Them Bones

Bessie VI

The rain slammed against the tents. They began to leak around the pole grommets. The walls moaned like living things.

Bessie sat on a camp stool. Though there was a roaring wind outside, the tent was close and hot. When lightning blasted nearby, they could see through the walls, see the cook tent, part of the bluff, the nearby trees slanting in the storm.

A bolt hit something near the bayou. Bessie and the others jerked; she saw individual raindrops printed on her eyesight like a photograph, hanging still in their fall toward the earth, trapped by the lightning. Thunder screamed instantly.

‘Lordy,’ said William, ‘what a storm!’

‘I’m not so much worried about this bad storm, or one or two, if they’ll quit,’ said Bessie. ‘If the rains keep on, the bayou will rise and they’ll have to throw the gates above here. All this work will just go under.’

Ned and Leroy were quiet, hands folded on their laps. Bessie could tell they were uncomfortable being in the tent with her. They were younger and newer to the job than the other workers, and were still uncomfortable around Kincaid and the others.

‘I sure hope Dr. Kincaid got to cover,’ said William. ‘Last I saw he was just getting out of the trench while we was floppin’ the tarps down.’

Then Bob Basket spoke for the first time.

‘Two years ago,’ he began. Bessie jerked her head around toward him. She had not seen him come in, in the rush for the tent. He was seated on the ground cloth toward the back, legs crossed. He still wore his hat. His long face looked like a gnarled limb in the dim light from the kerosene lamp by the bulging tentflap.

As Basket spoke, there was another gigantic flash and crack. Bessie saw him illuminated, white and searing, in her gaze, outlined by a crooked lightning bolt that dug itself into the woods beyond the road. She saw beyond the tent walls the outline of the LaTouche house. She saw something else, too, in Basket.

‘Two years ago,’ he said again as the thunder died, ‘the river left its banks and was forty miles wide, and killed many thousands of people. The government got excited and now wants to make the river flow like a creek.

‘But in the time of my father’s father’s great-great-grandfather, it rained once for three years. There were never more than two days with sunshine. There were no crops. There was no summer and no winter either, just rain and fog, the woods, the fields, the sky lost in gray.

‘The second year the ground could hold no more water. The rivers started to rise more and more. The little creeks spread out and joined each other like hands of water. All the grass had died in the rain and the waters covered that. All the weeds had died and the creeks covered them. The small trees were still standing, and the waters began to rise up their trunks.

‘Our people began to be worried. Where will we go? What can we do? Already dead buffalo and deer and wolves were floating in the water, more and more. Snakes climbed into trees, and when the waters rose up them, they hung like vines and fell into the water and swam to larger trees. They waited there for the waters to rise into them.

‘A catfish the size of a bear swam between the huts of our village and paused at the knees of the shaman, swimming around him in slow circles.

‘He wants us to follow him, said the shaman. Into your canoes as fast as you can.

‘So the people got into their canoes and went to the village center, and when they were ready, the catfish turned and swam past the chiefs house, and over the fields, and our people followed, paddling their canoes. And the catfish swam slowly so that even the weakest of our people could keep up in their boats.

‘As he swam, our people passed the mounds of the Old Ones who were here before us. The mounds were washing away into the rising waters, exposing their ornaments and weapons, their bones and grave goods. We watched many of them fall into the rushing streams, large mounds, small ones, ones without anything in them, some as full of things as a store in Baton Rouge.

‘And then the catfish brought my people to this place where we are now. It brought them to the mound out there, and they pulled their canoes up on it, all ten thousand of them. They had all remembered the mounds to be very small ones, below the bluff, but they all stood on its top in comfort, and the bluff was nowhere to be seen in all the moving waters.

‘The big fish turned and left, swimming away without looking back, but some said they saw it turn into a crow and fly away into the rain and darkness before it got out of sight.

‘So my people stayed there for another year, and they planted their corn, and it grew, and they were content, and got used to the rain, the waters of which had covered everything in all directions, as far as their eyes could see.

‘Then one day a year later it quit raining, and the sun came out and the waters began to drop away, so that first the trees on the bluff, then the top of the bluff, then the trees toward the bayou, then the saplings and the shrubs and grass all came into view as the sun dried everything out.

‘And my people noticed now that the mounds were very small, and that the crops were only a few inches tall, and that their canoes were the size of toys. They noticed also that the bluff and the trees were much higher than the mound, and they wondered greatly about the whole matter.

‘But the shaman had them give thanks to the catfish and the Old Ones who built the mounds, and the crow (if there was one) and to the miracle of the whole thing.

‘And so they harvested their little crops and picked up their toy canoes and they walked back many miles to where the village was and started all over again.

‘And they named this place the Great Big Small Place and they remembered it in their prayers until the white men made them quit praying to things they could see and hear.

‘All this happened in my father’s father’s great-great-grandfather’s time, and that is the way they told it to me. I see it has stopped raining.’

Bessie looked around. It had stopped. There was the constant drip of water running off the tentflap, the sound of a small rivulet gurgling down the bluff. She didn’t know how long she had listened to Basket talk, his face shining in the glow of the lightning and the lamp.

Ned and Washington were asleep. Leroy stared ahead of him.

Bessie climbed to her feet, took the lamp, opened the tentflap and stepped outside. Her feet squished in the mud. There was a cool wind blowing from the north, and lightning still flashed in the east.

The other tents were wet glows on the bluff line, light and shadows from the lamps inside them falling on the dripping boxes and the wheels of the trucks parked around them. Farther back toward the road, there was a single lamp burning at the LaTouche place. Away to the westnorthwest over the bayou, she could see the light from the boat landing in front of the Crimstead house.

Below her she saw the dim outlines of the mounds under their tarps and covers.

She saw too, in the darkness for the first time, that there was a slight depression, extensive in area, to the northwest of the mounds, where the ground sloped off toward the bayou. She had walked over it dozens of times on the way between Mound One and the connected mounds. She was sure it was marked on the contour maps.

She turned back inside the tent, looking past the sleeping black men.

‘There was some kind of settlement here,’ she said.

She looked wildly around.

Bob Basket was gone, only a wet place on the ground cloth showing where he had sat.