Говард Уолдроп - Them Bones

‘It’ll take months to dry the pages and separate them,’ said the curator.

‘We’ve got nothing but time,’ said Bessie.

On the side of the box, beneath the coat of pitch hardened to an amberlike material, and the cracked layer that had once been shellac, was a message in smeared grease pencil:

KILROY WAS HERE

and underneath, another hand had written

BUT NOT FOR MUCH LONGER

Light cold rain pattered against the top of the bluff. The wind was from the north. Cold gusts whipped Bessie’s rubberized raincoat against her legs. The weather had changed. There would be sleet before nightfall, possibly snow by tomorrow night. The weather was as crazy as the rest of the year had been.

She looked down at the dark waters of the bayou. The top of the mounds was already under four feet of water – all the work of the summer obliterated as if it were a slate wiped clean. There was nothing left of the site but the specimens in the museum, her and Kincaid’s notes, the Box. All the trenching and leveling, the work, the coffer dam against the rising flood was down there, known to catfish and gar.

There must have been a last stand and a final massacre. Just over there had been where the Box was buried. Right down there were the mounds where the old chief had had their bodies piled and the heads taken home. It was also where they brought him back when he died and buried him some years later, on top of the dead in their mounds, next to their horses.

Two cultures must have clashed here, neither able to understand the other, or help the other. A small drama in the scheme of things. Now traces of both were gone, relics of two doomed groups. One wiped out by their ancestors, the ancestors themselves then swept aside by the roll of time.

Bessie shivered for the future, for all futures. She leaned against Captain Thompson, who was lost in his own thoughts.

‘None of it was fair,’ she said.

‘Of course not.’ He watched the sleeted waters of the bayou.

‘They should have let us find out more. They should have closed down the whole state. They should have let Baton Rouge drown. They …’

‘You know all of it, don’t you?’ he asked.

‘No! I want to find out why it happened. I want to understand !’

‘They killed each other. They couldn’t get along.’

‘No. The ones from the future, up there. Why couldn’t they have been wiser, kinder? Something? They came from a time when …’

‘I don’t know. Why do people do anything?’ Thompson threw his cigarette out in a spinning arc off the bluff. The twisting red dot winked out in the waters.

‘A copy of the report’s back at my hotel room. You can read it tomorrow,’ he said to her. ‘I wrote down just what happened, and what you found. I sent photostats of all the things we could copy. Kincaid will send a copy of your final papers. That’s all I can do.’

‘Will it make any difference?’

‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘It’ll be strange reading for some archivist. Somebody might want to do something with it, but what can they do? They can’t change the past.’

‘But the future! That can be changed.’

‘I hope so. But we don’t even know the terminology, half of it. People at the War Department will start asking about what some of the things are, and I’ll try to tell them what I think they are. Then they’ll ask you about all the Buck Rogers stuff. I’m sure Amazing Stories or Weird Tales will be interested, but that’s about it. That’s the kind of reaction I’ll be getting.’

‘But proof. We’ve got it.’

‘Look,’ he said. He put his hands on her shoulders. ‘It’s all very fine, what you have, for a museum, for what the average bloke thinks. But when you start waving it around in public, that’s when you get in trouble. You know that. Look at that … what, the … elephant thing….’

‘Cincinnati tablet.’

‘That. That’s been nothing but trouble, and still nobody’s convinced. All you can do is try to prove this to your colleagues.’

‘And you?’

‘I’m going to quietly insist to my superiors. That’s all I can do. Any more, and they’ll quit listening.’

‘Kincaid’s going to deliver his paper when he finishes it.’

‘I wish him luck. There’ll be cries of hoax before he’s halfway through.’

‘I know.’

They were silent. The sleet began to fall harder.

‘We’d better go,’ said Thompson. ‘These roads are bad enough without this freak ice storm.’

Bessie climbed into the Army truck beside him. He cranked it up and turned on the headlights. The truck faced the bayou. Through the sleet and rain she saw the waters of the bayou flat and black before them. This time next summer they would be another six feet higher. The whole landscape would be changed for hundreds of square miles around.

Thompson turned on the wipers. ‘There’s a bottle of coffee back there; find it, will you please?’ He turned the truck around. ‘I’m chilled through.’

She rummaged behind the seat and found the warm jug. She looked out the rear window, saw the waters being lost in the darkness.

‘They didn’t understand,’ she said.

‘No, I expect they didn’t,’ said Captain Thompson.

He put the truck in low gear and bounced past a mudhole.

Things aren’t normal, and they never will be again.

Everyday Sunflower and I and a few others go and pile some more dirt on Took’s mound.

Everyday I work a little at the pipes Took-His-Time left in rough form, and finish them up a little more.

Everyday brings new horrors to which we have grown numb.

Stories come from upriver on both sides: villages deserted, given over to the woods.

The Buzzard Cult people danced by one day last week, still across the River. We all watched. Their hands are joined, they do their shuffling steps for kilometers at a time. We hear they dance into dead villages, through their plazas, out the gates again.

When they danced back by again, earlier this week, there were fewer of them. Our hunters who go back across the Mes-A-Sepa keep away from the towns and solitary huts, any place that had been settled by man.

The only good news to come across is that the Huastecas seem to be dying faster than we ever will, from some other disease, or the same one with a whole new set of symptoms. Theirs sounds like mumps to me. They got it way down on the Gulf where their merchants had set up permanent trade with the Traders during last winter.

The Traders and Northmen are being hunted and killed wherever they are found. I hope some of them get away. The diseases are here; it’s too late to stop them. Killing the messengers is futile. It probably makes the people feel better.

On this side, the Buzzard Cult is growing, too, but slowly, quietly. They get together and dance, then they go home. Without the Woodpecker, there’s not much else. The tattoo man is busier than ever. Weeping eyes are the next big craze, also hands and eyes, and rattlesnakes.

There is death and resignation all around.

Sunflower tries to keep busy and to keep me happy. I have to go out with the other guys now and hunt. It’s late spring, and we’re not sure if the crop we planted over here will make it. We’re killing and drying meat as fast as we can. Maybe that mammoth will come back this winter, and if the pipe magic works, we’ll all eat good.