Them Bones

Bessie I

‘There’s a horse in the small mound,’ said Bessie.

Dr. Kincaid sat behind his camp table in the hot tent, his shirt off, smoking his pipe. The kerosene lamp on the table was turned up too high; its chimney was sooty.

On the Berliner Bijou phonograph, its brass horn only inches from Kincaid’s head, Louis Armstrong and His Hot Seven were honking out ‘Potato Head Blues’.

Kincaid, a tall man in his fifties, had been tapping a pencil in time to the music on his field notebook when Bessie walked in. He had only gotten as far as writing ‘June 17, 1929’ across the top of the page. When he listened to music he was oblivious of his surroundings – the heat, mosquitoes, the humidity, the sootiness of the lamp.

Bessie Level waited just inside the netting of the tentflap. She was dressed in jodhpurs, puttees, and khaki shirt and a pith helmet.

Kincaid put the pencil inside his notebook, closed and placed it on the folding camp table. A troubled look came across his tanned face. He stood slowly, reached over and flipped the resonator arm up off the spinning Okeh record, turned off the machine. Then he put the record carefully in its buff sleeve, took his pipe from his mouth, pulled on his white shirt and pushed the tails carefully into his canvas hunting pants. He clipped a black bow tie on his collar, pulled on a jaunty L. L. Bean canvas hat and put his pipe back in his mouth. The whole operation was performed with great deliberation.

He took two long puffs on his pipe; those and the whisper of the kerosene lamp were the only noises in the tent. Outside, Louisiana swamp sounds drifted in – birds, a bullfrog chunk, gleepers, indeterminate mammalian grunts. Kincaid pulled the briar pipe from his mouth.

‘That’s impossible, Bessie,’ he said.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘But it’s a horse, it’s in the smaller mound, and William found it. He said, “Miss Bessie, I found a horse,” I said, “No, William, you didn’t” and he said, “Yes, ma’am, I did! Come look!” and I did. It’s a horse.’

‘Let’s go see it then,’ said Kincaid. He lifted the chimney and blew out the lamp. They stepped from the darkness of the tent into the darkness of the night.

‘I’ve already sent William for the acetone,’ said Bessie.

Kincaid’s pipe glowed. The night around them was black, broken only by the ghost outline of the workers’ tent, the only light on the bluff, on whose walls the shadows of the diggers moved. Lightning bugs dotted the air. Bullfrogs roared off in the bayou. Bessie and Kincaid went down the path from the bluff, which stretched away to either side.

Before them, dimly outlined against the waters of the bayou, were the mounds.

Off to their left, on the old flood terrace of the Suckatoncha Bayou, was a mound, designated as Mound One. It was thirty feet in diameter, ten high. Another time and it would have been a promising mound. They would have trenched it first.

But as Bessie and Kincaid walked the path from the campsite, they turned to the right, toward the other mound.

It was two mounds, really, 2A and 2B on the surveys. But the mounds were joined by a small ridge running between them, six feet in height. The larger mound, 2A, was what had drawn them there. It was an irregular mound, the base platform some twelve feet high and fifty-five feet in length to the point where it joined the ridge connecting with the smaller mound. But atop this flat platform of 2A was a conical mound, thirty feet in diameter, whose base was on the platform, and which extended to a curved apex eighteen feet higher.

A platform mound was often an indication of the site of a temple or of a chief’s house. A conical mound was often for burial. In two years of digging, Bessie had never seen a mound so unusual in shape. Neither had Kincaid in his thirty years of archeological work.

They had been as excited about it when they arrived at the site as had the archeologists on the salvage survey the year before. To contain themselves, they had begun by trenching the smaller mound, 2B. They had arrived late that afternoon, set up camp, and staked the mound areas off into five-foot grids, with the apex of 2A as the centerpoint. Kincaid had quit work, as was his custom, as soon as the sun set over the bayou.

‘I thought you’d stopped work,’ he said as they stepped between the stakes toward the smaller mound. The large mound loomed over them to the northeast, with its ridge of connecting earth flowing into the base of the smaller.

2B was a conical lump which rose eleven feet from its base line. It was just over fifteen feet in diameter. On the side opposite the large mound the ridge of earth tapered to a point at ground level.

Viewed from the top, 2A and 2B looked like the ornate fat hour hand of a grandfather clock pointing southwest.

‘There was a little light left, so William kept digging. For the first four feet of the trench, nothing. I’ve got the stratigraphy in my field book. Mixed sand and loam, what you’d expect. A couple of individual earthload impressions, but no containers. We can sift tomorrow, but the first four feet look pretty sterile to me.

‘Then, five feet in, some ash and mica flakes. I had William widen the trench toward the outside. By then it was getting pretty dark. While I labeled the mica and was putting it near the sift box, William found the horse.’

They stood at the edge of mound 2B. The test trench showed as a darker gouge against the grass-covered side of the mound.

Back up on the bluff, a lantern came around the truck and tents and started down the pathway.

‘Miss Bessie?’

‘Down here, William,’ she yelled.

Kincaid’s pipe turned this way and that in the darkness. Bessie could tell that he was imagining this spot the way it was centuries ago. She’d seen him do it on digs the year before. He’d been at the business so long that he could almost make his imaginings come alive. He had, in classes, when she had been an undergraduate. It had changed her life, made her drop her English major, turn to anthropology, go off to become Dr. Level so that she could return to university to work with him.

She was still new enough at it that what she saw was the silent mounds themselves, as if they had once been living things, and had died here, made to give up their mysteries inch by inch, layer by layer, in a sort of dissection. Sometimes they held no mysteries at all – they were just piles of earth with nothing in them, intended for some purpose never carried out.

She had had a feeling about these mounds when she first saw the survey photographs last winter while they were preparing this summer’s salvage. It had been a cool day, and she had imagined digging them in that climate. Now she was here in the middle of a heat wave that made the very air itself seem thick, heavy.

William hurried up with the lantern. He brought the preservation kit – acetone, collodion, varnish, shellac, brushes, picks, gauze, all in a tool box – and set it down.

‘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.