by Mary Saums
“I’m not.” Rowdy had his head stuck out the top of his wicker basket. He was doing his pitiful wet-eyed look. Delilah reached over and rubbed between his ears while making baby noises that had Rowdy blinking and licking his lips. Little spurts of whimpers, along with Delilah’s goo goo gaga schweetie bitty boo boo nonsense, just about made me barf.
She straightened up, pushed her thick white hair behind her ears and said, “So what kind of trouble have you been getting up to? How’s your new friend out at the Hardwick place?”
The Hardwicks were the old Tullulah family who built Jane’s house and lived in it for several generations. “She’s fine. We haven’t been in any trouble lately, unless you count the mugging at the Pig or finding those old Indian bones at her place after the storm.” I told Delilah all about both. She looked pretty interested, enough to stop that baby talk with Rowdy.
Sissy finished up with her customer and joined us. Delilah said, “I have to get back to work. I’m still thinking about what I want. I’ll come back later, okay?” And off she went with her eyeglasses and chains rattling up and down as she trotted out the door.
Sissy turned her attention to Rowdy. She took one look at him and said, “Were you trying to make braids?”
“Well, it wouldn’t stay down. It kept sticking up no matter how much I tried to comb it.”
Her eyebrows wrinkled up as she studied Rowdy, lifting a knot of hair here and there while walking slowly around him. When she got to his face again, she took his jaw in her hand, looked him straight in the eye and said, “Don’t you worry. You’re going to look like a million bucks here in a minute.”
She stroked the ratty hair on his head and touched the end of her nose to his, like the Eskimos kiss. I pulled back, thinking about Rowdy’s wet little nostrils and how I’d hate to breathe in cooties like that on purpose. I guess that’s one of the pitfalls of needing a silly pet around all the time. Luckily, I’m perfectly self-sufficient in that department.
“So, do you want any kind of special cut?”
“No. Just regular. Make him look as normal as possible. No frou-frou stuff since he’s a boy. And nothing expensive since he’ll be leaving soon.”
I heard a screech outside. Delilah’s car jerked at the curb but stopped quick to let a car go by. Her tires squealed again when she pulled out in the street. I wondered what she was in an all-fired hurry for, going from lolly-gagging to speeding like a stock car racer all of a sudden.
Twenty-Two
Jane Takes Michael to the Corral
After our trip to see Phoebe’s relatives, I spent the rest of the day at the bones site with Michael. He caught up on his sleep while I was out that morning. It didn’t surprise me that he had found his way to the site and started working before I returned. With all his tools spread around him and several small areas cordoned off with string, he looked up as I walked toward him and grinned, happy in his element.
We decided to celebrate the end of our first official day in the field together by going out for dinner. Phoebe suggested several restaurants some miles away in a larger city, but I wanted Michael to experience Tullulah’s special cuisine.
We settled on a little place on the edge of town, the Catfish Corral, Home of the World’s Best Hushpuppies, as its neon sign proclaimed. They were certainly the best I had ever tasted, light and crisp and deliciously seasoned. We each ordered the house special, Cats and Dogs, catfish filets cut into planks then battered and fried with a special dipping sauce, and hushpuppies, with a side order of coleslaw and choice of fresh vegetables.
The meals arrived quickly. Michael and I were both ravenous from the excitement of the day’s work, so we set into our dishes with hardly a word spoken between us for some time. The owner and chef, Jack Quick, made his rounds of the tables to make sure his customers were happy and full. “Fish and chips, Southern style,” Mr. Quick told us in an exaggerated accent. “Dessert is included in the price. Homemade orange rolls. My grandmother’s recipe.” When we sat back to let things settle, coffee arrived, along with the dessert rolls from which emanated a most heavenly aroma.
Michael’s face positively glowed. He tapped his lips with his napkin and sighed. “My dear Jane. What a day. And what a glorious end to it.” He reached both hands across the table to hold mine.
“You must be exhausted,” I said.
He laughed. “Yes. And much work to do tomorrow, as well. A bit of a rest is certainly in order for the old man.”
“We’ll make it an early night then. Unless you want another dessert.”
“Heaven’s no!” he said with a smile. “Not tonight. But I wouldn’t object to visiting again while I’m in town.”
Once home, Michael was anxious to look over the photos we took at the site, just for a few minutes before he turned in. He downloaded them from our cameras into his laptop computer in the den. We put it on my writing desk underneath the green shade of the banker’s light there. Homer, who had come inside with us for a visit, took up his usual spot on the rug by the fireplace.
Michael set about highlighting photos on the computer screen with a bright yellow square around various areas of interest. He drew small rectangles around spots that lay several feet away from the skeletal remains. “The soil discolorations,” I said as I looked over his shoulder.
“Yes,” he said. “It pleases me to see you can still read my mind after so many years.” He tapped away and quickly became absorbed in his work.
When we took the photos, he had snapped a shot and looked to me with one of his old meaningful looks. I knew he meant me to note it but not mention it.
Now he clicked through four pictures and reversed through them again slowly. They all showed different aspects of small darkened spots in the dirt. He brought a finger up to hover over a particular close-up. “This is the photo I hoped you wouldn’t react to, Jane. I thought it best to wait. Until we were alone.”
Just over his fingertip, two of the rectangular discolorations met to form a perfect right angle. “Some sort of structure once there, eh? Covering the body?”
He nodded thoughtfully. “And in these,” he said as he clicked on photos that showed the other side of the small pit, “that are still partly covered by a root, it appears likely we have the opposite corner underneath. The size of it, you see. That’s the worry. Too large to be a coffin. Too proportional to the body to likely be a preexisting structure.” He shrugged. “Or not.”
We looked at other photos of the darker spots and various angles of the skeleton for a while.
“It bothers you,” I said.
“Yes. Something isn’t right,” he said softly.
I waited, watching him as he concentrated.
“The thing is, we have a man who, we presume for the moment, lived sometime in the 1800s, Dr. Norwood guesses, when Scottish and Irish settlers moved in numbers into the area. We know many natives still lived here as well for most of that time and certainly long before. Yet this idea of a structure, built expressly for burial, is not traditional for any of those peoples of that time to my knowledge. And I admit my knowledge here is quite limited. I could call someone about it.”
“No,” I said. “Please. I don’t want anyone who is not directly involved to know about the site. Not yet. All right?”
“As you wish. It may be we will find exactly this sort of thing in limited cases when we research. Still, other smaller things, or I suppose rather the whole of it, to my eye at first glance, doesn’t quite fit together properly.” He rubbed his fingers over his chin, clearly puzzled.
“Michael, it’s the first day. You’re weary from travel and from work. Everything will come together, just as it always does, with a little time and a little digging. And a little well-deserved rest.”
He smiled and gave me a hug before going upstairs to bed. Homer rose from his place by the fire and into a stretch. He trotted to the kitchen, took a few bites from his food bowl, and went to the kitchen door, where he sat, waiting for me to let him out for his
evening rounds.
Before I turned in for the night, I wanted to look through the books I inherited from Cal. Specifically, I needed to find what information I could on tree “scars,” as Dad Burn had called them on the phone. He told me Cal thought it important I read about them, and that I would find references among his book collection. Somewhere. I looked over the stuffed bookcase that contained Cal’s books on native lore. Next to it, another stuffed bookcase held his many volumes on animal and plant life of the forest. Too many. This would call for tea.
First, I decided to look through the books I’d bought at McGaughey’s. They were of no use whatsoever, whether they had a blue glow or not, as they covered such disparate subjects as building walls, the discovery of America, and the history of Wales. It was silly of me to buy them without even looking at the titles. None had anything about trees or lightning strikes.
About an hour into the search, I came across a booklet, cheaply made and without a hint of scholarly attention, which listed native superstitions that involved lightning. A couple of items looked promising. One legend said it was unlucky for a person to touch a tree where it had been struck. Another said only a medicine man could touch the lightning scars without causing an adverse effect to himself. He could say a blessing over the wood to take away any bad luck or potential harm should another person touch it.
In addition, a tradition among some Cherokee was that the medicine man could take splinters or strips of the burned bark and make paint from the blackened wood. With this, he would paint the faces of young men competing in sports, so the strength of the powerful lightning bolt might transfer to the athletes and give them an edge to win.
I spent awhile longer looking through books on legends, but found nothing more that might relate. Was the thought of this scar and the special qualities the paint might possess what captured Mr. Graybear’s interest at the dig site? Did he think he could sneak in again and cut out the bark to sell for profit?
I looked at the clock. It was still early enough. I rummaged around my desk, pushing Michael’s things aside. I found my notebook under a stack of his notes and found the McWhorters’ phone number inside. I wanted to see if their tribe happened to have a medicine man I could borrow.
“We sure do,” Grant said. “The best there is, if I do say so myself.”
“Wonderful. I’d like to have him come out to the site, if that would be all right.”
He chuckled. “Ours is a medicine woman. I’m sure she would be interested. Let me see when she can come and I’ll be back in touch, okay?”
I thanked him and hung up the phone with a sigh. The excitement of the past few days was catching up with me. I turned the banker’s lamp off and walked upstairs, more than ready for a good night’s rest.
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, HOMER WAITED FOR ME outside the back porch’s screen door as he always does, precisely at the appointed time for our early run. I believe we returned more quickly than usual, due to the autumn chill in the air, rather than the presence of a guest in the house. Once I’d finished my tai chi routine, I walked around to the front of the house to retrieve the morning paper.
With care, I moved about in the kitchen, trying to be quiet as I made a pot of coffee. Homer, patient though he was, looked concerned as he wondered, I’m sure, why I wasn’t cooking up his egg and ham treat on schedule.
“Not long, dear,” I whispered. I poured a cup of coffee and set the newspaper on the table for a leisurely read before Michael came down for his breakfast. I suddenly became more fully awake on seeing that the story that took up the entire top fold of the paper stood out in bright yellow. I moaned and squinted my eyes shut. “It’s a bit early in the morning for that, isn’t it?” I said, though I wasn’t sure whom I imagined I was addressing. With a sigh, I drank some coffee and read the article.
The headline read: “Brody Reed Found in Forest.” A large photo showed crime scene workers marking off an area of woods with tape. A park ranger and Detective Waters stood among the crew, away from the center of the action where photographers worked.
How sad to read of the old guide’s death. The article gave no details of how he died, only that his body was found in Bankhead Forest near a certain tree. Apparently, the reporter found it unnecessary to elaborate on what the yellow Bear Poplar was or its precise location. I would ask Phoebe.
This reminded me of the candle. When we drove by the Reeds’ home and saw the floating candlestick with a blue flame, something stirred within me. The feeling was strange and familiar at the same time. A memory lurked there that didn’t come out from hiding until Phoebe mentioned the white dog.
When I was a child of about six, while visiting my grandparents in Wales, my great-grandmother Annie was still alive. One night, after everyone had gone to bed, we heard her screaming. We rushed to her room to see what was the matter. She stood at the window, as white and ghostly in person as her reflection in the glass, pointing out into the night.
There near the road, we saw a white dog. We had no streetlamps there but could see the white shape easily under a bright moon. It moved slowly and steadily toward our door, occasionally stopping to sit and howl then moving again, closer and closer, until it sat before the front door.
Great-grandmother Annie wasn’t the only one scared half to death. The looks on my grandparents’ faces also disturbed me. I was sent back to bed while the three of them stayed awake the whole of the night. Much later I learned they saw it as a terrible omen that someone in the house was about to die. They thought the dog had come for Annie, and that if they stayed awake and alert, nothing would happen.
They were right. Annie survived the night and the dog disappeared. She laughed and sang through the house the next day. That night, I happened to look outside from my upstairs window. A small light I hadn’t noticed before seemed to hover in the yard before the front door. When I asked Grandfather what it was, he had a look himself. He started and went rushing to Annie’s bed. She lay there smiling, having passed away peacefully in her sleep. The corpse candle, one with a blue flame, was said to appear at the door of a house where death had come.
With a sigh, I turned the newspaper over below the fold. The photo took me by surprise, so much that I gave out a startled cry. Homer jerked his head up. He was on his feet and beside me in seconds.
“It’s all right, love,” I said to soothe him. “Just a bit shocked, that’s all.”
To my astonishment, the photo was of my house. I recognized it as one previously used by the paper when Phoebe and I had our bit of notoriety some weeks earlier. Its accompanying article’s title read “Bones Found on Old Prewitt Land” in large bold print. Beneath it, the reporter, Delilah Newberry, told of the discovery occurring after the recent storm. She knew lightning hit the tree. She knew the resulting hole exposed the skeleton. It was a relief to see no mention whatsoever of where the skeleton might be on my land. She did say that the coroner and police department visited the scene. She also noted that a friend of the land’s present owner, yours truly, was called in for his archaeological expertise.
I wondered why the reporter hadn’t talked to me. Not that I wished to discuss the matter and might even have refused to do so had she called. Of course, my telephone isn’t terribly reliable, so she may have tried. Her information must have come from the police department, through the ordinary report that would’ve been filed. Grant and Carol, the couple from the tribe, didn’t seem the sort to talk with the media, though they may have made their call to the state historical commission. They, in turn, may have notified the Indian Affairs Council that the bones were most likely those of a Caucasian. Reports by the coroner and the forensic anthropologist would be done, certainly, but it seemed most unlikely to me that any of those offices would have received or filed reports available to the media so quickly.
That left only three others beside myself who had been to the site. Michael had hardly been out of my sight since his arrival. The young Mr. Graybear could possibly be the source if he wasn�
�t presently detained in jail. No, if he were the informer, he would have given the reporter a more native activist slant and made himself the center of his story. As I read the article again, my feelings became stronger that all the above scenarios were unlikely to have been the case. In my heart, I knew the real culprit. As I said earlier, I would need to have a word with Phoebe.
Twenty-Three
Phoebe Goes to the Library
Early next morning, I saw the news that old Mr. Reed had been found. He was on up there in years, but still, it was a terrible thing. Since the newspaper didn’t say how he died, I hoped it was some kind of natural cause. I knew that it must mean something else, something bad, or they would have said. I couldn’t help but cry. He was a nice old guy and from a mighty fine family.
The rug rat trotted over to the side of my chair to see if I was all right.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m fine…uh…what am I going to call you now, huh?”
Sissy Breedlove had dropped a bomb on me when I went to pick Rowdy up at Smoochie Poochie. I took one look at him when the assistant brought him out for me to see his new hairdo and knew something was severely wrong.
He looked like a completely different dog. All the knots were cut out, and all the hair left on him was smooth and sleeked down. The coat was shiny. The big difference was I could see his face and the hair around it was either cut pretty or tied up on top of his head.
“Hey, Sissy,” I said. “Now, granted, you’ve sure done a great job here. I’d even say it’s close to miraculous. But remember, I told you I didn’t want any of this frou-frou stuff like ribbons and toenail polish. I’m not sure I can afford it all, and besides, it’s not right to embarrass the poor boy and make him look like a girl.”
She laughed so hard she dropped her doggie comb. “Phoebe, darling, I don’t know how to break this to you, but ‘he’ is a ‘she.’ She’s supposed to look like a girl. Surprise!”
