Relics

by Mary Anna Evans

  The palm-sized object had a pinkish-beige body, and Faye was certain it was man-made. Light-colored veins slashed across its surface, radiating from a single point. The sunlight reflected oddly off these radial imperfections, first red, then gold. Its surface had been coated with a glaze that probably owed its appealing white sheen to tin. Could it be made of enameled metal? Years in the ground would have been hard on an enamel coating; it was possible that the golden veins were simply areas where grains of sand had abraded the white coating, revealing the underlying metal.

  Faye reached out a hand for the glimmery thing, but Jorge beat her to it. He snatched it out of the dirt and palmed it before she could get a good look at it.

  “I’d like to see that, Jorge.” She held out her hand.

  “I thought you said you weren’t interested in anything we found here. It’s way too new.”

  “Nevertheless, I’d like to see it. Please hand it to me.”

  “No,” he said, looking at her with his insubordinate eyes. She kept her gaze steady on his face and her hand stretched out toward his.

  Jorge looked her square in the face and dropped the thing onto his trowel, where it broke into two pieces. Unsatisfied by that mutinous act, he used the heel of his boot to grind it into the ground.

  There was nothing left but beige dust. Faye was at first struck dumb by the sheer, stupid destructiveness of his action, but she soon found her voice. “You’re fired. Take your things and go, right this minute. You have no business here.”

  “You can’t fire me.”

  “I’m sure I don’t know why not,” Faye said. “I can’t think of many things that would get a field technician fired any faster than intentional, pointless destruction of an artifact. Any artifact.”

  “You can’t fire me,” Jorge repeated. “If you do, we’ll all leave, and nobody in the settlement will take our jobs. You and the Indian can’t get the work done without help.” Fred and Elliott walked over to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Jorge. All three were big men; if any of them were to stretch his arm straight out at the shoulder, Faye could have walked under that arm. If she lost her cool with these guys, she would look like a Chihuahua throwing a tantrum.

  Sarcasm was her tool of choice when dealing with large people “That’s true,” she said in pleasant, even, measured tones. “I couldn’t afford to fire anybody who had been any help whatsoever. Fortunately that doesn’t apply to you. You’ve been no help at all. Jorge, please leave and don’t return. Fred and Elliott, you may stay if you’re willing to learn to do your job correctly. But if you leave with Jorge, you won’t be coming back.”

  Jorge threw his trowel into the open excavation. Fred and Elliott threw their trowels after his, and they landed on it with two nerve-jangling clangs. “We quit,” they said, and they turned and walked away.

  Elliott climbed into the passenger side of Jorge’s shiny, gunrack-adorned pickup, while Fred roared away on a motorcycle that had the speed and throaty roar of a Harley. Faye reflected that she may have been a failure as a first-time manager, but she was still an archaeologist. She grabbed a plastic bag from the shed and carefully gathered the tiny bits that remained of the artifact that Jorge had crushed.

  She rushed to the cardboard box in the equipment shed. Grabbing one of the broken plates excavated before she arrived, she studied its glaze and the color of the clay that had formed it. Gray. The body had been made of a clay that turned gray when it was fired, and it had been given a decorative gray salt-glaze. The vessel that had been broken into this sherd had looked very different from the sherd that Jorge crushed.

  She was most intrigued by the color-changing glimmer she’d noticed just before Jorge snatched the potsherd. It had looked like a lusterware finish of a type rarely made since machines had taken over the manufacture of everyday household ceramics—or since Columbus had crossed the ocean blue, for that matter. Finding a piece of pottery that had crossed the Atlantic with the earliest Sujosa would be an archaeologist’s dream come true, but it was simply too much to hope for. What was this lovely artifact that Jorge had destroyed?

  It would be hard to tease a date out of the crumbs that remained of the sherd. It was possible that thermoluminescence analysis would help. Still, even if the analysis proved that it was lusterware and that it was very old, there was the issue of where it was found. When it had been dug it up and flung into a spoil pile, the potsherd had been completely divorced from its archaeological context. If she couldn’t prove where it had been found, it would be hard to link it to the eighteenth-century Sujosa artifacts she needed to find.

  She shook the bag and let the particles of the ruined potsherd sift around inside it. Surely it was her imagination that made some of the tiny grains sparkle. Lusterware owed its metallic glow to a layer of silver or copper only a few molecules thick. She wasn’t sure any sheen could possibly be visible now that the sherd was pulverized.

  Joe arrived, looking forlorn.

  Pocketing the bag, she said, “We’re done for the day, Joe.”

  “What are we going to do for help, Faye?”

  “I reckon I’m going to have to hire a new team. Somebody will work for me, even if they’re getting paid in dirty ‘outsider’s’ money.” She started to walk away, but a new idea stopped her in her tracks and she turned around. “Do you remember which units Jorge backfilled?”

  Joe nodded.

  “First thing tomorrow, I’d like you to empty all those units, then screen the soil before you put it back in. And keep it separate from that pile of soil he was using as backfill, because I want you to screen that, too.”

  “Want me to do any flotation?”

  Faye considered his question. “No. We’ll do that at the mound site, but not here. Potsherds don’t float, and I can’t imagine we’ll find anything else useful here. Even if some interesting stuff floated to the top, what would it tell us? Raleigh’s scrambled the soil strata so badly that we’ve lost the archaeological context of anything we find here. The only useful artifacts he may have left us would be more pieces of that broken pot, so that’s what we’re going to look for. We could wind up screening the whole site.”

  “No problem. It’ll take a while, though.”

  “Never mind that,” Faye said. “I’m not making much headway on getting access to a new site, so we have the time.”

  ***

  It had seemed politically wise to speak with Dr. Raleigh immediately. Far better for him to hear the story of how she lost her field team from her own lips rather than, say, from the lips of Jorge the mutineer. Unfortunately, she found that the Sujosa grapevine was faster than the Internet. In the time it had taken her to give Joe his assignment and walk over to the bunkhouse where Raleigh had his comfortable headquarters, the news had already reached her boss.

  “You cannot fire those men,” he said in his maddeningly complacent voice. “The grant that pays your salary requires you to hire local workers.”

  “Surely someone other than those three slackers needs a job.”

  “You tell me that you fired one of them—Jorge, I think it was—and the other two quit in protest. These people are all related to each other. What makes you think that you can find three Sujosa willing to work for the woman who canned Cousin Jorge?”

  “Well, I can surely try.”

  “See that you do. You realize that I’ll be monitoring the progress of your excavation closely, don’t you?” These memorable words came from the lips of the man who had managed to work the crew for a solid month while accomplishing nothing. Faye didn’t trust herself to give him a diplomatic answer, so she walked away, leaving Raleigh behind.

  But, however far or fast she walked, she couldn’t leave her frustration and uneasiness with him. Since the devil dummy had fallen from the trees in front of her car, everything that could go wrong had gone wrong. Without realizing where she was headed, she ended up standing in front of the few remaining timbers of the burned house. An acrid odor acc
osted her nose. How long would the burned-out house smell like charred wood, melted plastic, and death? Its presence was a scar on the small community, and the air was jittery with the unspoken words of people who craved resolution where none was to be had. The social codes governing behavior in the face of sudden accidental death were tenuous when the victim wasn’t a friend of long standing. Carmen’s parents lived far away, and they were strangers. Robbed of the chance to reach out to her bereft family, Carmen’s new friends were left with no place to put their grief.

  Raleigh had fed the team’s uncertainty with his silence. He had hardly acknowledged Carmen’s death to her co-workers upon his return that morning. Work had resumed as if nothing extraordinary had occurred over the weekend. He had announced at breakfast that Carmen’s parents were planning a private memorial service in Miami after the coroner released the body. And that was all.

  There was no eulogy planned for Carmen among the people who had worked with her for weeks. There hadn’t even been an alcohol-soaked evening when everyone shared favorite memories of their departed friend. There had been no effort to acknowledge and heal the grief of people who must somehow learn to function as part of a team that was irrevocably changed.

  The day’s last red rays filtered through the bare branches and lingering seed pods of a sweet gum tree, and the dappled light glittered with reflected flames. Faye drew in a sharp breath full of fresh wood smoke, and panic wouldn’t let her force it out again.

  Something was on fire.

  She sprang into action immediately, before her body reacted with adrenaline and a racing heart and trembling legs. Nobody was going to burn to death today. Not if Faye could help it.

  Sprinting to the edge of the burn site, she checked the blackened timbers for evidence that the fire had rekindled after nearly forty-eight hours. It was a cold shell. There were no other houses close enough to be the source of the smoke she smelled. Perhaps there was a storage shed nearby? She didn’t care if a storage shed burned slap to the ground, even if it were full of money, just so long as there was nobody inside.

  Faye skirted the back of the house, covering the ground she had been too weak to cover the night Carmen died. She skidded to a stop near the place where Carmen’s window had been, but wasn’t any more.

  Joe was crouched there beside a campfire, feeding the flames with sticks and dry leaves. A faint plume of tobacco smoke rose from his pipe and drifted upward to join the campfire’s heavy black wood smoke. A shallow basin full of water sat on the ground beside him. Varied leaves and berries had been scattered over the water’s surface, floating in a pattern as spare and beautiful as Japanese calligraphy.

  Faye wondered whether Carmen, who was probably Catholic, would have liked the idea of a Creek-style send-off for her soul, because that’s what Joe was giving her. He had built the fire to carry his good wishes to Carmen’s everlasting spirit. She supposed that he had purified himself beforehand by washing his face and hands with water laced with ritual herbs, then drinking a cup of a purgative known as Black Drink, a noxious decoction made of water steeped in leaves of the ilex vomitoria species of holly. Joe was sending Carmen to her eternal rest in the only way he knew how.

  She dropped to the ground beside him. “I wish some of the other field team members could be here. They would feel better.”

  Joe nodded, taking a deep drag of hot tobacco smoke into his lungs. Faye was pretty sure he only smoked on ritual occasions, and she wondered how he escaped addiction. He gestured to the basin. Faye responded to the wordless invitation and dipped a hand into it, anointing her hands and face with the good-smelling water. She understood almost nothing about Native American spiritual practices, but she would have given a lot to experience the kind of peace that Joe wore like a mantle.

  “Is Carmen—” Faye hesitated. Her mind was so Western and analytical that she could hardly frame her question.

  “Carmen is here,” Joe said, relieving her of the burden of asking a question that her left brain said was ridiculous. “She doesn’t know what happened to her. Most folks who die sudden or too young feel that way, but I think there’s something else she wants us to know.”

  “What is it?”

  Joe shrugged his broad shoulders. He took a long straight stick and poked at the fire. “I think Carmen’s going to hang around here until we figure that out.”

  ***

  Since Faye knew Joe wouldn’t be roasting a chicken over his ceremonial fire, she knew that supper would be sketchy and late. No one else on the project team seemed to have the time or inclination to cook. They were all accomplished eaters, though, so the odds that any of Joe’s pinto beans had survived twenty-four hours in the communal refrigerator were negligible. Instead of looking for something to eat, Faye opted to try to salvage her day by finding out who owned the property around her two possible sites.

  Jenny Hanahan, the woman who ran the grocery store which appeared to be the beating heart of the Sujosa settlement, was the obvious person to ask.

  “DeWayne Montrose owns the property that the Indian mound sits on. He’ll sprout wings and fly before he’ll let you dig on any property that belongs to him,” was Jenny’s encouraging answer to Faye’s first question. “What else do you want to know?”

  “Who owns the property around the bridge?”

  “Miss Dovey owns all that property, on both sides of the river and both sides of the road,” said Jenny.

  “Really?” said Faye. “Isn’t her place in the other direction?”

  “Her husband Taylor never had any brothers or sisters, so all the Murdock land passed to Miss Dovey when he died.” She paused to ring up a six-pack for Jorge. “Miss Dovey’s father left her a goodly chunk of the Miller land, too,” she continued. “And of course she’s got the property she and Taylor bought while they were married. Her land is scattered all over the place and most of it’s worn out. The rest of it wasn’t ever worth farming in the first place. That’s the way land is in this settlement—it just sits there. Give me a store, now that’s real property.”

  “Do you think Miss Dovey’d let me work down by the bridge?” Faye had asked.

  “She’s never been known to tell a young person no, and everybody’s a young person to her, these days. Besides, the land’s not worth a hill of beans. You couldn’t hurt it if you tried. Ain’t nothing underneath the briers and the kudzu but thin red dirt, and most of that’s washed into the river. You could stand in some of those gullies and not even your head would poke out the top.” Thrusting a phone into Faye’s hand, Jenny said, “Give her a call. I bet she’ll say, yes.”

  Age had rasped a jagged edge on Miss Dovey’s voice, but it couldn’t wear away the softness that revealed who the old woman really was. She would mother everyone within reach for as long as she drew breath.

  “You spin an interesting tale, Ms. Longchamp. Do you really think you might find something important under my land?”

  “It’s very possible.” Faye felt her Southern upbringing bubble up in her chest. She was incapable of speaking to a woman of Miss Dovey’s age and experience without peppering her speech with terms of respect. She caved in to the urge to say “ma’am.” “Yes, ma’am, it’s quite possible. May I have permission to excavate on your property?”

  “I’m sure a few holes wouldn’t hurt that worthless land, but why don’t you come over here and let’s talk about it? The old schoolteacher in me is right curious about what you and your scientist friends find so interesting about us Sujosa. I have some biscuits left over from supper that are still warm, and I’ll put a pot of coffee on.”

  There was nothing for Faye to say but, “Yes, ma’am.”

  ***

  Faye took the project’s diesel pickup, a massive brute of a truck that was better suited to the settlement roads than her own ancient car. Before she’d traveled far, she realized that the trip might have been quicker and safer if she’d walked. Like most Sujosa homes, Miss Dovey’s house was much close
r to the settlement center when traveling by foot than it was by car. The route to Miss Dovey’s crawled up a steep slope, one switchback at a time. The notion of streetlights was laughable, and neither Faye’s headlights nor the cloud-obscured moon made much more than a dent in the inky night.

  It was comforting to see that Miss Dovey had left the porch light on for her, until a shadowy figure that was too fleet-footed to be ninety-seven emerged from the house. The faceless person walked briskly toward the car where Faye waited and looked in through the open window. The car’s dome light played dimly on Ronya Smiley’s face.

  “Miss Dovey’s asleep,” the Sujosa woman said.

  “But I just spoke to her,” Faye said, making a move to get out of her car by sticking her leg out the open door. Ronya didn’t take the hint. “It couldn’t have been thirty minutes ago. She invited me for biscuits and coffee.”

  “Miss Dovey’s been feeding everything on two legs for seventy-five years, but she’s old now. When she gets tired, she goes to sleep, whether she likes it or not. But she gave me a message for you.”

  “I hope so. We were going to discuss something very important—”

  “Yeah. Well, she said, she’d had second thoughts about your question. She’s not real sure she wants anybody digging on her land. What if somebody gets hurt?”

  “Of course, she wouldn’t be liable—”

  The expression on Ronya’s face moved past suspicion toward disdain. “A woman like Miss Dovey doesn’t worry about legal things like ‘liability.’ She frets over what she’d do if someone was out-of-work because they hurt themselves on her property. What if they had medical bills they couldn’t pay? She doesn’t have any money, so she couldn’t help them out, but she’d feel responsible forever. When you’re that old, you’ve got a pretty good idea of how long forever is. Nobody around here would put up with anybody fretting Miss Dovey.” Ronya helped Faye close her car door, then walked back into the house and shut the door.