned at an odd angle. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.

He went to the table, turned her field book right side up.

‘Oh, I see. It’s the tents. For a minute, I thought you were drawing a defense perimeter.’

Something went through Bessie like it had the night Bob Basket disappeared in the storm.

‘What did you say?’

‘I see now. Nothing.’

‘What did you say ?’

‘Your notebook. I looked at it upside down. It looked like a defense perimeter, a pentangle. Center command post, five bunkers around it. For defending ground like this. I see now it’s the mound, and two of the tents on the bluff, and these three things marked “shallow pits”.’

‘If you were in one of those, and wanted to hide something, where would you put it?’ she asked.

‘You mean in combat? Under siege?’

‘Yes.’

He looked at the page a moment. ‘One of the bunkers. Under a bunker wall. They’d go by it on the way in. They’d search your command post with a fine tooth comb.’

‘Grab your shovel,’ said Bessie.

They could hear the water, up higher than their heads. They were in the one shallow pit beyond the mounds inside the dam wall. The dam loomed like a frozen wave, its sandbagged top like bad teeth.

The crowd watched them expectantly. There were kids’ footprints all around where they dug.

‘Little hellions,’ said Bessie.

‘Uh, I don’t like that breach in the wall over there, Bessie,’ said Thompson. The small gurgle was now a steady dirty flow. Rain fell into their faces. The top of the bluff was a mushroom bed of umbrellas and sheets with faces under them.

‘What are we looking for?’

‘Anything,’ she said. ‘We won’t find it. Give a yell when the wall gives way.’

‘Before then,’ he said.

They worked on in the rain. ‘Potato Head Blues’ floated from the camp, made them work faster. The drainage pit the highway people dug was filling. Soon the water would rise and creep into the pit where they dug.

‘How will we know when we find anything?’

‘You’ve been digging through post mold for the last five minutes,’ she said. ‘Lots of it, more than for a wall.’

There was a scream from the bluff. Some sandbags slid down the inside of the dam wall. Water sheeted in behind them.

‘Bingo!’ said Thompson. He put down his shovel. ‘Keep digging,’ said Bessie. He picked his shovel back up, dug in the wet earth.