T. Boyle - San Miguel

She was in a mood and she couldn’t help herself. In the parlor — gloomy, damp, cold as ever — she went straight to the stove and saw that the basket beside it, the wood basket, was empty because Ida was too busy with The Ladies’ Home Journal to bother with anything so trivial as keeping the house above the temperature of a tomb. She flung back the cast-iron door — barely warm to the touch — snatched up the poker and stirred the coals angrily before settling into her chair. And where was Edith? Why couldn’t she help? Because she was out walking or riding or hunting seashells, because she was locked in her room reading Jane Eyre or Northanger Abbey for the sixth time instead of applying herself to her lessons, because she was thoughtless, that was why. She was about to call out to her, to shout her name up the stairwell no matter the strain on her voice, when she happened to glance across the room and catch herself.

It took her a moment to register what she was seeing. Shelves. Will had built a series of shelves into the far wall while she lay struggling for sleep, which explained the banging, but she couldn’t imagine why he hadn’t waited till she was up and about. What was the hurry? And why would they need shelves in the first place? They couldn’t have had more than two dozen books with them and nothing to display, no curios or drawings or sculpture, not even a mantel clock. But there was something there already, she saw that now, vague shapeless forms splayed across the top two shelves as if they’d washed up in a flood, as if the water had rushed through the room while she lay sleeping, or trying to sleep, and left its detritus behind. Puzzled, she got to her feet and crossed the room for a closer look.

At first she thought she was examining a rock collection, thinking Will had suddenly developed some sort of geological fervor, but then she understood: these were artifacts, Indian things, the fruits of yesterday’s expedition, arrowheads, a stone knife blade, shell beads, a mortar and pestle, what looked to be a serving bowl scooped from smooth gray stone and tilting ever so slightly away from its uneven base. She was fingering one of the arrowheads — or no, it must have been a spearhead, as long and tapered as a letter opener, and sharp, still sharp after all this time — when she heard footsteps in the hallway behind her. It was Edith, stepping carefully, cradling something in her arms. She was in her charcoal gray skirt and a light shirtwaist, looking pretty, looking groomed for a change, and she seemed to be wearing some sort of ornament, a pale concave object that dangled from her throat on a thin silver chain.

“How do you like it, Mother?” Edith asked, crossing the room to her.

“What is it?”

“A pendant. An Indian pendant. You see?” Edith set down what she was carrying on the corner of the table — more artifacts, dirty things, things that had lain forgotten in the earth, bits of rock and shell and bone — and lifted the pendant on its chain so she could have a closer look.

It was a worked section of abalone shell with a hole drilled dead-center so that it hung perfectly, mother-of-pearl, catching the light and shining as if it had been shaped yesterday. “Very pretty,” she said.

“Jimmie found it.”

“Jimmie? And he gave it to you?”

“Mother. He couldn’t very well wear it himself, could he?”

She was about to say something, to raise some sort of objection— Jimmie —when Edith bent to the table, scooped up a handful of the fragments there and held them out to her, cupped in one palm. “Do you know what these are?”

She did. They were shells, grape-colored, chestnut-colored, the shells of the littoral snails you found when you were wading at low tide. “Snail shells?”

Edith had superior knowledge. She was grinning. Enjoying herself. “Look closer — do you see these holes? Do you see that each one of these has been drilled through so they could be strung on a bit of cord? They’re money, Mother — this is what the Indians used for money!”

“Really? Then I suppose we’re rich — where on earth will we spend it all?”

Edith laughed and it was good to hear. She’d been moping lately — for weeks, it seemed — and if she wasn’t immured in her room she was roaming out of doors like the lost and brooding heroine of one of her romances. She was barely civil at meals, peevish and sour-faced, endlessly complaining about being stifled and bored, as if she were the only one suffering, as if they could just snap their fingers and go back to the apartment they could no longer afford, at least till the wool went to market. If it ever went. If Will ever finished the road and Charlie Curner ever brought his boat back and the world stopped cranking round its axis and the oceans went still as the water in the dishpan.

“How I wish it were true,” Edith said. “Even more, I wish the Indians had made things out of gold instead, but Jimmie says they didn’t have any gold, only shells. Still, they’re pretty, don’t you think? I could make a necklace if I could find enough of them.”

“Yes, of course,” she said, warming to the idea, though the things seemed common enough. “We could use a bit of ribbon to string them, don’t you think? Black. Or navy, navy would be nice. Maybe Ida could part with just the smallest length of what you gave her—”

A noise from the direction of the porch made them both look up. In the next moment the front door swung open on Will, in his stocking feet — a flash of light, his thrown shadow — then fell shut behind him. “Minnie,” he boomed, “you see what we’ve done here, Edith and I?” He had a sack slung over one shoulder and she could see that it was weighted, mysterious bulges gathering and shifting as he moved. “And there’s more, much more — we really hit the mother lode yesterday, but because of those damned Chinamen I had to leave the better part of it behind. But here,” he said, setting down the bag with a click and rustle of the contents within, “see for yourself.”

“We went up to Eagle Cave and there were paintings there on the rocks and all sorts of things just lying around,” Edith put in. “And then, on one of the bluffs”—turning to Will—“where was it?”

“Harris Point.”

“On Harris Point we found a place where there was a whole mountain of shells, thousands and thousands of them, mussel shells, clamshells, abalone, everything the Indians must have been eating since the dawn of time — and there were pits there, depressions in the ground where they’d made their fires, and that got us looking until finally we found where they were buried.”

“Under the sand. Probably three or four feet of it just to get to the dirt beneath. But we kept probing, didn’t we, Edith? Because we knew we were on to something.” Will was reaching into the bag, a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat, and the thing he produced — naked and white and fissured with age — was no artifact. It was a bone. A human bone. He laid it on the shelf beside the rest of the things and then he bent to the sack again, rummaging, its sides swelling and deflating as if the contents had come to life.

She took a step back. She felt flushed suddenly.

Edith said, “I found a bone too. This one, I think”—she held up her right arm and pulled back the sleeve. “Or Jimmie thinks it’s this one — the little bone here?”

And now Will: “Here,” he said, “here’s the prize,” and he was holding a skull aloft, a human skull, a skull so small and compact and with teeth so reduced it could only have come from a child.

“But you didn’t — those were their graves. Graves, Will. Hallowed ground.”

He set the skull carefully down on the top shelf, shifting the stone bowl to one side so that the skull was centered in the middle of the display. “Yes,” he said over his shoulder, “they were graves of a sort, I suppose. But certainly not hallowed ground. Not unless one of the Spanish friars took time to consecrate it, but then why would he? In truth, no one really knows much about what went on out here, aside from legends and that sort of thing.” And now he turned to her, holding out his palms in extenuation. “They were Indians, that’s all. Just Indians.”